Tendance Coatesy

The Morning Star, The ‘Only English Language Socialist Daily’

Posted in Britain, Communism, European Left, French Left, Front de Gauche, Labour Movement by Andrew Coates on January 3, 2012

 

 

Bring Back Pif as Editor?

The Morning Star, incorporating the Daily Worker, is an important paper.

At our recent UNITE Branch Meeting we were asked to contribute to its fighting-fund.

As the Branch Chair I argued that despite very strong political differences that some of us hold with the paper, we should, as trade unionists, support the only daily which gives unions real coverage.

We agreed to donate a sum to this end.

As someone from a labour movement background who’s read the Star since the days when Pif was in it, I have to make the following comments.

  • The Morning Star has been revamped and has greatly improved. Its core, the reporting on unions, has also got more open with genuine alternative views expressed.
  • Its features pages, are, by contrast,  of uneven quality. They give an opportunity to read the views of what the CPB considers to be the ‘left’. Supporters of sundry dictators and right-wing Islamism – such as George Galloway have not gone way. Is the new crop  better? Recent articles (and by no means the worst) have explained that the ‘Arab Spring’ was the result of a US-led plot, and that Tom Paine was an awful racist.
  • These are not opinions widely shared on the left.
  • It would not be an exaggeration to say that Commie Chef’s recipes are not likely to be widely admired either: sample (exaggerated only slightly): take one tin of tomatoes, red lentils, and boil for an hour. Serve on toast.

But I have a more serious gripe.

The Communist Party of Britain is well-known for its No2EU Yes to Great Britain politics.

One would expect this nationalism to have had an impact more widely.

But in the past it had, we hear, some links with European Left parties, such as Die Linke and the Parti Communiste Français.

There is some spattered coverage of the former.

But if anyone wants to read coverage of the PCF, and the electoral initiative (Front de Gauche) - an inspiring alliance of Communists, with left socialists, Trotskyists and self-management ecologists  - they will have to look to this Blog.

Not to the Morning Star.

 

 

Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Oskar Lafontaine

Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Front de Gauche by Andrew Coates on December 31, 2011

Serious leaders of the European left get-togther to talk politics.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Front de gauche) et l’Allemand Oskar Lafontaine (Die Linke) se sont rencontrés à Strasbourg ce mercredi pour proposer un autre visage du couple franco-allemand. Contre l’austérité et l’autoritarisme, ils appellent à la fraternité des peuples.

The two leaders of the French left socialists and the German left party declared ‘Against austerity and authoritarianism” They called for friendship between the peoples’.

 

More from L’Humanité Here

That what I call a real New Year’s Message.

Great Expectations on the BBC.

Posted in Britain, Culture by Andrew Coates on December 30, 2011

A point apparently done to death deserves to be repeated.

Did we need another Great Expectations?

The answer is clearly no.

Not that it wasn’t a fine dramatisation.

I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Magwitch was particularly fine.

But why was it made?

Now we can look forward to seeing the seriously flawed, uncompleted, novel Edwin Drood.

Okay it’s the anniversary.

But that’s not excuse for the dearth of drama from other than a tiny set of writers from the Great Tradition.

Are there no other authors’ writings available?

And not always English ones?

Time was the BBC would think, I have heard, of dramatising Balzac.

Now there’s someone who can stand muster with Dickens any day.

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Ben Gummer, M.P. A New Year’s Message.

Posted in British Govern, Capitalism, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on December 28, 2011

One of the Grooviest Chaps to Have Ever Read Chomsky.

The Right Hon Benedict Gummer Ipswich M.P.,(Conservative) Editor of the Ipswich Evening Star, honorary Mayor of Ipswich, Mayor of Suffolk, and PPS for something or other, is no stranger to this Blog.

Today he sends his traditional New Year’s Message to our readers.

“Can I extend, in this season of good-will, my deepest thanks to all the fabulous people of Ipswich.

In these trying times let’s not forget that a deeply loved one, Lady Thatcher, lies at this very moment in pain as she awaits her reckoning with the Maker.

I shall be opening a book of condolences in Ipswich Old Town Hall.

All of you will be welcome to come and sign.

Now to more pleasant topics.

  • It’s Boost for Ipswich! Top Doctor Who Star Tim Baker to appear at Ipswich Regent – on the invite of yours truly!
  • More boost for Ipswich as Waitrose opens new store – at behest of you-know-who – on Ipswich Corn Hill! Fancy some truffles with quail eggs and a nice drop of vintage Saint-Émilion? Look no further!
  • Now that the City of London is safe we can all sleep tight in our beds.
  • Not a single Labour MP ever visited Ipswich during the last government. A scandal! This time round entire Cabinet has hired a flat off the Norwich Road where they hold regular meetings!

Now for some special thanks.

To Daddy: that special Mole treatment and Fly-Mo came in handy!

To Nigel Pickover, my deputy at the Evening Star, and to my other staff, including up-and-coming Gofor Paul Geater.

Paul winkled out the fact that I have Geordie blood!

What a scoop (see pages 1-17)

Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice…. 

 

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Arab Spring, Islamist Winter, and the Left.

Posted in Colonialism, Imperialism, Islam, Islamism, Marxism, North Africa, Trotskyism, Tunisia by Andrew Coates on December 23, 2011

http://en.qantara.de/files/16967/4e4e40c0b4c7d_Liberty.jpg

Not Everybody Celebrates Islamist Victories.

Arab Spring, Islamist Winter, and the Left.

“The current Arab revolution forms part of the colonial revolution that has been irresistibly developing since the last world war. This revolution, furthermore, is only one aspect of the accelerating and irremediable break-up of the capitalist regime, and consequently forms part of the proletarian revolution by which the end of the capitalist regime will be completed and the new socialist social order will begin.”

Michel Raptis, ‘Pablo’. The Arab Revolution. 1959.

“Political Islam is winning a popular mandate as sweeping (although perhaps no more long-lasting) as that given by the events of 1989 to Eastern European liberals. It could not have been otherwise. Over the last half-century Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia—the first two invading, the third proselytizing—have virtually destroyed secular politics in the Arab world. Indeed, with the inevitable demise of the last Baathist in his Damascus bunker, the great pan-Arab political movements of the 1950s (Nasserism, Communism, Baathism, Muslim Brotherhood) will have been whittled down to the Brotherhood and its Wahhabi rivals.”

Mike Davis. Spring Confronts Winter. (New Left Review. 72) 2011

In Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began, Salafists are occupying the faculty of Manouba, demanding the “freedom” for women students to wear the niqab. Unveiled female lecturers have been insulted with shouts of “whores” (putes). The Education Minister and the police have refused to intervene. (Le Monde 20.11.12) In the newly elected Tunisian Constituent Assembly the Islamist Ennahda, of Rached Ghannouchi is, with 89 seats (41 %) out of 217, the largest party. It proclaims its commitment to democratic principles and the independence of the public power from direct religious influence. A few months ago it expressed its understanding of a violent Salafist protest, against a television station that broadcast the ‘blasphemous’ film Persepolis.

Prime Minister Hamdi Jebali, of Ennahda, heads a Coalition Cabinet dominated by his party. It includes the left-nationalists of the Congrès pour la République (29 seats – 13 %) and the social-democrats of Ettakol (20 deputies – 9%) – in secondary posts. It is charged with drawing up a new Constitution. In the Assembly a heterogeneous group of centrists, ex-Communist modernists (5 seats), the extreme left (4), notables with ties to the Ben Ali regime, and El Aridha, run by London based businessman and former Ennhaha supporter, Hechmi Hamdi (26) represents no coherent opposition. Outside attempts to replay the passionate protests that began the revolution on the 17th of December 2010, have only drawn a limited audience.

Meanwhile Islamic vigilantism has spread, unchecked by the authorities. In Sidi Bouzid, the town where Zine El-Abidene Ben Ali immolated himself, and set off the Tunisian uprising in December 2010, the followers of Sheikh Khatb Idrissi preach a return to the “origins” of faith. They try to enforce their mores on the population. (Le Monde 17.12.11) Some consider that that these Salafists are in hostile competition with Ennahda. Others believe their relationship is more porous.

Ghannouchi refers to the ‘Turkish’ model of politics, of democracy and ‘secular’ state neutrality. Turkey’s ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) faces constraints on religious proselytising through government decree. This does not stop it promoting Moslem norms (particularly through municipal decree). The AKA has favoured the influential religious network of Fettullah-Gülen. This has a ‘Gramscian’ strategy with national and international ambition. That is to engage in a war of position, by Islamising society – through education, charity and business. Ennahda may well be adopting this template of state-power and the conversion of civil society. It faces far fewer obstacles to more coercive means than its Turkish counterpart. In this light the Salafists could be seen as outriders, pushing the boundaries of faith-by-force.

In Morocco the Islamist Justice and Development Party, led by one-time member of the hard-line Al-Islah, Abdelilah Benkirane, did not participate in their – limited – domestic Spring, the 20th of February Movement. But it came top in November’s elections (27,08%). It now heads a Coalition under Mohammed IV, said to be moving in the direction of a constitutional Monarchy. Its leader, Abdelilah Benkirane is a former long-term member of the Chabiba Islamiya, which killed leftists in the 1970s. Called by their critics the ‘King’s Islamists’ their ‘moderation’ is accompanied by policies aimed at the Islamisation of society, with consequences for women’s rights (whose extension they strongly opposed in recent years) and freedom of thought.

The National Transitional Council (NTC), which includes Islamist currents, runs Libya. It has announced its intention of introducing laws based on the Sharia. It is embroiled in squabbles over sharing power and money, and implicated in violence against supporters of Colonel Gaddafi, and other suspected opponents. There are conflicts underway between the Zentum militia, the Islamists of Abdel-hakim Belhaj and the Army led by General Khalifa Hifter. Regional and minority jostling for position further embroil the NTC.

The impact of Islamism in the aftermath of the Arab Spring extends from the Maghreb to the Mashriq. In Egypt the Salafists of the Al-Nour coalition won over 24% of the vote in November’s first round of elections. They are the second party of the country, behind the victorious Moslem Brotherhood standing as the Freedom and Justice Party – over 37% At barely 13 % the liberal Egyptian Bloc (13% and the left alliance with groups that came out of the revolution (3%) have been pushed to the margins. The extra-electoral demonstrations continue, in Tahrir Square. Protests at continuing control by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) have been met by indecent violence. There have been 14 deaths so far.

Most of Yemen’s successful protesters have an Islamist slant, though Salafists appear geographically isolated. Bahrain looks increasingly to be a straightforward Shia and Sunni conflict, centred on the well-founded protests of the former against discrimination. Jordan saw some initial unrest. The Syrian uprising, viciously repressed, has the active support of its wing of the Moslem Brotherhood. There are signs that religious sectarianism, rife in Iraq, in the wake of the American-led Occupation, and always present in Wahhabism (as the Saudi Arabian version of Salafism is often called) could spill into its neighbour, as Syria plunges into civil war.

Only President Boutefika’s Algeria appears to stand apart. There have been protests over food prices and unemployment. But the façade democracy, where real control rests with the Military-Administrative structure, le Pouvoir, has not met serious opposition. To stave this off state salaries have been raised, housing issues looked at, and measures to help commerce and the young have been taken. The State of Emergency – in force for 19 years – has been lifted The memory of the 1990s Civil War, with the Islamist Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), and armed groups, such as the GIA, whose remnants in the network, Al-Qaida au Maghreb, still carry out outrages, weakens the will to confront le Pouvoir head-on.

The Islamist Victory.

In those countries where the Arab Spring has carried the day in elections, the transitions to a new political order are in a state of flux. But one thing is clear. It has been the electoral triumphs of Islamist parties that are now to the fore.

With office, if not full control over their states, the Islamists will be decisive players for the immediate future. Their capacity to respond to the frustration and aspirations for a better life felt by those who went into the streets to risk death at the hands of authoritarian regimes is unknown. This will be tested sooner rather than later. There is mass unemployment – a major push to protest amongst the under-25s – and predictions of continued economic recession and slow growth, not to mention a catastrophic decline in the important tourist sector. They will have difficulty in satisfying not only the protesters but also the economic and social needs of their most enthusiastic voters.

For some people this result is unexpected. Olivier Roy famously talked of a “post-Islamist’ revolution. To him the Arab Spring embodied demands for “dignity and respect”, not for religious order. The Islamisation of society that had proceeded apace over the last two decades had left faith “de-politicised.” (Le Monde. 12.02.11) Yet it is parties committed to religious authority that now wield power. Hani Ramadan (Tariq Ramadan’s brother) demands that we respect the “popular will” that backed their “spiritual and moral” message. (Le Monde 8.12.11) But will they be able to carry out their mandate? And what exactly is it?

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Respect: The End (Archive 2007)

Posted in Britain, Islamism, Left by Andrew Coates on September 22, 2008

From Chartist Magazine 2007 – here.

Andrew Coates tells a tale of opportunism, egos and splits.

Where to begin? Where to end? Respect’s attempt to create a credible left-wing alternative to New Labour has culminated in a split, ferocious even by the standards of the British left. This won it coverage from Newsnight and Channel Four News reports, and a tide of instant Web reports and comments.  Nevertheless, beyond the rhetorical fireworks, and the apparent lack of political differences, is there anything to be gleaned from this débâcle? Did it start from false premises? Does the saga of the two fighting wings of Respect throw up issues important to democratic socialists?

Respect’s feuds appear just another case of the left’s tendency to self-destruct. Yet when it was launched the party looked as if was aiming for an enduring political presence. Called the ‘Unity Coalition’, it was founded in January 2004. It was primarily an electoral vehicle, allying expelled Labour M.P., George Galloway, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), anti-War Muslims and some small Leninist groups. It stood, if one remembers the mouthful, for respect, equality, socialism, peace, environment, community and trade unions. The main platform was opposition to the occupation of Iraq; Respect was the biggest organised force in the Stop the War Coalition.

In the General Election of 2005 George Galloway was elected M.P. for Bethnal Green and Bow, replacing Blair loyalist, Oona King. In three constituencies it came second in the polls – though other results amongst the 25 seats contested were much lower. At its local electoral highpoint in 2006, the party got 26% of the vote and three seats in Newham, 23 % and 12 councillors in Tower Hamlets and a victory for liberal Islamic activist, Salma Yaqoob in Birmingham. To leading SWPer, Lindsey German, this indicated, “there is a big audience for socialism and radical ideas.” (ISJ No 108. 2005). Three further municipal by-election gains seemed to confirm a real, if limited, electoral base. The Coalition’s leaders began to appear on the national media, and their sense of self-importance was visibly growing.

All this was to fall apart. By November 2007 there were two ‘Respects’. One, SWP dominated, held a National Conference, and the other, a Galloway-Yaqoob led alliance, Respect (Renewal), staged an alternative rally on the same day. The former accused the other of launching ‘an onslaught’ on the left. Accusations of communalism and Tammany Hall politics were made. The latter asserted that the SWP operated a two-tier organisation, controlling Respect through a system of ‘Russian Dolls’. There were allegations of packed meetings, an illegal donation, intimidation, and even violence. The pro-Galloway Socialist Unity Blog was flooded with hundreds of posts by warring former comrades. In group therapy they poured out their woes and mutual loathing (http://www.socialistunity.com).

There are now two rival lists for this year’s GLA elections. The SWP is standing Lindsey German as Mayoral candidate with a List for the Assembly. Their opponents are trying to build a “broad based progressive slate” of constituency and party list, candidates, and (with some dissent already) back Ken Livingstone for Mayor. Disputes remain about who has the right to the ‘Respect’ label under electoral law.

Respect had deeper roots than opposition to the war on Iraq, or Galloway’s political ambitions. As New Labour assumed Thatcher’s heritage and abandoned even moderate social democracy the socialist left was marginalised. A hollowed-out party offered no expression for effective dissent. The Scottish Socialist Party, formally launched in 1999, offered an independent alternative based on radical socialism. Tommy Sheridan and five other MSPs’ election to Holyrood in 2003 appeared to show that this strategy could work.

A parallel English and Welsh initiative was the Socialist Alliance (SA). SA candidates stood in the 2001 General Election, combining left groups, such as the SWP, the Socialist Party (ex-Militant), some Greens, and some former Labour left-wingers. In the event it scored an average of 1.7% of the vote, and only saved its deposits in two seats. The SA began to falter. The Socialist Party withdrew over moves towards greater centralisation. Former Labour NEC member and SA Chair, Liz Davies resigned her post in 2002 complaining of financial malpractice and manipulation (Tribune. 1.11.02). 

The left, however, was bolstered by the opposition to the invasion of Iraq. The massive anti-war march of 15th February 2003 was organised by the Stop the War Coalition, in which the SWP played a major part. How could the demonstrators’ views be represented? An answer, which would take the SA from its impasse, appeared to come. George Galloway had pushed himself out of the Labour Party and was looking for a new political home. Known for his anti-war views, and pro-Arab nationalist opinions (if not notorious for his genuflection to Saddam Hussain), he set about negotiating a deal with the SWP. Respect replaced the SA.

Detractors were not slow to point out the faults of Respect, or Galloway’s sulphurous and erratic reputation. The SWP’s political culture – described as permanent hysteria and disregard for democracy – particularly irked. Complaints rested on the conflict between the SWP’s version of Leninism, and democratic practice. The Party claimed it was in a ‘united front’: it, the ‘revolutionary’ element, allied on equal terms with those who opposed racism, exploitation and war. In reality the leadership took decisions with other notables, Galloway to the fore, above the membership’s heads.  On a range of issues, from calling feminism a ‘shibboleth’ to downgrading LGTB rights, to opposition to secularism, Respect alienated the left.

A real bone of contention was Respect’s description of itself as ‘the party of Muslims’. In their dash for electoral gain the party had compromised with the Islamicist bullies described by Ed Husain in The Islamicist (2007). De facto alliances, now admitted by the SWP, had been forged with right-wing Islamicists, such as supporters of the reactionary Jamaat-i-Islami party present in the East London Mosque. Secular Bangladeshis were not slow to point to the bloody role the Jamaat played in opposing independence and suppressing the left in their country. Communalist appeals led to a growing electoral rival amongst Afro-Caribbean voters in the East End, the Christian People’s Alliance. Salma Yacoob associated with Birmingham mosques that played host to ultra-conservative preachers. Any attempt to oppose this approach was met with cries of ‘Islamophobia’. In municipal politics Respect increasingly relied on ‘community leaders’ (including wealthy businessmen) of a Muslim background (Bangladeshi in East London, Pakistani in Birmingham) rather than socialists or trade unionists. Nor was this the only difficulty. Their councillors often operated as councillors frequently do: vying for position, and standing up for ‘their people’ first, squabbling, switching sides, and puffing themselves up, regardless of their party’s instructions.

The low point in Respect’s history came in 2006 when George Galloway became a Big Brother Housemate. Hs antics, whilst highly amusing to the non-Respect left, did the party great harm amongst its supporters. A torrent of ribald jokes about ‘Kitty’ Galloway sapped what little credibility they had. Undeterred, the Honourable Member began a media career, making him one of the five highest paid MPs.

This was but an interlude. It became public knowledge that Respect’s membership had declined from 5,500 in 2005, to 2,200 in 2007.  That autumn Galloway circulated a litany of complaints about the party: ‘The Best of Times, the Worst of Times’, a title modestly drawn from Dickens’s novel of the French Revolution. Respect was “not punching its weight”, its activists suffered from “exhaustion and enervation”, its organisation was marked by “amateurism”. It was unfit to face a General Election (widely mooted at the time). The stage was set for outburst and counter-outburst. Both sides borrowed freely from the analysis of their opponents: the formerly taboo words ‘communalism’ and ‘Islamicism’ were traded against a critique of democratic centralism. Respect had descended into a shouting-match between some very large egos.

The prospects for both the SWP Respect and Respect (Renewal) are not good in the GLA elections, or elsewhere. Their political differences are invisible to the general public. The intensity of the dispute means that voters are more likely to shy away, and the pool of left activists willing to engage in either of these ‘unity’ alliances has shrunk drastically.

Lack of public accountability, the culture of going for ‘what works’ – regardless of who gets hurt – and a disdain for democratic debate, helped bring Respect low. This contempt for the membership of parties, treating people as tools, connects Respect’s leadership to the norms of New Labour. Can anything be learnt from Respect? Perhaps that a serious effort to create democratic socialist politics has yet to be tried.

 

 

 

 
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Review of Empire

Posted in International, Marxism by Andrew Coates on September 22, 2008
 

 

Weekly Worker 420 Thursday February 21 2002

Struggles for freedom

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Empire Harvard University Press, 2000, pp496, £12.95

Marx’s revolutionary ‘old mole’, disappearing underground and resurfacing unexpectedly, has “finally died”. It has been replaced by the “infinite undulations of the snake”(p57).

In their metaphor for the kaleidoscopic campaigns thrown up against the spread of capitalist globalisation, Hardt and Negri are nothing if unbounded in their ambitions. Empire has indeed had a wide international echo, even in notoriously conservative America, as proudly described by the journal of Hardt’s employer, Duke University (November-December 2001). The collaboration between the former leader of Potere Operaio (Workers Power), unjustly imprisoned – and still on limited release – for ‘armed insurrection’, and an American literary scholar has ranged beyond purely academic objectives.

Empire ends by talking of the role of the militant in “positive, constructive and innovative activity” and the “irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist” (p413). Negri has recently declared that the anti- (or rather, ‘alternative’) globalisation movement is becoming a “new political subject” of struggle, of counter-power, forming a “social body” (Le Monde January 27 2001).

Reaction from the left to the book has been mixed, and often highly critical. (Important reviews include: Gopal Balakrishnan New Left Review September 2000; Alex Callinicos International Socialism autumn 2001; John Kraniauskas Radical Philosophy September 2000; Malcolm Bull London Review of Books October 4 2001; Mike Rooke What Next? January 2002.) Few, however, ignore the transparent sincerity of the authors and the seriousness of their efforts to come to grips with contemporary capitalism. Nor that the debate should be brought to the widest possible audience.

Empire is not easy to digest. It teems with concepts and references, from the history of socialism, communism and the working class, to Foucault’s disciplinary society and bio-power, Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines, Castells’ network society and theories of postmodernism. Its frequently serpentine language makes it often hard to grasp. But Negri has described with clarity Empire’s two principal ideas: that there is no global market without a juridical order, and that this new political power is without a centre, without boundaries (T Negri, ‘L’Empire: stade suprême de l’impérialisme’ Le Monde Diplomatique January 2001).

A powerful examination of the global constitution is backed up by an analysis of economic and cultural transformations. The potential for resistance and a new society – a third element – is discovered, amongst which what the authors call the “multitude” (the ‘new proletariat’) is never far away. In each domain Empire challenges the left to rethink its stand.

Capital’s universal republic

“Empire can only be considered as a universal republic, a network of powers and counter-powers structured in a boundless and inclusive architecture. The imperial expansion has nothing to do with imperialism, nor with those state organisms designed for conquest, pillage, genocide, colonisation and slavery” (pp166-7). This is not meant to excuse the west from its responsibility in subordinating and exploiting the planet, not to mention armed interventions, from Korea to Afghanistan. Hardt and Negri’s argument is that Empire legitimates itself through the expansion of legal norms, a search for universal peace, and not brute force alone.

Thus, America has not only “international police power” but has become part of a “legitimate supranational motor of juridical action”. “The importance of the Gulf War derives rather from the fact that it presents the United States as the only power able to manage international justice, not as a function of is own national motives but in the name of global right” (p180). From Blair’s doctrine of the international community, to former leftists, converted to legal moralism enforced through humanitarian militarism, one can see the centrality of this development. They are part of this expansive network, which has absorbed national liberation struggles, tamed many NGOs and caused the withering away of civil society.

This arrangement works through a hierarchy. At the top is the United States, the principal holder of military might. Next are the global monetary institutions that regulate exchanges, while nation-states are “filters of the flow of global circulation and regulators of the articulators of global command” (p310). Finally there is civil society, “channelling the needs of the desires of the multitude” in ways that can be represented within these structures. In this synthesis, there are parallels with the early Roman empire painted by its Greek admirer, Polybius, as a balance of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Empire today is “the monarchic unity of power and its global monopoly of force; aristocratic articulations through transnational corporations and nation-states; and democratic-representations comitia” – nations, NGOs, media and “popular organisations” (p314). A new eternal city appears in construction.

Imperialism in its colonial and neo-colonial forms, based on the export of capital and the exploitation of raw materials, rested, Hardt and Negri assert, on an “inside and an outside”. However, “Capital must eventually overcome imperialism and destroy the barriers between outside and inside” (p234). At the same time “the subjectivity of class struggle transforms imperialism into Empire” (p235). Here lies the fundamental contradiction that runs through the heart of the book.

On the one hand, Empire is replete with an analysis of the various forms of governmentally, bio-power (Foucault’s concept of the management of populations), postmodern, flexible accumulation, and the inexorable expansion of “networks”. These, in stressing an impersonal logic, offer, as critics such as Callinicos have observed, much in common with ‘hyper-globalist’ theories. That is, in other words, the dynamic fusion of capital, politics and culture rolling over the planet.

On the other hand, there is the insistence that Empire, and modern production, has arisen as a consequence of the powers of labour: “The proletariat actually invents the social and productive forms that capital will be forced to adopt in future” (p268). Capital’s problem after the worker revolts of the 60s, a “refusal of work”, was to capture this in a new postmodern structure, the “informatisation of production”. Indeed the crises of the period were caused by the demands of employees: “The long cycle of struggles against the disciplinary regime had reached maturity and forced capital to modify its own structures and undergo a paradigm shift” (p261).

The reasoning here resembles the ‘profit squeeze’ popular on the British left (and the right) in the 70s: the workers were not just corroding capitalism by just/unreasonable demands, but are always near to overthrowing it. Hardt and Negri extend this notion further: living labour is a creative social force that can no longer be measured: “the transcendental determinations of value and measure that used to order the deployment of power (or really determine its prices, subdivisions and hierarchies) have lost their coherence” (p354). Politics and economics are “beyond value”. Labour is literally escaping from the socially embodied categories of capitalism, as in Negri’s earlier writing in Marx beyond Marx (1979), which introduced the figure of the “self-valorising” salariat and the breakdown of divisions between economics and politics.

“Self-valorising” signifies, it might be conjectured, a refusal to submit, the rejection of work. An era of militancy may have forced some changes in work arrangements, though mass unemployment under monetarism had perhaps more effect. Loading responsibility onto the workers for crises in the capitalist regime of accumulation may be intended to celebrate their power; but it also mirrors neoliberal complaints about wreckers. The dialectic of labour and capital is a one-dimensional account of capitalist development, as recent debate initiated by Robert Brenner on the contradictions of inter-capitalist ‘horizontal’ competition indicates. But if the self-valorising proposition has some coherence, if debatable, it is impossible to make sense of the claim that value is no longer measurable, as a trip to Sainsbury’s will swiftly show. Without any further discussion of the labour theory of value, and abstract labour (which opponents have always seen as non-measurable, based on heterogeneous and non-equivalent work), we are left in a void.

Struggle and the multitude

Spontaneist forms of Marxism have often believed in the logic of the process of class struggle to carry workers forward to clash with the state. Hardt and Negri go one stage further. The main struggles of the last decades of the 20th century – Tiananmen Square, the May 1992 revolt in Los Angeles, the Chiapas uprising that started in 1994, the 1995-96 French strike wave, and the work stoppages in South Korea of 1996 – were regional and national events, which remained “incommunicable” outside their country of origin. Blocked from travelling horizontally, every serious social conflict is now forced to “leap vertically and touch immediately to the global level” (p55) because they “directly attack the global order of Empire and seek a real alternative” (p57).

Nevertheless, translating this potential into an effective reality, recognising a “common enemy” and “language of struggles”, is lacking. What is the social subject that bears the potential to coordinate the fight and rise up against capitalism’s imperium? The concluding and even more unsatisfactory arguments of Empire are centred on the concept of the “multitude” – its potency and power – and the route to a new struggle for communism.

What exactly does this concept mean? It refers to the unbounded movements and mingling of peoples, the deterritorialised force of living labour. In part a race of new barbarians. It is the “creative subjectivities of globalisation that have learned to sail on this enormous sea” (p60), “an antagonistic and creative positivity” (p61). A new “nomad singularity” constitutes Empire: “The ontological fabric of Empire is constructed by the activity beyond measure of the multitude and its virtual powers” (p261). Labour is where the new proletariat appears as this active power. It is where the multitude is “becoming self-valorising. They express themselves as machines of innovation. They not only refuse to be dominated by the old system of values and exploitation, but actually create their own irreducible possibilities as well” (p369).

Without going too far into somewhat abstruse philosophical byways, Hardt and Negri have, as they state, swallowed hefty chunks of the ‘vitalist’ theory of Henri Bergson (1859-1941), though insisting on the “reality of the being created” (p468n). And describe, in Bergson’s words, “a self which lives and develops by means of its very hesitations, until the free action drops from it like an overripe fruit” (H Bergson Time and free will London 1959, p176). Thus the “insurgent multitude” is poised for action. For, “Empire creates a greater potential for revolution than did the modern regimes of power because it presents, alongside the machine of command, with an alternative: the set of all the exploited and the subjugated that is directly opposed to Empire with no mediation between them” (p293).

The last battle

From this ambitious, to say the least, clarion call, we face the Last Fight for the “self-valorisation of the human (the equal right of citizenship for all over the entire surface of the world market; as cooperation (the right to communicate, construct languages and control communication networks); and as political power, or really as the constitution of a society in which the basis of power is defined by the expression of the needs of all” (p410). This is welded together by a demand for a guaranteed minimum income – a call raised by both free-marketers and some sections of the green and alternative left (though how it will be administered with freedom of movement is, as has been pointed out, a hornet’s nest in itself).

Militants should play the role of the early 20th century Industrial Workers of the World agitator, one who “best expresses the life of the multitude, the agent of biopolitical production and resistance” (p411). From the ruins of Empire will arise new cities – “great deposits of cooperating humanity”. Prudently, Hardt and Negri state that, “Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real” (p411).

It is beyond the scope of this review to explore in depth the full complexities of Empire. The book’s great merit is to challenge some central Marxist categories, notably imperialism. Plainly a critique of the illusions of the left in the nation-state is in order, from the stillborn belief of the old British New Left that constitutional reform would create a more favourable environment for socialism, to the tragic adaptation of national liberation movements to the global market.

Criticising the illusions of pursuing justice through the existing international institutions rings many bells. Many well-meaning human rights activists have wound up in juridical institutions more contorted than Bleak House’s Court of Chancery. If Hardt and Negri are no Dickens, as their prose style so painfully indicates, their sallies are well directed. The lack of a ‘centre’ to Empire may be off-putting, in view of the unilateralism of the US, but it soon becomes apparent that the Washington-Wall Street-Pentagon axis is placed at the summit of the system.

The greatest difficulties in the book come from three directions. To begin with, Empire employs a variety of philosophical problematics, spatchcocked rather than integrated together. The concept of the multitude as a self-valorising subject is not even clarified to the extent that we can pin down its independent existence, or how Foucault’s disciplinary regime, and “biopower” (an inescapable net) mingles with Bergson’s absolute creativity. Quasi-Marxist class struggle mingles with non-class theories of sovereignty.

Next, the “mediations” between the multitude and Empire are asserted to be breaking down. It stands facing the multitude with no intermediaries. Yet what is Empire if not a system of complex mediations – civil bodies, filters, networks, states, transnational corporations, and global institutions? These ties, as Hardt and Negri indicate if only in passing, are what Marx would call the “invisible threads” binding millions of people to the process of globalisation. Such a formidable expansive apparatus has surely some density of its own.

Finally, given this, how can the judiciary, power and biopolitical machine standing over the plural multitude be shattered? Lyrical language, a heritage from Negri’s autonomist origins, is used to smother any serious political debate. There is not the slightest consideration of the hold of pro-neoliberal ideologies over large sections of the population, the elected (however imperfectly) free-market governments of the left and right, and a sheer wanton ignorance of the problems faced by socialists assuming political power, in however small degree now possible.

The thread of unresolved links between structure – the overwhelming power of Empire, and agency, the strength of the multitude, runs through these triple domains. There is no strategic politics to bring them closer. Where, before the ultimate attack, does any subject go from now, in this workplace, and tomorrow, in this strike, and the next day, in this election? Or the day when Empire is overthrown?

This is the point where Hardt and Negri’s revolutionary snake retreats under a stone. It is unlikely to emerge.

Andrew Coates

 

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Perry Anderson Remembers (Archive)

Posted in International, Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on September 23, 2008

 

On May 1968’s fortieth anniversary Tendance Coatesy publishes exclusive extracts from legendary Marxist Perry Anderson’s forthcoming memoirs, Apodic Aporiae (necessary doubts). Unlike many Anderson has never reneged on his class origins. He remains today as committed to the left as he ever was. With a rare personal voice Anderson sheds light on the key moments of 68, at home and abroad.  These passages describe the unfolding of the événements. An English translation will soon be available.

 

Extracts.

 

“Clachtoll Broch. The 1st of May, 1968. I knew something was afoot. That morning I hailed the Gillie, “Tha latha math ann an diugh.” “Aye, young Master, it is a-raining in the field.” A glint came into his eye. “The beaters say we dinna see the best of it yet.” Prescient words! Surely the best was to come.

 

Lunch. Tariq had just arrived. His palanquin was still outside. ‘Gorge Rouge’ Blackburn, had come, post-haste, from his London Red-Base. Tom Nairn was there, fresh from his triumphs in Tossing the Caber at the Sutherland Games. In the kitchen, the ‘chicks’ (unreconstructed were we, alas), Germaine Greer, Juliet Mitchell and Hilary Wainwright were preparing some amuse-gueules, and roast Osprey. As Homer might have described us, ές ‘Нλΰόίου πεδίου.

 

The wireless crackled. As hôte I deftly tuned to Radio Luxembourg. Our comrade ‘Danny’ was on the microphone. “Nous, on a demandé la semaine dernière, qu’on puisse visiter les nanas dans leurs chambers. On nous a dit non! C’est la répression bourgeoise. Faut faire la révolution!” Outraged I forgave the failure, after the clause, ‘last week we asked’, to employ the subjonctif imparfait. The right to visit female students in their rooms denied? Truly an act of repressive intolerance. Had the doomed and inert capitalists bared their teeth at last? Danny would show them his own molars.”

 

……..

 

“We took to Boat-train to Calais. Paris was ablaze. At the Gare du Nord a charming poulbout from Montmartre disrobed us of our bourgeois wallets. Inside les Deux Magots Sartre and Castor were ebullient. Radical discontinuity ruled. Wordsworth described well the atmosphere of a similar Revolution. As lesser known line goes, ‘When Reason seemed most to assert her rights..’ While I mused, Guy Debord popped in, “It’s ze societie of the Spectacle, hein?” He shoved a paving stone under my chin, “On the beach, the stones to throw.” He paused, and spoke to a companion, Ian Bone, “Où sont notre pintes?” Althusser rose from a nearby table, “Only through theoretical practice will the class struggle be won.” As the rock reached his head he seized his sword-cane and poked Debord in the eye.

 

I was seized by doubt. Would there have to be a Niederwerfungsstrategie? What would be the calibration of means and ends? That evening from the occupied Sorbonne, I addressed an attentive audience of thousands. “Solidarity! A coherent and militant student movement has not yet emerged in England. But it may now be only a matter of time before it does. Hornsey Art School is in our hands as I speak. The LSE will soon fall. The Oxford Union is a Soviet under the joint leadership of Comrade Tariq and Comradette Benazir Bhutto. Hasta la Victoria, siempre! ” Deafening applause followed.”

 

…………

 

“Looking back, forty years on, what have we learnt? Perhaps it’s the origins of the present crisis. Try the protasis, what if…  It is revealing, the supine remains supreme.  . For the if stands as fungible property, in a  world where radical opposition has drained into new channels. A revolution in the revolution. Oneself? A Watchtower, Nairn, a Flag, the Saltire, Blackburn, a Pension Fund, Tariq, a Leading Liberal Democrat supporter, the ‘chicks’? Perhaps the deepest revolution of them all: soon to publish a joint soc-fem Cookery Guide, ‘Alternative Appetites’. The future? States dissolved. National democracy reborn. Alterglobalisation. There are no certainties here; so far, all that is possible are proposals and conjectures.  Jottings more than theses, they stand to be altered or crossed out. The old Mole grubs on….”

 

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

Posted in International, Islam, Left, War by Andrew Coates on September 25, 2008

  

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Charlie Hebdo.

Posted in International, Secularism by Andrew Coates on September 26, 2008

 Charlie Hebdo should be Veiled!

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

 

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

 

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

Charlie: good cartoonists, shame about the Editor.

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Sarkozy Nous Voilà!

Posted in European Left, Left by Andrew Coates on November 27, 2008

 

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

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

 

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

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Review: Strange Fruit Indeed.

Posted in Left, Multi-Culturalism, Racism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on December 4, 2008

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Many of us have never abandoned it.

 

 

 

Parti de Gauche: tous ensemble dans le front de gauche pour changer d’Europe!

Posted in European Left, French Left by Andrew Coates on February 2, 2009

All Together in the Left Front to Change Europe!

Europe is in upheaval, with strikes, demonstrations and popular discontent spreading – the factory occupation in  Ireland’s by Waterford Glass workers is the latest flash point.  

Is there a European political response? In France the new Parti de Gauche (left Party), initiated last November,  held its first Conference over the weekend. It was principally created by Parti Socialiste left-wingers,  Senator  Jean-Luc Mélenchonet the Deputy (MP) Marc Dolez. They resigned from the PS on the eve of its national conference, last November, declaring that the Socialists were headed towards a dead-end right-wing future. There inspiration is the German Die Linke: a left party, backing radical reforms, anti-capitalism, ecology and feminism, within a democratic republican framework. They have drawn strongly on opposition to the neo-liberal cast of European Union legislation, and were opposed to the proposed Constitutional Treaty, and, the (substituted) Lisbon Treaty. Both are considered part of  the free-market ideology and practice they stand against. This platform had resonance. In the following weeks other significant Socialist figures, such as Deputy Jacques Dessangre and the Senator François Autin,as well as local councillors and members of left republican organisations,  joined them.  Further support has come from intellectuals and a raft of trade unionists. Behind is the experience on much of the left of working together during the Referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty.

At the Limeil-Brévannes (Val-de-Marne)Congress 500 delegates listened to speech’s decalring that, with mounting crises and unrest, “L’heure est à la riposte” (The time has come to Fight Back).  The party claims 4,000 members (organised in 250 committees). Naturally the unfolding social and economic crisis in Europe formed the background to the meeting.  The Parti de Gauche declared that, faced with the burgeoning slump, “C’est la responsabilité des partis de gauche disponibles pour rompre avec les logiques capitalistes qui ont si lourdement faillies.” (it’s the responsibility of the left parties who are ready to break with failing capitalist logic.). Their answer? To fight by both popular mobilisation and by the ballot box. To this end they propose a common Front, “Il s’adresse à toutes les forces qui refusent le traité de Lisbonne, combattent pour une autre Europe sociale, démocratique, écologique et porteuse de paix..” (it is a call to all the forces opposed to Lisbon treaty, and who fight for another Europe, social, ecologists and promoting peace..) . The New Party notes that, Les élections européennes de juin prochain nous donnent l’occasion de changer la donne.”  (With the June European elections we have the possibility to change the political landscape – I clarify the meaning).

Can the French non-PS left work together? There was  a joint declaration on Thursday’s general strike (which the NPA claims they initiated). What of the European contest? The PG wants to present a list of all those on the left who oppose the Lisbon agreements (which endorsed the rules which have created the social dumping UK workers are protesting against). A strong argument in favour, which Mélenchon cites, is that an opinion poll indicates that if a left front, from the Parti Communiste Français, Lutte Ouvrière,  Mélenchon’s Party to the Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste stood in the European Elections it could get up to 14,5% of the vote.  With the PCF on board he asks if Olivier Besancenot will assume his responsibilities and make this alliance. The LCR postie is  the leader of a party that’s  ”no longer a groupuscule” (here). Will the NPA agree with his proposal at its own founding Congress the coming weekend? The LCR aligned unions in SUD seem generally favourable. Christian Picquet of the  LCR minority has said that “there is no reason at bottom to refuse this.” (here)

We shall see.

Tarnac Affair: Review of L’insurrection qui Vient.

Posted in Anarchism, European Left, French Left, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on February 5, 2009

Coming Near You Soon?

The Tarnac Affair rumbles on (Here - in English). At recent French demonstrations in support of the accused, in particular for the, still incarcerated, Julien Coupat,  there were arrests. (Here). Clearly those marching in support of people facing the Courts are, rightly, most concerned about a miscarriage of justice. One should recall the seriousness of the charge:  sabotage of the French railway system, something potentially murderous. Questions about its truth are, then, of prime importance.

Nevertheless it’s worth looking at the ideas which are said to have inspired the group marshalled before Justice  by the French police. Their origins lie in writings in  the ‘post-situationist’ review Tiqqun (more here and here). As is the way with such reviews they appeal to small groups of the interested -  whatever replaced the avant-guarde, and  groupuscles of anarchist-autonomist origin. The same applied to other material produced by the anarchists-autonomists  now under investigation. It  took the affair of the Tarnac Nine to bring L’insurrection qui vient to a wider audience. Given the rising European unrest, it may reach even more readers. So, does their concept of a “coming uprising” have much to tell us? These  are some – critical – reflections.

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

 

To the French Police and (some) Magistrates the country is menaced by the avatars of the Bande à Bonnot. These libertarian, individualist, anarchists, carried out the first motorised hold-up in France (1911), in the Rue Ordener, Montmartre. Some in the modern equivalent of the Sûreté have dreamt up a similar threat from anarchists. They are echoed by right-wing politicians. The President of Sarkozy’s Parliamentary group, François Copé calls the extreme left (from anars to the Nouveau Parti anti-Capitaliste) an “abcès idéologique” for the left as a whole. Today’s enemies of the State, the Tarnac accused,  are accused of sabotaging rail tracks.  For their part those accused in the affaire Tarnac (see above), have little time for any elected left, or conventional politics. Their central concerns lie elsewhere. The authors of L’insurrection qui vient, a certain Comité Invisible – which included Julien Coupat – denounce, as a major target ‘le quadrillage policier’ (omnipresent police control) of the country. In doing so they seem to have run up against something that goes back even further than the pre-Great War anti-anarchist Bloodhounds: the counterparts of Balzac’s early 19th century Peyrade and Corentin (Splendeurs et misères des courtisans). That is the state’s henchmen, with a  flair for conspiracies. Such a secretive arm of the Sarkozy règime does exist: paranoiac, manipulative and heavy-handed. It really seems to have got it in for the Tarnac accused.    

 

The text at hand is probably the most lucid up-to-date summary in French of what is often called ‘Autonomism’. Seven sections are headed, circles, a title of no doubt profound significance that nevertheless escapes me (Dante had nine circles of Hell).  It begins with customary French left grandiloquence that “ Le futur n’a plus d’avenir”. Or no future. Well, well. An equally strident and gratingly wrong-headed celebration of the 2005 riots in the French banlieues follows. “L’incendie de novembre 2005 n’en finit plus de projeter son ombre sur toutes les consciences. Ces premiers feux de joie sont le baptême d’une décennie pleine de promesses.” (the conflagration of November 2005 hasn’t stopped projecting a shadow on everyone’s conscience. These first celebratory bonfires baptized a decade full of promise). Claiming that those arrested came from all social and ethnic groups, they assert that only a hatred of existing society united them. We should, they assert, revel in the destructive nature of these disturbances, identify with the ‘dangerous classes’ and ‘bandits’ and their violent rejection of the existing order, their violence indeed tout court. With an unpleasant sneer, teachers who regretted that their schools were burned down are described as having “pleurnicher” (snivelled) about it all.

 

With this kind of prose, well known to aficionados of the French ultra-left, we know where we are going. Strikingly it leads us back to some ideas popular amongst anarchists during the Bande à Bonnot epoch. A meme transmitted across the generations? There’s a clarification of the difference between a capitalist-spectacular ’I am What I am’, and real freedom. So, «Devenir autonome», cela pourrait vouloir dire, aussi bien: apprendre à se battre dans la rue, à s’accaparer des maisons vides, à ne pas travailler, à s’aimer follement et à voler dans les magasins.” (becoming autonomous, that means, as much: learn to fight in the street, take over empty houses, not working, loving each other madly, and stealing from shops). Action should not concentrate on the wage-labour capital sphere, but more widely in “insoumission” (insubordination),“Nous avons la totalité de l’espace social pour nous trouver. Nous avons l’hostilité à cette  civilization pour tracer des solidarités et des fronts à l’échelle mondiale.” (we have the totality of social space to find ourselves.  We have the hostility of this civilization to lay down the path of solidarity and ‘fronts’ on a world scale – blocs of those in rebellion). So the marginal, the eternally stroppy, the true individual, in her own band of mates,  is the Figure of Autonomy. With this language in full flow, no-one will be surprised to find written that, “L’État français est la trame même des subjectivités françaises, l’aspect qu’a pris la multiséculaire castration de ses sujets.” (The French state is the framework of all French individual subjectivity, the aspect which has for centuries castrated its subjects – a use of the word castrate which one imagines would not occur to an Anglophone leftist, I note). Nor is it long before the claim that, “Toutes les organisations qui prétendent contester l’ordre présent ont elles-mêmes, en plus fantoche, la forme, les moeurs et le langage d’États  miniatures.” (all political organisations that claim to fight the existing order have themselves, in a puppet-show form, the customs, and the language of miniature states) is reeled out. That’s a few leftist lives wasted, hein? What fools we labour movement and left political party activists are. What fools.

 

There is reference to Capital, its transformations, its domination and integration of human tissue, and the sphere of value which now “embrasserait toutes les qualités des êtres” (which embraces every quality of human beings). Rather sub-Negri, Hardy and Virno I would suggest (on Tendance Coatesy’s analysis of these authors see here). As for work itself, with automation and information sciences, many “ travailleurs sont devenus superflus.” (Workers have become superfluous). This leaves capital’s gigantic machine pumping out profits while excluding large sections of the masses. Those inside are dedicated to ‘personal development’ shaping themselves for Capital’s needs; those outside are in precarious, typicallyAgency work, or in the ‘slave’ sectors of domestic employment, even prostitution, in sum:  ‘personal services’. Preferring not to have anything to do with the State, Politics and Capital marks off all the autonomist tradition and so we find it here. Reference to a Situationist-type social spectacle, (that vamps our energy) are accompanied with a Bartleby refusal to work. An eagerness perhaps to smoke dope.  As well as backing for wildcat strikes (grèves sauvages) – unions naturally are lieutenants of Capital. For good measure they also throw in some stuff about the environmental catastrophes (Hurricane Katrina), and ecology being appropriated by the system. As a small mercy there is none of the usual anarchist drivel about animal liberation. The  alternative? A dose of playfulness. Communes, self-organized, outside the circuits of power and production, with an autonomy, a life in liberated zones, living off the black economy, even fraud; whatever resources can be found, and shared.

 

So, they ignore the potential positive side of the Labour movement and the left. Equally the massive anti-revolutionary bloc in France, la Droite, (which managed rather effectively to get Sarkozy elected I observe) is little more than an obscuring fog over the domination of Capital. The central enemy is the Police. Since resistance can come from nearly anywhere (though especially the poorer urban zones), why bother with even this sketchy economic and class analysis? Nobody would have any idea from this text that a massive fianncial crisis (signaled in advance by people such as Larry Elliot in the UK and plenty of writers in France’s Le Monde Diplomatique), was looming and would cause popular unrest across Europe – there is no economics here to speak of. Or investigation into the political economy of neo-liberalism. All is rolled down to the – in their opinion – central conflict between the police and the ‘dangerous classes’. As for these potential supporters: it’s a commonplace that autonomists have a crippling inability to relate to the popular masses. Except no doubt those who have ‘Mort aux vaches’ (Death to the Pigs) tattooed on their arms. Here the rhetoric smothers and ignores the hostility of the majority of the inhabitants of the Cités (Council estates) to the violence that unfolded in their areas during the Banlieue revolts, and which hurt them more than anyone else. No doubt all this goes down well in their proto-Communes – though not possibly so swimingly when they dine with their parents and grandparents on Sunday, as a majority of the French ultra-left, for all their radicalism (famillies je vous hais)  tend to do.

 

As the L’Insurrection qui vient continues in this vein one wonders what all the fuss is about. Perhaps some clues lie in the analysis of the great metropolises. These are no longer anything but points in a network of flows, and “La métropole est le terrain d’un incessant conflit de basse intensité” (the metropolis is the site of a continual low-intensity confect). Hah! Something for the experts in terrorism and counter-insurgency to grasp. They aim furthermore to halt the urban perpetuum mobile. Stopping its incessant movement can proceed by blocking production, and the circulation of goods. “les autoroutes sont des maillons de la chaîne de production dématérialisée” (motorways are the links in the chain of dematerialized production) – leaving aside the fact that Negri, Hardt and Virno see this originating in a rather more ethereal dimension (immaterial production in fact), we can see why keen coppers’ ears prick up. Isn’t the French Railway network, the SCNCF another essential link? Weren’t the accusations that led to the Tarnac all about breaking this circuit – by sabotage no less? The description of Paris as not a centre of power to be ‘captured’ but the “cible de razzia, comme pur terrain de pillage et ravage” (target of raids, a place to loot and wreak havoc in) touches some raw nerves. These after all are the chaps whose profession is to protect the Capital from such attacks. The rozzers must have also felt rather, well, personally, affected by the demand to “Libérer le territoire de l’occupation policière” (free the country from Police occupation). To say the least.

 

Unfortunately for anyone drawing neat conclusions from  L’Insurrection qui vient  tops its ‘circles’ by some further dense paragraphs, strongly opposing a strategy of armed struggle. Naturally they indulge in some waffle about all uprisings being armed. But, given that power is not truly centralised and autonomists have no wish to build a ‘counter-state’, even a  ‘dual power’, they declare that, “la perspective d’une guérilla urbaine à l’irakienne, qui s’enliserait sans possibilité d’offensive, est plus à craindre qu’à désirer. La militarisation de la guerre civile, c’est l’échec de l’insurrection.” (the prospect of urban guerrilla warfare, Iraqian style, bogged down, without any possibility of going onto the attack, is more to fear than to wish, it’s a setback for the insurrection). The militarisationof civil war is a failure for the insurrection itself). All rather mealy-mouthed – the Islamists in Iraq are murdering reactionaries whom one would not even bother considering in a serious left perspective. But clear on the criticism of classic, RAF style, terrorism. In case even Inspector Plod doesn’t get the meaning of this they refer to the libertarian view that the Russian Revolution was set back precisely at this point. He might also reflect on the claim that new oppositions will emerge, in the wastelands of the banlieue, and that one day, all his fruits of his society will be “grandement ruinée” (ruined completely) and that “cette effroyable concrétion du pouvoir qu’est la capitale, “(Capital’s terrible concentration of power) will fall. Or not.

 

So, a text whose politics boils down to a celebration of revolt, and (in real terms) a kind of late ‘sixties/early ‘seventies ‘alternative society’, filled with a great deal of lyricism, romanticism about the 2005 riots (as if the rioters were incarnations of Victor Hugo’s Gavroche) that makes some good, if unoriginal, points, about the nature of the social and institutional dislocations underway, rooted in the purest autonomist ideology – that’s to say, perpetual grandstanding – is the basis for a new version of Action Directe. Maybe. But I think not. Unfortunately, to continue the reference to Les Misérables, the presumed authors have a pack of would-be Javerts yapping at their heels.

 

 

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A Real Marxist, Georges Labica, Passes Away.

Posted in European Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on February 25, 2009

Georges Labica: Real Critical Marxism.

Georges Labica (1930 – 2009), one of France’s most important independent Marxist writers and theorists, passed away on the 12th of February (See: here). During an extremely productive life (bibliography here) he wrote important studies of Marxist theory, from editing the Dictionnaire Critique du Marxisme (1982, 1984, 1989), to short accessible works, such as Le marxisme-léninisme, Eléments pour une critique (1984). He worked with,  amongst many others, the theoretical review, Marx Actuel and  L’Utopie Critique (homages here) . Politically engaged throughout his life Labica-operated with the non-establishment left, notably self-management political organisations, such as the Alternatifs. His last published work, Théorie de la violence (2007) attempted to explore the conditions of legitimate violence (as opposed to ‘substitutions’) in the South, and the synthesis of democracy and Marxism (Review)

Georges Labica had a long engagement with the left. A member of the Parti Communiste Français from the 1950s to 1981, he was was conspicuous for his anti-colonial activism (from his time teaching in French Algeria),  and was prominent enough to be threatened by the OAS.  Academically his research continued in the line of Louis Althusser, though he never adhered to the Althussarian ‘school’. After leaving the PCF (as it drifted aimlessly in the first blush of Mitterrand’s Presidency)  Labica continued to describe himself as a Communist (in the democratic Marxist tradition). He produced critical works on Marxism-Leninism, from a Marxist prospective. In general he researched into the fundamental problems of Marxist theory and practice, producing a string of studies as a result. Without ever creating a grand  ’Theory’, in the vein of Foucault, Negri or Guatteri, Labica’s importance lay in sustaining the independent critical spirit on the left. His writings have influenced generations of socialists and Marxists. Above all he kept alive the kind of First International democray of Marx himself.

Largely unknown to the left in the English speaking world (where the academic left tends to live cloistered from the kind of activism Labica represented), he was recognised by the German, Spanish and Italian ones, to cite but a few.

Labica ‘s death is a great loss.

I need hardly add that I have been influenced by Labica – or that I was once due to meet him at a TMR meeting. But he was delayed at his work. 

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Waiting for the Etonians: Review of Nick Cohen’s Latest Book.

Posted in British Govern, European Left, Islamism, Labour Government, Left, Religion by Andrew Coates on March 5, 2009

 

Eton Spats.

 

REVIEW: WAITING FOR THE ETONIANS. NICK COHEN. Fourth Estate. 2009.

 

Nick Cohen is dismayed. Professionally. He rants, but is terribly reasonable. He finds little reasonableness in the world he looks on. There lie the ruins of popular capitalism. This gives Cohen but small pleasure. He had pointed to the complacency of the Labour governments of Blair and Brown, which inflated the housing and financial bubble. Its policies funded by a deal with Capital, or bluntly, by “prostituting itself” to the City. Cohen had seen that “The spivery of the City afflicted the political left as severely as its blind optimism.”(P 26) He had uncovered subsidised tax breaks for private equity barons, foreign billionaires and British companies with boltholes in tax havens. (P 345) In short, had we read his columns, we would have learnt the truth. This collection of articles bears witness. Not to praise folly, but to condemn it.
 
Nobody listened. Now he listens himself. It’s time to admit the free-market reformist wing’s merits: Labour’s public investments and the consumer boom together fostered a degree of modest personal happiness. Yet (see above) these conditions are evaporating, as the sources in expanding finance dry out. What has the Cabinet, the Third Way, or whatever they call it now (other than save your own skin), to offer? Cohen has more to say. Brown manages some ‘social democratic’ measures – taking the helm of the banking system. Will he go further? Where to? Cohen can only note that the left, from Government to the wilder shores of Trotskyism, has nothing to offer. Nothing whatsoever.
 
The author of What’s Left? (2007) is something of a cult figure on the British left. Admired for his capacity to roar, bellow indeed, though some, who do not measure up to his standards of decency, do not always relish his assertions about the left’s history and ideology. Sample, no doubt weighed on a heavily broken scale, “Because there is no coherent left-wing political programme, anyone can affect a leftist posture, just as anyone can walk into a shop.”(P 188) Ouch!
 
Cohen’s collection of journalism shows him generally in fine fettle. Sharp digs at once fashionable ideas from the ‘therapy culture’, and personal growth (though done better by the late Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism 1979), go down well amongst bitter and twisted leftists. So does attacking the culture industries’ treatment of “underprivileged whites” with “suspicion and condescension” living in a “parasites paradise, scrounging of the cozened middle classes” continues unabated. We lack, he rightly says, someone with the moral depth of Dickens to stir opinion about the poverty of millions. Or, I add, a Balzac to rip into the speculators and financiers.
 
The long-term trend, partly imported from America, for the liberal left to prioritise ‘equality of opportunity’ through promoting people’s identities, is rightly lambasted. Diversity often means flattering diverse prejudices, “..it has become racist to oppose sexists, homophobes and fascist from other cultures.”(P 191) There is an “intolerance of the intolerable inculcated by postmodernism, and the doubts about democracy in the liberal mainstream.”(P 192) Real equality, and better living conditions, are not achieved through a race with plenty of losers, endless ‘monitoring’, and promoting ‘diversity; while failing to improve the lot of all. Again, Robert Hughes’ Culture of Complaint (1993) has been there before. But there’s nothing wrong is rattling out the good old tunes.
 
Nick Cohen is famously opposed to appeasement of religious reaction, above all Islamism. He writes that, “When society decides that people’s religion, rather than their class or gender, is the cultural fact that matters, power inevitably passes to religious fanatics who believe religion justifies any crime.”(P 144) He appears to think that, when “confronted with ultra-reactionary movements and dictatorial regimes, liberals recommended surrender.”(P 31) Recent cases include Iraqi Baathism, and, above all, Islamist movements and regimes. All partly right. There is a kind of appeasement, exemplified in George Galloway that deserves Cohen’s loathing. Self-righteous followers on this path, can scream all they like about Cohen’s ‘apologies for liberal murder’ (he doesn’t make any): they are wrong.
 
Yet the basic analysis demands a challenge. Such surrenders are not principally due, as he elsewhere asserts, to ‘post-modernist relativism’. Galloway and those of that kidney have transferred their loyalty to the Revolution to ‘anti-imperialist’ Islamism, as in poor old Tariq Ali who thinks the Taliban are a national liberation movement, or those who consider the ultra-right-wing Hamas ‘anti-imperialist’ (for being against Israel). Livingstone is largely trawling for City Boss lieutenants.  But with others, who seek to ‘understand’ Islamism, the motives are more mixed.  Cohen’s definition of liberal tends to be an American not British one. That is a mixture of faith in social improvement, wishful thinking, transcendentalist optimism (the living experience of the Soul), and (in modern times) the betterment of a kaleidoscope of worthy oppressed groups. It is this kind of ‘trying to be fair to everyone’ liberal tolerance (deeper rooted that the transient fashion of postmodernism) which is at fault here.
 
 
It would be better to state that by definition no believer in liberty would indulge in excuses or (in the case of Respect and Ken Livingstone) alliances with reactionary religious-political groups. Nor would they, for example, praise, as Cohen’s friend Bernard Henry Lévy did, for the Afghan warlord and (non-Taliban) Islamist, Commander Massoud (here, here). What is a liberal anyway?  Mill’s definition of liberty included the freedom to think and write as one wants, freedom to tastes and pursuits, regardless of ‘moral’ rules (provided they are ‘self-regarding’ and cause no harm to others), and the freedom of assembly. Exit the Sharia and any Autocracy. For Marxists and socialists the choice is simpler: Islamicism and the dictatorships Cohen cites are vehicles of oppression. The former of the pious Moslem bourgeoisie; the latter of various hybrids of state kleptocracy and robber capitalism. 
 
 
Now that a “battered public seemed willing to embrace its old ruling class with something approaching relief.”(P 32) – the Etonians (aka David Cameron’s crew) – is there really no left in the offing? Brown’s Cabinet barely keeps its head above water. The anti-globalisation movement had little concrete to say, and its Social Forum wing has become (in the UK) the haunt of harmless cranks. The Green Party has plans to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.  Respect and the SWP are, well Respect and the SWP.
 
But there is a left that it emerging. It is one the spans the distance between radical social democracy, Compass, the unions, the small independent socialist publications, such as Labour Left Briefing, Chartist, and many others on the democratic socialist left, a gamut of groups, feminist, gay, anti-racist, green, and which extends to many on the ‘far left’ who are fiercely democratic. Ideas are now being developed, on welfare, public ownership and working conditions, that connect with the legacy of the socialist and labour movement. A left that never had any time for tyrants and dictatorships of whatever ilk, Stalinist, Nationalist, or Religious.  Or so I think – because I come from this movement. As do many. It’s a shame that other than offering some warmed over diatribes, and a few real insights on class and culture, wrapped in well-written prose, that Nick Cohen doesn’t seriously engage with us. Perhaps the East Wind has frozen his frowning face.
 
 
 
 
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Welfare Reform Therapy: There’s a Lot of Ruin in the Notion.

Posted in Labour Government, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on March 8, 2009

Therapy for the Workless.

The Observer today reports that a keystone of its Welfare ‘Reform’ programme is flawed. Well, a bit more. A tissue of lies and cover-ups for the usual crew of useless private companies touting for business on the backs of the less fortunate, (end of clause) has come to light. In the sensitive area of incapacity claimants no less.

 A report marked “restricted” revealed how the private companies placed just 6% of incapacity benefit claimants on their books into work, rather than the 26% they had claimed would be possible when they bid for contracts. This compared to 14% achieved by state job centres during the same period. The report described the performance of the private contractors as “not satisfactory”.

Now unbiased commentators like Tendance Coatesy could have foretold this. We have heard a slew of heart-rending cases of people harassed, forced into unsuitable ‘schemes’, and the usual range of personal tales of great misery. The fact is that getting people with physical and mental difficulties into jobs is no simple task. It’s certainly not aided by money-grubbers, of whatever well-turned out stripe.

Not that all, it must be said, the problems in the to-be-farmed off benefits system are the  fault of the way existing private contractors operate. Job Centres themselves can be pretty threatening places, and not just for work-shy gobby Marxist dossers like our good selves. Just to give one case: they are already charged with funnelling people into the notorious ‘New Deal’ programme. Willy-nilly. This can be calmly described as an ‘open prison’ and a make-dosh opportunity for a variety of dodgy ‘trainers’ and ‘placement providers’ (amid a few good eggs that is). Apart from anything else the Dole queues have got too large for them to deal with effectively. Sign on, and meet the crowds. Due to multiply. Hell knows what it’ll be like when they roll out the full workfare boot-camp call-up. Tasar manufactuers will make a killing.

Yet help is at hand. Damp down the protests lads and ladettes. The same Observer leads with this encouraging news. “Victims of the recession to get therapy. State aid planned to fight job anxiety.”

Fears of a depression and an anxiety epidemic, caused by the recession, are forcing the government to offer psychological help to millions of people facing unemployment, debt and relationship breakdown. Sufferers will be referred to psychotherapists for expert counselling via an advice network linking Jobcentres, doctors’ surgeries and a new NHS Direct hotline.

Under the plan, which will involve training 3,600 more therapists and hundreds more specialist nurses, psychotherapy centres will be established in every primary care trust by the end of next year.

Further legislation, exclusively leaked to Tendance Coatesy, reveals plans to combine the scheme with the New Deal/Workfare. To adapt to the changing patterns of market positioning and reskilling, the unemployed will be given ‘talking cures’ to resolve their maladjustment issues. ‘Fitting in’ will be a quality programme individually tailored and incorporates health and safety legislation. In line with existing rules those failing to comply with the assessment/compliance criteria will be ‘exited‘.

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International Women’s Day: Iranian Activists.

Posted in Feminism, Iranian Resistance by Andrew Coates on March 9, 2009

 Iranian Women Activists In London.

International Women’s Day. Just some interesting photos and reports from the Iranian left women’s movement all over the world (largely Worker Communist Party). In Battaile Socialiste.

 

Tendance Coatesy cannot stress enough how important it is to back the Hands off the People of Iran’s Campaigns, from opposing sanctions (that would bolster the Clerical Regime), opposing a US-led military attack (if it gets back in the picture), to supporting the democratic secular opposition, from trades unionists to women’s and LGBT rights.

 

Here and here (both 2007) are some further reasons why. We await up-to-date reports of what happened yesterday.

French Radical Left: Strong but Disunited for European Elections.

Posted in French Left, LCR, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on March 10, 2009

375_image.jpg

NPA: Only a United Front From Below.

According to the opinon pollers, Ifop, the PCF-PG (Left Front) has  4% voting intentions, against 9% for the NPA (Olivier Besancenot)  and 3% for Lutte ouvrière. This totals 16% for the combined radical left score, against 8,6%  2004 results (when neither the NGA’s forerunner, the LCR, nor LO got seats). 

Olivier Besancenot, generally thought to play a major part in his party’s good image,  is on a NPA list, but not far enough up to be in sight of any position to win a seat at Brussels. One would attribute this decision to a desire to stay close to the terrain of day-to-day politics. I must say that I warm to Olivier, and the fact that he lives a couple of bus stops away from where I had my Parisian flat does little to lessen this. But I underline that those expressing reservations about the strategy of the NPA have a lot on their side: you can’t just ‘jump over’ forces like the PCF and the PG; not at least if you want to build something substantial on the left  – see below.

Christian Picquet, leader of the NPA minority current that’s favourable to an alliance between the Front de Gauche and his party, has maintained his backing for such a List. In its absence he says he supports the PCF-PG electoral bloc. He argues that apart from a better election result, it would offer a serious challenge to the Parti Socialiste, and break with the endless fragmentation of the French left.

Of the current NPA direction, Picquet says

«Le NPA était censé apporter un renouvellement des pratiques à gauche. En réalité, il se comporte comme une boutique qui fait prévaloir ses propres intérêts par rapport à l’intérêt général du peuple de gauche», a-t-il déploré.

He regretted, “The NPA was meant to bring  fresh air to the activity of the left. In reality it has behaved like a business, and puts its own interests well before those of the left as a whole.”

Selon lui, «l’écho qu’a le NPA aujourd’hui et la popularité d’Olivier Besancenot les amènent à penser qu’ils ont les clefs de la réponse politique à la crise dela gauche et à la colère sociale», mais le NPA est «dans une bulle qui les enferme dans une illusion mortifère».

According to him, “The echo the NPA has found at the moment, and Olivier Besancenot’s popularity, have led them to think that they are they key forces that can respond to the left’s crisis and society’s rising anger.” But the NPA is, “in a bubble which imprisons them inside a deadening illusion.”

 

The Weekend’s  6,000 strong meeting for the PCF-PG and allies succesful rally here. Piquet’s role in standing up for Unity is extensively covered on this, the Humanité site.

Watchers of the French left await the NPA’s response to this defiance. Note added Wednesday: it seems as it’s coming to the turning point as if Picquet’s crew have ‘self-excluded’ themselves.

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Review: Under Two Dictators. Margarete Buber-Neumann.

Posted in Fascism, Human Rights, Marxism by Andrew Coates on March 12, 2009

Train to Where?

Train to Where?

Review of ‘Under Two Dictators. Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler’. Pimlico 2008.  
 

Margarete Buber-Neumann’s testimony of suffering in Stalin’s Camps, and then, in the Third Reich’s, is a key document of the twentieth century. After an intense period of activism in the German Communist Party (KPD) she and her husband, the leading KPD official Heinz Neumann, fled when Hitler came to power, and headed for the Soviet Union. Employees of the Comintern, they worked in France, and in Spain, during the Civil War. As the Communist International  became, as she puts it, a branch of the secret police, the GPU, any disagreements with the Soviet run leadership, and ‘unreliability’ became capital offences. When the Great Purges began in 1937, and hundreds of German Communists were arrested,  Heinz was one of them,  a ‘deviationist’. Neumann was tortured in the Lubyanka and soon shot. Initially in a social limbo, ostracised (though a few managed to show her acts of kindness) and frantically trying to get news of her partner, Margarete was arrested in 1938 and spent miserable months crammed into a Moscow gaol. In January 1939 she was sentenced to five years imprisonment and sent to the Gulag.  From there, in one of the most sordid deals of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, in 1940 she was handed over to the Nazis and then sent to Ravensbrück. Miraculously she survived to write down her story, published in 1948. This,  as the enlightening Introduction states, is “one of the most important survivor memoirs of totalitarian terror.”(P xxii) It is now back in print through Pimlico. Nearly every page makes harrowing reading.

 

Buber-Neumann reached an international audience for her role in exposing the lies of the French Communist journal, Les Lettres Françaises, in the famous liberal case brought against Soviet defector Kravchenko (I chose Freedom). The PCF denied the Soviet Archipelago of Penal Servitude. She, to their chagrin, was living proof of the existence of the Gulag. That is, sent East with others on a hundred thousand strong slave labour mission to turn barren steppe into fertile fields for crops and grazing. Not even  cutlery and mess tins were provided for their daily use. Everything, primitive huts ownards, had to be built. Great disorder reigned amid back-breaking toil. The division between favoured ‘Criminals’ and ‘Politicals’ (noted by all survivor accounts) made their lives a living hell. The description of remorseless oppressive and chaotic daily life prefigures Solzhenitsynby many years. Initially (soon to be disabused) she found conditions in Germany a relief, “The Ravensbrück hut seemed a palace to me after the wretched clay huts of Birma. And the equipment: a proper lavatory, a washroom with proper basins, tables, stools and lockers!”(P 166) This was not to last as the Nazi extermination programme was stepped up. Everything went worse and worse. But. in the hard winter of 1944 – 5 the Cremetorian was in full swing, its “.. glow at nights was almost always there.”(P 263)

 

 

The narrative must be read in full, a vivid word picture of existence at its lowest,  from the Gulag, to the darkness  in the Konzentrationslager. Memorable are acts of resistance, however ultimately to little avail, from left oppositionists to the most downtrodden victims. In the course of this journey to hell, two reflexions stand out.

 

 

The first, is the mechanism which undergirded Stalin’s mass murders had its original in a Bolshevik institution of long-standing. It was not just the constant adulation of the Leader and the Party. It was permanent efforts to ‘purify’ the CPSU, an urge whose origins lie in Lenin’s not Stalin’s time. That is, the “Tchistka, or purge, was a regular institution in the Russian Communist party.”(P 15)  Originally designed as a way of clearing out ‘dead wood’ (human beings deemed unsuitable, unworthy, then, unreliable, then nonconformist, non-orthodox, dissident, anything other than fully obedient Stalinists). A fright that leaves those saved all the worse morally.  Any Party member had the right to get up and denounce any other member, pointed questions about political past and present activities, if guilty of some deviation had to do public penance, Often a preliminary to actual arrest. “It can be imagined what an opportunity all this offered of paying off old scores.”(P 15)  One can easily imagine.

 

The second is a moral observation, “Christian morality declares that suffering ennobles the sufferer. That can be only a very qualified truth. Life in a concentration camp showed the contrary to be true more often than not. I think that nothing is more demoralising than suffering, excessive suffering coupled with humiliation such as comes to men and women in concentration camps. That is true of individuals and probably of whole people.!”(P 185) To her, it’s not like ordinary prison, where there’s  one blow, loss of freedom, is only the first. “You had lost all human rights – all, all without exception. You were just a living being with a number to distinguish you from the other unfortunates around you.”(P 185) What can you say to that?

 

The final passages contain further reflections. In the wake of her liberation Margarete was, like millions, adrift in a defeated Germany. On her wanderings she met with dissident Communists, who had rebelled against Stalinism in the KPD and retained their faith under the Nazis.  Her host began by stating that, “The Comintern was used only for what was useful to the Russians.”(P 311) Something went deep inside Buber-Neumann, “I experienced a long, long forgotten feeling of happiness, K hesitatingly, and with uncertain words, directed the following question at me: ‘Comrade Grete, what do you actually think of Soviet Russia. You have been there, haven’t you? To us, you surely can tell the truth.”(P 312) Friends came in the room as she told them,  “All of them former members of the KPD, members of the opposition who, like K, had left the Communist Party yet had remained antifascists imprisoned by the Nazis for many years in penitentiary or KZ,”(P 312) Nevertheless they remained treated by Communists as traitors, “Yet they still considered themselves to be Communists, they believed that they were the fighters for the true the fact that their ideological foundations was already damaged at all its corners. They didn’t dare yet to doubt Lenin, let alone the October Revolution or even Marxist theory. The great traitor was called Stalin.”(P 312) She described the full extent of the Big Cleansing and the Show trials. When she  got to the Hitler-Stalin Pact and  the Soviets handing her over to the Nazis one of her audience couldn’t control himself, “filthy killers!” he shouted.  

These are surely good people every democratic  left-winger would identify with. But is the following the case? “The path of suffering hadn’t ended yet for them, but already they had known the pain that a Communist feels when he loses his political   faith and has to re-orientate himself in this life – lonely and banished. (P 313) It seems an impertinence to comment after such a series of terrifying experiences. But one holds to the democratic root of Marxism so firmly because it is strongly planted, for all the efforts to tear it up.

 

The tale finishes on the most glorious of notes. Her heart-rending welcome in the House of Johannes Thuring, by her mother, sister, brother in law Dr Fleiss, and their children, rings in the mind, “From above on the steep wooden stairs at the entry to the house my mother’s voice, which had turned old, called over and over again, ‘Had  she really come? Has she really come…’”(P 341)

Margarete was embedded in the culture of the 20th century. Apart from her link to the core of German Communism her first husband, Rafael Buber, was the son of Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher. In Ravensbrück she befriended Melina, that is the woman of  Kafka’s beautiful letters Briefe an Melina. The two had promised that the one who managed to live would write down what they had seen. Melina wasted away, but Margarete managed to survive. She must be listened to. I don’t care about her eventual support for German Christian Democracy. This book has something that stays

 

 

 

 

 

Important Article in Taz Today about Islamist Manipulation of ‘Islamophobia’.

Posted in Islamism, Racism, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on March 16, 2009

Necla Kelek: Doughty Fighter for Secular Freedom.

There’s a very important article today  in the German centre-left daily, Die Tageszeitung, by Necla Kelek, (who’s of Turkish origin), taking apart, root and branch, the campaign against  ‘Islamophobia’ by various kinds of Islamists (here). The piece,  a solid essay, goes into the whole misuse of the concept of ‘racism’ in this context. She points out the racist ideas of Islamicists: that one is ‘born’ a Muslim and can never stop being one. There is a promiennt place given to  the manipulation in Turkey by pro-AKP conservative Islamicists of the alleged anti-Islam atmosphere in Germany. In short, it paints a sad picture of the ideology of Islamicism: rather than fight for equality and act against real racialist politics, it serves as a counter-banner of prejudice around an Islam beyond criticism. That is, a closed ideology constantly under ‘threat’.

I observe that it seems a common religious trope. It could be extended very widely (put in other faiths for the one cited above)  to those who continually see their religions ‘menaced’.

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France: Day of Action Tomorrow, Students Already in Uproar.

Posted in European Left, French Left, Unions by Andrew Coates on March 18, 2009

 

European upheaval continues to grow, from Iceland, Ireland, the Baltic states, Greece, to France. Oh yes, France. Tomorrow’s one-day General Strike promises some mass activity. Not just by official union and left parties. As a taste of the urnest brewing last night there was a student demonstration of several thousand  in Paris which wound its way through half the capital. It ended up in Montmartre, accompanied by ‘incidents’. As Le Parisien reports,

“Manifestation étudiante cette nuit à Paris : 4 gardes à vue.”

As part of the protests against the government’s ‘reform’ of higher education, a ”universities night’ began in the 13th arrondisment. The students then decided to have a spontaneous demonstration, which wove its way across the capital. After briefly blocking the traffic at Châtelet, they headed for Barbès and Montmartre (this is a hell of a route I note). At this point confrontations with the police took place. Around 150 youths began breaking shop windows, and attacking cars. The CRS (riot squad) moved in and arrested four people.

Thursday’s Day of Action – called by all the unions and backed by the left parties (and the Greens, who notably refused to do so for the previous General Strike) -   has overwhelming popular support (around 70% in the polls). The defence of the public sector (the famous ‘French model’ of social protection, its difference with other European systems rather exaggerated in our view), is important, and as in the UK the future of the Post Office is an issue. This comes together with widespread anger at Sarkozy’s tax breaks for the well-off.  The latter,  ’le bouclier fiscal’ (a shield that protects those who earn the most), is causing as much anger as the Bankers’ bonuses and pensions in the UK. There is this is dissatisfaction in the private sector, anxiety about unemployment and wages drifting downwards. A further range of causes, such university researchers’ fury at plans to to base their work on a quasi-business template – as is projected for higher education as a whole is pouring fuel onto the social fire.

 

The central demands are: 

  • - Donner la priorité au maintien des emplois dans un contexte de crise économique. (Priority to keeping jobs during the economic crisis).
  • - Améliorer le pouvoir d’achat, réduire les inégalités dans les politiques salariales. (Raise spending power, reduce salary inequalities in pay-scales).
  • - Orienter la relance économique vers l’emploi et le pouvoir d’achat. (Turn plans to reboot the economy towards bettering employment and pay levels).
  • - Préserver et améliorer les garantiescollectives. (Preserve and improvec ollectively adopted standards – a  big difference from the UK, there are tripartite negotiations and binding agreements on a whole range of working conditions and salaries).
  • - Réglementer la sphère financière internationale. (Regulate the international financial sector).

Where this will end is not at all clear. Apart from these rather wishy-washy demands the real meat is in whether the State will back down in its drive to privatise and drop the coddled status for the higher earning classes. Sarkozy says – in effect – “I’ve already acted to deal with the financial crisis and helped protect employees. I’m not abandoning  my modernisation projects”. Will he change his mind? He has proved less ridiculously stubborn and a free-marketeer than Gordon Brown, who is notorious in Europe as the last man standing who will protect ultra-liberal EU Commissioner, Barroso. But a different Cabinet would be needed for the unions’ minimum demands to be met  - the traditional way for French Presidents to alter direction. The Unions are not seriously up for a strike to topple the François Fillon government – yet.  

 

Globalising Hatred – The New Anti-Semitism. Denis MacShane.

Posted in European Left, Fascism, Islam, Islamism, Israel, Jews, Secularism by Andrew Coates on March 19, 2009
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Globalising Hatred. The New Anti-Semitism. Denis MacShane.Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2008.

 

I had expected to be intensely irritated by this book. Denis MacShane is Tony Blair’s former Minister for Europe, and is well-known on the Continent for preaching the Gospel of the Third Way. If only the French Socialists had listened to his message, broadcast in Le Monde and Libération, as elsewhere… They could have enjoyed the glory Gordon Brown now bathes in. While as a contrariest, one has a certain sympathy for MacShane, capable of annoying people on a grand scale, it was not to be expected that this book would contribute much to an already overabundant public debate. Yet in discussing contemporary  anti-Semitism, MacShane is unexpectedly modest, and makes a whole set of well-judged (if contestable) points. Is it therefore right to claim that “The anti-Semitism of old has morphed into something new. It is a significant component of the new ideology; one might call it the ‘Endarkenment;’ which is seeking to deOccidentalise the world.”(P 159) ? Or that, “It is Islamism the ideology that has unleashed the new twenty-first century anti-Semitism..”(P xi) ? Yes and No. In any case, these are real issues, and not provoc’ Denis being provoc’ Denis.

  

MacShane, like many of us on the left, managed to pass most of his life without being over-conscious of religious or ethnic identities. He begins by noting that it was only comparatively recently that he became aware, for example, of the Jewish background of some of his comrades (I have the same experience). That doesn’t mean he is not conscious of cultural identity, an important fact – I observe that defending for example the Yiddish heritage has played a role in the admirable Jewish Socialists’ Group. I doubt if his own Catholic, Irish and Polish background is forgotten either. Just that it doesn’t function as an overwhelming fact. That is when close, he could “simply stop seeing people in terms of their skin colour or religion.”(P 1)  

 

Good. Cleared the decks.

 

Now why is anti-Semitism important today? MacShane took part in the All Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into anti-Semitism. (Report, 2006.)  People tend to dismiss anti-Semitism, “as not important as a contemporary phenomenon” (P 7) But, he asserts, “it is a growing component element of international politics.”(P 9) I find myself in agreement. Firstly, anti-Jewish remarks and acts are far more widespread than some liberals are willing to recognise. Keeping a sense of proportion – it is rare to meet anyone in the UK with the virulent Jew psychosis of some from the former Eastern Block – it certainly exists. Secondly, this prejudice is given a boost by a noxious mix of conspiracy ‘wise-guy’ thinking, and, most significantly Islamism. Even multiculturalists have had to confront the bigotry of those who brandish the Qur’an as the solution to all ills. Thirdly, there are European political parties, such as the BNP and the French Front National, that cluster round an anti-Semitic ideology. They’re part of a wider culture. The French black ‘humourist’, Dieudonné, now parades the Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson, on stage, and collaborates with the FN and Shiite zealots. 

 

Islamism. That’s it said. There have been, MacShane doesn’t mention, anti-Jewish (and anti-Non-Muslim generally) persecutions in societies where Islam has been the state faith over a long historical period.  For instance, under the 17th century Persian Safavids. There appears a diiffulty here of the dominance of religious judgement in politics – which has existed in Europe (as if anyone will let us forget this) But doctrines that believe that salvation is an exclusive property of one Faith are wide open to modern (militarised and tooled up) intolerance, and (media led) mass moblisations. Not to mention a  few (civil and external) wars of religion. On such fertile soil in the 20th century European anti-Semitic ideologists took root in historically Christian lands  but ended up embraced amongst the Islamist founding fathers. Minus the biological gibbish about race these figures encouraged, nevertheless, pure religious-racialism(faith as a quasi-gene). Globalising Hatred pays a lot of attention to this in the thinking of Sayyid Qutb - the Egyptian Islamist always cited in these cases.  His writings show a “world of unremitting hate against Jews.”(P 100)

 

I wonder. The Muslim Brotherhood has had more factions than Trotskyism. Its ideology, shifts around politics, and its own power, using the Sacred in different ways. The Jew is but one target, puppet-master and scapegoat. In The Root of Radical Islam. Gilles Kepel (2005) we get a broader picture.  The hatred of the Moslem Brotherhood is wider and narrower: against the Jew, for sure, but the Secularist-Freemason, Communist and Westernisers figure equally. -This goes back to the reaction against the French Revolution and the origins of the far-right. It’s angst at modernity’s shattering of the Divine Order, a fear of Obedience threatened by Critique.

This hate is a major problem. There is no way we should ‘understand’ it:  religious fanaticism can only be opposed. But is  MacShane right to work with the assumption that Islamism as such is identical to Jihadism, to suicide bombing and mass murder? Clearly not. There are those who wish to use peaceful means to impose their theocracy, those who use mass movements, and these, well those who wish simply to kill. Is not just that Muslims are victims of Jihadism, as a kind of spin off from their loathing of Jews: it is inherent to their programme to want to ‘cleanse’ the world. What and Who? See the four figures just listed. Add (and this is by no means the least): its hostility to women’s rights, to gays, to non-Muslims generally. Hey – that’s a lot.

 

Every chapter of Globalising Hatred is not so heavy. The pages on Tariq Ramada are a joy. Especially since the ‘Professor’ get reverential treatment in the United Kingdom. MacShane is sometimes too eager to attack political enemies (claiming, for example that Le Monde Diplomatique is purely anti-Western and pro-Islamist, ignoring secularist authors in its stable). But here he is spot on. Ramadam’s shaky qualifications, poor-level academic work, pontificating, well-funded propaganda, obscurantist puffery, platitudes, unreadability, and shifty slippery inability to answer straight questions about the Sharia should be widely broadcast. Ramadam’s role in banning Voltaire’s play, Mohamed in Geneva (an act of ‘politeness’ that makes you cringe), should be brought to very Islamophile’s attention.

It is worth thinking, for anyone, like myself, who is opposed to Zionism (from its ‘national liberation’ claims onwards), and backs a ‘two state’ solution in the Middle East, that “Just as anti-Semitism was a euphemism for anti-Jewish politics, so too is anti-Zionism an attempt to find a formula that covers up a call for the eradication of the state of Israel. And on the whole when a state gets eradicated, its citizens vanish, one way of another. So anti-Zionism is Jew-Hatred by other linguistic means”(P 83) Maybe. But it won’t stop leftist internationalists pointing out the ruthless brutality of the Israeli government, and the fundamental wrongs of the state’s nationalism. Or, at the same time, against those who back the Brotherhood inspired Hamas as a national liberation movement (with Islamic charity as some kind of ‘socialism’), it is surely justified to point to its foundations in the far-right ideology of tis founders.  

 

Ultimately, then, MacShane only partly persuades. Anti-Semitism is a problem. But the problem of Islamism is far deeper. His largely muted criticisms of the British government’s failures to deal with it – partly the result of their own pandering to religious communitarians – show this. Getting rid of Islamist diatribes against Judaism will in itself not break its underlying totalitarianism. That needs thorough-going criticism and social movements of hope to counter its despair.

 

What then is the wider nature of Islamism, and what could combat it?  Islamism is a collection of movements, whose leaderships are bourgeois, or at least middle-class. Its programme is a forced harmonious form of capitalism. Its totalitarianism is Book, not Leader, based. It claims to express a desire for justice. But fighting global injustice need egalitarian secularism, not religious supremacy, unity, not the divisions of faith. Confronting real oppressions and exploitation needs rational thought, it can’t be done on the say-so of ancient texts.  Or say-so I. Socialism, which remains a hope, has a part to play – a central one for many of us. There is no place for religious bigotry amongst all shades of democratic socialism. On a  very optimistic day I think that MacShane might one day stray from the Third Way and consider this road. He might…

No2EU: Egg on the Dead.

Posted in Europe, European Left by Andrew Coates on March 21, 2009

They’re Bidding for His Vote.

No2EU, Yes to Democracy!

The Euro-Election alliance of the RMT, the CPB, the Socialist Party (still to be announced Galloway’s Respect and Sheridan’s Solidarity’s backing), and the Campaign to Defend Imperial Measures and Winding British Lanes (actually I made that bit up) is off to a flying start. To the Morning Star, the June European elections will be “electrified” - and as experts on how electricity brought Soviet Power their judgement must be respected. Meanwhile Tendance Coatesy is taking wagers on whether this doomed enterprise will get above 0,1% of the  vote.

Let us leave aside the fact that this platform’s anti-EU trademark is hotly contested by a  host of Barmy Britishers, that its exclusion – with one fell swoop - of left groups (SWP, et.al), is somewhat arbitrary. The important – though not redeeming – fact is that the original nationalist edge of the RMT-CPB has  been affected by some discreet changes in its original platform. The line about ‘restoring democracy’ to sovereign states, has been replaced by ‘repatriate’ democratic powers to EU member states. But still, a simple ‘No’ to the European Union sits badly with the strategy of demanding such changes to the EU – such as altering directives on privatisation (actually competition, but what the hell, this is not ever going to get near Brussels decision-making), and the ECJ etc. So we have an appeal to the worst traditions of the left, blaming the capitalist crisis on foreigners, the EU,  (not only British, one can find them elsewhere, such in Chevènement’s current in France), mixed up with something that could be reasonably supported if it was part of a campaign for a democratised-united social European republic. But not in this form. No.

There thus seem two programmes waiting to emerge: one, for democratised European political and economic structures, the other for a retreat to national sovereignty, with (dredged from the CPB’s dreamtime) reviving  the old Alternative Economic Strategy (national Keynsianism plus nationalisation). We can debate for a long time about whether the former should be United, Federal or Confederal, or Social or a Socialist Republic. Okay, that’s a bit of a reverie as well. But please, let’s look to the future, not to a (as they call it in France) ‘sovereigntist’  withdrawal faced with the – international - structures of capitalism (or, globalisation, neo-liberalism, etc etc etc).  Phew!

Here is the No2′s bullet point list, in all its finery:

  • Reject the Lisbon Treaty
  • No to EU directives that privatise our public services
  • Defend and develop manufacturing, agriculture and fishing industries in Britain  
  • Repeal anti-trade union ECJrulings and EU rules promoting social dumping
  • No to racism and fascism, Yes to internationalsolidarity of working people
  • No to EU militarisation
  • Repatriate democratic powers to EU member states
  • Replace unequal EU trade deals with fair trade that benefits developing nations
  • Scrap EU rules designed to stop member states from implementing independent economic policies
  • Keep Britain out of the eurozone.
  • NO, NO NO.

    That’s about it.

    Oh, YES, YES, YES: Democracy!

    Collapse of all anti-democrats.

     

     

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    Tarnac Affair: No Material Proofs.

    Posted in Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on March 27, 2009

     

    A great injustice pursues its course.

     

    In Radical Philosophy Alberto Toscano provides a good introduction to this.

     On 11 November 2008, twenty youths were arrested in Paris, Rouen and the village of Tarnac, in the Massif Central district of Corrèze. The Tarnac operation involved helicopters, 150 balaclava-clad anti-terrorist policemen, with studiously prearranged media coverage. The youths were accused of having participated in a number of sabotage attacks against high-speed TGV train routes, involving the obstruction of the trains’ power cables with horseshoe-shaped iron bars, causing a series of delays affecting some 160 trains. The suspects who remain in custody were soon termed the ‘Tarnac Nine’, after the village where some of them had purchased a small farmhouse, reorganized the local grocery store as a cooperative, and taken up a number of civic activities from the running of a film club to the delivery of food to the elderly.

    Le Monde yesterday commented that in the dossier of the affair (as a big as seven or eight telephone  books) that, it had ” beau être dense, il ne contient ni preuves matérielles ni aveux, et un seul témoignage à charge, sous X, recueilli le 14 novembre. ” It may have been dense, but it contains neither material proofs nor confessions, and a single witness cited, under X, has been received on the 14th of November.”  The documents contain the following exchange:

    “– Le juge:”Pensez-vous que le combat politique puisse parfois avoir une valeur supérieure à la vie humaine et justifier l’atteinte de celle-ci?

    – Julien Coupat: “Ça fait partie (…) du caractère délirant de la déposition du témoin 42 [sous X] tendant à me faire passer pour une espèce de Charles Mansonde la politique (…) Je pense que c’est une erreur métaphysique de croire qu’une justification puisse avoir le même poids qu’une vie d’homme.”

    The Judge: “Do you think that political struggle can sometimes have a greater value than human life, and can justify causing harm to human beings?”

    Julien Coupat, “This is part of the insane delirium of the testimony of  42 (X ). which tries to make me out as a kind of political Charles Manson. I consider it a metaphysical error to give any (abstract)  justification a greater weight than human life.”

    Meanwhile Julien Coupat  languishes in gaol, and the other accused (out on bail) wait to see if charges are brought.

    The cost of the surveillance operation, which lasted some years before the Tarnac autonomists were raided and slung into the clink, must be enormous. We are seeing the same State-Media obsession with anarchists and autonomists in the run up to the London anti-G20 Demos.

     

    More information (in English) here. Coatesy’s critique of the autonomist ideology here.

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    GM20 Demo: Notes of a Leftist Trainspotter.

    Posted in Capitalism, European Left, Labour Movement, Unions by Andrew Coates on March 29, 2009

    TUC Leads the New Revolution: March Against Those Who Put People Last!

    Apparently, according to the Police,  there were 35,000 people on the Put People First March yesterday, (Here). I hate to disagree with our ever-reliable coppers but this is probably an over-estimate (yes, you got that right). While it was a successful event, we at the Tendance say it was around 20,000. True it was cold, which led to less bunching, and the march had got split into half at some point(some say it was a police tactic, others some anarchist protest that involved a sit-down, Coatesy says, who cares?)  but we stick by our scientific Marxist method of counting demos (Units based on the length of Park Lane).

    Lowlight of the day was the presence of Tony Robinson as comic compère on stage. He introduced the ever bubbly Brendan Barber in terms which would have made Kim Il Sung blush. We know that poor old Tony lavished similar praise on Tony Blair, and was elected to the Labour NEC on that basis. All went well until he made some mild complaint. Punishment was swift. He got reminded that he was a lowly Baldrick after all. So watch out Tony: history has a habit of repeating itself.

    Still, Mark Thomas distinguished himself by being funny (not uncommon, but a first for his political platform performances). He was in fine fettle -  socialism, Yes! I would have liked him to say something on the lines that  all the Blairite-Brownite  Bourgeois Bastards (and Banking Bosses)  should be strung up from the nearest Mobile Phone Mast. He didn’t. But one sensed that the thought was not far away.

    We had up to 40 people on the coach from Ipswich, not bad (we did leafleting and a street stall which helped get the word out). On the March the Tendance had comradely conversations with the Weekly Worker lads, and indeed ladettes, the AWL, a leading  Briefing Cadre, and a Norwich anarchist. Topics covered were Iran (with a prominent HOPI comrade) , the doomed N2EU election slate, the anti-Workfare campaign, for Decriminalising Prostitution and Trades Council activism. In case anyone thinks we are dropping our guard and becoming a spreader of light, peace and friendship to all the left, we sneered at the Swoppies, Turned our Nose up at Newsline, Snubbed the Sparticists, and Stood away from the Socialist Party (extend list if and when group comes to mind). The Black Bloc – we listened a while but they struck us to amiable but aimless. We were able to ignore the scattered charity types and eco-warriors or whatever name ineffectual green herbivores call themselves this year. Poueff – and there were some desultory leafleteers for the No2EU.

    Back home for a healthy dinner of two thick bacon rashers, baked beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, black pudding,  poached eggs and fried bread. With mug of Co-op 99 Tea.

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    No2EU, RMT, Sir Teddy Taylor and Far-Right Henry Nitzsche.

    Posted in Europe, European Left, Fascism, Unions by Andrew Coates on March 31, 2009

    The People’s Flag is Red, White and Blue?

    In the Morning Star Monday Column, usual  ad for the Korea Friendship on the anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, “exploring his work on anti-imperialism, and the socialist economy.” Hah, just before, we find something a bit odd: Campaign for an Independent Britain and Campaign against Euro-Federalism. Public meeting, Democracy or EU Dictatorship’. Saturday 4th April. Friends Meeting House. Speakers; Frank Keoghan, People’s Movement Ireland, Brain Denny, Trades Unionists Against the European Union Constitution, and RMT Press Officer, Sir Teddy Taylor, former MP, Henry Nitzsche, MP, (Germany).  I was initially alerted by comrade Ian on Socialist Unity (though he has yet to post about it on his Blog) who questions workers’ interests in sharing a meeting with the likes of Taylor. Just in case you’ve not got the slant of the event it is further advertised on UKIP sites such as this.

     But there is worse than the fact that this is a platform of the RMT initiated No2EU, with British and Irish right-wing chums, such as Teddy Taylor. A lot worse.

    On Henry Nitzsche (here):

    “I am sick of being the bogeyman,” Nitzsche said on Friday, confirming his resignation from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Nitzsche had recently caused an uproar in Germany when he said that Germany “should never again be governed by multicultural fags from Berlin.” He was referring to the previous German coalition government consisting of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Green party.Nitzsche also spoke about the German “cult of guilt” in the way Germans deal with their country’s past. (15.12.2006)

     

    Nitzsche is reported saying a few years back  that, “”A Muslim would sooner allow his hand to rot away before checking the box next to the CDU on his ballot.” (here)

     

    According to Wikipedia’s German pages: “Seit dem 18. Februar 2008 ist Nitzsche Vorsitzender der von ihm gegründeten Wählervereinigung Bündnis Arbeit, Familie, Vaterland – Liste Henry Nitzsche.” That’s how he got elected.

     

     

    Family, Work, Fatherland – sounds familiar, hein?

     

     

    Added 1st April.

    This is too good not to miss (Hap-tip to Herbert): Kilroy Silk to stand on No2EU list. Poisson d’Avril? ‘Apparently’ not: official confirmation here.

     

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    The Believers. Zoë Heller. Review.

    Posted in Left, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on April 2, 2009

     

    Angry Woman
    Angry Woman

    The Believers. Zoë Heller. Fig Tree. 2008.

    Zoë Heller is a spinner of acerbic tales, as those who’ve watched the film of Notes on a Scandal know. The Believers is equally riveting, using literary rivets that is, and as a plus has a cast of interesting figures in a dynamic New York setting. The Litvinoffs, the ultra-radical lawyer, Joel (currently defending suspected terrorist Mohammed Hassani) his English wife, Audry (in the thick of post 9/11 anti-war activism), the grandmother Hannah, offspring (undergoing religious and personal crises) and their politicised milieu.  From the first pages, the prose grabs our attention. It begins closer to home, near Malet Street (home of so many left encounters) Audrey and Joel met in London, both on the left – her in the outer orbit of the Healy cult, he a young American legal fighter. Both have a secularised Jewish background – hers, lower middle class Polish, his, assimilated US immigrants, strongly left, himself already soaring in Civil Rights circles.

     

     

    Why do novels feature these kind of glamorous left wing characters in interesting circumstances? One thinks of Russell Bank’s The Darling (2004), an ex US underground leftist who ends up in the vicious disintegration of one of West Africa’s failed states, or Unity, by Michael Ardetti (2005) about an upper class Brit actress who acquired a taste for Palestinian supporting armed struggle in Germany. Why not, say a fictionalised account of life as an Ipswich activist? Er well.. 

     

    If, as Heller heads the novel, “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusion without becoming disillusioned.” (Gramsci no less), The Believers are much challenged. The unfolding plot, refracted through the prism of intense leftist culture (real and imagined), revolves around a set of potential and actual disillusionment.  

    Switch to other side of the Atlantic. Joel still perusing his career of defending. defending. Against. Against. Suddenly he is taken ill and falls into a coma. The family gather round. Only for Audrey to be forced to face the news, after understandable reluctance to believe, that her husband had fathered a son by a black woman, Berenice, who (no doubt to make it more hurtful)  takes action-art photographs of her vagina, and has a room full of  “gerund-heavy non-fiction titles: Mindful Eating, Writing the Body, Understanding Gynocritcal Theory, Reading Tarot”.

     

    Heller portrays Audrey’s leftism in ways which hardly evoke much sympathy. She declares, to cite but one instance, after 9/11 that, “The anger that motivates the suicide bombers is a political anger. A perfectly rational anger against the American hegemon.” A lippy young Englishwoman she has become a termagant in late middle age (not uncommon – for either sex). A conversation with her friend Jean is the occasion for reflecting on the shrillness of her ideology.  For decades now, she had been dragging about the same unwieldy burden of a priori convictions, believing herself honour-bound to protect theme against destruction at all costs. No new intelligence, no rationale argument, could cause her to falter from her mission. Not even the cataclysmic events of the previous September had put her off her stride for more than a couple of hours, By lunchtime on the day that the towers fell, when the rest of new York was still stumbling about in a daze, Audrey had already been celebrating the end of the myth of American exceptionalism and comparing the event to the American bombing of a Sudanese aspirin factory in 1998.”(P 33 – 34) I hate to evoke realist criteria but this is a realist novel: most of the left also went around “in a daze” at that time. Those with Audrey’s response, callow and bellowing, stood out like sore thumbs. But that may not have been the case in the cosier reaches of Manhattan’s left. Maybe after all Wolfie Smith emigrated and has a smart apartment near Central Park.

    A confrontation of another stripe occurs with her daughter Rosa. She had been a believer, a Revolutionary, but a long stay in Cuba had shattered her faith. Not to mention her self-image as a Soviet muscular heroine. The “paradisical era of righteousness had come to an end. After a long and valiant battle against doubt she had finally surrendered her political faith and with it’s the densely woven screen of doctrinal abstraction through which she was accustomed to viewing the world.” Absorbed in the discovery of her Jewish interior Rosa attends Synagogue and religious education classes. These lead to more believing. The Red Heifer sacrifice (which purifies the recipient’s but pollutes the sacrificers) and many other ideas which “cannot be explained in logical terms that defy human reason.” are easily absorbed. Audrey tries to sneer her conversion away but Rosa brushes this off. She insists on Israel’s right to exist and defend itself (the ultimate betrayal to the WRP-culture of her mother). Auderey is lost in a welter of feeble counter-arguments, unable to deal with things seriously – rather a cop-out on the issue one might think.

    As can be gathered, The Believers has a fine sense of character. It is studded with miniature portraits, prickly and sharp. Her wayward drug abuser adopted son, Lenny, floats in chaos, yet Audrey wraps this in cotton wool. His birth mother, gaoled as a terrorist in the ’70s for the semi-Weather Underground New York Cong, is a blinkered pathetic hard-case.  Audrey’s overweight social-worker daughter, Karla who flees from a loveless marriage to the arms of an apolitical Egyptian lover, Kahled, a Newsagent owner, is so put in her place than one wonders if her feelings ever register. Karla, a ‘caring person’, is somebody one warms to, a sickly heat when one realises just what a meaningless choice she’s made.   

     

    The dénouement of The Believers takes place at Joel’s funeral. Audrey recognises her husband’s lover and son. She speaks of being part of a ‘tribe’, and the guests, the exotic fauna of American leftism, political and artistic, attend. Indeed in many senses her politics are a cultural, not ideological choice, for originality, striking a pose. That is, it suggested that they are like the ”arcane tastes” of adolescent Indie Music enthusiasts. Chosen for their rarity. More fundamentally Heller suggests that this kind of leftist will never recognise any refutation of her beliefs. As Audrey spits out, `You want to know what I’d do if the truth revealed itself to me and it wasn’t the truth I wanted to find?” Audrey smiled, “I’d reject it.”

     

    For all the undoubted talent shown in The Believers, its taut syntax and its stylish ethical satire (that is: I liked it), and that anyone, there are some indeed, who hides in this shell merits a few verbal lashes, this is not a leftist approach. Indeed I would expel and shun not to say eradicate from the pages of History, and refuse to listen to anyone anyone who dared to advance such views! 

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    New Deal: YMCA Training, A Major Scandal.

    Posted in British Govern, Capitalism, Ipswich, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on April 3, 2009

     

    Plan of Dencora House, Ipswich.

     

    For Important Updates see here.

    Forget Gordon Brown’s success in solving the global financial crisis, bringing food and water to the world”s hungry and thirsty, and eliminating child poverty for ever. His star project, the  New Deal for the Unemployed, a foretaste of the Workfare schemes to be  introduced by the Government’s Welfare Reform, is facing a major crisis.

    In Suffolk this programme is managed by the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Or rather its Training arm. This is  Brown’s support for religious charities taking over the welfare state in action. The YMCA  promises high quality services. It says that “We are dedicated to inspiring individuals to develop their talents and potential and so transform the communities in which they live and work.”  There are two centres in Ipswich, one for young people on the town outskirts. The other, Dencora House (popularly known as ‘the Den’) on an industrial-commercial estate in another far-flung suburb, Whitehouse. After varying periods of unemployment (dependent, for example, on age), the workless are assigned, in their majority, to a ‘course’ of thirteen weeks at these units. In theory, after a short period of CV and presentation skills induction, participants should be sent on ‘placements’ in various enterprises, local government, or the voluntary sector. The latter is an important growth area. In many cases taking over from  ’community service’ ordered by the Courts. Then you have to attended a session back at ‘the den’ to do ‘jobs search’ – sit in front of computers (never enough available) looking at a page of ads, filling in a few forms – in fact what you would normally do anyway if you’re looking for work.

    The last time I was obliged to undergo this rigmarole there were the following complaints. Dencora House is in the middle of nowhere. It is very hard to get to from a lot of East Suffolk (its catchment area). It costs £1,70 pence each way on the bus there, from Ipswich that is. From other places, plenty of rural districts,  it’s double, even treble. Dole is just over £60 pounds a week, New Deal is £15 plus, minus (yes) the first £4 of your travel expenses. The rest of the journey’s cost is covered. But you had to queue up every Friday with all your tickets to get this back. In some cases this meant £30 to £40 – laid out beforehand on the Dole money just mentioned. Next, placements have been known to be thinly disguised exploitation of free labour. A training scheme offered for some over 55 year olds was on learning to ‘lay bricks’ (guess what the qualification is worth). Then there was the fact that even then some people never found placements and were stuck in the Den all week, doing little. At around forty people there during peak days there was also the question of health and safety – one men’s toilet for about 35 men. Anyone getting stroppy was threatened with being “exited” (charming word) – that is suspended form all benefit whatsoever. Finally there was the simple fact that the process rarely lead to work for anyone who was not already highly employable.

     

    Switch to the present. Numbers of those thrown out of work swell and swell, even in relatively prosperous East Anglia. Yesterday I was told by someone on his way to ‘the Den’ that there on many days there are around 170 people there. Sometimes just two members of staff. The jobs supplement of the Ipswich Evening Star has roughly five pages of ads – at most. Those at ‘the den’ have to work through them – there is an even worse ratio of participants and computers. Many, hell of a lot in fact,  are now obliged to spend their whole 13 weeks at Whitehouse. Even those with a placement promise spend weeks waiting for it to be processed. Staring at the walls and the odd screen. Waiting for the few toilets to be free (large waiting list there as well). They are thrown out at lunchtime for an hour. Believe me the charms of ASDA, a chippie and a small café are about all the area has to offer. Any complaints? Exit! Get really angry? Exit! Want an alternative? Exit!

     

    Translation: No Money, Live in the Gutter.

    Strange to say we were talking about this when the local full-time Labour Party Secretary-Agent walked by. He heard it all from the foaming horses’ mouths.

    I have checked this account with four other participants. It is borne out. One told me of a letter they had signed one day protesting against their treatment. It went to the DWP. I will report on the outcome.

    It is an utter scandal that the YMCA is getting paid to pen people in a shed in the Ipswich Wastelands. Similar abuses are taking place all over the country. But who is digging the stories out? What is being done to bring them to a halt?

    European Unrest: Strasbourg. UK: Dead London By-Stander was Assaulted by Police.

    Posted in Anarchism, European Left, Imperialism, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on April 5, 2009

    NATO Adviser at Work.

    The British news today downplays the anti-NATO rioting in Strasbourg. German Radio reports that their authorities are angry. They managed to prevent any serious trouble on their side of the near-by border; why didn’t the French poulets do the same? Well, they didn’t. In fact the French police blame the violence on..German Black Blocks! (here)

    The happy image of Barrack Obama travelling through Europe as a charismatic leader is forever wedded to pictures of black clad autonomists wreaking havoc and burning Alsace buildings. Deutsche Welle paints an even more extreme picture, with some protesters apparently armed. A picture show is available via Le Monde (including shot of 7,000 German marchers  blocked off from entering France). Now I feel that for all his merits (beginning with not being George Bush) Obama barely touches the surface of the problems these acts of rage stem from.

    People don’t like NATO’s work: Afghanistan is a quagmire in which it’s sinking. That raises the hackles of a broad range of liberals, leftists and people with common sense. Who, the Strasbourg demonstrators are saying (I am speaking on their behalf thank you very much – elected by TC to do so), “enough posturing around the ‘New World Order’ – end your Great Game.” Not much positive, but there you go.

    So, it seems that the thaumaturge Obama, and his loyal assistant, Gordon Brown, have been unable to squash opposition to capitalism and militarism. How wide is the span of discontent, or simple dissatisfaction the market? As broad as it is deep. There is a profound annoyance, fed-upnesshood to the max. Hate. And that’s just at this keyboard! Not onky against the Bankers who’ve scuttled off with their money bags full. It’s (well, some of it) against the ”moral capitalists’ in charge of state and market.  The ones running the show now.  People have had rising expectations dashed. They are getting mass unemployment, huge price rises in basic necessities (food above all), more coercion, and more moral and health police.  A bit of shouting and protest, mindless or not,  is the least the popular masses can do. Ian Bone (among other Bloggers) at least has his finger on this racing pulse. Even perfide Albion is showing a bit of protesting backbone in factory and school occupations.

    The chance to touch the  hem of the anointed leader of the world doesn’t quench a thirst for real change. Mind you that at least is tangible, not like Gordon Brown’s witless remarks about bringing ethics to the market.

    Meanwhile, here in the UK this story has broken: Dead City Protests By-stander was Assaulted by Police (Observer). That’s morals for you.

    Gordon Brown Shows the Way!

    Posted in Gordon Brown, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on April 8, 2009

    Brown’s Mentor.

    Gordon Brown in the Independent today,

    The Prime Minister considers that the era of unbridled free-markets is over, ”Mr Brown insisted that the end of the free-market consensus – and need for greater regulation– could yet help Labour to neutralise the “time for change” factor that would normally play strongly for Mr Cameron.” The philosopher in Downing Street considers the world ready for global governance – just like all those books by David Held on Cosmopolitan Democracy predicted. He says, “This is going to be a progressive decade. I think people do understand that some of the problems we had can only be solved, first of all, by governments working together with other governments, nations co-operating with nations. There is a new internationalism, a new strategic role for countries working together to solve common problems.” We hate uncommon problems.

    We hear what brought Gordon into his relentless campaigning. No doubt as well that quality of gavitas that explains why he does not waste time listening to those he disagrees with,

    “Some will be found to help the jobless back into work. “What brought me into politics was that I saw the waste of unemployment and importance of tackling it as quickly as possible, so we don’t allow a large number of people to become unemployed.”

     Maybe Brown should read the exposé of the YMCA open-Prison, Denocra House, Ipswich,  on this site, here. There he will find that he allocates large numbers of the unemployed to an enterprise unit in the Ipswich wilds, doing little, being hectored and having their behaviour under tight surveillance. That’s how he can, and indeed does,  stop more people becoming workless: for statistical purposes every participant in YMCA ‘training’ is not counted as unemployed!

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    Alain Badiou: The Meaning of Sarkozy. Review.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on April 9, 2009
    President of France?

    President of France?

    The Meaning of Sarkozy. Alain Badiou.  Verso. 2008.

    Everywhere you look in Europe enthusiasts for Mao are flowering a thousand blooms. The President of the European Commission José Manuel Durão Barros, once an activist in Portugal’ s PCTP/MRPP, thunders for the free-market. La COPE, Spain’s steadfast Catholic radio, stars Frederico Jimenez Losantos, a former Mao fan in the anti-France underground. He rails against  socialists, Communists, separatists, free-masons and secularists. But it is from France, home of the Maoist movement, that we hear from a great  philosopher with a Mao badge past. Alain Badiou, ex-Union communiste de France, Marxiste-Léniniste (UCF-ML) polemicises against Nicolas Sarkozy, the “rat-man”. Inter alia he makes fun of Blair, following his discovery that Blaireau means Badger in French, and notes that Sartre called an anti-communist a dead-dog (chien crevé – inexplicably translated by Verso as ‘swine’). As Pierre Assouline remarks, “Après les rats, puis les blaireaux, les chiens. Décidément, drôle d’oiseau que ce philosophe.” (after the rats, then badgers, and dogs.. Certainly what a strange bird this philosopher is..) A period of enthusiasm for the Great Cultural Revolution and its Helmsman does give one  such a way with words.

    But that’s enough on les noms d’oiseux (insults) for the moment.

    The Meaning of Sarkozy (De Quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?) is a political pamphlet. It is written by a professional philosophy teacher (in the ENS – France’s most elite college in the discipline). Born in 1937, and a long period of adhesion to leftist causes behind him, Badiou is  still active in L’Organisation Politique – a group principally committed to defending immigrant rights. Badiou’s tract made a splash. Including comparisons with the political interventions of the late,  much respected, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The main conceit (in all senses) of the polemic is that the Victory of Nicolas Sarkozy and his UMP Party in the French 2007 elections heralded the triumph of Pétainism.  Yes, the puppet far-right regime that ruled the Southern half  of France from Vichy during the German Occupation. Sarkozy represent a ‘restoration’, after (very much after one would say) May 1968, a national revolution to ensure, “unconditional obedience to the potentates of world capitalism.”. Its themes, an end to moral decadence. Its models, the US and Blair’s Britain, servility, like Pétain, to the foreign powers (see potentates). It loathes immigrants.  France has undergone a huge reaction. A way prepared by the anti-Communist Nouveaux Philosophes, André Glucksman (an ex-Mao rival), and Bernard Henri Lévy. And the whole political class, left included, very much included. The Communists? Enemies of 68 par excellence. Result? Now we have France under Petanism “on a  mass scale”. A return to the social ‘transcendental’ (underlying structure beyond appearances) – France’s – apparently – eternal ultra-conservative order.  There is  ”fear, informing, contempt for others” around Sarkozy and his Prime Minister Fillon. The President encourages work, family and dislikes criminals! This is the spirit that gave 1940s France total censorship, banning of political parties, repression of all dissent, not to mention co-operation with the Nazi Final Solution. This New Order is truly an equal  threat.

    Sarkozy is a ‘rat’ who rushes in on what’s on offer, obsessively gnawing away. Badiou then explains how this sharp-tooted vermin  came to power (counter-revolution)  in a highly original way. It appears that ‘democracy’ , at least in the sense Badiou gives it – “equality in the face of the Idea” – was not involved. In any case, “voting is a state operation. And it is only by assuming that politics and the state are identical that voting can be conceived as a political procedure.” In fact, “Rejecting our illusions means categorically denying that voting is the operation of a genuine choice”. Thus, there was no choice. None. Voting for a Socialist alternative, like Ségolène Royale, or for the various Trotskyist, Communist, Green candidates on offer during this (bogus) election? Not a true choice. Poor fools who backed them, weep now at your folly.  These marionettes were not prepared really to confront the system. The ballot – piège à cons!

    The author of Ethics (2001 – English Translation) offered an alternative: “politics without party”. A crude Marxist analysis of the state (basically that the state is class domination)  and a politics of truth. That is fidelity to the ‘event’,  unique bursts of life in the world unsullied by the existing Order (something similar to the existentialist notion of ‘authenticity’). Badiou’s cumbersome writings on ‘ontology’ may explain something. I couldn’t put them down (having never picked them  up). Practice? Essentially Badiou backs “local experiments in politics”. His central one is his - feeble group of mates,  if truth be my politics – L’Organisation Politique. A few principles are strewn around, that all workers belong here, that art is creation, science is superior to technology, love must be reinvented, any sick person is entitled to treatment, and that newspapers that belong to rich managers do not deserve to be read (a reference no doubt to Libération, now under Rothschild Bank control).  Apparently he works with “our African friends” (cosy expression), to “exchange experiences”. And that, “The Morrocan worker forcibly asserts that his traditions and customs are not those of the petty bourgeois European.” Noble North Africans! This ‘test-bed for political experience” is already showing its worth.

    Or not. Badiou seems to be groping towards the, commonplace,  idea of unifying the oppressed, without imposing uniformity. Nothing much wrong there. But it hardly needs the strident vocabulary he uses to get there. Such as the wholly misguided idea that the State in his 3rd Period Stalinist rhetoric, is a bogus simulacrum of democracy, based on naked  repression  and obedience to the rule of world capital. Furthermore one can do without the comparison between Sarkozy and Pétain: History involves no such “eternal return”. Sarkozy is a right-wing liberal (economically) and a conservative morally (except in his public-private life – Carla to the fore). Far from encouraging a Corporate Organic Vichiest state he has sought to reform his bureaucracy on free-market lines. His Catholic moralism does not extend to any legislative effect (unlike Pétain). Sarko comes from the Neuilly Haute Bourgeoisie, which gives him a brittle smartness and narrow-mindedness. Sarkozy’s cosmopolitan origins (his, absent,  father is Jewish), is very far from the provincial terrain of the Vichy notable. A smart-arse, nervously rushing around and hard to bear. I can loathe him quite happily without any comparison with the Marshall. I do and I will. Full stop.

    Mass opposition to the President is under way, from workers, intellectuals, and students. Led by democratic parties and uni0ns who spend a lot of their time engaged in that mystifying democratic process.  We do not need to be amused any longer by Badiou or others’ hysterical hyperbole. As unrest spreads in Europe we , in each country, need to act: not to stew in this warmed-up dish of puerile rancour.

    All of which amounts to less than a hill of haricots blancs. Badiou has none of Bourdieu’s seriousness and clear objectves (direcetd at preventing backward looking neo-liberal ‘reforms’).  Is there anything of comparable urgency on offer here? No: an abstract call to vigilance and to stand behind banner. Of what? The assertion of the  ”Communist hypothesis” is about all Badiou has to affirm: the conjecture that a communist society is worth trying to create (discussion of the economics and politics of Das Kapital are noticeably absent here). Plus a few historical examples of when people have tried to verify the theory. Such as, Maoism oblige, the Shanghai Commune. Can anyone who’s for the self-emancipation of the working class can so easily dismiss the electoral process? Clearly L’École normale supérieure, is a better vantage point from which to decide the workers’ views than the voting slip. In the face of such certainty it seems impertinent  to observe   that more participate in the latter than get educated at the former.

    Badiou is clearly not a Marxist in any substantial sense. Certainly an active one. He has many admirers amongst the kind of folk who play at leftism at  academic symposia and buy books that are hard to read. The Meaning of Sarkozy may be a step downwards to near-ordinary language. But it contains a  sufficiently strong dose of disdain for ordinary people to satisfy a need for the esoteric.  Or provocative, in a pointless way, prose. Badiou announces his scientific discovery that France’s President is a rat man a number of times. When Assouiline remarked that this reeked of the images of Jews as rodents, that this reminded one of Vichy propaganda  films, he exploded. Is Assouiline Cultivated? Doesn’t he know Sigmund Freud’s  case-study  of the ‘rat-man’? What is he, a cretin?

    As a fellow cretin I can only say: the Jew as vermin in Der ewige Jude is exactly what Sarko-rat made me think of, and to pity, not admire, the man who thought of this, and wrote thispile of worthless cack.

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    Political Islam. Tariq Amin-Khan Versus Samir Amin, and Vica Versa.

    Posted in Islam, Islamism, Marxism by Andrew Coates on April 11, 2009

    Eurocentric Demands?

    I really cannot recommend reading this recent (March) exchange  of views too much. The American Monthly Reviewis far in advance of its British counterparts in giving a platform for serious debate about Political Islam. Unlike in the dominant UK  Islamophile left, Marxist opponents of this trend are given a central place.

     Tariq Amin-Khan makes a case (here) for ‘understanding’ Political Islam, based largely on a critique of a ‘clichés’ of ‘Islamophobia. That is, the left supporters of an ‘uncritical’ Enlightenment adopt, ”the dominant narrative in Western societies of “the Muslim” as violent, as oppressor of women, and as a medieval aberration against modernity.” I observe in passing here that there isplenty of evidence that “medieval aberrations” exist in abundance in mvoements and states dominated by Political Islam, and this is simply a fact. Enlightenment values for all their complexity (etc)  are at their most universal when they oppose oppressions and violence. If Amin-Khan is saying that this is Eurocentric then he is seriously misguided. He might as well say that Train Time Tables are an imperialist Canon imposed on railways. The truth is that these standards work, or should work. And does he have anything better?  

    Amin-Khan’s conclusion is that, “Similarly, the popular anti-imperialist sentiment in Muslim majority states should not be confused with the actions of militant Islamists, which are not anti-imperialist. Militant Islam is conceived and imagined in the present, current context. It is, therefore, a “modern” manifestation that posits its own version of the Islamic “welfare state” for the current conjuncture to rival the Western capitalist state and Enlightenment notions of modernity. Understanding militant Islam in its current context will only enable the development of a coherent strategy of opposition and an alternative non-Eurocentric vision of society.”

    Samir Amin, (here) contests this. To me Amin-Khan’s most serious error is to think that the Islamic ‘welfare state’ is really about people’s well-being, and is in opposition to the capitalist one. Amin argues notably in support of secularism as a basic principle for the left,

    ” I am in favor of adopting the absolute principle of secularism, of separating politics and religion. Radical secularism is the condition for implementing a creative democracy, one which does not justify its progress by an interpretation from the past, religious or otherwise, which always acts as a conservative obstacle. Radical secularism is inseparable from the aspiration to liberate human beings and society. That is why radical secularism was proclaimed by all the great revolutions of modern times (the French, Russian and Chinese), which led to the best moments of democratic and social progress. Nevertheless, the progress of secularism was slow, governed by the rhythms of the advances of bourgeois modernity, the beginnings of socialist-inclined advances, which opened the way to go beyond this bourgeois modernity..”

    And that, “The major fight, the one that defines the very nature of a progressive (and socialist, obviously) left, unfolds on the terrain of social struggles for the rights of workers (wages, working conditions, union rights, right to strike), peasants (access to land), women (radical reforms in personal status laws) and citizens (access to education, health and housing). Fighting in these areas is not “to substitute these struggles for the struggle against imperialism”. On the contrary, the anti-imperialist fight, which should not be reduced to rhetoric, becomes real and effective only insofar as it is led by the working classes strengthened by the conquest of their rights.

    On this plane, the current regimes and the Islamist movements are fundamentally opponents of these social struggles. There is no need to recall the violence of the repressive means they use — together — with the approbation (or silence) of imperialist diplomacy.”

    There are interesting discussions on development (Amin’s forte) and so-called Orientalism. The latter is a  rather hackneyed term these days. Globalisation’s effects on world culture, politics and society  erode  the meaning of a distinct so-called Other all the time. One notes with satisfaction that both authors are serious about their opposition to Islamism. Amin-Khan tends to give some credence to the claim that its rise is partly a deflected popular radicalism, running up against imperialism’s interests (that is, the US and Europe’s) That an Islamic ‘welfare state’ , its source of appeal,  is its objective. Clearly a capitalist  religious dictatorship would be a better description,  or a totalitarian theocracy. But the quality of the exchange is striking.

     I couldn’t help thinking of this when reading about the Algerian Presidental elections Le Monde yesterday. It illustrates the reaction that the Left should be confronting, without pandering to comforting illusions about Islamism.

    As the voters turn out to ballot (without real legitimacy), Le Monde describes how much of Algerian society has become ultra-conservative.

    In 2000, 27 % of the population favoured equality between the sexes, today only 16 % do so.  With the exception of Kabylie, this has affected the whole land. Only two out of ten Algerians favour women working. Seven out of ten back women wearing the Veil. Young people are barely more progressive than their elders.

    One can explain this in many ways – effects of the Military repression and search for some kind of safe haven in religion. Or that poverty, precarity, and a huge level of unemployment drive people back to traditional certainties.

     But clearly Islamism, ideologically that is,  has played a dominant role. The Islamicisation of Algeria has indeed been backed by the Military-Presidential clique, le Pouvoir, and their bureaucratic-entrepreneur claque. Their ‘secularism’ does not mean free opinion and secular values (the article notes the increasing persecution of Algerian Christians for preaching in a Muslim lands. It simply signifies that this state  faction rules and not one from the Mosque. The have encouraged, a conservative moral atmosphere, and the authority of religion. Only the relentless Arabisation has met successful resistance, from the Kabyle speakers – who have retained a more popularly supported  progressive outlook.

    What of these elections? The establishment candidate, Abdelaziz Bouteflika has won, and participation was higher than expected. But it is a hollow triumph. The Algerian ruling class has prepared the way for Political Islam to make a return to overt activity – with all the oppression and blood spilt, not least by the Islamicists, that implies. 

    Shame on le Pouvoir!

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    Abel Paz: (August 12, 1921. Died April 13, 2009)

    Posted in Anarchism, European Left by Andrew Coates on April 15, 2009

    A Great of the Workers’ Movement: Abel Paz (1921 – 2009).

    Abel Paz, pen name of Diego Camacho, has died.

    Brought to politics in the 1930s as a  member of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) (CNT Obituary) Diego fought in Spain against Franco and the counter-revolution. A member of the legendary Durruti column he took part in some of the most violent batttles.  As a supporter of the libertarian syndicalist side he participated in the – failed – 1937 Barcelona combat against the Stalinist take-over. At the end of the war, when Catalonia finally had gone down in 1939,  Paz survived and fled to France. The author of a number of important histories of the Spanish war, he remained a committed anarchist all his life, saying that,

    El anarquismo invoca una vida completamente diferente. Trata de vivir esta utopía un poco cada día.

    Anarchism means a completely different  form of life. Try to live a little of  this utopia every day.

    If anyone on the left dismisses anarchism,  one should contemplate the life of this hero of the international workers’ movement.

    Hat-tip to Entdinglichung  (here), some more details (in French) of his initial internment in France, and  later war-time armed opposition in the Spanish maquis to Franco (here.)

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    Afghan Women’s Protests Stoned.

    Posted in Islam, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on April 16, 2009
     The BBC reports on the attack on women protesting against new Afghan laws (for the Shiite Community) reducing them to chattel. The women were faced with counter-protesting men, who cried “Death to the slaves of the Christians.” And threw a hail of stones.

    “Dozens of Afghan women who tried to protest against a new law they say legalises rape within marriage have been attacked in the capital, Kabul.  ”

    News from Afghan defenders of women’s rights on the background here.

    The Independent carries a detailed story.

    Meanwhile after the acceptance of Sharia ‘law’  in Pakistani province Swat Islamists vow (here) to extend it to the rest of the country. “Joyous over the implementation of sharia law in Malakand region of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), the Tehrik Nifaz-i-Shariat Muhammadi (TNSM) chief Sufi Mohammad has said that the law would be extended to other parts of the country too, The Dawn reports.”

    Yes, the aged bigot is a Sufi.

    On Afghanistan, Anne McShane is right to point out in the latest Weekly Worker that, “despite the constitution and various other conventions and protocols signed by Afghanistan since 2003, even the US itself is forced to admit that ‘these commitment and efforts do not appear to be translating into safer and healthier conditions for Afghan women and girls. These paper exercises are simply a cover for a  wracked by war and backwardness. A backwardness that US intervention has worsened, not alleviated.”

    The issue remains: how do we express solidarity with the Afghan women’s fight? A start might be by recognising that the conservative Islamists (many with their own blood-drenched Mujaheddin past) in charge of the state (such as it is), under US control, are to be opposed. But that the Taliban who after all want to accelerate the descent into Sharia reaction, cannot be regarded as a ‘resistance’ worth anything other than contempt. In these conditions some, from New Left patricians to Islamophiles,   are  tempted to imagine that there is  a ‘good’ Pashtun nationalism waiting there to overthrow imperialist occupation and when that happens,  then we will deal with such issues as women’s oppression and human rights. Experience shows, by contrast, that this concern has to to begin now.

    Couscous (la Graine et le Mulet): DVD Review.

    Posted in Culture, Films, French Left by Andrew Coates on April 17, 2009

     

    La Graine et le Mulet (Couscous) is now available on DVD * . It’s one of the most important films of 2008 and won a French César (Oscar) in that year.  Set in the Mediterranean Port of Sète, it follows the  crises of everyday life, and the joys, of a warm unselfconscious family. Nothing special. The Director, Abdellatif Kechiche, says he wanted to show a milieu of the French working class, of North African,  Midi, and more recent immigrant, origin, as ”ordinary“. 

    This friendly and roving clan is the backdrop of a solid drama. This unfolds around the plight of Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares)  a sixty-year old shipyard worker. He is a Tunisian immigrant of long-standing. He is devastated to find himself dismissed as work dries up. Is delocalisation of boat-building and repair at fault (that he is sacked as ’un français’ when they can get the job done cheaper elsewhere)? Clearly it is his age that counts – badly. But the background is the death of commercial fishing. The accelerating transformation of Mediterranean ports into marinas and tourist resorts  is happening in many other seas.

    Redundancy money does not go very far. Beniji reacts dismissively to suggestions that he - as was the dream (rarely  fulfilled) of many North Africans,  returns  ’au bled’ (back ‘home’). Wracked by feelings of impotence, he flounders a while to find a way to keep going in Sète.  Scenes from the less than happy married lives of some of his family heighten the tension. But Beniji’s quiet dignity – his principle that he wants to leave a decent legacy (achievement, not money) - wins out.

    His former wife, Souad (Bouraouïa Marzouk), cooks a brilliant fish couscous (hence the Mulet). At one of those long extravagant diners shared by the French working class it has pride of place. North Africans and French, drink, and talk – as they really do, not as in some kind of diversity training course – about their different languages and culture.  The food gives Beniji inspiration. Helped by Rym,(Hafsia Herzi) the daughter of his present companion Latifa (Hatika Karaoui), he sets about creating a floating restaurant offering the speciality. Rym carries the plans forward.  They face a  frosty (realistic) reception from banks and local bureaucrats (one emphasising that ‘here in France’ we do such and such). As is the way in film the restaurant gets a grand Opening Night: the occasion for the final dramas of La Graine et le Mulet. Do not under any circumstances miss the Belly Dance.

    La Graine et le Mulet has traces of Ken Loach’s slices of working class life (without the didactic tone). Herzi’s performance as Rym has been described as ‘fizzing’: I’d say it’s guts electrified. There are tastes of sexual conflict, in the raw way of the world. There is a lot of other rich fare here. The couscous meal has echos of the glorious feast in Renoir’s Partie de Campagne (working class Parisians escaping to the countryside). One side (the vistor’s ) of Sète is a kind of escape; reminding us of Georges Brassens, and a feed by the Mediterranean. 

    Abdellatif Kechiche  shows that  there are vibrant working class communities in Sète still. Even if their employment is threatened. Or that the Parti Communiste lost in 2001 to the UMP. One might call the picture soft-focus realism. If the camera shots weren’t so sharp. It is a truly humanist  film, with a fine balance between optimism and realism. As a celebration of ordinary working class people’s lives, and the genuine mixture of cultures and individuals, La Graine et le Mulet is up there amongst the greats.

    * DVDs are the only way we at the Tendance can see the latest World Cinema since Ipswich Council leased  off the Film Theatre to a ‘businessman’ more interested in Manchester United than film. They do have the advantage of an option where you can turn the subtitles off.

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    New Labour’s Unfinished Revolution Finished Off?

    Posted in Gordon Brown, Labour Government, Labour Movement by Andrew Coates on April 19, 2009

     

    Philip Gould: Thank you!

    The plight of Georgina Gould, her contretemps in the Eirth and Thamesmead constituency, must have touched many hearts. It reminded me of the role her father, Lord Philip Gould, played in New Labour, for both Blair and Brown. His book, The Unfinished Revolution (1998) rightly stands as a classic. Gould set out the strategy for government whose results are with us today.

    The Polster retells some anecdotes about the hard, ” aspirational” working class, that he knew in his (non-Lordly) youth. Today, he notes, the “new middle class” is at the centre of the country – drawing energy both from his old acquaintances, and the dynamic forces unleashed by markets. Newness, he discovers, is happening all over the planet. This globalisation needs “managed change”. People need to be equipped to go out and sell on the world market. Old fashioned statism, and class based politics cannot cope with these changes. Mandelson and Liddle (in their Blair Revolution. 1996) saw the key to winning British elections, and successful government, in wedding the “dynamic market economy” , “real equality of opportunity”, with a dose of social equity. Gould added that this “social” awareness should appeal to New Labour’s core constituency, the “people of the suburbs.”

    Apparently, at 19% behind the Tories, the leafy lanes and driveways of the UK, not to mention my terraced street, are deserting New Labour in droves (here).

    The only book on political polls which made a serious impact on me was Butler and Stokes Political Change in Britain. This, appearing in the 1970s, worked with a methodology that differentiated voters according to ‘cohorts’. That might mean, for example, that Gould’s aspiring hard-working, car-driving, home-owner, is a group that ‘came of age’ politically with Thatcher. They backed her primarily on economic grounds – mortgages, low taxes – with a degree of patriotic pride. They went over to Labour when they were convinced that the same ruthless pursuit of their interests and British self-assertion was served by Blair. A bonus was that the ‘social’ but of New Labour appealed to the Old Labour constituency and even those flinty types who liked good public services. Those to the left of that had nowhere else to go.

    This strategy – a coalition hinged on the new middle class, the new Subject of History – had a lot of faults. For a while they could bear having to pay increased costs. Of privatised utilities. More and more farmed-out state provision,. Or the cost of schemes like PFI. Okay, what was left fully public was undermined. The managers-turned-businessmen taking over the rest were useless grasping cack. So? That group, the privatising middle class, did very well thank you. Having got rid of the Labour Party as a real political power-base, they created a version of Craxi’s Italian Socialists – a ‘big tent’  dependent on state largess.

    A problem. Not foreseen - the economy would not always be “dynamic”. Even the hardest of hard employees don’t like facing the Dole. Or dynamic entrepreneurs enjoy going bust. They tend to whimper. Ask for help. When they don’t get it they take their votes elsewhere.

    Instead of building up a lasting constituency based on an egalitarian, class, interest – making conditions better across the board — Gould successfully argued for this competitive ‘equality of opportunity’. When it’s become equality to fail, then the strategy falls apart.

    Still Gould’s got his Lordship and I’m sure his daughter won’t end up on some  ‘training’ scheme for the unemployed.

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    Caterpillar (France): Back to Work? French Workers’ Anger Remains.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Unions by Andrew Coates on April 20, 2009

    Caterpillar Stuff.

    In France the world-wild-and-wide economic downturn has met resistance. Facing the wave of redundancies, attempts at pay-cuts,  and mounting unemployment there have been massive united union days of actions, huge  demonstrations, workplaces have been sat-in,  and managers ‘kidnapped’. The conflict at Caterpillar (at Grenoble et d’Echirolles) has been a symbol of this fight-back. The company produces real things of use. That it is hard hit by the recession shows the downward turn’s  depth.

    Reports (in English) suggest that the Caterpillar conflict has been radical. At one point four bosses were held ‘hostage’ (here). The police were used at Echirolles and activists charged. The magistrate who judged the workers’ actions illegal talked of a « situation insurrectionnelle » or in legal terms, « une entrave à la liberté de travailler » (attack on the freedom to work).  He decided that any further blockages will be met with daily fines. Today the latest news is  that  after the plant occupation, negotiations have restarted with the American-multinational. On offer is a reduction in the number of employees laid off (from 733 à 600) and some better conditions for those forced onto part-time employment. The main redundancies stand. Union reps have signed up to this accord.

    This agreement will be submitted, by secret ballot, to the affected. In the meantime work has restarted “à contre coeur” (unwillingly). It’s  hard to see how those fired up will accept such limited gains, and more sackings – but I am not writing as one of them.

    On the Left all parties have supported the workers. The Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste,  offfers good  coverage of  this, and many other disputes. They  demand an end to legal proceedings against the Caterpillar workers, and a halt to all redundancies.

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    French Reactions to Ahmadinejad.

    Posted in Europe, Islam, Islamism, Israel, Jews, Racism by Andrew Coates on April 21, 2009

    Doughty Anti-Zionist.

    A quick round-up of reactions in France (which will doubtless develop).

    Ultra-Catholic French ‘intégrists’ welcomed Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s ‘anti-Zionist’ declaration at the UN Geneva Conference on Racism: (here). ‘Anti-imperialist’ opponents of ‘Juiverie’ commended his ‘flying start’ (here). Not so strangely these two Blogs are interlinked.

    France’s Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, and a noted defender of human rights, has refused to follow  advice not just to walk out from the Hitler’s Birthday speech, but to pull out altogether. He called the event the ” le début d’un succès”, (the start of a success”) (here). The Parti Communiste Français has talked of the Conference being ‘held hostage’ by the American led boycott, and Ahmadinejad’s ‘extremist speech’. Socialist Party General Secretary Martine Aubry was forthright and has demanded that France withdraw from the Conference.

    No doubt Ahmadinejad’s British admirers on the ‘left’ who work for, or appear on,  Press TV – Iran’s state-funded ‘information’ broadcaster – would disagree.

    Interestingly Press TV reports a proposal to set up “a secretariat to follow up and coordinate exchange of information on war crimes, genocide and other forms of organized crimes and holding periodic conferences in the Islamic and other interested countries to discuss the agreed subjects.”

    These states certainly have plenty of their crimes to discuss.  

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    Hamas Kills Opponents; Clare Short Turns a Blind-Eye.

    Posted in Islam, Islamism, Israel by Andrew Coates on April 23, 2009

    Do we seriously want this in Power?

    Clare Short and Liberal Democrat Lord Adlerdice held a House of Commons Meeting last night.With a video-link to Hamas leader Mashaal . Supporters of recognising Hamas have welcomed this event. It happened that the connection wasn’t working (here) but the pro-Hamas intention was there, Short’s that is.

    It appears largely up to to those who stand with the Israeli hostility to Hamas to criticise this. Yet there are plenty of reasons to do so. Without ceeding an inch to Israeli policies. That nationalist, militarist and human-rights breaking state, with plenty of blood on its hands, deserves serious democratic resistance. But is Hamas it?

    Hamas’s platform for government (minimum programme) is anti-Israeli occupation and for the building of a Palestinian state. It supports resistance, and a range of measures, including backing for political pluralism. Behind this is an Islamist ‘maximum’ programme, the reign of the Qu’ran on Earth. The enforcement of Islamic standards of ‘modesty’  for example – dress code. These are ‘transitional’ measures. They bring the day-to-day party regime to its final goal of a pure society. Called the Sharia – the denial of human equality made into a parody of law. What has this, even remotely, got to do with the left? It’s the opposite of the socialism in any form. It is based on private property, inequality (for women and non-Muslims). Life is ruled by Divine decree. As interpreted by god’s representatives.

    Parties are to be judged on how they carry out their aims. We have evidence of how Hamas operates in practice. Human Rights Watch (here) gives plenty of reasons to be more than wary of the Palestinian Islamists  - such as killing suspected ‘informers’ (aka, political opponents) notably during the Israeli armed forces attack on Gaza.

     

    On the left it is customary to reel out the stale old arguments. That it is not up to us to tell ‘resistance’ movements what to do. Or that we don’t ‘really know’ about the conflict. We should let those ‘there’ decide. They are not brief on telling us how we should  support Hamas. Make as much noise as possible (following Clare Short). Boycott, people, and goods manufactured in Israel or by ‘Zionists’ generally. Do some flag waving and cheer-leading.

    It is one thing to ask for, say, opposition to Israeli attacks on civilians. To oppose its policies, from the West Bank to Gaza. To give a general welcome to a Palestinian state. It’s another to work closely with Hamas – as George Galloway does, and Clare Short gestures towards. If anyone wants us to endorse this degree of  co-operation they had better come up with some pretty solid evidence that the group they link with is sound. Start with the  democratic, progressive, nature of the organisation. It’s no longer good enough to point to past practice, when Europe’s left enthused about all Third World movements without looking too closely at them. That we stood by African national liberation, or, the Indo-Chinese Communists, without telling them what to do. Or indeed really knowing too much about them. Well Galloway has ditched the PLO, too venal, and now he tells us that Hamas it tickity-bo. He would, wouldn’t he? Who else would take the words from his ilk, or from the other pro-Hamas groupies, from Islamist Tariq Ramadam, to grizzly Patrician Tariq Ali? Or Gilad Atzmon… (all on the same lletter calling for recognising Hamas).

    It all ended so happily didn’t it? Naturally all these countries are now basking in such prosperous social democratic plenty (er….)  because of the lack of unwanted European leftists’ advice. Hamas will surely…yes, we have plenty of reason to think that if it gains more power its rule will be followed by more tomb stones in the self-proclaimed anti-imperialist cemetery. While outside the Peter Pans of the left will move onto the next Cause.

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    France: “Extreme Left Manipulation” Behind Social Conflict.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Unions by Andrew Coates on April 24, 2009

    Les ‘Contis’.

    Today former French Labour Minister, and present UMP (Sarkozy’s Party) General Secretary Xavier Bertrand accused far-left ‘manipulators’ of being behind recent labour unrest and social conflict (here). Speaking of this week’s trashing of the sous-préfecture of Compiègne (government offices) by angry Continental workers, he said, 

     ”J’y vois l’action de certains manipulateurs d’extrême gauche. Il y a des militants d’extrême gauche qui sont dans certains conflits et qui n’ont qu’une seule volonté, attiser la violence”

    “I see there the activity of certain far-left agitators. There are extreme left activists who are only involved in such conflicts with one aim: to incite violence.”

    This outburst comes with the background of continuing industrial and social disputes. Facing a galloping recession employers are scaling down enterprises. Their employees are reacting with fury.  The Continental (tyre manufacturers) conflict continues, with doubtful claims of a potential take-over. The Caterpillar workers (already cited here) have refused to participate in a vote on an agreement while colleagues remain under threat of victimisation. Encouraged by tough talk from Sarkozy and his employer allies, Caterpillar has begun legal proceedings as a result of the ‘kidnapping’  of four bosses. A host of other disputes are taking place (here). Former centre-right Prime Minister, Dominique Villipin, has talked of a “risk of revolution” building up (here). Electorally it seems likely the radical left Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste (NPA), and to a lesser extent the Front de Gauche,  will make a splash in the coming European ballot. They have been involved in supporting these struggles, with other groups, such as Lutte Ouvrière.

    Blaming these ‘extreme left agitators’ has become part of Sarkozy’s crisis strategy. The vindictive “ Tarnac affair” attacked autonomists. Now new laws on demonstrations and labour disputes appear likely, repressing ‘hoodies’ in the former, and ‘kidnappers’ in the latter. One theme wins out: blaming social unrest on anything but the failings of the capitalist economy and the UMP-State.

    Terry Eagleton and the Supremacy of Faith.

    Posted in Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on April 27, 2009

    Don’t Worry Terry’s With You!

    Terry Eagleton is thoroughly upset (here). At the “militant rationalism” of Dawkins, novelist chaps called Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, not to mention, Christopher Hitchens, and philosopher AC Grayling. They have become “weapons in the war on terror.” Indeed “Western supremacisim has gravitated from the Bible to Atheism.” He forgot Rosie Bell - who inched the path of doom last year.

    Why? Apparently it’s because these sceptics and secularists are liberals. And liberals holds that “the state should tolerate any opinion that does not seek to undermine that very tolerance.” Eagleton, reader of Gnostic hidden meanings, sees that this is a “form of partisanship”. That they don’t like  Islam. That some of them, Hitchens and Amis, want not just to lock up terrorists.  They stand for “western cultural supremacism”. That Dawkisn is “self satisfied” critic of “benighted Islam”. That Grayling even believes in Progress! They end in a “slanderous reduction of Islam to a barbarous blood cult.”  Yes, Islam, the rationalists soil it with the same libels. These reductionist Islamophobes: they are all of the same kidney!

    To Eagleton, agnosticism is “part of late (how late?) capitalism’s everyday routine.”  These characters look at other people’s faith with “superiority” ,”disdainfully above it.” Unlike Eagleton. He knows the sense of “national injury and humiliation” that underlies Islamist terrorism.  Having to hear Dawkins, Hitchens, Grayling and the rest of the gang of atheist sneerers and witherers can’t help either.

    Poor Islam.

    Terry Eagleton briefly mentions socialism, which stands for civil liberties, a key demand of  the working class movement. Apparently it is different from liberalism, which tolerates “any opinion” (even if it turns its nose up at them). One awaits clarification of this difference.

    While waiting (a long time one suspects), let’s give a case. What might a socialist stand on Islamism be? For socialists it is one of complete and total opposition. Islamisms, in their various  forms, are movements led by the pious Muslim bourgeoisie. They are anti-socialist (standing for private enterprise), anti-democratic (believing in a harmonious society based on divine Law), and oppressive. Generally pretty racist as well. Class enemies we might say.

    Eagleton, by contrast, has a lot  in common with post-modernism liberalism. And with the high-minded thinking-the-best-of-everybody of American Transcendentalists, Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman. That is ways to relativise difference, to reach out to the Other. Thus: Eagleton is against  Islamism. But understands where Muslim self-assertion is coming from. Better than most. Certainly better than supercilious metropolitan liberals who probably lack the balls of a gutsy Manchester Irish boy, an EngLit prof who’s done a couple of years in the Weasels (Workers Socialist League). Hard-types, orthodox Trotskyists.

    But….Eagleton is not really talking about politics at all. If he dismissed (here)  Dawkins’s The God Delusion as a book written by a man ignorant of religion, the literary commenator shows few signs of acquaintance with political socialism. Socialism after all has strong roots in anti-clericalism, (even socialists with a  religion). Few socialists want a religious state – in that they agree with liberalism. That’s a reason why they loathe Islamism – amongst the others already given. Secularism is a belief in a state which attempts to be neutral about religious by not ceding to any of them. We might have an interesting debate about how this might come about in the United Kingdom, where under New Labour organised religion has unprecedented state influence. Or the faults of secularism, say, as interpreted in the French political tradition. Or how imperialism is a structure of economics and politics, not some kind of ‘anti-Islamic’ ideology. Again, what unites and separates the liberal rationalists Eagleton cites from the atheists and rationalists in the Marxist and socialist ranks.  But I digress.

    What Eagleton is really talking about is the Christology and Ethical Theory he elaborates in The Trouble with Strangers (2008). This rests on the Imitatio Christi - the image of a Christ who takes on the suffering of the world. Who struggles for Justice. Eagleton opines that Christians follow this, in love and solidarity, in their reach out to identify with ‘strangers’ in a common humanity.

    Humbly he imagines a Christian standing in for another in the queue for the Gas Chambers.

    Truly the man is a worthy successor to Thomas à Kempis.

    Atheists? They have fallen “at the first hurdle” – or we could say, at one of the stations of the Cross on the way to Calvery. Turned away. To wander in error eternally. 

    There is indeed nothing like a Christian to endure the suffering of others.

    Carnival of Contrarians.

    Posted in Left by Andrew Coates on April 29, 2009
    A la Bastille!

    A la Bastille!

     

    There’s something called the ‘Carnival of Socialism’. It’s a rotating list of Blog posts the ‘Carnis’ decide are socialist. I suppose they must be  -  if I could be arsed to check up on all of them. Like most self-appointed glee clubs it’s terribly dull. The latest one looks as if it’s written by a professional dullard. Somehow Tendance Coatesy, despite its leading position in the labour movement, and the hope and joy it spreads amongst the world’s struggling oppressed, doesn’t get mentioned. In its place too many Quorn pies of bland comment maketh a sorry feast.

    ← Left is what a real Bakhtin Carnival looks like.

    With a proud tradition of contrarianism we at the Tendance are now holding an alternative Carnival, of, you guessed it, Contrariness. Here are some recent recommended Posts that grade the make: Tony Greenstein has a go at David Aaronovitch and ‘anti-Zionist’  Gillad Atzmon  (here). Bob from Brokley (where?) is a, “Blog about trans-Atlantic translation, Jews and Jew-haters, the old and new Stalinists, islam and secularism, contrarians and refuseniks, and South London.” Voltaire’s Priest has some excellent musings on religion’s claims to spread peace  at Shiraz Socialist. This drew forth a  reply from the Grande Dame of West London, Red Maria (not, I suspect, her real name). Charlie, who actually thinks about economics, asks if the left should consider a ‘sustainable austerity’ programme. Stroppy pleads,  “can commentators on this please try to debate without calling people names such as scabs and nazis?”   Nation of Duncan does a bit of battling for the class struggle. Mick talks up the Japanese Communist Party. Pouminista does a magnificent job speaking about the often forgotten parts of the anti-fascist, anti-Stalinist left. Social Republic has some sharp thoughts on Italian nationalism. The Soul of Man Under Capitalism opines that “the man is screwing you through every fucking orifice…” Ian Bone recommends that we “get up off your arses..” Dave Osler controversially argues against Tax Cuts for the Rich. And Modernity does a Quick ‘Anti-Zionist’ Quiz that is certain to bring joy to members of George Galloway’s dwindling band of last-standers. Rosie Bell  has thoughtful reflections on the play Seven Jewish Children. Enty gets ready for May Day.

    Finally, 3AM Magazine extends the domain of Contrarian struggle to the cultural field.

    This List of Glory is by no means exhausting or conclusive. Be Contrarian !

     

    UPDATE: Modernity raises questions about the other  ’Carnival’s’ tolerance of pro-Iranian apologists, here.

    Tariq Ramadan: New Homophobic and Sexist Charges.

    Posted in Islam, Islamism, Multi-Culturalism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on May 1, 2009

    To Ramadan the Qur’an Says Gays, Sick, Women, Be Modest!

    Tariq Ramadan,  faces a new crisis (here). This time it’s in Holland.

    Ramadan is employed part-time as an Adviser by Rotterdam City Council. His role is to  ’stimulate discussion” on immigration and to ’build bridges’ with the Dutch Muslim community.  At the pay of  27 500 Euros a year he does two days a month work, has produced two reports and has led some public debates. This adds to Ramadan’s active presence in various guises across the world: in France, Switzerland, and elsewhere. Which includes the  United Kingdom where  he has an academic reputation, and is fêted by Conservatives, New Labour,  multi-culturalists and Islamophiles alike.

    According to Le Monde this week Ramadan stands accused by the magazine Gay Krant of homophobic and sexist comments.

    Ramadan aurait déclaré que l’islam prohibait l’homosexualité, laquelle serait “un dérangement, un dysfonctionnement, un déséquilibre”. “Dieu a fixé une norme qui veut qu’un homme soit destiné à une femme et une femme à un homme”, aurait aussi indiqué le philosophe. 

    Ramadan is alleged to have declared that Islam prohibits homosexuality, which is ‘a disorder, a disequilibrium, a disfunction’. He is also said to have declared that ‘God has fixed a norm that means a man is intended for a woman, and a  woman for a man’.

    Regarding women’s public appearance he recommended that they take less care of their appearance, and behave with modesty (soberly). In the street, they should “garder toujours les yeux fixés sur le bitume” (keep their eyes fixed on the pavement).

    Reactions to these reported remarks  have hit Rotterdam Council. An enquiry has been launched. The comments are alternatively denied or considered taken “out of context”. The Islamist has been defended by the Green Party, whose Rik Grashof holds the  portfolio of Integration. he has declared that even if Ramadan is opposed to homosexuality he gives priority to “respect for people.”

    In France long-standing secular critics of Ramadan place these remarks in context (here). Caroline Fourrest remarks that  ’Brother Tariq’,  praised as a religious progressive, has more in common with Jerry Falwell than Martin Luther King. In brief his comments are par for the course. While the Council has (here) apparently ‘exornerated’ Ramadan, the controversy rumbles on.

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    YMCA New Deal Training: Shut the Detention Centres Down!

    Posted in Ipswich, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on May 3, 2009

    http://www.inctr.org/publications/images/2003_v04_n02_a01.jpg

    Storm Dencora House!

    Let the following know what you think about this:

  • Chris Mole(molec@parliament.uk)remove contact
  • YMCA Training(banbury@ymcatraining.org.uk)remove contact
  • Disturbing information reaches Tendance Coatesy that YMCA Training in Ipswich is reaching a major crisis. In the run-up to the ‘Flexible New Deal’ in October the DWP and the YMCA are pushing as many people as possible into the scheme. They have no placements. People are stuck in the ‘Den’ with nothing to do. They are effectively in prison 5 Days a week. We cannot be optimistic about how the ‘Flexible’  version will look like. If past private companies involved in the provision of such ‘training’ are anything to go by this will involve the usual problems (scams, lack of decent facilities and a total absence of real training). The plight of tens of thousands of the unemployed – harassed in programmes designed to force them into jobs which do not exist – will get worse and worse.

    Dan who has been posting in the Comments Box of the original posts on the topic says,

    If history is anything to go by, half the law will be lost in translation (from law into guidelines) that is to say policies will be created that differ slightly from what the law says.

    For example, the process of “signing on” even though staff members even say this has an official term called “signing labour market declarations” by DWP which JCP staff appear unaware of.

    Only two New Deal Advisers in Ipswich have been “upgraded” for the Flexible New Deal, the rest currently as stand will be useless. There is still major confusion over the different stages.

    Lets be grateful that there is still time.

    My New Deal adviser told me I can’t change my New Deal option however I have found an current manual stating that participants may transfer between New Deal provisions – and that ability has been available since march 2004!! That’s 5 years…

    Do they really still need to threaten you with the disclaimer to each job they find you ((”when”) however rare that is)?? But when they get you to sign most times they let you sign then remember to ask whether you [I] have done any “paid or unpaid work” blah blah – if you [I] did would have been too late and you [I] would have been sanctioned if not prosecuted for signing.”
    He earlier commented, that,

    1. “I totally agree with all points made here and being exited are widely stuck in the favour of YMCA Training when gone to a decision maker. Many people find themselves banned for 26 weeks because of this

    2. ? Yeah, you are supposed to be there for 1 week of induction then get stuck in a placement… everyone seems to be doing 30 hours job search a week… not far from full time hours. Then the job search sessions are not supervised anyway! Always under staffed.

    3. Did you know under DWP/JCP policy you are supposed to get a “Taster” session of the provision before you get signed on to the course?

      Then if it isn’t suitable – and you have a good enough reason – you don’t have to go on it.

      Having a reason afterwards isn’t good enough (under JCP rules) which then compromise your benefit. I know why you don’t get the taster opportunity in Ipswich or maybe just my New Deal adviser?

      4 pages of job search sounds good… then when you realise that only one page are small adverts (the rest are big box adverts) then short list out jobs you can do (there seems to be a lot of caring jobs etc. around which aren’t applicable) you end up with just 3 or 5 jobs to apply for and everyone applies for them so you stand no chance even though you apply for them anyway as you need a job (better then staying there and getting so little money)

      Your New Deal adviser supposed to be helping you – the “customer” – however their only objective is to stick you on to that course to mess with the official figures – as you will be classed as receiving “training” not “unemployed”.

      If you are lucky to get a placement the Government classes you as “employed” (until I looked it up I thought you were classed as in training still.

    4. May I also bring to your readers attention that one of the reasons for New Deal VSO is:

      “In many cases taking over from ’community service’ ordered by the Courts.”

      It is true. Unemployed people are being treated as a criminal would if caught for an offence.

      People may read this article and see it as perhaps a few unemployed people getting together and having a go at the state because they are ungrateful spoilt brats BUT the truth IS the participants are demotivated (funnily enough against YMCA Training values which is incorporated in the infamous red triangle).

      Without misleading anyone it is like the Iraqi prisoners who were made to stay still to avoid getting shot or electrocuted but instead of that happening its the threat of benefit being stopped (”exited” from the course) and perhaps poverty.”

    There is one solution: Close the YMCA Training Centres Down Now! There needs to a through investigation. Ipswich is unlikely to be a lone case of abuse of public funds, and the waste of human potential these New Workhouses have brought. Ultimately two people are to blame: Gordon Brown and James Purnell. They are responsible for the misery  involved. They need to be made to answer for their decisions.

    In the meantime despite opposition to the next stage of Welfare Reform (a further tightening of the screws) only the left of the Labour Party has expressed Parliamentary opposition. Unions and campaigners are not being heard in the media (even by some left magazines like Red Pepper, which seems to be getting quite a reputation for ignoring anything to do with welfare reform). The Tories promise an even tougher regime.

    Now is the time to step up the opposition!

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    Dieudonné’s French ‘Anti-Zionist’ List: Worst Political Alliance in Europe?

    Posted in Europe, Fascism, French Politics, Racism, Religion by Andrew Coates on May 7, 2009

    Holocaust Denier and Friend.

    Few deny that ‘Anti-Zionism’ can be  a cover for racism. But rarely does it lead to this broad alliance. In France the mixed-race (Cameroon-French)  ’humourist’ Dieudonné  has launched the Parti Anti-Sionist (Site). Its candidates are standing in the European Election this June (in the Isle-de- France). The List contains, Alain Soral, former Communist, then member of the Front National,  and Thierry Meyssan, famous as the author of  ”L’effroyable imposture” – a founding document of the 9/11 ‘Truth’ Movement.  They are joined by Sidi Yahi Gouasmi of the Fédération Chiite de France. As  well as Rabbi Schmiel Borreman of Judaism Against Zionism. This week, some senior political figures have called for this list to be banned (here).

    The resolute nature of Dieudonné’s ‘anti-Zionism’ is such that he invited Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson, to his stage show last year (here).

    The PAS’s  programme includes the following:

    Faire disparaître l’ingérence sioniste dans les affaires publiques de la Nation.  (End Zionist interference in our Nation’s public affairs).

    Eradiquer toutes les formes de Sionisme dans la Nation. (Eliminate all forms of Zionism from the Nation).

    Libérer notre état, notre gouvernement et nos institutions de la main mise et de la pression des organisations sionistes. (Free our state , government and institutions from the hands of Zionists.)

    Fans of Islamism, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Holocaust deniers, French nationalism, Conspiracy  Theories and France’s mixed-race answer to Bernard Manning, have (if they live in the Isle-de-France) a unique voting opportunity. Truly unique.

    Update: Dieudonné Blocked by Police for 2 Hours When Registering his List. But do not Despair,  the Negationist Numskull Got Through.

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    June Elections: No2EU struggles, BNP Nous voilà!

    Posted in Europe, European Left, Ipswich, Labour Movement, Left, Scottish Nationalism, Unions by Andrew Coates on May 9, 2009

    Crow and Friends: Move the Masses!

    The June elections loom. County and European – not exactly key institutions for the popular masses. Held in an atmosphere of absolute political pissdoffnessness they will be  the occasion for a lot of cock-snooting. Probably the BNP’s first Euro Parliament seats. A wipe-out for Labour. One hopes the mildly reform-minded Green Party will hold onto their positions. So far not even a blip for No2E (and I’m acquainted with some pretty unblippy blips). Still, they are standing everywhere, including in the vast Eastern Region. That includes here, East Anglia. Seething with resentment at MPs expenses - like anywhere else. Who knows if a couple of voters might cast their ballot papers in Bob Crow’s direction in protest.

    David Semple expresses scepticism about this domed venture. Rightly he targets No2EU’s sovereigntist programme (British Democracy first), the process by which the RMT came to launch it,  the Socialist Party’s participation, and its laughable presence on the ground. Yet he sees a potential lurking somewhere. That is in possible further union disaffiliations from the Labour Party. The basis for a future launch of a left political alternative. Or maybe not. To Dave Craig in the latest Weekly Worker the initiative is a “temporary workers’ party”. That is despite, as he acknowledges, its flawed platform. How anyone can see a space for Dave’s project of a European Republic (a social republic that the left can build for socialism) is hard to grasp. No2EU is pretty clear on its opposite: the existing nation-state (the UK) as the prime site for socialism. Well, at least this is a  better position than the nationalist left. One (how long for this world) faction, Sheridan’s Solidarity, is behind the campaign. The other, Scottish Socialist Party claims to be pro-European. It criticises Union Jack waving opponents of the EU. But wishes for the day when the Scots will be waving the Saltire. Or rather, believes that “Scotland out of Britain” is a progressive demand (here)  Tacitly aligned with the business leaders of, say, the SNP, that is. As for No2EU’s  appeal to the electorate the same Weekly Worker has a letter by Chris Straffrod. He reports 8 people at the No2EU Manchester launch. Half of them were left-wing critics. Some mass interest.

    No2EU’s previous promotion of a public meeting involving a German far-right M.P. first exposed here,  led to a  public  climb down in the Morning Star. Are supporters  up to these tricks again? Communist Student (Weekly Worker)  Chris Strafford alleges a No2EU supporter is promoting the List on British extreme-right and xenophobic Facebook sites (here).

    So much for an alternative to Brown, the Tories and the rest. Here we have more pressing concerns. In Ipswich the BNP are standing for the first time in the County elections. In two wards, Bridge and Chantry (here). Both working class. The first, Bridge, covers Stoke, a classic largely white poor and workers’ and area. Its Labour Branch  is practically dead. The candidate, Bryony Rudkin, politely described by a world-celebrated  left activist sometime back as ‘Blairite yuppie scum’ replaces Harold Manga a well-respected black Councillor. Harold was removed by New Labour equal opportunities. The principle that well-off former Islington Council leader PAs and County Council leaders should remove working class types from Guyana. It did not need the cunning of a skulk of foxes to see a weak point there. Nor that Chantry, a vast estate, has in many areas the same make-up. Though with some Labour life left. Maybe enough to fight back the BNP’s ambitions to stir up  in-fighting amongst the less well-off and panic the worried middle class. So that Griffin’s cronies can prance around with their Union Flags in elected positions.

    This is a  threat we will be concentrating on.

     

    Note: Nick Griffin was educated at a minor public school in near-by Woodbridge. The first time he stood for election (some decades ago) was in Ipswich, for the Council. Didn’t win.

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    European Left: Chronicle of a Defeat Announced.

    Posted in Europe, European Left, French Left, Iceland by Andrew Coates on May 11, 2009

    Wilting.

    This morning on France-Inter Bernard Guetta, in his ‘géopolitique’ slot, outlined the coming electoral defeat of the European Left (here). It’s an analysis worth thinking about. In view of the June European elections and coming national contests in Spain and Germany (to cite but two). To begin with, Guetta asks: why is the left not on the rise? The recession/slump should have helped reforming alternatives.  The right’s polices are unsettled. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy, elected as a hard-line neo-liberal, has changed tack. Now he calls for regulation and a new financial and economic order. The international scene looks better: America’s right has finally lost Presidential power. The left, one would imagine, could  accelerate the retreat from liberalism. For a start, by doing well in elections.

    In fact opinion polls indicate that the European Socialist Party will lose heavily to the conservatives.  Notably the European People’s Party and whatever band of  cranks the British Tories align themselves with. Britain is far from an exception amongst the 27 EU countries. Except that the far-right here are in a position to make a break-through for the first time.

    Why?  Voters, Guetta argues, don’t blame their right-wing governments for the crisis – it came from America. They see them as better placed to deal with than uncertain new faces. Guetta suggests that the Socialist bloc is also tainted with its own association with the worst kind of liberalising economics (to say the least – Brown and Blair). It has been unable  to build a coherent European force (not able to offer a candidate in opposition to right-wing EU Commission chief, José Manuel Barroso). Or even a serious counter-programme on a Continental level. In these conditions the right appears to offer prudent management rather than a leap into the unknown. Crisis driven prejudices, resentment and fear can be channelled by the racist right in all its hues. Fortunately, against this, forward looking alternatives have gained appeal  (notably in France and Germany) towards the left of the social democratic parties. But these groups will not have much power.

    “cette crise fermerait la longue parenthèse libérale a laissé le champ libre aux droites pour préempter le retour de l’Etat et aux extrêmes gauches pour surfer sur la colère sociale.

    “This crisis will close the long liberal parenthesis, leaving the field free for the right to take advantage of the return of the State and for the extreme left to ride the wave of social anger.”

    He concludes,

    En ne jouant pas l’Europe, en ne sachant pas se faire l’avocat d’une puissance publique continentale à même de défendre le Travail, les gauches achèvent de se tirer dans le pied.

    In not staking on Europe, not knowing how to make itself the advocate for a Continental Public Power, and not even defending Labour, the lefts have shot themselves in the foot.

    The particular misery of the British Labour Party deserves a section on its own. Like a wounded and manky stag Gordon Brown is at bay. New Labour expended generations of political capital building up transient support in the ‘new middle class’ and ditching the labour movement.  It has recently turned to making the lives of the unemployed a living hell. No wonder it has nothing to fall back on in its present despair.

    But are there Left alternatives emerging? Opinion polls suggest that in France the Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste (NPA has fallen down to 7% of voting intentions (from around 11%), while the Front de Gauche is hovering close at 6%. Lutte Ouvrière is at a low 2%. Unlike these fragments the German Die Linke may do better. But as the SPD looks likely to lose the autumn federal elections they will remain an opposition within an opposition. As is clearly the case in other European states. Italy’s left, faced with a malevolent clown, is impotent. It is still dominated by failing attempts to transplant the pro-business-socially-reformist model of the US Democrats. The Spanish PSOE seems simply unable to get a grip on the country. The traditional enemy of progressives, the Catholic Church, has been on the rampage. The Socialists’  left competitor, Izquirada Unida, remains marginal.  Only Iceland, which today announced its intention to join the EU, seems to have a real new Left government. But will its Green-Left partners remain trapped in the old hostility to European-wide structures it was born with? A warning: such policies have helped drive the British left to irrelevance.

     

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    European Elections: French Left Fractured.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on May 14, 2009

    This latest French Opinion Poll on voting intentions for the June European Elections is of interest.

      Février 2009 Avril 2009 Mai 2009
    Liste de Lutte ouvrière soutenue par Arlette Laguiller 3 3 2
    Liste du Nouveau parti anticapitaliste soutenue par Olivier Besancenot 9 7 7
    Liste d’union Parti communiste et Parti de gauche soutenue par Marie-George
    Buffet et Jean-Luc Mélenchon
    4 5,5 6,5
    Liste du Parti socialiste 23 22,5 21,5
    Liste Europe Ecologie soutenue par Daniel Cohn-Bendit 7 7,5 7
    Liste du MoDem soutenue par François Bayrou 14,5 14 13,5
    Liste UMP 26 26,5 27
    Liste MPF-CPNT soutenue par Philippe de Villiers et Frédéric Nihous 5 5 5
    Liste Debout la République soutenue par Nicolas Dupont-Aignan 2 1 1
    Liste du Front national soutenue par Jean-Marie Le Pen 6 7,5 7,5
    Autres listes (1) 0,5 0,5 2

    That the UMP (Sarkozy’s party) is at 27%, a head above the Socialist Party(PS)  has many causes. Sarkozy has wind in his sails. He’s managed a deft act. Pre-becoming President  Sarko promised ruthless liberalisation. Now, faced with the recession, and its scandals, he calls for humanising capitalism. The main Parliamentary opposition? A weak, compromised, ’orthodox’ social democratic party. Weaknesses? The French Socialists are seeing the results of not defining themselves as a robust reforming force. There is the legacy of their own ‘Blairite’ period (1984 – 86)  – market-worship under Prime Minister Laurent Fabius. Then, after a return to Government following the thundering 1996 social movement, they vacillated. Socialist Prime Minister (1997 – 2002) Lionel Jospinbegan by defending the public sector. He ended up agreeing to privatisations. He lost, notoriously, to Chriac in 2002 – scoring less than le Pen for President. In the wilderness it seemed as if they might getradical. No: there was scramble for power before the last (20060 presidentials. Followed by in-fighting. Without any clear PS left opposition (its left fragmented, behindthe long-standing grandees, some quit the organisation with Mélenchon) their divisions are arranged around personalities. Above all,  the legendary feud between PS General Secretary Martine Aubry and Presidential loser Ségolène Royal. The result? A reduction of support to its core constituency: 21,5%.

    If anyone has reaped a harvest from the PS’s lack of dynamism it’s the Modems of  François Bayrou. Posing as the most resolute – if avuncular – opponent of Sarkozy’s ‘coup d’état (attack on liberties) gets him a hefty 13,5%. To a lesser extent the Liste Europe Ecologie led by a smirking Daniel Cohen-Bendit (liberal market Green), at 7% have captured attention. Both appeal to mildly annoyed voters who don’t want anything really to change in France, and recoil from anything more than verbally challenging Sarkozy. By contrast another harmless diversion, the ‘Gaullist’ (pure republican) list, led by Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, is barely registering at 1%

    The left of the PS still scores well. Olivier Besancenot’s Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste has come down from an inflated 11% (claimed) to 9% to 7% – illustrating the danger of politics as  personal mangetism. At 6,5% the Liste d’union Parti communiste et Parti de gauche backed by par Marie-George Buffet (PCF)  et Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Parti de Gauche) closely tails them. No doubt this will cause some embarrassment to those ‘anti-capitalists’ who failed to recognise the underlying strength of these ‘reformists’. Still we can read again the refusal of the NPA to have a common List or agreement  with their rivals (here). Apparently its due to the PCF-PG sometimes working with the French Socialists and making arrangements with the social-fascist class traitors (okay I made that last bit up). LO, at 2% is nowhere.

    Unlike the UK the far-right appears on a downward slide. A kind of UKIP (with ties to Libertas), the Liste MPF-CPNT  gets 5%. Le Pen is at 7,5%. Anti-Europanism and ‘security’ are still important issues  for some, and xenophobia has hardly gone away, but not they’re not the seismetic forces they once were.

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    MPs’ Expenses and Marxist Methodology.

    Posted in British Govern, Gordon Brown, Labour Government by Andrew Coates on May 15, 2009

    Gordon Needs Some Top Tendance Tips.

    Nearly everyone has had a say on the MPs expenses scandal. So now’s the time for the Tendance to have its two penneth worth. From the view point of a section of the drinking classes which has raised itself to the level of understanding of the world-historical development of capitalism. That is. 

    Some tips.

    Comrade Wooster rightly pointed out that “stout denial” is best tried quickly. Congrats to Justice Minister Shadid Malik for following the Bertie Bolsheviks on this. We all stand by his statement that his claims were all made “a million per cent” within the rules.” (here) With those maths shame he’s not in charge of the Treasury!

    Honesty is the best Marxist policy, is it not? Commendation to Clare Short, Shadow Minister for Belated Courage and Patron Saint of Cracked Tunes, on her contretemps, “an honest mistake.” (and see here)

    Elliot Morely appealed to the anti-capitalist in us all by blaming the number crunchers for his difficulties: “sloppy accounting” (here).

    Michael Trend, although from the monopoly capitalist enemy, melted our class warrior heart by blaming his claim of £19,000 on naivety and “misunderstanding” (here). How many times have the great unwashed  used that one when Graham caught them filching a bottle of Absolut Vodka from Sainsbury’s!

    Let’s not forget that UKIP showed the way. Tom Wise, a UKIP (now independent) MEP for East Anglia charged this year with fiddling expenses (here), said that he has not “personally profited” from any of the loot (here). Hats off to the clever ex-Copper.

    Now for the rest of the lot about to mount the stage and explain themselves: break a leg!

    Euro-Elections: A Marxist Analysis.

    Posted in European Elections, European Left, Labour Government by Andrew Coates on May 17, 2009

     

    Will the British Left Support a Social European Republic?

    Who likes politicians? Or at any rate those in office. Fewer and fewer it seems. For the June European elections, the flight to small parties has begun. Demagogues and chancers, xenophobes and frank racists.  Thus: voting intentions at CON 28%(-9), LAB 19%(-3), LDEM 19%(nc), UKIP 19%(+12!), GRN 6%(+2), BNP 3%(-1). As the Sunday Mirror comments these  opinion polls run  UKIPneck and neck with Labour. The BNP looms. Those who see a silver lining in the Green vote forecast  (6%) are clutching at (organic) straws. The trend is, to say the least, not progressive.

    The Continent has seen party-systems shaken by scandals over Politicians and money before. Germany was rocked by them when Chancellor Kohl was found out financing the CDU by dodgy means. France has periodic bouts of outrage over party funding – usually creaming off municipal contracts and an imaginative range of front businesses and ‘not-for-profit’ bodies. Spain sees at this very moment a crisis over right-wing Partido Popular political corruption in Valencia.  Still we’d have to go back to the Italian Tangentopoli scandals  to see anything that’s had a greater impact than the present UK meltdown. No-one is suggesting (well, not strongly) that UK Parliamentarians have Italy’s relation with organised crime. Though the interface between political figures and business is murky territory. Take the example of David Blunkett: his princely wage from the ‘training’ company A4E   (newly awarded a raft of contracts for the flexible New Deal) deserves further investigation (here). No. It’s more direct: the cosseted lives of MPs at people’s expense really gets on the electors’ goat.

    What should be the left do?

    The first response is: shout and spit blood. The second is: can we show anything politically? The answer to that is, the coming European and County Council elections are an opportunity to express our views. That is opposition to all of the above, notably Gordon Brown. But how?

    Should we follow Geoff Martin, a respected comrade – just expelled from the Labour Party for calling for a vote for a rival to the LP List  -  and back No2EU? (here)

    There is thus the No2EU List – not registering in the polls at any rate. Its strategy? To say No to the European Union and yes to British democracy. It is, in short ‘sovereigntist’ (nations first). It wants popular rule to come through a stronger British – independent – state. Nationalists on the left disagree – they want even smaller states (Scotland, Wales notably)  to run our affairs. Both groups are throwbacks to the 19th century. That’s the  ideas of the Italian liberal Giuseppe Mazzini. He thought that ‘people’s  nations’  were a progressive goal. They should be republics. Rid of tyrants and dynastic states that  imprisoned nationalities. Free peoples would then co-operate and make the world a better place. Put Brussels and the UK in these slots and you get No2Eu and the Scottish Socialist Party, plus a lot of left flotsam and jetsam. Excluding naturally well-respected cormades etc who are wrongly informed. They did not choose wisely.

    Maybe they’ll get round to reforming Mazzini’s People’s International League.

    Marx argued  frequently with Mazzini and his followers. Famously during the time of the First International (1860s-70s) The Italian Patriot’s cloying sentimentality rankled enough. But the real disagreement was over class. Conflict that is. Some very simple principles. Nations have classes. Mazzini wanted class harmony.  Capitalism is international, it forms, classes, well you’ve guessed it, internationally. The national shapes (influenced by states, culture, local conflicts) shape this. But do not cause it.  To abolish them means world-wide activity. To Marxists how the working class (broadly defined) might gain the power to end its exploitation is the key political issue. This depended on class unity – across the very national boundaries that the nationalists, however left, whatever their republicanism,  try to reinforce. 

    Switch forward to the June European elections. The British left, from its woolliest Red-Green Wing to its hardest Communist Party of Britain/RMT one, is united in rejecting Euro-Liberalism. On offer by all the main party lists. But what does this mean? Most see this implying that rejection of the European Union (said more or less openly, I;m not even sure about the Greens’ views, till recently they demanded withdrawl). The SSP and Soldarity  advocate some kind of Saltire Socialism  the others, a  Parliamentary left revival. The SSp claims to be pro-Euroepan though its main contribution seems to be to add another flag to the already crowded EU one.  Or, perhaps like the harmless cranks of the Social Forums, they believe in devolving power so much it will disappear.

    They are out of joint with most of the European Left.  They have no credible alternative to  European institution than sovereign states. The French anti-Euro Constitution booklet, En finir avec le euro-libéralisme (2008, L’Utopie Critique) is full of the former. It shows how European institutions are wedded to neo-liberalism, are remote from the electorate, deny even the creation of a European public constituency. So far, so much the Euro-scepticism.That the EU has not hindered – indeed has encouraged – the conditions leading ton the Banking crisis and the return of the bust part of the boom, is obvious. But here we split. The writers of En finir pose the question of a different Europe. One   which the excluded have the power to shape the institutions of the Continent. Hard as that may be, the demand for a Social Europe, a European Social republic, is one that unites, not divides. It’s a classic Marxist objective.  In the path of the First International, not Mazzini’s People’s Alliance.

    There are some small  British left groups, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and the Weekly Worker-CPGB, which stand for such internationalist politics. The Weekly Worker offers a highly developed political analysis of the need for a Europe-wide socialist republic. One that needs some strategy to create, not just voting. Not that we have anyone here to vote for that stands for such ideas. No doubt there are others who think in this direction, from the democratic socialist left above all.  Unfortunately withthe  fragmentation of the electorate all the most visible part of the British left seems to offer is a mix of dead-ends and confusion.

    Extension du domaine de la lutte.

    Posted in European Left, Left, Workfare by Andrew Coates on May 19, 2009

    Key Theoretical Text.

    The class struggle intensifies. The floating signifier of the articulated hegemonic practices has been rent with lack, its suture is unravelling in chains of equivalence. The Tendance’s unity offensive against Dave Dudley reaches a peak. Er. Whatever. Michael Martin, symbol of all that is rotten in AEU pompous right-wingery, is (after clinging to his Office for dear life) going to resign as Speaker (here).  There’s a national political vacuum. We intend to do our best to intervene.

    Here the Ipswich Anti-Racist, Anti-Fascist Committee held its first meeting last week. Around forty people attended – at a  few days notice. We will be out campaigning against the BNP.

    A web site, created by Ipswich Unemployed Action, has been set up. The site presents many interesting first-hand reports and comments by Dan (and our good self – others will be forthcoming – yes you bloody will!) from the town. Its objectives are here.  

    Nor should we forget the past. We would  like to signal the Country Standard. The Standard was the Communist Party of  Great Britain’s ‘rural’ paper (corresponding to La Terre in France). It was closely connected to the Agricultural Workers’ Union – now part of Unite the Union. There is a wealth of articles on the site, illustrating a positive side of the Communist Party. Of interest are the categories for Marxist historian A.L.Morton (who had strong  links with Suffolk), Paxton Chadwick (post-war Communist Mayor of Leiston), and his widow, Lee Chadwick, who continued the fight until her death in 2003 at 93 years old. I have a signed copy of her book, In Search of Heathland   in my front room. For all East Anglian comrades the Wilf Page section is of great importance. This marvellous man left a deep imprint. Poorly he was still a regular attender at the annual Burston rally. He passed away in 2001.

     

    An absolute gem of a site.

    From Fatwa to Jihad. Kenan Malik.

    Posted in Islam, Islamism, Multi-Culturalism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on May 21, 2009

     

     It is twenty years since Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, pronounced his Fatwa against Salman Rushdie. On 14th of February 1999 he sentenced to death all involved in its publication. The Cleric offered a reward of $3 million (or $1 million to a non-Muslim) for anyone who carried out the murder. The effects of this ‘judgement’ still reverberate. In this finely layered book, From Fatwa to Jihad (2009), Kenan Malik describes the campaign against the Satanic Verses. Its unfolding left a significant legacy in the United Kingdom. He concentrates on two important areas. How the Rushdie affair provided an opportunity for Islamists of various stripes to assert themselves on the national scene. Behind fronts, the latest being the Muslim Council of Britain, they have laid claim to being the true representatives of British Muslims. The other is an account of the way in which the British state’s accommodation to such groups has shaped multiculturalism. How the Rushdie Affair brought to the fore fundamental principles  of freedom of speech. That is, how these liberties have been eroded by the defence of the sacred in the name of difference.

    Malik reminds us that the Satanic Verses, is a complex and densely textured piece of literature. It was initially considered as a playful ‘post-modernist’ kaleidoscope with pronounced anti-racist traits. Most today, however, remember the episodes involving ‘Mahound’ (an amusing caricature of Mohamed). These were loosely anchored on the ‘Satanic verses’. That is, revelations that did not fit with doctrine (accepting a compromise over traditional deities) that were later excluded from the Qur’an. The novel’s parody of Islam’s founder’s years of rule and, notably, of his wives – such as the (historically real) decision to execute poets critical of the Prophet immediately raised a few hackles. They were gleefully seized on. In recounting the less picturesque tale of the organised outbidding by Saudi Arabian inspired outrage, and Iran’s, Malik details the Moslem protests. These began on the Indian subcontinent, reached the streets of the UK and culminated in atrocities: the attack on William Nygaard, Rushdie’s Norwegian translator, the knifing to death of his Japanese confrère, Hitoshu Igarashi. In Turkey, a Hotel meeting at Sivas, of the liberal Alevi religious current, at which the Rushdie translator, Aziz Nesin attended was surround by a mob. It was razed to the ground. 37 people were killed. The killers were prosecuted but the Turkish state initially attempted to try Nesin. I had occasion to talk to a Kurdish Alevi (now an atheist)  a few days ago and she still seethed with rage at the inferno and the Islamist pogrom in the town that followed. These events, as much as the book itself and the furore in Britain, left their mark.

    At the time many people, liberals and leftists, including his publishers, Penguin, defended Rushdie. Yet a few empathised with the ‘hurt’ caused to Islam by the ‘West’. Or considered that Rushdie was a foreign chap out to make trouble. The most notable case was the British Government. Its spokespeople expressed ‘understanding’ for the anti-Rushdie anger, and apologised for the publication of the Satanic Verses.

    Meanwhile the British Islamists who marched, attracted a wider audience. They discovered pride and identity in Islam. Former leftists from a Muslim background began to join them. He does not delve deeply into this, but it was also a key moment not just in the state’s policy of co-option, but in leftist accommodation to Islamism. The process has been encouraged by those who consider this a repeat of assertions of anti-racist Black identity. Why these are not considered traitors to the left on a par with ex-Trotskyist neo-conservatives is but one of many shameful aspects of the affair. Their contribution to reaction, should, all proportions kept, never be excused. Malik takes great pains, bolstered by on-the-spot investigation, to prove how wrong this approach is. What has happened is a proliferation of religious and ethnic fragmentation – hardly a left-wing objective. A world in which the most rigorous forms of Political Islam have flourished.

    Talking to former members of the Bradford based Asian Youth Movement, Malik explores how this has occurred on the ground. In place of this 1970s anti-racist movement, with its class based and inclusive agenda, we have “plural monoculturalism”, with competing ‘communities’ fighting it out for public resources. After the initial Black (political) identity of anti-racism, we were faced with a process of endless redefinition, frequently on religious grounds (Islam first, rapidly imitated by other faiths). This finished by “imposing identities on people”. Nor was this a matter of purely cultural politics. A crude power struggle for community grants was been encouraged by challenging funding through religious and ethnic ‘community leaders’ – from the Greater London Council’s policy during the Livingstone 1980s period (reintroduced by the new GLA in the second millennium) to Birmingham’s Umbrella Group. The scene is set by the process, of doling out cash on what Malik calls a ‘tribal’ basis. In this way “multiculturalism has helped create new divisions and more intractable conflicts which made for a less openly racist but a more insidiously tribal Britain.” Plenty of cases of ethnic and religious jostling, from Hindis, Sikhs, and Christians, to the opens sore between South Asians and those of black descent, follow. The complicity of some of the left in this spoils-system, and the bullying shown by those who wield the term Islamophobia to shout down their critics, is well known. Thus it is a shame the author of From Fatwa to Jihad did not interview at greater length leftist activists who have long expressed opposition to this kind of multiculturalism – communalism in all but name. Such opinions are shared beyond the stalwart anti-racists of Southall Black Sisters– rightly cited out by Malik for their persistence to fight fundamentalism of any ilk. It is becoming a key issue for grass-roots left politics in fighting the rise of another ‘community’ ethnic politics. That is the one Malik notes, parading under the label of ‘British identity’ – the BNP.

    Malik does not follow the self-lacerating route of explaining Islamism through the ‘humiliation’ of Muslims. He covers the spectrum of Islamic social and theological doctrines. From Fatwa to Jihad centres on Islamism, that is, the political-religious forces  often called fundamentalists or intègrists. Getting to grips with the political and cultural roots of the phenomenon he draws on recent writings by Olivier Roy and others he detects a response to globalisation in the diverse tans-national movements. They are fixated on rules, and literal interpretations of the Qur’an. Yet many enthusiasts are strangely contemporary, with tinges of New Age individualism. Islamism “is very much a child of modern plural societies, with its celebration of ‘difference’ and ‘authenticity.” The screams of hate against any perceived insult of Islam are more about blaspheming their ‘feelings’ than serious theology. This is less clear. No doubt there are some forms of Islam that fit this mould. Locally there is the mysteriously wealthy Origo ‘community’ centre and café which acts as a cover for an Islamic version of the Alpha Course*. But what of more directly Political Islam?  If it is anything, it is organised. They have finance, they have class origins, not just the educated jihadis that Malik cites, but leaders in the pious Islamist bourgeoisie. Al-Qaeda may be dispersed around the world; other networks are rigidly structured, as Hizbt ut-Tahir indicates. The way these bodies operate offers an entry into religious revelation. The objectives may be the fantastic Cockaigne of an Islamic Republic in which only the pure may walk. But the effects are manifold. This inspires people’s whole lives, and cuts them off (when politically translated) from the rest of society. So both streams of Islam exist – alongside all the multiple forms of traditionalism and modernism. A recent case, the Danish caricatures, is an indication of both individualism and organisation, Malik has not rouble showing that the very act of representing Mohamed is not against traditional Islam. It is rather considered a personal attack on puffed up individualists. But it was the ‘Muslim community’ with its all-too eager offence seekers that arranged the protests, to which the British liberals and government so cravenly capitulated. They might not achieve their utopia but the Islamists search for political influence and power continues. Over the bodies of the impure.  

    What impulse, detached from the realities of  human needs, and based on religious delirium, encourages these forces? How do they recruit? Their propaganda is telling. Fear plays a big part. The height of this trend, Malik demonstrates, can be found in warning about an immanent Endlösung for European Muslims, as if the whiff of the gas chambers had crept into our streets. Malik shows that this is “hysterical to the point of delusional” While restrictions on civil liberties in the ‘war against terrorism’ (a very real terror, as 7/7 indicates domestically), infringe human rights, and there are some bouts of aggression against Moslems, there is little evidence of systematic attacks on British Muslims. Still less the kind of religious  descrimination against, say, Copts in Egypt. On stop-and search alone it is youths of an Afro-Caribbean background who are overwhelmingly targeted. The BNP rails against foreigners en bloc,  and are equal opportunity racists. Malik indeed argues, “If Muslims are singled out in Britain, and it is often for privileged treatment.” That is, public figures from Prince Charles to Tony Blair, go out of their way to praise its contribution to the world, and there are constant arrangements made to accommodate believers – subsidies, provisions for observance of ritual, and even efforts to incorporate Sharia ‘law’ into British jurisprudence. Nevertheless the effect of this rhetoric may be, he observes, to legitimate slaughtering the ‘kufer’, as acts of resistance.

    The upshot is a poisonous legacy. Today Malik remarks, there is “widespread acceptance that it had been wrong to publish, and even more wrong to republish. Writers and artists, political leaders insisted, had a responsibility to desist from giving offence and upsetting religious sensibilities.” The law of blasphemy has been repealed but the first steps towards prosecuting criticism of religion have been taken through other legislation. Against this the wholly misguided view has been expressed that this is a battle between the ‘West’ and Islam. The latter Martin Amis opines, should be made to pay by collective punishment. Even the Enlightenment has been conscripted to this distorted cause. Destroying the very universalism which is its mark. An insult to the beloved Alevi martyrs who paid with their lives in Sivas for the defence of the Enlightenment’s most cherished values. The upshot? The failure to advance genuine Enlightenment canons of freedom of speech, and universalistic anti-racism, has “helped build a culture of grievance, in which being offended is a badge of identity, cleared a space for radical Islamists to flourish and made secular and progressive arguments less sayable, particularly within Muslim communities.” 

    This book cannot be recommended too much. The dilemma of how to promote real equality, and universalism, in the face of the demands of anti-democratic religious groups, remains a key political issue. This is not a problem just of the ‘unrepresentative’ nature of bodies like the Muslim Council of Britain. It’s deeper. There can be absolutely no compromise or flexibility on the core principles of the Enlightenment, freedom of thought, enquiry and expression, at their head. In the meantime I wish that all those attending the meeting I went to last night at a Council for Racial Equality, would read From Fatwa to Jihad.

    * Though this apparently harmless group soon reveals its links to organised obscurantism here.

    Ben Gummer to Join Tendance Coatesy?

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on May 24, 2009

    Ben collecting Post Office signatures in the Cornhill

     

    The face of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy?

    Or a true Comrade?

    Ben Gummer is the son of MP John Gummer (Suffolk Coastal). Famous for his Agriculture Minister Father forcing mad-cow burgers down his throat at a  tender age. Now, prospective – Conservative – PC for Ipswich, Ben was out on the Corn Hill yesterday. If you looked very closely you’d have found that his petition to save Ipswich Hospital/the NHS/Baby seals etc was a Conservative Party one. At £100 for a day’s permission to hold a stall on the privatised town square, he certainly was keen not to get abuse from passers-by who might take exception to a load of Tories. Though as we pointed out, such tricks are normally the mark of the Trotskyist tradition.

    Ben, or Benjy as I call him as we are mates of a kind, a not very kind kind, wants to be liked. We know because he spoke of this very Blog last week. And had actually read it. Naturally our first reaction was to consider this a plot launched from our ever increasing swamp of enemies. But apparently not. This week he distinguished himself by talking to a local anarcho-syndicalist about his interest in libertarian ideas and Noam Chomsky. Ben later came over to the Ipswich Against Fascism and Racism stall – pushed down Tavern Street away from the privatised centre. And engaged in a chat with assorted anti-BNP leafleters. With no doubt the same wish to be taken as a jolly good fellow.

    No doubt he is a jolly good fellow. But we have a message for Benjy. One of those hard facts of life that aspiring politicians should know. No Tory, the offspring of John Gummer, reared on a diet of roast moles culled from his dad’s extensive estates, is going to be liked by the Tendance.

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    Tarnac Affair: Julien Coupat Freed.

    Posted in Anarchism, French Left, French Politics, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on May 29, 2009

     

    Just a  short note: Julien Coupat has been freed (provisionally) – here. He was accused of running a clandestine anarchist-autonomist network, responsible for sabotage of rail tracks. And no doubt Sarkozy’s bad breath. This has become a cause célèbre in France. Put simply, at the heights of the French state there was a view that, with widespread social unrest,  far-left terrorism was on the cards. They then ‘found’ the Tarnac accused (Julien is the last one held – for over seven months) to ‘fit’ the theory. Julien remains under stringent ‘juridical control’ (here). When, and how, the trial of Julien and his co-accusees, will take place, is now extremely unclear.

    I will be blogging (we’ve been posting on this from the beginning) in more detail about this sordid episode. There was a long interview with Coupat in le Monde a couple of days ago, now translated I have just learnt,(here) and lots of things to say. Basically though, it’s an indication of serious political over-reaction.

     

    Good news. We hope.

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    After the Election Débâcle.

    Posted in Britain, Conservative Party, European Elections, Gordon Brown, Greens, Labour Government, Left by Andrew Coates on May 31, 2009

    Bedside Reading.

    Next Read This?

    The Euro-Elections are this Thursday (Sunday for most of Europe). County Council ballots will take place the same day in many areas. All the indications are of a historic collapse of the Labour vote. Alan Johnson the very right-wing Cabinet Minister tipped to be next Labour leader, predicts his party’s worst results ever. (Here) 

    As the multiple crises overwhelm the Cabinet, and the spectral figure of Gordon Brown prepares for an early grave, the political landscape is being reshaped.

    Firstly, there is a rise in populism. I mean this seriously; not as a lazy journalistic blame-word. The politics of ‘the people’ against the ‘élite’. Run, as it is often is, by celebrities (wealthy media stars looking for a new stage and a comfortable extra pension). And the far-right.  I note, having been out campaigning against the BNP, that this populism is directed against immigrants – the ‘non-people’. For all the guff about massive waves of anti-Muslim feeling, this is a lot simpler. Ordinary people fighting it out over scarce resources and blaming the incomers for their problems. Plus lumping a lot on ‘the politicians’ – and the easiest target, ‘Europe’.

    Secondly, the Tories are going to get in under cover of darkness: the Labour Party is going to go down in shame and confusion, unable to react. Their policies, for those bothered to read them, are a sharpening of the privatisation, hard right strategy of Gordon Brown. For those  who  refuse to settle for the Labour lesser evil, they have lots more evil to offer. The tools of state finance capitalism (nationalised banks) are there to favour the rich. The well-off who will be the first rewarded: tax cuts are a priority. And for all the rhetoric about freedoms the true moral culture of the Tories is shown by their EU alliance with Europe’s reactionary fringe.

    Where will this leave Labour? Johnson is an atheist, which puts in bad odour with the religious leadership of the  Party. He was the only major trade union MP to back abolishing Clause Four, and backs privatisation. Which makes him loathed by the left – though it is said that the more ambiguous figure of John Cruddas could work with him. Since nobody know who will survive the coming wipe-out of a General Election, all of this is pretty speculative in any case.

    That the left has been unable to present a challenge has deeper causes than the traditional ‘the main UK left parties are the most sectarian in Europe’ (not while the Tendance is still here!).

    To begin with it is unable to counter populism.

    On the one hand it is trying a feeble populist operation itself: No2EU. One groaned at the sight of Tony Benn during their electoral broadcast. Been may be a good chap. But he has the political judgement of a fruit-fly. A very amiable fruit-fly. One with a ‘O’ Level in the British Constitution.  And fundamentally, for all his ’internationalism’,  a patriotic dissident. Which is what this anti-Europe campaign is all about. It is unable to confront UKIP- to all forecasts, the grand winners of the Euro-Elections – because it shares their premise about ‘British democracy’ being threatened by Jonny Foreigner.

    On the other hand, its anti-BNP campaign has been rent through with populism. Of a jolly ‘we’re all Benetton babes’, and ‘communities’ united against, you’ve guessed it, the ‘foreign’ ideology of Griffin. I have noted some ‘anti-BNP’ campaigners even say that it is better to vote UKIP than the overt fash. Why?

    There are plenty of other causes of the feeble left response. That is, its own contribution to fragmenting the fragments. The left has been down the dead-ends of nationalism (the so-called progressive route of the break-up of the UK, or simply ‘restoring’ British democracy), alliances with ‘faith communities’ for a long time. It has failed to grapple with the politics of creating a degree of unity and universality, the traditional type of class struggle politics. Its communalist slant on multiculturalism has fed the pond that the BNP has thriven in. Thus the far-right promotes its own ‘community’ of the White British. Outbidding the other ‘communities’ with their ‘leaders’.

    One part of the left (and sections of Respect, desperate for a way to jump a sinking ship) imagines its got a way out through the Green Party. Others look at the dying embers of the anti-Globalisation movement and all they see are a few gleams from the Greens. That is a party unable to deal with class issues (it was founded as an explicit alternative to class struggle socialism). Despite some people’s belief that they are left-wing the heart of the Greens lies on the  centre-right  centre-left. Daniel Cohen-Bendit is a good guide to their politics: a chap who’s allied with Christian Semocrats rather than the Die Linke. They often side with the left on issues such as human rights. No doubt some of their activists are good people. But Green issues are prior to everything. We should be in ‘harmony’ with  Nature – something like a religious belief. As ‘post-materialists’, believers in Gaia-politics,  they are very far from socialism.

    So what do we have as an immediate  left strategy?

    Item: failure to do anything but ‘defend British jobs’ when General Motors etc, goes under. We need to defend jobs, workers. No national prefix. Full stop.

    Item: failure to campaign on the greatest attack on the Welfare State ever seen. The Workfare programme for the unemployed, and plans to draft all ne’er-do-wells (junkies, druggies, prostitutes) onto this scheme, has met little opposition.

    Of national left leaders only John McDonnell has grasped these issues. Of national left groups only the AWL and the Weekly Worker come close to realistic politics. Of journals, Labour Briefing and Chartist – and no doubt more. That is, those groups that deal with these two items. But time is not on our side.

    What will we do in the General Election?

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    Banned for Blog: YMCA Suppresses Dissent.

    Posted in Free Speech, Ipswich, Religion, Secularism, Suffolk, Welfare State by Andrew Coates on June 1, 2009

    Some old habits die hard.

    It had to come. It has come. YMCA bans Blogger.

    This morning I went to Dencora House, Ipswich. For my ‘New Deal’ induction at YMCA Training. The first day in fact.  A little while in and I was summoned. YMCA manager and colleague. Copies of this Blog, and Ipswich Unemployed Action’s, on the table. Nervous type. Points to print-out. Picture of medieval Bastille. Legend, “Storm Dencora House“. Liked he it not. Or calling it a “detention centre”. Oh dear. Next, famous (hundreds of viewings), New Deal: YMCA Training, A Major Scandal.  Not too fond either.

    Finally, their account of  this (posted by anonymous, which may not his correct title),  

    “I have placed this website as the Home Page on all computers at Dencora House today. Hopefully some of my fellow detainees here will read it. There has also been print outs of your articles left around the centre. The staff have been going round ripping them off the walls. They then get put up again. 

    People who merely found this site as the home page have been undertaking these actions on their own. Hopefully more people will involve themselves in such sabotage. If we make it too much hassle for them to treat us like this then they will be forced to stop!”

    Apparently, the chief said, some people are upset about this kerfuffle. Deary me.

    The upshot is I face being suspended from all benefits for exercising my (see YMCA Induction Pack), “freedom of conscience”. Apparently human rights do not apply to the out-of-work on the New Deal. Still no doubt they’ll find some way of justifying themselves. YMCA Mission Statement, “Motivated by its Christian faith, YMCA Training’s mission is to inspire individuals to develop their talents and potential and so transform the communities in which they live and work.” Needs some creative re-writing.

    Oh yes, one of our many invisible supporters  tells us that they’ve blocked their computers’ access to our Blog.

    Some faith.

     

    Note to YMCA.

    Posted in Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on June 2, 2009

    Ipswich Unemployed Action’s Web Master this Morning!

    Yesterday this Blog had 1,071 Visitors!

    That’s all.

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    YMCA Affair: Partial Victory?

    Posted in Free Speech, Secularism, Welfare State by Andrew Coates on June 3, 2009

    Note Place of YMCA in Pyramid.

    Latest developments.

    Letter from YMCA (received yesterday lunch-time), 

    “Dear Mr Coates

     New Deal Programme. Further to our meeting earlier today, I am writing to confirm that you have been dismissed from the New Deal Programme at YMCA Training, Dencora House.

    As Discussed, the dismissal is due to our Health and Safety concerns due to the comment made on your Blog, ‘Tendance Coatesy’ which states ‘Storm Dencora House’. Our Duty of Care to our staff and participants on New Deal programmes remains paramount.” (my emphasis)

    Operations Manager, Nofolk and Suffolk. “

    Phoning my New Deal Adviser at the Dole she was surprised. Later in the day, another call, and I was told that I would indeed be treated as having been ‘exited’ (suspended) from the New Deal. Which means loss of benefits. She had seen this Blog. A special interview was arranged next week  - local manager to be present.

    This morning I heard again.

    It appears I will not be suspended. No special meeting will take place. I will  have to make a new claim. This means I am not sanctioned, but will have to go through the process again. Not immediately though. Not (I wonder why) with the YMCA. But, eventually, with whoever is running this autumn’s  new ‘Flexible New Deal’ .

    Two observations.

    Firstly, it clear that this proved more trouble than it’s worth. The YMCA letter indicates that ‘comments’ from my Blog were a cause for concern.  The picture of a medieval Bastille and the legend “Storm Dencora House” ( published start of May) was the cause. Yet, oddly, Dencora House has not been overrun by a pike-waving mob of baying leftists.

    The revolutionary acts advocated were two: 1) Send E-Mails to Chris Mole MP, and the YMCA in protest at the New Deal, and 2) Stepping up the Campaign against Welfare Reform and the YMCA-run local New Deal.

    It was obviously hard to pin a case against this other than on political grounds – Dodgy for the Dole, Crass for the Christians of the YMCA.

    Secondly, there is little doubt that the solidarity shown here, and by many bloggers played a major part in this decision. I would like to thank everyone who did so. We often give solidarity for causes and don’t really think about what it means to those affected. I can assure everyone it means a lot.   

    There are those in trouble with this system who do not have the networks we have. We must extend our solidarity to them, and continue the fight. As Harpy says, the Flexible New Deal promises to be worse. Some contracts have been won by private prison companies and similar organisations. Their victims need aid, to organise and for that they must have our solidarity.

    An Injury to One is an Injury to All!

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    Euro-Elections: Carlos le Chacal Parle.

    Posted in European Elections, Fascism, French Politics, Racism by Andrew Coates on June 4, 2009

    Fighting the ‘Anti-France’.

    Now (have just begun new signing-on process) for something different.

    French Euro-elections.Le Monde has reported a Meeting by the Dieudonné ‘anti-Zionist’ list (here) (More information here and here).

    The Théâtre de la Main d’Or (1st of June) was packed out with Holocaust deniers, ‘national revolutionaries’,  9/11 ‘truthers’, Islamicists, fascists, Dieudonné’s mates, former Greens, former leftists, very much present anti-Semites.  

    There was one very special guest – albeit by telephone link from his Prison cell. A certain CarlosTaking time off from gnawing a few bones, the Venezuelan extended his full  ’symbolic’  support.

     ”Saluant sa “camarade” Ginette Skandrani, il s’est indigné : “Toi qui vis avec un Arabe, on te traite de raciste”avant de s’en prendre à “cette bande de gitans et de juifs qui te taxent d’antisémitisme. Ces gens (…) sont protégés par l’anti-France, excusez-moi d’employer une expression vichyste, c’est l’anti-France”. La salle s’est levée pour l’acclamer.”

    “Saluting his ‘comrade’  Ginette Skandrani, he showed his anger, “You who live with an Arab, they treat you as a racist.” before launching into, “this band of Gypsies and Jews who accuse you of anti-Semitism. These people (…) are protected by the ‘anti-France’, excuse me for using this Vickyist expression, it’s the ‘anti-France’. The room rose in acclamation.”

    Those bloody Zionist gypsies are at it again!

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    A Cold Warrior Attacks: Do the Greatest Cowards Try to Hurt the Most Ferociously?

    Posted in Human Rights, Imperialism by Andrew Coates on June 4, 2009

    Henry-Jackson’s Human Rights for the Vietnamese.

    Attila Hoare, of the Henry-Jackson society,  has chosen this week to make a serious attack. Under the label, Shiraz Stalinist, and a picture of Bosnian Concentration camp victims.

    Who against? Some nationalist warlord? Some genocidal General ? No: Andrew Coates.

    It’s a cry from the grave of his political tomb - the past when he posed as a leftist  ’anti-imperialist’. That’s before his present incarnation as European Neighbourhood Section Director of the Henry-Jackson Society, a body founded in the name of American Cold Warrior Henry Jackson.  This society is united in  ”a common interest in fostering a strong British and European commitment towards freedom, liberty, constitutional democracy, human rights, governmental and institutional reform and a robust foreign, security and defence policy and transatlantic alliance.”  Emphasis on the ‘robust’. Jackson was a strongly in favour of waging war in Vietnam. Hoare supported the invasion of Iraq. Hoare thinks the main threats to world peace come from opponents of the US-led military alliance (here).  

    Hoare is repenting for his past. In Democratiya  he has written, “As an eighteen-year old Trotskyist and ‘anti-imperialist’ at the time of the 1991 Gulf War, I can testify to the empowering sense of self-righteousness I felt as I demonstrated against the US and its allies, in the course of which my views became increasingly extreme: I fervently believed that the US-led intervention was by far a greater evil than Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait; that it would be a blessing for humanity if the US and its allies were defeated; that such a defeat would trigger revolutionary outbreaks across the Middle East and even in the West. ” Hoare has, since then,  long dropped his association with the far-left.

    Though not from being “self-righteous“.

    Hoare has chosen this moment to write on his Blog that,

    “During the war in Bosnia, Coates was outspoken in his praise of the ‘apologists for nationalist murder’ and the ‘anti-imperialists’. In August 1992, Living Marxism  magazine published a letter by Coates, in which he said: ‘Three cheers for Living Marxism’s courageous stand on Serbia. At last some proletarian internationalism has seen its way into print.’ He went on to complain that in the Western ‘official media’, a ‘totally distorted picture of the Yugoslavian conflict has been presented’.”

    Let’s leave aside the ill-judged ‘outspoken’. I take it that Hoare suffers from the same delusion as the YMCA. That thinks a letter, or a Blog, means someone screaming an opinion in the streets. Concentrate. At the time Living Marxism  advocated a ‘hands off’ the unfolding civil wars. I agreed. In 1992.  Hoare then goes on to state that Serbian atrocities in the former Yugoslavia were well known at the time. I cited other atrocities. He doesn’t. He implies that I backed Serbia. He loads me - with the strained chill of a true Cold Warrior – with responsibility for what LM said in 1993, and 1997. Not to mention their views on Rwanda. I say implies because he is unable to find any evidence whatsoever for this claim. Not to mention the obvious fact that I was never a member of the RCP or part of the group in any way. He began by discovering a letter, he ends by finding….nothing.

    What were my views? A  lengthy piece, which I had published in Labour Left Briefing not long before this, explicitly said “Don’t Take Sides” in the civil wars in the disintegrating Yugoslavian state. I repeated the view in other far-left publications. I condemned all atrocities. If Hoare can find some revisionist under-the-carpet- sweeping I refer him to the long debate I had on the Red Pepper Yahoo group a few years back.It was against someone who tried to do just that.  I backed (as he briefly deigns to note)  federalism, in its Austro-Marxist version. This opinion I defended in the Socialist Society’s Internal Bulletin. It would no doubt seem to be a pro-Serb position, for someone who backed other nationalist sides. Hoare is welcome to criticise the position of not taking sides. The one I held and not the one I did not.

    Hoare then refers, with filial emotion, to rude remarks I made about his parents’ support for Croatia. The pair are as notorious as Vanessa Redgrave for running to the Courts (here). I don’t have expensive libel-lawyers at my beck-and-call (Carter-Ruck, Hoare I saw the legal documents). I will only comment that I expressed strong disapproval of this position.  From being -  hard-line –  New Left Marxists they have since developed other sympathies. On the same Right as Hoare. I therefore consider my contempt  far-sighted.

    Hoare claims that,  ”Never having raised a finger to oppose the genocide and aggression that were taking place in Bosnia in the 1990s, he continues to defame those who did, while now pretending to have been one of the good guys all along !” No doubt he does not claim to have been a ‘good guy’ all along. I certainly have never claimed that either. I opposed putting petrol on the fire. In the midst of the Yugoslavian civil war. I stood for federalism. Wrong or right, and in any case irrelevant, that was my opinion. For which the self-confessed moral cretin who thought Saddam Hussain would lead to way to a Middle Eastern Revolution now rails at me.

    I am not going to be a big a ponderous bore as the prolific Hoare and give my stand on every single conflict since that time. Except this. During other conflicts I am much more closely aware of, such as the Algerian Civil war, I realised that human rights were a better political foundation than I had thought.  We all change. I used to think in terms bounded by socialist democracy.  I now support the  view that universal human rights are the lynch-pin of left politics. 

    On what this means,  I differ from Hoare. I do not think their main enemy of human rights  lies outside of the US and the West. I am internationalist: not Transatlantic. I am doubly internationalist: I am against countries acting by imperial diktat.

    Horrid Hoare. Hateful Hoare. Whore of the robust Transatlantic Alliance.

    Why don’t you fucking pick on someone who’s a real enemy of human rights? Or is it because your own record stinks to high heaven?

    By the way I, unlike you, allow comments on my Blog.

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    Sandy Martin Breezes Through.

    Posted in Britain, Ipswich, Labour Government, Labour Movement, Left by Andrew Coates on June 6, 2009

    An Example to Us All.

     

    Beloved comrade Sandy Martin is elected Suffolk County Councillor.

    St John’s: *Sandy Martin (Lab) 1,022, Gavin Maclure (Con) 865, Richard Atkins (Lib) 365, Lucy Glover (Green) 298. Lab hold. Turnout 38.8%.

     

    To join three other Labour councillors on the County (may be more, on the phone this morning his partner says there’s some recounts going on).

    Openly gay, democratic socialist and green…

    We salute thee!

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    Who the Henry-Jackson Society (aka Attila Hoare) is.

    Posted in Free Speech, Human Rights by Andrew Coates on June 7, 2009

     

     

    More Henry-Jackson Human Rights.

    From a well-respected, indeed beloved,  comrade,

     ”Scoop Jackson is the stuff commie nightmares were made of. I tend to
    think that Schactman’s support of Scoop was more than political or
    ideological, was made to irritate and infuriate his former comrades
    into furious polemics of rabid prose. You know what an earnest bunch
    we can seem when faced with cynics like Max Schactman in his late
    years, and how much grumpy old cynics love to piss off idealists like
    ourselves by doing provocative crap like that.

    Of course, Scoop Jackson is not only the first Senator embraced by
    neo-cons, but to a large extent the creator of their practical
    framework: he was the one that created the practical precepts of
    neo-conservatism, such as hawkish budgetary policy, support for
    Israel, avowed “non-partisanship” in military affairs.

    But in the forefront laid the opposition to the confluence of
    left-pacifists and right-isolationists that started to develop after
    the Korean War, and exemplified, most dramatically in two speeches by
    then President Eisenhower: the 1953 “Chance for Peace Speech” at the
    American Society of Newspaper Editors and his most famous speech, the
    “Farewell Address”, better known as the “Military-Industrial Complex
    speech”.

    http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/speeches/19530416%20Chance%20for%20Peace.htm

    “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition
    of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
    military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
    misplaced power exists and will persist.”
    http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/speeches/19610117%20farewell%20address.htm

    Scoop was largely responsible, then for the political strategy that
    defeated Nixon (seen as a populist continuator of Eisenhower’s
    isolationist tendencies) and put JFK in power, and of the Vietnam War.
    There is no coincidence the Vietnam War was ended by Nixon, who hated
    Scoop with a passion, even when having to “unite” with him.

    Of course (as mentioned in the wikipedia entry) he best known as “the
    Senator from Boeing”, and there was a strong practical basis for being
    a hawk: Boeing remains both one of the largest single private
    employers in Washington State, and a major political donor to the
    Washington State congressional delegations. So any senator from
    Washington State will to a certain extent be a Senator from Boeing.
    Except Scoop elevated it to an art.

    An evil man, responsible for much evil.

    Today, perhaps the standard bearer of this ideology is Joe Lieberman,
    except that unlike Scoop, he is a boring Connecticut nerd, while
    Scoop was a dashing and gregarious good old boy.

    Paul Wolfowitz’s “Scoop Jackson Republican” speech in 2002 (can be
    considered the height of Neo-con triumphalism in the W era):
    http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=307

    BTW, Wikipedia, FTW!
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Jackson

    sks

    To which is added,

     

    >> What I am asking. Does anyone here have any information about this
    >> Henry-Jackson chap? I know he’s a first class piece of cack.
    >>
    >> But more…
    >>
    >
    > Democratic Senator from Washington from the 50s to his death in the early
    > 80s. FDR-style liberal when it came to domestric issues, hard-right when it
    > came to foreign affairs. Hard-line anti-communist, anti-USSR. Pro-Vietnam
    > war etc.
    >
    > He has spotterly interest because he was Max Schachtman’s favorite
    > politician in his declining years. Many of his followers, including Tom Kahn
    > worked on his failed presidential campaigns. Many future neo-cons, Richard
    > Perle for one, also worked for him.
    >

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    BNP: The Sound Of The Lambeg Drum.

    Posted in Anarchism, Anti-Fascism by Andrew Coates on June 8, 2009

    Do they have the right idea?

    That the BNP have got two Euro-MPs…

    This filth brings me back to the first really intense demo I went on.

    Red Lion Square (here).

    Standing waiting for Nick Griffin’s mates (National Front in those days), I recall the sound of a drum.

    A Lambeg Drum: an  Orange Marcher’s drum. The sound of bigoted hate down the ages.

    Like the Balrog it got closer and closer.

    Comrade Kevin Gately died that day.

    I vowed to myself that I would avenge that death.

    I hear the sound again.

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    Front de Gauche Wins Seats. NPA. Er, Not.

    Posted in European Elections, European Left by Andrew Coates on June 8, 2009

     

    Front de Gauche won seats (here)

     

     la compétition qui opposait le Front de gauche au Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste (NPA), les amis de Marie-George Buffet et de Jean-Luc Mélenchon ont emporté la partie. Avec 6,05 % des voix et quatre élus, l’alliance du PCF, du Parti de gauche et de la Gauche unitaire (transfuges du NPA) a réussi son pari. Alors qu’il était largement en tête des enquêtes d’opinion pour la cinquième place en début de campagne, le NPA s’est fait dépasser et obtient au final 4,88 %, mais pas d’élus.

     

    So that’s that.

    Fighting the BNP.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on June 10, 2009

     

    I have a few words to say on this.

     

    First, fight the fash on the Ground. No getting around they have won a substantial share of the vote. 

     (Evening Star)

    ELECTION chiefs have today announced the two county councillors who will represent Ipswich’s Chantry ward.

    Conservative Paul West and Labours Peter Gardiner will now take their seats at Endeavour House.

    The vote had to be recounted following the county council elections on Thursday.

    Mr West secured 1,858 votes (20%) and Mr Gardiner 1,819 (19%).

    Labour’s Keith Rawlingson came third (1,726) followed by Conservative Nadia Cenci (1,691), Liberal Democrats Alison Williams (840) and Robert Tiffen (826) and the BNP’s Dennis Boater (714). 

    ELECTION chiefs have today announced the two county councillors who will represent Ipswich’s Chantry ward.

    Conservative Paul West and Labours Peter Gardiner will now take their seats at Endeavour House.

    The vote had to be recounted following the county council elections on Thursday.

    Mr West secured 1,858 votes (20%) and Mr Gardiner 1,819 (19%).

    Labour’s Keith Rawlingson came third (1,726) followed by Conservative Nadia Cenci (1,691), Liberal Democrats Alison Williams (840) and Robert Tiffen (826) and theBNP’s Dennis Boater (714).

     

    They exist. Us lot campaigned against them. Their vote is large.

    Second, be democratic. No calls for state bans. No stupid egg-throwing. When it comes to physical confrontation with the fash we know how to defend ourselves.

    Thirdly, fight the Nazi scum by class struggle politics.

    Prime example: fight for the rights of the unemployed.

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    Defend the SWP!

    Posted in Anti-Fascism by Andrew Coates on June 11, 2009

    There’s a Place even for Harry’s Place in the United Front Against Fascism!

    Nobody, but bobody, can accuse (that is not a a typo Attila, or as you toffs calls it, a spelling error), can accuse the Tendance of liking the Socialist Workers Party.

    But This is well out of order.

    The local ‘cadre’ of the SWP is a good comrade

    She, with the Labour Party, the Trades Council, the Greens, the Anarchists, the  local Socialist Party, the leftists of all stripes, and some of the local youth, ran the campaign against the BNP.

    Hats off to the much-liked comrade!

    Victory for Coatesy! Now the Fight Goes For Our Other Comrades’ Rights.

    Posted in Free Speech, Human Rights, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on June 13, 2009

    http://www.inctr.org/publications/images/2003_v04_n02_a01.jpg

     

    “A mob of unruly Transylvanian Peasants are rumoured to be heading towards Dencora House this Saturday. To celebrate the Victory of their alleged ‘leader’.” (Vlad the Impaler Workers’ Daily)

    I have to announce to the International Proletariat  and Unity of the Peoples against YMCA-Training, that guess what, Coatesy has won his epic struggle!

    I was not best pleased yesterday reading some stuff from the Dole about my ‘misconduct’. Just a phase, but it rankled.

    But I noted – that is after quenching my thirst on three pints of Abbot Ale – that I had got the Dole transfer in my account.

    This morning, looking at the sordid pile of junk mail, I picked up a Dole paper.

    Coatesy has been reinstated on the Dole.

    Now the struggle has to focus on the rights of the other blokettes and blokes who have got thumped on.

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    The Iranian People Will Fight Back!

    Posted in Iran by Andrew Coates on June 14, 2009

     

    I just have the briefest of moments to say this: but all socialists, democrats and lovers of the beautiful Iranian people must feel concerned at the actions of the Islamic Junta at the present moment.

    The best comments I have read are on the HOPI site.

     

    The worst were on the site of that SWP type who calls himself, modestly, Lenin’s Tomb. Apparently it’s a ‘class vote’ (here). Mind you on Socialist Unity there’s been some Scottish nationalists calling Ahmadinejad an ‘anti-imperialist’.

     

    I’m sure that’s a great comfort to the Iranians clubbed and arrested by the secret police.

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    Support the People of Iran Against the Theocrats!

    Posted in Iran by Andrew Coates on June 15, 2009

    Support for the mass protests against Ahmadinejad’s re-election! But we should have no illusions that Massouvi would have been any better

    Yassamine Mather, chair of Hands Off the People of Iran, assesses the highly fluid situation in Iran: (Here)

     

    One awaits the analysis of those who broadcast on Iranian fundamentalist Press TV. Notably that darling of Socialist Unity, George Galloway (Here).

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    Iran. Galloway Has spoken: Iranian Masses Tremble and Obey!

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance by Andrew Coates on June 17, 2009

     

     

    Thanks to Enty (here) Galloway, referring to Iran, “You can count on the fact that the election was fair”. And that unspeakable, who is, “the president of an important country and we’ll just have to accept it.”

     

    I don’t know about Iran in detail.

     

    We have to show our love and solidarity to the masses. That’s the message.

     

    But to Galloway: this parasitical enemy of every freedom loving person must be driven from political life.

    Harry Potter, Politics and Iran.

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance by Andrew Coates on June 20, 2009

    Red Base?

    I’ve got this thing going round my mind all the time.

    The children of Beslan (here) before the Islamacists slaughtered them had a last prayer.

    They prayed to Harry Potter.

    Some might sneer.

    I do not.

    Harry Potter, friend of the oppressed masses of Hogwarts, and the symbol of all that is good and living inthis world, is the best example of why the popular masses will defeat the sterile tyranny in Iran.

    People of Iran: remember the children killed in Beslan.

    Their deaths were not in vain.

    Marg Bar Diktator!

    For Live coverage: Here.

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    Comment on Iran.

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance by Andrew Coates on June 21, 2009

    “We did not give blood to give up now” – Eye witness report of June 20 Repression

     

    One thing is very noticeable about Iranian developments: it’s the sense that this ‘is enough’.

    The apologists for Islamicism in the West try to explain all of this away as a middle class, ‘Western-inspired’ ‘etc (add word) plot by a bunch of privileged malcontents.

     

    In fact it  is a protest from the heart of the Iranian people. As the important post from Shiraz Socialist shows.

    Anyone who actually knows Iranians is aware of how dearly they cherish their high culture. Their sense of dignity and respect. With bloody good reason.

    They feel humiliated by being dictated to by a boor and his cronies.

     

    Marg Bar Diktator!

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    Are these the Worst Weasel Words on Iran Ever?

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance by Andrew Coates on June 21, 2009

    Socialist Unity’s Political Editor.

    From their site, commenting, at length, on Iran.

    “(Iran) whilst not a progressive society as we would understand it, has played a progressive role as a bulwark of resistance to US imperialism and Zionist expansion (here)

    Something called John Wright wrote this.

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    Rules for Agitators.

    Posted in Anarchism, Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on June 23, 2009

     

    Bob from Brockley has published an extremely important analysis of activism on the left. The brilliant Irish Left Review provides an aide-mémoire on why the left gets it wrong so often (here).

    Can we suggest another approach?

    How to get it right?

    This is the Short Guide for Agitators.

    First rule: Be Honest.

    We are socialists (or anarchists)  because we want to see a society of free and equal people. We do not begin from the premise that there is some kind of magical formula that we we have to impart to the masses: we are part of the masses. We treat others are we would ourselves. That is with candid truth.

    Secondly: we do not operate with behind-the-scenes manipulation. If we are there for an issue, it is because that cause really matters. Not to get some affiliation for some clapped-out front-group. But to make the cause win.

    Thirdly, be sure of what we are talking about. Something real. We should never forget that the popular masses are not stupid. You or I might think our knowledge of Lacanian psychology and Althusser is important. They might perhaps think that their skill in mechanics or music is. They listen when they know that you talking reality and talking sense.

     

    These are the rules comrades.

     

    We follow them by supporting HOPI and the Iranian People.

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    Ban the Burkha?

    Posted in French Politics, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on June 25, 2009

    Islamicism in Practice.

    There has been much controversy (here) about the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy’s comments regarding the Burka.

    Firstly, let’s be clear. Having had the time to read Le Monde’s print edition on the remarks: these are suggestions not laws. Sarko is adept at floating ideas. Not so good at carrying them out.

    Secondly, no socialist, secularist and libertarian should be in favour of women being in this cage. It is an insult to human dignity. It is a grave insult to human rights.

    Thirdly, the real issue is not what people wear in the streets. It is if these symbols of oppression have authority that should concern us. In le Monde there is an article which describes,  sympathetically, a woman who said that when children are frightened of her she takes her niqab off.

    Well that’s all right then.

    I would not want children educated by her!

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    Benjy Bumps Up!

    Posted in Ipswich by Andrew Coates on June 28, 2009

     

     

    Tory Tout Out On The Tout.

    You have to bleeding laugh  sometimes.

     

    Benjy bounces back.

    He says, I quote the actual words “I am not a Tory”, (here) “I’ve been incredibly lucky: a strong family, a good education, and a career I am passionate about. I’ve lived in Suffolk — and now Ipswich — all my life, and that is why I want to serve the people of Ipswich.”

     

    Why don’t you fuck off and help your dad repair a few bird nests my son?

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    Fraud in the Welfare to Work Scheme (no question mark).

    Posted in Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on June 30, 2009

     

    New Deal Company Manager.

     

    Channel Four had this report last night (here).

     

    Seems our enemies are finally getting flushed out.

     

    You could have contacted us, you know.

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    Building to be Halted?

    Posted in Greens, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on July 1, 2009

    Suffolk University. Ariel View.

    Rumours abound. And bound back. That Suffolk College’s building programme is going to come to one almighty halt.

    Suffolk University is already built. Down by the docks. Complete with its peat-bog roof it is a touching symbol of futile green politics.

    Suffolk University Campus. What a nice name.

    Its claims to rival the beauties of Nice can be seen here.

     

    This building has transformed my area into a permanent obstacle course.

     

    Yet another example of Brown’s Britain.

    Don’t Ban Press TV!

    Posted in Free Speech, Iran by Andrew Coates on July 2, 2009

    Press TV Situation Comedy.

    The ever wonderful and weird world of Press TV (here) came under fire on Newsnight yesterday (here). Micheal Crick did the business.

    Apparently they’re under investigation for their lack of impartiality!

    But where else can you hear Gallows Galloway (appropriately Press TV are based by Gallows Corner) pontificate. Or that little darling Yvonne Ridley espouse the wonders of the Iranian regime.

     

    A national treasure indeed.

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    TUC on Welfare Reform.

    Posted in Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on July 5, 2009

     

    I went down this Friday to the TUC day of discussion on Welfare  Reform.

     

    That is, against.

    I can’t say I was in a good mood before I got there: paying £1 40 for a small bottle of water on the train does not inspire great thought.

    The seminar was well-organised.

    But let me observe these points.

    Firstly, there is no compromise with the likes of Brown. The only response he respects is absolute opposition. I said that. To some agreement.

    Secondly, there was very obviously what we call in French an OPA (take-over) attempt from two quarters. One, from Anne Gray, ex-CPGB (old CPGB that is) who wanted the Green Party to be the main reps of the unemployed. Sorry Anne but your mates in Norwich who banned foie gras from chippies are not going to be leading this one.

    The other was the lassies from the various front groups of the King’s Cross Women’s Centre (now in Kilburn). Even a hardened sectarian like Coatesy can’t keep up with all your fronts. I don’t wish you ill.  You played a role in supporting us in Ipswich which shall never be forgotten.

    But please you are not going to get a campaign going on an assemblage of women’s groups.

    Same goes for that black women who talked of ‘her’ people (as if she bleeding owns blackness). And talked of slavery etc. That, the New Deal was about putting ‘her’ people back on the plantations.

    Excuse me darling, I went to Westminster Further Education College to do me A levels.  A few streets from Congress House. I was in a minority of ‘whites’ (what the hell does that mean?). At the time in Peter Street, just off Berwick Street Market. The woman who took care of me (chief of library), and was me Mentor was a Jamaican. Jackie, an absolute pearl of a person. She was not oppressed: she helped  free me from oppression!

    Stop talking gobshite.

    Class Unity!

    Smash Welfare Reform!

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    Coatesism Victorious!

    Posted in Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on July 8, 2009

    The Spirit of our Goddess was with us today.

    The Historic Leader of Tendance Coatesy was in a bit of a foreboding.

    The Dole had summoned me for  a special meeting.

    Turns out I am excused from any version of the New Deal.

    And I get my dole!

    Now if we all stood up like this we would smash the New Deal (and variants) into the ground.

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    The Line on Torchwood.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Britain, Films, Science Fiction by Andrew Coates on July 10, 2009

    Comrades.

    Watched Torchwood all week, Children of Earth, like I imagine millions of us here. Can I say how political it is.

     

    And bloody brilliant.

     

    456. What a menace! The Brownite-Blairite Ministers deciding to sacrifice the ‘less able’ children off the council estates. The celebration of gay love. The stand of the brave revolutionary woman Lois Habiba. Cap’n Jack saying an injury to one is an injury to all.

     

    Comrades from Torchwood – there’s a place for you in the Workers’ United Front!

    “So left, two, three!
    So left, two, three!
    Comrade, there’s a place for you.
    Take your stand in the workers united front
    For you are a worker too!”

    Brecht.

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    Comrade Attacked by Job Centre Security.

    Posted in Ipswich, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on July 11, 2009

    Details are just emerging of a serious attack on a prominent member of Ipswich Unemployed Action by Security Guards at the Silent Street Job Centre.

    Three brave security guards homed in on a small working class youth. Who had got a bit stroppy.  They called the coppers. He managed to escape.

    What a fucking nightmare the Dole is becoming!

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    Robespierre on BBC Two.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on July 12, 2009

     

    Watched the programme on BBC Two Last night. ‘Bout Robespierre. (here)

    What a load of unmitigated cack!

    The sight of two of the worst enemies of freedom, half-baked rightwing pundit Simon Schama and self-proclaimed ‘Marxist’ Slavoj Zizek, debating the role of Robespierre, really got to me. There were some good historians present. But the general tone was: support Terror. Or be a Democrat.

    Have they not read Les Dieux ont Soif  by Anatole France?

    A true republican revolutionary, an atheist, goes to the guillotine because he protects a Royalist prostitute, and a priest.

    A real revolutionary always stands by the oppressed. Come what may.

    The revolutionary democrats won. In case the BBC hadn’t noticed.

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    Us and the Germans.

    Posted in European Left, Uncategorized by Andrew Coates on July 15, 2009

    Never forget: Germany produced this poem of unspeakable beauty!

     

    I am deeply influenced by German culture. I spent several years of my life reading Kant and Hegel. In depth. I have gone to evening classes in the speech and my German is to an extent that I can understandthe beautiful language. I went with a German bird to Heine’s grave round the corner to my gaff in Paris and know what he means to the Germans. I have his poems in me front-room.  My politics are strongly influenced by Germany. I think I do not need to cite the name. Or names.

    All eyes on the European left are on howDie Linke is going to do in the forthcoming elections.

    But I have a problem. We English are not Teutonic. I do not really speak German. On Facebook as a French-speaker I can communicate with Italian comrades with a flash of an eye-brow. I cannot do this in German.

    Last night  I read Chesterton’s essay on this.

    Our eyes have been turned towards the Latin world for over a thousand years. We are in fact more Latin than Germanic.

    But as I say, all attention on Europe’s left is now on Germany.

     

    We wish you well comrades.

     

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    Open Left and Equality.

    Posted in Left, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on July 22, 2009

    Open Left Theorist.

    So” equality of capability” and, elsewhere, “equality of potential” are James Purnell’s objectives (here). Whatever this means: like equality of being capable to realise a potential chance to have a chance to get a capability.

    John Cruddas pontificates on fellowship and moral unity with material equality (here). Blimey he’s read a bit of Tawney. Though not, one suspects, any serious modern discussion of what equality means. Like by Brian Barry.

    Our old friend, David Blunkett, notes on today’s letter pages that, Cruddas’s approach is misguided. What is needed are new directions. He cites, “The fascinating speech of Oswald Mosley, then a member of the cabinet, in 1930 – before his decline into fascism – showed that what was required were bold economic measures, not the cutback, retrenchment and cut in wages that were the reality of the early 1930s.” In fact David, the need for these bold measures were precisely what led the leader of the New Party  to his fascist trajectory. But then we always knew you had a shine for Mosley.

    As for the rest of this stuff about equality. I note a deafening silence on a major cause of rising social exclusion, poverty and inequality in the UK. Welfare Reform. Even Red Pepper, which participates in Cruddas’s Compass, has kept mum about it. Mind you as it was founded by Trustafarian money I suppose they already have a welfare system of their own. Only the unions and a few campaigning groups have done anything at all. Which has not been enough – yet.

    Until the left grasps the mettle and campaigns against Welfare Reform all these fine words on equality butter no croissants. Mass unemployment is coming back and those on the Dole are being subjected to a life of pain. Those on incapacity benefits are suffering. Lone parents, drug users, alcoholics, are being dragooned into coercive schemes. Against this we need decent welfare, freedom of choice, proper jobs and higher benefits. Or as they used to say, work or maintenance.

    Or maybe the Open Left  – so open I bet they’ll ask lot to contribute (er, not), wants to force us to have equality that Blair, Brown, Purnell and Blunkett have created. Hat tip to rwendland on the very rich, Quangos,  and large companies who fund Demos here.

     

    Their project. For most of us: Equality of misery.

    Update: as this post seems to have got attention from Open Left they couldn’t do better than see this  site to grasp what is meant. Ipswich Unemployed Action.

    Ernest Mandel. A Rebel’s Dream Deferred. Jan Willem Stutje.

    Posted in European Left, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on July 24, 2009

    The Bright Side of Things.

    Review: Ernest Mandel. A Rebel’s Dream Deferred. Jan Willem Stutje. Verso 2009.

    From the latest Chartist (not though in on-line edition – they only put a limited selection on the Web).

     

    In 1976 Ernest Mandel observed that Europe’s far left had been able to “accumulate sufficient forces” in this “revolutionary period” to have the “realistic possible of winning over the majority of the working class.” (New Left Review. No 100.) As a young member of the same Fourth International as Mandel I read many of Mandel’s similar exhortations. Even to us ‘ultra-leftists’ in the International Marxist Group, only a few believed that this was true in Britain. Most were wary of what Stutje calls his “exuberant optimism”. Yet someone with a command of serious Marxist theory, a democrat and a revolutionary socialist, opposed to the official Communist parties of the day, a tireless activist, deeply impressed us. That our International had someone with such fierce intelligence, not a bullying leader of a sect, was a source of pride. A Rebel’s Dream Deferred tries to do justice to this Mandel. Somebody with the ambition to influence and take part in not just Europe’s but the World Revolution is no easy subject. If Stutje’s biography does not unearth a forgotten figure, Mandel’s writings remain in circulation; it confronts us with aspirations that have seemed, for a long period, from another epoch.

    A “Flemish internationalist of Jewish origin” Mandel was born (1923) in Hamburg and grew up in Antwerp. His father was a leftist refugee from Hitler, who became a diamond dealer and then insurance agent; he was linked to the small Trotskyist movement opposed to Stalin. Mandel was brought up in an atmosphere of high European culture, and classical Marxism. Soon after the founding of the Fourth International in 1938 he joined the Belgium Trotskyists. Under German occupation Mandel remained politically active. Arrested once, and released (or ransomed, Stutje recounts), he was finally tried again for giving German soldiers anti-militarist leaflets. Deported to a labour camp in Germany, he was freed in 1944 full of expectation of the coming revolution. He had a lasting impression, “The alliance against fascism had consolidated both the democratic and Stalinist regimes, but under working class pressure.” Mandel threw himself into a lifetime of ratcheting up that pressure.

    From the 1940s hope that Europe’s workers would rise in socialist revolution, to the joys of ’68, the left’s rise, and impasse, in the decades that followed, Mandel plunged into far-left politics. Stutje recounts the saga of the Belgium left (through the microscope of Trotskyism), and Mandel involvement in the Fourth International. Or rather, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. He is fair to Michel Raptis (‘Pablo’), for years his closest collaborator and rival, praising his “political intuition”, and his faults, “imperiousness”. They separated mid-60s, on Pablo’s unconditional support for anti-colonialist movements. Mandel too, as the sixties wore on, had been wrapped up in ‘third-worldist’ causes – Struje cites close contact with Che Guevara. But his principal faith lay in the working class in industrialised counties. At the same time the party man was writing serious, if (critics comment), too all-embracing works, such as Marxist Economic Theory (1962), and the unfortunately titled Late Capitalism (1972) – how ‘late’? These consolidated his academic position at the Dutch language Free University of Brussels. That aside, few consider Mandel as the founder of a ‘school’ of Marxist political economy. As Stutje remarks, his study on the ‘long waves’ theory of crises (1978), lacks the institutional details of how capitalist accumulation developed post-war. But his influence was wider. Amongst prolific writings, which read as if stitched together from Europe’s press, Mandel produced real gems, his Introductions to the Penguin edition of Capital, and on Marx’s wider intellectual development. Perhaps his greatest political contribution – a break with the Leninist past as great as Eurocommunism’s – was to envisage socialist democracy. Strange to say, in retrospect, this was a major turning point for those reared in the harshest interpretations of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It would be impossible to imagine a left capable of confronting the collapse of Official Communism without this return to democratic roots.

    In the 1970s Mandel was banned from entering several countries, including Germany, France, and the US. Not only Mandel envisaged – in this case, feared – revolutionary upheavals. Even when this prospect subsided in the early 1980s the Fourth International peaked at 10,000 active members. But it did not weather the Thatcher-Reagan years well, nor adapt easily to the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. They foresaw everything but the neo-liberalism that ran riot across the globe. Yet till his death in 1995, Mandel remained bound to the “moral imperative” to continue to fight. Mandel was too much part of the real left – perhaps obscured in Britain through his brief canonisation by the most politically sterile faction of the New Left – to retreat to the Watchtower. A Rebel’s Dream Deferred pays tribute to the sheer ethical drive of the man. That the Fourth International’s Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, now the Nouveau Parti Anti-capitaliste is now a real player in French politics demonstrates that he was not entirely mistaken.

    Andrew Coates.

    Also read Phil Hearse (Fourth International) on this book here.

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    Open Left: Bouncers, Bullies, and Britain.

    Posted in British Govern, Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on July 26, 2009

      

    Ere you gonna pay that fine or not?

    Open Left witters on about ‘choice in public services’ (here)

    I shall not cite Marxist writers on the changing nature of the state.* That is about, the privatisation of its functions and the increased domination of the interests of capital. No. I cite one in favour, Phillip Bobbitt (here). Bobbit argues, amongst general considerations on the ‘war against terror’, that that the Western state has been transformed. It has become a ‘market state’. That’s one that “promises to maximize the opportunity of its people, tending to privatise many state activities and making representative government more responsive to the market”. That includes said sacred freedom of choice in public services.

    A perfect illustration today. The BBC reports plans to extend the right to issue on-the-spot fines to private security firms. That includes Bouncers. Increased opportunities for would-be hard men to get into fights with customers. And for the bosses  – a nice little earner.

    Anyone with a modicum of common sense- obviously this does not include The Cabinet or its Advisers – can see this is a  recipe for disaster. Unlike many Marxists I find that Magistrates – now protesting vigorously at this imbecility – are often people of great good sense. Will they be listened to?

    No doubt about it. There will be plenty of ‘listening’.

     

    *For those interested in such matters one of the most interesting modern Marxist writers on this is Bob Jessop. Jessop works with a concept of the state that is a “condensation of class forces” and not a fixed instrument of bourgeois rule.

    Crisis in the Parti Socialiste: Saved by the Summer Holidays.

    Posted in European Elections, European Left, French Left by Andrew Coates on July 27, 2009

     

    Not so rosy.

    The French Parti Socialiste (PS) is undergoing a deep, even existential, crisis.

    The background is the continued feud between PS General Secretary Martine Aubry and  failed Presidential (and failed General Secretary) candidate Ségolène Royal. The most obvious immediate cause the fall out from the results in the European Elections. The PS got 16,5% , with 14 MEPs,  closely followed by Europe Ecologie at 16,3% . The latter also got 14 MEPs.

    Europe Ecologie is an alliance of, notably,  pro-EU and social market Green Daniel Cohn-Bendit (co-President of the EU Parliament’s Greens) anti-EU anti-capitalist,  José Bové, and  Verts National Secretary  Cécile Duflot, whose background is in the  Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne (Young Christian workers). Its principle was that, “Ecological and social imperatives must drive political choices.” The Euro-election programme  gives priority to combating climate change, protecting biodiversity, extending ecological measures across industry, and European-wide raised social standards (wages, social security). It calls for a new European Dream.

    Here are some recent comments from leading Socialist figures (though where BHL fits in I’m not sure).

    Below:

    “ Depuis le 14 juillet, date de sa lettre à Manuel Valls le sommant de taire ses critiques ou quitter le parti, les attaques ont fusé : Mme Aubry, taxée d ‘”amateurisme” (Julien Dray), a été qualifiée de “gardien” d’une “maison morte” (Bernard-Henri Lévy).”

    “Since the 14th of July, when Martine Aubry (PS General Secretary) wrote to Manuel Valls telling him to stop criticising or  leave the Party, a flurry of further attacks has been launched: charging Aubry with ‘amateurism’ (Julien Dray), describing her as the ‘caretaker of a dead house’ (Bernard-Henri Lévy).

    Furthermore,

    “Le PS, cet “arbre sec” (Jack Lang), qui est “tombé dans le formol” (Arnaud Montebourg), doit “changer ou mourir” (Arnaud Montebourg).”

    “The PS is ‘dead wood’ (Jack Lang) , “has fallen into Formaldehyde (‘ (Arnaud Montebourg), it “must change or die” (Arnaud Montebourg).

     

    Maybe they should come to Britain and get some advice. From some real experts on how to reduce a left party to pathetic wreck dying on its feet.

    For now they’re off to the beach hoping everyone will forget about this.

    Origio: Islamic Cult?

    Posted in Fascism, Islam, Islamism, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on July 28, 2009

     

     

    What a Selection of Learned Works They Have!

    Origio in Ipswich is an Islamic evangelist movement. It has an Internet Café in Eagle Street and a ‘Community Centre’ in Upper Orwell Street. Rather well-funded by the looks of it. Certainly posher than our Council community centres – to say the least. A bit of a creepy cult-like atmosphere around them. Hard-looking types offer you elaborate cakes like they is spreading peace and light. Right goody-two-shoes. Wormed their way into the favour of the local state religious-support structures – aka CRC, Inter-faith groups etc. That it’s a ‘charity’ indicates how far the public purse subsidises all religions.

    Clearly its openness has its limits. Like material about forbidding non-Muslim men from marrying Muslim women. Usual stuff about ‘hygeine’.

    More important it is heavily pushing the works of a certain Dr. Mohar Ali (deceased 2007). According to Wikipedia he was “arrested after the liberation of Bangladesh and exiled” (here). The cause? He was charged with being a collaborator with the Pak army and complicit in the infamous 1971 Dhaka University massacre.

    Oh dear.

    We have a cult round the corner that looks up to someone implied in the Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh.

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    How Mad are Origio? Origins of Soap: Islamic!

    Posted in Ipswich, Islam, Islamism, Secularism, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on July 29, 2009

    European Savants Inspired by Islamic Science.

    From one of Origio’s numerous front sites (Jimas).

    Cartoons, Science and a Shared Euro-Islamic History

    By Professor Salim Al-Hassani

    Read here. “ They show that many everyday things that have become integral to Western civilisation were invented or brought to us by Muslims. Examples of these are coffee and the culture of coffee drinking, soap and surgical tools, vaccinations, paper, carpets, ‘Arabic’ numerals, algebra, cameras, soap, automatic water raising machines, clocks, many musical instruments, architectural features such as the pointed ‘Gothic’ arch. Even Robinson Crusoe and the English rose have been found to have Muslim origins, this list is endless. But the problem is that this knowledge isn’t yet widely available for the public.”

    Coffee is no more Islamic than Tea is Confucian. The Professor, poor soul, is confusing the camera obscura with a camera that could take photographs – the latter is a European invention. Soap (in the modern sense, soap-like substances were known circa 2000 BC in Mesopotamia)  is an prehistoric Germanic  discovery (as the etymology of the word indicates, even in Romance languages). 120 types of surgical tools have been discovered in the ancient Indus Vally Civilisation. Smallpox vaccination was practiced in China and India 200BC. Paper in the modern sense (not Papyrus) is from ancient China.  ’Arabic’ numerals are from India. Algebra originates in the Babylonian civilisation (here). Water clocks, clepsydrae, were invented in antiquity; the first mechanical clocks were created in Europe in the 13th century, and it was not until the 15th that they appeared in the ‘Islamic’ world.

    I could go on through the list but I’m bored. Though the Muslim ‘origins’ of the English rose and Robinson Crusoe looks promising material.  But, be fair: the Ottomans were the first to manufacture carpets.

    Let’s bear in mind that these well-funded nutters (bigots?) have free run of University Campus Suffolk & Suffolk New College (here).

    Salim T S Al-Hassani is an Emeritus Professor Mechanical Engineering and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, Faculty of Humanities, University of Manchester.

    I wouldn’t trust him to repair my bath taps.

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    French Workers Threaten to Blow Up Factory.

    Posted in French Politics, Unions by Andrew Coates on July 30, 2009

    New Fabris 

    Workers at New Fabris (sub-contractors for the automobile  industry) have threatened to blow up their factory.  Faced with redundancy they have demanded a special sum of 30,000 Euros as a pay off, on top of statutory payments.  Today they have announced they will carry this out if their demands are not met.  The ultimatium date is  the 31st of July.  (Here)

    A large demonstration is planned today at  at Châtellerault  (Vienne). (Here)

    Workers’ declaration (from NPA site):

    Nous exigeons toujours une prime de licenciement de 30 000 euros en plus des indemnités légales.

    (We demand a special redundancy payment of 30,000 Euros on top of legal indemnities.)

    Nous appelons l’ensemble des salariés des entreprises qui, comme nous, sont sous la menace d’une fermeture de leur entreprise ou de licenciements, du bassin châtelleraudais et de toute la France, à nous contacter de façon à coordonner nos luttes et à former un collectif contre les patrons voyous et licencieurs..

    (We call on all workers in companies,. like out own, who are threatened with their enterprise closing or redundancies, in the châtelleraudais region, and across France, to contact us in order to coordinate our struggles and to form a collective against ‘thug-and-lay-off bosses’.)

    Nous appelons l’ensemble des salariés en lutte pour l’emploi à une manifestationà Chatellerault jeudi 30 juillet à 14h.

    (We call on all workers out struggling for employment to join the demonstration at Chatellerault Thursday the 30th of July at 14.oo. )

    Nous invitons également tous les responsables politiques et syndicaux à venir se joindre à nous.

    (We invite all the political and trade union leaders to join us.)

    Vous pouvez nous contacter en écrivant à : newfabrisenlutte@yahoo.fr

    (Contact details.)

    Communiqué de la CGT New Fabris, Châtellerault, le 24 juillet à 11h.

     

    Note: there’s a good article about New Fabris in the latest Solidarity.

     

    Added Friday: Report on demo (about 1,000, composing important union delegations and personalities): here

     

    UPDATE SATURDAY: End of movement. The workers have accepted 11,000 Euros extra payment and stopped their actions (here).

    Burkha in France: Marginal.

    Posted in French Politics, Islam, Islamism, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on August 1, 2009

     

    Not ‘Must-Have’ Beach-Wear this Summer.

    In Paris a parliamentary committee, headed by Communist André Gérin, is examining the question of the Burkha (or burqa). From an inquiry it has become in reality a ‘study group’. The reality of its object?   The French Police (interior information service) estimate that only 367 women wear the full body veil – burkha or niqab –  in France (here).

    “Pour les policiers de la SDIG, le port du voile intégral s’apparente à une volonté de “provoquer la société, voire sa famille”, à un militantisme affiché, issu du salafisme.”

    For the Police of the SDIG being completely veiled stems from a wish to “provoke society, or one’s family”, and is a badge of militancy, of Salafist origins.”

    In an Editorial (29.7.09) le Monde  asks,

    Doit-on légiférer pour moins de 400 personnes, légiférer pour une exception ? Faut-il ajouter une loi à la pile de textes de circonstance déjà votés par le législateur ? Compte tenu des risques – dont la stigmatisation de l’islam, qui pourrait offrir à la burqa une fausse image libératrice -, la réponse est non.

    Should one legislate for less than than 400 people, legislate for an exception? Must one add yet another law to the pile of texts already voted through by the legislature? Taking account of the risks – such as the stigmatisation of Islam, which could give wearing the Burkha a false liberating image  - the reply is No.

    I would tend to agree. But the intimidation of non-burkha wearing Muslim females (like that against non-veiled) is a problem. The veil in all its forms is an oppression. But this is even more deeply reactionary: the root being that non-veiled women are unclean meat. There remains an issue about putting anyone in a position of authority who is basically saying to uncovered women that they are impure and that men are a source of danger.

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    Hugo Chávez Prepares Dranconian Censorship Law.

    Posted in Free Speech, Human Rights by Andrew Coates on August 2, 2009

    No Socialism Without Freedom of Speech.

    In El País yesterday (here) reporting from Venezuela.

    “Luisa Ortega Díaz presentó el jueves al Parlamento un instrumento legal que permitirá al Gobierno de Hugo Chávez sancionar, con penas de entre seis meses y cuatro años de cárcel, a todo el que a través de los medios de comunicación divulgue informaciones que puedan atentar contra “la estabilidad de las instituciones del Estado”, “la paz social, la seguridad e independencia de la nación”, la “salud mentalo moral pública” y el “orden público”, o que “generen sensación de impunidad o de inseguridad” entre la población.”

    Luisa Ortega Díaz (Public Prosecutor) presented to Parliament on Thursday a legal measure which will permit the Government of Hugo Chávez to punish, with penalties from six months to four years of prison, all those who, through the media, divulge information which could damage ‘the stability of the state’ , ‘social peace, the security and the independence  of the nation’ ‘public moral and mental health’, and ‘public order’ or which ‘ generates feelings of impunity and insecurity’ amongst the population.

    More (in English) from the Venezuelan El Universal (centre-right – anti Chávez)  here.

    This is an extremely serious development. All those sympathetic to Bolivarian Revolution and the cause of the Venezuelan people should be concerned. Such dranconian censorship is clearly very wrong indeed.

    (I would have missed this if I hadn’t bought a print copy of El País).

     

    Update: suppression of 34 Venezuelan radio and television stations Libération.

    The Class Struggle on Ipswich Allotments.

    Posted in Greens, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on August 4, 2009

    Class Struggle Lunch.

    It’s that time of year. Strawberries a distant memory.  Red currents, raspberries (well, not too good ), gooseberries, black currents,  soft fruit season has passed. Last rhubarb made into jam. Waiting for the plums and apples. New potatoes all eaten. Peas devoured. Turnips – only a few this time. Broad beans just finished. Shallots drying. Runner beans just beginning.  A mountain of Courgettes and Squashes. Beet spinach and Chard ready. Cardoon (flowering heads a bit like artichokes), eaten. Ridge Cucumbers blooming. Salads – Little Gem, Feuille de Chêne, Webbs Wonder, Merveille de Quatre Saisons, Salade à couper,  Rocket, Frisée, Lambs Lettuce, Land Cress, Radish (3 varieties), -Endives – Catalogna, Treviste, Barbe de capucin, and Oriental mix  leaf Mustards, Golden Streaked and Red, Komatsuna, Mizuna and Sky Rocket). Jerusalem Artichoke. Herbs: Sorrel, Chives, Angelica (good with Rhubarb), Marjoram, Mint (two varieties, one from Kurdish allotment holder), and Lovage (most of my herbs for immediate cooking use, Thyme, Basil etc,  I have in my small back garden or on a shelf next to the kitchen window).

    As everyone knows Allotments are extremely trendy. Even five years ago there were plenty of abandoned rods  on ours. The old bor (often Italian or Caribbean) who worked in the engineering factories and escaped to their allotment for the weekend have faded away. Now everything is taken and there is a waiting-list for a plot. Wild life: slow worms, frigs, toads, voles, newts. Beautiful flowers, neat verges  – that’s not mine! High fashion for greens, that is middle class people  saving the planet by growing stuff. A slew of reds (there are a number of comrades on the site). Plenty of organic growers – slug lovers I call them. Traitors in the eternal war against the class enemy.

    Now these vegan-vegetarian-greens no doubt feel virtuous and healthy by simply eating what they produce. But I wonder why so many (not all) take their cars onto the site. Including at least four who live only a bit further away than I do. That is a maximum of ten minutes walk. Green Cars?

     

    More about Ipswich Allotments here.

     

    Added: I forgot to mention my Sweet Corn (Maize), Leeks, Kohl-Rabi and Blackberries (they grow wild all over the place).

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    Coco Avant Chanel: I should…..

    Posted in Culture, Films by Andrew Coates on August 5, 2009

     

    Recommended.

    Be prepared to be pleasantly surprised. Most reasonable leftists have as much interest in Haute Couture as they do in Fabergé Egg collecting. We’re not too fond of Coco Channel Number 5 either. As for the woman herself, there’s that odour left lingering after her behaviour during the German Occupation, and her antics in Paris at the time. I saw The Devil Wears Prada and that’s about the depth of my fashion-knowledge. The attraction of Ugly Betty is one of those mysteries, like the Bermuda Triangle or why Gordon Brown continues to breathe, that lie beyond rational explanation. Yet this is not the case with this solid attractive film.  

    Coco Avant Chanel is not bad at all. It concentrates on Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel ‘s  early years. The role is played by Audery Tautou. Beginning with her time in an Orphanage, abandoned by her widowed father,  she learnt the seamstress craft. Coco  emerges in Paris to a lif eof  repairing dresses and helping to fit out wealthy clients. With other ambitions, she is a night-time singer with her sister  in seedy Cabarets. From there she inveigles herself into the Châteaux of a Military aristocrat, Etienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde). Horses and drunken orgies are the mainspring of Blasan’s extravagant life. It’s lived in an eternal Gosford Park, before anyone needed to cut back on the servants. With this backdrop there are enjoyable scenes of sub-Woodhousian comedy “Here’s Coco, she’s a lady of many surprises, some of them good’.  As this existence unfolds, Coco falls for a more serious character, English industrialist Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola). But the course of true love never runs smoothly…

    Coco’s talent emerges along the way. From making hats, and helping instill a new sense of modern style (clean cuts, no constraining Edwardian costumes)  she gets set-up as a Couturier. The film concludes with shots of dazzling light, costumes, and stunning parades of mannequins – marks of the success that Coco enjoyed for the rest of her life.

    Naturally much of this is myth wrapped in candy-floss. Chanel must have been as hard as nails. Unlikely to be someone you’d like to meet in the flesh. Here she is a quirky kitten, if with inner-drive. How ? Most would admit that Audry Tautou is an endearing actress. She would make Lucretia Borgia a sympathetic character. Did Coco help women free their bodies from Victorian constriction? Only if they were of ‘ le gratin’. But regardless of any historical truth this is a time well spent. Not much illuminating about the class struggle, but lots of being bathed in light.

    It was a definite plus that our local Multiplex showed in French, with sub-titles. About 120 people attended when I saw it.

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    Against Xenophobia and Patriotism: Fighting the BNP.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Fascism, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on August 7, 2009

    It has taken a  while, and some degree of distance, for this really to sink in. That is, the consequences of the  June Euro and Country Council Elections:  2 BNP MEPs, now 60 BNP Councillors. 9  UKIP MEPs, up to 100 Local Councillors. Clearly the shift to the far-right was not stopped – could it have been? – by the campaigning of Unite Against Fascism (UAF) and Hope not Hate.

    As in many other European countries Britain now has a significant far-right electoral presence. Its main appeal is ‘anti-foreigner’ feeling, xenophobia, and – in both cases, but particularly  UKIP – a dislike of the EU’s machinery. Not that either declines to profit handsomely from European Parliament largess.  But Europe is the outside shell of their programme: opposition to Immigration is the kernel. It is a whipped up fear of being overwhelmed by a wave of ’new-comers’  (principally from within the EU), that won them  backing. As they say, “we”re not against X or Y – they’ve been here for years. But these new ones..they take the housing, the jobs…”. Secondary targets, ‘Islam’ , for the plebeian masses, and – sotto voce -’Zionism’, for the initiates, have none of this elemental attraction. 

    Or that their loathing for aliens stays there. The BNP, no longer a classical fascist combat party, remains racist. UKIP claims to be a democratic party but has a structure based on odd-balls and obsessives. It is far-right in a classic sense: for a strong state and patriotic virtue. UKIP’s  ’non-racial’ tolerance does not extend further than embracing British patriots of immigrant stock. Ballot box success  for the BNP may lead to ventures into street politics, that is, confrontations with the left and violence against other hate-objects, blacks, Asians, gay. May, but it’s by no means certain. Continental far-right parties sometimes exist purely in electoral politics.  There is  little evidence that,  while an atmosphere of hostility to foreigners encourages aggression that a new NF Honour Guard is being formed. 

    There is intense debate about what the left should do. One of the best contributions is made by Kerion Farrow in the latest Red Pepper (August/September) – not yet on the Web. He argues against relying on highly emotional exposés of the misdeeds of BNP members, strident marches, and shouting, while not offering political alternatives. Singled out  is the misguided – indeed totally deluded – idea that the BNP can be ‘banned’, and its supporters purged from employment through a version of the German Berufsverbot. Such laws, apart from stinking of the witch-hunt, can be used against the left.

    What should be done?  Farrow says that the root cause of BNP growth is the result of Labour strategy:  ”the abandonment of much of the working class in pursuit  of narrow section of ‘swing voters’”. That’s the aspirational – individualistic – working class and the middle class. Not the poor, the low paid, and the – collectivist – unionised. To build anew the left must turn to this constituency. Needed are

    “‘community unions’ unconnected to Labour, possibly funded by trade unions but with organisational Independence assured, that would work directly on helping to meet the needs of those political abandoned working-class communities where conditions are deteriorating by the day. The would be based around the self-identified needs and plans of those communities- which can only pit them head-to-head against the BNP and the political mainstream.”

    The sticking point, however, is the call to completely abandon any support for Labour. Even by default.

    Paul Meszaros of Hope not Hate faces up this point. He states, “For the BNP to lose an election, another party has to win.” In many cases this will have to be Labour. Defending Hope not Hate’s own community activism, he neglects to answer Farrow’s view that much of their propaganda has a negative effect. That it focuses on making the link with Nazis rather than talk to problems people run up against in their daily lives. Paul White, obviously a very genuine grass-roots activist, defends campaigning in the difficult area of Barnsley. He nonetheless  observes that the strategy of shouting “Don’t Vote  BNP/they’re Nazis’ failed.

     

    The Tendance tends to sympathise with Farrow. Though has doubts about never voting Labour as a principle. We are also unsure about the record of the Independent Working Class Association whose strategy this is.  But very impressed in general by the outline in Red Pepper. That is, class based unity  against xenophobia and patriotism.  

     

    In the brief experience of mobilising against the BNP in Ipswich – in those elections – it would seem that ‘exposing’ the BNP indeed failed (they got over 700 votes in one County Council Constituency despite having practically no organisation and this being their first candidacy). Maybe the left here as well  ought to be thinking about how to apply some version of the ideas offered by Farrow. Notably, how to demonstrate a practical alternative to the fear of foreigners.

    As for Red Pepper why don’t they, at long last, try to connect with these working class and poor communities by campaign against Welfare Reform and  Workfare?

    I forgot, they don’t do welfare.

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    East Anglian Voyage.

    Posted in Capitalism, East Anglia by Andrew Coates on August 9, 2009

    East Anglian Heimat.

    £13.50 – Anglia Day Rover. Every year it goes up £1.00. But still a snip when you consider that it cost £3.40 for a return bus trip of an Ipswich suburb.

    Early train – 7.42. Window seat on spacious train. Mist clearing, swathes of intense greenery flick by. Norwich in about forty minutes. I had intended to go to Sheringham first (the ‘Bittern Lien’). But a wait for fifty minutes when there is a locomotive about to leave for elsewhere?

    Take the departing train – believing it headed for Great Yarmouth. Even more intense greenery. Full streams and rivers. Fields of maize, sugar beet and corn. Heavily wooded. Yet more trees, forest and heathland, heather and furze. Direction: Thetford. Boudica’s capital, and that of the Anglo (Saxon) Monarchs. Birth-place of Tom Paine. Visit Tom Paine Avenue and see Tom Paine Hotel. No time to see again his Statue (it’s imposing ). Note: hear Portuguese and Polish everywhere.

    Return to Norwich and set out for Great Yarmouth. The only real holiday seaside resort in East Anglia (though Waltoin-on-the-Naze and Clacton come close). Approaching though marshes, a heron takes flight. Station not far from centre. Crowds everywhere. The magnificent sandy strand is dotted with people:  the working class at play, English beshorted and t-shirted, Caribbeans and mixed couples, large groups of Asian coach-trippers. Cheap toasties, burgers, rolls, fish ‘n’ chips,  cappuccinos, gooey sweets, rock and kebabs, tinnies of lager, flasks of tea, smoothies and pop.  Gaze at the Wind Farm off shore. Bumped into elderly Ipswich Trade Unionistsand wife – still a Labour man. Not many of them around these days. Bought a cornet of chips (Yarmouth is famous – some of the best in the country) at  thriving market. Choice of sauces (curry, Thai) just like Belgium. Had a big dollop of mayonnaise. Popular capitalism at work ?

    Norwich again. Bus (free with Rover) to Castle. Walk to Market – colour everywhere. Reminded instantly why Norwich is a City and Ipswich a Town. More medieval, Tudor, Georgian buildings than you could possibly see in a day. Visit the Forum: vertiginous architecture. Extensive gleaming library (though unlike in Ipswich there are no lefty journals).  Merge with popular masses in streets crowded with busy chain stores, independent shops of all kinds (see Colman’s Mustard boutique), and three major Book shops (Ipswich – one). Look at Terry Eagleton’srevent diatribe against secular freedom (‘liberal humanism’). Decide not to buy (reserved in library anyway).

    Recommended Day-Out for East Anglians.

    Now where, one may ask, is the reference to Coatesy’s notorious pub penchant. Answer: I didn’t go in a single one. It’s not a good idea to booze when making complicated voyages around the East Anglian Rail Network. Example: at Great Yarmouth to get back to Norwich the train was delayed by fifteen minutes and crowd of several hundred people – many returning home with all their luggage, was queueing. A train to London had been cancelled as the engine broke down (something that happens all the time with National Express). With this a risk frequent trips to the bog are not a good idea. Even being a little merry can turn into its opposite when you’re stuck in a hot place.

    Being merry with small tins of Taurine stimulant drinks is much better.

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    Burston Rally 6th September 2009.

    Posted in East Anglia, Unions by Andrew Coates on August 11, 2009

    Burston Strike School Rally

    11am to 4.30pm, Church Green, Burston, nr Diss, Norfolk

     

    A comprehensive outline of the history of the strike (begun 1914 – till 1939)  in Burston and the Higdons’ role is given here.

    Join us at Burston to commemorate the longest strike in history, and to celebrate the people who continue to fight for trade union rights, working class education, democracy in the countryside, and international solidarity.

    In April 1914, Kitty and Tom Higdon, loved and respected teachers at Burston Village School, were sacked for their socialist and trade union views.

    The pupils walked out in support and from then until 1939 the villagers and the Higdons, ran the ‘Strike School’, providing an education for local children.

    Times change, but the struggle in rural areas for economic and social justice continues.

    This year at Burston we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, with music, speakers, and special children’s activities.

    Speakers include Tony Benn, and Luis Marron (Cuban Embassy)

    Burston Strike School – the longest strike in history

    Coaches will be running from various places. One will pick up from Colchester, at 9.30am, by the Gala Bingo in Osborne Street, Colchester. It will proceed to Ipswich, Tickets (£5.00) from Ipswich Community Resource Centre, 16 Old Foundry Road, (open 10 – 14.00 Monday-Friday). Leaves Crown St lay-by Sunday 10 a.m.

     

    Further details: Colchester TUC here.

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    Progressive Conservatism and the Third Sector.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on August 12, 2009

    Mr Beadle: Pioneer Progressive Conservative.

    Channel Four News last night. Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, launched, on the Demos platform,a robust project:  ‘progressive conservatism’.

    Osborne declared that,

    The torch of progressive politics has been passed to a new generation of politicians – and those politicians are Conservatives.By pursuing a course of illiberalism, centralisation, fiscal incontinence and opposition to meaningful public service reform, the current leadership of the Labour Party has abandoned the field of progressive politics.

    In its place, the modern Conservative Party is now the dominant progressive force in British politics

    Full Speech here.

    There’s quite a lot (mean and dishonest) in this allocution. We can leave to one side, for the moment, rich men’s gimmicks, like Open Primaries for Parliamentary candidates. Most will concentrate on the ‘reform’ of education. Apparently on a Swedish model (I have my doubts about that claim). That is, to break up further school management  and make them responsible to local oligarchies and those eager to make rhino out of the three ‘Rs’. In Osborne’s terms:  ’businesses, charities and parents’.  The plans to turn over greater layers of NHS (following New Labour) to commerical interests will also get plenty of coverage.

    TC,  by contrast, is largely interested in Channel Four’s attention to the Third Sector in Tory plans.  They underlined that many voluntary body, Charity, not-for-profit enterprise, chiefs were in Obsborne’s Demos audience.

    What are they hoping to pick up?

    The ‘Third Sector’ is not so  much a  sector as multi-storey car park for all kinds of vehicles. Some are sterling. Doughty fighters for people’s rights. Not a few genuinelly help ‘make a difference’. Others less so. Within this vast realm  there are increasingly money and power-hungry large-scale organisations. Social ‘entrepreneurs’ eager to get influence. Boards dominated by national or local worthies who expect deference – not democracy. I could cite the YMCA ‘training’.  I just have. I could mention the whole range of bodies dealing with the unemployed. Unlike traditional ‘impersonal administrations, the civil service, they are all too personal. Nosey-parkers, out to ‘reform’ the shiftless. A notable case locally is a Charity dealing with drug addicts. It expanded (state and local funding), following the Ispwich murders, into rehabilitating street workers. From supporting decriminalising it now enforces the criminalisation of prostitution. Wields power over people’ lives (with the threat of benefit sanctions and even prosecution). In-between the state and civil society they may be: as  the arms of the State interfering in  the lives of ordinary people.

    Unemployment is up again today. 2.44 Million, including, a million young people. Workfare, Labour or Tory is coming. It’ll be hell on earth if private companies are in control. Not just of ‘training’ but of work itself. But what of the (apparently) softer option? Will the out-of-work be consigned to Third Sector care? More logical, since compulsory volunteering treads into their areas.  TC knows that already some voluntary sector organisations are gearing themselves up for this. Justifying their action on the grounds that people should ‘give back something’ to society (at weekly wages that would barely pay for a ticket to a rock concert at the Regent and an Indian meal afterwards).   

    As trade unionists are well aware, Third Sector bodies are often poor employer. It is unlikely they will  always deal fairly with the unemployed (who will have even fewer rights). What mechanisms will there be to reign in the power of those in authority over them? What if the person in charge, a not so hypothetical scenario, has strong opinions about work-shy scroungers, and foreigners taking advantage of the system? Harassment and similar issues are hard enough to deal with in ponderous state bureaucracies. Believe me there’s nothing like local tyranny to make you yearn for their formal ways.

    So, progressive conservatism look like giving power back to the local stock-jobbing oligarchies who ran British  towns and cities in Victorian times.  That ran decentralised welfare services. Devolved to  the capable hands of Mr Beadle. Progressing back to the 19th Century.

     

    For more information on what’s happening on the Welfare  Front see Ipswich Unemployed Action.

    Alan B’Stard Back: NHS a ‘Mistake’.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Welfare State by Andrew Coates on August 14, 2009

    He’s Back!

    Everyone in the UK (well, nearly everyone) is up in arms at the US Right’s’ barking-mad attacks on our National Health Service. A Maoist propagandist couldn’t have come up with something more guaranteed to get the Popular Masses up in raging anger. The sight of baying Americans screaming hatred against the egalitarian institution that draws us together was bound to wound. It has wounded. We all have tales of how the NHS has helped us. The dedicated staff. The liberty that free-at-point-of-delivery gives us. We love the NHS.  

    If we moan about it, that’s because 1) We Brits like to whinge 2) We don’t like government measures to get private companies running schemes like PFI, or undemocratic Trusts. That is, business making money out of illness or unaccountable big-wigs ruling on health needs. 3) We fear above all any move towards a US style ration-by-ability-to-pay system. But, as they said on the News this morning, the country is up in arms at these US slanders.

    Long Live Socialised Medicine!

    But hark. What do we see pandering to the US mob?

    Alan B’Stard, the Tory MP, ultra-Thatcherite , and star of  The New Statesman comedy series, has returned. Or rather,

    “Tory MEP Daniel Hannan (here), who has long campaigned for the NHS to be dismantled and replaced with a system of “personal health accounts”, has joined in the criticism on US television, where he described it in April as a “60-year mistake”.

    Speaking on Fox News on Friday, Mr Hannan continued his criticism.

    “The most striking thing about it is that you are very often just sent back to the queue,” he told the Glenn Beck programme and spoke of elderly patients “left starving in wards”.

    He described the NHS as a product of wartime planning, like rationing, and added: “I find it incredible that a free people living in a country dedicated and founded in the cause of independence and freedom can seriously be thinking about adopting such a system in peacetime and massively expanding the role of the state when there’s no need.”

    He’s since added that he wouldn’t wish the NHS on anyone.

    The upshot? Hannan has been disowned by the Tories (here).

    Will this be enough?

    The Popular Masses will want him brought to the Tower of London, through Traitor’s Gate. They await seeing his head  stuck on the battlements.

    The Tendance reckons there’s going to be  plenty more like Hannan in the British Parliament after the next election.

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    Burqa Yet Again.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Islam, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on August 16, 2009

    Watch Out, She’s a Threat to Guardian Liberals!

    The Guardian, as part of its campaign against secularism in general, and French laïcité in particular, published a lengthy bleat by a Pankaj Mishra in its Review section yesterday, A Culture of Fear. Perhaps better titled, Islamophobic Europe: the Threat to Humankind and Nice People. He (note the gender) attacks the  book on Europe and Muslims, a devioce to make sweeping judgements about the faults of the Englightenment and European politics. I shall leave this aside until I have read Caldwell’s writing. What is important is that Mishra states that in France, “a  nation state whose geopolitical and cultural insignificance  in recent years has only been partly obscured by its hyperactive President..” . This comment (strangely absent from the On-Line text – I wonder why), is followed by this, accounting for the centrality of the issue of the Veil,

    “In The Politics of the Veil, the distinguished scholar of gender studies Joan Wallach Scott explains how the banning of a small piece of cloth that covers the head and neck affirmed an “imagined France”, one that was “secular, individualist and culturally homogeneous” and “whose reality was secured by excluding dangerous others from the nation”. Scott demonstrates that French Muslim girls, who were directly affected by the law on the foulard, were “strikingly absent from the debates” in France, which were dominated by intellectuals and politicians frantically defining the dangerous “other” (typically by describing the veil as, in Jacques Attali’s words, a “successor to the Berlin wall”). 

    Well I shouldn’t remind the ‘distinguished’ scholar and her ‘distinguished’ Guardian columnist that the ‘small piece of cloth’ was a rather important point during the Islamicist assault  on Algerian society. That their brutal way of enforcing it means that it is flecked with the blood of our martyr-sisters. Or of the  hundreds of thousands who died in this conflict between vicious Political Islam and the torturing Pouvoir, oddly not mentioned  in such distinguished company.  That Algeria and France are intimately connected, through population, culture and history. That in particular the Burqa, more than the simple foulard (which is a religious symbol removed from education and places where equality is important) is a means of enforcing inequality in public. It is  promoted by the Salafist forces  - well-funded agents of the pious Islamicist bourgeoisie – across Europe  is more than a piece of schmutter on the head.  It is a cage, of sexual paranoia and repression. That French secularism is an advance – and what exactly is there to criticise about it? That contrary to the above claims there was a very strong presence of Muslim women in the debate (here - Sisyphe) Including the voices of numerous North Africans who oppose rigid interpretations of Islamic rules and customs, those that legitimate oppressions (such as the moral dress code), and are secular. That the leading forces of the French anti-racist left, and groups, such as the Parti de Gauche (part of the succesful Front de Gauche Euro-list) are militantly secular.

    Apparently a French Muslim Minister thinks differently to her American feminist anthopologist and other English-speaking culturally significant  betters.

    The BBC reports,

    A ban on the wearing of the burka in France would help stem the spread of the “cancer” of radical Islam, one of its female Muslim ministers has said.

    Urban Regeneration Minister Fadela Amara told the Financial Times that a veil covering everything but the eyes represented “the oppression of women”.

     

    It is, she declared,  opposed by a massive majority of Muslim women – and men.

     

     (I won’t go into the full theological arguments about forms of modest dress, and the regulation of women’s behaviour by men and Islamicist ‘brothers’.)

    On Friday the Débats Page in le Monde ran a polemic byNathelie Heinrich entitled, La burqa, les sophistes et la loi. She took another more culturally significant American, John Brown, to task. He worries that banning the burqa undermines private life. By contrast, the French feminist researcher argued that if the burqa was only worn bya  few, it was nevertheless an affront to public human dignity.  France lets, “Des cercueils ambulants, des insultes vivantes à l’humanité circulant dans les rues comme si de rien n’était – chut ! (walking coffins, living insults to humanity walk in the streets as if nothing was happening – Quiet!) At the least the existing laws on such concealed identity  should be used against what many in France call, ‘le voile integral’ – complete veil. Heinrich advanced a strong argument, that to accept the burqa was  to “ déni de l’existence de principes moraux supérieurs aux caprices de la volonté individuelle.” (to deny the existence of moral principles which are superior to the whims of individual wills).

    A ban is not the answer. I am more concerned with religious dress codes as Islamicist instruments of  power and control. That burqa wearers are present in public places – and in the UK they are now enforced in some Swimming Pools (allegedly) on non-Muslims (here)- is a disgrace. They are testing the waters in order to extend their oppressive regime. But this is not the central point today. It’s about the ability to carry  further, by authority, this  totalitarian moral doctrine. Above all anyone in a position of power should be prevented from following them, thus making the first step towards their coercive introduction, them, for themselves or others.

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    David Szalay, The Innocent. Review.

    Posted in Culture, Stalinism by Andrew Coates on August 19, 2009

    The Perverted Logic of High Stalinism. 

    Review: David Szalay, The Innocent, Jonathan Cape, 2009

     Andrew Coates.

     From 3 AM Magazine - well worth looking at.

    Novels about the former Soviet Union are often hard graft. To read, to write, no doubt, as well. Martin Amis wrote his worst book, Koba, the Dread (2002), personifying Stalin, and studded it with inane profundities. We learnt that the Man of Steel was barking. But a lot, too much, about Amis. David Szalay puts that approach to one side. The Innocent is not about pure evil. It’s about a misguided intelligence officer, the sane Aleksandr, and the ruins he left behind him.

    Looking back on a life shaped and trapped in the perverted logic of High Stalinism. To the twists of career and marriages. Not from the time when Official Communism began to break down, but from the years of its lingering glory. The present, the 1972 Munich Olympics where Soviet athletes showed off their prowess to compete against the West. A time historian David Caute described in The Dancer Defects, when the Russian state tried to compete with the West, in sport, in science, and presented a façade of stable progress. The past, back to 1930 when The Head of the OGPU (State Political Directorate) lectures on the Rightist conspiracies, “wrecking, murder, terrorism.” The Ruitin conspiracy, the Eismont-Tolmachev-Smirnov conspiracy – and, naturally Trotsky’s. With all that follows in Aleksandr’s fight for the plotters’ downfall… To convey this Szalay’s narrative switches between Aleksandr’s type-written memoir and third person in the unfolding present. The former relocates us in the Stalinist period, and its aftermath. To the purges, the manoeuvres, and the making and breaking of marriages, bounded by a country he never leaves.

    It begins when the earlier Bolshevik battles have been settled and state building, purging and personal advance rule. At a time in the 1930s when he joined the Feliks Dzerzhinsky OGPU Higher School in Moscow. Then the “making of Communism was something sacred for us.” Marxism, for these enthusiasts, was close to a “language of faith” of a “new heaven.” This jarring description – to say the Author knows that Marxism-Leninism was a cover for a religious commitment – reinforces an equally heavy-handed justification of killing for political, or rather millennialist, ends.

    The meat lies elsewhere. In more credible events. Aleksander recalls a certain Antolony Yudin. A very famous pianist, believed, publicly, dead. Fast forward to the late ‘forties and the conclusion of the great patriotic War. Yudin, this former musician, is being held in a psychiatric hospital, out in the endless Russian forests. Injured during his detention as a traitor, his brain is so affected his short-term memory is awry. His past? A philo-germanic, (music, culture) he attempted to keep his contacts with country alive as war loomed and broke out. Who wrote to a German musicologist in 1942 asking if it were possible for him to go to Germany? Arrested… Hold on. Like the mystical communism this jars. Arrested after writing? Anyone, above all anyone well-known, with the remotest connection with Germany at this time would have already been under intense suspicion, most likely already sent to Gulag, and probably shot. With their relatives and friends. What need of a cover up of a botched shooting and false, not genuine, obituaries when there was actual proof for once? Kept alive for the sake of Doctor Lozovsky’s research into brain injuries… I think not. And I am only criticising this because a novel with realistic ambitions has to suffer some judgements in terms of its realism.

    Fortunately there is a lot better writing at work. The intricate plot rests upon Aleksandr’s steadily rising career, with its set-backs, in the Soviet Intelligence section. But only for a few minutes are it banal, roughly tumbling through marriage, relationships, and accumulating posts and possessions. Most of the time there are reminders of a darker backdrop, the high hopes of the Kosmonol youngster. Meeting with a fervent Communist, with a hidden alien class origin, a series of edgy contacts with the sharp needles that stuck out all over the Stalinist system. Periodic purges, anti-semitism (Lovosky is one of “our long-nosed friends”), wives, lovers, and a settled routines existence as a functionary, pass along. The purging of Lovosky is, with the coming of Khrushchev, now a fault, and a period of unset menaces this steady progress. Aleksander considers him, retrospectively in 1960, in some way not innocent. Overshadowed: in 1960 he has his own worries about getting shot. But isn’t Living on Aleksander watches events in the Fisher Iceland Chess Match and then the Munich Olympic Black September terrorist atrocity take place. More flashbacks to the threats against the Stalinist regime, hidden whites, Trotskyists. Late middle-aged comfort.

    To what? Perhaps I got lost as to where The Innocent was going. Or enjoyed myself on the journey – there is plenty of fine reflection on the way. Reading I found myself constantly thinking of the raft of books that have appeared about everyday Stalinism over the last decade. Many of the best are listed at the back of the The Innocent. But what I felt a lack of was a feeling that one could see what was happening. A cinematic input. Something in the genre of Burnt by the Sun or The Inner Circle. But more down to earth. Even so, the novel keeps your attention, and brings with it its own shafts of light into a world of everyday darkness.

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    Recipes for Social Democracy: Jean-Christophe Cambadélis

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on August 21, 2009

    The French socialists are in a decisive debate about their future. This contribution (extracts below) is by one of their central figures, Jean-Christophe Cambadélis (from Lambertist student to supporter of the liberal Socialist Dominique Strauss-Khan).  The principal interest here is how far it echos similar moves around Compass.

    Lettre à un militant qui n’en peut plus 

    The Letter  begins by asking why the Socialists keep losing elections and votes.

    “”La raison en est simple. Elle est la clé de tout. Nous sommes désormais perçus comme un élément du «système ». Selon le juste mot d’Edgar Morin,la réduction du socialisme au gestionnarisme a sapé les ‘fondements de l’espérance nos concitoyens’…”

    The reason is simple, and the key to everything. Henceforth we are seen as  as part of the ‘system’. In the well-judged words of Edgar Morin, the reduction of socialism to management has enfeebled the ‘basis of hope amongst our fellow citizens’…   

    Au moment où nous avions les conditions de l’offensive après le krach de décembre 2008, nous n’avions plus de dynamique. Le modèle social démocrate, devenu social libéral, s’était évanoui. Le nouveau modèle était empirique, sans force, sans certitudes, incapable de rassurer, d’entraîner les peuples d’Europe.Il faut maintenant opérer une rupture claire avec les années libérales du socialisme européen. Ceci est d’autant plus facile que ce ne fut pas la thèse officielle du PS français.

    At the very moment, during the Bank crashes of December 2008, when had the conditions to go on the offensive, we had no energy or sense of direction left. The social democratic model, that had become social liberal, had evaporated. This model was based on ‘what works’, without any strength, without any certainties. It was incapable of reasurring, or bringing with it Europe’s peoples. Now we have clearly to break with the European Socialist parties’ neo-liberalism. This  is all the easier for us, because the French Socialists have never officially adopted this approach.   

     Yet no back to the 1970s, Programme Commun, radical nationalisation, workers’ control. Still less the ‘rupture’ with capitalism (as opposed to the neo-liberal variant of it).

    Instead  Cambadélis’s  ideas for a new course  are vague. In a society where justice reigns,

    “Cette société juste doit combiner l’écologisation des moyens de production et d’échanges et une nouvelle répartition des richesses portée par l’égalité réelle.”

    This just society  must combine the ecologisation (his neologism) of the means of production and exchange with a new share-out of wealth based on real equality.

    Finally apart from advocating Primaries to select candidates, notably the Presidential one, he states that,

    “Le PS n’est pas la résultante un jour de l’alliance avec Olivier Besancenot parce qu’il y a des mouvements sociaux, le lendemain avec François Bayrou….”

    The Parti Socialiste is not the going to have one day an alliance with Olivier Besancenot (new Anti-Capitalist Party) because there are social mvoements, the next with  François Bayrou (centrist) – (because he  seen as a vigrous  opponent of Sarkozy).

    Conclusion: The Socialists, Jean-Christophe Cambadélis repeats (an old refrain), are the lynch-pin of unity on the Fench left. Only through them can it regain power.

    Well he would say that, wouldn’t he..

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    Workers’ Control: The Note That Grew.

    Posted in European Left, Marxism, Unions, Workers' Control by Andrew Coates on August 22, 2009

    A NOTE ON WORKERS’ CONTROL AND SELF-MANAGEMENT.

     

    Above available from Spokesman Books.

     

     (Extract from The Spirit of Factions and Sects – still being worked on. This is a revised and expanded version).

     [This follows a chapter on the Soviet Union and Stalinism. Criticisms of that is..)

    A NOTE ON WORKERS’ CONTROL AND SELF-MANAGEMENT.

     

    Two ways of arriving at socialism…

     

    “One way is the way of democracy of working men; the way of raising the level of production; of voluntary self-reliant activity, self-discipline of the masses. This is, in our   opinion, the only way that can lead, and will inevitably lead, to the triumph of Socialism; while the other ruinous way is the way of the deprivation of the working classes themselves of every right and liberty, the way of transforming the working masses into a scattered human herd, submitted to benevolent dictators, benevolent specialist of socialism, who drive men in this paradise by means of a stick.”

     

    Moscow Printers’ leader, Mark Kefali, in the presence of the British Labour Delegation to Russia, 1920. (55)

     

    Where does this leave us? (more…)

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    Ramadan Sacked: Dutch City and University Say, Has links with Repressive Iranian Regime.

    Posted in Islam, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on August 22, 2009

    Loses Dutch Support.

    Tariq Ramadan deux fois congédié à Rotterdam

    Libérationtoday: Pays-Bas. La ville et une fac coupent les ponts avec l’islamologue . Story in  English here.

    Sa «relation indirecte avec ce régime (iranien) n’est pas acceptable»et «a entaché la crédibilité de ses travaux». Telle est la raison évoquée par l’université Erasmus et la ville de Rotterdam pour mettre fin, de manière anticipée, à leur collaboration avec le controversé islamologue suisse Tariq Ramadan.

    L’universitaire présente, depuis 2008, Blogguer cet articleune émission hebdomadaire sur la chaîne publique iranienne Press TV, ce «qui est inconciliable avec ses deux fonctions à Rotterdam»,peut-on lire dans un communiqué commun.

    «Répressif». Les deux institutions précisent que les propos tenus par Ramadan dans son émission ne sont pas en cause, mais simplement sa position au sein d’une chaîne financée par le régime «répressif»de Téhéran.

     

    The City of Rotterdam and its University have sacked Tariq Ramadan (who had part-time posts/co-operation with both)  for his links with the Iranian regime. Notably with Press TV.

     

    The Iranian regime now is hurtling towards a reign of terror. Accused anti-Semitic terrorist, Ahmad Vahidi, is Defence Minister. We should be backing the Iranian democrats, workers and the repressed, to the hilt.

    How many more people can justify their collaboration with state-funded Press TV? Why should not those that do be subject to the same sanctions as Ramadan?

    Why is Ramadan still  covered with media and academic honour in the UK?

     

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    Europe’s Left Divided: France Highlights General Line-Up.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Labour Movement by Andrew Coates on August 26, 2009

    Tricolor, Green or Red Flag?

    The holidays are coming to an end. The French ‘rentrée’  is beginning. That’ s the time when the country’s Political and Cultural agenda gets set for the coming twelve months – in principle. It’s when the parties of the left try to settle their strategies, resolve their differences, and set out their wares.  At a series of ‘universités d’été’ (summer schools) the Parti Socialiste (PS), the  Parti Communiste Français (PCF), the Verts (Greens), the Nouveau Parti anti-Capitaliste (NPA), and other events (no doubt including the Parti de Gauche), have been and will be debating their failure to present a credible alternative to President Sarkozy. Or even, despite millions protesting on the streets this Spring, to affect substantially his policies. Neither the social-movement left, nor the (overwheminglySocialist) parliamentary deputies, look in any position to oust the right. For the latter, the European election humiliation of the PS, barely beating the Verts, adds piquancy to their dilemma. Renewal, from the right or the left?

    Three responses are emerging. They all have a wide echo with debates across the European left.

    The first is found amongst a wide layer of the PS. It is to try to establish an alliance with the centrist Mo-Dem party of François Bayrou and the Verts. That is, a tie-up between ‘democratic’ forces (Bayrou vaunts his claim to be the best fighter against Sarkozy’s  authoritarian populism), with an ‘ecological’ vision of progressive reform. Former LCR leader, Senator Henri Weber, who backs the latter, claims (here) that a ‘third refoundation’ of social democracy is underway. The first, the break with totalitarian Leninism (1920s), the second, with Marxism (Bad Godesberg – 1950s to 1980s), the third, with productivism and towards a new mode of ecological production (now. This greening goal, in various forms, is widely shared. However the first component of this new ‘cartel de gauches’ (the 1920s agreement between left republicans, liberal radical  socialists and the socialist party, the SFIO, co-operation with Bayrou (and ex-member of the centre-right UDF), is not accepted by all. It remains hotly contested. Not least by the PS’s General Secretary, Martine Aubry – elected on a platform opposed to such an alliance.  It is equally received with hostility by a majority of PS voters. Not to mention all the forces to their left.

    This may become a wider pattern in Europe. As the SDP fails in the coming German elections, and Labour goes down to ignominious defeat, we will no doubt see similar calls made. 

    The second are demands to ‘open up’ the selection of the PS’s Presidential candidate by ‘primaries’. This would mean an expensive publicity campaign to enroll a large swathe of the ‘sympathsiers’ of the Parti Socialiste in this race. How ‘open’ it would be is open to anyone’s guess. The advantage this process would give to those with publicists rather than politics  is enormous. Disregarding the utter failure of primaries to lift the Italian Democratic Party from the doldrums those with a vested interest are heavily promoting the idea (here) -with support from unexpected sources such as Laurent Fabius. Aubry, a party-activist at heart, is against; the ‘star’ struck Ségolène Royale (herself designated by a primary of those who paid a small membership due).

     Like its American template, this is an anti-democratic populist practice which puts power into the hands of the wealthy and well-connected with the established media. And takes away yet another reason to join a party – notably the PS where members have hitherto enjoyed considerable policy-making influence. One notes the idea’s popularity amongst the British Conservatives. No doubt similar forces in a defeated skeleton of the Labour Party will warm to the suggestion in time.

    Thirdly the NPA remains stuck in its call for movements of opposition. A rumour, circulated at the end of July, has it that the party of Olivier Besancenot has lost around 3,000 members since its European election failure to obtain any seats. While this is patently untrue, they have lost a  momentum and no doubt a few hundred card-carriers. Relying on strikes (despite the unwelcome noises form the main union federations) and demonstrations is not much of a strategy. For next year’s regional elections the NPA intends trying to reach some agreements with other (non-PS) left parties, such as the Parti de Gauche and the PCF. The sticking point remains their refusal to countenance any accord with the PS – any. It’s hard not to have sympathy with their dislike of the Socialists’ manoeuvres and abject failure to launch a  radical challenge to the right. But the NPA display arrogance in refusing the meet the needs of these left parties, who depend on municipal power for their existence.

    In this respect at least, unlike the two others,  France shows a great difference from British politics. We don’t have the luxury to split on such issues!

    France nevertheless illustrates many of the causes of the failures of the European left.  A social democratic wing tied to the established system, losing its identity and flailing around for electoral relief. Opportunism about Green politics – which are in a complete muddle (talk of ecological modes of production, post-materialist activists, inverted priorities: Gaia first, exploitation and oppression a long way behind).  A radical left unable to connect with the broad labour movement.  Still, we have had Blair and now we’ve (just about) got Brown. So we’ve not much to crow about.

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    Workers’ Control: Notes that Grew.

    Posted in Marxism, Unions, Workers' Control by Andrew Coates on August 27, 2009

    A NOTE ON WORKERS’ CONTROL AND SELF-MANAGEMENT.

     

    Above an important pamphlet available from Spokesman Books which explains a lot of the background to workers’ control.

     

     (Below: Extract from The Spirit of Factions and Sects, by Andrew Coates - a long text – book – still being worked on. This is a revised and expanded version).

     [This follows a chapter on the Soviet Union and Stalinism. Criticisms of that is..)

    A NOTE ON WORKERS’ CONTROL AND SELF-MANAGEMENT.

     

    Two ways of arriving at socialism…

     

    “One way is the way of democracy of working men; the way of raising the level of production; of voluntary self-reliant activity, self-discipline of the masses. This is, in our   opinion, the only way that can lead, and will inevitably lead, to the triumph of Socialism; while the other ruinous way is the way of the deprivation of the working classes themselves of every right and liberty, the way of transforming the working masses into a scattered human herd, submitted to benevolent dictators, benevolent specialist of socialism, who drive men in this paradise by means of a stick.”

     

    Moscow Printers’ leader, Mark Kefali, in the presence of the British Labour Delegation to Russia, 1920. (55)

     

    Where does this leave us? (more…)

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    Support Iranian Resistance Against Theocratic Gaolers.

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance, Islamism by Andrew Coates on August 28, 2009

     

    The ever-excellent Weekly Worker has some of the best reports on the unfolding crisis in Iran. 

    In the latest issue (after the break for the Communist University) Yassamine Mather reports,

    Misogynist Torturers Cling to Power.

    Over the last few weeks, following the show trials of ‘reformist’ personalities and the imposition of even more severe forms of repression in Iran, the nature of protests has changed considerably.

    However, demonstrations continue on a daily basis in Tehran and most other Iranian cities, with numbers attending ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand. Reports from the working class neighbourhoods of Tehran, such as Ekbatan, Apadana and Karaj, and from the white-collar suburbs of Tehran Pars, indicate that anti-government demonstrations take place every night and often lead to confrontation between protesters and Bassij militia.”

    Full Story here.

    In the same issue is a thoughtful review by comrade Dave Osler of some heavyweight books about Iran.

    He comments, “The Islamic Republic is a theocratic dictatorship sui generis, and we should earnestly desire its downfall; while we would like to see that job achieved by the Iranian working class, we should acknowledge that even bourgeois democracy would be an advance.”

    The Weekly Worker, essential reading.

     

    Hands off the People of Iran (HOPI) Blog – here.

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    Primaries in the Labour Party: Coming Some Time, Maybe? Now!!!

    Posted in European Left, French Left, Labour Government, Labour Party, Parti Socialiste by Andrew Coates on August 30, 2009

    Gordon Brown faces a well-deserved humiliating defeat. Next year at any rate.  Before he goes down in ignominy and shame New Labour strategists will flounder around looking for a way to claw their back to power.

    The French Socialist Party has known its own set-backs. This August, the ‘silly-season’ in the UK, has seen, some concerted attempts to think their way out of their impasse. All centres on two strategies. The first are alliances. We shall leave the wisdom of aligning oneself with complacent landowners like François Bayrou (Mod-Dem right-centrist) and smirking right wing centrist Greens, such as Daniel Cohen-Bendit, to PS members to judge. The other strategy is based around primaries. That is open selection-processes for Presidential candidates, and, who knows, other PS aspiring Office Holders. The principle has now been accepted by General Secretary Martine Aubry (here). It is suggested that the process may involve non-PS candidates (from the MoDem or the Greens) – all depending on the willingness of them to participate. In any case the real point is that the voting will involve the public as a whole – self-declared backers of the PS, or not.

    This has caused resentment and opposition on other left parties, who feel – rightly – that Socialists are trying to monopolise the ‘left’. It’s a risky idea: novelty and media bunting apart it will undermine (fatally?) the power of card-carrying activists.  The more to dominate them with  publicists and, no doubt vacuous US-style rallying techniques. In the long-term the structure of the PS looks set to undergo a massive shock, and possibly dissolution.

     It has not passed unnoticed in France that the Italian Democratic Party, now run on this principle has eliminated its left. It has equally been a resounding failureas a political alliance, and a feeble opponent of the loathsome Berlusconi. The pathetic fate of the Partito Democratico does not, some comment, seem a good recommendation for primaries-as-a-solution-to-the-left’s-problems.  

    In the UK the Conservativeshave begun running primaries for local candidates. The first was in Totnes (here). This was completely open. Er hum – for deciding a Tory candidate or a Tory candidate. The Tories modestly note that, ”This will be the first time that a candidate will have a mandate from the whole electorate.”  The practice looks set to be followed.

    Now the Labour Party’s Constitution would seem to prohibit such a move. But given that the present Party leadership pays scant attention to the Constitution, and would dearly love to be able to jump over the heads of those tiring members to reach the electorate a a whole, how long will it before some ‘strategist’  backs this idea. Will many get behind this, a way to funnel off anger at New Labour’s catastrophic governments? Whip up new enthusiasm?

    I merely ask….

    And have already been answered: the dull-as-ditch-water ‘Progress’ right-wing New Labour lot  have already jumped on this bandwagon (well, a couple of weeks back): here.

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    Die Linke on the Up: Saarland, Saxony and Thuringia Regional Elections.

    Posted in European Left, German Left by Andrew Coates on September 2, 2009

    It looks as if German politics are not playing out to the scenario predicted. That is, a shoe-in for Angela Merkel and the Right in this autumn’s, 27th of September,  General Election.  On Sunday in Saarland, an old stomping ground of Die Linke leader, Oscar Lafontaine, the left party scored 21,3% (detailed breakdown here).  A major upset, given that the PDS (one of Die Linke’s components) had never got more than a few percentage points in the Saar before. Some kind of coalition is inevitable, but by and with whom? It’s  suggested that the Green Party will be ‘kingmakers’ in this region. Given Die Grünen’s hostility to socialist policies this seems a delicate task. Elsewhere, in Saxony the Left got 20,6% and in Thuringia, 27,4% – good results, though in line with previous levels in former GDR areas.

    Der Spiegel comments that (here), 

    Left Party leader Oskar Lafontaine only managed to utter four words before the crowd of supporters drowned him out in cheers: “Yes, good evening everyone.” The 65-year-old politician was just greeting the crowd, but in fact he was giving them a lot more — an unprecedented election victory that many even in his own party didn’t even believe could happen.

    The left-wing party scored 21.3 percent of the vote in elections for the state parliament in Saarland on Sunday — a result that was 10 times greater than that achieved by the party’s predecessor, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), in the state during the last election in 2004. In 2007, the Left Party was created through the merger of the western German WASG party and the eastern German PDS, the successor party to East Germany’s Communists. 

    On the suggestion that there be a general alliance with the SPD and greens Lafontaine has this (here) to say:

    In Deutschland wird seit den Wahlen vom Sonntag wieder viel über Rot-Rot-Grün spekuliert. Eine realistische Option auch für den Bund?

    Nein. Für die Linke ist immer das Programm ausschlaggebend. So lange SPD und Grüne den Krieg in Afghanistan befürworten, solange sie mehr oder weniger die Rentenkürzung, die Kürzung des Arbeitslosengeldes und Lohndumping durch Hartz IV unterstützen, solange gibt es keine Basis für eine Zusammenarbeit.

    After Sunday’s vote there has been again speculation about a Red-Red-Green alliance. Is this a realistic option?

     No. For the Left the Programme is always the decisive issue. So long as the Greens and SPD continue backing the war in Afghanistan, so long as they more or less support reductions in pensions, cuts in unemployment benefit, and social (wage) dumping (Hartz IV), there will be no basis for common work between  us.  

    More analysis (in English, from China – of interest)  here. In German (here) a flavour of the hysterical political hostility that accompanies any successes of Die Linke, and efforts to reach coalition agreements between it and the SPD.

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    Disarray of the French Left.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on September 4, 2009

     

    Reminder of How Dismal the European Election Results were in France.

    From the Latest Chartist Magazine (September/October). Written about a month ago.

    The June European elections were not a success for the left. In the Continent-wide upsurge of the Right France was not exception. Head of State Nicolas Sarkozy was the principal victor. At 27,87% of the vote his party, the UMP, outran the Parti Socialiste (PS) – 16,48% – by a kilometre. The Socialists only just beat the Green List, Europe Ecologie, (16,28%) and got the same number of seats (14). There was no centrist break-through. François Bayrou’s MoDems, who posed as the best fighters against the President, obtained a low 8,45%. On the far left the anticipated surge for Olivier Besancenot’s Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste (NPA) failed to materialise. At 4,88% (and no MEPs) they were outdistanced by an alliance of break-away Socialists and the Parti Communiste Français, the Front de Gauche, who got 6,05%, (5 seats). For the left the only really good news was that the far-right Front National’s vote shrank to 6,3% and just 3 Euro representatives.

     

    Before the elections the Socialists had barely recovered from a damaging feud. The battle for the post of General Secretary, between Martine Aubry and failed Presidential candidate, Ségèlone Royal was intense.  Aubry won by O.O4%of the vote. November’s ReimsCongress left disagreements unresolved. The party has an inability to decide on its direction. Efforts to wrench the PS from its class struggle heritage (at a time when class conflicts are highly visible in France), and replace them with a watered down version of Enlightenment values, republicanism, have not been rewarded by the electorate. Royal adds populism and talk of ‘hope’ (mimicking Barrak Obama). Critics allege she is a ‘social liberal’ – who accepts market economics. Aubry’s austere approach – rooted in a more traditional social democracy – has been too modest to make an impact.

     

    The Euro election results were felt as an “earthquake “ by the socialists. Leading figures have made dramatic remarks about its coming “death”. Julie Dray has declared the party is “à la derive” (adrift). From the sidelines, Bernard Henri-Lévy suggests that the PS should “disappear”. A common refrain is that the party, in Manuel Valls’ words, “must change or die”. Yet nobody seems to offer any clear programme of change. Connecting to the voters by open ‘primaries’ is not much of answer – and is resisted by Aubry. A turn to the Third Way, given British experience has little appeal. But democratic socialist strategies have not made headway given the splintering of the Party’s left.

     

    Europe Ecologie, apart from Sarkozy the main victors of the election, is led by Daniel Cohen-Bendit. He defines himself as a “libertarian liberal”. ‘Danny’ backs the European Constitution, humanised markets, and increased federal powers. Their other internationally known MEP, José Bové, was opposed to the Constitution during the French referendum and ‘anti-liberal’ in the French sense of opposing the free-market. The Greens’ programme gave priority to general ecological measures and moderate reforms of European social policy  – thus making them a safe choice for a protest-vote. But in other French elections the French Greens, the Verts, are completely dependent on agreements with the PS. It remains to be seen how their success will translate into domestic politics.

     

    On the left the Front de Gauche, with the backing of the PCF’s apparatus and many left wing democratic socialists, is trying to emulate the German Die Linke. Its most dynamic component, the Parti de Gauche, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was onyl formed at the end of 2008. It received the backing of the Piquet faction of the Ligue Communiste Révoltuonnaire (LCR), now a separate organisation, Gauche Unitaire. The Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste, which replaced the LCR at its founding conference this year, claims to embrace a wider ‘anti-capitalism’ than Trotskyism alone (it is not officially a section of the Fourth International), apart from some very small left groups, and new anti-globalising activists, it remains under the 10,000 membership target it fixed itself.  The NPA, at one point polls gaveit over 10% of the vote, failed to convince the electorate. It refused an alliance with the Front, on the grounds that it was compromised by agreements with the Socialists and did not offer an alternative to the State. NPA activists have consoled themselves that Mélenchon’s supporters tend to be elderly – as is the age of all those who cast their ballots in these elections.

     

    Those looking for extra-parliamentary activity to defeat Sarkozy havealso faced an impasse. Massive one-day general strikes and street protests (mobilising up to 2 million people) this spring have not had any concrete results. Militant factory occupations and threats to blow up factories (New Fabric, Nortel, Givet) if special redundancy payments are not given, are signs of desperation. They have been compared with Luddism. The Union movement, unusually united, is looking for new ways to defend its interests. For the moment opposition to Sarkozy’s government has been out-manouevred.

     

    Comment: Aubry and the majority of the Socialist Party have since been swept up in the move to hold Primaries. I’ve given more up-to-date analysis here.

    Against the Greens, Again.

    Posted in European Left, Greens by Andrew Coates on September 5, 2009

    Green Power? No Thanks!

    The left is fascinated with Green Parties and Green politics. Now all sniffiness aside (I have enough snuffles  about the Climate Camp protesters to cause a pandemic) there are serious issues at stake.

    Yes, the fate of the Planet is important. Yes, pollution, global warming, the exhaustion of natural resources, and bio-diversity (simply – the countryside and the wild) matter. Yes, ecological measures should form a part of a left programme.

    But, no, no, no, the Green parties are not a vehicle for progressive left politics.

    All Green parties are cross-class ‘post-materialist’. Or so the text-books say. Their politics address people as human beings and a part of nature (Gaia). Socialist politics speak to people as citizens and members of classes. Why? Let’s boil this down to the essential. Socialism, whether Marxist or not, has two central objectives. To fight exploitation (the principal  source of inequality – capitalism), and to combat oppression (people being badly treated because of their class, ethnic, gender, sexual choices, religion or lack of religion).  For the first, class assertion, people’s interests, means support for trade unions, and a socialist economic strategy (okay apart from defending ourselves, we haven’t got much of one at the moment). At least something like workers’ control – of the whole economy. For the second social republicanism, human rights, and anti-racist secularism.

    The Greens appear sometimes to back some of these objectives. At least in part. It’s obvious that, for example, their support for Co-ops (here) is the strategy of ‘growing co-operation within capitalism’. Now it’s all very well to encourage the idea of turning “existing for profit companies into workers co-ops”. The crucial point is that, as argued in A Note on Workers’ Control - here – that these need something a lot more. Either state encouragement, or a really massive upheaval to introduce self-management across society. Otherwise, all the experience of such islands of anti-capitalism is that they will fail.  

    It’s hard not to think that the ley-way given to these policies is part of a wider attempt to embrace just about anything moderately radical going. Opposition to privatisation, anti-globalisation, climate change, even against Welfare Reform. This sums up the Greens’  approach: make lots of strong statements about how bad big businesses is, sloganise about No Logo, talk up the anti-globalisation movement and NGOs. But when push comes to shove they will never go against the grain of the market society. They, in short, are not socialists. Since they don’t claim otherwise the fault of thinking that they are, or at least close to, the Left, is not theirs. It’s those on the left who a re desperate to find some way out of our present dilemmas, or, more cynically, some (in Respect) looking for an exit-strategy when their organisation gets wound up (the near future).

     Green parties are not socialist and never will be. They are what they say they are: eco-centred and hostile to socialist industrialisation, socialist planning and a whole raft of socialist policies (from nationalisation to forced redistribution of ownership and wealth). Some members might be socialists. That’s another affair.

    Why?

    The reason is that Green parties are strongly marked by their origins (a feature of parties that Maurice Duverger underlibed0. That is, their Utopian super-class picture of the world means they appeal to anyone. Of Good Will. Like the early Robert Owen or Fourier they  ask for the support of well-intentioned individuals. Some, like these two, go so far as to ask for support from the rich and powerful (The Ecologist is a prime example). But most appeal to those who are sufficiently well-off to consider Green issues a priority – the so-called ‘post-materialists’. Not that there are not material reasons to be Green. But, at least until the class-based political system began to break up (encouraged by such parties as New Labour and its counterparts elsewhere) people cast their ballots on things like taxes, economic growth (a big problem for the so-called fundamentalist Greens), and welfare. Either way that is.

    The central turning point for the European Green parties has been when they have got enough electoral support to have their own professional Green politicians(and hangers-on). A layer with its own interest in keeping their positions. This has meant systematic calculation and electoral strategy. They have to become more and more respectable. Without a defined class constituency, they trawl widely. Their political anchor has such a  long chain that it lets them drift.

    Hence right-wing liberal-libertarian types like Daniel Cohen-Bendit. Hence the attempt by French Green leader, Cécile  Duflot(from a Christian background) to appear a competent ‘manager’ of a party. Les Verts have one of the highest ratios of  people holding posts in local government to members in Europe (9,000 members, up to a  couple of thousand elected figures – 5 Senators, 3 Deputies, 41 Mayors, and 168 Regional Councillors, and many more, though a lot  are very local – the equivalent of Parish Councils – ‘cantons’)  Everything depends then, on being capable of  running municipalities efficiently. Green-wise that is. Feeling the wind in their sails the French Greens are going alone. Until they need other parties. The future looks like this: compromise, coalitions, deals. This already happens between the Norwich Labour Party and the Council Greens.

    In brief: the Greens are set to become, if their European sister parties are their template,  a version of the Liberal Party out to offer its support to the highest bidder, always waiting for the main chance to break through into the major league.  

    The Greens are neither natural allies of the labour movement nor the left. If on specific issues they may be on the same side that is one thing. If it’s a matter of anti-racism, or opposition to selling-off public services, or for union rights. Fine. But there is no serious strategy for regrouping the left around the Green Party. Not now. Not ever.

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    Burston Rally, 6th September 2009. Report: Sunshine and Socialism.

    Posted in East Anglia, Labour Movement, Left, Unions by Andrew Coates on September 8, 2009

     Burston Strike School: Rally is held on Village Green in Front.

    Last year it poured with rain. This time the sun shone. Around 2,000 people attended the annual Burston Rally on Sunday (small notice in East Anglian Daily Times). The Morning Star carried a fuller report yesterday (here) and the YCL posted on it  (here).

    The theme of this year’s event was solidarity with the Cuban revolution. Luis Marrion from the Cuban Embassy spoke on the advances towards socialism made on the Island.  Steve Hart of SERTUC (South Eastern TUC) warned about the continuing US blockade. He spoke of solidarity with the Latin American people, and the need to oppose the Honduran coup. Richard Howitt, Eastern Region Labour MEP gave his views. Others were less enthusiastic about the policies, and prospects, of the Labour Government.

    There were stalls from most of the major trade unions: UNISON, UNITE, GMB, NUJ and the RMT. Bob Crow, from the latter, was present with a full crew ‘on tour’, a marching band (said to have learnt it’s tunes from the Raj), and its own zeppelin. Campaigns and pressure groups included: Unite Against Fascism, StWC, Palestinian Solidarity, Cuban Solidarity (with Carnival Musicians), Amnesty International, Workers’ Musical Association, Tom Paine Society (an exhibition at near-by Diss Museum is currently on show – see here), and the Humanists (no Christian Socialists this year). A group of Woodcraft Folk appeared, visiting from their Suffolk Hostel.  Of Left groups there were: the SWP, Socialist Party, CPB (M-L), a larger than usual YCL contingent, Socialist Appeal, and both wings of the SPGB (the  Socialist Party – not to be confused with the SP above, and the other lot).

     

    Ipswich had its famous jams and elderflower cordial on sale, and the comrade had even produced Medler conserve this year (which I was intrigued enough to fork out for). Plus there were  free golden plums from a well-known allotment holder.

    Few eco-warriors were present: they have a fête timed normally  on the same day as Burston. It’s held on some Lordship’s land in Norfolk.

    With such a good turn-out one could see that a hefty chunk of the East Anglian active labour movement were there. This went from the left to many leading Labour councillors from Ipswich. Former Norwich MP, Ian Gibson, however was not spotted. The age-range went from the very young to veterans. Wilf Page’s biographer, Mike Pentelow,  was there to sign copies of his biography (Norfolk Red) of one of our region’s most important activists.

    Our coach, jointly organised between Ipswich and Colchester, was about two-thirds full. On returning to Ipswich  we headed for the Dove. It was generally agreed that the day had been a great success and yet another step on the inevitable road to victory of the East Anglian Proletariat (and small peasants).

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    Parti Socialiste: Hold-Ups, Cheating and Treason…

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Left, Parti Socialiste by Andrew Coates on September 9, 2009

    Not Friends at the Best of Time.

    Are these the worst allegations of fraudulent internal elections in European Socialist History? Anyone listening to France-Inter this morning would have been surprised by the  allegations made about rigging in the vote that saw Martine Aubry win the post of Parti Socialiste. Antonin André et Karim Rissouli’s  ”Hold-uPS, arnaques et trahisons” alleges this and much more. Literally piles of pro-Aubry ballots are said to have been added to the total.  The Nouvel Observateur gives a full report: here.

    “On savait que ça avait triché, mais pas avec cette ampleur ni avec ce système d’organisation”, commente Ségolène Royal après la parution du livre “Hold-uPS, arnaques et trahisons”, qui lève le voile sur les tricheries lors de l’élection de Martine Aubry. Laurent Fabius, lui, estime que ce livre ne contient “pas d’éléments probants”.

    We knew there had been cheating, but not on this scale, and not so systematically organised, declared Ségolène Royal after the publication of the book, Hold-ups, arnaques et trahisons (Hold-ups, Cheating and Treason), which lifts the veil on the tricks used during the election of Martine Aubry. Laurent Fabius* , for his part, that the book is not thoroughly convincing.

    Reading extracts from the book in le Point I can only agree with Royal. It begins by reporting a message from an Aubry bureaucrat, “We’re not wearing kid-gloves, Stuff the Ballot Boxes!” – here.

     

    I cannot overemphasise how damaging these claims are. The PS has just emerged with a  fragile truce about its future direction (acceptance of Primary selections, and at least entertaining the idea of alliances with the Greens and the Centre MoDems).

    Now all hell look set to break out.

     

    * PS ‘elephant’ (elder statesman) and former PM.

      

    The Bells of Saint Lawrence and the Silence of the Film Theatre.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Culture, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on September 11, 2009

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    Tolling for the Death of Film.

    For those who watched the National News, Ipswich (again!) is the Navel of the World.

    Apparently we have the oldest bells in Christendom. At Saint Lawrence Church (here).

    For those who so wish one can hear them here.

    Meanwhile the Liberal-Tory Junta is facing the fact that its private cinema replacement for the Ipswich Film Theatre is going to close.

    A letter has been sent about the latter to the local paper,

    “Hollywood Cinema to close. A Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The Usual Suspects, led by Councillor Judy Terry, got rid of the Film Theatre. The Tory-Liberal adminstration assured us that with Hollywood  La Vie was en Rose. That the venue would be part of the Things to Come.  Others regretted the loss of a specialist outlet, highly regarded across the whole of East Anglia, not just East of Ipswich. Under the Rules of the GameHollywood could not compete. Commercial movies and some art cinema could be seen at CineWorld. Few went to the unpredictable showings at the Corn Exchange. Which only played a Handful of Dust apart from – often late – blockbusters.

    After the Broken Embraces with private operators will the Council learn that commercial companies cannot be relied on the provide public culture?

    I have a Shadow of a Doubt.”

    The Tories and Liberals love ancient Bells, they hate modern uncommercial film.

    It’s noteworthy that Saint Lawrence hosts a Drop-In Centre for the well-off (lunches start at well over a fiver). Or as Councillor Judy Terry calls them, the “nice people.”

    Goodbye un-nice cinéphiles, and un-nice Caribbeans and their centre (the next on the Lib-Tory  hit-list).

    Bob Crow: Election Challenge to Labour.

    Posted in British Govern, European Left, Labour Government, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left, Unions by Andrew Coates on September 12, 2009

    The Times reports (here)  that Bob Crow, the RMT and a variety of groups are seriously discussing standing left candidates in the next General Election.

     

    Mr Crow is planning a new challenge to the political elite. The unions, he says, are planning to set up an alliance to stand candidates at the next general election. The RMT has already had six meetings in the past three months with representatives from other unions, pensioners groups, student bodies and green campaigners. “If we don’t believe that any of the candidates are good, there may be an alliance that comes together. We would be putting up policies that we believe people want. What our members vote for is their democratic right, but certainly we can’t just sit back and say vote Labour.”

    He cannot lead the alliance himself — “my rules restrict me from standing at a general election,” he says — but he can help with the manifesto and fundraising, while his preferred policies are clear. “I would like to see taxes go up massively for the rich, I’d abolish all private education and all private medical care. I would do away with the Royal Family — that’s not to say they’d be executed but why should those people have a privileged place in society?”

    This is worth deep consideration. I will begin with the best Spartist reasons why.

    • Gordon Brown, who is likely still  to lead Labour in these elections, is nothing but a centre-right politician. His support for free-market globalisation (with a dose of Christian humbug) is far from even moderate social democracy. There has been no back-tracking on this, except a public safety-net for the banking system.
    • The ‘market state’  Blair and Brown have inherited from the Conservatives, has been developed. On the one hand a variety of private contractors are now delivering public services. A large parasitical ‘para-state’ has grown up, taking in profit for themselves and offering disorganised and incompetent services in return. On the other hand the low-paid in the public sector have seen their real wages decline, and their working conditions worsened by outsourcing. Many manual and precarious workers in private companies have not seen their rights, conditions and pay significantly improve. Only a few groups with industrial muscle have made advances. The Cabinet has not introduced significant measures that would enable trade unions tip the balance the other way.
    • The unemployed (a growing number of people, to say the least)  and all those who rely on state benefits have been targeted for a compulsory moral reform campaign. Their incomes have been  reduced, their eligibility for money constantly challenged, they have been harassed, and their lives made a misery by the market state. 
    • The Labour government has failed to combat racism and xenophobia. Its multiculturalist state strategy is unable to fight rising extreme-right support. Instead of uniting people around common interests it divides them,  separating people by ethnicity and religion, and giving power and money to unelected ‘community leaders’. Secular anti-racism, the real alternative,  has been vigorously opposed.
    • The UK Government has engaged in murderous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq  without a genuine democratic mandate. Or a clear exit strategy.

    I could go on. A  constituency inherently opposed to the politics of Brown’s Labour Party can be seen emerging here. Attempts by the wordy John Cruddas (who backed the very welfare reform that is causing so much pain for the poor) to offer a Social Democratic  Alternative are not worth much. he ahs no worked-out programme that differs from Brown in the five bullet points listed, except vague principles, such as ‘regulation’ ‘social justice’ or more equality’ (while working for a few quid an hour to get the dole…).

     

    We shall see what Bob Crow’s initiative has to offer. Its policies and its support. And how far it will be able to present candidates. There is an advertisment in the Morning Star (Saturday) about a Conference, open to all, which will discuss this.

    In any case I am resolved not to vote for my local Labour candidate (Ipswich), Chris Mole. He has publicly backed Workfare. On these grounds alone Mole cannot be supported by any left-winger, or progressive.

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    Norway: Still the Red-Green Coalition? Update, Tuesday.

    Posted in European Left, Greens, Left by Andrew Coates on September 14, 2009

    To Continue Green, and Red?

    Many reports indicate that the Norwegian Red-Green Coalition is set to continue (here). Other reports say not. That the results will be close (here). More info here.  In any case it is interesting to note that the Reds in some part of Europe (not a member of the EU)  are still a substantial force.

    The Picquet Tendency, now The Gauche Unitaire, argues that most European Social Democracy is becoming ‘Democrats’ on the US Model. But this is not a universal trend. Certainly Norway’s Labour Party (Det norske Arbeiderparti)  is not as bad as say, the abysmal Italian Democrats. Who have followed this route to nowhere.  Letting rule a Berlusconi who’s the laughing-stock of Europe. That’s when he’s not a less amusing tyrant. Out to shut the oppossition press up.

    To become like the US Demcoratic Party – that merits a digression and a half. A sad fate: parties dominated by  interest groups, chief amongst them big business, and the wealthy, with other parts of the ‘coalition’ behind. Apart from a few brave souls they seem liberals with guilt, with ‘progressive’ ideas even woollier than Cruddas’s.

    Not that Obama is anything but a great deal better than the previous US crew. With a  dash of social democracy.

    What we need is an improvement on social democracy, not a  step back towards it. Does the existence of the Norwegian Socialist Left Party (Sosialistisk Venstreparti) help in that country?  Most, on the left, could say so. Though some criticise the Coalition lack of deep redness. The far-left (much of it Marxist-Leninist in origin) Røte alliance may get a couple of seats this time as well. Who knows what the feeble centrist Green Party will do, or think.

     

    Update: Red-Green narrow win here. More here.

    The xenophonic Progress Party made headway - here.

    I have not found anything about the result on the Guardian site.  Or the Independent. Which shows something about their interest in European politics. By contrast a serious European centre-left paper gives a proper report – here. And here. Even the Spanish media think it’s important – here.

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    Ignorance of the Learned. John Keane.

    Posted in European Left, India, Marxism by Andrew Coates on September 16, 2009

    John Keane and Tendance Coatesy’s Bed-Time Reading.

    John Keane’s The Life and Death of Democracy (2009) is a thick tome. I did not expect the theorist (here) of ‘civil society’ as the site of social progress to be sympathetic reading. But, in contrast to many of the books I’ve been looking at when writing recently I thought it would be stimulating, interesting, and well-argued (add usual adjectives for someone you don’t really agree with). Besides I’ve a soft spot for anyone who annoys the Iranian theocrats.

    I have not finished it yet.

    But so far I have been throughly annoyed. A good thing one might think. But in this instance I think not.

    To begin with Keane spends a good deal of his time sharing his knowledge of philology with us. This runs through  many pages. That is, for example, he has discovered that Democracy in ancient Greek is a feminine noun. That we should try to imagine a world in which this word is surrounded bya  cluster of other substantives which are also feminine. How hard! That it implies a female personification for a form of government. Er, like la République, and la Démocratie, not to mention Marianne. And (hey) la Recrue (Recruit – a word in French which is feminine regardless of the sexual gender of the person).

    Not content with this erudition Keane explores the origins of the element, demos. Apparently it goes back to  Minoean Greek, and the famous Linear B. It meant something slightly different to do with people’s relation to the land. Strike me pink! English ‘Folk’ no doubt goes back some time too. Perhaps he could help us out here (he probably does, I have already got to the point where he labours over the origin of the word Thing in Old English and Common Germanic). Anyway, amongst other gems Keane notes that the Greek Hubris is (he claims) an import from Hittite, huwap (Page 63). I wonder really if this is true – Hittite, dead without any descendants.  Pretty hard stuff. Keane also opines that there was an ancient Sumerian word which is “semantically” related to demos. ‘Semantically‘ mother is related to all the languages of the world, but one suspects he implies rather more than this kind of relation.  

    Tendance Coatesy has a strong bond, (stronger than semantics) with Sumerian culture. We consider that the Fall of Ur was a great disaster (Lament here). Things have gone down-hill ever since. Sumerian civilisation had the great advantage of being: 1) The  founding one for writing. 2) Its speech was neither Indo-European, Semitic, African, Turkic, Asiatic or indeed with any known cognate language. 3) No-one can therefore claim it as ‘theirs’ .

    Apparently Keane differs. He uses 20th Century discoveries about Sumer (written up in any text on the subject – believe me I have read plenty of them), that they ruled with some kind of City assembly. Uses? Yes, to wage war against Marx. Citing Marx’s famous article, British Rule in India (June 10th 1853 – New York Daily Tribune), he says the following, “Had Marx the opportunity to learn Sumerian..”

    Thus Marxy got the whole notion of Oriental Despotism wrong. That government in hydraulic societies (as Wittfogel called them), were based on three departments: Finance, War and Public Works. That – going back to what Marx wrote – village life, was isolated in these societies, that custom ruled them while the government ruled above. Marx did not mention if such states had, or had not, assemblies, though he said they dominated said settlements despotically,  warred, and taxed without their consent. Now the newspaper article uses pretty sweeping generalisations, cites Mesopotamia (where Sumer civilisation flourished) in passing, and is concentrated in India. Where he criticises British rule (main target) and criticises (in a patronising way) Indian traditional life. No references to Sumer as such in fact.

    But then, unlike Keane and Tendance Coatesy Marx could not and had not read Sumerian. That is, before cuneiform was deciphered.

    I suspect the theory of Oriental Despotism and the concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production have greater weaknesses than that, but no doubt Keane has struck a blow. Like his claim that Marx disliked Democracy because (sic) George Grote (a banker) wrote a paean of praise to Athenian Democracy this makes one wonder about slipping academic standards and ego inflation in the faculties.

    Protests in Iran Erupt Again.

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance, Islamism by Andrew Coates on September 19, 2009

    More protests in Iran, (see also: BBC)

    Our hearts and minds should be with all those fighting for democratic freedom and against the Iranian Theocracy.

    It is particularly important that the left and the labour movement should be backing those who are standing  against Ahmadinejad. Many of us have (here), and a wide swathe of left activists are behind the protestors’ demands.

    There are still some British groups like Respect who have a different view of this issue. As they are  “on course to win up to three seats in General Election” (here) this is maybe time for them to think seriously about their position. Respect MP George Galloway has his own show on the tyrants’ telly (the Real Deal), Iranian state funded Press TV. Should George change his mind he could have a little word in the ear of his bosses in favour of those languishing in the regime’s gaols.

    Update: Renewed Holocaust denial yesterday  by Ahmadinejad – here (English) and here (in French). Stroppy Blog has published a report on the Iranian leader’s  speech (here ) – which has inspired the first showing of  an apologist for his claim that the Shoah was a”myth”.

    Background: Shiraz Socialist on what it’s like to work for the propagandist channel, Press TV, here. Stroppy Blog publishes (here) a further report. The latter has inspired – Comments Box -  the first apologist for Holcaust denial seen today.

    Slide-Show Socialist in Shropshire Hills.

    Posted in Britain, Culture by Andrew Coates on September 20, 2009

    Coatesy Standing Firm.

    Coatesy Standing Firm.

    My photos.

    Well everyone else does it on their Blogs, Facebook and Mobiles. So here’s my very own slide-show. Settle down with the cocktail sausages, pineapple-chunks, silver onions, and cheese flavoured crisps.  Don’t stint on the Dandelion and Burdock pop.

    Enjoy!

    Visit to Carding Mill Valley, Shropshire Hills. Sunday.

    Road to Helm's Deep

    Road to Helm's Deep

    Snowdon in the (far far) distance.

    Snowdon in the (far far) distance.

    Feeling East-Anglian Culture Shock at Sight of Hights.

    Feeling East-Anglian Culture Shock at Sight of Hights.

    The Workers' Paradise is Just Over the Horizon.

    The Workers' Paradise is Just Over the Horizon.

    Maybe Paradise is Just a Little Bit Further Away than Predicted.

    Maybe Paradise is Just a Little Bit Further Away than Predicted.

    These are photos of an historic area hitherto unknown to the workers’ and progressive movement.

    Note the strange contours of the landscape.

    Hardly a flat surface to be seen.

    Apparently these things are called ‘hills’. To veteran climbers of the Suffolk Alps they look like the colossal remains of a cyclopean age.

    I mean look at them!

    Pressing on, without regard for personal safety, we came to this.

    Alas.

    It led to another impasse.

    Morning Star’s Hall of Leftist Fame.

    Posted in Human Rights, Labour Movement, Stalinism by Andrew Coates on September 22, 2009

     

    The Morning Star has had quite a face-lift in recent months. Lots more news, features, investigative journalism (Simon’s stuff on homelessness), a widening of the political spectrum included and much better arts coverage. Plus the usual stuff by figures deemed worthy of space (Galloway, dull Greens, Union bureaucrats). Though it’s not yet a full daily paper with even more padding columnists.

    I recommend reading it. If you’re used to putting up with things you disagree with  that is. Which is not a universally shared trait on the left.

    Despite change, it’s encouraging to see that some old traditions are being kept up.  

    Neil Clarke’s Monday piece, The Leftists who Didn’t Sell Out (here) might raise a few hackles. And thoughts of the Star’s enthusiasms in the past.

    He lists ten figures.

    • Clement Attlee
    • Bruno Kreisky
    • Salvador Allende.
    • Olaf Palme.
    • Julius Nyere.
    • Janos Kador.
    • Pierre Trudeau
    • Daniel Ortega.
    • Slobodan Milošević
    • Hugo Chávez

    It’s no secret, as they used to say in the Morning Star, that some of these figures are controversial.

    Some here, naturally, would in any Socialist Pantheon (Allende). Others…? Something really rankles. Words like, authoritarian, brutal, misogynist  free-market shell (guess which ones), come to mind in a few cases.  Are they all part of the same Left? One wonders if Olaf Palme would sit comfortably with Milošević. Or if Attlee would get as cosy with Iran’s tyrants as Chávez so frequently does?

    Opps.

    Just failed Clarke’s ‘litmus test’ for sorting out the left from the rest.

    Unconditional support of Hugo Chávez is the duty of every revolutionary Morning Star reader!

    But there you go.

    As another nostalgic reminder the  Star’s ever entertaining, Monday Column, advertises a must-see meeting “Celebrate China’s National Day”. A plus is that it’s organised by the CPGB (M-L) – still in existence apparently (not to be confused with the CPB, M-L). Speakers include George Galloway and Harpal Brar of the Stalin Society(here).

    Hands off China!

    Quite.

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    Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste: Opinion Poll on Unity.

    Going it Alone Didn’t Pay Last Time.

    French Regional Elections are next year. They’ll be a further test of the new anti-capitalist party, the NPA (which failed to get any Euro MEPs). Many people (in France that is, not British fans of the NPA)  think that a  drop from over 10% in opinion polls to below 5% was due to the party’s resolute refusal to align with the rest of the radical left. Will there be a recognition of this error? A call for unity with the Front de Gauche(Parti de Gauche and Parti Communiste Français)? With an entire tendency of the old-LCR (the Picquet group) now a separate body, the Gauche Unitaire, and working with the PCF-PG, one would have thought this is worth considering.

    Le Monde yesterday (here) published an article saying, predictably, that the leaders of the NPA, are posing hard demands for other left groups. That any alliance with the parties of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marie-George Buffet, rested on their refusal to join (post-election) regional council executives led by the Parti Socialiste. Which is a way of “closing the door” on the PCF – to state the obvious. That is, the Communists will generally accept such governing posts – in return for PS backing where they are in the lead.

    An opinion poll suggest that these NPA tactics are not going down well. 59% of the sympathisers of the left want a PCF-PG-NPA alliance. 61 % of NPA sympathisers think the same!

    You heard it here first – it is very doubtful if any of the British left groups, admirers of the go-it-alone NPA, will talk about such inconvenient facts.

    Portuguese Elections: Left Bloc Breakthrough?

    Posted in European Left, Left by Andrew Coates on September 25, 2009

    Serious Presence in Portuguese elections.

    This Sunday Portugal goes to the Polls.  José Sócrates, Socialist Party PM, may keep his grip on power. This is despite his government’s ferocious modernising policies, which have alienated public sector workers (aiming to recruit only one for every two leaving), and his efforts to ‘reform’ education. Not to mention a raft of scandals surrounding his Party and the State, including wire-tapping.

    These are the latest opinion poll figures summarised (here).

    Socialist Party (Centre-Left ?) : between 32 and 35%.

    Social Democratic Party (Right) of Manuela Ferreira Leite: between 29 to 32%.

    Left Bloc, led by Francisco Louça: between 9 à 12%

    CDS-PP (Traditional Right): between 8 to 9%.

    Communist Party (in alliance with the tiny Green Party): 8 à 9%

    The Left Bloc looks as if it may get more votes, then, than the well-established Portuguese Communist Party. This party, the Bloco de Esquerda (here)  is sometimes compared to Germany’s Die Linke. However its main organised groups are rather different: the (Fourth International), Partido Socialista Revolucionário and the (originally Marxist-Leninist) União Democrática Popular. Independent leftists and other currents exist.

    Portugal appears one country where the left is on the rise.

     

    Background on CWI site here.

    Coatesy’s Hall of Leftist Fame (and Honour).

    Posted in European Left, Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on September 27, 2009

    Within its Shade We’ll Live…..

    The Morning Star (see below) has published a list of 10 Leftists who never sold out.

    There are surely better candidates than many of theirs.

    We accept that they should be twentieth and twenty-first century figures (otherwise we could go back to Ur).

     However, the rules should be a bit laxer than the Star’s. They  concentrate exclusively on Office Holders. Having a degree of political or social power and influence should be the major criterion. In any kind of politics (from Cabinets to movements). This would mean no pure academics or theorists. But would embrace a wide swathe of those who’ve helped shaped the world for the better. Without them necessarily having been in charge of government.

    Here are some suggestions.

    • Rosa Luxemberg. Three things stand out. Her utterly uncompromising defence of democratic freedom – against all comers. Her activism on behalf of  the power and ability of ordinary people to organise and decide for themselves.  And Rosa’s brilliant contribution to Marxist theory. Murdered by Fascist Freikörps backed by German Social Democrats. Our greatest Martyr.
    • Jean Jaurès. A founding democratic socialist Jaurès combined ethical idealism, French republicanism, internationalism, and undogmatic Marxism. In 1914 shot by nationalist. Paid for his anti-war campaigning with his life.
    • Andrés Nin. Leading figure in the Spanish POUM. Independent  Marxist  and anti-Fascist fighter, defender of  the Republican cause.  Tortured to death under the supervision of Stalin’s NKVD.
    • Antonio Gramsci. Leader of young Italian Communist Party. Imprisoned by Mussolini until his death. Active supporter of workers’ councils, and theorist of hegemony.
    • Emma Goldman. For her love of life, her free spirit, and her contribution to the cause of liberation. Loathed by bullies:  from the USA’s plutocrats  to the bureaucrats of Soviet Russia.

    Now for some more recent people.

    • Michalis N. Raptis (‘Pablo’). Innovative Marxist who developed out of Trotskyism into a backer of self-management. participated actively in the Algerian Revolution, and backed Thrid World Causes before this became fashionable.
    • Alain Krivine. The living embodiment of the best in European Marxist activism.
    • Evo Morales. A real Latin American leftist leader. From his work in the Indian communities of Bolivia to the mines and urban centres, Morales is a democrat and a socialist who’s got his feet on the ground. Not his head wrapped  in self-promotion and glorious deeds.
    • Aimé Césaire. Poets are the ‘unacknowledged legislatures of the world’. One of the greatest, he helped bring ”Third-world’ culture to the World at large.

    Any ideas for a tenth?

    Portuguese Elections Results: Good Score for the Left Bloc.

    Posted in European Elections, European Left, Left by Andrew Coates on September 28, 2009

    Good Result.

    The Socialist Party has won the Portuguese elections with 36.6% of the vote (down from 45.03% at the last elections in 2005). Prime Minister José Sócrates, a moderniser in the mould of Blair and Brown, will hang on. No doubt the scandals surrounding him (such as allegations about wire-tapping) will as well. He now has to negotiate agreements with other parties (which?). They will have 96 MPs in the new parliament, not a majority outright. (Adapted from Euro News Samantha David).

    Manuela Ferreira Leite,  leader of the centre-right Social Democratic Party got 29.1% (as opposed to 28.77% at the last polls). The party will have 78 MPs in the new parliament. In third place, the People’s Party (the Centro Democrático e Social – Partido Popular – CDS/PP) polled 10.5% (as opposed to 7.24% last time). The party will have 21 MPs in the new parliament. This is unpleasant news, since they looked like descending lower down the poll.

    In fourth place, the Left Bloc (Bloco de Esquerda or BE) polled 9.9% as opposed to 6.35% last time.This is highly significant, if slightly less than foreseen. It is one (?) the best result for a party for the hard-left (of Trotskyist and Marxist-Leninist origins)in any European coutnry for some years.  The party will increase their MPs, to 16 in the new parliament.

    In a speech, the Left Bloc leader Francisco Louca said

     ” the social security system has to be rebuilt, that unemployment payments has to be sorted out. He said that part-time employment should be converted into real full-time jobs by reforming the work code. The third objective for the Left would be to have a meaningful wealth tax and a minimum wage and lastly, a decent retirement pension. He also promised to dog the new government’s every step. He finished by saying that with the new mandate for the Left, things would never be the same again. After tonight, he said, he would have more power to argue against privatisation. He declared that the Left should be ready to fight for basic workers’ rights. He finished by thanking everyone.”

    The Green/Communist alliance the CDU – made up of the PCP (Portuguese Communist Party) and the small
    PEV (Portuguese Ecologist Party aka the Greens) – together polled 7.54% in the last polls. They have polled 7.9% giving them 15 MPs in the new parliament.

    Euro-News comments that, “More than half a million people (ie 9% of the working population) are currently unemployed in Portugal, which is one of the EU’s poorest countries, many people (around a third of the workforce) taking home less than 600 euros a month. This is the highest unemployment rate in 20 years but with turnout at a depressing 59.1% (the lowest turnout ever recorded in Portugal, down from 64.26% last time) it is clear that a sizeable proportion of the electorate have yet to be convinced that any of their politicians can get the country back to work, let alone solve the long-term economic problems.”

     

    This is only too true. As a conversation with Portuguese migrant workers in the UK will confirm, it plays a big part in their decision to leave the country. Perhaps we need to be equally thinking along the lines of the Left Bloc’s programme of measures to tackle the problem here.

    Where does the Bloc begin from? The policies of the modernising Socialist Party. Or as they put it (here):

    Durante quatro anos e meio, o Governo Sócrates dispôs de maioria absoluta: teve todo o poder e usou todo o poder. Os resultados foram mais privatizações, a degradação de serviços públicos, a acentuação das injustiças.

    During four and a half years the Sócrates government, which has an absolute majority, thus complete power,  and used it. The results were more privatisations, the worsening of public services, and a rise in injustice.

    Sounds familiar (though we’ve had even longer of that!).

    El País comments that,

    El veredicto de las urnas demostró que la bipolarización de la vida política portuguesa, a la que apelaron PS y PSD, no funcionó. El nuevo Parlamento estará más fragmentado

    The verdict from the ballot boxes shows that the bipolarisation of Portuguese political life, that’s between the PS and the PSD, doesn’t work any more. The new Parliament will be more fragmented.

    This decline in the two-party system appears to be a general European pattern (see German results). The attempt by Sócrates to swerve a little to the left, by backing a programme of public works, may have helped him avoid the disastrous fate of the SPD. However, a common pattern of a rising left force, protesting against the free-market turn of social democracy,  in evidence, does not look as if it can be avoided by such half-measures.

     

    If only we had a left pole like this here…

     

    Update Report from the NPA (French): here.

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    Beyond Brown and the Sun: A European Left.

    Posted in European Left, Gordon Brown, Labour Government, Labour Movement, Labour Party by Andrew Coates on September 30, 2009

    Labour’s Flagship.

    The Sun no longer behind him, Brown still has his flagship policies to save the Labour Party.

    Hah!

    Last week I was in the pub with the local Labour Party delegate to the Brighton Conference. His view was that the stage-front of the Conferences of today, with no votes on anything important, did not matter. The Government ignored them in the past, so why bother? Behind the scenes stuff, and the ‘policy-making’ forums, had at least some role. His goal, modest in the extreme, was to have a word in the ear of Ed Balls. About an alternative to a planned Academy take-over in Felixstowe. Which just about sums up life as a humble petitioner in the Court of Brown.

    Didn’t Mandy do well? No he didn’t. Anyone can make fun of their own faults. Particularly when you’ve got as many as he has.  Didn’t Brown rouse them? No he didn’t. He trolled through a boring list of boring lists. The thinning ranks of the faithful would swoon over the ten-times table to stop them contemplating the Government’s failures.

    What do we have? The Guardian cites three axes of Brown’s polices.

    • Appealing to Middle Britain’s angry and struggling families with various poll-driven policies aimed at swing voters, including greater powers to curb 24-hour drinking, reforms of tax relief to give the parents of 250,000 two-year-olds free childcare for the first time, and the creation of a network of “supervised homes” for all 16 and 17-year-old parents who receive benefits.

    Apart from the promise of free-child care (a promise unlikely ever to be  fulfiled) more ineffectual work for interfering busy-bodies.

    • Showing how the government will be prudent with the public finances by pledging to put the government’s deficit reduction plans on a statutory footing.

    See “unlikely to be fulfilled” above.

    • Reaching out to disillusioned Labour voters, who may have been tempted to defect to the Liberal Democrats or even the Tories, by pledging that ID cards would not be compulsory.

    This is so going to make me vote Labour….

    So it’s still full throttle on Welfare ‘Reform’ (now with young mums forced into ‘homes’), pumping loads of cash into para-state private companies, privatising parts of the NHS, PFI schemes, low pay for the public sector, and, well the rest. Including wars. Brown has left all the mechanisms in place for a Tory Cabinet to accelerate the transfer of public revenue into private hands. In short, the Market State.

    You can already see a gaggle of outsourcing companies queuing up next week  to get in Cameron’s good grace, the ‘voluntary sector’ gearing up to implement Workfare, and ..hop… here comes the Sun.

    Is there anything to say other than, yuck?

    A few. Electoral scores of the German Die Linke, and the Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal, are encouraging for the European Left. That is, the non Social Liberal, Market-State left. They indicate that a  strategey of radical reform programmes can have an appeal in the ballot box. That broad parties (or alliances), anchored in democratic socialism, pluralist internally and rooted in the labour movement, can be political players. And that less inclusive, narrower, initiatives (such as the NPA in France) have become a problem when they refuse to stand with others (as proposed in France by the Communist Party and Left Party). Finally, that the left does not need to hide its colours and attempt to cash in on the vogue for green politics (ultimately a road to the centre): it can stand on its own merits.

    Or would if we had anything resembling this here.

    Guinea: the Bloodbath that Should Shake the World.

    Posted in Human Rights by Andrew Coates on October 2, 2009

    Manifestation à Conakry 28 septembre 2009 (Photo: youtube.com)

    Guinée: “massacre” et actes de barbarie lundi à Conakry, au moins 157 morts

     

    See Video here.

    Details on the political background here,   here and here.

     

    NPA Communiqué here (Hat-Tip, Entdinglichung):

    L’armée s’est rendue coupable d’un véritable carnage, lundi 28 septembre, à l’encontre des manifestants qui exigeaient que le putschiste Dadis Camara, soutenu par P. Balkany grand ami de N. Sarkozy, tienne sa parole et s’abstienne de briguer un mandat présidentiel. Plus d’une centaine de morts et plus d’un millier de blessés : c’est le terrible bilan d’une répression impitoyable.

    On Monday the 28th of September the army was guilty of  real carnage against demonstrators who had been demanding that the putchist Dadis Camera, backed by the friend of Sarkozy, Mr P.Balkany, kept his word and did not attempt to become President. More than a hundred dead and a thousand wounded: the terrible result of ruthless repression.

    Tories to Make Life Worse (if that’s possible) for Unemployed.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, Unemployment, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on October 4, 2009

    House of Lords: One of this Lot Will Make the Unemployed Toil for their Gruel.

    The media today is full of David Cameron’s plans to Get Britain Working.

    He plans to abolish the New Deal (in its various forms) for the Unemployed.

    Good.

    But what will they put in its place? And who is behind the schemes?

    Details are sketchy (we will update them as they are revealed), but this (here) is worth noting. The policy is called,

    Get Britain Working” – which will see sweeping changes to policy across whole swathes of Whitehall in an attempt to “unleash investment and entrepreneurial activity that helps create more jobs”.

    That is, the usual guff.

    But wait..Who is the Shadow (unelected) Chap in Charge?

    Mr Cameron’s article puts wholesale reform of Britain’s welfare system at heart of his drive for jobs – masterminded by Lord (David) Freud, the welfare expert who “defected” from advising the government to become a Tory shadow minister earlier this year.

    David Baron Freud’s ‘expertise’ on welfare is nill. What has he done in his life? Well, he was a public schoolboy. He went to Oxford. Worked at the Financial Times. He then swanned around advising on financial deals, pilfering and making a mess of things.

    A general outline of his knowledge of welfare issues:  (here).

    “His involvement in raising £50bn ($72bn) during some of the biggest deals of the 1980s and 1990s made him a wealthy man – yet he continues to cycle to work, swim regularly in Hampstead Heath’s ponds and conduct his business in functional off-the-peg suits.”

    Mistakes he has made in his career include (here), 

    He moved into advising companies, and was involved in piecing together extremely complex deals such as the flotations of Eurotunnel and EuroDisney, which cost investors millions, and the financing of the Channel Tunnel rail link. Eurotunnel opened in May 1994 one year behind schedule and £2bn ($2.9bn) over budget. Sir David later admitted the deal was a “shambles” and that he had “successfully sold the market a pup”.But his chutzpah meant his career was not held back.Hauled before furious MPs to explain the mispricing of Railtrack, he was subsequently appointed an advisor to the government on its successor, Network Rail.

    As a an adviser to the Labour Government Freud was responsible for introducing the principle of Workfare and the Flexible New Deal. Now he has ratted and joined the Tories we can be sure he will have had an even freer hand. Expect loads of money for the usual suspects (A4E etc) to ’train’ the workless, and a programme of workfare. That will be as a futile, demeaning, pointless, costly, as anyone can imagine. And do absolutely nothing to deal with mass unemployment.

    Watching A4E gives some more information on this depressing, tyrannical, absurd, scheme (here).

    Welcome to the Baron in charge of Creating Social Exclusion.

     

    Cross-posted from Ipswich Unemployed Action.

     

    Update  (Monday).

    People on employment support allowance who are deemed fit to work would be put on the jobseeker’s allowance, reducing their benefits by £25 a week. Work ‘experience’  and ‘training’ to be compulsory after 6 months. The core elements of the Tory package involve putting everyone on a single out-of-work benefit, including the stock of 2.6m incapacity benefit claimants and lone parents. The back-to-work programme will largely be run by voluntary groups and private sector companies.

    I woke up – briefly – around five-thirty this morning. Put the radio on (Radio Five I think). Some woman from (guess it!)…A4e. Haven’t heard anyone so thick. And such a  goody-two-shoes. Unable to get simple questions. Interviewer asked if there was a subsidy to take on the unemployed employers might get rid of existing workers to have the extra money. She failed to understand this. Replied about what a  wonderful job her company was doing.

    These are the people who are going to Get Britain Working!

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    Tory Libertarianism: Work For 64 Quid a Week. Or Sleep Under Bridges.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, Unemployment, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on October 5, 2009

    Model Community Programme.

    It’s worse than you thought.

    People on employment support allowance who are deemed fit to work would be put on the jobseeker’s allowance, reducing their benefits by £25 a week. Work ‘experience’  and ‘training’ to be compulsory after 6 months. The core elements of the Tory package involve putting everyone on a single out-of-work benefit, including the stock of 2.6m incapacity benefit claimants and lone parents. The back-to-work programme will largely be run by voluntary groups and private sector companies.

    I woke up – briefly – around five-thirty this morning. Put the radio on (Radio Five I think). Some woman from (guess it!)…A4e. Haven’t heard anyone so thick. And such a  goody-two-shoes. Unable to get simple questions. Interviewer asked if there was a subsidy to take on the unemployed employers might get rid of existing workers to have the extra money. She failed to understand this. Replied about what a  wonderful job her company was doing.

    These are the people who are going to Get Britain Working!

     

    But, Lo there is more (from the Morning Star):

    The package of measures include scrapping the New Deal and replacing it with a one-stop shop for all claimants, including those on incapacity benefit.

    The proposals also build on the government’s “work for your benefit” scheme, forcing long-term unemployed to engage in community work programmes to “earn” benefits.

    Participation in community work will be for one year, at the end of which participants will start a fresh back-to-work cycle with a fresh assessment.

    The Conservatives admitted that they were basing their ideas for the unemployed on Australia’s “work for the dole” projects.

    Added Tuesday: Tories Putting Labour Plans into Place?

    This is an accelerated implementation of Labour plans, not a set of really new policies.

    Firstly, the underlying policy of replacing benefits which maintain people at a minimally decent level of existence has been eroded for a long while (beginning with said Tories). New Labour explicitly came up with the idea of actively encouraging those on benefit to seek work by a very simple measure: making their incomes so low they cannot possibly survive reasonably well (however meagre their income is) on them. Next they introduced a whole series of coercive rules to make life as unpleasant as possible for anyone signing-on – from constant checks, obligation to produce proof of job-seeking. To their final masterpiece, the New Deal. A central aim of this was to remove anyone working on the quiet, and to bore and cajole the rest into accepting any work going (thus making them an active drag on the conditions of those already in employment). A final part of this, the Flexible New Deal, will, under Labour, involve compulsory charitable and social labour – exactly the same as that carried out by those convicted but the Courts, Community service, for the long-term workless this will be a Community Programme.

    All of these are efforts to remove an ultimate safety net and replace it with a machine to force people onto the labour market under the worst possible conditions. It really has its roots in the ideas behind the Victorian Poor Laws: make life for the unemployed as harsh as possible to encourage them to accept anything going.

    Secondly, as part of this programme, those on Incapacity Benefit have already had to undergo a new series of checks on their status. the Tories will just bring this to bear more severely and more rapidly.

    Thirdly, apart from the effects this is having on the labour market (a general downward pressure on pay and conditions) it will i) fail to deal with the most elementary features fo said market, its segmented nature. This will means large numbers of people trapped, regardless of any wish to work, in unemployment. ii) massively corrupt charities and the ‘voluntary sector’ which will be engaged in workfare – there are very clear signs that this is already happening (I speak from direct knowledge). iii) Feed the already greedy companies providing ‘training’ (parking people in near-detention centres, and yelling at them) for these schemes, as well as those giving ‘placements’ (useless for all but a few).

    The Conservatives will move more quickly and create a greater mess than Labour – in terms of misery, failure, profiteering, fraud and broken lives.

     

    Mass unemployment is the problem neither the Tories nor Labour really address. Or how to provide a decent life for those unavoidably out-of-work.

    But, as is obvious with the advice of David Freud behind them, they are on the same track.

     

    Mind you that hasn’t stopped  James Purnell (former Minister for above Misery) from bleating (here):

    “So, the questions that should be asked:
    1. How many people do the Tories expect to get back to work support? (Question to Purnell: how does back to work support resolve above problems in the labour market?)
    2. How much would the service and success fees be? (Purnell, you set the gold standard of paying up front – would you pursue this wasteful idea?)
    3. How much would the providers be expecting to borrow? (How much have your lot already funded these companies – break-down in detail if you please).

     
    4. Do they have provider or banks prepared to commit to this policy?
    5. When would the programmes start?
    6. Are they abolishing the Future Jobs Fund?”

    To all three questions: provide us with an independent Commission’s report on the results of the existing schemes, including stats of those suspended from benefits, salaries of providers, consultants, and an assessment of their effects on the labour market. This Commission should hear evidence from participants in the New Deal, Trade Unionists, and others affected by Government welfare reform policies.

    JSA: £50.95     16 – 24  £64.30     25 or over

    Diversity Dilemma No 200,001: Can Religious Football Teams Play Gays?

    Posted in Gay Rights, Islam, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on October 7, 2009

     

    Is this Boot Gay?

    Who Can Believers Play Footie with?

    Libération: Here.

    Dimanche, les joueurs du Paris Foot Gay ont été contraints de laisser crampons et maillots dans le sac. L’équipe adverse, le Créteil Bébel, qu’ils devaient rencontrer pour un match de Coupe Foot Loisir a refusé la veille de disputer la partie pour une raison de «principes». Des «principes» exprimés via un simple mail.

    Sunday, the players for Paris Foot Gay, had to leave their boots and tops (whatever the football words are in English), in their bags. Their opposing team, Créteil Bébel, which they should have met for a Foot Loisir Cup match, had refused the evening before, to come to the game, because of their ‘principles’. Principles explained via a simple E-Mail.  

    «Désolé, mais par rapport au nom de votre équipe et conformément aux principes de notre équipe, qui est une équipe de musulmans pratiquants, nous ne pouvons jouer contre vous, nos convictions sont de loin plus importantes qu’un simple match de foot, encore une fois excusez-nous de vous avoir prévenus si tard».

    Sorry, but in view of the name of your team, in light of our principles  – we are practising Muslims – we cannot play against you. Our convictions are more important than a simple game of football. Again, please excuse us for having let you know so late.

    The Gay team are calling for action. What should it be?

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    Front de Gauche: A Reality.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on October 8, 2009

    There’s a Place for You in the Front de Gauche!

    Christian Picquet  is a former Ligue Communist Révolutionnaire leading figure. He fought for a distinct set  of politics in the Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste, before, with his tendency, resigning just before this year’s Euro-Elections. He is now of the independent Gauche Unitaire (GU). The GU, with the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Parti de Gauche (PG), have this month established a long-term co-ordinating committee. They urge the left of the French Parti Socialiste to combine, not just for next year’s municipal elections, but for mass action, to defend social rights and workers’ interests, against President Sarkozy.

    In the PCF’s  L’Humanité this week here Picquet comments of his former organisation,

    “Le NPA doit prendre acte de l’échec de son projet initial d’être la force hégémonique à la gauche du PS. Quand Olivier Besancenot déclare que la gauche est menacée d’un désastre à l’italienne, cela devrait le conduire à renoncer aux replis boutiquiers pour s’insérer dans la coalition la plus large possible, respectueuse de l’apport de chacun.”

    The NPA should take stock of the failure of its initial project – to be the hegemonic force on the left of the Parti Socialiste. Olivier Besnancenot has announced that the left is threatened with an Italian-style disaster. This should mean that instead of shoring up his own group’s interests, he should get involved with the broadest possible alliance, one that respects everybody’s contribution.

    The background is clear. On the one hand the Socialist Party has been sucked into a vortex of its own making. Unable to decide whether it will be an openly pro-market liberal party or a reformist one, its life is overshadowed by personality clashes. Rather than end this in-fighting itself,  it has found a novel way out. It has decided (by direct membership vote) to select its future Presidential candidate by ‘open primaries’. Instead of an internal duel, between Aubry and Royal, there’ll be a public battle – open to all-comers. But this means that instead of the membership of the PS, its activist core, the self-declared public sympathisers will decide a crucial aspect of its political strategy. This means even more of rule of the media-telegenic, and financially well-supported. In short, the reign of opinion-poll politics over democratic deliberation over programmes and strategies.

    On the other hand, the feeble mobilisations of public opinion – on the streets and the enterprises – against Sarkozy, accelerate this process. Who has even heard of the latest wave of Union (token) protests? The result is that there are indeed pressures in French politics for the official left to concentrate ont he centre-ground. And to go the way of the pathetically impotent Italian Democratic Party, unable to challenge the brutal domination of the Right.

    The Front de Gauche is a deep alliance of three principal forces - left Socialist, Communist, and Far-left . They offer a challenge to this process. It corresponds to the politics of Die Linke and the Bloco de Esquerda.  Whose rise has been widely noted on the French left. It remains to be seen if the NPA will listen (more details of how the NPA is reacting, with great difficulty,  to unitary pressure here).

    Socialist Unity: From Soviet Union to the GDR, and the People’s Republic of China.

    Posted in European Left, Labour Movement, Left, Marxism, Stalinism by Andrew Coates on October 10, 2009

    The Duty of Every Revolutionary is to Defend the Soviet Union.

    The Workers’ World Party, the Morning Star, the Party of Socialism and Liberation, George Galloway’s Green Shorts, and Socialist Unity, have been discussing joint-action. Internationally. That at least is the message we hear. As part of this on-going merger initiative study-groups have been organised.

    The below is an extract from a verbatim account (leaked to TC)  of one such meeting. On The Socialist Sixth of the World. Hewlett Johnson (Fred Kite collection).

    Introduction (Ydna Wennam).

    Today is the anniversary of the publication of The Socialist Sixth of World (Second Edition, 1939). For generations this book has inspired socialists. For all its faults, and Hewett’s  account here is a little too over-optimistic; but is a useful reminder that for the majority of its citizens the Soviet Union was a society that basically worked. There mass popular participation in the organisations helped in sustaining the society. To those who talk of labour camps and GPU, NKVD, or GUGB, these bodies and their operations were actually quite popular,  at   least as far as one can tell from their  enthusiastic  endorsements at Party conferences and public rallies. There was political repression, but you need to look at what actually happened, rather than assuming some Orwellian template. The groups who were liable to be persecuted were anti-social semi-criminal people; and those who courted political (and sadly sometime just social) links with the West. Let us not forget that the Soviets were encircled by hostile powers. Or that some groups openly encouraged the ‘overthrow’ of socialist power. There were widespread reports of wrecking and illegal factional activity. We can all accept constructive reservations.  But the opposition to the Soviets seems to be towards any attempt to even understand the USSR, or to acknowledge the degree to which it deviated from the Western propaganda stereotype.

    Johnson came from a religious background – like many comrades in the fast-growing Respect Party. Yet he recognised that  the Soviet Union’s official atheism allowed full scope for private belief – if kept well  and truly to oneself. In fact the regime was “Christian in spirit”. A society in which “Love is the fulfilling of the Law” (page 368) Nor was he uncritical. “The order of Soviet Union is far from perfect” he noted, “Naturally the new order lies open to criticism in a hundred minor points.”(Page 87)

    The material achievements of the Soviet Union were already apparent in the 1930s when Johnson wrote. He cites the growth in the agricultural production: the sugar-beet harvest alone is to show a further increase of 37.2% - as the five year plan products. “The sale of soap in the Soviet Union has increased many dozenfold since 1913.” (Page 212). Tea-leaf output is to be increased by 1939 to 3 million!  In an amazing anticipation of modern green thinking the author states that “Home grown food saves transport” (page 159) Rippling corn fields, and ballet in the evening!

    We cannot recommend this book too highly – for all the comments one may one have about its details. Its message is clear. Who could not inspired by these lines? “Dawn breaks over the east. And in that fresh dawn men see the promise of a new world, nor a perfect world, and not a Utopian world, but at least a  world freed from poverty and explotiation…a world where mankind, realised at last from much that binds it to the earth, may find within itself a nobler and more enduring goodness and beauty.”(Page 384)

    I pause for a moment to let this sink in.

    Nor did this progress leave everyday life unaffected. The USSR , regarding personal sexual relationships, and respect for women as being the equals of men, then the Soviet Union was a surprisingly innovative and successful society. Stalin’s closest comrades, such as Beria, gave women many opportunities. And can I say that the Party General Secretary was a good dancer, a superb one, unlike Churchill…

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    German Greens Align with Right in Saarland.

    Posted in European Left, German Left by Andrew Coates on October 12, 2009

    Socialists? Nein Danke!

    The German media are full of this today. In Saarland the Greens are forming a ‘Jamaican coalition’ (Green, Black, Yellow) with the right-wing CDU and the free-market FDP. Die Tageszeitung reports that a cause is the claims of Die Linke leader, Oskar Lafontaine, to the fruits of Victory (here). The Greens defend their decision, arguing that they never promised to co-operate with the left (who are the largest bloc). From the SPD’s National leadership Andrea Nahles the fault lies with Die Linke,

     ”Absicht oder nicht: Lafontaine agiert als Steigbügelhalter für einen abgehalfterten Ministerpräsidenten”, sagte Nahles der Berliner Zeitung.

    Intentionally or not Lafontaine acts as if he is the given victor of the election, and due the Presidency (of the region).

    By contrast, from Saarland itself,   SPDer Heiko Maas has thrown the blame on the Greens, 

     ”Wendehälsen der CDU  CDU  und der FDP einen Pakt gegen die strukturelle Mehrheit der Wähler geschmiedet” zu haben.

    The Green’s turnaround with the CDU and the FDP goes against the structural majority that was forged by the elections. 

    Die Linke received 21,3% of the vote in the region during the recent German General Election. Lafontaine is Fraktionsvorsitzenden (Chair) of the Linke’s group in the  SaarlandLandtag.

     

    2009 Results:

    34,5 %  CDU 24,5 % SDP 9,2 % FDP 5,9 % Greens 21,3 % Die Linke
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    Autonomists Run Rampage in Poitiers.

    Posted in Anarchism, European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on October 13, 2009

     

    Poitiers. Saturday afternoon, around  250  people, according to the police, took over the centre of the town. Declaring they were a ”collectif anticarcéral” (collective anti-Prisons), masked and hooded, they broke about a dozen shop windows, bus shelters and telephone boxes. There were 18 arrests of which 8 were  immediately judged (by special sped-up procedures). They received two months (suspended)  to four months prison. Weapons and explosive caches have been found (Report - in English here).  

    The action was in protest at the opening of a new Prison.

    The police have announced that they have been following the organisation of this protest – through Web networking sites (and no doubt infiltration). The Mayor of Poiters has protested at not been informed of their prior knowledge.

    The Minsiter of Interior, Brice Hortefeux, has declared war on the ‘ultra-left’. French security agencies have, for some time,  predicted that this kind of event would take place. There are demands for the autonomist left to be banned. (more here)

     

    Note: The French prison system is one of the worst, and harshest, in Europe.  
     

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    Terry Eagleton: Reason, Faith and Revolution.

    Posted in Culture, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on October 15, 2009

    http://yaholo.net/images/reasonfaithandrevolution.jpg

    Will God Save the Left?

    REVIEW: REASON, FAITH AND REVOLUTION. REFLECTIONS ON THE GOD DEBATE. TERRY EAGLETON. Yale University Press. 2009.

    Why should we take it for granted that the Church is the Pillar of the Establishment? Is religion, potentially, a source for radical protest against injustice? This idea has a long history, and can be found in numerous socialist writings. Karl Kautsky in The Foundations of Christianity (1908) claimed the early Christians preached a form of communism. With atheism and secularism live issues the time has come (for those who back it)  to resurrect the view. Taking umbrage at the new wave of anti-religious writers, Terry Eagleton has vigorously pleaded the case. Christ was a revolutionary. The “Roman state and its assorted local lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of love, mercy and justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile political situation. Several of Jesus’ close comrades were probably Zealots, members of an anti-imperialist underground movement” (London Review of Books. 19.10.06). The flame is not extinct. The message of the Gospel of the poor lives on. In The Trouble with Strangers (2008) Terry Eagleton asserted, “It may well be a dismal sign of the times that it is to the science of God, of all things, that we must look for such subversive insights.” Kautsky’s observed elsewhere – against his contemporary anti-clericals – that Socialism “preaches the energetic conquest of this earth and not the patient waiting for a future life” and in this can draw on believers, though not the Official Church hierarchy. This, to Eagleton, needs expanding. To him we can turn away from the bad side of religion, the heresy hunts, authoritarianism, complicity with exploitation and oppression, the moral prudery, and embrace the true “radical impulses” of the faithful.

    Reason, Faith and Revolution is the published form of lectures in defence of the transcendental drive – in theological, philosophical, and political forms. It charges that many modern critics of religion rely on feeble arguments, and that some its champions veer to an apology for the West in the guise of a campaign for Secularism. Read out from the lectern it must have produced some wry agreement from the – no doubt – high percentage of believers amongst its American audience. Though not, one suspects, amongst any left-wing atheists (a group, of which I am one,  he has difficulty taking at its word) who happened to be present. The principal target of his venom is Ditchkins, a laboured amalgam of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens’s names. These chief (English speaking) proponents of the New Atheism are wrapped in mechanical ideas about “untrammelled human progress”, and that the “trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin..”(P 89). But there is more. Religion, of an oppositional, anti-Establishment (yet still ‘Orthodox’ – theologically) kind is one way, a way of unconditional Love, to socialism. Through that is, “political love” as its ethical basis. In “tragic humanism” there is something shared “in socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, (which) holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own..”(P 169) One opposed to both the inherent ‘atheism’ (Page 39) and ‘agnosticism’ (Page 149) of modern capitalism. We are left in no doubt as to whom the committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie has delegated the task of spreading this message.

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    Ipswich “Arrest Machine” Nabs 2.2 A Day

    Posted in Human Rights, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on October 17, 2009

    State Repressive Apparatus.

    Ipswich’s Ali Livingstone, the Coppers’ Cop, is in the national news (here). He has Britain’s highest recorded arrest rate with 524 people held in 12 months.

    Now I don’t want to have a go at Ali. Why? As the Evening Star says, “Earlier this year, Sgt Livingstone was honoured by the Royal Humane Society after he risked his life saving a suicidal who tried to jump from the Willis car park.”

    Or the Ipswich rozzers in general. Not that long ago they set up a fake Pawn shop in the Norwich Road and nabbed a load of artful dodgers with the sting. This was: a) well targeted and b) highly amusing.

    But there is a growing problem in Ipswich. It can be called, for that is its name, the Central Safer Neighbourhood Team. They have encouraged a greater and greater police presence in Town. To the point where it can feel downright suffocating.

    The background? The centre of the town has seen, as with many other working class places, an increase in ‘incivility’. That is public drinking, and rowdy behaviour. Plus  drug dealing, and attendant thieving. Plus, specific to Ipswich, the aftermath of the Steve Wright murders.

    Strategy to deal with this? The State has encouraged a two-pronged approach: schemes to (compulsorily) rehabilitate potential, and, actual, law-breakers, and a  crack-down on minor offenders.

    Ipswich is a pioneer in dealing with prostitution, to begin with street workers, then, they have gone for the massage parlours.  The women involved get help, limited and short-term, involving such miracle cures for drug  addiction as acupuncture (I am not making this up). Bodies such as the Iceni Project whose chief  once backed decriminalisation have been drawn into the idea that prostitution will be magicked away by these means. The evidence is that selling sex still goes on, but is more hidden, and therefore riskier and (even) more exploited.

    Next, public drinkers. New Labour has created a substantial class of socially excluded people. The rigorous Dole requirements, and fake-training schemes, have meant that increasing numbers of people are thrown onto the streets. Where they sit, sipping tinnies of strong lager and cider. These ‘benchies’ as we call them, are too rough for Wetherspoons – which says it all. Some of them are rough-sleepers as well. But now they face daily harassment from the Boys in Blue – backed by the town centre’s Commmercial Interests and Respectable Opinion  (the Ruling Liberal-Tory Junta’s  main constituencies). Three strikes and they are sent to Norwich gaol.

    No doubt as the Flexible New Deal progresses, and Workfare comes into force, they will be subjected to compulsory rehabilitation as well.  

    Or, as is  more probable, will be forced further into the gutter. From where they will end up in Prison. Costing a much heftier wedge than the Dole.

    But there’s no doubt that plenty of coppers will notch up mighty Arrest rates in the process.

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    Scabs: Royal Mail Plans to Crush Strike.

    Posted in Gordon Brown, Iceland, Labour Government, Labour Movement, Unions by Andrew Coates on October 18, 2009

    His Lordship ‘Beyond Rage’ : Bring on the Scabs!

    Royal Mail is heading for a bitter confrontation with postal workers after announcing plans to recruit an army of 30,000 temporary staff in an attempt to crush the national strike that starts this week. (Guardian  here)

    In a move that stunned union leaders and raised tensions between management and workers to new levels, Royal Mail said it had ordered the biggest recruitment drive in its history “to help keep the mail moving during the strikes called by the Communication Workers Union (CWU)”. Sources inside the CWU, which has called national strikes for Thursday and Friday, questioned whether the move was legal and suggested that it could be challenged in the courts.”

    With obvious Labour Government approval.

    Is there anything to add to the total feeling of disgust at this?

    Yes.

    No doubt the Dole – or the Companies operating the Flexible New Deal – will be forcing us to apply for jobs as strike-breakers.

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    Split in Class War Follows SWP Faction.

    Posted in Anarchism, European Left, Left, Sectarianism, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on October 19, 2009

    Tendance Coatesy has always had a soft spot for Ian Bone. Anyone who feels for the repression of Kronstadt as if it were yesterday cannot be all wrong. We have the same attitude to the Fall of Ur (BC, 1940).

    But disturbing news comes to  us. After the formation of the ‘real SWP’ faction (here) the fashion for lefty bust-ups appears to have reached the erstwhile comrades of Class War.

    It began, apparently, with Ian becoming a supporter of Animal Rights. Then it was Veganism. From whence to pacifism and Buddhism. Now he is said to be working for Demos on the Progressive Conservatism project. His hand can be seen in the paper, “Democracy, Community, Neighbourhoods & Power”. This arguesthat the best way to kick start democracy is to drive control down to town halls, neighbourhoods, and individuals.”

    Ian is said to  have linked up with the SWP’s  John Rees. Rees has worked closely with ultra-conservatvives such as George Galloway and  the Jamaat-I-Islami. He has many lessons from that experience.

    Meanwhile died-hard Class War supporters are planning to picket the Anarchist Book-Fair where Demos has booked a stall.

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    Statement on Sex, Lies and Trafficking (English Collective of Prostitutes).

    Posted in Feminism, Human Rights, Welfare State by Andrew Coates on October 21, 2009

    PROVED RIGHT, RIGHT AND RIGHT.

    Yesterday on Newsnight Denis MacShane, the MP who notoriously claimed that there were around 25,000 trafficked women on British streets, was confronted with the Guardian investigation cited below. Niki Adams of the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) put the falsity of his charges to him. MacShane, being MacShane, blustered and waved his arms around. He dared to cite the Ipswich sex worker murders in an attempt to muddy the waters. Niki wiped the floor with him.

    The facts are clear. As set out below. 

    What is our connection? Young Ipswich women organised a march in the wake of the Ipswich killings.  We all joined in. The ECP participated. Niki Adams has since visited Ipswich and we have had the opportunity to talk with her, and her colleagues in the ECP. Their case is a strong one. Ipswich and District Trades Council, after a thorough democratic discussion with no pre-existing ’line’ on the issue, endorsed the call for decriminalising Prostitution. Our body put this to the Annual Conference of Trades Councils. It was passed without opposition. Since then this stand has faced the hostility of some feminists, from outside the Town, in the way described by the ECP.

    This is what they have to say:

    English Collective of Prostitutes Crossroads Women’s Centre (here)

    The Guardian trafficking enquiry vindicates sex workers’ experience.

    Nick Davies’ report (“Sex, lies and trafficking — the anatomy of a moral panic” Guardian, 20 October 2009) vindicates what we have been saying for many years: figures on the numbers of women trafficked into the sex industry are distorted and in many cases purely fabricated. In our wide experience working with women in most towns and cities throughout the UK, most sex workers have not been trafficked but are working to support families. Does that make prostitution “freely chosen”? Does it make any job freely chosen when economic need is pressing?

    Feminism has become identified with a political agenda that considers prostitution uniquely degrading and equal to rape. Consent, the central issue both in rape and in prostitution, is being dismissed in favour of a fundamentalist law and order crusade. NGOs who sign up for this have seen their funding and influence increase. Far from being an independent women’s group, the Poppy Project has become a Home Office front funded to the tune of £9m. The Poppy Project is now trying to save itself by saying there “there is an awful lot of confusion in the media and other places between trafficking (unwilling victims) and smuggling (willing passengers) . . . they are two very different things.” Yet they were the first to blur that distinction, label most immigrant women as victims of trafficking, and promote legislation which does not require force and coercion in order to prove trafficking.

    The impact of this anti-trafficking crusade on the ground has been to increase dramatically the numbers of raids, prosecutions and convictions of sex workers working consensually and often collectively with other women. Immigrant women have been particularly targeted as anti-trafficking laws have been used as an extension of immigration controls to get them deported. Sex workers have been campaigning against rape and other violence for decades.

    From 1975 when we started, to 1981 when our we conducted the first research into the situation of prostitute women, 1982 when we took sanctuary in a church for 12-days, 1994 when we campaigned against serial murders, 1995 when we took the first successful private prosecution for rape with Women Against Rape, and 2008 when we initiated the Safety First Coalition in the aftermath of the Ipswich murders, we have been pressing for protection, highlighting how criminalisation makes women vulnerable to rape and other violence, and prevents women from coming forward. Our calls were ignored because they did not suit the government agenda. While feminists campaign for the criminalisation of clients under the Policing and Crime Bill, they hide all the measures in the Bill which further criminalise women and undermine our safety: increased arrests against women working on the street, forced ‘rehabilitation’ under threat of prison, throwing women out of the safety of premises, increased power to seize women’s hard won earnings and assets. If they are so concerned with our safety, why the silence?

    They have also kept quiet about the Welfare Reform Bill which is making its way through Parliament at the same time as the Policing and Crime Bill. Welfare Reform threatens to bring destitution to increasing numbers of single mother families, people with disabilities and others. How many more will end up on the game?

    Both the government and their feminist backers have refused to look at New Zealand which decriminalised prostitution over five years ago. A recent comprehensive government review found a reduction in attacks and sex workers are more able to report violence. Grahame Maxwell, head of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, who doesn’t dispute Nick Davies’ findings is quoted as saying “what we are trying to do is to get it gently back to some kind of reality.” Let’s start with scrapping the Policing and Crime Bill.

    20 October 2009.

     

    SIGN THE PETITION: HERE.

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    Nick Griffin on Question Time.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Fascism, Free Speech by Andrew Coates on October 23, 2009

    File:BNP logo.svg

    Dead-End Identity Politics. 

    “Question Time was dominated by questions of identity. Whether the BNP were really ‘British’. Or Nazis (non-British). Or who was the Legitimate Heir of Churchill.  What was it to be ‘British’ (’aboriginal’ whites or not). Whether British was an inherent mix of ethnicities. In short, a Bottomless Pit of Identity Political Ideology.

    Griffin began badly and only came into his stride when most of the other panelists began to outbid each other on being tough on immigration. He was still a fairly poor, pedestrian, speaker. In this he was a big contrast with Le Pen (whose telly appearance in France is said to have marked his serious entrance into politics). Le Pen (I saw this broadcast in the early 1980s) is a true demagogue: he mixes very classical French with moments of extremely brutal vulgarity (and still does). Griffin was only capable of a few coherent bursts of populism when others came out on the theme of controlling immigration. He came across as utterly confused  in his explanations about the BNP’s turn to the model of the European electoralist far-right. That he had ‘changed’ about sums it up, with little more explanation.

    It was obvious that 1) Everyone used up their ammunition about Griffin’s Nazi background far too early, and then echoed it far too often. 2) Same for the references to the zig-zags of the BNP. 3) The BNP acts as a force to draw politics further to the right on the issue of hostility to foreigners. It achieved this aim last night.

    The UAF Demo was also confused. If it was to protest against the BNP’s politics, then this became submerged in the issue of Banning the BNP from the BBC, or indeed any platform. Instead of attacking the issue of the BNP’s racialism, or its wider politics, this turned into a debate (or rather, a call for a non-debate) about letting them speak.

    Bonnie Greer, who has British nationality, was terrible, smug and unable to relate to the debate. I say this with some sadness since I really admire the woman and thought she would deal a mortal blow to Griffin. Frankly telling everyone that we all originally come from Africa and stuff about the Neanderthals was irrelevant.

     Since the discussion centred around identity, Britishness, whether it had democratic values in itself, or was being weakened by immigration, or whether multiculturalism was a way of making a new British identity, there was little opening to left politics. Which are based on issues of class politics, equality, ending oppression and exploitation. 

    All in all a sad example of a failure to grapple with the BNP.” 

    The BNP are a force helping to drag politics ever rightwards.  But not exactly the only one. If they hardly present an imminent threat to democracy, they do give voice to a lot of menace towards a wide swathe of society. Above all to ‘foreigners’ -’ethnic’ or otherwise.

    The rest? It’s mostly all been said. Lots of it bluster. Patriots outraged at him. Liberals yelling. General mayhem.

    In this confused context, without a serious idea of what this implies,  UAF and its supporters do themselves no favours by calling for a Ban on the BNP.

    No amount of shouting can get round the fact that the BNP are a legal political party. Question Time is a forum for legal political parties. Protest, showing our opposition, is right. But it has limits.  I recall vividly how television gave Le Pen his breakthrough in French politics during the early 1980s (not unrelated to Mitterrand’s desire to split the Right). But no-one then proposed banning his appearances. Apart from say, myself. What did people say to that? The view was never discussed. For one simple reason. If you can be voted for, then you have to heard.

    The French Front National is now in decline. Increasingly marginalised  Why? Partly due to Le Pen’s advancing years.  It’s had plenty of internal feuds as well. And nutters.

    But it’s mostly due to its failure to get to grips with the  political landscape. What has really undermined the FN is its incapacity to propose a coherent alternative in local politics. What did they say: La France aux Français!  How do they run a Town Hall  with a  slogan? If they are out for the ‘ethnic’ French only (‘national preference’)? What do they do with the rest of the electorate and inhabitants? How do they further the needs of some (French), and exclude others (non-French, or non-European)? The ‘nons’ aren’t going to disappear. The idea, looked at closely, that they could be made to, looks pretty ridiculous close up.

    These are problems the Front National has never resolved. Which has led to drift, drift and drift. ultimately to going back to the sidelines. This week there are reports of a new far-right alliance, the Bloc Identitaire (here), seriously challenging it. That the Bloc Identitaire seems to be rethinking and rebranding some  of its themes shows that ‘indentity poltiics’ (mirrored in a way by ‘multicultralism’ and its liberal, left supporters), has more of an impact.

    Does this apply in the UK? Phil has some pertinent questions to the BNP. How it operates (here). That is, what a  rabble they are in local government. How they – hard as this is to believe – are even worse than the average bunch of maverick councillors.

    This is the right angle to fight them with. From the ground upwards. Not from the Screen downwards.

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    German Coalition Puts Far-Right, Far-Left and Islamists in Same Category.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, European Left, Fascism, German Left by Andrew Coates on October 24, 2009

    German Anti-Fascists Now Face State As Well as NPD.

    In Taz today there is a report that the new German FDP-CSU/SDU Coalition plans a crackdown on all kinds of ‘extremism’. That is, far-right, Islamist, and far-left. Or, to put it bluntly, concerning the latter category, militant opponents of the German neo-Nazis.

    “Die Koalition will das bisherige Programm gegen Rechtsradikalismus auch zum Kampf gegen Linke und Islamisten nutzen. Aktivisten gegen rechts sind entsetzt.”

    The Coaliton will extend the implementation of existing policy against right ‘radicals’ against leftists and Islamists. Anti-fascists are enraged. 

    In practical terms this measure will be directed largely to extending records of far-right violence to the violence of Islamists and the far-left (???). In effect, downplaying neo-Nazi racist aggression. But its significance is rather greater.  

    The importance of this is simple. It illustrates how the term extremist can slide easily across the political spectrum. It opens the way for restrictions. It shows how state measures to deal with unwelcome political organisations have a habit of being broadened. By the will of who’s in power.

    Those calling for a state ban on the BNP, rooting out its members from jobs, and suppressing their rights, take note.

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    Note on the Rees ‘Left Platform’ Faction.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, European Left, Left, SWP by Andrew Coates on October 25, 2009

    Judge of Legitimate Political Parties?

    The Weekly Worker has published (here) some analysis on the emergence of the Rees Faction in the SWP. It’s called the Left Platform.

    I just note this claim. That is, in Rees and mates’ initial public declaration of dissidence. The Defend the No-Platform Resolution (there’s a joke in there somewhere but I can’t see it yet),

     This calls for reaffirming the blanket policy of not giving  the BNP any public vehicle for its policies – against the SWP Central Committee’s partial recognition that this line is impractical (not that it is in principle wrong 

     

    5. The BNP will not be beaten by ‘clever’ debates. What they want is legitimacy. If we appear with them, even if we win the argument, we lose the real battle because we add to their legitimacy. The principle at stake here is that the BNP should not be regarded as a legitimate bourgeois party.

    Since when does the SWP, or a small group of it, have the responsibility of deciding what is, and what is not, a ‘legitimate bourgeois political party’?

     

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    Three Recent Books on Communism.

    Posted in Labour Movement, Marxism, Stalinism by Andrew Coates on October 26, 2009

    On to Victory!

    Requiem For a Dream? Three Books on Communism.

    The Red Flag. Communism and the Making of the Modern World. David Priestland. Allen Lane 2009. The Rise and Fall of Communism. Archie Brown. The Bodley Head. 2009. The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union, Paul Flewers Francis Boutle Publications. 2009.

    Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall or not, drawing up the balance-sheet of Communism remains a central issue on the left. There are those, from the shrunken Western CPs to some on the hard left, who try to save ‘positive’ elements from the record of the ex-USSR, its satellites, and the remaining Communist Party-run states. Others, philosophical speculators, such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, yearn for a Communism beyond mundane time and politics. Anti-Communism, sometimes claiming left credentials, has enjoyed a revival. Frustrated at being unable to soldier in the real Cold War, one section, with little success in extending democracy by military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, have latched onto fighting the Lilliputian chiefs of the European far-left. None of these stands has the remotest chance of contributing much of value  to understanding what Paul Flewers calls ‘Official Communism’. That is the history, political structure, and ideology of those Communist Parties that came to power in the wake of the October Revolution. By contrast, each of these books is of use. They range from discussing Communism’s  relation (or not) to Marxism and socialism, their harsh regimes – under Lenin, Stalin, and the period of ‘stagnation’ – the way they were seen in the West and on the left (Flewers’s object), and their final collapse. The Red Flag and The Rise and Fall of Communism are more syntheses than original studies. But  it’s as overarching summaries that they are most useful. A New Civilisation? is the most valuable, that is, for anyone from a left that is both anti-Stalinist and ‘anti-anti-Communist’. It is important for the new light it sheds on the way British political opinion came to look at the USSR during Stalin’s rule.* More than the posturing of residual Soviet patriotism, or (at its lowest) one-time leftists out to justify their present-day opinions by re-enacting the ideological war against totalitarianism, Priestland, Brown (both politically liberal) and Flewers (decidedly left) all offer serious ways of looking at the final account of the self-proclaimed heirs of the October Revolution.

     

    David Priestland and Archie Brown begin their books with an outline of the sources of Communist ideology. Brown cites Christian origins for communism – his authority, Beer’s Edwardian History of British Socialism. Thomas More’s Utopia is evoked. This is a rather cursory start. (more…)

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

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, European Left, French Left, French Politics, Left, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on October 27, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Posted in British Govern, Europe, European Left by Andrew Coates on October 29, 2009

    People’s Choice for European President.

    So it goes.

    Blair for this.

    Blair for that.

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

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

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

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

    No matter.

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

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

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    Anti-Postie Picket: The Shame of Ipswich.

    Posted in Conservatives, Ipswich, Labour Movement, Suffolk, Unions by Andrew Coates on October 30, 2009

     

    The Sorrow of Ipswich.

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

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

     

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

     

    Strange to say it was ignored.

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    Dieudonné: Fine for Anti-Semitism.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Islamism, Jews, Racism by Andrew Coates on October 31, 2009

    Not Welcome Here.

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

    Worth bearing in mind when he visits the UK again.

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

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

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    The Coming Insurrection. Review.

    Posted in Anarchism, Left, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on November 2, 2009

     

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

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

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

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

    Protests in Iran Wednesday.

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance, Islamism, Religion by Andrew Coates on November 3, 2009

    Will the Religious Regime Evolve Peacefully?

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

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

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

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

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

    On second thoughts, I’d prefer not to.

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    BNP Funded by Suffolk Toff.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, BNP, Racism, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on November 5, 2009

    Friston Scene.

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

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

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

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

    There is more information in this book here.

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

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

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

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    Hezbollah Censors the Diary of Anne Frank.

    Posted in Fascism, Islamism, Racism by Andrew Coates on November 6, 2009

     

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

    Hezbollah censors the Diary of Anne Frank (Here).

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

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

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

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

    Does one need to comment?

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    Chris Harman is Dead: Expanded Political Obituary.

    Posted in Left, Marxism, SWP by Andrew Coates on November 8, 2009

    Contested Till Death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Example, The  Prophet and the Proletariat (here)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Spontaneity, Strategy, Politics 2004. (here)

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

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

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

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

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    Against Marxist Messianism.

    Posted in Left, Marxism, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on November 9, 2009

    AGAINST MARXIST MESSIANISM.

    Important New (very largely) Statement from Tendance Coatesy.

    NOTES ON RELIGION

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

    Everything starts in mysticism and ends in politics.

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

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

    Notre jeunesse. Charles Péguy. (1910)

    “Did Péguy kill Jaurès? Did he incite

    the assassin? Must men stand by what they write

    as by their camp-beds or their weaponry

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

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

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

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    Peter Tatchell: A Human Rights Defence.

    Posted in Human Rights, Islam, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on November 11, 2009

    The Results of Standing up for Human Rights.

    Islamaphobia - the attempt to define criticism of Islam in any form as racialism and  beyond the Pale -  has taken a new toll. A virulent discussion has taken place on the Socialist Unity site. Around charges that Peter Tatchell is ‘Islamphobic’. That his campaigning for human rights is barely disguised Western cultural imperialism. That Peter has used gay issues to attack Muslims. That he is therefore, objectively, (and subjectively) an ally of the far-right. Barry Kade (Green left) has added fuel to the fire by a confused partial defence of this disgraceful pack of lies (here). He even added his own claims. That Islamophobia is hidden behind atttacking Islam on rationalist grounds,  ”this racism is veiled in the language of enlightenment liberalism and secularism.”

    Really….

    There are plenty of causalities in this battle. Beginning with Kade’s ability to disscuss politics without clichés. Andy Newman appears to have stepped into deeper waters than he bargained for. Derek Wall of the Green Party’s left,  published a reasonable defence of Tatchell’s record as a human rights campaigner. That this charge is “a lie plain and simple”. We have teased Derek in the past (and not doubt will in the future) but this was heartfelt. For reasons best known to himself Andy Newman saw fit to add a much more mixed analysis (here). This had some well-expressed comments that make it clear that Tatchell was not an ally of the far-right. But melded them with much pontificating around the subject, he failed to resolve the issue. Letting the smear’s traces there. To the annoyance of some Greens. They see this, not unreasonably, as an effort to stir up animosity between  the Green Party and liberal Islamist Salma Yaqoob. She after all refuses to reject the Sharia – how could she, she is a believer! It would be like a Marxist criticising Marx (opps - we do).  Instead Yaqoob and her apologists, talk of Islam’s ‘respect’ for human beings (not, all varieties and forms of the religion  taken account of, often  in evidence for Gays). Andy Newman caps this by  citing the obscure post-Colonial cultural studies academics and paper activists who began the latest hunt-the-Tatchell,

    Rather than help, politics such as Tatchell’s have worsened the situation for the majority of queer Muslims. It has become increasingly difficult for groups such as the Safra Project, who are forced into the frontline of the artificially constructed gay v. Muslim divide, to contest sexual oppression in Muslim communities. The more homophobia is constructed as belonging to Islam, the more anti-homophobic talk will be viewed as a white, even racist, phenomenon, and the harder it will be to increase tolerance and understanding among straight Muslims. The dialogue which Safra and other queer Muslim groups have long sought over this is more often than not ignored or disregarded, and white gay activists such as Tatchell have proved indifferent to the fact that the mud which they sling onto Muslim communities lands on queer Muslims themselves.

    Peter has answered such charges many times. He states that ”We should fight the real oppressors and not pick fights with, and publish false allegations against, other progressive people. Sectarian attacks undermine the struggle for human rights, social justice, peace and anti-imperialism.” (here) It follows that if homophobia (and say, the oppression of women) is something Muslim institutions and organisations practice (which is obviously the case) then we have to fight the institutions and organisations that promote this. If these academics (whose dismissal of ‘white gay activists’ says more about their ‘anti-racism’ than anything else) want a ‘dialogue’ with the Safra Project then so be it. But what is their attitude to States, Islamist parties and religious bodies which do actively promote anti-gay anti-human rights policies? Dialogue with oppressors?

    Let’s be clear on this. Peter Tatchell stands on the side of universal human rights. Some cack-handed Leninists and post-modern relativists, may consider this as disguise for Western claims for European and US cultural norms to be better than any others. However, human rights, in the way Peter grasps them, are part of a fight for a better world. They are not fixed, but the result of people actively to defend them. We could add that the UN Declaration of Human Rights was itself the product of a sincere desire to draw together many different conceptions. Far from being exclusively  ’Western’ – they tried to include a planetary spectrum of views (Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ( 2000). It was explicitly anti-colonialist. For all its faults (and there are many, starting with its neglect of material rights), it remains something that can be carried forward and developed. Not retreated from because some Muslims ((excused by attendant Islamophiles) think it represents an attack on their divine right to declare their own religious rights more important than anyone else’s.

    Andy Newman now states, that (here),

    At no time did any one ever accuse Derek Wall of being Islamophobic.
    At no time did any one ever accuse Green Left of being Islamophobic
    At no time did any one ever accuse the Green Party of being Islamophobic

    The term Islamophobia has poisoned the whole discussion. Rather like the question ‘when did you stop beating your wife’, it is almost impossible to deny without some dirt rubbing off. I have good reason to dislike the word – as one of the first British leftists to be charged with it publicly on Islamophobia Watch. Someone very hostile to Islam full stop, Christopher Caldwell, in Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe (2009) has claimed that it’s a sign that any criticism of Islam is deemed unacceptable. This appears borne out by the ‘debate’ around Peter Tatchell.

    What a mess.

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    The Burqa, Sarkozy and the British Left.

    Posted in European Left, Feminism, Islam, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on November 13, 2009

    Marceau Pivert (1895 – 1958): Socialist Secularist.

    In a speech yesterday French president Nicolas Sarkozy stated that, “France is a country where there is no place for the burqa, where there is no place for the subservience of women,” he said in a speech on French national identity. (More here – in English)

    Sarkozy is trying to hold a national discussion about what it is to be French. In terms of the nation. Central to it, he argues, is a conception of republican secularism (or more exactly Laïcité). Behind this is an attempt to obscure issues which divide France, his own free-market politics to begin with. Thus, most of the French left rejects the terms of Sarkozy’s ‘debate’.  However the stress on secularism has had an echo. This morning on French radio the Communist Mayor of the town where he made this speech welcomed the assertion of republican liberty through secularism

    This is not a  surprise, Much of the French left recognises the need for a republic free of religious influence. It splits people on quasi-ethnic grounds. It introduces a powerful source of obscurantism into public life. Laïcité is where they draw the line against, notably, Islamism. Not that socialists of any stripe are uncritical of the French state: it is rent with inequalities and favours religious organisations indirectly by subsidies and recognition. It has a history of imperial rule, and neglect of the rights of the colonised. Still, unlike in Britain, the direct influence of religious politics is considered anathema. French leftists can draw on an atheist and anti-clerical tradition in the radical Enlightement that opposed slavery and imperial expansion (Diderot, Condorcet). The French Marxist left also has a strong secularist background. In the 1930s the non-Communist hard-left was particularly marked by this – Marceau Pivert  to the fore (here, French, and English, here).

    Here is what part of that Left says. In mid-October the Parti de Gauche participated in a big Paris demonstration for women’s rights. The PG attacks Catholic attempts to restrict abortion rights, and all forms of religious oppression. This is their statement on the veil and the burqa (more Here).

    Le développement de l’islam radical contribue à la multiplication du port du voile et du voile intégral ; le port de la burqa est l’illustration emblématique d’une régression des droits et de la dignité des femmes, il est le symbole de la soumission des femmes, qui affecte la notion même de personne comme membre de l’association politique.

    The development of radical Islam has contributed to an increase in veil, and total-veil display; wearing the burqa is the emblematic sign of a regression in the area of women’s rights and dignity. It is the symbol of women’s submission, which affects the very notion of a person as a part of political life.

    This seems a fair starting point.

    Why don’t we in Britain on the left  work from these premises on this issue? We have our own anti-clerical Enlightenment figures. Think of Tom Paine. To begin with.

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    KPA Unit 1224 Inspected.

    Posted in Stalinism by Andrew Coates on November 14, 2009

    It is a scandal that the British Morning Star does not print more news on the achievements of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) (Hangul: 조선민주주의인민공화국, Chosŏn Minjujuŭi Inmin Konghwaguk).

    It looks likely that  Kim Jong-un, the second son of former dancer Ko Yong-hi, Kim Jong-il’s favourite wife who died of cancer in 2004 will take the helm of the world’s leading socialist state.  After his dear father’s death. He is apparently called, in a touching gesture of solidarity with the UK paper of the toiling masses, “Morning Star King“.

    Unlike the ungrateful newspaper of this name we publish up-to-date news from the homeland of Juche.

    KPA Unit 1224 Inspected

    Kim Jong Il, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, chairman of the DPRK National Defence Commission and supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army, inspected KPA Unit 1224.

    He acquainted himself with the unit’s performance of military duty and made the rounds of the education room for revolutionary relics, bedroom, mess hall, bathhouse, soldiers’ hall, library, gymnasium, shooting gallery and other places, paying deep attention to the soldiers in and out of service.

    Seeing a rest home-like cosy barrack building furnished with all the best fixtures and its compound kept neat and tidy like a park, he expressed great satisfaction over the fact that the unit has provided the servicepersons with good conditions for their living and training.

    The KPA servicepersons are the precious Songun revolutionary comrades who safeguard the Party, the revolution, the country and the people with arms, he said, stressing the need for all the commanding officers to take good care of their living with paternal affection lest they should feel any slightest inconvenience.

    After watching the courageous training of the servicepersons, he was greatly satisfied to see all of them grown up to be a-match-for-a-hundred combatants who are fully prepared politico-ideologically and in military technique so as to safeguard the socialist homeland with credit. He set forth tasks to be tackled in boosting the combat efficiency of the unit in every way.

    Expressing his expectation and confidence that the servicepersons of the unit would display the honour of guardsmen in the honourable post for defending the country, he posed for a photo with them.

    here.

    Respect (Renewal): from SWP to Green Party.

    Posted in European Left, Greens, Left, SWP by Andrew Coates on November 15, 2009

    Was Red, is now Green?

    The scales should be falling from some people’s eyes this morning.

    The leadership of Respect (Renewal) announced yesterday ever closer ties with the Green Party (in England and Wales). Reports on their Annual Conference (yesterday)  have yet to appear on their Web page (here).

    Derek Wall posts (here) this comment from a Green Party observer,

    ‘Overall all speakers were very very positive towards the Green Party, George Galloway, Salma Yaqoob, Ger Francis and a number of other members made a very big deal of supporting the Green Party in various different ways and how we work mutually as two different parties.I think it is important to note that George Galloway called for people to vote for Peter Tatchell if they are able too and gave a stong endorsement of Peters politics, so fair play to George. They were obviously very positive about our decision to stand down for Salma but also talked often about Salmas support for us in the Euros and used it as an example about the right way to go about left unity. There was a lot of talk from George and others that Respect should not look to small far left cults for coalitions but to organisations like the ourselves.”

    Tendance Coatesy has expressed the view for some time now that Respect (Renewal) has been looking for an exit strategy. In a link-up with the Green Party. Goodbye small cult SWP – hallo big cult Green Party.

    Unkind people might suggest that Socialist Unity’s battle over Peter Tatchell owed something to the reluctance of Andy Newman to join in this move to the politics of Recycling Loft Insulation. That Comrade Newman has seen sense in hitching his waggon to the project of European left parties might seem to support this speculation.

    Socialist Unity still bears the SWP imprint. It calls this Conference (Rally) a ‘big success’. But it has yet to comment on what went on. The Green Party are no doubt so overwhelmed with joy at George Galloway’s support that there is still no official response.  

    We await these statements. We really do.

     

    Added: apparently the Green left account is ‘third hand’ (Socialist Unity).  What will be the first hand report?  The breath bates.

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    Purge Looming in Respect?

    Posted in Marxism, Sectarianism, SWP by Andrew Coates on November 16, 2009

    “Respect’s leadership is absolutely determined that the influence of the ultra-left will remain marginal. There is no place for the kind of political sectarianism that is indifferent to a Tory victory or bitterly hostile to cooperation with the Green Party. Such views, often articulated by politically irrelevant grouplets of the far left, are an obstacle to the growth of a radical party of the left.” (more)

    Ger Francis – leading Respect Light (Birmingham, Nationally).

    No place for obstacles, eh

    Indeed.

    Comrade Ger (Geeeer to his friends) further states that,

    “I fully expect the new National Council, on which the more sectarian voices are a shrinking minority, to drive through this perspective more forcefully in the coming year.” (here)

    Sectarian voices be warned.

    Ger’s background? SWP cadre.

    You know I could have guessed that.

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    Trotsky: Two Recent Books.

    Posted in Marxism, Stalinism, SWP, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on November 17, 2009
    Review: Stalin’s Nemesis. The Exile, and Murder of Leon Trotsky. Bertrand M. Patenaude. Faber & Faber. 2009. Trotsky A Biography. Robert Service. Macmillan. 2009.

    “Estimations of Trotsky tend to shade into explanations for his political downfall.” So comments Bertrand Patenaude. How should the man be considered? Why should we be interested in his defeat? Rigid, lacking sound political instincts, the overweening “flaw” in his haughty personality, – all judgements of Stalin’s Nemesis – Trotsky offered brilliant justification of the Russian Revolution, and mordant criticisms of Soviet rule under Stalin. To Robert Service Trotsky was “an exceptional human being and a complex one”. He was a major actor in a central drama of the 20th century, whose “ideas, including those about Russian history, had a lasting impact”. Patenaude’s Stalin’s Nemesis is a solid, if not particularly friendly, account of Trotsky’s life following his expulsion from the Soviet Union. It frequently expands to encompass the longer course of his vocation, from inspiring mass leader to marginalised founder of the Fourth International. But to get the full flavour of a study that puts the emphasis on how the one-time Commissar’s personality, imprinted with a “definite ideology”, shaped his career, from a leading player in the October capture of power, to exile, and victim of Stalin’s brutal revenge one needs to read Robert Service’s biography. With all the faults, and these flow in abundance, of such a method. Not that would have expected a sympathetic portrait. In Stalin (2004) Service compared Trotsky’s use of violence to Stalin’s and stated that he alone of the leading Bolsheviks approached the Georgian “in bloodthirstiness”. Or indeed a rounded grasp of Communist ideology and history. In his Comrades (2007) Service asserted that by the end of the 19th century Marxism had become “an infallible set of doctrines and political substitute for religion.” And that Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ “new type of state” based on “one-party, one-ideology” with no respect for “law, constitution and popular consent” that had spread to “mutate like a virus”, infecting the body of Fascism, and Nazism. It remains around, apparently, to taint “the Islamist plans of Osama Bin Laden” and the Taliban.

    Each book then offers not just narrative but assessments of Trotsky. That is, to the history of Communism and the Soviet Union. Patenaude’s story is largely centred on life in his Mexican homes in Coyoacán. Wider historical description and judgements about Trotsky tend to flow from this location. Despite its dismissive conclusion about the “dogma of Marxism” and Trotsky’s faith in the “glorious Soviet future” (did Patenaude mislay his style guide?) the book is gripping and illuminating. Aware of his previous writings, one expects less, and gets a lot less, from Service. In an ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist review David North (here) has rigorously unravelled the string of howlers that litter the book – apparently produced by a serious historian – from names, dates of people’s death, (including that of Natalia, Trotsky’s wife) to graver errors. The claim that this is the “first full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside Russia who is not a Trotskyist” may, nevertheless, be true. It is less than sure that Service’s efforts, to offer a “more searching approach” than previous biographies, such as Isaac Deutscher’s celebrated Trilogy, or the painstakingly documented publications of Pierre Broué, not to mention his subject’s own “self-serving and misleading” accounts, offer more than acres of darkness about Trotsky. (more…)

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    Compass: Social Democracy Against Democratic Socialism

    Posted in European Left, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left by Andrew Coates on November 19, 2009

    Manifesto of the Conference-Going Classes.

    Jon Cruddas MP and Andrea Nahles MdB have announced that “European social democracy needs a fresh start”. They have launched the “Good Society” debate (here). About the future of the European left. And ideas of what a good society should be. All within the background of declining electoral weight for the main socialist and social democratic parties.

    In Building the Good Society, launched this April, Cruddas and Nahles, set out some ideas. They define the contours of the Compass project.

    This document consists of tightly written paragraphs around seven main topics. Its admriers see at as a major step forward. In defining the post-Brown agenda of the left.

    So what is its defining agenda? Not much is sparkling, new. Much is ‘ante’, not ‘post, the Third Way. A few good points, though not much.

    As we can see:

    • The pages open on the screen with the observation that social democracy (New Labour, the German SPD onwards) has failed to offer an alternative to unrestrained globalisation. That it saw (as we can read in Anthony Giddens’ work) a “positive” side of the process. This ignored the down-side of free-market expansion. Markets and growth have to be harnessed. For a better version of social democracy, Cruddas and Nahle assert that redistributive approaches are needed.  For, well…a better world. As indeed does Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, all relying on on the same processes of international agreements that underpin the institutions they claim to want to reform.
    • They emphasise the central place of democracy to social democracy - not perhaps a very new idea.   
    •  That social democracy  is based on the principles of solidarity, social justice and autonomy. Does it need pointing out that this is an even older trilogy? It could have been stated any time since the setting down of the Synoptic Gospels.
    • Justice and equality are core values for the social democratic left. A claim that repeats Crosland’s View in The Future of Socialism (1956) – whose aim as a “just, co-operative and classless society”. The classless bit never got defined then. This document does not care to offer any development.
    • That society should be run on a  co-determination (Mitbestimmung) basis. The German model which obliges companies to have a degree of responsibility to ‘social partners’ – a principle the TUC used to promote in the days when Will Hutton was listened to.  It has failed to take on in the UK. The employers don’t want it. So it’s got forgotten. Now it’s come back. Whoppie!
    • Welfare – making people into “assets” in the economy. This is a market state idea full of pitfalls for the left (see below).
    •  Social Europe – a range of social policy standards set on a Continent-wide basis. The best bit. Better than dead-end nationalism. But there si no programme to overturn existing EU institutions to make this possible.
    • Wrapped around the document is the ideas that a ‘civic state’ should replace the ‘market state’.  idea about how a “civic state” should replace the ‘market state’. That a wide range of forms of social enterprise (co-operatives, not for profit projects) , including renationalised utilities,  should reassert  a democratic imput into mixed economy. There is little that is  different from Crosland’s original description of social democracy.

    It would seen that ‘social democracy’ in this form is just the ‘left-wing’ of the Third Way.

    Two major problems are not tackled.

    The first is that the ‘market state’ is not just the result of a political choice by  Labour Governments to deepen the rule of private companies over public life. It now has its own material logic  – a stratum of parasitical contractors carrying out state functions. This lobby, representing a class fraction of the state bourgeoisie, is not challenged by words,. It needs a programme to cut it out. Secondly, the Good Society, fails to begin to grasp the problem of equality. Notably in the area of  welfare. Cruddas backed welfare reform – in fact his support for making people an ‘asset’ is a pure market state concept. It is  not to support people on an equal basis but to ‘equip’ them to ‘compete’ on the ‘global market’. This involves compulsion and payments of benefits at such low rates that any employment will be taken – making the system a permanent drag down on working conditions and wages. Work for Your Benefits, which he endorsed, will accelerate this process, and undermine public services by creating a pool of unpaid forced labour to take over public functions.

    Secondly, the document does not begin to look at the structural nature of ownership and control of the economy and the state. Its ambitions are limited to restoring the ‘balance’ of the mixed economy which was lost during the 1970s. It fails to identify the political agency (one created by political parties as much as structurally inevitable), that could change these relations. In short, it is no democratic socialist programme based on the labour movement. Its ambitions are for reforms, by the well-intentioned. That is, not the popular masses, but  the conference-going classes. And some grandstanding pundits (Polly Toynbee).

    It is not surprising that the journal Soundings has warmed to the Compass debate. The review’s editors come from the tradition that was immersed in 1980s concept of “radical democracy” and “populism” as alternatives to class based socialism. During the Blair decade those that had a residual belief in working class participation in participative democracy have tried to reinvent themselves. On the Left. But they have not dropped the strategy of ‘hegemony’ through coalitions  ’articulated’ in a  wider programme . More recently their allies have opposed (or, in they’d say, ‘critiqued’ ) universal human rights. Notably  the ‘cultural imperialism’ of gay rights.  Andy Newman of Socialist Unity adds to this mix an embrace of ‘progressive national identity’. 

    Perhaps Andy’s warmth for the good side of the national progressive identities of the old Soviet Block  is a trail-blazer here. For some of Sounding’s writers to go back to their own past. O those halcyon days Sally, we had in the Woodcraft Folk!

    All of which avoid the central mechanisms of class formation that left politics tries to latch onto. In its ambitions to fight oppression (of a wide nature) and exploitation (capitalism), through a democratic movement. Or the argument made by left specialists in Europe’s left, for example, John Callagham. That social democracy, based on the above approach, has failed in the past. That the Third Way was  a dilution, not a replacement, of it. And  that class continues to play a significant role in British politics which the left should grasp (The Retreat of Social Democracy. 2001), amongst other writings) More specifically, social democracy failed in the past to answer the democratic socialist alternative. One based on the dominance of social ownership  and popular control.

    It is not suprising that in this debate (at least as far as one can see) there is little mention the rise of new left parties, such as the German Die Linke, or alliances, such as the Front de Gauche, in France. These are broad enough to cover a radical  strand and traditional labour movement lefts. But they involve people doing things. Not just attending prestigious media-eying conferences to agree with weighty debate on values, and  ‘concerns’ about Gordon Brown and the Tories.

    That would be a tent too big by far.

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    Social Democracy: From MacShane to a New Civilisation?

    Posted in Europe, European Left, French Left, German Left, Labour Movement by Andrew Coates on November 21, 2009

    Time for a twenty-first century Socialism – not Social Democracy. 

    Denis MacShane writes (here) that,

    “Social democrats need a new understanding of the historic compromises that are necessary for the practice of power.

    The German election defeat followed on from losses for social democratic parties in the European Parliament elections. To be sure, socialists kept power in Portugal and Norway, but without a majority of votes. And PASOK’s win in Greece was based on a new politics, of criticising state bureaucracy and pledging support for small businesses, in place of old-style statist clientilism.

    At a regional or city level the left can win power. But this is less and less the case at state government level. The democratic left is challenged by other parties that claim to represent its values or its electorate. The national-populists in the anti-European parties of the xenophobic right attract many of their voters from the white working class. The anti-capitalist parties of the populist left attract some of the proletariat, and workers protected in public service unions. The anti-industry parties of the greens also steal many progressive votes.”

    Why? To the former European Minister it boils down to people being scared, in an economic downturn. They turn, turn, and end up with the established Right. Trusted with managing the crisis. Or the far-right, preying on fear. Or the greens, growing through the public’s concern about climate change and the environment. Or even ‘anti-capitalists’ feeding off worries about capitalism (I helpfully added that bit Denis). That much of the left (Denis excepted) has no thought-out economic policy – based not on slogans but on grasping the international nature of capitalism. It needs a realistic one, reaching about beyond the “prison the nation”. The left has to be  serious about the “conquest of power. ” This can only be achieved “through  historic compromises – with market economics, with the nation, and with voters.” To do what exactly, in the light of the abject failures of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown,a nd their Continental ilk, is less than clear. Perhaps MacShane might care to enlighten us.

    Still, like Tendance Coatesy MacShane dislikes, “metropolitan elites organising endless conferences”.

    That’s about as far as our agreement goes.

    To clarify this analysis (to inject a bit of serious compromising with the need to look at reality that is)  Henri Weber (French Socialist, and former Trotskyist, LCR, here) makes some points. Rather more concrete than MacShane’s (here).

    That Social Democracy’s present crisis rests on the unravelling of the ‘compromises’ (historic in fact) that  underpinned its European hegemony in the late ‘nineties. This political offer underpinned the successes of socialist parties in the second half of the 1990s.  This reached its limit in  2002  when 11 governments out of 15 in the European Union were socialist.

    The first was a liberalisation of the economy, varying in form across different countries but present everywhere. In our ‘mixed economies’ the weight of the public sector was reduced, while that of the private sector was strengthened. “

    In brief the ‘market state’. It did not result in either increased society-wide equality, or a solution to the long-term (relative) industrial decline (core social democrat vote) of Europe. Prosperity was a brittle and uneven thing – the same processes  created a massive ‘flexible’ labour force which could be dumped as quickly as possible (a lot swifter in the UK than many EU countries).

    They expected in exchange, from state and industry, more investment and innovation, leading to a more efficient specialisation of our economies in the new international division of labour. They expected an ‘upscaling’ in all sectors of activity, so that they could reinstate full employment and ‘good employment’.

    Which did not happen. An economic crisis – something beyond the end of Brown’s history apparently – did. European social democracy (in all its variants) was worst hit. Its  policy and institutional strategy was a recipe for disaster. The competitive advantage of market-states was thrown into doubt when the first breezes of economic problems reached them. This affected liberal ‘third way’ countries the UK above all. Because of its greater adaption to global flows those in the current got caught up and thrown into the vortex.  Social democracy’s electorate was hit; its strategic compromises with business partners left the latter  safe, not their ‘own people’. Mass unemployment, reinforcing the  structural worklessness neoliberalism rests on, has returned.

    The second pillar of the compromise of the 1990s was the mutualisation of the costs of modernisation. It was believed that these costs should be borne primarily not by individuals but by the nation as a community. This required high levels of taxes and social redistribution, quality public services, a reduced but preserved welfare state, and negotiation between all social partners.

    One should add that in Britain the said market state farmed out broad swathes of public services. To expensive and incompetent private companies. Whose costs are a massive drain on public finance. Social partnership ceased to have any meaning for anybody except these private groups, and the increasingly state dependent and private modelled ‘third sector. It is this apparatus which is now being marshalled in the UK (other countries, now under right-wing control, are following suite) to coerce the unemployed away.  A doomed project if ever there was one.

    The third element was the affirmation of social progressivism. Socialists were the champions of the liberalisation of mores, gender parity and equality, homosexual marriage, the right to die in dignity, and the defence of the quality of life.

    In other words it promoted social liberalism without social equality. Diversity, multiculturalism, and other aspects of this agenda took root. They took over from the reforms for universal human rights. In doing so they became attached to the market state. And the alienating forces of division and private gain they embodied. The worst example was the British state’s embrace of faith-based institutions in civil society. From bringing religious groups in welfare services, the authority given to faith leaders in minority communities, to a strategy of equal opportunities that replaced equality for all, this has undermined popular consent for social democratic parties. It has left the door open for the right and far-right to reassert national identity (and xenophobia)  as an alternative source of cohesion.

    Weber notes that “The 2007-2010 crisis, followed as it will be by a period of weak growth, will condemn this compromise to obsolescence.”

    Which it has.

    Unfortunately all Weber can offer is this,

    “If it wants to return to power, European social democracy must propose a new political offer. And such an offer has to be conceived, from its inception, at the level of the European Union. Furthermore it must embody – beyond its economic objectives – a civilisation project.”

    Which is as clear as North Sea silt.

    The democratic socialist project, in measured or radical form, is to replace the above ‘pillars’ by 1) A programme of publicly ownership to re-orientate the economy. Based on popular control – to re-root the left. 2) A transformed public service agenda to replace the market state with a popular (secular)  one. 3) An end to diversity and multiculturalism, a beginning to equality and universal public rights. Its appeal can be gauged from the fact that ‘social democracy’ is having to take the radical left into account.

     

    If you want to see a completely wrong and disastrous way of dealing with these issues look at France (Britain’s Labour Party  is a bit too obvious, poor old Brown does not bear much looking at). As much of its left has split off to the Parti de Gauche Weber’s Parti Socialiste has not the slightest coherent project. Its politics? A mix of very civilised green waffling, gestural opposition to Sarkozy, municipal Parti Radical politics (in the 1930s sense) and some tax reforms. It has shifted to an alliance with the centre and the Greens. And some strange ideas about shaping itself on the US Democrats – through primary selections of candidates  (a disaster you’d have thought they’d seen coming from the Italian experience of them). Not to mention a permanent drama largely caused by Madame Royal, which has made them the second biggest laughing-stock (after New Labour) on the European Left.

    The radical left is known best for its slogans. True. The previous remarks are just phrases to hook a deeper programme around. And we should recognise that the European radical left is fragile. The news that Oscar  Lafontaine’s illness (cancer) may threaten the whole project of Die Linke shows this. But this is clear. It requires a strong force to make its way. Not willingness to surrender before it begins. More aggressive than MacShane’s recommendation that we must compromises before we’ve started. To say the least. 

    Oh, and did I mention the wars? The left is a bit more civilised that MacShane on that.

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    Camus in the Panthéon ?

    Posted in Culture, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on November 22, 2009

    Albert Camus in the Panthéon ?

    Nicolas Sarkozy would like to transfer the ashes of Camus – on the  50th anniversary of his death (the 4th of  January 1960) to the Paris Pantheon. That is the national memorial for GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE (“To the great men, the grateful homeland”). Interment here is severely restricted and is allowed only by a parliamentary act for “National Heroes”.

    His son Jean  is opposed (here).

    There was an extraordinary brilliant and concise interview with Camus’ biographer, Olivier Todd, in le Monde yesterday (here). Todd, a first-hand witness of the post-War Left Bank, refers to Camus’s brief membership of the Algerican Communist party in 1934 – he left because it failed to support independence movements clearly enough. In the full article (the on-line version is cut), there is an account of the author of the Etranger’s later hesitation about the FLN’s campaign for full independence. And an account of  his disputes with Sartre – right about Stalinism, wrong about anti-colonialism.

    Todd’s judgement on Camus is worth citing, “ Camus fut d’abord un écrivain, un artiste, un artisan, beaucoup plus qu’un philosophe dans la série Platon, Kant, Sartre, Wittgenstein.” He was first of all a writer, an artist, a workman, much more than a philosopher in the mould of Plato, Kant, Sartre, Wittgenstein.” This view TC shares.

    His courageous Resistance  activity, his journalism,  moral presence on the left, and searing novels deserve better than a credential-boosting stunt by Sarkozy.  

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    Peter Sloterdijk: No to Forced Taxation.

    Posted in European Left, German Left by Andrew Coates on November 23, 2009

    Radical Icon?

    There is an intellectual controversy ranging in Europe. France has been outpaced in its usual autumn row: this one’s  in Germany. Launched by Peter Sloterdijk. A mad-cap theorist to rival Slavoj Žižek, Sloterdijk is best known to British readers through a review I did (a long time ago) in Labour Briefing of his Critique of Cynical Reason (three paragraphs). This book, still available from an academic US publisher (here), was described as the philosophical answer to airport “shopping and fucking” novels.

    Sloty’s campaign against the “Steuermacht”, the state-tax machine, has raised a debate. Neatly dovetailing into his other obsession - loathing of Die Linke. His line? Rather simple: taxes are forced out (‘Zwang’ being the operative term) of productive workers. They are thus the object of the new class struggle. For those who care to follow this, the discussion (largely opposing this pose) is all over the Germanophone Web (start perhaps from here).

     

    Montgomery Burns  has found a Court Philosopher.  

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    Hands off the People of Iran AGM this Saturday.

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance by Andrew Coates on November 24, 2009

     hopi-agm-logo-medSaturday November 28 2009
    Somers Town Community Centre, 150 Ossulston Street, London NW1 1EE (near Euston station). Registration from 10am.

    More Information here.

    It will be interesting to watch this on BBC Two tonight:

    “This World tells the story of Neda Agha Soltan, with exclusive accounts from those who really knew her. Many young Iranians have claimed her as a ‘martyr’ for Iran’s protest movement; but the Iranian regime has tried to blame the West.”

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    Tariq Ramadan, What I Believe. Review.

    Posted in Islam, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on November 25, 2009

    http://bks5.books.google.co.uk/books?id=K8uX8H8JpTEC&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=5&edge=curl&sig=ACfU3U0YOHwPCbKx-WgfOzfLa6dR2z3DHw

    Review. What I Believe. Tariq Ramadan. Oxford University Press. 2009.

    Tariq Ramadan is a “controversial intellectual”. He faces “many-sided opposition”. The soft-spoken supporter of “solidarity, human dignity, and justice” is accused of “doublespeak”. “Criticisms first of (and mainly in) France, then taken up by some French loving groups of some ideological currents, have built up a haze of controversy around me and my commitment.” He asks, “What are the “ideological and/or interests” of these groups?” Not too savoury, as we shall see. He, by contrast, tries to “build bridges between two universes of reference”, “Western and Islamic ‘civilisations’” “and “between citizens within Western societies themselves”. The book’s contribution to this “process of mediation”? It’s an “opportunity to read me in the original and simply get direct access to my thought”. To show that we “share many common principles and values”. That it is possible to ‘live together’” (all liberal English Anglian inverted commas Ramadan’s). That he belongs to a “reformist trend” within Islam. Which is? A “great and noble religion.” And what of the West’s achievements? “Freedom and democracy.” Its faults? “Murderous ‘civilising missions’, colonialisation, the destructive economic order racism, acquiescent relations with the worst dictatorships, and other failings”. Ramadan is bold enough “to contradict accepted opinions” – even by raising these all-too often ignored features of the Western world. Particularly the “other failings”.

    There is much in this pamphlet on the need for Muslims to engage in Western society. Its tone throughout is high ‘inverted comma’ clericalese. He pleads for Islam’s European future as part of a new ‘We’. “Western Islam is now a reality” – that is there are European populations with Muslim beliefs immersed in Western culture. So, “Islam is a Western religion”. Apparently this is a big plus. For bridge-builders this implies, Openness to Others (reciprocally), “Handling Fears” and “post-integration” pluralism. Up to, political engagement, and a commitment to worrying about the rights and oppressions of other groups than Muslims (why does this need to be said?). This has to be negotiated through “the fluctuating multiplicity of personal identities”.

    Islam, in all its complexity, has to reach into the public domain. This will come about not by playing on “community feelings” and “community-oriented political logics”. A much more ambitious strategy is afoot. Much like the early Christian Christians the Muslim faithful need to integrate, to become part of the institutions of the state. Why? Muslim organisations would wield power and influence. As bearers that is, of a “consistent global vision”. This would be one that assembles a variety of interests in an effort to capture a position in society. Not just politics are important. There is ignorance of Islam’s intellectual richness. To counter this, he claims, the religion’s contribution deserves a larger place in the culture. Revised syllabi, he argues, may help. There needs more mention of Muslim thinkers, from al-Kindî (ninth century), al-Ghazâlî (twelfth century) to Ibn Khaldûm (fourteenth century) To rival no doubt the attention already given in Europe’s school trivium to Thomas Aquinas, Dun Scotus, and Anselm of Canterbury.

    Not everyone from an Islamic background wants to span the division between Islam and the West. More shame them, apparently. Ramadan is forthcoming about his battles with Qu’ranic literalists – those who see in the Qur’an signs enough to justify their rigorist interpretation of the Sharia. Who, though he is fairly coy about this, do not exactly like non-Muslim societies, or indeed non-Muslims. (more…)

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    Wilf Page: Norfolk Red.

    Posted in East Anglia, Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on November 29, 2009

    Norfolk Red. The Life of Wilf Page Countryside Communist. Mike Pentelow. Lawrence & Wishart. 2009.

    There are some people who truly make a difference. For the greater good of the world. Wilf Page made a deep impression on left and trade union activists across East Anglia. And much further afield, as Norfolk Red narrates. Born just before the Great War Wilf became a socialist, a long-term member of the Communist Party, a stalwart of the Agricultural Workers Union, and then, after its merger, with the Transport and General Workers Union, active in upholding trade unionism across the region. He made a mark in campaigning groups, above all in the peace movements, and helped the workless set up (now sorely needed once again) Unemployed Centres. In his later years he was a pillar (Vice-President) of the National Pensioners’ Convention. Many people will remember him at the annual Burston Rally to whose growing success he contributed a major part. Will would welcome all and sundry with a smile. Remaining eager for news while waiting for the speakers, his staunch socialism never dimmed. Wilf was, in short, widely respected and loved.

    Mike Pentelow puts Will’s life within the “history of the struggles of the rural workers of Norfolk.” One of the few regions of Britain where farm labourer radicalism continued up to the twentieth century (and beyond?) this has roots far back. Wymondham, where Wilf was baptised, was the home of Robert Kett (1492 – 1549), who led a famous rebellion in 1549. The Captain Swing revolts of 1830 were in response to the capitalist mechanisation of farming. Begun in Kent with the destruction of threshing machines they quickly had an echo in East Anglia – in Norfolk and neighbouring counties. Disputes over the conditions of rural workers continued throughout the century. In Sharpen the Sickle! (1948) Reg Groves described Norfolk as the “stronghold and birthplace” of the Agricultural Workers Union. Its founder Joseph Arch (1826 – 1919) made his mark there. The agricultural workers’ strike of 1923 – which precariously halted the farmers’ efforts to reduce wages and increase the standard week and ended amongst a wave of victimisation – had its stronghold in Norfolk. Wilf’s first political action was inspired by the dispute. He led fellow school pupils “to try to prevent the leaving of his much loved teacher, Miss Bunn, who was getting married”. The County authority did not employ women after wedlock, and Wilf’s protest failed. The children were all punished. This was but one injustice that marked Wilf’s early life.

    Norfolk Red (named after a famous bull breed) describes how in the 1920s the rural and urban East Anglian poor were treated as beasts of burden. The poverty Wilf grew up in still shocks. Initially he drifted to London for work, and then in Jersey got employment in backbreaking potato picking. Serving in the RAF from 1933 he met a Communist Party member Dan Cohen. “He used to talk to me about the frictions in the world where anti-semitism was an historic problem, and explained the economics of capitalism. He thought the Soviet Union was a new experiment that was going to succeed and produce a new world society.” Wilf was stirred by his message. “My old Sunday School teacher used to say about world problems, the wealthy and poor, Dan was doing the same thing but a much higher level.” He spent 13 years in the RAF, continuing to educate himself and his wife, Christina, whom he married in 1939, in socialist ideas. During a largely uneventful war, apart from some North Sea flights, he became a lecturer in the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA). This organisation is often credited with helping to shift opinion in the Service leftwards. Wilf played a part in that move. A Sergeant and never commissioned, he was demobbed in 1945.

    Back in Norfolk Wilf plunged into the agricultural workers’ union and politics, working full-time for the local Labour Party. The latter, which maintained a network of rural agents in East Anglia up till the 1980s, was not to be his political home. He resigned in 1949 – over the Labour Government’s conservative approach to running nationalised industries, its failure to confront farmers over tied cottages, and colonialist repression in the Far East. By 1950 he had joined the Communist Party, becoming their election agent in the Paddington North. He stood as a Communist candidate for Edgefield on Erpington rural district council (where he sat as a Labour member) and was returned as a Communist councillor for every election from then until 1974 – including a spell on Norfolk District Council. Through the union and council he pursued his opposition to the tied-cottage system (the practice of bonding workers to their employers by letting them accommodation tied to their jobs). Defending those threatened with eviction, and writing on this and other topics in the Communist party aligned journal the Country Standard Wilf was a thorn in the side of the country gentry, farmers, and their Tory friends. As a Red he was an obvious target. He tried many different occupations, briefly an extra-mural lecturer, a bus driver, and many jobs. But “it would not be long before Wilf was organising his workmates and getting victimised for this – and getting sacked again.” Fortunately his wife had more stable employment with the County Council.

    For the texture of a life well spent one needs to read Mike Pentelow’s description of the union and community activist that Wilf became. He played a part in the British Czechoslovakia Friendship Society. He supported the early CND. In 1961 Wilf helped draw up the Communist Party’s plans for agriculture – public ownership of land, improved pay and conditions for farm workers. This developed over the years. Perhaps not everyone will agree that “increased food production” – in opposition to the Common Market – was a step towards a modern approach to ‘produce locally’. The CPGB’s main aim was for national “food security”. But Wilf really came into his own inside the Agricultural Workers’ Union. Despite hostility from anti-Communists (he was only elected to the Executive in 1969) he kept on agitating. From a Norfolk base he pushed forward a whole range of policies, opposing endemic low wages, supporting increased training, demanding equal pay for women. The cause of tied cottages remained vital. It finally wound up on the Parliamentary agenda. Wilf “drew attention to the case of a young farm worker who, having been made redundant, was living with his wife and baby daughter in a shed, while their two other children slept in a car.” Joan Maynard, closely linked to the union, steered the Rent Agriculture Act into parliament. Legislation in 1976 ended summary evictions without alternative accommodation. Finally recognised by the movement in 1979 Wilf became the President of the European Federation of Agricultural Workers’ Union. This campaigning did not cease in later years. Domestically he stayed deeply involved in the union, peace activism, and left politics. After retirement he was a leading figure in the pensioners’ movement and was, as mentioned, a very welcome sight at Burston every year.

    Wilf Page stayed with the Communist Party during the turbulent years of 1980s. He eventually joined the Nina Temple offshoot (that retained the party property), the Democratic Left. While he sold its short-lived paper, New Times, he also, his daughter Carol says, continued to read the Morning Star. The fall of Official Communism did not undermine his socialism. He considered that “I have realised that communists have got to start thinking for themselves..” That, “I think my Marxism has been enriched as a result of the downfall of the Soviet Union, I still think of myself, as I have done since the war, as a Marxist.” “I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to think for themselves and create new ideas and new structure. He old militarist structure has got to disappear and new ones have to emerge from grassroots experience of life.” As the Democratic Left evaporated, and a variety of political groups disputed its legacy – from some of Wilf’s colleagues who looked to the Greens, to others who claimed the mantle of social democracy – he kept with the labour movement. When Wilf Page passed away in 2001, the Norwich Labour MP at the time (who had been in the International Socialists), Ian Gibson, said that he “turned up like a magician whenever there was a struggle”. For this, and many other sterling qualities, individuals of Wilf Page’s stature will always be dear to the hearts of the people. He stimulated, encouraged, organised, and was true, throughout his life, to the socialist principle that people should think for themselves.

    An inspiring biography – this is a must-read.

    For more information see the Country Standard (here).

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    Work for Benefit: Labour’s New Helots.

    Posted in Labour Government, Labour Party, Unemployment, Workfare by Andrew Coates on November 27, 2009

    This article appears in the December issue of Labour Briefing .

    Work for Your Benefit: Labour’s New Helots. 

    Welfare reform legislation is due to be one of this Government’s enduring legacies. From this autumn there will be two benefits: Jobseeker’s Allowance, and Employment and Support Allowance. Already there is pressure on medical assessors to channel those on Incapacity Benefit into the former, where many lone parents and others will also eventually join them. JSA brings a lower income – down to the standard rate of £64.30 a week, in contrast to £89.80, the starting point of incapacity allowance – and, after six months, puts claimants on the Flexible New Deal. This, being tried out in large parts of the country, will eventually replace all existing welfare-to-work schemes. For a year the jobless will be farmed out to private companies, intensively advised and obliged to carry out a minimum of four weeks of “work related activity” (they may be “advised” to do much more).

    This sounds relatively benign. It replaces 13 weeks in “work placements” of dubious value or simply stuck in “training centres” (where the only “training” is sitting in front of computers “job searching” for work that does not exist) of the previous New Deal. However, the Government has learned nothing from its experience of farming out the New Deal to private companies, two of which at least have been accused of malpractice. The faith-led YMCA has also run schemes. Most have scraped through their contracts with low employment outcomes and feeble training standards. The approximately 600,000 claimants who have faced sanctions for not complying with every aspect of the schemes shows how they are used to punish people. If participants were in charge of inspections, the companies would fail in an instant – yet the DWP has been told to contract out its new scheme to the same bodies.

    The new regime will closely regulate people’s lives. Partners of JSA claimants will also have to seek work actively. Those dependent on drugs and alcohol will undergo compulsory rehabilitation. There is no clear notion of what will happen if they fail, other than they will have no benefits.

    Most worryingly, after two years unemployment people will be forced onto the Work for Benefits programme. This will involve full time activity in “training options, short term work trials, a remuneration subsidy for employers to take them, or voluntary work in the local community,” (DWP October 2009). With unemployment set to rise to 3 million by October next year, when this policy is enforced, they will have plenty of compelled “volunteers”.

    Some argue that since JSA is supplemented by housing and council tax benefit, it is “fair” to work for this money. However, those further benefits are paid at varying rates, making the overall pay rates different between individuals – and still leaving them well below the minimum wage.

    This all raises fundamental issues. First, why should those who through no fault of their own have no job be forced to do what has up to now been the task of those sentenced to do community service by the courts? Indeed, what will happen to community service orders when the long-term unemployed start to undertake similar “sentences”?

    Second, this will corrupt the voluntary sector, parts of which are already gearing up for it. The character of the voluntary sector will change. The nature of forced labour is to give power to the employer while discouraging the worker, making them dependent on the goodwill of the employer. The rights of volunteers are not the same as those on paid contracts. Groups and no doubt individuals will profit financially.

    Third, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that cash-strapped local government will see this as an opportunity to plug gaps in their services. A tied labourer is cheaper than a paid employee. In areas as disparate as home helps to environmental projects volunteering could become a new national service, replacing those working for real salaries.

    Those opposed to welfare reform have to date had little impact on Brown’s take it or leave it decision that this is the direction welfare will go in. The umbrella initiatives organised by the TUC have petered out in well-meaning but ineffective lobbying by a coalition of “antipoverty” NGOs with some union support. There are now signs of a more militant approach emerging from unions of the unemployed and other groups. There are web sites promoting opposition and plans for a decent benefit system that could really cope with people’s needs. As mass unemployment returns pressure for change will increase.

    Labour looks set to leave behind a new body of helots – the work-for-the dole underclass. An incoming Conservative Administration will have plenty of conscripts for its plans for workfare. Both ideas were pioneered by the same person – once adviser to Labour and now the Tories, the exceedingly wealthy Lord Freud.

    Andrew Coates

    􀁺For more information, visit Ipswich Unemployed Action Here.

    Minarets: Tendance Line.

    Posted in Religion, Sectarianism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on December 2, 2009

    Ban every Church Steeple!

    This shock declaration by arch-secularist, Tendance Coatesy, rocked the Left.

    ER….

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    Ispwich Racist Filth.

    Posted in BNP, Racism by Andrew Coates on December 4, 2009

    IPSWICH: Bouncers at an Ipswich pub are today under investigation for allegedly barring Asian drinkers.

    Shocked councillors heard last night how two Asian men were turned away from a live music night at a pub in the town.

    The story as written in the Evening Star appears to have got edited into oblivion.

    The original cites a  a number of cases barring Asians.

    Those who know Ipswich will realise that the pub’s name is The Plough.

    Here.

    Defend Socialist Unity!

    Posted in Fascism, Racism by Andrew Coates on December 6, 2009

    This is important,

    Under the title “Andy Newman is ashamed that he is promoting a Hamas Fundraiser” Harry’s Place wrote a libellous article that is crammed with deliberate lies. The author of the article is anonymous, reflecting their cowardice, and they turned off comments, preventing there being a right to reply, and which also meant sending all the Harry’s Place yahoos over here to disrupt this blog. (more here)

     Andy has posted a very justified response on his site.

    Ipswich Trades Council voted to give money to a campaign to bring aid to the Palestinian people. This very Wednesday. Our of solidarity with the  people.

    Nothing more complicated than that.

    So I suppose this makes us lot in Ipswich supporters of Hamas.

    Er I think not.

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    Iran: New Protests. Priority is International Solidarity.

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance by Andrew Coates on December 8, 2009

    Manifestation d'étudiants à Téhéran sur le campus (Sipa)

    At the Hands of the People of Iran AGM a couple of weeks back (More info here and here)  the protests in the country were a central concern. We learnt that these were demonstrations by the people – the popular masses. They involve significant working class forces. Opposition is continuing to the theocratic regime.

    The BBC reports events yesterday. The people are not cowed. The students’ day protests struck a further blow for liberty.

    At the HOPI AGM it was mentioned that we should no illusions in many of the reformists. But that the demands for freedom, women’s and workers’ rights, strike at the heart of the Islamicist tyranny. This means that we should not let liberal Americans think that they have a monopoly on supporting human rights (here).  Human rights start with backing the Iranian people in their fight.

    During the moving recent BBC documentary on the beloved martyr Neda an apologist for the regime claimed that ‘President’  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in his heart a socialist.

    Perhaps that lie – repeated by we all know whom –  has had some success in quarters of the British left.

    The first duty of every revolutionary is to show active solidarity with the Iranian masses in their struggle for democracy.

     

    More reports via HOPI:

     

    Dear friends, supporters and members of Hands Off the People of Iran,
     
    Please find below a link to a report about yesterday’s mass protests in Iran: http://hopoi.org/?p=850 Please spread the word about the courageous fight of our brothers and sisters.
     
    Also, you can find the statement by Khodro car workers on our website here: http://hopoi.org/?p=848
     
    Finally, the policies adopted at our AGM on November 28 are also now online: http://hopoi.org/?p=840
     
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    Red Pepper: à quoi ça sert?

    Posted in Islamism, Left by Andrew Coates on December 9, 2009

     

    Trustafarian Must-Read.

    There is a magazine in Britain. Even most lefties will have probably never heard of. It’s called Red Pepper.

    Latest cover is on the ‘anti-capitalist movement’. We all know this has had great success in abolishing capitalism.

    Most of it is concerned with issues which Mrs Jellyby from Dickens’ Bleak House would recognise. Nothing to do with any effect on the lives of the kinda people who read the glossy mag.

    Concern for the deserving domestic poor? Stuff from groups like the London Coalition Against Poverty. And similar ineffectual ’coalitions’ (donchya just hate that US imported word for campaigns?). 

    Nothing, literally nothing about the real campaign against Welfare Reform. Specifically not a word on the looming work-for-benefit. 

    But this is not my specific  gripe today.

    It’s the article written by Bilal El-Amine on Hizbullah in Lebanon. It ends with the conclusion that “It is tragic that progressives in the West have such a one-sided picture of Islamist political practice and fail to see the liberatory aspects of the movement. “

    We know where we are going…..

    Hizbullah have given the “Shia of Lebanon” “some semblance of dignity, liberated from Israeli occupation and terror, secure on their land, with a far brighter future than anyone could have predicted.”

    It does not take a specialist knowledge of Lebanese sectarian politics to recognise that this is an immense piece of cack.

    Presumably this future will be all the brighter for not having copies of Anne Frank’s Diary read in schools (story here).

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    New ‘Marxism Today’ strategy in UK. From Scratch to Gangrene.

    Posted in European Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on December 13, 2009

     Has not Breathed its Last.

    Marxism Today was magazine of the old CPGB. Noted, it its final years,  for its ebullient Editor Martin Jacques.

    And its sterling efforts in creating what became Blair and Co.

    The actual Blairites said to them, “Thanks awfully chaps and chapettes, but we won. You can now sod off”.

    Bereft, this lot have lacked a political project.

     But a new one is forward.  

    The basic line of the Marxism Today crew was to drop class politics for a national-popular strategy (believe me you have to read Gramsci to get what this means in detail but essentially it’s becoming patriots).

    You can see it coming again in the strange alliance  of former leftists, nationalists, Green Party débris, religious enthusiasts, and something called Respect. AKA Socialist Unity Blog.

     

    A tell-tale sign is the barely disguised stuff by Andy Newman and contesting national hegemonic discourses on patriotism.

     Translation: we have to be the real patriots.

     

    Socialist Unity Goes End Game.

    Posted in Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on December 14, 2009

    Icon of the Left?

    Socialist Unity confirms (here) its ‘national hegemony’ strategy by an appeal.

    Vote for the jolly good fellows and fellowettes they like.

    “We will therefore support the following for example (and there may well be many more), who strongly demonstrate practical representation of the left in its widest sense:

    Caroline Lucas (Green, Brighton)
    Dai Davies (independent, Blaenau Gwent)
    George Galloway and Abjol Miah (Respect), John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn (Labour) (in London);
    Peter Tatchell (Green, Oxford);
    Dave Nellist (Socialist Party, Coventry);
    Salma Yaqoob (Respect, Birmingham)
    Gayle O’Donovan, Kay Phillips (in Manchester; Green and Respect respectively);
    Peter Cranie (Green, Liverpool);
    Val Wise (independent, Preston).

    Now given the way it’s written you’d have thought (okay I thought) it was signed by the individuals in question. Most of whom are greatly valued comrades. Or at least some.

    It ain’t.

    Just a bunch of Andy’s ‘counter-hegemonic’ mates.

    Starting from Nick Bird (Lowestoft).

    Love ya to bits mate.

     But, well. How shall it puts this politely?

     Not exactly centre of the class struggle.

    Still the appeal has its attractions. 

    A charming confusion between two well-respected left wing MPs, and a certain fine feline from Glasgow.

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    Ispwich Goes Snow. Yuk!

    Posted in East Anglia, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on December 18, 2009

    East Anglia is normally one of the most snow-free places on the Planet (after sub-Saharan Africa).

    Today Ipswich is covered in mucky drifts, and black slush.

    The pavements are made of ice.

    The roads are knee-deep in said drifts. (Evening Star here)

    And that’s just the centre of town.

    Talk about climate change.

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    SWP: you gotta laugh, ain’t ya.

    Posted in SWP by Andrew Coates on December 19, 2009

    The ever- reliable WeeklyWorker  reports on the SWP faction fight (here).

    The SWP central committee has made its intentions regarding the opposition Left Platform crystal-clear, writes Peter Manson. John Rees, Lindsey German, Chris Nineham and their supporters now look set to be charged with ‘factionalism’ and expelled

    You would have to heart of stone not to laugh.

    I first came across Lindsey German in the movement in support of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution.

    She suddenly appeared as some kind of leading authority on Portugal.

    This did not do down well with the actual London based Portuguese workers (Portuguese workers’ Co-ordinating Committee) who were mostly supporters of the MES.

    And as for the execrable John Rees…

    Well I haven’t forgotten when he practically slammed the door at Conway Hall last year in my face.

    Oh, is there any politics involved here?

    I merely ask.

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    In Defence of ‘Centrism’: Against the SWP’s Democratic Centralism.

    Posted in Marxism by Andrew Coates on December 22, 2009

    There is an alternative Marxist tradition. Okay there are lots. But one that’s increasingly attracting attention is known to self-styled Leninists such as the SWP as ‘centrism’. According to them we are in-between social democracy, reformism, and them – the ‘true revolutionaries”.

    I beg to differ. Put simply it is democratic Marxism.

    Heroic groups such as the POUM in 1930s Spain, the ‘Pivertists’ in France and many other groups, including the Austro-Marxists and the organisations that Henk Sneevliet ran, never accepted the kind of ‘democratic  centralism’ than runs like a thread throughout the SWP and similar parties’ practice. Nor indeed their mentor, bossy-boots Trotsky.

    After the Second World War most of these formations were absorbed back into the mainstream labour and socialist movement. But reemerged in the 1960s New Left. In France the PSU were a leading current in this tradition. During the Portuguese Revolution the MES led the way. Since then clearly parts of Die Linke and the Parti de Gauche  as well as les Alternatifs in France form part of this current.

    Whatever disagreements one can have with the specific politics of these groups  their basic principle is inner party democracy, the rights of tendencies and factions, and open debate. Other aspects stand out: the concern for workers’ and social self-management, and the respect for wider democracy. The current is beginning to be revived. As such a source of continuing conflict with organisations like the SWP.

     

    The spirit of  Andreu Nin  shall be avenged!

     

    Or maybe not.

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    Grewal Household Captures Nation’s Hearts.

    Posted in Racism by Andrew Coates on December 24, 2009

    Loved by the Masses.

    The Grewal household have captured the hearts of tens of thousands. (More here).

    Last night’s episode was the best ever,

    The big Indian wedding,  Shay’s start of a new life with Sunny. All the drama and live exposure.

    Terrific.

    It was so thoroughly acute and touching. Warmed the cockles of a usually very cynical Coatesy heart.

    The fact that the dad got pissed on three bottle of wine went down well.

    This show did more for anti-racism than a million UAF tracts,

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    Ipswich Buses to be Flogged off.

    Posted in Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on December 29, 2009

    Soon to be Carted to Rubbish Dump.

    Ipswich Buses, one of the few remaining municipal transport services in the country, is be sold off to some privateering chancers (here). Ipswich buses, the pride of the town, will be destroyed.

    It is no secret that the ruling Tory-Liberal Junta is one of the most oppressive regimes this side of North Korea.

    The clique contains the following,

  • Councillor Elizabeth Harsant – Leader of the Council.
  • Utter numpty.  
  • Councillor John Carnall – Deputy Leader and Portfolio Holder for Finance.
  •  The eminence grise. Grey and Greyer.
  • Councillor Nadia Cenci – Portfolio Holder for Communities.
  •  Likes to associate with the BNP.
  • Councillor Judy Terry – Portfolio Holder for Arts, Culture and Leisure.
  • The easiest woman on the planet to bait. Loathed by all the council staff. Tried to join Labour at one point.  Sole merit: a large round bottom.
  • Councillor Richard Pope – Portfolio Holder for Housing Services.
  • Who? What?  When?
  • Councillor Tanya De Hoedt – Portfolio Holder for Transport & Highways Services.
  • Possible candidate for war crimes prosecutions.  
  • Councillor Richard Atkins – Portfolio Holder for Planning & Economic Development.
  • Non-entity amongst even non-entities.  
  • Councillor Phil Green – Portfolio Holder for Safer Ipswich.
  • You’re having a laugh here geezer?
  • Councillor Louise Gooch – Portfolio Holder for Environmental Services.
  • Ah poor Louise. Everyone’s friend. No-one is “more left wing than I am”. How are things with Andrew Cann recently eh?
  •  

    To top it all one half of this committee of Free Market dictators, is rallying behind Benjy Gummer, (here). Benjy, as I call him as we is mates, came up to us during the local elections. He reads Chomsky and apparently that makes him a good chap. Not in my book mate.

    The other part of this rabble backs (though not all of them, see reference to Louise) Andrew Cann. He is the son of the former Labour MP Jamie Cann (here). Now a Liberal Democrat. Following in his father’s footsteps down the Dove.

     

    And now they are set to destroy one of the best bus services in the country.

    Mike Marqusee in Guardian.

    Posted in Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on December 30, 2009

    Loved by all Progressive Humanity.

    Mike Marqusee has a moving and important article in the Guardian today. ( here)

    He is, as we all know, extremely ill. Cancer. Worst kind.

    Mike Marqusee was an ‘historic’ editor of Labour Briefing.

    His contribution to the left is second to none.

    My dad, an old style Labour man, after his stroke and when he was in in Hartesmere Hospital, used to  cut out his articles from the papers.

    His proud boast? He would tell the staff that “my son knows Mike Marqusee”.

    Beloved comrade, what more can we say?

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    Death to Anti-Semitism!

    Posted in Racism by Andrew Coates on December 31, 2009

     Referring to us lot.

    “Because you all go to the same N.London synagogue? Posted by jock mctoursers. Dave’s Part (here).

    With these words shall ye know them.

    Death to anti-Semitism!

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    Bab El-Oude City.

    Posted in Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on January 2, 2010

    Islamicist Terror at its Beginnings.

    More here: Bab El Oued City

    For those who labour under the illusion that the Algerian civil war all began with the Miliary coup.

    This brilliant film shows how Islamicism began to be enforced.

    “L’Algérie en 1989 : Peu de temps après les émeutes d’octobre 1988, la vie quotidienne est dure dans le quartier de Bab El-Oued à Alger. Boualem arrache, sur son immeuble, un haut-parleur diffusant la parole de l’Imam, car cela l’empêchait de dormir (il travaille de nuit). Les intégristes islamistes saisissent ce prétexte pour répandre la terreur. Ainsi, ils prennent à partie Ouardya, une femme aux moeurs jugées trop libres…” (here)

    Explanation: Algeria in  1989, just afer the riots of October 1990. Daily life in the Bab El-Oued quarter in Algiers. Boualem tears down a loud speaker (blasting out hysterical Islamicist propaganda) from the roof of his building – it stops him from working  (he is a baker on nights). The Islamists seize this as a pretext to spread terror. So they take it out on Ouardy (a Marxist feminist), a women whose morals are judged too free…

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    David Tennant, Doctor Who, “life-long socialist”.

    Posted in Culture, Science Fiction by Andrew Coates on January 3, 2010

    Brilliant amongst the Brilliant.

    David Tennant is a lifelong socialist, and even appeared in a party political broadcast for the Labour Party in 2005.” (here)

    Doctor Who (The End of Time here) Par t Two on New Year’s Day was one of the most amazing and sidérant episodes ever.

    The very trees in Christchurch Park groaned as he passed away.

    The Oud’s song will remain in our hearts.

    Comrade, you shall not be forgotten!

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    Irish Greens Impose Blasphemy Law.

    Posted in Secularism by Andrew Coates on January 4, 2010

    Green Politics?

    Anyone with any illusions about what Green politics mean should read this,  (here).

    Put simply, being rude about religion is now against the law in Ireland. The legislation was pushed through by the Irish Green Party (Comhaontas Glas) and Fianna Fail

    “The convener of the blasphemy.ie website, Michael Nugent, said: “This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentivises religious outrage, and because Islamic states, led by Pakistan, are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level.”

    Mr Nugent now faces possible prosecution and having his home searched under the terms of the new Defamation Act which came into operation on January 1.”

    Instead of the Greens support for religious bigotry we should perhaps support this,

    “We ask Fianna Fail and the Green Party to repeal their anachronistic blasphemy law, as part of the revision of the Defamation Act that is included within the act. We ask them to hold a referendum to remove the reference to blasphemy from the Irish Constitution.” (More here)

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    Communiqué of the NPA on Iran: Back the People in Struggle for Liberty!

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance by Andrew Coates on January 5, 2010

     

    French leftists back Iranian Democrats.

    I shall only roughly translate this: it is written in such a way that it is practically the same as English.

    “Communiqué du NPA. Le NPA solidaire du peuple iranien en lutte pour sa liberté.

    vendredi 1 janvier 2010

    C’est avec courage que le peuple iranien fait face depuis plus de six mois à une répression de plus en plus violente et meurtrière.

    It is with courage that the people of Iran have stood up, for six months, against a more and more murderous repression.

    L’extension et l’approfondissement de la contestation populaire témoigne de la détermination des femmes, de la jeunesse et des travailleurs iraniens. Par sa mobilisation le peuple iranien met en échec la stratégie de terreur qui est la seule ”réponse” dont est capable le régime dictatorial de la République Islamique d’Iran.

    The extension and deepening of the popular revolt bears witness to the determination of women, the youth and Iranian workers. By its mobilisation the Iranian people have checked the strategy of terror which is the only ‘response’ of the dictatorial Islamic Republic of Iran.

    Face aux aspirations démocratiques légitimes exprimées, les dirigeants de la République Islamique d’Iran et les Gardiens de la Révolution menacent d’écraser la résistance populaire dans un bain de sang, comme l’a montré les 8 morts et les centaines d’arrestations suite à la répression des manifestations du 27 décembre.

    Faced with legitimate democratic hopes the leaders of the Islamic Republic and the Revolutionary guards threaten to crush popular resistance in a blood bath, as was shown by the 8 deaths and hundreds of arrests during the demonstrations of the 27th of December.

    Plus que jamais, le peuple iranien a besoin de notre solidarité.

    More than ever the Iranian people need our solidarity.


    Le NPA apporte son soften à toutes celles et ceux en Iran pour la liberté, l’égalité et la justice sociale et exige la libération des centaines d’opposants détenus dans les geôles du gouvernement iranien.

    The NPA backs all those in Iran who are fighting for freedom, equality, and social justice. We demand the release of the hundreds of oppositionists held in the gaols of the Iranian government.

     (Here)

    The French left has a good record, and this proves it.

    It is the duty of every revolutionary to support the struggle!

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    Ispwich Buses, Council Agenda.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Ipswich, Labour Movement, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on January 6, 2010

      

    Pride of the Town: To be Destroyed by Tory-Liberal Junta.  

    To give an example of how this clique run things. Next Council agenda here.  

    The stuff on the Buses is part of the ‘closed agenda”. A source comments, “At the meeting next week on the 12th they will probably vote to begin the process. At a future meeting (certainly before the next elections in May) they will vote to confirm the sell-off. That meeting will be held in secret too.” 

    Worthy of note:  

    “Exclusion of Public
    To consider excluding the public (including the
    press) from the meeting during consideration
    of the following items under Regulation 21 of
    the Local Authorities (Executive Arrangements)
    (Access to Information) (England) Regulations

    2000 as it is likely that if members of the public

       

    were present during that item there would be 
    disclosure to them of exempt information 

      

    falling within paragraphs 3 and 7 of Part 1 of  
    Schedule 12A of the Local Government Act  
    1972 (as amended).”  
     

    Ipswich Labour Party Campaigns Against Bus Sell-off: (here)  

    Meanwhile arch-Thatcherite Tory Benjy Gummer is spending thousands of pounds (this is not made up) ‘campaigning’. Figaro-ci, Figaro-là, Benjy here, Benjy there, Benjy fucking everywhere.  

    Benjy fuck off.  

    I might even vote for Chris Mole the next time I see your mug in the Star or in some expensive glossy publication your minions stuff through my door.  

     

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    Ipswich Tories and Liberals’ Hatred of Public Transport: a Class Analysis.

    Posted in Conservative Party, East Anglia, Ipswich, Liberal Democrats by Andrew Coates on January 7, 2010

    Ipswich Liberal-Tory Transport Strategy Meeting.

    Anyone walking in Ipswich today will know that the streets are a death-trap. The Borough (Liberal-Tories) and County (Tories) have let the roads and pavements  round here become skating rinks. Nothing done about that. No doubt to save money. But the Buses work well. This has to change. No doubt at all. Must make bus-users suffer. Selling off Ipswich Buses is just part of a general pattern: they do not care about ordinary people in general (pavement users), and bus passengers in particular.

    What is the origin of this attitude?

    Tendance Coatesy can exclusively reveal the real causes of this position.

    Councillor John Carnall  – Deputy Leader and Portfolio Holder for Finance. Travels to work by Black Helicopter. Evenings? He hovers above our comrade’s house in Chantry.

    Councillor Nadia Cenci – Portfolio Holder for Communities. Spends most of her time in an attic watching DVDs of Bewitched.

    Councillor Judy Terry. After hearty breakfast of ten eggs, five muffins (laced with Maple syrup), six bars of chocolate, she is winched up by a Cherry-Picker and wafted away to her second flat down in Neptune Quay.

    Andrew Cann – if he can stumble to the Dove he feels everything is fine.

    Benjy Gummer – claims to live in Ipswich. Spends most of his time on extensive estates in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Where he owns a slave plantation. Is transported back by a Chariot pulled by Inferi Dii (demons from Hell).

     

    Ipswich Tory-Liberal Slogan, “Pavements and Buses are for losers.”

    Note: Interesting local Labour Blog here. (comments mine).

    Alasdair Ross quotes the following, “Crown Street Car Park shut (Lords and Ladies don’t need public car-parks, just heliports)
    Crown Street Swimming Pool neglected (too posh to wash)
    A promise of a million pounds towards Broom Hill Swimming Pool removed (not exactly unforseen)
    Planning to close the area Housing Offices (peasants, can’t they use the Web?)
    Passing on as much work as they can to private consultants (nice little earners)
    Planning to close West Villa. (homeless families – scum)”

    One could add their attack on the Caribbean Centre…

    Anti-Semitism in Ipswich.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Ipswich, Racism, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on January 8, 2010

    Outrage against the Human Race.

    Modernity is often accused of exaggerating the presence of anti-Semitism.

    I can personally testify that he is not entirely wrong.

    I have heard people say things about ‘the Jews’ which make my blood boil. From 9/11 Troofers at the CSV who speak of the Israelis who didn’t turn up for work that day to people talking abut the ‘yiddos’.

    Yesterday I went to the pub (the Robert Ransome)  after writing on the Web.

    There was an old fool there, mouthing off about said ‘race’. Sitting on the other side of the bar you could hear him rant and rave from five tables away.

    He loudly declared that Hitler “had the right way to deal with them.”

    I am acutely conscious that this pub is a few metres away from where the Blackshirts had their Ipswich HQ.

    Think, Coatesy.

    I have had some tremendous rows recently defending migrant workers and ‘foreigners’ from racists. Do I need another?

    This one is clearly a nutter.

    But wait.

    Help is at hand.

    An old Suffolk bor speaks up.

    “Moi wife were a Jew.”

    Ipswich people have a way of dealing with things.

    I strongly suspect this was not true. But he was obviously revolted by what the man said.

    That shut his foul gob up.

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    Save Ipswich Buses!

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, East Anglia, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on January 9, 2010

     

    The United Front of all Progressive Humanity to Save Ipswich Buses (Coatesy on extreme left, er, sorry right).

    Joking aside this is really important.

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    Chomsky and La Vieille Taupe.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, European Left, Fascism by Andrew Coates on January 10, 2010

    Serious doubts remain about Chomsky.

    Chomsky may be the favourite leftist author for Ipswich Tory Benedict  Gummer.

    But very definitely not for Tendance Coatesy.

    Chomsky besmirched his reputation for ever by his defence of the Veille Taupe (here). More here.

    Apart from his appalling attempt to deny (or at the least, minimise) the extent of the Cambodian genocide, Chomsky leapt to the side of this vile ‘leftist’ French bookshop and publisher, which specialises in anti-Shoah denial. Loathed by every French leftist I may add.

    More recently the Veille Taupe has published  Roger Garaudy, Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne. A denial of the Holocaust. Written by the former ideologue of the PCF. Who is best known for his attacks on Louis Althusser. And conversion to Islam.

    The Observer yesterday published an article on pro Pol Pot academic  Caldwell which cites Chomsky’s genocide denial during the Cambodian massacres (here).

    Noam Chomsky. An icon of radical dissent who continues to command a fanatical following, Chomsky had questioned the legitimacy of refugee testimony that provided much of Ponchaud’s research. Chomsky believed that their stories were exaggerations or fabrications, designed for a western media involved in a “vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign” against the Khmer Rouge government, “including systematic distortion of the truth”.He compared Ponchaud’s work unfavourably with another book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, written by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, which cravenly rehashed the Khmer Rouge’s most outlandish lies to produce a picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll. At the same time Chomsky excoriated a book entitled Murder of A Gentle Land, by two Reader’s Digest writers, John Barron and Anthony Paul, which was a flawed but nonetheless accurate documentation of the genocide taking place.

    For all his interesting and valuable work doubts therefore remain about Chomsky.

    The stink was such that even  publications like Le Monde Diplomatique still refer to this – while defending Chomsky against his more direct critics.

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    Coatesy Facing Up to Global Warming (New Year’s Day).

    Posted in East Anglia, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on January 11, 2010

    Felixstowe Ferry (here).

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    Parti de Gauche Leader on Burka: The ‘Body Veil is an Affront to Liberty Itself’.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on January 11, 2010

     

    French Left Leader Backs Secular Freedom Against Religious Garb.

    Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Here

    On proposals to ban the Burka.

    What is wrong with the Burka (voile intégral) ?  ”D’abord parce qu’il est obscène.”

    To start with it’s obscene.

    Principles?

     ”l’universalité des droits de la personne humaine, d’autre part la défense du caractère laïque de la République française.”

    The universality of human rights, and on the other side, the defence of the secular basis of the French Republic.

    “Si l’objet de la nouvelle loi est bien de garantir la liberté, l’égalité et la dignité de toutes les femmes qui vivent sur notre territoire, d’autres mesures seraient opportunes dans ce cadre.

    If the object of the new law is  to guarantee freedom, equality and dignity of all women who live in our land, there are other measures which should be taken within this structure.

     Si une proposition de loi est débattue, je pense que les parlementaires de gauche devraient les proposer par amendements.

    The Parliametary Left should amend the law (he is a Senator).

    Le but serait d’étendre le champ d’application de l’impératif laïque.

    The aim should be to extend secularism.

    Après cela il est temps aussi d’imposer l’obligation de mixité des lieux publics et services publics. En effet le principe de mixité n’est pas aujourd’hui garanti par la loi, y compris à l’école.

    It is time to impose the principle of ‘mixing’ (that is women and men should allowed to be together) in all public places. Today this principle is not guaranteed by law, even in schools.

    Par exemple, on ne peut accepter le maintien et l’extension des horaires de piscine non mixtes, ou bien les heures d’accès au sport réservées aux seuls hommes ou aux seules femmes, chacun de leur côté.

    For example, one cannot accept the rule that reserves certain hours in swimming pools for one gender. Or that certain types of sport should be reserved for one gender.

    Enfin, si législateur voulait afficher la constance de ses principes et la cohérence de sa pensée pour notre pays, il pourrait, pour conclure la nouvelle loi laïque, étendre l’application de la loi de 1905 outre-mer et en Alsace Moselle.

    Finally, if the legislators are really coherent they should extend secularism to French overseas territories and to Alsace Moselle (where there is still recognition of religion as part of the state and the education system).

    Even more hard-line than Coatesy!

    Our Goddess. Not wearing a Burka.

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    Front de Gauche: Best Wishes Comrades!

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on January 13, 2010

    Meeting de lancement de la campagne des régionales 

    One Two, One Two, Comrades there’s a Place for You in the Front de Gauche!

    Le Monde here

    “L’accord a été signé la veille. Sachant que leur salut dépend de leur politique unitaire, les communistes se sont faits plus coulants. Le Parti de gauche a obtenu deux départements de plus et trois têtes de listes départementales en Ile-de-France. La Gauche unitaire de Christian Picquet, une région et quatre départements et les Alternatifs obtiennent l’Alsace. Le reste sera pour le PCF, soit environ 90 à 95 candidats pour 184 sortants.

    The agreement was signed yesterday. Knowing that their success depended on unity the Communists were more supple. The Parti de Gauche will have two regional lists, and three list heads in the Isle-de-France. The Gauche unitaire of Christian Piquet (ex-LCR minority tendency) will have one region and the Alternatives (self-management) will have Alsace. The remaining regions will be PCF-led lists, around 90 to 95 candidates (for 184 former councillors).

    La fin des négociations s’est faite au détriment des autres petites formations comme la Fédération pour une alternative sociale et écologique et des personnalités comme Clémentine Autain ou Leila Chadli, minoritaire “unitaire” du NPA.

    Smaller groups lost out in the negotiations, such as the Federation for a social and ecological alternative and Clémentine Autain ou Leila Chadli, a minority current in the Nouveau Parti Anti-capitaliste.

    Le Front de gauche, élargi aux Alternatifs, au Parti communiste des ouvriers de France et au Mouvement politique d’éducation populaire – qui se présentera aux électeurs sous l’appellation “Ensemble pour des régions à gauche solidaires, écologistes et citoyennes” –, est “dans les starting-blocks”, jurent-ils tous.

    The Front de Gauche, broadened to the Alternatives and Parti communiste des ouvriers de France and the Mouvement politique d’éducation populaire ( even I, leftist  train-spotter who likes the Arlernatifs do know who these last two lot are) will stand as “Together in the regions for a social, ecological and citizen left. ”

    We are now in the starting blocks!

    This is a remarkable alliance.

    Going from self-management leftists, republicans, libertarian leftists, democratic Trotskyists, democratic socialists to the French Communist Party. In December Le Monde reported that a current within Les Verts (Greens) wanted to reach an agreement with the Front de Gauche.

    Comrades we wish you well!

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    Daniel Bensaïd is Dead.

    Posted in European Left, French Left by Andrew Coates on January 13, 2010

    Amid the good news about the Front de Gauche I have just learnt that Bensaïd is dead.

    (here) More here

    Will be posting on this.

    I am  sad. Really sad.

    He was a real beacon of hope.

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    Rohmer Dies.

    Posted in Culture, Europe, Films by Andrew Coates on January 14, 2010

    One of his best.

    Eric Rohmer is dead.

    For all cinephiles he was an perpetual source of beauty and wonder. I have a framed postcard of Triple agent just behind my telly.  Rohmer’s ‘intimist’ films showed life in its real complexity, anxiety, and love.

    BBC report Here Le Monde here.

    Wikipedia here.

    1. Ma nuit chez Maud (1969)  A mighty film.
    2. La Collectionneuse (1967) La Femme de l’aviateur ou On ne saurait penser à rien, antithèse de l’œuvre de Musset On ne saurait penser à tout (1981) Perceptive to the max.
    3. Le Beau Mariage ou Quel esprit ne bat la campagne qui ne fait château en Espagne de La Fontaine (1982) Great.
    4. Pauline à la plage   A gem. A real gem. Expressed every reason why we love French women – in all their forms.
    5. Le Rayon vert ou Que le temps vienne où les cœurs s’éprennent, vers extraits du poème Chanson de la plus haute tour d’Arthur Rimbaud (1986) Now have DVD from the Independent. Fantastique.
    6. Conte de printemps (1990) The whole Contes series is translucent
    7. Conte d’hiver (1992)
    8. Conte d’été (1996)
    9. Conte d’automne (1998)

    All below recommended.

    The man was simply a genius.

     

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    Daniel Bensaïd, Camarade.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, LCR, Marxism by Andrew Coates on January 15, 2010

    A Real Marxist.

    There have rightly been many tributes to Daniel Bensaïd (biography in English here). Images and references in Le Monde here. In English from the Fourth International here. More in English here.  In French here. And thanks to all the comrades, notably Jim  Monaghan, who have supplied links.

    He was an exceptionally fine human being.

    His history is that of the left: son of Communist parents he moved to the revolutionary left in the 1960s.

    I won’t repeat what has already been said about his career.  From shaky beginnings (such as his enthusiasm for Third world guerillarism) he gradually became a major Marxist thinker. Personally I was more influenced by his thought in the 1990s and the present decade than by his earlier books.

    But what I would like to add is that Bensaïd became, during the 1990s, heavily engaged with Kantian and open democratic Marxist thought. Like many of us who have a background in the same intellectual tradition he was in a perpetual dialogue with republicanism. Unlike, say the British Socialist Workers’ Party, he was critical of the religious turn of some of the left. His last writings develop his earlier critique of postmodernism into a general attack on the former Marxists who had become admirers of  Mystical Messianism – all the more remarkable given his earlier work on Walter Benjamin. They can be viewed here.

    I met him once, at a day-long seminar held in London Metropolitan University in the late 1990s. I asked him about his references to Kant’s Contest of Faculties. Essentially Kant says that such was the capacity for improvement shown by the French Revolution, that despite all the setbacks, all the horrors, this event showed humanity’s capacity for improvement for ever. That never again would this drive for progress be fundamentally thwarted. Bensaïd believed that the Russian Revolution was in the same great line.

     

    Was he right?

     

    Well Tariq Ali, who grovels at the feet of Islamism, has the cheek to write an Obit as well.

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    SWP Nears the End.

    Posted in Left, SWP by Andrew Coates on January 16, 2010

    Fourth Song of the Dead?

    Ian Bone comments (here).

    My long term deep entrists within the belly of the beast  tell me that the Socialist Worker is on the verge of financial collapse.No ones been paid at the Socialist Worker or Socialist Review for the last 3-4 weeks, none of the full timers have been paid for a similar period, morale is low. They are looking to declare bankruptcy by June.None of this was of course revealed to the membership at last weekend’s conference!

    Boney may not be the most impartial reporter of this (though as we have a deep personal link I tend to trust his judgement).

    But is this true, or is it bleeding true?

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    The Devil Has Us By The Throat.

    Posted in Unemployment, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on January 18, 2010

    Flexible New Deal Training Centre.

    Casablanca. Young women refugee. “The Devil has us by the throat Sir, please help us.”

    Caught between the twin evils of Christian and Islamist reaction (Brown and al-Qaeda), we are in this situation today.

    I have been ‘strongly advised’ by the state’s sub-contractors not to post anything on the YMCA.

    So I won’t.

    Save us from the religious barbarians O Pallas Athena‎.

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    Sixth International. Traitors.

    Posted in Anarchism, European Left, Left, Marxism, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on January 21, 2010

    Betrayed by So-Called Sixth International.

    It has come to the attention of Tendance Coatesy that a group of splitters are in the process of forming the Sixth International.

    A special plenary session of Tendance Coatesy was held last night in the Spring Road Allotment shed. Our Central Committee (Majority Faction) formally denounces this band of traitors to the cause of liquidationism. Our external faction of the Sixth International has published a detailed critique of this clique of sell-outs (available in English, French and Sumerian cuneiform tablets). It will shortly be available on the Darknet.

    Wikipedia entry (here):

    “The Sixth International is or was an international socialist organisation which claims the heritage of the Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Internationals, while considering that the members of each were irrevocably liberal, centrist splitters. It does not recognise The First International as it considers its official name, the International Workingmen’s Association, phallocentric.

    The main body of the Sixth International split from the Fifth International some time before it was founded, objecting to its leadership’s delaying tactics in recognising their faction, the “League to Destroy the Fifth International”.

    When founded, the group claimed three members, one each in Milton Keynes, Stamfordshire and the Gilbert and Sullivan Islands. However, its Stamfordshire section (known as the Stamford Worker’s Party) was disaffiliated when they were found to have skipped its stringent admission requirements, which insisted that each member must have read the entire output of Marx, Lenin, Mao and Hoxha in the original tongues, have mastered sumo to Olympic standard and be able to recite the complete lyrics to Mmm-Bop by Hanson. The Stamfordshire section soon came to see an opening to the proletariat in local pigeon racing clubs, and undertook a long-term entrist strategy, disguised as a collared dove.

    Within a month of the Stamfordshire split, the two remaining sections agreed to hold the Founding Conference in Milton Keynes. The Gilbert and Sullivan Islands section was unable to find the venue, and promptly left the international, writing a famous polemic, Well, you started it.

    Both sections continued to refer to each other as the official Sixth International, while giving their own groups increasingly elaborate names. The Milton Keynes section is now known as the “Sixth International (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Hoxhaist) (Provisional Central Committee)”, and now bases its ideology on the thoughts of Pol Pot and Margaret Thatcher, calling for intellectuals to be sold shares in the countryside and forced to march to the Conservative Party Conference.

    The Gilbert and Sullivan Islands section calls itself the “World International League for the International Redistribution of the Assets of the Sixth International (Gilbert and Sullivan Islands) International”, its member said to be close to splitting with herself over the question of the orthodox pronunciation of “Boise”.”

    It is sad sign of the degeneration of this once healthy current that it fails this pons asinorum for all revolutionaries.

     Boise is pronounced Boïsé

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    Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition: Good, But Where is the Policy on Migrant Workers?

    Posted in Labour Movement, Left, Unions by Andrew Coates on January 22, 2010

    Keep the Red Flag Flying!

    The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition has been launched. Analysis of its prospects via Phil here, and the general political background in the Weekly Worker here. Wikipedia here. Clearly its aim is to mobilise support for left candidates in the coming election. From a wide spectrum of parties, including Labour. No doubt there is much to say about the left and union bodies involved, or the refusal of some groups (CPB for example) who do not back it. This is its provisional programme. On this basis it looks encouraging but, as noted below, there is a serious gap and underdeveloped themes.

    “The core policies include, amongst others, opposition to public spending cuts and privatisation, calls for investment in publicly owned and controlled renewable energy, the repeal of the anti-trade union laws, and the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

    The statement makes a clear socialist commitment to “bringing into democratic public ownership the major companies and banks that dominate the economy, so that production and services can be planned to meet the needs of all and to protect the environment”.

    Here.

    PUBLIC OWNERSHIP, NOT PRIVATISED PROFIT
    Stop all privatisation, including “PFI” & “PPP” – privatisation just rakes off our money into their pockets, for worse services.
    Bring public services and utilities back into public ownership under democratic control.

    NO CUTS – QUALITY PUBLIC SERVICES
    Take rail back into public ownership and build integrated, low-pollution public transport.
    Quality, free National Health Service under democratic public ownership and control.
    Stop council house sell-offs and build eco-friendly, affordable public housing.
    Good, free education for all under democratic local control, plus student grants not fees.
    Keep Royal Mail as a publicly owned service, not a privatised cash cow.

    STOP GLOBAL WARMING
    Deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions – otherwise climate change, caused by capitalism, will destroy us.
    Invest in publicly owned and controlled renewable energy – not nuclear or dirty fossil fuel.

    JOBS, NOT HANDOUTS TO BANKERS & BILLIONAIRES
    Bring banks and finance into true public ownership and democratic control, instead of huge handouts to the very capitalists who caused the crisis.
    Tax the rich. Progressive tax on rich corporations and individuals, with a crackdown on tax avoidance.
    Massive investment in environmental projects, for jobs and survival.

    EMPLOYMENT & TRADE UNION RIGHTS
    Repeal the anti-trade union laws.
    A minimum wage set at half average adult male earnings, with no exemptions.
    Invest to create and protect jobs, especially for young people.
    Solidarity with workers taking action to defend jobs, conditions, pensions, public services and trade unions.

    PROTECT OUR ENVIRONMENT
    Recognise that we depend on our environment for survival.
    Move to sustainable, low-pollution industry & farming – stop the pollution that is destroying our environment.
    Recognise that many of our planet’s resources are limited and that capitalism fritters them away for profit.
    Produce for need, not profit, and design goods for reuse and recycling.

    DECENT PENSIONS & BENEFITS
    Restore the pre-Thatcher real value of pensions and link them to the higher of wages & earnings.
    Protect entitlement to benefits and their value; end child poverty. This needs a clear stand against Welfare Reform and Workfare to be added.

    DEMOCRACY, DIVERSITY & JUSTICE
    Welcome diversity and oppose racism, fascism and discrimination.
    Ensure women have genuinely equal rights and pay.
    Defend our liberties and make police and security democratically accountable.
    For a democratic socialist society run in the interests of people not millionaires. For bringing into democratic public ownership the major companies and banks that dominate the economy, so that production and services can be planned to meet the needs of all and to protect the environment.

    SOLIDARITY NOT WAR
    Bring home all British troops from Afghanistan immediately – no more wars for resources.
    No more spending on a new generation of nuclear weapons, huge aircraft carriers or irrelevant eurofighters – convert arms spending to socially useful products and services.
    An independent foreign policy, based on international solidarity – no more US poodle, no moves to a capitalist, militarist United States of Europe, no Lisbon Treaty.

    It has been pointed out by the comrades on Facebook that this lacks any policy on migrant workers. Or on immigration.

    These are core issues for trade unionists and socialists. Xenophobic  ’anti-foreigner’ sentiment is widespread in the UK. It shades into open racism. It drives politics to the right. It divides. We need to above all to defend the rights of migrant workers. That is, to  build working class unity, and make class politics, not the communalism of fading groups like Respect, or the nationalism of the mainstream parties, our principle. Not to mention the need to fight the BNP.

    Nouveau Parti AntiCapitaliste in Disarray?

    Posted in Europe, European Left, French Left, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on January 23, 2010

    Nouveau Parti AntiCapitaliste in Disarray?

    Le Monde reports yesterday (here),

    Olivier Besancenot is to head the regional election List in the Ile-de-France – “ à contrecoeur” – reluctantly. He stands in a weak position in this area.

    Depuis que sa direction a été mise en minorité à la mi-décembre, le NPA n’a pas d’orientation nationale sur les régionales et les fédérations gèrent localement leurs accords. Résultat : dans trois régions, le NPA s’allie avec le Front de gauche ; dans trois autres, il part avec les amis de M. Mélenchon ; en PACA, avec les Alternatifs… Ailleurs, il se présente seul, avec le soutien du Mouvement des objecteurs de croissance.

    Since mid-December, when its leadership was put in a minority, the NPA has no national strategy for the regional elections. The result? In three regions the NPA has allied itself with the Front de Gauche, in three others, it is alligned with the ‘friends of Mélenchon’ (Parti de Gauche), with the PACA (left alternative republicans), the Alternatifs. Elsewhere it is standing alone, with the support of the Red-Green ‘Objectors to Growth’.

    En interne, l’absence de ligne trouble les militants et ça tangue. Les minoritaires, partisans de listes avec le Front de gauche, refusent de faire la campagne. L’amertume en gagne même quelques-uns qui se retirent sur la pointe des pieds. “Le choix de partir seul est pour moi l’expression de l’échec du projet NPA”, écrit Leila Chaibi, démissionnaire de la direction nationale.

    Internally, the absence of a line is worrying the activists and (leaving their politics askew) is hardly to be wished for. The minority, who want a common list with the Front de Gauche, are refusing to campaign. Bitterness has gone so far that some have backed off completely. “The decision to go it alone is for me the expression of the set-back for the NPA-project”, writes Leila Chaibi, who has resigned from the national executive.

    There are currently three main positions in the NPA on this: A) the position above (let local groups try to work out their own ‘unitary’ strategy – the current Majority’s position), B) No alliance with the Front de Gauche and C) Alliance with the Front de Gauche. (More here). Indications from the membership show strong support for B, with backing the two other lines however, when put together, nearly equalising this score.

    Despite the popularity of the go-it-alone stand, it appears then that the good sense of many local NPA activists has resulted in agreements with other political forces of the left. Others still riding into battle without allies, are, we can judge, even from this distance, making a serious error. It should not forgotten that the real problem is not intra-left, but the complete mess represented by the Parti Socialiste. Apart from the never-ending farce of Ségèlone Royal, there is its steady drift rightwards. The Socialists’ are trying to align with the right-wing French Green Party – les Verts – and they are attempting to reach agreements with the pompous centrist François Bayrou. They are following in the foot-steps of  the Italian Democratic Party which  destroyed the country’s left. Which has left Italy ruled by a blustering tyrant. The stakes are extremely high. Sarkozy will never be defeated by the Socialists’ strategy. Nor by the NPA standing ‘seul contre tous’. The Front de Gauche is an attempt to fight back. A serious effort to refound the left. To emulate Die Linke.

    Pete has described on this Blog the way of alliance in Languedoc. “Here in the Languedoc our list includes the NPA, RdG, PCF, Fede, Alternatives, GU and Objecteur de croissance (Red greens).” Mind you does mention some PCF people now standing under the (racist ex-Parti Socialiste) Frêche  ticket (he was expelled for his racialist rants, such as calling ‘harkis’ – Algerians who fought on the French side in the war of liberation - ”sub-human”).

    These comrades deserve support. The challenge by the real French left against a proto-’Italian’ turn will have repercussions for the whole European movement.

    Though I somewhat doubt if we’ll hear much of this side of the story in the British left press.

    Hands off the People of Iran: February Week of Action.

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance by Andrew Coates on January 26, 2010

     

    Hands Off the People of Iran is launching a week of action in solidarity with the grassroots opposition movement in Iran, running from February 13-20 2010.

      

    More information here.

    It is the duty of every revolutionary and person of good will to show solidarity with the Iranian protesters.

    Lest we forget.

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    Burka: French Propositions.

    Posted in French Left, Islam, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on January 27, 2010

    How Should This Be Approached?

    In France, the Voile intégral (Burka, Niqab) may be prohibited in certain public spaces. A special Parliamentary  Commission has just announced the conclusions of its investigations. This recommends.

    Une résolution parlementaire «condamnant le port du voile intégral comme contraire aux valeurs de la République», assortie de son interdiction dans les services publics et de mesures visant à conditionner son abandon à l’obtention d’un titre de séjour ou de la nationalité française, à encourager les actions de médiation et de pédagogie et à renforcer la lutte contre les violences faites aux femmes. (More here)

    A Parliamentary resolution, condemning “wearing the Burka, as contrary to the values of the republic” linked to its ban in public services, and measures making French nationality and permission to stay in France, and to encourage education and mediation to prevent violence against women.

    The report, adopted this Tuesday, argues for a parliamentary resolution followed by a ban on “hiding one’s face” in public services, including transport, but not in the street.

    According to the Nouvel Obsevateur many UMP (Sarkozy’s party) deputies support banning the Burka in all public spaces. (here) Representatives of the Catholic Church and the French Protestants and Muslim organisations oppose any law. The Chief Rabbi has refused to take a position (here). But also see Paris Iman Hassen Chalghoumi backs Burka Ban (here). The French Communist Party (PCF) has already made clear its opposition to any such legislation, saying it ‘stigmatises’ Islam (here). However the joint rapporteur of the Commission on the Burka, André Gerin (here) is a prominent member of the PCF.

    The rest of the left shows divisions. Opposition to the Burka from the Parti de Gauche (here) but criticism of the laws as ‘stigmatisation’ of a particular relgion, and a lack of a general secularist approach.

    Nothing will be decided before this Spring’s Regional Elections. It appears doubtful if a sustainable law can be thought up.

    This is a sledge hammer approach to a very small problem of a few thousands wearers. Such a law would be impossible, without repression, to enforce. Marie George Buffet (PCF leader) is right, it does stigmatise Islam. It is in fact a diversion from real social problems. Notably a political response to reactionary Islamism. It would result in more confinement of women not less. It is startling that the UMP, which is is noted for hostility to social equality, is mounting this campaign.

    Few on the French left would defend the Burka. Many would prefer no legal measures at all. However, there clearly is a case to prevent anyone in authority over others (teachers for example) imposing their anti-humanist dress code. It is a reproach to ‘unveiled’ women every minute it is worn. Not to mention a continuous proclamation of ‘purity’ against the ‘impure’. In these conditions it is a true challenge to the republican and democratic values of any land.

    The anglophone left tends to ignore the reality of Islamism. It always looks for some ‘positive’ aspect of this far-right ideology, and ignores the violence it imposes, particularly on women. There is no doubt that Islamists in France are trying to enforce their anti-human ideas of ‘purity’ on those they consider ‘their’ women – as Enty links in the tragic tale of Rayhana, below.

    Feminist actress attacked in Paris

     By John Lichfield in Paris 

    Saturday, 16 January 2010

    Police launched a terrorism investigation in Paris yesterday after two men tried to set fire to an Algerian feminist playwright and actress.  The attackers sprayed Rayhana, known only by her first name, with petrol and threw a lit cigarette in her face. The petrol did not ignite, possibly because of the extreme cold. 

    Rayhana, 45, is appearing in and directing her own play about the oppression of women in Algeria. She was walking to a theatre in a north-eastern suburb of the city when she was insulted in Arabic and attacked. A fortnight ago, she was approached in the same area by two men who said: “We know who you are, you miscreant whore. This is a warning.”  More here.

    Interesting general history of the imposition of the Veil here.

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    Tories May Let Councils Set Benefit Levels.

    Posted in Ipswich, Unemployment, Welfare State by Andrew Coates on January 28, 2010

    Life On Ipswich Tory-Liberal Local Unemployment Benefits.

    Tories May Let Councils Set Benefit Levels. Toby Helm. Guardian here.

    Under the proposal benefits would be lower where it was easier to find work, and councils would also be given incentives to help people find jobs. The Conservative Treasury team are holding talks on handing responsibility to local councils for setting and distributing benefits such as the jobseeker’s allowance.

    A move to setting benefit rates to match the needs of local labour markets has been pushed by radical Tory councils but it is the first time that the frontbench has embraced the concept.

    Speaking at a conference organised by the New Local Government Network in London, the shadow chief secretary, Philip Hammond, disclosed that he was holding talks on the issue with Conservative councils, including Kent. He said: “There are some key challenges we will have to face in delivering this agenda. Can we take the public with us in this agenda? Can we persuade people living in your area, for example, they would rather see the management of workless benefits in the hands of a local authority than in the hands of a national government setting standards nationally?” He said “huge potential savings” were available, adding that he regarded local government as pivotal to reducing the public sector deficit.

    Under the proposal benefits would be lower where it was easier to find work. Councils would also be given incentives to help people find jobs. The plan has not yet appeared in any formal document.

    This is part of a pattern. It’s not just cuts, (‘savings’). Or lower benefits generally. We can be sure that making welfare more ‘local’ and ‘decentralised’ will mean (through inevitable sub-contracting) greater involvement of Charitable and religious groups. That is,  in running the lives of the out-of-work. The days of Mr and Mrs Bountiful will return. And Mr Beadle.

    In Ipswich this would be an utter disaster. The Liberal-Tory administration has attacked public services: shut down local Housing Offices, closed the Film Theatre, closed Crown Pools Car Park, hived off work to ‘consultants’, threatens to shut a residence for homeless families, and is now privatising Ipswich buses. They refuse to deal properly with the needs of growing numbers of street sleepers. They  have made a Council funded Community Centre (largely dealing with the workless) into a ‘Trust’ with a dominant religious  and charity element on the Board.

    Their attitude to the poor is summed up by one leading Tory Councillor saying that their new ‘Community Centre’ in an old town Church (St Lawrence Centre) will “keep the riff raff out“.

    Put that lot in charge of the dole and we will be queuing at Charity soup kitchens in no time.

    More on Unemployed Campaigns, Ipswich Unemployed Action, here.

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    ‘Progressive’ London ? The Last Gasp of Popular Frontism.

    Posted in Britain, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left by Andrew Coates on January 29, 2010

    Last Gasp of Popular Frontism?

    This weekend there is a conference that calls itself ‘Progressive London’.

    It’s being held to set out the Progressive Agenda to Stop the Right in 2010.

    The background?

     
    Progressive London is a unique coalition, launched by Ken Livingstone, and involving people and views from across the political, cultural, community, generational and artistic spectrum, to promote the kinds of progressive policies which have made London such a success and a place where people from all walks of life and cultural backgrounds can be themselves and come together around common goals.

    Based on this,

    London is one of the most dynamic and exciting cities in the world. The basis of its recent success, creativity and prosperity has been its international openness, radical steps to protect the environment, respect for diverse cultures and traditions and the central role of public sector investment and public services in helping the city to work. 

    Rarely has so much wool been spun to cover a threadbare political programme. Progressive is a term that can be extended far. Though not so far as to clothe those who oppose a “dynamic and exciting” London,  have “no” respect for diverse cultures,  who dislike openness, and detest public services. Gotcha reactionaries!

    Speakers include (I cite one session on electoral reform):

    Jenny Jones AM, Leader, Green Group, London Assembly
    Mike Tuffrey AM, Leader, Liberal Democrat Group, London Assembly
    Neal Lawson, Chair, Compass
    Sunder Katwala, General Secretary, Fabian Society

    So from right-wing New Labour, to Liberals, via the Greens, and the centre left Compass, we have a gamut of ‘progressives’.

    Then we have a hefty gang of the religious-minded.
    Edie Friedman, Director, Jewish Council for Racial Equality
    Professor Tariq Ramadan (our old friend gets about doesn’t he?)
    Bruce Kent, Vice President, Pax Christi
    Mike Barnard, Uprise
    Wilf Sullivan, TUC Race Equality Officer
    • CHAIR: Murziline Parchment

    George Galloway MP, Harriet Harman MP, Ed Miliband MP, Jon Cruddas MP, Diane Abbott MP, Bairbre de Brún MEP, Sinn Féin, and his nibs, Ken Livingstone, will be speaking.

    Prominent members of secretive sect Socialist Action (John Ross for example) and fellow travellers, such  as Annie Marjoram, will be there to talk as well. Though in all fairness one should add that Martin Smith national organiser of the SWP will be there for a session of music and racism. And on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq there are prominent Communist Party of Britain supporters,  Andrew Murray, Chair, Stop the War Coalition and the  Chair, John Haylett, Political Editor, Morning Star

    Still some might suggest that Socialist Action have played a key part in setting the agenda.

    It is hard, if not impossible, to see any common agenda between such diverse people. Let’s leave aside religious fishers after souls, and dodgy groups like the Islamic Initiative. Or the Islamic Forum Europe, whose associate, Azad Ali is part of the session on There is no Progressive Imperialism. Ali is former Head of the Civil Service Islamic Society, closely associated with the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE)  and the East London Mosque (ELM) both of which are dominated by the Jamaat-e-Islam (the murderers of our beloved leftist Bangladeshi comrades).

    The Forum publishes gibberish like this (here),

    In order to be effective agents of change in the community, Islamic activists (duat) should take into consideration what may be termed as the ‘Diversity- and relationship – oriented empathy’ attitude towards da’wa and the people who are being called (mad’u). This, you may say, is more of a counselling psychologist approach, which was, without a doubt, the method employed by the Prophet when he interacted with other people.

    The central point is that there is nothing progressive (forward moving) about the agenda of New Labour. Never was. It was a reaction: it aimed to grab the centre-ground of politics. It went for Middle England. It continued the Tories’ plans to make the state a ‘market state’. It has privatised and kowtowed to the Finance that Livingstone thinks plays a major role in making London such a dynamic city.  It is making the lives of the workless a misery by Welfare ‘reform’. It has not promoted Trade Union Rights. The central problem of the left is to recreate a viable democratic socialist alternative to New Labour. So what do the Saturday Conference-goers  have to talk about?

    ONE SOCIETY, MANY CULTURESTHE COST OF WAR – AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ, TRIDENT. DEFENDING FRONT LINE SERVICES, BORIS JOHNSON MID-TERM – AND HOLDING THE MAYOR TO ACCOUNT, THERE IS NO PROGRESSIVE IMPERIALISM, STOPPING THE BNP – NO CONCESSIONS TO THE FAR RIGHT, WINNING THE ARGUMENT – NEW MEDIA AND THE ELECTION, WHY THE TORIES ARE NOT PROGRESSIVE,CAPITALWOMAN, HOMES AND PLANNING FOR LONDON’S FUTURE, A PROGRESSIVE AGENDA TO STOP THE RIGHT IN 2010,  CONFRONTING THE ECONOMIC CRISIS – INVESTMENT NOT CUTS KEEP LONDON MOVING – CUT FARES NOT INVESTMENT,TACKLING CLIMATE CHANGE AFTER COPENHAGEN, PR – PROGRESS THROUGH ELECTORAL REFORM?THE WAY FORWARD 

    All no doubt worthy topics.

    But not the slightest agenda setting programme. That is a serious break with New Labour, Neo-Liberalism, and the promotion of Communalism that many of the religious figures invited promote. A realistic set of proposals to fight unemployment, rebuild the Welfare state, promote equality and anti -racism (against multi-culturalism), to offer plans for social ownership and to claw back and extend working people’s rights. And on Welfare Reform, the single most regressive policy of the present government – silence, silence, silence. All is subordinated to the need to battle the Tories and the BNP. Any group or individual willing to do so, in classic ‘popular front’ style, is welcome to join in.

    The overwhelming impression (apart from being a vehicle of numerous personal ambitions) is of the lost huddling together to stay warm.

    Nothing at any rate remotely resembling the projects of Die Linke and the Front de Gauche.

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    Tariq Ali: Politics and Philosophy of Cant.

    Posted in Imperialism, Iran, Islamism, Obama, War by Andrew Coates on January 31, 2010

    Gentleman Anti-Imperialist.

    Tariq Ali is an anti-imperialist. In the latest New Left Review (Jan/February) (here) - just out – he writes about President Barak Obama (‘President of Cant’). One year after the election. “How has the American empire altered?” Results and Prospects. His focus? American foreign policy.

    US global strategy under Obama Ali notes, has a “continuity” with previous Presidents, from Reagan, Clinton to both Bushes. Despite humanitarian ”mood music” it remains about entrenching the power of the “American Empire”. Change, but remaining the same.

    The structure of this Imperial realm is broadly painted. We have an, often incisive, analysis of how US interests are upheld across the world. Notably in the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Obama stands accused of “sonorous banality and armour plated hypocrisy”. That is, his warm words about human rights and social justice cover - thinly - naked exercises in realpolitik and a drive for world hegemony.

    One would have liked discussion of what exactly the ‘interests’  in each case are. No doubt based on state power, resources, prestige, and markets. But it’s always niggled me that this can be used to explain any US policy going. Including say, the exact opposite of what Obama is doing. One wonders if there are some serious misjudgments being made in Afghanistan and Iraq. That betray not just human rights, but American ‘interests’ as well.

    In this instance Ali should have explained why Obama is pursuing the same basic strategy as his forerunners. What mix of lobbies, policy analysts, inner Presidential factions, Congress and Senate committees, is at work here. Where it is leading. Instead we have a ‘discourse anlaysis”. That “each address larded with every egregious euphemism that White House speech-writers can muster to describe America’s glowing mission in the world, and modest avowal of awe and sense of responsibility in carrying it forward.”

    But he does not go far into the material analysis of interests.

    Neverthless Ali describes the Allied occupation in Iraq with well-measured (and deserved) scorn. He attacks the Afghanistan client regime. American intervention in the labyrinth of Pakistani politics, and questions their heavy-handed attempt to force the country to crush domestic radical Islamists.  He doubts the US’s good faith in the Palestine-Israel conflict. He puts the sheer misery inflicted on the people in these lands  in the foreground. On Iran Ali cites the history of tacit co-operation between Tehran and Washington. He sketches the recent conflicts between the Islāmic republic and the US – from the nuclear issue to regional alliance. In short a complex jig-saw puzzle of different rivalries, regimes, and bloody disputes, is put together.

    So far so good. Ali is at his strongest in describing inter-sub continental conflicts. One has the feel of someone really grappling with the politics of Pakistan and its neighbours. Who is intimate with the details of its President ” infamous widower of Benazir Bhutto, Asif Zardari, a discredited crook.” Afghanistan under Kazari is a state for which words like  corruption and profiteering are too mild. The US presence is profoundly malign. Recent drives in the border zones (drone bombing for example) and across over to Pakistan itself,  are wreaking havoc. They are truly  ”destabilising another society in the interests of the American Empire.”

    But what are Ali’s philosophy and politics? What is his alternative?

    He bemoans the lack of “anti-imperialist solidarity” with Afghanistan, which would “weaken the system in it homelands.” That there a “Second Saigon is not in prospect”. That is, “No world-historical spectacle could be more welcome than the American proconsul feeling once again by helicopter from the roof of the embassy”. For all the resemblance with Vietnam (says he) this isn’t on the cards today.

    On Iran he opines that the present revolt stems from an attempt of the most “openly pro-Western  to take power on a  wave of (mostly) middle-class protest”. This “was supressed by an incumbant counterstrike that combined electoral fraud and militia violence”. He criticises the  opposition leadership as compromised with past repression. But nobody can ignore than for Ali “pro-Western” is not a compliment. Ali rages at Obama’s “ideological posturing” for expressing support for the Iranian protestors. Against his grief at Neda’ murder. ‘What about’ – the cheapest trick on the left – killings in the imperial domain? asks Ali. 

    I will resist the temptation to do my own “What abouts”.  Except one: what about backing the democratic opposition loudly and clearly Tariq?

     No doubt Ali is wrapped up in his conclusion, that Obama is looking to fail. That, “If the recent setbacks for Democrats in West Virginia and New Jersey—where Democratic voters stayed at home—become a pattern, Obama could be a third one-term President, abandoned by his supporters and mocked by those he tries so hard to conciliate.”

    Hold on. What about the foreign policy itself?

    This signals the underlying dilemma of the essay. In the lands where the US and its Allies are present we have the “Western occupation and its collaborators”. That there are those, throughly not ‘pro-Western’, who are ‘anti’ the Empire. They are the “resistance” – Iraqi above all. Ali can’t quite bring himself to give this tag to Afghanistan – he talks instead of “Afghan guerillas”, “reorganised neo-Taliban”. So, being opposed to the Empire is good. They are ‘anti-imperialists’. Brave chaps. Perhaps a little misguided on some  issues . However, Ali, probably sensibly if he wants to avoid upsetting his fragile ideology, does not go far into the nature of these ‘resistances’.

    For they are dyed-in-wool reactionaries.

    By minimising this Tariq Ali is as guilty of cant as any American President.

     

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    Iran: Number of Dissidents Threatened With Death Rises to 66.

    Posted in Free Speech, Iran, Iranian Resistance by Andrew Coates on February 1, 2010

    Iran on Thursday hanged two men for being ‘dissidents’ and for participating in protests that erupted over the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June last year. The appeals court upheld the preliminary sentence handed down to Reza Ali Zamani and Arash Rahmani Pour, who had also been charged with plotting to topple the Islamic government; the Tehran prosecutor told the media that they had belonged to the monarchist group Tondar. (Pakistani Newspaper Dawn here).

    The true scale of the repression is now emerging.

    Names of political prisoners condemned to death  (from here) :

     1 – Ali Saremi, 2- Ayub Porkar, 3 – Ahmad Karimi, 4 – Nasser Abdolhosseini 5 – Reza Khademi, 6 – Amir Reza Arefi 7 – Alireza Karami Khairabadi, 8 – Khaled Hardani, 9 – Abbas Deldar 10 – Farhad Vakili, Kurdistan : 11 – Zeinab Jalalian, 12 – Habibolah Latifi, 13 – Shirko Moarefi 14 – Farhad Vakili, 15 – Farzad Kamangar, 16 – Ali Heidarian, 17 – Hossein Khezri, 18 – Rashid AKhkandi, 19 – Mohammad Amin Agoshi, 20 – Ahmad Poladkhani, 21 – Sayed Sami Hosseini, 22 – Sayed Jamal Mohammadi, 23 – Rostam Arkia 24 – Mostafa Salimi, 25 – Anwar Rostami, 26 – Hassan Talei 27 – Iraj Mohammadi, 28 – Mohammad Amin Abdollahi 29 – Ghader Mohammad Zadeh, 30 – Shirin Elmhavi 31 – Adnan Hassanpour, 32 – Hava Botimar, 33 – Ramadan Ahmad (prison d’Ourmia, originaire du Kurdistan syrien) 34 – Farhad Chalesh, 35 – Sarhad Chalesh (militant politique du Kurdistan turc, prison de Zanjan Prison) 36 – Saeed Ramadan, (militant politique du Kurdistan de Syrie, prison de Qazvin) 37 – Hajar Ghaderi, 38 – Jahangir Baduzade Sistan-o-Balouchestan 39 – Abdul Rahman Naruee, 40 – Abed Gahram Zehi 41 – Abdoljalil Rigi 42 – Nasser Shebakhsh 43 – Mahmoud Rigi 44 – Ali Saedi, 45 – Valid Nisi 46 – Mahed Faradipoor 47 – Daer Mahavi, 48 – Maher Mahavi 49 – Ahmad Saedi, 50 – Yusuf Laftepoor Ahvaz 51 – Ovdeh Afravi 52 – Ali Reza Salman Delphi 53 – Ali Halfi 54 – Moslem Elhai 55 – Abdolreza Navaseri 56 – Yahya Naseri, 57 – Abdoliman Zaeri 58 – Nazim Berihi 59 – Abdolreza Haldchi 60 – Zaman Bavi 61 – Risan Savari, 62 – Leila Kaabi

    Reminder of Hands off the People of Iran Week of Solidarity. 13th – 20th of February – more information here.

    It is the duty of every Revolutionary to side with the Iranian democratic opposition.

     

    Let us remember this: Galloway Praising Iranian ‘Democracy’.

    Lutte Ouvrière: Front de Gauche Not Really Left.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Marxism, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on February 2, 2010

    The French Spring Regional Elections are important for the whole European left.

    A new sign of the Parti Socialiste’s problems is the ‘Frêche affair”. This former regional Socialist Leader,  an elderly loud-mouthed self-styled ‘bluff character’, was excluded from the party. But he still headed the Languedoc List with his former comrades (many of whom still like him). He  has now committed another gaffe. Saying  ex-PM Laurent Fabius has a “tronche pas très Catholique” (a mug not exactly Catholic). Fabius is of Jewish origin. The PS now is negotiating a separate list – rejecting Frêche’s outbursts as “incompatible with Republican values”.

    Meanwhile Lutte Ouvrière’s (LO)  take on the Front de Gauche (alliance of Communists, left socialists, Alternatives, left republicans, left Greens and democratic Trotksyists)  is largely critical (here).

    They describe the haggling, negotiations, and uneven presence of the Front de Gauche’s list. Its proposals, such as using ‘regional funds’ to boost employment, will lead, they argue, nowhere.  LO concludes that,

    “Rien donc qui puisse convaincre de l’ancrage à gauche de ce Front de gauche et de ses futurs élus dans les prochains Conseils régionaux. Rien surtout qui puisse ouvrir des perspectives aux luttes que les travailleurs devront mener pour ne pas faire les frais d’une crise dans laquelle les capitalistes les ont entraînés, avec pertes et fracas.”

    There is nothing here, therefore, that could convince us that Front de Gauche and those who will be elected,  are really anchored on the left. There is nothing that could open up the perspective of struggle that the workers must wage, to resist paying for the crisis. A crisis which the capitalists caused, with all its upsets and loses.

    In the 2008 municipal Elections Lutte Ouvrière participated in unitary left lists. In  69 cities and towns,  this was an alliance with the  Parti Communiste, the Parti Socialiste, or both. In a number of other districts they stood with other parties, such as the LCR (forerunner of Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste), Greens, left republicans, the Parti de Travailleurs (Lambertists), and the MRG (Centrist ‘Radical Left’). 

    Despite these criticisms LO has yet to make a public declaration on its voting recommendations for the crucial Second Round of these elections.

    LO has an independent take on the Trotskyist tradition. It has influence in some unions, and  a number of local councillors. Some accuse it of being a sect of ‘warrior monks’. An English language account of their history and politics is given here.

    Bella ciao, Iran

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance by Andrew Coates on February 3, 2010

    It is the Duty of Every Revolutionary to Support the Iranian Democratic Opposition.

    Cherie Blair: Religious People More Equal than Others.

    Posted in Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on February 4, 2010

    Best Way to Appear in Court.

    It’s becoming more and more obvious that religious people think they have special rights. More than anyone else. Here is the Cherie Booth (Or Blair) in action:

    A secularist group has lodged an official complaint against Cherie Booth QC after she spared a man from prison because he was religious.

    Shamso Miah, 25, of Redbridge, east London, broke a man’s jaw following a row in a bank queue.

    Sitting as a judge, Ms Booth – wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair – said she would suspend his sentence on the basis of his religious belief.

    Miah – who had just been to a mosque – punched Mr Furcan inside the bank, and again outside the building.

    Ms Booth told Miah that violence had to be taken seriously, but said she would suspend his prison sentence because he was a religious person and had not been in trouble before.

    She added: “You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour.”

    More here. The Group complaining is the National Secular Society here.

    Get religion, get your own legal system!

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    Pornography and the Left: Angela Carter’s Sadeian Woman.

    Posted in Feminism, Free Speech by Andrew Coates on February 5, 2010

    Pornography and Left: A Retrospective on The Sadeian Woman. Angela Carter. Virago. 2006 (1979)

    Close to the live debate on Prostitution, lies the more muted feminist discussion of pornography. In the background of arguments about the sex-trade are issues about the commercialisation of obscenity. Or rather, “Any violation of a woman’s body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.” (Intercourse. Andrea Dworkin. 1987). In this “occupied territory” surely the pornographic writer is the bureaucratic lackey recording the tortures of its victims. Selling sexual pleasure is only part of a mass-producing industry that reaches the top shelves of the local newsagents. Nobody can doubt that the presence of sexuality, commercially or individually express, sold, consumed, or bound up with gender politics, remains an unresolved issue. Except that is for puritans whose hostile answers are ready-made.

    Here we reach a problem that has faced feminists since the late 1970s. Debates continue about sexuality, and oppression, over masculinity and femininity, over LGBT topics, and about their cultural, and economic basis. In this instance the clash between anti-pornography feminists, and those who back libertarian sexual pleasures, those for and those opposed to censorship (sex-positive feminists), has drifted away from argument about the content of the material, to concentrate on the business.

    In a sense the terms of debate have not advanced much since the William’s Report (1980) and working out degrees of public protection from “obscenity” and assessing what should be considered “private”. Williams’ concern with pornography was that it crossed this line, by making picture of intimate acts visible. The worries about its accessibility and half and unwilling consumption has increased today with the deluge of images present on the Web. Not to mention the Net’s threat to post-Williams legislation restricting its consumption. Rules restricting sales of certain types of porn to sex shops, or preventing under-age buyers, appear unstable faced with computer access.

    Anti-prostitution campaigners also underline the changing nature of the sex-industry. There are allegations of trafficking and near-slavery, as well as increased availability (via the same Internet, and local advertising), which the law can legislate against. Those supporting decriminalisation regard it as a private affair, (choice) but agitate for labour rights and the legal protection of those engaged in this activity. Both issues are normally talked about in terms of choice, privacy, and the scope of public regulation. Or the people involved in the commerce. Not through a take on the activities themselves.

    Angela Carter (1940 – 1992) did look at this, in terms of culture and relations between men and women (she barely touches on the Lesbian Gay Bi-sexual Trans-sexual field). Most of us know, and revere her fiction but the author of Nights at the Circus’s writing ranged much wider. In The Sadeian Woman (originally published 1979) she thought long and hard about pornography and its connections with sexuality. The centre of this book is pornography’s most radical producer, the Marquis de (post-French revolution – Citizen) Sade (1740 – 1814). His portraits of diverse sexual acts are often difficult to stomach – far from the erotic – but well worth considering for their insights. As Sade is at present rather an academic taste, it involves looking at some pretty abstract ideas to get a handle on what he said, while attempting to relate them to these topics. (more…)

    Strange Days Indeed. Francis Wheen. Review.

     

    Strange Days Indeed. Francis Wheen. Fourth Estate. 2009.

    An Essay On Francis Wheen’s ‘Seventies. 

    Francis Wheen burst into public view with a scandalous biography of gay Labour MP, Tom Driberg,  (1905 – 1976) “Poet, Philanderer, Legislator and Outlaw.” To the left he made his name with Karl Marx a Life (1999), a splendid study of Marx “the man”. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (2004) defended the Enlightenment against “holy warriors, anti-scientific relativists, fundamentalists, radical post modernists, New Age mystics or latter-day Chicken Lickens..” Wheen’s Marx’s Das Kapital, a Biography (2006) managed the almost impossible task of making intelligible a book that resembles a “vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created.” It is not everyone’s taste that the author-journalist associates with Nick Cohen and the view that ‘the left’ is menaced by ‘totalitarianism’. But, as a fellow Suffolk dweller, he has a lot of other things on his side. Wit to begin with.

    Strange Days Indeed, is about “the most distant of times” the 70s. It was, he claims, a “golden age of Paranoia.” Years no-one would want to revisit. Dominated by “apocalyptic dread and conspiratorial fever”. Suspicion and fear seeped from heads of State, from Richard Nixon to Harold Wilson, to society at large. Conspiracy thrillers, such as the Parallax View, Pynchon’s novels and the Illuminatus! Trilogy (read by nearly everyone I knew when it was published), were wildly popular. The “frustration” of everyday life ratcheted up the tension. With secret agencies, bugging and infiltrating subversives, and politicians plotting in concealed cabals. In Britain there was talk of an authoritarian national government, military coups and building private armies to crush the left and unions. A decade when the bearers of the ‘60s counter-culture and the left were met with steady hostility and open repression.

    This hatred often meant moral panic. Wheen has fun with the absurdity of the 1971 prosecution of Oz magazine for its School Kids issue. Written by a guest team of teenagers one of its greatest crimes was to re-paste a Robert Crumb cartoon with Rupert Bear, carrying a huge erection. The charge? “Conspiracy to corrupt public morals or outrage public decency”. They must have had a point about corruption – I still have a copy, bought when I was at Secondary School. I got my first political kicking from a guardian of decency (Salvation Army) when we OZ supporters tried to disrupt a Festival of Light March.

    Much of Strange Days Indeed is devoted to high politics as they descended low. Of Wilson, MI5, Nixon, the CIA, Watergate, and the hideous twists of Mao’s China’s Mass Line. The Great Helmsman was plainly filled with violence and rancour, a scourge of ‘class’ enemies, and the sponsor of a Court that pursued their own ‘Marxist’ ultra-nationalist vendettas. The Chairman’s wife, Jiang Qing, was “afraid of sounds and strangers”, and devoted to her own “sadistic omnipotence”. Elsewhere there were the Russian ‘years of stagnation” during which dissidents were imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals. There are chapters on the FBI, the CIA and the fraught relations during Harold Wilson Premiership with his own secret services.

    The Left, Wheen observes, shifted towards its own clandestine practice. There was a great deal of romantic fantasy about guerrilla warfare, which moved from rural foci to urban insurrection. Some, “convinced the revolution had begun” in 1968, moved from “street theatre” to fanaticism. Redoubling the effort while losing sight of any objective, they struck a pose, and descended into a hallucinatory parody of “revolutionary action”. Some launched their underground schemes, from the Baader-Meinhof Band (RAF), the Brigate Rosse,  the Angry Brigade, to more substantial metropolitan and rural guerrilla movements in Latin America, the South, East and South Asia. It was a decade when “the cities of the non-Communist world were alive with the sounds of explosions and police sirens.” Other far-left groups engaged in strident demonstrations and violent class struggle. The state responded in kind. Wheen fails to mention (if he even is familiar with this) in any real detail the tortuous history of the most important in Europe, Italian militarist leftist groups, notably the Brigate Rosse (surely the most serious case of wild, often justified, paraonia around). They quickly began to spiral into dubious actions, and mutual suspicion, no doubt aided by secret service manipulation.

    Domestically, it is not the still influential Communist Party of Great Britain that gets much mention in Strange Days. Nor a great deal on industrial left-led militancy. There are pages on the Miners’ strikes in 1973 (the Battle of Saltley Gate – mass picketing), the Three Day Week (1973 – 4), and the ‘Winter of Dicontent’ . Nor are other working class rooted lefts examined. The largish leftist group, International Socialists, which lost its main Midlands industrial base in this period, is not seriously covered. . As it  became the Socialist Workers Party,  a ‘demoncratic centralist’ organisation, it set down hysterical and opportunist political norms which continue to have an impact on the left to this day.

    Instead we get a tour of exotica. After the gestural neo-Situationist Angry Brigade, it is the antics of Gerry Healy’s much smaller Workers Revolutionary Party, and the even smaller International Marxist Group (IMG) that grab Wheen’s attention. The former, leader a “squat bullet-headed thug” considered the collapse of capitalism imminent. He bullied his way through the cadres and raped female members. The IMG, he considers, had different faults, political ones. They “drooled” over a wide range of guerrillas and supported the Provisional IRA (the correct formula here is “unconditionally but critically”).

    It is true that while on this path the group found time to “lionise” some ‘heroes’ of very dubious dramas (echoing in reality, the enthusiasms of the Parisian left). * But this soon shifted. Perhaps the “reluctance” to take up arms was a sign of self-indulgence – though personally I would not have liked to end up like former Red Brigade members in exile, with unclean hands, brimming with mutual rancour. But if so, the gourmets of vicarious revolutions had other dishes to feast on. The IMG’s Fourth International thought in terms of a European ‘new mass vanguard’ of students and employees. They anticipated an “explosion of mass struggle” and “dual power” In Britain this was focused on calls for a General Strike. The IMG’s best-known public face (though far from its formal leader) Tariq Ali, Wheen observes, predicted workers’ Soviets across Europe in the decade. But then Tariq Ali later considered that Boris Yeltsin was a going to prove a good democratic socialist….

    Drawn by the romance of armed struggle and individuals such as Ulrike Meinhof Wheen only briefly sketches the real mass uprising in Portugal during 1974. After post-Corporate Dictator Caetano Portugal a quasi-insurrectional landscape developed. The Carnation Revolution, as Tariq Ali predicted, saw near-Soviets in the Portuguese factories. This was not to last. Although, by contrast, land occupations endured years in the central Communist regions around Evora. The confused politics of the Revolution (including a counter-strike against an alleged Communist coup) soon ended in a stabilised country aligned to NATO, not the Warsaw Pact. As an activist in the original Portuguese-led Solidarity campaign, one began to get a sense of the importance of large-scale movements rather than striking personalities, or intense political factions. This, for many of us, signalled the route that much of the radical left would take in the coming years – away from Che Guevara and back to broader democratic socialist organisations. Such a turn, like the principal issues that dominated far-left activism during the decade – the rebirth of the Labour left as ‘Bennism’, and the large-scale violent street fighting with the National Front – get ignored in Strange Days. Though apparently he did go to a Rock Against Racism concert.

    In pursing radical performance Wheen ventures into other areas he is not genuinely familiar with. To him the self-dissolution of the French Gauche Prolétarienne (GP) in 1974 was linked to disgust at the 1972 Black September Munich Olympics Massacre. This may have played a, delayed, part. But it was much more the result of enduring rancour at their 1972 witch-hunt against alleged killer of Brigette Dewevre (a miner’s daughter) at Bruay-en-Artois. A part of France that resembles the bleakest English proletarian North. The Maos called for the castration and lynching of the alleged murderer, a Notary, and Rotary Club notable, Pierre Leroy. Prominent GP members who protested at this hysteria were dismissed as “vipers”. A woman amongst them was called by the future Editor of Libération, Serge July, “the daughter of a bourgeois”, “afraid of seeing your father’s head on a pike”. Despite this certainty the case has yet to be solved.

    The dissolution of the GP left many different legacies. What happened to its former supporters as the decade wore on? Wheen cites André Glucksman, as an emblematic leftist intellectual of the ’68 generation. He was a leading activist, not a leader. But his career is of interest. It shows something of the ‘70s Strange Days passes over. Glucksman had begun to drift from Marxism in 1972. He was heavily influenced by Solzehenitsyn, defending the “plèbe” (plebs) against class based Leninism. Another figure was Benny Lévy (‘Victor’). He, rather more central to the GP, was Sartre’s secretary – which explains the ties between them and the ageing Existentionalist. The strong reservations felt by Simone de Beauvoir (in La Cérémonie des adieux) about Sartre’s relationship with the ‘Maos’ stem largely from Lévy’s unbounded – changing – enthusiasms.

    Glucksman, and Lévy, were, by the end of the decade fierce opponents of the Union of the Left, and increasingly of the “actually existing left” as such. The former became associated with the ‘nouvelle philosophie’ (which saw totalitarianism in Marx himself). During its heyday 1976- 77, he was linked with media celebrity Bernard Henri Lévy (whose leftist phase was much briefer). Glucksman’s more recent backing for Sarkozy was rewarded last year with the Légion d’Honneur. In another direction, Sartre’s aide, Benny Lévy became a student of the Torah and descended into obscurity. Not everyone became a renegade to the left. A part of the GP went into mass movements (such as the supporters of the mid-70s Lip Watch-making factory occupation). Individual former GPers have continued in leftist campaigns to this day. Yet others became highly respectable. Serge July became a 1980s ‘social liberal’ who enthused about quasi-Blairite modernisation in the formerly leftist, Libération. ** A small fraction went on to become real terrorists, in the 1980s Action Directe. To explain these careers would need a lot more than any tale about the consequences of leftist ‘paranoia’. Though the New Philosophers certainly tended (and tend) to see the threat of the Gulag behind any left-wing movement.

    There are unfortunately many other flaws in the book. Most of the history and the anecdotes are known to all who care to read (On Mao, see Simon Leys, writing in the 70s, well before Chang and Halliday, on the Soviet Union, Zhores and Roy Medvedev – whom he cites). The US President’s equal opportunities bigotry and psychological blemishes are as notorious as Homer Simpson’s love of Duff. Wilson’s PM years, his fear of intelligence agencies, and his ‘fat spider’ and ‘blind beggar’ stage, are so well known they are practically in dictionaries of quotations. And the history of the 70’s left, including its flirtation with ‘armed struggle’ has been done to death – on the RAF and the far left. In France a cottage industry regularly publishes weighty tomes on the post-68 radicals. Many of whom are still around. Little is “distant” or “strange” here. Nor is Wheen’s main thesis of much solidity: there is never any indication that the ‘paranoia’ evoked came anywhere near, to mention the obvious, other historical waves of pathological suspicion – take that of the Great Terror in 1930s USSR.

    Strange Days, then, lacks investigative depth. No doubt there is much to say from the vantage point of the New Statesman during the decade. But it was not a good listening post from which to gather material for the ambitious story, englobing such a wide political spectrum, and real movements that he attempts. Wheen’s fleeting encounter with the ‘alternative society’ came at its alleged end. Though I can recall squats and flats in London that still flew this flag up to the end of the decade. He does not appear to have read accounts of how some from this trend, far from becoming obsessed with ‘changing themselves’, ultra-violence, or ‘them’, got involved in the serious left precisely during the ‘70s. There is next to nothing about how feminism engaged with of the left. Sheila Rowbotham and Lynne Segal’s revealing autobiographical writings illustrate the real transition from the ‘underground’ to socialist feminism are absent. Their Beyond the Fragments with Hilary Wainwright,  summed up the development of their, and the next, generation. There is nothing on the growing influence of Marxism – however transient – on the intelligentsia.  The work of Stuart Hall, who examined the rising star of Free-marketeers, and the ‘Great moving Right show”  that led to Thatcher’s ’authoritarian populsim’, does not shine on Wheen’s horizon. Nor, as we already mentioned, is there much on the growth of  the Labour Left and the radical left’s engagement with the labour movement.

    Still, Wheen has some perceptive observations (as an essay marker would say). Give me time and I’ll recall them. As someone who participated in the left during the decade, I would like to be able to say that I never fell for the romance of violent revolution. But I can’t. All one can observe is that it was force of circumstance that drew us away from conspiracies, real or imagined, and into democratic left politics.

    Whatever. This is a world far from today’s “fusion paranoia”. This thesis about the 70s can only bear so much. In a much more limited way the concept has been put to good use by David Aaronovitch – Voodoo History indeed. It certainly stands good when applied to the various Truth Campaigners worrying like dogs over the bones of 9/11 victims. But Wheen stretches his argument too far – and the famous humour cannot cover what is a rather thin dish of gruelling effort. That is, an attempt to squeeze a complex world into a theory rather than to test it. Rather similar to conspiracy theorising in fact.

    * On the IMG’s mentor, the Fourth International (USFI), and its flirtation with Latin American ‘armed struggle’ see Ernest Mandel. Jon Willem Stuje. 2009. Pages 186 – 192.

    ** A very amusing polemical book by the pioneering gay activist Guy Hocquenghem summarised some time back the developing careers of many former ’68 revolutionaries in this vein, Lettre ouverte à ceux qui sont passés du col Mao au Rotary.  1986.

    Strange Days Indeed

    Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste “has failed”.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on February 7, 2010

    An Effect Effectively Ending.

    French March Regional Elections: NPA Faces an Impasse. Here.

    (Summary and explanations) According to the most recent opinion polls,  the NPA will get 3,5% of the votes in the French March Regional Elections, barely more than Lutte ouvrière (3%), against 6% for the Front de Gauche.

    Political historian Stéphane Courtois says,  ”they wanted to believe in a broader party, but everyone has realised that they have only repackaged the LCR. . The presence of a candidate wearing the veil on the  list of Vaucluse, which has been attacked by nearly all the other political parties, will not help. “The LCR always had a feminist image, and this will tarnish it. I consider this will create a problem for them.”

    Olivier Bescanenot’s star is waning. As a media favourite he has been overtaken by Daniel Cohen-Bendit. Without this publicity, his lack of serious prospects becomes more evident. He has  no real political strategy for the elections, or the prospect of bringing concrete change about. The NPA is caught between the Greens and the Parti de Gauche (part of the Front de Gauche). To the left electorate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Front de Gauche) appears “more constructive” than the “sterile” revolutionary vote.

    Bescancenot has failed to debate with Mélenchon.

    The NPA is unable to decide on what to present nationally in the ballot box. They have entered into alliances with otehr left and Green groups. In 15 regions they are pesenting their own lists, in 3 they co-operate with the Parti de Gauche, and 3 others with the both the PG and the Parti Communiste Français.

    The case of the veiled NPA candidate Ilham Moussaid continues to make waves.

    To Olivier Besancenot, “on peut être féministe , laique et voilée…” One can be a feminist, secularist and veiled.

    This claim – to begin with why is veil not worn by men? and if one is a secularist why does one want to assert one’s religious beliefs in every public place – has been met with derision on the rest of the left

    Vaucluse  : le NPA présente une candidate voilée 

    Meanwhile Jean-Luc Mélenchon has criticsed the NPA for its promotion of a veiled candidate here.

    “cette jeune femme est une très bonne militante. Mais si elle a une conscience politique, c’est sur le terrain politique que ça doit se jouer, avec des arguments. La religion est du domaine de la vérité révélée. On ne peut pas débattre de ce qui relève de la vérité révélée.

    This young woman is a very good activist. But if she has political awareness, it’s on the political terrain that this should be worked out, with arguments. Religion is the domain of revealed truth. One cannot debate with assertions of revealed truth.

    On the NPA he says,

    Ils se saisissent de tous les moyens pour creuser le fossé, pour se différencier de nous qui sommes d’une gauche laïque, d’une gauche qu’ils savent à cheval sur les principes.
     
    They are grabbing every means of deepening the division, to distinguish themselves from the secular left, a left stands for our principles.
     
    Put simply the NPA backs the veil for sectarian advantage. As the prospect of building a broad, vibrant, left out of the LCR and a thin layer of new recruits, recedes, they are turning to the multiculturalism of the British Socialist Action, George Galloway, and Ken Livingstone. This alliance with religious ‘progressivism’ is leading nowhere in the UK. In France, from the left,  it may be electoral suicide. 
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    Amnesty Suspends Gita Sahgal.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Human Rights, Islamism by Andrew Coates on February 8, 2010

    Statement by Gita Sahgal – on many Blogs.

     Hat Tip Stroppy.

    7 February 2010This morning the Sunday Times published an article about Amnesty International’s association with groups that support the Taliban and promote Islamic Right ideas. In that article, I was quoted as raising concerns about Amnesty’s very high profile associations with Guantanamo-detainee Moazzam Begg. I felt that Amnesty International was risking its reputation by associating itself with Begg, who heads an organization, Cageprisoners, that actively promotes Islamic Right ideas and individuals.

    Within a few hours of the article being published, Amnesty had suspended me from my job.

    A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when a great organisation must ask: if it lies to itself, can it demand the truth of others? For in defending the torture standard, one of the strongest and most embedded in international human rights law, Amnesty International has sanitized the history and politics of the ex-Guantanamo detainee, Moazzam Begg and completely failed to recognize the nature of his organisation Cageprisoners.

    The tragedy here is that the necessary defence of the torture standard has been inexcusably allied to the political legitimization of individuals and organisations belonging to the Islamic Right.

    I have always opposed the illegal detention and torture of Muslim men at Guantanamo Bay and during the so-called War on Terror. I have been horrified and appalled by the treatment of people like Moazzam Begg and I have personally told him so. I have vocally opposed attempts by governments to justify ‘torture lite’.

    The issue is not about Moazzam Begg’s freedom of opinion, nor about his right to propound his views: he already exercises these rights fully as he should. The issue is a fundamental one about the importance of the human rights movement maintaining an objective distance from groups and ideas that are committed to systematic discrimination and fundamentally undermine the universality of human rights. I have raised this issue because of my firm belief in human rights for all.

    I sent two memos to my management asking a series of questions about what considerations were given to the nature of the relationship with Moazzam Begg and his organisation, Cageprisoners. I have received no answer to my questions. There has been a history of warnings within Amnesty that it is inadvisable to partner with Begg. Amnesty has created the impression that Begg is not only a victim of human rights violations but a defender of human rights. Many of my highly respected colleagues, each well-regarded in their area of expertise has said so. Each has been set aside.

    As a result of my speaking to the Sunday Times, Amnesty International has announced that it has launched an internal inquiry. This is the moment to press for public answers, and to demonstrate that there is already a public demand including from Amnesty International members, to restore the integrity of the organisation and remind it of its fundamental principles.

    I have been a human rights campaigner for over three decades, defending the rights of women and ethnic minorities, defending religious freedom and the rights of victims of torture, and campaigning against illegal detention and state repression. I have raised the issue of the association of Amnesty International with groups such as Begg’s consistently within the organisation. I have now been suspended for trying to do my job and staying faithful to Amnesty’s mission to protect and defend human rights universally and impartially.

    ***********

    Gita is a member of Women Against Fundamentalism and Southall Black Sisters. She is a truly wonderful person – a principled activist. Her defence of secular values led her to be one of the first to stand up for Salman Rushdie against the Islamist ‘Fatwa’. She wrote about this in the Socialist Society Magazine of the time – Interlink. I wrote a companion piece. (Details here) I shall never forget her shaking my hands at a meeting and thanking me for my support.

     

    All true anti-racists and supporters of human rights should stand by her side. Against the disgrace of Amnesty International.

     

    Face Book Group here.

    Bernard-Henri Lévy Admits Error.

    Posted in Culture, French Politics, Philosophy by Andrew Coates on February 9, 2010

    New Philosophers’ Must-Read.

    Bernard-Henri Lévy has recognised unwittingly using a spoof philosopher in his latest book,  “De la guerre en philosophie”  (On War in Philosophy) (Here.  - French). (News in English here).

    The crumbled crumb made this gaffe by citing a fictional  Jean-Baptiste Botul (15 august 1896, Lairière - 15 august 1947, Lairière) (here) . In all the earnest gravitas the author of Barbarism with a Human Face could muster.

    No doubt the title of Botul’s magnum opus, The Sexual life of Immanuel Kant, was enough to draw in BHL. Plus, it was rude about one the greatest philosophers of all time…

    What larks we had, Benny, what larks!

    List of BHL’s works that contain mistakes, false information and common-old-garden lies:

  • Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution, 1973 (réédité sous le titre Les Indes rouges 1985)
  • La Barbarie à visage humain,Grasset, 1977,ISBN 2-246-00498-5 (more…)
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    Gita Saghal: ‘Anti-Imperialists’ Reply By Bullying.

    Posted in Colonialism, Feminism, Free Speech, Human Rights, Islamism by Andrew Coates on February 10, 2010

    No to ‘Anti-Imperialist’ Bullies.

    Gita Saghal’s suspension from Amnesty International continues to create waves. Anyone wanting to follow the details can get more information from the Support Site: Human Rights for all (here).

    Noteworthy is the unrestrained bullying of her critics. Gita has been called a member of a “nutty group, Women Against Fundamentalisms” and a crank (here). The ever-so sane Bob Pitt who wrote this, ex-member of a well known highly mentally stable group, the Workers’ revolutionary Party, is not alone.  

    Others are calling us lot “anti-imperialists lite” and, more commonly, pro-imperialists tout court. Stroppy, another uppity woman, has got it in the neck for her support for Gita.

    The prize for intellectual confusion goes to Andy Newman of Socialist Unity who criticises Gita Saghal (here) on the grounds that she fails to respect religious morality,

    for religious people, their ethical and moral viewpoint is part of who they are, because it derives from a code of values which they believe comes from an authority higher than man made laws. What we cannot do as atheists is assume that the evolution of moral and ethical viewpoints within our own society can be regarded as a superior standard that other people must comply with. Nor can these values be simply private questions of belief, as they have practical consequences for how people organise child rearing, probate, divorce, etc.

    Furthermore, Gita’s stand,

    effectively amounts to an endorsement of Western liberalism as being a superior set of values which if necessary must be allowed to overrule the rights of others.”

    At least there are no insults. It’s just that we cannot be right by asserting ‘Western liberalism’s superiority’. It is down there on all fours with any ‘legal’ code on the planet. Just a plural set of options. 

    This links, falsely, two separate things. Firstly, Andy Newman claims that moral and ethical views evolve  (is this not a tautology?) from different contexts. Societies, religions, cultures. Secondly, that because of this no-one ‘in’ such a society can regard their standards as “super standard” for other lands, faiths, ideologies and, no doubt,  tastes.

    This reminds me of an episode of Angel (spin off from Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

    A group of demons about to sacrifice someone and eat his brains are stopped by the Vampire with a Soul. “Racist” they cry at him. “This is our custom – you have no right to stop us.”

    Yes, Andy Newman, says, eat his brains!

    The whole point of ethical systems by contrast is to make universal claims. Otherwise they are not moralities but mores – customs. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is just that. Universal.

    Gita Saghal  stands under this banner.

     

    Unlike those who think that Islamist bullies have special rights.

    Tagged with:

    Lindsey German and the Trotskyist Tradition.

    Posted in Left, SWP, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on February 11, 2010

    Some Red Knight for the SWP.

    On the resignation of prominent SWPer Lindsey German  there is an abudance of commentary. Personally I think she did it on a day that would make it too late to appear in the Weekly Worker. Phil has posted a good summary- more here.

    What does this say about the ability of Trotskyist groups to tolerate differences?

    In the New Course (1923 – here on-Line), protesting against the  Bolshevik Party ‘monolithicism’ Trotsky tried to get to grips with the problem of democracy.

    He wrote,

    “If factions are not wanted, there must not be any permanent groupings; if permanent groupings are not wanted, temporary grouping must be avoided; finally, in order that there be no temporary groupings, there must be no differences of opinion, for wherever there are two opinions, people inevitably group together.”

    The fate of German’s Left Platform in the SWP – allowed (just) for a brief period before their national conference – is clearly a case of how this logic works. We await John Rees to express his own “different opinion’”.  A short way to becoming “not wanted”.

    No doubt then we will learn more about what is really at stake. At present we have just snipes, and curt rudeness.

    Trotsky was really only arguing for an element of discussion. John Molyneau of the SWP claims   (here)  that the “Leninist democratic centralist party is both necessary for the success of the revolution and the most democratic form of political organisation”.

    Yet Trotsky never accepted the need for full inner-party freedom. In 1923 he buckled. Caught in a  contradiction between the need to agree on One ‘line’, and ‘implement’ it, and the day-to-day clashes of different views, he opted for the primacy of the former.

    The Founder of the Fourth International remained hostile to ‘factionalism’ and the need for ‘unity’. Even if, in the 1930s, he came to accept an element of internal party democracy - and even socialist democracy (limited to socialists that is) in a future Workers’ State. This ambiguous  legacy has profoundly influenced the tradition that the SWP stems from.

    Molyneau notes (rightly) the pressure of how mainstream party and business organisation influences left groups. He asserts however that, “ democratic pressure from below is all the stronger in a small far-left socialist party, even if it remains overtly passive, because (a) the leaders are plainly not motivated by desire for material privilege, there being none on offer (though sometimes the desire to maintain material security may be a factor); (b) the rank and file are motivated overwhelmingly by conviction; and(c) it is not difficult for them to vote with their feet and leave.”

    Perhaps they are doing just that now. But what about posing the question of the freedom of tendencies? Molyneau - unlike German and her partner John Rees, sees some merit in the LCR/Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste’s practice of internal liberty for ‘actions’. It might be that this norm has something to teach the British left – the split of the Piquet tendency (Gauche Unitaire) had none of the Left Platform’s  drawn out drama. In some regions the NPA even co-operates with the GU in the Front de Gauche. Surely this is Rees’ famous ‘united front’ in practice.

    More fundamentally we have to recognise that all politics involves potential stasis – upsetting, challenging, subverting, existing rulers, central committees, leaderships. Turbulence, in short. Or more simply, efforts at policy change. The SWP is tearing itself apart by not having a way of letting this happen in a democratic arena.

    The leader of German’s Left Platform, JohnRees deserves no sympathy since his own conception of the Party – derived from the early György Lukács mixed with Trotksy’s most centralist writings  - is hostile to such a  democratic forum. For those who follow this line the Party is the bearer of proletarian consciousness, that pierce to the ‘actuality’ of the revolution through its ‘epistemological’ mechanisms. Disagreements simply get in the way.

    As German clearly was and is.

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    Baroness Tonge and the Paranoid Style in British Politics.

    Posted in Conspiracies, Liberal Democrats, Racism by Andrew Coates on February 13, 2010

    Tonge Takes a Nap.

    Following her remarks about Israeli ‘organ traficking’ in Haiti, Baroness Tonge, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Health in the House of Lords, as been sacked. Party leader Nick Clegg has “apologised” for Tonge’s claims.  The BBC reports,

    Jenny Tonge told the Jewish Chronicle there should be an inquiry into claims that Israeli troops sent there after the earthquake were trafficking organs.

    Nick Clegg said the comments were “wrong, distasteful and provocative” and dismissed her from her post.

    He said she apologised “unreservedly” for any offence she had caused.

    The peer is a patron of the news website, the Palestine Telegraph, which printed the allegations.

    It claimed that members of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), sent to help with the humanitarian effort after Haiti’s devastating quake, were selling human organs.

     

    More from the BBC here.

    Tonge said in 2006: “The pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the western world, its financial grips. I think they’ve probably got a grip on our party.”

     Hofstadter, in the Paranoid Style in American Politics stated, (here).

    So the Liberal Democrats are in the ‘grip’ (by the throat?) of the Israel ‘Lobby’ . No further explanation is needed. nor indeed of its “financial grip” leading to ripping out the internal organs of dead or dying Haitians. Though she ‘apolgsies’ for causing offence – notably not for the assertions she made.

    Tonge stands in a broad international tradition. In a famous Essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Hofstadter described the extreme US right of the 1950s as in the grip of paranoid fantasies. Amongst his description of this cast of mind is this,

    The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.

    Tonge clearly holds a lot more ill-will about Israel, Zionism more than she will say publicly. It is a long-standing Tendance Coatesy principle that people in positions of authority with ‘controversial’ views say a watered down version of what they really believe. But then that’s not paranoia, just common sense prudence. Tonge crawls pretty low even in this field, by making claims about Israelis profiting from Haitian misery. But there you go.

    David Aaraonovitch in Voodoo Histories (2009) observes the rise in “conspiracy theorising”. That is those who consider they have contact with the “underlying universe” who “understand” what is “really” going on. He notices, rightly, that today this way of thinking exists amongst the educated as well as the traditional US-style know-nothings. But Aaarnovitch thinks that this “projection of paranoia” is the mark of the “politically defeated” the “causalities of politics, society..” Those who are “impotent.”

    This may be the case for the Palestinians Tonge cites. Or even the Islamists she is close to. But is her condition really the result of the pathetic failure of her party to make any impact on British politics? For sure, as permanent oppositonists, the Liberal Democrats have a reptuation for attracting eccentrics – that is nutters. It would not be hard to find others with the same opinions – no doubt wider, there will be doubtless further calls for an investigation into these allegations. It is to be expected that some  ’anti-imperialists’ will endorse her demand for an ‘enquiry’ – and if goes the wrong way they’ll have more ‘proof’ of their ideas.

    Or maybe this is part of a wide revival of anti-Semitism. A more formidable ideology than, say, the American paranoid style of the 1950s. One with a political agenda, to racialise political scapegoating, with deep roots in the far-right. That seems a better area to look for an explantion.

    Socialist Campaign to Stop the Tories and Fascists: Some Friendly Comments.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservatives, European Left, Labour Government, Labour Movement, Labour Party by Andrew Coates on February 15, 2010

    Yet Again and Again: Without Illusions?

    As the General Election approaches there are many calls from the left. They include favoured Candidates.That is boosterism for a handful of left-leaning Greens and communalists (Respect – continuity). Or, out of sheer desperation, celebrations of ‘progressivism’ around watery ’social democratic’ wish lists. 

    Still, there are more serious appeals. Amongst the latter there is the on-going Campaign  for a New Workers’ Party (Socialist Party led), the Socialist Campaign group of Labour MPs. The one with some ideas about a new left organisation – which remains to be defined. The other, with a strategy of bolstering what remains of the Labour left. Neither is wrong – I would back both. But they hardly have much of a real base of support.

    The issue is, do we vote Labour or not?

    The prospect of a future Tory Government is concentrating minds wonderfully. ” The choice of government at the general election will be between Labour and the Tories. All the current signs point to a Tory victory” .The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty notes.

    Their call- SOCIALIST CAMPAIGN TO STOP THE TORIES AND FASCISTS - should be included in the ‘serious’ category (Site of Campaign here, debate in Shiraz Socialist here).

    They observe that,

    There are now, for the first time in many years, real policy differences between Labour and the Tories.

    That,  union support will, in these conditions, remain wedded to Labour. But,

    There is mass working-class disillusionment with New Labour – rightly. Now we need a “Socialist Campaign to Stop the Tories”which will organise rank and file trade union activists and organisations to link a Labour vote with a positive campaign.

    Furthermore,

    There is no chance of the outside-Labour left having a sizeable and concentrated presence in the general election.To create better choices, we need a campaign across the country to provide a working-class voice within the Labour vote at the general election. That is the best way to start organising for a labour movement fightback against a coming Tory government – or against the cuts and privatisations of another Brown government.

    This is a fair, broad-brush, analysis.

    t is important, nevertheless, to add, that a ‘socialist campaign’ cannot have much impact on Labour itself. Not for want ot popular sympathy (though yet another campaign?….). There are more basic reasons. The internal organisation of the Party now consists of a series of formidable buffers against left-wing policy making. It is a bulwark against individual left MPs extending their influence. Not only is the Party organised around the needs of the Cabinet and the Leader – this is a long-term process. The hollowing out of the party began under Neil Kinnock in the 1980s, accelerated during the ‘Party into Power’ reforms (that gutted Conference’s powers and internal democracy), and has left Labour as a a set of rallies and an inner organisation of notables – in modern guise.  The hierarchy of Policy Forums and the revamped NEC mean that socialists have a hard time getting heard, let alone influence.  

    But far worse is afoot.  Labour is in a close relationship with the very privatising profiteering mechanisms of the ‘market state’ that make the public administration unfit for any purpose other than more free-market policies. From quasi-state bodies to dubious private companies, this layer of the publicly subsidised its (hopelessly incompetent)managerial classes is devoted to  retaining contracts and privilege. It is even embracing and influencing the former ‘voluntary’ sector. It can threaten to jump ship for the Tories at any moment (and many already have).  This drag on Labour is not challenged by the Campaign’s calls from the wilderness for a ‘workers’ government’ .

    In these conditions one would vote for Labour in many constituencies – where the candidates are genuinely part of the labour movement (in the broadest sense). They will seize on  Tory plans to savage public provision, and introduce even more illiberal social measures (though it’s hard to see how Cameron could be more of a straight-faced religious authoritarian than Brown). This obviously is not enough. The policies this appeal raises, on union rights, opposing cuts in public services, ending military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so on, are tools to bring to their attention better ideas than those that a Labour manifesto will hold. 

    Perhaps the emphasis on fighting the BNP will help set some political minds thinking about the Cabinet actions that have helped fuel this party’s more visible presence. Though one can always exaggerate its importance and get bogged down in hysteria. That often provides a convenient outlet for anger to Labour members who otherwise have done nothing to oppose Brown and Blair.

     But where candidates stand for precisely this market state, then they cannot be supported. These are elements of the bourgeoisie (or more simply, tired careerists) living off the heritage of the unions, and the party. Those, for example (I do not choose this case by chance) who back Welfare Reform and Workfare, are enemies of the poor and working class in the most intimate way.

    They cannot be campaigned or voted for.

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    Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste: The Movie.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, LCR, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on February 16, 2010

     

    C’est parti is a documentary that covers the launch of the NPA.

    It has had good reviews.

    Perhaps someone will get the idea of doing a film about recent intrigues and deering-don’ts  in the SWP/Respect etc.

    Chronicle of a Death Foretold?

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    New Left Review at Fifty.

    Posted in European Left, Left, New Left by Andrew Coates on February 19, 2010

     

    New Left Review at Fifty: Is There Life in Their Politics?

    Halcycon Days for the New Left

    New Left Review is a “left intellectual project”. What is the nature of this undertaking? On its fiftieth anniversary can a balance sheet, and future prospects be drawn? The British New Left, respectively the original New Left from E.P.Thompson and John Saville’s New Reasoner and Stuart Hall from the University and Left Review, that combined in 1960 to found the Review, and the Second New Left, whose chief theorists, Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, as well as Robin Blackburn, ran the journal after 1962, is often the object of intellectual biography. Assessing the value of the individuals’ work. Or on the magnificent set-piece battles between Thompson and the later NLR’s editors. Here there is a different object: the transition from the original New Left’s aim to “make socialists” to New Left Review’s (1962)  Editor, Anderson and his  more ambitous plans. That is, to his ultimate goal, to produce a fresh layer of left intellectuals who would help end British anti-theoretical “exceptionalism” and pave the way for socialism. History, careers, and disputes, should be seen in the light of these objectives.

    Susan Watkins in the Editorial to the 61st Edition (Second Series) of the Review, talks of its launch in 1960 as “one of a myriad of small harbingers of left renewal”. Its early enthusiasm for “anti-colonialism”, Third Worldism in general and Latin American guerrilla activity and Cuba in particular, were causes championed by a much wider international New Left (notably American and French). They were succeeded by “intensive debates within Marxism” of the end of the decade. But what really brought the New Left prominence, and shaped the journal’s frame of reference, was 1968. Leading up this was the movement against the Vietnam War, whose British wing, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) had a decidedly New Left tinge. This, as we are frequently told by veterans, was a tumultuous period, at its most spectacular in May, marked by student revolts, the counter-culture, the democratic and humanist socialist resistance to Stalinism, and, above all, the stirrings of mass workers’ action in Europe. Even in ‘sleepy London’ the London School of Economics saw a student occupation – which displayed solidarity with French protests. In the VSC held a mass demonstration in September ’68, causing manufactured panic in the media, and, saw a ‘Maoist-Anarchist’ splinter faction (several thousand strong) march on Grovesnor Square. Violent clashes with the police ensued. A Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation (RSSF) came into being, with encouragement from the New Left’s publications. Its influence, split and reformed into various factions, rippled through British campuses in the years to come.

    New Left Review engaged in theorising these events, and, also to Watkins, “helped pioneer work on women’s liberation, ecology (? There are so many claims to have been a proto-Green), media, film theory, the state.” Not that theory smothered action. (more…)

    Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste at an Impasse.

    Posted in Europe, French Left, French Politics, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on February 22, 2010

     

     Not Articulate in Defence of Secularism.

    The Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste was founded just over a year ago (Wikipedia – in English - here). Its origins and general character do not need rehearsing on this Blog. Suffice to cite two elements.

    Firstly, the NPA is not just an ‘anti-capitalist’ party, but claims to be a ‘revolutionary’ as well. Secondly, its ideology is a mixture which includes, apart from the said hostility to the bourgeoisie, Trotskyism, Marxism, Ecology, Anti-imperialism, Feminism and Guevarism.

    The latter remains a bit of mystery. One suspects it’s something to do with wanting the support of those types who put up Che posters in their flats, back Venezuela’s ’Bolivarian Revolution’, and wear groovy Cuban T-shirts. As for feminism, we shall see.

    The NPA’s  revolutionary creed is now confronting the less lyrical world of the March French Regional Elections. This, as we have noted here before, has involved the NPA is a compromise. Local NPA branches can decide on their alliances with other left groups (or  to ‘go it alone’) - as long as they “totally independent” of the (rightward moving) Parti Socialiste. That is the largest political left party in France. When it comes to the second round of these elections …this will be a matter for the same local groups to decide if they will support the leading force on the left. In all certainty the Socialist Party lists, will often be remade to include others, such Greens and, the Left alliance, (Front de Gauche) which the NPA will have difficulty actively supporting. More probably they will simply call for “blocking the way to the right”.

    The NPA’s programme, Tout Changer, rein lâcher (change everything, don’t let anything go), is, as one might expect. Maximalist demands (in Trotskyist terms, they are transitional - ones that capitalism cannot concede), such as a prohibition of  redundancies and absolutely free public transport appear. As do minimum proposals for equal pay, sustainable, local, agriculture, public banking. And, specific to the Regional Assemblies, they call for plans to raise taxes, sustain budgets, and develop publicly run training schemes. In brief, to oppose the present drift towards private provision, and built a decent public democratic sector. Further democratic principles include opposition tot he Sarkozy repressive ‘security’ legislation. On international issues, the  withdrawal of French involvement in Western interventions is prominent.

    One can say that – watching the videos of their campaigning , and meetings – that the NPA manages to put on  an honest, inspiring (and frequently really touching) operation. More like the Right to Work Conference, speaking from the heart,  than the bombast of Respect leader George Galloway, or the velvet evasions of Salma Yaqoob.

    But political problems loom large. There appears to be diminishing ’ompf’ in the left’s camp. The NPA – and the non-PS generally (including the Front de Gauche) do not appear to be taking off. Opinion Polls give the non-PS left lists national percentage points under  5 % (though locally this varies considerably).This has something to do with the morose political and social climate – which France shares with the rest of Europe.  The difficulty of presenting a credible alternative to Sarkozy – beyond calls for yet more ‘struggle’ – lies in the absence of the left of the PS’s ability to unite around a different national political project.

    But the NPA’s specific, self-inflicted, problems, stem from another source.

    The decision to  feature a veiled woman on one of its South of France  lists has created an immense furore. (Initial story Here.) The candidate has a good background in militant democratic activism. But her open support for religious dress overshadows this.

    She  claims – for reasons which are unclear - to be a feminist. That is, beyond this assertion and backing for abortion rights, there is no exploration of the link between her Moslem beliefs and ‘feminism’  in the ‘Interview with Ilham Moussaïd’ (republished by an anglophone living in France here.)

    If she is a feminist why does she accept a rule – said to protect women from male lust, or at the very least an instruction from god to keep women pure – which does not apply to men? If Islam is in any way feminist, why does it permit polygamy and polyandry?

    These contradictions led three of Moussaïd’s fellow NPA list candidates to resign. Nationally NPA web sites have been buzzing with hostile exchanges on the matter – with a  substantial part of the organisation outraged at the attack on secular public values it represents.

    The NPA is caught in a contradiction. It criticises the veil (in any form -  a symbol and reality of oppression). Yet it accepts this breach in its principles. Efforts to wriggle out of by stating that the decision in supporting the reactionary dress was  decentralised are hardly convincing. The Parti de Gauche has openly accused the NPA leader, Olivier, of “racolage” – touting for business – in religious constituencies. When he offers a justification of this action (or lack of it)  Besancenot looks frazzled and disingenuous to the rest of the left.

    In the UK the left will generally welcome giving a religious ‘pluralist’ dimension to politics. In Britain the multiculturalist and religious left not only accept the veil, but makes a virtue out of its embrace of ‘diversity’. Most think that the veil is a matter of pure individual choice – ignoring the religious ‘law’ which enforces it, and the bullying of the zealous to extend its use.  

    One should look at the origins of this ‘anglo-saxon’ attitude. One cleverly exploited by the ‘soft’ Islamist Salma Yaqoob who claims the veil is a “woman’s right to choose” (here). And hypocritically ignores the violent, murderous, recent history of its imposition under waves of Islamisation across the world.

    In the United Kingdom this ‘liberalism’ is a modern adaption of the ‘tolerance’ of British imperialism for the faiths and customs of those they ruled over. Specifically, it is a legacy from the Raj – of imperial sanction for religious ‘personal law’. Today this stand is transferred to Islamic dress. It can be extended to any ‘cultural’ practice – judge not or ye shall be judged, one might say. A kind of liberalism that ends up in the Stanly Fish argument that religious censorship is no great deal, since people always have different ‘preferences’. And don’t we ‘censor’ too. Or, in this case, is not encouraging women to dress as sex objects just as bad.

    Well, they don’t harass women or stone them for not dressing up as Pole Dancers.

    As far as I am aware.

    The hard-line secularism of the Parti de Gauche on this, opposing religious dress codes (though not ‘bans’ on the Burka) is attractive  - you know where you stand with them. Religion should be fought in left politics – not by law but by political struggle. One day maybe even the British left will recognise that.

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    SWP Descends to Threats.

    Posted in Sectarianism, SWP by Andrew Coates on February 24, 2010

    Gerry Healy: Gone but Not Forgotten!

    Just been threatened by the new  Suffolk SWP cadre.

    This individual cancelled a meeting of the ‘Right to Work’ campaign – at very short notice. So short I only heard of it half an hour before it was due. Too late to inform one person, who was busy walking from the Chantry Estate (he is suspended from the Dole, bus costs £1.80 each way). A long trudge through the drizzle. I had to go and meet him at the arranged place to say it was cancelled.

    Naturally I was angry.

    Next day saw said ‘cadre’ flogging paper outside College.

    Expressed said anger.

    Just now ‘cadre’ came up to me in Library. Seething with rage. Not welcome at Right to Work (bye-bye that!). Groans about my talking him in such a way. Brief explanation. Face contorts. Apparently I am a ‘bittter (heaven forfend)) sectarian”. Then suggests that I “come outside” for a “full and frank discussion” of this. “Are you threatening me?” “No” Body language says otherwise.

    One cannot help but think that their little recent contretemps has affected the way the Party behaves.

    SWP…WRP here we come!

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    Bangladesh Set to Become Again a Secular State.

    Posted in Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on February 26, 2010

    Justice at Last?

    Glory to the Great Bangladeshi People!

     

    News just in:

    Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government plans an attempt to turn Muslim Bangladesh into secular state, a minister said.

    Nearly 90 percent of the population is Muslim and Bangladesh ranks fourth after Indonesia, Pakistan, and India by the number of Muslims, with over 130 million.

    Earlier this month, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision declaring the Fifth amendment, which dropped secularism as a guiding state principle, as null and void.

    The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat-e-Islami party had appealed against the High court judgement.

    “In the light of the verdict, the secular constitution of 1972 already stands to have been revived,” Law Minister Shafique Ahmed said late on Saturday.

    “Now we don’t have any bar to return to the four state principles of democracy, nationalism, secularism and socialism as had been heralded in the 1972 statute of the state,” he said.

    Bangladesh gave up the word “secularism” in the 1975s.

    (from here) (Reuters here)

    Background here.

    There are also the forthcoming Tribunal and Trials of War Criminals (here)- those who stood with Pakistan in its mass slaughter during the 1971 War of National Liberation (here).

    Many of the alleged crimes were committed by  members of the Jamaat-I-Islami or related Islamist groups. In Britain these political forces are closely aligned with George Galloway’s Respect Party. They have also enjoyed close relations with the SWP and Ken Livingstone’s advisers.

    The principal link, through the East London Mosque, is claimed  here . The contents of this site, Bangladesh Genocide Archive,  are well worth looking at. If you can stand weeping at suffering and the indifference of the world today  to the plight of the Bangladeshi people.

    It will be interesting to see, as the legal process unfolds, how the above UK groups and individuals  justify their alliance with war criminals.

    We await Islamophobia Watch’s wriggling.

     

    Facebook Group here.

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    Tendance Coatesy on Secularism: a Short Guide.

    Posted in Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on February 27, 2010

    Secularism:

    In Defence of Militant Secularismhere.

    So What is Secularism? Ian Birchillhere.

    A rely to Ian Birchallhere.

    Religion (General).

    Against Marxist Messianism - here.

    Review of Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution - here

    Islamism.

    Burka: French Propositionshere.

    Review of  Tariq Ramadan’s What I Believehere.

    Review of Kenan Malik From Fatwa to Jihadhere.

    Rushdie Affairhere.

    Anti-Semitism.

    Review: The New Anti-Semitism. Denis MacShanehere.

     

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    Tariq Ali: Vichey to Blame for French Left Secularists.

    Posted in French Left, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on February 28, 2010

    Foe of the Enlightenment and French Secularists.

    The assault on Illhem (here)

    By TARIQ ALI (who “comes from an old, crusty, feudal family” - here)

    Ali’s comment on the controversy about the NPA candidate with the veil (a subject posted on here frequently), and the recent row over wearing the  Burka, starts reasonably,

    Patriarchal traditions, cultural habits and identity are what is at stake here and they vary from generation to generation. Pushing people back into a ghetto never helps.

    Pushing people into ghettos by subsidising religious communalism is a bad idea. Such as the British state’s sponsorship of multiculturalism and state funded ‘communtiy’ eladers. Or pandering to religious customs which clearly oppress people -as with all other “cultural habits” (from British sexism) that are against universal human rights. But one suspects this is not what Tariq  has in mind.

    This is what he is referring to, 

    The Algerian women who fought in the resistance against French republican colonialism did so as anti-imperialists. Some were partially veiled, others not. It did not affect the way they fought or the methods used by the French to torture them. Perhaps the torturers should have been more brutal to the hijabed freedom-fighters to help integrate their progeny better in the Republican tradition.

    Well, that’s clear: critics of the veil are the progeny of racist French imperialist thugs. Indeed we are the offspring of torturers.

    Apparently no-one has a right to criticise the NPA having a veiled candidate because the world is such a  bad place:

    The anger against Ilhem and the NPA is completely misplaced. The real state of the world leaves the defenders of the Republic completely unaffected: the million dead of Iraq, the continuing siege of Gaza by Israel and Egypt, the killing of innocents in Afghanistan, the US drone attacks in Pakistan, the brutal exploitation of Haiti, etc. Why is this the case?

    Several years ago I noticed that French protests against the Iraq war were muted compared to the rest of Western Europe. I don’t accept that this was due to Chirac’s opposition to the war [after all de Gaulle had opposed the Vietnam war even more strongly], but to Islamophobia: an increasing intolerance of the Other in French society, reminiscent of the attitude towards Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The conformism of that period explains the popularity of Vichy during the early years of the war.

    Ah yes, them Frenchies are anti-Semites. Criticism of Islamism is in a direct line with the ravigns of Édouard Adolphe Drumont’s La France Juive. Having transferred this loathing to a new Other, they hate Islam so much they (including the conformist secualrists) backed Bush.Or at least were happy to see him invade Iraq without their help.

    A pretty long chain of non-sequitors. But what can you expect from a man who called for a Liberal Democrat vote in the last election on the grounds that they were opposed to the War on Iraq. Not sense at any rate.

    Islamophobes and anti-Semites share a great deal in common.Islamophobia: an increasing intolerance of the Other in French society, reminiscent of the attitude towards Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The conformism of that period explains the popularity of Vichy during the early years of the war.

    Now we know where we’re going. Frenchies (always secret defeatist fascists), French secularists, are, well French, thus: secularist Left = Vichy.

    Ali is never shy of showing off his wider intellectual culture:

    How many Western citizens have any real idea of what the Enlightenment really was? French philosophers undoubtedly took humanity forward by recognizing no external authority of any kind, but there was a darker side. Voltaire: “Blacks are inferior to Europeans, but superior to apes.” Hume: “The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the parrot manages to speak a few words.” There is much more in a similar vein from their colleagues. It is this aspect of the Enlightenment that appears to be more in tune with some of the Islamophobic ravings in sections of the global media.

    Doddery old Tariq obviously doesn’t know much about the Enlightenment either. Such as Condorcet’s appeal against slavery and for equality. Or the Society of the Friends of the Black People. Or the abolition of slavery under the First French republic (rescinded by Napoleon).

    Most people would say that racist comments are against the Enlightenment, whether the Philosophes said them or not. That is, that they contradicted their won principles. As did the occasional racist or homophobic remarks of a certain Karl Marx.

    Le Monde on February 20, 2010.

     

    Tariq Ali’s wrong-headed and unwelcome comments neglect the central point: Islamist attempts to enforce dress codes are part of their political programme. Since he so fortiche in Algerian History he might profit from following what happened when this programme was attempted -to the  misery and terror of Algerian women. Which is a central reason why the French secularist left is hostile to the veil and religious symbols in the equal public domain – though not in favour of a ‘ban’ by law of the, say, the Burka. Or remark on the fact that Sarkozy is very pro-religon, and would like to adopt – to a small degree it’s true – elements of ‘multiculuralism’ that Ali admries so much.

    As someone who admires Islamist ‘anto-imperialists’ Tariq Ali is now at the end of his political trajectory: mouthing insults against the Englightenment and French Secularism. Let;s hope he doesn’t go even further and defend Jamaat-I-Islami War Criminals.

    There’s no fool like an ageing old New Leftist Fool.

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    Hitchens and Amis: A Marxist Dismissal.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Culture by Andrew Coates on March 1, 2010

    Marxist Study Group Reading?

    Boulevardiers and flâneurs such as Tendance Coatesy have been entranced by recent spats by the country’s leading cultural figures. That is, Martin Amis and Anna Ford. Now we have Christopher Hitchens’s mémoires, Hitch 22,  to contend with. Marxists will be asking: what is the political significance of these rows? What do they show about the contradictions amongst the (self-styled) contrarians. The enchantment continues.

    Or maybe not.

    Amis we can dismiss with an adjective: he’s a poor writer. His muffled voice (London Fields – can anyone remember the plot?). His slack, truly cack-handed,  style, “the awful human colourlessness of South Wales, the dully flickering whites and greys, like a Pathe newsreel, like an ethnic Great Depression”. And his  risible attempts at ‘profoundity’  about Stalinism and the left (Koba). Even Britain’s leading Christologist, Terry Eagleton’s attack on Amis, over some sweeping and commonplace remarks about Islam, failed to inspire any sympathy for its object. At least not from me – and that really tells.

    Now we have Hitch 22. Christopher’s friends. P.G.Wodehouse meets Tony Cliff . Some scabrous allusions to sleeping with two future Tory Ministers to pepper it (is that moaning or boasting?). Some tales of long-distant leftist days. No doubt we will hear some whingeing as well as bragging. Will there be any justification of Hitchens’s turn to the right? As he finally gave in to Jeeves and got rid of his friends in the Heralds of the Red Dawn.

    So far not on the evidence.  Or rather yes. In a sense. Hitchens provides probably the definitive account of his drinking strategy,

    It’s the professional deformation of many writers and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.) I work at home, where there is indeed a bar room, and can suit myself. But I don’t. At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr Walker’s amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal.

    Personally I find this hard to believe. G.K.Chesterton once described the size of an average full bottle of wine as fit for one person’s consumption. This is hard to fault. Note to self: submit Hitch, above, to Pseuds’ Corner asp.

    Unlike Hitchens’ other political stands. Ramblings about Islamic fascism and support for the invasion of Iraq. the former, a complete failure to recognise that the real fight against Islamism passes through the secular left of the countries where the battle is being waged. Not through the good offices of the US-NATO military.

    As for his atheism - fine as it goes, but even Coatesy finds it a bit shallow. Lacks depth. Lacks profondeur. As we flâneurs say.

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    Response to Islamophobia Watch.

    Posted in Islamism, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on March 2, 2010

    Bob Pitt’s Islamophobia Watch has a take on Bangladeshi secularism – and Tendance Coatesy’s “ultra-secularist” site. (here).

    Regarding moves to reintroduce the secularist principle of the Bangladeshi Constitution he notes,

    the government has shown little enthusiasm for such a change. Following a meeting last month between the ruling Awami League and its coalition partners, one of whom urged that the constitution should be amended along those lines, prime minister Sheikh Hasina stated firmly that the words “Bismillah-ar-Rahman-ar-Rahim” would be left unchanged in the constitution, as would the declaration that Islam is the state religion.

    This is indeed the case. Not one to be celebrated either.

    It is not difficult to identify the motive behind this decision. During the 2008 election campaign the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its Islamist ally Jamaat-e-Islami accused the Awami League of hostility towards Islam, and Sheikh Hasina no doubt reasons that if her government were to abolish the religious elements in the constitution this would be exploited by the opposition. So an entirely justifiable change that would restore the secular principle to the constitution has been rejected on pragmatic, not to say opportunistic, political grounds.What, then, are the “secular foundations” of the 1972 constitution that the Bangladesh government wishes to restore? Well, crucially they want to reinstate a provision, subsequently removed, which declared that “no person shall have the right to form, or be a member or otherwise take part in the activities of, any communal or other association or union which in the name or on the basis of any religion has for its object, or pursues, a political purpose”.

    Indeed, following the Supreme Court’s verdict, Shafique Ahmed was quoted as saying that all religion-based parties should “drop the name of Islam from their name and stop using religion during campaigning”, and he went on to announce that religion-based parties are going to be “banned”. In short, what the government of Bangladesh is planning to do is to amend the constitution in order to illegalise Jamaat-e-Islami.

    Here we pause. The Jamaat - unnoticed in the UK where its supporters are free to run the East London Mosque – has engaged in systematic violence against leftists and secularists in Bangladesh. This continues on a daily basis. The latest outrages and their outcome (today) noted here.

    Pitt continues,

    What does this have to do with secularism? Nothing whatsoever. If a secular constitution required the suppression of faith-based political parties, then secularism in Germany would require a ban on the Christian Democrats. And nobody, not even a secularist ultra like Andrew Coates, is calling for that.

    Quite a few constitutions ban political parties that based on religious, other communalist or racist  ideologies. There are provisions in, say the Turkish Constitution to that effect. The German Constitution bans the resurrection of the Nazi Party – and its laws are extremely harsh towards Holocaust Denial. Political Parties under the Grundgesetz must have “internal organisations that conform to democratic principles”. In general the idea of calling political parties by religious labels is not particularly democratic since it suggests that they have a special role in representing that religion rather than electors. German or other Christian Democrats face the problem that  in today’s  Europe  Christianity is not the only religion of its citizens, and that vast numbers of people are secular. In countries with a majority Moslem population this is particularly acute since it is usually synonymous with a call for Islam (and the Sharia) to be the basis of the Constitution and not democracy.

    In that context, groups like the Jamaat seek to impose a narrow vision of Islam. Nor is this just a matter for Bangladesh. As Andrew Gilligan’s Channel Four documentary last night (here) demonstrated beyond controversy how the Islamic Forum of Europe is implementing its reactionary segregationalist agenda.  In this they are aided by generous State and local government subsidies. All the  better to throttle opposition and any Bangala culture – secular or religious – they dislike. That a land, which has one of the richest and most glorious cultural legacies in the world – Bengali –  is threatened by such thugs is of prime importance to progressives across the world.

    One would wish to combat such parties – something Islamophobia Watch singularly fails to do.

    In this case we would not accept that say the Jamaat should be banned but ought to be politically confronted. Something Respect, the SWP and Livingstone, because of their alliance with the Islamic Forum of Europe, will not do.

    Abdul Hamid of the Spitoon notes that the Jamaat and its much larger ally, the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), are at present denying the rights of the Pahari people. (Spitoon)

    This is in a long line of their sponsorship of pogroms against non-Muslims, ‘tribals’, and secularists.

    Something Bob Pitt fails to register.

    We leave the last word to a Bangladeshi secularist, Rasel Pervez,

    Awami League, as a political party, claims it upholds secularism, and most of the Awami inclined intellectuals simply wants Awami league to follow this secular path. All the intellectuals of Bangladesh wish and want Awami league to become a party that leads the fraction of Bangladesh population which supports secularist view; but, in essence, this particular party never moved further away from its roots and always in practice has nurtured the Muslim sentiments as its party policy.

    In fact, Awami League has never really overcome their religious roots. In practice, it uses the religious sentiments of people to stay in power. And, this is precisely the point where it looses its idiosyncrasy from Jamaat e Islami and other non-secular parties.

    Actually the spirit of 1972’s constitution was to establish a secular state which would have no state-religion, which aimed for the state not to patronize any religion and should not use religious sentiment of people politically. But Awami League is failing to follow that course of secularism and using the religious sentiment of people to justify its misdeeds. Instead of being called Awami League, we should at least recognize their effort of Islamizing this country by renaming it as “Allama Awami League” and also to respect the believes of  our countrymen start a political movement of having a Islamic name of our country.

    (More Here)

    Front de Gauche Slightly Up, Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste Disappears: Opinion Polls.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on March 4, 2010

    French Socialist Party Likely To Do Well.

    Opinion Poll, Le Monde, 4th march, for the March French Regional Elections. (Relayed Here.)

    These are figures that relate to the first round of the elections. The second round – where further agreements and alliances are possible – is crucial.

    Lists (right-wing) of the  UMP-Nouveau Centre-MPF-CPNT remain at  30%, plus  1%, of other fragments of the right make  31%. Parti Socialiste for the  PS lists  (28%), adding 2% for  Divers gauche (diverse left) lists  (Frêche in Languedoc-Roussillon, Liste Giacobbi in Corsica…). That is a total of  30%, a rise of two points.

    Les Verts-Europe-Ecologie, à 12%, lose a point.

    The Front National at 8% loses a half point.

    The  Front de Gauche à 7% has gained a point, while the MoDem (centre)  are unchanged at 4% (Note a lot lower than they expected).

    The Extreme Left is clearly losing support:  2,5% for  Lutte Ouvrière (-0,5) and 1,5% for the  NPA (-2).

    From this one can assume that the Socialists are well poised for the second round. They can make deals with other parties of the left, and are likely to win in most (if not nearly all) regions). The Front National will probably damage the right further.

    The left of the Socialists and the Greens is therefore not making a great impression. At 1,5% the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste risks effectively disappearing electorally. Its inability to defend secularism clearly and its ambiguity towards reactionary religious dress codes (Islamic veil), have doubtless played a part in this dramatic drop in support (3,5 to 1,5%). Added: LO critique of NPA’s stand on the religious issue here.

    The fact that the Parti Socialiste has been able to prove its capacity in local government (municipal and regional) seems to help them. They remain, nevertheless, well short of a convincing national political strategy. Hovering around alliances with the Greens or the Mo-Dems further confuses their profile. In these conditions the Front de Gauche (Left Front – grouping together electorally left socialists, Communists, Greens and radical leftists ) may be able to present a more radical programme, based on the wave of social and industrial discontent that is stirring. It may have a longer-term impact – that is up to the next Presidential and national elections. How the NPA reacts to this will be an important for the future of the French left.

     

    Pabloism: A Serious Biographical Sketch of Michel Raptis.

    Posted in Left, Marxism, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on March 6, 2010

    ‘Pablo’.

    We are often asked about Pabloism (well not very often but it has happened). Well the Pablo is one, of many, party names of a revolutionary usually called Michel Raptis. The most reviled Trotskyist of the post-war period, the father of lies, liquidationism, and revisionism of all stripes and spots.  With this in mind it is no surprise that Tendance Coatesy, as with many other leftists, owes a political and ideological debt to this outstanding individual.

    There is more. Hearing that his principal orthodox Trotskyist enemies were Gerry Healy, Pierre Lambert and James Cannon – all po-faced right-wing authoritarians – one cannot but help but like Pablo.

    Then there are heavyweight political and ideological reasons to be interested in Pablo, and the Tendency around him (which, if it ever was, was certainly not reducible to his personality). For an introduction, Wikipedia here. More texts are beginning to appear on the Marxist Internet Archive – here. These help give some portrait for anyone interested –  to make their own minds up, not rely on worn-out judgements on ‘Pabloism’.

    But  the best biographical introduction to Michel Raptis: on the Lubitz Trotskyanet –  here  The account cannot be cut and pasted so go to the – extremely useful – site.

    Lubitz effectively debunks a host of myths about Pabloism. The biography outlines the complex early period of his political life – including important episodes - such as the Second World War and his participation in the Algerian Revolution - where documentation is of necessity not always easily available. The rows in the Fourth International – - in the 1950s – between the figures cited above and Pablo and Mandel – are given fair attention. The article covers the later politics of the Tendance Marxist Révolutionnaire (TMR), and wider aspects of the later period of Pablo’s political career - the primacy of self-management. There is a solid bibliography. In short, the highest standards are met.

     This provides a window into how the TMR embraced the project of a ‘self-managed’ republic, took up themes such as feminism, supported anticolonial revolutions (without neglecting as their consequences unravelled, the necessary critique of ‘anti-imperialist’ national bourgeoisies), and defended democratic politics against Stalinism and orthodox Trotskyism.

    By the 1980s the TNR, which operated on a collegiate rather than a ‘Leader’ basis (and numbered outstanding figures such as Maurice Najman), had returned to some position of influence. It helped keep alive the ideas of workers’ control during the political triumph of neo-liberalism. This heritage continues. Not to mention its close relations with modern movements, that place ecological issues within the context of popular control. Those influenced by these ideas are today active in the French ‘alternatifs’, left social- republicanism, and the (left-wing of) the  Front de Gauche. As well as in other countries where the TMR’s impact was wider than its formal membership.

    For its contemporary relevance then this sketch of a biography  is therefore highly recommended.

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    Iceland Votes No.

    Posted in Europe, Iceland, Imperialism by Andrew Coates on March 7, 2010

    Manifestations devant le Parlement à Reykjavík (AFP)

    Happy Days Are Here Again!

    Early referendum results showed that 98 percent of Iceland’s 230,000 voters had voted “No” against the deal to repay the UK and Dutch governments who compensated Icesave 340,000 customers in 2008 – the outcome came as no surprise to the Reykjavik government. (From here)

    Or “ En þegar talin höfðu verið yfir 130 þúsund atkvæði höfðu 93,3% kjósenda hafnað Icesave-lögunum en 1,7% samþykkt þau.”( here.)

    IceNews reports that 1,5 %voted yes (Here) and that, “Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir said following the referendum that negotiations will likely restart next week with all three nations as committed as ever to finding a fair solution to the repayment of money lost in the failed Icesave savings accounts.”

    No doubt ways will be found to ignore this result.

    For all that, it would be tempting to say that Icelanders are to be congratulated. That by saying ‘stuff it’ to the bankers and fund-managers, and rich individuals who tried to benefit from finance capital, they are well within their rights. That the misery - wage and social cuts, unemployment – they have suffered should not be made worse to curry favour with these rapacious thieves. That this shows a people united in their ability to say “No”.

    Tempting.

    And entirely right!

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    Against Communitarianism.

    Posted in Human Rights, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on March 8, 2010

    http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Music/Pix/covers/2009/10/30/1256926928137/Justice-Whats-the-Right-Thin.jpg

    Against Communitarianism.

    A Critical Review:  Justice. What’s the Right Thing to Do? Michael J. Sandel. Allen Lane. 2009.

    Michael Sandel is a ‘communitarian’. A critic of political and economic liberalism and its building block, the private “unencumbered individual”. An advocate of the common good based on “situated” selves. In the Reith Lectures of 2009, Sandel threw caution about transposing a version of US history to a different European context to the wind. He announced that, “renunciation of moral and religious argument in politics in the decades following World War ll, prepared the way for the market triumphalism of the past three decades.” This must be remedied. In place of a framework of neutral law and secular politics we should engage in substantive debate about the good society – including within this those who argue in terms of the sacred. Or as he puts it in Justice, “a politics of moral engagement”. One that, in contrast to the liberal and secularist hostility to religion, is “more capacious faith-friendly form of public reason.” Issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, patriotism, stem-cell research, the ‘moral limits of markets’, and redistributive taxation, imply, inevitably, “moral and religious controversies” that should not be kept out of the civic domain. Indeed they reveal “moral ties” that are bound up with the striving for a better life.

    In many respects Justice is an expanded version of Sandel’s best known book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982). This – an extended critique of John Rawls’ egalitarian liberal A Theory of Justice (1972) – put forward the notion of justice as “constitutive”. That is, made up by people’s “shared self-understandings” of their “attachments”. He concluded that with this type of politics, “we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone.” The present text, which “accompanies” his “legendary” Justice course at Harvard University, is directed at a less specialist audience. As such it often resembles the curriculum of those Great Thinkers DVDs one sees advertised in the New York Review of Books. There are chapters on Utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill), neo-liberalism (Milton Friedman), market-libertarianism (Robert Nozick), political liberalism (Kant, John Rawls), and an interpretation of Aristotle, associated with fellow communitarian (Catholic and one-time New Leftist) Alasdair MacIntyre. Along the way, he spins folksy anecdotes or as he calls them, from MacIntyre, “story telling” (about, amongst others, car repair-men, and baseball players) to make his case. Whose tendency to run to blandness is enlivened by a dose of some Tabasco Sauce – a plea for citizenship beyond the logic of the market, and for the pious to play an important role in defining our “sense of community.”

    With its appeal to religious ethics seriously, it is hardly surprising that Justice has found admirers in faith communities. These range from enthusiasts for ‘social’ Christianity to Islamists, desperate to find someone who recognises the value of their calls to divinely grounded Justice. Some former leftists flaying around for support for their claim that key alliances must be made with believers on issues of communal injustice might be equally seduced. No doubt there will be also Third Wayers who are drawn back to Tony Blair’s brief flirtation with another – much more woozy – communitarian, Amitai Etzioni. And whatever it was is he said about mutual obligations in “responsive communities”. Much of Sandel’s “exhilarating journey” (blurb) is more wide-ranging. As already described, it is a History of Great Ideas: of Freedom, Ethics and the Good Life illustrated by Burning Issues of the Day. It is by examining them that Justice attempts to demonstrate that the “demands of solidarity” raise topics where religious, and other heart-felt, moralities’ voice should be heard. They should be part of the “narrative conception of moral agency”.

    (more…)

    Taslima Nasrin: The Wandering Victim of Islamism and Multiculturalism.

    Posted in Human Rights, India, Islam, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on March 10, 2010

    The Book That Still Upsets.

    Taslima Nasrin has been under a cloud since 1994 (more here). In exile from Bangladesh for her secularism. For writing such as Shame  (Lajja) – which criticised religion, and particularly political Islam. The cause of her reaction? Bloodshed. Those who were not followers of the Prophet were driven out of the country. Not just in the period of the partition of the sub-Continent. But in waves afterwards. In her own land the far-right parties of God continued to terrorise slaughter non-Muslims. In particular pogrom drives, “In the Hindu eviction drive, village after village was burned to the ashes” A Hindu was “a two-legged animal which had become a foreigner in his own land” Threatened, “You will be cut to pieces to be given to the cows as fodder.”

    Brave Nasrin would not remain silent. She wrote. She fight. For “the disease of religious fundamentalism is not restricted to Bangladesh and..must be fought at every turn.”

    Pogroms – Jamaat and other Islamist  inspired – remain a threat.

    Nasrin was and is not afraid to attack the failure of Bangladeshi left parties to defend Hindus. “Which party could be trusted after even eminent Communist Party leaders  didn’t feel secure with their Hindu names?” Ignored by British press she remains in serious risk of attack by Islamists.  Under sentence of death.

    Yesterday Le Monde (here) gave a full page to Nasrin’s plight. 

    Taslima Nasreen, 48 ans, est ne apatride trimbalant sa valise de pays en pays, de villes en villes, séjours fugaces en des havres provisoires.”

    “She has no nation, who carries her suitcase from country to country, from city to city, hidden stays in fleeting havens.”

    At present in India her refusal to stop criticising religion means her present home is increasingly provisional.

    Since Nasrim criticised the burka. She suggested women take this “symbol of oppression ” off and burn it. As a result  she has been again the target of a violent Islamist campaign. Last March two people were killed in  demonstrations in Karnataka demanding her death. the Indian left accuses her of fomenting hatred against an already oppressed religious minority. She replies that she also attacks hard-line Hinduism. To no effect.

    It looks probable that her stay – even under such restrictions she is barely free at all – in India will not last. They are already talking about a new exile, a new search for refuge.  (More here).

     

    It is hardly surprising that Nasrin’s case has not been loudly heard in Britain. By the ruling religiously inspired Establishment or by more liberal multiculturalists and much of the left. Lippy Bangladeshi atheists - a woman to boot – do not fit into the narrative of oppressed Islam. Nor any possible consensus about the role of faith in finding ”social justice’.  She must be ‘nutty’. She is a pain. No doubt an ‘Islamophobe’. Better keep quiet about her. Just watch.

    By contrast it is the duty of every revolutionary to stand shoulder to shoulder with Nasrin.

    Downbeat End of Campaign for the NPA.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on March 11, 2010

    All is not going well for the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste. launched to great fanfare as a potential leading force on  the French Left it is now facing up to the potential of a poor election result in next weekend’s regional elections. Its failure to take a clear secularist stand against the veil has contributed. As has its inability to decide clearly on a national line – though tending to a ‘go it alone’ position in most place in others it has entered alliances with the rest of the non Socialist Party left.

    Mercredi 10 mars, devant quelque 800 personnes – une petite “Mutu” pour le facteur révolutionnaire –, il a tenté une nouvelle fois de reprendre son antienne sur “la crise sociale profonde” et “la répartition des richesses” qu’il préconise, discours qui a fait son succès.

    Mais les dirigeants ont du mal à cacher leur difficulté à faire campagne. “C’est compliqué cette fois-ci”, admet Basile Pot, un proche de M.Besancenot. Malgré une campagne militante ”à l’ancienne” axée sur les mots d’ordre nationaux classiques et la revendication des “transports gratuits pour tous” en Ile-de-France, le leader du NPA reconnaît que “c’est difficile”.

    Avec des prévisions donnant le NPA entre 2 % et 3,5 % des voix, les sondages ont traduit à leur manière ce ressac.

    I would put its likely score lower, at below 1,5%. This is because NPA supporters tend to come from layers that are less likely to cast a  ballot than the average  – youth, and protest voters. But then I well may be wrong.

    Le Monde here.

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    Ben Gummer Plays the Race Card.

    Posted in Conservative Party, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on March 12, 2010

    Is Ipswich Worth a Bit of Racism?

    “A Message on Immigration from Ben Gummer to residents of…….(Ipswich Street).”

    This came through the door yesterday. “Immigration – it’s time to Act”.  ”I have been recently in your area, knocking on doors”. Not that I noticed.  A Window sign saying “Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys on the People” may have put Benjy off. Him being a bit of tick  that it.

    It goes on “everywhere across the town people are concerned about immigration”. 

    So concerned that is that Benjy has to “address ” these “concerns“. Not that it’s about ”race or colour” – since we all know the “concern” people feel about the large numbers of Americans, Australians, Canadians and Kiwis here.

    So: we get Conservative promises for an “annual limit” on people let in here, a “point-based” system for those with skills, “limit immigration from new EU counties”. I am getting bored. He mentions the asylum system, Border Police, greater integration and a British Bill of Rights in place of the Human Rights of Act. Obviously not all humans are good enough to be British.

    There’s even some stuff about “myths” about Asylum Seekers. Apparently they don’t get free cars! This reminds me of the campaign against Ben’s Dad, “apparently he doesn’t get free champagne breakfasts every day” (when does he get them?).

    The culmination is the claim that “No fit person, British or not, should live on benefits as a way of life”.  A big  thank-you to full-time Careers and their meagre benefits.

    This clearly means: Workfare. That is replacing people working for real pay with those on the Dole – work for benefits as it’s known. Which will reduce wages in ways unseen in this country  since pay cuts in the Great Depression. The unemployed with eat into full-time salaries, and they will take over the work of council and private companies. A prospect no doubt wished for those with full-time jobs.  And sure to deal with immigration (?) and its ‘problems’.

    All in all a disgraceful case of stirring up fear – of “immigrants”. If Ipswich Spy reckons it’s “quite tame” then he (or she) fails to see what blowing a dog-whistle does: it gets the mutts frothing.

    This glossy leaflet was financed by a certain non-domiciled Vice-Chair of the Conservative Party. This foreign-based individual has poured funds Tories fighting into marginal seats. Ipswich for example. The text is centrally generated. Then slightly adapted. Benjy benefits from the profits of a foreign based millionaire – I underline this point to illustrate the double standards of these xenophobes. Ashcroft has plenty of other points against him. Such as being a rapacious exploiter.  Which is nothing to do with where he lives.

    This funding issue is ignored by Bridge Ward News who seems only interested in Ipswich Labour Party’s  cash sources.

    As for being a populist…

    Ben Gummer is the author of the Scourging Angel (2009). A scholarly, throughly researched, study of the Black Death. Showing some talent as a historian Gummer promotes the optimistic view that the Catholic Church was a force for good during this plague. It, he asserts, tried to fight anti-Semitic and other scapegoat-searching persecutions that followed its progress. He enlivens otherwise rather ponderous chapters with citations from Middle English literature, including Langland and Chaucer. Showing some signs of genuine appreciation. True the book lacks  any serious analysis of the – overarching -  processes – accelerated by Bubonic death – to the dissolution of feudalism, or indeed of any generalised class structure. But it is serious history.

    If Gummer choses to add the theory that the word “job” stems from the medieval scribes’ way of writing “unun opus”, he is entitled to crank etymology. It shows an agreeable propensity – growing with age – for all kinds of odd-ball theories.

    Stick to the medieval history Benjy.

    Ex-SWP Left Platform (Rees and German) Mount a Counterfire.

    Posted in BNP, Left, Racism, SWP, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on March 13, 2010

    Rees, German and Friend: Happy Days are Here Again?

    The former SWP Left Platform has launched its own web site, Counterfire. Or rather a Blog - here. Or at least have a presence there.

    Nothing about the world-historical reasons for their break  with the SWP as yet. Under theory some pedestrian stuff about Gramsci, Climate Change, Peasants Revolting and Trotsky on the United Front (Part 331). Most is ‘reporting’ in the Socialist Workers style (that is, always check out the facts for yourself before believing any of it).

    If their coverage of the failure of the state to ban BNP members from being teachers is anything to go by: they are profoundly confused and illiberal.

    This contains this claim by Tony Dowling,” a National Union Teachers (NUT) activist in Gateshead ”

    “Schools need to be safe, inclusive places where every child is valued. This is ABC for teachers – and I know the overwhelming majority of parents feel the same way. Teachers who are signed up to a party with diametrically opposed values – values of intolerance and exclusion – cannot possibly support the sort of environment we need. Last week we took a group of pupils to a mosque in Newcastle, where they had a tour and learnt about the Islamic faith. Such educational opportunities broaden children’s horizons, but are despised by the BNP.

    The new report claims that existing measures to protect pupils from discrimination are adequate. Those who have lobbied for new restrictions, by contrast, argue that a teacher’s membership of the BNP is incompatible with values like respect for diversity and a commitment to schools as inclusive communities (from  here.)

    This utterly misleading scare-mongering.

    Once you set up “values” like diversity and commitment to “inclusively” as the criteria to be a teacher without further qualification, you do two things. Firstly, you lay down a ‘test’ for them on the basis of what you take their values to be. Secondly, you fail to distinguish between what people think and what they do. Since only the latter are visible, you can make all kinds of judgements about their ‘hidden’ ideas. In this way, you lay the ground for an Inquisition into personal beliefs.

    Singling out the BNP evades the problems this creates.

    Diversity and tolerance are challenged by a  variety of groups, including Islamists, extreme nationalists, various religious sects, and cults. To make all of these groups fit into the ‘values’ you see lay down is impossible. Rees and German have worked closely with Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-I-Islami who violate all the basic notions of tolerance and diversity. Do they still maintain links with the shadowy IFE? If they couldn’t see these people for the intolerant racist bullies they are, what chance has a School Tribunal – motivated by the pressure Counterfire and other more substantial lobbyists for a purge of the BNP  would exert –  of reaching just decisions on who to ban?

    By whipping up fears about the BNP Counterfire and those with the same views fail to fight the racism present in  mainstream political parties, beginning with the Labour and the Tories.

    A poor start for the former SWP leaders’ new project.

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    Slavoj Žižek: First as Tragedy. Then as Farce. Review

    Posted in Marxism, Multi-Culturalism, New Left by Andrew Coates on March 15, 2010

    Communist Explosion

    Review: First as Tragedy. Then as Farce. Slavoj Žižek. Verso. 2009.

     

    [Note More recent Critique of  Žižek  here.]

    Slavoj Žižek came to the left’s attention in the 1990s. Initially he was called a “‘right Hegelian’ masquerading as a ‘Left Hegelian’ with a dubious neo-liberal past. (Peter Dews 1995) A few years later he was heralded as a “welcome recruit to the anti-capitalist struggle”. Blending “rarefied Lacanian themes” and Classical Marxism resulted in a “highly suggestive theory of the revolutionary act” (Alex Callinicos. 2001). More recently he has become a fixture. Someone who “defends an iconoclastic Marxism against ‘conformist liberal scoundrels’.” (Göran Therborn. 2008). Not without critics. To some on the left the Slovak theorist’s “critique of capitalism has little to do with Marx’s” (Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey. 2006). With such contrasting assessments it is not surprising that Wikipedia has detailed pages on Žižek’s critics and defenders. This will probably multiply them. A prolific author it is near impossible to keep up with all of his writings, but this seems certain to be his most politically engaged and politically relevant book – for what that’s worth.

    No doubt First as Tragedy Then as Farce will still startle a few. We rapidly forget its laboured “IQ Test”. Marx’s well-worn phrase is taken and applied to the collapse of the liberal-democratic political utopia on 9/11” (did you notice that?), and the ‘repetition’ in the ‘farce’ of financial meltdown (is that still going on?) But this is not the main thesis. Fortunately. The central objective of the book is to “take the ongoing crisis as a starting point”, examines the “utopian core of capitalist ideology”, the nature of the “real” is mystifies, and attempts to unravel its central contradictions. That the text’s efforts to “locate aspects of our situation which open up the space for new forms of communis praxis” will have some echo is certain. Well-attended public appearances and media coverage underline Žižek’s present popularity (videos here). Though one has little evidence that his audience is doing much to “re-actualise the communist Idea.” Or to resolve the Left’s dilemmas – either to struggle for state power (what is normally called Leninism) or to reject capturing the state altogether (a line associated at the moment with John Holloway’s writings) – by adopting his own ‘Leninist’ project of “to make the state itself work in a non-statal way”. Is this the way forward for “communist praxis”? Many people will probably already think of a few objections here. What this implies for governments and civil services is not explored beyond reference to “radically changing” state power, “and its relationship to its base” “and so on”….

    This review will not try to negotiate all of the “so ons”. They lead us to the inner alcoves of Žižek’s maze of concepts. Just for theory: Lacanian psychoanalysis, theories of the ideology and the subject, Kant, Hegel and subsequent German idealist philosophy, not to mention Marxist dialectics, are there in abundance. With plenty of by-ways into Badiou (star turn – here), Laclau, Saint Paul’s universalism and Walter Benjamin’s “divine violence”. Not to mention more empirically based writers picked up along the process of churning out the present pages, such as Jean-Pierre Dupuy and his warnings about potential catastrophes – commonsense advice that we should anticipate disaster before it happens that Žižek manages to render into Latinate profundity. Or musing on “humanisation” in telling stories about people that “emphasise the gap between the complex reality of the person and the role he has to play against his true nature” There is reference to Jonathan Littell’s aridly formal novel Les Beinveillants (2008), a “fictional-person account of the Holocaust form the perspective of a German participant, SS Obserturmbannführer Maximilan Aue” From thence to psychology and politics of ‘Toxic subjects’ (‘the Two-Faced Sneaky Back-Stabber’ for starters), and then the Italian Government’s use of the State of Emergency. A hotchpotch of High Theory and journalistic commentary. All of interest, but hard to keep within the boundaries of the narrative we are busy constructing out of the pages of First as Tragedy.

    Invariant Communism.

    We are concerned however with one, if often over-egged, dish. How Žižek’s mixes the ingredients to explain the way “invariant communism” – a “concrete universality”, “universal features that may be applied everywhere”- “has to re-invented in each new historical situation.” If the ‘Real’ of the global market mechanism, a limit on representation, how can we speak of communism today and how can it become actual? The new Spirit of capitalism for Žižek fills the symbolic dimension. A world not run by traditional hierarchy but by “post-modernism”, a flat decentred world, where the “master-Signifier” is multiple consumerism, or rather, a kaleidoscope of enforced choice. A world in which we buy for “experience”, consume for pleasure and meaning, where companies promote their “ethical values”, and politics are fragmented by our (multiple) “identities” A world that by its very permissiveness foments fundamentalist – puritan – reactions. And the populist-racist mobilisation around its own version of “fear of the toxic Other” (Žižek rarely misses a helping hand from the clichés of the academic left even when he turns round and tries to maul them). An environment, in short, which the capitalist ‘real’ – operating beyond the ken of most people – throws up a vast array of misleading images and ideas that smother radical challenge. (more…)

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    French Regional Elections: Socialists on Course, but Massive Abstentions.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Greens, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on March 15, 2010
    With a total of 50% (29% for the Socialist Party) the left won a historic score.  The elections were marked by record abstentions ( 54% ) This was nevertheless a slap in the face for Sarkozy’s Party, the UMP, (which he openly campaigned for – violating Presidential neutrality). They were down (with their allies) to  26,18%.
     
    The election results will not alter the existing leadership of Regional Councils, which are all under Socialist control, except for Alsace and Corsica. In the latter the right may lose. Only the situation in Languedoc, where the Frêche list (organised by a loud-mouthed ex-Socialist  populist) came out ahead of all left lists. The Parti Socialiste is calling for a vote for him to stop the UMP gaining power.
    ****
    Europe Ecologie, an alliance of the Verts and Green ‘notables’ from all sides, got, 12,46% – a reduction on the European election result., 16,2% They will be a position to negotiate positions of strength inside new regional council. Their politics on ecological issues, are not expected to cause difficulties, though the self-importance of some of their candidates may be more of a problem.
    ****

    To general surprise the far-right Front National did well. They has a high vote in the Nord de Calais (Le Pen’s daughter Marine - now coming Party leader)  and 20% in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur where Le Pen stood. In many places they will be able to stand again in the next round – thus undercutting the traditional right, and effectively helping the Socialists retain power. The FN ascribes its success to the debate on French ‘identity’ – where their xenophobic message has seemed to be part of the mainstream.  

    The Front de Gauche got over the limit of  5% – up to 6% . The Nouveau Parti Anti-capitalist (NPA) got around 2,5% (it is not clear whether this figure includes the minority of regions where they were allied with the Front de Gauche or not). This defeat (they had hoped for 5%) was expected. Commentators account for it, partly from their perceived sectarian stand, and partly from their failure to stand up for secular principles on the issue of the Veil.

    All of these left forces call for a vote ‘against’ the right. But only the Front de Gauche will actively negotiate with the Socialists and campaign for their victory.

    The  Mouvement Démocrate (MoDem), the ‘centrist’ opposition to Sarkozy declined to 4,35%.
    ******

    High abstentionism is said to be due to the feeling that regional councils are not relevant to everyday  life, and to the failure of any party to convince people that they will make a difference.

     

    (From here) Perceptive analysis, Rue 89 here.

    Green Chahārshanbe-Sūri.

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance, Islam by Andrew Coates on March 16, 2010
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    French Regionals: Where the Left now Stands and What it Means.

    French Regional Elections Results of the  14th of  March 2010
    POLITICAL LISTS. Make-Up First Round
    # %
      Extrême Left NPA, LO 662 199 NPA 3,4%LO 1,10 %
      Front de gauche et alliés, Communists, Left Socialists,Ex-NPA and Altenative Greens and others.  PCF, PG, GU, Les Alternatifs 1 137 153 5,84 %
      PS et alliés PS, PRG, MRC 4 579 807 23,52 %
      Europe Écologie (Green Party with  political personalities and allies) Les Verts, F&S 2 372 340 12,18 %
      Divers gauche Variables 594 947 3,05 %
      Union de la gauche (Socialist Party, Left Radicals,Republicans, some Communists) PS, PRG, MRC, PCF 1 094 111 5,62 %
      Other listes Variables 366 422 1,88 %
      Listes régionalistes, from Bretons to Corsican nationalists. RÉG 146 104 0,75 %
      Mouvement démocrate et alliés (Centrists) MoDem, alliés variables 817 608 4,20 %
      Majorité présidentielle: President Sarkozy;s right-wing UMP and its allies. UMP, NC et alliés 5 066 826 26,02 %
      Divers droite. Odd-ends. Variables 241 153 1,24 %
      Front national FN 2 223 760 11,42 %
      Extrême droite (Identity Bloc and dissident FN) EXD 173 283 0,89 %
     
         
    Abstentions 23 407 608 53,64 %
    Voters 20 232 451 46,36 %
    Spoiled and Invalid Ballots. 756 738 3,74 %
         

     Three Main Issues from these results for the French Left:

    • The Rise of the Green Vote. Europe Ecologie (Official Site here) is an alliance of the Green Party a few  political refugees (or opportunists)  from other parties (Socialists and Communists) and well known Ecological personalities (such as José Bové). It is headed by Daniel Cohen-Bendit. This result contrasts startlingly with their Presidential score in 2007 (1,7%). Danny le Vert’s  aim now is to create a new platform for ‘political ecology’ – to become a major player. The Greens (les Verts) are a small group of around 5,000 members. More than fifth hold elected positions, from the lowest levels  of municipal politics to the Senate. With their present allies they are likely to become even more top-heavy. Their politics, opposing for example, regional rapid train projects, are not without ambiguity. Allied with the Socialist Party they will do well in the next round of elections – in terms of seats. Their political future looks more and more conventional - in the direction of the German Greens that Cohen-Bendit is determined to push them. One will follow of itnerest their ability to sustain these voting levels in sharper more crucial elections .
    • The Front de Gauche (in English here) did reasonably well – eclipsing the Nouveau Parti Anticapitalist (NPA) where the latter stood apart from the rest of the non-Socialist left. In Limousin, where the NPA stood with them – they scored their best result (over 13,13%). This indicates the benefits of working together. Even if it now posing problems with the Socialists for the next election round – they will not accept NPA candidates hostile to their party(here).  LO – who really went it almost alone – got nowhere. In the Vaucluse, where the NPA succumbed to multiculturalist  opposition to secularism, by standing  a veiled candidate, their vote dropped by a half to around 2%. Internally NPA critics of this inability to stand up to religious oppression were numerous. As they said, here is a  difference between  defending people’s right to wear oppressive religious dress and conniving in it politically. The future of the Front de Gauche as an electoral alliance looks probable, though how far there will be future candidates for Presidential Elections (already Jean-Luc Mélenchon is spoken about) or – improbable – a joint organisation remains to be seen. The weight of the Parti Communist Français’s past remains heavy.
    • The Parti Socialiste did well. Both the Greens and the Front de Gauche appear to have gathered support as perceived pressure groups on them rather than full-blown alternatives. How far they will be able to operate – within the limits of Regional Government – remains to be seen. The Socialists are still without any clear nationals strategy. Their proposed alliance with the centrists of the Modems appears up in smoke, and the centre party is already imploding.

    The Second Round on the 21st of March promises to consolidate the pattern of left – PS-led – advance. Whether the left will have a ‘grand slam’ and win every region is of little interest outside of the hexagon

    The Parti de Gauche says:

     Le Front de Gauche s’enracine. Nous sommes les seuls à avoir progressé en voix tout au long du cycle qui s’achève. Nous entrons donc dans le suivant en dynamique ascendante. L’adhésion est bien présente, souvent au-delà de nos électeurs

    The Left Front has put down roots. We are the only force to have seen our votes go up in the political cycle which is now ending. We are entering, therefore, on an rising wave, into the next cycle. Support and backing is really there, often well beyond our electorate.

    Internationally we may reflect on the positive results of unified political campaigns. To begin with the French left has avoided the ‘Italian’ disaster of being dragged to the centre and impotence - though Europe Ecology remains a threat which may yet do the same as the Mo-Dems once menaced. Equally it shows the importance of standing up to social democratic compromises with market-liberalism from the left, by open new organisations. The NPA’s inability to ‘jump over’ the rest of the left has left many of its members openly disappointed. The NPA’s declaration, that the Elections showed a rejection of Sarkozy and massive abstention, failed to face their own responsibilities.  But the fact that some local NPA groups co-operated with the Front de Gauche (not to mention a  whole tendency – the ‘Piquet’ tendency – which joined it) is a good sign for the future.

    Review: The Idea of Communism. Tariq Ali.

    Posted in Communism, European Left, Marxism, Stalinism by Andrew Coates on March 21, 2010

    Not a Totem?

     

    Review: The Idea of Communism. Tariq Ali. Verso. 2009. 

    Communist spiders, capitalism as a nervous disease, the triumph of liberal capitalism, when “utopia, together with all notions of collective activity and its misshapen Communist children, was buried safely in the family vaults..” the Flying Machine of the Tailor of Ulm… The opening pages of The Idea of Communism are full of confusing metaphors and allusions. We steady around the motif that, “the idea of ‘Communism’ grew out of the need to challenge wage-slavery of workers during industrial capitalism of the nineteenth and twentieth century”. From Europe and North America as wage slavery spread, resistance to it developed – the twin sides of the “first wave of globalisation”. It was the analysis of this process, of its “longue durée”, that Marx and Engels offered. “Because of its lasting value, it will last as long as the planet”. Tariq Ali has not published a memorable, well-researched or even well written book, (in comparison with his The Duel, 2008, on Pakistan and Afghanistan). But its 126 pages have great ambitions to say something of value. 

      

    The Idea of Communism is not so much an exploration of Communism, as an account (cobbled together from historical insights of varying quality, and his own published writings of decades past ) of the fate of one type of Communism. This begins with the Communist Manifesto (1848) and concludes, as the “light is dim” with a call for “new forms” of combat “between the possessors and the disposed.” An evocation of William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball (1888) Where “fellowship shall be established in heaven and on the earth” completes the elegiac tone. An unfortunate reference. Perhaps Ali imagines himself as the Lancelot in Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere (1858). Mounted on the “roan charger” who comes to rescue Communism “at good need”. 

    The history of the “idea” of communism it is not. Nor does it explain its Ali’s claim that as long as capitalism exists so will a communist challenge. It never specifies why resistance to markets and private property have to be communist as such (Interview here, rhetoric in full flow here). It is an account of the views of “Communism’s founding fathers”, Marx and Engels, their appropriation by the leaders of the October Revolution, and a balance-sheet of that event and its consequences for today’s left. That is, there is nothing about pre-capitalist communist utopians, the communism of Moses Mendelson, Wilhelm Weitling and Étienne Cabet, anarchist communism, or contemporary communist thinkers such as Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. The “practice” is that of Marxist parties, post-1917 that followed the Leninism codified and (transformed) by Stalin and their (largely) Trotskyist or former Trotskyist, critics. It is a story of the “divorce of theory from practice” – a promise of social equality and freedom that would come with the abolition of wage labour, and a bureaucratic reality. Repressive dictatorships – founded on other waves, of terror. There is plenty on the search for a true “praxis” that unites the two realms. Pre-Lenin the 1870 Paris Commune comes close to the ideal. Apparently in opposition to the ‘social’ republic that its leaders supported. Or as Marx stated, the “vital elements” which “frankly avows ‘social emancipation’ as the great goal of the republic” (First Draft of ‘The Civil War in France’ 1871). The author of Capital saw in it the germs of a transformed state. The future lay, not in rejecting ‘republicanism’ . It was in the way it went beyond it through its “organised power” and its role as “the vanguard of working men of all nations”. But then Ali’s image of the Commune has more in common with the vivid (c more essential) novel by Commune participant Jules Vallès in L’Insurgé (1885) than a thought-out, critical, historical inquiry. (more…)

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    French Left Victory. Europe Écologie: Cracks Start To Open Up.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Greens by Andrew Coates on March 22, 2010

    The Sunday Second Round of the French regional Elections were a success for the Left.  56% of votes on a national level for the joint-lists of the Parti Socialiste, Europe Écologie and the Front de Gauche (in  a few regions, such as Brittany - for the Greens, and Limousin for the Front,  they stood separately). Sarkozy’s supporters got  37% . The far-right Front National got  7% This leaves the left running all the regions, except Alsace. Negotiations  with Corsican nationalists over a regional government are continuing. (Summary here)

    The left clearly benefited from disillusion with Sarkozy’s main promise. That if people worked more they would get more (more jobs, less taxes). Economic growth remains modest and unemployment high. Proposed reforms of the welfare state affecting retirement and pensions frightened many. Yet the left has no attractive central objective,  apart from defending existing rights and a dose of ‘green’ politics for the environment. Ecologists were able to gain support partly because they appeared to offer ideas on the latter in elections for the bodies (Regional Super-Councils) that initiative and run the infrastructure (transport and planning) that touch these concerns.  The Parti Socialiste hope to integrate many of those elected on the Europe Ecologie slate. But their own internal disputes continue: the saga of the fight between Socialist leader Martine Aubry and Ségolène Royale.

    The future of  Europe Écologie is now capturing media attention.

    This electoral alliance is made up of the Green party (les Verts) and a gamut of personalities, ranging from left wing figures like José Bové, radical intellectuals, notables, activists,  to “neither right nor left” ecologist pioneer, Antoine Waetcher.

    Daniel Cohen-Bendit, the ‘liberal-libertarian’  leader of Europe Écologie wishes to create a new structured organisation out of this alliance. On Sunday he called  for a new “political co-operative” formed around «collectifs Europe Ecologie-22 mars». (here). The reference to Cohen-Bendit’s May 68 (very much) past, is underlined by his critique of ‘obsolete’ political machines, adapted to the industrial past. A new form of political organisation, (inevitably) held together by the Web, with full plurality, should be created. “Il est nécessaire de «repolitiser» la société civile en même temps que de «civiliser» la société politique et faire passer la politique du système propriétaire à celui du logiciel libre.”  “We have to repoliticise civil society while, at the same time, civilise political society, passing rom the political system based on proprietors’ ownership to that of a free radical.” (literally from property to free software). Opines Danny.

    Others are less keen. Martine Aubry, former Green Presidential candidate, says it’s all  “too early” for such a project. Rhetoric of a new ‘co-oeprative’ politics hides more than it reveals.  (here). Is the political axis of a new formation to be clearly on the left? Or, as Cohen-Bendit’s practice in Germany and the European parliament indicates – open to the Centre and centre-right? Another issue is the internal organisation of this proposed body. How would these groups operate? The not-too-distant experience of the anti-liberal ‘collectifs’ during the Referendum on the proposed European Constitutional treaty did not result in any new political organisation. They split over the formation of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste - many backing Bové for his marginalised Presidential bid, others supporting Bescancenot and the NPA.  Europe Écologie contains potential divisions from this period: José Bové invested a lot in this campaign, Cohen-Bendit actively backed it. Not to mention the widespread suspicion of Cohen-Bendit on the left, including left-of-centre social-ecologists.

    With these problems in mind another thought must have occurred to activists on the French left,. Cohen Bendit speaks increasingly in terms of “je” (I) rather than “nous” (We). Have not the newly elected Greens seen that the real issue they face is not to create a “new” party but to come to grips with the Parti Socialiste’s embrace? This reality – a hard fact they will confront in their Regional Council rather more than Cohen-Bendit’s effiorts to drag them away into his own personal project.

    As strains over this proposal are emerge the prospect of the 20012 Presidential elections is concentrating  minds. But in which direction?

     

    Update: last night over 300 people crowded into a meeting organised in a Parisian café to hear Cohen-Bendit argue for a “metamorphosis” of the Green movement. Present were important Parti Vert members, with several leaders notably absent (here).

     

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    Gauche Unitaire: Unity Pays!

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Front de Gauche by Andrew Coates on March 24, 2010

    The comrades from the Gauche Unitaire (ex-NPA) contributed to the score of the Front de Gauche. They stand  for a new democratic socialist party.

    They deserve their success.

    There was one unfortunate exception to the push to join the left together.

    In Limousin the Socialist Party refused to integrate the Front in the second Round of regional Elections. This was because of the presence of Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) candidates. In the event the joint list went from 13,1% to 19,1%. 3 Communist Party (PCF), 2, NPA and 1 Parti de Gauche councillors were elected.

    This shows the positive benefits of unity (more from NPA here)

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    The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History. A Notice.

    Posted in European Left, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on March 25, 2010

    Important Book

    The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History. Vol 1. Projectiles for the People by André Moncourt and J. Smith (Here)

    The history of the Red Army Faction (1970 – 1998) is important for the European Left. The group did not just take up arms. From the “Urban Guerilla Concept” (1971) to its final declaration of dissolution, the RAF produced justifications for its strategy and actions.  The film, the Baader-Meinhof Complex, has stirred up interest in the organisation. Based on Stephan Aust’s book it gave a version of the RAF”s best-known leaders’ lives, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, which is widely accepted. That is, that these underground militants were deluded and isolated. They killed needlessly, and ended their own lives in despair. The  picture is shrouded with a doomed glamour.

    Smith and Moncourt (two pseudonyms) have produced a hefty alternative version. It extends far beyond biography, and the Baader-Meinhof band. It provides an introduction to the West German New Left from which the movement emerged. Unlike many who toyed with the romance of Latin American Foci, the RAF were serious about their project: to establish an outpost of Urban Guerilla action in the First World. To the authors, they were far from indiscriminate: their targets were institutions and players in imperialism.

    The book offer a detailed narrative history of the RAF’s development (up till the mid 1980s)  backed up with contemporary documents.  Projectiles for the People also offers an account of lesser known armed bodies, such as the Revolutionary Cells (RZ) and the Second of June Movement. The list of actions is placed in a wider political context, including the intense state clamp-down that went with rising media hysteria against the Baader-Meinhof Gang (as they became known).  Moncourt and Smith claim that the RAF took great care to avoid hurting civilians. The controversial heart of the book is soon apparent.  That Meinhof’s death in 1976, and those of Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe and Gudrin Ensslin in Stammheim in 1977, were not suicides. In all these cases there is “compelling evidence” that the State and Prison authorities were involved. That these were, in effect, murders. All of this is supplemented with numerous references and a clear chronology (at the end of the book).

    We discover how the rest of the West German left interacted with the armed struggle. For example,  the present leading European Green, Daniel Cohen-Bendit and future German Green Foreign  Minister, Joshka Fisher initially sympathised with the armed struggle. Their ‘sponti’ (non-dogmatic left) organisation (Revolutionärer Kampf) proclaimed, after the hunger strike to the death of Holger Meins in 1974, “unambiguous solidarity with the guerilla“. After Meinhof’s death, and rioting in the streets, they backed off. But only to support “mass militancy” against armed action. Fisher called for them to “put down the bombs and pick up the stones”.

    The authors do not shy away from confronting difficult issues. These include anti-Semitism, or at best, callous ’Anti-Zionism’ and the crimes of the hijack that ended at Entebbe. They demonstrate at least one point. That Horst Mahler, a former member now on the Holocaust-denying far-right, was expelled from the RAF in 1974. His trajectory, they assert, was an isolated one. However this bears little on the problem that during the 1970s the group and its allies were slow in “recognising or rejecting antisemitism”.

    There is much in this throughly argued and documented book that will cause a pause for thought. Many of us on the European left, who had sympathy for glamorous guerillas, were turned away by former combatants   ’Bommi’  and Klein’s accounts (June the 2nd and RZ) of what was wrong in this strategy. German leftists told us of how the repression against the RAF and other armed groups had turned against the whole left. They made us consider the moral issues at stake, though I would not exaggerate this too much. Perhaps, more significantly, the spiral of more and more isolated violence turned people off . Those who backed the  RAF after Stammheim turned from anti-imperialism, Smith and Moncourt state, to an obsession with imprisoned guerillas.

    Today the idea of a united ‘anti-imperialist’ movement, let alone an armed struggle in Europe, appears impossible,  politically and ethically dubious . What would such a  strategy be based on?  What ‘anti-imperialist’ countries are there, and what movements? North Korea? Jihadists? The area of dispute is limitless. In Europe the dying embers of nationalist armed combat, in the Basque Country, and in Corsica, are overshadowed by the horrors that went with the break up of Yugoslavia – a real armed conflict.  What happened there, which was sometimes presented as a fight for national liberation, had effects that linger in Europe. The actions of the erstwhile ’anti-imperialists’ of the German Green Party, Cohen-Bendit, and Fisher, have not fared better. Their backing for military ‘humanitarian interventions’ in the Balkans, is said by many to have paved the way for US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. After  these developments it is not surprising that many on the left today are sceptical about any use of force. That they prefer mass struggle to an armed one.

    Nevertheless,  Projectiles for the People should open a debate about what the RAF meant, historically and politically. It should be widely read.  

     
    This volume will be followed by a further one. More information here.

     

    Work for Your Benefit Coming to East Anglia.

    Posted in Ipswich, Labour Party, Suffolk, Unemployment, Welfare State by Andrew Coates on March 26, 2010

    Pilots are due to begin this autumn.

    Succesful tenders for Norfolk, Cambridgeshire & Suffolk.

    The information below identifies the suppliers who have been successful at PQQ stage of the Work for Your Benefit competition and the Contract Package Areas they have been invited to tender in.

    1 – A4E

    2 – Consultancy Home Counties

    3 – Ingeus

    4 – Intraining

    5 – Reed in Partnership

    6 – Seetec

    7 - Suffolk County Council

    8 – TBG Learning

    9 – TNG

    From DWP, Here.

    Usual suspects. Chancers, Millionaires (are they not the same thing?), dubious recruitment agencies, ‘learning’ (what?) and ‘Consultants’.

    With a new face – Suffolk County Council.

    The Chancellor Alistair Darling is calling for radical cuts to public expenditure (here). The Tories agree. How is this going to go with the duty to provide services? Answer: make the unemployed carry out public sector work for well-below the minimum wage, with no labour rights, and under the constant threat of destitution if they disobey. Cheap. Problem solved.

    Wondered how Suffolk County Council  is going to make savings without massive cuts (no service reductions here)? See above…

    Criticisms of Workfare on the Ipswich Unemployed Action site – here

    How Not to Fight the BNP.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, BNP, Fascism, Labour Movement, Left by Andrew Coates on March 27, 2010

    Today sees a Hope not Hate Day of Action against the BNP. This is just one initiative amongst many. Unite Against Fascism organises opposition to the BNP and the English Defence League (EDL). There are regular skirmishes. Last week’s demonstration against an EDL rally in Bolton was met with brutal police action. Emotions are rising.

    What are the ideas and strategies behind these campaigns?

    That all democrats should act to “expose” the BNP and the EDL. To show that they are far-right racists, out to attack non-British ethnic groups. That they hold a neo-Nazi agenda.

    The UAF writes, “We aim to unite the broadest possible spectrum of society to counter this threat.” This alliance includes the labour movement, the left, liberals, religious and ethnic groups.

    Those involved are motivated with genuine anger at the BNP’s public declarations, and, limited,  election presence.

    Why are some people voting BNP? Why was the party able to get MEPs elected? What are its roots? How has the EDL  got the means to bring football supporters and casuals out on the streets to shout about Islam?

    Is the best way to answer them to “expose” their real aims by door-to-door and media campaigns? To bring out anti-fascists when the far-right is in the street  to say “No Passaran!”

    Eddie Ford argues in the Weekly Worker (here) that,

    The EDL is but a symptom of the alienation engendered by the decaying system of capital, defended and promoted by the whole bourgeois establishment and its state. And to take on the latter we need to begin by uniting the existing organised left around a partyist perspective and hence take a decisive step towards what the working class really needs – a mass Communist Party of hundreds of thousands and millions.

    The profound problem being, of course, that this is almost the exact opposite of the approach adopted by the SWP/UAF and others. Deliberately, and with a certain degree of cynicism, such groups constantly present the threats and dangers posed by the EDL and BNP in such an exaggerated way as to justify the construction of the widest possible popular front – which turns out to be the SWP and assorted liberal personalities, vicars and trade union officials.

    Eddie is on the right track. Neither a popular front nor streeting-fighting will get anywhere.

    • The fury at the BNP and the EDL is displaced resentment. The left is unable to offer a cedible alternative to Gordon Brown. Encouraged by members of the Labour Party and Trade Union officials it united  against what seems a far easier target. The left can feel warm, self-righteous and active without having to confront its own weaknesses. The Labour Party equally avoids  its own responsibilities.  
    • Far-right parties have grown across Europe. Why? What is the alienation Eddie Ford talks about? Political scientist Eric Maurin explains the French Front National support as a response to a “fear of the future” (here). Despite its claim, this is not just high in France. A ‘factured’ society where there’s a loss of faith in tommorow, is emerging across the continent. What is it based on? It is a division inside both the working and middle class between those who are still ‘safe‘ in their work and careers, and those exposed to the ‘flexible‘ labour market. The fear of being turned out from a job and having to face competition for employment means that people blame the last arrivals on the market . In Britain, migrant workers take the brunt of these anxieties. Whether deliberately or not, employers take advantage. 
    • In these conditions, the far-right can get people to blame ‘foreigners’ for everyone else’s difficulties,  even when they are not even in the running for the same work. Anyone anxious about keeping their job and salary (mortgages, debt and high private utility prices make most of us on the edgy about our income) can vent her or his frustration on this convenient object.
    • In-fighting extends to  state provision (housing, education and health). Those protected ‘in’ the system are worried about being cast into less protected. The government’s programme of privatisations and outsourcing increases the difference between private welfare and public. It makes a whole swathe of people nervous about their position. Unemployment looms. Anyone forced onto the Flexible New Deal and other dole schemes (hundreds of thousands) is made to feel that they do not have benefits as a right. They have duties to the state. It, and its private contractors) have rights over them. Many people loathe this condition. This is another source of frustration.
    • The government’s multiculturalism has encouraged this process. This is not by its welcome promotion of mutual understanding. It is by its political strategy of supporting ”community leaders’  of ethnic and religious groups the recipients of local power and money. It contributes a further level of frustration and competition over resources. Multiculturalism, in this  sense ,  is a factor in fostering racism.
    • The far-right can concentrate all the resentments and insecurities of people together into an  ’anti-system’ programme. This can slip from anti-foreigners, British nationalist, to virulent anti-black or Moslem propaganda. But its hinge is a reaction to the market-state. That is Labour’s commitment to keeping its consistency ’safe’, promoting their interests. With its idea that the state should equip us to compete in a global market, people are left vulnerable  to the gales of insecurity when economic crises arrive. Their own policies inflame the atmosphere in which the far-right thrives.

    UAF and Hope Against Hate have not tackled these problems. They tend to reduce the source of BNP backing to ‘anti-Islam’ inflamatory speech. They have tried to create the view that nobody should criticise religious belief.  But opposition to religions, such as Islam, and Islamist politics, should not be confused with dislike of Moslems. By putting these together they are unable to pursue an  anti-racist agenda. In Tower Hamlets, for example, Ken Livingstone, Galloway, the SWP and other’anti-BNPers’ , are allied with the supporters of the far-right Jamaat-I-Islami  a well-funded  Islamist group responsible for massacres in the Bangladesh War of National Liberation and the slaughter of leftists, Hindus and other minorities ever since. By failing to answer those who criticise this link they expose a weakness that undermines their own credibility as anti-fascists.

    Nevertheless, one should not exaggerate either this factor, or the importance of the BNP. Much more serious, is, as Eddie claims, the inability of the left to develop a “partyist” perspective. Only a densely networked left, present in the community, can begin to fight the BNP and the EDL. This would have to be one that confronts the legacy of Blair and Brown – the market state to start with – that is the real cause of what popularity the far-right  has got.

    This does not mean ignoring the BNP, or the need for a street presence against the EDL. But it’s an issue of different priorities.

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    Italy: Right Holds on, Northern League Surges.

    Posted in Europe, European Left, Italy by Andrew Coates on March 30, 2010

    Idol of the BNP.

    The Weekend’s Italian regional elections did not bring good news for the left. According to the BBC (here),

    The coalition of Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi has made gains at the expense of the centre-left in regional elections, partial results suggest.With most votes counted, the coalition has a lead in six of 13 regions where voting took place. It previously controlled only two. The gains came despite Mr Berlusconi’s recent personal  and political scandals.

    Le Monde comments that of the political forces,

    un seul a vraiment triomphé : la Ligue du Nord, alliée au PDL, obtient pour la première fois de son histoire les présidences régionales de la Vénétie et du Piémont.

    Only one has really triumphed: the Northern League, ally of the PDL  (Party of Liberty – Berlusconi’s rally), has got for the first time in its existence the regional Presidencies of Veneto and Piedmont.

    Bossi, the League’s leader, speaks of “tsunami della Lega Nord” – a “Tsunami” in their favour. (here)

    This is very bad news. It means that an outright xenophobic party is in a position of real power. The Lega Nord’s appeal is straightforward. It raises fears of foreigners (non-Italians) and the Italian South, on the kind of dog-in-manger defence of the relative regional prosperity of the North. It is a good illustration of a side of regionalism that many British leftists are usually keen to avoid, since they assume that decentralisation is always a good thing.

     

    The abject failure of the Partito Democratico, (Democratic Party) is heart-rending. It  shows the futility of trying to model a European centre left party on the US Democrats.  Forces to their left have  Partito della Rifondazione Comunista, (Communist Refoundation) are divided.  (here) The marginalisation of the left indicates is partly a result of their own internal fragmentation. This has been helped  by the Sinistra critica (Critical Left)  allied to the French Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (itself in crisis as a result of its own ‘stand alone’  strategy).

    For the European left Italy is a source of great sadness.

    La Ballade de Jim.

    Posted in Culture by Andrew Coates on March 30, 2010
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    Burka and Niqab To Be Banned In Belgium?

    Posted in Feminism, Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on March 31, 2010

    Le Monde reports today that,

    Les députés belges membres de la commission de l’intérieur de la Chambre ont approuvé à l’unanimité, mercredi 31 mars, une proposition de loi visant à interdire le port de la burqa dans les lieux publics.

    Belgium deputies (MPs), in a Parliamentary Commission, have unanimously approved on Wednesday the 31st of March, a proposal  that would mean the Burka (voile integral) will be banned in public places.

    (More here.)

    Le Soir, Belgium’s  foremost daily, states that only the Francophone Greens had, some,  reservations (here), and that,

    La Belgique est vraisemblablement le premier pays d’Europe occidentale à adopter une loi qui bannit le voile facial de l’espace public. Une interdiction générale et absolue que le Conseil d’État français vient d’estimer peu tenable, juridiquement.

    Belgium is probably the first Western European country to adopt a law banning face-veils in public spaces. A general ban which the French Council State has said is not tenable in legal terms.

    In France there is a growing realisation of the potential for arbitrary and heavy-handed action if any full ban is made. It is extremely unlikely that France will do more than make prevent wearing the full face-veil (Burka and Niqab) in certain public conditions - where it would prevent equality. Such as in state and municipal services.

    In Belgium the proposal still has to go to  the Parliament to be approved. It is likely to be challenged in terms of its compatability with the state’s constitutional law (notably Title 2, Article 11 on freedom of religion). 

    It seems a hasty over-reaction. In France the whole nature of the debate has been criticised. Many welcome the affirmation of public equality and are opposed to all forms of religious covering up, the target. But when there are many government measures that attack people’s rights (over pensions to start with) it looks as if the issue is artificially inflamed to divert attention away from them. Such ‘culture wars’ have a tendency to distract from more significant problems.

    Even if we considered this a key topic these measures steer away from challenging  the strength of religious institutions.  Islamism is not just a galaxy of  far-right political movements based on the pious Moslem bourgeoisie. It is bound up with efforts to establish the power of Islamic jurisprudence , Fiqh, (here) .  The combination of religious ‘scholars’ and bigoted activists is the source of the oppression.  Not individuals. No prohibition of the full veil addresses this seriously. Probably because many of those worked up about the Burka are not just on the extreme right themselves – or on the right generally – but because they too favour religious bodies (Christian). In other words they are not secularist to begin with.

     

    Can anti-racist secularism can deal with this delicate subject?

    This is far from clear.

    What is certain is that one has to start from a secular state. This is something which does genuinelly not exist in Belgium. Although, unlike England, there is no official  Church there is an institutionalised system of “recognised religions(here). This gives subsidies  and power to faith organisations, including Moslem ones.  In this way the country’s religious policies resemble British ‘multiculturalism’ . They have helped foment communalist identities. Banning the full veil will not deal with the problems this causes, not least the divisions between Flemish and Walloons, and their inability to give ‘immigrants’ (many of second and third generations) real equality.

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    Notes on Why I am Not a Muslim.

    Posted in Human Rights, Islam, Islamism, Religion by Andrew Coates on April 2, 2010

     

    Notes on Why I am Not a Muslim. Ibn Warraq. Prometheus Books. 2003. 

    First published in 1995 Why I am not a Muslim was part of the blowback at Ayatollah Khomeini’s Fatwa against Salman Rushdie. It is a searing assault on Islam, seen as fostering “religious fascism” and a defence of intellectual liberty. Against those who, at the time, were (and are) openly calling for Rushdie’s death he affirmed his right to “criticise everything and anything in Islam”. Yet despite common ground over defending democratic values, for the secular socialist left Why I Am Not A Muslim goes against the grain. Appeals to Karl Popper, and Arthur Koestler, and sallies at “fellow travellers” with “totalitarian Islam” seem to place the author on one side of a religious Cold War.  More recently he has torn into Edward Said and the concept of Orientalism (here). However the book’s title is taken from the free-thinking writings of a hero of the left, Bertrand Russell (Why I am not a Christian). This suggests that we should look at it in terms of another tradition; one, which has increasing importance in European, left politics, secularism. Warraq indeed concludes with his readiness to oppose “fascism and racism in the West”. That is, if need be, to defend the value of universal freedom and openness against the West itself. 

    Today there is unreasonable hostility in Europe to Islam, not just towards Jihadists or aspects of the religion, but to all Moslems. At the moment proposals to restrict the right to wear full-face veils (Burka, Niqab) in Belgium and France, are grabbing the attention. Some say that we are seeing a full-scale campaign against Muslims. But this is not the whole picture. These reactions meld into a far more generalised prejudice against ‘foreigners’, migrant workers and long-established non-Christian groups. By contrast Governments and states try to institutionalise Islam and other religious communities within a multiculturalist consensus. In Britain the main political parties stand for an ever-growing role for ‘faith communities’ in determining and carrying out public policy. Some liberals and leftists appear to welcome this process. There are those preaching a dialogue between “Western and Islamic ‘civilisations’” on the basis of an assertion of Islam’s progressive values. (Tariq Ramadan).” Others, ‘alter-globalisers’, seeking interfaith unity around global ‘social justice’. In the guise of opposing prejudice they would help support state sponsored influence for all supernatural creeds. 

    But fighting against stigmatising Muslims on the basis of their religion is not the same as embracing religious institutions. In fact putting Islam on an equal footing with other state endorsed faiths is a recipe for greater intolerance. The Rushdie affair has been followed by a string of other cases where believers have asserted their right to censor critical voices. Local politics have been opened up to competing religious groups, not just to influence-seeking Islamic organisations but also to Christian lobbies and the Christian People’s Alliance. All have their own agenda, yet tend to coalesce around conservative moral principles. In this sense Warraq’s writing should be considered as not just as a rationalist attack on one doctrine, but as part of a broader critique of the social influence of religion. (more…)

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    Democratic Centralism. Origins of the Slate System.

    Posted in Communism, European Left, Left, Sectarianism, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on April 3, 2010

    This is a Guest Post by  Dave Parks

    The article below is from karlmarx.net. Some key points briefly – the slate
    system was NOT operated by the Bolsheviks or even the early Communist Party -
    it was introduced in 1921 along with the ban on factions and this was
     two years prior to Stalin first getting control of the party. This was then
    combined with the massive expansion of the CC so that it could be filled with
     loyalists – that way bureaucratically outnumbering any opposition. The slate
    system was introduced into the Trotskyist movement in 1950 by Gerry Healy -
    he was also having problems with the awkward squad(s) at the time. the rest as
    they say is history … all of today’s sects have a slate system.

     Dave Parks

    On to Victory!
    With the Slate: On to Victory!
     

     A link to the article The Origin of the ‘Slate System’: here.

    The Importance of this article and the issues Dave raises are fundamental to any balance-sheet of the democratic Marxist left. Starting with the nature of democracy.

    Pat Byrne   March 2010

    The Origin of the ‘Slate System’ used in elections for the leadership of Leninist Groups.

    The leadership-recommended slate system for internal elections to the national leadership is used in most Leninist groups. It is not a natural system arising from the workers own experiences and democratic instincts but something artificially imported into the workers movement. In theory, the slate system can be used to recommend a list that consciously includes a good balance of talents and personalities. In practice, it gives the existing leadership a tremendous advantage in elections and experience has shown that it has allowed leaders to secure their continuous re-election along with a body of like-minded and loyal followers.

     

    Let’s examine how the ‘slate system’ arose. As the Leninist movement supposedly bases itself on the example of the Bolshevik Party, we need to start our process of discovery here. The following information comes mainly from a study made on how Communist Party internal elections were carried out in Revolutionary Russia. The study, ‘The Evolution of Leadership Selection In The Central Committee 1917-1927’, was written by the well-known sovietologist and academic Robert V. Daniels who drew most of his information from the official records of Bolshevik and CPSU party congresses. His essay was published in a fairly obscure academic study of Russian Officialdom which covered Russian society from the 17th to the 20th centuries. (more…)

    Criticism does not exclude Muslims from the political process.

    Posted in Free Speech, Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on April 5, 2010

    This letter (Here. )  caught my eye in Saturday’s Guardian – a paper that normally never publishes anything critical of Islamicist politics. Amongst all the good comrades  I was particularly pleased to see Amanda Sebestyen’s name on it.

    We are disturbed by the visible rise, in some parts of the country, of anti-Muslim bigotry resulting in sporadic attacks on Muslims and their places of worship. We deplore this and condemn it unreservedly. However, the authors of the letter you published (Islamophobia is a threat to democracy, 25 March) are quite wrong to equate legitimate concerns about the leadership of the East London Mosque and the Islamic Forum of Europe with anti-Muslim bigotry. To do so betrays those who have genuinely suffered discrimination. The East London Mosque has frequently allowed intemperate clerics to speak on its premises, some of whom have promoted values antithetical to those required in a tolerant and progressive society.

    They intimidate and bully other Muslims into accepting their contested theology as undisputed truth. Their allies and associates across south Asia have encouraged discrimination against minorities, opposed the reform of family laws and supported laws on blasphemy.

    How can it be right for those of us who believe in liberal democracy to leave unchallenged those who would discriminate against religious minorities, women, homosexuals and Muslims with dissenting or heterodox views?

    Criticism of incitement to religious hatred has nothing to do with excluding Muslims from the political process, as the supporters of the East London Mosque and Islamic Forum of Europe suggest. There are many impeccably non-sectarian Muslims active in political life, including in parliament, who are capable of opposing both racism and fundamentalism.

    The greatest threat to democracy comes from reactionary and sectarian political groupings. We are disturbed by the rise of confessional identity politics in this country. Those who would promote such politics deserve robust scrutiny. To combat them is a moral duty.

    Ansar Ahmed Ullah Nirmul Committee Gita Sahgal Women Against Fundamentalism Monjulika Jamali Cultural activist in east London, Denis MacShane MP, Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui Trustee, British Muslims for Secular Democracy, Nigel Fountain, Saikat Acharjee Lawyer, Amanda Sebestyen, Tehmina Kazi Director, British Muslims for Secular Democracy, Sandra M Kabir BRAC UK, Tahmima Anam Novelist, Amina Ali Gender equality campaigner in East London, Murad Qureshi London assembly member, Aisha Shaheed Women Living Under Muslim Laws, Dr Ahmed Zaman President, Communist Party of Bangladesh UK Branch, Harunor Rashid President, Soytten Sen School of Performing Arts, Darren Johnson London assembly member, Green party parliamentary candidate, Lewisham Deptford, Keith Angus Lib Dem parliamentary candidate, Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Rayhan Rashid War Crimes Strategy Forum-WCSF, activists’ coalition, Waliur Rahman Workers Party of Bangladesh, Peter Tatchell OutRage, Syed Enamul Islam Former MEP candidate for London with the NO2EU: Yes to Democracy coalition, Dr Irfan Al Alawi International director, Centre for Islamic Pluralism, Dr Rafikul Hasan Khan President, Bangladesh Udichi Shilpi Gosthi UK Branch based in east London, Prof Tom Gallagher Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, Prof Nira Yuval Davis Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging, UEL, Cassandra Balchin, Sujit Sen Bangladesh International Foundation, Syed Neaz Ahmad Academic and author, Harunur Rashid JSD, Zoe Fairbairns Novelist, Carolyn Hayman, Brigitte Istim, James Bethell Nothing British about the BNP, Jenny Harris Theatre administrator, founder of the Albany, formerly of National Theatre, Marieme Helie Lucas Secularism is a Women’s Issue, Victor Sebestyen, Syeda Nazneen Sultana Gender equality campaigner in east London, Dr Nowrin Tamanna University of Reading, Pragna Patel Southall Black Sisters

    From a letter calling for support for this:

    Dear Friends
    Ansar Ahmed Ullah, whose anti-racist and Bengali cultural history work I greatly admire, participated in the making of the recent C4 film criticising the East London Mosque .
    Some of you may know that this mosque is run by the same religious extremists who collaborated with the Pakistan Army during the Bangladesh war ,and were involved in the mass murder of Bengali intellectuals.
    Clearly the socialist lawyers and other progressives who signed the letter in the Guardian this morning, roped in by George Galloway and Respect to denounce any attack on the East London Mosque and Islamic Forum of Europe as an incitement to Islamophobia, may not have known all the facts. 
    Personally I don’t  dispute that the C4 film might have been followed by  even further racist attacks, on people who go to the mosque without knowing the full story, and on ordinary muslim people. If so it is horrible that the remedy is seen to be denying other muslims the right to speak out or have any democratic debate. 
    I think this is a good and brave letter – I don’t know the other people who will be signing and I don’t want to find myself stranded in a sea of Andrew Gilligans and Melanie Phillipses, so I hope that at least as many progressive people will sign this letter as mistakenly signed the earlier one. 

    Now we await a foaming Bob Pitt of Islamophobia Watch to make a reply.

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    Ipswich General Election Line-Up: A Bad Start.

    Ipswich Line-Up for General Election in the Evening Star: (Here)

    The BNP has selected ex-RAF serviceman and former Ipswich publican Dennis Boater as their candidate and he will also be standing in the Stoke Park ward at the annual Ipswich Borough Council elections.

    Mr Boater said: “I go out leafleting and get a very positive response. Voters are pleased to see us and ask why we haven’t stood before.”

    Mr Boater said that if invited, he would take part in hustings meeting with other candidates.

    “Some may say they will not share a platform with the BNP – that’s their choice, but it will not look good in the eyes of the electorate.”

    Asked if he would take part in a candidates’ debate with Mr Boater, Ipswich Labour MP Chris Mole said: “While I am instinctively disinclined to give the BNP any credibility, they have to be defeated by argument.

    “I regret the BNP will be standing in Ipswich – it’s sad to think they can win votes here. The concerns the party says it has on immigration have been addressed by the Labour government.”

    This is very unfortunate phrasing (if correctly cited).

    What ‘concerns’? The BNP wants to get rid of ‘foreigners’. To enter in an “argument” when one “addresses” their “concerns” is to have conceeded more than is needed.

    Ben Gummer, Tory candidate, said: “I am very sad that the BNP will be spreading its lies and disinformation around Ipswich.

    “I can understand the concerns that people have over immigration, but the BNP is playing on that for its own wrongful ends.”

    More “understanding” “concerns”. What exactly do they “understand?

    As the French expression goes, “tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner”.

    To ‘understand everything, is to forgive everything.” (Here)

    The General Election has already got off to a bad start in Ipswich.

    Do we really have to be reminded of what the ‘concerns’ of the BNP are

    See here.

     

    Update: Ipswich Spy (here) says, “ we leave our comments section open, and we welcome all sections of society, (but) this site will not give any publicity to the BNP or their candidate Dennis Boater beyond this post”.

     

    Bridge Ward News, which has showed plenty of “understanding” for the BNP’s “concerns” has yet to comment.

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    Sarkozy, Those Rumours, Dati, Those Denials, Finance, Those Plotters.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on April 7, 2010

    Going Their Own Way.

    The saga of Nicholas Sarkozy’s infidelities, corruption, abuse of power and persecution mania continues.

    Ex-Minister,  Rachida Dati, has been forced to reply to claims she has been stirring the boiling cauldron. (Here).

    Contrary to myth the French media has covered the story.

    Its best-known investigative journalist, Stéphene Guillon (here), has poured revelation after revelation out on France-Inter every morning. Under the cunning disguise of ‘humour’ Stephy has revealed the truth: that there exists a vast web of conspirators out to ‘get’ France’s beloved Monarch.

    Even so, progressives have a duty to publicise that truth will out like a dammed spot.

    We can reveal that Sarko regularly dresses up as “Madame Frou-Frou”  for trysts with a foreign political leader, known only as “David C”.

    Meanwhile Carla Bruni has made an “Eminence Rousse”, with the pet-name of  ”Benjy”, her devoted “love slave”. They were spotted on Ipswich’s glamorous Neptune Quay yesterday evening.

    The forces behind publicising this, in the financial world, are too mysterious to mention (Yet more here).

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    Malcolm McLaren and Situationism.

    Posted in Anarchism, Culture, European Left, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on April 9, 2010

    Juvenile Respect for Authority.

    Malcolm McLaren’s death was unexpected.

    He made a great contribution to radical culture. The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, that is.  It was mixed with a greater boost to his own personal inflation. Frankly, who cares about that? Punk was a much needed shock. We liked it in the late 70s. A real thrust in the guts.

    One thing made him real him for me. Not long ago he was on a Radio Two programme about  Serge Gainsbourg (here). McLaren really loved and understood the poetry and music. Really. That chimed a lot with me.

    A useful account of his relations, or not,  with situationism is here . I’ve always heard that Jamie Reid was the real situationist. That is the account I had from a few Warwick Uni people who got into King Mob, not that they, nor Jamie (more here), were actually members, (the people I spoke to were too late on the scene anyway). 

    Some  say that McLaren never got beyond the ”détournement” of  the ‘spectacle’ bit. Or that he fell in love with it.

    There’s a useful entry on Punk and Politics on Wikipedia - here.

    We could do with some of that anger and energy in politics and culture today.

    Ian Bone notes funeral here.

    Splinty has a Video-Fest here.

    French Tribute here. French radio here. Le Monde trying to be ‘tendance’ (which apart from being the name of a well-known revolutionary group means ‘trendy’ in French) – here.

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    On Soundings and Reinventing the Left in Britain.

    Posted in British Govern, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left by Andrew Coates on April 11, 2010

     

    After the Crash: Reinventing the Left in Britain. Edited by Richard S. Grayson and Jonathan Rutherford.

    As the General Election approaches the left is hesitant. Support for Labour, the few score candidates endorsed by the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUCS) or the handful of other left candidates, is debated. On Saturday the 10th of April activists have been demonstrating to defend the welfare state. What would be a re-elected Labour government be like? How can we fight a Conservative one? What would a Coalition mean? There is little clarity about the left’s future course of action faced with any of these possibilities. A post-election conference is simply called “Join the Resistance!” In other words, continue to do what we’ve done up till now, but try a lot harder to do it better.

    In an effort to bring some strategic sense to the left Soundings, has published an E-Book (here). It is a collection of essays around the theme of ‘reinventing’ the left.  This claims to think beyond the election to where forward-looking politics could stand on a different basis. It calls for “ New kinds of transformative political alliances.” The Editors announce, “we need to create a common ground for a progressive coalition of ideas and action.” “We need to rediscover our capacity for collective change. Our task is to reverse the decades-long transfer of wealth and power from the great majority of people to the financial sector, global corporations and a tiny rich elite.” For this, “We believe that now is the time for a new coalition of ideas and action on the centre left, working together to find common ground for change. At the heart of such a coalition is the belief that social democrats, liberals, greens and civic nationalists share a wide range of concerns. The processes by which we negotiate our alliances with one another will define the democracy of our movement, our acceptance of pluralism and our recognition of difference. It will be our commitment to a plural and democratic politics that will make us truly radical.”

    What does this imply for the General Election? To put it simply, Soundings is thinking in terms of hedging its bets. The issue of what an incoming government will do is less important than establishing “common ground” for these forces. For the 6th of May this reduces to a hope. The signs of the times indicate, they claim, that a realignment of the left is emerging. If any part of this hypothetical “progressive coalition” does well in the ballot box this is to be welcomed.

    Transformative Alliances.

    The model here is not centred on affirming traditional labour movement politics against the Conservatives or New Labour. The new fault lines are broader. “On one side are those who continue to believe that the market and individual choice are the most effective means of governing people and maximizing individual freedom. On the other side are those who believe that individual freedom must be rooted in greater equality, social relationships and the democracy of public action.” Straddling the categories may be both ‘compassionate conservatism’, with its own ‘social’ dimension (strong communities) and New Labour, which had/has is own vision of how to equip people for the market-place, public sector reform, and if not equality, then equal opportunity. But Soundings would like, if rather indirectly, to set both in the former camp and itself and its (wished-for) allies in the latter. (more…)

    Jean-Luc Mélenchon “feels capable” of Presidential Candidacy in 2012

    Posted in French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on April 12, 2010

    Jean-Luc Mélenchon “feels capable” of being a Presidential candidate in  the French elections of 2012.

    The leader of France’s Parti de Gauche (Wikipedia – in English – here) says in a period of crisis “characters” stand a better chance than  “pasturised cheese or  freeze-dried fish” (“des fromages pasteurisés ou des poissons lyophilisés”.) (Here.)

    What his allies in the French Communist Party think is not clear.

    More on Senator Mélenchon (in English) – here.

    Labour Misleads Over Jobs ‘Guarantee’.

    Posted in Britain, British Govern, Labour Government, Labour Party, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on April 13, 2010

    Faith-led Job Placement.

    Labour to guarantee a job for anyone unemployed for over 2 years?

    To hear the media and read the press apparently so.

    Channel Four News even did a special ‘report’ .  On the 11th of April it claimed,

    “Labour is to fight the election on a manifesto pledging to offer jobs but cut long-term benefits to anyone who has been unemployed for more than two years.”

    Ahead of Labour’s manifesto launch tomorrow the party said its proposals would be “ambitious but affordable” as the prime minister stakes Labour’s claim to a fourth consecutive term principally on securing the economic and social recovery.

    Under Labour plans public jobs would be offered to anyone over 25 who has been unemployed for two years or more and everyone under 25 unemployed for 10 months or more. If the job is turned down they will lose benefits such as jobseeker’s allowance.  ( here.)

    The Independent repeats this today, Labour plans to

    “Create 200,000 jobs through the Future Jobs Fund, with a job or training place for young people who are out of work for six months. Benefits cut at 10 months if they refuse a place; and anyone unemployed for more than two years guaranteed work, but no option of life on benefits.” ( here)

    But the Labour Manifesto says,

    All those who are long-term unemployed for two years will be guaranteed a job placement, which they will be required to take up or have their benefits cut.

    A ‘plecement’ then, not a job. People on the ‘Flexible New Deal’ get placements. They get no extra money than the standard JSA. A £15 a week extra allowance for placements has been abolished. So, one pay cut already and it doesn’t  look as if there are plans to pay people real wages for these new posts.

    People on these schemes have few rights and plenty of obligations. Labour’s Welfare Reforms increases these to “work for your Benefits”. It looks as if this proposal is a way of disguising Workfare.

    This promise of work (that is paid at a reasonable rate at least) for anyone unemployed for over 2 years is then misleading.

    To put it bluntly, it is a lie.

     

    Will this be different from the Tories’ “Work for Dole” scheme for a “Community Work Programme” ? (here)

    We have our doubts.

    French Greens Fall Out.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Greens by Andrew Coates on April 14, 2010

    French Greens Battle Elements.

    As exclusively predicted here the French Greens have fallen out amongst themselves.

    Fresh from their recent electoral success in a broad electoral alliance, Europe Ecologie, Daniel Cohn-Bendit wanted to form a  post-party movement  corresponding to the novel stage of cyber-capitalism. But his ship had barely begun to sail before it ran aground at the reefs. Or rather the rocky coves of a structured Green Party, a Parti Vert. Known as Les Verts.

    Their leading figures took ill the suggestion that they should dissolve into a information highway-network under Danny’s captaincy (here). Cécline Duflot, the Party Secretary (here - in English)  has written her own, maturely pondered, response to this utter drivel (which barely hides a wish to move the Greens rightwards). To put it simply she wants the French greens to remain aligned to the left (that is, the Parti Socialiste). With a few nasty remarks about the Nouveau Parti Anti Capitaliste (NPA) to broaden her polemic, not to mention the Socialists moves to gather other allies on the centre, this is a call for a future Green-Socialist Party agreement for government. Cohn- Bendit has clearly over-reached his ambitions with his plans to ‘skip over’ such an accord. The wild claims made for the post-materialist post-party ‘political co-operative’ he promotes can’t have helped suppress already well-known tensions between Danny and anyone on the serious left of centre political scene. No one can doubt that despite its quicksilver image his project gives power and authority to Notables, not members. And certainly weakens the position of activists. That’s just to add to  widespread scepticism about Cohn-Bendit’s “reformist utopia” (latest version here).

    Anyone interested in the future of the European Green movement should follow these developments closely.

    At stake is a dispute between two models. Cohn-Bendit’s ‘immaterial‘ ecological centrist alliance is pitted against the greening of social democracy.

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    Benedict Gummer: Dad’s Dosh.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on April 15, 2010

    Would He Bless His Namesake?

    Terrible bad form and all that. But perhaps we ought to be reminded of the background prospective Tory Ipswich MP Benedict Gummer comes from. That is, his MP dad. These God-botherers do after all believe in sins of the fathers, or something or other. He did finance Benjy’s time at Tonbridge Public School.

    Let us be reminded that Benedict’s father, John Gummer M.P, was one of the worst offenders in the Parliamentary Expenses scandal (Here).

     

    John Gummer, the former environment secretary, used the parliamentary expenses system to claim more than £9,000 a year for gardening.

    Mr Gummer also received hundreds of pounds to meet the costs of “treating” moles, removing jackdaw nests, tackling insect infestations and an annual “rodent service” contract. He claimed more than £100 a year for the mole treatment alone.

    Not content with killing innocent wildlife Gummer ‘earns’ (we use this word loosely) his living by touting himself around a vast array of companies.

    Here are a few examples of how John Gummer earns his hefty crust : here. Note Valpak. It would be interesting to know more details about Valpak’s (or other Gummer interests) and the Suffolk Incinerator and the (Tory-run) County Council. This has yet to be covered in the highly interesting Ipswich Spy and  by Bloater Bridge Ward News (no surprises there, he can barely manage a key-board).

    1. Remunerated directorships
    Chairman, Sancroft International Ltd.; consultants providing advice and monitoring in corporate responsibility and environmental, social and ethical issues. Address: 46 Queen Anne’s Gate, London SW1H 9AP.
    Received £13,750 (gross) quarterly salary for chairing company meetings and giving strategic global advice on corporate social responsibility. Hours: 42.75 hrs. (Registered 22 October 2009)
    £9151.25 quarterly salary(gross): chairing company meetings, strategic global advice on corporate responsibility, 89.75 hours (Registered 27 January 2010)
    Chairman, Veolia (formerly Vivendi UK); water companies. Address: 5th Floor, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London, N1 9AG.
    Received £3,562.50 salary (gross), 2 hrs, board meeting by phone plus preparation, and attendance at office opening (unremunerated). (Registered 14 August 2009)
    Received £3,562.50 salary (gross), hrs: nil. (Registered 21 September 2009)
    Received £3562.50 (gross) salary for chairing a board meeting. Hours: 3 hrs. (Registered 22 October 2009)
    Received £3562.50 (gross) salary: no board meetings in November. Hours: nil. (Registered 21 December 2009)
    Received £3562.50 (gross) salary. Hours: nil. (Registered 20 November 2009)
    Received £3562.50 (gross): board meeting and strategic advice. Hours: 3.5 hrs. (Registered 27 January 2010)
    Received £3562.50 salary (gross): no board meeting in February. Hours: 0 hrs. (Registered 23 March 2010)
    Chairman (non-executive), Valpak Ltd, Stratford Business Park, Banbury Road, Stratford-upon-Avon, CV37 7GW; not-for-profit organisation for compliance with packaging waste directive. Salary paid alternative months. (more…)

    Iranian Regime Links-Up With European Far-Right.

    Posted in Fascism, Iran, Islamism by Andrew Coates on April 15, 2010

     

    Far-Right Likes Iranian Theocrats; Theocrats Like Far-Right.

    Hat-Tip to Enty.

    From Iran en Lutte (Here)

    Seyed Mehdi Miraboutalebi, l’ambassadeur de la République islamique d’Iran à Paris ne fait pas les choses à moitié. Mardi 13 avril, “pour approfondir les relations entre les deux peuples” et “parce que les médias injectent des idées préconçues dans les opinions publiques”, il s’est prêté à un jeu de questions-réponses dans un bar à vin parisien du 5e arrondissement (qui, pour l’occasion, ne servait pas d’alcool) tenu par un ex-militant du Renouveau Français (groupe pétainiste et antisémite), ex-colistier de la liste antisioniste de Dieudonné, très proche des hooligans du PSG et des ultranationalistes serbes. Bref.

    Seyed Mehdi Miraboutalebi, Ambassador of the Iranian Republic in France, doesn’t do things by halves. On Tuesday the 13th of April “to deepen ties between the two peoples” and because “the media spreads preconceptions amongst public opinion” he offered himself to a question-and-answer session in a Wine Bar in the Parisian 5th arrondissement (which, for the event, served no alcohol). The bar is run by a former member of  Renouveau Français (a Petanist and anti-semitic group), a member of the Dieudonné electoral List, who is also close to the Football hooligans of PSG (paris saint-Germain), and Serbian nationalists….

    This little chat was organised by the journal Flash -  the  magazine of the “altermondialiste” (anti-globalisation)  extreme-right (site here). It publishes well-known rightist racists (from a Front National background), 9/11 Truthers, and ‘identity’ theorists such as such as  Christian Bouchet, Philippe Randa, Alain Soral and Alain de Benoist (the key Intellectual of the Nouvelle Droite). Oh,  and Dieudonné.

    Clearly Iran’s Islamists knows where  their real friends lie.

    Tagged with: ,

    Socialisme: Godard’s Last Film?

    Posted in Culture, European Left, Films, French Left, New Left, Philosophy by Andrew Coates on April 16, 2010

    Screening at the Cannes’ festival – here.

    Tagged with: ,

    Benedict Gummer and Dad.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on April 16, 2010

    Criticised by Ipswich Spy  for ‘familism’ Tendance Coatesy points this out:

    Address of Benedict Gummer’s Web sites: Registrant:
    Benedict Gummer
    46 Queen Anne’s Gate
    London, London SW1H 9AU
    UK

    Domain name: BENGUMMER.COM

    Administrative Contact:
    Gummer, Benedict
    46 Queen Anne’s Gate
    London, London SW1H 9AU
    UK
    +44.2079607916

    Note Dad’s Main Business Address: 46 Queen Anne’s Gate, London SW1H 9AP.

    This appears to contain a minor misprint as the correct post code for Sancroft is SW1H 9AU.

    John Gummer is Chair of Sancroft (more here). On the 21st of June 2009 the News of the World reported that

    “(In Context of Expenses Scandal)

    In total Gummer claimed at least £9980 in payments to Sancroft. …”

    The right-wing Taxpayers’ Alliance stated (here),

    The former Environment Secretary, already under fire for claiming to remove moles from his country estate, handed in a raft of invoices from a company called Sancroft.

    Gummer is founder and chairman of Sancroft, based a stone’s throw from Parliament in posh Queen Anne’s Gate.

    It is one of the astonishing revelations from the millions of controversially blacked-out MPs’ expense submissions published by the Government this week.

    The heavily-censored receipts show Gummer made at least 16 claims for Sancroft’s services from 2004 to 2008.

    Rigorous

    They included repeated claims for the use of laptop equipment, many at hundreds of pounds a time. He also claimed thousands towards the recruitment and wages of a diary secretary who works out of Sancroft’s offices and who he admits dealt with both his private and parliamentary work.

    Gummer submitted at least two claims – £2,400 and £1,808 – for recruiting the aide. He also put in an invoice from the firm for a £46.50 train fare.

    Some of the invoices were for thousands of pounds. But one scrawled handwritten note submitted to the Commons Fees Office said simply: “Please pay Sancroft £4.86 VAT.”

    In total Gummer claimed at least £9,980 in payments to Sancroft.

    The firm describes itself as providing “Corporate Responsibility Solutions” – giving advice on environmental, social and ethical issues.

    Gummer yesterday insisted he had done nothing wrong, telling the News of the World: “I try to do things as cheaply as possible for Parliament. I am very careful about being extremely rigorous about the way in which I behave.”

    Benedict Gummer “is currently operations director at the corporate responsibility consultant Sancroft.”

    Hey op!

    Benedict works for Dad’s company.

    Don’t expect Bridge Ward News to mention this.

    Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste, Nouvelle Crise.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on April 17, 2010

     

    Message not Received.

    The Nouveau Parti Capitaliste (NPA)  created just over a year ago – the rising left force in Europe.

    How long ago it seemed…

    Le “camarade Olivier” caracole alors dans les sondages, apparaissant comme le seul opposant à M. Sarkozy face à une gauche à la peine. Le facteur alterne plateaux de télé ”punchy” et visites dans les usines. Fini ”la vieille gauche défaillante” - un PS englué dans ses querelles, un PCF moribond et des Verts qui se cherchent -, place à la “vraie gauche qui résiste”.

    Comrade Oliver climbed up in the opinion polls, appearing to be Sarkozy’s only real opponent – facing a left wasting away. The Posty popped up “swinging punches” on television shows and factory visits. It was the “end of the failing old Left” – a Socialist Party stuck in in-fighting, a moribund Communist Party and the Greens naval-gazing. It was the moment for “the fighting left”.

    L’atterrissage est douloureux. Le NPA s’est vu distancé électoralement par le Front de gauche, l’alliance entre le PCF et le Parti de gauche de Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Avec Martine Aubry, le PS est redevenu crédible. Et pour la nouveauté en politique, c’est Europe Ecologie. “On s’est auto-intoxiqués en disant qu’on était les seuls à gauche à résister à Sarkozy et on a oublié de faire de la politique”, reconnaît Pierre-François Grond, numéro deux du parti.

    Coming down to Earth has been hard. The Front de Gauche, the alliance between the Communist Party and the Parti de Gauche of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, overtook the NPA in the (regional) elections. With Martine Aubry the Socialists have become credible again.  As for political novelty, they have been replaced by Europe Ecologie. “We were intoxicated when we said we were the only ones fighting Sarkozy and forgot how to act politically” – recognises Pierre-François Grond, deputy Party leader.

    (More Here.)

    The NPA will hold a congress to discuss its future direction in November. There has been a  drop of membership (last week Libération alleged the decline was around 10%). Criticisms of the NPA’s decision-making process – allegedly confined to a group around  Oliver Besancenot - are rife.

    In the Vaucluse there is more or less open war by the majority of the local NPA who opposed the decision to accept a candidate (for the regional elections) wearing the veil. The Congress, it is said, “réaffirmera sa laïcité et reconnaîtra son “erreur” sur le voile.” (will reaffirm its secularism and recognise its ‘error‘ on the veil).

    This will no doubt please British supporters of an alliance with Islamism – not. (here and here)

    As Pete Shield says, there is a general crisis of political parties in France. The left, and now, the right, have not been succesful in reforming society for the better (in their own terms). The most obvious failure is that mass unemployment has not gone away for two decades. There is rising electoral abstension and (as across Europe) a decline in mass memberships. From Sarkozy’s UMP, to the (difficult) formation of a new grouping out of the Greens, not to forget the Socialists, all are trying to re-define their role and strategies.

    But for the NPA sobering up after their go-it-alone binge is proving particularly difficult.

    Yvonne Ridley and George Galloway: Why Socialists Should Never Vote for Respect.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, European Left, Islamism, Left, Multi-Culturalism by Andrew Coates on April 19, 2010

    George Galloway, Salma Yaqoob and Yvonne Ridley: Best of Friends.

    Yvonne Ridley is a prominent member of Respect. So prominent in fact that she has a special section on their official site (here).   

    Respect claims to left-wing and anti-imperialist. What kind of ‘left-winger’  and ‘anti-imperialist’ is Yvonne Ridley?   

    Wikipedia notes (here),   

    After the Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev  (accused of the Moscow theatre hostage crisis and blamed for the Beslan school massacre) was killed, Ridley wrote an article referring to Basayev as a “shaheed“, despite a noted Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad where the deaths of ‘enemy’ children were denounced, and that all children who have yet to reach maturity are considered to be on the natural path (Fitrah) in Islam. The article however does not state her views on who was responsible for the deaths since there has been contradictory accounts regarding those events, with Basayev writing in particular that the Beslan School Massacre was “a terrible tragedy” and, in reference to then President Vladamir Putin, “Kremlin vampire destroyed and injured 1,000 children and adults, giving the order to storm the school for the sake of his imperial ambitions and preserving his own throne”. She went on to refer to Basayev as leader of “an admirable struggle to bring independence to Chechnya”.   

    This is of interest, 27th December 2009   

    The activities of the rent boys who parade up and down Al-Shawarby Street in Cairo provide a good metaphor for the relationship the Egyptian Government has with Israel and the US. Both are quite shameless and ruthless; prepared to do whatever it takes to please … in order to secure a fistful of dollars. But at least the man whores of Al Shawarby are honest about their trade as they eagerly hustle potential customers. (here.)   

    Not many socialists would use expressions like “man whores” and compare politicians to “rent boys”. Still fewer would speak like this : 12/04/2010,  Ridley stated (here),   

    For too long have we allowed the long, poisonous tentacles of Zionism and Islamaphobia to twist and weave their way into British courts. Ordinary, law-abiding citizens of faith and no faith have had enough of seeing our courtrooms hijacked by those who believe some are more equal than others when it comes to freedoms and liberties.   

    Ridley famously claimed that,   

    “[Respect] is a Zionist-free party… if there was any Zionism in the Respect Party they would be hunted down and kicked out. We have no time for Zionists.”    

    Which sums up her view of Respect’s politics.   

    One should add that Ridley runs a programme on Press TV: The Iranian Theocrats’ propaganda arm (here). 

    George Galloway naturally has another show on the same station (Here). 

    Anybody thinking of voting for Respect should think long and hard. 

    Should they back a party deeply entangled in support for the Iranian regime? That as a result has the blood of our martyrs on their hands? 

    Even so Galloway has a “sense of humour“.

    This is from an esteemed column and Blog  in the Daily Record,  in which he muses (here) – Hat-Tip Enty.

    Danni in M&S knicks and pyjamas as part of the new advertising campaign will surely help the store. Alongside the past adverts featuring Twiggy and Mylene and my favouriteNoemie Lenoir – the ad campaign of the high street warhorse has begun to get it back on its feet.

     

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    Johanna Kaschke: A Plea For Help.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, Free Speech by Andrew Coates on April 20, 2010

    The libel action brought by Conservative Party activist Johanna Kaschke against Dave Osler looms nearer (here).

    Ol’ Black Forest Cherry Gâteau (Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte) has been at the end of her tether, (Blog  Here. )

    Her Blog is märchenhaft, phänomenal, prima, sensationell, sondergleichen, spektakulär, staunenswert. Not at all written by someone sternhagelvoll.

    An  attempt at American almost succeeds,

    Even when the council was liberal they could only make those delightful improvements to our area because they gotten plentiful supplies of money to do so. Imagine a Liberal council under a Labour government today could not make any more improvements to the area in respect of maintenance for lack of money. 

    But it is Libel cases that are a main preoccupation. (here)

    I have dcided to publish the orders made in those legal cases that are currently ongoing at the High Court.

    You can view them and if you wish to provide legal support to me please get in touch at once.I need you urgently.HQ08X01628 Kaschke v Osler

    this case is set to go to jury trial on 27 April 2010. Mr Joel Bennathan QC is representing Mr Osler on a pro-bono basis, I urgently need pro bono representation or the case is doomed under ECHR Article 6 if I loose.
    HQ08X00922 Kaschke v Gray, Hilton, Pressdram
    HQ08X00921 Kaschke v Der Spiegel, this case was thrown out of the English court but is now filed with the ECHR
    Please look under links for a link to the folders with the orders on MSN as I cannot put public PDF files on Google docs but can do so on MSN spaces. I am unable right now to embed an iframe to show the folders here.

    Johanna clearly needs help.

    Of a kind that, one suspects, the Courts cannot provide.

    Ipswich Election Odd-Bods.

    Posted in Capitalism, Conservative Party, Conservatives, East Anglia, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on April 21, 2010

    It is commonly, and ridiculously, asserted that we on the left have more than our share of odd activists.

    I refute, rebut  and categorically deny this.

    If we once wore the ‘looney left’ label with pride we have long been dethroned.

    Benedict Gummer is a promising crank. He claims to find the origins of the word ‘job’ in some obscure Latin phrase (it has no such source). I can confidently assert (though no doubt the Order of the Templars will expel me for this) it does not. Not, not, at all.

    The local Tory Party contains – in order  of looniest - supporters of the Richard the 3rd Society, Christian bampots, and – need I mention this? – Judy Terry. Now frazzle-em up Bridge War News is making an electrifying stab at joining their ranks.

    Yet it is the Liberal Democrats who win the prize for outstanding nutty-barking maddest political party in Ipswich. They range from embittered former Labour members, former Communist Party supporters with a cute vein in abuse of the disabled, greenies, those interested in UFOs, more Bible thumpers, and 9/11 Troofers.

    I was reminded of them yesterday evening. I was coming back from my Job placement waiting for a bus. A woman approached me. Wild-eyed and starting. Would I sign her election nomination form? What for? Reply: I’m either a Liberal or an Independent.

    Quite.

    She did not get my signature.

    It may interest Ipswich Spy that this women has been spotted in past elections.

    He ought to find out more.

    Tagged with: ,

    Belgium Moves Today To Ban the Burka (Voile Intégral).

    Posted in European Left, Feminism, French Politics, Human Rights, Islamism by Andrew Coates on April 22, 2010

    Belgium looks likely to see some kind of ban on the voile intégral (total veil). As it stands it seems that the Burka, Niqab will be prohibited  in all public spaces. (Le Soir. ) (BBC here)

    Doubts remains about the constitutionality (state and European) of such legislation. Neverthless, with the support all the country’s political parties (including the Greens, despite some reservations) this look set to move a stage closer.

    It is not clear how such a law – as opposed to one limited to public services - could be enforced without gross interference in people’s private lives.

    It may well be that this will not get afoot because continuing disputes between the land’s Dutch speakers and the French will cause the government to fall apart – on unrelated issues here. STOP PRESS: Belgium Government falls over federal question – here.

    Meanwhile moves are proceeding to devise a similar law in France.

    La présidente de Ni Putes ni soumises (NPNS), Sihem Habchi, a salué comme une «victoire des femmes» l’annonce mercredi à l’issue du Conseil des ministres d’un projet de loi  visant à une interdiction générale du port du voile intégral dans tout l’espace public.

    The President of Ni Putes ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Door-mats - background in English  here. ), Sihem Habchi, hailed Wednesday’s announcement of a Cabinet White Paper  that plans a law introducing a general ban on wearing the total veil in public spaces, as a “victory for women”

    «C’est la victoire des femmes, c’est le début d’une nouvelle page pour l’émancipation des femmes des quartiers populaires à qui on va proposer autre chose que l’enfermement ou la mort sociale», a déclaré Sihem Habchi.«Aux législateurs, je demande du courage politique pour voter une loi de protection et d’émancipation des femmes. Qu’on entende la voix de celles qui luttent contre le fascisme vert!» a ajouté la présidente de cette association qui revendique 6.000 adhérents dont 20% d’hommes.

    “It’s a triumph for women, and the beginning of a new chapter in the struggle for the emancipation of women in working class quarters. We are going to offer them more than the choice between social imprisonment or being spurned.” declared  Sihem Habchi. “I ask legislators to have the courage to vote for a law to protect and free women.” To listen to the voice of those who fight against green fascism.” added the President of the association, which has 6,000 members (20% men).

    (Libé)

    Two observations.

    Firstly it is a point of principle for those who stand for freedom, and women’s rights, to  campaign against the total veil. As the feminist libertarian Rebecca West described it, (Black Lamb Grey Falcon 1941), its use stems from the horror that masculine tyranny feels at female sexuality.

    Secondly, this fight is not best carried out by the state. Certainly, not by laws which will prove invasive, and require the use of considerable surveillance and repression. Or that could create support for Islamists and their fellow-travellers on the religious left. However, where the veil is worn by instruments of the state and law, and where it enters into legislation by its presence, it is a problem. One that creates a basic inequality between the ‘purity’ of the hidden female and the ‘impurity; of any woman not so clothed. In these conditions (state public services it ought l therefore to be restricted. That is, anyone with power, should not be allowed to impose their horror of females publicly displaying their bodies.

    One thing should be clear: for the Islamic defenders of the total veil it is not a matter of  human rights.

    It is divine law versus human legislation.

     

    This illustrates what is at stake (here),

    The telephone has not stopped ringing at the offices of “Insoumise et devoilée” (Defiant and unveiled),” located in Verviers, in southern Belgium. “In the past two weeks, sixteen young women have reached out to us,” says Karima, who is visibly overwhelmed by her work. When in 2008 she founded the organisation, named after a book she published the same year, Karima never imagined things would evolve so quickly. “It’s proof my story is not an isolated case, as some politicians suggested,” she jokes.

    Born in Belgium to a large Moroccan family, Karima was forced to wear the veil from the time she was nine. “They ended up sewing it to my hair,” she confides. Treated like a maid by her family, she was cloistered, mistreated and forcibly married in Morocco; an existence she managed to escape from, and recount in her autobiography. She says she wrote her story for the girls and women who face the same ordeals.

    Today, Karima’s organisation strives to provide women who are seeking a fresh start with a network of host families. “When we receive a call for help, we respond immediately, because often the courage doesn’t last,” she says. Her work also takes her to schools, town hall meetings and television programmes.

    Her long-term goal is to achieve a ban on headscarves in public institutions.

    St George’s Day: Why I Hate it.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Britain, Capitalism, Colonialism, Culture, Uncategorized by Andrew Coates on April 23, 2010

     

    Let’s Hear it For the Dragon!

    Reasons to loathe St George’s Day:

    Events were planned in many areas to honour England’s patron saint from Morris dancers in Loughborough to costumed stilt-walkers handing out silk flowers in Tameside. In London, the English flag will be raised at City Hall .Mayor Boris Johnson said: ”As well as marking the extraordinary life of a Cappadocian merchant, Saint George’s Day is an opportunity to celebrate our country’s many achievements.

    ”Our small island, sitting at the confluence of European cultures, has a rich heritage whose influence on language, art, learning, and politics – to name but a few – has been felt right across the globe.

    ”Gguitarist Joe Brown and singers from the Players’ Theatre who will reprise Victorian music hall songs such as ”Let’s all go down the Strand”.

    Chairman of the Local Government Association Group Dame Margaret Eaton said: ”St George’s Day provides people with an opportunity to come together in community spirit and enjoy themselves

    Plus the Daily Telegraph, here. 

    And there is also English Heritage  here.

    But most of all there is former leftist Anthony Barnett’s call for English ‘Home Rule’ – here.

    I have just seen Jerusalem, the hit play that takes place on St George’s day in Wiltshire. It summons up the spirits of England to return to the aid of a forsaken land of suburbia and regulation. It got a standing ovation. It’s Dionysian central character, an outsider living on the inside of a lost identity. Its wonderful assortment of the young. Its broken, rural self-confidence. Its rendition of the slavishly imported yet at the same time ‘up yours’ defiance of life here. It’s confident use of Shakespearian violence.  All suggested it is a play for an epoch – with a future energy just being released.

    On this St George’s day, Our Kingdom carries a statement from Mark Perryman in praise of modern England and a marvelous projection of the Cross of St George onto the Houses of Parliament by Power2010.

    At least some past English nationalist warblers and spiritual wanderers, like G.K.Chesterton, were often witty

    The Rolling English Road

    by G. K. Chesterton

    Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
    The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
    A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
    And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
    A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
    The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
    I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
    And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
    But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
    To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
    Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
    The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.
    His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
    Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
    The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
    But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
    God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
    The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.
    My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
    Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
    But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
    And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
    For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
    Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
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    David Harvey’s ‘A companion to Marx’s Capital’ : A Review.

    Posted in Left, Marxism, Theory by Andrew Coates on April 24, 2010

    Not just a study aid

    Andrew Coates reviews David Harvey’s ‘A companion to Marx’s Capital’ Verso, 2010, pp320, £10.99

    Weekly Worker – here.

     

    “Of course, we have all read, and all do read, Capital.” Louis Althusser’s opening words to Reading Capital (1968) were improbable to most Marxists then, and even more unlikely now.

    Forty years on, in the wake of the worldwide financial crisis, anti-capitalism and Marxism have seen a modest revival, it is true. As the Communist manifesto observed, capitalism is “like a sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”. But going through Marx’s critique of political economy ‘to the letter’ to find the bourgeoisie’s grimoire remains a minority taste. As David Harvey states, “a whole younger generation has grown up bereft of familiarity with, let alone training in, Marxist political economy”. This is not just an academic loss.

    To Harvey movements that oppose capitalism need an “alternative vision”.[1] If The enigma of Capital (2010) tries to show one, A companion to Marx’s Capital is its essential partner. The book explores the factory where Enigma is manufactured. Harvey’s aim is to “get you to read a book by Karl Marx called Capital Volume I, and to read it on Marx’s own terms”. Honed by years of lectures to an American graduate audience (replete with ‘gottens’), it is of greatest interest to those whose “practical engagements” demand a “strong theoretical base”.

    Left readings

    There are two main left approaches to Marx’s Capital. The first, largely academic, is taken by his critics. Theorists have taken Marx’s works to pieces so thoroughly, as in the writings of Jon Elster, Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst,[2] that little remains but the concepts of forces and relations of production. From these, we get ‘post-Marxist’ theories of the total autonomy of politics, largely beyond any of the categories of Capital.

    A second approach is that of a ‘return to Marx’. But it is of a very particular type. The ‘capital-logic’ school, which owes debts to the analysis of value by the early Soviet writer, II Rubin, is influential on the non-academic left. One theorist, John Holloway (Change the world without taking power, 2005), has his own reading of Marx. He maps the theory of commodity fetishism onto politics and states (‘form process’). The realm of “fetishised social relations” enwrap us in capital’s power to the extent that opposition has to begin (as the book does) by one big “scream” against the entire system. Anything less ends up propping up capitalism.

    Harvey therefore does not write in a vacuum. Companion is not just an invitation to read Marx. He is obliged to defend some basic Marxist positions against the radical critics. The labour theory of value is justified as a necessary “material base” of production. Harvey states (repeating some classical views): “We need the concept of value as socially necessary labour-time” to stop us imagining that the economy of the market “arrives magically”, “facilitated by the magic of the money”.

    Against analytical Marxists, who criticise Marx’s ‘flirtation’ with Hegelian terms, he is less forthright. There is no widespread use of Hegelian language or reliance on Marx’s (metaphorical) concept of the ‘negation of the negation’. While Harvey admires Marx’s ‘dialectical’ method, this largely refers to their ability to capture social development ‘in motion’, within an interlinked “totality”. Dialectics, he observes in the first chapters, enabled Marx to go beyond the surface or “appearance” of capitalism to discover its inner workings. We get a sense of the way the labour process is dynamically organised, how the circuits of capital are interrelated, how “space and time get set up and understood”, how machinery is deployed and the contradictions of commodity production develop. That lets us see the major contours of the modern capitalist world.

    But this (loose) dialectics is only a tool. As for the analytical theorists, it is the capacity of Capital to offer accurate diagnoses of how capitalism operates that matters, not, as Harvey states in his concluding chapter, the “dance of dialectic”.

    The ‘autonomist’ reading of Marx and its ‘great refusal’ of capital’s capacity to abstract is also addressed. Labour and technology are part of ‘metabolic’ processes bonded to nature. By their intrinsic character they imply hard effort. A demand for autonomous free play is not the pivotal point from where capital can be challenged.

    Workers’ resistance takes a different form. It is directly related to conditions inside work. Class struggle may (by preventing destitution and preventing its tendency to throttle demand) help capital reach a better equilibrium. But such conflicts (for example, over the length of the working day) “can go beyond trade union consciousness and morph into more revolutionary demands”. Left unresolved, however, is exactly how class struggle can be related to politics, and can avoid being absorbed or quashed by the state and the bourgeoisie.

    Piloting a voyage

    In the journey through Marx’s work there can be few better pilots than Harvey. He unravels the most difficult chapters of Capital, on commodities, on the labour theory of value, to expose with clarity the process of surplus value extraction.

    There is a constant effort to retain a critical awareness. So, in discussing the origins of money, Harvey casts doubt on Marx’s own historical beliefs (that they emerged directly from commodity exchange). Companion equally makes good use of modern theory to indicate the continuing importance of Marx’s fertile suggestions. Harvey claims (perhaps optimistically), for example, that Foucault’s works on ‘Panoptic’ labour discipline are compatible with Marx’s description of the regimenting of wage-labour in the first factories. The book equally sparkles with Marx’s literary allusions (from Balzac to Shakespeare), historical illustrations (such as the British 19th century Factory Acts and Chartism), philosophical debts (Hegel), political and ideological context (utopian socialism, Fourier, Proudhon, Owen, Cabet, Saint-Simon). Harvey gives due attention to the political economists Marx critiqued – Adam Smith, above all, though also Ricardo, Malthus and John Stuart Mill, whose writings are important for anyone wishing to go further into what Marx meant.

    Readers of Companion (and Enigma) should be aware of the context. A radical geographer and critic of postmodernism, Harvey has become increasingly concerned to link his theoretical work to political conclusions. This appears throughout Companion. One central theme is how the crises of capitalism work out. While he adopts a multi-causal approach on this (considering underconsumption as well as the decline in profit rates), a central problem for capital is “overaccumulation” (a theme of the Communist manifesto). In Capital’s pages there are only indications of this problem, as the work stretched into further volumes (capital is reproduced generally though recurrent devaluations and crises of disproportionality continually upset the system). The important point is that overaccumulation means a lack of internal effective demand for products, and a reserve of idle capital. Rosa Luxemburg saw a resolution external to the existing circuits of capital reproduction. This lay in “the existence of some latent and mobilised demand outside the capitalist system”. Its use implied “the continuation of primitive accumulation through imperialist imposition”.

    Harvey extends this insight into even wider economic and political arenas. Whether every feature of classical pre-great war imperialism defines the ‘highest stage’ of capitalism or not, these mechanisms, Harvey argues, still operate. He asserts that modern business continues to resolve its difficulties through seeking external outlets for its surplus goods and capital. It seeks to “solve its capital-surplus problem through geographical and temporal displacements”. This implies both a continuation of imperialism (through capital export), and the internal colonialisation of formerly non-market social institutions.

    The process we call ‘globalisation’ is thus more unsettling than a networked world market, ‘immaterial’ (technological) production or other aspects of the transnational economic and political flows described in Toni Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004). Classical colonialisation has been succeeded by endless economic and political shocks. Repressive political or directly military means are still used to open up new markets and dispose of people.

    In The New Imperialism (2005) Harvey described the battering down of barriers to capital through the “enclosure of the commons”. Naturally he develops – from and beyond Marx – a host of forms relating to how the contradictions of capitalism develop and are (in phases) resolved, not to mention the spiralling complexities of the different “limits and barriers” of capital. But this element of his theory, extending the life of primitive accumulation to contemporary capitalism, is probably the most politically significant. It is the basis for both oppression and resistance. Or, as Companion indicates, “political struggles against accumulation by dispossession” are “just as important as more traditional proletarian movements”. Nor are the western heartlands unaffected: in Baltimore people are losing their homes because of the subprime mortgage crisis – “a vicious class war of accumulation by dispossession”. In these conditions, political strategies are needed “around the notion of class war”.[3]

    Today, while we see capital turning inwards to cannibalise formerly publicly owned and administered assets, the process is, Harvey has argued, helped by political means. A brief history of neoliberalism (2005) describes a similar process of dispossession at work. “The reversion of common property rights won through years of hard class struggle (the right to a state pension, to welfare, to national healthcare) to the private domain has been one of the most egregious of all policies of dispossession pursued in the name of neoliberal orthodoxy.” Neoliberal politics – Thatcher in Britain, Reagan in America – were about “the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power, locally as well as transnationally, but most particularly in the main financial centres of global capitalism.” Capital is turning in on itself, as ‘unproductive’ state functions are turned over to private contractors for private profit (though in Marxist terms this creates a conceptual difficulty – are they still ‘unproductive’ when all the surplus value comes from diverted taxation?).

    We might also note that the neoliberals’ success in creating a permanent ‘reserve army of labour’ (the out-of-work or causally employed) is now accompanied by coercive dispossession of existing welfare rights, and forced labour (Workfare) to provide a flexible pool of employees and push down wages. This reminds us that primitive accumulation was accompanied by forceful measures to make those without property toil.

    Class struggle

    Companion is, then, not just a study aid. It has political ambitions. To illustrate how Marxist politics could operate Harvey focuses on Capital’s account of struggles over the working day. He updates this discussion of the tendency of employers to extend as far as possible the working day with descriptions of conditions in plants producing Wal-Mart goods today, and the loss of “class power” to alter them. But we are not clear – as we indicated in discussing autonomist thinkers – how far sufficient class power, if it reappeared, could be exerted to shape the legal framework of society or the state’s internal make-up.

    Marx apparently never fixed an “equilibrium point” for class struggle that could tell us how far we can proceed in this direction. In which case Capital is a political route-map which indicates clearly the starting point (class struggle), but fails to signpost most of the paths (against or through the apparatus of the public power) through which the working class has to travel.

    One example makes this difficulty plain. Harvey asserts that capitalist exploitation cannot be fought by appeals to human rights or “rights talk” generally. Exploitation and dispossession are acts of class power, which can only be met with class action. Yet when he discusses the struggle over the length of the working day and wages he cites accepted living standards as socially established ‘givens’ capitalists have eventually to accept. They evolve, as a wider, more prosperous standard of life is accepted as the absolute minimum.

    Can we not see that ‘human rights’ are part of the independent ‘moral economy’ of the masses, which is the bedrock of movements for better conditions? If neoliberalism is based on markets and the norm of legal equality, what is there to prevent people from asserting their own moral universe in opposition? Marx may have been right to observe how the existing notion of rights corresponded to the apparent equity of (normal) exchanges in a capitalist society, while ignoring the underlying inequalities behind them. But the system cannot impose itself over all what Harvey calls our “species-being”. From that source come new demands that reach beyond existing society. ‘I know my rights’ may be a more intelligible starting point than Jon Holloway’s scream.

    Marx and, influentially, Engels believed in forming mass working class parties. The classical Second International perspective is that the cause of labour proceeds by steady democratic expression. Is this fundamentally flawed by the existence of capitalist states ‘internally related’ to the process of accumulation? Is the state largely (as in Capital) concerned with maintaining certain essential functions of capitalism (law, money, communications and so on)? Are successful workers’ demands for a more active role (welfare, education, pensions, health) just doomed to make capitalism more stable? Are these ‘gains’ or half-victories – half-self-interested concessions that may be lost?

    Clearly the main British political leaderships think that neoliberalism has won for the foreseeable future. In which case how and at what point will more radical class struggle be able to go beyond such a framework? Harvey explores in other writings the alliances beyond labour this may require, but more significant may be the way in which parties can be constructed.

    This is a good point on which to conclude. A companion to Capital is more than excellent company. It makes us consider that it is not identities – national, religious or cultural – that primarily define how we live. It is capitalism. Its ever-present form is crystallised in money as a “radical leveller”. This “indicates a certain democracy of money, an egalitarianism in it; a dollar in my pocket has the same value as one in yours”. But revenues are not democratically distributed. Capital stands against labour; rents and surplus are extracted from the workers. Thus the “concept of class, in all its ambiguous glory, is indispensable to both theory and action”.

    I want more money, I want my rights!

    Notes

    1. T Cutler, B Hindess, A Hussain, P Hirst.  Marx’s Capital and Capitalism Today London 1978; J Elster Making sense of Marx Cambridge 1985.
    2. For discussion on these views see ‘Symposium on David Harvey’s ‘The new imperialism’, Historical Materialism Vol 14, No4, 2006.
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    Anti-Communist Figes Versus Anti-Communist Service (and Others).

    Posted in Communism, Free Speech, Stalinism by Andrew Coates on April 25, 2010

    On to Victory!

    No Anonymous Criticism!

    Robert Service, author of Comrades and Trotsky complains,( here.)

    Today I awoke to find that my fellow academic Orlando Figes had admitted responsibility for anonymous negative reviews of my three most recent books posted on Amazon. It’s been quite a fortnight. Last week I heard from Rachel Polonsky, whose book had also been negatively reviewed. The strong suspicion, strengthened by a survey of the Amazon data, was that Figes was the author. I sent out an email about this to leading Russian and European historians without specifically naming who I thought was the culprit. Figes loudly objected, claiming to want to mend relations. Then quietly came the letters threatening legal action, and the assertion that Figes’s wife, Stephanie Palmer, had admitted responsibility.

    Now we know it was Orlando Figes - the author of the The Whispers and A People’s Tragedy. Both works are historical criticisms of Stalinism and more widely, Communism. As are, er, all of Robert Service’s books.

    Now all this fluttering of legal threats is clearly very vexing, Totally misguided. Wrong, wrong wrong.

    Fine, praising your own books is OTT (more here). But what exactly is there against Figes being rude about Service  anonymously? A bit stupid. Callow even. But hardly a midnight-call to a sterner critic.

    Times Literary Supplement reviews were all anonymous up a couple of decades back.

    More on the background, Orlando’s vexacious litigant past and so on  (here).

    Service remarks that,

    “This is a matter that has broad implications for the public interest..” and “For nearly two weeks we’ve been sustained by two-way mega-splenetics about the waste of time and money and about the psychic cost to our families.”

    He notes, “Still, you have to laugh. This winter I’ve been picketed by Trotskyists at public talks. While they may be bitter, they do at least deliver their denunciations in the open. They confirm my belief that there’s a genuine public need for Ol’ Man Trotsky to be looked at with a clear eye.”

    Tendance Coatesy’s  been rude about Robert Service’s book on Trotsky here. He hasn’t picketed – rather infra dig we would have thought. Yet we reserve our right to publicly repeat the odd sneering comment.

    Isn’t criticism awful!

    Again what’s afoot when the press makes this out to be some big affair?

     

    On Figes perhaps he’ll look at this: here.

     

    Monday: Apparently many others seem to dislike Service’s ‘crap’ – here.

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    Good Riddance to New Labour? Or, Not?

    No Future! No Future! No Future for You! (?)

    Tony Wood has written what may be one of the most significant political articles in New Left Review  (here. ) It is devoted to British politics. Here and now. Wood,  known for writing on Chechnya, grapples with the central issue of this election. That is the future of New Labour.

    At  times Good Riddance to New Labour is marked by the vapid theory that Britain is a ‘prison of the nations’ (Ukania) – a strange gaol where prosperous Scottish Nationalists eat at their fill. Fortunately this gestural belief that regionalism and sovereigntist fervour  in Scotland and Wales are the wave of a better tomorrow, and a tendency to see ‘democracy’ in constitutional terms rather than, say, industrial or social, is not the principal message. Wood presents a brilliant overview of British politics, a ‘conjunctural’ portrait of all the factors that are concentrated in this election. Where he really hits all the right notes is through focusing on what exactly is wrong with New Labour.

    As Wood begins,

    The UK elections of May 2010 will mark a watershed in British politics. After thirteen long years, New Labour’s economic model lies in ruins, but a reckoning has been delayed until after the vote.

    He concludes,

    The specifics of New Labour’s record—one murderous war after another; slavish devotion to finance; promotion of rampant inequality; repeated assaults on civil liberties; fragmentation and privatization of public services; outrageous corruption—make plain that they have fully merited being turfed out of office. Good riddance; this execrable government deserves to go.

    That is a balanced judgement. Not much more to loathe in the list. Whatever marginal improvements there’s been (such the much exaggerated minimum wage – a feature in plenty of other countries where I don’t notice it getting cited as a historic victory) they’re undercut by this catalogue of disasters.

    Brown does not deserve anything other than a humiliation. Whether we also merit the punishment a Tory victory would bring, or the uncertain prospects offered by a variety of Coalition possibilities, is another matter.

    How have we  got to this point? Wood’s analysis melds political science, political economy, finance, social surveys, high politics, international relations, and ideology.

    For us it’s the meeting point between ideology and Blair and Brown’s government strategy that matters most. To begin with, New Labour claimed to be a new hegemonic project. That is, one with deep roots, able to channel the votes of the aspirational working class, the middle class concerned about their futures, and dynamic business forces, into a ‘new’ (always that adjective)  progressive alliance. One once called the Third Way, between socialism and neo-liberal capitalism. Though very soon (as it was no longer ‘new’) that expression got dropped. It became er….No-one has yet named ‘it’ properly, and perhaps never will, but let’s say Christian social marketism.

    They might conveniently forget it now but many on the centre-left (a very New Labour phrase) accepted that the labour movement was no rising power. That the New Labour constituencies and voicing of their concerns was the way to gain, and maintain, a powerful reforming government. The media and ‘progressives’ decked this out with their concerns, from constitutional reform (a New Left Review hobby-horse), to tax and welfare changes to lift up the deserving and improve the listless. Above all there would be a massive expansion of state funding for public services – where all types of Labour supporters worked in or depended on.  

    To Wood there never was a hegemonic ‘moment’. That is a time when New Labour joined up its vision with the voices of the masses, and became the dominant common sense of society to the point where all other views were subordinate. The above constituencies were there to be captured, and their votes were not the expression of a new regime of truth. They won in the face of division, not over real adversary.

    “New Labour’s remarkable longevity has largely depended on the unprecedented eclipse of the Conservative Party, which after its ejection from power in 1997 disappeared for a protracted bout of internal blood-letting; it only began to re-emerge as a contender after 2005. Within Britain’s two-party system, a decade without serious competition left the field empty for Labour, which—thanks also to the distortions of first-past-the-post—secured commanding majorities with declining levels of popular support.”

    In terms of ideas and inner-party Tory politics, it’s hard to fault this. New Labour got Conservative backing precisely because it appealed with similar ideas. Blair (sometimes called by the Right, ‘the best Conservative PM we’ve got’)  went with the Conservative grain; he did not strive to establish a different set of political and economic opinions (on anything from markets to international relations) He, and Brown, are meritocratic, not egalitarian, Christian believers in charitable help, defenders of reconciliation. In short, conventional thinkers well in the mainstream of European Christian democracy.

    Yet there needed to be a certain momentum behind New Labour. If in voting terms who can doubt that,

    “If Tory absence provided the negative foundations of Labour’s ‘weightless hegemony’, its positive basis was supplied by the long economic boom that began under the Major government, and from which Downing Street continued to benefit until 2008. This record-setting period of expansion was premised on the inflation of a series of asset-bubbles, above all in housing, which, together with the spread of more complex debt-based financial products, permitted the creation of significant wealth effects for UK homeowners and property speculators..”

    This indicates a more deep-rooted base – the hard-nosed homeowner, the hard-working family, the hard-minded individualist – right up to the financier. Who are hardly ‘weightless’ social agents.

    Blair and Brown have  built a state in this image, the ‘market state’. One that hives off for private profit public assets and revenues. An extremely heavy, cumbersome, regime, riddled by  the typical inefficiencies and profiteering  of private enterprise applied to public ends. Thus,

     ” from the 1990s onwards, rather than assets being sold outright into private hands, it was now streams of public revenue that would be handed to shareholders as guaranteed profits. This has taken two main forms. Firstly, subcontracting: under Major, public enterprises were encouraged to contract out provision of services to private companies, opening the way to a new realm of commodification. This trend was rapidly expanded under Labour, now reaching from local refuse collection to the administration of welfare, from dentistry to prisons. These immense subsidies to private profit have occupied a significant, and rising, proportion of government outlays: in 2007, subcontracting alone, at £68bn, accounted for 20 per cent of current public expenditure.”

    Joining this are even more leaden instruments,

    “The second modality has been the Private Finance Initiative (pfi)—of all the Conservative policies which New Labour has adopted and then accelerated, perhaps the most damaging in its long-term impact on public services.ce infrastructure, which would then be leased back from them under 25- to 30-year contracts. Large portions of public funds would now be mortgaged ..The real justifications for the scheme lay rather in accounting legerdemain and neoliberal ideology: delegating ever more of the state’s functions to capital.”

    The third pillar of the market state (not described as such by Wood) is equally important. That is its reshaped  ‘training’ and disciplining functions. These are carried out by market-oriented public educational bodies, and, for the unemployed (over 2 and a half million people) by private companies funded by state largesse. Several billion pounds of public revenue flow into these bodies, which range from highly selective Universities to sink schemes for the out-of-work. These apparatuses are both meant to equip people to sell their skills on the ‘global’ marketplace, and to reform the recalcitrant poor and workless. In reality the encroaching private sector has profited without delivering results. The introduction of workfare - forced labour – for the long-term unemployed will seal the nature of the market-state. That is it will explicitly demand  duties  to work for  quarter of the minimum wage.

    Rather than summarise the rest of the Tony Wood’s article we will concentrate on its conclusions. That is, what can be done to tear the party and government from its support for the market-state? Not to mention changing its  other policies (a long list, including above all,  foreign adventures and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan).

    Wood notes,

    “What of the argument that Labour might still be persuaded to return to its better, social-democratic self? As noted, the party made its social-liberal turn much earlier than its European counterparts, seeking to reverse the catastrophic electoral defeats of the 1980s by accepting the Thatcherite settlement and dropping any redistributive programme. Kinnock marked the first stage of this shift, Blair its culmination. The dominant impulse behind it was not so much ideological as instrumental: a quest for electability rather than a Damascene conversion. This produced a progressive hollowing-out of the party, under the sign of a ‘modernization’ led from above. Under Blair the party conference became an echo chamber for pronouncements from on high. The void at the party’s core has been filled by conformism and careerism, hunger for electoral success distancing it ever further from its origins in the labour movement.”

    Anyone who has been active in the Labour Party knows this is the case. In the mid1990s I wrote a lengthy article for Tribune describing the new system of Policy Forums, at their inception, in these terms. Others did as well. If anything the blockage of democracy has got worse since. From patrician disdain at the Bennite upsurge (how dare these people tell us Parliamentarians what to do!), to general dislike of any radical rocking-of-the-boat, we have a managerialised hysteria well satirised (though not by much) by the series In the Thick of It. The real left is wholly marginalised. The ‘centre-left’ of Compass is a wistful presence, reduced to a pale version of 1950s social-democracy. Enfeebled local parties, whose activists are often reduced to those seeking election, are no counterweight.

    This is the result,

    “ Labour’s steadily declining share of the vote, and even more by the rate of abstention in the party’s industrial heartlands. Here Labour has been buoyed by the lack of electoral alternatives. But still, one of the striking features of the last decade has been the extent to which the party’s longest-standing supporters now refuse to vote for it—including many who had been party members. This is another index of the party’s degeneration: its membership halved in the decade after 1997, and has now reached a historic low of 166,000. To be sure, the phenomenon of declining party-political membership is not confined to the UK. But even within the broader landscape of decreasing partisanship, Labour seems in worse shape than its European analogues: the French ps, notorious for being a collection of notables, currently has around 200,000 members; in Germany, the spd is rather larger, at 500,000, while the Italian pd claims over 800,000 iscritti. The actual influence any of these members have over policy is open to question, but it is clear that the Labour Party faces a comparative lack of cadres…”

    We would add that this lack of activists is equally visible inside the trade unions, where even formal memebrship is becoming rarer. The generous and disinterested (since rewards are meagre for the unionised) use of union political funds in a last-ditch campaign for Labour’s re-election will have little efffect. 

    So what does this imply for the May ballot-boxes ?

    I feel, from going campaigning against the BNP and whatever political activity a left-winger can presently undertake, that something important has changed. That not only are people not enthusiastic about New Labour (for a vast variety of reasons) but they no longer care about appeal to loyalty. That they are determined to vote for those they choose – not those they are told to support. For the left this means that if we vote for the left, left Labour and Left socialists (as I would at least hope) we should really be thinking about new mechanisms that can effectively represent us on the political landscape . That we should not vote for those in the Labour Party who took us into the market state is another aspect we should consider. That our long-term projects need to be brought forward for yet another effort at creating a serious left organised alternative. Meanwhile…

    As Wood states,

    surely the clinching argument against New Labour is one of simple democratic principle. Any government with a record as appalling as this one’s deserves to be punished at the polls, if accountability to the voting public is to have any meaning.

    Quite.

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    Burka: French Socialists Against a Sweeping Ban.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Islam, Islamism, Parti Socialiste by Andrew Coates on April 28, 2010

     

    Are these Chains a Sign of Freedom?

    Controversy in France over the proposed ban on the full face-veil (voile intègral) steps up,

    “France’s Socialist Party has come out against a potential law forbidding women from wearing the burqa. The party argued that women should instead be discouraged from wearing the head-to-toe-veil.” (France 24 Here.)

    However Martine Aubry (PSA General Secretary and Mayor of Lille) states,

     Selon la maire de Lille, le port du niqab ou de la burqa est “un réel problème” dans notre société et il convient de s’y opposer, comme n’ont cessé de l’affirmer les socialistes. ”Le Conseil d’Etat, consulté, a donné un avis qui remplit ces conditions. Que le gouvernement se donne le temps de la concertation au lieu de diviser et d’opposer, et qu’il suive cet avis. Alors nous serons d’accord. Sinon, qu’il sache que nous proposerons notre propre loi”, a ajouté la première secrétaire du Parti socialiste.”

    According to the Mayor of Lille, wearing the niqab or the burka is a “real problem” in our society and we have to oppose it, as the Socialists have constantly re-affirmed. “The Council of State (Constitutional watchdog) has given its opinion, which fulfils our conditions. The Government has to give over enough time to consider seriously  their advice. Instead of sowing division they should follow the Council’s recommendations. If they do, we will be in agreement with them. Without this they should know that will propose our own law.” Added, the Socialists’ General Secretary.   (Le Monde Here. )

    The Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste notes (correctly)  both the manipulation of this ‘debate’ by the French right and that this hastily-cobbled together law will stigmatise Muslims, (here) -

     ”le gouvernement cherche à détourner l’attention des conséquences de la crise et de sa politique sur la population ” “Pratiquant l’amalgame, il cherche à diviser le monde du travail en désignant comme principal bouc émissaire les musulmans, assimilés en bloc à des intégristes.”

    The government is looking for scapegoats to distract attention from the effects of its policies on the population, and the crisis. By smearing and by sticking all in one bag called “fundamentalists”  they are attempting to make Muslims the main scape-goat.”

     ”…interdisant le port de la burqa dans l’espace public : elle interdira de fait à ces femmes de circuler librement et les assignera à domicile, ce qui renforcera encore l’oppression qu’elles subissent.”

    “Forbidding wearing the Burka in public spaces will prevent these women’s from moving around freely. It will confine them to their homes, under virtual house arrest, and will reinforce the oppression they undergo.”

    “Tout en s’opposant à ce projet de loi liberticide, le NPA réaffirme sa solidarité avec les femmes qui luttent contre toutes les formes d’oppression, dont le voile intégral, mais c’est d’abord en luttant toutes ensembles pour le droit à disposer de leur corps que les femmes s’émancipent.”

    “While affirming our opposition to this liberty-killing law, the NPA reaffirms its solidarity with women fighting against all forms of oppression – which the full face-veil is – we strive above all to struggle together for women’s emancipation and the right to do what they will with their bodies.”

    What?

     The NPA regards the Burka as an oppression?

    Surely the British left  knows better!

    It’s a precious sign of the religious struggle for liberty….

     This is barely exaggerated.

    It is interesting to contrast the NPA’s stand with that of the increasingly religious rightward drifting  ’Socialist Resistance’ group, which apparently belongs to the same ‘Fourth International’ – here. According to them a ban on Burka is “It is all about denying freedom to be confident in what you believe in and to take part in society under equal terms.”

    Misogynist dress codes are all about ensuring being “confident in what you believe in”.

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    Brown, Bigots, the Left and ‘I’m not Racist, But…’.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, British Govern, Fascism, Gordon Brown, Ipswich, Multi-Culturalism, Racism by Andrew Coates on April 29, 2010

    Fight Bigots!

    Most of it’s been said. Gordon Brown, Gillian Duffy, “bigot”, apologies, and a heavy bow to people “immigration concerns”.

    So it went, and goes and goes. (here and here).

    The PM is a man of overweening arrogance, a sociopath. The left owes him nothing.

    Hubris struck.

    Tough.

    But there remains the issue, immigration.

    Let’s be clear. The question for the left is not just the ‘problems’ which migration is said to ’cause’. Competition over housing (alleged),  a scramble for jobs, tussles over scarcer public services,  are ideal conditions for anyone to end up blaming ‘others’. The most visible being well, ‘other’ – migrants and immigrants. Rich people with plenty of resources tend not to get nasty over these things. They don’t jostle and shove, they just have.

    We should be implacable in opposing the whole ‘debate’. A discussion that’s one-sided concession after concession to those who blame foreigners for their woes. From lack of money or poor public services to pub closures. Rtaher than the real culprits – not to be seen on the street -the top-paid managers, CEOs and state decison-makers. Basic socialist stuff.

    I’ve had some furious rows about this. Those people always begin, ” I’m not racist, but…”

    If this is not ‘racism’ it is clearly its closest ally, xenophobia – fear of foreigners.

    But who are the Eastern Europeans Gillian Duffy was moaning about? They are, in the immense majority, migrant workers.

    Many seem unable to grasp what this means. The British left has indulged itself for too long in nationalist dreams (Scotland, Wales and now England), and multiculturalism to seize on this point. They’ve put priority for their ‘nations’ (which they claim are ‘oppressed’). Or they’ve  translated backing for ethnic equality into support for religious groups, above all Islamists. This section of the left has lost sight of the fact that the rule of money and capital trumps ‘identity’ of any kind.

    It ought to be simple good sense that the left offers ideas to bring people together to fight oppression and exploitaiton – a cliché but bleedin’ obvious. On the basis of shared interests. Does this exist?  It is happening in the food processing industry, where migrant workers have begun to get unionised and engage in our common struggle.

    Anyone in close contact with ordinary people is well aware that ‘immigration’ is a big issue. In Ipswich this focuses on the visible presence of migrant worker and ethnic minorities near the town centre. That is, the area around Norwich Road which people say is ‘no longer England’, or my district.

    The answer is not only to ‘understand’ such  ’concerns’ . After all some people dislike change – though others like it. Multicultural tolerance is not the main thing at stake. It is despair and a lack of political vision for the future. A result of the New Labour and Tory market state that throws everyone back on their limited resources. The  answer? Well, at least an attempt at one is to offer a way forward. to make all our lives better. For equal rights!

    The alternative is to engage in a rush to a Dutch auction (if I may permit myself the term): politicians outbidding each other in demanding stricter and stricter control over immigrantion.

    This will not halt the movement of people across countries. It will make our lives more and more ruled by having to prove our nationality, and stigmatise migrant workers.

    But then those demanding this are “not racist”.

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    Ipswich Tories, Foreigners and Workfare.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Ipswich, Labour Party, Racism, Workfare by Andrew Coates on April 30, 2010

     

    In Favour of Starving Unemployed into Work?

    Ipswich Tory Candidate Benedict Gummer is best known in the town for spending time in pubs and home wine-tasting parties.

    What else does he do? No doubt emerging reluctantly from a busy schedule of hostelry visits and trips to the Off-Licence Benedict  has found the odd moment to propagate Conservative Policy on foreigners. That is, there needs to be a “limit” on them.  For reasons which remain obscure a Tory Ipswich leaflet linked this to the workless. Who are another problem that must be tamed.  Benedict Gummer  announced that, “No fit person, British or not, should live on benefits as a way of life”.  No doubt benefits should be rather a way of death. Or rather, forced labour – Workfare.

    Advanced business thinkers are already contemplating how they will make this happen.

    Ipswich Unemployed Action reports,

    “This week the former head of the CBI, Lord Digby Jones, told Panorama that he thought the time was right for the introduction of workfare – as the plan is often called.

    Lord Jones actually took a step further than most in claiming that if he were a viewer at home, Panorama’s report on the young unemployed would make him so angry that he would want to starve some of the long-term unemployed back into work.”

    Something ol’ jowelly blubber-guts is unlikely to do in the immediate future.

    Digby Jones after a Good Feed.

    “He added that he thought he was in step with the British public’s thinking on the subject.”

    Lord Digby, a former Minister of State for Trade in the Labour government, is moving closer to the Conservative Party (here).

    That Party is busy “addressing” public “concern” about immigration. Will the  Tories address Digby Jone’s  ”concerns” as well?

    They already have…

     More Local News:

    Guardian report on hell-hole created by Ipswich Liberal-Tory Junta – here.

    Feel on local pulse – Labour Councillor Alasdair Ross’s Blog here.

    First of May in France: Numbers Down from Last Year.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Unions by Andrew Coates on May 2, 2010

    1er mai : des défilés moins fournis

    All reports conclude that despite largely unified First of May marches  there were fewer out on the streets of France than last year. Saturday saw around 350.000 demonstrators, according to the left-union federation the CGT. This contrasts with a  union estimation of 1,2 million in 2009. In Paris about 45.000 attended, as opposed to 160,000 in that year. The same smaller turn-out  was repeated elsewhere.

    It should be noted that the – exceptional – 2009 mobilisation was driven by a wave of protests and days-of-action against Sarkozy’s policies. This First of  May was only the beginning of a campaign against proposals to ‘reform’ the pension system. Today Olivier Besancenot (NPA) asked Martine Aubry of the Parti Socialiste to engage in a joint-campaign to protest against plans to reduce payemnts and raise the qualifying age (here).

    Manifestation le 1er mai 2010 à Strasbourg.

    Manifestation le 1er mai 2010 à Strasbourg. (© AFP Frederick Florin) (Here)

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    Liberal Democrats, Harbingers of New Labour’s Death.

    The strange rebirth of Liberal England is having an effect on the ‘centre-left’. It may well turn out to be a false pregnancy. For the moment, however, it seems to have grabbed the attention of all those political figures who have striven hard to destroy the left. The Guardian, which backed the ‘Alliance’ of Social Democrats and Liberals in the 1984 General Election, has returned to its roots. With the Observer it now calls for a Liberal vote – here. Their star columnist, Polly Toynbee, who spent the 1980s attempting to smash the Labour Party, urges people of both Labour and Liberal sympathy to vote “tactically”  If they don’t then, she writes this morning,  we will fail the Council Estate poor,

    ..if centre-left people don’t vote tactically in every seat for whoever best keeps a Conservative out – Labour or Lib Dem regardless of personal preference – it is Donna’s Clapham Park people who will be stricken by George Osborne’s first emergency budget.  (here).

    Poor Pet Poor.

    The ‘left-of’centre’ group Compass has got in the act as well. (here)

    The key issue now is denying the Tories outright power, but in doing so recognising that power is likely to be shared. However much the parties have converged on the same space, and however much people have been disappointed by Labour in government, clear differences still exist between progressives and the Tories. Clearly the best hope of progressive politics, of something better than this, lies first in keeping the Tories out. Only then can we start the process of building a new politics in which greater equality, sustainability and democracy take us on the journey to the good society.

    In the Independent today Peter Hain is cited offering a four-year ‘partnership’ to the Liberal Democrats.

    There are a number of causes this hands-across-the-ballot-box. Leaving aside the most obvious, a wish to cling to power, there has long been a confused sentiment that somehow the Liberals, “progressives”, are unjustly sundered from other “progressives”. That the split between Labour and Liberal parties was a historical error.

    However, the Liberals were a party of a section of industry, nonconformist respectability, reform from above, and (most importantly) visceraly hostile to wealth redistribution and the interests of the unionised working class. While Labour had a tradition of high-handed, well-meaning, but bureaucratic reform, it clashed with the Liberals on the latter point. Those within the old Liberal party who accommodated to the rising power of the unions transferred to Labour, and carried on the tradition of social liberalism there. Those who fixed on the beneficient market regulated by the judgements of the Wise and the Great, ruling municipally through philanthropic notables, stayed. No Governing Liberal, including Nick Clegg, has ever been anything but hostile to organised labour.

    It is hardly a coincidence that as New Labour favoured markets and the civic role of Lords and Lady Bountiful they opened the way up again for the true Liberal tradition. In this way the rise – yet to be confirmed in the Ballot Box – of the Liberal Democrats owes everything to Blair and Brown. If they get any power they will complete the transformation of new Labour into a US style Democrat Party – and hasten its death as an effective alternative to the Conservatives.

    The other source of sympathy for the Liberals lies in the idea that British political system is rent with a  fundamental undemocratic constitutional set-up that needs “reform”. On the left a whole theory is attached to this, that the ‘backward’ UK Monarchy and State – a system built on subjecthood - has to be replaced by a Constitution based on citizens. As the Liberal Democrats back this strongly then they are held to be particularly ’progressive’. None of these theorists has ever explained how all the principal faults of British politics and society are found in republican states, in the rest of Europe to start with. Nor that the whole process of globalisation has rendered this notion of a British ‘sonder weg’ (special route) to modernity irrelevant in the face of world-wide convergence around the model of a Market State. That the Liberals equally fervently back this Market State escapes their admirers’ attention. Their programme for change relies on strengthening local elites, not on democracy. Only Proportional Representation may offer some meagre comfort by opening up the political landscape to a more genuine electoral confrontation between different forces.

    The Liberal Democrats politics differ mildly from the more overtly right-wing programme of David Cameron’s ’big society’ Tories. They are, apparently ’nicer’. This might be true - in parts. The cabal of self-promoters, cranks, grudge-holders and genteel amateurs that make up Ipswich Liberal Democrats are not, however, generally thought of in these terms. Selfish and vain is how many would describe the Ipswich Liberals. Which holds true for the national party.

    If, a heavy if, there is any coalition with the Liberal Democrats after this election it will only be in the interests of the not insubstantial constituency of vain, self-regarding and selfish people.

    Not any step forward for the Left, however generously defined.    

    Icelandic Ash A Call to Vote Christian People’s Alliance: Religious Parties Gain Ground.

    Posted in Britain, Ipswich, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on May 5, 2010

    Even the Ash Votes Christian!

    Side-by-side with an assertive  ’Muslim’ vote is a rising ‘Christian’ political presence. With 150 Candidates in the General  Election the Christian People’s Alliance (here)  is making its way to the ballot box. It looks set to expand its total of 5 local councillors in the coming municipal contests. Membership figrues are hazy but there is no doubt that it involves a swelling number of Christians, predominantly from an Evangelical or revivalist background.

    In Ipswich the Christian Party – 71 candidates nationally (here and here) is standing a candidate, Kim Christofi. According to Wikipedia, “It aims to fill a void they say exists in the current political spectrum for the Christian Right in the UK. They are pro-life, have opposed moves towards legislation equalising the position of homosexual, bisexual and transgender people with heterosexual people and hold a sceptical view on the EU.”

    Their policies (announced in last Scottish Elections) include:

    • a proposed referendum on the reinstitution of the death penalty for severe crimes, where two or three witnesses were present at the crime scene and forensic science confirms involvement.
    • legislation to ban abortion.
    • increased taxation on alcohol and tobacco.
    • initiatives to bring personal responsibility to bear upon “self-inflicted disease” (such as alcoholism).
    • Zero tolerance on drug possession.
    • curfewss for under 11 year olds, with mandatory intervention of child protection agencies in relation to any child 10 years or younger that is found unaccompanied on the street after 9:00pm.
    • the reintroduction of the right of teachers to use corporal punishment in extreme circumstances.
    • greater observance of a weekly day of rest (Sunday).
    • limits around coastlines to preserve stocks of fish and sand eels.
    • promotion in school of chastityy before marriage.
    • re-instatement of Section 2A (also known as Section 28), a law to guard against the promotion of homosexuality.
    • the re-introduction of corporate readings from the Bible in all Scottish state schools.
    • provision of Christian religious education on a mandatory basis, with no obligation to promote other faiths, regardless of the wishes of those being instructed or their parents. There currently exists a level of compulsory Christian observance in all British schools,] so these policies are calling for this to be increased.
    • a science curriculum which should “reflect the evidence of creation/design” in the universe (see Creation-evolution controversy).
    • public health campaigns to discourage homosexuality  alongside excessive drinking and the use of addictive substances, whilst maintaining “God loves and we should love” such individuals.
    • the restoration of the right for parents to smack their children (as with prayer, this currently exists and the policy is a call for an increase).
    • “Mind Pollution Levy” on 18 Certificate Films, DVDs, CDs, Video Games and Top Shelf magazines.
    • a re-establishment of the principle of the innocent party in a divorce being acknowledged in any divorce settlement.
    • discouragement of the practice of addressing women as Ms.
    • opposition of the practice of altering birth certificates to reflect gender confirmation surgery.
    • promotion of Biblical alternatives to the current criminal justice system, including emphasis on the role of witnesses over forensic evidence.
    • Total privatisation of public assets, including the NHS and the public schools. Job cuts in the public health sector. All immigrants will be required to be covered by private health insurance.
    • Increased restrictions on immigration.

    The Christian People’s Alliance (more here) claims to be more  ’social’  (very sharply distinguished from socialism) and socially tolerant. It has these policies:

  • Recognition of Christ’ s sovereignty (supreme authority) over the nations and in politics.
  • Respect of [the Judeo-Christian]-God‘s law as the basis for constitutional government and a stable society.
  • Like the Islamists the Christianists base politics on Divine Rule. We can dismiss the below as blather:

  • Reconciliation among nations, races, religions, classes, gender and communities [with god]
  • Respect for human life given by God.
  • Social Justice to address wrongs and provide restitution to the wronged.
  • Peacemaking, by addressing the causes of wars.
  • Open, transparent government, which subjects itself to debate and critique.
  •  

     

    The CPA’s views on the sovereignty of God can be forthright, (here)

    John Manwell Chair of Liverpool City Churches network, Together For The Harvest, which brings together over 100 churches. He is also the Christian Peoples Alliance candidate for Liverpool Walton. He says that the volcanic ash from Iceland is a sign from God that Britain and Europe need to turn and confess their sin of unbelief and rebellion against the Gospel. He commented on the fact that the ash surrounded Britain at the same time as the three main party leaders had their first televised debate in front of the nation:

    “Ash is a clear Biblical symbol of repentance. The ash from Iceland brought our airlines to a halt for a week. As a sign from God it was gracious – no-one was killed. The standstill reminded us that with all our power and politics, the human race is powerless compared to God and His creation. It is right that judgement begins with the house of God and clearly the Roman Catholic church is taking steps to sort itself out, as the party leaders alluded to on Sky. However, our whole political system has hardened itself against God in rampant secularism. This has to change.”

    Like the ‘soft’ Islamists, and their toadies in the ‘Respect Coalition’, then, the CPA finds that religious progress is thwarted by secularism.

    Those damned secularists!

    More Ash Vicar?

    Benedict Gummer a 9/11 Truther? And Other Musings.

    Posted in Britain, British Govern, Conservative Party, Conspiracies, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on May 6, 2010

    Ipswich Tory Thinks ‘Mickey Mouse’ Did This.

    Will Ipswich have a 9/11 Truther as its MP tomorrow? We don’t know for sure. What we do know is that Benedict Gummer, Conservative Candidate for Ipswich, has claimed that “Mickey Mouse” was behind the attack on the Twin Towers.

    When did Benedict make this claim? This Tuesday. Before eight in the morning the dapper Tory was standing outside Ipswich Railway Station. With a gaggle of cronies he was thrusting leaflets in commuters’ hands. No doubt he was hoping for ” the smiles and offers of good luck ” that his Blog claims he gets.

    Not this time. A comrade from Ipswich Against Racism and Fascism was there, giving out anti-BNP leaflets. He had a few ‘words’ with the man himself. Benjy came out with the just cited (and amazing) statement. Was he influenced by his readings of Noam Chomsky? Was Benedict still recovering from his heavy schedule of wine-parties and pub visits. Or was he  rattled at this?

     

    We shall never know. But we would like Benedict to answer this: what theory do you have about 9/11?

    Tendance Coatesy is open to all your speculations on this subject. Though not to your  lies ab0ut saving Ipswich Hospital – here.

    Now to another point.

    The impression we have is that a large swathe of voters have taken one look at David Cameron and do not like what they see. How they will cast their ballots is anyone’s guess. Obviously the Liberals will do much better than anyone expected a month ago. They will do even better in Alexandra Ward Ipswich since there is no Green candidate for the local election. Why? The Liberal candidate was one of the signatories for the inexperienced Green. He found that this autograph was invalid (not difficult to predict since the Liberal had already nominated another Liberal and you can’t do this twice). Exit Green from the election. Without even a vote!

    But for the rest - we await the results.

    Ipswich, General Election: Bad Result.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservative Party, Fascism, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on May 7, 2010

    Ipswich Result.

    Ben Gummer Conservative 18,371 39.1 +8.0
    Chris Mole Labour 16,292 34.7 -8.2
    Mark Dyson Liberal Democrat 8,556 18.2 -2.9
    Chris Streatfield UK Independence Party 1,365 2.9 +0.2
    Dennis Boater British National Party 1,270 2.7 +2.7
    Tim Glover Green 775 1.7 +1.7
    Kim Christofi Christian Party 149 0.3 +0.3
    Peter Turtill Independent 93 0.2 +0.2
    Sally Wainman Independent 70 0.1 +0.1
    Majority 2,079 4.4  
    Turnout 46,941 59.9 -0.2

     

    From Ipswich Spy - for best up-to–date reports. More from the BBC.

     

    The town was crawling with Tories all yesterday. I told one, obtrusively asking for cards at Zoar Baptist Chapel, that he was “Tory scum”.  The absurdity of a place like Ipswich getting a nasty Tory squirt elected is not lost on the Tendance cadres.  

    I had planned to go to sleep early and get up in the middle of the night. Just drifting off after 11.15  and heard phone ring – Anwar, who thought Exit polls not too bad. When I got back to sleep I kept waking up and going downstairs turning on the telly, hopping around radio stations. Great that McDonnell won so decisively Rest is, well rest.

    Benedict Gummer is a walking disaster. But then most readers of this Blog will know our views on Benjy. On what emerges from negotiations to form a Government we, like all politicos, will have ample time to comment.

    For Ipswich Against Racism and Fascism (which can be contacted via the E-Mail given in Sidebar ‘About Tendance Coatesy’), the 1,270 votes for the first-time BNP candidate, is an unacceptably high score .

    Galloway Bad Loser to the Last. Wither Respect?

    Posted in Britain, Islamism, Labour Movement, Left by Andrew Coates on May 8, 2010

    George Galloway lost. ”Fantastic ” Salma Yaqoob lost. Abjol Miah Lost. - here.

    Respect admits to a “disappointing night” (here). Socialist Unity, their tireless cheer-leader says, “there is now some need for reflection about what happens next. I offer congratulations and commiserations to our brilliant candidates who deserved better results.” (here)

    Galloway didn’t even have the courage to turn up at the Count Result.

    A sad reflection on the waning standards of communalist politicians.

    One wonders if his Iranian state employers will continue to pay a very ex-MP.

     

     Tower Hamlets:  Respect: 1 . Newham Respect 1.  Birmingham: 3 Respect Councillors.

    No doubt Yaqoob will have time as well to campaign in favour of religious rights for Muslims in Europe. But perhaps she is now looking for something more solid to build her political career on. Labour? Liberals? Greens?

     Newly elected Labour MP Fitzpatrick (here) showed that once introduced communalism has not gone away,

    “The disrespect party has clearly suffered a huge defeat and that’s another major positive from yesterday,” he said

    Reflecting on a campaign which had been marred by negative publicity and claims of electoral fraud, he said: “I have recently been the subject of a number of smears, being accused of Islamophobia, of trying to ban traditional Muslim weddings, of trying to close the East London Mosque and other such nonsense.

    “These would be laughable if they were not peddled to try and poison the minds of the Muslim community.

    “That community refused to be conned and came out to vote for me,” he said.

    The Morning Star ‘reported’ (here) Ms Yaqoob saying that,

    “It is a fantastic achievement and testimony to a desire for a political alternative to the parties of bombing and big business. It is clear that many people’s fear of a Tory government boosted the Labour vote, puncturing the Lib Dem bubble but also squeezing my vote as well.

    “I am really proud of the campaign that I ran.”

    For our part we follow this little chap’s reaction,

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    After the General Election….

    Posted in European Left, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left, Unions by Andrew Coates on May 9, 2010

      

    Time for the Left to Shift Gear! 

    AFTER THE GENERAL ELECTION . . . JOIN THE RESISTANCE!
     
     
     
      

    SATURDAY 15th of May
    10:30am – 3:30 pm
    University of London Union, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HY
     

      

    Entrance: Free
    (donations welcome)
     
     

      

    Whatever the outcome of the General Election, this Parliament will see the new Government savage public spending to pay for the crisis caused by the bank bailout.
    But how can we protect our services, and build a political alternative?
    This is a one day conference for the labour movement left across the UK to share experiences of the General Election and plan for the coming months.
     

      

    Speakers include:
    John McDonnell MP
    and Mark Serwotka, PCS General Secretary
     
     

      

     

     

    Co-sponsored by the LRC, CLPD, Convention of the Left, CWU, Labour Briefing, NUJ, Save the Labour Party, Right to Work and the Socialist Campaign to Stop the Tories and Fascists. 

    ‘Progressive Partnership’: Mon Cul!

    Posted in Britain, British Govern, Conservative Party, Conservatives, Labour Movement by Andrew Coates on May 13, 2010

    The Future?

    Soundings and Compass must he well happy. A “ new progressive partnership” (here) is underway.

    We have lived under this ‘patnership’ in Ipswich for the last few years. ‘Nice’ people have got rewarded. The pathetic grudges of Andrew Cann (Liberal Leader) made public policy. Public services ruined. Looney Tory Bendict Gummer elected.

    Ipswich made into a rubbish bin.

    In this town even the crêpes are oppressed!

     

    Et alors, bientôt le pays!

    Vote Guardian, Vote Tory, Vote Ipswich Liberal-Tory Junta!

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    Fascist March Against Globalisation in Paris, 9th of May.

    Posted in Fascism, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on May 10, 2010

    The Far-Right in Europe Remains a Threat.

    Fascists March in Paris, 9th of May, Against Globalisation.

    According to Le Monde (here) there were a maximum of 700 ultra-right fascists on the March. That is those to the right of the Front National in such groups as the  Nouvelle droite populaire (dissidents from the  FN); le Renouveau français (traditionalists), the néo-Gud (the name is from hard-line student fascist group of many years standing) and the  Nationalistes autonomes (anti-globalising far-right).

    These by no means exhaust the range of the French ultra-right. 

     

    The attempt to use leftist-sounding rhetoric and imagery (against the capitalist market, backing strikes and protests) is blatant.  

    ‘Progressive Coalition’, a Millstone, McDonnell for Leader!

    Posted in British Govern, Labour Government, Labour Movement, Labour Party by Andrew Coates on May 11, 2010

    Millstone Waiting for Labour Movement’s Neck.

    Gordon Brown is going. But not gone. This has a momentum of its own.  Desperately trying to cobble together a ‘progressive alliance’ with the Liberal Democrats he is using the last of his Doctor Evil powers. But his strength is ebbing day-to-day. The popular masses are heartily sick of these manoeuvres. Labour MPs are thinking of the future Party leader elections. The Tories are waiting for their hour. Only the Liberal Democrats, flattered at the attention, are playing their moment as hard as they can.

    For the left the following are some important considerations.

    • The feeble score of  left of Labour candidates in the election illustrates the failure of various socialist combinations to create a clear alternative to the Brown government. It shows that socialism, and left ideas more broadly, have had little resonance in the electorate. The gap between our views and ordinary people’s is wide.   It is not just that groups like Respect have pandered to Islamism, or that the SWP has tried to put its own ‘party-building’ above the movement’s interests. The fundamental reason for the left’s impasse is the lack of a convincing popular message.
    • This has been helped by the succesful effort to shape the Labour Party in the image of the non-social democratic American Democrats. The policy-making process of the Party (Policy Forums onwards) are designed to exclude radical, labour movement and socialist, challenges. The unions have tried to adjust to this, by pursuing their own interests through Lobbying. They too have been unable to make an impact – despite The Thick of It media figures like Charlie Whelan.
    • The real political issue is not going to be reduced to who takes over the leadership of the Labour Party. It is going to be about the policies he or she offers. The crucial point is the response to the ‘inevitable’ massive cuts in public spending. From the BBC onwards every force of the British establishment is presenting a case for financial ‘rigour’. Nor is this just propoganda - similar to that carried out in the 1970s to  popularise Monterarism and the free-market on the state and private media. One only has to read the European press to see that the UK’s financial deficit is widely considered a massive problem.
    • ‘Inevitable’ or not financial austerity will clash with the interests of millions of people, in the public sector outwards. There is therefore a constituency – concentrated in the unions’ membership - which is opposed by its nature to such plans.
    • A ‘progressive alliance’ between the Liberals, the Labour Party and nationalists, will be sealed on a programme of financial cut-backs. Apart from the perception of thwarting the popular vote it will be anything but progressive in social and economic  terms. It will rapidly become a millstone around the neck of the parties involved. On the bright side it will show the political exhaustion of all the ‘centre-left’ attempts to remove socialism from the political agenda.
    • The left needs therefore, in the first instance, to offer a convincing alternative set of measures to the coming cuts. We have to have an economic narrative that can respond to this crisis. More than just ‘fight the cuts’ we should be concerned with strategies for the future, to not just oppose but to initiate a series of alternative propositions. This has yet to emergence in a popular form. The time to begin this is now.
    • If the left can align with Labour MPs and Union leaders who recognise the blockage we have the opportunity to emerge as a political force on the national stage. If we manage to get behind John McDonnell, a serious, well-liked, socialist MP, and campaign for him to become Labour leader, we may be doing something of greater use than boosting small left groups’ fortunes.

    If….

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    May Day, Review.

    Posted in Culture, Marxism by Andrew Coates on May 14, 2010

    The West Bletchley Left Book Club Circa 1936

    By Andrew Coates. Published here.

    md

    John Sommerfield, May Day, London Books 2010/1936

    April 29th, London, early 1930s, “In this whirlpool of matter-in-motion forces are at work creating history.” May Day (1936) sets out “a new world painfully fighting to be born from the filth, the rottenness, the miserable decay of capitalist society”. John Sommerfield’s ‘collective novel” of the London class struggle portrays and celebrates this struggle. It is full of high optimism. In a Postscript he calls it “early ‘30s Communist Romanticism.” A worker-writer and a Communist (remaining so up to the 1950s), this, his second novel, is red with the flush of Leninist enthusiasm. The Stalinist Zhdanov would call such committed literature, “a new type, revolutionary romanticism”. “Socialist realism” then is not just about showing how “things really are” or should be. Sommerfield, is concerned with love, with passion and despair; his characters’ souls are not engineered to react like cold automata.

    There are many of them; too many to pay close attention to them all. There is John, a unionised Carpenter at Langfier’s Carbon Works. He life is ruled by deep affection, for his young wife, Maritime, and their baby David. This craftsman, while pleased with the new employment his trade has won him, is revolted by conditions in the Works’ machine shops, and the lot of the hard-driven factory workers affected by speed-ups and a rising numbers of accidents. But when union brothers urge action he remembers his “long miserable months of unemployment” and Martine’s “little ambitions for a nice home with bright curtains and new furniture.

    The machinists, all women, are “silly girls with their synthetic Hollywood dreams, their pathetic silk stockings and lipsticks”. Yet, they are the “raw material of history” touched by “deep discontent” at the way the “automatic lathes” are to be operated on piece-work. Carbon Works is drawn into the conflict between bosses and workers. A Communist, Ivy Cutford, is there to bring them to class-consciousness. “The girls are beginning to take a good deal of notice of what she says because they like her.” While the bosses rear up at the prospect of conflict, aware that these “Communist elements” pose a threat. John equally comes to realise that “Life is a struggle for us, life is a battle under the long shadows of the factory chimneys.”

    The employers are changing; the firm is becoming part of a larger holding. Capital is being concentrated. Sir Edwin Langfier, the founder of Carbon Works, is now in thrall to Amalgamated Industrial Enterprises, and their agent, Dartry. In Park Lane the Cabal of Monopolists behind the Corporation meet to decide on the future, “they are scheming to close down factories and speed up others, to consumer their lesser rivals. They making their class an ever-smaller and more exclusive society: control of production passes into the hands of an ever-shrinking group.” Below, there is a shout, “Workers, all out on May Day. Demonstrate for a free Soviet Britain!”

    The Bus Drivers are out on strike. Mr Raggett Secretary of the Transport Workers; Union, “the owner of a fine house and car, a man of weight, with a large income and twelve-thousand pounds’ worth of securities” tries to break it.” May Day gets nearer. “The Communist cells have sprayed out leaflets like machines guns scattering bullets”. All out on May Day! It’s as if the world has become laid out in the columns of the Communist paper, the Daily Worker.

    Sometimes one follows this, other times words scuttle past like beetles (I nicked that phrase from Roberto Bolaño). The frequent clumsy metaphors and language don’t help, “colours of halted waterfalls”, “soft lights glow unaudienced” to cite but two at random. As for the Communist tracts, “like autumn leaves falling into running rivers” “dropped into the living torrents of the homeward-hurrying workers” all leftists have given out bits of papers that get swept away.

    But the narrative holds. On May Day an accident happens in the carbon Works Big Shop. A hand, Mabel, is scalped by the shafting, and the plant strikes. There is a fine description of how Sir Edwin Langfier is revolted by this result of speed-up. The callousness of the agent of the Monopolists, Dartry, who is only concerned about the hold up to orders, is heightened by his realisation of his ageing, and “the spectre of senility and impotence.” As a virile contrast the Monster Demonstration bursts forth, streaming out from the East End. A baton falls on one marcher’s head, “and the world exploded into a scarlet oblivion”. “Men and women who have never marched in a demonstration before are becoming revolutionaries in the course of a few hours”. Marble Arch is the destination, with the “flag-draped body is held up and saluted by a hundred thousand clenched firsts raised”…”Red Front!”

    You don’t read May Day waiting for an unexpected conclusion. The “party-minded” Sommerfield lays on the Daily Worker line with a trowel. But is not Proletkult ‘pure’ proletarian literature. There is a freshness that is hard to dismiss. Unsettling modernist techniques, of the “Camera-Eye”, collages of newspaper reports, a montage of scenes, interrupt the narrative. As important as the lives of May Day’s characters are the Carbon Works, the Docks, Charing Cross Road, West End cinemas and theatres, the powerhouses of Battersea and Lots Road, the Print, Bus garages, the March, newsbills, statistics on unemployment, industrial accidents and strikes. There is a genuine tenderness and complexity of feeling (John’s hesitations, Langfier’s scruples) at work. True, the revolutionary vortex they are all thrown into has more magic than realism about it. Yet its picture is not consoling. The energy at work is agitating, dividing. Sommerfield is not bent on drawing together people of “good will”. One could say that for these reasons, the 1934 novel would not have gone down well with the mixed liberal, communist and pacifist audience of, say, the West Bletchley Left Book Club circa 1936.

    Today, after May Day 2010, “everyone’s talking about politics”. But Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Gordon Brown, hardly represent the kind of new world that John Sommerfield (1908–91) would have revelled in. The present-day unions efforts at “mobilising the masses” have been singularly muted – the RMT (a donor for the book’s production, excepted). Only the routes of the London Streets, portrayed with great vigour, remain fixed in the same direction. But as foreign leftists sometimes say about the British Capital’s roads, they are wide and long enough for demonstrations to get lost in. Not, at any rate yet, highways filled with a swelling Red Front.

    ac
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Andrew Coates
    is long-standing socialist and trade union activist who lives in Ipswich, near the Sunshine Suffolk Coast. He owns one of the best collections of sectarian left literature in East Anglia and 540 Everyman Classics. To while away the long-days he posts incessantly on the Web, pursuing vendettas and the line of his international organisation, Tendance Coatesy. His pastimes include putting slug pellets down on his allotment and watching the creatures die.

    First published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, May 10th, 2010.

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    Normal Service To Be Resumed – Shortly – After London Curry.

    Posted in Left by Andrew Coates on May 17, 2010

    Counter-Revolution?

    I was in London on Saturday.

    A really good meeting of the left.

    John is standing.

    So it was worthwhile.

    But I digress.

    Had a curry in the evening – a real feast with all the trimmings.

    I can still feel it.

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    McDonnell’s the One!

    Posted in British Govern, Left, New Left by Andrew Coates on May 19, 2010

    John’s Programme.

    John McDonnell is trying to gather enough MPs to stand.

    Read more: here.

    It is the bounden duty of every socialist to support John.

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    Diane Abbott: Schmoozing with Portillo too Much ?

    Posted in Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left by Andrew Coates on May 20, 2010

     

    Stands Against Doughty Socialist Campaigner John.

    Dianne Abott’s best mate is Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo.

    That is only political fact that I retain about her.

    Oh apart from bumping into  her a few times a vaguely left meetings.

    Now she standing for the Labour leadership (here).

    No doubt ‘Sue R’ who posts her will tell us more Diane’s political, and indeed social background.

    Apart from her public school education her fling with Jeremy Bernard Corbyn springs to mind.

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    Dianne Abbot: Vote for the City of London!

    Posted in Labour Movement, Labour Party by Andrew Coates on May 21, 2010

     

     

    City of London School.

    Rumours that Dianne Abbot  has been offered a place in David Cameron’s Cabinet have been vigorously denied.

    The dapper gal was educated at Harrow County Grammar School where she met her life-time sparring partner Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo.

    Her political trajectory from left to wealth  is not unprecedented.

    Meanwhile this (Hat  Tip to Sue R)

    Her leftwing credentials were dented in 2003 when she decided to send her son to the private £10,000 a year City of London school, after previously criticising Tony Blair and Harriet Harman for sending their children to selective state schools.

    here.

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    Diane Abbott: Jonathan Aitken Gives his Backing in Labour Bid.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Labour Party, Left by Andrew Coates on May 23, 2010

    Abbott’s Street Creed Support is Growing.

    Jonathan Aitken has given his backing for Diane Abbott as leader of the Labour Party

    From today’s Independent on Sunday here

    Aitken was jailed for perjury in the late 1990s, so his endorsement might not have been the first Abbott sought. Still, there it is:

    “She has outstanding qualities. She’s a standard bearer for the left, and a good communicator. It’s what Labour needs. I wish her well.” 

    Given the former Tory minister’s bluer-than-blue background, the move might come as something of a surprise. Still, the pair have history: They worked together at TV-am and Abbott’s son is Aitken’s godson. And, who knows? If she gets Michael Portillo’s backing, she might overtake Ed Balls as the Opposition’s favourite candidate.

    McDonnell: The Real Reason Why Some of the Left Oppose Him.

    Posted in British Govern, Labour Movement, Labour Party by Andrew Coates on May 24, 2010

    From Wikipedia:

    In 1981, McDonnell was elected to the Greater London Council (GLC) as a member for Hayes and Harlington. He became the Chair of Finance, responsible for the Greater London Council s budget, and was Ken Livingstone‘s deputy leader. In an interview with Ronan Bennett for The Guardian  newspaper, he described his role during this time as being, “to translate policies into concrete realities on the ground.” He further discussed his performance by indicating, “I was a fairly hard-nosed administrator. We set in train policies for which we were attacked from all sides but are now accepted as mainstream: large-scale investment in public services; raising the issue of Ireland and arguing for a dialogue for peace; equal opportunities; police accountability. We set up a women’s committee, an ethnic minorities committee”.[

    Livingstone removed McDonnell from the post of deputy leader in 1985, shortly after they came into conflict over the GLC’s budget. Margaret Thatcher’s government first cut central government funding to local government, and then introduced rate capping, preventing selected councils from raising local taxation beyond a set level as a means of reducing public spending. Encouraged by the success of the Liverpool City Council, which delayed issuing a budget in 1984 until the government agreed to restore some funding cuts, twelve Labour councils that had the cap imposed on them chose not to set a rate at all in the spring of 1985, demanding that the government lift the cap. The GLC also faced capping, and McDonnell headed a campaignn amongst Labour members to adopt this strategy in response. Unlike the local councils, however, the GLC faced a legal obligation to set a rate by mid-March. McDonnell contended that accepting the cap would lead to a reduction in spending and prevent the GLC, which had already lost all of its funding from central government, from honoring the manifesto pledges Labour had been elected on in 1981.

    In his book If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It, Livingstone outlines his belief that McDonnell presented exaggerated figures in order to support his proposal. Despite paying lip-service to the “no rate” campaign, the GLC set a legal rate on schedule, passed by moderate Labour councillors with the support of Conservative opposition members.

    Comment: I happen to think that McDonnell was right.

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    Welfare Reform: It’s a-Comin’.

    Posted in Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on May 26, 2010

     Frank Field’s Deputy For Welfare Reform.

    A bit more here and here.

    This is really serious.

    When I signed on yesterday the woman on the counter asked me of what things I’d done to seek work.

    I replied, “I am interested  in a career in the Civil Service.”

    Now apparently I will have my opportunity: volunteers to run the Job Centre!

    Only joking.

    Just.

    Cordelia Gummer Speaks Out.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservative Party, Conservatives, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on May 28, 2010

    Esteemed Comrade Abused Under Tory Misrule.

    Cordelia Gummer, a long-time sympathiser with Tendance Coatesy, has a view on her bro’s failure to get an  appointment as under-Minister for Paper-Clips.

    “The in angustiis pecuniae caused by the renovations at  Giles Corner are not there “pour rein”.

    Even the crows on the street in Ipswich know what a financial failure the Conservative-Liberal coalition has caused.

    How could they appoint Benedict with this local background?”

    So much for Ipswich Spy’s puerile accusations of nepotism and family loyalty!

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    Sex Workers and Brian Tobin: A Respectful Comment

    Posted in Feminism, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on May 29, 2010

     

    In the Guardian yesterday.

    The murder of three women working as prostitutes in Bradford has reminded us of the terror that gripped the streets of Ipswich four years ago. During Steve Wright’s killing spree in the winter of 2006, many of the women I work with became acutely aware of their vulnerability and wanted to get out, there and then.

     We can introduce new legal measures, and various groups can keep spitting vitriol about decriminalisation, legalisation or whatever their preferred option is; but unless we as a society learn to deal with drugs more effectively, we will never see an end to what is a desperate and dangerous activity that destroys lives.

    More here.

    Now Brian is a person for whom I have the utmost respect.

    I really mean this.

    But what does this highlighted sentence mean?

    I know for a fact that yesterday in the streets of Ipswich that there were women with very obvious drugs problems. And men.

    Like really serious heroin and crack users.

    They have not gone away.

    Brian may recall our Trades Council Meeting to which he was invited (as he has strong links with the labour movement). We talked about this very issue.  I said that heroin use devastates people’s  lives.

    I meant  the case of two of my really closest friends. The beautiful Sue Tout (her brother from the group Renaissance – here) and her boyfriend Lawrence. Lawrence ended up throwing himself on the Tube line at Finsbury Park. Sue  died from heroin-related complications. Both from socialist and communist families. You can imagine how it affected their even nearer and dearer

    This was thirty years ago but what has changed to make people get off this poison?

    I do not think, Brian, will all due respect, that a programme of this

    acupuncture, aromatherapy, reflexology

    is going to do it.

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    Liberal-Tory Coalition (Ipswich) elects Coco the Cann as Culture Czar.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Labour Party, Liberal Democrats by Andrew Coates on June 3, 2010

     

    Ipswich Liberal-Tory Coalition Culture Chief.

    Barking news: Andrew Cann just elected as Culture Supremo of Ipswich (here).

    Andrew Cann has a distinguished career.

    His dad was former Labour MP for Ipswich Jamie Cann.

    Andrew Cann managed the rare feat of getting turfed out of his position as Secretary for a Town Labour Branch after a year (normally once you’re the sec you stay – I did for seven years). He resigned from the Labour Party and joined the Liberal Democrats. Soon, teamed up with the local Conservative Party in the Liberal-Tory Junta, has made a name for himself. Particularly down the Dove. Perhaps fellow councillor, poor Louise (more here), would give him many names indeed.

    His cultural interests include Quiz nights with fellow ex-Labour renegade, Christopher Newbury (the man who, when he was a Labour councillor,  famously said of a disabled Lib Dem Councillor that ‘they used to put people like you down’) . Oh and picking his nose.

     

    Benedict Gummer BagMan BridgeWard News has yet to comment.

    Ipswich Spy remarks on Andrew Cann’s forgotten wizard plans to regenerate Ipswich.

    With the former Coop store (flogged off to some dodgy group) closing the  whole of Carr Street is falling into ruin.

    Onwards and upwards with the new progressive alliance!

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    World Cup, Football and the Left.

    Posted in Capitalism, Culture by Andrew Coates on June 5, 2010

    Banned from my Gaff.

    Football don’t you get bored by it?

    It is compulsory in this country to follow football.

    The streets of Ipswich are festooned with emblems for the English team, white vans fly past with the flags, and everyone is talking about the World Cup. The media is full of it.

    Not chez Tendance Coatesy.

    The sight of some types running round with a ball fails to excite.

    We plan a mammoth session of watching our old Buffey the Vampire Slayer videos when the games start.

    Leaning hard lessons of the class struggle from the heroic exploits of the comrades in the Scooby gang.

    George Galloway: is he seriously ill?

    Posted in Fascism by Andrew Coates on June 6, 2010

    With all the tenderness and affection we have for George Galloway, we feel deeply moved by his recent ailments.

    See here:

    Look at the heid.

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    Galloway: Is He Dying?

    Posted in Left, Multi-Culturalism by Andrew Coates on June 8, 2010

    A sad look for our esteemed comrade.

    Friends of George Galloway there are many. He apparently buzzed off to Hollywood to make the next LA Confidential and then came back to mouth off about Israel.

    Looking at the state of the beloved leader we  are very concerned about the health of the man who some call the helmsman of the European Left.

    That arse,  sagging, and the chops well soggy.

    Hard to imagine George in this state having a taxi running (and paid for by War on Want) while he shags some bint.

    We wish him the recovery he well merits.

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    McDonnell Stands Down.

    Posted in Labour Movement, Labour Party by Andrew Coates on June 9, 2010

    John McDonnell withdraws from Labour leadership race in favour of Diane Abbott

    The Guardian reports, “Leftwinger says he hopes he can make sure a woman gets on the ballot paper for the contest to choose a successor to Gordon Brown”

    (More here)

    This is a bad move. Probably inevitable given – as John McDonnell says – that he was never anywhere near getting enough nominations from other Labour MPs. But McDonnell did get support from across the movement, and stood with some clear socialist ideas. He launched his campaign by talking soundings from a wide spectrum of people.

    I was present at the initial London meeting where he began and there was some real enthusiasm there.

    I certainly feel no enthusiasm for Abbott. She is not going to get a socialist campaign off the ground.

    We need strong voices in the coming months to oppose the cuts. One cannot see Abbott being one.

    But there you go – she has just secured enough nominations to get on the ballot (BBC).

    Diane Abbott has gained enough nominations to get onto the Labour leadership ballot paper.

    The backbencher managed to reach the threshold after fellow left-winger John McDonnell withdrew from the race.

    Ms Abbott will go up against four former cabinet ministers – Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and David and Ed Miliband.

    Abbott’s campaign, such as it is, is on this basis here.

    “I am not just another man in a suit. There’s not a lot of difference between the candidates so far. I am standing because I represent ‘real choice’, not a return to the Blair/Brown politics of the past 13 years. I voted against the Iraq war which is the single biggest source of disillusionment with Labour. And I do not believe that we lost the election because of immigration, as some of my rivals seem to be suggesting. I am a truly independent candidate who will create real change out of the ashes of New Labour, and reclaim the true identity of the Labour Party. I want to provide a platform for debate about who should be the next leader, and that debate would not be complete without a candidate, like myself, who represents a more diverse choice.”

    We can at least agree that she is not a man in a suit.

    The issues however that are going to dominate British politics in the coming months will stem from the Lib-Tory programme of cuts. People are absolutely terrified about this. What are the Labour leadership candidates’ views?

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    Far Right Breakthrough in the Netherlands. Belgium Next?

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Europe, Fascism by Andrew Coates on June 10, 2010

    More Sorrows for the Low Countries.

    Listening to a discussion on France-Culture about the growth of the nationalist Flemish movement in Belgium I just checked out the Dutch election results.

    By Mariette le Roux (AFP) – 2 hours ago

    THE HAGUE — The spectacular election breakthrough of the far-right anti-Muslim Party for Freedom shocked the Netherlands on Thursday as two mainstream parties braced for weeks of coalition haggling. 

    The pro-business Liberal VVD party had 31 seats and the Labour party (PvdA) 30, with 98 percent of the vote counted. But far-right PVV leader Geert Wilders demanded a share of government after his party came third with 24, more than doubling its seats in the 150 member parliament. 

    (more here and here)

    In Belgium there are federal elections this weekend. The background is growing demands amongst a section of  Dutch speakers for a near total breakup of the country. The far-right is very active in the country’s Flemish population. This summary of opinion polls (here) indicates that the  extreme Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest – here in English) is credited at between 10 – 17% of voting intentions.

    The background here is complex but one element is that the Flemish nationalists not only have thriven on asserting their linguistic rights. There is a very significant anti-immigrant strain they have exploited.

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    Galloway Exposes Anti-Iran Trotskyist-Zionist-US Terror Centre.

    Posted in Iran, Iranian Resistance by Andrew Coates on June 11, 2010

    Maziar Bahari, held and tortured in Iran after last June’s protests, tells Channel 4 News he has referred Iran’s Press TV to Ofcom after it sent a journalist to cover his interrogation.

    (Here ) More from Today’s Indy here.

    Prominent Press TV Reporter, former MP George Galloway, is said to be preparing a “thundering response“.

    George Galloway has just launched a new career (here) “The former Labour and Respect MP, whose 23 year tenure in the House of Commons ended last week, intends to launch a new career in Hollywood as a presenter of documentary films.He plans to emulate Michael Moore, the American left-wing film-maker.”

    Insiders report his first project is underway.

    Provisionally entitled, “The Anti-Iran Trotskyist-US  Zionist Centre” it will lift the lid on recent events in the country’s so-called “unrest”. Extensive historical research by Galloway reveals a continuous link between the right-blockists, anti-people spy centres and the Iranian ‘opposition’ (more on his model  here) And “Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan.  Grover Furr”  here. (Hat-tip Roger).

    Galloway on Press TV.

    Sarcasm aside this is a major bloody disgrace.

    Shame on you Galloway, Ridley and other collaborators with the Iranian torturers.

    Shame, Shame, Shame!

    Back the Iranian Democrats to the Hilt! (More here)

     

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    Parti communiste français : Small Split.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Front de Gauche by Andrew Coates on June 12, 2010

    Communist Split Says This Obstacle to Unity.

    Some of the Communist ‘rennovators’ have finally left the French Communist Party. They are around 200 and include 2 Deputies in the National Assembly and 1 Senator.

    These individuals,  include Jacqueline Fraysse, Roger Martelli, Lucien Sève (who is known internationally as a philosopher) et Pierre Zarka. There are various  reasons for their resignation from the balance sheet of Soviet Communism to the attitude of the Communists towards other parties. They are critical of Stalinism and share a liberal, democratic, socialist and green background with their own historical Communist loyalties and culture. All however centre their criticisms on the decades-long electoral decline of the Party and its inability to respond. (More Here)

    Interviewed in Le Monde their leading figure, National Assembly Deputy (and former Mayor of Saint Denis - an historic Communist municipality), Patrick Braouezec, estimates that one should act against the fragmentation of the left. But that the Front de Gauche (the alliance against fragmenting the left between the PCF the left Socialist Parti de Gauche and the Gauche Unitaire - the’ Piquet’ tendency formerly of the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste), has not had the required impact.

     Parce que je considère qu’il n’y a pas de dynamique de Front de gauche, il existe un cartel d’organisations - le PCF, le Parti de gauche – qui a sauvé les apparences lors des deux derniers scrutins, mais n’a pas créé la dynamique souhaitée. Sauf dans des régions où la dynamique des militants de base a prévalu sur les logiques d’appareil. Je pense notamment au Limousin, à la Corse, avec les résultats que l’on connaît.

    Because I think that there has not been a dynamic of the Front de Gauche. There is a ‘cartel’ of organisations – the PCF, Parti de gauche – which has kept up its image during the last two elections, but has not created a real momentum. That is, except in the regions where grassroots activists have won out against the party apparatuses. I am thinking notably of Limousin and of Corsica where we know the results.

    He continues,

    convaincu qu’un projet de gauche de gauche devra faire l’articulation entre le socialisme, le communisme, l’écologie et le mouvement libertaire.

    I am convinced that a political project of the left of the left must bind together socialism, communism, ecology and the (left) libertarian movement. (More Here)

    Braouezec’ s opinion is that the ‘form’ of the Communist Party is outmoded (more in le Point). That not only the Front de Gauche but also the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste are ‘obstacles’ to the reconstruction of the left (Blog here). His own small group is the La Fédération pour une alternative sociale et écologique (here). Braouezec has expressed the wish that it should become “more structured”.

    Meanwhile the Front de Gauche has announced that it has found a new ‘dynamic’ in its unitary project (here).

    It remains to be seen if they can agree on a common candidate for the next Presidential elections.

     

    One should note that such splits from the French Communist Party historically tend to be drawn into the orbit of the Socialist Party. Though at present the Green Party – in the shape of the alliance Europe Ecologie rather than the Verts (Greens) alone  -  may act as another pole of attraction.

    Belgium: From Federation to ‘Confederation’?

    Posted in Belgium, European Left by Andrew Coates on June 14, 2010

    “Belgium really is made up of two countries” headlines La Libre Belgique (here).

    The victory of the centre-right Flemish separatist party the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (New Flemish Alliance) is clear. On a national scale they won 17,40 %. In Dutch speaking areas this meant around  29 %. In the French-speaking areas the Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste) made gains – 13,71 %. In Wallonie they got up to 35%. Le Monde notes that the far-left went up in certain working class bastions (though not enough to win seats). The far-right Vlaams Belang lost votes, going down to 7,76 % – losing 4,23% They remain outside of any possible coalition agreements – the cordon sanitaire still holds.

    Without going further in the labyrinth of the results (Christian Democrats, liberals and Greens) three things are clear.

    Firstly, there is going to be some kind of break-up of Belgium in its present form. This is unlikely to take the form of the NVA’s demand (the first article of their constitution) for a Flemish Republic. The process of negotiating a coalition capable of carrying out the reform of the state means that those in favour of retaining at least a symbolic Monarchy are likely to succeed. Secondly, that the Socialist Party, despite its ‘affairiste’ background (that is, involvement in scores of financial scandals) has won the support of many French speakers. In a sense this is also an ‘identity’ inherited from the workers’ movement. The imprint of the unitary past remains in the Flemish areas, where the corresponding socialist party (Socialistische Partij Anders)  got 9,24 % – a minor fall in votes of just over 1% Thirdly, that Belgium rather than discussing the economic crisis will be plunged into debates about language and culture.

    The result, after endless negotiations, may well be a kind of ‘confederation’ between two states to replace the existing federal structure. There is, apparently, little desire for a merger with the Netherlands, on the one side, though on the other, some would not mind fusing with France. However the institutional weight of the existing political forces would be threatened by either move. This means that they are both unlikely to happen. The future of Brussels, which the Flemish nationalists lay claim to (it is officially a ‘bilingual’ region), is a crucial issue. In fact Brussels is massively Francophone. But then there are the suburbs….

    On the France-Inter this morning they called this a ‘repli sur soi’ (going back to one’s self).  In other words, identity politics. European nationalism, even its civic form, amounts in the end to this. It a terrible waste of time. And what is more, how does this relate to the problem of racism? What of the situation of the very large community in the country of a North African background? Where do they fit in? Oh, and then there’s the state finances – cuts . Nationalism will means a beggar-thy-neighbour fight rather than one uniting a potential majority of Belgium around the unions and left’s opposition to financial austerity.

    Nationalism, linguistic quarrels, one might say, are the opium perfume of the bourgeoisie.

     Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA) 1 135 617 17,40 % - 27 -
      Parti socialiste (PS) 894 543 13,71 % -2,85 26 +6
      Christen-Democratisch en Vlaams (CD&V) 707 986 10,85 % - 17 -
      Mouvement réformateur (MR) 605 617 9,28 % -3,23 18 -5
      Socialistische Partij Anders (sp.a) 602 867 9,24 % -1,02 13 -1
      Open Vlaamse Liberalen en Democraten (Open VLD) 563 873 8,64 % -3,19 13 -5
      Vlaams Belang 506 697 7,76 % -4,23 12 -5
      Centre démocrate humaniste (cdH) 360 441 5,53 % -0,53 9 -1
      Ecolo 313 047 4,80 % -0,30 8 0
      Groen! 285 989 4,38 % -0,40 5 +1
      Lijst Dedecker (LDD) 150 577 2,31 % -1,72 1 -4
      Parti populaire (PP) 84 005 1,29 % +1,29 1 +1
      Autres 316 108 4,84 % n/a 0 n/a
      Total 6 527 367 100 % - 150 -

     

    More here.

    Far left votes (Hat-Tip to Nico Via Leftist Trainspotters):

    “The Workers Party of Belgium (PTB/PvdA) almost doubled its votes and has the
    best result of its history:
    101,088 votes, 1.55 percent (2007: 56,167, 0.84 percent)
    The Front of the Left (Front des Gauches) an alliance of Parti Communiste,
    Parti Humaniste, Comité pour une Autre Politique (CAP), Ligue Communiste
    Révolutionaire, Parti Socialiste de Lutte/Linkse Socialistische Partij
    (PSL/LSP) and Vélorution in french speaking regions and the Region around
    Brussels got less votes than its components had in 2007: ): 20,734, 0.32
    percent compared to 25,511 votes and 0.38 percent in the same regions (4,729
    (CAP), 19,329 (PC) and 1,453 (Vélorution))
    In the flemish speaking regions the LSP candidated on its own and got 6.791
    votes (0.10 percent) compared to the 15,354 votes for the CAP in 2007 in the
    same region. The LSP was part of the CAP in 2007.”

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    Retirement Age: A European Issue in France.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Unions, Welfare State by Andrew Coates on June 15, 2010

     Defend The Right to Retirement!

    Raising the age of retirement is a European-wide issue. Everywhere there are plans to raise it. In France this means plans to put the age to get a pension up from 60 to 62/63 (here). This is meeting great resistance.

    People often forget that such low limits were once welcomed as a means to help reduce unemployment. While no doubt many over-60s enjoy their work and should be encouraged to do so this may affect others, particualrly the younger, and block their careers. The unsightly attempt to cling to one’s post – and privileged position – appears widespread amongst highly paid professionals such as academics (including some well-known leftists). In less exalted realms most welcome their retirement. Postponing it effectively worsens their conditions. It, to repeat, will certainly help increase the level of unemployment. It harms the notion that you should have a real chance to enjoy a secure future without being pressed into lengthy toil.

    Such a measure is part of a wider attempt to cut public spending. That is, it fits into European ‘economic governance’ based on austerity. The savage measures used to ‘solve’ the Greek crisis in public spending are being introduced, in varying degrees of severity, across the continent.

    The French Unions, more strongly than their British counterparts, have vigorously resisted.

    Defending the age of retirement at 60 is a symbol of this fight. The unions have been untied on this, even the previously moderate and compromising CFDT. This has not lasted.  Unfortunately  they are already undergoing a split. In a brazen attempt to outbid the other trade union federations Force Ouvrière (a coalition of business unionists, paleolithic anti-Communists and ‘Lambertist’ Trotksyists – background in English here) has called for its own protests today (here). That is, on the eve of the expected announcement of  French government plans.

     

    The 24th of June will see a unitary day of action (with all the other union federations, from the CFDT to the CGT onwards)  (CGT here, CFDT here). It is hoped that this will be extremely well followed.

    Communiqué commun CFDT, CGT, FSU, Solidaires, UNSA

    Appel à une nouvelle journée de mobilisation le 24 juin

    Les organisations syndicales CFDT, CFTC , CGT, FSU, Solidaires, UNSA se sont réunies le lundi 31 mai 2010 pour faire l’analyse de la journée de mobilisation du 27 mai pour l’emploi, les salaires et les retraites et pour envisager les suites.

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    Belgium: Nationalism, Politics and Language.

    Posted in Belgium, Europe by Andrew Coates on June 16, 2010

    Ancient Linguistic Dispute

    “We hope to have a government by September” La Première this morning.

    The biggest winners of last Sunday’s Belgium Federal Elections were the N-VA  Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, New Flemish Alliance(in English here)  Bart De Wever’s (here in English) party has emerged as a moderate nationalist alternative to the far-right Flemish Vlams Belang. Some claim that it is a ‘civic’ nationalist grouping. That its demand for an independent Flemish state can be met through an amicable divorce - along the lines of the split between the Czech and Slovak Republics. I have suggested that some kind of ‘confederation’ will emerge, a loose alliance between two states, under a largely symbolic monarchy.

    Others note that De Wever has come from largely nowhere on the crest of wave of populist enthusiasm for blaming ‘profligate’ Wallonia. His self-publicising, such as the appearance on a Flemish game show, and his background as a historian preoccupied with claims about the wrongs inflicted by Francophones, do not bode well. Nor does the N-VA’s support for neo-liberal economic policies, such as cutting the civil service, and ending annual pay rises rewarding the length of service.

    Negotiations to form a Coalition government in Belgium typically take a long time. At present the Socialist ‘family, French and Flemish social democrats, (here in English) is led by Elio di Rupo. He may emerge as Prime Minister – becoming the first French-speaker for many years to get this position. Negotiating with the N-VA – the largest grouping – is going to be hard.

    Break-Up of Belgium

    The N-VA would like to see a break-up of the country. In the meantime they realise that such things in Belgium always proceed by ‘negotiation’ – in other words bids and outbids, deals and barely concealed rows, and reconciliations through gritted-teeth. Their two immediate demands concern the thorniest issues. The first is that they want the Health Service’s finances (and no doubt other federal funds) cut into two. This would mean that the more prosperous Flemish areas would cease ‘subsidising’ the less well-off Walloon ones. or to put it another way, the richer would stop helping the poorer.

    Secondly, Wever demands the abolition of Brussels as a region. That is, it  should be run jointly by Flanders and Wallonia. This claim rests on history. That  Brussels is ‘really’ Flemish. That its long and complex history is one by which a French-speaking aristocracy and (later,  bourgeoisie) took ‘their’ city over. That the honest Flemish people were dominated by this arrogant ruling class. In fact this is doubtful: Brussels has been linguistically mixed for a long time. There was even a unique dialect that mixed Spanish, Dutch, French and Walloon.   Today Brussels is French-speaking, surrounded on many sides by Dutch speakers. Some Francophones  want to construct a ‘corridor’ uniting them with the French-speaking Wallonia

     As a result  much of the population of Brussels is intensely suspicious of a party, the N-VA, that makes the use of Dutch obligatory in all citizens’ dealings with the municipalities it controls. The notion that they should have a hand in running their city is not appealing.

    Language and Nations

    Why is language so important in these disputes?

    It is a standard refrain on the left that nationalisms are constructed - largely by states. But in this case nationalism is interwoven with the difference between French and Flemish. Linguistic nationalism has deep roots.  It si about the most important part of people’s lives - the whole way we experience the world.  Gary Young in the Guardian explores this (here). Unfortunately he claims that Brussels is ‘multilingual’. This is only true in the sense that London is.  It is the clash between two languages, French and Dutch, that matters in this political dispute. It is worth noting that most of the population from an immigrant background is Francophone.

    Analyses of the link between nationalism and langauge tends to over-polticise it. To make it a side-aspect of the conflict between political and social groups. Or part of a narrative by which the State imposes ‘a’ national tongue over all others.

    Nicolas Ostler (Empires of the Word 2005) offers a different way of looking at this. He examines how exactly languages develop, spread, and maintain their power. Apart from the importance of political support Ostler notices that religions have carried and sustained languages (Arabic by the Qu’ran, Hebrew by the Jewish Bible, Sanskrit by Hinduism). Latin had a place in European history not only through the Roman legacy but through its use by the Church. Business and military needs can sustain language growth – needed for contact communication. Administrative structures can sustain special languages – enabling the earliest written language, Sumerian, to survive for a millennia after it stopped being spoken in normal conversation.

    The story of languages is also one of the entry into modernity, capitalism, and the development  of communities through education, and, at present, the various forms of mass media. (Here)

    These involve symbolic and cultural power. Ostler uses Benedict Anderson’s writings on nationalism to see the full range of these factors at play in the way that  speech forms part of  national ‘imagined communities’ as well as administrative ones. Demography is another factor in langauge growth and reach. This has an ancient history. Some modern linguistic archaeologists think that Indo-European languages grew throughout Europe not through conquest but through the spread of farming by an increasing population of  Indo-Europeans in pre-historic times. Even in the 21st century some languages without the might of say English are sustained by their large numbers of speakers.

    Ostler looks at the way languages interact, merge, or are replaced. One factor is the capacity, he speculates, of speakers from one linguistic community to absorb, or be absorbed, by another. One view is, fore ample, that Continental Celtic was replaced by Latin because it was similar form. Lacking the later celtic ‘lentitation’ its nouns declined in a not-too different  fashion (sometimes, he shows, using nearly the same forms and words). French Celts were able to adapt to Latin more easily because of basic similarities.

    Walloons

    The ethnic name Walloons  is Celtic. Or rather , the population in what is now Southern Belgium  were called this in the early medieval period by Germanophones - as the cognate word Welsh for Celts in the UK indicates. Today in Belgium we have two language communities whose speech is  different. Grammatically and in many other ways they are very distinct, though Dutch and French are hardly as different as say, Chinese and Icelandic. The clash between them, the struggles over their propitiation, are entangled with politics. Yet in some sense there is an underlying divergence over the one of the most significant ways we have of experiencing the world.

    Linguistic nationalism may be a lot less vicious than the purely ethnic variety. However, it’s worth thinking about Ostler’s emphasis when looking at Belgium. Because it’s not just politics and economics that’s involved here. Were one to take up some of his approach – and lay out the full weight of the different shapes language is connected to cultural, eocnomic and political factors – one might add something to understanding what’s at stake.

    These are, naturally, wider contexts. At the moment with the unfolding crisis in Beligum, the problem of Brussels shows that politics is the central issue. And that it is clear that the N-VA is in no way progressive. Its ‘civic’ nationalism is full of venom. This will lead to a series of dead-ends - pitting people into arguments of its own making.

     

    Meanwhile Bart De Wever wants Beligium to “evaporate” (here).

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    In Honour of the Appel de 18 Juin.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, French Politics, Human Rights by Andrew Coates on June 18, 2010

    In Honour of One of the Greatest Gestures in History (Here - in English).

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    The Class Struggle on Ipswich Allotments: Defend Comrade Renard!

    Posted in Allotments, East Anglia, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on June 19, 2010

    Threatened by Liberal-Tory Coalition.

    It’s drizzling today – which at least saves me from having to water the allotment.

    The end of Spring and beginning of Summer are the busiest time for the oppressed Ipswich peasantry. After the early sowing and planting (potatoes – first early, carrots, broad beans, peas, shallots) there come the second wave – radishes, Oriental Salad mixture, Italian Salad mixture, other lettuces (four varieties of loose leaf), rocket, beetroot, turnips, spring onions. Then there is the planting-out of maize, courgettes, squashes, tomatoes (I am taking a chance on this – they often get blight here), ridge cucumbers, chilis, brocoli, and more sowing, runner beans, French beans (somewhat compulsory chez Coatesty), more lettuces (a further six types, including Merveille de Quatre Saisons, Batavia, Little Gem – heartening varieties), and the first endives (frisé, barbe de capucin).

    Soft fruit and rhubarb, not to mention fruit trees are a good investment on allotments. They need little attention and you can get fruits in abundance which cost a lot in the shops and market. From red currents, gooseberries, strawberries to black currents and raspberries there is nothing to compare with your own fresh produce. Later cooking apples and plums (I have a tree of both) are well worth having. I have planted a couple of eating apple trees this year (Cox and something whose name I forget – it is a pollinator for the Cox).

    I prefer Herbs in my tiny back garden Rosemary, Sage, Thyme, Majoram,  (I have some, such as Chervil and Oregano, Parsley, Dill,  Borage and Savory, in pots) for immediate cooking use. But others, such as Angelica, Mint and Lovage,  need space. So they have a place next to the salad plants.

    Digging, weeding, watering, an allotment can take up a lot of your time.

    But every drop of sweat is a contribution in the struggle against the ruling class!  

    Which brings me to the scapegoating of Comrade Renard. A vicious campaign by the bourgeois media against Urban Foxes is underway. Allotments tend to be ideal lairs for our valiant vulpines. Renard is well-known and loved by all. He has a good dispostion  - I have seen him not long ago scampering up to the railway embankment with a cheery look on his face.  Spring Road allotments are equally the home of slow worms, voles, toads and frogs, not to mention bird life. A spinney has a few small deer in it. All this ten minutes from Ipswich town centre. Fortunately  these are not under threat – yet.

    All comrades must defend foxes against this latest attack.

    The Liberal-Tory Coalition will stop at nothing as it crushes everything under its iron boot.

     

    Update:  David Green in today’s East Anglian Daily Times makes my point – here.

    In a survey by the Mammal Society the fox was voted one of the most popular British mammals.

    Audrey Boyle, spokeswoman for the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, told me she was unaware of any complaints the organisation had ever received about foxes and people. “Many people regard it as a real treat to see a fox,” she said.

    Only a truly evil organisation, like the Liberal-Tory Junta that rules Ipswich, could wish to attack them,

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    34ème Congrès du Parti communiste français: New Leader Pierre Laurent.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Front de Gauche by Andrew Coates on June 20, 2010

    Pierre Laurent has been elected as the National Secretary of the Parti communiste français on Sunday the  20 June with 80,7 % of the vote. He replaces Marie-George Buffet (here). The Communists call for a  ”pacte d’union populaire” and will continue to back the Front de Gauche (here).

    Laurent is said to be a “pure product of the party-apparatus”. He is an ex-Editor of l’Humanité.  He came to public attention in the recent regional elections as head of the list in the Ile-de-France. This was achieved only after an internal fight with the ‘refounder’  (the party’s opposition) Patrick Braouezec - who has since left the PCF (a decision covered on this Blog).

    Laurant has lost no time in announcing his backing for the strategy of the Front de Gauche. This got 6% of the vote in the regional elections earlier this year. However without a first-round agreement with the Parti Socialiste the Communists went from 178 councillors to 95. The party now has around 134, 000 members – a figure which signals a continuing slow but steady decline.

    In 1946 the PCF had 28,2% of the vote and sent 183 deputies to the National Assembly. In 1969 the General Secretary Jacques Duclos still got 21,3%. After the break up of the Union de la Gauche and in the late 1970s the Communists still had 15,3% in 1981. But since then the PCF score has not ceased to drop, Robert Hue (now the leader of a micro-independent organisation) had 3,3% in 2002. The nadir (to date)  was the result obtained by Marie-George Buffet in 2007 1,9%

    Critics (such as Braouezec) allege that the PCF has not been able to open itself up to new forms of struggle or discover a new reference point – to replace the ‘model’ of the USSR. It is true that history weighs heavily on the PCF. It was totally enamoured with the Soviet Union. Its record from the 1930s to the 1950s is thoroughly tainted.  It was intolerant of all opposition, and was organised by on  the most pyramidal forms of  democratic centralism. However ’openess’ is a harder issue to gauge. 1968 is said to have been the key turning point towards decline. That the Party effectively suffocated the May Revolt, particularly by its hostility towards the student movement. This ignores the he PCF’s brief second breath during the period of the Programme Commun - 1972 – 1978 (PCF details here). Its real problems came when Mitterrand became President in 1981, and the period of the Union de la Gauche (a government coalition Parti Socialiste, with the PCF as the junior partner along with the phantom  party, the Left radicals). The PCF was systematically outmanoeuvered,  and lost all sense of direction.

    To grasp how off-beam a general critique of the PCF’s hostility towards its left opponents during the 1968 events is  Louis Althusser (L’Avenir dure longtemps 1992) offers some suggestions. He distinguished  between the ‘gauchists’ (leftists) of the period and the ‘extreme-gauche’. That is, the mixture of spontaneists, Maoists and followers of a galaxy of fashionable gurus (Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Gauttari and Deleuze - though the latter two had a more serious committment to the left), and the non-Communist  left – from the Ligue Communiste Rèvolutionnaire (LCR – now the Nouveau parti anti-capitaliste) to the self-management current. The extreme-left, Althusser stated, was ‘part of the workers’ movement’, the gauchists were not. This is not to deny that many of their theorists were interesting and important,. But politically, as the episode of the nouvelle philosophie demonstrated, they were not really of the left. The present position of many of them  - pro-market liberal-libertarians (Daniel Cohen-Bendit), ‘anti-totalitarians’ (that is, pro-NATO and supporters of ‘humantiarian intervention’ who demonstrate how right the Marxist philosopher was. That the PCF now cooperates with Trotskyists in the Front de Gauche equally indicates his good judgement.

    There is no doubt that  long agony of the PCF accelerated after the collapse of Official Communism.  I recall visiting Le Havre in the late 1990s and there was still a vibrant (in appearance) Communist municipality. But in an interview with the PCF Town Hall aides one could almost physically feel the sense of impending loss. The film Petites Coupures (2003) centres on  the ebbing faith of Party cadre. It this feeling of great sadness that crept gradually throughout the membership that accounts for its terrible indecision and hesitation.

    There is a host of reasons to be wary of the PCF. But one should never forget their moment of eternal glory. The film L’Armée du Crime (2009) is a dramatisation of the events that led to the Affiche Rouge. This is a famous poster (shown in the clip posted here of Le Chant des Partisans) of  the first ‘terrorists’ who fought the German occupation in Paris. These were ‘immigrants’, Ashkenazi Jews, Anti-Fascist Spaniards and Italians, and Armenians. All were caught.

    After having been tortured for three months, the 23 were tried by a German military court. In an effort to discredit the Resistance, the authorities invited French celebrities (from the world of the cinema and other arts) to attend the trial and encouraged the media to give it the widest coverage possible. The Manouchian Group’s members were executed before a firing squad in Fort Mont-Valérien on February 21, 1944. The woman, Olga Bancic, who had served the group as a messenger, was taken to Stuttgart, where she was beheaded with an axe on May 10, 1944.

     

    The film shows their very real actions – of spectacular  courage, and imagines a scenario of their personal lives. The director Robert Guéduguian wished to show the profound courage and decency of these members of FTP-MOI (PCF-led resistance).

    I agree – I am sick to death of all the (once merited but long outdated) attempts to show the sordid side of French life under the Occupation. We need the ‘legend’. But there is the reality. There is incredible violence, not least in scenes of torture carried out by the Gestapo and their French collaborators. Ethical issues get raised. The Resistance figures refuse to attack a Bistro where German soldiers consort with French women. Unlike certain modern terrorists who would no doubt find an added bonus in killing ‘slags’. The film has real moments of pure beauty. As Guéduguian says, after his capture and facing impending death, one of the resistors announces, ” I refuse to hate the German people.”

    Never forget that for all the rest the PCF has this inheritance.

    And this:

    French Satirist, Stéphane Guillon, Sacked by Sarkozy.

    Posted in European Left, Free Speech, French Politics by Andrew Coates on June 23, 2010

    Booted Out By Sarkozy.

    French political satire can be some of the funniest in the world. It is also often one of the most vicious. G..K.Chesterton once said anybody not French who liked it was a cad. Cad I am.

    On the French Public Radio Station, France-Inter, there has been, up to today, a  ‘humeur’ slot. At around ten-to-eight (seven our time) in the morning they broadcast a monologue of searing satire. It worked, roughly half the time.  Stéphane Guillon was the star. He makes Rory Bremmer look like a gentle Benny Hill. To say that he was insulting about French politicians, Nicolas Sarkozy downwards, would be feeble. Better imagine throwing acid in their faces. That is, vitriol.

    Sarkozy did not appreciate this. Through the influence of Carla he had renegade leftist Phillipe Val appointed director of France-Inter. It took some time but  they have finally got rid of Stéphane Guillon, and his mate Didier Porte. (here )

    The Head of Radio France Jean-Luc Hees announced today that  “l’humour ne doit pas être pris en otage par des petits tyrans.” – (humour shouldn’t be a hostage of petty tyrants)  (here).

    So shut up and fuck off Stéphane and Didier.

    This morning Stéphane was on rare form. For his last broadcast he reached a peak of satirical frenzy. I have never heard the like of it, and no doubt will not hear the like on France-Inter for some time.

    Allez Stéphane! Fonce! On veut que tu continue!

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    France: Two Million in the Street Against Pension ‘Reform’.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Unions by Andrew Coates on June 25, 2010

    As Britain prepares to raise the retirement age, and public sector workers face attacks on their pensions this is worth looking at.

    Yesterday’s Day of Action in France against ‘reform’ of their own retirement system drew up to 2 Million (organisers’ estimate – Police estimate 23 – actually I made that last bit up) demonstrators out on the street. The main union federations (CGT, CFDT, FSU, Solidaires) with the exception the go-it-alone FO organised the event. There were widespread, if uneven work stoppages. The leader of the Socialist party, Martine Aubry, came out strongly in favour of the protest – which got her criticised by the government UMP party for trying to take advantage of the unrest. Other left parties, NPA, Parti de Gauche, Parti Communiste, les Verts (Greens) and Lutte Ouvrière took part. (More here)

    Last night British television did not think this worth reporting.  

     Perhaps they thought it might give people ideas.

    Details  (in English) here and (in French)  here and here.

    More Videos:

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    Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Renovation.

    Posted in International, Stalinism by Andrew Coates on June 26, 2010

    Innovative Marxist Leader.

    Tendance Coatesy is sometimes accused of “Euro-centrism”.

    But even the most Eurocentric person is stirred by this – just announced – news.

    Long Live Kim Jong-Il and  Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) (Chosongul: 조선민주주의인민공화국) !

    North Korea party to pick new leadership

    SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea’s ruling communist party has called a rare meeting to elect a new leadership team, in a move analysts said could set in motion succession plans for ailing leader Kim Jong-il’s youngest son.

    For the first time in three decades, the dynastic state’s political elite have been summoned to a Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) convention in September, amid a series of military and political changes over the past few weeks.

    “The Political Bureau of the WPK Central Committee decides to convene early in September … a conference of the WPK for electing its highest leading body reflecting the new requirements of the WPK,” the North’s official KCNA news agency reported on Saturday.

    By Jack Kim and Suh Kyung-min

    More Here and Here.

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    Toronto Riots Against G20: More Important than England v Germany?

    Posted in Colonialism, Globalisation, Human Rights, Imperialism, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on June 27, 2010

    Some ‘left’  Blogs speak of little but the England-Germany Match Today.

    True revolutionaries like Tendance Coatesy are made of sterner stuff.

    This is much greater sport:

    BBC here.

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    The New Old World. Perry Anderson. Review Essay.

    Posted in Europe, European Left, French Politics, German Left, Italy, Marxism, New Left by Andrew Coates on June 28, 2010

    http://newhumanist.org.uk/images/1003-Howe-Anderson-cover.jpg

    Review Essay: The New Old World. Perry Anderson. Verso 2010.

    The European Union lies at the horizon of our politics. Like the sky’s limit it seems a distant prospect. Yet a major part of what we see of government is shaped by decisions in the Halls and Chambers of Brussels. How then can we grasp their workings? The New Old World begins with the observation that the EU has an “institutional framework of famous complexity, overarching the nations that compose it that sets this world off from any other” The Union is marked, moreover, by the “intractable sovereignty and diversity of the nation-states” that make it up. To write about this, Perry Anderson observes, is difficult. The difference between the national and supranational planes makes it hard to hold them together “within a single focus”. A causal reader might immediately shrink from reading further; fearing no doubt that the author is also talking about the tangled nature of his own book.

    They would be wrong to do so. Anderson, a leftist intellectual’s intellectual, is not about to get lost. If the pages of The New Old World are “makeshift” and made up of “discontinuous” efforts, it is full of critical political and theoretical insight about the European Union, and its member states. Readers of the London Review of Books and New Left Review will be familiar with many of these essays. But placed together, re-edited, and concluded with up-to-date Prognoses they repay re-reading as a whole. Few British commentators (Timothy Garton Ash being one, though from a standpoint close to power) have managed to link the national and the pan-European in such a stimulating way. Reviewers have praised Anderson’s ‘breath’, his ‘magisterial’ grasp of a vast range of material. He is one of the small number of people capable of describing this “impossible object”, and its successive historical, cultural, ideological, national and Continental levels. He does so from the vantage point of the left – a left however that is never clearly defined. (Page xi)

    The New Old World aims to “inspire curiosity about the life and thought of other nations”. That is, largely, through an account of ‘high’ national cultures, intellectual reviews, and the ‘quality’ arts of France, Italy and Germany, although, just outside the European marches, Turkey gets a broader ideological look, centred on Kemalism and Islam. There is little evidence of materialist cultural studies, that is, the attempt to make links between the elite-national and the ‘popular’. In a similar vein Perry Anderson’s famously erudite style – peppered with untranslated phrases from many European languages – staunchly resists Orwell’s recommendation in Politics and the English Language to always use “Everyday English” and short words. But it is none the worse for making readers consult a dictionary or Google. (more…)

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    Galloway Backs Ed Balls.

    Posted in Britain, Labour Party by Andrew Coates on June 29, 2010

    Galloway Likes Balls!

    Welcome backing from Britain’s leading Press TV Presenter:

    Labour must have Balls to succeed

    By George Galloway on Jun 28, 10 06:00 AM .

    Ed Balls did well on Question Time and it’s reported he clashed with Tory Philip Hammond in the Central Lobby after the cameras stopped rolling.

    The splendid spat between the two men, with Balls reportedly coming close to banjoing the Tory fact- ddler, showed at least Ed has, well … cojones.

    here.

    Ken Coates: a Eulogy.

    Posted in European Left, Fascism, Labour Government, Labour Movement, Left by Andrew Coates on June 30, 2010

    A Flower of the Labour Movement.

    Ken Coates (Here) has passed on, at 80, on the 27th of June. (Guardian Obituary Here - letters about it here, Independent Here, Blog Three Score Years and Ten Here, Five Leaves Blog Here, Keith Flett in the Morning StarHere Socialist Worker Here. Left Futures  Here This is Nottingham  Here)

    He had had a heart attack a few years ago. This time one carried him off.

    Ken was one of the best and most influential socialist activists, politicians, and writers of the European Left.

    From the Institute for Workers’ Control, the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, European Nuclear Disarmament, the European Appeal for Full Employment, to Socialist Renewal, he played a leading part in the left and the labour  movement.

    Rare are people with such gifts: Ken combined a superb grasp of abstract economic and political issues, with the ability to organise within the board trade union movement and peace campaigns. His experience as a Coal Miner (never worn as a trump against ‘intellectuals’), his easy relations with ordinary working people, and his enduring commitment to grass-roots activity, earned him great respect.

    I came into direct contact with Ken during his period as a MEP (1989 to 1999). The European Full Employment Conventions (both held in Brussels at the European Parliament) had a wide echo. Attending them both made  you realise just how widely and deeply Ken was respected. The delegations to each  from Southern England (filling a coach from London) were made up of the kind of salt-of-the-earth left and union activists that keep our movement going. Ken name was part of the draw. The Appeal itself - which demanded decent levels of benefit and real job creation – is still relevant during the present economic crisis. It offers an answer to calls to slash-and-burn the public sector.

    Ken stood four-square in the tradition of democratic socialism and promoted the self-management principles of workers’ control with brio. He was evicted from the Labour Party (1998)  over his protests with Hugh Kerr against dropping Clause Four. Efforts to form an alternative through the Independent Labour Network, were not succesful. However, the steady stream of pamphlets from Socialist Renewal,  his articles and books,  and the journal-publishing house, Spokesman continued. They interested, and will keep interesting,  a wide public.

    Like many on the left with similar views I have scores and scores of letters from Ken (the most recent was a written reply to an E-Mail about a year back). Ken seems never to have really trusted the Web for writing. His ability to engage in constant dialogue pre-dated Blogs, Newsgroups and Facebook. It was just one of the aspects that made him so deeply rooted in the best sides of the European, and world, socialist tradition.

    Ken Coates was a flower of the labour movement.

    He leaves behind comrades with warm memories and a determination to build on his achievements.

    Condolences to his nearest and dearest.

     

    Update: Ken’s funeral will be on July 8,  14.00 at Chesterfield Crematorium.

    Bonfire of Illusions, Alex Callinicos. Review: A Keeper of the Flame.

    Posted in Capitalism, Globalisation, Labour Movement, Left, Workers' Control by Andrew Coates on July 2, 2010

    http://www.polity.co.uk/images/jackets/highlights/bonfire_of_illusions.jpg

    A Keeper of the Flame. Review: The Bonfire of Illusions.  Polity 2010.


    Was Autumn 2008 marked by “events of a genuinely epochal character”? The Bonfire of Illusions begins by announcing that it saw the “end of the post-Cold War Era.” 2008’s harvest months saw a war between Russia and Georgia. For Alex Callinicos, King’s College Professor of European Studies, and the Socialist Workers Party’s Maître à penser, it was defining moment. Moscow’s victory underlined its assertiveness, and American global weakness. This had a hefty economic counterpart. The “ collapse on Lehamn Brother on 15 September” heralded “the biggest global financial crash since the great Depression of the 1930s” (Pages 1-2) On a deep level, this “historic turning point” can be seen in terms of Alain Badiou’s concept of ‘event’, a radical turning-point, an eruption of the new, is “affirmed and proclaimed”(Ethics. 2001). Callinicos concludes by stating that a “huge hole” in neo-Liberalism that it’s created may allow a widening of the “boundaries of the possible” for those “prepared to seize this moment boldly.”(Page 143)

    How the changes now underway in states, markets, offer a spur towards socialism is another, more open-ended, affair. There is the “chronic political weakness of the radical anti-capitalist left on a global scale” to begin with (Page 143). The Bonfire of Illusions argues that the time has come to revive plans for “democratic planning” “democratically taking control of the financial markets, nationalising under workers’ control..” “extending social provision” and even a “universal direct income” (Page 141) What is it about the present ‘twin crises’ of the world economy and state-system, in the “immanent laws of capitalist production itself”, with all their contradictions, that brings these principles to the fore? Have they re-shaped the global landscape in ways that will allow the left to spring to life and “collective action”? This prospect, and the identity of the “anti-capitalist” left that could come to power, remain uncertain throughout the book.

    Markets turn to Governments.

    Alex Callinicos has nevertheless some steady vantage points. The US inability to influence the outcome of the conflict between Moscow and Tbilisi was the result of a widely commented “longer term geopolitical process of declining US power.” The punctured speculative bubbles, and the ‘credit crunch’, were, by contrast, for mainstream observers (trapped within the perspective of a benignly growing world-economy), a bolt out of the blue. Following two decades of unchallenged financial expansion, and speculation, the subsequent collapse invites, Alex Callinicos states, comparison with the 1930s Depression. He believes that the workings of market capitalism, set on “auto-pilot” to free the economy from political control, have unravelled. Both overtly right-wing governments and those following the market –states with a dose of social justice promoted by the Third Way of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. Finance is humbled. A re-assertion of direct government involvement in the economy is underway. “We are likely to see both a stronger state and a more unstable state system (page 127)

    A turn towards “state capitalism”, through bank nationalisations (the “greatest nationalisations in world history” and the “apparent conversion of the capitals of Neoliberalism to Keynesianism” is underway (Page 9) It may well be that “rescuing the banks and increasing spending and borrowing” will “encourage yet another speculative boom followed by yet another crisis” (Page 134) But, as Callinicos notes in his Preface (better described as an Afterword), “illusions have survived the bonfire”. In fact “liberal capitalism attempts to steam ahead as if nothing has happened” (page x). At present we could argue, more affirmatively than the SWP leader, that we see instead a series of drifts. Across the globe, there are continuing ‘state-shrinking’ and wage-cutting measures (paralleling the 1930s in other ways): drastic cuts in public spending and simple salary reductions in the private sector. There are “strong state” policies, not to master the financial or industrial infrastructure, but the reserve army of labour, such as draconian efforts to discipline and punish the workless. The ‘enclosure of the commons’ – privatisation – is proceeding apace, in the United Kingdom, under the newly formed Liberal-Tory administration. Perhaps it would therefore be better not to talk of ‘state capitalism’ but of ‘market states’ that use a variety of instruments to support capital. (more…)

    Ill Fares the Land and the Ill-Farer Lord Freud.

    Posted in British Govern, Capitalism, Left, Welfare State by Andrew Coates on July 3, 2010

    http://www.spokesmanbooks.com/acatalog/maydaymanif.jpg

    Example of Judt’s Lost Left  Tradition?

    Ill Fares the Land, by Tony Judt, (here) is the book of the month.

    A lot clearer and more direct than Perry Anderson or Alex Callinicos that is.

    In plain hard words it illuminates the darkness our present politics are plunged into.

    Judt argues that:

    • Letting loose ‘market forces’, privatising and outsourcing public services, has been vastly inefficient and expensive. In country after country it has enriched a few at the expense of the many. Essential common goods, from transport, utilities, and social  housing infrastructure, are  second-rate. We only have to look at the wretched state of the British railways to see what a cheap-jack companies – who cream off subsidies for their own benefit – have created.
    • That the wealthy and powerful have put their hands in the till to the extent that their standard of living is too high for ordinary people to imagine. They are increasingly barricaded off from the rest of the population  themselves in ‘Gated’ communities.  Far from being the source of creative energy, they are a drag on the rest of us.
    • The Welfare State provides fewer and fewer universal benefits (what larry Elliott calls a ‘safe home’ for those in difficulty). It is a grudging, means-testing, regime for the workless and sick. It is edging closer and closer towards the model of the Workhouse: a last resort, an interfering institution designed to force people into the lowest-paid jobs. Or, if these are not available to maintain them on (or just under) the bare minimum for survival.
    • The Left lost its way in the 1970s and 1980s The New left dropped class and equality for romanticised Marxism and individualistic identity politics. More significantly the mainstream left slipped, during the 1980s, into camp followers for market ideologies. New Labour bent to the market and bankers, and has sapped the foundations of social democracy.
    • What is needed now is a revival of egalitarian social democracy. To build a common egalitarian home for us all we should begin from first principles: for redistribution of wealth,  publicly owned services and a sense of a shared purpose and pride.

    This short book (it expands an article in the New York Review of Books)  is a must-read.

    I have problems identifying with Judt’s description of the 1970s left. the left I am from was always part of the broader, collectivists, labour movement. We had little truck for what we called ‘identity’ politics . For us causes like feminism, anti-racism and defending gay rights were part of the wider movement, not separate individual causes. If we were (and in some cases still are ) Marxists  it was within the wider European democratic  socialist current. In our eyes this movement, if not everything, is as important as our goals.

    But I have no difficulty whatsoever identifying with the simple, direct language of Ill Fares the Land.

    A person could walk upright if these egalitarian principles were followed.

    Which brings me to an invertebrate.

    Lord Freud former Adviser to the Labour Government on Welfare, and now Minister for Welfare Reform with the Liberal-Tory Coalition.

    He is visible  proof of Judt’s arguments.

    Let me cite one. Judt observes how outsourcing and privatising welfare makes people dependent on uncountable private companies. Like the tax-farmers of early modern times they rake in money, and run things their way, beyond democratic control. As with the old Workhouse system they create petty tyrannies.

    Freud is making sure this will happen.

    He recently  said (as Ipswich Unemployed Action reports)

    “But we will not tell you how to run your businesses and we won’t meddle in your operations.”

    “We are determined that the “black box” approach”… stop.

    Black-Box?

    Is that what the government has made  its ‘Work Programme” for the unemployed?

    Send the out-of-work to a dark hole…

    Quite.

    French Political-Financial ‘Affaires’ Explained to Children: The ‘Bettencourt’ Vintage.

    Posted in Conspiracies, Europe, French Left by Andrew Coates on July 5, 2010

    Byzantine Bettencourt Business.

    This is everywhere in the French media:

    The resignation of two ministers from French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Cabinet late yesterday over their expenses came as officials fend off criticism over potential conflicts of interest.

    An appellate judge is set to decide this week whether to permit a probe into secretly recorded tapes that were leaked to the French media linking Sarkozy and Labor Minister Eric Woerth to a tax probe involving the country’s richest woman, L’Oreal SA heiress Liliane Bettencourt.

    More here (Bloomberg)

    It is claimed that this is part of a clean-up of the abuse of Ministerial privileges and expenses. The two – UMP (Sarkozy’s ruling Party) Henchman were Alain Joyandet et Christian Blanc. Ostensibly this pair have been shoved out because of allegations about their abuse of state expenses. They make  UK Parliamentary claims look trifling . Joyandet liked his private jet flights to begin with (Here).

    But all is not as it seems. The French press estimates that these two ‘resignations’ (sackings) are to protect Eric Woerth and his wife Florence (who is the central person linked to Bettencourt) – Here. That is, they are being thrown to the wolves while the defence of more important people is strengthened.

    This is where the fun starts. The ‘affaire Woerth-Bettencourt’ ( Wikipedia special page, in French,  here).

    Eric’s wife Florence (as in the Magic Roundabout)  was Lilliane’s  financial adviser. Liliane was mixed up with dodgy money and tax deals. Her major-domo (Butler) was taping her every word (and some pretty unpleasant ones they were too) …..am I losing anyone? Anyway,

    Toujours selon les enregistrements, Patrice de Maistre assure avoir embauché Florence Woerth au sein de Clymène à la demande de son mari et « aurait fait accepter à Liliane Bettencourt un versement d’argent à Eric Woerth mais aussi à Valérie Pécresse et à Nicolas Sarkozy[9] », lors des élections régionales de mars 2010, d’un montant de 7 500 €[Note 1]. Selon Le Monde, « construire et maintenir de bonnes relations avec [...] le ministre en charge du budget et de la lutte contre l’évasion fiscale est le cœur de la stratégie de Patrice de Maistre[8] 

    According to the Tapes Patrice de Maistre hired Florence Woerth for Clymène (Bettencourt’s Business) at the request of her husband ,and made Liliane Bettencourt agree to pay Eric Woerth, and also to  Valérie Pécresse and Nicolas Sarkozy - during the 2010 regional elections - the sum of 7,000 Euros. according to Le Monde, “build and maintain good connections with the Minister in charge of the Budget and the fight against tax evasion,  was at the heart of  Patrice de Maistre’ sstrategy to avoid paying taxes.

    The tax evasion they undertook was massive.

    Agence France Press reports (Here),

    The taped conversations between Bettencourt and her financial adviser reveal that the 87-year-old allegedly hid 80 million euros in Swiss bank accounts while making big donations to friends in the UMP.

    It adds this:

    The butler’s tapes were the latest twist in a long-running family feud between the billionaire and her daughter, who claims Bettencourt is mentally unfit after she gave more than a billion euros to a photographer friend.

    So far all those implicated in wrong-doing are keeping to the line of stout-denial.

    We shall leave aside for the moment the mounting scandals surrounding other Sarkozy ministers, and his own vain attempt to cut back on the President’s ‘train de vie’ (expenses). Around 64 % of the French public estimate that their politicians are corrupt (really!).

    Followers of such ‘affaires’ be warned.

    • They start complicated, get twisted, and end up Byzantine.
    • We will never get to the bottom of this one.
    • You will bored with it before it comes to Court.
    • You will get tired of it during the Court case.
    • You will get really fed up with the books written about it afterwards.
    • What was all it all about?

    Just remember – as the Nouveau parti anti-capitaliste points out, – the sheer greed of the French political bourgeoisie:

    Christine Boutin ne voyait rien d’anormal à cumuler retraite parlementaire (6 000 euros), indemnités de conseillère générale (2 000) et rémunération d’une « mission » sur la mondialisation (9 500). Soit 17 500 euros mensuels quand même. Alain Joyandet, secrétaire d’État à la Coopération, s’indigne qu’on lui reproche de fausses déclarations afin d’obtenir un permis de construire illégal pour sa villa sur la Côte. Lui qui s’était déjà offert, aux frais du contribuable, un vol en Martinique à bord d’un jet privé pour la somme exorbitante de 116 500 euros ! Exorbitante… mais quand même inférieure au coût d’un des voyages de son collègue, Christian Estrosi : 138 000 euros !

    That’s Boutin while Minster for Housing, got, on top of this salary,  a pension, pay for a regional councillor, and extra for some ‘misison’ on globalisation – 17,500 Euros a month.

    ThaAlain Joyandet  got a permit to build a villa, fraudulently. That he got 116 500 Euros for a private flight to Martinique.

    That his mate Estrosi managed to spend 138 000 Euros for another private jet flight.

    So it goes.

    The Summer Holidays are coming up.

    So it’ll all dampen down.

     

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    Full Body Veil (Burka, Niqab) French National Assembly Debate Today.

    Posted in Europe, European Left, Feminism, French Politics, Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on July 6, 2010

    French Leftists Say, Oppose, But Not by Total Ban.

    Just in time to headline in the media - rivalling yet more revelations in the Bettencourt Affair - we have today’s debate France’s National Assembly on laws restricting the full-body veil – the Burka or Niqab. (Continuous reports in the Nouvel Observateur) (BBC). There is the distinct impression that the whole issue is inflated, and a prime case of ‘culture wars’ obscuring more important political topics.

    Le Monde reports that this law aims,  

     à interdire le port du niqab et de la burqa dans tout l’espace public, sous peine d’une amende de 150 euros et/ou d’un stage de citoyenneté.

    aims to forbid wearing the Niqab or the Burka in any public space – any violation of the law will result in a fine of 150 Euros and/or a course in citizenship.

    This will happen in the Spring of 2010, after a campaign of six months of government preparation and education.

    Anybody who forces a women to cover herself (with a Burka or Niqab) will risk a year of gaol, and a fine of 30,000 Euros.

    The main opposition, the Parti Socialiste, argues for a law forbidding the full body veil in more limited areas, “services publics et aux commerces” (public services and shops etc). However, they plan to abstain on the law as it is proposed.

    à gauche comme à droite, tous dénoncent le voile intégral, certains évoquant un “apartheid sexuel”, PCF et Verts continuent de refuser une loi spécifique, qui “stigmatise” les musulmans. Lundi, Amnesty International a appelé les députés à refuser une interdiction complète, qui “violerait les droits à la liberté d’expression et de religion”.

    On the left as on the Right, everyone denounces  the full body-veil, some calling it “sexual apartheid”. However the Parti Communiste Français and the Verts (Greens) are opposed to a specific law which they consider ”stigmatises” Muslims. Amnesty International is against any total ban, considering that this would “violate freedom of expression and religion.”

    Also to  the left of the Parti Socialiste there appears some controversy inside the  Parti de Gauche. There are those  who have criticised the Majority, Sarkozy-led law as a sop to the far-right and those who – correctly in this Blog’s  view who, see secular values uphold through better means than all-embracing legislation (Here).  

    The PCF and the Greens seem to have the right view. At least from a secular left standpoint. To defend human rights we should oppose this, the “voile intègral”. But law is not a good way of regulating dress codes. Except when the person is part of the public authority and in a position of power (teachers for example) this symbol and practice of oppression is best dealt with politically not administratively.

    It is, nevertheless, curious that Amnesty International France is so concerned as to issue public statements on this domestic issue. (Here. )

    We are against a general interdiction because under international human rights conventions, nobody should be prevented from wearing any kind of dress,” said Patrick Delouvin, a spokesman for Amnesty International France

    “Women should not be forced to wear the burqa or niqab in certain countries or forced not to wear it in others,” he told IPS. “How do the French authorities plan to implement this law? It will be hard even for policemen to enforce the restrictions. The ban will be counter-productive.”

    We await Amnesty International’s campaign on  the violation of personal rights that the Burka and Niqab represent in the countries where the full-body veil and other regimes of ‘female modesty’  are enforced by violent means.

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    France, Woerth Scandal Reaches Crescendo.

    Posted in Europe, French Politics, Sarkozy by Andrew Coates on July 7, 2010

    How this Began…

     

    L’ex-comptable des Bettencourt accuse: des enveloppes d’argent à Woerth et à Sarkozy.

    The former Accountant of Bettencourt accuses: envelopes of cash for Woerth and Sarkozy.

    From Medipart Here

    Selon Claire T., l’ensemble de la droite a bénéficié de largesses. En 2007, Eric Woerth, trésorier de la campagne électorale, aurait perçu 150 000 euros à quelques jours de l’élection présidentielle.

    According to Claire T (The Accountant), the whole of the Right benefitted from her (Bettencourt) generosity. In 2007, Eric Woerth, Treasurer of the (UMP) electoral campaign, allegedly received 150, 000 Euros a few days before the Presidential Elections.

    Rue 89 Here.

    French electoral law limits donations from individuals to 7500 euros per year for a political party, and  4600 euros for a candidate.

    More on the unfolding affair: BBC (English) here.

    Despite forecasts that all this would ‘dampen down’ (okay my predictions) the affaire Woerth is reaching a crescendo. By the minute the tensions  are rising.

    Is this the big one that will help bring President Sarkozy down?

    There are three principal points:

    • Anything that breaks the law on financing political parties, as this appears to involve, is very serious. The present French laws are the result of a whole series of scandals - which have touched the entire political class  – going back years. (Laws – in English – Here)
    • There are allegations, patently true, that Sarkozy’s Presidency has been marked by his party and Ministers treating the state as their private property. To be exploited at their will. Minister Christian Blanc, who resigned a couple of days ago, charged 12,000 Euros worth of Cuban cigars to the state. This unravelling affaire will only deepen the crisis.
    • Woerth (whose name I hear on the radio increasingly pronounced to emphasise its German origin) is in charge of the Pension reforms. As in Britain this is a major issue.  Being the top man, the Minister ministre du Travail, de la Solidarité et de la Fonction publique sits ill with his money-grubbing and dodgy dealing.
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    Co-op and USDAW Leave Workers in the Lurch.

    Posted in East Anglia, Ipswich, Labour Movement by Andrew Coates on July 8, 2010

    Gone Forever.

    13th of May, (from Here.)

    Vergo Retail Ltd this week axed hundreds of jobs less than a year after clinching a takeover deal with the East of England Co-operative Society. A number of stores, including one in Stowmarket, now face closure as administrators seek another buyer.

    The Co-op signed off five department stores, six home stores and one jewellery store to Vergo in July last year to concentrate on the non-food market amid recession fears.

    With four stores threatened with closure, the deal was seen as a welcome reprieve for staff.

    Around 350 Co-op employees were transferred to the stores and Vergo was given a year rent-free in the Co-op premises as a sweetener.

    But this week, administrators announced 335 job cuts with immediate effect – including, it is believed, 25 at the Ipswich store in Carr Street.

    18th of June (from Here)

    FIVE stores owned by the Vergo Retail group, including three in Suffolk and Essex, are to close tomorrow, the company’s administrators confirmed today. 

    And the remaining 10 stores in the chain, including that in Ipswich, will also close in a week’s time unless a buyer is found. 

    Joint administrator Sarah Bell, from insolvency specialist MCR, said that negotiations with prospective purchases of the 10 remaining stores would continue. 

    However, she said the closure of the five stores due to cease trading tomorrow had become inevitable following a lack of any suitable offers. 

    “Since the administration began we have worked hard to secure a purchase of the Vergo business,” she said. 

    “However, given the tough economic climate and the financial challenges hitting the UK’s retail industry, certain Vergo stores can no longer be sustained.” 

    But she added: “I must reiterate that negotiations are still in progress on a number of stores still operating and can not rule out a sale of the stores until all avenues have been exhausted. We encourage any interested parties to come forward urgently.” 

    Unless purchasers are found, the final day of trading for the 10 remaining stores will be Saturday, June 26. 

    The stores due to close tomorrow are the Felixstowe homeware branch, the separate department and homeware stores in Clacton-on-Sea, the department store in Great Yarmouth and the separately-branded Joplings department store in Sunderland. 

    Vergo’s presence in East Anglia stems from its acquisition in July last year of department store and homestore business of the East of England Co-operative Society, which saw a total of 350 former co-op employees transfer to the new owner. 

    Before today’s announcement, four stores had already been closed by the administrators while one, in Hexham, Northumberland, has been sold. 

    A total of 482 employees across the company have been made redundant although the administrators have declined to give any breakdown of the jobs lost in East Anglia. 

    The East of England Co-op retains the freehold of its former stores 

    More (Wikipedia) on Vergo, Here).

    7th of July. In the Ipswich Carr Street Store they were flogging the remaining goods off cheap yesterday.

    ***************

    The background is that the East of England Co-op decided to pull out of the Department Store Business. The Ipswich store, in Carr Street, had been a flag-ship for the Co-op with deep historical roots in the Movement. It is to be more than regretted: this has ripped the heart out of what has been a part of the British Left (with all its faults) since its 19th century origins .

    That said, as a commercial businessthere are no doubt reasons for the closures. It is a consumers’ , not a workers’ co-op. The Co-op trades in the capitalist market, and for all its ‘ethics’ this determines the way it operates.

    A number of issues, however, within this framwork,  remain unresolved.

    • The Co-op must have known the Vergo was unlikely to continue long trading from these outlets. Anybody with any nous could see this. The whole operation looked like an unloading fix, with Vergo xpected to rake fof as much profit as possible in a short-time before declaring itself insolvent.
    • The remaining staff have been left in the lurch. As claimants on the liquidated company they will only receive the minimum state redundancy pay – regardless of their years of service for the Co-op.
    • They will not get any pensions – something the Co-op always provided for.
    • USDAW, the shop-workers’ union which is very strong in the Co-op, has not made any real protests about the former staff’s plight.
    • The former Department Stores will soon become empty shells, a blight on the surrounding streets (already in Ipswich, affected by the closure of near-by Woolworth’s).

    This issue is of great concern to many people in East Anglia.

    Meanwhile all USDAW did (in May) was to urge Vergo to find ‘new buyers’ (Here),

    Usdaw has contacted the Administrators to urge them to leave no stone unturned in finding new owners for the affected stores.”

    The Union will be contacting all affected members when there are developments.

    Nothing has been heard, or seen On-Line since.

    So far the local media, notably the EADT and Evening Star, has reported the bare facts and regretted the loss of shopping ventures.  The hardship the former Co-op employees face gets no mention.No doubt it doesn’t fit with their endless ‘boosterism’ about the region’s fortunes.

    But former employees have spoken on more objective regional media (BBC Look East and Anglia News) of their growing anger.

    Otherwise well-informed Ipswich Bloggers so far seem oblivious to this: Here, and Here.

    Ipswich MP, Benedict Gummer, is too wrapped up in the wonder of being an MP  to care. In his maiden speech eh described Ipswich as “a significant service centre with a beautiful medieval centre. (Here) MInd you he hasn;t managed to update his Web site (Here) since the election so he must be very busy somewhere.

    Ho Ho. 

    Only Bob Russell, Liberal MP for Colchester, has made any Parliamentary intervention (Here)

    2 Jun 2010

    Vergo Retail

    Bob Russell: To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills if he will hold an inquiry into Vergo Retail Ltd.’s acquisition from the East of England Co-operative Society of the society’s non-food trading activities in 2009 and its subsequent operation of the business. [215]

    Mr Davey: Vergo Retail Ltd. went into administration on 11 May 2010. In view of the reporting duties imposed on the joint administrators of the company the Department would not normally duplicate their work by carrying out separate inquiries. However, my officials will ask the joint administrators to inform them of any specific matters that come to their attention in relation to the company’s affairs which might require further consideration by the Department.

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    Agora: Sandals Against Religious Bigotry.

    Posted in Culture, Films, Islam, Islamism, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on July 9, 2010

    Agora is a unique film. A picture about Hypatia -  the 4th century  female mathematician-philosopher who taught in Alexandria’s famous Library (the Serapeum). She lived and philosophised  in the dying days of the classical world the power of monotheistic faith gripped the declining Empire. 

    The scenario is embroidered with love interest (her student admirer Orestes), humanist flashes (the inner turmoil leading to Christianity of her former slave Davus) and dramatic scenes where the remaining Pagans confront militant Christians. But it is  very different to a sword and sandals story or Pepulum; it is not an epic either. As far as one can tell Agora is the first overtly ideologically humanist film about the means used by the victorious Jesus followers to impose their faith that has been produced for a mainstream cinema audience.  

    Portraying free-thought in conflict with religious bigotry is a theme with obvious modern echoes. In this Agora offers a very different message to the pro-Christian films, from Quo Vadis to the Centurion, that have dealt with the conflict between Pagan pluralism and Christian monotheism. It is bolder politically than, say, Spartacus – attacking not the easy target of slavery but the harder object of the Church. The weight of the Chrsitians’ own beliefs is given its due: alongside the thugs mobilised by Cyril there are fine and noble faithful believers. But the thrust of their religion is clear. That is, the vicious hysteria of the Christians of the City  was raised to fever pitch by Cyril  of Alexandria. His hatred extends from pagans and jews, to ‘immodest’ women.

    We are told that subsequently Cyril became a Saint and a Father of the Church.

    The fact that what we know of Hypatia  is only her advanced research into mathematics, and her death, should not obscure the merit of the attempt to imagine her anew.. A luminous Rachel Weisz plays the heroine. She is portrayed, tenderly, as an assertive feminist, and deep intellectual. She refuses, literally to the death, to stop asking fundamental questions about the nature of the universe. Not through the dark nights of faith, but through rational enquiry.  At one point Hypatia is described by a Senator as someone who believes in “Nothing”. “I believe in philosophy” she replies. 

    In succesive waves, the murderous logic of religious hatred is unleashed.  From attacking the followers of the old gods, they turn to the Jews, drenching the streets in blood. Hypatia  meets her fate under the stones of the fanatics.

    Which made me think of the regimes which still murder people by stoning.

    In fact the bands of bullying fanatics in 4th Century Alexandra resembled nothing so much as the Islamists in numerous Moslem countries, or the Christians in Central Africa. It makes you wonder if there’s not some kind of enduring mechanism at work here: driving people into blind loathing of the religious ‘Other’, and, above all, the odium they pour on women.

    A fine film – a beautful film, a wonderful woman, Hypatia, the glory of Alexandria.

     

    Update.

    Sources close to the Vatican tell me that this film has caused quite a rumpus. A Blog, which has the eye and ear of the Papal Curia (Splintered Sunrise) now trying to rehabiliate Dunce Scotus, is said to beside itself with rage.

    Flemish and Catalan Nationalists Rise Up.

    Posted in Belgium, Europe, European Left, Nationalism by Andrew Coates on July 11, 2010

    Lest Flanders Forget: 11 Julie!

    Today is the Day of the Flemish Community – Belgium. That is,  De Feestdag van Vlaanderen. *

    As a forward-looking nationality,

    11 July is the National Day of the people of Flanders. On Flanders Day we mark the anniversary of the Battle of the Golden Spurs in 1302 when an army of Flemish townspeople set to the flight the knights of the king of France.

    The battle takes its name from the hundreds of knights’ spurs that lay on the battlefield, the Groeningekouter, outside Kortrijk afterwards.

    The victory was an important one as it prevented Flanders from being incorporated into the kingdom of France and allowed it to continue to develop as a separate entity.

    In his 11 July address the Flemish Premier is expected to speak of the need to press through state reforms and realise a Copernican Revolution under which powers are transferred from the federal state to the regions and gravity too moves from the federal government to the regional governments.

    (More Here)

    The Prime Minister of  the Flemish Region, Kris Peeters, speaks today.

    In his 11 July address the Flemish Premier is expected to speak of the need to press through state reforms and realise a Copernican Revolution under which powers are transferred from the federal state to the regions and gravity too moves from the federal government to the regional governments. (More Here

    In the French version this goes,

    Cette révolution selon Peeters s’articule autour de 4 principes: un gouvernement fédéral qui vient en soutien de la politique flamande, une réforme profonde de l’Etat qui doit donner aux entités fédérées des compétences homogènes, un renforcement du lien avec Bruxelles et une collaboration durable entre toutes les entités.

    To Peeters, this revolution will be elaborated around four principles. A federal government which helps Flemish policies and politics, a deep reform of the state, to make it have equitable responsibilities, a reinforced link with Brussels (that is, Flemish power over the capital’s administration, TC), and long-term co-operation between the different political institutions. (More Here)

    Briefly, moves towards a confederal rather than a federal state.

    Another nationalist movement is on the up. Yesterday around a million people demonstrated for the cause of Catalonia (Here).

    According to El País  the street protest was at the Spanish Constitutional Council’s decision to refuse recognition of Catalonia as a full-blooded ‘nation’, and to block any attempt to make the Catalan language legally predominant  in the region.

    Catalans have very good historical reasons to detest Spanish state centralism.

    However, Catalan nationalism of a more recent vintage is hardly of the left – as the career of Pujol demonstrates.  It is of public notoriety that, like the Flemish, one of the reasons for a revival of their national feeling is the widespread veiw  that they (a rich region) are paying for the poorer ones – the Spanish ‘African’ south.

    Many aspects of cultural autonomy, such as promoting people’s langauge rights, are fundamentally desirable. From the standpoint of equality and free expression they get a wide degree of support, and, for the left, are important . But political separation – fragmentation Europe into smaller and smaller states, run by a political cliques  that live off resentment at neighbours, is hardly the way forward for any kind of progressive.

    If you want to see how right-wing bourgeois nationalism infects otherwise reasonabel people look at,  Jill Evans Plaid Cymru MEP’s Blog here.

    * The Belgium Francophone national holiday on September the 23rd  commemorates the 1830 Uprising. The result was to throw the troops  of  the Dutch-headed Royalty out of the country, creating a separate state – Belgium. Which became a monarchy under strong British influence.  (Here and Here)

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    End Stoning, End Sharia, In Iran, Across The World!

    Posted in Human Rights, Iranian Resistance, Islam, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on July 12, 2010

    The international campaign to support  Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani has, it seems, led the Iranian regime to halt her stoning.  (French language leftist Iranian site, Here) The threat of executions still hovers over her, and others condemned under Islamic ‘law’. Perhaps this particular penalty will soon be shunted aside. But Sharia Law will continue to inspire the Iranian ‘legal’ system and that of many other states. It is a key demand of Islamists across the globe.

    One Law for All campaigns against Sharia law everywhere. It was created from within the Iranian democratic and leftist opposition. It is only one strand, amongst many, of secularist and democratic opinion. But it offers a very good explanation of why Sharia law, in any form whatsoever (including proposals to give tacit recognition of it in British law) must be opposed. See – Here.

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    Sarkozy Goes for Bertie Wooster Strategy: Stout Denial.

    Posted in French Politics, Sarkozy by Andrew Coates on July 13, 2010

    A great political thinker, Bertie Wooster, is best known for the policy of “stout denial“.

    Nabbed by the Rozzers on Boat Race night  he would call himself  “Leon Trotsky“.

    The Beak would admit that he “strongly suspected” the name was not Bertie’s own.

    But Mr Wooster would stick with it.

    The same policy seems to have entered French political life.

    Last night, on French Television, his Highness,  Nicholas Sarkozy stated that everything he has ever been accused of is “mensonges” et “calomnies” (lies and calumnies). No fault lies with Woerth (at the centre of accusations about illegal funding for Sarkozy’s political campaigns). The man is as honest as the day is long.

    Poor old honest toiling Eric Woerth had just left his post as Treasurer (bag-man) of Sarkozy’s Party, the UMP (Here). Yet his Boss wants him to stay on to reform the French pension system.

    Not everyone has leapt to the President’s defence.

    Interviewed on the Belgium Radio La Première this morning (Here) former Le Monde Director, Edwy Plenel, chose this song (They hide everything from us..).

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    France’s Former African Empire: Human Rights Abusers on Parade Today.

    Posted in Colonialism, French Politics, Imperialism by Andrew Coates on July 14, 2010

     See this Important Video (in English)  - Here.

    Today is the 14th of July.

    The traditional parade on the Champs Elysées.

    This year there are contingents from France’s former African colonies (with the exception of the Côtes d’Invoire) * (le Monde) There is plenty to say about france’s past role as an imperial power on the continent. And its present activities as a commercial and military player in Françafrique. Most of which is bad. That is, is starting from its failure to stem the forces that began the genocide in Rwanda  and its connivance in the rise of Hutu extremism, up to its actions in the rest of Central Africa.  

     There are many other dark chapters in the history of Françafrique – the ‘domain reservé’ of french presidents.

    But there is more.

    Radio France International says (Here.)

    This year, Presisdent Sarkozy has invited thirteen African nations to march alongside the French, not in celebration of the 50th anniversary of independence, but “to celebrate the strength of the ties that history has weaved between us”.

    This has caused somewhat of a fuss in human rights circles. Libération reports that various NGOs have complained that among the 13 ex-French colonies invited, there may be soldiers that took part in brutal repressions.

    Some 500 political opponents were killed by the armed forces of Congo Brazzaville in the 1990s, as was the case after 2005 elections in Togo. And 100 were killed in Cameroon in 2008 after food shortage riots in 2008.

    The Elysée Palace has been quick to point out that none of the participants are currently under investigation for anything illegal.

    The Nouvel Observateur reports concerns by the International Federation for Human Rights. Here).

    An Open Letter says, (Here),

    14 juillet 2010 : la fête nationale française, fête de l’impunité ?

    The authors note that “people who are” responsables de graves violations des droits de l’Homme” may be present. That these people (that is, from Central Africa, and many francophone countries under dictatorships) will be granted immunity from prosecution while they attend. They worry that France is becoming a country with “ de quasi-impunité pour les criminels contre l’Humanité.”

    In brief, that it is grotesque to celebrate the French Revolution with such individuals present.

    * - Note, Tunisia and Algeria were never colonies in the ‘legal’ sense. The former was protectorate and the latter - eventually – a Department)

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    Co-op Goes Some Way to Help Vergo Workers.

    Posted in East Anglia, Ipswich, Labour Movement by Andrew Coates on July 15, 2010

    Ipswich Evening Star reports (with TC Comments -follow up to earlier story),

    Co-Op’s cash boost for Vergo workers

    The East of England Co-operative Society is to make an unprecedented financial gesture to nearly 300 former employees who were made redundant when their new employer, Vergo Retail, went into administration.Around 345 employees transferred from the Co-op in July 2009 under Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations (TUPE) when Vergo took over the running of 12 Co-op department and home stores in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex.

    Even though the staff left the Co-op’s employment a year ago, the Society’s board of directors has decided that an exceptional discretionary ex-gratia payment should be made to former employees who had worked for the Co-op for at least two continuous years and who were subsequently made

    There are still hopes that another retailer will bid for Vergo – although there is nothing firm on the horizon. Mr Samson added: “We would welcome a government investigation into Vergo’s collapse and I have already written to Vince Cable, Business Secretary, offering our full support for any such investigation. We will be writing to him again to take up the issue of how employees can be better protected under the Law as this has clearly highlighted how inadequate current legislation is when a business failure takes place.” The Society’s President Gillian Bober said: “Our Society’s ethos revolves around

    (Full story Here.)

    Now what has USDAW to say? Not a dick-bird on the Web so far. The redundant employees still are without their pensions (as transferred they are the responsibility of Vergo and therefore – Zero). Why does the Co-op want a government investigation? Wasn’t there something fishy about the deal in the first place?

    Finally, can the Ipswich Evening Star stop using the word ‘Boost’ in half its headlines? It’s getting on people’s neveres.

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    Vincere: Mussolini’s Cast-Off Wife.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Fascism, Films by Andrew Coates on July 16, 2010

     

    Mussolini’s regime  is still a live issue in Italy. There have been repeated attempts to rehabilitate him. As well as efforts to put the Italian Partisans on the same level as the Fascists.

    Vincere is a film that is based on the life of the first wife of Benito Mussolini. It stars Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida Dalser and Filippo Timi as Benito Albino Mussolini. Teh director  Marco Bellocchio, who has made a documentary about the Red Brigades and the Moro kidnapping. Although he does not have a high political profile one can assume he is not favourable to Mussolini. Vincere, from its opening, is on the side of those determined to shed light on the sordid history and legacy of the dictatorship.

    A montage of the feverish development of pre-Great War Italy, thrusting factories, turbulent crowds, begin the film. We cut into the intense agitation of the new socialist movement (a late birth in the country). In a meeting, chaired by a Priest, to debate religion, Mussolini challenges god to strike him down. Strangely he is not (god must have got pretty weary of attending so many atheist debates).

    In the audience Ida Dalser falls for Mussolini the violently anti-clerical socialist and republican.  His intensity, or rather love of intensity, burst forth as War is declared. As is well-known Mussolini switched from international socialism to the National Revolution. Ida is portrayed as so star struck she barely notices the change. Without any indication of ideological turmoil or even feeling, she throws all her money and adoration at his feet.

    Ida  bore Mussolini a son before the outbreak of the War. The rising National Revolutionary fought for the allied cause (identifying with the ‘civilised’ Latin races against the ‘Tuetons’). In a hallucinatory scene, while a silent film about the Crucifixion is projected on ceiling, she bumps into his recognised official wife. The spouse  screams with venom against her. From that moment her fate is fixed: Mussolini does everything to get rid of her, and shut her up.

    Iha protests. She becomes a Lady of Letters – to every authority in sight. Which causes annoaynce at the very least. Mussolini’s authority, unspoken but clearly present, is used to get the ‘matta’  confined to a Psychiatric Hospital. She is treated with the casual cruelty of the time (and standard medical practice). Underlined by the Sisters in charge.

    Vincere melds  historical drama with a harrowing personal descent from ‘un amour fou’ to madness. To Ida’s immense chagrin her son, Benito, is carried off  and educated away from her – under strict supervision. His parentage is however known, if never formally recognised. In revenge he is shown performing searing imitations of Il Duce in full rhetorical flow. They are in a class beyond the traditional buffon-ruffian routine.

    Dalser continued to claim to be married to Mussolini, but we are informed at the end,  no documentation of the marriage has ever been found. Dalser later died in an asylum in 1937. He son also perished in a similar institution, perfecting his Mussolini mimicry - now mirroring the Duce’s fluent German address to his Teuton allies.

    The film has a strong aesthetic angle – blending futurist imagery with the claustrophobia of the institutions Ida is confined in.  In parallel to the better known  ’expressionist’ influence on 1920s film-making, this slices violent snaps of war with urbanity, industry, and, above all, violent combat. The  proto-Fascist glorification of war by Futurists, above all their leading figure Filippo Tommaso Marinetti existed in the same period as a different leftish Futurist ultra-modernism  in Russia and the early Soviet Union.   Just in case you missed the references the leader of the Blackshirts visits an exhibition of Futurist paintings. Later, as a  counterpoint, there are close-up shots of Ida, during a hospital film-showing, displaying  deep emotion at the beautiful humanist conclusion of Chaplin’s The Kid.

    The end is brutal – and historically true. Ida was never recognised. Her sad fate just one amongst thousands discarded and sent to their deaths by Il Duce. If not a major study, and to histrionic at times,  the film is strong on narrative, and manages to show Italian Fascism through a new prism. As for history, if I knew that Hitler was a good ballroom dancer (thanks to the Producers), now I am aware that Mussolini was a dab hand at the violin.

    Vincere is still showing at Ipswich Film Theatre.

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    Burqa and the Left, from Secularism to Religious Right.

    Posted in Feminism, French Left, French Politics, Islam, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on July 17, 2010

    Should the French law banning the Burqa and Niqab (that is, full-body veils) from public spaces be “resolutely fought” (David Osler) ? That, “No ban, but no obligation either. Sounds just about right to me.”  

    Liam (for the British section of the Fourth International) says (endorsed by the mystical left-wing of the Green Party),  

    •    Oppose the ban on religion or custom specific dress as a form of racism and anti-minorityism.
    •    No legal sanctions for following particular religions.
    •    Politically combat the oppression of women using religion as an ideology.
      

    The Morning Star carries an article today which announces (Here.),  

    “the labour movement must reject all attempts to hijack and misuse our republican principles of secularism and gender equality to fuel an anti-Muslim witch-hunt.”  

    The French group Lutte Ouvrière puts the emphasis rather differently,  

    “la loi de Sarkozy, d’Hortefeux ou de leurs pairs n’est pas une loi émancipatrice pour les femmes les plus opprimées. Et si nous faisons nôtre le combat contre le port de la burqa ou contre le port du voile que mènent des femmes jeunes ou moins jeunes, originaires de pays où la religion musulmane est dominante, nous ne mêlons pas nos voix à celles de dirigeants politiques dont les objectifs ne sont pas l’émancipation des femmes, mais une politique de concessions vis-à-vis de préjugés sécuritaires et antimusulmans.  

    So this law is not one that will lead to emancipation for the most oppressed women. If we make our own the fight against wearing the burqu and the veil (NB what British leftists call the hijab), waged by young women and not-so-young women who come from countries where Islam is the dominant religion, we will not mix our demands with those politicians who aims are not female liberation, but a policy of making concession to prejudices about insecurity and against Muslims. (More Here)  

    The Parti de Gauche carries a post (not an official ‘line’) stating that while the Burqa and the Niqab are clearly contrary to republican values of any kind, the law is not a just way of carrying out these aims (Here).  

    Communists and Socialists largely abstained on the vote in the National Assembly. They are generally, however, opposed to the law (Here).  

    The Nouveau parti anticapitaliste says (Here)  

    “Tout en s’opposant à ce projet de loi liberticide, le NPA réaffirme sa solidarité avec les femmes qui luttent contre toutes les formes d’oppression, dont le voile intégral, mais c’est d’abord en luttant toutes ensembles pour le droit à disposer de leur corps que les femmes s’émancipent. La loi de Sarkozy ne les aidera en rien, bien au contraire.”  

    While completely opposing this anti-freedom law, the NPA reaffirms its solidarity with women who struggle against  all forms of oppression, such as the fully-body veil, but it is above all through fighting together for rights over their own bodies, that women will free themselves. The Sarkozy law will not help them – it will do the opposite.  

    The major difference them is that the French left begins from the premise that the Burqa and Niqab are oppressions.  

    The British Left tries to defend them as some kind of religious ‘right’.  

    The concluding words should go to a former Muslim, and now feminist leftist, Women’s Rights vs. Political Islam. Azar Majedi. (2007)  

    “when dealing with the burka or the niqab, we surpass the sphere of individual right. Here we enter the sphere of what I call societal rights. The person under this kind of veil has not identity in the fellow citizens.” “the question of trust and identity goes further than the workplace. It is just as important on the bus, in the park in the recreation ground, etc, that you can see the face of the person in your immediate surrounding, here it is the question of individual rights, here are instances where the society rightfully decides to deprive certain individuals of certain rights for the benefit of society as a whole.”  

    I do not agree with her view that the “Burka or the niqab must be banned for the benefit of society.”(P 172 – 3) Society is not best represented by the state. Or, on such issues, truly democratically transformed by its regulations. It is changed  by direct campaigning in the streets and the communities concerned. Though fo coruse, it woudl eb absurd to have anyone with any power using  the voile intègrale (face-veil). That would send a signal that it is endorsed.  

    But the judgement that,“the veil is a symbol and a tool for women’s subjugation and degradation.” seems right.  

    The issue that the British left completely ignores is how to deal with this fact. Concentrating as Liam does, on ‘women’ using Islam as an ideology of oppression, is particularly wrong.  

    Islam is rich. Muslims are, in the UK, generally, poor. As the Mosques swell in wealth, and Salafism and other hard-line ideologies grow, how are the left, and women,  going to ‘politically fight’ reactionary misogynist Islamic ideologies  when they are defending the instruments of oppression? We need to link up with secularists opposing socially oppressive religions in general, and Islamism in particular. That there are young women (as LO indicates) In France waging this fight is a welcome fact. That there appears fewer in the UK may be due to the connivance of the liberal left and left generally with Islamism in Britain.  

    Against the law and against the Burqa and Niqab! 

    Interesting to see an American Leftist reaction (or rather, hesitation to make one) here.

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    Burqa Ban: Tories Say ‘Unbritish’, Liberals and Left Explode with Joy(?).

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, British Govern, Feminism, Islam, Islamism, Multi-Culturalism, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on July 19, 2010

    Secularism is also UnBritish Threat to Freedom.

    If a Tory Minster had supported a ban on the full-body full-face veil the debate on the subject would be drowned by the sounds of anguished liberal, and outraged leftist, howls.

     There would not be much nuance.

    Those of us who are opposed to a sweeping law on the ‘voile intègrale (full body veil) but support campaigns against this reactionary practice would be tarred with the label: Tories! Racists! Islamophobes!

    Yet when the Conservative Minister for Immigration, Damian Green calls such a law “unbritish” (Here and here)  you have no need of ear-plugs to hear the sound of silence.

    This apology for doing-nothing:

    The Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman, agreed saying: “I take a strong view on this, actually, that I don’t, living in this country, as a woman, want to be told what I can and can’t wear.

    “That’s something which both myself and (community cohesion minister Baroness) Sayeeda Warsi have argued very strongly, that one of the things we pride ourselves on in this country is being free – and being free to choose what you wear is a part of that.

    “So actually banning the burka is absolutely contrary, I think, to what this country is all about.”

    Let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that some women consider that cutting themselves off from the ‘impure’ gaze of men and conforming to the Word of God (which cannot err – though we know that there are many interpretations on this issue), is a good thing.

    But what of others, subject to Islamicist bullies? If they are told what to wear, who is going to tell them otherwise, or let them free from intimidation? Or the fact that in countries where far-right Islamic groups  has prospered unchallenged such dress codes, part of wider moral ones, are the fer-de-lance of reactionary Islamism.

    Certainly not the Tory-Liberal-Islamophile Popular Front.

    I thought I would just mention this.

    Oh, and the fact that said Minister supports all manner of racist legislation.

    Makes you wonder why he backs the ‘right’ to wear the niqab or burqa.

    Er….

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    Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual. Review: The Search for the Absolute.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Communism, Labour Movement, Marxism by Andrew Coates on July 20, 2010

    All Gods Fail.

    Koestler. The Indispensable Intellectual Michael Scammell. Faber & Faber 2010.

    The Search for the Absolute.

     (This Review is also on 3 Am Magazine – an interesting on-Line review of fiction, poetry and non-fiction “Whatever it is, we’re against it”   here)

    The Indispensable Intellectual has been widely reviewed. A thoroughly researched study of Arthur Koestler, it portrays an immensely complex personality and politically entangled actor. The author of the anti-Stalinist classic, Darkness at Noon (1940), was, Scammell says, a “Casanova of causes”. Koestler passed through Revisionist Zionism, militant-Communism, he was active in Germany and was an anti-fascist involved  in the Spanish Civil War, before settling down for a long period as an anti-Communist pillar of the Cold War Congress for Cultural Freedom. In-between he found time in 1954 to help found the admirable National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (NCACP).

    The thorny issues raised by Koestler’s close co-operation with the USA’s militant anti-Communists, may help explain why there have very few left-wing responses to Scammell’s biography. During his 1950s public hey-day many would have challenged the claim that Koestler, “ was undoubtedly a man of the left but, given the vehemence and strength of his anti-communism” But that, “he had ended up in a sort of no-mans’ land with very few sympathisers for company.”(Page 385) After this decade Koestler political presence also shrank drastically. The ’anti-totalitarian’ herald had a lengthy subsequent career as a seeker after inner light. Deciphering the “invisible ink” of ultimate, cosmic, reality, or exploring the way religion and spirituality trump science, studies on ESP, UFOs and psychedelic mysteries, or claims about the Khazar origins of the Ashkenazi Jews, are acquired tastes. These two aspects of his work mark out a gamut of difficulties for a leftist reader of this biography. Any form of assertive anti-Communism is a mined location where the left has to tread gingerly. That, is many of us are as much “anti-anti-Communists” as are anti-Stalinists. One also hopes that most on the left remains sceptical about the kind of bad-science Koestler indulged in.

    That said, this is a life. Those of a less political bent would concentrate on what the book, accompanied by painstaking detail, calls Koestler’s “lust” and “frenetic love life”. This will not be discussed at length. Koestler’s career was littered with promiscuity, often fuelled by heavy drinking, and Scammell’s accounts of his forceful adventures take up too many pages. Nor is the language used in these passages always the most nimble. Women are invariably described as “attractive” “pretty” and “irresistible” (though not – a one-night fling – Simone de Beauvoir..). This becomes tedious. Whether he raped Jill Cragie (Michael Foot’s wife) or not, it’s a feeble excuse to talk of the “likeliest explanation” being that “that behaviour that wasn’t at the time seen as rape has since come to be regarded as such”. (Page 408)

    Despite this, The Indispensable Intellectual shows with enormous clarity Koestler’s actions and thinking in the framework of the most crucial topics of twentieth century history. The dilemmas he faced were both personal and of wider intellectual resonance. The time and place shaped the man. From Koestler’s birth and upbringing in Mittel Europa, Hungary and Austria, to several decades of physical and intellectual voyaging, he stood at the heart of the events and ideas that shaped the twentieth century, Fascism, Nazism, Zionism and Stalinism – and then, Anti-Communism. From the beginning these mingle. Scammell argues that one cannot understand the biography without drawing out Koestler’s inherent capacity to respond in extreme terms, ‘absolutitis’, to the world. Koestler had an early taste for the Absolute, a vision of an “arrow in the sky”. This was not just a personal rapture. “It was the same quest and the same all-or-nothing mentality which drove me to the Promised Land and into the Communist Party”. (Page 19)

    (more…)

    Derek Wall (Green Party) Goes God.

    Posted in Greens, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on July 22, 2010

    By the Rivers of Babylon….

    Derek Wall has ”a vision of faith and hope”. (Morning Star - Here.)

    That is “even as a firm non-believer, I think religion can be a source of real good.”

    But, “is it possible to argue that religion generally fuels oppression, hatred and is based on irrational authority.” (No Question mark in Web text).

    His answer is that religion can be a force for good.

    That is while it can rest on absolute authority, be sexually oppressive, “At its best religion does two important things. It calls for justice and it asks big questions about the relationship of humanity to the rest of the universe, including the non-human natural world.” 

    It can be a source of liberation as well as sometimes being used to justify oppression.

    Apparently.

    This extends far back in time. We get the usual clipped references to medieval millenialist movements. They were socialist inclined.

    Apparently.

    Engels said so.

    I wouldn’t fancy the chances of  a non-believer, a sinner, or a doubter,  in a Hussite city myself.

    Qu’ranic expert Wall states that, “Islam, so derided and attacked, has social justice at its very heart. Mohammed was a great reformer who challenged what he saw as backward attitudes and, more than any other monotheistic prophet, he drew wisdom from contemporary women, especially his wife Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, a powerful businesswoman.”

    Good ole Mohamed. There was no doubt a great deal of social justice in persecuting anyone who would not accept the “Great reformer’s” message. Hey, and all socialists support “powerful businesswomen’s” fight for social equity.

    Furthermore,

    “For every bin Laden there is a Rumi – the great Persian mystic poet who preached tolerance. For every Inquisition, there is a group of Quakers calling for a non-violent struggle for justice.”

    So nicely balanced!

    Like Ying and Yang,

    Today we have (and this is indeed the case) inspiring people from a religious background helping indigenous people in South America fight for their rights.

    Why they should get special praise because they are religious is not explained.

    But lo and behold.

    There are,

    “Two of the most inspiring leaders I have come across – Britain’s Salma Yaqoob of Respect and the Brazilian Green Party presidential candidate Marina Silva – are both attacked by their opponents because of their respective religions.

    Yaqoob is Muslim, Silva is from an evangelical Protestant background. Both are powerful voices for the liberation of women and against neoliberal attacks on society.”

    Yes a Brazilian anti-abortionist who supports Creationism is Wall’s tribune of the oppressed. The member of a British Party whose leaders are linked the Iranian State funded Press TV – a mouthpiece and executor of opposition - is another worthy Saint.

    Derek Wall claims not have a religion.

    This is news to us who have followed with interest his enthusiasm for ‘Italism’,  ”the peaceful principles of Zen Buddhism and the localism of Rastafarian..” (He practices Zazen, More on this ‘lifestyle’ here)

    He ends by claiming that, “Both Marx and the Buddha adhered to the same phrase – “doubt everything.” I think it is one we should continue to practice, but it should not blind us to what can be good about religion.”

    So don’t doubt that.

    See Derek Wall’s Blog

    Hungary: Conservative Christian Purges.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Europe, Nationalism by Andrew Coates on July 24, 2010

    Viktor Orbán With Back-Drop Of Friends.

    Hungary does not normally figure much in the news media of other countries.

    But the stench coming from Hungary after the sweeping election victory of Vikor Orbán reached the le Monde this week. A couple of days later and the Financial Times followed suite.

    His Fidesz party came to power with a two-thirds parliamentary majority. He has tried to present an image of national pugnacity, resisting the more outrageous pressures from international financial institutions for austerity. They have “no right” to meddle with internal affairs, he has declared (Here) This has caused some bad-blood with the IMF – but it is unlikely he will long hold away from cutting back on state expenditure, like the rest of Europe. Hungary’s present efforts to avoid this, through a  levy on financial sector  is , in the long-term, not likely to cause a deep fracture in capitalism.

    Orbán has attacked the central bank’s Governor, capped his pay, and all but forced him to a corner. Not much wrong with that in principle,  especially as the man in question, Andreas Simor  has  overseas investments that cast doubt on his priorities (more here). But the PM’s  aim is to install a party puppet.  Even more significantly Orbán has attacked  media freedom. He intends to bring  all the main broadcasters under his wing, and has proposed the compulsory registration of bloggers.

    Countless officials associated with opposition parties have been sacked and replaced with Fidesz supporters.

    All state-institutions display, in pride of place,  a 50cm by 70cm notice that states that a  “revolution in the polling booths” took place on April 11, restoring Hungary’s self-determination.

    The far-right. Jobbik party is outbidding him. The Prime Minister claims to oppose them root-and-branch.

    Orban has declared June 4 a national day of unity, in commemoration of the Treaty of Trianon that forced Hungary to surrender large areas of its territory after the first world war. Anyone familiar with Hungarian history knows that this is to loudly launch claims for the restoration of a Greater Hungary.

    Le Monde summaries his mix of patriotic chauvinism and authoritarianism as,

    “il entend faire voter une loi de contrôle des médias publics. Au nom de la lutte contre l’extrême droite, ce chrétien conservateur flatte sans vergogne le nationalisme hongrois. ”

    He intends to pass  a law taking control of the public media. In the name of the fight against the far-right, this conservative Christian flatters without shame Hungarian nationalism.”

    Hungary is set  take over the EU’s rotating presidency next year. We face the prospect of a right-wing demagogue as the formal head of the Union.

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    Burqa: Weekly Worker, Sometimes Right and Sometimes Seriously Wrong.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Islam, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on July 25, 2010

    Jacobin Statism to Weekly Worker.

    The latest Weekly Worker carries an important article by Peter Manson on the issue of the Burqa (Here).

    Unlike most of the British liberal left it does not start from the absurd premise that the full-body veil is “empowering”. Religious practice is, for the comrades of the CPGB Provisional Committee, defined in a  secular way. That it, it is not the business of the public authority to define what people should believe, or how they should carry out the obligations of their faith. That is the principle of non-interference  in individuals’ religious activities.

    This is a good starting point.

    However, its limits are pretty great. Peter Manson then goes seriously wrong on a number of counts.

    To begin with Peter Manson claims that “We demand that women have the right to wear the hijab, the burqa or the niqab.” That, “I would not for a moment wish to understate the dehumanising effect of imposing the burqa. It reinforces the notion that women may not assert themselves on an equal basis to men; that they should be regarded as a man’s possession, not even to be looked at by other males. “

    This confuses a number of issues. Is there a human right to be ‘dehumanised? There is no such thing as a ‘right’ to be regarded as a man’s possession. One may tolerate (that is negatively) sexism, but one never gives this the status of a  claim that has to be respected.  

    In this context the ‘right’ not to wear the ‘voile intègrale’ (the unambiguous French term referring to the ‘total’ extension of veiling) is meaningless.I have just as much a right not to support the BNP and not wear a Swastika T-Shirt. But do I have the right – that is a demand that this clothing be accepted and protected? Who, then has the obligation to make sure this right is a reality? The law? Or what?

    The assertion is confused: either it means that there should be a legally protected ability to wear certain types of religious clothing – however ‘dehumanised‘ -  and an instrument to enforce this claim against anyone opposing it, or this is one of those ‘rights’ that exist in very rarified aether.

    It is in the same vein that the idea that the “state should not decide what people wear”is advanced. True, in generala good basic principle. But this is another abstract claim which soon runs into obstacles. What, to start with,  if it is the state’s institutions that are involved? Who then decides on what the state does? And what should this be?

    Peter Manson accepts that “certain jobs – the teaching of young children or the welcoming of guests at a hotel – cannot in general be carried out satisfactorily by people who completely cover their face.” I would say that any position in why a person has power over others should not be occupied by somebody loudly proclaiming that anyone who does not dress as they do is impure.  In other words, public functions. If  we have state – or wider public – institutions they need rules, and these should not tolerate anti-equality practices - like the burqa and niqab. Democracy rests on egalité.

    Next, the French context is that the republic is not just secular in a negative sense, but positively aspires to the values of equality, fraternity and liberty. This implies that activities against this are, in a  deep sense, anti-republican. the burqa, is one such practice. Racism is equally anti-republican. The Islamists combine both a  quasi-religious racism (drawing boundaries between the pure believes and the impure non-believers) in a noxious anti-republican cocktail. It is hardly unlikely that the far more serious problem of marginalisation fo the poor in the banlieues can be fought without equally offering a strategy against their exclusion. This Sarkozy does not do, to say the last.

    The French left (from the PCF, LO, PG, to the NPA) therefore tends to concentrate on wider issues of social inequality and oppression (which affects much larger communities than Moslems, as recent rioting by Rom in Saint-Aignan indicates). This is not a result of their Jacobin DNA but a perfectly justified reaction to present-day French conditions. The republican tradition brings people back to equality and not to the brief, anti-clerical, Age of Reason.

    Finally, socialists “strive to empower oppressed minorities, and oppressed women in particular. We do this to unite and strengthen the working class, to weaken the power of the state and the system of capital. And part of that fight involves breaking the grip of the mosque and the Muslim establishment over their flock.”

    But Peter Manson offers no account of  how exactly how this can be done. Some on the British left, like the ill-fated Respect coalition, have a actively collaborated with the ‘Mosque’ – or rather a far-right and right-wing  fractions of Islamism. They have no authority to talk about Islamophobia – when they, and the SWP, have collaborated with such reactionary forces.

    These are quasi-state institutions in their own right - with close links with would-be (Moslem brotherhood, Jamaat-I-Islami) or actual  state-powers (Iran) in other lands. Many ‘moderate’ Moslems receive generous funding from the theocratic dictatorship of  Saudi  Arabia.

    Peter Manson does not outline any immediate political conclusions from his analysis. Does he support the campaigns of groups like Amnesty International  to defend the ‘right’ to the burqa?  Or Liberty’s most recent efforts (such as here)? It is noteworthy that neither of these organisations even raises the issue of whether veiling may be oppressive.

    There is not the slightest prospect of the veil in any form being banned in the UK. But religious remains a problem – as a state institution, and as a source of oppressive ways of life. Obviously these embrace much wider issues. In Britain religion has a privileged place in public authority. It is likely to grow with the ‘Big Society’. Multiculturalists have sought to extend this to all faiths, including Islam. The political influence of these institutions is growing, filling a vacuum in society left by the absence of mass working class movements and the fracturing of the left. In these conditionswill Peter Mason  back any campaigns for secularism? If so, what?

    The defence of the Burqa is part of a general trend to assert special privileged protection for religious claims. It is root-and-branch against any form of equality. The assertion of religious rights, of which the ‘right’ to wear the burqa is just one, should be opposed not embraced. Secularists should engage in activities against this – though one hardly needs reminding that, faced with many other urgent issues,  this is not a top priority.

    Despite a justified hostility to settling matters of religious faith by state decree, if we are engaged in politics we cannot  avoid trying to influence what the state does. Fighting against Islamicism, and political expressions of the moral codes that endorse the full-body veil, is only aspect of this combat. But as a hard case it is an important test of secularist principle

    More background: The Eyptian feminist Mona Elthaway here. Tendance Coatesy on French left’s own views here.  An argument that any criticism of the veil is reactionary, here.

    NOTE:

    I mention in passing that the following translation of the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste’s (NPA) position, “While completely opposing this freedom-killing law, the NPA reaffirms its solidarity with women who struggle against all forms of oppression, such as the full-body veil. But it is first and foremost through fighting together for control over their own bodies that women will free themselves.” could have been acknowledged to Tendance Coatesy. Which goes, “While completely opposing this anti-freedom law, the NPA reaffirms its solidarity with women who struggle against  all forms of oppression, such as the fully-body veil, but it is above all through fighting together for rights over their own bodies, that women will free themselves.” Um…

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    Ill Fares The Land: Review. Living Social Democracy?

    Posted in British Govern, Capitalism, European Left, Labour Movement, Left, New Left by Andrew Coates on July 26, 2010

    Social Democracy's Base

    Ill Fares the Land. Tony Judt. Allen Lane. 2010.

    Social Democracy on the Return?

    Toby Judt is suffering from a severe neurological disorder. “I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship to the world has been reduced to them.” (New York Review of Books. July – August 2010) But he has found the energy and the will to write a splendid defence of equality against the “extremes of private privilege and public indifference”. The British think-tank Compass, stands for “solidarity and social justice” to restore trust. Judt equally vigorously argues that for the need for a reinvigorated social democracy. Ill-Fares the Land is an expanded version of a lecture given at New York University in October 2009. There the Director of the Remarque Institute stated that social democrats should defend what is living in the left’s reforming tradition and to “speak more assertively of past gains”. (New York Review of Books. December2009-Juanuary 2010). That is, of the “social service state” that offered welfare and redistributed wealth. His present work both outlines the threats that this faces, the “eviscerated society” of market states, and the need for social democracy, which has “lost its way”, to return to these roots.

    To Ill-fares the Land the post-war Consensus, the ‘corporatist’ class compromise (including the trade unions) around the ‘Keynesian’ “social security state” beneficially reduced inequality and uncertainty. The predictions of classical economic liberals, like Von Hayek, and Milton Friedman, that this was the “road to serfdom” were falsified. People were happier the economy grew, liberal democracy flourished, and a sense of wider equity held societies together over much of the Western world. In these times, “everyone believed in the state.”(Page 48)” In this context American liberalism, that is the Democratic Party, that believed in equality of opportunity rather than equality, but was still committed to welfare, developed similarities with European social democracy. This unravelled in the 1970s. The story of how this ended is perhaps too well-known to be retold at length. For its New Right critics it was responsible for creeping statism, and failed to deal with swelling inflation, rising unemployment, and labour militancy. Judt admits failures such as faulty town planning or poor quality social housing. But its goals were fundamentally sound.

    Il Fares the Land does not describe in any detail how the consensus fell apart amongst its own supporters. The more assertive class demands of unionised workers and public employees, notably in Britain, persuaded many on the centre-left that they had too much power. The electoral pool of the New Right was not just naked self-interest in, say, tax-cutting and authoritarian populism. The feeling that an erosion of deference for one’s natural leaders, and, a fear, at the time not wholly misguided, of radical socialism, helped many ‘social democrats’ go along with the free-marketers who offered to end not just inflation, but to restore a competitive edge to the social fabric. Explanations of how social democracy went off course, from the literature of the time, concerned with the “profit squeeze” that union pressure created – or, in more recent accounts, the claim that the “baby boomers” perused their own interests to the determinant of the general social good, are not discussed. Nor are left-wing views, that the New Right successfully advocated capitalist class benefits by melding their ideas with the electorate’s wider frustrations with the ‘state’ into a hegemonic project. To Judt people simply elected politicians pledged to halt ‘creeping socialism’ – to demolish the consensus. We then move straight into the “deregulation” of the structures underpinning the consensus under Thatcher and Regan. (more…)

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    ‘Big Society’: Volunteers To Replace Paid Public Service Staff.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservative Party, Liberal Democrats, Workfare by Andrew Coates on July 28, 2010

    Volunteers Help Out After Railway Cuts.

    Some weeks ago the Bookseller reported that (Here. )

    Public sector trade union Unison is to ballot its Southampton City Council library members about strike action, following plans to replace full-time staff with volunteers.

    The Conservative-run council announced in its 2010/11 budget plan that it intends to replace six full-time staff with volunteers, with at least one of the city’s libraries set to be run entirely by
    volunteer staff.

    Unison regional organiser Andy Straker said: “There is real anger from our members over this issue. They feel that management and councillors are devaluing their skills and experience.”

    This has developed into a full dispute. Librarians struck on the 21st fo June. Reports from UNISON – Here. The BBC states that the most recent strike has been postponed for further negotiations to take place (Here).

    The key point is that,

    The council plans to recruit members of the public to carry out unpaid work in the libraries to cover seven librarian posts and save money.

    PM David  Cameron’s Big Society has been described by Labour Leadership Contender Ed Milliband as,

    a return to Victorian philanthropy, with little role for the state. “This is essentially a 19th-century or US-style view of our welfare state – which is cut back the welfare state and somehow civic society will thrive,” he said. (Here)

    The Big Society means shoe-string public services that is clear. Outside of  prosperous middle-class areas it hard to see many people ‘volunteering’ for these roles.

    But there are other sources of unpaid labour.

    Ipswich Unemployed Action has frequently pointed out that Workfare (backed by New Labour as well as the Liberal-Tory Coalition) will be used as a source of ‘volunteers’ to plug gaps in public provision and help drive wages down.

    We await the Government’s Work Programme with interest.

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    Jamaat Leaders Arrested For Genocide.

    Posted in Bangladesh, Human Rights, Islamism by Andrew Coates on July 29, 2010

    Bangladesh 1971: One of the Worst Genocides of the 20th Century.

    The International Crimes Tribunal yesterday issued arrest warrants against already detained four Jamaat-e-Islami leaders on charges of committing genocide and crimes against humanity and peace during the Liberation War.

    “Warrants of arrest should be issued against these four people to ensure effective and proper investigation,” Tribunal Chairman Justice Nizamul Huq said allowing the prosecution prayer after submission of Chief Prosecutor Golam Arif Tipu.

    The four Jamaat leaders are Ameer Motiur Rahman Nizami, Secretary General Ali Ahsan Muhammad Mojahid and senior assistant secretaries general Muhammad Kamaruzzaman and Abdul Quader Molla.

    More Here.  Hat-Tip to Enty.

    Jamaat Leaders Arrested for War Crimes

    By Faheem Haider

    Monday, July 26 7:18 pm EST

    The War Crimes Tribunal has issued arrest warrants for the 4 senior Jamaat leaders already in government custody.  The charges: committing genocide and crimes against humanity and peace during the 1971 War of Liberation.  The leaders wanted in connection with the crimes: none other than Motiur Rahman Nizami, the Jamaat-e-Islam chief and his Secretary General, Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid and two lower ranking assistant secretaries general.  Nizami and Mujahid are widely known to have been leaders in the Al Badr brigade, the militia that has been thought squarely responsible of murder and slaughter of a large number of young and promising intellectuals.

    This is a very important move.  These are the first charges brought against persons and citizens of Bangladesh for crimes committed under the International Crimes Tribunal Act of 1973. This act brought about a legal procedure to prosecute war criminal but was never used to in court.  Decades of maneuvering and indemnity saw to that.

    The sitting Awami League government returned to power in 2008 in no small measure from its promise to use just that law to prosecute those held responsible for collaborating with the (West) Pakistani military to commit murder and rape, destroy lives, unleash crashing waves of public and private torment.

    More Here.

    On the Genocide see here.

    In the UK,

    The full influence of Jamaati organisations such as the Islamic Foundation UK, East London Mosque, Muslim Aid UK, Dawatul Islam and the UK Islamic Mission is yet to be fully studied but these groups are known to be aggressively pushing Jamaat’s anti-secularism and anti-western literature and ideals – some of the backgrounds of arrested for terrorism ties in the UK such as Mozzam Begg and some of the 7/7 bombers show flirtations with Jamaat politics .

    (From Here)

    Noteworthy are the political links of these bodies, which are wide-ranging. They include local politicians in East London, and the Respect Party.

    We await with interest Islamophobia Watch’s response to these arrests.

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    Burqa: Weekly Worker Letter-Page Debate.

    Posted in Islam, Islamism, Multi-Culturalism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on July 30, 2010

    Secularism to its Enemies.

    The Weekly Worker is proof that the British Left doesn’t need to think in clichés about the Burqa. 

    After Peter Manson’s thought-provoking article (which was replied to on this site)  today’s letters page has a, mostly, excellent set of contributions – here. 

    All resolutely secularist I note. 

    Robert Wilkinson defends the PCF and its abstention on the National Assembly Vote. 

    The greatest omission in your analysis, however, was that it had an inadequate appreciation of the concept of la laïcité (secularism), something that means more than simply the separation of the church and state. Even the PCF deputy who voted for the ban, André Gerin, argued: “Our mission is not to demonise Islam. Far from it. We have to respond to a fundamental question: how best to integrate this religion into the heart of the French republic?” 

    For the left in France, then, the issue is more about how best to integrate Islam into French society than an expression of Islamophobia. La laïcité is a struggle against the separatism and privilege of any religion and a recognition that the ‘freedom’ of a few fanatical believers renders immense assistance to the far right in their demonisation of Muslims. 

    I am less than persuaded that it is just a matter of ‘religon’ . Islamism is a political force. Britain has tried to integrate this, and in France various state sponsored bodies have attempted the same. The left should respond by fighting these movement straightforwardly -to further  wider ‘integration” of people on political not religious grounds. 

      

    Jacob Richer suggests a wider secularist programme, 

    So, in between liberal secularism and the politically immature Society of the Godless of 1925-47 (with its public destruction of churches in the early 30s), I pose the conversion of all buildings of organised religion, from the Vatican and Mecca’s Masjid al-Haram to more local temples, into intercultural community centres. Various religious groups scheduling their worship and/or prayer services would be forced to engage one another culturally – hence the interculturalism and not multiculturalism – thereby promoting real religious diversity. Articles of worship and/or prayer could be kept in various storage rooms within the community centres, to be brought out during appropriate services. 

    Hopefully this potentially programmatic demand would make a huge dent in the megachurch business phenomenon, itself a display of unequal access to mass media. 

    I would add that, an end of religion’s quasi- automatic charitable status would be another useful reform. 

    Bill Cookson however adds some dubious ideas to secularism. I comment on his remarks in Italics.

    (Peter Manon’s) defence of the wearing of the burqa and niqab – didn’t go far enough to my mind. It comes over as highly weighted in defence of these two symbols of male chauvinism and female repression.Let’s be right – they have nothing whatever to do with religion. They have nothing whatever to do with Islam as such, and any Islamic scholar will tell you as much. This is a dress code imposed from the start on women, and in so far as some women today may ‘choose’ to wear it, it is a choice which is of the same nature of battered wives who stay with their husbands, or slaves who side with their masters.

    It has a lot to do with the reverance people have for ‘scholars’ who find in Islamic texts justifications for this, and religious institutions and political movements (Salafists) that spread the message of Isalmisim.

    Still, being libertarians, we can only demand the right of people to wear what they wish, even if that means causing offence – and deliberately causing offence, as these garments often do and are intended to do. They are a statement of non-integration, a statement of separation. Nobody who wears them is ignorant of the hostility they create, but we defend their right to be offensive.

    No-one defends the right to be a eprmanent state of offence: if we did we couldn’t even open our front door and speak to the neighbours.

    But let’s go beyond that. Do the English Defence League have the same ‘right’ to wear St George’s masks on demos, or folk to dress up in fancy dress Gestapo uniforms, or far-right idiots to march under the hood of the KKK? It would follow from defence of the niqab they must and we must defend their right to do so. What if I choose to wear the niqab, as a white, non-Muslim bloke? The truth is, in all three of these last cases I would be arrested for causing public offence, for conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace, for racial hatred, etc.

    Humm, and your point is..?

    Some bits of cloth, like those who wear them, are more equal and more protected than others, and that’s what makes the left look like such screaming hypocrites in the eyes of many working class folk when we don’t point up the double standards. It follows a decade of Islamic codes imposed on majority non-Muslim communities, non-observance of religious and cultural holidays which don’t happen to include Muslims, the removal of food off the menu at schools which isn’t halal, and forcing the majority population to conform to rules and codes acceptable to Muslims.

    Ah, that Muslims are privileged? There is no doubt a certain multi-cultural kow-towing to Islam but what are you going to do about this? Is it worse than deference to English nationalism during the World Cup? Does it mean anything that affects you?

    Those are facts, comrades. We choose to shut up about it, not mention and even support it, because we are scared shitless of being labelled ‘racialist’. The conclusion which many working people draw is that the left isn’t interested in equality, isn’t interested in defending common justice and fair play for everyone: just minorities. I know I’ll be howled down for this, in this paper at least, but I know and you know, I’d be supported on any street in the country, in any bar, in any workplace, and I’d be right.

    Until we start telling the whole truth, and seeing fairness and fair play as extending to white workers too, we will have no dialogue with anyone but ourselves.

    Let’s set aside the fact that many Muslims are ‘white’ – Arabs to begin with. Unless you have any specific gripe this seems like a good old moan in said bar and workplace. My own immediate moans tend to focus on something that casues  a lot more immediate problems: the local Liberal-Tory Junta that runs the Council, and effects of the coming cuts on my life. They also touch people regardelss of their religon, and minority status. Maybe we ought to be be about uniting people on a common class basis instead of dividing them – like multiculturalists and racists.  

    Then there is this (modesty stops me from singing its praises): 

    Unlike most of the British liberal left, Peter Manson does not start from the absurd premise that the full-body veil is “empowering” (‘French burqa ban has nothing to do with women’s rights’, July 22).

    (more…)

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    Benedict Gummer’s New Column.

    Posted in Conservative Party, East Anglia, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on August 1, 2010

    Ipswich’s MP on life in Suffolk, Westminster and Hades.

    Tendance Coatesy welcomes an old friend of our Blog as regular Guest Contributor: Benedict Gummer.

    Nigel Pickover, Mr Trimley, of the Evening Star, kindly gives Benedict pages of coverage in his advertising sheet. But has so far refused to print our MP’s opinions in full. Unlike our so-called rivals, the Conservative Ipswich Spy, and  Bridge Ward News, Tendance Coatesy practices a free-speech policy for anyone we agree with.

    Be prepared for some surprises!

     

    Fun-For-All!

    It’s that time of year again! Never a day goes past without me setting up, opening, or visiting, one of the many succesful projects I have initiated in Ipswich! In the words of Hannibal, of the A Team, “I love  it when a plan comes together!” So far I have built the new Suffolk University, brought down the price of cider, set up an exhibition of world-famous Saatchi art, run Ipswich Music Day and carved the new statue of Gilles’ Granny for the corner of Prince’s Street!

    It’s a busy life bringing austerity-proof fun to Ipswich!

    I read Chomsky you know.

    Lady Lane.

    A little gem in the heart of medieval Ipswich. A shrouded statue of our blessed Lady in a cobbled ally surrounded by beautiful gabled houses.

    Step over the discarded tins of Tennent’s Super and you can imagine yourself back hundreds of years.

    Whilholm pilgrims from as far away as Santiago de Compostela  would visit this spot to pay respects.

    In fervent devotion they would whip themselves. Then, after pints of Holywell’s White Wine, the crowd would be off to see the latest pyre of burning heretics!

    Nearby is the rupestre retreat of Saint Mary at Elms.

    I often visit this church wearing my Opus Dei  hair-shirt.

    I read Chomsky you know!

    Choo-Choos!

    Quo Vadis? One of our government’s top priorities is better public transport. It was  only through a Tory government that people had buses and trains! I have my own choo-choo set in my loft. So what could be finer than to inaugurate a new Benedict Express on the Ipswich to Manningtree line (a mere three hours journey these days!).

    The locomotive, powered by Work Programme Volunteers, is sleek and shiny. A special carriage, modelled on the Orient Express, can serve as a function room. The chandeliers are a joy!

    I like footer as well. Ipswich Town is the greatest team in Europe!

    Perhaps I will invite them for a day trip on the Ipswich to Aldeburgh line!

    I read Chomsky you know!

     

     

    Suffolk Libraries To Be Run By Community Groups.

    Posted in Conservative Party, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on August 2, 2010

    Replacing Public Services Near You.

    As predicted on this Blog the ‘Big Society’ is coming. That is, getting rid of public services and replacing them with the ‘community’ and ‘volunteers’.

    In Suffolk the County Council is exploring ways of  fulfiling its statutory obligations at the utmost  minimum and hiving off as much responsiblity as possible to ‘community groups’. The first wave appears to affect branch libraries.

    Today’s East Anglian Daily Times reports,

    The county is keen that local community groups or parish councils should take over the running of library buildings.

    A county council spokesman said: “There is no suggestion that if a community group does not take on the responsibility for running the library that it will automatically be closed.

    “Clearly consideration needs to be given to the viability of a library but this is not about dismantling the library service and replacing all staff with volunteers.

     (More Here. )

    One can assume that in well-heeled areas ‘community groups’ of, er, the well-heeled, might do this.

    But what of the Branch libraries on Ipswich and Lowestoft estates?

    With the Big Society we can expect more string-and-sellotape public services.

    Held together by Lord and Lady Bountiful.

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    Roma and Travellers (Gens du Voyage)Threatened with Explusion in France.

    Posted in Europe, Fascism, French Politics, Racism by Andrew Coates on August 3, 2010

    The explusion of Roma and Travellers in France is a major attack on human rights.

    The state-financed France 24 reports (from Here).

    President Nicolas Sarkozy warned on Friday that France would strip foreign-born criminals of their French nationality if they use violence against police or public officials.
       
    Struggling in the opinion polls after his government was implicated in a financial scandal and in the wake of a spate of violent unrest, Sarkozy announced a headline-grabbing package of security measures.
       
    Top of the list, in a week when Sarkozy had already threatened to expel foreign Roma minorities who commit crimes back to Eastern Europe, was a vow to tighten nationality rules for other non-French-born criminals.
       
    “Nationality should be stripped from anyone of foreign origin who deliberately endangers the life of a police officer, a soldier or a gendarme or anyone else holding public authority,” Sarkozy said.
       
    Speaking in the eastern city of Grenoble, scene in recent weeks of clashes between police and armed rioters, Sarkozy said that foreign minors who commit crimes would henceforth find it harder to get citizenship on coming of age.

    The European Roma Rights Centre says (Here),

     In reaction to French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to systematically evict French Travellers and migrant Roma from their homes and collectively expel Roma EU citizens from France, the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) today called for an end to plans which would lead to gross human rights violations of these marginalised groups.In a letter to the President, the ERRC stated that the French Government’s plan would worsen the housing conditions of Travellers and Roma and may breach legal protections on freedom of movement and against collective expulsion. The ERRC also noted that the President’s plan reinforces discriminatory perceptions about Roma and Travellers and inflames public opinion against them.

    In reaction to the President’s plan, ERRC Executive Director Robert Kushen stated, “Last year the European Committe of Social Rights found that France violated the European Social Charter by failing to provide adequate accommodations to Travellers and migrant Roma. If the Government wants to address the problem of illegal settlements, it should start by fully implementing French law that requires the creation of an adequate number of halting sites for Travellers with appropriate services. The scapegoating of Travellers and Roma is not going to solve the problem.” 

    The ERRC also called on the President to respect and protect the right of free movement for all EU citizens, including those of Roma origin, and to avoid the collective expulsion of Roma from French territory.

    This is part of a wider European wave of discrimination and intimidation. (More Here and, particularly well-expressed Here – in English).

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    Bob Avakian Tribute: Coatesy Goes RCP!

    Posted in Imperialism, International, Marxism, New Left by Andrew Coates on August 4, 2010

    It would be a failure in the revolutionary duties of the Tendance Coatesy not to join in the people’s international campaign to make Bob Avakian a Household Name!

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    French Human Rights League Calls for Protests Against Xenophobia and Scapegoating.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Human Rights by Andrew Coates on August 5, 2010

    Republican Values Never Die!

    Face à la xénophobie et à la politique du pilori : liberté, égalité, fraternité!

    Faced with the government’s xenophobia and scapegoating the Ligue de droits de homme calls for a massive protest. For Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!

    Et nous appelons à un grand rassemblement citoyen à l’occasion du 140e anniversaire de la République, le samedi 4 septembre Place de la République à Paris, à 14h00, et partout en France, pour dire ensemble notre attachement à la liberté, à l’égalité et à la fraternité qui sont et qui resteront notre bien commun.

    (More Here. )

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    Suffolk Library Cuts: Evening Star’s Paul Geater Says Volunteers Replacing Staff, “Interesting”.

    Posted in Conservative Party, East Anglia, Ipswich, Secularism, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on August 7, 2010

    Christian Volunteers’ New Library Index.

    Paul Geater is the Ipswich Evening Star’s Political Editor. The big feller (who ate all the Salmon en croûte?) has close contacts with the Tory Party. As is the nature of his job. Though some say he is closer to them than a thirsty lip to a pint of Abbott Ale.

    In his Friday Column for the local  paper (not yet available on-line) Geater takes up the issue of cuts to county council budgets. He observes, that they may cause “pain to some of the most vulnerable members of Suffolk society”. He then moots the opinion that “some of the ideas being proposed for the Library Service sound interesting”. (Plans covered Here and Here.)

    ‘Interesting can mean the kind fo thing you say about a bad painting. Here it appears to signify that while Geater likes to idea of a universal service” he has nothing against ”volunteers from the community”  working at the “desk” -. That is “especially if means opening the libraries during the evenings and the weekends”. Some reserves about handling fine-money apart the bulky bloke says that “I don’t see the idea of involving volunteers in running libraries as  the end of the world.”

    We will all see “how tight the council’s finances are”. What will really matter, it seems, is when budget reductions will hit “vulnerable members of society” and the “safety net” they rely on. Books and knowledge are a luxury, along with CDs and DVDs.

    Geater has apparently never heard of the expression, the thin end of the wedge.

    The Tory-led County proposes to give over entire branch libraries to “community groups“. Volunteers will replace paid staff. The busy-body tendency will be in charge of parts of a major public service. This will be template for other sectors.

    Some weeks back Geater stated that (Here

    So the next time you hear cuts are inevitable ask why – is it really out of necessity or for narrow political reasons.

    There’s nothing wrong with wanting to cut the size of the state in itself – but to push through painful cuts on the pretext that there is no alternative when there quite clearly is another way is plain dishonest.

    So this is the ‘alternative’.

    This is David Cameron’s Big Society in action.

    I mention, for the moment, one problem.

    Christian Churches and other religious groups are eager to get involved in running these parts of the state. Theymake up probably the largest collection of groups to welcome the Big Society idea. (Here)Will they get their hands on parts of Suffolk library service? These organisations are not known for the commitment to free-expression. Indeed nearly all religious groups strongly campaigned for the hardest versions of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act. That would have meant it illegal to make vicious fun or strong criticisms of their beliefs. They did not succeed in this aim, but not for lacking of trying (Here).

    I would not like to have any of them responsible for any part of the public library service.

    Pope Welcome to Preach Without State Subsidies.

    Posted in Free Speech, Gay Rights, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on August 8, 2010

    Same Name as Ipswich MP! Spooky, eh?

    Britain faces, the Liberal-Tory Cabinet claims, a crisis of public finance.

    The Pope’s  coming visit is estimated to cost £10-12 Million of public funds (Here).

    It would be an indication of Christian compassion, and support for the “big society”, if the Pope made a gesture on this topic.

    The Catholic Church should offer to take these expenses over itself.

    To show even-handness he should also back the workers’ demands in this dispute,

    The Pope’s visit to Scotland could be disrupted by a day of strikes by council workers in an ongoing dispute over pay and conditions, the GMB union has said.

    Benedict XVI is to face picket lines at the venue where he is due to celebrate Mass before thousands of pilgrims in Glasgow next month.

    Workers employed by Glasgow Life are expected to walk out on September 16, the GMB said.

    (Morning Star Here. )

    We therefore endorse this moving appeal from quasi-official Vatican sources, and call for even more pocket digging.

    “So I am asking the faithful to have a good rummage down the back of their sofas, and see if you can find any spare change. Or perhaps you have a jar of pennies that’s just lying around doing nothing. At this point I recall what Our Lord said in the Parable of the Talents about how it is praiseworthy to put your change to work. So, instead of having your penny jar just sitting on the fireplace gathering dust, you may like to consider contributing to the common good by sending it to Mgr Andrew Summersgill. Every little helps.

    That way ole purple-socks, the creature of the Beast,* might get some understanding. 

    Though his stand on gay rights makes that unlikely, at least for this Blog.

    Though personally I couldn’t be bothered to Protest the Pope.

    * This is a joke: we are equal opportunity god-baiters (note addressed to here and here)

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    Hitch 22: Review, The Loss of Faith.

    Posted in Fascism, Islamism, Labour Movement, Marxism, Religion, Secularism, SWP, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on August 9, 2010

    Hitch-22. A Memoir. Christopher Hitchens. Atlantic Books. 2010.

    Review: Hitchens and the Loss of Faith.

    Christopher Hitchens is one of the most talented polemicists of the last decades. The former International Socialist, left-wing journalist “as someone who had spent much of his life writing for The Nation and the New Statesman” he became an enthusiast for Humanitarian Interventions, and assembled “an informal international for the overthrow of fascism in Iraq”. After calling for war on Saddam Hussein, he “stopped calling himself a socialist in 2002”. To most people of the left, Hitchens has been thereafter associated with Neo-Conservatism. There are others who still appreciate him, and are saddened at his present cancer, even while opposing liberal internationalism by force. For all how his “loss of faith” remains a striking, and in many ways unresolved, issue. In god Is Not Great (2007) he said his belief in Marxism could not survive the “onslaught of reality”. That its “intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories” “were in the past.” That it was “no longer any guide to the future” and, as a “total solution” had led to “the most appalling human sacrifices”. (Page 153) But is this all there is to say? In the New Statesman he has been cited as saying that he has remained in some sense a Marxist “but not Socialist”.  Hitch 22 concludes “Karl Marx was rightest all when he commended continual doubt and self criticism” (Page 424).

    Hitch 22 is more, then, than the memories of a conventional journalist. His defence of a range of public causes, books on Orwell, Tom Paine, and atheism, to cite a few, show a powerful voice in defence of dissent, and, a “violent sense of repulsion” at the anti-War left. If we disagree with that there is no longer any “authentic socialist movement” (Page 411)that does not mean we reject everything he has ever said, en bloc.  With the deep emotions expressed Hitchens deserves more than clamour at a ‘turncoat’. Critical respect, above all criticism, for this Life and Opinions is called for. Some have begun this. He has been described as “political romantic’ by David Runciman, and as a “man of faith” subjected to tender scorn by Ian Buruma. From the left, of the relatively benign, Tom Rainer from the AWL  has some understanding for his hostility to indulgence towards Islamism. Nevertheless Hitch 22 is not written by one of “us”. James Bloodworth admires his “engaged” position, and ability to keep “belligerently arguing a point”. Guy Rundle in Spiked On-Line gets nearer to our objective by asking how and when Hitchens began to drift away from the left – in the mid-1980s. They too have never explained clearly how the Revolutionary Communist Party became the libertarian rightist, Institute of Ideas. How Hitchens had a faith, lost it, and whether he has truly found a new one, is probably, for the left, both a mystery and of major interest to those who look into Hitch 22.

    Very Near and Very Recent.

    A leftist reader begins Hitch 22 with all this in mind. There is plenty to disarm the most hardened cadre. (more…)

    French Left Mobilises Against Sarkozy’s ‘Politics of Hate’.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on August 12, 2010

    Face à la xénophobie et à la politique du pilori : liberté, égalité, fraternité!

    There is no summer-holiday truce for the French left’s protests against President Sarkozy’s racist rabble-rousing. The Nouveau parti anticapitaliste has joined, with the rest of the left, unions, civil liberties and other associations, in this appeal.

    Il est urgent que l’ensemble de la gauche sociale et politique, les organisation syndicales, les associations réagissent tous ensemble pour stopper cette politique anti-sociale et de criminalisation des étrangers.

    It is urgent that the whole of the social and political left, trade unions, and other groups, act together to put a stop the these anti-social policies, and the criminalisation of the foreigners.

    Près de 50 organisations appellent à manifester, le 4 septembre, à partir de 14h, Place de la République et dans plusieurs villes de France.

    More than 50 organisations have called for demonstrations on the 4th of September, Place de la République, Paris, and in many other French cities and towns.

    Le NPA sera présent pour signifier son rejet de la politique raciste, sécuritaire et anti-sociale du gouvernement, son refus de toute législation d’exception inspirée de celle de Vichy sur la déchéance de nationalité …

    The NPA will attend to express its rejection of the racist, repressive and anti-social policies of the Government. We oppose attempts to employ ‘emergency’  legislation, inspired by the Vichy regime, such as removing (French) nationality (from those convicted by the courts).

    (More Here, National Appeal Here)

    The NPA links Sarkozy’s ‘security’ clamp-down (on travellers, foreigners, young people) to wider issues. These include austerity plans – affecting the pension system.

    In Britain the Liberal-Tory Coalition austerity plans have a different rationale. But they seem to involve a comparable level  of hysteria. In this case it’s against the unemployed. Migrants and tavellers are, nevertheless, also attacked.

    Will we see this increase?

    One wonders if Cameron and Clegg will look to Sarkozy for some helpful tips.

    It is worth mentioning that not only does Sarkozy’s UMP party contain ‘liberals’, and ‘centrists. Amongst his cabinet ministers there are individuals from the ‘diversity’ and the ‘left’ (Bernard Kouchner foreign affairs). Important as well is that  the UMP acts as a ‘coalition’ in the National Assembly with the ‘nouveau centre’ grouping (in English here).

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    French Government “se frontnationalise”

    Posted in European Left, Fascism, French Left, French Politics, Racism by Andrew Coates on August 13, 2010

    How it Began…

    France on Thursday sought to fend off sharp criticism from the UN’s anti-racism panel after members highlighted a “resurgence” in racism and xenophobia in one of Europe’s biggest nations.
       
    French officials underlined the legal grounds for measures being taken against travelling Roma from central Europe as the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination wrapped up its hearing on France’s application of international standards.

    The panel of 18 legal experts is due to issue its findings on August 27.
     

    On Wednesday, several of the independent experts began the hearing with unusually sharp comments about the state of racial discrimination in France.
       
    Despite legal safeguards, the country is experiencing a “significant resurgence of racism and xenophobia”, Kokou Ewomsan, a Togolese human rights official, told the French delegation.
       
    France’s treatment of Gipsy communities, the debate on national identity and immigration, minority rights and a hardening political discourse were all questioned.
       
    US lawyer and former State Department official Pierre-Richard Prosper, vice chairman of the committee, pointed to a lack of “real political will”.

    (More Here)

    More than 40 Rom camps have been dismantled in the last fortnight (Here).

    In an Interview published in today’s Libération leading Socialist Arnaud Montebourg comments, (Here)

    «Le pouvoir se “frontnationalise”»

    The Government is “Front Nationalising itself”.

    This seems fair comment.

    More informed analysis on Rue 89. Including this remark form one of the UN experts,

    Le carnet de circulation des gens du voyage « rappelle l’époque de Pétain », a déclaré l’un d’eux.

    The (special) licence-permit  for Travellers to move around “is a reminder of Pétain’s regime“, said one of them.

     

    Harry’s Place: Stick to Your Last.

    Posted in Free Speech by Andrew Coates on August 14, 2010

     

    Michael Ezra’s Mate in Action.

    I have this comment to make: Harry’s Place stick to your last.

    En ce qui concerne le Blog vous , me dégoûtez.

    The  Fitz affair says it all.  

    I have nothing more to add.

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    Now For Something Different.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on August 19, 2010

    Bashung  tu nous manque déjà!

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    Pope Defends Roma: Coatesy Goes Pro-Pope.

    Posted in French Politics, Racism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on August 23, 2010

    Good On You My Son!

    This

    CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy — Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday asked French pilgrims to welcome people of all origins, just days after France repatriated more than 200 Roma and Gypsies in a controversial crackdown.

    The pope said Sunday’s scriptures were “an invitation to know how to accept legitimate differences among humans, just like Jesus came to pull together men from every nation and speaking every language.”

    Amid fierce criticism from opposition politicians and human rights groups, France flew Roma and Gypsies back to Romania on “a voluntary basis” on Thursday and Friday in exchange for grants of 300 euros (385 dollars) per person.

    He deserves the support of all anti-racists.

    More in French here.

    Des hommes d’Église critiquent la “guerre” contre les Roms

    Meanwhile les pauvres hères are cast from pillar to post.

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    Roma Expulsions Continue: La Honte de la France.

    Posted in French Politics, Racism, Sarkozy by Andrew Coates on August 26, 2010

     

    Are these Not Human Beings Who Merit Love, not Hate?

    Deux avions ”spécialement affrétés” ont décollé à destination de Bucarest en pleine visite de deux ministres roumains à Paris. 

    here.

    Archbishop of Paris concerned about Gypsy crackdown as expulsions continue

    By Angela Doland (CP) – 22 minutes ago 

    PARIS — The archbishop of Paris added to mounting criticism of France’s crackdown on Gypsies, referring to the operation as a “circus” and saying Thursday he would tell the government that there are lines that cannot be crossed. 

    Meanwhile, France expelled more Gypsies, or Roma, on Thursday, 

    Here

    This is a complete and utter scandal.

    Those of us who deeply  love France and its people are feeling something is going terribly wrong.

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    Alle Menschen Werden Brüder: The Ideas of Hope and Liberty.

    Posted in Left by Andrew Coates on August 28, 2010

    This Is The Ideology We Should Follow.

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    Kang, Harry’s Place and Kodos.

    Posted in New Left, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on August 31, 2010

    Is this the True Political Agenda of Harry’s Place?

    I merely ask.

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    Michael Ezra and the Falsification of History.

    Posted in Marxism, SWP, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on September 1, 2010

     

    Michael Ezra’s Morning Tipple.

     

    World-famous Hedge Fund Manager and General Toss-Pot Michael Ezra descends to the hallucinatory depths.

    He reckons the SWP are some kind of Historical Revisionist Sect on the basis of a few ill-chosen words from one of their cadres.

    Here.

    Ian Bone says, HOW LONG TILL THE SWP DENIES THE HOLOCAUST?

     

    Shame on you Boney, Shame, Shame Shame.

    Proof?

    Here

    The Fourth International turns not to the governments who have dragooned the peoples into the slaughter, nor to the bourgeois politicians who bear the responsibility for these governments, nor to the labor bureaucracy which supports the warring bourgeoisie. The Fourth International turns to the working men and women, the soldiers and sailors, the ruined peasants and the enslaved colonial peoples. The Fourth International has no ties whatsoever with the oppressors, the exploiters, the imperialists. It is the world party of the toilers, the oppressed, and the exploited.

    Now Ezra, who is a tyro in politics, may eventually get to know that the ‘Trotskyists’,  as he calls them, were a minority of a minority of a minority of leftists in the 30s.

    But, j’en passe.

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    Now or Never: The Tip-Top Tabloid.

    Posted in Anarchism, Anti-Fascism by Andrew Coates on September 6, 2010

     

    From Here 

    The Magazine   

    “Twice as funny as Class war but only half as important”
     

      

    Issue 17 includes Binge drinking taste testing, female genitals, political nonsense and exorcism. Featuring Talibandy Capp and Gary Glitter’s. 
      
    Highly recommended by Pabloite Liquidationists of all countries. 
     
     
    Though I should point out that it comes from Norwich.

    Arrh…

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    Burston’s Socialist Magician.

    Posted in Labour Movement, Labour Party by Andrew Coates on September 7, 2010

    Burston this year was magical in itself.

    Seeing the little nippers of the Woodcraft Folk, Bob Crow in the crowd  (I shouted, Good on You Bob!), and literally every variety of the left – from the doughty warriors of the relaunched Country Standard, the New Communist Party, SPGB, CPB (M-L), Socialist Appeal, Anarchists, SWP,  Socialist Party, Communist Party of Britain, to the entire leadership of Suffolk Labour Party – was a treat.

    And Tony Benn – warmed the cockles of yer heart.

    But this act topped all.

     More info here.

    Former Labour MP Tony Benn headed a procession of more than 700 marchers for the annual Burston Strike School Rally yesterday to mark the longest strike action in history.

    The veteran politician was joined by leading union officials and Labour leadership hopefuls Ed Balls and Diane Abbott who dropped in on the village green event near Diss.

    The rally commemorates the struggles of teachers, Tom and Kitty Higdon, who set up a rival school in Burston in April 1914 after being dismissed from the Church of England county school because of their union connections. The strike lasted until August 1939.#Mr Benn, who joined the rally on a horse and cart, followed the protest route first adopted by school children 96 years ago, along with union branches from across the country.

    The socialist, who has called on people to revolt against the proposed spending cuts put forward by the coalition government, said it was a “really lovely” event and it was important to recognise the struggles and success of the Higdons.“We have got a government making big cuts in pay, pensions and jobs and people come here because when they hear about the struggles of the past, it inspires them to carry on. Every generation has to fight the same battles again and again and there is no final victory and no final defeat,” he said.

    Organisers spoke of their delight following a “fantastic” turnout for the annual procession, which has been running since 1984. Mike Copperwheat, trustee of the Burston Strike School, said there were many teachers at this year’s event and the attendance could be down to the Conservative-Liberal government.

    Len McCluskey, Unite assistant general secretary, added that the rally was “incredibly important” given the anger over “vicious” public sector cuts.

    “It celebrates the spirit of community and solidarity of people nearly 100 years ago and in the current climate we will need that spirit of resilience more than ever,” he said.

    Just on a personal note us Ipswich lot ended up in the Dove back in town.

    The leader of Ipswich Liberal Democrats, Andrew Cann, came up and made threatening noises about this very Blog.

    Brahma!

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    France: The Street Speaks.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on September 8, 2010

    From the Telegraph:

    French strike brings trains and planes to halt

    Schools, trains, planes and public services suffered widespread disruption in France as demonstrations unfurled across the country to protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62.

    The Paris crowd was so big it had to split into two to march through the capital.Unions, who claimed that 2.5 million people had taken part, insisted that Mr Sarkozy must give ground on his plan to raise the retirement age to 62 by 2018 from the current 60 for both men and women – the lowest figure in Europe.

    In French from Here

    Retraites : la rue “exprime une inquiétude qu’il faut entendre”Mais “ce n’est pas la rue qui gouverne”. Une déclaration, signée du secrétaire d’Etat à la Fonction publique Georges Tron, qui résume l’attitude adoptée par le gouvernement devant l’ampleur des manifestations contre le projet de réforme des retraites.

    And here

    Les dirigeants syndicaux tablaient sur une mobilisation plus importante que lors de la précédente journée d’action. Le 24 juin, entre 800’000 personnes, selon la police, et 2 millions, selon les syndicats, avaient défilé en France.

    Les premiers chiffres mardi midi confirmaient une mobilisation plus forte qu’en juin pour ce que la presse qualifiait mardi de “tournant” du mandat Sarkozy (La Tribune) ou de “journée vérité” (Le Monde).

    Just  to Pete Shield. Graham Bash from the Briefing phoned me last night and would be interested in contacting you.  He has a high opinion of you btw.

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    Wilebaldo Solano, dernier dirigeant du P.O.U.M., est mort hier à Barcelone à l’âge de 94 ans.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, European Left by Andrew Coates on September 8, 2010

    We salute thee beloved comrade!

    Who the POUM were here. (Wikipedia)

    The POUM or Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista (Catalan: Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista; English: Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) was a Spanish communist political party formed during the Second Republic and mainly active around the Spanish Civil War. It was formed by the fusion of the Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain (Izquierda Comunista de España, ICE) and the Workers and Peasants’ Bloc (BOC, affiliated with the Right Opposition) against the will of Leon Trotsky, with whom the former broke. The writer George Orwell served with the party and witnessed the Stalinist repression of the movement, which would form his anti-totalitarian ideas in later life.[1]

    Wilebaldo Solano est mort.  Wilebaldo Solano, dernier dirigeant du P.O.U.M., est mort hier à Barcelone à l’âge de 94 ans. Secrétaire général de la Jeunesses communiste ibérique en 1936, incarcéré en 1938 avec les autres dirigeants du POUM, Wilebaldo s’était réfugié en France en 1939, y avait été emprisonné par Vichy, avait gagné le maquis, fut élu secrétaire général du POUM en 1947. Il avait travaillé à l’agence France Presse à partir de 1953. La traduction française de son livre Le POUM: Révolution dans la guerre d’Espagne (2002) a fait date et restera un incontournable des bibliothèques militantes.

    Wilebaldo Solano has died in Barcelona at the age of 94. He was the last leader of the POUM. After escaping Franco’s Spain he was imprisoned by the Vickey regime. He escaped again and fought in the resistance. He was elected to the POUM General Secretary post in 1947. Worked for France Presse from 1953. His book Le POUM: Révolution dans la guerre d’Espagne (2002) is indispensable.

    From the excellent site La Bataille socialiste here.

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    Burn the Koran? Tendance Official Line: NO.

    Posted in Islam, Islamism, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on September 10, 2010

     

    Excellent with Fish and Chips.

    “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen”

    Where one begins by burning books, one will end up burning people”

    Heinrich Heine Almansor (1821)
     

    So that’s that.

     

    Story on this everywhere – eg here.

     

    But when I hear the likes of Tony Blair going about what a peaceful religion Islam is, worthy of great respect, and all the usual suspects crawling to the importance of religion and the wonders of the barely readable Qur’an (I have two translations both as full of garbled rubbish as the original)….

    For example,

    The Archbishop of Canterbury has joined UK politicians and Muslim groups in condemning plans by a small US church to burn the Koran on 9/11.

    In an Eid greeting to Muslims, Dr Rowan Williams said there was “no place… for violent response”.

    The US pastor later announced that he had cancelled his protest.

    He claimed the group behind a planned Islamic centre near Ground Zero in New York had agreed to relocate it, but the group denied this.

    A spokesman for the site developer said: “The Muslim Community Center called Park51 in Lower Manhattan is not being moved.”

    Downing Street had earlier also joined a chorus of international criticism about the Koran-burning plan, condemning any bid to offend a religious group.

    Ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair urged people to read the Koran, not burn it.

     

    That is here.

    I suggest by contrast that the Koran would make excellent wrapping for fish and chips.

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    80th Fête de l’Humanité.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on September 11, 2010

    It’s all happening now. More Here

    Now we have had, er hum, major differences with the PCF. (French Communist Party) – though we’ve been at the Fête many a time. And we support the Front de Gauche (in American English here) as one of the best initiatives on the European left.
     

    Pierre Laurent, secrétaire national du PCF discute avec Cécile Duflot, secrétaire nationale des Verts au stand du Parti communiste le 10 septembre 2010, à La Courneuve.
    AFP/MIGUEL MEDINA
    Pierre Laurent, National Secretary of the PCF in dicussion with  Cécile Duflot, National Secretary of the Verts (Green Party).
    From Le Monde  Here

     

    Happy Birthday Comrades.
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    Claude Chabrol: Homage.

    Posted in Culture, Films by Andrew Coates on September 13, 2010

    One of France’s best-known film directors, Claude Chabrol, has died at the age of 80.

    Chabrol is best known for 1960s and 70s thrillers such as The Unfaithful Wife, The Butcher and This Man Must Die.

    From BBC Here

    My favourite Chabrol Film

    From Wikipidia.

    La Cérémonie tells the story of a dyslexic illiterate domestic servant, Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) who has been hired by wealthy housewife Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset). Sophie becomes friends with an erratic post office employee, Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), and their lives begin to spiral towards violence. Chabrol presents an ambiguous view of culture and class conflict in this film, which he jokingly called “the last Marxist film.”

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    Official Statement on Ratzinger’s State Visit. The Tendance Shows Love.

    Posted in Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on September 14, 2010

    Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner.

    The Tendance finds itself in a quandary.

    Pope Benedict is no friend of progressives.

    It is clear that he holds many abhorrent views – which it would be hardly news to cite.

    As a political and social figure he is worthy of criticism.

    We watched Peter Thatchell’s documentary last night on Channel Four. It made some good points about birth control and the Catholic stand on gays. But we find ourself partly agreeing with the Bishop who said it smacked of a ‘hatchet job’ (Here).

    We have an intense dislike of interfering with people’s private religious feelings. It would be deeply offensive if any attempt were made to disrupt faith ceremonies.

    The strident tone of the secular protests  is also  a turn-off (here).

    As if Benedict were a Khomeini!

    We are also queasy when people try to raise the issue of Child Abuse in the Church.

    This is a question of private suffering. It’s up to those involved to work out how they should be helped to settle the matter with the Church.For secularists to interfere is distasteful.

    It smacks of 19th century salacious tales about Monks and Nuns.

    Our view is this: Goodness is too important a matter to be divided between the religious and the secular.

    Fellow secularists: show some love!

     

    France, Pension ‘Reform’, Stormy Debate in Assembly, Opposition Mobilisation Next Week.

    Posted in Europe, European Left, French Left, French Politics, Labour Movement, Unions by Andrew Coates on September 15, 2010

    7th of September Demo Against Pension ‘Reform’.

    Yesterday’ s French Parliamentary debate on raising the Retirement Age was stormy.

    From France 24. (State Financed, and you can bet Sarkozy has his hand in there).

    Following a marathon debate that started Tuesday afternoon and continued all night, the French National Assembly prepared to vote on Wednesday on a law that would raise the legal retirement age in France from 60 to 62. Opposition Socialists had been planning to use delaying tactics to postpone the process, but the vote was scheduled to proceed at 3pm in Paris.

    The controversial bill that will require the French to work longer has been the centrepiece of one of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s key reforms. In the current French retirement system, a person can retire and receive a full pension at the age of 60 if he or she has worked 41 years, with the government redistributing citizens’ income tax money to the retired. Sarkozy’s centre-right Union for a Popular Movement party (UMP) has argued that if France doesn’t raise the retirement age by two years, the country will no longer be able to fund pensions, given the country’s growing deficits and the increasing life expectancy of its senior citizens. 

    Even at 62, the French retirement age will still be one of the lowest in Europe, where the norm tends to be 65.

    Note By Coatesy: To get a Full Pension most people have to work till 65 – these measures will raise this to 67.

    But Socialists and unions, who staged a massive strike on September 7, have opposed the law vigorously, with Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry calling the retirement issue “a question of justice”. 

    The debate in the National Assembly has been intense, with Socialists pushing back hard against Labour Minister Eric Woerth, who is in charge of drafting the law and getting it passed. Woerth’s credibility has been compromised by his involvement in the L’Oréal heiress scandal, in which he has faced accusations of accepting illegal donations for the ruling UMP party and helping France’s wealthiest woman evade taxes. 

    Note by Coatesy: this is the tip of the iceberg. Woerth has been exposed doing lots of dodgy deals (e.g. l’hippodrome de Compiègne, property deals involving a racecourse) including setting up phantom ‘micro-parties’ to channel funds to the UMP and Sarkozy.

    Sarkozy himself has seen his poll ratings flounder this summer and his administration has been the target of criticism, not only for the pension reform, but also for new security measures aimed at breaking up illegal camps of Roma in France. 

    The reform is widely expected to be approved by the National Assembly and then move on to the Senate for further examination next month. 

    What exactly happened during this Marathon Debate to make it so long? And then for it to be suspended?

    Spectacle inédit: les députés de gauche ont alors manifesté dans le Palais-Bourbon en hurlant “démission“. Le député Verts François de Rugy a dénoncé un “coup de force, qui représente ”un déni de démocratie”. “Cette façon de faire déshonore le Parlement”. Le député PS Philippe Martin a pour sa part évoqué ”une nuit blanche et une journée noire pour la démocratie”. L’ancienne ministre et députée communiste, Marie-George Buffet, s’est déclarée ”en colère”…

    Unprecedented scenes: the left deputies demonstrated in the Palais-Bourbon (Parliament) screaming resign”! The Green Deputy  François de Rugy denounced a “power grab” – part of the government’s “denial of democracy” and that “this behaviour dishonours Parliament.” For his part Philippe Martin of the Socialist Party called the late drawn out session, a “nuit blanche” , literally, a white night, and a “ journée noire” – black day, for democracy. The former Minister and Communist, Marie-George Buffet declared she was “enraged”.

    From Here

     Bernard Accoyer, the President (Speaker) of the National Assembly was responsible for this clamp-down on debate. The Socialist Party called this morning for his resignation. On France-Info this lunch-time he talked of having been ‘physically threatened’ by opposition deputies….

    The new session this afternoon was expected to take a vote. In theory that it. But the time for this keeps getting pushed back and back. Indeed it may not take place this week at all. Though one should not estimate the steam-roller effects of the UMP’s crushing majority and its determination to push these measures through.

    There are demonstrations taking place at this very moment. Meanwhile on France-Inter this morning it was said that the unions are planning a further day of action next Thursday. More information here.

    “Des syndicats français ont appelé à une nouvelle journée de grèves et de manifestations le jeudi 23 septembre partout en France contre la réforme des retraites. Force ouvrière et Solidaires ne se sont pour le moment pas associés à cet appel lancé par les six autres centrales (CFDT, CGT, CFTC, FSU, UNSA, CFE-CGC).”

    Some background:

    Record historique et absolu d’impopularité de la politique économique du gouvernement… 71% de mauvaises opinions.

    The unpopularity of the government’s economic policies have reached an absolute historic record, with 71% people having an unfavourable opinion of them.

    .

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    France, Roma and Travellers (Gens du Voyage): Not The Same Discrimination.

    Posted in French Politics, Racism, Sarkozy by Andrew Coates on September 16, 2010

    France’s expulsion of Roma continues to make waves. The state ‘circulaire’ which specially called for the removal of a specified ethnic group has caused outrage across the world. The EU has vividly criticised the action.

    Today Sarkozy at the Brussels summit will defend, in a very loud voice, his government’s actions (the idea that his PM François Fillon has any power is rapidly evaporating). Whatever he says, Sarkozy stands condemned and France may have to face European legal sanction (Here).

    But before we follow the route of Louise Doughty (here) and call for France’s expulsion from the Union some points should be considered.

    That is not just that discrimination against Roma is not a specifically French problem, as the Guardian rightly points out in its Editorial today (Here). It is that a lot of reporting is based on confusions.

    Firstly, the racism of the French action  has been roundly attacked…. in France.

    Secondly, there is a basic inability to think clearly  here.

    There is no general French action against ‘gypsies‘ – as even the Guardian sloppily asserts. There is a distinction between Roma (from Bulgaria, Romania) and ‘gens du voyage‘ (travellers). They are not the same, though obviously there are (often) ethnic links from the same stem.  The former are sedentary, the latter, voyage. In French law the latter term covers anybody who is ‘nomadic’ – including those with no Roma connections at all. Some travellers in the UK have an Irish origin, and some in France have a distant background in those who similarly ‘took to the road’ . 

    French state policy towards the the gens du voyage - who are overwhelmingly French – is not so different from that of other countries.

    There is an exception. The oddity of a special identity card (at the origin designed for fair and circus workers) this is related to such things access to education and other services, not a repressive move.

    French legislation obliges local municipalities to provide sites for travellers (aires). Exactly as in Britain there is often local opposition to them, and many councils find ways not to provide them. Exactly as in Britain there are ‘fears’ by locals, and, exactly as in Britain, a reluctance by councils to provide services (such as education) for travellers. Exactly as in Britain gens du voyage are often expelled from non-authorised camps.

    Prejudice, yes, discrimination, yes, explusions, yes.

    But this is not the same as the action against Roma. That is shoving people out of the country.

    Britain does not have a substanital Roma population. There are a few individuals. Nothing  comparable to France’s. That is a group of people installed in temporary sites resembling third-world ’shanty-towns’ (bidonvilles).

    France, more directly than in other European countries, has decided to deal with this by the worst kind of method: explusion.

    Why? Commentators seem to blame not just French governments (who are certainly at  fault) but French republicanism for its failure to deal with the needs of Roma. Apparently centralised states that lay claim to the device of liberty, equality and fraternity are incapable of dealing with ‘diversity’.

    Josie Appleton argues in Spiked-on-Line (Here)  that France lacks ‘intermediatory institutions’ to cope with minorities. This means they are not intergrated. The French state  has (therefore?) latched onto ‘Roma’ as symbolic others to attack.

    Her knowledge of France and this issue is illustrated by her claim that the gens du voyage in Saint Aignan are…Roma.

    One wonders what the wonderful British multicultural state would do with the installation of Roma settlements….

    Sarkozy is attacked by his critics on the left  for his anti-republican discrimination. Perhaps the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity might be better at combatting racism than letting people fester in diversity.

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    Pope Links Atheists to Nazis; Coatesy Says, May We Forgive Benedict.

    Posted in Fascism, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on September 17, 2010

     Those who trespass against us

    How many times shall I forgive a. Believer when she/he sins against me? Up to seven times?’ Coatesy answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.’” (Tendance Coatesy. Collected Works Volume 11. Page 275)

    A speech in which the Pope appeared to associate atheism with the Nazis has prompted criticism from humanist organisations.

    From Here.

    Benedict XVI used the first papal state visit to Britain to launch a blistering attack on “atheist extremism” and “aggressive secularism”, and to rue the damage that “the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life” had done in the last century.

    The leader of the Roman Catholic church concluded a speech, made before the Queen and assembled dignitaries at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, with the argument that the Nazi desire to eradicate God had led to the Holocaust and a plea for 21st-century Britain to respect its Christian foundations.

    Here.

    The Catholic Church has, naturally, an impeccable record of heroic opposition to Nazism and Fascism. Its role in promoting science, reason, equal rights, anti-racism during the Dreyfus affair, and more recently in promoting the overthrow of capitalism by donating its wealth to the poor, speaks for itself. Never anxious to grab political or social power the Church has meekly accepted a loss in its control of education and has always listened to contrary views - if not always accepting them, or indeed even giving them the slightest credence. .

    So we atheists should be wary of criticising it.

     

    But surely we cannot be but a bit miffed at the tone of this language?

    Our patience is further sorely tried by Baroness  Warsi’s claim that faith-motivated volunteers and charities (soon to play a major role in state-funded social policy) are of superior merit and worth than secular ones. (From Here.)

    Though one can see where she gets her confidence in religious volunteers from.

    She stood for Dewsbury at the 2005 General Election and lost by nearly 5000 votes. Yet here she is, telling us of the joys of religion as a Baroness, and an unelected government Minister.

    Proof that faith pays!

    Death of Lutte Ouvrière Founder Hidden For a Year.his

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on September 17, 2010

    Inouï: comment Lutte Ouvrière a caché la mort de Hardy, son chef occulte.

    Dirigeant historique de LO, Robert Barcia, alias Hardy, est mort. Avec lui disparaît l’une des figures de la politique française : il était le fondateur de la première organisation trotskyste du pays. Mais il n’est pas mort hier ; en réalité, il est décédé il y a plus d’un an. Et depuis, les quelques mille militants de Lutte ouvrière gardent farouchement le secret sur sa disparition… Enquête…(More Here)

    The Historic leader of LO, Robert Barcia, alias Hardy, is dead. So disappears one of the characters of French political life. He was the founder of the country’s  premier Trotskyist organisation. But he didn’t die yesterday. In fact he passed away more than a year ago. Since then the few thousand activists of Lutte ouvrière kept this disappearance rigorously a secret….Enquiry on….

    More Here Here

    He died in June last year.

    Nathalie Arthaud, the present public leader of LO, says,

    J’ai lu que nous avions tout fait pour cacher la mort de Hardy, mais c’est complètement faux! Si vous m’aviez appelé il y un an, je vous aurais dit la vérité.

    I’ve read that we did everything to hide Hardy’s death. That’s totally false! If you had called me a year ago I would have told you the truth.

    Elsewhere through these links we learn that not announcing the news was part of his ‘last wishes’.

    So LO would have told the facts if someone had asked about something that they didn’t know had happened…..

    Hat-Tip to Mariategui  Red

    On LO (in English) here.

    I knew they were odd.

    But this!

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    Benedict Gummer Goes Popery.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Ipswich, Liberal Democrats by Andrew Coates on September 19, 2010

     

    Benedict Gummer is the much respected MP for Ipswich. His book, The Black Death and the Big Society, is an international classic. Benedict’s latest pamphlet, “How Bubonic Plague could solve the Pension Crisis” is required reading in the DWP. A frequent Guest Contributor to Tendance Coatesy the Right Honourable speaks on local and international affairs.

    • Pope’s Visit Brings Joy to Ipswich.

    As a member of Opus Dei I have been very excited by the visit of my namesake, Pope Benedict XVl  to Britain. I’ve been wearing my hair-shirt all week! At Westminster Hall yesterday we heard how secularism brought the Nazis, Mussolini, the Khmer Rouge and Hoodies. Today I’ll be attending the beatification of Cardinal Newman. He didn’t like liberals, socialists or atheists either. In Ipswich they’re ringing the Church Bells in celebration. No need for an apologia pro vita sua for the Church!

    As Bridge Ward News says, Vive il Papa!

    • My good friend Paul Geater backs the Big Society in the Ipswich Evening Star.

    The film theatre, run by volunteers is his model. Paul suggests this is a model for running Swimming Pools, Libraries and Museums. Hum.. That’s what my Cambridge tutors would call “an interesting idea”. Will these places open only for three hours, three days a week?

    • The Past Teaches Lessons.

    The anniversary of the Battle of Britain reminds us of some real heroes. Later in the war Ipswich was bombed. It’s worth remembering that before this  our town was a jewel of medieval architecture. My close colleague Andrew Cann, Borough culture chief, tells me that his reasearch in the Dove has thrown up some photos of the area round Rope Walk. A monastery, apple orchards, and a vineyard, are visible. Plump-red faced burghers, their apple-cheeked wives,  and smiling children stand in front of their half-timbered mansions. While all this was destroyed we fought back and won.

    If atheists had been governing Britain we’d now be under a Gauleiter from Berlin!

    Belgium: A Hundred Days Without Government, Europe’s Future?

    Posted in Belgium, Europe, Multi-Culturalism, Nationalism by Andrew Coates on September 21, 2010

    The Sorrow of Beligum.

    100 Days after General Elections Belgium is still without a Federal government.

    The country is always ruled by coalitions, between, Flemish and French, and political parties (and ‘families’) of the centre, left, and right. The balance towards one side  is what matters. In the Federal Parliament and Senate this has been complicated by increasing support from Dutch-speakers for their own, separate, state. This year, the process of Cabinet Formation, always laborious, has dragged on and on.

    After his victory in Flemish territory the nationalist separatist Bart De Wever (N-VA) began negotiations with the Parti Socialiste. PS leader Elio di Rupo was thought likely  to become the next Prime Minister. He, after all, is part of a ‘family’ that spans both linguistic communities. Nevertheless, negotiations between free-market nationalists and federalist social democrats promised to be difficult.

    Wever’s  Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA) wants an independent Flanders. The unemployed  in the Francophone Wallonia are, they claim, subsidised by the hard-working  Flemish. The principal sticking point in Cabinet negotiations it the N-VA’s demand that the Federal Budget (relating to social security and health) be broken up so that the prosperous North does not contribute to the poor South.

    As with nationalists everywhere this is dressed up in foggy rhetoric about oppression. The French-speakers are accused of a range of faults. Some are true (the historic dominance of Francophones and disregard for the Dutch language and people). Others are  fantasies (such as the claim that their region was downtrodden to the level of a colony). From this range of ‘historic’ grievances (some going back to the Middle Ages) a poisonous cocktail has been mixed.

    Politics becomes centred on these issues. They have institutional effects. A long-term objective of the Flemish is to capture French-speaking speaking Brussels (officially bi-lingual) for its ‘historic’ rulers - the Flemish. A range of petty municipal authorities in the Flemish local districts that lie around part of the Capital increasingly impose rules against French. Unspoken is the fact that most of the high immigrant population in the urban areas are French and not Dutch speakers.

    There is talk of a ‘corridor’ to link Brussels to Wallonia to break out of this ‘encerclement’.  

    Today Le Soir reports that government negotiations have begun again. The main public Radio, La Première, carried interviews this morning with Francophone politicians. Most seemed to think that the NV-A was making the running. There is a continual drift towards a ‘confederal’ state – two effectively independent countries with symbolic unity under the Monarchy. Albert ll would remain King but little else would be held in common.

    There are the same fiscal pressures on Belgium as on Britain. Cuts in public spending loom.  The Flemish Bart De Wever will make sure that ‘his’ people will suffer less than the Walloons. Faced with similar pressures One can see similar nationalist and regionalist self-interest being asserted across Europe.

    Nationalism aligned to the free-market will ensure that efforts to fight fiscal austerity in Belgium will be thwarted.

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    France: More Mass Protests Thursday.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Unions by Andrew Coates on September 22, 2010

    RÉFORME DES RETRAITES - Les syndicats condamnés au succès dans la rue

    La manifestation du 7 septembre a réuni 1,12 million de manifestants selon le ministère, contre 2,7 millions selon la CGT. ©SIPA

    France’s National Assembly voted last week to raise the retirement age. That is from a minimum of 60 to 62, and (for full pensions for most jobs) from 65 to 67.

    The law now has to be passed by the Senate. Thursday will see unions organise further mass protests. They hope to reach numbers near to the two and half million out on the streets on the 7th of September. 

    Annick Coupé, spokesperson for the radical union federation, l’Union syndicale Solidaires,  has called for a

    “un affrontement central avec ce gouvernement..”  Here

    A direct confrontation with the government.

    SUD clearly wishes to repeat the strike wave of 1995. Then mass protests centred against liberalising first work contracts made Jacques Chirac withdraw the plans. They led to the downfall fo Prime Minster Alain Juppé, (Here.)

    From the other end of the union spectrum, the ‘reformist’ CFDT, support for the protests is strong.

    François Chérèque, assure être “dans un mouvement durable” de contestation de la réforme des retraites , qui est “en train de gagner le soutien populaire”.

    François Chérèque (General Secretary of the CFDT) is certain that this is a “long-term movement” to challenge the retirement reform. It is “winning popular support”. (More Here)

    This is clearly true. The (formely) Communist and now simply left union federation, the CGT reports that,

    A majority of French people would like a ‘great debate’ on retirement. (63%)  That is, as opposed to the way the changes have been steamrolled through. A majority are opposed to the plans.  (70%) . (More Here)

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    Suffolk County Council Cuts Go Ahead: First Wave of Transfers Looms.

    Posted in Conservative Party, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on September 23, 2010

    Suffolk for Public Services picket line outside Endeavour House. 

    Suffolk for Public Services picket line outside Endeavour House.

    No Coatesy, He Was On A  ’Motivation Programme’  Course.

    (Suffolk Coalition for Public Services: Facebook group Here).

     MEMBERS of Suffolk County Council today approved controversial moves that could lead to the authority selling off most, or even all, its services and the loss of thousands of jobs. More Here.

    From the Official Policy Documents (‘New Strategic Direction’) Given to Councillors:

    The lack of detail about the Big Society, and the pace at which some of the artefacts are developing (sic) , the Big Society Bank for example, has created a policy vacuum.The council is being understanding (sic) with this vacuum within the vacuum primary with the conversation about divestment (i.e. privatisation Note by Coatesy).

    Sources close to the Suffolk Labour Party indicate that ‘divestment’ will take place in 3 phases.

    The  first will mean that Registrars, Home First, the Records Offices, Independent Children’s Centres, Country parks, Hate Crime Services, and Youth Clubs will be hived off. That is, either to private companies, ‘social enterprises’  or will be ‘volunteer-run’ . Libraries are thought to be transferred to a ‘social enterprise’ with some branches also run by ‘volunteers’. A senior Labour Party figure indicated that he thought the use of volunteers may extend to other libraries.

    Several thousand County Council employees are set to lose their jobs.

    We are interested to know how private companies will make a profit out of hate crimes.

     
    Dear Councillor
     
    We understand that today the leader of Suffolk County Council will be putting forward proposals to the Council, which will enable the outsourcing of those Public Services currently served by the Council.
     
    We are most concerned by the detrimental effect this will have on jobs and actual services.
     
    This extreme course of action did not feature in any election manifesto received by the public in the recent County Coumcil elections and we therefore, demand that, if you consider yourself in support of such proposals, you should resign from your elected post and re-stand on a manifesto that clearly outlines the demise of Public Services in Suffolk.
     

    Bridge Ward news has yet to comment.

    Ipswich & District Trades Union Council.
    PRESS RELEASE
    from THE SUFFOLK COALITION FOR PUBLIC SERVICES

    Members from this newly formed Coalition, following a meeting of local Public Sector Trades Unionists on September 9th, will be picketing County Councillors as they enter Endeavour House for a full County Council meeting, and will present them with the following message:

    UPDATE:  Our Informant proves accurate:

    By Neil Puffett
    Children & Young People Now
    24 September 2010

    Youth clubs, integrated youth support and children’s centres will be among the first potential pilot projects for outsourcing services at Suffolk County Council, it has emerged. More Here.

    Guardian Commentary by Patrick Butler  here,

    These changes are a mixture of inspiration and desperation. Some may lead to better, cheaper services. Others could lead to catastrophe. The consequences of this rapid, largely unstrategic shakeup – its effect on democratic accountability, its economic impact on areas where the council is the largest local employer – are unclear.

    Some experts say restructuring on this scale is hard enough at the best of times. Service transformation, the argument goes, happens most effectively when there is money to oil the wheels of change. Blair could have done it in the age of plenty seven years ago; now the piggy bank is empty. Councils are not yet allowed to raise money on the capital markets, and are prevented from putting up council tax.

    Change on this scale is hugely expensive. Redundancy payouts in local government – while not as generous as in the civil service – are typically equivalent to two years’ salary. In theory outsourcing transfers costs and risk to the private sector. Done badly, councils end up paying more, locked into costly, underperforming long-term contracts, or trapped in legal challenges brought by trade unions.

    Nor is there any guarantee that the private companies and charities will be queuing up to take the contracts. Transferred council workers by law keep their council terms and conditions and must be offered “broadly comparable” pensions – requirements that often end up as outsourcing dealbreakers.

    For Tory-run councils, such as Suffolk, the public spending crisis seems to offer an ideological opportunity to change the face of local government. Making it a reality will not be easy.

    If Patrick Butler knew the people behind this plan – the Tory Councillors to begin with , and had read the Strategic Plan cited above (gibberish and incoherence mixed with naked ultra-market ideology), he would be more than sceptical.

    He would be scathing.

    We should be out in Tavern Street tommorow (weather permitting) from 11.00 a.m.

    Well-known Suffolk Facts Number 1: Council Chief Executive, Andrea Hill’s salary is aprox £220,000 per year.

    Suffolk County Council: From Democracy to ‘Enabling’.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on September 25, 2010

    Leader of Suffolk County Council.

    (Suffolk Coalition for Public Services: Facebook group Here).

    From Suffolk County Council’s Site.

    Weasel words:

    At today’s Full Council meeting it was agreed that the future role of Suffolk County Council in delivering services will be different.  By changing the way council services are delivered, the county council will be able to reduce costs, reduce its size, cut out waste and bureaucracy and give the people of Suffolk a better say on how they receive services.

    Note: Agreed implies that everyone ‘agreed’. In fact the New Strategic Direction was voted through with opposition councillors opposing it – they did not ‘agree’.

    What ‘will’ happen is a claim, not a fact about the future

    In the future, the council will focus more on commissioning services and supporting other organisations, including the voluntary sector, private sector, and community groups, to deliver services.

    Note: Nearly every service will be contracted out. ‘Commissioning’ and ‘supporting’ means these private bodies will run them and decide on how they deliver the services – democracy will play little part in this.

    Councillor Jeremy Pembroke, Leader of Suffolk County Council, said: “This decision was made with consideration to the financial deficit in the public sector and the Coalition Government’s priority to reduce the deficit and the size of the state.  The Coalition requires lesser government and a bigger society, and Suffolk County Council has responded to this change.”

    Note: What on earth is a ‘bigger society’?  Is Suffolk going to expand into the North Sea? The assertion that this will reduce public spending mean either much worse services by a worse paid workforce, or much higher spending to make sure private bodies make a profit. With probably worse services to boot. Or all at the same time.

    Councillor Pembroke continued: “Now that Full Council has debated the issue and agreed with the future model for the county council, we can begin to talk with the people of Suffolk so they can be involved in the shaping of services for the future.”

    Note: Like Hell! Were we involved in deciding to contract everything out?

    Today’s decision now enables the leadership within the council to further explore different options for the future delivery of services, along with beginning discussions with those people in the county who will be affected. 

    Note: see above. Why didn’t they discuss with people before they inflicted their experiment on us?

     

    From Here

    What will happen?

    The first services to be affected are:

    Services planned for outsourcing in the first wave are:

    •    Transactional property
    •    Registrars
    •    Suffolk traded services
    •    Employment enterprises, learning and careers advice
    •    Libraries
    •    Home First
    •    A record office
    •    Independent Living Centres
    •    Highway Services
    •    Country Parks
    •    Economic Development
    •    Youth clubs, and Integrated Youth Support and Outdoor Education
    •    Early Years & Childcare, including Children’s Centres
    •    Home Shield Plus
    •    Hate Crime Service

    Here

    It is interesting that the Conservative Party’s Local Government Blog gives more information than Suffolk County Council’s public site.

    Well-known Suffolk Facts No2: Jeremy Pembroke, Conservative Leader of Suffolk County Council spent his working life ‘in the City’. 

    He  ”feels very strongly about those who are the most vulnerable in our community”.

    What he feels is not known.

     More Here.

    France: The Street Keeps Speaking.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Sarkozy, Unions by Andrew Coates on September 27, 2010

    Protests to Continue.

    A slightly edited version of the below appears in the latest (October) Labour Briefing. (It was written a couple of weeks ago).

    Across France more than two and a half million people demonstrated on the 7th of September. Protests organised by all the country’s unions (united in the ‘intersyndicale’) were directed against government plans to raise the general retirement age, from 60 to 62, in many cases, and 65 to 67 in others.

    Demonstrations have accelerated as legislation, pushed by the ruling right-wing UMP, is due to be passed this month. While it faces a host of amendments the strength of the majority means it will face few real obstacles in the National Assembly.  Opinion polls indicate that 63% of the population back opposition to these measures (Le Monde 7.9.10). There are few other vehicles than union mobilisations and few places but the street to express this resistance.

    The country has been plunged into a crisis in many areas. To begin with, it is galling that a Minister initially in charge of the pension change, Eric Woerth, is at the centre of a storm about illegal party finances. The complex ‘affaire’ Woerth-Bettencourt involved illegal funding for Nicolas Sarkozy’s electoral campaign.  Political influence for the rich is a long-standing feature of the UMP. In this case the matter is worsened by revelations about the creation of shadowy ‘micro-parties’ to get round rules limiting donations.

    Next, there is the ‘security’ and immigration policy of the government. The expulsion of Roma has become an international scandal. The government promises further hard-line measures.  These include allowing French nationality to be withdrawn from those naturalised (which include soem categories of those of immigrant descent). These policies have met fierce opposition from human rights organisations. The venerable Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, formed during the Dreyfus affair, has led them. Intellectuals, religious figures and left parties have expressed their horror at this scapegoating of a minority.

    Finally, in common with the rest of Europe, there are plans to reduce the public deficit. It is proposed to shrink it from 8% to 6%. This would mean making drastic savings in public spending (yet to be announced). While probably less extreme than, say the cuts we see in the UK, no doubt Sarkozy would like to follow a similar path. Projects about selling off the public sector (parts of the railway system, Postal services) are in their initial stages. The numbers of civil servants are already going to be reduced.

    By centralising power around the Presidency Nicolas Sarkozy has exposed himself to concentrated opposition. The leaders of the left, from Martine Aubry of the Socialists, to the Greens Cécile Duflot, the joint-leaders of the Front de Gauche (Communists, left Socialists and a Trotskyist minority), which did well in this Spring’s regional elections, and the far-left Nouveau parti-anticapitaliste (NPA) have backed the protests. The unions talk of a possible ‘radicalisation’ of the conflict. There are signs that the leader of the UMP may be forced to make concessions. Though at present nothing is less clear.

    Andrew Coates

    One result: this morning Prime Minister François Fillon (who?) was in the news. He appeared to be making a valedictory speech waving good-bye to his post. Fillon stated that Sarkozy was not his  ’mentor’ (here)  A government reshuffle is on the cards. With Presidential elections in the coming years some union leaders think that while they may not win their battle on this issue they will help defeat Sarkozy in the ballot box.

    There has been an argument about the numbers who came out last week. It is clear that a certain drop in strikers happened. But that a huge wave of protesters still demonstrated and feelings run high across the country. Though it looks unlikely that any serious concessions will be made this has only served to make some more resolute. Mobilisations opposing the pension reforms are continuing, and unions are indeed talking about a ‘radicalisation’. Further Days of Action will be held in October. Students, and their organisations,  are now involved (bringing no doubt other grievances into the protests). (Here.)

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    Suffolk County Council Sell-Off At Labour Conference.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservative Party, Ipswich, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on September 28, 2010

    Even The Orwell Has Had Enough!

    ANGER over the proposed out-sourcing of services at Suffolk County Council reached the floor of the Labour Party Conference when the Tory administration was described as “a circus act with no safety net.”

    Former county council leader Bryony Rudkin told the conference about the county’s attempts to sell off – or divest – all its services leaving just a few hundred contract managers at Endeavour House.

    She said: “It is one huge experiment. The Conservative administration is behaving like a circus act with no safety net.

    “There are no contingency plans if their brave new world goes wrong. Nothing to ensure that vulnerable people continue to get the services they need.”

    She attacked what she saw as the complacency of Conservative councillors who were keen to involve the voluntary sector.

    She said: “At the council meeting last Thursday, one Conservative said his village had come together to build a new doctor’s surgery.

    “That might be fine in the nice comfortable villages but who’s going to come together to build the doctor’s surgery in my area of Ipswich where there are some quite serious deprivation issues?” She asked.

    More Here.

    We hope that Bryony will join the Leader of Suffolk Labour Group, Sandy Martin, in co-operating with the Suffolk Coalition for Public Services.

    We need maximum unity now!

    Country Standard says,

    Suffolk Tories vs Suffolk Partisans

    Despite Suffolk right wing Tories failure to secure the support of a majority of voters at the 2009 County Council elections (they secured less than 50% of the electorate).

    Suffolk County Council Conservative Councillors have agreed to support the Chief Exec’s (Andrea Hill (£250,000) – long time resident of Private Eye’s illustrious columns) “New Strategic Direction” – total divestment of all services.

    Apparently what none of us had realised is that contracting out all services (to who – they have no idea) actually increases democratic participation, delivers “better outcomes” for the people of Suffolk and costs considerably less. “A new era of people power” The Leader of the County Council, Jeremy Pembroke said.

    The small fact Jeremy forgot to mention is that seeking an early reduction of 30% in budget means thousands of jobs…Suffolk County Council is by far the largest employer in Suffolk with 26,000 employees: 30% of 26,000 = 7,800 jobs.

    Not much of an outcome for those workers, their families and the people they serve eh Jeremy? One irksome opposition Councillor asked of Jeremy: Why had there been no consultation with staff or their constituents? The answer “we are here to show leadership.” In other words, we won’t ask you what you want; we might tell you what you get.

    Unsurprisingly the usually laid back people of Suffolk showed that they don’t want this; lobbies of Council were maintained all day and TV cameras had real difficulties in finding anyone to support such a scorched earth policy.

    The Council says it needs to make savings but they haven’t looked in detail at the services they provide, they haven’t considered any alternatives, they are pursuing the Tory ideology of Public Bad, Private Good: So much for the Big Society?

    Helen Muddock, branch secretary of the Suffolk county branch of UNISON, said: “Over the following weeks and months we will be working to protect services we all value within our community and the jobs delivering them to the old, young and the vulnerable.

    “Today’s decision amounts to a blank cheque given to the administration of Suffolk County Council to dismantle local public services as we know it.”

    Country Standard Supporter Ann Cater of Leiston condemned the move as “Crass, short sighted and politically driven” Now the hard work begins, we need to challenge, to make links with the community; this is a fight we can’t afford to loose. Undoubtedly other councils will be watching, waiting to see if they too can get away with it.

    Sharpen the Sikle !

    Join the Suffolk Partisans – Fight the Cuts !

    (Here)

    The Suffolk Coalition for Public Services will be out in Tavern Street , Ipswich, 11.00 to 13.00 Saturdays.

    There will be a regional demonstration in Cambridge on the 23rd of October. We hope to organise transport.

    Islamism and the Far-Right: David Hoile Surfaces Again.

    Posted in Fascism, Islam, Islamism, Racism by Andrew Coates on October 2, 2010

    David Hoile, From Apartheid to Islamism.

    David Hoile is an apologist for the Sudanese Islamist regime. He works for the European-Sudanese Public Affairs Council. The British ‘professor’ is noted for his defence of Khartoum actions in Darfur. In particular he stands up for the President Omar Al-Bashir  (critique of his views here). At present he is active in  opposing charges levelled against the dictator by the International Criminal Court. 

    Hoile’s  identification with Islamism goes further. He states that (here), “The fact is that within the Arab and Islamic world Sudan has led the way with regard to women’s social, political and economic rights.” Not surprisingly he has attracted the admiration of Respect Party notable, Yvonne Ridely (here).

    In Le Monde (29.9.10) it is revealed that he attended the Geneva building of the  ”conseil des droits de l’homme’ (human rights council) on the 16th of September. He claimed to represent an independent NGO under the name of ‘David Howil’.  At a meeting of the Hawa Society for Woman,  a ‘GONGO’ (Government Operated non-Governmental Organisation), he  attacked the International Court, calling it a “  European Guantanamo”. ‘Howil’ , defending Sudan against “propaganda” saw “positive developments” in its human rights record.

    In the 1980s Hoile was one of the leaders of the Federation of Conservative Students. He backed the Contras in Nicaragua, UNITA in Angola, and attacked the ANC. He is worse a badge saying “Hang Nelson Mandela”. Hoile equally enthused over Remano, the anti-Frelimo guerilla movement in Mozambique, financed by the South African apartheid regime.

    More background here.

    Funny that Tory racists should admire brutal Sudanese Islamism so much.

    Or perhaps the racists and misogynists of  Khartoum really are defenders of human rights.

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    France, More Anti-Pension ‘Reform’ Demos: War of the Numbers.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Unions by Andrew Coates on October 3, 2010

    Unlikely to Happen.

    Demonstrations in France continue against Sarkozy’s pension ‘reform’.

    As the legislation passes from the National Assembly to the Senate next week the only possible venue for opposition is the street. The wave of revolt appears, however, to have reached its peak.

    To the left Saturday’s marches drew as many people as the previous ones (two Days of Action), attracting support from those unable or unwilling to sacrifice a day’s pay. A wider  participation of those in the private or un-unionised sectors, as well as younger people, has not meant bigger overall total of supporters marching.

    The limits of protest are becoming apparent. Without either a full-scale revolt, with serious industrial and administrative disruption, it is hard to see what signaling disagreement can achieve in the short-term. Sarkozy and his ministers can effect say “I understand your concerns” without changing their basic plans. Which will, without any doubt, soon extend to something approaching the ‘cuts’ we see looming in the UK.  

    In such an impasse debate seems to centre on the numbers of people demonstrating.

    A trois jours de l’examen du texte au Sénat, les syndicats ont estimé la participation aux cortèges (229 selon eux, 240 selon le ministère de l’Intérieur) “au même niveau” que le 23 septembre, date de la précédente journée d’action: 2,9 millions pour la CFDT, près de 3 millions pour la CGT.

    Pour le ministère de l’Intérieur en revanche, le nombre de manifestants s’est élevé à 899.000, soit 98.000 de moins.

    The unions estimate that there were 229 marches, the Ministry of the Interior, 240, and participation as the “same level” as the previous Day of Action (23rd of September). That is, there were , for the CFDT (union federation), 2,9 million people out, and for the CGT, 3 million.

    For the Ministry of the Interior, by contrast, there 8,99,000 marchers, that is, a drop of 98,000 people fewer.

    (Here)

    It is not a good sign that the main debate on this movement of protest seems, at the moment to be about the method of counting demonstrators (here).

     

     

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    Suffolk County Council Sell-Offs: The Tories’ Scandal Grows and Grows.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on October 4, 2010

    The New Suffolk Enclosures.

     

    (Suffolk Coalition for Public Services: Facebook group Here).

    The East Anglian Daily Times  reports today,

    In a survey of more than 20 town and parish councils and voluntary groups carried out by the EADT, the overwhelming majority said they did not feel they had been consulted properly on the Suffolk County Council proposals.

    (Note: Hardly surprising since they were not consulted. More interesting would be a list of those who dreamt that they were!)

    County councillors last month voted 52-11 to approve moves towards introducing a new strategic direction which could see county council services being provided by other organisations.

    (Note: Not surprising, these  Ladies and Knights of the Shire (or South-Folk),  vote as they’re told.).

    One of the visions of the new direction is for communities to do things for themselves and for volunteers to take on more responsibilities, like running vital services.

    However, the EADT has discovered that many town and parish councils – who will be given more responsibilities under the plans – have been left angry because they feel they had not been consulted before county councillors agreed on the new strategic direction last month. (More Here)

    (Note: Angry!  Localism is a fraud if it’s imposed on unasked, unconsulted people in elected positions. Let alone the unasked, unconsulted electorate.)

    Now we realise that not many lefties, even those of us who live in Suffolk, read the EADT print-copy. It has to be said that the daily has seen better days. This is not the journalists’ fault but part of a general trend to run down local newspapers  - as readers of Flat Earth News know. 

     But this story has been covered very thoroughly.

    In the print edition there is an article title, “Don’t take the voluntary sector for granted“.

    Cliff Horne of the Suffolk Pensioners’ Association is quoted as saying that, “They are taking a lot for granted in assuming that the voluntary sector will take up the slack, that we are ready and able to take on this extra work.” and “At the end of the day we are still volunteers and if it does get too onerous people will won’t volunteer.”

    Dr Wil Gibson rightly asks “if there is a  reference as to which voluntary organisation takes the lead or if there will be a formal tender process”.

    We confidently predict (since the Tories’ National Local Government site is better informed than Suffolk County Council’s one) that the Suffolk Strangulation of Services (SSS) will feature at the Conservative Conference.

    Meanwhile Suffolk County Council is run by a clique of ideologues. They interpret David Cameron’s Big Society to mean fewer publicly funded services, resposible to democraticaly elected councillors. Instead we will have most services provided by ‘volunteers’, ‘social enterprises’ and (more probable) private profiteers.

    We would ask some further questions:

    • By what criteria are voluntary bodies assumed suitable to take over County Council responsibilities? How are these organisations to be assessed?
    • Do voluntary bodies have to submit to minimum standards of internal democracy and accountability?
    • Who are they, and any ‘social enterprsie’ or private company, responsible to  during the period during which they carry out their  contractual obligations? To their CEOs, to their Management Boards, to their shareholders, or to the people of Suffolk? If they are in some way accountable to the electorate, how is this to operate?

    With the eye of a Suffolk Seer we can envisage that the process of hiving off  publicly owned property to private hands  will offer rich pickings for Private Eye in the months to come.  

    The Socialist Party have already begun – here.

     

    Update: some information has finally appeared on the County Council’s site – Here.

    Sarkozy Verses Unions and Left: Test of Wills Reaches New Stage.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Unions by Andrew Coates on October 6, 2010

    Inching Towards a General Strike?

    Alors que le débat parlementaire sur la réforme des retraites se poursuit au Sénat, les initiatives en faveur de grèves reconductibles ont fleuri ces derniers jours, face à la détermination du gouvernement à reculer l’âge de départ en retraite.

    While the Parliamentary debate continues in the Senate, and the Government has shown itself determined not to back down on its proposals to raise the retirement age, initiatives in favour of a ‘continous series’ (grèves reconductibles) of strikes have blossomed in the last few days.

    Sectors affected include:

    SNCF (Railways). The  CGT-cheminots (railworkers),  the largest union, has proposed to other railway unions that from the 12th fo October there be ‘contunuous strikes). Other unions have already decided to strike.

    RATP (Parisain Regional Transport System).. The  CGT de la RATP, the leading unions in this public service, has indicated that it intends to begin an unlimited strike from Monday the 11th of October. FO (anti-Communist and Lambertist union group),  SUD (far-left) support the same move.  Update CFDT join in (here)

    In other Urban Transport Networks the a CGT calls for this movement to continue until the  30th of October.

    Total(Oil refineries). The  CGT-Total calls for a continuous strike (grève reconductible) from the  12th of October

    Ports et docks. The CGT Federation call for a continuous strike (grève reconductible ) from the 12th of  October

    Routiers (Haulage) . The CGT calls for the same wave of strikes from the 12th of October. .

    From today’s Le Monde  Here

    Claude Lefort (Socialisme ou Barbarie to Anti-Totalitarianism) Dies.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, Marxism, Stalinism by Andrew Coates on October 7, 2010

    Claude Lefort:  From Socialism to Anti-Totalitarianism.

    The French political theorist and philosopher Claude Lefort died on Sunday the 3rd of October at 86 years old (Here)

    For the left Lefort’s most significant political and intellectual activity was some time ago, in the 1950s hey-days of the libertarian socialist (and critical Marxist) French group, Socialisme ou Barbarie.

    Wikipedia summarises this,

    Claude Lefort (1924 – October 4, 2010) was a French philosopher and activist.

    He was politically active by 1942 under the influence of his tutor, the phenomenologistt Maurice Merleau-Ponty (whose posthumous publications Lefort later edited).  By 1943 he was organising a faction of the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris (Note: an elite institution of the Parisian intellectual bourgeoisie).

    Lefort was impressed by Cornelius Castoriadis when he first met him. From 1946 he collaborated with him in the Chaulieu-Montal Tendency, so called from their pseudonyms Pierre Chaulieu (Castoriadis) and Claude Montal (Lefort). They published On the Regime and Against the Defence of the USSR, a critique of both the Soviet Union  and its Trotskyist supporters. They suggested that the USSR was dominated by a social layer of bureaucrats, and that it consisted of a new kind of society as aggressive as Western European societies. By 1948, having tried to persuade other Trotskyists of their viewpoint, they broke away with about a dozen others and founded the libertarian socialist group Socialisme ou Barbarie. Lefort’s text L’Expérience prolétarienne was important in shifting the group’s focus towards forms of self-organisation. (Note: their views had something in common both with theories of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ of Djilas’ critique of the ‘new class’ in Stalinist states). (From Here. )

    During the 1970s Lefort moved from his libertarian socialist, or ‘gauchiste’ origins, to develop a more general (and explicitly non-Marxist) theory of ‘totaliarianism’. This owed a debt to thinkers like Hannah Arendt (the importance of the plastic nature of politics, and its degradation by ‘totalitarian’ social power), and less to the concepts of a new bureaucratic class. 

    Lefort’s  theory of ’ totalitarianism’ developed, amongst others, these themes:

    • Totalitarianism abolished the distinction between the state and society. Political power ruled all human relations and created a hierarchy of power. That is between those who give orders and those who obey. The totalitarian ruling enclosed all the public and private space.  
    • Totalitarianism denied the principle of internal division in society ( « le principe de division interne de la société ») and affirmed the primacy of the totality – subordinating every social organisation to the state, and all personal life to its orders. Stalinism rested on the ’« identification of the people with the proletariat, the proletariat with the party, the party with its leadership and the leadership with the ‘Egocrate (on the model of Bureau-crat).  (Lefort 1981, p. 175) The totalitarian state was continuously mobilised against ‘enemies’.

    Lefort elaborated this ‘ideal-typical’ picture in greater detail over the years.

    Opposed to Totalitarianism was Democracy. For Lefort this was characterised above all by  institutionalised conflict. This recognised as legitimate divergent interests, different opinions, and clashing visions of the world. Its basic principle was created around an “empty place”, that disappearance of absolute sovereignty (both historically at the end of feudalism, and intellectually, as universal suffrage became a political norm. The grounding of society was axed on no unifying central principle. Democracy was “invented” in this constant stream of divergence.

    Democracy was founded on “désincorporation”, having no fixed body. It was bolstered by the separation between civil society and the state, though Lefort considered that alongside representative mechanisms social movement played a role in democratic creativity. (More, in French, here)

    A consequence of this ‘anti-totalitarian’ stand was that the world was regarded as divided between totalitarian  and anti-totalitarian states. That is, the Western democracies and the Soviet-Chinese spheres. As a  result Lefort, and his fellow thinkers often opposed the Left, considering them agents of totalitarianism. Outside of the fringes of the French ‘second left’, the left as such showed few signs of  interest in Lefort’s ideas - though he has had some influence academically, notably in  liberal American universities, amongst post-graduates.  

     

    Lefort texts (mainly in French) at La Bataille Socialiste - here.

    Dick Howard, Claude Lefort: From the Critique of Totalitarianism to the Politics of Democracy - here.

    Socialisme ou Barbarie texts (in English) – here

    .

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    The Spirit Level: A Short Socialist Critique.

    Posted in Left, British Govern, Capitalism, European Left, Labour Party by Andrew Coates on October 8, 2010

    True Equality: a Tin of Baked Beans

    The Spirit Level. Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Richard Wilkinson, and Kate Pickett. Allen Lane. 2009.

    Ed Miliband takes charge of the Labour Party without any settled political narrative. A campaign call for a debate about ‘values’ and new ideas remains open. Roy Hattersley says that the leader “wants to see a more equal society” and that he knows that “equality and liberty” “go hand in hand”. Anchoring them, Kate Pickett, should be the “core values of equality and social justice” (Observer. 26.09.10). Pickett and Wilkinson’s The Spirit Level, has attracted attention for advocating the importance of “political will to make society more equal”(Page 264). Miliband may even be a fan of the book (here). But why and how exactly is this drive to equality to come about?

    Few people doubt that Britain today is a grossly unequal society. The evidence is before our eyes. We do not need statistics to see glaring divisions, from gated communities for the wealthy, to sink estates for the poor, from chocolate box villages for prosperous commuters, to crumbling urban areas. In a small country like Britain they are never far from each other.

    Equality, that is bringing the less well-off up to a higher living standard, and justice, that is ending the exploitation of powerful positions for material and social gain, are perennial themes of left-wing parties. The Third Way, or New Labour, famously advocated equality of opportunity, equipping the aspirational to compete on the global market. Since the banking bail-outs of 2008, these markets remain affected by long-term turbulence, leading to a new fiscal crisis of the state. During their terms of office both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had undermined public services, by direct privatisations and outsourcing. Now, under David Cameron, and Nick Clegg, the state is ready to be further marketised, under the guise of the ‘big society’ as its core functions, nationally and locally, are hived off to private companies, ‘social enterprises’ and ‘volunteers’. In the process resources are transferred to those who exercise power, and the poor are reduced to a ‘safety net’ welfare state.

    In response to this some Labour supporters, and the left, in groups like Compass, have begun to coalesce around the need for equality and social justice. Social democracy appears to have ended its long retreat. Policy that might shape a future government’s actions is the crucial issue. Does this imply greater ‘fairness’ as, say Will Hutton advocates – “just deserts” not equality – in order to “unleash a flood of productive entrepreneurship” (Observer New Review. 26.09.10). Or is something more radically egalitarian needed? A focus on equal conditions of life? Perhaps, in a more directly socialist vein, a modern version of what the French Revolutionary Babeuf called, “l’égalitié des biens et des traveux” (equality of property and work)?

    Evidence Based Policy.

    Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, in the Spirit Level introduce an empirical element to this debate. That is, not by just showing that inequality exists (which is standard fare of sociology courses) but what effects it has. They claim that, “The role of this book is to point our that greater equality is the material foundation on which better social relations are built.”(Page 265) It claims to appeal not to our sense of outage at inequality, or fears about the social unrest and degradation it causes. Rather it is, they assert, addressed to our reason, as “Evidence based politics”. As such Pickett and Wilkinson try to speak to everyone. That is, by showing how inequality saps away at all our lives, they can convince even those with the highest revenues that they would benefit from a more even distribution of wealth. So, “Not only do large inequality produce all the problems associated with social difference and divisive class prejudices which go with them, but as later chapter show, it also weaken community life, reduces trust, and increases violence.”(Page 45) A more equalitarian society would help us all be “creative, adaptable, inventive, well-informed and flexible” (Page 263)

    (more…)

    Suffolk County Council and the ‘Big Society’.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on October 10, 2010

    From Big Government to…. where?

    What is the Government’s idea of the ‘Big Society’? Ian Birrell, a former speechwriter for David Cameron writes (Here),

    At its core, the big society is an attempt to connect the civic institutions that lie between the individual and the state – and these range from the family and neighbourhood to churches, charities, libraries, local schools and hospitals. It is born out of recognition that our centralised state has become too big, too bureaucratic and just too distant to support many of those most in need of help, and that it deters people from playing a more active role in public life.

    This, then, is the theory. But how are individuals going to connect to these bodies  differently to the way they do now? How are their roles in our lives going to change? How are they going to be less “distant” and encourage people’s “active role in public life”?

    In political terms, this means passing power to the lowest level possible: radical public service reform, so that schools, social services, planning and even prisons are more responsive to the needs of those using them; and social action, to encourage more people to play a role in society. Not just charities, but neighbourhood groups, workers’ co-operatives, social enterprises and, yes, businesses.

    Let’s look at what is fast becoming a laboratory for the Big Society. The experiment in hiving-off public services to these groups, and…yes, business. That is Suffolk County Council’s plans to ‘divest’ itself of direct delivery of nearly all its functions.

     Jeremy Pembroke, leader of Suffolk County Council,  has written in the Ipswich Evening Star (24.9.10) of the “new philosophy”  Its based on

    • Greater personal responsibility.
    • Stronger society.
    • A smaller and less intrusive government - a government that works for us, not against us.

    He talked of increasing the “strength and number of bonds that link individuals in a  community”. This would mean we’ll be “happier and more fulfilled”. We will have to take “more responsibility for our own lives”. And “a public sector which does less, costs less.” So in the new big society is marked by  “people power”. It’s a place “in which we are more responsible, do more ourselves and for our neighbours”.

    The County’s New Strategic Direction, now being implemented, is, as we have noted before,  based on plans to hive off nearly all its services.

    The First Phase of transfers includes:

    •    Transactional property
    •    Registrars
    •    Suffolk traded services
    •    Employment enterprises, learning and careers advice
    •    Libraries
    •    Home First 
    office
    •    Independent Living Centres
    •    Highway Services
    •    Country Parks
    •    Economic Development
    •    Youth clubs, and Integrated Youth Support and Outdoor Education
    •    Early Years & Childcare, including Children’s Centres
    •    Home Shield Plus
    •    Hate Crime Service

    There will be less funding, and one assumes any private company will provide a service at a lower cost only by lowering standards. People will have to more self-reliant, from those suffering from dementia, to the victims of Hate Crimes. Fortunately, Pembroke writes, there will a lighter ”burden of inspection” to monitor the outcomes of his plans.

    In the Evening Star again (1.10.10), Celia Hodson of ‘Choose Suffolk’, says these are “exciting times”. Apparently the new system will have to “accommodate a spectrum of opinion “(even those who oppose it?). ‘greater cotnrol’ will involve, “such activities as volunteers working in libraries to help keep them open.”

    A “real sense of empowerment” will be created by such path-breaking initiatives as “next generation broadband services for Suffolk”.

    No doubt the less well-off in Central Ipswich and the Housing Estates are already gearing up for such “innovative solutions” to their problems.

    Simon Ash, Suffolk Chef Constable, (Evening Star 8.10.10) is equally enthusiastic about the “opportunities to be seized” by the Big Society.  Less Whitehall interference, he writes, will by “removing interference from the centre” be a step forward. “The  use of volunteers in a  range of roles supporting frontline police will become increasingly more common.” “Strong and resilient communities” will sustain policing.

    One wonders what happens where communities are not convinced enough to join in with the Conservative idea of the Big Society. Will the Police still offer their full services to them?

    This experiment will create enormous inequalities in the County. The prosperous volunteering, business aware areas will maintain something near to the present of  public services. The rest will have to get what they can. voluntary groups and Charites - which are not, for all their merits democratically responsible bodies – will get resources. As will even less responsible private companies and so-called “social enterprises” (which if Housing Associations are to go by, they will  end up resembling the private sector structures).

     ’Distant’ and equal treatment will give way to highly individualised standards – underpinned by a restoration of traditional deference and hierarchies particularly in rural and districts dominated by the wealthier. People’s rights to services will be replaced by a  dependency on the good will of their neighbours.

    It is also highly unlikely that any of the sub-contractors from the private sector will prove cheaper or more efficient. After an initial wave of cost-cutting, cheese-paring and salary reduction for employees these companies will milk the public purse for what they can. Teh experience of the ‘welfare-to-work business – all privately provided – indicates how such privatisation fuels the growth of a parallel tax funded private sector with its own political agenda.

    But what of the Suffolk Voluntary Sector?

    It is just about to suffer a huge series of cuts! (Here.)

     

    Meanwhile Ipswich Tories remain quiet as mice about this: Here. and Here. The Suffolk Big Society Blog has precisely one post!

    Blogging Notes: en Attendant la Grève Générale .

    Posted in Culture, Internet Freedom, Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on October 12, 2010

    Famous Bloggers.

    While waiting for the results of this morning’s start of the  French Day of Action against Pension Reform here are some long overdue Blogging Notes.

    Phil, the Very Public Sociologist (whose site  covers with verve Theory, Politics and grass-roots activity) observed a few months back that many left Bloggers had got the taste from their time on the UK Left Network Yahoo list. The hard-fought wars played out on this forum have no doubt shaped us. Some predicted that Blogging would mean we ended up ploughing our own course, with ever-decreasing contact with reality. Has this happened? It is interesting that many of these Blogs successfully integrate activism, writing immediate posts, and articles for the socialist press.

    Amongst those which are always of interest are: Organised Rage – Mick covers of a wide range of issues, particularly Irish ones, and his obituaries of labour movement figures - the latter of great value. Harpy Marx writes of her London activism, with film reviews and wonderful photos. Her in-depth knowledge of welfare makes her a leader in the field. Stroppy, a collective Blog, is entertaining with a direct insight into the doings of the London RMT. Marashajane in Union Futures  integrates her work as a member of the Labour Representation Committee with East London left union and Labour politics. Anna Chen produces a professional Blog with wit. Her defence of China is carried  further by Socialist Unity. Dave’s Part, Dave Osler’s Blog, manages to directly address the kind of political issues a wider public talks about. Dolphinarium swims on, in-between month-long glasses of wine.

    Harry’s Place – whose founder believe or not originated on UKLN - has defended Israel more and more vociferously. Its Ezraitist phase, fighting the Cold War by re-heating Google left-overs, overshadows its continuing useful role as an exposer of Islamism and its apologists.  

    Other Blogs worth noting: Shiraz Socialist – for its against-the-grain attacks and good sense about Islamism. Rosie Bell, raising the cultural tone. Bob From Brockley offers an indispensable round-up of left Blogging, and recently wrote a superb history of the RCP/Living Marxism. Poumista covers with rigour the kind of left the Tendance comes from. The Spanish Prisoner does great film reviews, and – a real source of new information – explains life on the Dole as an American leftist. Entdinglichung covers such a range of European leftist news, history and theory, that one wonders how he manages it. Beyond the Transition is essential reading on the former Eastern Bloc.

     

    Locally the much heralded wave of citizen bloggers has largely failed to take off. On Suffolk County Council’s plans to flog off and hive-away all its services  Tendance Coatesy has been largely alone in providing information and comment. The two main Ipswich Blogs worth looking at (with noses held) are Tory ones: Riverside View and Bridge Ward News. Though Labour Councillor Alisdair Ross’s Blog shows potential. Poor (as in piss-poor) old Ipswich Spy seems to have been taken on a well-deserved trip to the Knacker’s Yard.

    Apologies to anyone I’ve missed for the moment.

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    France After Mass Demos: Oil Refinery Strikes May Lead to County Shut-Down.

    Posted in Europe, European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on October 13, 2010

    This may lead to a country-wide transport seize-up (combined with rail and public network strikes) and economic shut-down.

    Two other areas indicating  a ‘radicalisation’ of the French protests.

    Strikes and demos (no-one contests that the latter have grown in size – here):

    Young People:

    French Presidents tremble when the French lycéens begin to march!

     

    Latest Photo:

     NPA Posters,

    Sarko Out!

    France: Mobilisations Accelerate and ‘Se Radicalisent”.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on October 14, 2010
    Devant le lycée Voltaire à Paris, jeudi 14 octobre.
    AFP/PIERRE VERDY
    Devant le lycée Voltaire à Paris, jeudi 14 octobre.

    C’est la faute à Voltaire!

    France is undergoing a radicalisation of protests against the government’s reform plans. The screw tightens around striking Oil refineries. Not just university students but lycéens (secondary school students) have joined the movement against raising the Pension age in growing numbers. Here. Today there have been clashes between at high schools and police in Montreuil et Saint-Denis (la Banlieue) - here. The Green Mayor of Montreuil has just denounced “police violence” against the young protesters here.

    A violent confrontation took place yesterday in Caen between demonstrators and the police. (More here) A 19 year old , on the edge of a march against the pension reforms, was seriously injured (narrowly escaping brain damage) by a Police Tear-Gas projectile.

    The left backs continuing mobilisation. The Communist Daily, l’Humanité is one of the best sources of information – here. The Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA) has more news from those who would like to radicalise the movement.

    Former Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal is said to have called on young people to join the protests (which she denies – here). 

     

    The Parti de Gauche has published a comprehensive alternative programme for the future of pensions (here).

    The next Day of Action is on the 16 of October.

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    The Cameron Delusion. Peter Hitchens. Mind at the End of its Tether.

    Posted in Britain, British Govern, Conservative Party, Conservatives by Andrew Coates on October 15, 2010
    Anti-Utopian Conservative.

    The Cameron Delusion. Peter Hitchens. Continuum 2010.

    Peter Hitchens is a Christian. A conservative Christian to boot. One who finds his ideas out of kilter with the modern Conservative Party. To him the real political divisions today are not between the nominally Left and Right. They are “between idealist, optimistic. ‘progressives’, and anti-utopian, pessimistic conservatives. “(P viii). The real contrast is between the “utopian reformer” and the “anti-utopian conservative”. Or more simply, between those who believe in the “perfectibility of man” and those who believe in “Original Sin” (Page 197)

    Where does David Cameron stand in this? The SWP’s Richard Seymour has noticed that, “The Conservative Party under David Cameron represents itself as a ‘progressive’ force in British politics, concerned with gender equality, civil liberties and the rising inequality of wealth.” (The Meaning of David Cameron. 2010) The same observation fuels Hitchens’s ire, “The Conservative Party is in any case just as committed as New Labour to fiercely egalitarian economic and social policy, combined with very high public spending, and dependent for its success on excessive borrowing.”(Page 8) That is, one assumes, they are out to prefect us all. He, by contrast, would wish us to live under proper Burkean conservatism “attached to liberty and limited government”.

    The Cameron Delusion goes to great pains to illustrate this point. That is, that there is a “new establishment” around “leftist and ‘progressive’ attitudes” that are the “ triumphalist orthodoxy”. By contrast it’s “faith, piety, chastity – and attempts to apply Christian belief in public life – which have become outrageous and likely to attention self-righteous derision and even the attention of the law.”(Page xi)

    New Labour is infected with this kind of derision (despite its pious leaders) – riddled with former Marxists it inherits the “the Spirit of 1968.”(Page xvi). But even the Conservatives bow before the consensus, a “centre-left party” (Page 43) Indeed “All three major parties share the same left-liberal policies.”(Page xxxv).the end result? A Labour defeat – in prospect as he wrote this cut-price Philippic – will nor reverse the trend. Hitchens asks, “When Britain dies, which seems likely to happen quite soon…”(P 196). One can feel the tears welling.

    Wounded Animal.

    The Cameron Delusion reads as if it’s written by a wounded animal thrashing around in gamekeeper’s trap, There are only a few interesting arguments made amongst the screams and yelps.

    Hitchens is revealing – unlike his brother chronicling his own move from the left – about his turn to visceral ultra-conservatism. he initially warmed to working class bluff good cheer.  But the former public school-boy found, during the 1970s, that it was outrageous that their bloody-mindedness led to unreasonable refusals to do what managers and employers told. He soon frankly loathed anything that disrupted the social order.  The source of this threat became clearer. A pattern emerged: workers’ organisations were influenced by Soviet Communism. So much so that they were hostile to workers’ movements in countries like Poland, that challenged the People’s Democracies’ tyranny. It was that which must be exposed.

    After direct experience, Hitchens, found life in Eastern Europe unbearable. Here again he began to have visions of encroaching Soviet power in Britain. There was a resemblance between the “concrete estates and the propaganda of the Warsaw Pact countries” something close to the “greyer, harsher parts of my own country” (page 59) Concluding that the greyness was the fault of Labour local authorities he reasoned that the shadows would further spread Warsaw Pact darkness over Britain if given the chance. The idea that anyone, whether a Stalinist or a British Labour Councillor, would want to have the best kind of public housing possible apparently does not occur to him. Instead we are left with the intriguing notion that the 1970s London local government may well have “supported the suppression of opposition parties, the secret police and the Gulag.” (Page 60) That is, to add his Question mark, answered by looking at what Hitchens claims is their admiration for Bukharin, Lenin, and, indeed Trotsky. All were no doubt models for County Hall leadership – an admiration carried, if one accepts this dodgy reasoning, by Ken Lvingstone to this day.

    For Hitchens the impression of menacing socialist gloom and tyranny was bolstered by his experiences of the British revolutionary left – notably the SWP. Here he miles more revealing than his brother Christopher Hitchens, largely because Peter has some direct grass-roots experience. His main objection to the SWP is that they pretended the USSR was nothing to do with them, when it was “the fault of people exactly like us, but we closed our mind to this with a web of excuses.”(Page 95) This interesting causal claim – identical in logical shape to the one through which one could bind Hitchens to every Christian atrocity in history as well – is linked to a more specific one. The SWP attracted nutters, often-violent ones as well. In village near to his base in Swindon he met a “misfit”, who had “something physically fearsome about him, not revolutionary at all” (Page 77)

    Apparently this way a sign of the “dark hole”, “opening up in the ground under my feet”. Or perhaps it was a sign that politics, of any stripe, attracts odd-balls. The 1970s were the time when conservatives and union haters  were mobilising in various tin-pot private armies. Some were quite seriosu, others, fantasists. As I can testify from my extensive knowledge, from Liberal to Tories, to Labour and the hard left, the political world is full of the strangest creatures. Some might suggest that Peter Hitchens is one of them. But I am too polite to do so.

    Against the War.

    Another series of points revolves around Blair’s backing for Humanitarian Intervention, from Kosovo to the invasion of Iraq. This led to a de facto alliance between neo-conservatives and some liberals on the left. The occupation of Iraq was justified as opposition to Sadam Hussain’s fascism, and bolstered by reference to Al-Qaeda’s atrocities, above all the attacks on the Twin Towers. Both encouraged “regime change” by force. Both held to some kind of belief “in human perfectibility and thinks its holy ends justify its unholy means..”(Page xiii). This section of the Left denounces Islam, breaking with the pro-Islamism of the anti-War left, and could “continue to condemn religious faith, as fiercely and as contemptuously as possible” (P 186). They could also be “warlike, patriotic and radical all at once.”(Page 179) As a portrait this fits some of the signers of the Euston Manifesto, but amongst them one can find people with more reservation about the war than its more publicly known cheer-leaders.


    Hitchens was against he war, on the grounds that Saddam Hussian did not threaten national sovereignty, and that the legal conditions for an attack on Iraq were not present. On Islam he point out, rightly that some of those opposed to the Iraq expedition have developed a political cringe towards all forms of political Islam, including the most reactionary types of Islamism. The Respect Party was surely influenced by the view of “Muslims” as “convenient substitutes for the white working class which had now ceased to support it, or vanished altogether” (Page 100)

    The idea that there is a ‘white’ working class exists or could ever be a political agent is pretty ropey. Nobody has yet defined such a group on clear ethnic or ‘racial’ criteria. Given the rise in the numbers of mixed race people it is unlikely they will ever do so. But the deeper fault here is the way Islamism gets treated. Islamist parties are led and structured by the pious bourgeoisie, which have nothing to do with the labour movement. From this it would follow that the left should not ally with them but with, for example, secularist parties of the left in the so-called ‘Muslim’ world and amongst ‘ethnic’ communities with this background. This would naturally reveal deeper differences, the very division between the left’s basic progressive principles and the religious conservatism of Islamism that parallels Hitchens’ own. He at least is aware of this. As the believer in Original Sin states, “I regard Muslims as allies against he current fashion for militant atheism, and against the moral chaos which it is creating.”(Page 97) Left-wingers of all varieties please note.

    But these moments of political lucidity are rare. Hitchens could not be further wrong than in his starting point: that the Tories are ‘left-wing’ in any meaningful sense. The Conservative-Liberal Coalition is wrenching out the last blocks of the Fabian state, in a drive to build a new Market state. It has just abolished a raft of unaccountable Quangos. By heavily cutting public spending and axing grey Warsaw Pact style services, it will let the Big Society flourish It is beholden to private outsourced companies and local oligarchies (from Free Schools to hived off municipal services). It is intent on boosting spiritual belief through segregated religious schools and the transfer of welfare responsibility to religious charities. It is, in short determined to realise the Burkean dream. The people of this country, the “thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the show of the British oak” can chew the cud and be content again. The left, the “insects of the hour”, “little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome” will be ignored. (Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke).

    For all these wishes, just be sure, Peter, that you have not heard the last of  us, the “swinish multitude”,

    The Cameron Delusion

    Lib-Tory Big Society Drug and Homeless Strategy: Cut Off Help (Iceni and HOP).

    Posted in British Govern, Conservative Party, East Anglia, Ipswich, Liberal Democrats by Andrew Coates on October 16, 2010

    No Help from the Big Society.

    The Ipswich Evening Star yesterday has an article wittering on about the importance of ‘social enterprises’ and the ‘voluntary sector Some type from  Housing Action , Jim Overbury, seemed to be licking his lips at the prospect of more cash and power flowing his way.

     

    He says, “Can libraries, care centres and the state of the roads be delivered not by county council employees, but by employees of a social enterprise? Of course they can but the process of the change may be difficult. Whilst the managers may see the logic, getting the hearts and minds of the workforce and training the volunteers is harder. “

    So not only libraries but roads and care services will be delivered by volunteers!

    Meanwhile the Government has cut all funding the Iceni Project.

    Award–winning charities such as Iceni Project – which gained nationwide acclaim for tackling street prostitution in Ipswich – and Focus12 – which has helped stars such as Russell Brand and Davina McCall to kick hard drugs – face possible cuts after it emerged that Suffolk Drug and Alcohol Action Team Partnership (Suffolk DAAT) could award funding to new tenders.

    The EADT believes that other services set to face proposed funding cuts include NORCAS and the Suffolk Mental Health Partnership Trust.

    (More Here.)

    We learn from reliable sources that Health Outreach Project (HOP) that provides medical treatment for the homeless, those with mental problems, and addiction issues is also for the chop. (who HOP is Here)

    The Evening Star has belatedly followed Tendance Coatesy and says it will be ”watching closely” Government and Suffolk County cuts and sell-offs.

    Our source indicates that one thing to look at is the rise in burglary, drug pushing and prostitution that will follow these cut-backs.

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    French Anti ‘Pension Reform’ Demos: 3 Million or 824,000 Strong?

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Welfare State by Andrew Coates on October 17, 2010

    One of Saturday’s Marches in France.

    Réforme des retraites: 3 millions de manifestants selon la CGT… 825.000 selon la police

    3 Million demonstrators to the CGT …825,000 for the Police.

    More Here.

    In any case the numbers are huge and not going down!

    More French Protests next Tuesday when we will be lobbying Parliament against the Cameron-Clegg Cuts.

     

    Monday: petrol running out (here). ‘Incidents’ between school students and the police (here). Lorry-Drivers Block Roads (here)

     

    Grève: les routiers entrent en scène 

    TUC Rallies Against Cuts, France, The Street Explodes.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservative Party, Conservatives, European Left, French Left, French Politics, Unions by Andrew Coates on October 20, 2010

    We Need This Here.

    Nearly a dozen Ipswich supporters of the Suffolk Coalition For Public Services joined other East Anglian trade unionists and anti-cuts activists on a UNITE sponsored coach to the Westminster TUC Rally against Cuts yesterday. The Morning Star reports that around 3,000 people filled Westminster Central Hall -  high attendance for a workday.

    The All Together for Public Services event brought together a broad coalition of trade unionists, campaign groups and community leaders.

    Waves of colourful trade union flags rose and vibrated across the giant hall as public service union Unison general secretary Dave Prentis proclaimed: “Today the fightback begins. Hands off our public services.”

    Protesting that the government was “taking a chainsaw to our public services,” Mr Prentis pledged: “We will march in our thousands, and we will vote in our millions to ditch this coalition.”

    Urging a massive fightback against the cuts, general union Unite assistant general secretary Tony Woodley said: “Trade unions have got to lead, not be led. Let us lead.”

    The entire hall rose to give a standing ovation to 14-year-old school student Lizzie Louden, who told of the devastation at her school in Leytonstone, London, following cancellation of the Building Schools for the Future programme.

    Another thunderous reception greeted Sherlock Holmes actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who told how budget cuts were a body blow to the arts.

    Irish union Siptu vice-president Patricia King reported on the collapse of the Celtic Tiger and the damaging effect of swingeing cuts, which had pushed unemployment up from 4.5 per cent in 2008 to 14 per cent today.

    “If you want to know what Britain will look like in two years’ time, just look west across the Irish Sea to your closest neighbour,” she warned.

    National Pensioners Convention general secretary Dot Gibson condemned the coalition concept of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, which she said came straight out of the Victorian era.

    Other speakers included Child Poverty Action Group chief executive Alison Garnham, Friends of the Earth executive director Andy Atkins and End Violence Against Women Coalition director Holly Dustin.

    (More Here.)

    After this there was Lobbying. Our delegation to Ipswich MP Benjamin Gummer were told that he “understood” their concerns. But that the cuts were “Labour’s fault”. He was firmly told that the reductions in Public Spending were now his government’s responsiblity and that they would hit hard,  especially against women and the poor.

    It was noted by some that the TUC’s policy of a ‘board coalition’ of opposition to the Liberal-Tory spending Plans, while fine as it went, did not address the principal problems these cuts raised: how to fight effectively against them. NGOs and Charites have their place in opposing attacks on the poor and vulnerable  but how could they actually defend people’s jobs and public services?

    From the Irish TUC Patricia King pointed out that when push came to shove it was the responsibility of the unions to fight back. Tony Woodley, who made a fine sharp speech, gave indications that this was his approach as well. Will the TUC General Council move towards more dynamic mobilisation, or wait until a planned national demonstration next year?

    Meanwhile France seems to teeter on the brink of full-scale civil unrest (Here).

    The first signs of  cuts- which is what the pension reform is all about – have been met with fury.

    Much is made of the differences between the French attitude to protest  and the British one (as Newsnight yesterday revelled in).

    In fact the French union movement is many respects weaker than the UK one – split between rival federations, and with very many fewer members. |Nor are people in this country all the  forelock tuggers of the Mondo Man stripe (hard against the weak, servile against the strong).

    There is more in common between the ‘people of the left’ in Britain and the ‘gens de gauche’ in France than monolingual commentators in right-wing and liberal press give credit.

    We are of the same kidney.

    If the British unions were able to use their strength they could (and the Westminster Rally indicates this) turn out the troops, if not on the scale of France, at least in impressive numbers.

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    France: Violence, Les Casseurs Make An Entry.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on October 20, 2010

     

     

    French Police and their Hard Men.

    There are increasing reports of violent incidents in France.  ‘Casseurs’ (literally, breakers, smashers), determined to fight the police, sack shops and burn vehicles, have appeared on the fringes of lycèen marches. This morning Lyons was the theatre of clashes. There are continuing incidents in the Parisian banlieue, notably in Nanterre (here).

    No one doubts that  disaffected, and often opportunistically vandalising, youth are capable of this on their own back. .

    But one always wonders, when this happens, just how convenient it is for Sakozy, for this to happen.

    Picture shows the kind of people the French state has working for it in these conditions.

     

    (Hat-Tip FMR)

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    Spending Review: Under 35s to Live in Rabbit Hutches.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservative Party, Housing Benefit, Welfare State by Andrew Coates on October 21, 2010

     

    Future Under-35s Accommodation.

    Okay I made that headline up. But only just.

    The item that stuck out in the Spending Review (though there’s plenty else to get annoyed about) is this.

    From Inside Housing, Here.

    The government has announced further plans to cut housing benefit payments in the comprehensive spending review.

    From 2012, single people under 35 will be paid a shared room rate rather than a rate for a full flat.

    The shared room rate is lower than all other housing benefit payments and is currently paid to claimants under 25. It is based on the amount of rent charged for a single room with shared use of the rest of a house.

    The government expects raising the age at which the shared room rate can be paid will save £215 million by 2014/15.

    Announcing the change, which comes on top of savings announced in the emergency Budget and at the Conservative party conference, chancellor George Osborne said: ‘This will ensure that housing benefit rules reflect the housing expectations of people of a similar age not on benefits.’

    Today’s review also revealed a cap on benefits for out-of-work single people of £18,200. This follows the announcement of a £26,000 cap for workless families at the Tory party conference two weeks ago, and will be administered in the same way, with housing benefit being cut up to the cap.

    Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter, said: ‘The combined worry of cuts to housing benefit and the slashing of the affordable house building subsidy, coupled with the absence of a long-term strategy, will be devastating for the housing aspirations of thousands of young people consigned to increasing costs and bringing up their families in an insecure private rented sector.

    ‘The chancellor acknowledged this generational shift in housing aspiration for under 35s in his speech.’

    This comes after this, (Inside Housing here),

    Local housing allowance will be limited to between £280 and £400 a week depending on house size and housing benefit will be reduced by 10 per cent if a claimant has claimed jobseeker’s allowance for 12 months.

    So, under-35s will face restrictions on how they live, and forced to share (at least in terms of their benefits).

     At the same time anyone on the Dole for more than 12 months will have top fork out an extra %10 of the rent – which could be anything from a  tenner a week upwards. That’s off their £64 JSA.

    They think of everything to help us, these Liberals and Tories!

    Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste: Coming Congress Debates.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Front de Gauche, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on October 22, 2010

    NPAlogo3-2

    Megaphone Still Shouting?  

    The Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA) will have its Congress on the 10th, 11th and 12th of December.  This will be the occasion for the two-year old party to draw a balance-sheet of its own activities. In the super-heated atmosphere of the revolt against President Sarkozy’s pension reforms, they will try to set out a strategy for the French anti-capitalist left.

    French politics, for historical, cultural and political reasons (beginning with 1789), has substantial importance for British socialists. While not attempting to take a ‘line’ (though one cannot avoid critical remarks), some description of  debates on the French left, of which the NPA’s are only one aspect, can be useful for our political development. That is, they are in the context of a Europe-wide wave of financial stringency, the growth of the privatising market-state (accelerated by cuts), and efforts in many countries to create serious socialist alternatives.

    NPA’s  Foundation.

    The NPA originates in the Fourth International’s French party, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR). In 2007 their Presidential candidate, Olivier Besancenot got 1,498, 581 votes in the first round of the elections. Following this, and in line with the (still resonating) wave of ‘anti-globalisation’ protests worldwide it was decided to launch a new party. This would open up the old LCR to changed conditions. A handful of tiny left groups joined, with a much larger number of individual recruits. Committees were set up to prepare the way for what is now the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste. One third of its members come from the LCR, and 45% of National Political Committee.

    Since its formation in 2008 the NPA has defined itself, as a “une gauche de combat, anticapitaliste, internationaliste, antiraciste, écologiste, féministe, révoltée par toutes les discriminations “ that aims for a “transformation révolutionnaire de la société” based on a “nouvelle perspective socialiste démocratique pour le xxie siècle” en mettant fin à l’économie de marché”.

    There is little point in putting the same words in their English form.

    The party did not attain its target of 10,000 members, gaining 9,123 (still three times that of the LCR). It began to have an enhanced role in French political life, partly because of the articulate freshness of its ‘Postie’ Spokesperson, Olivier Besancenot, but also because it was a genuine player on the left. However media stardom did not lead to electoral success. In the of 2009 European Elections the NPA, largely standing alone, got 4,98% and no Euro Deputies.

    More Electoral Set-Backs.

    The Regional Elections of 2010 saw a further disappointment. The NPA refused agreements with anyone who would later align (under the French two round electoral system) with the ‘social liberal’ left, the Socialists. This was later modified to allow some local agreements with the left of the PS Front de Gauche (FdG) and other left forces.

    The FdG combined the ex-Socialist, Parti de Gauche (PdG), the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and a small current that had left the NPA, the Gauche Unitaire. They succeed in getting well over the 5% hurdle and won seats.

    For the NPA’s 21 Lists an average score of 3,40% was seen as “not good “.

    It was revealing that their 14 go-it-alone one had 2,85%. Those allied in 3 areas with the Parti de Gauche got between 4 and 5%. Three unitary lists (including the Parti de Gauche and others) for over 5%. (8,59 % en Languedoc-Roussillon and 13,13 % in Limousin). In the latter list the PS refused to align with them for the second tour of the election, because of the NPA’s presence. They kept the List going and scored 19,10% of the vote, resulting in two NPA candidates’ election.

    For the second round of these elections the NPA called for unity against Sarkozy and for a “third social round” around mass movement opposing the raising of the pension age.

    The NPA’s refusal of a national alliance with the FdG has been criticised on the left. It has been accused of refusing to put “les mains dans le cambouis” – get its hands dirty. That is, making alliances with the Front de Gauche (Parti de Gauche, Parti Communiste Français and Gauche Unitaire plus smaller allies). Such agreements are a key part of politics. The LCR has always been noted as a genuine partner in campaigns and social movements. The contradiction between this and their present stand has not passed without notice. This has been a major topic in its internal debates. (more…)

    Suffolk County Council Divestment, Opposition Grows.

    Posted in British Govern, Capitalism, Conservative Party, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on October 24, 2010

    Jermey Pembroke Encloses Suffolk Common Services.

    Divestment, Suffolk County’s Tories and Managers favoruite word, means privatising. It will led to most of the Council’s services  being run by commercial companies, so-called ‘social’ enterprises, and, in some cases, helped by a staff of volunteers.

    On the last point the free-market seems to run into difficulties. A few well-heeled Parish/Town councils (Southwold)  are ready to taker over running public institutions (such as Libraries) as a hobby. Most are not. Some Voluntary organisations are said to be willing, others are not. All are wary in the absence of funding.

    An important article in Paul Geater’s Evening Star column this Friday indicates rapidly eroding enthusiasm for these plans.

    Geater asks ”What is behind the county changes?” He says that the county the County has exaggerated the reduction in tis income – really exaggerated it. “This week the Country council learned it is going to have the money it gets from government grant cut by 7,1 % every year for the next four years.” With compound interest that means 26% cut. ButtSuffolk get only £216 million of its £520 non-school budget from the government. This means that “in bald figures the loss of government grant will be £56 million over four years or 11% of the budget.”

    So with a cut of just 11% why is going for “the most radical restructuring of services ever seen in this country” ? 

    Geater asks “is it being driven by an ideological dive to be seen as the most radical county in the county.”

    In Tendance Coatey’s view,  Suffolk is to be an experiment. It is probably inspired by national Free-market think-tanks, and certainly aided directly by the national Conservative Party.

    The plan is to make everyone into market-players. The end is that communities, through councils, will have to compete for services. Business and other ‘providers’, will be able to run their concerns free from outside democratic supervision. They will become political players with more power than voters. Communities will compete for services, through offering packages including their voluntary and individual resources.  Tight budget controls will mean that only those able to pay extra for what are now County responsibilities will get a decent level of provision (for everything from Home Helps, Retirement Care, to Libraries). Bargian basement level services will be offered to the poor.

    They will restore traditional authority to business friends, and the knights and ladies of the Shire. . This is not ‘radical’: it is reactionary.

    Meanwhile,

    A new campaign “Suffolk coalition for public services” has been set up by trades unionists and they are planning a protest march through the town at the end of the month.

    Organiser Roger Mackay said: “The Tory Coalition’s Comprehensive Spending Review has made it absolutely clear that the proposed cuts in the public sector are an attack based on ideology rather than economic need.

    “To claim that cutting half a million jobs is good for the country is neither fair nor true.

    “Unemployment is an economic drain on the country, but even more devastating for the individuals concerned and their families.

    “Even the Treasury has predicted that the cuts will lead to at least 500,000 public sector job losses and between 600,000 and 700,000 in the private sector over the next four years.

    “In Suffolk the projected 28per cent cut could mean 7,500 public sector and 8,500 private sector jobs over the same period.”

    The coalition is planning a protest march on November 27 from Suffolk County Council’s headquarters at Endeavour House.

    More Here.

    French Police ‘Infiltrated Demos’ to Cause Trouble.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Front de Gauche by Andrew Coates on October 25, 2010

    Were Agent-Provocateurs Involved as Well?

    Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the Parti de Gauche, alleges,

     que des policiers avaient des «consignes» pour «infiltrer» et «jeter des pierres» dans les manifestations sur les retraites.

    That Police had orders to ‘infiltrate’ and ‘throw stones’ during demonstrations against the raising of the Pension Age.

    A police union has called for  Mélenchon to be prosecuted for these claims. (More Here.) (More from Toulouse Here).

    Mélenchon says he has a picture of one such incident on his Blog.

    The Blog is now undergoing ‘maintainance’.

    Update. Blog now available.

    The key section begins, “J’en reviens aux casseurs et aux mystères qui les entourent.” – “I turn back to the ‘casseurs’ and the mysteries surrounding them.”

    The Picture is one we have already published:

    French Upheaval, Beginning of the End? Or More Mobilisations?

    Posted in Europe, European Left, French Left, French Politics, Unions by Andrew Coates on October 26, 2010

    Not Kicked Out Yet.

    The revolt against Sarkozy’s pension plans continues.

    For the moment.

    The Nouvel Observateur says that this is the “Decisive Day for the Pension Reforms” (Here)

     le vote définitif du texte mardi 26 octobre au Sénat et mercredi à l’Assemblée nationale, tandis que les étudiants sont appelés de nouveau à manifester. De leurs côtés, les syndicats se veulent rassurants et affirment que le mouvement ”continuera” et “prendra d’autres formes”.

    The definitive vote of the text (of the Pension Reform Law) takes place today in the Senate, and on Wednesday in the National Assembly. STudents are called again to demonstrate. On their side the unions say they are confident and state that the movement will “continue” and “take other forms”.

    Students are out in force in France today. (Direct reports Here.)

    7 out of 12 refineries remains blocked, but workers have voted to return to work.  There is solidarity action from Belgium workers.  against Total. The SNCF disruption has halted. In the waste collection strike, rubbish is being collected again.

    One thing is clear. If there are two more Days of Action to come (one is this Thursday) ‘other forms’ of action are unlikely to involve a General Strike. The centre-right L’Express suggests this form of words mean a move towards ‘the end’ of the conflict (Here). There is talk of the CFDT negotiating with the Bosses’ union over youth employment.

    What it means is that in effect the revolt has reached a limit in its present form.

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    Rampant May 68 in France?

    Posted in Capitalism, European Left, French Left by Andrew Coates on October 27, 2010

     

     

     Annick Coupé, spokesperson of the  l’Union syndicale Solidaires (close to the NPA), * says,

    Beaucoup de commentateurs ont employé l’expression ”mai rampant”, c’est la référence à ce qui s’est passé en Italie dans les années 1967-1968, où il y a eu quasiment en permanence des mobilisations sociales sous diverses formes : grèves, manifestations, occupations… qui étaient impulsées à la base et qui regroupaient aussi bien des syndicalistes que des jeunes.

    Many commentators have used the expression “rampant May”, referring to the events that took place in Italy between 1967 – 68 (in English the more significant period, 1968 – 9 in Italy is sometimes called the Hot autumn), where there was a near permanent round of diverse social mobilisations, demonstrations, occupations…which grouped together the grass-roots of the trade unions as well as young people.

    Effectivement, aujourd’hui, des salariés, des jeunes, des précaires, des chômeurs se retrouvent au niveau local et se mobilisent ensemble depuis plusieurs semaines. Les liens qui se sont constitués sont des liens interprofessionnels et intergénérationnels et ne vont pas s’arrêter. T

    Today, in effect, employees, young people, those in precarious jobs, the unemployed have locally found themselves organising together – between generations and they will not be halted.

    La colère sociale reste très forte et l’idée que ce gouvernement est au service d’une minorité reste très présente. Il faudra donc continuer à se mobiliser dans les semaines et les mois qui viennent. Mais évidemment, personne ne peut dire ni décider comment cette colère va continuer à s’exprimer dans l’avenir.

     Anger at a the idea that this government can act on behalf of a minority remains present and intense. We will have to continue to mobilise in the weeks and months to come. But obviously nobody can say, or decide, how this rage will continue, or be expressed in the future.

    (From Le Monde Here.)

    To me this looks close to saying that this particular battle is nearly over.

    *Solidaires claims 90000 members, in 45 federations ou national unions, according to professional sectors, (SUD-Rail, SUD-Education, SUD-Aérien…

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    Big Questions for Suffolk Council, And Some More.

    Posted in East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on October 28, 2010

    Jeremy Pembroke and Friend.

    The East Anglian Daily Times asks some important questions about Suffolk County Council’s Plans to Divest its services.

    The Daily says that it is “neutral” about the changes. But the very fact of putting such a list forward – including many very awkward topics – is unlikely to please Tory Council leader Jeremy Pembroke and whatever her title is, Anthea Hill.

    We would like to increase their disconfort by adding a few comments of our own.

    (from Here.)

    THE QUESTIONS

    1. Impact on vulnerable people.

    Has Suffolk County Council thought through all the implications of its new strategic direction, especially for the most vulnerable people?

    Given the County says that we all have to shoulder our own responsibilities this is a very sensitive issue. Who is going to shoulder the vulnerables’  repsonsibilities? What exactly is proposed to do with  existing support services – that is are there not just transfers of agencies to private hands but service charge rises and cuts envisaged?

    2. Local government’s moral and legal responsibilities.

    Has it done this in the context also of other impacts over the next two/three years – e.g. reduced personal income, loss of employment, reduced welfare and housing benefits?

    Does Suffolk County Council think that people will realistically be able to make the ‘choices’ and ‘take control’ of their circumstances in the way it proposes?

    See previous point. Does the Council see the way forward for a transfer of responsibility to families and carers? In which case what support is to be given – and taken away?

    3. Linking things together.

    Has Suffolk County Council a clear plan for linking together the changes proposed and their timescales?

    This is a hard one for the County, which anyone who cares to look can rapidly find an answer: they have announced things in dribs and drabs. The Tory Local Government Blog had the list of ‘first wave’ transfers up before the County put it on their site. Their plans at present remain in a shambles – at least from what we see from the outside.

    Good one EADT!

    4. Leadership capacity.

    Does Suffolk County Council have the general leadership knowledge, experience and capacity for the scale and pace of changes proposed – and their implications, including unanticipated events?

    Well, we know the answer to that one….

    How will the council build support for what is proposed?

    Answer: confusing people by sending out mixed messages. Making extreme free-market statements, than slightly backtracking.  Prevaricating. Letting it seem that the worst will never happen.

    The old Strategy.

    First  make a really hard-line set of right-wing  proposals.

    Then some slight compromises .

    People will think that a good-old British compromise has been reached.

    5. Suffolk’s local economy.

    What quantity of services does Suffolk County Council anticipate being provided by organisations which are not currently part of the Suffolk local economy?

    More to the point who are these organisations? What information do electors have about them? How much are their CEOs and top-staff paid?

    6. Suffolk County Council and the NHS.

    Excellent point.

    7. External advice and feedback.

    What advice is SCC taking from others nationally or regionally about the changes proposed?

    Let’s be frank. What free-market Think Tanks and ideologues are involved?

    What has been the feedback received so far?

    8. ‘Pro-active and wide-ranging engagement’

    On 23 September Suffolk County Council agreed formally that there ‘should be pro-active and wide-ranging engagement across Suffolk to establish whether the key new strategic direction proposals find favour with the communities we all represent before moving forward to implementation; and the findings from this engagement be reported back to full council at its meeting on 2 December.’

    What pro-active and wide-ranging engagement has there been so far with…..

    We know the answer: no-one, nowhere….nothing, nothing and nothing.

    The Suffolk Conservatives can barely be bothered to talk about this. Even Eager Tory Toadies Like BridgeWard News spends more of his time on Benedict’s Cycling Stunt than engaging on these issues.

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    Counterfire and the Coalition of Resistance: a critical analysis.

    Posted in Britain, Labour Movement, Left, Marxism, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on October 29, 2010

    Is this the Way Forward?

    Counterfire, the Coalition of Resistance and John Rees.

    “At last, when the Duchess saw that no patterns would do her any good in the framing of her world; she resolved to make a world of her own invention, and this world was composed of sensitive and rational self-moving matter; indeed, it was composed only of the rational, which is the subtlest and purest degree of matter..”

    (The Blazing World Margaret Cavendish. 1666)

    The Coalition of Resistance (CoR) is holding a conference on the 27th of November. It was set up to “organise a broad movement of active resistance to the Con-Dem government’s budget intentions.” In view of the Cabinet’s massive reductions in state spending its task now is to “Oppose cuts and privatisation in our workplaces, community and welfare services”. Its role in making opposition effective is to “Support the development of a national co-ordinating coalition of resistance.” Apart from a list of left-wing signatures, it has received support from the Communist Party of Britain’s ‘People’s Charter’.Already there has been controversy about this “co-ordination”. Some on the left support different initiatives, such as the National Shop Stewards’ Network, others are relucant to commit to such a “cordination” outside the official labour movement.

    Exactly what the Coalition of Resistance (CoR) owes to a small network called Counterfire is a matter of conjecture. Clearly the group hosts the CoR’s site. Counterfire’s best-known figures are John Rees, late of the Socialist Workers Party, and currently still influential, and his partner, another ex-SWPer, Lindsey German, in the Stop the War Coalition (StWC). The reasons for their departure from the SWP are of some interest to the inner Leftist Trainspotter, but largely personality and tactically based, have only a limited relevance here. The SWP’s present activity, with the Right to Work campaign, has its own difficulties. In this case, the Counterfire network is small, which has led, it is said, a few small left groups to feel that they can work with the CoR with interference. What is more important, however,  is regardless of their strength, is these leaders’ political practice, from the Socialist Alliance to the StWC, and their present stand.

    From United Fronts to Coalitions.

    John Rees has recently written of the importance of political “experience” in “the struggle itself.” Equally significant is “theoretical experience.” (1) As any visitor to the Counterfire site can see it is full of reports, of varying quality, on international and British “mobilisations” and mass movements. For Rees, an enduring issue is that any large-scale protest (whether industrial or social) shows “uneven consciousness in the working class movement”. Workers have a “dual consciousness”, both of being “of subordination”, which creates a sense of acceptance of capitalism, and a good feeling that they “have the right to control” their work The two meet in ‘reformism “a particular amalgam of good sense and common sense” To deal with this he defended the view that this means that the left should build the united front “to maximise the unity of the working class in struggle, and at the same time give revolutionaries and reformists the chance to discuss their wider differences.” Yet it must be based on “separation on matters of principle such as reform and revolution. We cannot properly determine those immediate issues on which we can unite unless we also properly, and organisationally, separate over matters of principle.” (2) (more…)

    Carla Bruni in the Comics.

    Posted in Culture, French Politics by Andrew Coates on October 30, 2010

    Who cannot be moved to tears of joy as Carla weds Sarko?

    Fighting Religious Obscurantism.

    From Libération’s article on this new gem - Here.

    More in the Huffington Post – Here.

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    Flora Tristan: The Beauty of Life as a Feminist Socialist.

    Posted in Feminism, French Left, Labour Movement by Andrew Coates on November 1, 2010

     

    Flora Tristan (1803 in Paris – 14 November 1844) was a landmark figure in the history of the labour movement and feminism.

    She is all-too little known in the English-speaking world.

    Her writings, Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838), Promenades in London (1840), and The Workers’ Union (1843), are little read. On the left only a few feminists have paid her much attention – though she has always tended to get sidelined, particularly by the liberals who dominate ‘mainstream’  women’s studies and lobbying. This can be seen by her absence in the Wikipedia entry on the history of feminism. That Flora was also a founder of the workers’ movement and socialism may have a lot to do with that.

    It is a paradox that it is the free-market liberal and Nobel prize for Literature winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, who has made the most accessible portrait of this wonderful woman’s life. Indeed it because I was reading some of his novels – in the light of this Prize – that I rediscovered Flora and found aspects of her life I knew nothing about.

    Llosa’s The Way to Paradise (2004) is a novel with two principal characters. Flora Tristán (the accent to emphasise her half-Peruvian origin) and the painter, Paul Gauguin. The hinge linking them is that Flora was Paul’s grandmother.

    With an exhibition of Gauguin’s paintings at the Tate Modern one would normally concentration his tumultuous life – narrated with verve. No doubt many will revel in his “openly scandalous behaviour” in French colonised Tahiti. The density of his artistic sensibility unfolds through word-paintings of his famous tableaux.  His idealisation of  Tahitian ’primitiveness’ – under threat from French civilisation – and Gaugin’s sexual indulgence, and descent into racialist anti-Chinese fantasies, holds attention.

    Flora, nonetheless, is another in another class to artists behaving badly. One marked by sheer courage.  

    The ethical energy of Madame la Colère, her rage against the injustices she met  at the hands of men, and her search for a new moral world, is shattering. The details have to be sipped slowly to be grasped: she truly suffered.

    And fought back with very fibre of her being.

    The tale, as it unfolds, wrapped next to Gauguin’s, is full of  the boundless energy that drove Flora . Llosa shows tenderly Flora’s discovery of sexual love, with an aristocratic intellectual woman, Olympia. One wonders, yet hopes, that this is a true encounter with warmth. Or true at all.

    Her socialism stemmed initially from the Fourierist  and Saint-Simonian utopians, with some influence from Icarian communism. Tristan met the most reasonable of the Fourierists, Victor Considérant (one of the few whose writing still repays looking at). She gained entry to literary circles, and met the romantic socialist novelist George Sand. Cranks (paralleled today by animals rights and vegan greens), such as Saint-Simon’s High Priest, Prosper Enfantin,   swarmed in this milieu.

    But Flora was far in advance of well-intentioned utopians.

    She visited London and saw the depth of degradation early industrialisation brought. Promenades in London (which French leftists at any rate read) stands muster with the Condition of the Working Class in England, and Mayhew’s London Labour and London Poor. A measure of Llosa’s skill is that he makes the Capital’s “naked children rolling in filth” and the “stench of the whorehouses of London”  spring to substance on the page.

    Through  encounters with London Chartists Flora conceived the idea of a movement uniting men and women for their liberation and equality: the Workers’ Union.Bringing women and workers together, organising the two groups into an alliance that would transcend boundaries and could not be  crushed by a police brigade, army, or government. Then, heaven would no longer be an abstraction, and, liberated, from the  sermons of priests and the credulity of believers, it would become history, the reality of everyday life and all mortals.”

    She found, despite sectarian reservations and misogyny,  a real echo in the nascent workers’ movement. She learnt humility. Railing at the laboruers’ ignorance she was told by Gosset, the ‘Father of the Blacksmiths’ ,to grasp how they sweated for the cause. He stood by her like a rock.

    Flora toured France recruiting for her union. Crippled by illness, she was harried by the authorities, denounced by the Church, and often rejected by the workers. She found the Occitan and Provencal langauge incomprehensible, and people often not only hard to reach but deliberately unwilling to change.

    But she laid the foundations of the socialist movement and met some who treated her with immense love and devotion.

    Falling fatally ill in Bordeaux,  Tristan was nursed with great kindness by true friend. She died in their, the Lemonniers’ , house.

    “The funeral procession left the Lemonniers’ house on the rue Saint-Pierre, and wound its way slowly on foot along the streets of Bordeaux to the cemetery, under a grey and rainy sky. kong the mourners were writers, journalists, lawyers, a number of townswomen, and  nearly one hundred workers. The later took turns carrying the casket, which weighed almost nothing, The coffin cords were held by a carpenter, a stonecutter, a blacksmith, and a locksmith.”

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    Left Speaks Out Against Persecution of Christians In Middle East. Er…

    Posted in Islam, Islamism, Religion by Andrew Coates on November 2, 2010

     

    Left Should Stand For Their Freedom Too.

    Fifty-eight people, most of them worshippers from the Chaldean Catholic community, are confirmed to have been killed in the massacre, which was carried out by al-Qaida-aligned gunmen, some of whom claimed to be avenging a foiled move by a small-town US pastor to burn the Qur’an.

    Survivors spoke of religious taunts, random killings and then a gunman slaughtering hostages en masse as the Iraqi army stormed the church to end the four-hour siege.

    Things changed during the security vacuum that followed the fall of Baghdad. Christians in Mosul have been targeted by Sunni insurgents who align with the jihadi world view. Mass migrations have followed the attacks, with the number of Christians in Iraq now thought to be as low as 500,000. Those who remain see themselves as an increasingly threatened minority.

    Here.

    One of the demands of the armed Islamists concerned Egyptian Copts – Here.

    In the news reports on Sunday’s massacre by al-Qaeda of 42 Christians at Baghdad’s Our Lady of Salvation Catholic Church, one item struck many as incongruous — one of the terrorists’ demands was the release of two women purportedly held prisoner in Egyptian Coptic monasteries. While this has been little-noticed in the West, it is an explosive issue in Egypt, where threats against the Copts, about 10 percent of the population, have increased in a year that began with a massacre of Copts in Nag Hamadi on Christmas Eve.

    Part of the background is the increasing abduction and forced conversion of Coptic women. On April 19, 2010, a bipartisan group of 18 members of the U.S. Congress wrote to Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, director of the State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Office, about reports documenting that Coptic women and girls are increasingly subject to “fraud, physical and sexual violence, captivity, forced marriage, and exploitation in forced domestic servitude or commercial sexual exploitation, and financial benefit to the individuals who secure the forced conversion.” They urged the TIP Office to investigate whether this should be covered in the 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report.

    Islamist extremists responded by accusing the church of imprisoning two Christian women who had converted to Islam. One was Wafaa Constantine, wife of a Coptic priest, who disappeared in 2004 but then returned to the church. The other was Camilia Shehata, also a priest’s wife, who disappeared on July 19, 2010. Copts believed that she was abducted by Muslim extremists, and asked, without success, for the security services to investigate. There were then widespread Coptic demonstrations and, on July 23, security services returned Camilia to her husband.

    Amnesty International has been covering the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, and particularly in Egypt – Here.

    Surprisingly nothing yet from the Stop the War Coalition - here.

    Or Islamophobia Watch - here.

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    Suffolk County Council Fails To Answer Anything.

    Posted in Britain, Conservative Party, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on November 4, 2010

    Jeremy Pembroke: Protecting the Quality.

    Last week the East Anglian Daily Times posed a set of closely thought-out questions to Suffolk County Council.

    The leaders the Council have now ‘replied’.

    The inverted commas are there because it is hard to say why they thought they were replying to.

    Anyone wanting to read this can look at the paper: Here.

    A relatively more concise answer is given in the attempt at public relations titled, “An Open Letter to the People of Suffolk“.

    This whinges about “inaccurate” national media coverage.

    It then goes onto to the hard task of “dispelling the myths”.

    For the moment we will leave aside the political wriggling to avoid mentioning the hard-right, free-market origins of the New Strategic Direction.

    Though the idea that public servcies should be contracted out (and profited from) private enterprises is its core.

    Or that the cuts in central and local “funding” are so drastic  is open to question (as we have noted already).

    The really important claim that cutbacks are best met by their “third route” the aim to “change the traditional shape of the council.”

    Let look instead at  the principal “myths“.

    That, “everything is being sold off to the private sector”.

    “No” they write. “We want to provide new opportunities for Suffolk-based business and not-for-profit enterprises to deliver services previously run by the council”

    Eer – that is they will be privatised.

    That is not run by the Council, but by private companies and organisations.

    It would be hard to wade through the other ‘myth-displelling’  assertiosn. But another sticks out.

    That  ”In most cases (my emphasis) there will be no “Individual residents volunteering”. However, the “third sector” – charities and voluntary bodies” will be taking on “new work”.

    Speaking for himself, the chief executive of the Suffolk Association of Voluntary Organisations (SAVO) says, “I am very pleased that Suffolk County Council has publicly recognised the need to engage voluntary sector organisations in helping them move forward with their ambitious plans. This is the start of two way dialogue with the Council what is very important for Suffolk’s future”.

    One can read many things into this (what exactly is this ‘dialogeu’ about?). But let’s be clear, Jonathan More speaks for himself  – as a member of a Voluntary Association affiliated to SAVO I can can assure anyone reading this that he has not asked our opinions.

    The letter then asserts that decisions have not been made behind ”closed doors”.

    No they are not closed - just so far away that ordinary people cannot reach them. The added claim that the New Strategic Direction has been “top co-create it with councillors and the community” is, in this respect not wholly false. But  the ‘community’ – a typical weasel word in the document – could mean anything. From the press to a Youth Club to be closed down by in the near future) it would seem that the initiative to expresses an opinion has come from their side (for some grass-roots ideas see here).

    Not from the Council.

    Ther Council, late in the day, has announced it’s conducting an ‘On-Line Survey’ of opinion – here.

    You can express your general views in a box.

    There are few specific point to reply to.

    Most is concerned about your background in volunteering and your willingness to do more.

    I wonder why.

    Finally the important point is the Tory Council’s claim that, “we cannot afford to do all we’ve done in the past”.

    ‘We’ can however, apparently, afford to pay the high salaries and profits of the private companies and ‘social’ enterprises.

    Council leader, Jeremy Pembroke, is said to be soon on the way out.

    In our opinion he can’t go faster.

    Student Clashes in Dublin.

    Posted in Europe, European Left by Andrew Coates on November 4, 2010

     

    More Here.

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    France: Movement out of Breath? Socialist Worker gets its Oar in.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on November 5, 2010

    SWP Blames Union Leaders.

    What is happening with the French movement against Sarkozy’s Pension reforms?

    In the media many have being saying that after the Senate definitely adopted the measures the main, union, forces organising opposition, are at an impasse.

    That  the mobilisations suffer from ”essoufflement” (loss of breath). 

    That numbers are down, and (this is certain) strikes have largely stopped.

    Tomorrow will see  big protests across France.

    On the  week of the 22nd to 26th november another Day of Action is (in principle) planned.

    The centre-right Le Point reports that – Here - on last night’s 3 hour  meeting of the joint union organising committee (the ‘intersyndicale’) .

    The CGT (the largest union federation and left  linked) has pushed for militant activism. They want to continue the movement, even if has to take new forms. At the end of the meeting the CGT,

    s’est aussi montrée satisfaite de la décision de l’intersyndicale qui scelle une nouvelle fois ”l’unité qui perdure”

    Showed itself satisfied that they had sealed their “enduring unity”.

    This was not the case for the modernising CFDT,

    En revanche, le numéro deux de la CFDT Marcel Grignard a prévenu : “Nous n’envisageons ni des mobilisations massives avec des grèves, ni des manifestations partout.” “On ne va pas se mobiliser sur les retraites tous les jours jusqu’à je ne sais pas quand”, a-t-il commenté. Selon lui, les syndicats vont se retrouver lundi ”parce que tout le monde a besoin de voir comment sera la mobilisation samedi”, faisant état d’”incertitudes” sur son ampleur

    By contrast the second in command of the CFDT, Marcel Grignard, gave notice that “we  foresee neither huge mobilisations, strikes, nor demonstrations everywhere.” “We are not going to mobilise on the issue of pension reform for ever and anon.” he remarked. “We will have another meeting on Monday to see how the weekend’s turn-out was.” he added – alluding to uncertainties about the numbers who will attend.

    On Tuesday Socialist Worker had its own take on the movement (Here.)

    But it would be premature to declare the battle over. And Sarkozy has survived only because the trade union leaders failed to push the movement forward.

    France shows the potential to defeat austerity policies, not that resistance is doomed to defeat.

    Union leaders, that is, except the CGT. A potential is, well, potential.

    We are writing something more serious after Saturday.

    One thing is certain.

    It will not blame France’s union leaders for failing to overthrow Sarkozy and render the French governmental process null and void.

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    Unemployed to be Sentenced to Unpaid Manual Work.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservatives, Unemployment, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on November 7, 2010

    File:Chain Gang Street Sweepers, 1909.jpg
    Ian Duncan Smith’s American Model.

    The BBC says,

    Long-term benefit claimants could be forced to do compulsory manual labour under proposals being put forward by the government, it has emerged.

    More Here.

    Unemployed told: do four weeks of unpaid work or lose your benefits

    The unemployed will be ordered to do periods of compulsory full-time work in the community or be stripped of their benefits under controversial American-style plans to slash the number of people without jobs.

    The proposals, in a white paper on welfare reform to be unveiled this week, are part of a radical government agenda aimed at cutting the £190bn-a-year welfare bill and breaking what the coalition now calls the “habit of worklessness”.

    The measures will be announced to parliament by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, as part of what he will describe as a new “contract” with the 1.4 million people on jobseekers’ allowance. The government’s side of the bargain will be the promise of a new “universal credit”, to replace all existing benefits, that will ensure it always pays to work rather than stay on welfare.

    In return, where advisers believe a jobseeker would benefit from experiencing the “habits and routines” of working life, an unemployed person will be told to take up “mandatory work activity” of at least 30 hours a week for a four-week period. If they refuse or fail to complete the programme their jobseeker’s allowance payments, currently £50.95 a week for those under 25 and £64.30 for those over 25, could be stopped for at least three months.

    The Department for Work and Pensions plans to contract private providers to organise the placements with charities, voluntary organisations and companies. An insider close to the discussions said: “We know there are still some jobseekers who need an extra push to get them into the mindset of being in the working environment and an opportunity to experience that environment.

    “This is all about getting them back into a working routine which, in turn, makes them a much more appealing prospect for an employer looking to fill a vacancy, and more confident when they enter the workplace. The goal is to break into the habit of worklessness.”

    Sanctions – including removal of benefit – currently exist if people refuse to go on training courses or fail to turn up to job interviews, but they are rarely used.

    The plans stop short of systems used in the US since the 1990s under which benefits can be “time limited”, meaning all payments end after a defined period. But they draw heavily on American attempts to change public attitudes to welfare and to change the perception that welfare is an option for life.

    More Here.

    Questions: What ‘advisers’ are going to be in charge of the sentencing process? what ‘Charities’ and voluntary groups are going to run these chain gangs along with private firms? What rights will those sentenced have?

    Above all: what difference will there be between those condemned to do this community work and those sentenced by the courts to do community service?

    The model is Wisconsin in the USA. Introduced in 1997 the  programme of Workfare has been found a “total failure” – here.

    The American Unemployment rate in 1997 was 5.30%

    In 2010 October it  is 9,6% (Here)

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    David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital and the Politics of the Crisis.

    Posted in British Govern, Labour Movement, Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on November 8, 2010

     

    The Politics of the Crisis and David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital. 2010.

    “Capitalism is dying and cannot be revived”. Very few would repeat today John Strachey’s 1937 prediction (The Coming Struggle for Power). But nobody doubts that the 2008 banking crises shifted the economic and political landscape. Some on the left were certain that capitalism was if not wholly shattered at least seriously undermined. The Socialist Workers Party’s Alex Callinicos has written that the world’s close brush with financial melt-down heralded changes of a “genuinely epochal character”. Capitalism, he claimed, has been as shaken as it was by the Great Depression. A “huge hole” had opened up in Neoliberalism (The Bonfire of Illusions. 2010). This had widened the “boundaries of the possible” for the left.

    The Marxist Geographer David Harvey’s   The Enigma of Capital also explores the background to the “mother of all crises”. Today’s difficulties have long-standing origins. One nexus lies in the absorption of a surplus of capital through ‘financialisation’, and the massive expansion of credit to those whose wages had been suppressed to restore profit levels during the initial stage of Neoliberalism. Leveraging (using borrowed money to invest) accelerated the growth of the available cash into a bubble. “Surplus fictitious capital created within the banking system was absorbing the surplus” (Page 30). Pension funds, municipalities, and larger numbers of private individuals (through easier ‘sub-prime’ mortgages, and credit generally), were drawn into an increasingly autonomous financial sector, which employed a dazzling array of profit-making devices in the ‘realm of circulation’. Trouble began in the US ‘sub-prime mortgage’ sector, with worries about the “toxic debts” (that is, hard to repay) behind mortgage-backed securities. * Trust evaporated, as with any run on banks, and the whole system began to fall apart. The crises “cascaded from one sphere to another”. The “Anglo-American model of world economic development” and “free market triumphalism” was discredited (Page 38). If it was not the dawn of a new epoch, it certainly looked for a while as if faith in markets, the cornerstone of neoliberal politics, was severely jolted.

    However, Harvey notes that for Marxists, the opposite of crisis, economic equilibrium, is an unusual condition. Capitalism’s present difficulties do not mark a truly novel event. They are “the culmination of a pattern of financial crises that had become both more frequent and deeper over the years since the last big crisis of capitalism in the 1970s and early 1980s.”(Page 6) His views on how Marx originally explained crises is given in his Companion to Marx – which has been discussed on this site (Here).  This is a ‘multicausal’ approach, which has involved  state policy.  Harvey lays emphasis in the present work on the way that governments will try to reconfigure continued growth (at the magical figure of 3%) by political means – putting the interests of the ‘state-financial nexus’ before anything else.

    There are many divergent thoughts on the depth to which market societies have been unsettled. At present in Britain politics have concentrated economics. The iron laws of economic necessity are used to justify targeted cuts in public spending, centring on social provision. Or, to put it another way, to secure support for a neoliberal ‘shock’ that will undermine the remnants of the egalitarian social functions of the state. If there was a widely shared view on the left that this period marks a decisive turning point for those who oppose capitalism, the terrain on which it can fight has been defined by these austerity policies. It is the purpose of this article, centred on David Harvey’s writings, to criticise some of the over-optimistic responses to the ‘crisis of capitalism’ and to sketch out some grounds for a more realistic strategy. (more…)

    Ken Livingstone: Back Forced Labour.

    Posted in Labour Movement, Labour Party, Unemployment, Workfare by Andrew Coates on November 9, 2010

    Ken Livingstone Job Scheme?

    Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London who has his eye on another term in 2012, supports plans to force people who are unemployed to carry out community work, or risk losing their benefits.

    “It doesn’t do poor and unemployed people any favours to leave them out of work,” Mr Livingstone said.

    Ken Livingstone backs unpaid forced labour plan.

    “If you get people into the habit of getting out of bed, doing something, having a sense of worth and if that involves getting people who are currently unemployed helping out with the elderly or clearing up an area or things like that, I think it’s worth doing.”

    (from Yorkshire Wired)

    (Originally from the BBC)

    Hat-tip to Owen Jones.

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    Student Protests: Notes of a Veteran.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservatives, Cuts, European Left, Welfare State by Andrew Coates on November 11, 2010

    Rightly Felt Anger.

    ‘This is just the beginning’ reports the Guardian. (Here.)

    France-Inter this morning had British students chanting in French, “Tous ensemble! Grève Générale!”

    Good on You! Hats off! Chapeau!

    Ignore the NUS leaders who run you down – it’s a tradition lost in the mists of time.

    The message from the serious media is that this is the first important  protest against the austerity programme.

    It’s traditional as well to find a bogey student lefty figure.

    Clare Solomon looks as if she’s already standing up well to media bullies (BBC here).

    The Daily Mail warmed the cockles of me heart by saying (here)

    It was supposed to be a day of peaceful protest, with students exercising their democratic right to demonstrate against soaring university fees.

    But anarchists hijacked the event, setting off the most violent scenes of student unrest seen in Britain for decades. Militants from far-Left groups whipped up a mix of middle-class students and younger college and school pupils into a frenzy.

    The Daily Mail’s sympathy for the students’ plight is touching.

    Murdoch’s well-paid red-hunters have been unleashed – here.

    Some think, I suspect rightly, that the crafty coppers were not too displeased. It was visible  proof of where cuts in their numbers could lead.

    Many of you, and not only students, voted for the Liberals thinking you were getting US-style ‘social liberals’ who’d stand up for you.

    You’ve got European-style Economic Liberals - free-marketers with a few shreds of conscience.

    But that (pretty clear in Ipswich under the Liberal-Tory Junta) was not widely known.

    So what now? Does the past tell us anything?

    Veterans of student protests in the past (back to the 70s I’m afraid to say) are happy that someone has shown a bit of backbone.

    It would be wrong to romanticise our own past. The 1970s (which were the peak years for UK student protesting) were remarkably ineffective. Large numbers traipsed up and down London streets, there were occupations, and a few tussles. But not much. We probably helped postpone, though only possibly, the free-market system’s introduction into education for a couple of decades.  Or maybe we didn’t since many of the greedy guts of today got their higher education free at the time and now want others to pay.

    The real action in those years was in anti-National Front demos – which were extremely violent.

    Back in the 1970s we also  fought cuts.

    If we had known what we were up against when we shouted “Smash the State”!

    Today its Austerity, Austerity, Austerity.

    The pundits say that the misery created by slashing publics spending will be so diffuse that it will hard to join people up to fight it.

    We are trying to prove them wrong by building anti-cuts campaigns that unite protests on these issues.

    Everywhere.

    Students welcome.

    Further: Charlie, who was at the same Uni as Coatesy, has useful comments – here.  More Veteran musings here. Well-judged comments about the famous window-smashing here. Radical nightmare for Daily Mail – here. Liberal Conspiracy has some wise words - here. Dave Osler is the Voice of Reason. He helpfully points out that at least twenty million people in the streets (okay I exaggerated the figures a bit)  are needed for victory – here. National Treasure Ian Bone – here. Boney says (note Plods) “ i am pleased to say that the anarchos and libertarians were completely out done by our “non-political” fellow students”. Good heartfelt stuff from the trusty Louise – here. Permanent Revolution are worth looking at – here. Mick surveys the scene here.

    Studious students could not do better than read David Harvey – reviewed here.

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    Crack Capitalism, John Holloway, Review.

    Posted in Allotments, Left, Marxism, New Left, Trotskyism, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on November 12, 2010

    Weekly Worker 841 Thursday November 11 2010

    Introduction.

    Wednesday’s student protests have illustrated that anarchism (and autonomism though the media is not too up on their difference) have some presence in the UK.

    John Holloway’s writing has had an impact in these sectors for some time. His has influenced ‘solidarity  economics’  building housing co-ops, food co-ops and other places to practice lifestyle politics). Holloway has also lent support to the belief that all left political parties are oppressive mini-states.  More confrontational anarchist-autonomists are interested in his work. In short, he encourages the creation of ‘autonomy’ in the broadest sense, as anti-party self-expression with a Marxisant tinge. For what long-term purpose it is never clear.

    This review traces Holloway’s debt to the ‘capital logic’ school. This has Marxist roots in the theory of commodity fetishism. It makes politics and ideology expressions of the dialectic of alienation and estrangement in production and exchange. The theories which tried to link some kind of politics to the stand originally tended (in the 1920s) to be ‘ultra-leftist’ supporters of workers’ councils. They saw these as mechanisms to end the alienation (division) of the market and private ownership. Stalinism marginalised these currents. By the end of the 1930s they had retreated to the academic and political fringes.

    The sixties saw, with the growth of the New Left,  a revival of interest in such ideas. The International Situationists placed the dance of commodities at the pinnacle of capitalism, the ‘society of the spectacle’. In academic, and later, left party circles, the early works of  Georg Lukács, whose History and Class Consciousness (1923) covered the same terrain, became popular.

    Holloway come from a slightly different angle. That is the German ‘Capital derivation’ debates of the 1970s. he was also partly influenced by 1970s Italian autonomism. Holloway’s debts to 1920s studies on Marx’s theory of fetishism and value, are discussed below. These theories were discussed in early issues of  the British Conference of Socialist Economists’ journal Capital and Class. Simon Clarke, a lecturer at Warwick University, also developed a reading of Marx based on a similar  ’pure’ analysis of capital. Both attacked Marxists, such as Nicos Poulantzas, who advocated a theory of the ‘specificity’ of the political’. Clarke claimed that Poulantzas was a ‘functionalist’. This was, apparently, because that he saw the state and politics as a condition of the formation and reproduction of capitalist class relations. Clarke’s political alternative has never emerged, though he has written sometimes interesting studies of Marx’s economics, notably on  his theory of crisis.

    Nicos Poulantzas owed a theoretical debt to Louis Althusser. The ‘relative autonomy’ of politics, and institutional weight of ideology were related to a series of concepts he developed which described the complexity of social formations and modes of production. These were not purely academic ideas. By the late 1970s both theorists were engaged in a  strategic political debate over the ‘transition to socialism’. Premised on the existence of mass communist parties in Western European they advocated democratising the organisations internally and launching  mass struggle within the state. This, they argued, had to be allied to concrete institutions of self-management. It would ‘condense’ into power through social movement forces in the working class and oppressed.

    Poulntatzas  committed suicide in 1979. Althusser’s murder of his wife, under the influence of long-standing mental illness, removed him from the scene. Politically the ‘left Eurocommunism’ they each supported evaporated in the 1980s as the weakened Communist politics turned ever-rightwards. For period the ‘specificity’ of the political developed a life of its own in the ‘discourse’ readings of Marxism by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. From radical democracy these progressed to support for ever-shifting radical projects. Mouffe went from the revival of ‘strong’ classical democracy, a detour via  Carl Schmitt,  and emerged with  ‘agonistic democracy’.  Little connection with class remained, except as one amongst many conflicts in the creation of a social assembly and politics.   The influence of Althusser’s and Poulantazas’ theories retreated to academia.

    Holloway’s belief in “changing the world without taking power” is, amongst many other things,  a belated reply to the Marxist strategy of Poulantazas and Althusser.

    Mike Macnair’s Weekly Worker articles on the political strategies of British Trotskyism illustrate the continued importance of strategic debates about politics and taking power. In this Poulantzas and Althusser’s legacy has a role to play.

    Capitalism cracked

    Andrew Coates reviews John Holloway’s ‘Crack capitalism’ Pluto Press, 2010, pp320, £16

     

    How do we make a “break” with the “world ruled by money, by capital”? In Crack capitalism we learn there are spaces in between “exploitation, starvation and injustice” where we can find thousands of “interstitial” fissures. Where we can see that communism is “an immediate necessity, not a future stage of development” (p26). Can we “scream ‘No’ so loud” to bring it about? For John Holloway, from Walter Benjamin’s Jetztzeit (now-time) “moments of creativity”, we can begin “walking through a looking glass” into a “world that does not exist” (p36).

    John Holloway is Irish-born and by training a lawyer. For 20 years he has been an internationally known, Mexican-based academic and ‘anti-globalisation’, pro-Zapatista activist. He refuses point-blank to accept the world as it is. In Change the world without taking power (2002) Holloway stated that the “starting point of theoretical reflection” is “opposition, negativity, struggle”. We begin not with left political organisation, but “a scream of refusal”. Leninism, social democracy, ‘the party’ – any type of state-centred political activity – are dead-ends. Instead, through this yelling, we assert our ‘anti-power’, a “drive towards social self-determination”.

    Holloway admires the Zapatistas. Their uprising in Chiapas (south-east of Mexico) and council-based organisation of a quasi-autonomous territory is the nearest to a model he offers. In Change the world he claimed their strategy “does not have the state as its focus, and that does not aim at gaining positions of power”. They showed that one could “change the world without taking power”. Short on the details of their successes (or mention of Mexico’s more pressing problems at the time, from the end of PRI rule to Narco-trafficking), we were told that they were “ordinary-therefore-rebellious”. They illustrate the importance of direct democracy, of do-it-yourself politics, as opposed to party-building focused on capturing political power, the central “state illusion” of the left for the last century.

    Crack capitalism is Holloway’s latest version of the same argument. Its first ‘thesis’ (small chapter) cites La Boétie (1530-63). In his youth, this friend of Montaigne wrote the Discours sur la servitude volontaire. The essay is a landmark. It tried to explain why people came to endure, even accept, tyranny. People are subjugated at birth; they think arbitrary power normal and put up with every indignity and cruelty. The weight of custom and religion bolsters the autocrat. He diverts unrest by laying on public entertainment – “les farces, les spectacles, les gladiateurs”. Above all, for La Boétie, the ruler was the head of a pyramid of violent minions, holding a monopoly of violence.

    Yet, the 16th century author said, ultimately despotism is our own creation, propped up by our tacit consent. By withdrawing this support it would be overthrown. We could “resolve to serve no more” – and, thus, we would become free. The Discours alludes to some (unnamed) French royal tyrants, and the bloodthirsty henchmen must have been still around (he died just as France entered 35 years of wars of religion). This is no doubt one reason why the essay was not, prudently, published until 13 years after La Boétie’s death.

    La Boétie’s call to “stop making the tyrant” (but not his explanation of how we become servile), is Holloway’s starting point: “We can refuse to perform the work that creates the tyrant” (p7). Capitalism is the modern despot we should stand aside from. Holloway makes no allusion to the historical context of the Discours, or tries to unpick its complex implications, including the obvious fact that not obeying was too risky a strategy for La Boétie himself. Everything is reduced to one portentous statement: serve no more.

    Crack capitalism is generous with examples of “ordinary people” that show such a “movement of refusal-and-other-creation”. These “rebels, not victims” include, apart from overtly political activists, the Birmingham car worker who spends his evenings on an allotment. Amongst a host of other local heroes there is the girl in Tokyo who spends her day in the park, reading rather than going to work, and the young Frenchman who is devoted to building dry toilets. They are as devoted to doing something different to the “labour that creates capital” as the activist out in the jungle determined to “organise armed struggle”.

    Abstract labour

    Crack capitalism binds these homely tales to a version of Marxism. Its roots lie in the theory of commodity fetishism and abstract labour, as developed in the 1920s Soviet Union in II Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s theory of value and the writings of Evgeny Pashukanis, who extended Marx’s critique of political economy to law and the state. For these writers the legal system, government and administration were completely moulded by capitalist value-production. Holloway takes Rubin’s emphasis on the “process of impersonalisation or equalisation of labour” – abstract labour – as the template for all social relations. “The state by its very form, and independently of the content of its action, confirms and reproduces the negation of subjectivity on which capital is based. It relates to people not as subjects, but as objects or – and this amounts to the same thing – as subjects reduced to the statues of mere abstraction” (pp58-59).

    The ‘state-derivation’ debate of the 1970s illustrates these themes. Holloway’s first publications drew on them in opposition to Marxist theorists, like Nicos Poulantzas, who developed an explanation of the “relative autonomy” of politics and ideology. In Poulantzas’s later efforts the state was a “condensation of class struggles” and ideology was the place where the dominant links of “knowledge and power” were challenged by opposing class forces.

    Holloway both denies these conflicts their individual specificity and criticises their ultimate tie to the fight of labour against capital. In Crack capitalism politics and ideology are always immediately reduced to the dance of commodities. Instead of labour class struggles, we have the battle against entering the process – work, ‘abstract labour’ – in the first place. To engage in the state, or try to ‘capture’ power (or adopt the strategy of Poulantzas, mixing direct and representative democracy in a ‘transition to socialism’) is to succumb to the tunes of capital. Rebellion has to find “another melody” for our own ball. Instead we should encourage, “collective coming-to-eruption of long stifled volcanoes”, resting on the refusal to serve no more (p225).[1]

    Abstract labour and the fight against it dominate everything. One wonders why Marx bothered to write his studies of the revolutions of 1848, and the 1870-71 French civil war. Or went into the details of how states, political parties (including those with such ‘fetishes’ as support for rival dynasties, Orleanists and legitimists), class and power blocs (apparently ‘above’ them, as with Louis Napoleon) were formed. Or wasted his time drawing portraits of individual politicians. Why Marx engaged in the delicate work of helping create and sustain the First International. His efforts to unite ‘labour’ (that is, those who fought for better conditions for “the subordination of our doing to alien control” (p157) with the full gamut of 19th century labour movement opinion, ranging from anarchists, moderate social democrats, left republican revolutionaries to “every kind” of socialist, is another mystery. He was no doubt fooling himself in thinking that “political struggle is the struggle to take state power” (p158). All he really needed to do was announce that workers should no longer participate in ‘abstract labour’. We can see that only the 19th century anarchists rival Holloway’s ‘political indifferentism’.

    Expressive totality

    The basic flaw of Crack capitalism is that it places us in what Louis Althusser called an ‘expressive totality’. That is, a concept of capitalism in which “each part is pars totalis, immediately expressing the whole that it inhabits in person”.[2] The process of abstraction is always present, giving rise to immediate contradictions that express the general nature of capital. Holloway writes: “One form of doing, labour, creates capital, the basis of the society that is destroying us. Another form of doing, what we calls simply ‘doing’, pushes against the creation of capital and towards the creation of a different society” (p85). Everything derives from the dialectic between ‘doing’ and ‘abstract labour’.

    Not that Holloway is without criticisms of those often seen as part of the same ‘autonomist’ camp. He opposes the idea that the economy is so solidified around abstract labour that it cannot be challenged. We can refuse to submit to it. But he does not see any positive revolutionary subject emerging from the process either. To him the Italian ‘autonomist’ theories of Paul Virno, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri believe in the ‘multitude’, “diverse forces of social production”. To them the multiple contradictions with post-Fordist capitalism and the world polity of empire form the basis of a “new political agent”.

    Holloway by contrast asserts: “The post-operaista, post-structuralist theories extend into the crisis of abstract labour the thought-prison that was part of the domination of abstract labour.” So that “What gets lost is the crack, the ek-statis of concrete doing, the standing out-and-beyond of useful doing from abstract labour …” (p193). Even the German Krisis group, who get good marks for their work on the crisis of ‘society of labour’ faced with automation, fail to dig at the “two-fold character of labour”. That is, between doing and abstraction. To Holloway, all these theorists cannot see that the opposition to abstraction is always negative: “Revolution is not about destroying capitalism, but about refusing to create it” (p252). Which is another way of saying that the contradiction between abstraction/doing in every aspect of our lives, everyday, directly, leads us to “stop making capitalism” and to “make” … well, what?

    Certainly not socialist and Marxist political parties. They are thoroughly tainted by the drive for political power. Daniel Bensaïd has observed of John Holloway’s earlier writing, that “he has reduced the luxuriant history of the workers’ movement, its experiences and controversies to a single march of statism through the ages.”[3] Crack capitalism does nothing but reproduce this caricature. Parties are riddled with hierarchy – because of their adaption to statism and the lure of changing the world “from above”. Their totalising strategies focus on the state, which is in fact a “false, illusory totality” (p206). Exit electoral work, party-building or, to put it another way, talking to the wider public, and organising amongst the masses and working class in a structured way. There are only minor internal problems left for other ways of organising. Those with some experience of them would disagree: the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ or, more commonly, sheer futility are heavy obstacles to their progress.

    Crack capitalism is in many senses timeless. Its dialectic has unravelled since the dawn of the production of exchange value. Yet there are some present-day references. Capitalism “is in its deepest crisis for years” (p250). The fall in the rate of profit is, apparently, due to “a failure to subordinate ourselves to the degree that capital demands of us” (p151). In the age of globalisation national politics are less important than they were. The state, we are no doubt surprised to learn, is a national form, when capitalism is international.

    Holloway does not discuss what this implies, that political movements should develop strategies that take account of the reality of inter-state bodies (the European Union, for example). Or that programmes and not yells and cracks are needed to build a social base and bring about the kind of transformation of politics that could begin a transition to communism/socialism. Indeed how and through which structures socialists would “socialise the means of production and abolish wage labour” (ibid) on an international level is not discussed. Though for some things “some form of global coordination would be desirable in a post-capitalist society” (p210). On that little more can be said. There is, at the moment, no “right answer” to the question of what is to be done. Instead there are “millions of experiments” for those who wish to be “against-and-beyond capital” (p256).

    So perhaps we should return to our allotments, to our parks, to our dry toilets, and keep scrambling around looking for cracks.

    Notes

    1. J Holloway, S Picciotto (eds) The state and capital: a Marxist debate London 1978.
    2. L Althusser Reading Capital London 1975, p17.
    3. ‘Commodity fetishism and revolutionary subjectivity’, a symposium on John Holloway’s Change the world without taking power in Historical Materialism Vol 13, No4, 2005

    French Greens Take a Turn.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Greens by Andrew Coates on November 14, 2010

     

    Danny the ‘Red’: Power without Responsibility.

    The French Greens, and their Euro-election allies in Europe Ecologie  have created a new political party (le Monde reports – Here. More here.). It will be called Europe-Ecologie-les Verts.

    On Saturday the French Green ‘family’ grouped together for a Rally-Conference to launch the new organisation.

    The anti-European Union,  José Bové, right-wing Antoine Waechter, Christian social green, Cécile Duflot, NGO Professional Yannick Jadot, former Trotskyist and advocate of ‘ungrowth’ (decroissance) Jean-Paul Besset, pro-European ‘liberal-libertarian’, Daniel Cohn Bendit, centre-left Dominique Voynet, appeared with  Noël Mamère Monsieur Loyal.

    The name Europe Ecologie-les Verts was chosen with  53 % of the votes. “One doesn’t change a winning name” slipped out  Daniel Cohn-Bendit. The creator of ‘Europe added that he has no exact role in the movement. He prefers to remain a free spirit, able to exert power influence without any constraints. A position, some may remark, similar to that of the Press -as described by Rudyard Kipling.

    The French Green alliance, Europe Ecologie won over 16% of the vote in the 2009 European Elections, just behind the Parti Socialiste led List. In recent opinion polls these scores have held up.

    The new party aims to conquer majority French support.

    Its chances of by-passing the Parti Socialiste and the left are not so clear.

    A brief glance at its leading figures, whose views range from right-wing, liberal centre, ‘anti-growth’ ecologists, social ecologists, to mildly left of centre personalities, gives little promise of political coherence.

    Nor is the exact functioning of EELV.

    While many of the ‘personalities’ at their head are largely responsible to themselves, the Verts  did take a vote on this turn.

    Participation : 3944 votants (51,41 %)
    Oui : 3319 (85,1 %)
    Non : 403 (10,33 %)
    Blanc : 178 (4,56 %)
    soit 3900 exprimés
    Nuls : 13
    Ne prend pas part au vote : 31

    So, the Greens’ ambitions to win over a majority of the French public largely depended on 3,944 Green Party members.

    Background to French Greens, in English, here.

    Tagged with: , ,

    The Big Society and Charity: a Growing Dependence.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Labour Movement, LCR, Liberal Democrats, Welfare State, Workfare by Andrew Coates on November 16, 2010

    Future Welfare State?

    Last night Radio 4 broadcast a programme on changes to the Welfare State. It was called the “Deserving and Undeserving Poor”. You can listen to it via here.

    A central theme was that the Beveridge, 1945, institutions of welfare were inevitably being changed. To an individual based system of social protection. That this would be supplemented by charity. Voice after voice welcomed greater individual responsibility.

    Ian Duncan Smith’s Universal Credit puts conditionality at the heart of the welfare state. People have to follow thick  rules of behaviour. To end ‘welfare dependency’ they have to follow a ‘new contract’.

    That is making benefits dependent on complying with state and private-contracted advisers’ wishes. To job-search. To comply with anything they’re told. Or one will risk sanctions. Beginning with forced work. If that isn’t fulfilled they risk the street, penniless.

    From free-market right Philip Booth to the formerly liberal Will Hutton, all considered it hardly worth a comment that this puts claimants in the position of suppliants – having to behave as they are instructed if they want basic (very basic) resources to live on.

    On the programme it was said  that this was, in part, a  return to the mutualism of the 19th century trade unions and friendly societies. The message was: this worked. Tough moral codes should be applied to those who want aid. Beveridge was cited in a  similar vein – welfare was a result of insurance, not a right.  The giver (whether voluntary society or the obligatory state)  has rights over the claimant.

    Charities are going to play a more important role.

    Funded by public money they will be in charge of helping the badly off. They will also have a place in enforcing workfare, organising gangs of forced labourers.

    A turn in public opinion towards a harsher system was registered. This, one would agree, has come about partly because New Labour, under both Blair and Brown, bought into the 19th Century ideology of British Christian socialism. This social-ism  abhorred class demands and individual rights. It wanted people to obey social rules. New Labour tied this to the idea that any rights we have should be linked to obligations. In practice it let open the space for the state to claim more rights over one category of people: those getting benefits.

    The programme failed to mention a number of very important points.

    • 19th century trade unions that functioned as self-help associations were often described as part of the ‘labour aristocracy’. They were challenged by general unions – which rose in the early years of the 20th century - because of the exclusive conditions they laid down for membership.
    • Beveridge’s idea of the welfare state involved fighting want. Help to relieve this was not conditional on insurance.
    • Present day welfare reform is about the state, and its private proxies, making claims (rights) on individuals. That is, making people responsible to their demands. It removes the idea of a right and replaces it with it with obligations to become an agent responsible to the state’s demands.  

    The core of the new ideology of welfare is to base it on voluntary decisions by all members of society. It is not to be a right. It will, instead, become a last resort for the needy.

    Charity will play a more and more important part in the system.

    It is  ‘voluntary’.

    Welfare will therefore make more and more people dependent on the good will of others.

    Many on the left admire charities. They are part of ‘civil society’. They are decentralised. They are often quasi-political NGOs. When the left  attacks charities it is usually for executives’ high salaries, waste, their (well-established) vulnerability to fraud, and their (frequent) poor staff conditions.

    Giving them a bigger welfare role is largely considered a technical problem (their administrative structures) or a political one (they are without direct democratic accountability).

    There are far more radical reasons to be wary of Charity.

    Immanuel Kant’s ethical writings describe a system of charitable relief as the cause of dependence. Having to accept charity makes someone dependent on the good will of others. It is the opposite of a right: a universal claim that should be met. While acts of goodness are to be encouraged building a social system on them leads to arbitrary actions.

    “Kindnesses (Gutigkeiten) occur only through inequalities”.

    Instead of a truly ethical act, carried out for universal reasons, we have a very mixed bag of motives for charity.

    A person overflowing with human kindness is likely to be ruffled when faced with a demand for aid as a right.

    “Such a  person will do  great deal out of charity, but if someone came to him in great need to demand something as owed, speaking in the language of indebtedness, then would call this vulgar, and say the other wants everything by compulsion.”

    (Both citations from Kant’s Ethical Thought. Allen W. Wood. 1999)

     

    Charity become even more problematic when it is administered by religious groups. Their universality is undermined by their own faith. Christians, and not only fundamentalists,  often have strong opinions on other people’s lifestyles. As do Moslems, orthodox Jews, and the majority of believers.

     

    They would certainly wish to influence the “lifestyle choice” of the out-of-work.

    Putting people in a relation of dependence on such groups is profoundly wrong.

    Kant’s universal rights by contrast autonomy and responsibility in the real sense: the ability to make our own choices.

    By underlining this the Big Society and Welfare Reform are a massive step backwards: to moral and physical dependency.

    Update (15th February) New BBC 4 Programme on the Big Society – Here.

    Nouveau parti anticapitaliste: Congress Postponed – Again.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on November 18, 2010

    NPA: Revolution Put Off Till February.

    Le week-end des 13 et 14 novembre s’est tenue une réunion du conseil politique national du NPA.

    On the 13th and 14th of November there was a meeting of national political council of the NPA.

    Le mouvement que nous venons de vivre contre la réforme des retraites, même s’il n’a pas abouti au retrait de la réforme, enclenche une nouvelle étape dans la situation.

    We have just been through the movement against the pension reform. While it has not stopped these measures, it has created a new stage in the situation. 

    Mais il faudra du temps pour mesurer les conséquences politiques et sociales de la mobilisation en termes de rapport de forces et pour comprendre le poids des différents éléments qui ont empêché qu’il débouche sur une victoire.

    Time is needed to gauge the political and social consequences. To look at the relations of forces involved and to grasp the weight of the different factors which prevented the movement achieving victory.

    Face à cette situation exceptionnelle et après une longue discussion, le CPN a décidé de bousculer le calendrier et d’organiser une conférence nationale des comités le samedi 11 décembre et le premier congrès du NPA début février 2011. 

    Faced with this exceptional situation the NPA has decided, after a lengthy discussion, to hold a national meeting of our committees (branches) on the 11th December and the first National NPA Congress at the start of Feburary 2011.

    More Here.  

    I have been informed by French comrades (following my analysis of the NPA’s internal debates) that there is a fourth tendency  in the party – CLAIRE. They are “une Tendance du NPA défendant la révolution, le communisme et l’auto-organisation” (more information here). It looks as if this, unlike the other 3, which are basically groups of people backing general resolutions, looks like what we would call a faction. Not exactly big either. (Wikipedia says “La tendance CLAIRE édite Au Clair de la lutte, et affirme qu’elle rassemble des militants de l’ex-Groupe CRI, de l’ex-LCR et des inorganisés.)

    ******

    The NPA already postponed its Conference date from earlier this year.  

    People have asked what the NPA will do if there is another social movement at the beginning of the New Year.

    Tagged with: , ,

    Red Plenty, Francis Spufford. Review

    Posted in European Left, Left, Marxism, Stalinism by Andrew Coates on November 19, 2010

    Red Plenty. Francis Spufford. Faber & Faber 2010.

    Red Plenty is a unique book. Francis Spufford locates it in once-upon-a-time, in the former Soviet Union. Neither history, nor novel it is a “Russian fairytale” that “really happened, or something like it”. A collage of real events, multiple characters, invented and genuine, centre-stage is its hero: the idea of the Soviet planned economy. This would provide the “horn of plenty” the Communist Party foretold. A wishful dream that began during High Stalinism, it lasted, in theory, until the Fall. By then socialist Geniis and Swan Maidens had long vanished.

    As Spufford imagines, many loyal Soviet citizens like the (real) songster Sash Galich, had by the 1960s understood what their world was built on. That even a happy childhood under Stalin brushed close to terror. That this lurked “just around the corner, just behind the scenes, just out of his sight, as if he had been a child in a fairytale wood who sees only green leaves and songbirds ahead, because all the monsters are standing behind him.” There was to be no age of plenty, but “an empire of inertia.” The state supplied “a pacifying minimum of consumer goods to the inhabitants of the vast shoddy apartment building ringing every Soviet city.” Above all, then, the Plan did not work.

    Primitive Accumulation.

    Red Plenty’s political narrative is plain. It begins with the Bolsheviks, a “tiny freakish cult under the thumb of a charismatic minor aristocrat” – not a description that will please everyone one suspects (Here). In the disordered aftermath of the Great War iron discipline enabled them to seize power. Once ensconced, and after some experiments in market socialism, they mimicked the “industrial revolution”. Paying little attention to democracy, or hard economics, they created a “brutish, pragmatic simulacrum of what Marx and Engels had seen in the boom towns of the mid-nineteenth century…” That is, one recalls, the primitive accumulation in which Marx wrote, “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder in short, force, play the greatest part”.

    Crash industrialisation was introduced. The population was marshalled by ideological campaigns and compliance was enforced by police methods. Collectivisation of agriculture and the Gulag were exploited to finance primary good production. These violent means swept across society crushing opposition, and crept into the party itself. Society become totally hierarchical, intellectual life was dragooned into heavily policed utilitarian education, and Stalinist paranoia was given free rein. As the mathematical prodigy Leonid Vitalvitch (a future Nobel winner) discovers, there are great opportunities for young scientists to be promoted, “the older ones having taken to disappearing by night..”.

    Yet, despite unimaginable sacrifices and the devastation of the Second World War, by the 1950s the economy grew. In the late 1950s and early 1960s it growth rates at 5% were faster than any country in the world except Japan. The USSR began to civilise living conditions, wages went up, there was an 8-hour day, the collective farmers were better off, housing improved enormously. Life seemed good. They had entered a world of modernity and science, whose echoes were still around in the pages of Sputnik and Soviet Weekly in the early1970s. But then it all began to slow down. Extra inputs were needed, more raw materials, extra investment, and extra labour. Primarily, the “capital productivity of the USSR was a disgrace.”

    Boffins.

    In The Backroom Boys (2003) Francis Spufford showed a flair for portraying “mechanics”. The story of the British Boffins who have kept the Island’s tradition for inventing useful things (rockets to mobile phone) at least half-alive is less tragic than Red Plenty’s. Here the would-be heroes of “revolutionary romanticism” (as Zhandov would have put it) are pioneers in computing and cybernetics. They came into their own in the 1960s. Placed in special scientific townships (The Siberian Science City, Akademogorodok), these privileged, but incredibly dedicated specialists lived for their vocation. They are often bogged down by the burdens of everyday Soviet life, like their mundane administrative counterparts, kitchens “where only cold tap worked”, they still dream. Some were able to puzzle about the nature of a socialist economy and communism, an idyll Red Plenty observes, that Marx and Engels only sketched in the haziest terms. (more…)

    Message to Parti de Gauche Congress.

    Posted in Europe, European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on November 21, 2010

     

      French Left Alliance.

    The Parti de Gauche (PdG left party) is holding its conference this weekend. A key issue will be a balance-sheet of the recent anti-pension reform movement. Another will be determing a candidate for the French presidential elections (2012). This is a letter from a former Nouveau parti anticaptialiste tendency who have joined with the PdG and the French Communists, and other groups,  in the Left Front (France)(in English). The  Gauche unitaire have sent the following letter to their comrades.

    Message de Gauche Unitaire au congrès du Parti de Gauche

    Chères camarades, chers camarades,

    Nous vous remercions de votre invitation à assister aux travaux de votre congrès.

    Depuis le lancement du Front de Gauche, nous mesurons le chemin que nous avons parcouru ensemble, avec nos camarades du Parti Communiste Français et tout ceux qui se sont engagés dans cette démarche, sans ménager leurs efforts.

    Depuis près de deux ans, nous avons franchi les premières étapes pour la construction d’une gauche digne de ce nom. Beaucoup reste à faire ! Mais nous mesurons les responsabilités du Front de Gauche et l’espoir qu’il suscite parmi tous ceux qui cherchent une véritable alternative à gauche.

    La mobilisation sociale historique que venons de connaître ces dernières semaines pour la défense de la retraite à 60 ans ne fait que renforcer cette situation. Même si nous n’avons pas réussi à obtenir le retrait du projet de loi gouvernemental, la droite au pouvoir en ressort affaibli, sans légitimité réelle pour poursuivre sa politique de contre réformes. Il est évident que les conséquences de cette mobilisation d’ampleur vont se faire sentir dans les prochains mois – sans attendre 2012 ! – à travers une crise sociale et politique qui peut prendre une forme inédite.

    Dans une telle situation, l’enjeu est pour le Front de Gauche que s’affirme aujourd’hui une véritable alternative face à la droite, dans la rue comme dans les urnes. Nous devons viser à être l’aile marchante de la gauche, à vouloir rassembler en permanence tous ceux qui à gauche veulent combattre sans concession les politiques libérales.

    Le travail engagé sur le projet partagé est essentiel. Au-delà de cette démarche indispensable d’élaboration d’un projet et d’un programme du Front de Gauche, nous sentons tous que le Front de Gauche est à un tournant de son existence. Nous mesurons bien que, pour faire face aux prochains défis politiques qui nous attendent, il ne suffira pas d’être une simple coalition électorale durable, mais qu’il faudra agir comme un véritable front politique pluraliste de différents partis, c’est-à-dire comme une force politique capable de s’ouvrir à d’autres courants qui partageraient sa démarche, de s’ancrer dans la réalité militante de terrain, d’entraîner, de s’élargir bien au-delà de ces partisans, de s’adresser sur la base de son projet à toute la gauche pour y faire bouger les lignes et de gagner l’adhésion des classes populaires.

    Si nous en avons la volonté nous pouvons franchir ces étapes dans les prochains mois. Cela suppose de renforcer la cohérence et la clarté stratégique de notre rassemblement, et de multiplier les initiatives communes que nous pouvons prendre.

    Chères camarades, chers camarades, bon congrès !

    Crédit photo de Une : Photothèque du mouvement social

    It is not important to translate most of this rather formulatic letter. The point here is the’Gauche Unitaire’ (Unitary left) is committed to the Front de Gauche. Not just as an electoral coalition, but as a real pluralist front of different left parties. This should be “in the streets and in the ballot boxes”.

    The PdG Congress, which is still taking place, can be followed here:

    Below: How Some of His Enemies See the PdG’s Leader (Hint, the word Emmerdeur comes from Merde):

    Suffolk Anti-Cuts Demo Next Saturday in Ipswich.

    Posted in Conservative Party, East Anglia, Ipswich, Labour Movement, Liberal Democrats, Unions by Andrew Coates on November 22, 2010

    Speakers Confirmed:

    Lucille Thirlby      UNISON National Officer
    Peter Allenson      UNITE  National Secretary, Public Services Trade Group
    Richard Edwards  PCS  Regional Secretary
    Paul Moffat          CWU Regional Secretary
    Graham White     NUT Suffolk County Secretary
    Keith Anderson    NASUWT Suffolk County Secretary
    Annie Twigg         CYW – UNITE
    Teresa MacKay    Ipswich & District TUC
     

    Note: Very Good post from Mick, on what’s happening “With the Tories in power, David Young and watching ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ reminded me of just how god awful Tory governments are.”

    France: 200 ‘Multiform’ Protests Today.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Unions by Andrew Coates on November 23, 2010

    French Protests Continue.

    Just when you’d forgotten.

    While the Pension ‘reforms’ will now come into force protests continue in France. Supporters of the 9th Day of Action say, “Even passed the Law remains Unfair” (Background, in English, here. More here).

    Rassemblements, manifestations, meetings ou arrêts de travail, les modalités de ces ”actions multiformes” sont décidées localement. Près de 200 rassemblements sont prévus un peu partout en France, dont la moitié en fin d’après-midi voire début de soirée, de source syndicale, mais aucun mouvement de grève susceptible de provoquer des perturbations importantes n’est prévu.

    Mass Meetings, demonstrations, rallies, or work stoppages – the forms of action today have been decided locally. More than 200 gatherings are planned, across nearly all France. According to union sources half of them are to take place in the afternoon, that’s towards the evening. No significant disruptions (i.e. to transport) are predicted.
    (more Here.
    )

    The main unions have kept up their protests. But numbers are expected to be low. The street has not forced Sarkozy to withdraw his plans. Bernard Thibault (CGT) says the President ”couldn’t care less” (s’en fout) about trade union opposition. (here)

    It should be noted, for those on the British Left who thought a general strike was on the cards, that very few of the strikes in the past months ever seriously looked like taking that turn. Most days of action were carefully staggered to reduce to a a minimum any loss of pay. Massive joyous demonstrations in the streets were not mirrored by an equally large wave of work stoppages. To claim that this was because of tepid union leaderships is wrong-footed to say the least.

    Sarkozy, meanwhile, has shifted to the right. Last week his Cabinet reshuffle was marked by the exclusion of the ‘centrsits’ (their Liberal Democrats).

    The conflict in France has therefore centred on mounting a wide challenge to the politics of the government.

    In this sense the strengthening of the Front de Gauche, FdG  (now expanded to embrace  parts of the “alternative  left” )is important. Last Weekend’s National Conference of one of its most important parts, the Parti de |Gauche (PdG) stated that one of the FdG’s main platforms was the repeal of the pension age rise (more Here).

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    Nick Clegg: Is This The Most Hated Man in Britain?

    Posted in Liberal Democrats by Andrew Coates on November 24, 2010

    Sadly, One of Many Clegg Corpses.

    Students, eh! Deplorable….

    Yet more Here.

    Turning back: Protesters angry over Nick Clegg's U-turn on student tuition fees have symbolically hanged an effigy of him outside the building where he was due to give a speech last night

    Nick Clegg Hate sites: Here, Here, Nick Clegg Must Die – here (and plenty more).

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    Daily Mail: The Lefty and Students’ Friend.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservative Party, Conservatives, European Left, Ipswich, Liberal Democrats, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on November 25, 2010

    Riotgrrls.

    What British paper should the left read?

    At the moment, there’s no contest: The Daily Mail.

    Every day the august journal publishes stories to put a smile on a lefty, and a student, for the rest of the day.

    This week alone we’ve had the revelation that the International Communist Current (current membership five) is a major threat. 

    No doubt about it, they’ll poison the minds of impressionable youth.

    Scoop-wise Thursday is not exception,

    “Rage of the girl rioters: Britain’s students take to the streets again – and this time women are leading the charge.”

    (More Here).

    Meanwhile in Ipswich yesterday there were FE and school students demonstrating.

    It is said that FE staff removed certain, er hum, ‘insulting’ posters from the walls of the College.

    Were they perhaps like this?

    They certainly had the words Class War on them….

    Report on Ipswich protests in the Evening Star.

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    Them and Us. Will Hutton, The Mirror of Princes. Review.

    Posted in British Govern, Capitalism, Conservative Party, Labour Government, Left by Andrew Coates on November 26, 2010

     Them and Us

    Following our reviews of David Harvey, Alex Callinicos, and John Holloway, we turn to the centre-left’s response to the crisis.

    Them and Us. Changing Britain – Why We Need a Fair Society. Will Hutton. Little, Brown. 2010.

    “..I haue nowe enterprised to describe in our vulgare tunge the fourme of a iuste publike weale: whiche mater I haue gathered as well of the sayenges of moste noble autours…”

    The Governour. Sir Thomas Elyot. Knight. 1531.

    The Mirror for Princes was a popular literary genre in the Renaissance. Books offered guidance on the upbringing of Kings, Statecraft and the pastimes of courtiers. They exhorted virtue and justice. Machiavelli’s well-known treatise (often said to run counter to the last two qualities) (1532), Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528) and Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Gouernour (1531) are famous examples. They were handbooks designed for rulers, magistrates and (sometimes) citizens. Historians of ideas have explored their context and theories in depth. But, with their claim to offer rules for success one can also consider their kinship to, say, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Chicken Soup for the Soul.

    Present-day political (would-be) ‘best-sellers’ often owe a debt to these Looking Glasses. Them and Us  addresses to the Modern Princes and their Court – Politicians, Policy Markers, the Captains and foot-soldiers of Capital. Will Hutton informs them that “Capitalism is a much more subtle system than many capitalists think” belongs to this evergreen bookshop section. It has handy adages for running the market, that, “innovation, innovation, innovation”, needs “regulation, the friend of innovation.” He is optimistic, “Politics has already been transformed from managerialism to reasoned argument about policy and purpose.” He considers that, for “the “liberal Conservative government with a Liberal Democrat partner” he can help clarify their “incoherence of values”. One reason is that, “some of their aims echo the ideas that have been presented in this book – constitutional and banking reform, along with solid commitments on the environment.”(P 390.)  Hutton would like to push people further in this direction, talking to ‘them’, and ‘us’ too.

    Them and Us is indebted to many “noble autours”, invariably introduced by the verb “to argue’ and sometimes with the description, “path-breaking”. Humanist virtues are glossed into a ‘big idea’. This is fairness, a “visceral moral imperative”. The principle that keeps capitalism buzzing, innovative and productive is “due reward” for effort. Effort and enterprise must be seen to be pay. But this is not wholly the case. Elites take a disproportionate share of the national cake, encouraging people to cling to what share of the rest they have in the ‘Have-What-I-Hold” society. In the process world capitalism has been taken over by toxic finance, which has a “destructive dynamic”. This burst through in the crises that are still shaking Europe. Hutton stands back from this to consider what is needed. This means, not just ways to repair the mistakes that caused them, but ethically informed reforms. We need a halt to undue benefits. “Rank unfairness threatens prosperity.” (P 227) Wealth is good, “But it should not be disproportional to effort, socially useless, or largely generated by luck” without any social responsibility. (P 273) He has discovered that, “The more capitalism adopts fair process, the better it works” (P 89) It would seem, then, that Entrepreneurs are from Mars, and Hutton’s “nurturing, binding together and investment.” is from Venus. According to at least one reviewer Hutton has a hit on his hands, “fairness is the word of the moment”.

    The States That Were.

    Will Hutton began his writing career as a giver of radical public-advice. His early publications are no doubt still there, browning, on many Progressives’ shelves. The State We’re in (1996) bristled with Machiavelli’s republican virtù. From the ‘centre-left’ he advocated a citizen’s army of ‘stakeholders’ to replace the “Treasury/Bank of England axis” and Britain’s “unwritten constitution”. After New Labour’s victory in 1997 The State to Come (1997) he announced that they these proposals had “a chance”. That, “the best in the English liberal tradition – reformist, fair-minded, tolerant even ‘stakeholder’ – is being awakened.” This was ignored. New Labour had “no appetite” for its ideas, or for “modernising social democracy”.

    The stakeholding side of English liberal tradition (?) did not stay awake for long. Those attending Unions 21 Conferences at Congress House would have noticed that the late 1990s enthusiasm for Will Hutton, translated into ‘social partnership’ between unions, employers and government, fizzled out in the face of Blair, members, and business leaders’ indifference. The World We’re In, less read, appeared in 2002. It defended Europe’s “welfare states, trade unions, labour market regulations and belief in the husbanded or stakeholder enterprise..” Hutton believed that a “European dimension”, including financial regulation, transparency over accounts and taxation” would provide the basis for an alternative globalisation to full-flown free-markets. This did not happen. Blair and Brown did not move towards a ‘European’ or any other, regulation of capital flows. Finance, a “bubble economy” ruled instead. The result? Them and Us observes, “the big bet on big finance, property and construction didn’t pay off” (P 33). “Today, England is in another deep, deep sleep in the aftermath of the financial crisis, hardly disturbed by the disaster through which it has just lived, let alone the challenges ahead.”(P 37) Yet, “Politics as a craft has been given a new mission and even new integrity” (P 390). As we have noted, Hutton is ready, yet again, to proffer his counsel to the Princes of the land. (more…)

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    Suffolk Anti-Cuts Demo Report.

    Posted in Conservatives, East Anglia, Ipswich, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left, Liberal Democrats by Andrew Coates on November 28, 2010

    Trade Union protest on the streets of Ipswich

    Trade Union protest on the streets of Ipswich (Evening Star).

    Six hundred anti-cuts protesters assembled in Ipswich on Saturday. Led by the Suffolk Coalition for Public Services they marched through snow and freezing wind from the County Council’s offices in Endeavour House  to a Rally at  the Wolsey Theatre.

    There were uniformed Firefighters(FBU),  Postal workers of the CWU, UNISON, UNITE, the PCS, and other trade unionists were present in numbers. Ipswich Labour Party had a large contingent. Sellers of socialist papers, Socialist Worker and the Socialist did (unusually)  brisk  business. High school and Suffolk College students waved home-made placards. There was a person with a Green Party flag. The wider public, concerned about the government’s austerity programme, and Suffolk County Councils plans to slash and hive off all its services, joined in.

    The March wove its way through town. At its peak numbers may have reached 600 hundred. Speakers at a rally on the Theatre’s steps questioned the need for cuts. The government had found money for bank bail-outs, so why not to keep services going?. They condemned Suffolk County Council’s new Strategic Direction. This was a politically inspired move driven by free-market ideology.  

    A group of articulate school and FE students  talked of their fight against education cuts and study fee rises. Free and joyous they got a warm welcome.

    David Ellsmere, leader of Ipswich Borough Labour group, pointed out that Liberal County Councillors, who opposed these plans on the County,  backed cuts and sell-offs  on Ipswich Borough council. Apart from a few in the audience who asked about Labour’s record he was well received.

    He was followed by Liberal Democrat County leader, Kathy Pollard, who said she opposed the County’s strategy. But she did not criticise her national leader, and announced that would never leave the Liberal Party. Her reception was not good (to put it politely).

    Paul Moffet of the CWU , who had travelled for three hours to get to Ipswich, talked about the Royal Mail sell off, and announced protests at this. He called for opposition to government plans across the board. Moffet’s appeal for greater TUC action went down well with the audience.

    At the end Teresa MacKay of SERTUC and Ipswich Trades Council, said campaigners would keep up the pressure on the County Council and build for even larger future protests.”
     

    Suffolk Coalition for Public Services Facebook Group here.

    More details on anti-cuts campaigns across the country from the Anti-Cuts site.
      
    Full list of speakers.
     

    1.    UNISON            Lucille Thirlby       Senior National Officer
    2.    UNITE               Peter Allenson      Nat.Sec. Public Services Industrial Sector
    3.    PCS                  Richard Edwards  Eastern Region Secretary
    4.    CWU                 Paul Moffat          Regional Secretary
    5.    Ipswich Labour Party                     David Ellesmere
    6.    NUT                  Graham White      Suffolk County Secretary
    7.    CYW - UNITE    Annie Twigg 
    8.    NASUWT           Keith Anderson    Suffolk County Secretary
    9.   SCC/LIBDEM    (Invited on UNISON’s Insistence)                            Kathy Pollard
    10.  IPSWICH TUC/SERTUC                             Teresa MacKay

     

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    Carlos, the Film Version: a Political Review.

    Posted in Films, Islam, Islamism, Israel, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on November 30, 2010

     

    The cinema version of Carlos (telly mini-series) was shown in Ipswich last week. (More Here.)

    The story of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez is well known (Here.). Born in the Venezuelan  radical bourgeoisie he was a self-proclaimed international revolutionary. As Carlos, he attached himself to the Palestinian cause. A few shoot-outs, the dramatic kidnapping of OPEC oil-Ministers (which led to a  rift with his PFLP sponsors) , and he was left adrift in the Middle East.

    Constructing his own group, Organisation of Armed Struggle, Carlos hired himself out to a variety of Arab states. He had links with the Stasi, the Romanian  Securitate and pursued his own ‘revolutionary’ course.

    The end of the Cold War saw Carlos bind closely to Islamism, from the Iranian counter-revolution, to, later, al-Qaeda. He now sits peacefully rotting in a French gaol.

    Assayas’s scenario (cut down for the cinema) is eventful. There is a flash into the wider 1970s Euro-Terrorist scene. The Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionäre Zellen), make their appearance. Gabrielle, (Second Generation RAF) a kind of  psychopathic Bjørk on speed, is striking. The European decors are sharp and full of 70s tone (kept right up to the 80s for the DDR). As a contrast Carlos’s  South Yemen, Syrian, Bagdad scenes are full of colour and heat. His last redoubt, with the genocidal regime in Khartoum, is as near to steamy as a screen can convey.

    As a psychological thriller, with realist-political edges, Carlos works. It would be interesting to see how this is maintained in the much fuller television version.

    I had always thought of Carlos-the-man to be as vain as a peacock and as brainless.  Charged with playing the character Édgar Ramírez shows the former well – never far away from women, and a bottle of Johnny Walker. He is intensely self-regarding. But another side is displayed. Carlos believed he was a ‘revolutionary’ – a kind of Wolfie Smith for real. Apart from a talent for murder, getting pudgy,  and smuggling he is shown to be far from stupid.  Ilich is a gifted linguist, managing not only fluent French and English but South Yemenite accented Arabic (as his Sudanese hosts inform him).

    As  a portrait of a revolutionary that never was – spectacularly brutal  actions for the Palestinian ’cause’ apart - Carlos the film is convincing. European leftists in the late 1970s said that one you collaborate with one secret service you end up working with them all. When they have no use for you, you are on your own. Post the Fall the Syrians tell him “times have changed”. He changes  as well – openly embracing the blood drenched cause of Islamism.

    His book, L’islam révolutionnaire (2003), shows the depths to which he has sunk.

    Sánchez claims a debt to both Marxism-Leninism and the Islam.

    He declares,

    Le terrorisme, cela va vous surprendre, est une sorte d’hymne à l’humain parce qu’il replace l’homme de chair et de sang au centre de la bataille. Il n’est pas question de robot, de bombardier furtif, de drones de combat; le shahid qui se sacrifie pour déclencher sa ceinture est un homme, seul, confronté à la peur dans un environnement hostile, son choix est essentiellement humain, ce n’est ni celui d’un fou ni d’un fanatique, mais celui de l’homme confronté à la toute-puissance de la machine.” (p. 158) (From here.)

    Terrorism, it will surprise you, is a  kind of hymn  to the human, because it places human beings, in flesh and blood, at the centre of the battle. It’s not a robot, a covert bomber, a drone; the ‘shahid’ (martyr) who sacrifices himself by letting loose his belt of explosives is a man, alone, confronting his fear in a hostile environment,. His choice is essentially human, not that of a fanatic, but that of a human being confronted with the overwhelming power of the machine.”

    It’s said the man himself has whinged about the details of the picture.

    Too bad the French will  hold him till his death…

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    Palestinian Blogger Still Under Arrest for ‘Blasphemy’.

    Posted in Free Speech, Islam, Islamism, Religion by Andrew Coates on December 1, 2010

    Photo non datée du blogueur palestinien Waleed Khalid Hassaïn

    Walid Husayin: Prison for Criticising Islam.

    Walid remains, le Monde reported yesterday, in Gaol.

    Updates from Internet Sans Frontières More Here.

    Original Story from here.

    The case of the unlikely apostate, a shy barber from this backwater West Bank town, is highlighting the limits of tolerance in the Western-backed Palestinian Authority — and illustrating a new trend by authorities in the Arab world to mine social media for evidence.

    Residents of Qalqiliya say they had no idea that Walid Husayin — the 26-year-old son of a Muslim scholar — was leading a double life.

    Known as a quiet man who prayed with his family each Friday and spent his evenings working in his father’s barbershop, Husayin was secretly posting anti-religion rants on the Internet during his free time.

    Now, he faces a potential life prison sentence on heresy charges for “insulting the divine essence.” Many in this conservative Muslim town say he should be killed for renouncing Islam, and even family members say he should remain behind bars for life.

    “He should be burned to death,” said Abdul-Latif Dahoud, a 35-year-old Qalqiliya resident. The execution should take place in public “to be an example to others,” he added.

    Over several years, Husayin is suspected of posting arguments in favor of atheism on English and Arabic blogs, where he described the God of Islam as having the attributes of a “primitive Bedouin.” He called Islam a “blind faith that grows and takes over people’s minds where there is irrationality and ignorance.”

    If that wasn’t enough, he is also suspected of creating three Facebook groups in which he sarcastically declared himself God and ordered his followers, among other things, to smoke marijuana in verses that spoof the Muslim holy book, the Quran. At its peak, Husayin’s Arabic-language blog had more than 70,000 visitors, overwhelmingly from Arab countries.

    Facebook group here.
    Petition in support here, “Freedom for Waleed, irreligious blogger and activist.”

    Wikipedia Background here.

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    Suffolk County Council: Privatisation Big Bang to Go Ahead.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservatives, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on December 3, 2010

    Who Ate all the Public Services?

    County bids for ‘Big Bang’ approach

    Headline slightly altered.

    Tendance Comments Added.

    THE leader of Suffolk County Council has said there will be no “Big Bang” approach to plans to divest the authority’s services

    That was the pledge from Jeremy Pembroke as the radical programme for change was again endorsed by councillors yesterday.

    (In other words, all public services are to considered for hiving off  in a ‘big bang’).

    The meeting of the full council in Ipswich debated the results of the first feedback after the county began a “community engagement” programme across Suffolk.

    (Instead of a democratic procedure, such as a ‘consultation’, we have  ’engagement’. That is shoving a few leaflets and questionnaires around the place and having talks with selected interest groups).

    And Mr Pembroke insisted it was still too early in the divestment process to come up with any firm details of how services would be transferred to other providers.

    However, he did make three pledges in an attempt to “dispel some of the myths”.

    He said: “Firstly, we are not about to privatise all our services. Our intention is to encourage a diverse range of mutuals, co-operatives, social enterprises, charities, community groups, town and parish councils, or – in some cases – Suffolk-based businesses.

    (In other words they are to be privatised not publicly owned. Podgy Pembroke failed to answer the EADT’s pertinent question: who will decide on what these farmed-off services do when they are no longer under democratic public control? Who will they be responsible to in-between contracts – themselves or the public? Obviously they will answer to themselves first of all ).

    “Secondly the council will not be reduced to 500 staff. As the details for divestment have only just started to be drawn up, there’s no way of knowing how many people will be leaving the organisation.

    (No figures, no facts, no details – the Suffolk Policy all along)

    “Thirdly, we are not simply hoping for volunteers to deliver our services for nothing.”

    (No, but they would no doubt be very welcome).

    During his summing up at the end of the debate Mr Pembroke said divestment would be allowed to happen in its own way, at its own pace and insisted there was nothing ideological about the move.

    He said: “There is no blueprint under the table, there is to be no ‘Big Bang’ approach to the changes.”

    (Collapse of stout party).

    Deputy Liberal Democrat group leader David Wood said there was concern about the county’s New Strategic Direction (NSD) in communities because there was so little detail. He said: “We have been discussing this since September, 2009, but we still get the same old rhetoric. People need to get some straight answers to the questions they are asking.”

    Labour group leader Sandy Martin dismissed the council’s own consultation processes and said the reaction on the streets was clear.

    He said: “We know what people really think. 7,000 have signed petition forms for the Unison campaigns, for the Campaign for Public Services and on the Save Suffolk Services website.

    “And if you haven’t concluded from these petitions, or from the 350 to 500 people who marched through the snow last Saturday, that the New Strategic Direction hasn’t found favour with the people of Suffolk then there are other consultation processes in May, 2011, and May, 2013 (local elections).”

    (Good points Sandy.)

    At the end of the debate the council again backed the NSD proposals by 44 votes to 11 with one abstention. It also backed a call for regular reports to be brought back to council meetings.

    (As if we expected anything else. The field is now clear for democratic local government to be largely replaced by an oligarchy of private companies, ‘social’ enterprises, and the rest of the crew of cost-cutters, profit seekers, dignitaries, and local big-wigs).

    (Paul Geater EADT Friday, Here.)

    Let us be clear on this: the New Strategic Direction has been adopted (Here). The Council says,

    The Council voted overwhelmingly for the three recommendations put forward in the paper, which were to:

    • Agree that the Council continues to implement the New Strategic Direction and in doing so continues to engage with Suffolk’s communities throughout its development in order that they have the opportunity to better understand and influence the future direction of the Council;
    • Note that the Divestment Member Working Group will produce an outline programme for divestment covering the ‘big ideas’ and ‘Your Place’ as a basis for discussion with interested parties and the community; and
    • Agree that it is work in progress and that as the work of the strategic council, community capacity and democracy working groups, progresses regular reports will be brought to Cabinet and Council.

    Signs that the Suffolk Coalition for Public Services has made an impact come from the  eccentric Ipswich right-wing. 

    Hard-right Ipswich Spy talks of Left marching in ‘vain’. The “marchers were protesting ‘the cuts’ ” (perhaps a relic from his days in Foggy Bottom-  one supposes this means we were protesting against the cuts), and the march was supported by Unite, Unison, the PCS, the FBU, the NUT, Ipswich Labour Party and the CWU, as well as students who appeared to be loving the attention of a rather bemused crowd of Christmas shoppers. “

    He claims that Ipswich Labour is saddling itself with the unions. (More anti-union musings here)

    Pentecostal fundamentalist A Riverside View says (here).

     Representatives from Labours masters UNISON, Unite, PWC, CWU and NUT many of whom were concerned with possible job losses leading to a significant drop in union funds along with student groups made up of middle class kids who are so spoilt they are enraged by the idea of having to pay for something, waived their placards as they marched from Endeavour House,

    Bridge Ward News, Ipswich’s own Catholic Ultra, comments (here),

    “No public sector cuts.”

    This chant works well when talking about “education cuts”.  After all you can say that media studies courses are in the same class as primary schools, hospitals and foreign aid.  Or you could say that teaching Tamara Art History is an investment in our future.

    You can’t say this about the whole public sector. It’s moronic.

    Well that’s us answered!

    Ipswich Protest. Photo from UNISON.

    Follow the Tendance on Twitter: here.

    Secularism, Feminism and the French Left: from the NPA Debate.

    Posted in European Left, Feminism, French Left, French Politics, Islamism, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on December 5, 2010

     

    Britons Say Ilham Moussaïd’s Resignation Shows French Left is ‘Islamophobic’.

    Tribune « religion, féminisme, laïcité »

    présentée par celles et ceux qui soutiennent la motion présentée par Anne, Cathy, Galia, Guillaume, Ingrid (CPN)

    Dans ce débat, il nous semble que le NPA doit clarifier une série d’éléments :
    1. Nous sommes face à un contexte marqué par une offensive raciste, visant en particulier les musulmans mais aussi les Roms, et une offensive antiféministe. Ce contexte rend très concrète l’obligation qui nous est faite d’unifier les oppriméEs et les
    exploitéEs sur un programme. Cela entraîne la nécessité permanente de prendre en charge concrètement l’ensemble des
    oppressions sans les hiérarchiser. L’articulation des différentes oppressions est un défi difficile, mais on ne peut se permettre d’y renoncer. Cela signifie notamment qu’on ne s’allie pas au gouvernement au nom du féminisme ni aux fondamentalistes religieux au nom de l’antiracisme.

    In this debate it seems to us that the NPA has to clarify its position on this series of topics.

    Our position is shaped by a racist offensive, directed principally at Muslims, and Rom, and an anti-feminist offensive. This makes brings to the fore the need to unite together the oppressed and exploited through a political programme. 

    We have to take account of a range of oppressions without giving them one a privilege over the other. Linking these different oppressions together is hard, but we can’t  flinch from the task. This means we cannot back the government in the name of feminism, or fundamentalists in the name of anti-racism.

     
    2. Nous ne nous définissons pas par rapport à la religion, nous mettons dieu « hors-champ » tout en n’observant aucune autocensure s’agissant de la critique de la religion, et en combattant les pouvoirs religieux et les conceptions réactionnaires que les religions véhiculent.

    We do not define ourselves in relation to religion. For us god is not the issue. However,  we refuse to censor ourselves. This implies that we can criticise religion, fight religious authorities, and the reactionary views that religions embody.

     
    3. Ce choix est contradictoire avec le fait de mettre nous-mêmes la religion en avant et d’en faire un axe d’intervention politique, comme l’ont parfois fait les camarades du Comité
    populaire d’Avignon. Le NPA doit affirmer l’unité de classe au-delà des différences « communautaires ».

    This choice stands in contrast with those who prioritise religion as an area of political intervention - as has sometimes been the case for the comrades of the  Comité populaire d’Avignon. The NPA must support class unity above ‘community’ differences.

     
    4. Nous ne nous référons pas à la laïcité comme à un héritage de la iiie République, mais comme à un combat : comme enjeu plus que jamais actuel, elle est partie intégrante de notre programme et de notre projet.

    We consider that secularism (la laïcité) is not to be considered as simply something inherited from the 3rd Republic. It is a fight, a challenge that is more important than ever. It is an essential part of our programme and project.


    5. Nous comprenons que le port du foulard islamique puisse renvoyer à des motivations individuelles très diverses. Certes, dans le cadre de la stigmatisation des musulmans, qui s’exprime avec violence, certains musulmans souhaitent publiquement affirmer qu’ils le sont. Mais nous avons un avis sur le symbole utilisé dans ce cas d’espèce : nous considérons qu’un signe religieux qui symbolise et manifeste l’oppression des femmes n’est pas un bon choix. Le foulard islamique a un sens général, largement reconnu comme tel, celui que lui donnent ceux qui en ont fait une injonction en islam (et les autres monothéismes avant lui), lui associant des pratiques sociales que nous combattons. Le voile se situe dans la longue tradition patriarcale de la plupart des religions, qui ont cherché à contrôler le corps et la sexualité des femmes, pour les assigner à un rôle spécifique et subordonné dans la société, une tradition aujourd’hui ravivée. Cette conception est contradictoire avec notre projet féministe et démocratique.

    We realise that there are many different motives for wearing the Islamic scarf (hijab). In the context of  the stigmatisation of Muslims, expressed violently, many Muslims wish publicly to express who they are. But in our view the symbol that’s used in this way, one that symbolises the oppression of women, is not a good choice. The Islamic scarf has a more general meaning which is well-recognised . It is dependent upon religious rules, shared by other Monotheistic faiths, of a type that we fight against. The veil has a long patriarchical history. It is  used to control women’s bodies and sexuality. That is, to assign women a particular and subordinate social role. This tradition is today being revived. Such ideas are in contradiction with our democratic and feminist project.

    6. La contradiction liée au port du foulard islamique n’est pas en tant que telle un obstacle à l’adhésion au NPA. Il existe bien d’autres contradictions, moins visibles mais pas moins réelles. Dès lors que le NPA a un point de vue connu de toutes et tous, elles ne posent pas de problème insurmontable.

    Wearing the Islamic scarf (hijab) is not, in itself, a barrier to membership of the NPA – despite these contradictions. There are many other contradictions, less visible, but no less real. As soon as the NPA has a common standpoint these  problems can be worked out.

    7. En revanche, les choses sont différentes dans le domaine de la représentation publique car c’est l’ensemble du parti qui se trouve alors en position d’assumer la contradiction. Le NPA ne peut être représenté par ce symbole qu’est le foulard ni par un autre signe religieux ostensible quelle que soit la religion.

    By contrast, it’s a different matter when we come to our public representation. Here, it is the whole of the Party which has to work out this contradiction. The NPA cannot be represented by the symbol of the scarf, nor by any other ostentatious religious sign.

    More here.

    There are many different views, or rather, nuances, about the issues this resolution raises. They centre on the signification of the veil – as an oppression, and what this implies, or as an expression of identity. There is a general consensus against the Sarkozy state-run efforts to claim the ‘secularist’ mantle. But from this point on disagreements exist in abundance.

    A key issue is this: whether the NPA should support political candidates who express their faith through ostentatious religious symbols.

    Amendment: Sensibilité À Égalité

    Pour notre part, en accord avec notre conception de la laïcité, nous opposons systématiquement à la fois à l’imposition du voile et à son interdiction. »

    For our part, based on our conception of secularism, we are completely opposed both to the imposition of the veil as to banning it.

     « Un militant ou une militante manifestant une croyance religieuse a, comme tous les autres adhérentEs, le droit le droit de postuler pour représenter le parti lors d’élections.

    An activist, female or male,  who has religious beliefs, has, as any member has,  the right to apply to be a candidate for the party during elections.

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    Islamicists Kill Pakistani Leftists.

    Posted in Fascism, Islam, Islamism, Racism by Andrew Coates on December 7, 2010
     
    Pakistani Islamists Show Support for Taliban.
    Communist Party of Pakistan strongly condemns the audacious targeted killing of Comrade Latifullah khan, member CPP in village Gandigar, District Dir, Pukhtoonkhwa province.
     
    Since the start of Taliban and fanatics insurgency in the province of Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa (ex. NWFP), a holocaust of the enlightened and educated people is underway through a very wicked planning.
     
    Unfortunately this area is intentionally kept  backward in education and development of infrastructure at one hand due to the sheer oblivion of the state, to which the rise in Islamic fanaticism and jingoism has highly contributed ,which was once sponsored by the state of Pakistan through its international donors from Saudi Arabia and USA and allied countries to hamper the proliferation of Marxist ideologies in the region .
     
    The recent insurgency of Taliban in the region since last year has caused destruction of over 1100 schools and educational institution in the area , school teachers and school going children are mercilessly targeted and killed in a large number on daily basis .
     
    Comrade Latifullah khan ,who was only about 36 years old and belonged to District Dir upper ,an educationist by profession and the only one enlightened person in this department as the rest ,whole lot overwhelmingly consist of fanatic Jumatislami obscurants . Comrade Latifullah was an active progressive student leader and was member of the district cell of the progressive Pukhtoonkhwa front ( its is to be noted that due to high sensitivity and backlash for using the name of Communist Party of Pakistan , CPP ,CC had indorsed exceptionally for Pukhtoonkhwa this covert name ,of which comrade Dr Shafiq Ahmad had been Secretary ). (Monday, 29 November 2010 13:42 from Here. )

     

    This is not the first killing of Pakistani leftists. It adds to the murder By Islamists (whether ‘Taliban’ or from other groups)  of a variety of people, from opponents to Christians. There are equally inter-Muslim killings, between Shia and Sunnis.  (here).

    The Guardian reports today that there are growing fears for  ”the safety of Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman condemned to death under Pakistani blasphemy laws, after a religious preacher and a major newspaper issued a call for ordinary Muslims to behead her if the courts do not carry out the hanging.”(here).

    The worst persecutions and murders are directed at the Ahmadis here.

     

    One cannot but help wondering whether the reliance of Pakistan’s state structure, on a privileged and exclusive role for Islam, has more than a little to do with this.

    This bigotry (Enty adds) has begun to spread to the UK – here.

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    Poor Students’ Plea To Protest.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservative Party, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats by Andrew Coates on December 9, 2010

    Students Helped by New Fee Rise.

    It’s with a spring in the step that today’s protests have begun.

    The Guardian (as predicted) speaks of “worthwhile tweaks for the very worst-off, but…”

    Yes if it’s  one cause surely to be brought to the fore: the plight of the poor.

    The ill-fed, hard-working, dedicated, ragged-but-noble and deserving,  would-be student helped by the Liberal Democrats .

    On the Tory side,’ Pinch’ David Willetts calls (here)

    for widening participation efforts to focus not just on undergraduate social class, but also on “disabled people, ethnic minorities, mature students, part-time learners”.

    The Sun helpfully reports that (Here)

    DAVID Cameron came to the aid of embattled Nick Clegg yesterday by mounting a passionate defence of the student tuition fees rise.

    The PM said the Coalition’s plans would WIDEN access to university, CREATE better courses and leave the poorest graduates BETTER OFF than under the current system.

    Tendance Coatesy appeals to all poor would-be students to tell these people to shove off.

    Rights, nor more bloody charity is what we need.

    Tagged with:

    Student Protests: From the European Press.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservative Party, Europe, European Left, Liberal Democrats by Andrew Coates on December 10, 2010

     ”Das ist unser 1968er-Moment”, sagte Michael Chessum vom University College London, einer der Organisatoren der Protestkampagne gegen die Erhöhung der Studiengebühren in England. “Wie in Frankreich 1968 könnte die ungerechte Gebührenerhöhung eine breitere Krise auslösen”, sagte er. Taz, Here

    I’m not sure of the point of the last sentence linking the rise in fees with May 68 in France.

    It seems to imply that a rise in student inscription charges was a cause of France’ s 68. Certainly not true of its origins in the  Nanterre revolt (I recall something about dormitory rules for guests of the opposite sex played  part, but more directly threats to expell stroppy lefty students.). Or that even the ’tipping point’ argument is valid.

    Since comparisons with 68 are frequent at the moment we should be careful about them. France’s  68 was not  stirred into being by particularly harsh state measures. The 68 events seem to have had  much wider, and hard to pin down causes. That’s not even going into such facts as that in Italy and Belgium students were in revolt before France was affected by its own rebellions. Or that workers’ disaffection was gradually swelling up in the 196os across Europe and their strikes and occupations had a central place in what happened.

    This is a good discussion of these issues, The Spirit of ’68. Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956-1976 Gerd-Rainer Horn. Here.

    But, that said, the statement that this is the students’ 68 moment, is great.

    Things have changed” we could say.

    Here

    Libé is equally matter-of-fact (so far)

    De violents incidents — filmés en direct par les télévisions en continu — ont éclaté jeudi en milieu d’après-midi à Londres entre policiers et manifestants mobilisés contre la hausse des droits d’entrée à l’université, faisant plusieurs blessés de part et d’autres, selon les reporters de l’AFP et la police.

    (Here.)

    La Repubblica focuses on poor  Charles and Carmelia’s plight,

    Studenti, Londra a ferro e fuoco Assalto all’auto di Carlo e Camilla Here.

    Neo-liberal le Point  shows the famous photo of the distressing scene,

    Scène d'émeutes à Londres lors des manifestations étudiantes

    Les manifestants s’en sont pris au véhicule qui transportait le prince Charles et son épouse au théâtre © Terry Stephens / AFP  (Here.)

    ****

    Bild has typically restrained coverage.

    Studenten greifen Prinz Charles und Camilla an

    31 Verletzte,15 Festnahmen +++ Demonstranten zünden Rauchbomben

    Großbritannien: Blutige Studenten-Proteste - Angriff auf Prinz Charles und Camilla in London
    Prinz Charles und Lady Camilla in ihrem Wagen. Die Limousine wurde von Studenten mit Farbbeuteln attackiert
    Foto: AP
    2 von 23
    Großbritannien: Blutige Studenten-Proteste - Angriff auf Prinz Charles und Camilla in London
    Krawalle in London! Die Demonstranten griffen auch die Limousine von Charles und Camilla an
    Foto: dpa, Getty Images, Reuters, AP

    Krawall-Nacht in London!

    Nachdem das britische Unterhaus die Obergrenze für Studiengebühren erhöht hat, gingen in London tausende Studenten auf die Straße. Die Bilanz der Nacht: 31 Verletzte, 15 Festnahmen.

    Heftige Studentenproteste
    in London
    Hintergrund
    Le Soir (Belgium) gives clear and simple reporting.
    I liked the feminised headline,
    “Violentes manifestations estudiantines à Londres” (Here.)
    *************
     

    El País has lots and lots of photos, which is nice. Here.

    It also has a full, balanced, report,  Here.

    Anarchism and the Student Protests.

    Posted in Anarchism, British Govern, Conservative Party, Cuts, Marxism by Andrew Coates on December 11, 2010

     

    Defend Anarchism!

    The Media has rediscovered anarchism. The Left’s friend, the Daily Mail, writes that,

    “Observers said as few as half of the yesterday’s crowd of protesters were students, with a rent-a-mob of anarchists and other thugs taking control.”

    The Express says that,

    GANGS of anarchists are plotting to wreck the Westminster Abbey wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, it emerged yesterday.

    Police intelligence reports reveal how anti-capitalist thugs around the world are being urged to descend on London for the wedding on Friday, April 29.

    There are genuine fears anarchists will attempt to destroy the couple’s big day by sparking riots

    Thanks for that reminder. I’ll pencil it in next year’s Diary.

    Ian Bone, with his hand on the pulse, rightly points out that many of this ‘mob’ come from the “slums of London” (Here).

    The high-spirits/appalling thuggery of the crowd clearly has a lot in common with something well-known in the rest of Europe. That is the ‘casseurs’ (vandals) who flock to the fringes of demonstrations. When, that is, they don’t revolt on their own – for less defined political causes. Sometimes this about being totally fed-up with the world and wanting to hit out and get the adrenalin rush a riot brings. This is a problem, there’s no denying it. But we do not back  repressive solutions to a deep-rooted social malaise. The best known case lies in the positon of the French banlieue (similar relevant analysis here). But anyway, the Tendance has been known to have done some street-fighting as well, so our judgement has to bear this in mind.  *

    Politicised Anarchists, nevertheless, have played a role in the student protests. That can be seen from the Red and Black Flags, the old ‘A’  sign, and plenty of activist literature. We are certain that some of them, better described as ‘autonomes’ were acting out their strategy of creating ‘autonomous spaces’ – and attacking property (and having the odd pop at the rozzers and Royals).

    What does this mean?

    Here are some points.

    • Anarchism is part of the workers’ movement. Marx’s biographer, Mehring, was explicit on this point – against some comments of Marx himself (details here). In Britain the most public face of anarchism tends to be student based, or axed on the ‘social economy’ (LETs, Co-ops) and other small-scale ‘alternatives’ to capitalism. But there remain pockets of working-class anarchism in some cities, such as London’s East End. More generally anyone who thinks that Bakunin’s criticisms of Marxism, as a potential source of a ‘scientific tyranny’ are completely false, has a lot of history to ignore.
    • If disaffected youth come to demonstrations and act violently there are good reasons for them to do so. The slums of the East End are no joke – and the market state has made people’s lives there a misery. The shift from stable work to precarious employment, and the impoverishment caused by welfare ‘reform’ and other attempts to discipline the poor, fuels resentment. Class War used to argue that with the decline of the British industrial base the class struggle had spilled out onto the streets. The 1970s autonomists claimed that the ‘social factory’,  embraced the whole of society and fights over capitalist reproduction could happen in multiple flash-points.
    • Young people, freer to revolt, are just such a flash-point. Their reactions are in response to what they can see of the market-state and do not want to experience. Toni Negri and Michael Hardt have talked of the ‘multitude’ as a potential political figures including a wide range of people  speaking out for new demands. A dead-end response is found in John Holloway’s Scream and cracks in capitalism, which disperses all these struggles and has not the slightest idea of how to unite them. If the Marxist left disagrees with this it is up to us to offer a better alternative.
    • Many anarchists, based on the self-management and collectivist traditions which cross-over to libertarian Marxism,  have a strategy of class struggle. 
    • The Whitechapel anarchists are at the forefront of the anti-fascist and anti-communalist fight. By opposing both the BNP/EDL and the communitarian forces (Islamists, Christians and so on) supported by the left they play an extremely positive role. Anarchism has the strength to back popular unity and not bow to the British state’s and left’s multiculturalist management of the people.

     

     Anarchists are the salt of the workers’ movement.

     

    There are good reasons to defend anarchists against the present media-led state attacks.

    * Note to the curious: all long ago. Hummm.
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    Liar, Liar, Captain Ska for Noël 2010

    Posted in British Govern, Capitalism, Conservative Party, Culture, Cuts, Liberal Democrats by Andrew Coates on December 13, 2010

    Facebook Group Here.

    22 Days in May, David Laws. Review: The End of Progressive Liberalism.

    Posted in Britain, Conservative Party, Left, Liberal Democrats by Andrew Coates on December 14, 2010

    Liberal Progressive.

     

    22 Days in May. The Birth of the Lib Dem-Conservative Coalition. David Laws. Biteback 2010.

    “It was the child of Progress, which is not only an illusion but an athletic illusion, and which insists it is better to bowl oneself backwards than to stand still.” The Strange Death of Liberal England. George Dangerfield. 1938.

    The Liberal Democrats are a progressive party. They favour reform; they move forward. David Laws, closely involved in negotiating the Liberal-Conservative Coalition, and briefly Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has written more than an instant history of these talks. 22 Days in May is a vindication of the Liberal Democrats as part of the advance guard. The premise of 22 Days in May is also its conclusion, “This is a coalition formed in the tough times of fiscal retrenchment, one which has the potential to be a partnership for the good times too and to deliver the reform and renewal that Britain needs.”(Page 283) ‘Reform’ and ‘renewal’, once watchwords of Tony Blair, are now, Laws and colleagues, on the side of the ‘radical’ government that “believes in capitalism and freedom.”(Page 279)

    Have liberal progressives gone backwards by embracing the Conservative Party? The Coalition “Programme for Government” offers, Laws asserts, “a real possibility of a government which will be liberal politically, economically, socially, and in its attitude to personal matters.” (Page 277) It will “take many years” to fulfil its ambitions. In the meantime hefty reductions in public spending are unrolling. He offers an explanation – or at least sometimes rises near to one – of how the government’s combination of “tough actions” to reduce the deficit and sort out public finances (cuts), might be seen in progressive terms. Or have they become a “serious party” grappling with political reality. Supporting this view in the Independent Mary Ann Sieghart judges that they have “succeeded in casting quite a liberal complexion over the Government” (13.12.10). The issue turns upon what ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ mean. Following Will Hutton, Laws promotes “fairness”, meritocracy within markets. Nick Clegg considers David Cameron’s Big Society, in which plans to transfer much collective social provision to private companies, charitable oligarchies and local cliques emerge ever more clearly, to be pure liberalism. It strengthens civil society over the central state. The Coalition, as a result, helps individuals by improving social conditions. It is both liberal and progressive.

    Negotiations for Not-Nobodies.

    22 Days is, to many reviewers, an insider’s book for political ‘wonks’. This expression has the happy effect of translating the wish of professional political animals to exclude others from their doings. In fact Laws is usually far from wonkish. His prose is plain and his narrative smooth. It is infused with the confidence born from the rapid transition from the political wilderness, and the frazzled reality of the grass-roots Liberal Democrat party, into Cabinet. Some are heartless enough to demand more financial detail behind Laws’s resignation “for falling below the standards” constituents could expect of him. (Pages 258 – 261). But we won’t further detract from his evident pleasure in recounting his late-coming halcyon days. The portraits of the failed attempt to create a ‘traffic light’ coalition with Labour and other parties are not blurred with the need to please more than (as many have noted) those who might consider employing him in the future. Talk of Brown’s glowering presence, of ‘tribalism’ on the Labour side, and Peter Mandelson’s plea on behalf of the wealthy, are less interesting than the way in which the Labour tem “treated us to policy lectures”(Page 150). Not only Liberals but also left-wing opponents of Blair and Brown can recognise the ill grace. By contrast the Conservatives negotiated with them “on equal footing”, as well they might – given some of the implicit Liberal-Conservative synergy we have mentioned already. (more…)

    EDL Hates Students Now.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Britain, Fascism by Andrew Coates on December 17, 2010

    As a sign of sharpening political polarisation in Britain the English Defence League has now hit out at students.

    in a speech to EDL supporters in Peterborough on 11 December, EDL leader “Tommy Robinson” – a former BNP member whose real name is Stephen Yaxley Lennon – issued a threat to student demonstrators.

    Threatened

    His speech alternated attempts to whip up anti-Muslim hatred with attacks on the thousands of school and college students who have protested against fees and education cuts over the past weeks. He threatened:

    The next time the students want to protest in our capital, the English Defence League will be there.

    In terms that will come as news to millions of working class school and university students, he claimed:

    You had students living off their dads’ f***ing bank cards who have never lived a normal way in their life. They do not understand what it is to be a working class member of this community.

    And in a single scattergun blast, he lashed out at students, Unite Against Fascism and “communist scum”. His speech followed streams of hate directed at students on the EDL’s forums.

    From Unite Against Fascism. Here.

    Original source:

    We always thought the EDL leadership acted as ponces for the ruling class by dividing the people.

    Now the EDL touts want to smash protests against the Liberal-Tory Government.

    One of the best analyses of the EDL is made by the Whitechapel Anarchists. They call them a ‘Church and King’ Mob – Here.

    Support Bangladeshi Garment Workers! Demand Moshrefa Mishu Be Released

    Posted in Bangladesh, Capitalism, International, Labour Movement, Unions by Andrew Coates on December 19, 2010

    Back Bangladeshi Garment Workers!

    This is very important.

    Disputes Background BBC – Here.

    Rallying to Demand Garment Workers Leader Moshrefa Mishu’s Immediate Release!!

    Hi!
      
    Moshrefa Mishu, president of the Garments Workers Unity Forum (GWUF) was picked up from her house in the middle of the night, 14 Dec 2010 by a contingent claiming to belong to the Detective Branch of police. They did not have an arrest warrant. She was produced in court after midday (15 December), the court granted DB police a 2-day remand. She had not been allowed to take her medicine with her (for asthma, and a spinal injury from an attack on her life several years ago), the next day her sister Jebunnessa was permitted to meet her, and much later (past midnight), to drop medicines and a blanket for her.
      
    I had sent out a Protest Statement on 14 December but in my haste I had been unable to include many of you. My subsequent updates, I am afraid, were not as systematic as they should have been, often not including those who had been unable to respond immediately. I have now finally had the time to make a comprehensive list of people, both the initial signatories and those who later posted messages of solidarity on Shahidul’s Blog, or got in touch me with through e-mail, I have also included those who I know to be supporters of workers’ movements and would like to be informed about Mishu, her arrest, and government repression of garment workers movement for the implementation of wage increases previously agreed upon. For those who have been newly included I have pasted messages sent out earlier, our Statement of Protest, and daily Updates (below).
      
    TODAY’S UPDATE: Mishu was produced in CMM court today, the DB sought a 5-day remand on allegations that she had been seen in the company of some members of Jamaat-e-Islami (in a car) but were unable to substantiate it (not suprisingly). The court extended remand for another day, and Anu Mohd tells me that our Statement of Protest which was published in some dailies today, was produced by her defence lawyers, and presumably helped to weaken these bizarre allegations, and to reduce the number of days sought by the government. Thanks Hameeda apa, for making sure that the news got published!
      

    http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=166329

      Release of Mashrefa Mishu demanded
    http://www.prothom-alo.com/detail/date/2010-12-17/news/116398  Moshrefa Mishur greptarer protibad, Mukti dabi
     
     
     
     
     

     

    http://www.newagebd.com/2010/dec/17/nat.html  Release of RMG leader Mishu demanded
      
    A Protest Rally organised by writers, teachers, artists and cultural activists will be held tomorrow Saturday 18 December at 3.00 pm at TSC island, Dhaka University, we will gather to protest against Moshrefa Mishu’s unlawful arrest and to demand her immediate release, an immediate end to the repression of garment workers, and to all other acts that imperil the garment industry. Shommilito Nari Shomaj has told me that they will join the Rally, with their banner.
      
    A correction from Sara Hossain who has informed me that the writ petition challenging the legality of Mishu’s arrest has not yet been filed, that more time was needed to collect the needed information, that she expects the petition to be filed tomorrow.
     
    Anu also tells me that Mishu’s asthma is much worse, so please come to the Rally tomorrow so that we can collectively raise our voices in protest against the sheer injustice of arresting/remanding Mishu, who is being persecuted by the government for fighting for a decent pay, and for safe and secure working conditions for garment workers.
     
    Please pass around the news of tomorrow’s Protest Rally, urge everyone you know to join it so that there is a big turnout, so that we can all raise our voices together demanding Mishu’s immediate release
     
    In solidarity/r
      (more…)
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    Free Jafar Panahi and Reza Shahabi!

    Posted in Human Rights, International, Iran, Iranian Resistance by Andrew Coates on December 21, 2010

    Ahmadinejad Sneers at Human Rights.

    In Iran, as hefty price rises go ahead, Ahmadinejad looks vulnerable to a new bout of opposition.

    In response the Islamist regime is resorting to increased repression

    Screen International Reports,

    Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been sentenced to six years in prison and banned from making films, making political statements, doing media interviews or travelling abroad for 20 years.

    His lawyer said that Panahi was convicted of national security violations. Panahi has been an outspoken supporter of the opposition green movement.

    His collaborator Mohammed Rasoulof was also sentenced to six years in jail.

    His lawyer says Panahi plans to appeal.

    Panahi’s internationally acclaimed films include The White Balloon, The Circle, Crimson Gold and Offside. He was recently invited to be a juror at the 2011 Berlinale. He had been unable to serve on Cannes 2010’s jury because he had been arrested in Iran.

    There was an international outcry at that time, with support for Panahi coming from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Juliette Binoche.

    BBC here

     Meanwhile the condition that Iranian trade unionist Reza Shahabi is grave.

    The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said today that the Iranian Judiciary must immediately release labour activist Reza Shahabi, who is currently on a dry hunger strike.

    Reza Shahabi is a prisoner of conscience and member of the Union of Workers of the Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Sherkat-e Vahed) who has been on a dry hunger strike since Saturday, 4 December inside Evin prison’s ward 209. Shahabi’s wife, Zohreh Rezaei, told the Campaign that Shahabi is in critical condition. Shahabi has said he will continue his hunger strike until his judicial status is clarified.

    Shahabi was arrested on 12 June at his workplace. He spent 40 days in solitary confinement and so far no charges have been announced. Four years ago, Shahabi was dismissed from his job for his union activities.

    Hands off the People of Iran. Here.

    Reza has ended his full hunger strike but remains on ‘wet’ hunger strike.

    More up-to-date information here

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    Lenin Rediscovered and Politics Today.

    Posted in Communism, Left, Marxism, SWP, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on December 22, 2010

    NOTES.

    In the just issued Historical Materialism journal there is an important  ’symposium’ on Lars Lib’s Lenin Rediscovered ( another useful Review by Mike Macnair here). I have not read the original book – maybe when I have the odd sixty quid to spare I will (revised: $210.00!).

    The debate centres on Lenin’s What is to do Done? (1901 and February 1902), and its significance in the development of ‘Leninism’. Lib’s aim was to demolish the ‘myth’ of this text. For many, apparently, Lenin broke from democracy. His pamphlet against the Mensheviks on the need for a centralised structure of the Russian Social Democratic Party showed the germs of a future hyper-centralised and bureaucratic state-party machine. Lenin’s support for centralisation of policy-making and day-to-day decision-taking, along with control over the party paper and tight conditions for membership, was the basis of what later became known as ‘democratic centralism’.

    Lib establishes (fairly convincingly) that WITB was did not mark a radical break from  2nd International social democracy. It did not turn towards absolute centralism, and a party monopolised by full-time revolutionaries-by-trade. A degree of centralism and dedication to party-work were part of the building-blocks of any mass movement with a reasonable chance of winning power. Lib argues Lenin’s famous formulation, that socialism has to be brought from ‘the outside’ to the working class is part of ‘Erfurtian’ orthodoxy. That is the form of socialism set out by Karl Kautsky most famously in his commentary on the German SPD’s Erfurt Programme, The Road to Power.

    This type of Marxist politics is  grounded on the development of history (class struggle), analysis of social structure, and the role of a workers’ party in changing people’s minds, and encouraging their participation in the  unfolding of socialist strategy.  Lenin, Lars considers (as do most of the other contributors) based himself, in this text and his practice of the period, was democratic. He recognised the complex interaction between mass movements and the need for a professional revolutionary party. But the nature of that relationship, as other participants in the symposium indicate, remains an open question.

    There is much in this discussion that will interest only those thoroughly grounded in the history of the Bolshevik Party, and, above all, those wishing to defend this or that aspect of its politics. A few short sentences cannot properly summarise this rich, and largely rewarding, debate. Much turns on Lenin’s efforts to deal with political and working class  ’spontaneity‘ through the famous ‘outside’ party intervention. This again comes down to translation (here), as Wikipedia notes,

    Lih argues that even if we examine the controversial passages in WITBD we misunderstand them if we are not alive to the meanings of the words used. Some of these have been translated in such a way as to confuse or even to draw readers to the opposite of what Lenin’s real views were. Pages and pages of Lih’s book therefore are devoted to explaining why and how the word stikhiinyi, when translated as spontaneity, distorts his views; how konspiratsiia does not mean ‘conspiracy’; tred-iunionizm does not mean ‘trade unionism’ and revoliutsioner po professii should not be translated as ‘professional revolutionary.’”[4][5]

    Some points which have more contemporary relevance should be borne in mind.

    • Lib makes much of his strategy of “making strange” What is to Be Done? through a new translation. This includes an effort to make clear that the key word ‘spontaneous’ has been used (and accept as standard) to stand for the Russian Stikhinost and stikhiinyi. The Russian words have connotations, he says, of “primitiveness, uncontrolled impulses, lack of organisation” and even “violence”.
    • These are a lot of connotations.  Spontaneity in English (and in other European languages which employ it) is  understood with a different range of meanings politically, to say, in ordinary life (if we use it). The spectrum of these everyday  references includes, “coming or resulting from a natural impulse or tendency; without effort or premeditation; natural and unconstrained; unplanned: a spontaneous burst of applause, “given to acting upon sudden impulses”. Then we have scientific layer (of natural phenomena) “arising from internal forces or causes; independent of external agencies; self-acting. “growing naturally or without cultivation, as plants and fruits; indigenous.” In left politics by contrast spontaneity refers largely to self-acted, self-driven and, by inference, unpredictable, since a spontaneous action can crop up any time, any place, within the context that shapes any act.
    • Lenin both supported and opposed self-activity. Political activity located in  individual decision-making t4nded to be conflated with an appeal to unpredictable reasons. The Party-form was defended as a kind of shiled against its contamination by bourgeois ideology.  Lenin always, rightly, underlined the collective and taking-sides nature of politics.  However, this was not just because of the negative shades of meaning attached to  stikhiinyi. In  Lenin’s equally important  text, One Step Fowards, Two Steps Back (February-May 1904), that he opposed another side of self-decided acts (that is beyond the Marxist party’s organisation) . This is the principle that however collectively elaborated politics needs a bedrock area of individual freedom to dissent and cause upsets. His writing, In One Step…as in many other places,  is littered with criticisms of this as ‘autonomism’  ‘anarchism’ and – later – liberalism. It is what became known as the contrary of ‘party-mindedness’. In time this would sanction the elimination of ‘factionalism’ when the strains of the early Soviet State (and its political militarisation) meant that the already weak sanctio for the space of a final autonomous area was swept away.
    • Lenin may have been as flexible as possible, within the framework of Erfurt socialism, towards the spontaneous actions of the masses (notably the 1905 Russian mass strikes, and thereafter). But he was marked by this continual side-taking against the self-activation of anyone who opposed his particular view of what socialism was.
    • This was shored up by a belief in the scientific basis, or objective truth, of his version of Marxism in a wide variety of fields. Critics of this aspect of Lenin’s organisational principles may have agreed, or agree, with his writings on say the Development of Capitalism in Russia (the class structure, and the conditions it laid out for socialist change, uniting democratic, working class and peasant demands). But a party-mechanism that is more than just wary of (bad) stikhiinyi  but hostile to the ‘self-organisation’ of forces outside and inside Russian social democracy puts ‘scientific’ truth (an important goal – though objective assessments would be a better description) first and neglects the inherently turbulent stasis (conflict) of politics. Lenin, and the Bolsheviks in power, came to define stasis, internal party conflict, through a shift already apparent in Aristotle, as subversion, as a sign of the enemy’s acts.

    The problem than about Lenin, shown in What is to be Done? is then greater than this symposium suggests. It is that it showed Lenin attempting to deal with political conflict, opposition to his views on party organisation, throughly hostile to stikhiinyi   in a broad sense: the turmoil created by uncontrolled autonomy, of self-acting, of political stasis. Part of his  reaction was to support centralisation, backed up by an appeal to Marxist science as a source of authority (first and foremost). Another part was to promote the ideas of Erfurt in a broader way, to encourage people to think in socialist terms and to build a party which was more than a loose federation of the like-minded. This required a seriousness that party-mindedness helped.

    The symposium establishes this positive side well. Lenin’s success owes a lot to the second line of march. But other factors, as we have indicated,  would later accelerate the importance of the former.

    As is suggested by some of the contributors to this discussion Lib’s writings are no a true ‘Cambridge school’ attempt to unearth the contextual and historical meanings of the texts. The debate is dominated by the SWP’s efforts to find early breaks between Lenin and Kautsky – a topic Lars has no difficulty in showing is a dead-end. Lib points out, in the process, the shaky ground of SWP theory. Tony Cliff for example, smuggled in other people’s references to original Russian language sources and presented them as his own in his biography of Lenin.

    If this shows how we cannot easily read the political past without our own concerns coming to the fore – perhaps it is impossible. In this potential mind-field there are not just mythologies but real power struggles at work.  The author of Lenin Rediscovered  does not grapple with the fact that, say, nobody has ever attempted to defend Kautsky’s Foundations of Christianity as a guide to present day debates on religion and socialism, while Lenin’s Materialism and Empirico-Criticism loomed large for a long time in discussions about Marxism and philosophy. One obvious reason is that Lenin gave his entire practical and written corpus the status of party-mindedness, and expected to draw up battle lines on anything he touched on. In this he laid down grounds that made it hard to advocate individual autonomous judgement on the whole gamut of political and theoretical problems that the Bolshevik, and later, the Communist movement confronted. This legacy is not a historical one.

    Some consider that the Third International and Bolshevism, the resulting effects on all groups claiming a Leninist legacy, is marked by this tendency to be suspicious of a key aspect of democracy, individual judgement.

    Which explains why, when people look at the actions of British left groups trying to create their own fronts for anti-cuts campaigns they refer to the Party deciding the Line, and to Democratic Centralism (all following Party decisions) – a myth maybe, but one made real. Party-mindedness is essential to politics, as are distinctions between friends and enemies, and the reciprocal relations (close to friendship) that a workers’ movement should foster. But Lenin beqeuthed  an unattractive feature: a distrust of spontaneity, whether he considered it in terms of stikhiinyi or (since he was discussing in terms of Kautsky’s  German SPD) as  Spontaneität  or  Ungezwungenheit  (that is the style of un-forced expression).  

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    Library Anti-Cuts Protests in Feburary – Suffolk Faces Threat Too.

    Posted in Britain, British Govern, Culture, Cuts, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on December 23, 2010

    Coming to Suffolk.

    The Guardian reports (Here.)

    Library campaigners are proposing a co-ordinated day of protest in February over the mass closures announced for the service since the government’s comprehensive spending review.

    More than 350 libraries are currently threatened with closure, according to an online survey, with 26 mobile library services also earmarked to face the axe. The number is rising weekly as more councils come forward with cost-cutting proposals, with estimates that 800-1,000 libraries will soon be at risk.

    Campaigner Alan Gibbons is proposing a co-ordinated day of protest in February, the month when councils are due to finalise their spending decisions. Protesters, already active in local areas where major cuts are threatened, including Doncaster, Lewisham and Gloucestershire, will hold “read-ins” at selected branches, with speeches by concerned readers, authors, trade unionists, librarians and councillors.

    Suffolk faces a transfer of Library services to a ‘social enterprise’. Or perhaps a company with the usual Chief Executive. Or maybe a Sellotape-and-String charity dreamt up for the purpose. Or….well who knows since Suffolk County Council have not deigned to inform the public about how they are going to hive off a democratically run service and what will replace it.

    One thing we do know: tThis will happen very quickly – plans are for arrangements to come out in a few months. There will be library closures. In other cases there will be attempts to offload responsibility onto volunteers. Or even for ‘communities’ to take over libraries.(On the latter Here.)

    In near-by Cambridgeshire protest campaigns are already underway. (More Here. )

    Suffolk will see its own wave of protests. Support is growing locally for action against the threat to the Library service.

    I am told that there are extremely militant voices around – something certain self-styled Spies have yet to note.

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    A Tale of the Big Society for Christmas.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservative Party, Cuts, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on December 24, 2010

    http://www.americandecorativeart.com/internalpages/inventory/images/NFNMorris.jpg

    Big Society Localism?

    News From Woewhere: A Tale of the Big Society for Christmas.

    Down at the Ipswich Area Forum there had been discussion of what would happen on the morrow of the Big Society. Our Friend, Fronde, was there. Considering the subject, he said, the meeting was good-tempered. There was a Presentation and a Discussion. The little platoons spoke freely.

    Our young Conservative MP, wearing an Ipswich Town T-shirt, an I Love Ipswich badge, and an Ipswich, Capital of Culture bandana, had kicked off. He talked of the do-it-yourself future. The Honourable explained that they’d take responsibility Civil Service and Council-knows-best and hand it back to local communities in a can-do progressive spirit. He cited Education, which was in dire need of forward-looking reform. The Suffolk Association of Volunteering was encouraged. “We’ll be making tea and getting into serious multitasking interaction in no time” their representative opined.

    The prospect of free schools excited the audience. A besuited Councillor, who looked as if he’d dined well at the Suffolk Club, talked of the whilom joys of Kennedy’s Latin Grammar. A Monarchist wanted the true story of good king Richard lll to be taught. A Pentecostal with a snake wrapped around his shoulders, demanded that only the Gospel should be the subject of Public Instruction. A Lady with a Hermès handbag, from the Labour Party, preferred multi-faith Academies. A Green wanted children to learn recycling.

    There was a proposal to show hands in support of these ideas. Six sections of the Liberal Democrats offered different plans for the Alternative Vote.

    Outside students from the College were burning an effigy of the Town Mayor, Mr Carnal. Fronde caught a whiff of smoke. The Community Police rapidly left the room. There was soon the familiar sound of water cannon from Northgate Street.

    The meeting broke-up with nothing resolved.

    Leaving that vapour-pool of human dispute Fronde scurried home. He retired early, for the next day was Christmas Eve. Within an hour he was in bed asleep.

    The following morning, as light shone into the room, our Friend continued, I got dressed and made haste to go out for my Christmas shopping. My first feeling was that if it were winter last night it was now a beautiful hot morning, seemingly of early May. However, by my house the river Orwell was sparkling under the sun, with jolly tins of cider bobbing in it, as I had seen it yesterday.

    It was early, quoth I, and I daresay I might take my morning ale at Wetherspoon’s. I turned thitherward. Looking back backwards I was surprised that there were two bridges over the Estuary. Forsooth, there were twain! One, which looked brand new, had little traffic, save a couple of smart limousines; the other, lower than it, resembled the familiar crossing, though its parpens wobbled and it was full of dilapidated vehicles moving at a snail’s pace. I spied small figures underneath, picking over the sludge the outgoing tide exposed.

    “Bor, them childer be a-workin’ hard the Orwell!” I turned and looked at the man. He wore a smock with “Southfolk” marked on it. Before I could ask him what he meant he said, “”Whoi, I carn’t be a-snarkin along here, off the Moot Hall for to Christmas 2020 I be a-go. ” The date left me speechless. Ere I could raise the questions that swelled inside me he departed. There was a tiny ensign on his clothes, surrounded by gold lettering. Apart from the word “Owner” I could not make out its signification.

    I followed the countryman’s footfall. He strode swiftly in the direction of the Corn Hill. Passing along I could not but notice that every thoroughfare was full of shops that could have sprung out of a Victorian postcard. In Saint Peter Street there were emporiums of all kinds, bakers, chandlers, ironmongers, grocers, mercers, and haberdashers. Cheery youths stood with brooms outside the doors. A stall was doing a thriving trade in hot mince pies. Passers-by, dressed in a curious mixture of styles, men in tailored jackets and green breeches, women in tank-tops and bustles, sauntered up and down, in and out of the stores.

    I lost my rustic as I stopped near to Cromwell Square to look closer at the window displays. A butcher offered goose at 4 shillings and a farthing a pound. I glanced upon the same logo that my acquaintance wore. Part of it was something like a coronet, but I realised I had to find my spectacles to decipher it. Perhaps, I mused, this might be the label of excellence that brought so many customers to what had been the town’s neglected byways.

    I would lief have put the lenses on but my wonderings were suddenly broken off. A bedraggled youngster was running down the pavement. Two individuals whose dress I knew only too well pursued him: Robocop. He stumbled and they were upon him. Tasers must have become stronger, for I could see sparks simmering from his inert body. An armoured vehicle appeared. Quoth one, “Another Anarchist for the gaol” They hauled him within.

    Disconcerted in the extreme it was all that I could do to resume the route to the Town Hall. There I was astonished to see that the building was draped with flags. Upon the largest was a portrait of not Prince, but King Charles. The legend “Defender of the Faiths” lay underneath. A picture of a much aged Carnal, “Alderman Mayor of Ipswich” welcomed the townsfolk their Moot Hall. There was the ubiquitous symbol too, which I perceived contained a Crown and a Hand.

    A banner was hung across the Square, “Education for the New Season” A village of gazebos lay by. Each stand was from a different establishment, the Schola Anglorum, the Good King Richard, Christ the King, the Diversity Academy, the Allah is Great Madrasah, the Scientology College, and Gypsickcraeft. A passer-by nodded at me, “I seed last year that there’s not our Ragged School. They’re not here again either. Us without the money can’t choose.”

    I approached the Moor Hall steps. Two burly men barred my passage. “Whence go you?” they demanded. “To the Council to make a complaint” responded I. “Townsperson, Poll, or Pauper?” they replied. I stammered, “I live by Neptune Quay.” “The what?” The other seemed to understand, “He means the Gates, that’s what the olden folk call ‘em. Now, where’s your town card?” I was at loss. “You know, your right to property. To vote for the Company and travel on the Top Orwell Bridge.” “I rent my house.” “So you’re a Poll, you pay your charges – so where’s your Bill?” “I’m unemployed on Benefits.” “Benefits, what’s that?” His more knowledgeable companion answered, “He means the Relief – he’s a Pauper.” “Why’s he not a-workin’ at the House? All work is pleasurable, as Charles say.” “Now Mark, it’s the Eve – he’s come for the Parishes’ feast. It’s in the side-entrance, and” he looked me over “you’re looking a bit dapper for that, but why not try, eh?” he winked, “Don’t forget to say your prayers after the beadsman.”

    Nestling by was the Golden Lion, full of revellers. But the Pub board read, “Polls only”. I would have fain tasted a drop of Ale but I lacked the card, and the coinage too.

    I considered returning homewards. But I wished to complain and there was doubtless some authority inside. The only door through which I might pass into the building was marked Paupers.

    As I dithered a small queue was assembling outside. I joined them. My companions wore a great variety of garments, bits of cloth patched together to make trousers, skirts and coats, hats of straw, and many were tattooed up to their faces. As the Door guard had remarked, even my Primark gear, frayed as it was, made me, in comparison, look respectably turned out.

    One wiped his brow, “It’s so hot now since the Ice-cap melted.” “They say they’re cutting back on the weekday water ration.” “Stop bloody moaning. We’ve got this. The aliens’d take that if they could.” “They’re going to put the aliens outside the Wall I hear.” “Good job too. I hate aliens, smash them I would.” Without a doubt I, a stranger, was the target of these remarks. I tried to deflect a possible assault, muttering a familiar, and clearly local, “aright bor” in their direction.

    The arrival of a gang of shouting children distracted everyone’s attention. “It’s the mudlarks come for their treat!” a reedy voice from the line exclaimed. But he was wrong. These were not the sifters of Orwell silt, but a brood with very different aims. They dived through the crowds, grabbing at bags. “My Mobile’s away!” a woman cried out.

    Not Robocops but figures in red jackets swarmed over the Corn Hill. At first it looked as if the children were too nimble for them. But each of their pursuers carried a spray. A cloud from it seemed to stretch out a metre. The effect must have been potent because the ragamuffins halted, tottered, and fell to the ground.

    Somebody tittered, “They’ll be on the Tesco Treadmill the morrow!” As they picked the delinquents up I could now fully see the inscription I had kept noticing all day. The security guards’ backs were covered with the words, “Big Society Crown Warden: Every Little Helps.  Owner Tesco Plc.”

     

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    Sheridan: A Statement.

    Posted in Britain, Conspiracies, Ipswich, Left by Andrew Coates on December 26, 2010

    http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ4p-jsIw4kA6naXVUFIlJfKToedjDb36OqU0yi3uEWIK1-6xGugA

    Who’s a Sexist Lying Toss-Pot now?

    Tendance Statement on Tommy Sheridan,

    Tommy Sheridan has been found guilty. Not of being a ‘swinger’ but of being a lying toss-pot.

    The comrades from  the Scottish Socialist Party have been at pains to explain to fellow leftists the character of the man for some years now.  Today they are free to vent their views in the press,

    She told how she finally realised his true character after making a speech on International Women’s Day to condemn the sex trade. Sheridan sat boldly by her side despite, only a few weeks before, confessing to the SSP executive that he was a lying sex cheat who had visited sleazy swingers’ clubs.

    Rosie said: “It turned my stomach that he sat by my side, clapping and shouting, ‘Well done comrade’.

    “He knew I was making a point, speaking out against exploitation of women and his intention was to intimidate me. It was then that I realised how bad a man he was.

    “The day of that speech was the closest I came to making a public announcement about what he had done. I’ll always regret not doing it.”

    And she also regrets that the party did nothing to help and protect Sheridan’s wife Gail.

    More Here.

    Anyone who goes to a club called ‘Cupid’ merits what he got.

    Marg Bar Sheridan!

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    Passion and Decline of the French Communist Party?

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on December 29, 2010

     

    The Tendance, being Pabloites, has a less than hostile stand on the French Communist Party.

    However there are limits.

    Like this:

    And this: “Par exemple, le dirigeant du PCF, Maurice Thorez, se proclamait « premier stalinien de France”

    Lest we forget: here. Le Monde has got its act together and compiled an excellent dossier.

    Which is Here

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    Claude Lanzmann’s Le lièvre de Patagonie. Not Yet Out in English. Why?

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on December 30, 2010

     

    Bizarrely this book is not translated into English. Or at least as far as a quick googling can tell (and believe me given the importance of the author and its subject it would normally come up in an instant).

    When it was published in France last year back it caused quite a flurry.

    Considering who Claude Lanzmann is – lover of Simone de Beauvoir, editor of Les Temps modernes Director of the film, the  Shoah one would have thought it would have been (More Here.)

    Me blister bought me copy – obviously in French – for Winter Tidings.

    I will do a full review in the coming days.

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    Egyptian Christians Victims of Islamism: The Left Stands Against Any Religious Murder.T

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on January 2, 2011

    Des chrétiens d'Egypte aux funérailles des victimes de l'attentat d'Alexandrie, samedi 1er janvier.

    Des chrétiens d’Egypte aux funérailles des victimes de l’attentat d’Alexandrie, samedi 1er janvier.AP/Ahmed Ali

     

    From le Monde.

     

    Au moins 5 000 personnes ont assisté samedi soir aux funérailles des victimes de l’église copte d’Alexandrie où un attentat a fait 21 morts dans la nuit de vendredi à samedi. Les funérailles ont eu lieu au monastère Marmina à King Mariout, une banlieue située à une trentaine de kilomètres de la ville méditerranéenne.

    Weep comrades, weep.

    I cannot add anything to that.

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    On the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

    Posted in European Left, Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on January 7, 2011

    Any Room for a Small Party?

     

    It is well-known fact that many of us on the left learnt some of our Marxism from reading the excellent, clear, introductions to Historical Materialism in the SPGB’s journals and pamphlets.

    Stuart Watkins  makes a good point in the must-read Weekly Worker (Letters Page, from here).

    The SPGB understands that working class people are quite capable of making up their own minds about their struggles and actions, and making their own decisions. Once workers have realised that they must take political action to end capitalism and establish socialism, then they will have to organise as a political party to do this for themselves. In other words, “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.”

    This used to be a commonly understood Marxian socialist principle until Leninism came along and converted it into: ‘The emancipation of the working class cannot possibly be the act of the working class itself, which is why we need a leadership of professional revolutionaries to act on its behalf.’

    Call us old-fashioned, but we prefer the Marxian original to the Leninist distortion.

    Unfortunately one has to ask, what exactly has the SPGB done politically to advance the cause of socialism?

    Or how it proposes to help fulfil the  ”work of the working class itself.”

    They have been around for, er, a long time.

    1904 to be exact.

    True they have spawned an interesting array of ‘breakaway groups’ which contribute to the charm and  attraction of the left.

     

    As yet we await the breakthrough.

     

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    UK: Marxist Revolution.

    Posted in Anarchism, Britain, Communism, European Left by Andrew Coates on January 8, 2011

     

    Hat-Tip to Sebastian.

    This is a Guest Post by an Esteemed American Commentator.

    These Americans certainly feel the pulse of the Islands’ politics.

    Although a loose coalition of anarchist hooligans may have initiated the recent frenzy and violence in Britain, socialist organizations are now attempting to capture the student protests and use them as a pretext for wider social unrest. This, probably far more real threat has, however, gone unnoticed by the mainstream media.

    The lack of official comment is far from unusual, and must be accredited in part to the sympathy of the Left-leaning media and politicians. Notably, two member of the “democratic socialist” Labour Party have lauded the rioters via Twitter. MP John McDonnell commented that it “just shows what can be done when people get angry. We must build on this;” while fellow party member MP Alex Cunningham tweeted: “Well done our students – thousands outside the office getting stuck into the LibDem / Tory government.”

    Cunningham was referring to the first protest, in which anarchists attacked the Conservative Party HQ, Millbank Tower. Windows were smashed with hammers, metal bars, and sticks. Ceiling fixtures were pulled down. Walls were sprayed with graffiti. After which students poured into the building, with some reaching the rooftop. One of these protestors then threw a fire extinguisher, which missed a number of police by only a few feet as it crashed to the ground several stories below. By the end, seven police needed hospital treatment due to the sustained attack.

    Despite the coalition government’s attempt to cut benefits, Britain remains a welfare state. There are families in Britain in which no one has worked for three generations; and those who decide that they cannot afford a college education will have no problem in collecting welfare checks. Clearly three things need to happen: Cuts need to be made; the mentality of the welfare state needs to be recognized as out of touch with current reality; and aspiration needs to be encouraged.

    A few weeks ago rioters again showed their contempt for Britain and its values, tearing Union Jack flags down from the Cenotaph, spraying it with graffiti, and urinating on a statue of Winston Churchill. The mob – some of them wearing black balaclavas – set fires in the center of London and attacked police, throwing bottles of urine and sticks. As one Daily Mail reporter put it: “Every symbol of government or establishment became a target. Anything to hand became a missile.”

    A number of rioters broke away from the main protest, and made for London’s West End, an affluent and busy area known for its shopping and nightlife. There they were able to attack the car of Prince Charles (heir to the British throne) and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, as it passed through the area. Rioters – who were chanting “off with their heads” – kicked and threw paint bombs at the vehicle, fracturing two of its windows. Although they were only seconds from drawing their guns, protection officers were able to get the car away from the mob, and out of the area, without using force. Nevertheless, Camilla appeared to be visibly shaken by the attack.

    Although this Greek-styled riot was one of the most violent, Britain has been experiencing them since November, when the first student protest against a proposed rise in university tuition fees collapsed into chaos. The Daily Mail noted that “Militants from far-Left groups [had] whipped up a mix of middle-class students and younger college and school pupils into a frenzy,” and pointed to the presence of animal rights activists and one member of Class War. It later suggested that Anti Cuts Action, Students for Climate Change and Counterfire had also participated in the riots, although it failed to note that a flag in one of the photographs it published was that of the violent, self-described “anti-fascist” group Antifa.

    Although there are good arguments both for and against raising the tuition fees, the violence that has blighted the UK for more than a month is not the spontaneous outburst of disgruntled students, but the coordinated efforts of anarchists and socialist organizations.

    A special publication [pdf] of the Socialist Worker cites the attacks on the car of Charles and Camilla, the Treasury and the Supreme Court without the slightest hint of condemnation. (It instead appears to revel in the turbulence.) The reader is also informed that “Most of what happened was the result of independent organization, not ‘official’ protest from the [National Union of Students].” By “independent organization” the organ appears to imply that the Socialist Workers Party was behind, or at least, connected to the chaos.

    The party is well aware that the issue of tuition fees can be manipulated to create unrest in the UK. This, they hope, will cause the government to collapse, giving them an opportunity to establish a socialist state. As the Socialist Worker remarks:

    [I]f the revolt develops, the Tories and lib Dems can be blown away like the scum they are. […] We need bigger numbers to win. And we need the social power of workers to guarantee victory. […] That will be the most effective preparation for the battles to come.

    (more…)

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    ETA: Permanent Cease-Fire.

    Posted in Europe, European Left by Andrew Coates on January 10, 2011

     

     El País leads with this story:

    Alto el fuego “permanente, general y verificable” de ETA

    La banda terrorista declara su “compromiso firme con un proceso de solución definitivo y con el final de la confrontación armada” y pone como condición para superar “el conflicto” que se resuelvan “las claves de la territorialidad y el derecho de autodeterminación”

    The BBC explains:

    The Basque separatist group Eta has announced a permanent ceasefire in its campaign for independence from Spain, which has cost most than 800 lives over the past 40 years. This is the statement in full.

    “With this declaration Eta, the Basque socialist revolutionary organisation for national liberation, wishes to give news of its decision to the Basque Country:

    In recent months, from Brussels to Gernika [Guernica], well known personalities on the world level and many Basque social and political actors, have stressed the need to bring a just and democratic solution to the centuries-old conflict. ETA agrees. The solution will come through the democratic process with dialogue and negotiation as its tools and with its compass pointed towards the will of the Basque people.

    The democratic process has to overcome all situations of denial and violations of rights and must respond to the key elements at the heart of the political conflict, namely territorial sovereignty and self-determination.

    It is the task of the Basque social and political actors to reach agreements in order to come to an agreed formulation concerning the recognition of the Basque Country and of the right to decide, ensuring that all political projects, including independence, are possible. At the end of the process, Basque citizens must have their say and a right to decide on their future without any limit or interference.

    All parties have to commit themselves to respect the agreements reached as well as the decision of the Basque people, and to put in place guarantees and mechanisms to this end.

    Therefore, ETA has decided to declare a permanent and general ceasefire which will be verifiable by the international community. This is ETA’s firm commitment towards a process to achieve a lasting resolution and towards an end to the armed confrontation.

    It is time to act with historical responsibility. ETA calls upon those governing Spain and France to end all repressive measures and to leave aside for once and for all their position of denial towards the Basque Country.

    ETA will continue its indefatigable struggle and efforts to promote and to bring to a conclusion the democratic process until there is a truly democratic situation in the Basque Country.

    Long live the free Basque country! Long live the Socialist Basque country!”

    From the BBC here.

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    Kafka and Satire: Ein Bericht für eine Akademie.

    Posted in Animal Liberation, Culture by Andrew Coates on January 12, 2011

    You don’t seem to get as many references to Kafka as you used to.

    But I had noticed a reference just before Christmas and that is to this short story.

    I cite the Wikipedia entry,

    A Report to an Academy” (“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie“) is a short story by Franz Kafka, written and published in 1917. In the story, an ape named Red Peter, who has learned to behave like a human, presents to an academy the story of how he effected his transformation. The story was first published by Martin Buber in the German monthly Der Jude, (More Here.)

    I read it – it is only a few pages long – in the original.

    I don’t mean to impress (okay maybe a bit) but German for an English speaker is incredibly difficult.

    Kafka, strange as it seems, is not that hard.

    This tale is of a limpid beauty.

    It will last for ever.

    Up there with Swift, Voltaire, and Orwell (Animal Farm).

    Recommended – either in German or translation.

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    Tunisia: Revolution?

    Posted in Uncategorized by Andrew Coates on January 14, 2011

    Des milliers de manifestants réclamaient vendredi 14 janvier le départ du président Zine El Abidine Ben Ali à Tunis et en province, au lendemain d’une intervention du chef de l’Etat pour tenter de mettre fin à une contestation sans précédent, selon des correspondants de l’AFP et des sources syndicales.
    A Tunis, des manifestants ont défilé dans la matinée sur l’artère principale, l’Avenue Bourguiba, sans être inquiétés par la police. De centaines au départ, leur nombre n’a cessé de gonfler atteignant des milliers et ils étaient toujours dans la rue à la mi-journée.
    “Non à Ben Ali”, “Soulèvement continu, non à Ben Ali”, ont-ils crié en entonnant l’hymne national. Des avocats en robe noire faisaient partie de la manifestation.
    Aucun incident n’a été signalé en dépit de l’absence de service d’ordre. Un manifestant qui a jeté une pierre sur le siège du ministère de l’Intérieur a été conspué par la foule.
    Des manifestations se déroulaient également dans plusieurs villes de province, selon des correspondants et syndicalistes qui n’ont pas signalé de violences.

    From Here.

    The Tendance, whose views no doubt weigh much in this situation, has two obervations.

    Firstly, the Tunisians are totally justified to revolt against this kleptocracy. There are many many local reasons to revolt.

    Secondly, there is a general wave of revolt in North Africa (affecting Algeria at the moment as well).

    They have the same underlying economic reasons as the ones now touching Europe: the spill-off from the banking crisis.

    Tagged with:

    Galloway and Gail: Fight to the Bitter End.

    Posted in Britain, Conspiracies, European Left by Andrew Coates on January 16, 2011

    Galloway: No longer a Cuddly Pussy Cat.

    From today’s Record,

    GEORGE GALLOWAY yesterday revealed a peace pact with election rival Gail Sheridan.

    They have vowed not to attack each other as they both fight to win a seat in the Scottish Parliament.

    The former Glasgow Kelvin MP and the wife of disgraced Solidarity leader Tommy Sheridan will stand for a Glasgow list seat in May.

    The move could split the left-wing vote and deny them both a Holyrood seat.

    They were in talks about standing together until the issue of independence and Tommy’s tarnished image scuppered the deal.

    Galloway said: “They have been in touch and we agreed that to slag each other off would not be a good idea.

    Tendance Comment, come off it me darlings!

    “But there has been no olive branch. That door is now closed.”

    The Tendance Says: That’s more like it!

    The Sage of Scotland continues,

    He said: “In 2007, more than 40,000 people voted Labour with their second vote to no effect because the party did not get any seats on the list.

    “So my main pitch is to Labour supporters. I would like also to appeal to former Lib-Dem voters who feel betrayed by the coalition.

    “Thirdly, I would like to appeal to SNP supporters who like the party’s Labourish policies but don’t favour breaking the country up.

    Tendance Comment:a modest objective to be sure.

    “That’s why coverage of the far-left parties is misguided – because I’m not fishing in the same pond as them.”

    Aye, you’re too grand for that!

    Here.

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    Tunisia: Union Leaders Resign From New Government

    Posted in International, Islam, Islamism, Unions by Andrew Coates on January 18, 2011

    3 Trade Union leaders, Anouar Ben Gueddour  Houssine Dimassi, ‘Abdeljelil Bédoui, have resigned from the new government,

    They are members of the UGTT (Union générale des travailleurs tunisiens الاتحاد العام التونسي للشغل).

    (Background in French here)

    The UGTT will not recognise the new government. 

     A major sticking point is the  presence of previous supporters of the deposed leader, Ben Ali, in the team. 

    (Nouvelobs.com avec AP et AFP)

    From Here.

    More Here.

    Important return of  Moncef Marzouki, (a true democrat) here. Background (in English) here.

    Let us hope we have no more ‘reporting’ from Tunisia about the position of British tourists.

    Or the curious description by Jon Snow on Channel Four of  Yusra Ghannouchi’s father as the head of  a “moderate Islamic movement”.

    That is one supposes a special kind of moderation that is inspired by such moderate figures as Sayyid Qutb and Hassan El-Banna, and an even more moderate movement that merely moderately wants to establish an Islamist dictatorship to replace the previous kleptocracy.  More information on Ennahda (النهضة), here.

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    A Guide to the New Ruins of Britain. Short Socialist Notes.

    Posted in Britain, British Govern, Capitalism, Culture, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on January 20, 2011

     

    A Guide to the New Ruins of Britain by Owen  Hatherley has been widely reviewed.

    Here.

    Most people compare it to J.B. Priestly’s An English Journey. But to me it is much wider, deeper and fuller of rage: a kind of Cobbet’s Rural Rides. From Southampton to Liverpool, and South London, Milton Keynes, to the desolate waste that surround Cambridge Railway station, not to cite the whole list, it is a magnificent journey into the heart of darkness.

    Luke Butcher provides and overview of some essential points  (here), 

    Architects and developers are all held to account for the part they have played in creating the landscape we see today – the usual suspects are, often deservingly in my opinion, ‘named and shamed’ – BDP, Urban Splash, Capita, Broadway Malyan, Carey Jones, Aedas are all part of an (unfortunately) extensive list. Hatherley does also give praise to firms when he feels it is warranted. Of note here is BDP who at times are chastised and at others applauded (although most of this falls on earlier work before they became a private company and Liverpool One), being the only practice to get an apology directly in the text. Politicians, of the modern era, are not criticised as directly as perhaps they should be instead the part they play is usually implied, not stated (Hazel Blears being one of the exceptions).

    But as I have said. The Guide is much more than this. It is not about individual politicians as such. The Guide weaves together the post-war history of the land’s built environment and politics. From social democratic aspirations to the ‘third way’ (and one could add to what is now taking shape as the ‘big society’. That is the twists and turn to the control over the built environment by private firms and their political cronies.

    To those who criticise the legacy of the so-called Stalingrad-style creations of Labour Councils and revel in the unfolding structures  Hatherley notes,

    But while the modernism of council estates, comprehensive schools, “plate glass universities”, co-operatives and libraries was driven to a large degree by socialist commitments and egalitarian politics, these entertainment centres, luxury flats, city academies and idea stores were driven by exclusivity, tourism and the politics of “aspiration”.Full of rage about the last decade’s

    More Here.

    The Tendance’s  basic knowledge of town planning and architecture  is restricted an option I took in Urban Sociology in mid-70s Warwick University and my copy of Pevsner’s Suffolk.  Yet I was pleased to find that, like Mike Davis, he has the gift for making one interested in buildings. As well as the forces that have created our environment - that is, from the origins to the post-45 period to Blair’s neo-liberalism.

    A couple of gems in this brilliant study.

    • Jonny Lydon described as ‘Californian property developer’. Who claims he dislikes and ‘knows what socialism is because I grew up in a Council flat’. 

    Fuck off Jonny Rotten!

    • That T.D. Smith of famous corruption was an ex-ILP, Revolutionary Communist Party (that is the 1940s one) member.

    There is much in the Guide on the intersection between politics and town construction.  A keen sense of this relationship – paralleled again in the work of Mike Davis – amid the details of ‘redevelopment’.

    The evidence is that this kind of market-driven corrupt mess is going to get worse under the Liberal-Tory Coalition.

    As their mentor Adam Smith said, “there’s a great deal of ruin ina nation”.

    Come to Ipswich and look at the area around the docks!

    Tunisia Communiqué of French Left Parties.

    Posted in French Left, Front de Gauche by Andrew Coates on January 20, 2011

     This was issued at the beginning of the crisis.

    Communiqué commun des partis politiques de gauche et écologiste

    Solidarité avec le peuple tunisien

    (which needs no translation).

    La situation tunisienne est extrêmement préoccupante et nous sommes soucieux de sa gravité. Nous appelons à participer aux manifestations organisées samedi par le collectif unitaire de solidarité Sidi Bouzid - Tunisie, dont celle à Paris, Place de la République, à 14h.

    An appeal to demonstrate, faced with the worrying situation, in Paris, with the collectif unitaire de solidarité Sidi Bouzid.

    Les déclarations successives de Ben Ali n’ont pas entamé la détermination du peuple qui demande son départ. Les manifestations et la répression continuent.

    Well, he has departed.

    Nous demandons l’arrêt immédiat de cette répression et la libération de l’ensemble des prisonniers politiques, syndicalistes et des journalistes tunisiens ainsi que la prise en compte des revendications portées par l’opposition démocratique.

    This seems to have happened, but repression is continuing.

    Nous exigeons que le gouvernement français et l’Union européenne cessent leur soutien explicite ou implicite au régime tunisien et soutiennent une véritable transition démocratique

    Europe Ecologie Les Verts, Fédération pour une alternative sociale et écologique, Gauche Unitaire, Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste, Parti communiste français, Parti de gauche, Parti radical de gauche, Parti socialiste.

    One can simply remark that this shows that French left is determined to show soldiarity with the Tunisian democratic forces.

    This is continuing.

    From here.

    Up-to-date brilliant coverage on the ‘Jasmin Revolution’ from L’Humanité  here.

    Tagged with:

    Ipswich Allotments to be Run By ‘Volunteers’.

    Posted in Allotments, Conservative Party, Ipswich, Liberal Democrats by Andrew Coates on January 21, 2011

    Soon to be Built by Volunteers.

    I have just heard, from an extremely well-placed source, that the Ipswich Liberal Tory Council is planning to have its allotment service replaced by ‘volunteers’.

    That is the meaning behind the sentence cited earlier this week in the Ipswich Cultural Strategy,

    “Explore management options for allotment gardens.”

    The Tendance asks does this signify that:

    • That the Council’s responsibilities will be taken over by small site committees (many of which are not always well-attended, and have a high turn over of members).
    • Site Maintenance staff will be replaced by volunteers. Paid workers by unpaid.
    • That therefore path clearance, grass cutting, fence protection, water supply upkeep, will be a voluntary affair.
    • Problems with, say, break-ins and vandalism, will be resolved by volunteers.
    • The annual payment of rent will be collected by volunteers.
    • That disputes over allotments or between allotment hodlers and said committees will be resolved not by independent Council officers but by said committees?

    We mostly work together and I would not want to criticise people helping run the sites at present – with Council help and paid for labour.

    But, one can observe to begin with that many allotment holders are elderly, no doubt any ideal ‘resource’ for hard manual tasks.

    Then there is the experience that anyone involved in voluntary groups knows of – voluntary work cannot replace said paid for labour.

    This could mean, which I strongly suspect, that private companies will get a hold on allotments by providing many of the above services?

    Plus maybe a few ‘volunteers’ from the Government’s Workfare schemes?

    The person in charge of all this a Liberal Democrat. He is in an alliance with the Tories.

    Who are the Liberal Democrats?

    Video nicked from the Strops’ Blog:

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    Jean-Luc Mélenchon to be Presidential Candidate for the Parti de Gauche.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, Front de Gauche by Andrew Coates on January 22, 2011

    For a Citizens’ Revolution!

    Candidat à la présidentielle, Jean-Luc Mélenchon réunit samedi son parti. Il dévoile au JDD sa stratégie, met en garde ”les oligarques”, les médias, les verts et le PS.

    Presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon will meet with his party this Saturday. He spoke to JDD about his strategy, putting on their mettle the oligarchs  the media, the Greens and the Parti Socialiste.

    In his interview with the Journal de Dimanche Mélenchon says he represents a “citizens’ revolution”. He is opposed to the rightward turn of the Parti Socialiste, and to the pro-market Greens. In particular he warns that a possible candidacy by IMF director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, for the PS, will be a distaster.

    In contrast to these parties, he, and the Parti de Gauche, stand for a new social republic. This will be democratically created.

    En effet, je ne connais pas d’autres maîtres que le suffrage universel. La révolution doit passer par les urnes. Moi élu, il y aura une constituante, il y aura un changement du régime de la propriété dans plusieurs grands secteurs, la banque, l’énergie, la santé, l’éducation. Moi élu, il y aura la planification écologique. Moi élu, on sortira d’Afghanistan et de l’Otan. Si les gens m’élisent président de la République, nous mettrons fin à la Ve République. Je suis le candidat de la révolution citoyenne.

    In effect, I recognise no other master than universal suffrage: the revolution must pass by the ballot-box. If I win there will be, at the centre, a fundamental change in property rights, in the largest sectors of the economy, in banking, energy, health and education. If I am elected we will have ecological planning. We will leave Afghanistan and NATO. If elected President of the Republic we will soon have done with the 5th Republic. I am the candidate of  a citizens’ revolution. 

     The French Media have not been slow in attacking the leader of the Parti de Gauche as a “populist”. They suggest he is trawling in the same waters as the Front National. The cartoonist Plantu has put him side by side with Marine Le Pen.

    On France-Inter this morning it was mooted that this rabble-rousing image may be to the advantage of the left as  a whole. By fighting the oligarchs he will deprive the French far-right of its ‘anti-system’ appeal, and eat into some of its working class support.

    The reaction of the rest of the non-Parti Socialiste left remains to be heard. The NPA is unlikely to respond positively.There is hostility from parts of the Communist Party. Others feel that he is the only credible candidate, even if this means the party’s own identity is merged into a wider electoral alliance. The Front de Gauche’s other backers have yet to be heard. But in terms of a national profile Mélenchon is emerging as the figure on the left of the Socialists and greens with the greatest potential electoral weight.

    More Here. And Here. Potential squabbles in the Front de Gauche Here.

    Parti de Gauche  site here.  Profile (in English) here.

    Sunday Supplement.

    Plantu: "Les gesticulations de Mélenchon sont une caricature" 

     

    This is the odious comparison made between Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

    The French Left has expressed disgust at this caricature. The Gauche Unitaire says (here),

    Pourquoi le dessin de Plantu représentant Marine Le Pen et Jean Luc Mélenchon en costumes de néo nazis avec un discours commun « tous pourris » suscite t-il autant de réactions d’indignation ?

    Parce qu’en faisant un amalgame absolument scandaleux entre les discours du FN et du Front de Gauche que tout oppose….(more on GU site above)

    Mélenchon’s reaction: “Merci à vous tous, mes très chers amis et lecteurs qui m’avez entouré de votre affection et de votre solidarité sitôt connu l’infâme dessin de Jean Plantu dans « l’Express ». More here.

    Tunisia: Why Was Ben Ali’s Party Member of the Socialist International?

    Posted in French Left, Imperialism, Left, Parti Socialiste by Andrew Coates on January 25, 2011

    Till Recently a  Member of the Socialist International.

    This came up on France-Inter this morning.

    Benoît  Hamon, from the Parti Socialiste, was asked why the  Rassemblement constitutionnel démocratique (RCD) (التجمع الدستوري الديمقراطي) of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, was a member of the Socialist International. (Radio Broadcast Here. Background on Ben Ali in English here).

    Hamon replied that the French socialists had tried to end this relationship. But nothing was done.

    Nothing was heard about their efforts either, or we would have noticed.

    I cite Wikipedia, “Jusqu’au début de la révolution tunisienne, le RCD est membre de l’Internationale socialiste dont il est exclu le 17 janvier 2011[4].”  (here.)

    They also had links with Europe’s right.

    STRASBOURG) – Tunisia’s former ruling party, ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s RCD, has been sacked from the worldwide International Socialist movement, German euro-parliamentarian Martin Schulz said Tuesday.Schulz said at the European parliament that the party, a member of the grouping of socialist movements since the 197os, “has been expelled.”

    The movement’s website confirmed it had decided “to cease the membership of the Constitutional Democratic Assembly (RCD) of Tunisia.”

    “This decision, in extraordinary circumstances, reflects the values and principles which define our movement and the position of the International on developments in that country,” it added.

    The RCD also signed a cooperation agreement in June 2009 with the European People’s People’s Party (EPP), the largest and most influential political party in the European parliament.

    It groups parties leaning to the centre-right.

    All a bit  late in the day, hein?

    More Here.

    Tunisia: Clashes Between Demonstrators. New Government Today.

    Posted in Imperialism, Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on January 26, 2011

     

    http://www.egalite.be/tunisie-revolte.jpg

    Tunisie : Front du 14 janvier

    The Tunisian La Presse reports this morning,

    L’avenue Habib Bourguiba, la principale artère de la capitale Tunis, a été, hier après-midi, le théâtre «d’affrontements sans gravité» entre partisans et contestataires de l’actuel gouvernement d’Union nationale.

    The avenue Habib Bourguiba, the Tunis’s principal street , was, yesterday afternoon, the site of “minor clashes” between supporters and opponents of the present national unity government.

    *
    Les partisans de l’actuel gouvernement scandaient «oui,  oui au gouvernement d’union nationale», «non au vide politique» alors que les contestataires du gouvernement de M. Ghannouchi appelaient à la démission du gouvernement affirmant la détermination du peuple «à faire tomber le gouvernement d’Union nationale».

    Supporters of the present national unity government shouted ”Yes, yes to a government of national unity”, “No to a political vacuum!” while opponents of Cabinet head Mr M. Ghannouchi called for the government to resign and affirmed the willingness of the people to “bring down the government of national unity”.

    *
    There were no serious incidents.

    Here

    More clashes today here.

    New Government to be announced today.

    In the meantime the following measures will be implemented,

    1 – La remise d’une avance directe, aujourd’hui,  aux familles des martyrs, aux blessés et aux victimes des derniers événements.

    Immediate payments to the families of those who were martyred, and to those injured or hurt in the recent events.

    2 – Octroi d’une indemnité mensuelle de 150 dinars aux sans-emploi parmi les diplômés de l’enseignement supérieur tout en leur assurant une couverture sociale et des tarifs préférentiels pour le transport, en contrepartie d’un travail de volontariat à mi-temps dans les services publics.

    An immediate allocation of 150 dinars, medical and social insurance  to those unemployed who have  higher education qualifications for those who take up part-time voluntary public service work.

    3 – Doublement des fonds réservés aux chantiers régionaux

    A doubling of the funding for regional development.

    4 – Dissolution des conseils régionaux de développement et leur remplacement par des représentations avec la participation de représentants de l’administration et de la société civile, sous la présidence du gouverneur de la région, conformément aux dispositions de la loi organisant les conseils régionaux

    Reorganisation of regional councils of development  and their replacement by new councils, composed of representatives of civil society, under the Presidency of regional Governors, under the law regulating regional councils. (More Here. )

     

    A left alternative has emerged.

     Dans leur manifeste daté du 20 janvier, les initiateurs du Front demandent, entre autres, le départ du gouvernement et la constitution d’un nouveau gouvernement empreint de la confiance du peuple, la dissolution du RCD, du Parlement et de la police ainsi que le démantèlement de tout l’appareil politique du RCD.

    The composition of the Front du 14 janvier: le Mouvement des Unionistes Nasseristes, la Ligue de la Gauche Ouvrière, le mouvement Baâth, les Gauchistes Indépendants, le Mouvement des Nationalistes Démocrates, le Parti Communiste des Ouvriers de Tunisie et le Parti du Travail Patriotique et Démocratique.

    More Information  Here,

    English translation ( from  Here. ):

    The particular purpose of the Front of January 14 is to organize resistance to the current government of transition which is still made up of the chieftains of the RCD (Rassemblement Constitutionnel D�mocratique), the party of Ben Ali, and to build a popular alternative resulting from the vigilance committees created in many districts of Tunisia for self-defense from the terror sown by the RCD apparatus and the presidential police force. The Front of January 14′s call is addressed to all progressive political, trade-union and social forces to achieve the objectives of the Tunisian popular revolution. 

    Another site with the translation  here.

    Meanwhile Olivier Besancenot visits Tunisia and finds time to slag off Jean-Luc Mélenchon – Here.

     

    Tagged with:

    Sheridan In Prison. SSP ‘Statement’.

    Posted in Britain, Labour Movement, Left, Sectarianism, Tommy Sheridan by Andrew Coates on January 27, 2011

    SSP statement on Tommy Sheridan sentencing
    26-01-2011

    Today’s proceedings at Glasgow High Court finally end the ill-advised actionTommy Sheridan initiated 6 years ago in suing a tabloid over allegations he knew to be true. The jury found him guilty and the court has now passed sentence.

    He alone is responsible for where he sleeps tonight, no one else.

    He pursued legal action full in the knowledge he would lie in court. He asked his closest political allies and friends to join him in that crazy strategy and then turned on us because we refused. He still shows no sign of taking responsibility for his own actions.

    More widely this affair is a stark warning of the dangers of allowing personal celebrity to displace political principles.

    The economic and social challenge faced by the people in Scotland are however much more important.

    The political injustices they face day in day out is of greater concern to us and can only be solved with socialist policies on jobs, wages, homes and wealth redistribution.

    The SSP fully intends to put such policies to the public across Scotland as part of our Holyrood election campaign for a democratic Scottish socialist republic.

    Now as never before Scotland needs a party of integrity and clear socialist principles. Holyrood needs socialist MSP’s offering socialist policies more than ever as a clear alternative to the cuts and sackings agenda being pursued by the
    current gang of complacent, out of touch politicians.

    Here.

    Some Points.

    Firstly, some people have asked why the rest of the British left has commented on this matter. The reason is simple: Scottish socialists from all sides have involved us in the affair. Most of the left in this land, even if those who do not have Scottish connections (and a very large percentage of us do, er, like myself), felt great sympathy for the SSP when it was formed. Our interest and concern continues.

    Secondly, it is distasteful to say that Tommy Sheridan is the sole person responsible for being put in gaol for 18 month (3 years with reduction etc). How far does he have only himself to blame? The sordid News of the World is hardly a stranger to the whole process. Even if he were culpable of everything he was accused of I find it hard to near-gloat at someone spending time in prison (the phrase “where he sleeps tonight” is rankling). 18 months is a long time – even if some reports put the release date earlier.

    Thirdly, Sheridan may be as guilty as hell of all the faults we’ve heard about him. But who exactly allowed him to develop a political career based on ”personal celebrity ” in the first place? The SSP leadership springs to mind.

    Finally, regardless of this mean-spirited statement, the nationalism of the SSP is a dead-end. The very idea that a “Scottish socialist republic” is a viable political objective is pretty threadbare at the moment. As a principle it is a disaster. A cult of its own: a further split in the ranks of the left and the working and unemployed people of Europe. A licence for division when the left needs at least some basic unity. What’s more it’s not a political brand that seems remotely succesful at present.

    Solidarity Statement. Hat-Tip to Phil.

    Solidarity condemns as barbaric and draconian the sentence imposed today on Tommy Sheridan.

    We believe the lengthy jail term imposed by the judge is vindictive. It will reinforce the widespread view that this is the culmination of a brutal vendetta carried out by the rich and powerful against Scotland ’ most prominent socialist. A socialist who has earned their hatred for his uncompromising defence of working class people for the last 25 years.

    As such this sentence will be met with anger by tens of thousands of working class people across Scotland and beyond. Solidarity shares that anger.

    At a time when Britain ’s rich bankers are raking in billions in bonuses while working class communities and trade unionists are facing the most savage attacks in generations, the millions of pounds spent on the persecution of Tommy Sheridan is a disgrace.

    Solidarity regards as outrageous the continued cover-up of News International and the News of the World’s illegal activities by the police and the legal establishment. What a contrast to the lengths that Lothian and Borders police and the Scottish Crown have been prepared to go to try to ruin a working class socialist.

    They will not succeed. Solidarity appeals to all those angered today by this action to join us today and help us build a socialist party worthy of the name.

    Solidarity will continue to give our full support and backing to Tommy and in particular to Gail Sheridan and the family at this difficult time.

    We also send out this guarantee today. Neither Tommy Sheridan nor Solidarity will be broken. We will continue to build our party, offering a real alternative to the despair and brutality offered up by the ConDem government and the other parties of the rich and big business.

    Mick Hall supplies a link to an article by Kenneth Roy showing that nobody on the Scottish left comes out of this well: here.

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    The Flight of the Intellectuals. Paul Berman. A European Leftist Review.

    Posted in Culture, European Left, French Left, Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on January 28, 2011

    The Flight of the Intellectuals. Paul Berman. 2010. A European Leftist Review.

    The phobia against secularists has passed the liberal dinner-party test. From Baroness Warsi, through the Guardian Comments page, to the apparently Marxist SWP, it has become acceptable to describe ‘anti-god-botherers’ as vulgar and insulting. Behind the New Atheists’ rationalism, the chattering classes say, lies a Eurocentric sense of superiority. Their criticism of Islam barely disguises racial prejudice. Failure to understand that ‘extremist’ Islamists are not representative of the faith, but individuals reacting to Western callousness and their own humiliation, is to draw close to the English Defence League. Enlightenment fundamentalism is not just bad taste. It is ‘new racism’, a cover for military imperialism, and an endorsement of Guantánamo Bay.

    Guests at such soirées will find much to ruminate about in The Flight of the Intellectuals. Paul Berman describes himself as “pro-war and left-wing” – a supporter of “humanitarian interventionism”. In Terror and Liberalism (2003) he described Islamism as an irrationalist mass movement. Against this totalitarianism, with its “mad platform”, Berman advocated a “third force” that would defend human rights and build the basis of a liberal society across the Muslim world. It turned out that this force could be, albeit imperfectly, embodied by the overthrow of Saddam Hussain and the Allied military occupation of Iraq.

    That one can be a militant secularist, anti-racist, a left-wing democratic socialist, and strongly oppose both Islamism and American armed politics, tended to get forgotten in the confrontation between Berman’s ‘decent left’ and those who used ‘anti-imperialism’ to justify the kind of apology for Islamism sketched above.

    Berman has continued his campaign against what he considers to be Islamist totalitarianism. Tariq Ramadan is the hook on which this extended pamphlet hangs. “The conventional wisdom looked on Tariq Ramadan as a long-awaited Islamic hero – the religious thinker who was going, at last, to adapt Islam to the modern world.” (P 26) His essay is a genuine contribution to the “central debate of our moment”. That is the “debate over Islamist ideas in the Western countries, and over the reluctance of journalists and intellectuals from Western backgrounds to grapple seriously with the Islamist ideas.” (P 11) Berman subjects Ramadan to a degree of hostile forensic examination only exceeded by Caroline Fourest’s Frère Tariq (2004). He discusses the Rushdie affair, the Muhammad cartoons, and hostility to Israel. During this interrogation Berman tries to reveal a deeper complicity between Ramadan and the Islamist far-right. Some of his insights are illuminating, but that it is also riddled with contentious and wholly false claims cannot, nevertheless, be forgotten for an instant.

    The Flight of the Intellectuals is not just a study of Ramadan. Wrapped around Berman’s polemic is a favourite theme of his earlier writings. That the left, particularly the European left, and its liberal counterparts, has a congenital inability to stand up against totalitarianism. The recent past, when the continent was seized by the “mania” of the extreme right and the Stalinist extreme left has left an indelible imprint on its culture and politics. To the author it is, therefore, no coincidence that the European left has reacted to Islamism with a “string of bumbles, gaffes, timidities, slanders, miscomprehensions and silences?”(P 299) Like 1930s liberals unable to resist the appeal of the Popular Front Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash have displayed complaisant understanding towards Ramadan and his cohorts, while taking it upon themselves to condescend towards liberal anti-Islamist Muslims and secularists like the Somali born feminist and secularist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Unable to oppose Islamism seriously many on the left today are de facto fellow travellers of what they consider to be a “religiously motivated social conscience”. Or as the Guardian’s Seumas Milne puts it, “religion can be an ally of radical social change”.

    (more…)

    Egypt: Americans Back Rebel Leaders.

    Posted in Capitalism, Colonialism, Imperialism by Andrew Coates on January 29, 2011

     

    This is interesting. Since my fellow leftist bloggers have not cited it, it is worth linking to.

    Egypt protests: America’s secret backing for rebel leaders behind uprising

    The American government secretly backed leading figures behind the Egyptian uprising who have been planning “regime change” for the past three years, The Daily Telegraph has learned.

    (From here.)

    The American Embassy in Cairo helped a young dissident attend a US-sponsored summit for activists in New York, while working to keep his identity secret from Egyptian state police.
    On his return to Cairo in December 2008, the activist told US diplomats that an alliance of opposition groups had drawn up a plan to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak and install a democratic government in 2011.

    The secret document in full
     
     
    He has already been arrested by Egyptian security in connection with the demonstrations and his identity is being protected by The Daily Telegraph.
    The crisis in Egypt follows the toppling of Tunisian president Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali, who fled the country after widespread protests forced him from office.
    The disclosures, contained in previously secret US diplomatic dispatches released by the WikiLeaks website, show American officials pressed the Egyptian government to release other dissidents who had been detained by the police.

    Mr Mubarak, facing the biggest challenge to his authority in his 31 years in power, ordered the army on to the streets of Cairo yesterday as rioting erupted across Egypt.

    Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters took to the streets in open defiance of a curfew. An explosion rocked the centre of Cairo as thousands defied orders to return to their homes. As the violence escalated, flames could be seen near the headquarters of the governing National Democratic Party.

    Police fired rubber bullets and used tear gas and water cannon in an attempt to disperse the crowds.

    At least five people were killed in Cairo alone yesterday and 870 injured, several with bullet wounds. Mohamed ElBaradei, the pro-reform leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was placed under house arrest after returning to Egypt to join the dissidents. Riots also took place in Suez, Alexandria and other major cities across the country.

    William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, urged the Egyptian government to heed the “legitimate demands of protesters”. Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, said she was “deeply concerned about the use of force” to quell the protests.

    In an interview for the American news channel CNN, to be broadcast tomorrow, David Cameron said: “I think what we need is reform in Egypt. I mean, we support reform and progress in the greater strengthening of the democracy and civil rights and the rule of law.”

    The US government has previously been a supporter of Mr Mubarak’s regime. But the leaked documents show the extent to which America was offering support to pro-democracy activists in Egypt while publicly praising Mr Mubarak as an important ally in the Middle East.

    In a secret diplomatic dispatch, sent on December 30 2008, Margaret Scobey, the US Ambassador to Cairo, recorded that opposition groups had allegedly drawn up secret plans for “regime change” to take place before elections, scheduled for September this year.

    The memo, which Ambassador Scobey sent to the US Secretary of State in Washington DC, was marked “confidential” and headed: “April 6 activist on his US visit and regime change in Egypt.”

    It said the activist claimed “several opposition forces” had “agreed to support an unwritten plan for a transition to a parliamentary democracy, involving a weakened presidency and an empowered prime minister and parliament, before the scheduled 2011 presidential elections”. The embassy’s source said the plan was “so sensitive it cannot be written down”.

    Ambassador Scobey questioned whether such an “unrealistic” plot could work, or ever even existed. However, the documents showed that the activist had been approached by US diplomats and received extensive support for his pro-democracy campaign from officials in Washington. The embassy helped the campaigner attend a “summit” for youth activists in New York, which was organised by the US State Department.

    Cairo embassy officials warned Washington that the activist’s identity must be kept secret because he could face “retribution” when he returned to Egypt. He had already allegedly been tortured for three days by Egyptian state security after he was arrested for taking part in a protest some years earlier.

    The protests in Egypt are being driven by the April 6 youth movement, a group on Facebook that has attracted mainly young and educated members opposed to Mr Mubarak. The group has about 70,000 members and uses social networking sites to orchestrate protests and report on their activities.

    The documents released by WikiLeaks reveal US Embassy officials were in regular contact with the activist throughout 2008 and 2009, considering him one of their most reliable sources for information about human rights abuses.

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    Sudan: After Egypt Revolts Islamist Dictatorship Faces Street Protests.

    Posted in Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on January 30, 2011
    Updated and Revised.

    (From Opheera McDoom)

    KHARTOUM, Jan 31 (Reuters) – A student in Sudan died from his injuries after being beaten by security forces who broke up anti-government demonstrations inspired by protests in neighbouring Egypt, activists said on Monday.

    It was the first reported death as protests continued late into Sunday night, when students at Khartoum university were beaten and tear gassed in their dormitories with at least five injured.

    Police and security forces surrounded universities in Khartoum and other cities on Monday, said witnesses.

    “You are our martyr Mohamed Abdelrahman,” activists wrote on the social networking site Facebook, on a group called “Youth for Change” which has more than 16,000 members and calls for an end to President Omar Hassan all-Bashir’s government.   Continued…

    here.

    The Sudanese Communist Party  reports (Hat-tip to Nick Wright) :

    Sunday’s large demonstrations in Khartoum and other cities in northern Sudan were called to demand the resignation of General Omer Al-Bashir and his repressive regime.The following reports below were sent to the Communist Party website from Comrade Fathi el Fadl, one of the key comrades responsible for the International Department of CP Sudan.

    “Since 11 am, today Sunday the 30th of January young people took to the streets in Khartoum replying to the calls by different youth organisations to demonstrate against the cost of living, curtailing of democracy, lack of educational and health service and above all dictatorship of the ruling National Congress Party.The slogans included demands for removal of the regime, joining hands with the people and youth of Egypt and Tunis. Already the brutal police attacks claimed their first victim student Mustapha Al Noman, of Ahlia Unversity , who is suffereing from deep head wounds, scores of students were arrested in the areas around al Souque Al Arabi, among them student Omer Maghoub. As we are writing to you we are receiving news that demonstrators have reached Central Khartoum.

    More here.

    Background to Sudan here (Links International – Green-Left).

    Let’s hope the Islamist dictator and genocider, Omar al-Bashir, who rules Sudan (that is, from this week, only the North) will go the way of Ben Ali.

    BBC latest news – Here.

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    Algeria: Mobilisations for Democracy.

    Posted in Imperialism, International, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on February 2, 2011

     

    In denial? El Watan reports today (3.1.11).

    Pour le vice-Premier ministre, Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni, aucun parallèle ne peut être établi entre la Tunisie, l’Egypte et l’Algérie. “les situations dans les trois pays ne sont pas similaires”(APN).

    For the Deputy Prime Minister, Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni, one cannot make any comparison between  Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria, ‘ The situation in the three countries is not similar’.

    Selon Yazid Zerhouni, l’Algérie  a accompli de nombreux progrès qui lui permettent de se prémunir contre un mouvement de contestation sociale et politique. Et pour cause, “au niveau des politiques sociales, l’Algérie est le pays où les transferts sociaux sont les plus élevés au monde.”  

    According to Yazid Zerhouni Algeria has succeeded in made substantial progress which allowed it to stand up against any social or political opposition groundswell. For a good reason, regarding its welfare policies, social spending in Algeria is at one of the highest levels in the world.

    “Deux millions de logements  ont été construits. Il y a 10 millions d’élèves dans les différents paliers de l’enseignement et 1,5 million d’étudiants”

    Two million housing units have been built. There are 10 million school students in different types of education, and 1,5 students’ he added.

    “Il y a des avancées en Algérie, les choses changent graduellement.”

    There are advances in Algeria, things are gradually changing.

    Le Monde reports today that strikes are underway by paramedical personnel and in the education sector this week in the run up to a march on the 12th of February to express soldarity with the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. The unemployed are also mobilising.

    For a different opinion to Yazid Zerhoun’s.

     Djamaledine Benchenouf

    Background:

    Algerian police break up rally

    Thousands of police were deployed to Algiers on Saturday to suppress several hundred demonstrators. These images were filmed by Algerian journalist Elias Filali and show that despite the authorities banning a pro-democracy march, Algerian opposition is more mobilized than ever. 

    Inspired by the Tunisian revolution, intellectuals have launched an online petition calling for change. This group of academics, journalists and artists make mention of the riots that rocked the country at the beginning of the month and are notably criticizing the authorities for having found just one reason for this anger: rising food prices.
     
    Djamaledine Benchenouf takes a similar stance. This video blogger based in France does not think this uprising can be summed up as a simple food protest. He deplores however the lack of coordination between the different opposition groups and appeals to them to unite in order to mobilize the masses.

    And as the Algerian blogosphere is in a fever of excitement, web users are accusing the government of taking measures to censor the Internet. They believe Twitter, Facebook and SMS services have been intermittently blocked over the past few days.

    And this was all that was needed for Anonymous to launch an operation against the Algerian government. This cyber activist group that lent its support to Tunisian demonstrators is reportedly behind a series of cyber-attacks that notably blocked the web site of the Interior Ministry.
     
    But the success of this mobilization will depend on the demonstrations, which is why blogger Hchicha, who lives in Paris, is relaying the appeal made by numerous trade unions and political parties to take to the streets on the 9th of February, the anniversary of the establishment of the state of emergency, which has been in force in the country for nearly 19 years.

    From France24

    Wikipedia has a special article in English on these protests: Here.

    As the widely reported protests sparked off by Mohamed Bouazizi‘s self-immolation in Tunisia began to have a clear impact on the Tunisian government, a wave of self-immolations swept Algeria. These individual acts of protest mostly took place in front of a government building following an unsuccessful approach to the authorities. Three self-immolators have died of their burns so far.[37]

    It began on 12 January, when 26 year-old Mohamed Aouichia set himself on fire in Bordj Menaiel in the compound of the daira building. He had been sharing a room of 30 square metres with seven other people, including his sister, since 2003; he had repeatedly approached local authorities to get on the social housing list and been rebuffed. He has so far survived.

    On 13 January, Mohsen Bouterfif, a 37-year-old father of two, set himself on fire. He had gone with about twenty other youths to protest in front of the town hall of Boukhadra  in Tebessa demanding jobs and houses, after the mayor refused to receive them. According to one testimony, the mayor shouted to them: “If you have courage, do like Bouazizi did, set yourself on fire!” His death was reported on 16 January, and about 100 youths protested his death causing the provincial governor to sack the mayor. However, hospital staff the following day claimed he was still alive, though in critical condition.Al Jazeera described the suicide as “echoing the self-immolation that triggered the protests that toppled the leader of neighbouring Tunisia.” He finally died on 24 January at a hospital in Annaba.

    These suicides were followed by dozens more attempted or successful self-immolations across the country, so far without triggering nation-wide demonstrations, most of them after the Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali  fled his country on 14 January; cases included:

    • 14 January:
      • Said H. (26 years old, unemployed bachelor), in front of the Urban Security offices in Jijel; taken to hospital with no visits allowed.
    • 15 January:
      • Senouci Touati (34 years old, unemployed), in Mostaganem – had not heard of the previous Algerian cases; frustrated by what he considered an unjustified discharge from the army without a pension.
    • 16 January:
      • About 20 harraga (would-be illegal emigrants) from Annaba, who attempted to set their boat on fire when approached by the coast guard; the fire was extinguished, but the fate of two of the people on the boat is unknown.
      • Mehanaine Karim (38 year old fireman, father of three), got two bottles of petrol and threatened to burn himself in the fire station at Oum El Bouaghi after being told he would be sent to Illizi in the extreme south; he was dissuaded by the local governor before lighting it.[
    • 17 January:
      • Fatima (a woman in her 50s), in front of the town hall of Sidi Ali Benyoub near Sidi Bel Abbes – successfully dissuaded before lighting the fire. She had been living with her brothers, with whom she did not get along, and had repeatedly requested housing with no success; she decided to set herself on fire after her mother was “humiliated” by the town authorities while asking about housing.
      • Maamir Lotfi (36 years old, unemployed father of four), in front of the El Oued town hall; had unsuccessfully asked to meet the governor; taken to hospital with second-degree burns[
    • 18 January:
      • Karim Benidine (35 year old bachelor said to have mental problems), in front of the town hall in Dellys, critically burned and transferred to hospital. He died from his burns on 22 January at Douera hospital in Algiers.
      • A young man (23 years old), at Berriane in the Sahara; attempted to burn himself in front of the daira office; saved with only light burns on his right foot. (more…)
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    Le Lièvre de Patagonie. Claude Lanzmann. A Review, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Israel.

    Posted in Colonialism, European Left, French Left, French Politics, Imperialism by Andrew Coates on February 4, 2011

    http://www.decitre.fr/gi/88/9782070437788FS.gif

     

    Le Lièvre de Patagonie. Claude Lanzmann. Gallimard 2009 (Paperback 2010)

    Claude Lanzmann (born 1925) is the director of Shoah (1985), the landmark film on the Holocaust. Against the documentary’s theme of methodically organised death, his title, Le Lièvre de Patagonie, evokes the Hare, a symbol of fertility and renewed life (the original ‘Easter Bunny’). Lanzmann’s book, he writes, was written with this animal constantly in mind. In Shoah while Rudolf Vrba talks off-camera of his escape from the Birkenau extermination camp there is a shot of a hare sliding under the barbed wire. Lanzmann likes the creatures, he respects them as noble, and if there were transmigration of souls he would wish to be reincarnated as one. Glimpsing one of a legendary South American species in his car’s headlights in Patagonia signalled the moment that he felt fully in the land, vrais ensemble (truly together). The hare is a sign of a vital leap to freedom that infuses his own “joie sauvage” (wild happiness). It is this incarnation that constantly springs to Lanzmann’s mind as he unravels his existence.

    Le Lièvre de Patagonie is a record of Lanzmann’s out-of-the-ordinary intellectual, political and creative career, infused with joy, and sadness. It passes from the youthful résistant, to the culture and commitments that led him to Jean-Paul Sartre, and a “quasi-maritale’ companionship with Simone de Beauvoir (from 1952 to 1959). A contributor from 1952 onwards to Les Temps Modernes (publisher’s site here) he provides an important first-hand account of this review’s active support for anti-colonialism during the Algerian war for independence. The shattering experience of producing Shoah gives an additional edge to what is already for many a defining moment in their understanding of the Endlösung. After De Beauvoir’s death Lanzmann finally became the Editor of Sartre’s old journal (1986) marking another significant moment in an exceptional biography.

    The memories are much more than a record of events; they are an affirmation of his beliefs, and loyalties. Lanzmann’s commitment to Israel, expressed in the partisan documentary Pourquoi Israel (1970) remains at the heart of his being. In Le Monde last year Lanzmann was cited saying that, “Je suis d’autant propalestinien que je suis pro-israélian, et récroproquement” (I am as pro-Palestinian as I am pro-Israeli and the other way around). But there is little doubt that his empathy for the Jewish state marks his recollections the more, making the author a rare living defender of the left’s post-War support for Israel.

    Lanzmann does not just feel an affinity, as somebody with a secular-Jewish cultural background, with Israeli people. He considers that he is, despite the intensity of his French culture (visible in the depths of his prose). He remains “Français de hazard, pas du tout ‘de souche’” – French by chance, not of French stock. (Page 330) The Jews are “mon peuple”. Visiting the new state in 1948 Lanzmann found that compared to real Israelis, who had their country in their “os et le sang” (bone and blood) he was “un elfe” who weighed nothing. He has always, without Biblical faith, been astonished and full of “admiration” for the Jewish religion (Page 730). Such opinions (and his eulogy  of  Israel’s army in the film Tsahal, 1994), are deep in Lanzmann’s marrow. To this extent his praise of the Hebrew state’s military is  impossible to forgive or forget.  They may be why, despite the historical and political importance of the Le Lièvre, it has yet to be translated into English (though the LTS reviewed the original here). It is too leftist for right-wing publishers, too Zionist for the left. (more…)

    Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Constitutionalism.

    Posted in Human Rights, Islamism, Labour Movement by Andrew Coates on February 6, 2011

     

    Negotiating Today.

    Egypt, it hardly needs saying, is in the throes of the greatest power struggle to hit the country since the 1950s. It is unnecessary to repeat a description of the sufferings of its people, or the detailed reporting of the courageous revolt against the Mubarak regime. The growing importance of Egypt’s liberal constitutionalists, not least for the Western powers exercising their influence on the outcome of the crisis, is not universally welcomed. Some regard this turn as a way of preserving Cairo’s alignment with American interests. A transitional government led by such as Muhamed ElBaradei, will concentrate on legal change, while leaving the country’s neo-liberal economic policies intact. As the economic distress, which fuelled the protests, comes from that source, this is a matter of great concern.

    One issue however is dividing much more fundamentally those who wish, from the left, to support a democratic transition, and encourage the development of socialist movements in the land. That is the nature of Egypt’s most numerous opposition force, Islamism, and its strongest expression, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).

    Socialist Worker and Counterfire rightly place the MB within the camp of resistance. They appear however to have gone stage further. For the SWP it may be a “contradictory” party, with reactionary positions, but crucially, it is “anti-imperialist”. Counterfire simply places them within the National Coalition for Change, the “militant movement” that should enagage in “permanent revolution”. An even more ‘cordial’ description of them, by John Wight,  is given here. They incline to an objective alliance between the Egyptian left (and by extension, all who want to express solidarity with efforts to topple the Raïs), or at the very least, common action, with this Islamist party. This is to conflate support for the democratic rights of the MB together with active co-operation. It is not the pragmatic recognition that to establish new Egyptian political institutions, “The Muslim Brotherhood will play a serious part in any new politics” – as the Guardian Editorial of the 5th of February states. Instead it has echoes of the Third Worldist view that there is a need to create a common ‘anti-imperialist’ front against Mubarak, the puppet of the Americans. No doubt Counterfire and the SWP and their Egyptian surrogates intend to outflank the MB, which has, as the Guardian states, has become “less a radical organisation than a conservative one..”.

    These views have been challenged. The AWL’s Solidarity warns of the dangers of “Islamic counter-revolution”. Clive Bradley notes, “Though the Islamist movements have played little part in the upheavals, the fact that they have political cadres and organisation already in place gives them scope to shape outcomes.” He states that the MB’s aim is a “religious state” (2.2.2011). In the Weekly Worker Eddie Ford says, “the mass movement is not some attempted power grab by the Muslim Brotherhood or some other such Islamist group. Indeed, all the evidence points to the MB being to a large extent left behind by events – it is certainly unable to exert control or leadership over the uprising, doubtlessly to its frustration.” (2.3.2011)

    Yassamine Mathar in the same journal observes, “in addition to holding conservative views on issues such as women’s rights, the MB is anti-communist and has been hostile to independent working class popular organizations.” Illustrating the wider influence that Islamism has had in the country, also describes how even the Egyptian left-of-centre, in the Arab Socialist Party, the and the Young Egypt Party, believe in ruling people’s lives by the Sharia. The Social Justice Party stands for something called a “socialist Islamic economic System.” Whatever the differences between these writers, encouraging the MB or any form of Islamism is not on their political agenda.

    Egyptian Islamism.

    There is a good deal of evidence that Egyptian Islamism is a threat to a range of democratic and social rights. From its establishment (1928) the Muslim Brotherhood has been marked by the influence of profoundly illiberal and anti-socialist figures. The MB’s loathing of Jews, Communists, Freemasons (secularists) and ‘Crusaders’ has resembled in many respects the European extreme-right – though they somewhat obviously differed about the last target). Their founding leader, Al-Banna, was opposed to ‘Western’ democratic institutions and political pluralism; he advocated a pious ‘organic’ society in which God and his revealed Message in the Qu’ran were sovereign.

    The MB’s opposition to British colonialism, and its missionary, indoctrinating and charitable activities in the 1930s, helped build a party with enduring influence. This has remained despite serve repression by the Egyptian state, which began with Nasser. In 1952 his Free Officers included them in government until a falling-out over the terms of British withdrawal in 1954 led to a crackdown. In 1971 Sadat released MB prisoners, encouraged them to organise in universities against the left and Nasserite groups and, by 1975 allowed full reign to their social and religious activities. Sadat’s assassination in 1981, by a MB splinter, the Jihad, led to a return to repression. Under Mubarak’s rule there have been periods of accommodation to the MB, and sweeping clampdowns on all forms of Islamism. The entry of the 17 Brotherhood MPs into Parliament in 200 was followed by arrests of activists.

    Nobody who has read seriously about the Brotherhood can fail to be impressed by the complexity of its internal political and ideological life. But a general feature stands out above all others. That the MB could be a home for the Guide of modern hard-line Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, indicates that the Brothers’ embrace extended at one period to the currents, now wholly separate and hostile, known as Jihadism, and other, less violent but still rigorist groupings that derive from a ‘pure’ Salafist tradition.

    At present many commentators appear convinced that the MB is moving towards becoming a Constitutionalist Islamist party, on the model of Turkey’s AKA. In Egypt after Mubarak (2008) Bruce Rutherford describes how in the mid-1990s a group of younger members issued pamphlets, under the name of Ma’mun al-Hudeibi, which endorsed women’s full political and legal equality, and tolerance towards the Christian Copts. By the 2005 Parliamentary campaign, in which they were allowed to participate, their agenda included a commitment to restraining state power, improvements in the rule of law (emphasising judicial independence), and protection of basic civil and political rights. Nevertheless the dominant strain in the Brotherhood’s thinking has been, and remains, the view that the Sharia is central to their politics, “this is accomplished through the deliberation of elected Parliament that functions as the modern-day counterpart to the ‘people who loose and bind; in classical thought”(Page 180)

    Imperfect Liberalism: The State as Moral Agent.

    To Rutherford the MB is “imperfectly liberal”. This is an understatement. Religious tolerance is extended to Christians and (?) Jews, but not to any other faith. As with other kinds of Islamism, (notably in Iran), the Baha’is are beyond any covenant of protection. The country’s; most senior political leaders have to be Muslim, and women have no role at the highest level of the state. The American political scientist discusses the theorists of Islamic Constitutionalism, from Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Tariq al-Bishri, Kamal Abu al-Majd and Muhammed Salim al-‘Awwa. He compares them and concludes that, “The Brotherhood clearly accepts the theorists’ argument that a strong and invasive state is necessary for building pious individuals and a pious community. However, it also accepts the principle that this state must be monitored and constrained in order to ensure that it plays its transformative role effectively.” (Page 171)

    In effect the Brotherhood intends to use the Egyptian state apparatus to pursue what Hicham ben Abdallah and El Alaoui have called the “Salsification” of society (Les intellectuals Arabs entre Etats et intégrisme. Le Monde Dilomatique. August 2010). These writers paint of a picture of cultural spaces in Arab Muslim countries becoming increasingly structured by a strict interpretation of Islamic norms. The MB would like to see this process accelerated. They would Islamicise political and social life, through persuasion backed by legal means – and sanctions. It is a project that accepts pluralism, but only within an Islamic framework. One can be sure that many ‘Western’ traits not sanctioned by the Sharia, will not find a place in an Egypt ruled by the Brotherhood. Lea-way to dress as one wants, to enjoy full freedom of speech (including anything perceived to be anti-Islamic), free culture, everyday liberties such as the right to drink what one wishes, vanish. Islamic norms will be imposed on sexual activity, criminalising ‘abnormal’ behaviour. If the Christian minority may be licensed to enjoy some of these freedoms (on dress codes, eating and drinking), one can be certain that Muslims will not. Patriarchal Muslim Family Law (already adopted under Egypt’s hybrid Islam-Western legal system) will be tightened. The result, if this programme is carried through, will have something of Calvin’s Geneva about it, and become a Sunnite version of Tehran.

    The Muslim Brotherhood will play an essential role in the creation, if this comes about, of an Egyptian democracy. But to accept their rights is not to ally with them. The modernised, Constitutional Islamism they represent is not fundamentally democratic, it is bounded by the limits of the Divine Message. One can see the importance this plays in the MB’s priorities by their absence from the workers’ struggles that have been waged against the economic projects of the Mubarak regime, aimed at furthering the liberalisation of the economy. This is equally the case for the liberal opposition, which indeed has pushed for an even more aggressive turn to the privatised market-state. Those liberals, who originate from the Judges’ Club, and those MB members committed to a democratic framework, are temporary partners with the left, on the great issue of Egyptian revolutionary reform. Any convergence, as Yassamine Mathar argues,  is temporary. They are not allies on the substance of a social republic, which is both open to all, and secular, and the bearer of the rights of the people and workers against the sovereignty of god and the market. Worse, such collaboration in Egypt stands in the way of the international labour and socialist movement, whose interests are opposed to Islamism in all its forms

    Big Society Goes Bang.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Cuts, Labour Movement, Welfare State by Andrew Coates on February 8, 2011

    Model of the ‘Big Society’.

    Plans to devolve a large chunk of public services to ‘voluntary groups’  and charities are in a  shambles. There is whingeing even from its supporters. Efforts to replace representative democracy with “radical decentralisation”  (giving power to local unaccountable ’voluntary’ groups  and private business ) have suffered the effects of cuts (more Here , Here and Here).

    Unions and voluntary groups have joined forces to campaign against the Government’s spending cuts, arguing that they make a “mockery” of the Government’s Big Society.

    TUC general secretary Brendan Barber accused ministers of driving through “savage” cuts which he said will impact hardest on the poorest, most vulnerable communities.

    The union organisation said the voluntary sector was set to lose around £4.5 billion because of the Government’s austerity measures.

    Mr Barber said: “This unnecessary and economically damaging austerity will make Britain a meaner, nastier, more unequal place to live, so we’re bringing together unions and voluntary sector organisations to defend our civil society from attack and campaign against these cuts to vital support services.

    “The TUC is keen to build the widest possible coalition against the cuts, involving unions, charities, community groups and faith organisations.”

    More Here.

    There is a brilliant dissection of the Big Society concept by Posterous here.

    Point 5 is “It enshrines a Victorian model of philanthropy which will enable those with time and money to decide which causes are ‘deserving’.”

    I question, then, Brother Barber’s unqualified support for the role of charities and voluntary groups. They have an important place in civil society, but they are no replacement for public services.

    We should look at the roots of the problem.

    In the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) Robert Tressell painted a picture of early Edwardian town, Mugsville (Hastings). An important theme in this socialist classic is unemployment. This is met, Tressell lightly satirised, by the town’s worthies setting up an “Organised Benevolence Society”. It is headed by Sir Graball D’Enclsoed Land, Lady Slum rents, and the Rev. Mr Bosher. All help for the out-of-work is given over the ‘Big society’. Without rights the unemployed are obliged to seek charity.

    Oscar Wilde  in The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) described what this help meant for the poor.

    It could be seen as a,

    “ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives.”

    Many familiar with modern Charities would be the  first to say that this attitude no longer exists. They would be wrong. Many religiously based charities have very strong ideas about influencing the morality and behaviour of the poor.

    They are resented as such. 

    In this respect it is wrong that charitable institutions should replace equal public provision with services that are funded indirectly by the state and delivered by organisations which are not under democratic control.

    Wilde further noted that,

    “It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.”

    To put it simply, the people who were the agents of the economic crisis are allowed to shove responsibility for dealing with its results - unemployment and poverty - wish to divest state responsibility for dealing with its effects. Charitable and voluntary bodies are, if often useful, unable to deal with the enormous task: this needs universal public provision carried out by publicly accountable  services.

    The state’s attempt to use the unemployed to step in (unpaid) where public spending cuts have created a gap is described on the Ipswich Unemployed Action Blog.

    The Big Society is an attempt to bring back the Universal Benevolence Society, run by Sir Graball d’Bankbonus, Lady Jerrybuilt Property, and Rev. Mr Nosyparker.

    NPA Congress, Steep Membership Decline.

    Posted in French Left, Front de Gauche, LCR, Marxism, New Left, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on February 9, 2011
     
    The NPA Has Many Good Points.
     
    This Weekend the NPA is holding its Congress.
     
    Vote des militants pour le 1er congrès du NPA (from Here).

    The activists of the NPA have just held their local election meetings. 3 550 members have voted, that is 70% of those in good-standing with their dues. This means that the party has just over 6,000 members (adding those who are not up-to-date with their subs).

    The results are as follows.
    P1: 40, 83 % (Majority, no alliance with the Front de Gauche, no negotiating with the Parti Socialiste, the NPA must pursue its present course.)
    P2: 28, 29 % (We’re the Best! Build the Revolutionary Party to Overthrow Capitalism! Look to the Youth! )
    P3: 27, 20 % (Those – with a grasp of the need for allies and taking elections seriously  - supporting an alliance with the Front de Gauche).
    P4: 3, 40 % (Trotskyist fraction Fourth International – admired by Permanent Revolution – need one say more? Article, in English,  here)
    Plateformes locales: 0, 29%

    More details on the views of these tendencies (in English) here.

    This is the first step in a debate which will continue until the election of a new NPA leadership during the congress.

    The most significant aspect of these results is the NPA’s loss of membership.

    Libération reports,

    Plus de 9 000 cartes revendiquées lors de la création du parti en février 2009, 8 000 annoncées dix mois plus tard, les adhérents du NPA ne seraient plus qu’entre 5 000 et 6 000. (more here. On the NPA site here)

    That is a decline in two years of (a minimum) of 3,000 members.

    Explaining this  Céderic Durand Razmig Keucheyan argues  in Libération (here) that the NPA was wrong to imagine that it would be the only alternative to the Parti Socialiste’s “social liberalism”. Its ‘go-it-alone’ strategy has proved false. Apart from the fact that there are plenty of others offering an alternative to socialist democracy (from the Greens to the Front de Gauche, via a gamut of anti-capitalist and ecological groups) there is a basic flaw in the strategy. The sociologist observes,

    Ce qui manque au NPA depuis deux ans, c’est d’abord une bonne dose de modestie. S’imaginer qu’un seul courant de la gauche radicale, si clairvoyants soient ses représentants, allait à lui seul réinventer le «socialisme du XXIe siècle», après le désastre qu’a représenté celui du XXe, manque de sérieux.

    What the NPA has lacked for the last two years, is above all a healthy dose of modesty. Imagining that a single current of the radical left, however clearsighted its representatives, could on its own reinvent a ‘socialism of the 21st century’, after all the disasters of the 20th century, was just not serious.

    The NPA leaders look unlikely to heed this good advice. They seem to want to continue in “splendid isolation”.

    Olivier Besancenot vehemently rejects any alliance with the Front de Gauche (FG). Any agreement on Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s bid for a Presidential candidacy (Parti de Gauche – part of the FG) is out of the question. To the NPA’s leading figure  Mélenchon does not offer “unity”. ( Here.)

    The main problem the NPA faces this weekend is that the existing leadership (P1)  has,  at 40, 83 % of the vote, no absolute majority.

    This means it will be obliged to align itself, or reach an agreement with, one of the other currents (P2, or P3).

    As the former ‘identity’ tendency (P2), shows every sign of Trotskyist binge party-building, such an accord will further isolate the NPA. (Analysis of this dilemma here).

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    The Obama Syndrome. Tariq Ali. Review.

    Posted in Imperialism, Iran, Islamism, Obama by Andrew Coates on February 11, 2011

     

     

    The Obama Syndrome. Surrender at Home, War Abroad. Tariq Ali. Verso 2010.

    In January 2010 Tariq Ali wrote, “A year since the White House changed hands, how has the American empire altered?” (New Left Review ll. 61) In The Obama Syndrome, the author begins his second chapter with the words, “Two years since the White House changed hands, how has American empire altered?” (Page 35) *  The nature of American power, and its world-wide impact  is a defining political issue of our age. This alone is a good reason to look seriously at Ali’s reply to the question. That he writes fluently and – to this non-American at least – knowledgeably about the subject is a bonus. A lot less  appealing are his ‘anti-imperialist’ alternatives, beginning with Islamist-inspired ‘resistances’.

    Does Ali’s “preliminary report” on the first 1,000 days of Obama’s presidency help us understand the nature of this global player? The unfolding Egyptian drama, and Washington’s response to the revolt, indicate the character, and the limits, of US domination. Obama’s predecessors brought Cairo under its wing and shored up Mubarak’s authoritarian regime. Will the President facilitate or obstruct a transition from the rule of the Raïs to a viable democracy? Whose interests, and what parties, will he promote? Will they permit an independent democratic left-leaning and secular force to develop? ? Can we expect to see that something has really changed in the White House? Why would we even consider the question? The Obama Syndrome opens, and concludes, on these issues of power.

    Happy-Days Are Here Again.

    Barack Obama’s election as President of the United States was greeted, with a “wave of ideological euphoria not seen since the days of Kennedy.” (Ibid) A broad cross-section of the domestic and international “mainstream centre and left believed that the White House had been liberated, by a “mixed-race Democrat”, from a “coterie of right-wing fanatics.” The President’s wife was of slave ancestry. His victory was widely seen as a posthumous victory for the Civil Rights movement, one of the country’s greatest campaigns of social justice. Post these heady times, and after The Obama Syndrome went to press, mid-term elections indicate the survival and revival of the hard-line right. But still the memory of Obama’s triumph glows in many progressive Americans’ minds. (more…)

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    Iran: HOPI AGM, Freedom for Jafar Panahi and all Political Prisoners!

    Posted in Imperialism, Iran, Islamism by Andrew Coates on February 13, 2011

     

    The Hands off the People of Iran held its AGM this Saturday.

    After an update on the campaign by Mark Fisher, Mike Macnair and Moshe Machover talked on the international forces shaping Iran’s Theocracy. The US and Israel remain hostile to the country and keen to destabilise its regime HOPI is opposed to any attempt to try for regime-change through external, US-led, force. There was a discussion on how far Washington needed an ‘exetrnal enemy’, (or indeed if Iran did), and if this had to be Tehran. The conjuncture was heavily marked by the effects of the revolts in North Africa, and their victories in Tunisia and Egypt. It was suggested that the USA at present appeared to favour grooming ‘democrats’ in the Middle East and Iran, rather than military threats and adventures.

    A resolution, ” Democracy must come from below  backing a Iranians fighting for an alternative to the theocracy, was passed.

    After lunch  Ruben Markarian (from executive committee of Rahe Kargar)  talked about the anniversary of the Shiakal uprising, the start of a new Iranian left’s fight against the Shah. He described its enduring legacy despite the Islamist counter-revolution.  Yassamine Mather – (the chair of HOPI) – gave a brilliant overview of the Iranian Green opposition, and the forces ranged behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against them. She underlined the importance of growing working class opposition to the regime, how strikes on specific issues had taken a more political colour.  Yassamine noted in her summing up that as a result of its corrupt repression Iran had become one of the least pious and believing countries in the Muslim world.

    During the day great concern had been expressed at the collaboration, and appearance, of  British left-wing politicians on the Iranian state’s television service, Press TV. While this behaviour was to expected of  George Galloway and Ken Livingstone, it was surprising that Jeremy Corbyn,  a doughty internationalist and defender of Human Rights, had appeared on this  platform.

    A new campaign, Freedom for Panahi and political prisoners, was introduced by Lisa Goldman. Jafar Panahi received a six year sentence for supporting the Iranian opposition Green movement. The creator of Offside is in prison for no other act than the expression of democratic opinions.  Comrade Lisa had visited Iran and had seen first-hand the surveillance people were under. In a reminder of Stalinist photographic trickery  her own television photo had been retouched to make her Islamic head-covering more concealing.  A vivid picture of the socially conscious film-director’s plight in gaol brought home to the audience the harsh reality of Islamism in power. HOPI campaigns for the release of all political prisoners, and for an end to all the executions and barbaric punishments the Islamist state inflicts.

    John McDonnell MP made an impassioned and welcome call for the broadest support for the new campaign. He stressed that human rights were at the heart of our work. We should now go out and build support.

    The contributions of Iranian comrades, with direct experience of the Islamic regime, were highlights of the day. Held while many of the Left, and our supporters, were at Trafalgar Square celebrating the Egyptian revolution, the turn-out of around 30 people showed that HOPI continues to inspire support. We hope that perhaps that opposition to dictatorships elsewhere may  re-ignite the democratic movement in Iran.

    Reading Libération on the train home I came across an article on how the French cinema world is backing the fight for Panahi’s freedom – Here.

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    Nouveau parti anticapitaliste Congrès: ça cafouille!

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Front de Gauche, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on February 14, 2011

    Olivier refuses any Agreement with Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

    The Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA)  held its congress over the weekend.

    Socialist Resistance, their British counterparts,  has congratulated the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste on its successes. (Here)

    They appear alone on this point.

    We have already discussed the NPA’s dramatic loss of membership (over a third).

    This weekend saw the party’s congress was followed by the resignation of 6 members of the national council  from the NPA. (Here) It was also unable to reach clear decisions on a number of key issues.

    The NPA’s principal political strategy is determined by a vote on the general political line. As we have previously reported there is no over-all majority for one position. The existing leadership  got  (41,8%),  the «identitaires» (purists) got 27,8%  and  «unitaires»  (that is those who seek an alliance with the rest of the left in the Front de Gauche) obtained 26,4%. (Here.)

    NPA leaders are determined to continue the strategy of refusing any agreement with the alliance of the PCF, left socialists, Parti de Gauche (PG)  and their former comrades in the Gauche Unitaire. Olivier Besancenot claims that PG presidential hopeful, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is “too close” to the Socialist Party. (Here)  Where this leaves them is not certain. Are they going to ‘build the party’ on the lines the ‘identitaires’ suggest? Or are they going to try to create a more limited set of alliances? 

    Opinion Polls indicate that a united left candidate would get 12% in the Presidential election,  Jean-Luc Mélenchon aloene would have 5 to 7%, Olivier Besancenot (NPA) 4 to 7%  Nathalie Arthaud (Lutte ouvrière ) would have from  0 à 2%.In any case it is clear that Mélenchon has overshadowed them on the national scene.

    On secularism the NPA voted for a clear anti-racist opposition to reactionary religious dress codes. There was a majority against standing veiled candidates,

    Le NPA a débattu samedi du foulard islamique, semblant s’orienter, malgré ses divisions, vers le refus de voir des femmes voilées candidates aux élections, tout en reconnaissant leur droit à militer dans ce parti à la tradition trotskiste, laïque et féministe.

    On Saturday the NPA debated the Islamic scarf. It seems to have decided, despite its divisions, towards prohibiting veiled women standing as party candidates, while, at the same time, recognising their right to be active in our party, wedded to  Trotskyist, secular and feminist traditions.  (more Here.)

     The impact of the vote less than clear. Possible legal challenges will have to be resolved by the Party’s national council (CPA). There is some confusion about the ability of the NPA to reach a lasting party-wide agreement on the issue of fighting religious intolerance and patriarchy. Here.

    From the Parti de Gauche Jean-Luc Mélenchon says that he is “disappointed” at the NPA’s decision to refuse unity with the rest of the non-PS left. The Congress was a “wasted” opportunity (Here).

    “Revolutionary” Call at Ipswich Town Hall.

    Posted in Cuts, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on February 16, 2011

    Roger Mackey and Richard Edwards at the meeting last night

    Roger Mackey (Ipswich Trades Council)  and Richard Edwards (PCS).

    From the Evening Star.

    COMMUNITY groups from all corners of Suffolk joined forces in calling for “revolutionary actions” to prevent cuts to the county’s services.

    As the axe hangs over many services, concerned residents gathered to express their anger as the county council bids to make cuts as part of its efforts to save £125million over the next four years. More Here.

    There was one contribution that really went straight to Tendance Coatey’s heart,

    Simon Leatherdale, who is a professional forester and has also worked for the Forestry Commission for 35 years, said that consultation had been a “mockery” over the planned sell-off because there was no option for keeping things as they are now.

    He said: “We are facing 100% cuts and it doesn’t matter how they plan to dispose of the commission, it is a real concern.  “These forests are our birthright and I think that we need to hang on to that birthright.”

    Mr Leatherdale said that Rendlesham Forest offered both bio-diversity and incredibly high standards, adding: “Taking our forests away would be an horrific mistake.”

    In this Forest lies Tangham, and the river Tang. They are truly beautiful sites. My (deceased) mother planted  (with a  group of volunteers) one of the trees in this patch.

    The idea that the Liberal-Tory Government wants to steal it from the people and give it to their toff mates pushes me hors de moi.

    Which I said, or near enough, at the meeting.

    Suffolk Coalition for Public Services Facebook: Here.

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    Secret Affairs, Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam. Mark Curtis. Review.

    Posted in Britain, Imperialism, Islam, Islamism, SWP by Andrew Coates on February 18, 2011

     

    Secret Affairs. Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam Mark Curtis. 2010. Serpent’s Tail.

    Hat-tip to Paul Flewers who suggested I read this book.

    “Egypt’s future is uncertain after the death or fall of Mubarak and, whether there is a revolution or not, the Brotherhood could play a role in government or in the transition….Britain is the largest foreign investor in the country, amounting to around $20 billion. British elites want to be in a better position than after the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979 in 1979, and cultivating the Islamists is likely regarded as critical.”

    “Britain likely sees the Brotherhood – as it did from the 1950s to the 1970s – as counter to the secular, nationalist forces opposition in Egypt and the region….” Pages 308 – 9. Secret Affairs. Mark Curtis. 2010.

    Secret Affairs is a pioneering and unsettling study. It unravels how British officials have worked with apparently ‘anti-imperialist’ Islamists that they have found “useful at specific moments.” It sheds light on one of the less publicly acknowledged sides of British global policy – its “collusions” with Islamist groups and parties. Mark Curtis writes, “With some of these radical Islamic forces, Britain has been in a permanent, strategic alliance to secure fundamental long-term policy goals; with others, it has been a temporary marriage of convenience to achieve specific short-term outcomes.” (Page xi) Two geo-political aims have guided this policy, to keep control over energy sources in the Middle East and maintain the City’s place in a stable international financial system. More than out of sheer delight in the undercover world British intelligence agencies have pursued these rational, foreign policy, objectives.

    For many it will be a mental wrench to consider that the British State could be complicit with Islamism. Islamists, in all their heterogeneous forms, are, according to a refrain that tends to drown out all others, a real or exaggerated threat. To the right they are from a civilisation out to clash with the West; to most of the left, a riposte to its imperial, Crusader, ambitions. After digesting Secret Affairs the claim that the West has declared a no-holds barred ‘war’ on Islam, sounds hollow. On occasion even the most extreme Salafist inspired Islamists have been in the loop of the secret services, though more public state policy has been to nurture “moderate” Muslims, a moderation that exists sometimes only in comparison with the most violent Jihadists. If one turns the study’s conclusions upside down, one can also see some interesting aspects of Islamist politics: why, and how, they expect to use their contacts, half-hostile, half-respectful, with countries like Britain. Mark Curtis equally offers important signposts to the future direction Whitehall policy will take towards a key Islamist actor in post-Mubarak Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood.

    State Islamist Sponsors.

    The thread tying together Secret Affairs is an account of its relations with “the two most significant sponsors of radical Islam” – Pakistan, which promoted “the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the terrorist cause in Kashmir and its surge in central Asia” and Saudi Arabia, “the largest financier of the Islamist cause worldwide. “(Page 223 – 4) Mark Curtis is a master of weighing up what governments have considered to be the national interest beyond alliances with these states. He enters the murky intelligence world without his vision becoming darkened by the complexity of the dealings involved. The author argues that Britain has “long connived with Islamist forces and their Pakistani state sponsors.” (Page 293) He cites Martin Bright, “it is depressing that so few of the left have been prepared to engage with the issue of the Foreign Office appeasement of radical Islam except to minimise its significance.” (Page 307) He comments, that this is not so much appeasement, as an effort to “achieve key British foreign policy goals” (Ibid).

    In 2011 the arguments of Secret Affairs are extremely important.  The euphoria surrounding the popular uprisings against the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes, and the demonstrations unrolling from Algeria and Tunisia to Libya, Jordan, Yemen, and the Gulf States with its waves reaching Tehran, has spread across the world. It is more than welcome. Liberals and the left have greeted the democratic aspirations and secular demands of the protesters.

    Some ‘anti-imperialists’ consider the unrest to be the much-waited-for blowback to a Western ‘crusade’ against Islam that carries social opposition in its train. Its client dictators, Mubarak and Ben Ali, gone, they hope for a more radical moves, revolutions with wider ambitions, social and international. They may even be, it is often whispered, occasionally said out loud, radical forces, potential allies in a push for deeper change. Comforting stories, about veiled women involved in the struggle, have circulated, sometimes designed to demonstrate the irrelevance of religion, other times to indicate its ‘progressive’ role. Islamist groups, swathes of which have, on Curtis’s evidence, had ambiguous contacts in the past with Western states, are now held to be potential allies of the left. In the Iranian revolution, and its aftermath, such a common front has functioned to political Islam’s advantage and has not benefited any popular interest. If some Islamist groups have been prepared to work with Britain in the past, one wonders what kind of present-day agreements rival leftist suitors will reach, and what will be the result.

    Divide et Impera.

    (more…)

    Tunisia: 14 January Front Proposes a National Congress to Defend the Revolution.

    Posted in French Politics, Imperialism, Left, North Africa by Andrew Coates on February 20, 2011

     

    Front du 14 Janvier.

    La révolution tunisienne est la première du 21e siècle. Son onde de choc fait trembler bien des dictatures et des chancelleries occidentales, même si elle n’a pas encore renversé l’ancien régime, encore moins l’appareil d’Etat néocolonial qui le soutient. Expression d’un ras-le-bol généralisé, elle s’est nourrie du mécontentement de classes diverses, du moins jusqu’au 14 janvier. Depuis lors, elle connaît une polarisation de plus en plus forte entre le camp de la révolution et celui de la contre-révolution

    The Tunisian revolution is the first of the 21st century. Its shock-waves have shaken dictators and Western governments. But it has yet to overturn the ancien regime, and the neo-colonial state apparatus that supports it. As an expression of popular unrest it  has been fed by the anger of a diverse classes, at least until the 14th of January. Since that date there has been  increasing polarisation between the forces who back the revolution and those of the counter-revolution.

    La seconde s’agite pour sauvegarder ses institutions et sa constitution. Avec la complicité des franges libérales du mouvement démocratique, les agents des puissances occidentales, les naufragés de l’ancien régime et les islamistes essayent de désamorcer le soulèvement social. Le gouvernement « d’unité nationale » provisoire (GUNP) est ainsi formé d’anciens membres du pouvoir de Ben Ali, dont son Premier ministre (depuis 1999), architecte des politiques néolibérales dictées par les instances financières impérialistes.

    Those on the latter side are attempting to safeguard their constitution and its institutions. With the collaboration with liberal  fringes of the democratic movement, Western agents, Islamists, and the left-overs of the ancien regime, they are trying to stem the social movement. The provisional government of ‘national unity’ (GNUP)  is peopled by former members of Ben Ali’s power-structure. This includes a  Prime Minister (from 1999)  Mohamed Ghannouchi (here), who was the architect of neo-liberal policies dictated by imperialist financial bodies.

    Outre les trois ministres issus du mouvement démocratique, qui mettent tout en œuvre pour donner une légitimité à ce gouvernement, les autres seraient des « technocrates neutres » au service de la démocratie. Venus de France, diplômés des « grandes écoles » et détenteurs de capitaux qui œuvrent au pillage de la Tunisie, ils ont été recrutés par Hakim Karoui, ex-conseiller de Jean-Pierre Raffarin (1er Ministre français, 2002-2005). Le seul objectif du GUNP est de faire avorter toute tentative d’instaurer une démocratie politique et sociale.

    Apart from 3 Ministers from the democratic movement, who have done all they can to give legitimacy to the government, the rest of the Cabinet consists of “neutral technocrats” claiming to serve democracy. Educated in France, in the elite ‘grandes écoles’, they have been recruited by Hakim Karoui, a former aid to Jean-Pierre Raffarin (French Prime Minister 2002-2005). The sole objective of the Government of National Unity is to suffocate any attempt to create real political and social democracy.

    A l’opposé, la révolution est soutenue par le Front 14 janvier, qui regroupe la gauche anticapitaliste, les nationalistes arabes et des indépendant.e.s de gauche. Deux autres sensibilités ne reconnaissent toujours pas le GUNP : le Congrès pour la république (CPR) et le Forum démocratique pour la liberté et le travail (FDLT). La dynamique initiée par le Front 14 janvier est porteuse d’espoir (son meeting du 13 février, à Tunis, a rassemblé plus de 8000 personnes). Avec la multiplication des comités locaux et régionaux, la convergence avec les militant-e-s syndicaux et associatifs les plus combatifs, il annonce une perspective politique capable d’ouvrir des brèches vers un changement radical.

    By contrast the revolution is backed by the 14 January Front. This unites the radical anti-capitalist left, arab nationalists and left-wing independents. Two other tendencies equally refuse to join the GNUP: le Congrès pour la république (CPR) and the Forum démocratique pour la liberté et le travail (FDLT). The momentum set off by Front continues, embodying hope, (8,000 people attended its 13th of February meeting in Tunis). The Front has developed a common sense of direction with the growing numbers of  local and regional committees and  the most combative trade union and civil society organisations. For the Front political possibilities are opening up for  serious, and deep-rooted, changes.  

    Il propose un Congrès national de défense de la révolution, expression des comités populaires, de toutes les forces politiques, syndicales et sociales issues des luttes, vers une assemblée constituante pour élaborer une constitution démocratique répondant aux aspirations à l’émancipation nationale et sociale. Ce processus répond aux aspirations populaires : il veut rompre avec la dépendance et réorganiser l’économie en fonction des besoins essentiels des classes populaires, ceux des femmes notamment, en socialisant les banques et en annulant la dette odieuse de la dictature.

    We propose a National Congress for the Defence of the Revolution. This should be the expression and voice of popular committees, and of all the political forces, trade union and social, which have emerged from the struggle. This Constituent Assembly  should work out a  democratic constitution expressing the people’s wishes  for national and social emancipation. It should break with the country’s position of dependency. It should reorganise the economy, by socialising  the banks and cancelling the dictatorship’s debts, on the basis of the needs of the popular classes, above all those of women .

    NPA site 19th February.

    Here.

    Earlier Statement Here.

    A tempered analysis of the Tunisian left is given on  the AWL site  Here.

    News: Hundreds demonstrate against New French Ambassador.

    It is frequently said that France is not exactly popular in Tunisia these days.

    This is what the new Ambassador said yesterday,

    Boris Boillon called questions by Tunisian journalists,  ”débiles” (pathetic)  ou de “n’importe quoi” (rubbish).”n’essayez pas de me coincer avec des trucs à la con.” (don’t try and corner  me with this load of crap). (from  Here.)

    I wonder why the Tunisians got upset…

     

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    Cameron: (Nearly) All State Services to Go into Private Hands.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, Cuts, Liberal Democrats by Andrew Coates on February 21, 2011

    Cameron Continues Fight Against Jacobin Centralisation.

    A White Paper, due to be published in the next fortnight, will set out an automatic right for private sector bodies to bid for public work.

    Decision-making power will be given back to professionals – who have in the past been hampered by red tape – while people will be able to have more control over the budget for the service they receive.

    The changes could ultimately see many functions of the NHS – from operations to walk-in triage services – being run by private firms. All schools could be run by charities or private sector companies, as could municipal services such as maintaining parks, adult care, special schools or roads maintenance.

    Outside providers would be offered payment-by-results contracts, which would earn them more as they increased the quality of services.

    The only exemptions will be the judiciary and the security services. All other public services will be expected to open up to private competition under the plans, which the Government hopes will slash… (More Here.)

    David Cameron explains (Here),

    That’s why we need a complete change, and that’s what our White Paper will bring. The grip of state control will be released and power will be placed in people’s hands. Professionals will see their discretion restored. There will be more freedom, more choice and more local control. Ours is a vision of open public services – and we will make it happen by advancing some key principles.

    The most important is the principle of diversity. We will create a new presumption – backed up by new rights for public service users and a new system of independent adjudication – that public services should be open to a range of providers competing to offer a better service.

    Let us leave aside the fact that the only ‘people’ getting their hands on power will be money-grubbing private companies and Lords and Lady Bountifuls. Let us ignore, for the moment, just how inefficient and bureaucratic existing ‘outsourcing’ is – notably in the Unemployment Business.

    Let us just reflect on what this ‘decentralisation’ means.

    A couple of centuries ago Britain has an endless series of local ‘times’ Each area had its own clock hours. You could leave London at half Noon and,a  few hours later, find yourself at Ipswich around 12.27.*

    The Liberal-Tory  kind of decentralisation will make every place have its own ‘time’ for public services. Some will be run according to the rhythm of the rural gentry, some to the order of ‘diverse’ religious charities now running education and social services. Some will speed up, under the rule of mercenary private companies squeezing the last penny from the sick.

    Cameron’s plans are the biggest blow to equality and  equal treatment launched in this country since the reaction that followed the ‘anti-Jacobin’ campaigns of the 1790s.

     Ferdinand Mount in a number of writings has laid out the ideological basis of this ‘localism’ – here.

    *Okay a bit exaggerated, but not much: see on the standarisation of time: here.

    Tunisia: Secularists Mobilise Against Islamist Bigotry.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Human Rights, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on February 23, 2011

    A Tunis, la vie a repris son cours mais l'insécurité règne. Un prêtre a été retrouvé égorgé vendredi, et des islamistes ont voulu incendier une rue de prostituées.

    A Tunis, la vie a repris son cours mais l’insécurité règne. Un prêtre a été retrouvé égorgé vendredi, et des islamistes ont voulu incendier une rue de prostituées.

    At Tunis, life goes on, but there is an atmosphere of insecurity. On Friday a priest was found with his throat slit, and Islamists tried to burn out a street where prostitutes worked.

    «Arrêtez vos actes extrémistes», «Laïcité = liberté et tolérance»… Des centaines de manifestants manifestaient ce samedi à Tunis «pour une Tunisie laïque», sur l’avenue Habib Bourguiba, haut lieu de la contestation qui a provoqué la chute du président Ben Ali. Cette manifestation a été organisée au lendemain d’incidents avec des islamistes, qui ont attaqué une rue dédiée à la prostitution, et de la mort d’un prêtre.

    “Stop your extremist acts” “Secularism=Liberty and Tolerance”. On Saturday  hundreds of demonstrators took to the  avenue Habib Bourguiba – the flash-point  of the revolt against the former president Ben Ali –  support of   a secular Tunisia. The assembly took place the day after Islamists attacked a red-light district, and following the killing of a priest.

    Vendredi après-midi, dans le centre de la capitale, des dizaines d’islamistes ont tenté de mettre le feu dans la rue Abdallaah Guech où travaillent des prostituées. «Des habitants les ont empêchés de rentrer dans cette rue jusqu’à l’arrivée des agents des forces de l’ordre qui ont bloqué l’entrée en interdisant tout passage. Ils ont ensuite réussi à disperser ces manifestants», a raconté un policier tunisien sous couvert de l’anonymat le policier.

    On Friday afternoon, in the centre of the capital, dozens of Islamists tried to set fire to the Abdallaah Guech street, where prostitutes work. “Residents prevented them from entering the road, until the security forces came and sealed the area off. The then succeeded in dispersing the demonstrators”, a policeman, keeping his identity anonymous, said.

    Par alleurs, sans désigner nommément les islamistes, les autorités ont attribué à des «extrémistes» le meurtre d’un prêtre polonais près de Tunis vendredi. Marek Rybinski, 34 ans, a été retrouvé «égorgé» dans le garage d’une école religieuse privée de la région de Manouba, où il était chargé de la comptabilité. C’est le premier meurtre annoncé à la fois d’un religieux et d’un étranger depuis la chute du régime de Ben Ali, le 14 janvier.

    Elsewhere, the authorities have blamed ”extremists”, without specifically naming Islamists, for the murder of a Polish Priest, the 34 year old Marek Rybinski. He was found with his throat slit  in the garage of a private religious school in the region of Manouba, where he was in charge of the accounts. It was the first murder of a religious figure, and a foreigner, since the fall of the Ben Ali regime on the 14th of January.

    More Here.

    It is important to point out that Islam is the official state religion in Tunisia. According to the Constitution no non-Muslim can be President.

    Facebook Group, “pour un futur avec UNE TUNISIE LAÏQUE DéMOCRATE LIBéRALE.”  Here.

    Update:

    By Jamel Arfaoui for Magharebia in Tunis – 22/02/11

    [Jamel Arfaoui] Tunisians turned out in huge numbers in the capital to denounce religious extremism.

    A 43-year-old Tunisian man was arrested on Tuesday (February 22nd) in connection with the murder of a Polish Catholic priest, which stunned the nation.

    The alleged killer, Chokri Ben Mustapha Bessadek Mestiri, worked as a carpenter at the school in Manouba where Marek Marius Rybinski was serving. According to TAP, Mestiri confessed to the homicide, saying he did it to cover up the theft of funds used to buy building materials.

    The killing outraged many Tunisians and led activists to organise a march for secularism and religious tolerance on Facebook. The first-of-its-kind rally took place on Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis on Saturday and was reportedly attended by more than 15,000 people.

    More here.

    You won’t find any of this on the ‘Movementist’ site of Counterfire, supposedly stuffed with direct reports from Tunisia, here.

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    WRP: Stand Alongside Colonel Gaddafi! Defend Libyan Revolution!

    Posted in Colonialism, Imperialism, Left, Nationalism, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on February 24, 2011

    WRP Stands Firm Behind Gaddafi!

    Hat-tip to Janine

    From the Newsline, organ of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

    We print excerpts of Colonel Gadaffi’s speech to the Libyan people made last Tuesday evening to rally them against the internal counter-revolutionary forces and their UK and US backers.

    I SALUTE you oh courageous people, I salute you oh Al-Fateh youth, national youths, Al-Fatimiyah youths, the youths of challenge, the generation of challenge and the generation of rage.
    More (Yes!) Here.

    Yesterday they printed this,

     
    WHILE Cameron is in Kuwait seeking to sell more rubber bullets, poison gas and a variety of war machines to the British-trained Gulf monarchies, the Libyan leader, Colonel Gadaffi, remains in Tripoli, fighting for Libyan independence, and making a fool of the British Foreign Secretary Hague,who announced Britain’s real ‘war aim’ when he told the world that Gadaffi was fleeing to Venezuela.

    The British ruling class from the 2004 meeting between Blair and Gadaffi in a tent in the desert, where he cooed sweet nothings into Gadaffi’s ear, in order to win big oil contracts, had been treating Gadaffi like a long-lost cousin.

    Now with a right-wing reactionary uprising under way, the British hyena is showing its teeth, mustering its media to treat Gadaffi as a ‘mad dog’ who must be put down, spurred on by the hope that some Islamic state of Benghazi, if established over Gadaffi’s dead body, will hand over Libya’s oil to them.

    However, Hague has overreached himself. He is now being cautioned to be more careful, since if Gadaffi wins this struggle, oil-obsessed British capitalism may well find that the ‘Blair tactic’ of massive, rear-licking cosiness may not work.

    (…)

    We urge the Libyan masses and youth to take their stand alongside Colonel Gadaffi to defend the gains of the Libyan revolution, and to develop it.

    More (Yes indeed!) Here.

    Historical Background from entdinglichung: here.

    The British Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP) was a sizeable organisation up to its implosion in 1985.

    From 1976, in order to fund its daily paper, Newsline, the WRP took money from Libya, Iraq and other vicious dictatorships, rewarding its paymasters with anti-Jewish propaganda and support for those regimes, dressed up as “anti-imperialism”.

    In 1981, actress Vanessa Redgrave, the WRP’s best known member, sued our comrades John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna for libel for comparing the WRP to the Moonie sect and the Scientologists, and for reporting that the WRP used systematic emotional and physical violence against vulnerable young people.

    The WRP tied us up us in an expensive legal case for four years, although they never took the case to court. In response, we launched a campaign for a labour movement inquiry.

    We wrote in our paper that there was “circumstantial evidence” the WRP was getting money from one or more Arab governments. We challenged them to sue us on that. They never did. Their paper spoke glowingly of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Libyan despot Qaddafi.

    The WRP ran a heresy hunt against us because we told the truth about them. They were able to make some headway. Sizeable numbers on the left accepted the WRP’s public enthusiasm for the Libyan regime as “anti-imperialism”. A WRP-run broad paper, Labour Herald (1981-5), was able to get articles, and speakers for its meetings, from Labour Party dignitaries such as Ken Livingstone, Ted Knight, David Blunkett and even Margaret Hodge.

    We were vindicated in 1985 when the WRP expelled its 72-year-old leader Gerry Healy, accusing him of sexually abusing young women members. As the fall-out increased, Healy’s associates admitted that the organisation had, in return for money, spied on Arab dissidents and prominent Jews in Britain. Most shamefully of all they helped to get a number of Iraqi Communist Party members shot by Saddam Hussein.

    We were right to stand up for honesty and clean political hands in the labour movement. We were right to stand up against people who had sold themselves and become the mouthpieces for vicious despots. And we were right to say that anti-semitism and self-serving Arab nationalism, dressed up as “anti-Zionism” and “anti-imperialism”, is political poison.

    • More: http://bit.ly/e6BZz

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    Tunisia: 100,000 Call for Ghannouchi’s Government to Go.

    Posted in Colonialism, Imperialism, North Africa by Andrew Coates on February 26, 2011

    Police have cleared crowds of Tunisians who marched through the capital Tunis on Friday demanding the resignation of interim PM Mohammed Ghannouchi, a long-time ally of the ousted leader.

    It was the biggest rally since Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia last month after 23 years in power, after being toppled by weeks of unrest. (BBC – Here)

    L’Humanite reports (Here),

    Des manifestants scandent “Ghannouchi dégage” (get out!) , “Ca suffit avec les mises en scène” (that’s enough with your set-ups!, “Honte à ce gouvernement” (Shame on the government!) . D’autres brandissent des banderoles où l’on peut lire “Ghannouchi, ton insistance montre que tu caches ta mauvaise foi” (Ghannouchi, your bad faith is showing!) . “Révolution jusqu’à la victoire” (Revolution until Victory!) , “En avant les braves de la liberté” (Stand up the fighters for Freedom!), “Nous arracherons la répression de notre terre (We’ll tear out repression from our land) “, “Ghannouchi prend tes chiens et démissionne” (Ghannouchi, take your dogs and resign),Non à la confiscation de la révolution” (Don’t Confiscate the Revolution) , scandaient d’autres manifestants qui traversaient l’avenue centrale Habib Bourguiba en direction de la Kasbah. “Nous sommes là aujourd’hui pour faire tomber le gouvernement” (We’re here to bring the Government Down) , lance Tibini Mohamed, un étudiant de 25 ans.

    Mr Ghannouchi’s interim government has promised elections by mid-July.

    More Here.

    Fourth International Statement (via Socialist Resistance):

    Permanent revolution in the Arab world 

    The International Committee of the Fourth International at its annual meeting in late February 2011 unanimously adopted the following statement:

    1. The extraordinary victory of the Egyptian people against Mubarak steps up the historical range of the Tunisian revolution that cut down the Ben Ali regime. In just a few days, the shock wave of these popular victories extended to the entire Arab region and beyond that, influencing the class struggle across the world. Demonstrations, strikes, assemblies, self-defence committees, mobilizations of trade unions, high-school pupils, democratic associations clashed with absolute determination against state apparatuses, most particularly the police. Millions of Tunisians and Egyptians came into activity to bring down the dictators, and continue to mobilize to keep control of their revolutions.

    2. This is a process of permanent revolution, which combines social, democratic, national sovereignty dimensions, and is spreading internationally. More here.

    Update: French Minister Resigns. (from Here)

    French foreign minister to leave government

    Under-fire French Foreign Minister Michel Alliot-Marie will leave the government on Sunday or Monday, two senior French cabinet members told AFP on Friday.

    Alliot-Marie has become embroiled in a series of scandals over her controversial links to Tunisia, where she took a holiday during its popular uprising.

    “Michele Alliot-Marie will leave the government this weekend or on Monday. She should be replaced by Alain Juppe,” one of the two ministers said, saying the situation was “untenable” for President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government.

    “The French presidency of the Group of 20 is important and as foreign minister Michele Alliot-Marie will be very visible, next to the head of state. But in her job action cannot clear your image,” the minister said, asking not to be named.

    The other unnamed minister put Alliot-Marie’s future exit down to Sarkozy’s plunging support in opinion polls.

    “Michele Alliot-Marie has fallen and dragged everyone with her. This must be stopped,” he said.

    Alliot-Marie’s family also admitted buying a stake in a company from a businessman friend in Tunisia in late December, during the deadly uprising that deposed authoritarian ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

    An aide to Alliot-Marie later admitted that the minister had spoken by telephone to Ben Ali, despite the minister’s earlier attempts to play down her contact with his regime.

    Just days before the fall of the regime, she shocked Tunisian democrats by suggesting that France could help train Tunisia’s hated police force to better enable it to control the popular uprising against his rule.

    Lambertists (POI): Revolution to Cross Mediterranean.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, North Africa by Andrew Coates on February 27, 2011

     

    Former allies of Gerry Healey (WRP)*.

    We had missed this.  

    But as part of our revolutionary duty (and the deep friendship we Plabolites feel)  we feel obliged to report the Parti ouvrier indépendant’s   latest stand.

    Communiqué de Gérard Schivardi **

    Je n’ai pas annoncé ma candidature à l’élection présidentielle.

    I have not announced that I will be a candidate in the Presidential election.

    A la question qui m’a été posée sur ma candidature, j’ai répondu que les développements révolutionnaires en Tunisie en Egypte qui voient les populations de ces pays non seulement chasser les dictateurs mais aussi poser la question d’une assemblée constituante ; pourraient bien traverser la Méditerranée et balayer la question de l’élection présidentielle en France.

    On the subject of my candidacy, I have replied that the revolutionary developments in Tunisia and Egypt – which have seen the people get rid not only of dictators but pose the question of the Constituent Assembly – may well cross the Mediterranean and sweep away the whole issue of Presidential elections.

    22nd of February. From Here.

     

    * That is until their 1971 split. in the ICFI over the POR (Bolivia) and other South American groups, and the Healyites stand for the LWR (Ireland)  and the RCL (Sri Lanka) . In At present the Lambertists have their own planet-wide alliance, the Entente Internationale des Travailleurs et Peuples. Unfortunately it does not seem to a current website of its own. 

    Note Charlie Pottins berates me on Facebook for not pointing out that it was SLL not the WRP that allied with Lambert. As few people under the age of 130, and former members of the RCP know, or care, who the SLL was, I consider this brief deparature from strict leftist Trainspotting rules  justified: in any case it was the same  Healey.

    ** Gérard Schivardi has an interesting background (including having his election as a councillor invalidated for non-conformity with expenses rules) . His claim to stand for the 2007 elections as the “candidate fo mayors” (that si, local commune leaders) was declared invalid. Here. ”Le 2 avril l’AMF obtient une ordonnance de référé du Tribunal de grande instance de Paris interdisant à Gérard Schivardi de se présenter comme le « candidat des maires », ce jusqu’au premier tour de l’élection présidentielle et sous astreinte de 500€ par infraction constatée[La décision a été confirmé en appel le 6 avril 2007 par la Cour d’appel de Paris.”

    This campaign contained the following message:

     La nation veut vivre, la nation doit vivre, et, pour cela, il faut rompre avec Maastricht et l’Union européenne, et avancer vers l’union libre des peuples et des nations libres d’Europe.

    This need no translation.

    More  Here.

    Schivardi received 0,34% the vote in the (first round) Presidential election.

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    Anthony Giddens, Gaddafi and the Third Way.

    Posted in Britain, European Left, Imperialism, International, Labour Government, Labour Party, Left by Andrew Coates on March 1, 2011

    Lord Giddens of Enfield and the Third Way.

    Anthony Giddens the former director of the LSE, and noted theorist of the Third Way, has been in a spot of bother (More Here).

    Baron Giddens , after a trip to Lybia, observed in  March 2007,

    “If Gadafy is sincere about reform, as I think he is, Libya could end up as the Norway of North Africa.”

    As one-party states go, Libya is not especially repressive. Gadafy seems genuinely popular. Our discussion of human rights centred mostly upon freedom of the press. Would he allow greater diversity of expression in the country? There isn’t any such thing at the moment. Well, he appeared to confirm that he would. Almost every house in Libya already seems to have a satellite dish. And the internet is poised to sweep the country. Gadafy spoke of supporting a scheme that will make computers with internet access, priced at $100 each, available to all, starting with schoolchildren.

    Will real progress be possible only when Gadafy leaves the scene? I tend to think the opposite. If he is sincere in wanting change, as I think he is, he could play a role in muting conflict that might otherwise arise as modernisation takes hold. My ideal future for Libya in two or three decades’ time would be a Norway of North Africa: prosperous, egalitarian and forward-looking. Not easy to achieve, but not impossible.

    Here.

    Who is His Lordship?

    Many people who studied sociology in the 1970s and 1980s began with a foundation course based around Gidden’s Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. An Analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber. This was a solid, if somewhat summary, overview of the bases of contemporary social thought – a seen through the ‘founding fathers’.

    A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (1981) followed. This attacked Marxism as a dogmatic mono-causal theory. In place of economic determinism we should pay attention to a multiplicity of social antagonisms, from class to sexuality to state and social power. It outlined an overall left agenda for social advance, bringing Giddens close to radical socialism on some issues. He developed his own ‘structuration’ theory, which is basically a conceptualisation of everything agreeable to left-of-centre sociologists that has ever been said about structure and agency. By the time of the 1995 Second Edition and the Fall of Communism Giddens dropped socialism (or ‘the cybernetic model of socialism’) altogether. He began to talk of being “beyond left and right”.

    Third Way.

    In the rest of the decade Giddens developed the theory, and policies,  of the Third Way. There was no alternative to capitalism, only different ways of managing it. Social democrats backed equality and social justice within this framework. They should modernise society (welfare reform onwards) and help everyone ’pilot’ their way in the age of globalisation.

    Tony Blair appeared to endorse this approach. In practice, Blair’s leadership was used to turn  the outward practice of the Labour Party into a form of Christian Democracy (favouring social solidarity and market economics). Giddens’ own influence has left little ideological imprint. I wonder if even the author read Over to You, Mr Brown – How Labour Can Win Again (2007).

     Giddens was beguiled by Gaddafi. He illustrates that the ability to willingly let the wool be pulled over one’s eyes is not confined to the left. ‘Tends’ ‘Coulds’ and ideal futures apart the fact that he could not see the basic character of the regime speaks volumes about Giddens  The creatures that  have found progressive radicalism in Islamism are paralleled by this state intellectual who discovered the merits of the Green Book State and  its Great Helmsman.

    Some say that there is no stupid idea that some intellectual somewhere has not come to support (as Karel Čapek observed in the  War of the Newts ).

    Giddens, unable to show much for his labours,  proves that at least.  

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    NPA Crisis: An Analysis from the French Left (Gauche Unitaire).

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, LCR, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on March 16, 2011
     
     
    Is there a Place for the NPA in this?
     

    Introduction: The Nouveau Parti Anticaptialiste in Crisis.

    Governments of the Right dominate Europe, while the left fragments, David Miliband reminds us. Attempts to place public services in private hands, the ‘market state’, have gone far in many countries. In the United Kingdom this process is highly developed. Begun under New Labour the latest wave of outsourcing, accompanied by spending cuts, has met union and popular opposition. Across the continent similar movements exist. But are there signs of a robust political response to austerity – to parallel social unrest? In the absence of a social democratic challenge, splitnered between those who have adapted to the right and those who maintain commitments welfare and public services, the radical left is a potential vehicle of resistance and change. France, a “political laboratory” shows some significant indications of what this alternative might mean.

    The Nouveau parti anticaptialiste (NPA) is one Europe’s larger parties to the left of the social democratic Second International and post-Communist formations. It was founded by the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), whose origins lie in the open-minded Trotskyism of the Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) and the movements of May 1968.

    Long largely confined to extra-parliamentary social activism in 2002 the LCR had a breakthrough into wider politics. Its Presidential candidate, Olivier Bescancenot got 4,25% of the vote in the first round. It beat the Communist – PCF – Robert Hue, who had only 3,3%, and was not far behind the ‘eternal candidate’ Arlette Larguiller of the hermetic leftist Lutte Ouvrière, LO (5.72%). In the legislative contests that followed the party got a respectable 529,000 votes (209,000 more than in 2002). In 2007 prospects were even better. Besancenot became a media star, and received 1,498, 581 votes, that is 4,08% (but with 287,019 more ballots cast than in 2002). LO shrank to 1,33%%.

    Besancenot, a young postal worker (born 1974), became a popular figure with a broad audience. The LCR grew. Believing that a new ‘historical cycle’ had begun (a rebirth of the left after the collapse of official Communism) the Ligue launched a call for a new ‘anti-capitalist’ party in 2007. In 2008 they began the formal process of transformation. Founded in January 2009 the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA) seemed to be about to play an important, even pivotal, role on the French left. It proclaimed itself for a “socialism of the 21st century”. It would ally with others, but only on an anti-capitalist and, stringently anti Socialist Party (PS) basis. That it is, it backed a real “rupture” with capitalism, and wanted to make a break with the ‘institutional mechanisms’ (as their theoretician Philippe Corcuff put it) of the PS. Olivier Bescancenot considered that communism and socialism needed to be enriched by “libertarian” ideas of grass-roots power to free them from the “boa constrictor” of professionalised “top-down” politics. (1)

    The NPA therefore refused to contemplate electoral arrangements (a “cartel”) with the former governing ‘social liberal’ (their words) Socialists. It also implied (less directly) hostility to the other parts of the left, notably the Communist Party, with its remaining, diminished, bureaucratic apparatus and electoral fiefs. This meant that during the European elections of May 2009, it ignored calls to ally with the PCF and the left socialist Parti de Gauche (PdG – a radical break-away from the Socialist Party). A major objection to such an accord was the PCF and PdG were prepared to make pacts with the PS to favour election under France’s two-round system. The NPA decided to ‘go it alone’.

    The LCR’s score, an average of 4,88% (and no seats in the European Parliament), while the Front de Gauche passed the 5% hurdle and won representation, indicated the limits of this stand. Nevertheless the NPA had over 9,000 members. That is, less than a hoped-for launch at 10,000 but a respectable figure (the more so for their refusal to exaggerate numbers). Presence on the ground, its respected tradition of working with others as equals, and a vitality bolstered by the newness of their project, enabled the party to maintain an impact.

    But electoral failures continued. In 2010, for the regional elections, the NPA partly went it alone, though in some regions they made agreements with other left groups (a result of the working practices just cited). The ballots confirmed a downward trend, with an average of 3,40& (though with some successes where alliances were made). The impression was created of uncertainty (the NPA devolved responsibility), and of deflation of hopes. To many it was a botched job.

    The Gauche Unitaire.

    Since then the NPA has appeared to lose more of its élan. Its active and consistent support for the Arab revolutions apart, it has, at least to a many commentators, lost its bearings. At its February 2011 Congress the party admitted it had lost a large numbers  of its members (from over 9,000 only 4.500 were up-to-date with dues). Like the LCR the NPA has a vigorous internal democratic life, which stands in stark contrast with many parties of the far-left. Nevertheless internal life was morose. There was no majority (more than 50% of votes for their positions)  for any of the different platforms presented at the conference – despite an honest debate and all the authority one would expect from well-known leading figures like Besancenot and Alain Krivine .

    For the French left group, the Gauche Unitaire, the difficulties of Olivier Bescancenot’s party are grave. “Nobody denies it: the NPA is in crisis”. (Nul ne le conteste: le NPA est en crise). It is necessary, they argue, to analyse and understand this crisis. (Comprendre la crise du NPA Here.) (more…)

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    US Library Systems and Services Eyes-Up Suffolk Libraries.

    Posted in British Govern, Capitalism, Conservatives, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on March 3, 2011

     

     

    Some Americans don’t like Library Sell-Offs.

    The Evening Star Reports,

    AN AMERICAN-based company is hoping to take over the running of libraries in Suffolk, the EADT can reveal today.

    LSSI runs municipal libraries across the US and has already been in talks with Oxfordshire County Council about possibly taking over some of its libraries.

    Now it is hoping to have talks with council leaders in Suffolk which could ultimately lead to it taking over some, or all, of the county’s libraries.

     Here.

    Last week, the New York Times reported on Library Systems & Services, a private, for-profit company that an increasing number of towns are contracting to take over their local public libraries. The company pares budgets and turns a profit by, among others things, replacing long-term employees with those who will “work.”Here.

    In California, unlike Suffolk, there has been a democratic debate on letting LSS run their libraries.

    They rejected the idea:

    There were two primary factors that led to the decisions of the city and the county to approve a new agreement for library services,” Pamela Sloan, the director of Stockton’s Community Development Department, which administers the library system, told LJ. “Very important was the input provided by a variety of groups such as local Friends of the Library groups. The public’s displeasure with the idea of outsourcing library management was heard loud and clear by both city and county officials who are clearly interested in being responsive to public opinion,” she said.Manuel Lopez, the county administrator, in a February 2 memo to the board, also wrote that public opinion helped put an end to negotiations with LSSI, which is based in Germantown, MD.

    Sloan said the second factor was concern about the import of LSSI’s proposal itself.

    “The specifics of the proposal from LSSI were concerning to some that evaluated the proposal. The general de-professionalization of the library staff as a whole coupled with unrealistic staffing numbers compared to the proposed number of operating hours led to a belief that the quality of library service under LSSI may have declined,” she said.

     Here.

    Company background Here. Official Site Here.

    It is very kind of Suffolk County Council to consider helping out the ailing American economy by giving our Libraries to this firm.

    In preparation for ‘divestment’  we can already see the kind of service we have in Suffolk Libraries deteriorating.

    The Reference Section has been quietly cancelling subscriptions to a range of journals.

    Meanwhile Ipswich Spy repeats the Tory mantra that ‘drastic cuts are necessary’. Here they are at work.

    Fellow Ipswich Tory, though even more pious, A Riverside View, opines that a multinational is not welcome to run Suffolk Libaries. He prefers the ‘sellotape and string’ alternative of replacing paid workers with people who can turn up, gratis,  as they feel available.

    Update: in a thoughtful piece Liberal Councillor Kathy Pollard defends libraries. She mentions the important fact that 4 years ago a consultancy for the County Council (KPMG) advocated privatising most Suffolk services. This programme is now underway. here. 

    KPMG is best-known internationally for its Tax Shelter Fraudhere.

    We would be interested in seeing the ‘report’ by this dodgy band of privateers.

    Slavoj Žižek: A Radical Critique.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, Marxism, Philosophy, Theory by Andrew Coates on March 4, 2011

     

    Weekly Worker 855 Thursday March 03 2011

    The leadership of ‘events’

    Andrew Coates unravels Slavoj Žižek’s ‘communist hypothesis’

     

    Introductory Notes to the Article on Žižek

    (This is both a foreword and an afterword.) 

    Slavoj Žižek is notoriously hard to pin down. This article, from the Weekly Worker,  is a critique of his efforts to develop a modern idea of Communism. Žižek’s Communism is not just derived from traditional historical materialism. They make little reference to the ideas of the First, Second, Third and Fourth Internationals. Some of the theories and writers referred to need a lot of further discussion. These introductory notes give some help in that direction.

    Reading Žižek you frequently come across the name of Jacques Lacan. The French psychoanalyst is formidably difficult. Žižek refers to Lacan as a theorist of how the human subject enters the realms of the social, the imaginary, and symbolic realm. Behind this is the ‘real’, the rock bottom beyond our direct reach. Categories such as the Other, with which the individual subject has a ‘dialectic’, pop up as well. Terry Eagleton’s The Trouble with Strangers (2009) is probably the best recent introduction to these ideas in their political context. Not that it is exactly crystal clear. Eagleton also discusses Žižek and Badiou. On the latter’s concept of the Event (see article) he says, “Nothing is more traditionally modernist than the dream of such an ineffable rupture with the actual.”(P 261) Despite this Badiou has expressed a great deal on the topic, often employing ‘mathematical’ analogies. These may well be open to the charge of ‘intellectual imposture’  – that he uses concepts from a scientific field in a social one without fully grasping their meaning. It is a small mercy that Žižek  does not follow suite.

    Žižek does not often mention Lacanian politics as the French Lacanian left actually developed them. For this Bernard Sichère’s Le moment Lacanian (1983) is essential reading. The ex-Maoist Sichère, who has since become a critical philosopher in his own right, describes many of the ideas about the Other, Desire, the Law and so on, which may appear original in Žižek (though he gives them his own twist) but which are far from novel (see date of book’s publication).

    Žižek’s ‘political economy’ is, to put it politely, half-digested. He cites the ‘anti-German’ theorist Moishe Postene, and his critique of the ‘metaphysics of labour’, the idealisation of it as a source of all wealth (see also Anti-German translation Here). Postone makes the hardly original point that one can find in Marx a better concept of labour as “a socially mediating activity in capitalism”. From there (amongst other sources)  Žižek developed his own appropriation of the theory of ‘immaterial labour’. Alberto Toscano and Carlo Vercellone in Historical Materialism Vol 15 Issue 1 have discussed this in detail.

    It’s a complicated subject but Žižek seems unaware of these debates, or of one of the key authors I cite, Paulo Virno. Toni Negri is very conscious of the problems the concept of immaterial labour involves. Some initial indications of where it comes from are in Leçon 7 Negri’s Marx au-delà de Marx (1979). Negri, it’s important to remember, has always been concerned to relate his theories to potential and real political agents – something I note Žižek lacks. The ‘multitude’, made up of both immaterial and material labourers, could be said to be a, highly ambitious, world constituency of activists and masses. Negri (and Hardt) make reference to a series of political concepts in this respect (see the review Multitudes). They range from Spinoza, Felix Guarratari’s ideas on the state, to Carl Schmitt. Žižek’s comments on these, and concepts of democratic ‘dissensus’ and relevant ideas, such as Chantal Mouffe’s ‘agonistic – pluralist –  democracy’, are, if they have more a fleeting existence, not developed.

    Finally the Weekly Worker counts amongst its contributors people with a great deal of knowledge and well-argued views on the history of the Second and Third International. It must be galling for them, and certainly is for the rest of us, to see Žižek talk with apparent authority on Kautsky, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, not to mention the Chinese Cultural ‘revolution’ without this kind of serious background. I would refer to discussion in the paper’s pages on Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered (2006) to begin with. Žižek has nothing worth saying to add to these debates.

     

    The leadership of ‘events’ Andrew Coates unravels Slavoj Žižek’s ‘communist hypothesis’

    For Slavoj Žižek we live in apocalyptic times. The unrest and revolutions sweeping Arab countries are revelations; they disrupt the normal flow of history. Tahrir Square shook Egypt as if through “intervention of a mysterious agency that we can call, in a platonic way, the eternal idea of freedom, justice and dignity”.[1] The fall of the Mubarak state signifies more than regime change. It appealed to a “universal secular call for freedom and justice”. It shows, as Žižek never ceases to repeat, Mao’s truth that “there is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent”.[2] (more…)

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    Marine Le Pen Tops Opinion Poll.

    Posted in Fascism, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on March 6, 2011

     

    Future Fascist President?

    The Nouvel Observateur reports on an Opinion Poll about voting intentions for the French Presidential elections (2012):

    Marine Le Pen (FN) arriverait en tête au premier tour de la présidentielle, avec 23% d’intentions de vote, devant Nicolas Sarkozy et Martine Aubry, à égalité à 21%, selon un sondage Harris Interactive pour le Parisien à paraître dimanche 6 mars.

    Les résultats complets de ce sondage seront rendus publics vers 17h30, a-t-on précisé au Parisien.

    The Guardian site says, Here.

    The Le Parisien poll found that 42-year-old Le Pen, who took control of the National Front in January, would obtain 23 per cent of the vote in the first round of any poll if it were held now. Sarkozy would get 21 per cent. Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry, who has not announced her intention to stand, would also get 21 per cent.

    The survey does not give the level of support for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, who is expected to declare his intention to represent the socialists in the May 2012 vote and is widely believed to stand more of a chance than Aubry.(More Here. )

    From the left Jean-Luc Mélenchon comments that the opinion poll is “stupid” (Here),

    Jean-Luc Mélenchon a qualifié ce sondage d’«invraisemblable». «C’est aussi stupide que si le père Noël était en tête», a-t-il ajouté sur I-Télé.

    Jean-Luc described the poll as ‘unbelievable’. “It’s as stupid as if Father Christmas came first” he added.

    «Tout ça est une guignolisation de la politique, absolument invraisemblable», a lancé le président du Parti de Gauche. «Pourquoi voulez-vous que le peuple français soit le seul peuple qui ait envie d’avoir un fasciste à sa tête», s’est-il interrogé.

    All this is making politics into a version of Spitting Image*, it’s completely unbelievable” the President of the Parti de Gauche (left party) sallied. “Why do you want the French people to be the only people who would like to have a fascist at its Head.”  he asked.

    «Tout ça est une sorte de fabrication par les instituts de sondage qui mettent des coefficients multiplicateurs et qui espèrent comme ça avoir quelque chose à vendre et créer de l’actualité», a-t-il conclu.

    “All this is manufactured by opinion poll companies, who put together multiple coefficients and hope to make a splash in the news with them.” he concluded.

    More in similar vein on Jean-Luc’s Blog here.

    * Les Guignols de l’info. Popular televisision political puppet show, originally inspired by Spitting Image.

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    Suffolk County Council Bans Press Investigator.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Cuts, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on March 7, 2011

    Andrea Hill

    Andrea Bans Newshound.

    The Evening Star’s Suffolk County Council reporter, Paul Geater, has today been banned from getting comment from the authority – for simply telling the truth.

    The unprecedented sanction was imposed immediately after our exclusive revelations that £218,000 per annum chief executive Andrea Hill had received 23 lessons, at £525 plus VAT a time, from a leading expert on change.

    The council said it didn’t like “the tone” of our story – which was followed up by a string of national papers at the weekend – and which drew a strong postbag from readers.

    The Evening Star today condemned the council’s “astonishing and ill-thought out” ban and said it stands by Paul Geater and his story “100 per cent.”

    The Star, through its banned reporter, today asks a series of further questions of the authority – but we are unsure whether or not they will ever be answered.

    Today our pledge is to continue investigating affairs at Suffolk County Council, in common with our approach to all publicly- funded authorities in the county.

    Here.

    Paul Geater has been watching Suffolk County Council’s plans to hive off public services like an ‘awk.

    The Tendance has made favourable comment to him on this point.

    We have further questions to Suffolk’s privateers: What is the influence on  Angela’s New Strategic Direction of the KMPG report (four years back) ? How far have the recommendations in KMPG’s  Securing the Future  (List of Google References here) such as the separation of  commissioning and provision of services, been adopted?  (Here) Is ‘divestment’ just another word for full-scale privatisation and financial funny-dealings? How many people are aware of KMPG’s international links with serious fraud?

     

    Update:

    For once there seems a consensus amongst the political classes in Ipswich that this ban is “bonkers” (Here).

     

    This may account for the County’s Press department’s swift U-turn on this – here.

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    Egyptian Women’s Rights: A Long Way to Go.

    Posted in Feminism, Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on March 9, 2011

     

    Fatma Naib reports for Al Jazeera,

    Hundreds, rather than the thousands called for, demonstrated in Egypt’s Tahrir Square on International Women’s Day.

    Women of all ilk, young, old, veiled, unveiled, all decked up at the Tahrir Square. As they stood there peacefully with their signs that read: “more rights for women”, “Egypt for all Egyptians”, a small crowd of men started to gather in front of the women’s rally.The anti-women’s day crowd grew as did their loud chants that said:”al shab yoreed esqat al madam“, “the people demand the removal of the lady/women”.

    Some of them directed their aggression towards the men who were supporting the women; others just chanted ‘illegitimate’ while pointing at the pro-women crowd.

    ……………

    However, as the anti-women day crowd grew, the atmosphere went from celebratory to hostile. Most of the men and some of the women, that joined them later, had a problem with one of the demands that called for a woman to become a president.

    Mahmood, a student, said, “We can’t have a woman run this country, been there done that! This country was run by Mubarak’s wife, and she is the only role model of these women.”

    Significantly, a woman running for the president post was something not acceptable to the anti-women crowd.

    “If they run the country, then what will happen to us? This is unacceptable,” said one man.

    ……….

    But a pro-woman man replied: “Well, then just don’t vote for her.”

    The anti-women’s day crowd started to volley verbal abuse at some of the women for the way they were dressed and how they looked. At that point some of the women started to leave.

    However, a majority stayed and there were many men in the women camp who stood as a buffer between the hostile crowd and women, supporting women rights and chanting pro-women slogans.

    ………

    It was a sad moment to see how a day that was meant to celebrate women all over the world end like this. It was particularly sad to see the faces of some of the women that were visibly shocked at the response and behaviour of the anti-women day protesters.

    More Here. Another  Blog report Here.

     

    Egyptian Newpaper report here.

    By HADEEL AL-SHALCHI, Associated Press Hadeel Al-shalchi, Associated Press Tue Mar 8, 4:58 pm ET

    CAIRO – A protest by hundreds of Egyptian women demanding equal rights and an end to sexual harassment turned violent Tuesday when crowds of men heckled and shoved the demonstrators, telling them to go home where they belong.

    The women — some in headscarves and flowing robes, others in jeans — had marched to Cairo’s central Tahrir Square to celebrate International Women’s Day. But crowds of men soon outnumbered them and chased them out.

    “They said that our role was to stay home and raise presidents, not to run for president,” said Farida Helmy, a 24-year old journalist.

    Sexual harassment remains widespread in Egypt, where women often are afraid to report sexual assault or harassment for fear they and their families will be stigmatized. A 2008 survey by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights found that 83 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women in Cairo said they had been harassed — while 62 percent of men admitted to harassing.

    Tahrir Square was the epicenter of the protests that toppled President Hosni Mubarak last month after nearly 30 years in power. Women in Egypt had reported that Tahrir had been free of the groping and leering endemic in the country, but on Feb. 11, CBS correspondent Lara Logan was sexually assaulted and beaten on the final night of the 18-day revolt. The Associated Press does not name victims of sexual assault unless they agree to be identified.

    At Tuesday’s march, men scolded protesters and said their concerns were not urgent in the aftermath of the uprising. When the women argued back, some were verbally abused or groped. Others were beaten and had to be ripped away from the groups of men.

    Mostafa Hussein, 30, said many protesters had to flee the area and hide in a park nearby.

    “They were running for their lives and the army had to fire a shot in the air to break up the mob chasing them,” Hussein said.

    Passant Rabie, 23, said she was surprised that the women were abused after the role they played in the uprising. Women were central to the protests, leading chants, spending cold nights in the square and even fighting during the battle of Black Wednesday, when pro-government henchmen attacked the protesters.

    “I thought we were going to be celebrated as women of the revolution because we were present during the days of Tahrir,” Rabie said. “Unless women are included now, we are going to be oppressed.”

    On the occasion of the International Women’s Day, U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said on Tuesday that the transitions from autocracy in Egypt and Tunisia would be incomplete as long as half of society remained blocked from participating in governance.

    “The United States will stand firmly for the proposition that women must be included in whatever process goes forward,” she said.

    *****

    The left has been optimistic about the role of women in the revolutions against Arab dictatorships. To argue that women’s power will be greater now, is by no means certain.

    The above events show that women can take nothing for granted.

    We predict that women’s rights will become a key issue in the new political structures in the Arab world. Powerful conservative forces, from Islamists to other right-wingers, will oppose them.

    In Egypt the constitution and legal system, already based on Islamic ‘law’, and therefore profoundly unequal towards women,  will become a battle ground.  Legislation concerning  women will turn into a central issue for Islamists and religious figures. They will try to impose their will.

     

    It is to be hoped that the left will not consider such issues to be secondary. Or, even worse, side with reaction against ‘Western’ women’s  rights.

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    Suffolk Women’s Day Speech: Bread and Roses!

    Posted in Cuts, East Anglia, Feminism, Ipswich, Labour Movement, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on March 10, 2011

     

    This was one of the excellent speeches given at a small rally on Tuesday on Ipswich Corn Hill.

    Sisters and Brothers, greetings from the Suffolk Coalition For Public Services on this 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day!

    - did you know it was originally known as International Working Women’s Day but somewhere along the way the Working bit got dropped….

    We are here to shine a light for women, and to celebrate that humanity we share with our sisters and our brothers around the world.

    Those human strengths and human weaknesses we have in common that make our differences – however interesting – secondary to the solidarity that we owe each other as human beings.

    On this day it is traditional to take stock of women’s place in society, to see what progress has been achieved and estimate how much further there still is to go – and there is still a long way to go!

    There are as usual the lists of 100 inspirational women published to show us we too could break the glass ceiling if we just tried a little harder, but sadly these admirable women are still the exception and whilst role models have their uses, their lives are very different from those lived by the majority of women.

    We are told we are equal, we have the vote, and apparently many believe it – they must have read it on Facebook!

    The Equal Pay Act has been in place for over 40 years but there are still huge differences between the earnings of men and women. The rates of pay are closer in the unionised workplaces, especially in public services, but the pay freezes of recent years have served to widen the gaps again.

    The cuts being implemented will impact far more heavily on women, who are more likely to be both users of public services and workers in the public sector.

    So it is not surprising that women have been making the most positive responses to our Suffolk Coalition For Public Services campaign, signing our petitions, getting involved in saving their local services under threat: libraries, home helps, care homes and schools crossing patrols. Services that they and their families, old and young need.

    If these services are cut or privatised, then we will all need to either earn much more money to pay for them privately, or find much more time, energy and skills to provide them for ourselves – and where is that extra time and money going to come from? Or go without – and that doesn’t bear thinking about!

    Those making the decisions are all too often too well off to have to worry about such consequences, they can afford to pay for the services they want.

    Their attitude gives the lie to the “we’re all in this together” motto.

    But we do need to all be in the campaign against the cuts.

    We need to re-build belief and confidence in the idea that public services are good.

    That putting part of our resources together so that services can be provided for the whole community is good,

    And that means ‘tax’ must stop being a dirty word and something to be evaded.

    We need to create a more equal society where economic and political power are much more evenly distributed, where everyone is assured access to the necessities of life sufficient to allow them to develop fully as human beings.

    We need to show that there are other ways to express your individuality than amassing wealth and personal possessions.

    In such a society, the particular qualities and characteristics that we think of as masculine and feminine would still have a place – we do not want our future to be some kind of android dystopia where one size fits all!

    But for women to shine out, so must our friends and fellow workers: the men, our brothers, fathers, husbands and partners. It is not their gender that restrains us or exploits us unfairly, but the economic and political power that some people – of both sexes – have more than their fair share of.

    The Suffolk Coalition for Public Services has its stall here with petitions you can sign and contact lists you join and the unions are laying on free coach transport to London for the TUC’s March for the Alternative on Sat March 26th, so if you haven’t already, please sign up, get involved and get marching and Sisters don’t forget to put on your placards: we want Bread and Roses too!

    Sarah Sanford. UNITE LE/1460.

    The Big Society, Localism and the Labour Party.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Labour Movement, Labour Party by Andrew Coates on March 11, 2011

    Listening and Acting.

    Ed Miliband writes, “I stood to become Leader of the Labour Party because I recognise Labour lost touch with the ordinary hard-working families we are in politics to serve.” He wants the party to change. Looking for “fresh ideas” Labour figures have travelled the country to events where people are asked, “what do you want?” On the 2nd of March Harriet Harman came to Ipswich. She was at a meeting of a selection of the public to “listen”. Around tables groups of guests wrote down ideas about “what action we should be taking right now”.

    The French Socialist Party (PS) has gone one stage further in “listening”. This October they will organise “primaries” open to any elector with “left values.” On payment of at least a Euro they will vote on who will be the PS presidential candidate for 2012.

    Suffolk County Council is presently undergoing its own ‘ask the public’ exercise. A ‘consultation’ about its plans to ‘divest’ (hive off and cut) its public services is underway. Chief Executive, Andrea Hill has been on a £12,000 course. It included a session on “listening.” Her Press Office, not liking what it heard about this in the Ipswich Evening Star decided to stop talking to its political reporter, Paul Geater. Although they quickly withdrew the ban, this illustrates that paying attention to what the public says still leaves it up to the listener to decide on what to do about it.

    The Big Society: Listening to the Local.

    David Cameron plans more than this. The ‘big State’ is to be replaced by a society in which everyone can take over running public services. Business, social enterprises, charities and communities will be in charge. Localism means that we will have different bodies taking over. People will stand tall, proudly in control of their own lives and their own institutions.

    Many of these ideas were sketched in Ferdinand Mount’s Mind the Gap (2005). Mount criticised New Labour. He noted that it had dropped attempts to redistribute wealth and the interests of the remaining working class and the excluded (the ‘Downers’). Instead a “huge army of officials” enforced distorted “cultural enlightenment”. So, “the Downers must be coaxed and chivvied, bullied and bribed to behave better.” (Page 263) Mind the Gap offered an alternative. That is a “property owning democracy”, with land shared-out (not given away but sold). Local associations would play the role Cameron imagines.

    In this way Baronet Mount imagined the end of the rule of the ‘managerial classes.” The working class might rediscover its Victorian self-help heritage. Traditions like mutualism would reduce the class “gap”. Society could become more organically bound, “Perhaps churches and other ‘faith communities’ might be allotted out of public funds the equivalent of Victorian tithes to expand their schools and other existing activities in our inner-city areas.” (Page 303)

    The Labour Party and the left have had a hard time opposing these ideas. Most are trapped in a common, unreflective, hostility to all centralism. But Mount’s utopia of little platoons attached to their immediate institutions, is shrouded with symbolic, and highly reactionary capital. It is designed to give a certain “allegiance” to members of society – by analogy to religion. * This is to come near to the world of Edmund Burke, where universal human rights and its “ethics of vanity” dissolve before the “great primeval contract of eternal society” and its corporations. Perhaps it is not surprising that a left that wishes the break-up of Britain into older nationalities, or flatters multiculturalism and ‘sublime’ religious identities, is unable to confront this. Labour’s own flirtation with watered-down communitarian philosophy, from Amitai Etzioni to Michael Sandal, encouraged a belief in social obligations built from associations, not from class or universalism. Much of the left therefore finds it hard to oppose this agenda.

    But there is much to be against. The localism on offer has, as John Stuart Mill described the Victorian world Cameron draws on, an element of “unreasoning prejudice”. This was a country, “where jealousy of government interference was a blind feeling preventing or resisting even the most beneficial exertion of legislative authority to correct the abuses of what pretends to be local self-government, but is, too often selfish mismanagement of local interests, by a jobbing and borné local oligarchy. “(Page 163. Autobiography. 1983/1963.)

    The Big Society is a project that aims to hand over democratic power to local bodies without electoral responsibility. There are many such organisations where ‘oligarchy’ is a well-established trend. From Housing Associations to well-meaning voluntary groups, they are not subject to the same accountability as publicly elected institutions and paid employees under their scrutiny. Free Schools run for their promoters’ wishes are just an extreme example of this movement backwards: they are wide open to ideological and financial abuse. Others, such as the charities to be charged not with supplementary but with primary responsibility for welfare, risk not just mismanagement but creating a pattern of dependence on the good-will of the philanthropic.

    For Equality of Power: Radical Democracy.

    The Big Society is not just a vacuous catch-word and a cover for cutting public spending. It is a serious challenge to democracy. David Miliband notes, rightly, that the European centre-left lacks a credible programme on a range of issues, from the economy to welfare. One gap, which it shares with a more radical left, is an inability to offer an alternative to the ‘market state’. That is the long-term withdrawal of public responsibility for welfare and redistribution, and concentrating on promoting the interests of private enterprise. It has brought commercial companies into the delivery of services. In this way a powerful lobby in favour of using the public purse to fund their enterprises has been created.

    The Big Society involves greater transfers to this sector, often under cover of empowering local communities. Reports from Suffolk indicate that a great deal of cold-shouldering, veiled threats, and outright bullying are used to force its birth. Problems will grow. It does not take much imagination to see that when voluntary help reaches its limits, private companies will rush into the breach. These organisations will play an increasing role in determining state policy, as they already do in the ‘unemployment business’. The interests of the “jobbers” will influence municipal politics. Democratic responsibility will be splintered; politics will wilt, or rather be replaced by battles of cliques and contract-seekers.

    Radical democracy should begin from one principle: the transfer of power to all, not a wider “property-owning” democracy. Binding people in obligations and responsibilities to private firms, political oligarchies, and unaccountable local associations thwarts equality. The clearest case is in work where people are under the rule not of Mount’s social-worker ‘managerial classes’, but of Boards and managers full stop. Public enterprise, owned by the people, and run by their representatives with those who work there and their unions, is another part of democracy.

    If we were serious about local control than a good place to begin would be to give it to employees and their unions in greater and greater tranches of enterprise. But in some cases on universal standards are appropriate. Running welfare and social provision requires general equality. This should be expanded outside the national carapace to establish provision on a par across the rest of Europe, not fragmented into locally different standards and handed over to the caprices of different authorities. The knowledge that these benefits are rights would give people a sense of self-worth far more valuable than the feeling of gratitude towards charitable help.

    The problem with the Ipswich meeting was that there was nothing clear to discuss. There were no questions and answers either. If Labour want to listen then it could look into organised and structured debates around issues like the democratic ones just outlined. They indicate an area of common ground on the left and reach out to a much wider public. It should forget localism and adopt democratic universal values. But, as Andrea Hill shows, sometimes people only listen to what they want to hear.

    * See the importance of this to Mount in: Full Circle. How the Classical World Came Back to Us. Ferdinand Mount. 2010.

    George Galloway: Welcome Islamists’ Victory from Tunisia to Turkey.

    Posted in Fascism, Islamism, North Africa by Andrew Coates on March 12, 2011

     

    Galloway Preparing to Welcome Islamists?

    In the Guardian today there is a debate on Intervention in Lybia.

    George Galloway argues against British involvement, while Conservative MP Mark Pritchard says inaction is not an option. 

    During this exchange George Galloway opines,

     I welcome the imminent victory of the Islamic movements in Egypt and Tunisia, which I think will provide very good governments on the Turkish model. (From Here.)

    This confirms everything we’ve always thought about Galloway and the party, Respect, which lets such a figure represent them.

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    Women and the Arab Revolutions: Caution Needed.

    Posted in Colonialism, Feminism, Human Rights, Iran, Islamism by Andrew Coates on March 13, 2011

    In the Guardian Soumaya Ghannoushi writes,

    “The stereotype of the submissive, repressed victim has been shattered by female protestors in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen.”

    In an interesting summary she remarks that,

    This new model of homegrown women leaders represents a challenge to two narratives. The first of these, which is dominant in conservative Muslim circles, sentences women to a life of childbearing and rearing, lived out in the narrow confines of their homes at the mercy of fathers, brothers and husbands. It revolves around notions of sexual purity and family honour, and appeals to tradition and reductionist interpretations of religion for justification.

    The other is espoused by Euro-American neoliberals, who view Arab and Muslim women through the narrow prism of the Taliban model: miserable objects of pity in need of their benevolent intervention – intellectual, political, even military – for deliverance from the dark cage of veiling to a promised garden of enlightenment and progress.

    Arab women are rebelling against both narratives. They refuse to be treated with contempt, kept in isolation, or be taken by the hand, like a child, and led on the road to emancipation. They are taking charge of their own destinies, determined to liberate themselves as they liberate their societies from dictatorship. The emancipation they are shaping with their own hands is an authentic one defined by their own needs, choices and priorities.

    There is, and will be, resistance to this process of emancipation, as recent attacks on female protesters at Tahrir Square indicate. But the dynamic unleashed by the revolution is irreversible. From Here.

    On this Blog We have already indicated the depth of the fight against anti-feminist Islamism in Tunisia (here). This may be conservative, but it has a throughly modern, politicised, edge. From the pious bourgeoisie to the faithful masses it has a capacity to mobilsie support often greater than other political bodies. It is unlikely that its political-religious  ’dynamic’ can be undermined without confronting some unwelcome issues.

    Islamism is not a  life-style choice. It is structured through political-religious  micro-powers. Anywhere Islamists they have any real power, is wearing the veil a ‘right’ one can take up or leave . It is part of an overall religious obligation to be modest and obedient, enforced initially by moral pressure, then by physical coercion. Attempts to ignore this, by referring to critics of Islamism as “Euro-American neoliberals”, are steps in the wrong direction. This compulsory moral-order is anti-demcoratic through and through. It is the high-way to gender segregation and the rule of the religious over everyone else.

    Islamism represents not just traditional notions of honour and patriarchy. It is a modern political force, from the centre-right to the far-right, with international, well-financed, support.  Confused leftists and liberals claim that one should respect this ‘Other’ in ways they would never respect the European far-right. 

    In her article Soumaya Ghannoushi ignores the home-grown Arab secularist struggle against Islamism, and its ‘feminist’ apologists.

    We should look to the Iranian experience for some principles.

    Yassamine Mather (here) criticises Islamic Feminism,

    Of course, arguments within Islam on issues regarding women’s rights are not new. For decades reformist Islamists have tried to present more moderate interpretations of Islamic laws and teaching. And, although it is true that over the last few years urban Iranian women have succeeded in asserting themselves and influencing aspects of their lives and the country’s politics, any improvement in their plight is due mainly to their perseverance and courage, and the tradition of struggle against dictatorship – despite the majority of Islamic clerics.

    The defenders of so-called ‘Islamic feminism’ occasionally challenge us to define what we mean by progress, if we say it has not taken place in Iran thanks to their efforts. How about an end to the stoning of women for adultery, to the flogging of teenage girls for daring to show a fringe, to the Hezbollah’s practice of throwing paint at women who wear colourful scarves, to the segregation in hospitals, buses, schools and universities?

    It is ironic that political correctness has discouraged many western liberals from challenging ‘Islamic feminism’. Iranian women, who are amongst the worst victims of Islamic fundamentalism, have no intention of following this trend and indeed over the last couple of years have stepped up the fight against the forced wearing of the hijab, for freedom and equality.

    March 8 2011 saw a new generation taking up the same slogans.

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    VICTORY TO GADDAFI! (Says CBGB-ML)

    Posted in European Left, Stalinism by Andrew Coates on March 14, 2011

    The CPGB-ML lays down the Line!

    Some people and organisations, such as Stop the War, have been bamboozled by the non-stop and ubiquitous Goebbelsian propaganda that has spewed forth from the imperialist media ever since Gaddafi’s regime was put in place into believing that he is some kind of a monster who must be overthrown at all costs. In view of his record in defending the interests of the Libyan people, such an approach is absurd.

    Down with social-democratic treachery; down with imperialism!

    VICTORY TO THE LIBYAN REVOLUTION; VICTORY TO GADDAFI!

    HANDS OFF LIBYA!

    More in the same delightful vein Here.

    Hat-Tip to Gole (Leftist Trainspotters).

    TC comments: some ‘communist’ group with imperialist ’great’ before Britain!

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    Libya, the UN Resolution, and the Left.

    Posted in European Left, Imperialism, International, Left, Libya by Andrew Coates on March 18, 2011

     

    UN resolution 1973 (2011) is of great importance (Text and Debate here).

    The Guardian pulls out the key points,

    The resolution expresses the UN’s “grave concern at the deteriorating situation, the escalation of violence, and the heavy civilian casualties”, condemns “the gross and systematic violation of human rights, including arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, torture and summary executions” and says the attacks against civilians “may amount to crimes against humanity” and pose a “threat to international peace and security”.

    The central point is that it will enforce,

    A no-fly zone. This is  ”an important element for the protection of civilians as well as the safety of the delivery of humanitarian assistance and a decisive step for the cessation of hostilities in Libya“.

    It “demands the immediate establishment of a ceasefire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians” and “that the Libyan authorities comply with their obligations under international law … and take all measures to protect civilians and meet their basic needs, and to ensure the rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian assistance”. (More Here.)

    • The left has to begin from the premise of support for the Lybian people’s resistance to the Gaddafi tyranny. This is only a ‘civil war’ in the sense that all revolutions are civil strife. Given the opportunity the Lybian masses rallied to calls to overthrow the Gaddafi-state. Only its immediate use of violent repression halted their advance.
    • The Lybian  uprising takes place within the context of pan-regional Arab democratic revolutions. It is directed against a bureaucratic capitalist tyranny, with close links to international capital, Western states and institutions.
    • The UN-endorsed military interventions are neither part of a plan for military occupation, nor for the installation of an externally created political replacement for Gaddafi. In the first instance they correspond to the express wishes of the Lybian popular masses, as organised in their provisional governing bodies.
    • The UN sanctioned actions are not part of any generalised right to ‘humanitarian intervention’ but correspond to the particular needs of the Lybian population, under imminent threat of repression by the Gaddafi state machine. The are aimed to protect civilian populations.

    Those who seek retrospective justification for backing the invasion of Iraq – to overthrow Saddam Hussain - misjudge the present resolution. It has been made within the context of a genuine popular revolution, internally rooted. It is not a recipe for external regime change, nor for a world-wide policing operation to enforce liberal democracy. Iraq remains proof of the way in which geopolitics are not dominated by ethical universalism but by military, commercial and resource interests. The political and civil society structures it has left behind remain an open wound.

    Those who oppose such help to the Lybian revolution have some justification. The UK, France, and the US are undoubtably as concerned to be in the ‘wave of history’, that is, on the side of the Arab movements for change, and their own strategic interests as they are bothered by humanitarian concerns. Equally their capacity to help effectively and impartially, without unnecessary violence, the Lybian people, remains untested.

    However blanket opposition to such measures is morally bankrupt. The Stop the War Coalition’s call to demonstrate today against the help offered to the Lybian people in their desperate hour of need is repellent.

    We should not put all anti-interventionists in the same camp as the charlatan George Galloway and others who will no doubt brandish the threadbare accusation  that this resolution is a mask for naked imperialism. The claims by Counterfire, that the UN move is inspired by fear of a revolution already fighting back, are  empty.

    Other arguments, such as those employed by Tony Benn, that this is a ‘civil war’  – giving each ‘side’ a weight, are we have seen, false. Further claims about the West’s hypocrisy are distinctly distasteful. That, for example, the West does not intervene in Bahrain. This comparison is used by those who would immediately oppose Western miliary action in  such countries.

    The decisive point is that UN  excludes a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.  Intervention can naturally excalate, and we should be wary of this – as the Weekly Worker has pointed out.  But, as Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the Parti de Gauche says, there is no mandate for physically landing French or any other foreign troops in the country (Here).

    Reports are that the people of Benghazi welcome the decision.

    In the absence of any other means of international support, and in view of the dramatic threat posed to Lybian lives by Gaddafi’s’ forces, we would therefore give qualified support for UN resolution 1973.

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    Back UN on Libya: Vergiat, Mélenchon of the Front de Gauche.

    Posted in Europe, European Left, French Left, French Politics, Front de Gauche, Imperialism, Libya by Andrew Coates on March 20, 2011

     

    Ligue des Droits de l’Homme Backs UN.

    MEPs,  Front de gauche Jean-Luc Mélenchon and  Marie-Christine Vergiat voted on the 10th of March the resolution on Lybia in the European parliament. This contained the following sentence,

    “Les gouvernements de l’UE doivent se tenir prêts pour une décision du Conseil de sécurité des Nations unies concernant des mesures supplémentaires, y compris la possibilité d’une zone d’exclusion aérienne”. 

    The governments of the EU must be ready for a decision of the UN Security Council concerning supplementary measures, including a no-fly zone.

    The PCF, partners in the Front de Gauche, has opposed any form of military intervention (from here). It warns of the risk that the ‘logic of war’ may lead to disaster (Here). It has not, however, explicitly condemned the UN resolution.

    In the light of UN resolution Mélenchon has reaffirmed this position, Here.

    Marie-Christine Vergiat has welcomed the latest moves. She has posted on her site a declaration supporting it from the venerable Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, “Enfin ! Pour des mesures efficaces de solidarité avec le peuple libyen” Here.

     Meanwhile Marine Le Pen, from the far-right, opposes intervention saying it is “too late” (here).

    On the UK left Owen Jones makes some good and some bad arguments against intervention, that it will result in unnecessary deaths, that it outcome is unclear. Given the forces opposing Gaddafi, and the military means used this is probable.

    But in addition to strong points ’whataboutery’  is freely in (evidence here.) Whatever the West does or does not do elsewhere is ultimately of little weight when we look at the case in hand.

    The issue is, how can civilians be best protected from Gaddafi’s massacring tyranny? How can he be removed in conditions that favour democracy?

    Some aid, in the form envisaged by the UN, is a precondition for a degree of humanitarian help, and getting rid of the dictatorship.

    Clearly the use of French, British and US force is highly unpredictable, rent with danger, and will help these countries ability to determine who runs Lybia in the future (if they succeed). The only way to prevent the latter overwhelmingly everything else would be for the Lybian revolutionaries’ strength to be shown through arms. The only way for a democracy with a real basis to emerge is through their victory. That this could be a system based on human and social rights is obviously not guaranteed. But it is certain that their defeat will lead to the opposite of such a society.

    No argument against the UN resolution has shown any convincing alternative way of helping that to happen.

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    French Cantonal Elections: Historic Rise in Front National Vote.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Front de Gauche by Andrew Coates on March 21, 2011

    First Round of the Cantonal (the lowest level of French Local Government) Elections: (from Here.)

     Parti Socialiste 25,11%

    - UMP (Sarkozy’s Party) 17,13%

    - FN 15,26%

    - Front de gauche above  9%

    - Europe Ecologie-Les Verts 8,3%

    Abstensions are at  55,5%, - a  record for this type of election.

    The Front National got 30% in the department, le Nord, and  28% in the  Bouches-du-Rhône. It  can take part in 2nd round elections in 399 cantons.

    Commentators suggest that the extreme-right FN has siphoned off UMP support.

     

    le Monde on this ‘historic vote’ for the Front National – Here.

    The Front de Gauche notes the danger of the FM. It also welcomes its own results, which are higher than those it had got in last year’s regional elections (Here).

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    Blue Labour? A Socialist Response.

    Posted in Labour Government, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left by Andrew Coates on March 22, 2011

    Nothing to do with Blue Labour.

    In 2009 something called ‘Blue Labour’ was launched.

    Maurice Glassman – now ennobled – said, “Society as a functioning moral entity has, in effect, disappeared.”

    Glassman says a Blue Labour party needs to reform around the family, faith and work, and place. (From Here. More Here.)

    Last night Radio Four’s Analysis looked at this, slow to reach the public’s ears, idea (Here and Listen Here).

    The venerable Lord announced that,

    “Work and responsibility are core Labour values. I want to see a more relational state that doesn’t just provide personal care packages, but calls on people to meet each other, talk together and work together for the common good.”

    Blue Labour’s plan for delivering the common good involves a revival of the Labour tradition of mutuals, co-operatives and friendly societies, the creation of local banks and a new system of worker representation on company boards.

    And when it comes to the delivery of public services, it wants more localised provision and an end to what it sees as “Labour’s obsession with postcode lotteries”.

    There was much in the informative programme’s to flesh out this sketch.

    Labour politicians and activists described how their party has failed to appeal to working class ‘communiarian’ values, and class interests. They talked about New Labour’s view that, with the right training and help, we would largely all be winners from globalisation. How a metropolitan liberalism had ignored the fears of ordinary people – principally, it appeared, about immigration and crime. That Labour should get back to its pre-1945 non-Statist roots. Edwardian Guild Socialism was evoked (though in fact its principal theorist G.D.Cole was thoroughly socially liberal).

    The social economist, Karl Polanyi was cited. In his Great Transformation Polanyi outlined how the Victorian free market was pushed through by state action that reached people from their traditional lives. It was coercive. Society reacted in “self-defence”. Unsaid by Blue Labour supporters was that Polanyi considered state sponsored reform pushed for by trade unions social democracy - and not only mutuals and cooperatives - to be part of this process. Or that the Guild Socialists wanted worker control, not their own vague ideas about ‘participation’ in company boards.

    There remains the issue of alleged working class social conservatism – its ‘communtiariansm’.

    A further blow to Blue Labour was dealt by Roy Hattersely. He pointed out, rightly, that while liberal issues were not a priority for most ordinary people, there was as a great deal of support for tolerant measures, such as backing for gay rights, in these strata.

    There is little mileage in appealing to the majority of the British working class through religious morality In the US no doubt there are reserves of religious feeling that attract blue-collar voters to Christian supported politicians and campaign. This barely exists in the UK.

    Where religion retains a strong hold on communities, some of its forms, such as Pentecostalism or hard-line strands of Islam, it often has such a  reactionary moral tinge that even Blue Labour would shrink at embracing it. No doubt cracking down on poor people’s  alcohol use (by steep price rises)  would find favour there, as it does  amongst some urban liberals and ‘heath’ moralists. But is the kind of coalition Blue Labour wants?

    Globalisation is a problem: in the sense that shifting flows of capital equal shifting jobs and the relegation of large numbers of people to the Dole.

    Localism, which we have discussed on this Blog, (Here) is no answer. Critics already note that Blue Labour is not so much distinct as part of  ’Big Society’ conservatism.

    How did  James Purnell, who popped up during the programme, deal with this during his time as Work and Pensions Secretary?

    He embraced the means described by Polanyi. Purnell took away as much of social protection as he could get away with. He shoved the out-of-work, via worthless ‘training’ schemes run by the ‘unemployed business’, into a deregulated market. He abandoned social democracy.  Baron Freud, who helped Purnell and advised many of these measures, now works with the Liberal-Tory Government, and is behind moves to introduce workfare and hive off even greater parts of the welfare state.

    We wonder if Blue Labour will go anywhere with this kind of support.

    Its core ‘constituency’ is apparently, not just socially conservative but economically progressive.  Or, more exactly, ‘interventionist’ . This is it has an interest not in obliging the poor or the employed to follow the market, but for the market to meet our needs.

    New Labour was based on the premise that the likely winners from globalisation were its target audience. not the declining traditional working class. Ed Miliband has not dropped its own ‘blue’ rhetoric. He puts  ‘hard-working families’ in many speeches, and no doubt considers place and employment important. Wisely, he does not evoke divisive issues of ‘faith’.

    It is hard to see how Blue Labour can find a distinctive pitch in an already crowded political market-place.

    For a much more serious effort to look at the politics, culture and economics of the contemporary working class see Owen Jones Here.

    More on Guild Socialism here. 

    Review of Blue Labour’s E-Book, Labour and the Politics of Paradox – here.

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    Libya: The UN, Nothing But the UN Resolution, All the UN Resolution – Mélenchon.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Imperialism, Libya by Andrew Coates on March 23, 2011

    French Left leader Backs UN on Libya, Only the UN.

    The leader of the Parti de Gauche declares,

    Déclaration de Jean-Luc Mélenchon : l’ONU, rien que l’ONU, toute l’ONU

    Mercredi, 23 Mars 2011 11:37 Jean-Luc Mélenchon

    L’OTAN, dont je condamne l’existence et dont je souhaite que la France se retire, n’a rien à faire en Libye. La résolution 1973 de l’ONU concernant la Libye doit être fidèlement appliquée. Son objet est clairement délimité. Il s’agit de mettre en place une zone d’exclusion aérienne, actuellement effective, pour protéger les civils libyens. La résolution 1973 n’a pas d’autre objectif et exclut clairement toute autre intervention militaire.

    NATO, whose existence I condemn, and from which I wish that France would withdraw, has nothing to do in Libya. UN Resolution 1973 concerning Libya must be applied to the letter. Its aim is set out clearly. That is to implement a No-Fly Zone – in place at the moment – to protect civilians. The Resolution 1973 has no other objectives and explicitly excludes military intervention.

    More Here.

     

    Mélenchon’s conclusion is important,

    d

    …une opération dont nous attendons seulement qu’elle protège la révolution populaire en Libye.

    …an operation that we which we expect to protect, and only that,  the popular revolution in Libya.

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    Save Suffolk Libraries!

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Cuts, East Anglia, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on March 28, 2011

     

     
     

     

     
     

     

    Save Suffolk
    Libraries!

    Saturday 2nd April 2011
    11am Endeavour House, Ipswich

    Join us on our family friendly march in protest against the proposed
    library divestment, and to show our support for the Suffolk Library

    service. If you can’t manage the whole march, join us outside the

    library on Northgate Street from 11.30am for a ‘read-in’.

    We’ll finish the march with speakers sharing excerpts from their

    favourite books.

    
     

     

    Bring your favourite book to share with others!

    
     

     

    Dress up as your favourite character!

    
     

     

    Show Suffolk County Council that you love and need your locallibrary!
     

     

     

    For more information: email

    saverosehill@gmail.comhttp://rosehillreaders.wordpress.com www.twitter.com/saverosehill
     

     

     

     

     

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    Petition Against Anti-Muslim Campaign: Socialist Leader Unsigns.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, French Left, French Politics, Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on March 25, 2011

     

     
    Ramadan: Divisive Figure.

    Martine Aubry, première secrétaire du PS, a affirmé jeudi 24 mars qu’elle regrettait que sa signature figure au côté de celle de l’islamologue controversé Tariq Ramadan dans l’appel demandant au gouvernement de renoncer au débat sur la laïcité publié dans Le Nouvel Observateur.

    “J’ai signé un texte qui remet la laïcité au coeur de la République. C’est un bon texte et on en a bien besoin aujourd’hui. Je regrette que ma signature figure au côté de celle de Tariq Ramadan auprès de personnalités respectables”, a assuré Martine Aubry à l’AFP.

    “I signed a text which put secularism at the heart of the republic. It’s a good text and one needed at the present. I regret that my signature figures next to that of Tariq Ramadan by those of respectable personalities.” assured  Martine Aubry to the AFP.

    “Je suis étonnée d’être signataire des soutiens à l’appel auprès de Tariq Ramadan, avec lequel je n’ai rien à partager”, a affirmé la maire de Lille.

    I am astonished, a signatory of the appeal, to figure close to Tariq Ramandan, with whom I have nothing in common – she affirmed.

    The message is clear, Aubry removed her signature because of the presence of said Tariq Ramadan. (F rom Here. More Here.)

    The Petition is excellent.

    It demands an end to the public “trial of Islam”.

    The key paragraph is this,

    “Dans un climat de forte poussée de l’extrême-droite, après le fiasco du débat sur l’identité nationale, qui a libéré la parole raciste, nous estimons ce nouveau débat biaisé, stigmatisant et susceptible de mettre en péril une cohésion sociale déjà largement mise à mal par la politique actuelle.”

    In a political climate dominated by a strong push of the extreme-right, after the fiasco of the ‘debate on national identity’, which has unleashed racism, we consider that this new debate (on Islam), stigmatises and puts in danger our social cohesion, already threatened by present government policies.

    This addresses a real problem: the utilisation by Sarkozy’s government and the Front National of prejudices about Islam in France for racist ends.

    The petition (initiated by the respectable centre-left) is  admirable.

    Why withdraw?

    Yes: Ramadan is a shifty and divisive figure.

    He holds a mixture of New Age fantasies, genuine humanist views, British clerical piety,  pitiful Islamic dogmatism, and unclear views on Political Islam (Tendance on the wisest fool in Islamdom). Sometimes he has played close to Islamist reaction, with Iran and elsewhere. (Here) Ramadan has no moral or political authority whatsoever.

    His presence, which should be criticised, does not, all this considered,  justify Aubry’s move.

    She has made him look a victim.

     

    Aubry has weakened the opposition to Sarkozy and nationalist-racist policies.

    She is wrong, wrong, wrong.

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    TUC March: Shock Extremist Plot, Says UK’s Most-Feared.

    Posted in Anarchism, Labour Movement by Andrew Coates on March 25, 2011

    Months of Tendance Coatesy Undercover Work Reveal Plot (Above)!

    The Guardian reports that,

    “the Met’s former head of counter-terrorism, Andy Hayman, claimed to have “strong intelligence” that extremist groups were planning illegal acts at the march and rally on Saturday.”Here.

    To assist the Rozzers’ intelligence effort, Tendance Coatesy publishes the shock plans by one of Britain’s most feared anarchists.

    There are many brilliant and imaginative plans for March 26th. Some may happen, others won’t. Expect  the unexpected as  on December 9th. At the start of that day who could have forseen the attack on the royal car? The most vital outcome is that some buildings/some space in central London  is  still occupied, defended   and contested on Sunday morning – maybe lots of buildings, lots of space – and that A-B is consigned to the dustbin of history.

    THE RUBICON GLISTENS IN THE MORNING MIST  BEFORE US COMRADES

    More shocks Here.

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    TUC March Report.

    Posted in European Left, Labour Movement by Andrew Coates on March 27, 2011

     

     

    Legitimate Target of Angry Mob.

    Well, the Tendance was out in Force at Saturday’s TUC anti-cuts demo.

    The first thing to say is that it was real people’s march. Inspiring. Me mate J ex-T & G shop steward and rocker  (who’d had half a litre of whisky to cheer him on the way) was good company. UNITE leader Len McCluskey gave a brilliant speech – which we managed to hear  thanks to the Tendance’s long experience of pushing our way to the front of the march. 3 tins of taurine energy drinks made me a real bull!

    So, wot is this about a few people getting annoyed and heaving bricks at the capitalists?(here)

    I shouted the Ritz, we’ve got to get rid of the Ritz.

    Me sister worked at Fortnum and Mason’s as a ‘lift Girl’ when she left school at 15.

    I kid you not.

    Legitimate target I’d say.

    The fact is  that we – that is the people who got on UNITE coaches from Ipswich – were mightily pissed off about having to alight in the Docklands and having to make our way back there to meet a deadline of 4.30 to get back. So we didn’t join in.

     

    But the Ritz: we’ve gotta get rid of the Ritz!

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    Anarchist Protest: Shameless Rip Off.

    Posted in Anarchism, Left by Andrew Coates on March 29, 2011

    “Anarchist protest hijacked by TUC

    Anarchist protesters expressed disappointment last night after their protest in central London was hijacked by elements from the TUC.

    Protesters advocating militant direct action against businesses accused of tax-dodging were dismayed when TUC stewards in pink bibs broke away and directed crowds into Hyde Park.

    A huge anti-cuts march set off from Victoria Embankment at around midday, and marchers attacked the Ritz and Fortnam and Mason’s, but by mid-afternoon most protesters had been diverted from action and were standing around on some grass doing nothing. This course of action was widely denounced as counterproductive by organisers.

    Jezza, an anarchist from East London, said: “I find it disgusting that every time we hold a protest we have to put up with these idiots coming along. You never see the Ed Milibands or Brendan Barbers during the bread-and-butter work of community organising but as soon as there’s a big march they all come out of the woodwork, just wanting to further their own political agendas.”

    Sarah Smith, a public sector worker who came to the protest by coach from Newcastle, told us: “I was all in favour of kicking off, but when we got here I found out we’d have to listen to some boring speeches in a park.”

    Commander Bob Broadhurst, the officer in charge of the policing operation, said: “We like dealing with the anarchists because at least we get some exercise. But when the TUC appear, some of our officers find it difficult to stay awake, alert, and on their feet for a whole shift.”

    By the evening the remnants of the TUC elements…”

    Despite me bleeding cold I thought this worth a rip-off: from Here.

    The more I hear stuff about anarchists the more I feel sympathy with them.

    If I have mentioned this before bear with me.

    There is a strong bond between the Tendance and anarchism.

    I will just mention two.

    Steph  and John.

    Former, a Black country lass, absolute stunner, the latter a real Cockney and a diamond geezer.

    Both about as genuine working class politically active as you can get.

    Shared a gaff with them.

    The Best of the Best.

    So stuff all that gobshite about ‘middle-class weekend anarchists’.

    There’s always this:

    My sister worked as a Lift Girl for that place.

    She does not have a good word for them.

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    Suffolk Libraries March.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Ipswich, Suffolk, Uncategorized by Andrew Coates on April 1, 2011

    The lovely people running the Rosehill campaign in Ipswich have released full details of the march planned for Saturday 2nd April starting at Endeavour House at 11am.

    Join us on our family friendly march in protest against the proposed library divestment, and to show our support for the Suffolk Library service. If you can’t manage the whole march, join us outside the library on Northgate Street from 11.30am for a ‘read-in’.

     

    Everyone is going on  this.

    I do hope that Benedict Gummer does not turn up.

    He, the Tory MP of Ipswich, would be strongly disdained.

    Ipswich Hard Right Up To Old Red-Baiting Tricks.

    Posted in Anarchism, Conservative Party, Conservatives, Ipswich by Andrew Coates on April 3, 2011

    It would take a heart of a far stonier nature than the Tendance not to laugh at this: (from Here.)

    Ipswich Spy has to laugh at the nerve of the hard left sometimes. Having written here in praise of the anarchist thugs who rioted in London at the weekend, one left wing blogger has now told Tory MP Ben Gummer that he wouldn’t be welcome at a march to “Save Suffolk’s Libraries”. Mr Gummer has expressed his strong support for Rosehill Library in his constituency, threatened with “divestment” or closure by the County Council.

    Why on earth would a campaign to save the libraries not want such a powerful ally? Could it be because it doesn’t fit with the left’s convenient lie that the Tories are all nasty people who desire to cut services, rather than good people who are struggling to cope with cuts forced on them by the debts left by the previous Labour Government.

    The cuts to library services in Suffolk are appalling. Some Tory councillors have a lot to answer for. They are the Tory county councillors, including the portfolio holder Judy Terry. But to try to say all Tories are the same is like trying to say all Labour activists are the same. Ipswich Spy is sure that Andrew Coates wouldn’t want to be compared to Tony Blair…

     Compare here.

    SUFFOLK: The search is today underway for a new leader for the county council after Jeremy Pembroke announced his retirement.

     So Sorry You had to leave.

    Do the decent thing Benedict and Lady Judy: follow his example!

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    In Defence of Anarchism.

    Posted in Anarchism, Left by Andrew Coates on April 4, 2011


    Goldman circa 1911

    I am a Marxist.

    The foundation of my political views is formed by Engels, Marx, Karl Kautsky, Lenin, Gramsci, Althusser and, in particular, Rosa Luxemburg.

     But there is someone else:

    During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking “rebel woman” by admirers, and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution.[2] Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women’s suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism.  From .Here.

    Everytime I hear the press talk about ‘anarchists’ my hackles rise.

    As she said,

    “I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck. “

    Darling we love you.

    Farewell to Coco the Cann.

    Posted in Ipswich, Liberal Democrats, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on April 5, 2011

    Coco Gives his Final Bow.

    Andrew Cann, leader of Ipswich Liberal Democrats, has announced that “he will not be standing in this year’s Borough council elections”

    Mr Cann cited the fact that politics were “boring” and that a man of his obvious talents was not recognised in small-town Ipswich.

     

    His project to get rid of town cultural centre  (Corn Exchange) and  replace it with a much-needed Waitrose, are on hold.

    Meantime he plans to spend time with his growing families.

     

    Our so-called rivals on Ipswich Spy have not, as yet, reported the news that is shaking Ipswich.

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    Guild Socialism Against Blue Labour

    Posted in European Left, Labour Movement, Left by Andrew Coates on April 7, 2011

    An interesting site by Matt Smith on Guild Socialism.

    For most modern socialists the name associated with Guild Socialism is G.D.H.Cole. whose book, Self-Government in Industry is still fairly widely read. For socialists of my parents and grandparents” generation he was a major influence.

    Wikipedia writes, George Douglas Howard Cole (25 September 1889 – 14 January 1959) was an English political theorist, economist, writer and historian. As a libertarian socialist he was a long-time member of the Fabian Society and an advocate for the cooperative movement. He and his wife Margaret Cole (1893-1980) together wrote many popular detective stories, featuring the investigators Superintendent Wilson, Everard Blatchington and Dr Tancred.

    G.D. H.Cole, like William Morris, is also sometimes cited by Labour politicians who have only the vaguest feeling for his ideas, and would be horrified at them if they bothered to read him seriously.

    Most recently he has been said to have inspired Blue Labour.

    Cole advocated highly radical plans for social ownership under workers’ control. He opposed Collectivism (State control), Belloc and Chesterton’s Distributism, and the Free Market. He was a dyed-in-wool socialist, an anti-capitalist with a along and honourable libertarian record.

    Not something that could be said of ‘Blue Labour’.

    This Abstract summarises  his intellectual career:

    In his contribution to socialist thought G.D.H. Cole adopted and revised Rousseau’s concept of the general will. During his early guild socialist phase Cole drew on the general will in his scheme for a functional, associational democracy. In the late 1920s Cole began to question whether the socially oriented element of individual will might be expressed in the existing social and economic circumstances. In the 1930s he combined social democratic and Marxist tenets. Nevertheless, his interest in Rousseau persisted. Will was, for him, crucial to socialism. He made a significant, if neglected, contribution to the socialist tradition of Rousseau scholarship.

    His long history of Socialism (A History of Socialist Thought: 7 Volumes, (London: Palgrave Macmillan (2003) ISBN 1-4039-0264-X)is also of relevance  today.

    Cole’s ideas also had an effect on the post-War French movement for ‘autogestion‘ (self-management).*

     

    *Neither the French nor the English language sites on the subject list this reference but through close work with the PSU I can assure readers that this is true.

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    Les anarchists, Léo Ferré.

    Posted in Anarchism, Left by Andrew Coates on April 10, 2011

    Anyone with French leftist culture loves and reveres this song.

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    The Burqa: French Communists Make The Point.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Islamism by Andrew Coates on April 12, 2011

     

    Sarkozy: Makes Laws to Further his Own, not Republic’s Ends.

    From L’Humanité today.

    • Une loi de circonstance

    La loi, qui interdit ”la dissimulation du visage dans l’espace public”, sert officiellement à réaffirmer les valeurs de la République. Dans les faits, celle-ci a été prise pour marteler le discours sécuritaire de la majorité présidentielle et vise clairement les adeptes du voile intégral islamique - burqa ou niqab. Au vu des chiffres, il s’agit même d’une loi de circonstance, puisqu’elle ne concerne que trois mille personnes en France, selon les statistiques du ministère de l’Intérieur.

    The law, which prevents the dissimulation of the face in public spaces, is officially an affirmation of the values of the French Republic. It, however, clearly is aimed at the ‘integral’ Islamic veil, burqa or niqab. In fact it these measures are part of the discourse of security of the President. More it is a law directed against 3,000 specific people in France, according to official figures from the Minister of the Interior.

    (Note by TC: that is it a law aimed and used against a single group – that is, not a true universal republican law).

    Ce texte prévoit une amende de 150 euros pour les porteuses de voile intégral couvrant tout le corps à l’exception des yeux. Forcer quelqu’un à porter le voile intégral sera désormais puni d’un an de prison et 30.000 euros d’amende. Pour les syndicats de policiers, il est difficilement applicable.

    The law will mean a  fine of 150 Euros on wearers of the integral veil – that is one covering all the body with the exception of the eyes. Forcing someone to wear the integral veil will be published with a year in gaol and a penalty of 30,000 Euros. According to police unions it will be difficult to impose.

    • Un texte inapplicable

    Sur France Inter ce lundi matin, le secrétaire général adjoint du Syndicat des commissaires de police a estimé que le texte serait ”infiniment peu appliqué…

    On France Inter the secretary of the commissars (police) estimated that the law will be applied infinitely rarely 

     

    The article goes into to explain that it is not practical to make it the police’s job to go around finding if people’s faces are hidden.

    Here.

    Le Monde makes this observation: (Here)

    Voile intégral : les syndicats de police dénoncent une loi “inapplicable”

    Full Body Veil: police unions denounce a law that ‘cannot be applied’.

    On the General Issues involved the PCF declares:

     Il était nécessaire, face à ce symbole d’aliénation, d’emprisonnement et de négation de la dignité des femmes, de faire prévaloir l’émancipation et non la condamnation de victimes qui feront le choix de vivre encore plus recluse. Dès ce matin, ce qui était prévisible, cette loi a donné une tribune à l’intégrisme religion qui se nourrit en l’occurrence de la dérive droitière du Gouvernement.

    It is necessary, confronted with this symbol of alienation, of imprisonment and the negation of female dignity, to support the emancipation and not the condemnation of victims, who will now be forced to life even more secluded lives. From this very morning we can see that this law will feed the demands of the extreme Islamist right, which in turn will reinforce the rightward turn of the government.

    Olivier Dartigolles, Porte-parole du PCF (Monday) Here.

    For the complexities of the issues involved Sihem Habchi, Presidentof  Ni Putes Ni Soumises, and  Richard Malka are worth looking at here.

    They argue that secularism is being used politically in France – obviously by Sakozy (who is self-declared relgious), and also by the Front National (who have roots in the Catholic extreme right). But that, secularism remains an important value in itself.

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    Arab Revolts: Most Important Article by Serge Halimi.

    Posted in Colonialism, Imperialism, Islamism by Andrew Coates on April 13, 2011

    Serge: Neither Against the West, Nor in its Service.

    This is the most important article I have read on the subject.

    I was waiting for it to be translated.

    It has not yet been rendered into English, though no doubt at some point it will be.

    It is too long  and elegantly written to translate as a newspaper article is. I am therefore exceptionally cutting and pasting these extracts in French with a brief summary. The  importance of this text (written by such a  respected figure) is  immense.

    They are fundamental critique of the Western powers, those ‘anti-imperialists’ who have accommodated to Gaddafi and those who have bowed to Islamism. 

    There is much on the geopolitics of the conflicts, notably in Libya, and much of interest on the nature of present-day imperialism and globalisation.

    The extracts I cite (since this is a left Blog concerned with these debates)  begin by saying the world’s left is divided between those who put the emphasis on opposition to a Western-led military operation and those who put the priority on solidarity with an oppressed people. He then notes the disgraceful stand of the Latin American left-led countries, like Venezuela, who have ignored Gaddafi’s ruthless dictatorship. Not to mention the fact that the author of the Green Book, who yells about a colonialist plot against him, has long made his peace with these powers and joined with them in fighting against terrorism.

     

    Les pièges d’une guerre

    Les forces progressistes du monde entier se sont divisées à propos de l’affaire libyenne, selon qu’elles ont mis l’accent sur leur solidarité avec un peuple opprimé ou sur leur opposition à une guerre occidentale. Les deux critères de jugement sont nécessaires, mais on ne peut pas toujours réclamer leur satisfaction simultanée. Reste, quand on doit choisir, à déterminer ce qu’un label d’« anti-impérialiste » obtenu dans l’arène internationale autorise à faire subir chaque jour à son peuple.

    Dans le cas de M. Kadhafi, le silence de plusieurs gouvernements de gauche latino-américains (Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivie) sur la répression qu’il a ordonnée déconcerte d’autant plus que l’opposition du Guide libyen à « l’Occident » est de pure façade. M. Kadhafi dénonce le « complot colonialiste » dont il serait victime, mais il le fait après avoir assuré aux anciennes puissances coloniales que « nous sommes tous dans le même combat contre le terrorisme. Nos services de renseignement coopèrent. Nous vous avons beaucoup aidé ces dernières années (2) ».

     The paragraphs below are a rigorous analysis of the ‘anti-imperialist’ support for Islamism. That is. the ideology that it is anti-colonialist and a break with Occidental values.  Halmi analysis Islamist thinkers who have rejected universal values. There is an idea, propagated by some former leftists, that cultural ‘resistance’ by Islam is a progressive movement.  He calls this  ‘inverted Orientalism’.

    He points out that the present wave of revolts in Arab countries show that the struggle for individual freedoms, liberty, women’s rights, free-speech, secularism, and trade unions are not ‘Western’. That one can be ‘Neither Against the West nor in its Pay’. That the fight against Arab regimes that have treated their population like children shows the vitality of democratic struggles in these lands, that such great revolutionary pushes are of universal importance. They illustrate that far from being Western values dressed up as universal ones, that they truly apply to all of us. That these combats are taking place at the very moment when Western countries have lost their own democratic vitality and are slipping backwards to the politics of identity. 

    Deux ans à peine après la révolution iranienne de 1979, le penseur radical syrien Sadik Jalal Al-Azm détaillait pour les réfuter les caractéristiques d’un « orientalisme à rebours » qui, refusant la voie du nationalisme laïque et du communisme révolutionnaire, appelait à combattre l’Occident par un retour à l’authenticité religieuse. Les principaux postulats de cette analyse « culturaliste », résumés puis soumis à la critique par Gilbert Achcar, stipulaient que « le degré d’émancipation de l’Orient ne doit pas et ne peut pas être mesuré à l’aune de valeurs et de critères “occidentaux”, comme la démocratie, la laïcité et la libération des femmes ; que l’Orient musulman ne peut pas être appréhendé avec les instruments épistémologiques des sciences occidentales ; qu’aucune analogie avec des phénomènes occidentaux n’est pertinente ; que le facteur qui meut les masses musulmanes est culturel, c’est-à-dire religieux, et que son importance dépasse celle des facteurs économiques et sociaux qui conditionnent les dynamiques politiques occidentales ; que la seule voie des pays musulmans vers la renaissance passe par l’islam ; enfin, que les mouvements qui brandissent l’étendard du “retour à l’islam” ne sont pas réactionnaires ou régressifs comme il est perçu par le regard occidental, mais au contraire progressistes en ce qu’ils résistent à la domination culturelle occidentale (8). »

    Une telle approche, fondamentaliste, de la politique n’a peut-être pas dit son dernier mot. Mais, depuis l’onde de choc née en Tunisie, on sent que sa pertinence a été entamée par des peuples arabes qui ne veulent plus se situer « ni contre l’Occident ni à son service (9) » et qui le prouvent en ciblant tantôt un allié des Etats-Unis (Egypte), tantôt un de leurs adversaires (Syrie). Loin de redouter que la défense des libertés individuelles, la liberté de conscience, la démocratie politique, le syndicalisme, le féminisme constituent autant de priorités « occidentales » maquillées en universalisme émancipateur, des peuples arabes s’en emparent pour marquer leur refus de l’autoritarisme, des injustices sociales, de régimes policiers qui infantilisent leurs peuples d’autant plus spontanément qu’ils sont dirigés par des vieillards. Et tout cela, qui rappelle d’autres grandes poussées révolutionnaires, qui arrache jour après jour des conquêtes sociales et démocratiques dont on a perdu l’habitude ailleurs, ils l’entreprennent avec entrain, au moment précis où « l’Occident » semble partagé entre sa peur du déclin et sa lassitude devant un système politique nécrosé dans lequel le pareil succède à l’identique, au service des mêmes.

    From Le Monde Diplomatique Here.

    Serge Halimi is one of the most important and respected  left commentators on colonialism, international affairs and the Arab world.

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    Scrap “Maoist” Suffolk NSD Says Evening Star Political Guru.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on April 14, 2011

     

    Suffolk County Council’s New Strategic Direction?

    We reproduce in its entirety this important article by Paul Geater of the Ipswich Evening Star (with TC comments).

    SUFFOLK: The county’s New Strategic Direction has been a disaster for the county and deserves to be confined to the dustbin of history as soon as a new leader takes control at Endeavour House.

     The NSD has never been so much a policy for the council as ideological principle being followed by a few – with ripples and pain felt by many tens of thousands of our countyfolk. Trying to distil what the NSD is all about has never been easy – but the broad principle seems to be that all services provided by the county should be examined and, where possible, transferred to another provider who will operate them on behalf of the council. There is absolutely nothing wrong with transferring individual services in a bid to cut administrative costs – I give some examples later of where that would be sensible – but to start from a premise that everything should be examined and considered for transfer unless it proves impossible is putting services in great danger.

    (Note by Tendance Coatesy – the idea that ‘to cut administrative costs’  should be the guiding service principle of Councils is, to say the least, problematic. For a start it is often hard to separate off administration from delivery).

    Make no mistake this is a bold experiment, and Suffolk’s chief administrator was right when he told staff the is now at the “leading edge”. We were told in a statement: “Suffolk County Council is now at the leading edge of new thinking in the public sector. We have an inspiring and bold Cabinet who have placed us there. “It’s not an easy or comfortable place to be because we are challenging the old ways of doing things; we are developing a new model that will unsettle the status quo and, as we all know, any changes make ordinary people uncertain.”

    This is the kernel of the whole problem with the NSD – and especially as far as it relates to Suffolk. We live in a county that is up to date and modern – and had been rated “leading edge” for many years before the current hierarchy took control at Endeavour House.

    (Note by Tendance Coatesy, as Paul Geater’s irony indicates, nobody in the rest of the country has noticed that Suffolk County Council is  ’leading edge’ .)

    But this sceptered land doesn’t want change at any cost, not least to be at the leading edge of some theoretical policy dreamt up in the seminar rooms of business schools. If the likes of Wandsworth and Westminster in London want to set themselves up at the “leading edge” as they did under Margaret Thatcher and Nicholas Ridley in the 1980s then that’s up to them.

    Suffolk people want to know that a new policy will work before the county’s services are treated as a huge guinea pig in a social experiment. We used to say “You won’t hurry me, I’m from Suffolk.” That didn’t mean we were all slow carrot-crunchers – it did mean we didn’t want to leap without looking at what was ahead of us first!

    The NSD is being held up as a way of ensuring services continue to be delivered with less money. There is absolutely no guarantee that will happen. In fact many people think the idea of having lots of small providers running services will prove more expensive as they will not be able to achieve the kind of economies of scale you get from a large organisation like the county council. If the bureaucracy is inefficient at the county council then look at reorganising it – but there is no need to dismantle the whole structure.

    (Note by Tendance Coatesy: and they will also be far less accountable than directly run services, as anyone with experience of contracted out services, such as those run by Capita, know. And they often have Chief Executives who pay themselves huge salaries out of the public purse).

    And I remain perplexed by the sheer political stupidity of scrapping school crossing patrols to save just £220,000 a year – it is a tiny fraction of the council’s £1bn turnover but it has defined the council’s headlong rush to adopt a policy that the people of Suffolk don’t want.

    So if we ditch the NSD how do we go about making savings without cutting valuable services? There are bound to be some cuts – but I cannot see how the NSD will make them anymore palatable.

    On the libraries service, we hear much about the cost of the
bureaucracy that services the libraries – so why is the branch network under threat? Suffolk is joining Essex in a scheme to purchase books. Is there not merit in talking to Essex, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire to set up a regional library service with a single bureaucracy to run libraries from Felixstowe to Peterborough, from Cromer to Southend? Suffolk is already talking to Norfolk about setting up a joint highways management service for the two counties which would ensure that if the A140 is being resurfaced in Suffolk the work doesn’t necessarily stop at the Scole bridge. That is eminently sensible and could be extended to other county highway authorities – bringing a larger number of people under a single management structure.

    I have concerns about merging fire control rooms but if the service can be made to work then that is another logical cost-saving measure. But these changes should happen
at their own pace, not because some ideologues have decided it sounds like a good idea. I stress Suffolk is not the place for a radical, headline-grabbing experiment. So let’s consign the NSD to the dustbin of history, before it inflicts any more damage.

    This isn’t about resistance to change, as critics of these words may claim, this is about change at a sensible pace, with sensible debate and sensible planning. It is about taking a pragmatic approach to the county’s future. I was speaking to an old friend who is a Conservative councillor in London and he nearly choked when he heard the name. “Good God. It sounds like a Stalinist programme from the late 1940s or Mao’s ideas of the 1960s. I cannot believe any Conservative council would have come up with a description like that!” he said with a genuine splutter.

     

    Paul Geater is the political editor of the Evening Star and also writes for the East Anglian Daily Times. He knows more about the local council than many of the councillors and even some of the full-time officers. Some of my comrades reckon he is a Tory, others that he is that rare bird, a genuine independently minded person. I tend to the latter view. He  shows a real wish to be informed about all aspects of Suffolk and East Anglian politics, coming, for example to the Burston Rally.

    He also has a memorable spat with the County Council. They showed unbelievable stupidity in rankling the ‘big fella’.

    The welcome resignation of County Council leader ‘Fatty’ Pembroke has left the leadership of the Tories in disarray.

    This article puts the boot in.

    Though we learn today that County Council Chief Executive Andrea Hill is clinging like a limpet to her post – here. (more…)

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    Tunisian Elections, A Great Victory: Parity Between Women and Men.

    Posted in Feminism, Human Rights, International by Andrew Coates on April 15, 2011

     

    Historic Victory for Tunisian Women.

    A first in any Arab land, and in advance of most European Countries: the coming Tunisian elections (24th July) will be demand strictly equal proportions of  women and men on all  lists presented to the polling booth.

    Held under the PR system this will have a real effect.

     Skynet relays the news,

    La Haute commission chargée de préparer les élections du 24 juillet de l’assemblée constituante tunisienne a opté pour un scrutin de listes à la proportionnelle et qui respecteront la parité hommes-femmes.

    The High Authority in charge of preparing the 24th of July elections for the Tunisian Constituent Assembly has opted for a proportional electoral system which respects the parity between men and women.

    Here.

    Le Monde reported yesterday (print edition) that this also meant that candidates had to be also present in equal positions of eligibility – that is in the order on the ballot paper.

    The arrangements have been accepted by all the country’s political parties, including the Islamist Ennahdha.

    The report continues,

    “C’est une journée historique. Nous avons levé tous les doutes sur la volonté de bâtir la démocratie pour faire naître un nouveau régime en Tunisie. La participation de la femme dans la prise des décisions est une décision historique”, a déclaré à l’AFP Mokhtar Yahyaoui, célèbre militant des droits de l’Homme et membre de la Haute commission.

    This is a historic day. We have removed any doubts about the willingness to build a democracy and create a new political structure in Tunisia. The participation of women in decision-making is a historic decision” declared to Agence France Press Mokhtar Yahyaoui, the celebrated defender of human rights and a member of the High Authority.

     

    The spokesperson of Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President of the Commission, issued the following statement today (from Here):

    “The High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy welcomes the proposal by the Council of the Tunisian High Commission for the Fulfilment of the Goals of the Revolution, Political Reform and Democratic Transition of a Law on the parliamentary elections that enshrines the principle of male-female parity for any candidates’ list submitted.

    It demonstrates that Tunisia intends to ensure full participation of women in political life. Women have played a key role in the revolution. Now Tunisia has the opportunity to further consolidate gender equality and end all forms of discrimination against women in law and in practice. By putting these principles at the heart of all ongoing political reforms, Tunisia can be a beacon of innovation for the region and beyond.”

     

    Despite the above this kind of campaign is still necessary: Tunisiens Contre l’intégrisme religieux, here.

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    Niqab: French Protests Run by Self-Publicist.

    Posted in European Left, French Politics, Islam, Racism by Andrew Coates on April 16, 2011

    Stunt set up by Self-Publicist.

    Protests in Paris against the French law banning the full face-veil have been organised by an organisation founded by a self-publicist who failed in his attempt to become a Presidential candidate in 2007, Rachid Nekkaz.

    The objective of his association ‘Touche pas à ma constitution’ – (which claims to be the ‘Muslim women’s voice’ ) can be seen below:

    Le 15 Avril 2011, il annonce sa candidature aux élections présidentielles de 2012 (dans le cadre des primaires du Parti Socialiste) lors d’un “happening” au Fouquet’s visant à dénoncer la loi sur l’interdiction du port du voile intégral.

    On the 15th of April 2011 announced that he would be a candidate (attempting to get into the Socialist Party primaries) during a ‘happening’ at Foquet’s (an upmarket restaurant) which was organised to denounce the banning of the full face-veil.

    This is a serious issue.

    The law is part of Sarkozy’s rightward rabble-rousing, wrong, and will not be, in practice, applied without injustice.

    However, we should not fall for the hysterical voices who compare this to the persecution of European Jews.

    The self-styled  leftist who runs Islamophobia Watch who finds common cause with the Daily Telegraph in denouncing French “republican bigotry” is equally misleading - here.

    The Anglo-American liberal opinion which regards the ‘right’ to wear what one chooses as the issue  is  the wrong place to begin to grapple with the subject.

    Many French people regard the niqab and burqa as “la Charia dans la rue” (the sharia in the street) – here.

    It is to bind and to bond women to the Qur’an, and the patriarchical rules it lays down according, that is, to a politically organised interpretation of Islam.

    It is an exercise in religious power, not liberty.

    That is why the vast majority of the French left while opposing the law regards  it as an oppression.

    The last thing anyone needs is Rachid Nekkaz, who describes himself as a  ”knight” coming to the rescue of Muslim women. 

    The controversy should not be  a springboard for his vainglorious ambitions.

    Niqab Protests: Media and Counterfire Hoodwinked by ‘Presidential’ Candidate.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Islam by Andrew Coates on April 17, 2011

    Rachid Nekkaz: A Knight for Muslim Women.

    The French ban on the full-face veil (voile  intégral) is controversial.

    We have outlined the issues, at length, on this Blog (most recently – here).

    But to confuse matters the international media have been guilty of falling for the protests and stunts organised by an ambitious individual Rachid Nekkaz. (Here). Sometimes in the past  he has protested  against real injustices. But one can be assured that he ultimately acts in his own interests. Which always take precedence over the matter at hand.

    It would be wearisome to list all the media who were hoodwinked by Presidential candidate and Estate Agency Owner /Property developer  Nekkaz.

    But one stands out.

    Counterfire:

    A protest was held today outside Notre Dame cathedral in Paris where women defiantly wore the burqa in public. Excluding items such as sunglasses, the law has been explicitly targeted at Muslim women who wear the burqa and niqab. Two women were arrested, although the police claimed this was because the protest was ‘unauthorised’, not because of what they were wearing.

    Kenza Drider, one of the spokespeople of the demonstration, asserted that this was a protest to defend women’s rights: “For me this is women’s liberty, the liberty to wear what I wish and not be punished for it.”Here.

    French Press reports on this event state,

    Rachid Nekkaz, de l’association Touche pas à ma constitution, est à l’origine de ce rassemblement.Here.

    The same applies to the Foquet’s stunt we have already blogged on.

    Here is how this association describes (in their own unedited words) themselves,

    Touche pas a ma Constitution (Hand off my constitution) falls down like a drop of rain on the arid French ground and his democracy.

    Indeed Rachid Nekkaz put forward the fundamental basic of the constitution.  That’s exactly the purpose of Rachid Nekkaz and his association. In the heart of Muslims women he is a knight coming from the land of fundamentals right to instaure theirs. (Here)

    In French reports on his latest action this is cited,

    Rachid Nekkaz en profite pour rappeler qu’il est “candidat à l’élection présidentielle de 2012″.  Here

    Apparently he is a member of the Parti Socialiste – though in the past he has variously called himself a simple patriot and an independent.

    One wonders what his present comrades think of his antics.

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    Death Knell for Hated New Strategic Direction (?)

    Posted in Conservative Party, Cuts, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on April 19, 2011

     

    NSD ‘s New Home?

    No the title ‘Death Knell for Hated New Strategic Direction’ is not Coatesy’s.

    It’s the headline from the print version of the Evening Star.

    It’s the conclusion drawn from a change at the top of the Council’s leading group, the Conservatives.

     

    The East Anglian Daily Times reports,

    Waveney District Council leader Mr Bee won the leadership of the Conservative group at the county on the first ballot.

    The exact results of the election are not published, but it is understood that Mr Bee won the support of more than 30 of the 54 Conservative councillors.

    That included five of the nine members of the current cabinet.

    Mr Bee’s election came after members of the Conservative group at all levels spoke of the need to see a change in emphasis for the county council.

    And in attracting the majority of the cabinet, Mr Bee showed that this feeling extended to all levels of the political hierarchy at Endeavour House – this was a frontbench, rather than a backbench, rebellion against the policies of the New Strategic Direction and divestment of services.

    Mr Bee did not waste any time in announcing his intention to change the way the council operates.

    Anyone who lives in Suffolk and is interested knows that the New Strategic Direction (NSS) is a hard-right free-market  plan to hive off public services. That is, to place them in barely accountable private hands, with the ‘big society’ in the shape of traditional voluntary organisations providing the cover. The pared-down provision  on offer nevertheless still promised profits for  contracting companies, a few ‘social enterprises’, and a burden of responsibility on local communities.

    It could be called “the minimum state in one county”.

    The NSD has created, justifiably,  fear amongst ordinary people.

    Those little hopes and dreams that make up our lives were under attack.

    The feelings of love and care towards others were to be undermined.

    This attack on the basic social democratic structure of society was bitterly resented.

    The dislike of the County Chief Executive has been intense.

    Stickers have appeared on Ipswich Lamp posts attacking Andrea Hill.

    But is the ‘new course’ really underway?

    We welcome the decision to backtrack on getting rid of ‘lollypop’ people, and the promise to reconsider other aspects of the plan.

    But is it really a fundamental change?

    Newly chosen leader of Suffolk County Council, Mark Bee, writes, after underlining the need for cuts,

    …the county council made the difficult budget decisions it made this year, and why it is looking to find new ways of providing services wherever possible in the future.

    Part of this will be looking to local communities and voluntary organisations to help provide alternative solutions.

    I strongly believe that there is a Big Society out there, with people able and willing to play their part in their local community.

    However, if we are to expect others to help, we have a duty to listen to them in return, to hear their concerns, and to build solutions together, at a speed that we can all 
follow.

    That is why I’d like the time between now and the council meeting on May 26, to be a time for reflection and review.

    He then says,

    I believe that the direction in which we are heading is the right one, but that we need to be very clear about our aims, about what we are going to be putting in the place of the things we are stopping, before we actually stop them.

    This is, in some cases, already happening. The council created a transition fund precisely so that communities could have some extra time to develop alternative means of meeting a particular need.

    We heard just last week that the Household Waste Recycling Centres would be staying open for an extra three months to enable alternative solutions to be explored.

    With school crossing patrols in mind, in the areas where the patrols are most needed, we will look to continue to fund these, unless or until a suitable alternative arrangement has been found.

    Across the spectrum of the council’s work, such as with libraries, post-16 school transport, or any of the other issues of concern to people in Suffolk, I want to use this time to reflect, to think carefully about the pace with which we are moving, and be clear about how existing services will be replaced.

    Suffolk is blessed with wonderful towns and beautiful countryside. This is just one of the reasons why I also believe that we must continue to strive to become the greenest county, and protect the environment for future generations.

    We can build a better future for Suffolk, working in partnership with other local authorities, public bodies and our members of parliament.

    Here.

     

    Every sentence here needs weighing.

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    JIMAS, Ipswich Branch of Islamic Group, Some Questions.

    Posted in Ipswich, Islam, Islamism, Secularism by Andrew Coates on April 21, 2011

    To be JIMAS ‘Community’ Centre.

    JIMAS is an Islamic missionary group that calls itself a Charity Organisation (Here). They hold substantial property in Ipswich, in Upper Orwell Street, and have an Internet Café in nearby Eagle Street. The religious association planned to turn the abandoned St Michael’s Church, also in Upper Orwell Street,  into a ‘community centre’.

    In March a  fire , certainly caused deliberately, partly destroyed the building.  

    There have been rumours that this was a racist act.

    Others consider that vandalism by street drinkers is more probable – though the two theories are not incompatible.

    But as yet nobody knows who did it.

    JIMAS has said that  it forgives those responsible (here).

    The BBC reported that £5000,000 would have to be raised privately to build the centre in the ruins of the Church.

     JIMAS  had no  insurance for the building so everything has to start anew.

    We now learn that they are appealing to Co-op funds (here).

    This is their project.

    A community centre, where all money generated is put back into the community. It will house our current Internet Café operated as an enhanced social enterprise. Another area will be adapted to host a Day Care function for alternate use by the homeless, elderly & disadvantaged, with a small library & quiet area. Facilities would be subsidised and hired to the general public & charity groups for e.g., weddings, birthdays, aerobics, baby & toddler sessions, to host first aid courses, cookery demonstrations, floristry classes, seminars, martial arts classes, cultural events, concerts, debates or even a voting station during elections.

    This is an awful lot of activity for what is a smallish space.

    It is also questionable whether Ipswich people as a ‘community’ want a ‘Community Centre’ run by a small religious section of the local population, with ideas that very few (including Muslims) sympathise with.

    JIMAS modestly claims that,

    “Our aim is to break down barriers and create understanding through friendship and discussion so that together we can develop in Suffolk as one people in a strong footing of trust and warmth for one another.”

    They have spent time wooing local authority figures, such as the  then Suffolk Tory leader (here) claiming to be an open-minded tolerant group which wishes to find a place in Europe for Islam. The County Council has responded by helping them spread their message – here. 

    There has been a fine-line between  fund-raising for Charity to boosting the image of their variety of  Islam, as when they invited non-Muslims to join them in a Ramadan fast.  

    But fluff and a strategy of winning over those in power aside  who exactly are JIMAS?nderstanding through friendship and discussier we can develop in Suffolk as one peoplea strong footing of trust and warmth for one another.

    Alexander Melergrou-Hitchens in  Standpoint magazine gives some details.

    Originally founded in the late 1980s, JIMAS (an acronym of Arabic words which translate to ‘The Association to Revive the Way of the Messenger’) is a very different organisation from what it was then. During its earlier years, it acted as one of the primary conduits of hardcore Salafi and Islamist thought in Britain, introducing a generation of young Muslims to the ideas of modern jihadi thinkers, including Sayyid Qutb and Abdullah Azzam. It organised regular lectures and classes with some of the main Western contemporary Salafi ideologues, and within the milieu it created could be found household names of the Western Salafi movement including Omar Bakri Mohammed, Abdullah al-Faisal and Anwar al-Awlaki. As Manwar himself would admit, JIMAS undoubtedly helped to form a pool of angry young Muslims who resented Britain and the West, and injected within them an Islamist zeal the consequences of which we are experiencing to this day.

    Manwar has long since changed his ways, and the message of his group. JIMAS is now an organisation that, while remaining Islamic, goes far beyond sectarian and religious boundaries and promotes an integrationist, anti-Islamist agenda. Above all, the Sheikh expounds the importance of a truly national, rather than sectarian, identity with a liberal outlook reminiscent of medieval Islamic humanism (for more on this, see Lenn Goodman’s Islamic Humanism). Through his planned community project at the Church, he wants to revive a piece of the local area’s Victorian heritage and provide believers and atheists with a neutral discussion forum which will help people learn more about and, it is hoped, reject many of the ideas which create bigots and terrorists.

    Having worked with numerous extremist Salafis and Islamists in the past, he is under no illusions about the harm they have done to British society, and has taken it upon himself to help reverse this damage. On the face of it, he may seem the perfect candidate to benefit from a Government Prevent grant, but he has refused to apply for it, though not for the reasons one might think. Whereas many Muslim groups reject the fund either because they don’t trust the Government, or are concerned about losing legitimacy among the local Muslim community, Manwar has a novel (and noble) take on it: “People like me should not take taxpayer money to do a job that is our duty”, he told me over coffee in early February.   

    No single individual or group will succeed in defeating Islamic extremism in Britain; success requires the patience of many dedicated people who understand and believe in the values of this country. I have no doubt that Manwar should be counted among this group. Many on this blog may read this with more than a tinge of scepticism: the East London Mosque and its sectarian and extremist cohorts, for example, are often described in similar terms by naive reporters and politicians. JIMAS is not the same — it is now the real deal.

    This would be a pleasant surprise if true. 

     

    But there are reasons to think that even if JIMAS may help “defeat Islamic extremism”, and, more generously, has some good humanist intentions,  it is still an organisation which promotes blinkered religious ideology. (more…)

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    33 Revolutions Per Minute. A History of Protest Songs. Dorian Lynsky. Review.

    Posted in Culture, Left by Andrew Coates on April 25, 2011

    33 Revolutions Per Minute.  A History of Protest Songs. Dorian Lynsky. Faber & Faber 2010.

     

    Sometimes music does not soothe, nourish love, nor does it lie gently on the heart. A protest song rouses, at times grates, often intoxicates, and aims to “change opinions and perspectives”. The genre, Dorian Lynsky writes, “addresses itself to a political issue in a way which aligns itself with the underdog.” (Page xii) It is, many have felt, at the centre of the fight for social justice. Protest music is gut-wrenching inspiration with a far wider appeal than day-to-day activism

     

    Pop music, protest’s prime melody, embraced politics in Billie Holliday’s version of the anti-lynching Strange Fruit (1939), and became infused with the glow of contemporary Woody Guthrie’s radical folk. The American Communist Party loomed large in its diffusion. During the 1950s and 1960s folk acoustic protest music became a powerful inspiration in the American Civil Rights movement, CND, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, Ewan MacColl illustrated the continued link with the organised left. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez looked as if they were destined to join them. Only the latter did. Dylan, became electric at Newport in 1965 dropped activism for a “politics of the self”.

     

    Protest was widely considered a touchstone of the Anti-Vietnam War campaign. Country Joe and the Fish (referring to ‘Joe’ Stalin) wrote “I-feel-like-I’m Fixin-to Die-Rag’. If Lynsky observes, that strictly speaking “musical opposition to the war was feeble, tentative and diffuse” (Page 111) its part in sustaining a burgeoning New Left and counterculture was immense.

     

    In the 1970s black political voices thrust their way forward through music. From James Brown’s Say It Loud – I’m Black and Proud (1971), the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution will not be Televised (1971) to Stevie Wonder’s Living for the City (1973) they had an international echo. Listening to them today one often forgets just how threatening and potentially revolutionary the US black ghettos appeared at the time. The American administration also faced other enemies. The Kent State student killings inspired Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Ohio (1970). In the aftermath of 1968 the whole Western Establishment (as it was called) seemed so vulnerable to dissent that it was ready to employ violent repression to maintain order. Stateside the “country seemed to be breaking apart” there was “violence and factionalism on the left, backlash on the right.”(Page 206)

     

    Amongst this turbulence the counterculture offered a ‘revolution’ that stood everywhere. Its rebellious complaints, as Thunderclap Newman’s Something in the Air (1969) indicated, were too diffuse to pin down. There is a scene in the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Hunter S. Thompson gestures to the hills of the city to point to an invisible high level to which the movement rose at this point. But it lacked solid support. John Sinclair’s White Panthers, and his band, the Detroit based MCS were perhaps one of the few genuinely revolutionary rock groups. The principal US new left body, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), spectacularly collapsed and splintered. Its armed struggle faction, the Weathermen (later Weather) famously named themselves after a Dylan song. Their communiqués appealed to universal youthful solidarity against the ‘system’; this was not widely apparent.

     

    In early 1970s Britain, a smaller alternative ‘underground’ briefly flourished, with bands like Hawkwind producing Urban Guerrilla (1973). Amongst the young freaks who read Frendz and Oz a number were drawn to left-wing groups, such as the International Socialists (IS) or the International Marxist Group (IMG). These politically detached people from US influences (the SDS’s fall-out and what followed inspired nobody) and turned them towards the more mass based European leftist culture.

     

    This proved more important than Red Mole’s earlier embrace of John Lennon. David Widgery of the IS offered a bridge between the IS and the musical world. Widgery played a key role in Rock Against Racism whose concerts, at the end of the decade, were political events in themselves. A new wave of musical revolt, punk and two-tone, spearheaded by the Clash and the Specials, acquired a political edge as the National Front marched, and Thatcher and the New Right surged into office in 1979. The harder black musical poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson (a sociology graduate) is placed within this tumult. French leftists often say that the British had no ’68′ except musically, but in this case the sound merged with the politics.

     

    In America protest music of any kind lost influence in the next decade. The much-loved Dead Kennedys Holiday in Cambodia (1980) was a musical high-note. But Rock Against Reagan caused only minor ripples on the national scene. The same was not true of the Black scene. Hip-Hop Public Enemy produced Fight the Power in 1989. If their message was stained with some of the group’s anti-semitism, and confused, “the noise could not be disputed and it triggered more musical reverberation, awoke more consciousness, than that of any band since the Clash”. (Page 567)

     

    By contrast in 1980s UK political-musical links flourished, with the Miners’ Strike a high-point. Red Wedge in the 1980s, which mixed the whining vocals of Billy Bragg and, amongst others, the Communards, Madness, the Smiths, and the gay singer, Tom Robinson, was directly aligned with the Labour Party. 33 Revolutions Per Minute carries the story from those days, when music was thought to change the world, till the present, when, to say the least, this is not a widely shared belief.

     

    33 Revolutions is both a political history of music, and a musical history of politics. There is an enormous quantity ((843 pages) of skilfully written material to read, and savour. There are sections on the feminist Riot Grrls movement and their British counterpart, Huggy Bear, the beloved Manic Street Preachers, Rage Against the Machine, R.E.M, Crass (an anarchist group/sect hard to either admire or enjoy), U2, the SWP’s Redskins, Bay Area leftist bands, and so many names that it would be impossible to list them all. Lynsky is keenly aware of intellectual connections, with Situationism, SCUM (Valerie Solanas’s Society for Cutting Up Men) Gramsci, post-colonial theory, and Deconstruction, cited – though Scritti Politi’s I’m in Love with Jacques Derrida does not get mentioned.

     

    It has to be said that the ambition to write a history of protest music largely begins and ends in the US and the UK. There are excursions to Chile, though singer Victor Jara seems to figure partly because of a link with Phil Ochs. Jamaican Reggae and Bob Marley are located in the Island’s politics, and the Nigerian Flea Kuti own domestic role is explored. But outside of these locations: silence. Of Europe’s protest songs, from France’s rich tradition of politicised chansons where the words really count, to Germany’s, and elsewhere, there is nothing, and no explanation for this exclusion (a point also made here).

     

    33 Revolutions Per Minute ends with reflections on the present position of protest song writing. The narrative is wrapped up by a description of how the Internet has changed the scene, creating an “atomised world of digital music”. That is one in which on-line protest acts as a “catharsis” in itself, without need of concerts. This theme could be perhaps be explored through the ideas offered by Peter Doggertt’s There’s a Riot Going On (2007). Doggertt observes that rock music was given more political weight in the 1960s and 1970s than it could bear. That musicians always have “an ambiguous relationship between capitalism and revolutionary zeal”. Or, as a well-known Clash verse says, that record companies snap up rebellion and try to turn it into money.

     

    Yet street protests continue. The “wave of British tuition fee protests in late 2010 marked a welcome and surprising resurgence.” (Page 683) If it is a challenge to produce a successful protest song today, “To take on politics in music is always a leap of faith, a gesture of hope over experience, because there are always a dozen reasons not to. It falls to musicians to continue to make those attempts; whether they succeed or not depends on the rest of us.”(Page 685)

     

     

     

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    George Galloway, Syrian Communists, and Assad Dictatorship.

    Posted in Communism, Conspiracies, Fascism, Imperialism by Andrew Coates on April 26, 2011

    There has been widespread criticism, including on this Blog, of those who canoodled with Gaddafi.

    But what of Syria?

    Few people in the UK seem to have been close to the regime.

    Except…George Galloway.

    Wars Everywhere writes,

    Galloway called Assad “the last Arab ruler” because of his steadfast support for terrorism against Israel and the US. He said that the Syrian people should be happy to have Assad as their “president”. He called Syria a “Democracy” in his speech in Damascus. Shortly before the massive Lebanese uprising which kicked the Syrian army out of Lebanon, Galloway justified the Syrian occupation of Lebanon by saying: “Syrian troops in Lebanon maintain stability and protect the country from Israel.” He went on to express opposition to UN Resolution 1559, which urges the Lebanese government to establish control over all its territory.

    Here.

    Galloway’s affection for the Syrian regime is not unique on the left.

    But he has been quiet as a mouse about the country in the last few weeks.

    One of the two Syrian Communist parties, (Bakdash) which forms part of Syria’s  ruling National Progressive Front.,  has not been so silent. They have issued this statement (from here). In reading it bear in mind the highly critical stand taken by the Parti Communiste Français to the regime – Here (Hat-Tip to Arthur ).

    Regarding Syria
    by the Syrian Communist Party (Bakdash)

    A regular meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Syria, chaired by its Secretary General Comrade Ammar Bakdash, was held on 25 March 2011. . . .

    The Central Committee examined at length the manifestations of unrest in some cities in Syria, especially the unfortunate incidents in the town of Dara’a.  On the 18th of March, a confrontation took place between security forces and a variety of residents of Dara’a chanting slogans and raising demands.  At the forefront of these demands was the release of some boys who were arrested under the emergency laws.  With the development of the confrontation, other signs and slogans were added, concentrated, on that day, on some security and administrative officials in the province.  As a result of the security forces’ use of excessive force in dispersing the crowd, some demonstrators died and many more were injured.  That created broad discontent and heightened tension, which led to a number of clashes.  The media reported the government’s announcement of the formation of a committee to inquire into these incidents, as well as the release of the aforementioned young detainees.

    Then, reactionary forces tried, and are still trying, to exploit the deplorable incidents and to fuel unrest in various parts of the country, using an insidious method to attract the masses, mixing demands and slogans for democratic freedoms with the demands and slogans that are clearly retrograde, obscurantist, and provocatively sectarian in character, directed against the idea of secularism and the spirit of tolerance which have historically been distinctive features of the Syrian society.

    The mass media of the countries that are at the heart of imperialism, as well as of the reactionary pro-imperialist Arab regimes, lost no time in beginning a fierce media war against Syria, distorting and exaggerating facts and publishing lies, employing as their mouthpieces suspicious characters whose names mean nothing to the Syrian people.  Unfortunately, the Syrian government’s media have not been what they should have been at such a critical moment.  In this kind of circumstance, you must tell the truth, not make things look prettier than they are; telling the truth would increase the confidence of the public and strengthen their resolve to thwart the plot.

    The Central Committee expressed its support for the decisions and directions of the national leadership of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, among the most important of which in the political sphere are the lifting of the state of emergency, the drafting of a law for political parties, and the reform of the media law. (more…)

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    Syria, the Arab Spring and the Western Left.

    Posted in Globalisation, Imperialism, Islamism, Israel by Andrew Coates on April 29, 2011
     
     
    Perry Anderson on a ‘Concatenation ‘ of Uprisings.

    “The Arab revolt of 2011 belongs to a rare class of historical events: a concatenation of political upheavals, one detonating the other, across an entire region of the world.” Writes Perry Anderson (Arab World Concatenation - full text link*. NLR 68. March/April 2011). The links extend to the West. The region is of great strategic and economic importance, and the targets for the uprisings have been repressive authoritarian regimes that received overt or tactic support from Washington and the EU’s capitals.

    The Tunisian revolution, driven by human rights demands, economic grievances, legal rights groups, the union federation the UGTT, urban and rural workers and poor, began the process. Economic protests at mass unemployment, an inability to provide for a demographic explosion, joined with long-standing resentment at an authoritarian one-party system.

    The movement spilled across borders. Cairo was ignited, and the Mubarak system – or at least its leadership – fell. Ripples of revolt washed from the Maghreb to the Machrek. The past seemed forgotten as the West welcomed the overthrow of tyrannies and rushed to promote its model of democracy. Yet it showed decreasing enthusiasm the further into the Middle East one went, beginning with Yemen and Bahrain. Now, Syria is trying to repress mass opposition protests. President Assad has unleashed vicious repression, with hundreds of demonstrators shot. Civil war looms. It risks boiling the country’s politics down to sectarian religious and ethnic clashes. With this, and the likely even more profound chain-reactions in mind, Western appetite for further regime-change is weakening.

     

    The West Changes Tack.

    The West’s policy towards the Arab world remains in a flux. Nowhere has a strategic change in strategy been greater than in France. Earlier in 2011 exposure of the French political elite’s close financial ties to Tunisian dictator, Ben Ali, and its security forces, led to the resignation of the Foreign Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie. After hesitation and obstruction towards the Jasmine Revolution an effort to recast the Quai d’Orsay’s policy towards Arab societies is now in full play.

    President Sarkozy has heralded the “Arab peoples who have taken charge of their own destiny” and, to dampen one potential source of Franco-Arab conflict called for a “dialogue” with Islamists in these lands. (Le Monde 19.4.11). Obama, Cameron and France’s President have pursued, through the UN, limited military intervention in Libya. To Anderson this is “more of a luxury than a necessity”, a model of “humanitarian intervention”, to display “valour” and restore – principally French – “honour”. This result is not immediately apparent. Gaddafi remains defiant. There is a drift towards direct involvement on Libyan soil gains the upper hand, without any immediate victory for his opponents in the National Transitional Council in sight.

     

    The International Left Divided.

    The World’s progressives are divided, writes Serge Halimi, “as to whether they put the emphasis on their solidarity with an oppressed people, or on their opposition to a Western war”(Le Monde Diplomatique. April. 2011). Some on the left, including Nordic leftist parties, France’s Parti de Gauche leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, intellectuals like Gilbert Achcar( a ‘population truly in danger’ and no alternative way to protect them’) and small far-left groups, like Britain’s Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, backed, on the grounds of solidarity with the Libyan revolution, the UN motion authorising the No-Fly Zone over Libya. In the UK opposition is dominant. Labour Briefing editorialises that the brutality of the Green Book regime was a pretext to remove a “rogue state”. That “calls for humanitarian interventions serve a Non-conservative agenda.” (May 2011).

     

    The anti-intervention left has had great difficulty in finding a clear camp to back. It is hard to see Gaddafi’s phalanxes and administration – mired in decades of corrupt repression –  as just a ‘side’ . So, instead of backing him, some cast doubt on the politics and character of his opponents. The National Transitional Council, they suggest,  combines Islamists and pro-Western opportunists. A few, no doubt projecting their own inner feelings onto Tripoli, believe that perhaps Gaddafi was a Western asset whose loss is mourned by the White House. More accurately Eddie Ford talks of the US facing “imponderables” faced with its attempts to “deflect” and divert the revolution (Weekly Worker 21.4.11). If Eddie is against the intervention he stands with the revolution against Gaddafi, something far from being the case for many who oppose any form of Western or UN action against the Gaddafi regime.

     

    Perhaps an intermediate position is to be critical of the intervention, while recognising that in extremis Gaddafi can only be removed and the population helped to protect themselves through some kind of UN aid. For the rest, conditions are too fluid to talk of a full-blown Western plan to force through a regime reduced to being its cat’s-paw. It is up to the Libyan people to develop their own policies in these circumstances. What is certain is that with Gaddafi in power this will be impossible. (more…)

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    The End of Allotments: Big Society to Crush Small Growers.

    Posted in Allotments, Conservative Party, Conservatives, Cuts by Andrew Coates on May 1, 2011

    Puffy-Faced Pickles Wants to Steal the People’s Land.

    In the Independent on Sunday Jane Merrick and Mark Jewsbury unleash this bombshell,

    The century-old right of people to demand an allotment from their council may be abolished by the Government under plans to scale back red tape, it emerged yesterday.

    Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, is examining plans to free local authorities from a 103-year-old obligation to provide plots of public land for cultivation by gardeners. The proposals could see local authorities, many of them strapped for cash under government-imposed cuts, selling off allotment land for social housing or even for profit to major  companies.

    Here.

    The Independent announces the launch of a Dig For Victory campaign to oppose this. More on the issues:  Here.

    Eric Pickles is a fat Tory Bastard. He is a fat Northern Tory bastard, a rare but vicious breed.

    As a very different kind of Northerner – the backbone of the country – says (Here),

    For anyone under the age of 40, this is what the tories are like. Removing common rights and replacing them with market driven garbage.

    They’ve already taken a big chunk of my pay. They are attacking my pension. If Eric Pickles comes anywhere near my allotment, he’ll get a puncture.

    This proposal strikes at the heart of people’s needs, social development, and the environment. It is hard to see even a Tory could support taking away people’s right to cultivate the soil. They have “mixed” their labour with it and even in ‘possessive individualist’ theory they have some claims over it (as John Locke put it). 

    We allotment holders, as the early Ricardian socialists would say, have the right to the product of our toil.

    Stealing our land, looked after through years of hard graft, is an abomination.

    But then the ‘Big Society’ is all about taking from things away from people.

    It is nothing to with helping anyone but major  companies, private trust holders, financiers and people whose marriage costs a million quid .

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    Suffolk Libraries: Victory for Protesters?

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, Cuts, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on May 3, 2011

     

    Victory?

    Controversial county council proposals to stop running its library service have been abandoned, the EADT can reveal. 

    Suffolk County Council had planned to divest the service and hand over responsibility for running libraries to community groups, parish councils or other organisations.

    The plans could have resulted in the closure of 29 community libraries if no groups took over the running of them.

    However, due to the strength of feeling across the county, which resulted in a number of demonstrations in towns such as Saxmundham, Leiston and Eye, the county council has made a dramatic U-turn.

    It emerged last night that the authority will retain ultimate responsibility for running libraries – although communities will have an opportunity to help run individual branches.

    And while there is no guarantee that all branches will be retained, cabinet member with responsibility for libraries Judy Terry said she expected the overwhelming majority to stay open.

    Paul Geater. East Anglian Daily Times.Here

    The Print Edition adds the following points:

    “It was the reaction from market towns and communities across the county that persuaded members of the ruling Conservative group at the country council to abandon the divestment plans.

    The threat  to library services brought out protesters on to the streets which had never seen marched before and sparked a significant online campaign against the proposals.”

    Clearly the massive campaign against the ‘divestment’ (hiving off a slashed service) of Suffolk Libraires have triumphed.

    This shows that mass protest pays.

    Even if, the EADT states, the reaction of people in Lowestoft and Ipswich did not appear to weigh much in the minds of the Conservatives. Anyone inclined to vote  Tory in these large, mainly working class,  towns should bear this mind.

     

    And there is a big BUT…..

     ”The libraries are set to be run by a  community interest company which will be fully owned by the county council – but will include representatives of communities across Suffolk as well as councillors and officials.”

    We have to ask, why are they going to create a “company” – labelled “community interest” – to run public services?

    If the County is to have “ultimate responsibility” does this mean that this company has its own management structure, independent of the Council and without the existing connections to elected representatives? Precedents elsewhere are not enouraging.

    The more one thinks about it the more this looks like an attenuated form of ‘divestment’.

    Cuts, some closures, and some transfers to ‘communities’ are still in the offing.

    Andrew Grant-Adamson accuses the Tories of ‘political opportunism’ .

    He reports Councillor Terry Judy (who tried to join the Labour Party in the 1990s, but her application to Town Ward, when I was Branch Secretary, mysteriously  ’got lost’), saying,

    On Radio Suffolk she said that the Community Interest Company would make savings of at least 30% but they hoped the savings could be greater. Cllr Terry did say there would be a further consultation before a report to the council’s Cabinet.

    A lot of questions remain to be answered. Not least, why was the decision leaked on the Sunday of a bank holiday weekend at the start of a week in which local government elections (not including the County Council itself) take place?

    There is the question of why a community interest company with “community representatives” on its board will be more democratic than the council running the libraries. How will these representatives by chosen and how will that be more democratic than elected councillors running the service?

    How will a community interest company be able to make greater savings?

    In conversation today a leading Rose Hill Library campaigner is equally sceptical.  They foresee a move to closure and a bogus Tory-run ‘community’ group taking charge. It is to be hoped that the  excellent Rose Hill Blog( here. )which initially welcomed the change will reflect these doubts.

    The EADT’s Editorial that concludes with the claim that “the right result has eventually been achieved - but what a  torturous way to get there,”

    There has been no lack of torture (for users and for staff) .

    But as our comments indicate we are less than convinced  that this is an unqualified “right” result

    There are other reasons to be concerned.

    The national Liberal-Tory threat to public libraries still exists: Eric Pickles continues to plan to remove the statutory obligation of local authorities to provide a comprehensive library service.

    The ‘Big Society’ , as we have seen with allotments, is still out to crush the interests of the small people.

     

    UPDATE (Wednesday) flitched from Andrew Grant-Adamson (I imagine Sandy would be pleased to see his reactions broadcast as fully as possible)   Here

    Sandy Martin, labour leader on Suffolk County Council, was asked for his comments on the the plan for a community interest company to run the council libraries (see earlier post). This is what he said:

    Suffolk County Council is responsible for Libraries. They are already owned by the people of Suffolk. We don’t know the details of the so-called Community Interest Company – and why do we need it anyway?

    By all means let’s make any possible savings that won’t damage the library service, and let’s involve the local people even more than they are already. But how can we trust a word that the Conservatives are saying on divesting libraries?

    Why have they released this so-called “news” just 3 days before the local elections? What has changed since this whole libraries “consultation” process first started? Cllr Terry is still talking about local communities running their local libraries, she’s still talking about making a 30% overall saving, and she’s still not categorically promising that all the libraries will remain open.”

    Stewart Home, Pornography in the Service of the Revolution.

    Posted in Culture, Marxism, Philosophy, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on May 6, 2011
     

      

    More Innocent Days...

    stewarthome

    A Review of ‘Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie’. Stewart Home. 2010.

     

    “Your Fantastic Device Will Make Andy Warhol Shake! 70% Off Penis Growth Pills!” “Make Iwona Blazwick buckle and moan all night when you split her pussy wide open.” “My breast tingles with the excitement, and swells to bursting at the thought of you taking me under your wing…”

    It occurs to “you” at the start of Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie that there “has been an abstract movement in art but not in fiction”. Abstract Literature, is a “product of the subconscious”, a position staked out by the Surrealists. And so to the Suicide Kid, “a charming transsexual foot fetishist”, proposing an exhibition, Lederhosen Kamikaze Death Squat! to the Museum of Modern Art (London). “You” are soon off in the clouds, visualising another show Whores On All Fours.

     Stuart Home does not let us settle down. The pages jump back and forward, the pronoun “you” shifts all over the place, a world of H.P.Lovecraft’s “strange folds in the fabric of time and space” and “non-Euclidean geometries” is cut up and pasted. An unravelled patchwork, from “some eldritch dimension”, of cyber-sex, E-Mails, Spam, and cock, cock, cock. Appendix, ‘Stewart Home Replies to an enquiry from Guardian Blogger Jane Perrone Concerning the Claim that he is the real Author of the Belle de Jour Blog and Book.” Who wrote the Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl is caught in the, fractured angry dialect of Internet Chat-rooms. Stop at the Terminus: Index of Abandoned Material. Enjoy the parodies and paradoxes.

    Is there any there there? Blood Rites encloses the story of an Exhibition of Abstract Literature. That is a pornographic text whose “obscenity lies in the fact that it can’t be imagined, it can only be experience in its totality as a concrete form” “dense thickets of rhetoric”, lead flat down to the endlessly repetitive moments of desire for desire, Belle de Jour and cum. “In Abstract Literature words comes across like a sixties Art happening, all jumbled and confused.”

    Blood Rites is overridden by pornographic (writing about prostitution), not just erotic (sexual love), sentences. It’s the textual trace of key-board masturbation, not lettered fore-play, and not human seduction at a distance. It distantly echoes André Breton’s L’amour fou (1937) – “le desire, seul ressort du monde”, “seule rigueur que l’homme ait à connaître” (desire, the sole spring of the world, the only harsh rigour that humans have known). But much more, the prick theme resembles Louis Aragon’s Les Aventures de Jean-Foutre la Bitte (Jean-Spunk the cock).

    As the Suicide Kid types, “repetition is the basis of all thought, and all pornography too” we think of Michael Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires (‘Atomised’ 1988). Above all, his “Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Pleasure” that works its way out through Bruno and Christine’s love-making. That is to say, Blood Rites wouldn’t make many people wet or hard.

    The Observer said of Blood Rites that, it “merges penis enlargement junk mail with philosophical pontification to strangely comic effect.” (1.8.10) The anti-novel, or “novel for the sake of convenience” (Here)  is dosed with reflections on the way radical art is recuperated by the market. It is a “proven fact that the value of paintings rises dramatically if they are attacked” “We offer an all-in-one vandalism and restoration service. Smarties really are loading up on underground art of the nineteen eighties, and in particular all things Neoist.” The post avant-gardes are part of the manufacture of a present where fashion itself, from clothes to music, has come to a halt..” “crushed in the Spectacle’s iron heel.” (Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Guy Debord. 1988) Or, as we flit to Jean Baudrillard, the “l’absorption de tous les modes d’expression virtuels dans celui de la publicité (‘the absorption of all virtual means of expression into advertising’  – Simulacres et Simulation 1981) Since the Neoists were above all publicists, “invest your wealth in Neoism and reap the profits”. (more…)

    Ipswich Borough Elections, Liberal-Tory Coalition Routed: Implications.

    Posted in Capitalism, Conservative Party, East Anglia, Ipswich, Liberal Democrats by Andrew Coates on May 7, 2011

    No Waitrose Here Now?

    The Liberal-Tory Coalition that has run Ipswich Borough Council since 2004 has been routed.

    Labour is back in control.

    The Evening Star observes,

    The party won three seats from the Conservatives and two from the Lib Dems to hold 28 of the 48 seats at the borough.

    The Liberal Democrats suffered a disaster – losing all three seats they were defending, including mayor Jane Chambers’ Alexandra seat.

    The Tendance was particularly pleased with that result – since I live in the ward that ousted the Mayor (what will she do now as a  ’Mayor’ without a Council seat?)  and Labour’s Harvey is a good trade unionist and socialist,

    Alexandra: Harvey Crane (L), 1158, Jane Chambers (LD), 577, Steve Flood (C), 449, Jane Scott (Gn), 155.  (Here).

    Jane, the Green, called herself  ”Groovy Scott” on the Ballot paper.

    Enough said about the nature of the Greens.

    Labour’s Phil Smart win in Bridge Ward was also gratifying – here. Full results here.

    Liberal Vote Goes Walk-Away.

    Why were the liberals so affected (the Tories also lost seats, but won St Margaret’s because of the collapse of the Lib-Dem vote) ? Here are some suggestions.

    Firstly, the Ipswich Liberal-Tory Coalition was clearly identified with the national Coalition. Those dissatisfied with the latter could cast a ballot against the former. Conservatvies, above all their core voters , who turn out even in high-abstention local elections, were likely to be pleased with massive student fees, anti-EU and anti-foreigner rhetoric, flogging off the NHS, and attacks on the poor and disabled. Liberals, less so.

    Ipswich has only had a Lib-Dem council presence in the last decade. They have little chance to establish the kind of long-term obdurate liberal constituencies or place like Cambridge and Colchester, where a middle-class bien-pensant bloc is allied with self-serving interests of the same social stratum and anti-Labour populism. At the first serious challenge, its support withered.

    Secondly, while there is some truth that the Tories were able to use the Liberals as a ‘shield’ to defect hostility against them, Ipswich Liberals were perfectly capable of pissing off their electorate unaided.

    They are a bunch of grudge-bearers (Labour renegades) , nice people, a few genuine liberals, odd-balls and the very odd indeed.

    Ipswich Lib-Dems  went along with the local Conservative strategy a low council tax, and efforts to privatise as much as they could (financial services, attempts to get rid of Ipswich Buses, and, on the agenda, Street Care and direct works).  To an extent they injected  ’localism’  into Council Policy. That is, ending directly funded public services (Community centres for the poor, and minorities) and supporting their private  take-over, closure (Caribbean Centre), or replacement (St Lawrence Centre for Genteel Folk). These are often run by so-called ‘community’ figures – under no democratic control.  

    In basic agreement with the Big Society project they planned to hive off further public provision to local oligarchies. In this area they had a good rapport with ‘faith communities’,  some favoured individual ‘community groups’ and charities,  who are expected to replace democratic social provision with religious, the said ‘community’ (self-described)  and philanthropic institutions.

    The Conservative Culture Portfolio holder, Lady Judy Terry, left her mark with a sculpture of a blue-bottle on top of the Major’s Corner Toilets. Andrew Cann, her Liberal successor, planned to install a much-needed Waitrose in the Corn Hill Town Hall. Achievements like these are perhaps underappreciated.

    To pave the way they announced the closure of public bill-paying facilities in the Town Hall. Now people will pay their Council Tax and Council House rent at Pay Points in local Newsagents and Grog Shops.

    Thirdly, there is no doubt that the mayhem at the Tory-run Suffolk County Council, and the widespread anger at the New Strategic Direction (NSD), led many people to vote against their Ipswich counterparts. Liberals who protested at the NSD at County meetings, and went out to cut and close on the Borough, fooled nobody.

    Labour in Power.

    Labour, now in charge of the Council, with a competent and respected leader, David Ellesmere, will have their own priorities. Their election matrial, outling their priorities, was generally broad-brush:

    Protecting frontline services , Bringing jobs and investment to Ipswich,  More affordable houses and fewer flats,  Helping victims of crime and anti-social behaviour, Cutting council waste .(Here)

    More detail is needed.

    Here are some suggestions:

    • Go straight to finances. As was said at our Wednesday UNITE branch meeting, it is essential that Labour looks into the arrangements the Tory financial eminence grise, former Finance Portfolio holder John Carnell, has set up. he has no doubt left much of the Council spending locked into his pet projects. He will have also left some booby-traps for the incoming Labour Council.
    • Cancel the Waitrose plans. This proposal, to place a hyper-expensive supermarket in the Town Hall  (it’s not as if there’s a lack of empty retail space in the centre of Ipswich), is not just an insult to the less well-off (the majority of Ipswich people), it is an abuse of public property.
    • Get back to democratic public services responsible to elected Councillors, not private cliques. From Community Centres to a whole gamut of other provision, the experiment in handing over more power to religious, charitable ‘trusts’ and ‘communities’ (that is a section of them), should be ended. Voluntary organisations have an important and much admired role to play in Ipswich. They work best in co-operation with the directly elected Council, not by taking on powers of their own. The Council must re-assert its responsibilities.

    Many other challenges will no doubt arise. Restoring the battered morale of the Council employees, and the trust of the electorate, will need ambitious Council leadership. The issue of the nationally dictated cuts remains a live on. 

    But one thing is clear: we are free of the Liberal-Tory Junta that has run Ipswich into the ground.

    Rejoice!

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    Besancenot (NPA) will not be French Presidential Candidate.

     

     
    bes.jpg

     Won’t Stand for President a Third Time.

    Olivier Besancenot, the ‘revolutionary postie’ of the French Nouveau parti anticapitaliste, will not, contrary to widespread expectation, present himself as candidate for next year’s Presidential elections.

    This was announced a few days ago.

    Besancenot, who won 4,25% of the vote in the 2002 election and 4,08% in the 2007 one, has issued a statement explaining why he will not stand this time.

    He  begins with a citation: an appeal to the Paris Commune (1871) on the selection of council delegates.

    This warns against ambition and those pushing themselves forward. They will end by serving their ”propre intérêt” own interests). It recommends selecting those who do not canvass, whose “mérite” is modesty, and who are known intimately by the electors. 

    Drawing on these observations about the need to rein in leaders and elected political figures, Olivier notably asserts that,  

     Depuis de nombreux mois, je fais aussi partie de ceux qui mettent en garde notre parti contre les risques politiques de la personnalisation à outrance. Que les idées s’incarnent ponctuellement dans un contexte social et politique déterminé, ou qu’il faille déléguer la tâche militante de la représentation publique, par un mandat précis et limité dans le temps, est une chose. Jouer des ambiguïtés du système politique et médiatique pour se substituer à l’action militante réelle au sein de la lutte de classe, en est une autre.

    For many months I have been one of those warning our party against the political risks of excessive , exaggerated, personalisation. That ideas are embodied within a specific social  and political context, and that it is necessary to delegate the tasks of a activists through public representation – for a specific and time-limited mandate – is one thing. It’s quite another to play the media game as a substitute for real grass-roots action in the class struggle.

    Full Statement Here.

    For this read: I don’t want to a media-star any more.

    It would be unkind, though not wholly foreign to the tenor of Tendance Coatesy’s Blog, to suggest that it is also galling to be an increasingly less successful media star.

    We  have political differences with Olivier Bescanenot, and his platform in the NPA.  He has dismissed the efforts of the Front de Gauche to bring together the French radical left and  left-wing democrat socialists . The FdG is part of a wider European left (with some small British echoes) within which the NPA could have found a home. However, many of Besancenot’s comrades continue to dismiss this project as an alliance of “petits partis réformistes, soit du PC au PG”.

    That said Besancenot has been an inspiring figure. Worker, intellectual, fluent, and warm. This decision, which effectively means a semi-retreat from national politics, is to be regretted.

    More in le Monde here (though not the account of the recent troubled history of the NPA which is confined to yesterday’s print edition). One can also note that it is suggested that fear of ‘starisation’ was not the only factor in the withdrawal. As a “young father” a wish to have a personal life is said to have strongly influenced Besancenot’s decision: here.

    This does not leave everyone in the NPA happy.

    One can see why:

    L’absence d’Olivier Besancenot dans la bataille de 2012 rebat les cartes à gauche. Le PS se voit débarrassé d’un concurrent qui captait un électorat beaucoup plus large que celui de l’extrême gauche. «On peut se dire positivement que cela va limiter la division de la gauche», remarque Benoît Hamon, porte-parole du PS. Le forfait de la figure emblématique du NPA pourrait aussi ouvrir un espace supplémentaire au Parti de gauche de Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Même si les vases ne sont pas automatiquement communicants.

    Olivier Besancenot’s absence in the 2011 battle has reshuffled the cards on the left. The Socialist Party (PS)  has got rid of a competitor who attracted an electorate much wider than just the far left. “one can say, positively, that this will reduce the left’s divisions” stated  Benoît Hamon, PS spokesperson. The withdrawal of the key public face of the NPA will also open up a wider space for the Left Party (PdG) of Jean-Luc Mélenchon (TC: ahe principal left Presidential candidate). Though there is no guarantted transfer of support from the NPA’s electorate to the PdG’s.

     

    Ni Allah, Ni Maître: Tunisian Filmaker, Nadia El Fani, Faces Islamist Wrath.

    Posted in Fascism, Feminism, Films, Free Speech, Islam, Islamism, North Africa, Secularism, Tunisia by Andrew Coates on May 9, 2011

      

     This film has been met by  a hate campaign by Tunisian Islamists.

    Franco-Tunisian filmmaker, Nadia El Fani is known for her political engagement on issues that are at the same time controversial. Her latest film Ni Allah ni Maître (Neither Allah nor Master) focuses on secularism in Tunisia, a majority Muslim country, at the height of the revolutions taking place in North Africa.

    With the release of the film, she has been the object of rather vicious Internet attacks. In opposition to these attacks, an online petition in support of Nadia El Fani outlines its position on the issue of secularism and freedom of conscience.

    Below is a transcription of a recent interview with Nadia El Fani by Mohamed Kaci on Le Journal International TV5Monde and the Petition (which follows), both translated from French to English by Beti Ellerson.

    More  Here.

    The Nouvel Observateur has just published this by Séverine Labat:

    Franco-tunisien film-maker  Nadia El Fani, is the victim of the return of obscurantism in Tunisia. 

    A few months after the fall of Ben Ali it seems that freedom of belief and the right to publicly defend atheist views is under threat. 

    After  ”Ouled Lenine” (Lenine’s Children“) which deals with the lives and destinies of Tunisian Communists, Tunisians, such as her father, Nadia El Fani, has returned with “Ni Allah ni maître” – Neither Allah nor Master (which will be shown at the Cannes Festival on the 18th of May).

    After a programme about the film on  Hannibal TV,  she has stirred up the hatred of Islamists, whose reaction has begun to create serious fears in Tunisia. 

    Web and Facebook*  sites attacking her have flourished.  One (with a claimed 33 000 supporters). The principal one has  a profile picture of Osama Ben Laden. These sites promise Nadia the “fires of hell”, if not simply a “bullet in the head“. 

    Her crime? To openly declare she does not believe in god

    Other  cinéastes such as  Nouri Bouzid, have also had death threats  from activists of the Islamist party  En-Nahdha (the so-called ‘liberal’ Islamists invited to speak on British Television and address left meetings**).

    (Adapted and translated  from  here. )

    More information from Rue 89  here.

    An important Petition in Nadia’s support is here.

    “ La cinéaste Nadia El Fani fait l’objet d’une vaste campagne de violences verbales et de menaces physiques sur certaines pages facebook. Nous, citoyen-ne-s tunisien-ne-s attaché-e-s à la liberté de conscience, de croyance et de culte, déclarons par la présente notre soutien inconditionnel à Nadia El Fani.”

    “Following her public statements on Hannibal television, filmmaker Nadia El Fani has been the object of an extensive campaign of verbal and physical threats on certain Facebook pages. We, Tunisian citizens committed to the freedom of conscience, belief and worship, declare by this, our full support of Nadia El Fani.”

    Full text on site.

    * A relatively mild one here.

    ** Notably in the shape of this man – here.

     

    Update: HERE

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    Everything Flows. Vasily Grossman. A Review.

    Posted in Communism, Left, Stalinism by Andrew Coates on May 10, 2011

    Everything Flows. Vasily Grossman. Translated by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler with Anna  Aslanyan. Harvill Secker. 2010.

    The author of Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, gains in stature every year. That monumental novel has the energy and depth to cover the siege of Stalingrad, the Soviet fightback against the Nazi invaders, the Shoah, and does not shirk from describing Stalin’s terror. Begun with these events still fresh in his mind, the manuscript (completed in 1960)  remained confiscated by the KGB and the work was unpublished until the 1980s. Translations appeared in the same decade. But, as Robert Chandler notes in the Introduction to a new translation of  Everything Flows, “Grossman’s reputation grew onlyslowly.” His journalism, first-hand, patriotic, reports of the Soviet army’s progress, A Writer at War,  appeared in English in 2006. These pieces reminded us that the author was an eye-witness to the events he fictionalised.  Now, Everything Flows introduces us further to the moral and political foundation on which Grossman’s work rests.

    The present unfinished novel (begun in 1955, and worked onuntil his death in 1964) is an indictment against the Soviet “State without freedom”. It follows the path of Ivan Griegoryevich, newly released from the Gulag. He has survived three decades in the camps, a rare ‘guilty’ inmate who had, as a student, “declared that freedom is as important a good as life itself.”

    Ivan returns to a world where the State had been ready for a last lurch into frenzied repression. Only a short while before it was rumoured, in the wake of the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ that a wave of pogroms would sweep the country and the Jews would be deported to Siberia and Turkmenistan, to work on the construction of the Turkem canal through the Kara-Kum desert. Where people had made their compromises with the State, and those who would greet Ivan are rarely untouched by Stalinism or morally untainted. This remains a county where liberty has yet to be won. Griegoryevich, changed by his years of suffering, strains to find a tolerable niche in the post-Stalin land. he cannot step in the same social river twice.

    The flood of Ivan’s camp memories inundates Everything Flows. The horrific, detailed, account of camp life remains startling. During his years there Ivan observes the imprisoned population that had swollen with people who might  oppose Stalin. He is familiar with causal cruelty, impossible workloads, starvation, and killing. Ivan has witnessed everything. The caste of common criminals who oppress the atomised ‘political’ zeks sentenced under Article 58 for “counter-revolutionary activity” further poisons their lives. Readers of Solzhenitsyn are aware of the bleak landscape. The Green Procurer in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales describes in parallel to Grossman how conditions in the same Koylma  from the late 1920s onwards had got harsher and harsher. Yet would even the most pessimistic agree that, “neither within nor outside the camps were people willing to admit that everyone had an equal right to freedom”? (Page 93)

    Informing the Terror.

    Everyone knows about the Terror, though few are at all willing to more than allude to it, at least in the presence of Ivan.  But, who, he/the author, reflects, is guilty of its crimes? Who will be held responsible? Should it just be the State? Or Stalin? All of the public ‘organs’ needed individuals to carry out their wishes? They required, first of all, people willing to herd the victims into their folds.

    Grossman presents one of the most profound explorations of  informers and denouncers ever written. Seeking information against enemies, real, potential, or imagined, provided by individuals encouraged, forced, or bribed, to play this role, is as long-standing as politics itself. Use of the ‘delator’ (the Latin for informer – Imperial Rome was probably the first recorded systematic political use of informing) was well established – though periodically repressed. But the USSR under Stalin was not just an Emperor with a “passion for unmasking enemies” but a State. That is one, according to Stalin, which is a  “dictatorship of the proletariat”, “unrestricted by law and based on force.” (The Foundations of Leninism)

    In “the beginning was the  word..”(Page 61) One end of the chain there two people chatting,  next an activist speaking. At the other end are crazed eyes, damaged  kidneys, skull pierced by a bullet, “gangrenous, pus-oozing toes  gnawed by the frost of the taiga, scurvy-ridden corpses in a log hut  that served as the camp morgue.”(Ibid)

    Who then are the agents of the Stalinist Logos? There is the Judas 1, who buckles  under, who “behaved badly under interrogation”. He slanders a  man, who is not arrested, and ends up serving twelve years of forced  labour to return “barely alive, a broken man, a pauper “on his  last legs”. A Judas ll took the initiative, out of anxiety about  his tainted class background. “Enchanted by the new world” he  offers “his all on the alter of the fatherland.” There is Judas  lll, one of “life’s masters” who has pushed his way up from the bottom to become a true believer. He is filled with loathing for the  old Bolsheviks who hesitate to embrace the new order.  “Stamping in  its Stalinist boots, the Party had shouted at him, ‘If you show the  least indecision, you will prove that you are no different from these  degenerates –and I will grind you to dust.”(Page 66)  Judas IV  simply considered informing and denouncing as a way of replacing his  former poverty with position and property. He is a ready volunteer, who inverts Kant’s rule to treat human beings as ends in themselves:  “a man, and mankind as a whole, is simply a means to be employed in  the course of his never-ending hunt for objects.”(Page 68)

    All have reasons to  collaborate, initiate, and to excuse themselves; all have victims,  most of whom would never be able to contradict them. In this vein  there is enough in Grossman’s pages to furnish a library of commenatories on the  subject of this “human obscenity”, and its flourishing under the  Stalinist state.

    Two extremely powerful chapters deal with the  Ukrainian famine. A moment of happiness in Ivan’s life, as he meets  Anna Sergeyevna, is overshadowed by her account of ‘dekulkisation’  in 1929 – 1930. To her Lenin and Stalin said that The kulaks are  not human beings” (page 129) After the killings and deportations,  the collective-farms failed. The Plan was unfulfilled. Grain began to  be confiscated, famine arrived: starvation swept the countryside.  Every morning the dead were taken away, “I saw one cart, it was  stacked with the bodies of children. ..They looked thin and long –  faces like dead birdies, sharp little beaks..Some were still making  cheeping noises: their little heads were like ripe ears of grain,
    bending the thin stalks of their necks…” (Page 145)

    The description of the peasants’ misery is too  heart-rending to cite further. Blood Lands, Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010) by Timothy Snyder gives in documented  detail the facts of the Ukrainian holocaust that are painfully written out here.

    Lenin, Stalin and the Servile ‘Russian Soul’.

    Everything Flows concludes  in its present, uncompleted form, with essays on Lenin and Stalin.

    The former is judged severely,  “Lenin’s intolerance, his forcefulness, his intransigence in the  face of disagreement, his contempt for freedom, the fanaticism of his  faith, his cruelty towards his enemies – all the qualities that  brought victory to his cause were born and forged in the  thousand-year-old depths of Russian slavery. That is why his victory  served the cause of non-freedom. And in the meantime other aspects of  Lenin, the traits that have charmed millions, the traits of a kind,  modest Russian working intellectual did not cease to exist – but they  existed immaterially, without significance.”(Page 197)

    The ‘two-sides’ of Lenin, the  factionalist, the hardened leader, and the sensitive intellectual  with a warm private life, could be developed further. But Grossman  charges Russian national character with the worst side of Lenin. This  is much more contentious:  “The Russian slave soul is manifest in  Lenin’s revolution, in Lenin’s passionate embrace of Western  revolutionary teachings, in Lenin’s fanaticism, in Lenin’s  violence and in the victories of the Leninist state.”(Page 199) As for Stalin, “This fusion of  party and State found its expression in the person of Stalin. In the  mind and will of Stalin, the State expressed its own mind and will.”  (P 205) “It was Stalin – who was both a European Marxist and an  Asian despot – who gave true expression to the nature of Soviet  statehood. What was embodied in Lenin was a Russian national  principle; what was embodied in Stalin was a statehood that was both  Russian and Soviet.”(Page 205) “Stalin united within him all the  most ruthless traits of slave Russia.”(Page 206)  “In this  country, huge factories, artificial seas, canals, and hydroelectric  power stations do not serve people; they serve a State without  freedom.”(Page 207)  “skilfully employing the vocabulary of  revolution while living by the laws of tribal vengeance..”(Ibid)

    There is just one-side to Stalin, that  which fitted the ‘national principle’ of slavery. All of the  Caucasian, ‘Asiatic’ tyrant, come down to the burgeoning Soviet  ‘Statehood’. It’s as if there had never been  resistance to Stalinism from the Soviet and anti-Soviet people. We  are less than sure that this fits with Grossman’s own description  of the camp inmates who, if only a minority were actual opponents of  Stalin, numbered a great quantity of potential enemies of the  Despot, and still, in their bones nurtured the sense of freedom that  Ivan Griegoryevich stood up for. That is those in the villages who  were “overcome with joy”, and those in the Gulag who “rejoiced”  at Stalin’s death.

    These are very definitely not the last words to be said on Lenin, Stalin, the Stalinist terror, and  the Soviet State or its ultimate collapse.

    Lenin’s ‘cruelty’?  “Western Revolutionary teachings”?  The Russian ‘slave soul’?

    Perhaps not.  But, after such sadness, piercingly conveyed, can one reply to Grossman’s judgements  with  ease?

    Green Conservatism the Future of Europe’s Green Parties?

    Posted in European Left, German Left, Greens by Andrew Coates on May 13, 2011

    Winfried Kretschmann auf dem Landesparteitag in Bruchsal

    Green Conservatism in Power.

    The British Greens did well in the May local elections. It is interesting to look at how they are progressing in Germany, and what policies they have adopted to consolidate their swelling strength.

    The Greens’ electoral victory in  Baden-Württemberg has been in the European news all week (a full-page in Thursday’s Le Monde)

    Baden-Württemberg gets a Green premier – a first for one of Germany’s economic powerhouses.

    For the Greens it is a milestone: 30 years after the party was founded, they get to govern a German state for the first time, and in the normally conservative southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg no less.

    Since regional elections on March 27 the Greens have been riding on a wave of popularity. “More attention is definitely being paid to our policies, and people are more accepting of them,” the Greens’ federal manager, Steffi Lemke, said. “More people joined the party than ever before. There’s a real sense that green issues are becoming more important,” she added.

    Here.  and Here.

    It is interesting to look at the background of new State Premier, Winfried Kretschmann.

    From 1973 to 1975 he was active in the Communist League of West Germany. He later denounced this orientation towards the revolutionary positions of the German student movement  as a “political misapprehension”; today he is more ecologically and conservatively oriented (social conservatism).

    Here.

    The Green-led coalition with the SPD is then a major event. The huge  car-industry of the Land (described by Le Monde as the “real bosses of Bade-Wurtemberg) has reacted cautiously here.

    Few believe they much to fear,

    “If we want to remain successful, then we have to embrace change,” Kretschmann has said. The way forward, according to the new premier, is ‘green’ products that save resources and energy.

    “That’s the only way to stay competitive globally,” he insists. Ecology and economy must go hand in hand he says.

    The Greens want fuel-efficient cars, fewer new roads and more wind power, whereas the old CDU-led government favored nuclear energy.

    “And the interesting thing is that many companies in the state are far more advanced than the last government,” Alexander Bode said, arguing that green technology is already a way of life for many of those businesses.

    New style

    In the new coalition, the Greens have made sure that they run those ministries concerned with environmental and energy issues as well as transport and infrastructure.

    The Greens are opposed to a contentious project for a new underground main train station in Stuttgart, dubbed Stuttgart 21, which has met with fierce opposition from residents, sparking months of protests and demonstrations..

    Apart from the hysterical campaign against a train station, the Greens have benefited from post Japanese tsunami panic about nuclear power.

    It is noteworthy that on the central political and economic issue facing Europe – fiscal austerity or ‘cuts’, the Grünen, are prudent, inclining towards deficit reductions.

    AS for the future, the greens do not necessarily rely on an alliance with the SPD. Their present national leader, Cem Ozedemir, is known for his mid-1990s informal co-operation with CDU in a group dubbed the “Pizza Connection” (Here)


    Daniel Cohn-Bendit has criticised the French greens’ leftist conservatism’. Amongst other musings (to his credit Danny himself finds the Green  resistance to a train station hard to understand) he draws this conclusion from his colleagues’ success.

    Une politique écologique est possible avec des chrétiens-démocrates prêts à remettre en cause le nucléaire, à se moderniser, à faire une politique multiculturelle.

    Ecological policies are possible with Christian Democrats who are prepared to question nuclear energy, to modernise, and adopt multiculturalism Here

    Which is a good summary of the German Greens’ priorities, and no doubt of many Greens elsewhere.

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    Levellers’ Day, Burford.

    Posted in Capitalism, Culture, Labour Movement, Left by Andrew Coates on May 14, 2011

    The Tendance visited the Levellers’ Day event at Burford Oxfordshire ( a beautiful town on the threshold of the Cotswolds)  this Saturday (more information on the day here.).

    It is an important date in the labour movement calendar. For East Anglians  it could be compared to the annual Burston Rally.

    Gawain Little of Oxford Trades Council gives a good outline of the Day  in this weekend’s Morning Star,

    On the night of May 14 1649, at the height of the English revolution, Cromwell’s troops overpowered a group of 400 Levellers in a surprise attack at Burford, Oxfordshire.

    A number escaped, including their leader Captain Thompson, but the rest were imprisoned in Burford church and eventually three were shot for mutiny.

    This put an end to what was one of a number of Leveller uprisings which took place that year.

    Others were stamped out in a similar manner, the civilian leaders of the Levellers were arrested and the Leveller movement ceased to pose a serious threat to Cromwell’s rule.

    Just two years earlier, in 1647, the Levellers had been at the height of their strength.

    The movement had developed within Cromwell’s New Model Army – England’s first professional force – comprised of volunteers and with an openly political ethos.

    Inspired by the parliamentary cause and by the ideas of John Lilburne, Richard Overton and other radical pamphleteers, and faced with the reality of pay arrears and unacceptable orders from Parliament, they quickly became radicalised and organised.

    Their demands, set out in a manifesto called the Agreement of the People, included universal male suffrage, the frequent recall of Parliament, abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, and the equality of all under the law. (Continued here)

    This year Jobs and the Future of Employment were debated.

    We missed Paul Mason from the BBC. But we heard Billy Hayes (CWU Gen.Sec). He made a spirited speech, quoting Wittgenstein and John Ross, on the defence of public services and the social nature of human beings. Barbara Harris-White talked on the international economy, and the need to agitate everywhere – including “wine clubs” (unless we misheard her saying ‘whine’).

    The 400 strong* march set off through the town. Attending were people dressed as Levellers (The Unsealed Knot), Morris Dancers, local Labour parties, Oxfordshire Communists, SPGB – ‘Socialist Studies’, unions, peace campaigners,  Oxford Green Party and the more radical  ‘Green Bloc’ of the Woodcraft Folk.

    A popular mass (age 4) waved at us as we passed.

    Canon Tony Williamson, a retired worker-priest (Cowley),  made a resounding eulogy to the memory of the Levellers, particularly  those shot in Burford. He stirred the audience with a call to continue the fight for socialism, and the need to end divisions on the left.

    It was good to see an old comrade, Steve, from Oxford.

    We also saw Alan Thornett.

    The Levellers struggle for democracy and against the powerful is, as they say, of great and continuing  importance.

    Full marks to those who organised the Levellers’ Day.

     

    * We corrected this figure after reading the report in the Morning Star today.

    The Gülen Movement: an Islamic Opus Dei?

    Posted in International, Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on May 25, 2011

    Gramscianism of the Right.

    Sometimes there are real gems of analytical  reporting on Radio Four.

    There was one last night, by Edward Stourton.

    It was about the Gülen movement.

    “From Africa to Kazakhstan, a new Islamic network is attracting millions of followers – and billions of dollars. Inspired by a little-known Turkish Imam, the Gulen movement is linked to more than a thousand schools in 130 countries as well as think tanks, newspapers, TV and radio stations, universities – and even a bank. The movement’s critics claim its aim is to gain power and spread socially-conservative Islamic values around the globe. Its supporters say it’s just the expression of a modern, business-friendly Islam committed to human rights, democracy and providing education for some of the world’s poorest people.” 

    Listen and information Here.

    The leader of this movement  Fethullah Gülen claims to preach tolerance and interfaith dialogue. – site.

    He has been  ’voted’ “Top Intellectual”  in Prospect, but now faces investigation in the USA over his state-funded religious schooling network. – here.

    Wikipedia reports, under ‘Critics’, this:

    Several books have been published in Turkish since the 1990s criticizing Gülen and the Gülen movement. An increasing number of news articles address concerns about the expanding influence of the Gülen movement, both in Turkey and in other countries. Questions have arisen about the Gulen movement’s possible  involvement in the ongoing Ergenekon investigation.As Gareth H. Jenkins, Senior Fellow of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Joint Center at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in April 2011:

    From the outset, the pro-AKP media, particularly the newspapers and television channels run by the Gülen Movement such as Zaman, Today’s Zaman and Samanyolu TV, have vigorously supported the Ergenekon investigation. This has included the illegal publication of “evidence” collected by the investigators before it has been presented in court, misrepresentations and distortions of the content of the indictments and smear campaigns against both the accused and anyone who questions the conduct of the investigations.

    There have long been allegations that not only the media coverage but also the Ergenekon investigation itself is being run by Gülen’s supporters. In August 2010, Hanefi Avcı, a right-wing police chief who had once been sympathetic to the Gülen Movement, published a book in which he alleged that a network of Gülen’s supporters in the police were manipulating judicial processes and fixing internal appointments and promotions. On September 28, 2010, two days before he was due to give a press conference to present documentary evidence to support his allegations, Avcı was arrested and charged with membership of an extremist leftist organization. He remains in jail. On March 14, 2011, Avcı was also formally charged with being a member of the alleged Ergenekon gang.

    In March 2011, seven Turkish journalists were arrested, including Ahmet Sik, who was in the midst of writing a book, “Imamin Ordusu” (“The Imam’s Army”), which alleges that the Gulen movement has infiltrated the country’s security forces. As Sik was taken into police custody, he shouted, “Whoever touches it gets burned!” (referring to the Gulen movement). Upon his arrest, drafts of the book were confiscated and its possession was was banned. Sik has also been charged with being part of the Ergenekon plot.

    I cannot but help be reminded of the way Opus Dei exerts its influence.

    Or of the strategy the European Nouvelle Droite launched, called, a “Gramscianism of the Right”.

    That is a slow process of struggle for cultural hegemony, political and financial power, within civil society and the state.

    It also reminds me of the pretensions of the ‘post-Wahhabist” Jimas movement and its antennae in Ipswich. They claim to be creating a ‘community centre’ and are for ‘dialogue’ and ‘mutual understanding’.

    All these groups have one thing in common: they want the power to mould people, and control over people’s lives.

    Though doubtless their apologists would disagree - here.

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    Lenin. Lars T. Lih. Review: a ‘Heroic Scenario’.

    Posted in European Left, Labour Movement, Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on May 28, 2011


    http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31lp2ck7MZL._SL500_SS160_.jpg

     

    A ‘Heroic Scenario’. Lenin. Lars T. Lih. Reaktion Books. 2011.

    “Revolutionary centralism is a harsh, imperative and exacting principle. It often takes the guise of absolute ruthlessness in its relation to individual members, to whole groups of former associates. It is not without significance that the words ‘irreconcilable’ and ‘relentless’ are among Lenin’s favourites. It is only the most impassioned, revolutionary striving for a definite end – a striving that is utterly free from anything base or personal – that can justify such a personal ruthlessness.”

    Leon Trotsky (1)

    The collected works of Lenin, Lars Lih observes, that line his study, make up an “intellectual mausoleum comparable to the corporeal mausoleum that still stands in Moscow.” (Page 7) If Lenin’s 55 tomes are read thoroughly, it is normally by people with a focused ideological or academic mission. Some continue to treat the writings as an encyclopaedia of Marxist knowledge; others as evidence for the prosecution against Communism. More often Lenin is cited without much fore or afterthought. The “leading political philosophers of the left” in The Idea of Communism (2010) pick from his corpus to embellish their heterodox communism. Slavoj Žižek uses Lenin’s “climbing simile”, no doubt to describe his long march through the media and academy. Bruno Bosteels ponders Lenin’s “clinical-pedagogical” attacks on “leftism”. It is fashionable to refer the ‘Leninist Party’ in terms of Alain Badiou’s critique of ‘Party-State’ form and his conception of the pure ‘Communist hypothesis’. Elsewhere John Holloway has rapidly dispatched Lenin and “the theory of the vanguard party” as the “logical conclusion” of “Engels’” view of scientific socialism. This “consciousness” has to be brought by “those who have this knowledge” into the working class. (2) More direct discussion of Lenin’s far more complex stand on the relationship between Marxism, the party, and the working class, has until recently, been largely moribund.

    By contrast, Lih’s portrait of Lenin, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (2006) account of Lenin, is, even critics agree, at the very least, thorough. It is widely considered a landmark. Lih has shown himself less concerned to support his view by Lenin than to develop a contextual view of Lenin. For those of us unwilling or unable to pay Brill’s steep price for that book and have not ploughed through its dense argument, Lenin Rediscovered’s influence is nevertheless felt. Lih’s demolition of the ‘textbook’ view of Lenin, (reproduced by John Holloway) that those “in the know”, should bear Marxist knowledge to the ignorant working class, has become a reference point. Lih’s Lenin was supremely confident that the proletariat was ready for Marxism, that there would be no division between teachers and taught, and that socialism and the working class would ‘merge’. His presentation of the “broader historical data” about Lenin, Kautsky and 2nd International ‘Erfurtian’ Marxism, has an importance for any assessment of the Bolshevik’s relationship to other forms of socialism. This interpretation has also gained support from sections of the organised left. A large audience is now aware of its outline. (3)

    Now, the lucid Lenin, a “biographical essay”, has appeared and introduces Lih’s (un-italiced) Lenin directly to a wider public. Despite Lih’s claim that its portrait of Lenin is not “particularly original”, he develops out of his earlier research much more than a conventional life of a “leading cultural figure” in the Critical Lives series. It is in many respects highly novel. Lenin offers a picture of a “romantic” Lenin, a “stubborn dreamer” as Lih cites Pisarev. He held to a “heroic scenario” of how socialists will overthrow the bourgeoisie. It is not just Lenin’s relationship to Kautsky, but also Lenin’s bond to an emotional and visionary self which makes up the Life.

    But what came afterwards? How did Lenin, emotionally wedded to the importance of political freedom for socialism during most of his life, come, under his leadership of the Soviet Government, to deny political and social liberty? Lih considers that Lenin had an instrumental attitude towards democracy – that it is a means towards socialism. But here the difficulties begin. Lih compares the pre-great War Russian Social Democratic Party’s (RSDLP) division into two principal factions – Bolsheviks and Mensheviks – to a Buffy the Vampire Slayer   in Season Five. The plot there revolved around Ben, a human, coexisting in the same body with Glorificus, a demon goddess (Page 111). As the RSDLP could be seen as containing two clashing persons, many consider that within Lenin there is a similar conflict within his frame: between the humane, if, as Trotsky indicated, “harsh” and “relentless”, supporter of workers’ democratic power, and the demiurge willing to create socialism at any anti-democratic cost. The post 1912 formalisation of the split in Russian socialism led eventually to the death of the Mensheviks; in Buffy both incarnations die. How did Lenin’s “dream”, invested in this organisation, contribute to a conquering political structure that singularly failed to build democratic socialism? The triumphant faction of the Russian socialist movement was consigned, as is often the case for monsters in Buffy, to Hell, that is to Stalin. What role did the tool used to achieve the victory of the Bolshevik Party, contribute to the eventual triumph of the bureaucratic autocrat?

    Althusser once asserted that Lenin never offered a full theoretical account of his political practice. His texts were for “direct political use.” (4) Yet Lenin’s works (writings and acts), as presented by Lih, offer in a practical state material that suggests a real difficulty with democracy, and the nature of his ‘heroic’ projections, at the core of his politics. Trotsky flagged up Lenin’s “revolutionary centralism” as if it had purely personal results; it had effects on the Bolshevik political practice in government about which we still shudder. This essay will deal largely with these topics with a present-day bearing, and not cover the already burgeoning disputes over the historical details of Lih’s writings, which would require a much greater familiarity with the material than is available here. The ‘worry about democracy’ is, for left political activists, as will be seen, the most important issue that Lenin raises, and only begins to respond to.

    Biographical Narratives.

    “The aim of the present biographical essay is to keep the focus on both Ulyanov the flesh-and-blood personage and his rhetorical creation, N. Lenin.” (Page 13) Lenin’s chapters are laid out as if Lenin’s actions were part of an “enacted narrative.” (more…)

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    Marine Le Pen Analysed by Caroline Fourest.

    Posted in Conspiracies, European Left, Fascism, French Left, French Politics by Andrew Coates on June 1, 2011

    Caroline Fourest is a feminist, a fierce defender of French secularism, critic of Islamism,  and a ferocious opponent of the Front National.

    Caroline Fourest  has just published, with Fiammetta Venner, what promises to be the French political book of the Summer, on Marine Le Pen.

    On France-Inter this morning (see Here.) she made some important points.

    • Marine Le Pen’s ‘modernising’ turn does not mean a break with the extreme right. Her closest advisers are from the ‘third way’ nationalists. That is those who advance the concept of a ‘communitarian’ nationalism.
    • They are anti-globalisers, and even appear anti-capitalist (drawing imagery from the left). This side of the ‘revolutionary’right remains linked to an idea of a fight against those conspiring ’behind’ globalisation – guess who. 
    • They can be concerned with identity – agitating against non-European immigration.
    • They are attempting to appropriate French secularism, while retaining a  strong bond to French Catholic culture.

    As Fourest points out this is full of contradictions.

    Here are some.

    To be secularist, but to be strongly Christian, to support the French republic, but to defend the heritage of the French far-right which loathes the French Revolution, to be nationalist, yet in favour of European civilisation, to be anti-capitalist but to support French enterprises, and, above all, to be ‘revolutionary’ but respectable.

     

    Naturally one would need to go a lot deeper into the social basis of Front National support (at present outriding the Socialists, and the left). That the FN may be the ‘first party’ of the French working class, and certainly has strong roots in the popular classes, as well as in more traditional lower middle and conservative bourgeois circles,  has deeper causes than Marine’s rhetorical turn and the talents of her publicists. But Fourest make a good step in the right direction by not reducing it, as British observers, particularly those on the left, do to ‘Islamophobia’.

    This morning Fourest referred to Le Pen, père, and his liking for the Iranian regime.

    On s’en doutait…

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    Les Maoïstes. Christophe Bourseiller, Review and Reflections.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Marxism by Andrew Coates on June 3, 2011

     

     
     

     

    Reflections on Les maoïstes. La folle histoire des gardes rouges français. Christophe Bourseiller. 2nd Edition. Plon. 2008

     

    “Soutien à contre-courant des Khmers Rouges contre l’invasion vietnamienne.” Support, against the trend, for the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese invasion. 10 ans de Maoïsme. UCFML . 1981.

     

    “As for us, the UCFML, I’d say that we were a centre-left organisation, in the sense always advocated by Mao, who described himself as a centrist.” Alain Badiou. 2008.

     

    “Contradiction is present in the development of all things; it permeates the process of development of each thing from beginning to end. Mao Tse-Tung. On Contradiction. (1)

     

    Maoists, or as admirers of the Chinese Communist Party leader called themselves, Marxist-Leninists (M-L), were an important political current on the European far-left during the late sixties and ‘seventies. So tangibly present then, and so absent today Christophe Bourseiller begins by asking if they were images in a dream. It’s hard to recall that groups like the Parti du Travail Belge (PTB) or the Socialistische Partij (SP) in Holland, or that some of the most conservative individuals in the German Greens, had M-L origins, and intensely admired Chinese Communism. As a public movement Maoism, even its less personalised M-L form, is, apart from some small associations of migrant workers, and traces in the deep obscurity of Alain Badiou’s metaphysics, effectively dead.

    The most famous disappearing act of all was French Maoism. Long gone are the days when a young British leftist could find, with excitement, a copy of the daily Humanité Rouge in a rural French town kiosk. Those who were engaged in the meteoric rise and fall of Gallic Marxist-Leninism have not been silent about their experiences. But their accounts, marked by the precious gift of hindsight, are very partial. How can one write about Maoism when one has not been a Maoist? shouted one woman to Bourseiller after a debate on France Culture after the first edition of his study in 1996. Extremely lucidly, is the reply. Les Maoists presents their history from the standpoint of the “réalité multiple” of the period and the different groups following the Great Helmsman’s line. That is more than needed. The Maoists, and their opponents, were split into more rival ideological city-fortresses than China Miéville’s Besźel and Ul Qoma (The City and the City. 2009). Bourseiller is not afraid to open breaches in the narrative former Maoists have constructed, and to observe what many have ‘unseen’. He sheds light on what remains, for the non-Maoist left, a political enigma to this day.

    French Maoism originated in the crosshatched world of French orthodox Communism, as supporters of an orthodox pro-Chinese current that broke with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF). In 1963 the 25 point letter from the Chinese Communist Party attacking the ‘revisionist’ USSR’s leaders gave heart to those, with counterparts across the world Communist movement, who hankered for a purer ‘Marxism-Leninism’ than post-Stalinist Russia offered. Non-party M-L circles began to appear. Some stayed for a long time in parallel lines within the PCF. The process of forming new M-L parties so far resembles that in many other countries, that is, of ‘first wave’ Marxist-Leninism, such as the ancestors of the Communist Party of Britain (M-L) nostalgic for the certainties of the Comintern and the Soviet fatherland, who found an anchor in Beijing. But Reg Birch never ran up against the PCF.  The French  Party tried with exceptional violence (that is physical attacks) to suppress any public manifestation of pro-Chinese communism. In 1967 a “véritable armée” of PCF thugs attacked a meeting at the Mutualité of the newly formed Mouvement Communiste Français (M-L). The MCFML did not crumble but remained

    But the new political current’s cultural impact had been growing, helped by a degree of sympathy from less politicised Sinophiles. In the mid-6os, younger intellectuals like Robert Linhart, close to the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, developed M-L ideology in the Cahiers Marxiste-Leniniste. The Chinese Cultural Revolution profoundly impressed this ‘second wave’. Their Marxism mixed Mao and Althusser, the Little Red Book and Lire le Capital. But efforts to wage factional battles inside the student Communist organisation, the UEC, ran into a brick wall. Red Guards were not welcome. The UEC excluded them. They set up new organisations, such as the Union de Jeuenesses Communistes (M-L), UJC (M-L) – 1967, that soon aimed to expand beyond the student milieu. Theoretical practice (unlike the British journal of that name) would never to be purely academic, but an arm of political struggle. (more…)

    Blue Labour, The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox. A Very Conservative Socialism.

    Posted in British Govern, European Left, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Marxism by Andrew Coates on June 11, 2011

    http://steliq.com/c/lm/3/32/22353181_polpara.jpgBlue Labour and the Politics of the Good Life.

    The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox. Editor: Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Rutherford, Marc Stears, and Stuart White. (E-Book available here)

    “Every age and generation must be free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man, neither has any generation property in the generations which are to follow.”

    The Rights of Man, Tom Paine (1791.)

    Across Europe it’s said that the left is becoming obsolete. Gérard Courtis in Le Monde (7.06.11) cites the Italian writer, Rafaele Simone. Simone argues that there are “courants profounds”, deep trends, rightwards that are washing across our countries. A series of election defeats (the latest in Portugal) seems to confirm this. Right-wing governments, offering order, tradition, authority and security, are in control of most European states. Although there is protest against their polices, a revolt against fiscal austerity, it’s conservatives and xenophobic populists from the far-right who getting more votes, not the centre or radical left.

    For the French think-tank Terra Nova, the left has to reconnect with mass constituencies by giving up its ‘elitist’ cultural liberalism. Globalisation encourages world economic and cultural turmoil and an urge for security and traditional identity that the left should capture. Parties on the centre-left ought to build on feelings of popular solidarity, not abstract equality, and meet fears of a social breakdown. In Britain Blue Labour also wishes to reconnect with ordinary people and involve them in a “common story”. Its message appears to bring together social conservatism with criticism of one globalising force, finance capital. John Cruddas talks of the “most destructive period of capitalism since the 1930s”. He claims that one of the peculiarities of “English socialism” lies in its “love of home, of place and the local” (New Statesman.4.04.11). Unlike, no doubt, all other European socialisms.

    Maurice Glasman stands for Blue Labour, a “very conservative socialism” in the mould suggested by Terra Nova. He stands for the family, talking to people’s fear of change, and “re-engaging” with Labour’s history. But he is very different to the French promoter of the theme of security, Manuel Valls (a lonely Gallic admirer of Toy Blair and the Third Way in his time). Valls is tough on criminality but continues to ‘modernise’ economic policy in a market direction. Glasman explains last year’s electoral rout in terms of the Labour modernists’ embrace of the City…” The 2008 Banking crisis unarmed and disoriented them. What good reforms they initiated were top-down, and gave power to managers not the people. “Both Blair and Brown were recklessly naïve about finance capitalism and the City of London and relentlessly managerial in their methods.” A ‘new revisionism’ has to move beyond the Third Way by ditching its embrace of “unmediated” globalisation and its use of the state to achieve ‘abstract’ ideals of justice and equality.

    Glasman and his co-Editors of The Labour Tradition summarise the need to change Labour policy. People’s customary way of life is threatened by global finance. But New Labour denied not just state authority in the economy, but weakened it in social policy. “A corporatist, localist, federal and institutional form of politics came to be replaced by a liberal and consumerist one that ceased generating the leadership necessary to sustain a democratic movement”. To win back power, we have to promote “strong forms of a common life”. “Labour will need to recover its role as defender of society, and bring capital under national and global democratic control.”

    Glasman writes that, “Democratic politics …is the way citizens come together to protect the people and places that they love from danger.” As a shield, Glasman offers older associative Labour traditions, of “reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity”. This grass-roots politics will, he hopes, renew Labour’s underlying “ethical vision of a humane society”, which he calls the Good Life. (Observer. 24.04.11)

    Blue Labour’s message is largely determined by the Labour Party’s agenda in 2011. There is widespread anxiety about the party’s apparent lack of political and ideological direction. The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox offers some signposts intended to steer its direction. A turn towards a degree of communal Labour tradition is flagged. We rapidly realise its Communitarian direction, that is a call for a stronger moral order and “embedded” social bonds – the ‘blue’ in the current’s name. Yet this conservatism is not a celebration of those in Labour’s history who explicitly adapted to patriotism, monarchism and imperialism – that is the real Tory-socialism of the past. But Maurice Glasman and his fellows base the Good Life, as the Whig Edmund Burke put it, on “those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born’. To Blue Labour the rights of the people are constrained by the heritage of the past, the present, and the possible future. We cannot, as the author of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791) stated, build a political constitution “à priori” in line with “metaphysic rights”. But does Blue Labour really believe that we are part of the “great primaeval contract of eternal society”? As Tom Paine’s great objection goes, “It is the living, and not the dead, who have to be accommodated.” (more…)

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    The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, A New Hearing.

    Posted in European Left, Labour Movement, Marxism by Andrew Coates on June 17, 2011

    The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg. Edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza. Verso. 2011.

    “Rosa Luxemburg deserves a new hearing in light of the complex problems facing efforts at social transformation today.” Peter Hudis signals that this collection of 230 letters is a “companion volume” to Luxemburg’s Complete Works. This will include many texts previously unavailable in English. Why is this the first to go to press? To appreciate Luxemburg fully, we need, Hudis states, to “get to know her way of seeing the world”. This is not possible “if one lacks access to what is found in her correspondence.”

    Rosa Luxemburg had not only an exceptional life as a cosmopolitan Polish Jew who made original contributions to Marxist theory. She was at the eye of the storms that swept early 20the century socialism. A figure of weight in the battles over ‘revisionism’ inside the German SPD (German Social Democrats), the powerhouse of the European left, she kept close to the Polish socialist movement. Luxemburg’s commentaries on disputes within the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic Labour Party) remain key documents. Participating in the Socialist International Luxemburg had a unique worldwide viewpoint, which influenced her studies of global capitalism. A staunch opponent of militarism and the Great War she broke with the SPD when it took a patriotic line. Her calls for active resistance to the war landed her 3 years and 4 months in gaol.

    After leaving the SPD Luxemburg joined with a range of socialist dissidents in the Independent Socialist Party (USPD). In 1918, free, she threw herself into the Spartakus-led uprisings, despite strong reservations about the isolation of the radical workers’ council movement. While criticising the Soviet Union’s anti-democratic course she was a founder member of the German Communist Party (KPD) inspired by the Russian Revolution. Moments of ‘dual power’ in the country were followed by a savage repression endorsed by the right-wing of the SPD. On January the 11th 1919 Rosa wrote of “light and shade”, of a “fresh new generation” sometimes “half-baked”, with a “one-dimensional radicalism”. Yet the “movement is developing splendidly”.

    On the 15th she, with Karl Leibknecht, were murdered at the hands of a military death squad, tacitly covered by social democrat Ministers in the new republican government. The young Communist Party declared, “Between the Social Democrats and the German Communists lies the blood of Luxemburg and Leibknecht.”

    A Many-Sided Individual.

    Annelies Laschitza outlines the complex background to the present edition of Luxemburg’s letters. Apart from disputes over publication rights, Luxemburg’s legacy was disputed from her death onwards. Stalin, inevitably, charged her with errors. German Communists, reluctant to lose a martyr of the revolution, treated her a “bloodless, petrified icon”. Brought together now, after different editions, the letters remain incomplete. It is certain that many of her mails were scattered and lost (or destroyed); some may remain undiscovered or lie unrevealled.

    The present book is deeply personal. It shows a “many–sided individual.” That is someone whose “inner musical and lyrical quality was always inseparable from her ethical and political engagement as a public figure”. As Laschitza indicates, Luxemburg’s letters blend together different aspects of her life. They are not winnowed out for their political relevance, nor do they contain, as the Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence does, passages that explore in depth her theoretical investigations. The politics of early 20th century socialism are part of her being; her private existence echoes their effects, rather than being submerged. (more…)

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    New Religious Politics: How Secularists Got Lost.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Islam, Islamism, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on June 24, 2011
     

    A New Phase in the Politics of Religion: How Secularists Got Lost.

    For left secularists few events can have been more depressing than Marine Le Pen’s announcement that her far-right party, the Front National (FN), was now the defender of French laïcité. The apparent conversion of the youngest daughter of France’s 1905 Law on the Separation of Church and State has not been the only saddening story. The British left (with the exception of Solidarity) and the liberal Guardian ignored one of the most important trials of acts of  religious hatred in Britain for years. In May  four Muslims were given lengthy sentences for a vicious attack with a metal rod and bricks on East London teacher Gary Smith. The reason? In religious instruction he, an unbeliever, was giving lessons about Islam to Muslim girls.

    Across Europe the politics of religion are changing. Attempts are being made to single out Islam. From Denmark and Holland, to Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Italy, populist parties claiming to defend national identity have targeted the followers of the Qur’an. The most famous symbol of this trend is in France. The President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has banned the public wearing of the face-veil, while his “positive” secularism encourages the emergence of a ‘French’ Islam. Religious issues are, in this way, increasingly politicised and immersed in the noxious discourse of national identity.

    Here all mainstream parties pride themselves on tolerance towards the outward display of Muslim belief. Only would-be imitators of the Continental far-right, that is parts of the media and the English Defence League, seize on Islam. But instead of offering an anti-racist response, the Liberal-Conservative Coalition has adopted some of Sarkozy’s integrationalist policies. The ‘Prevent’ programme, designed to combat Islamic extremism, has been reshaped. Its aim now is to draw Muslims into a state defined ‘post-multiculturalism’, demanding that they accept British “mainstream values”. The spying on ‘extremists’  is deeply undemocratic, as can be seen by its use against left-wing radicals  – here. Political attention to religion has extended further. Ed Miliband has appealed to Blue Labour whose ideal of the ‘Good Life’ is equally patriotic and draws heavily on faith claims to virtue.

    The new politics of religion places great importance on the role of the State in fostering religious institutions. Not surprisingly many religious figures welcome recognition of their authority. Demands on public policy, from the evangelical Mothers’ Union report on the sexualisation of children, to efforts to curb abortion rights, are increasingly listened to. There is a continued creep towards making it impossible to offend religious sensibilities. David Cameron’s Localism is much more serious than his already shop-soiled rhetoric about the Big Society suggests. It will give devout groups, as charitable institutions, a fundamental role in social and community life bypassing democratic control.

    The Archbishop of Canterbury’s protests against the Coalition’s polities would have had more weight if religious organisations were not plundering State coffers to set up Academies and Free Schools. As would the left’s voice, if it recognised that acts such as the assault on Gary Smith demonstrate that religious intolerance is a problem. Instead the left places its hope in integrating faith groups through their own version of multiculturalism. Ken Livingstone’s efforts in this direction, which give prominence to fighting Islamophobia and binding faith communities in ‘progressive coalitions’, are widely followed. They have the effect of paralysing the left’s response to the Coalition’s faith agenda.

    Secularist Failures.

    A.G.Grayling’s self-interested support for the cause of private University education is an illustration of the limits of New Atheism. Its renewed criticism of sacred books and doctrines is to be welcomed. It has often been done with great verve – to the annoyance of the pious. Since the days of Charles Bradlaugh and Colonel Ingersoll, not to mention the writings of French anti-clericals, such the novelist Anatole France, this has not been done so well. But it has not inspired any great intellectual renewal, still less a New Enlightenment. More importantly, the politics of the New Atheists are, like Grayling, flawed. The New College of Humanities looks increasingly like it will resemble the privileged niche that the majority of British secularists are trapped in. (more…)

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    Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste: Close to Implosion?

    Phillipe Pontou: NPA Candidate.

    Libération reports, under the heading, NPA au bord de l’implosion,  Here

    C’est l’histoire d’un crash. Celui d’un parti (alors dénommé LCR) qui au sortir de 2007 se rêvait, avec 4,08%, en Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA), grande force à gauche du PS. Mais près de trois ans après sa fondation, le NPA file droit se fracasser sur la présidentielle.

    Samedi à l’université de Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine), la formation d’extrême gauche a choisi son candidat à la présidentielle : Philippe Poutou, 44 ans, ouvrier et syndicaliste chez les Ford de Blanquefort (Gironde). 53% de «pour» : ultime signe d’un parti divisé, au bord de l’implosion.

    It’s the tale of the crash, of a party (whose old name was the LCR), that at the end of 2007, with 4.8% of the Presidential vote, became the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste  (NPA) and dreamt of becoming a real force to the left of the Parti Socialiste. But nearly three years after its creation the party is tearing itself apart over the Presidential elections.

    At the University of Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine) the far-left organisation chose its candidate for the President -  Philippe Poutou, a trade unionist at Ford’s Blanquefort Plant  (Gironde). 53% voted “for” him – the ultimate sign of a divided party.

    The paper reports that feminists were not happy that Myriam Martin was not chosen.

    Gêné. Les féministes hurlent au scandale d’avoir choisi un homme alors que deux femmes porte-parole ont été nommées en avril. Candidate potentielle mais victime du «tout sauf», l’une d’elles, Myriam Martin, sort de l’amphi en retenant ses larmes après son intervention.

    Flustered and  embarrassed, NPA feminists shouted that it was scandalous to pick a man, when two women spokespeople were nominated in April. One of them, Myriam Martin, victim of an ‘anybody but’ (her) campaign left the amphitheatre after her intervention, holding back her tears.

    More information: (from NPA’s site

     In February during their Montreuil Congress the NPA indicated that it had  6.000 membersm but only  4.500 were fully paid-up. At its launch in 2009  the NPA (formed from the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (3.000 members), claimed  9.000.

    “3.100 activists participated in the vote for the June Conference.  50, 20%  backed ”texte A” supported by Olivier  Besancenot and the spokesperson  Christine Poupin (now Candidate). NOte: This refsues any negotations with the Front de Gaauche.

    Backed notably by the other official spokesperson,  Myriam Martin as well as Pierre-François Grond, the “texte B”,, which advocated discussions with the Front de gauche, against the line of “texte A”, got 40, 20%. 

    The  ”texte C” for a real  ”pôle révolutionnaire”,  received 5, 75%  local platforms,  3, 85%.

     From Here

    Philippe Poutou’s Declaration Here.

    Opinion Polls (before the weekend) put a NPA’s candidate at  1% of the vote.

    The Front de Gauche Candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon got around 7%.

    Nadia El Fani: Tunisian Islamists Attack Film Showing and Artistic Freedom Group.

    Posted in Islam, Islamism, North Africa by Andrew Coates on June 30, 2011

    Extrait de l'affiche du film de Nadia El Fani 

    Recent news from Tunisia is not good.

    Marianne reports,

    …un commando a attaqué le dimanche 26 juin, au cœur de Tunis, la salle Habib Belhedi où on projetait «  Ni Allah, ni maitre » le film de la réalisatrice Nadia El Fani, depuis longtemps cible de menaces que Marianne2 avait évoqué il y a un mois. La jeune femme avait osé déclarer qu’elle était athée dans une interview à Hannibal TV. Le gang de jeunes barbus a donc saccagé la rencontre organisée dans le cadre de la manifestation « Touche pas à mes créateurs », qui se tenait précisément pour protester contre les violences déjà exercées contre des artistes. Le collectif «  Lam Echaml », à l’origine de cette initiative, regroupe 80 associations qui défendent la liberté d’expression et de création. Les agresseurs se sont montrés très violents. Aux cris de «  La Tunisie est un Etat islamique ! » et scandant « Le peuple veut que la laïcité soit châtiée comme un crime ! », ils ont aspergé les participants de lacrymogène et molesté plusieurs personnes en les traitant de « mécréants ». Here.

    “Nadia El Fani has already been the target of threats, as reported in Marianne last month. On Sunday the 26th of June a commando attacked the projection of her  film, “Ni Allah Ni Maitre’, at the Habib Belhedi hall in the heart of Tunis. The gang of young, bearded, men smashed up the showing, which was taking place as part of a series of events held by ’ ‘Touche pas à mes créateurs  (Hands off Creative People) - a group set up to protest against…violent attacks on artists. The organisers of this initiative, the collective Lam Echaml, brings together 80 associations which defend freedom of expression. The attackers were extremely violent. Shouting “Tunisia is an Islamic State!” and “The people want secularism punished as a crime!” they sprayed the audience with tear-gas and called those present “infidels”.”

    Following this vicious assault, Nadia El Fani has changed the name of the film to  “Laïcité, inch’Allah“.(More information here)

    There was a report in le Monde yesterday which said that the Islamist party Ennahdha did not agree with this assault. But they also denounced the “provocation” of demanding free speech for Nadie El Fani – who has declared herself to be an atheist.

     

    The film comes out in France in September.

     

    We hope it will be shown in Britain.

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    Nadia El Fani, Caroline Fourest on the Swallows and the Birds of Prey.

    Posted in Free Speech, Islam, Islamism, North Africa by Andrew Coates on July 3, 2011

    Nadia El Fani Receives le Prix international de la laïcité 

    A particularly moving article by Caroline Fourest in le Monde yesterday,

    Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps. Mais quand, le printemps venu, quelques rapaces menacent de couper la tête des hirondelles, en toute impunité, cela ne sent pas vraiment l’été. Plutôt le retour à l’hiver.

    L’une des hirondelles s’appelle Nadia El Fani. Elle vient d’obtenir le Prix international de la laïcité pour son travail. Des films qui bousculent et font réfléchir. Le dernier en date, Ni Allah ni maître, plaide pour la liberté de conscience en Tunisie. Il rend fou les intégristes. Tout comme sa déclaration : ‘Je ne crois pas en Dieu.’ Depuis, la réalisatrice est menacée de mort. On promet de couper sa ‘tête de truie’. Elégante référence à son crâne rasé, qui n’est pas le signe d’une lubie d’artiste mais de son combat contre le cancer. Autant dire qu’elle n’a pas l’intention de se laisser intimider par une poignée de fanatiques rêvant de la précipiter dans l’au-delà.

    One swallow does not make the summer (spring in French). But when spring comes and a few birds of prey threaten to bite off the swallows’ heads, it feels more like but the return of winter than the start of summer.

    One of the swallows is called Nadia El Fani. She has just won the International Secular Prize for her work. Films  that shake people up and make them think. The most recent,  Ni Allah ni maître, is a plea for the freedom of conscience, in Tunisia. It has enraged Islamists. As has her declaration ”I do not believe in God”. From that point on she has received death threats. They have promised to cut her “sow’s head” off. This elegant reference is  to her shaven head - which is not a sign of artistic whim but the result of her cancer. That’s as much as to say that she no intention of letting herself be intimidated by a handful of fanatics who dream of sending her to the afterlife.

    Les mêmes appellent au meurtre du réalisateur Nouri Bouzid, ex-opposant au régime de Ben Ali et auteur de films qui ont marqué le cinéma tunisien. Le 6 avril, il a été agressé en pleine rue par un fanatique qui l’a frappé à la tête avec une barre de fer en criant ’Allah Akbar’. Il s’en est tiré avec quelques points de suture. Ces opérations commandos s’ajoutent aux raids menés contre des femmes dont les tenues vestimentaires sont jugées non conformes à la ‘morale islamique’, et à toute une série d’intimidations inquiétantes mais prévisibles.

    The same Islamists that is, who have called for the murder of the film producer, Nouri Bouzid. He is a former opponent of Ben Ali (dictator), and his works have had a major impact on Tunisian Cinema. On the 6th of April he was attacked in the street. A fanatic shouting ‘Allah Akbar’ hit in the head with an iron bar. Nouri has recovered, after stitches. This operation should  be placed alongside the growing assaults against women whose dress is judged not in accordance with ‘Islamic’ morality’. That is, as part of a growing series of worrying acts of – foreseeable – intimidation.

    On se doutait que des fanatiques, souvent fraîchement revenus de leur exil londonien, tenteraient de confisquer la révolution. Eux qui n’ont pas voulu la fin de l’autoritarisme par soif de liberté, mais pour le remplacer par une autre dictature… Les menaces contre Nadia El Fani constituent un test, parmi d’autres, pour savoir si la vitalité de la société tunisienne saura résister.

    We expected that such fanatics, often recently returned from their London exile, would attempt to take over the Revolution. Their opposition to authoritarianism did not stem from a thirst of freedom but the wish to create a new dictatorship. The threats against Nadia El Fani are a test, amongst others, which will show how far and how strongly Tunisian society is capable of resisting them.  More Here.

    Islamists (Ennahda) Attack Tunisian Left Meeting.

    Posted in Free Speech, Human Rights, Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on July 4, 2011

    IslamistsTry to  Attack Tunisian Left Democrats.

    Ennhada Islamists yesterday attacked a Left and democrats’  Meeting in Tunisia. The army and the security forces had to intervene. Mohamed Kilani, general secretary of the Left Socialist Party, indicated that a group of individuals, members of the Islamic liberation party and Ennahada had tried, on Saturday  to prevent the first public meeting of the Pôle démocratique moderniste held in the open air in Kélibia. He stated that the army and security forces and prevented individuals shouting hostility to the “slogans” of democracy and modernity entering the site of the meeting.

    Mohamed Kilani, secrétaire général du Parti Socialiste de Gauche (PSG), a indiqué qu’un groupe d’individus « appartenant au parti de la libération islamique et au mouvement Ennahda », a tenté, samedi, de faire échouer la première réunion du Pôle démocratique moderniste, tenue au théâtre de plein-air à Kélibia.

    M. Kilani, un des membres du Pôle, a déclaré que « des unités de l’armée et de la sécurité nationales sont parvenues à empêcher ces individus à accéder au siège de la réunion. Ces derniers ont organisé une marche dénonçant « les slogans » de liberté et de modernité levés dans la réunion du pôle démocratique moderniste. »

    Here.

    The groups supporting the meeting are,

    “Le Pôle démocratique moderniste comprend « le Mouvement Ettajdid », « Le Parti socialiste de Gauche », « Al Wifak Al-Joumhouri », « Le Mouvement de la Citoyenneté et de la Justice », « La Voie du Centre », « Le Parti du Travail Patriote Démocratique », « Le Parti de la Réforme et Développement », « Mouvement des patriotes démocrates », « Le Front populaire unioniste » et « le Parti de l’avant-garde arabe démocratique ».

    More information (in French): Here.

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    Andrea Hill and Suffolk Smugness.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, Feminism, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on July 6, 2011

    Smugness Incarnate.

    “Sensible chaps and sensible chapesses are back in charge.”

    Nigel Pickover and Paul Geater didn’t say these exact words in yesterday’s Evening Star. But that was the meaning behind the acres of print they devoted to the departure of Suffolk County Council’s Chief Executive Andrea Hill.

    Ipswich MP Benedict Gummer said “there had been major concerns about the way the politicians at the county council had regulated Mrs Hill.” He continued: “I am confident that (new leader) Mark Bee will find the right person and will work with that person to lead the new council in a new direction.” Central Suffolk and North Ipswich MP Dr Dan Poulter added, “Now the new political leadership can move on and appoint a new chief executive to take things forward in the future.” (Here.)

    On the Blogs prominent  Ipswich Conservative, and Holy-Roller, A Riverside View, was more forthright. “The  Witch is gone!” he rejoiced.

    Others concentrate on the power, conditions and pay of a new Chief Executive , as Ipswich Spy suggest.

    The direction this could lead to is seen here,

    The salary of the next chief executive of Suffolk County Council could be tied to the £142,000 earned by Prime Minister David Cameron.

     New government rules mean that any council appointments at a greater salary than the Prime Minister have to be approved by the Department of Communities and Local Government.

    And that gives MPs the chance to have a say on how high the salary should be. (From Here.)

    Andrew Grant Adamson, more thoughtfully suggests that it now time to take stock of Andrea Hill’s reign - here.

    We would begin by observing that the present changes will not stop the cuts programme, or prevent the fundamental shift in power away from elected authorities to private companies and local oligarchies that Andrea Hill began.

    Jeremy Pembroke (gone), his Cabinet team (still in place), and the full-time officers (still largely in place) who backed the New Strategic Direction, were players.

    It is absurd to say that Hill had a unique conservative vision.

    They shared and still share it.

    They only paused when faced by the massive disruption that threatened to engulf them when they pushed it too quickly.

    Andrea Hill became a human shield (like the Coalition’s Liberal Democrats).

    As Alasdair Ross suggests, the main thrust continues.

    That is, we would say:

    • The search for ways of hiring staff at lower wages, fewer rights, and without Council responsibility for pensions - will continue.
    • Libraries are still facing 30% cuts and a transfer to a Public Interest Company – a model whose record in Glasgow shows a potential to be a disaster for services and public culture.
    • The Records Office may be changed into a ‘Trust’.
    • Other parts of the County Council’s administrative functions may also be hived off, either through direct private contracting or by handing them over to various ‘self-run’ organisations accountable only indirectly to the wider public
    • Closures (as in care-homes) and straightforward privatisation of other services will continue.

    Divestment, giving responsibilities to unelected people (‘localism’), are part of a major turn in national government. This is called the ‘market state’. The state hands over responsibility (and tax revenues) to private bodies.

    Most are large-scale companies who buy the right to make a profit out of public services. Others are ‘not-for-profit’ grousp with similar executive models, and, increasingly, similar slanted pay rewards for their executives. A few are ‘voluntary’ or charitable groups , Many of these have little internal democracy. Very few give staff and, above all, unions, many rights.

    None are directly accountable to electors.

    All tend to concentrate power in their hands, not the public’s.

    This is not a Suffolk, but a National Tory and Liberal Agenda.

    Just to cite one example: largely unnoticed new planning rules will by-pass councils and planning officers and put decisions over new building in the hands of ‘local residents’.

    This NIMBY Charter is going to be the next big issue.

    “Son of Strategic Direction” in Suffolk promises to continue Andrea Hill’s plans.

    It is, perhaps, as Pickover and Geater would wish: business for the chaps as usual.

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    Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste turns to Sectarian Sniping.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Front de Gauche, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on July 8, 2011
    Photothèque du mouvement social/Sandino

    Devant plusieurs milliers de personnes, le Front de Gauche a tenu son meeting de lancement de campagne, le 30 juin dernier.

    The Front de Gauche held its first big public meeting last week.

    Their candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon was at the centre of this well-attended event.

    The NPA report in Tous est à Nous! has just appeared. Here.

    It begins with an informative description of the rally,  its political make-up and background.

    But, after duly noting the position of their former comrades of the Gauche Unitaire, the author descends to this, describing the speeches,

    des formules institutionnelles abstraites sur la vie République, la révolution par les urnes, pacifique et démocratique.

    “Abstract and institutional formulas on the life of the Republic, peaceful and democratic revolution by the ballot box.”

    Pas une seule proposition qui impliquerait la mobilisation des salariés et des couches populaires. Pas une seule allusion au Parti socialiste, à son programme, à la question des alliances et aux éventuels accords de gouvernement au cours de la longue allocution du leader du Parti de Gauche. Il faudra bien pourtant, pendant cette campagne électorale, que ce débat ait lieu ! Les tirades gaulliennes qui semblent être au cœur de la stratégie de communication de Mélenchon ne pourront l’éluder. Le NPA et son candidat Philippe Poutou ne manqueront pas de revenir, en toute fraternité, sur ces questions stratégiques décisives.

    Not a single demand to mobilise the workers and popular masses. During the long address of the FdG leader there was not a single reference to the Parti Socialiste,  to its programme, to its alliances, and to a possible agreement with the government. Yet during the long electoral campaign this debate will have to happen ! The Gaullist air  which appears to be the communication style of  Mélenchon cannot cover this up. The NPA and its candidate Philippe Poutou, will certainly come back, in all fraternity, on these decisive strategic issues.

    One has the feeling that before editing the author had added !!!!! after every sentence.

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    Tony Cliff’s Appalling Article on Puerto Rico Finally Published!

    Posted in Imperialism, Sectarianism, SWP by Andrew Coates on July 10, 2011

     

    I attach the article about which you seem so curious.
     
    It is appalling not because of its content but because virtually all the sources cited are 20 years out of date; it was clearly cobbled up in the British Museum during a hurried afternoon.
     
    Mike Pearn will put it on the MIA when he has time.
     
    Best wishes,
     
    Ian Birchall

    Puerto Rico

     

    By L Miguel

    The shooting of the five members of the American House of representatives by Puerto Rican terrorists a few weeks ago drew attention to the plight of the small American colony of Puerto Rico. The shooting was an expression of the revolt against United States imperialism, that rules over this downtrodden country.

    The United States conquered Puerto Rico in 1898, and it thus became one of its direct colonies. After more than 50 years of rule, American imperialism has shown clearly what disservice it can do to the people under its iron heel.

    The country is on the whole agricultural, producing in the main sugar, coffee and tobacco. The overwhelming majority of the agriculturalists are wage earners who own nothing. They live in one – and sometimes two roomed cabins which have no beds, but only pallets, folding cots or hammocks a chair or two and a rough table. Their monotonous diet consist of rice and beans and some dried cod fish and coffee. The position is so bad that the American nutritionist N C Shermann, assigned to study the island’s dietary situation in 1930, could state that he had never seen any place in the world “where the profits of a rich land go into so few pockets (largely those of absentees) and the people who work for the land are not kept so poor in money, but also as inadequately fed and housed..” (J de Castro, geography of Hunger, 1952, p. 110). The agricultural workers do not own a cow or even a goat, but usually have a few fowls or a pig. The working day is twelve to fifteen hours a day.

    Besides agricultural workers there are peasants with tiny plots. Of 53,315 farms in the country, 51,157 have an area of between ¼ and 3 cuerdas (a cuerda = 0.97 of an acre). Such midget farms are certainly not enough to make a living out of.

    The large majority of the land is owned by big United States companies which own an average of 40,000 to 50,000 cuerdas. In 1931 absentee companies produced 59 per cent of all the sugar, whole sugar represented 67 per cent of the agricultural wealth of the country. Thus “they control, in sugar alone, 40 per cent of the agricultural wealth.” ( B W and J W Diffie, Porto Rico: A Broken Pledge, New York, 1931. P. 53).

    American capital controls not only agriculture, but the rest of the economy too. The Porto Rican Telephone Company is controlled by the American International telephone and Telegraph corporation. The Porto Rico gas and Coke Company is controlled by the United Utilities and Service Corporation of the United States. The Porto Rico Power Company controls the railways and is itself controlled by the International Power company, Limited, incorporated in Canada. Electricity is supplied by United States companies, (Diffe, op. cit. p. 107).

    The labour conditions of the industrial workers are shockingly bad. In 1934 it was stated that the average week’s earnings of women in the United States owned canneries was 2.58 dollars at that time less than 13/-), while the working day was up to 13 hours or even more a day (Caroline Manning, The Employment of Women in Puerto Rico, Washington, 1934, p. 25).

    The picture presented is thus on the one hand a handful of American millionaires – on the other, the masses of starving Puerto Rican workers. One writer stated that “85 per cent of the population are now dependent on uncertain labour and wage conditions..” (R J and EK Van Deusen, Porto Rico, New York, 1931, p. 169). Another writer said that Puerto Rico is a country “where a whole population constitutes a veritable experimental laboratory of starvation.” hand in hand with starvation wages goes ignorance. In 1937 41.4 per cent of the population were completely illiterate. In 1951-52 the Government announced that it regretted it could not find room in its schools for 27 per cent of the children in the country.

    Aggravating the bad economic conditions of the people is the trade populace of the United States, which compels them, by customs restrictions to import most of the food they require from the United States, where prices are very high. Actually 60 per cent of the food imports of Puerto Rico are from the United States. As time goes on, the conditions, instead of improving, become worse. In 1944 they were so bad that some 40 per cent of the inhabitants were registered for relief (De Castro, p. 111).

    The overriding necessity for Puerto Rico is to overthrow United states control over the economy. In 1930 the Nationalist party f Puerto Rico declared: “we condemn the regime of exploitation to which Puerto Rico is subject by great absentee interests, individual an corporate… We denounce the latitudinal and we believe… that the ownership of the land by individuals or social or corporate interests in excess of 500 acres is an evil which requires immediate remedy… We are decided partisans of the nationalisation of all public service enterprises… (Diffe, op. cit. pp. 192-3).

    The terrorist act in Washington is only one expression, probably not leading to any beneficial results, of the national and social revolt of the people of Puerto Rico against American imperialism.

    SOCIALIST REVIEW, Vol. 3 No 8, April, 1954.

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    Platypus Versus the Weekly Worker: Negative Dialectics.

    Posted in Capitalism, Labour Movement, Marxism, New Left, Philosophy, Theory by Andrew Coates on July 12, 2011

    http://www.platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/theprweb1.gif

    Platypus and Mike Macnair: Negative Dialectics.

    “Un coup de dés, jamais n’abolira le hasard.”

    A Dice Throw Will Never At Any Time Abolish Chance.

    Stéphane Mallarmé.

    The Platypus Affiliated Society takes it name from their elaboration of a few lines in Engels’ correspondence. Challenged on the relation between the rate of profit and the theory of surplus value, he pondered the “essentially infinite process” by which we develop concepts for natural phenomena. As an illustration, Engels mentions that when he first saw eggs from the Australian mammal, he refused to believe in the existence of the monotreme (Engels to Schmidt. March the 12th 1895). It was only when he saw a live one in a Zoo, the Society continues, that Marx’s friend changed his mind.

    To the American group, “Engels came to respect that “reason” in history, natural or otherwise, must not necessarily accord with present standards of human reason.” Engels himself stated, “the day when concepts and reality completely coincide in the organic world development comes to an end.” Sports of nature and society will always crop up. He felt confident enough in his economic theory’s scientific standing to admit that while there is never a “coincidence of total value and total price” to deny its law-like status could be compared to failing to place the duck-bill within the evolutionary process. In retrospect the interminable Marxist debate on surplus value indicates that Schmidt’s queries have yet to be answered more than “approximately”.

    For Platypus this tale serves a higher philosophical purpose. It is first of all a reminder of the bounds of historical sense. “We maintain that past and present history need not indicate the future. Past and present failures and losses on the Left should educate and warn, but not spellbind and enthrall us.” Next, after the left that “destroyed and liquidated itself” we may still call for its original potentials to be fulfilled. “The history of modernity is not finished yet, nor will it be, short of redeeming its promise.” Finally, we have to address the “improbable but not impossible tasks and project of the next Left.” Unforeseen transformation can come about in a following, succeeding, emancipatory movement.

    There is an eschatological strain, a wish for hope amidst death, in these declarations, as in many of Platypus pronouncements. They seek Grace from the midst of Hell. As Adorno put it, “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption”. (1) As atonement Platypus has acquired some notoriety through criticism of “what exists”, principally the “dead” of the “pseudo-left”. But can the “reconstitution of a Marxist left” offer the Good News for the times to come? That is, the tantalising possibility that Emancipation may one day free us from servitude, be its laws as unfamiliar at the moment as Antipodean wildlife was to 19th century German Hegelians. After the Left’s Destruction, from the Slough of Despond, Platypus prepares for the Next Coming. Humanity’s future depends on it.

    Perhaps the story about Engels demonstrates a different point. Tristram Hunt’s says that Engels’ scientific forays were marked by “provisional humanity and capacity for revision.” (2|) The socialist was a rationalist, his Darwinian beliefs part of his enthusiasm for modern science. Engels was interested in how the existence of the Platypus was “proved”. He did not evoke the argument – that drifts towards Pyrrhonist scepticism – that ‘anything’ in nature could turn up to weaken the quest for certain knowledge. When he saw the webbed egg-laying creature he placed it in evolutionary terms within the laws of nature. With less ado, for Mike Macnair the story illustrates a narrower philosophical lesson. That “concepts are necessarily in imperfect agreement with the perceptible world.” (Weekly Worker 19.5.11)

    But what if doubt seized us by the throat and would not let us go? Adorno said that the function of art was “to bring chaos into order” – showing the turmoil of modern society. Mallarmé’s explores this contingency in poetic language. A shipwreck lies in the depths of the sea where “toute realité se dissout” (all reality dissolves). Julia Kristeva believed that his symbolist allusions might represent the crisis of the bourgeois state. Could this not stand not just for the forerunner of modernist experimentalism, but also for how Platypus tests the left? Is its portrait left “disorientation”, and questioning of what the left’s nature, would be the political poetry of uncertainty? Platypus alludes to the left as if it were a submerged hulk, with its tiller and rudder floating away. (3)

    Platypus is preoccupied by the left’s sinking fortunes. “The failure of the 1960s New Left, the dismantlement of the welfare state and the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 1980s-90s”. Its “utopianism” was “bound to end in tragedy”. Are the Affiliates able to escape immersion under the weight of this history and its ‘dead’ politics? The Society’s project of “building intellectual milieus from scratch” looks like a preliminary salvage job. Perhaps overwhelmed by this burden on their shoulders, Platypus spends little time, to use a Marxist-Hegelian expression, looking for the “reality striving towards thought” which might offer a hereafter for the defeated. That is something the laws of capitalist chance to help us. There is no indication of what ‘next’ liberating historical agency might bring emancipation about, or how it would do so.

    We should take heed of Engels’ reticence. It is not unreasonable that most of the left looks sceptically at claims that it is largely, if not wholly, drift-wood fit for Davy Jones’ Locker. The best gauge of the strength of Platypus’s case is how their arguments hold up when faced with some strong objections. The debate between leading Platypus figure, Chris Cutrone and the far-from-impressed Weekly Worker’s Mike Macnair gives an opportunity to see how far their concepts agree with what is perceptible about the “failed and betrayed” left Platypus’s ability to explain the ‘actuality of the rationality in the real’ can be put to the test. Most significantly, what, if any, emancipatory project are they under-labouring for within the “dynamics of modern society”?

    Spartacism Meets Adorno.

    Platypus’s project then is to reconstruct a “Marxist left” and help give it a key role in the “future of humanity.” Their immediate vehicle is the Affiliated Society, a small largely US-based group of academics and students. It produces an on-line journal and holds conferences and symposia. Its theoretical references, as talk of “redemption” suggests, lie in the Frankfurt of school of Critical Theory. That is, a Hegelian inflected Marxist critique of capitalist ‘administered’ society and the ‘culture industry.’ They follow Benjamin in lightening the pessimism of the Institute, which they so amply resonate, by shafts of Messianic hope. (more…)

    Mammuth, and the Revolt of the Weird Classes.

    Posted in Culture, Films, Globalisation by Andrew Coates on July 14, 2011

     

    Mammuth was on at Ipswich Film Theatre last night.

    Apart from being a great view, it’s a timely reminder of how complicated the French pension system is.

    The hinge of the film is  Serge (Gérard Depardieu), a recently retired French butcher, traipsing, (not the perhaps right word) a Mammuth motorbike, around South Western France in search of all the employment documents from his past. 

    Right-wingers mention that he retires at 60 .

    Good luck to him say I.

    His jobs don’t seem to have been pleasant, slogging it out in fairs, a farms, bars, as a gravedigger,  and in the abattoir. Though no doubt the Samuel Smiles of the US (where this kind of comment is made) could accuse him of not enough self-improvement and crawling to the bosses. 

    His wife. played by Yolande Moreau (the star of Louise-Michel , recently screened here) ends up on the fish counter of a supermarket. Perhaps she ought to take a course in aromatherapy instead.

    Anyone familiar with the French system knows that such a laborious travail is indeed needed to get it when you have, like many, if not most people, worked in different places, and (most importantly paid your contributions into separate ‘caisses de retraite’. (Review Here.)

    Hilarious event ensure – as they say.

    I was more struck by the weirdness of the characters. Or rather their familiarity. Miss Ming, – who’s strewn her father’s place with bizarre sculptures, made out of broken dolls and bits of rubbish. her style of  ’art brut’  (Here.)  or ‘outsider art’ (Here)  looked familiar - there are such artists  in Ipswich.

    Though I’ve yet to hear of someone doing a Miss Ming and thinking of writing a CV in mensural blood, I’ve little doubt there’s somebody out there with the idea.

    The people in the film resembled a whole group of people round here, who never get into films. Out-of-line with the world, often ending up in low-paid short-term jobs, others often on the dole. Usually a bit of counterculture in their background. More generally, those who simply those who don’t fit in.

    They don’t revolt against work, so much as not care about it.

    The Ipswich film-audience for Mammuth, to say the least, did not come from these classes.

     

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    Ben Gummer and Murdoch.

    Posted in Uncategorized by Andrew Coates on July 20, 2011

    Ipswich MP Ben Gummer has been unusually silent on the subject of Rupert Murdoch.

    For someone who has an opinion on the price of a packet of crisps, not to mention less weighty matters, this strikes us as odd.

    We wonder why.

    Here.

    Explanations for the Norwegian atrocities.

    Posted in European Left, Fascism by Andrew Coates on July 24, 2011

    It is obscene to dwell on this.

    But.

    A person posts here,

    Hope this makes you think twice about your own Islamophobic output. You are part of the sewer this guy swam in.

    I suppose the attack on the moderate left of centre Youth Camp on Utøya was a real Islamophobic give-away.

    Far be it from me to deprive ’SteveH’ (not one suspects his real name)  of his solitary pleasures.

    Most people would start for an explanation in the legacy of Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling.

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    On the American SWP: Total Collapse.

    Posted in Left, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on July 26, 2011

    Louis Proyect writes,

    In the latest issue of Against the Current, a nominally independent magazine that reflects the viewpoint of Solidarity, there is a long (11,562 words) article by Alan Wald on two recent memoirs by former SWP leaders.

     It is no secret that the Tendance has a deep and abiding hatred of the American SWP.

    That the oldest ‘Trotskyist organisation in the world is now reduced to a cult of less than a hundred members that spends its  time property dealing may, or may not, be a cause for rejoicing.

    Certainly I can hear Pablo’s voice saying something.

    But even we were surprised to read this:

    In the case of Barnes, the simplistic idea that “political line” trumps all became a mechanism for subordination to the leader and his increasingly smaller inner circle. Signs of disagreement were taken as an incitement to splitting the party or at least disrupting urgent tasks. Those anxious to ingratiate themselves with leaders offered off-the-rack refutations of threatening points of view, many of which came directly from the SWP press, pamphlets, or leaders; one was never quite sure if the person defending (or opposing) the “line” with Marxist-Leninist citations had read any primary sources.

    On occasion he made heretical comments, possibly even a short-lived call for an all-women’s political party. Peter’s humor oversimplified but was effective in large audiences: “Want to know what social class you’re in? Simple. Take a six-month vacation in resorts in the Carribean and pay with a check. If the check bounces, you’re a member of the working class.”(36) Yet Camejo’s connection to the more strait-laced Barnes Group put at his disposal an organization to which he could recruit and that afforded occasional muscle to get things done.

    In conclusion, one should remember that Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale has a happy ending. It is a play far more about self-delusion than manipulation; redemption comes through the acknowledgment of fallibility and complicity. But it’s rough going for Leontes, who fell under a central delusion years earlier that caused him to interpret so many subsequent events incorrectly. Even the Oracle of the Island of Delphos could not convince him that he was wrong. Only with the death of his son and wife does Leontes come to his senses.

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    Ipswich MP goes Tintin au Liban.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on July 30, 2011

    Special Adviser to Ipswich MP.

     

    Young reporter, Ipswich MP Benedict Gummer, is currently sorting out the Arab Spring, the Palestinian Question, and the price of a packet of crisps.

    In his daily column in the Evening Star the youthful vedette  of the Tory Party explains that he has been appointed to lead a special investigation of the Middle East.

    Armed only with his trusty hound, Milou, he will spend some time in the region.

     We eagerly await his front-line reports.

    He reads Robert Fisk you know!

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    Die Linke: Best Hope for Europe’s Left.

    Posted in European Left, German Left by Andrew Coates on August 1, 2011

    Met up with a German comrade yesterday, from Die Linke.

    He’s an associate of the  Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung .

    We went to the Dove and talked in-depth – as is our wont.

    He reckons that there is a debate on the German Left about class politics which will affect the course of Die Linke.  

    That the ‘retreat from class’ is a position advocated by some of the comrades in forming Das Programm.

    I mentioned that the strategy of the Front de Gauche is profoundly influenced by his party.

    He expressed regret that the British left has not been able to follow this route.

    All I can say is that we have great hopes in Die Linke and we wish them well.

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    Bob Pitt: Rappel à l’ordre.

    Posted in Bangladesh, Fascism, Imperialism, International, Islamism by Andrew Coates on August 2, 2011

    God save us from Hull, Hell and Halifax”.

    Bob Pitt is the owner of Islamophobia Watch.

    Known popularly on the left as The  pillock  from Hull, he opines thus:

    If a British Breivik emerges from the “counter-jihad” movement in the UK and commits similar atrocities here, it won’t just be the right-wing press that is to blame for stoking hysteria about “Islamisation” and its “appeasers”. Liberal journalists like Nick Cohen will have to take their share of the responsibility too.

    One would have thought that a former stalwart of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party posing as a moral authority is not perhaps the best idea.

    Bob Pitt has consistently defended the Jamaat-e-Islami (Bengali: বাংলাদেশ জামায়াতে ইসলামী).

    Indeed he has  said

    Defend Jamaat-e-Islami against ’secularism’. here

    Our beloved Bengali comrades could say: the next time there is a murderous attack in Bangladesh they could also ask him to take his share of responsibility.

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    London Riots: Caution.

    Posted in Anarchism, Communism, European Left by Andrew Coates on August 8, 2011

     

    “The autonomy does not speak. It acts.”

    I would not comment on this (and Dave has said most that’s worth saying here).

    But North London is my Heimat.

    Three points:

    • The Police in North London are not loved.  From the young policeman who used to order us around when we played on Bounds Green, to the stories my dad told me about the bent coppers in the Pentonville Road, to the time, when I was about 18 when  I saw them beat the shit out of demonstrators at Red Lion Square (and they killed our beloved comrade Kevin Gately), I have had no time for them. I fully understand the reasons why the good people of Tottenham distrust the Police ‘explanation’ for the death of Mark Duggan.
    • The riots strike me as so similar to those in the French  Banlieues that it is odd that few make the comparison.
    • Sunday was obviously an attempt to spread the ‘action’. In fact, as I’m sure the rozzers know, this was a conscious effort. But what action? Burning people our of their flats in Tottenham High Street? Having a go at Wood Green shops? Having a bit of agro in Enfield (of all places)?

    What the fuck are they trying to achieve?

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    China Miéville, Marxism and ‘Weird’ Science Fiction.

    Posted in Culture, Left, Marxism, Science Fiction by Andrew Coates on August 18, 2011

    China Miéville is undoubtably a genius.

    I was going to write the usual Coatesy 200 page Blog with 50 pages of footnotes and references.

    Instead I will simply say this:

    Perdido Street Station,  and  Iron Council, enriched with speculations about the nature of the human, living architecture, drugs, and have a highly political sub-text.

    To cite Wikipedia on the later:

    Judah’s story begins some twenty years before the novel’s opening. Judah was hired as a railroad scout for New Crobuzon, charged with mapping terrain, and informing the land’s inhabitants of the railroad’s coming. While doing so, Judah spends time with the Stiltspear, a race of indescribable creatures who can disguise themselves as trees and conjure golems, living creatures made from unliving matter. Judah attempts to warn the Stiltspear away, but they won’t listen and he must settle for making a few recordings and beginning to learn their golemetric arts. Eventually, he returns to the railroad, which does indeed wipe out the Stiltspear. Shortly afterward, Judah, a prostitute named Ann-Hari, and a Remade named Uzman lead a revolution in which the rail workers drive the overseers away, free the Remade, and hijack the train, transforming it into a moving socialist dwelling.

    The division between Besźel and Ul Qoma in The City and the City could be said to be an extended reflection on ethnic divisions.

    .His latest book, Embassytown Embassytown takes place in the title city, on the planet Arieka. Immerser Avice Benner Cho can speak the language of the Hosts; those who can are genetically-engineered linguists known as Ambassador.

    It could be said to be an extended reflection on this:

    ..the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everybody form uttering the words which otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialise as truth.

    Stéphane Mallarmé, as cited by Walter Benjamin.

    This may be a guess but since I think  China knows Esther Leslie I think not.

    The Runagate Rampant (which figures in the triology which began with Perdito Street and ends with Iron Council) quotes Rosa Luxemberg (without citing her name):

    Luxemburg’s last known words, written on the evening of her murder, were about her belief in the masses, and in what she saw as the inevitability of revolution:

    “The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this ‘defeat’ into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this ‘defeat’.
    ‘Order reigns in Berlin!’ You stupid henchmen! Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already ‘raise itself with a rattle’ and announce with fanfare, to your terror:
    I was, I am, I shall be!”

    Ipswich Waitrose Threatens Film Theatre.

    Posted in Capitalism, East Anglia, Ipswich, Labour Party, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on August 20, 2011
    Waitrose Luxury Jaffa Orange Curd (325g)
    Who Needs Culture When You Can Buy This?
     

    We have long warned about the installation of a Waitrose Store in the Ipswich Corn Exchange.

    Using a public building for a luxury store priced beyond most people’s means is an insult to the good name of the town.

    As if Ipswich lacks empty shop space.

    The project, a legacy of ‘Coco the Clown’, Ipswich Liberal Culture chief Andrew Cann, continues despite the change-over from Liberal-Tory rule to Labour.

    The Evening Star reports:

     Theatre bosses fear the future of a thriving independent cinema could be threatened if a supermarket wins its bid to open in the town. 

    Upmarket chain Waitrose wants to open a 3,000sq ft shop in the Corn Exchange, also home to Ipswich Film Theatre (IFT).

    The plans are part of a major investment in Ipswich by the group, which also wants to open a 70,000sq ft John Lewis store in Nacton Road.

    IFT director Dave Gregory said noise from the new shop in central Ipswich could disturb film showings.

    The IFT is sending in a letter of objection to the proposal.

    “We have got an enthusiastic team of volunteers, we’re run for and by the local community and we’re worried the Waitrose development could threaten that,” said Mr Gregory.

    “We don’t think our audience or the people of Ipswich want this.

    “It certainly could threaten the future of the film theatre.

     Here.

    To make way for this they have already closed the in-payment section of the building.

    People who pay by cash their  Council tax, Council Rent and other fees have to use Paypoints in the handfull of Post offices still there, their local newsagent, or grog shop*.

    Now our Film Theatre is menaced.

    The Council should promote  the interests of the majority of the people of Ipswich and not the minority of the well-off and Waitrose.

    *That is the local name for the large number of cheap alcohol stores around Ipswich. Paypoints have they all.

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    ‘Chavs’ and Ministers to Adopt Workless Families

    Posted in British Govern, Conservative Party, Conservatives, Fascism by Andrew Coates on August 21, 2011

    Owen Jones’ Chavs is simply the most incisive political book to appear for decades.

    One cannot help but think that behind David Starkey’s bellowing on Newsnight was some dim recognition of just how powerful a book it is – here.

    Its main themes are well-known: that the working class is demonised, that there is prejudice against the workless, and that any effort to create an egalitarian society has been replaced by the free-market scramble for wealth, consigning millions to low-paid jobs and unemployment.

    That calling low-paid people ‘chavs’ and making fun of them – not in themselves wrong (I’m always in favour of having a laugh)  was  part of deeper process. This has shunted them off from society and made them the objects of state action, never political actors.

    That the Labour Party and liberals focus on ‘equality of opportunity’, and promote multiculturalism rather than advancing the interests of the working class. Diversity became more important than equality. That is they substitute individual solutions for collective ones. That instead of fighting for a universal improvement of people’s conditions they want to offer a helping hand to those who want to ‘escape’ the working class.

    In this vacuum we have government measures such as the New Deal. It did not create jobs but a vast ‘unemployment’ bizness’ (my expression not Owen’s) which stigmatised the out-of-work and placed them on unrewarding schemes. These ended up largely benefiting the companies and ‘voluntary’ sector that ran them rather than participants.

    Now we have the Work Programme. Owen does not directly outline it but describes how it was foreshadowed by the Labour Work and Pensions Minister James Purnell and his adviser David Freud (now a Baron and an open Conservative).  Both wanted to destroy the welfare system. They  blamed the out-of-work for their own plight. Now the Work Programme’s  ’solution’ to unemployment is an attempt to turn everyone into a Samuel Smiles. Whether they like it or not.

    Chavs (which I read and nearly finished last night) sprang to life when I saw this in the media this morning.

    Some of David Cameron’s ministers and advisers are to volunteer as “family champions” and “adopt” families on benefits.

    Under the scheme, designed by ‘social entrepreneur’ Emma Harrison who manages a number of the Government’s training contracts, politicians will use their contacts and help manage the family’s finances to encourage them back to work. Tim Loughton is amongst the first volunteers.

    Work and Pensions Minister Chris Grayling said “my colleague Tim Loughton is setting up a charitable foundation to help in a sense be a thought-leader for family intervention”. He added that the Department of Work and Pensions was going to also help by helping get families back to work.

    Here.

    This gives some meaning to the expression ‘tough love’ – tough for those who’ll get it inflicted on them, love (or at least they hope)  for the politicians who participate.

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    Libya: End Game and the Left.

    Posted in Capitalism, Colonialism, Globalisation, Imperialism, Libya by Andrew Coates on August 22, 2011

    As Gaddafi makes his last stand what position should the left take?

    On the 13th of April the Tendance wrote, à propos an article by Serge Halimi,

    The world’s left is divided between those who put the emphasis on opposition to a Western-led military operation and those who put the priority on solidarity with an oppressed people.

    John Wight on Socialist Unity continues the former position, and pessimistically considers the overthrow of Gaddafi within this framework,

    Equally by now it is also the case, particularly for those nations of the developing world, that national and political sovereignty has likewise been rendered redundant, and in the last analysis is a matter for Washington and its loyal European satraps.

    Amid a lot of whataboutery and confused ramblings which meld together colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation he states,

    With NATO so crucial to the toppling of Gaddafi, the question becomes what next? Hopefully the collective brains in Washington, London and Paris have given the state of a post-Gaddafi Libya some thought.

    We base our views on a very different, Marxist, principle: the primacy of the mass struggle.

    Earlier (18th March) on Tendance Coatesy this standpoint was advanced:

    • The left has to begin from the premise of support for the Libyan people’s resistance to the Gaddafi tyranny. This is only a ‘civil war’ in the sense that all revolutions are civil strife. Given the opportunity the Libyan masses rallied to calls to overthrow the Gaddafi-state. Only its immediate use of violent repression halted their advance.
    • The Libyan  uprising takes place within the context of pan-regional Arab democratic revolutions. It is directed against a bureaucratic capitalist tyranny, with close links to international capital, Western states and institutions.
    • The UN-endorsed military interventions are neither part of a plan for military occupation, nor for the installation of an externally created political replacement for Gaddafi. In the first instance they correspond to the express wishes of the Libyan popular masses, as organised in their provisional governing bodies.
    • The UN sanctioned actions are not part of any generalised right to ‘humanitarian intervention’ but correspond to the particular needs of the Libyan population, under imminent threat of repression by the Gaddafi state machine. The are aimed to protect civilian populations.

     Much has happened since then. Our optimism about the UN was exaggerated. There is little doubt that NATO and the Western powers have exceeded the UN mandate. NATO’s actions have not been always justified – to say the least. There have been efforts, largely succesful, to reach agreements with the Libyan National Transitional Council . There have been dubious actions on their part. It is not a ‘clean’ revolution.

    But, the point at present is not to begin by denouncing the influence of the Western powers.It is to look at the political structures now emerging internally in Libya and the best ways of supporting the popular masses’ fight for democracy and social rights. These include the rights of supporters of Gaddafi. The fight may now take place within the victorious opposition. The left has to stand with the most progressive forces – if, or when, they emerge.

    Scepticism about outside influences, tribal interests,  the impact of Islamism, and the no doubt pro-business actions of the provisional government should not lead us to forget these basic principles.

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    Ipswich Libraries: Tories Pull Another Fast One.

    Posted in Conservative Party, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on August 24, 2011

    We have just received this notice: “‘Friends of Ipswich County Library’ to be held this Friday at 7pm in the Library Lecture Room.”

    There are a few scrappy notices around the Central Library.

    No real publicity in other words.

    The proposal is to form a staff and customer ‘co-operative’ of all Ipswich libraries.

    So, with a couple of days notice, on a Friday, at the end of August, just before the Bank Holiday, this plan will be put forward.

    Remember, Friday, Northgate Street, Ipswich – upstairs.

    Suffolk Tories: more manipulative and dissembling than any Trotskyist group on the planet.

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    Ipswich Libraries: Serious Reflections.

    Posted in British Govern, Conservative Party, Cuts, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on August 25, 2011

    Ipswich and District Trades Council and members of the Suffolk Coalition for Public Services have requested that Friday’s meeting of Friends of Ipswich Libraries be postponed.

    Breaking News: The Meeting is Postponed.

    This meeting will establish a Friends of Ipswich County Library group. It will discuss setting up a “staff and customer governed co-operative” to run the 6 Ipswich libraries.

    It appears, from conversation with relevant local figures, that some of the library staff would favour this move.

    As we have great respect for the staff of Ipswich Libraries we can see that their priority is to maintain a library service in the interests of users and employees.

    The proposal raises a number of significant problems.

    • Eric Pickles and the Government has a long-term strategy of turning over  significant swathes of public services to private or ‘local’ hands – private companies, not-for-profit enterprises and co-operatives.
    • Suffolk County Council claims to have dropped the wholesale adoption of this blueprint (The ‘New Strategic Direction’). But this is far from clear. The County Councillor responsible for libraries, Judy Terry, has issued a stream of contradictory statements on the future of libraries. Some are to be hived off to local parishes and other groups. Now it would appear that Ipswich may try to join them.
    • A co-operative exists for the benefit of its members. If Ipswich Libraries are to be run by staff and users then ‘non-users’ – who still pay Council Tax for their support – will not have a direct say in their running. The results of this will encourage people to think that the libraries are a special service for those who visit them and resentment at having to pay for them by those who don’t. If we apply this model to, say, social services, then only those directly involved in them will be responsible - and by the same token, many will consider themselves hard done by for having to fork out money for something they never use.
    • A friend said last evening: the implication is that in the end we will only get what public service we directly pay for. The hard-right ‘minimal state’ ideology behind Pickles’ policy, for all tis rhetoric about local power, plans exactly that. So firefighters will be paid by those who use them and their insurers. Bizarre as it seems this happens in some parts of the USA.
    • Setting up a co-operative when Suffolk libraries face a 30% spending cut is a recipe for the organisation implicating itself in sacking its own staff and reducing services. A further cost, of reorganisation, will weight the burden still more and fragment the County’s libraries.

    Only a democratically accountable universal Library service, run by the County Council, can meet the needs of Suffolk library users.

    We have one.

    Why get rid of it?

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    To End All Wars. Adam Hochschild. A Review.

    Posted in Colonialism, Europe, European Left, Imperialism by Andrew Coates on September 2, 2011

    http://www.historyextra.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/165px_wide/reviews/to%20end%20all%20wars.jpg

    To End All Wars. How The First World War Divided Britain. Adam Hochschild. Macmillan. 2011.

    My grandfather, Albert, and his older brothers, were East End members of the socialist Clarion Cycling Club. On Sundays they would bike to Essex and sell Robert Blatchford’s paper of the same name. Soon after the outbreak of the Great War, summer 1914, my grandfather and a few of his friends had a few pints of bitter. Swept away by patriotic fervour they all went and enlisted.

    Albert rarely spoke about his next four years on the Continent, except to say that trench warfare was unbelievably terrible. There was one story. He had once been in such despair that he’d resolved to shoot himself in the foot and get invalided out. But the gun had jammed. Returning from the battles he renewed his socialist commitment and was a member of the Labour Party all his life.

    Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars is about how the Great War affected people like Albert – their opinions about it, before, during and after the combats. It’s about what it meant on the ground when, “For more than three years the armies on the Western Front were virtually locked in place burrowed into trenches with dugouts sometimes 40 feet below ground, periodically emerging for terrible battles that gained at best a few miles of muddy, shell-blasted wasteland.” It’s about mustard gas. And it’s about the Battle of Passschendaele 1917, where one single day saw 26,000 British, Australian and Canadian, causalities. The Times headline read, “Our Position improved: Heroism in the New Advance.” Not everyone saw it that way, then or since.

    Empire

    The British Empire, for which soldiers from all its corners fought, was at its zenith during the first decade of the twentieth century. Sir Arthur Milner, the “imperial lion of Cape Town” and his Kindergarten of advisers, suppressed the Boers in the first years of the 20th century, appeared to set the seal on Britain’s enduring power. It was at this point that the country’s rulers began worrying about growing German industrial and military might. Erskine Childers wrote The Riddle of the Sands (1903) warning of a Hun scheme to invade England. Hochschild describes countless other books in the years that followed, that imagined Teutonic invasions. A “novel depicted the imperial German black-eagle flying over Buckingham Palace, and signs declaring its verboten to walk on the grass in Hyde Park.”

    Left and Right today agree that the First World War was a “great watershed” in modernity. The masters of the British Empire, its peculiar military caste and bureaucracy, infused with imperial pride, sent their people onto the fields of Europe, and Turkey, to face slaughter on a scale it’s hard to imagine. Arthur Miller, Douglas Haig, and Sir John French, solidly backed by patriotic politicians, sent millions to their graves. Propagandists like John Buchan saw “nobility and heroism” in the butchery. Fellow Imperialist Rudyard Kipling in his Stalky and Co. (1899) ends the tale with the schoolboys turned soldiers in the Great Game. This sacrifice of youth foreshadowed the fate of a generation across the continent. Remarque’s All Quiet On the Western Front (1929 – film 1930) opens with German Gymnasium scholars volunteering for the Front.

    To End All Wars deftly travels from military history, through high politics, to the lives and careers of players like Haig and Sir John French. Adam Hochschild, as is appropriate for a founder of the magazine Mother Jones, does not leave the field to the militarists. To End All Wars has a “cast of characters” that brings those who opposed the fighting to the fore.

    Sir John French’s sister, Charlotte Despard was one. A militant socialist and feminist, she maintained contact with her brother until their relations broke down. French had helped crush the Easter Rising in 1916; in 1918 he served his time as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. She supported Irish Independence. Sylvia Pankhurst has a more public dramatic inter-family dispute. Her suffrage mother, Emmeline, and her sister, Christabel turned violent jingoes as the outbreak of war. Sylvia had an affair with the anti-war Independent Labour Party leader, Keir Hardie, and agitated against militarism. Hardie, who died in the middle of 1915, was one of a small group of socialist internationalists, with counterparts across the Continent. Those at the top in every country did all they could to squash their protests.

    Many war resistors were inspired by religious conviction. Hardie was Christian socialists other were religious pacifists. Amongst the actors Hochschild describes individual consciousness objectors, like Stephen Hobhouse, a Christian pacifist, gaoled, and his cousin Emily, who had cut her political teeth exposing abuses during the Boer War But by no means all. The anti-colonialist, Fenner Brockway (far from a believer – he was honorary president of my parents’ North London Humanist group), was imprisoned for his socialist agitation against the conflict. Strikingly there is the Wheeldon family, whose mother Alice was sentenced to 10 years hard-labour for a plot mounted by an agent provocateur, Alex Gordon. She was said to have planned to hide behind a golf course bush and, with a blowpipe, shoot Lloyd George with a poisoned-tipped dart. In prison Alice would face a grim battle of her own.

    It was not just outright refusal to serve in the armed forces, or militant agitation that earned people a spell in goal –or being sent to the Front. Draconian censorship operated, amid hysterical attacks on opponents of the war. Bertrand Russell who “loved the tradition of English liberty, and would prefer an Allied victory to a German one” Russell perhaps best symbolises a quieter, more gradual, disenchantment with the conflict. He finally backed the No-Conscription Fellowship and ended up in a cell – as “first division prisoner” with the privileges of his class – for suggesting that American troops might be used as strike-breakers.

    The Left and Internationalism.

    To End All Wars weaves together many threads. It is a collection of narratives, from below, and from above, about defining historical events whose legacy, he cites Churchill, was a “crippled broken world.” Some may concentrate on the callousness of the army top brass, and their obsession with outmoded cavalry charges, or their sheer incompetence. Others on the harsh conditions conscientious objectors faced, including execution. This slots into the moving war literature of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and the poety of Wilfred Owen that has shaped the images and feelings of many subsequent British generations.

    One issue that is perhaps of greatest contemporary interest for the left is how not only the working class was overwhelmed with patriotism, but that much of the socialist movement supported imperial causes. In the first respect we can see that the rule of bellowing John Bulls was not complete.  If the workers were not opposed to defending the country, Hochschild notes, they “they showed less zeal than the better off.” We should not imagine that this was wholly misguided, “In late 1914 it was easy enough for a reasonable person to support a war against Germany, which seemed bent on dominating Europe. Stopping Germany might seem a moral imperative, albeit a tragic and regrettable one, given the inevitable bloodshed. Millions of quite unmilitaristic people in Britain felt this way.” Some, workers, given that we would not imagine them generally unreasonable, would surely have reacted in thsi way – until evidence proved the claim wrong. To End All Wars does sketch out some anti-war resistance from this quarter, caught up in wider protests about harsh conditions in the factories and lowering standards of living. Grumbles turned to protests and strikes as this continued.

    What is far more remarkable is that  the socialist movement threw up some of the most unreasonable jingoistic ideologues imaginable. A brief moment of international solidarity in 1914 soon passed as the Second International fell apart, like a bad transmission on digital television, into splintered fragments. The anti-war French socialist, Jean Jaurès was assassinated by Raoul Villain, in 1914 following a press campaign from the national right screaming at the “Prussian agent”, “Jaurès-Traïtre, Jaurès-Thaler”. But he did not just face hatred from this excepted quarter. Charles Péguy, the Catholic socialist and poet wrote that Jaurès should face the tumbrel “amid a roll of drums to drown out that mighty voice.” The syndicalist Hervé, who had proposed to plant the national flag on a dung-heap, rallied to the cause of National Defence, as did the Marxist Jules Guesde. Anti-militarists like the soon-imprisoned Rosa Luxemburg and the less forthright German social democratic centre were in a small minority. A hefty chunk of heir former comrades actively supported the war. The rhetoric of the pro-war left, while with some democratic – or anti-Prussian – cover, was unbridled patriotism.

    In Britain it was not the bull-dog trade unionists who backed the state-funded British Workers’ League and attacked anti-war supporters of the Independent Labour Party that make the most impression. Nor that upper-class suffrages like Christabel and Emmeline rallied to the flag. It is that the leader of the British Socialist Party, and the founder of the country’s first Marxist organisation, Henry Hyndman, formed, with Belford Bax, the National Socialist Party to support resistance to “Prussian aggression.” The Editor of the Clarion Blatchford, outdid himself in loyalty to the Allies.

    One would have wished for something in To End All Wars exploring this theme. The reasons for this people’s divergent  stands and the reeking chauvinism of some,  still merit attention. When the chips were down, they say, nation trumped class, let alone socialist principle and internationalism. But it was also a socialist principle to defend national communities against external aggression and to support those oppressed in or by other states. At the same time, as Hochschild notes, nobody at the time seemed much concerned about the war in Africa, where over two million people were conscripted into forced labour, and an estimated 400, 000 died. The issue appeared resolved for a minority when the Soviet Union declared itself the workers’ homeland. The flaws in, say, Charlotte Despard’s later enthusiasm for the 1930s Soviet Union, can be seen in the 1937 execution of Willie Wheeldon, who had settled there. Socialist thinking on internationalism has yet to settle down in a consensus.

    To End All Wars is a finely crafted study. It is a worthy successor to King Leopold’s Ghost and Bury the Chains. The latter, a study of the anti-slavery campaigner and supporter of the French Revolution, Thomas Clarkson, buried just outside Ipswich at Playford, rescued a great man from near-obscurity. Hochschild is treading  more familiar ground here. But he has done honour to those who felt like Alice Wheeldon, that “The world is my country.”

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    General Strike to Help Gaddafi, Says WRP.

    Posted in Colonialism, Communism, Libya, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on September 7, 2011

    Gerry Healy (WRP): His Succesors Keep up the Fight.

    Unfazed by recent events, the WRP’s Newsline continues on its principled path.

    This week they announce a novel way to save Gaddafi.

    The News Line urges the British workers to support the Libyan people, and to be for the victory of Gaddafi. UK workers must make their contribution to the struggle. This must be a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government.

     Here.

    Those who follow such things know that the WRP has some close co-thinkers in the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist),

    Down with social-democratic treachery; down with imperialism!
    VICTORY TO THE LIBYAN REVOLUTION; VICTORY TO GADDAFI!
    HANDS OFF LIBYA!

    Here.

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    Public Services, Localism and the New Enclosures.

    Public Services, Localism and the New Enclosures.

    “We want to give local people power over what happens in their communities.” Decentralisation and the Localism Bill. An Essential Guide. 2011.

    “When these noble-minded altruists offered their services to the town they asked the people to believe that they were actuated by a desire to give their time and abilities for the purpose of furthering the interests of Others….” Mugsborough Community Forum. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.Robert Tressell. 1914.

    The White Paper, Open Public Services (July 2011) follows the Decentralisation and Localism Bill – now coming into effect. They are at the heart of the Coalition Government’s policies. Public attention at present is absorbed by the impact the latter will have on loosening planning regulations. But perhaps more significant is the way that both pieces of legislation could potentially force the transfer all but a minimum of national and municipal services to a variety of non-state, private, organisations. A “diversity of providers” in the whole public sector signals the intention to alter the whole nature of the public sector. In the official Essential Guide to localism we learn that the underlying aim is “to give local people power over what happens in their communities.”

    This was initially part of David Cameron’s ‘narrative’ about the Big Society. To Ian Birrel, its political agenda was about “passing power to the lowest level possible”, “Not just charities, but neighbourhood groups, workers’ co-operatives, social enterprises and, yes, businesses.” (Guardian 9.1.10) Others added that ‘faith communities’ would play a prominent role (Greg Clark, Catholic Herald. 30.7. 2010). The prospect appeared to open up of giving authority to the “little platoons” of voluntary associations, community stalwarts, and social entrepreneurs.

    The Big Society faced ridicule. What state functions would be handed over to the ‘community’? Cuts in public spending implied that volunteers would replace paid workers. After the August riots the term has been largely replaced by sterner moral lectures on the importance of families, discipline and hard-work.

    But Birrell’s political objectives have been far from dropped. The Minister for Decentralisation, Greg Clark, has not ceased to repeat this message – as can be seen in the above Bill. Duncan Bowie has observed that the key measure in the Bill is the creation of neighbourhood forums, to determine issues such as planning (Chartist July/August 2011). There are few rules on how “communities” at the “lowest level” create these bodies, are, how they operate (by election or self-selection), and what exact powers they have. There is talk of “community budgets”. “Bureaucracy Busters”, who will make sure this revolution takes place. Government documents are conspicuously unclear about their relations with authorities whose legitimacy relies on the ballot box. Bowie suggests that the “real issue of localism is the bypassing of democratically elected local government structures to empower neighbourhoods.” Even with the reduced resources available under fiscal austerity, these ‘communities’ will play a privileged role in governance.

    Neighbourhood devolution is one aspect of the Coalition’s plans. The government is implementing other changes to some of the most fundamental aspects of public provision. These have a direct effect on the lives of civil servants, local government workers, and, above all, will “individualise” and “diversify” the services we all rely on. Despite floating the idea that Councils may be given the right to retain more of their revenues (which would favour the better-off) increased responsibility for some services, they are fragmenting others. Free Schools – taking over a name used in the 1960s by the ‘underground’ experimental education – and Academies signal he intention to remove much schooling from democratic local control. What of other areas? Will we be able to directly control how our Council Tax is spent – paying for what we want, and being allowed to refuse to contribute to services we don’t? Will we be able, as Barnet Council proposed at one point, (‘One Barnet’), to buy top-grade services at a premium price and queue-jump? Will a new range of local political actors come to determine policies and manage public provision through control of “community budgets”? (more…)

    Johann Hari and “Philosopher-terrorist” Toni Negri

    Posted in Anarchism, Anti-Fascism, European Left, Free Speech, New Left, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on September 16, 2011

    The Guardian reports,

    “The award-winning Independent columnist Johann Hari has apologised for plagiarising the work of others to improve his interviews and will take unpaid leave of absence from the paper until 2012.

    Hari also apologised for editing the Wikipedia entries of people he had clashed with, using the pseudonym David Rose, “in ways that were juvenile or malicious”, saying he was “mortified to have done this”. He admitted calling “one of them antisemitic and homophobic, and the other a drunk”.

    Hari is also handing back the George Orwell prize he won as “an act of contrition for the errors I made elsewhere, in my interviews” and will undertake “a programme of journalism training” during his leave of absence.

    It is understood that provided no more damaging revelations emerge about the journalist during his unpaid leave, the Independent editor, Chris Blackhurst, will allow him to return to the paper.”

    There is one story that deserves a closer look than this week’s  reports give.

    Hari’s ’interview’ with Toni Negri:

    From the vantage point of the bar, I look at the philosopher-terrorist. Now 71, he is tanned and tall, with a slight stoop. Was this bland-looking man really the cause of so much rage? Negri first became notorious in the mid-1970s, when the Italian far left began to fracture. The Italian Communist Party decided to enter into a coalition government with the Christian Democrats. The shard of the far left that could not accept this “Grand Historic Compromise” grew sharper and bloodier, and began to advocate immediate revolution. Negri was the guru of the new movement for “permanent civil war” and “mass illegality”.

    I am about to try once again, but we are interrupted by an angry woman. “Have you seen that?” she says to Negri, officiously. He turns to me, puzzled, as though this is part of the interview. It occurs to me with horror that she might be a relative of one of his victims. “Well? Have you?” she barks. Then I spot it: the “No Smoking” sign. He does not look at her but places his cigarette in the ashtray. Appeased, the ICA staff-member marches off. Negri picks up his cigarette, resumes smoking and nods at me to continue.

    Here

    The Daily Telegraph pointed out earlier this year, referring to the  plaigarism in the Orwell prize winner’s oeuvre,

    There are numerous other examples, the most controversial being Hari’s 2004 interview with Toni Negri, the Italian Communist. As the DSG blog points out, many of the quotes in that interview, which Hari presents as things Negri said to him when he sat down with him at the ICA, were lifted from a 2003 book called Negri on Negri in which he was interviewed by Anne Dufourmentelle.

    We, who were acquainted with Negri during his Parisian exile, are equally concerned at the assertion that our comrade was guilty of being a “philosopher terrorist”. That he had “victims”. That the ‘autonomists’ acted in the way Hari manages to imagine in his lubric fantasies.

    Someone who knows a great deal about Negri’s activism on the Italian left commented a few weeks ago,

    “Autonomia was not a ‘party’, aspiring to unite different struggles within a single organisation and political programme, but an ‘area’: a proliferation of local and sectional organisations, which could nevertheless come together in different configurations to work for shared objectives. Geographical and organisational poles can be identified … However, even the most clearly defined of these aspired to represent a plural reality, as suggested by the near-universal use of plural nomenclature (Collettivi, Comitati). For most participants Autonomia was a ‘galaxy’ of groups, built around local issues and affinity relationships, shifting in membership and ultimately innumerable.”
    (Edwards 2009:73-4)

    Hari is entitled to his ruminations about Negri’s prose,  ‘totalitarianism’,  and all the rest of the political criticisms he cares to spin out the top of his head. Or indeed, pillage from other people’s writings.

    There are many reproaches to be made against Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) and the Autonomia Operaia Organizzata.

    But my comrade Negri was not, is not, and will not be, a murderer.

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    New Interventions, Socialist Discussion Journal. Latest Issue.

    Posted in Communism, European Left, Islam, Islamism, Labour Movement, Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on September 18, 2011

    New Interventions is a socialist magazine, independent of any party of any left group. Our aim is to provide an open forum for all shades of radical left opinion.”

    The latest issue could be best begun with the Afterword – Arthur Trusscott’s ”Riots: Fish Rot From the Head”. Written in the thick of the disturbances he notes that “Unlike some anarchists, who see the riots as a carnival of the oppressed, socialists cannot be so sanguine.” He observes, that “innocent people are hurt and even killed..” In a strong polemic Arthur dissects the whole complex of events unfurling in the “rottenness of British capitalism.”

    Amongst other contributions…

    Issac Deutscher is the subject of a major article by Mike Jones and Alister Mitchell. This study offers a fresh view of  a “heretic” for both Official Communism and Trotskyism.

    A translation of Theodor Bergman’s The Tragedy of Paul Levi provides a valuable account of one of Rosa Luxemburg’s comrades.

    Mike Jones discusses the results of the Kosovo NATO intervention, describing the existing “gangster state” in ways bound to annoy more than a few. Chris Gray attacks Orthodox Trotskyism and the myth of ‘Pabloism’.

    Paul Flewers is rude about the New College of Humanities.

    Terry Liddle discusses the ‘New Atheism’.

     And Andrew Coates writes a long review article on Paul Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals -(originally published on this Blog - here).

    New Interventions is only available in print (!). Subs £10 for four issues. 116 Hugh Road, Coventry CV3 1AF. UK.

    E-Mail, drdavidspencer@talktalk.net. Editorial trusscott’foudnation@blueyonder.co.uk

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    Jimas, a Salafist Group in the Suffolk Establishment.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Fascism, Ipswich, Islam, Islamism, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on September 20, 2011

    Salafist Missionaries With a Finger in the Public Pie.

    Jimas, whose national HQ is Ipswich based,  is embedded in the Suffolk Establishment.

    It is a Salafist, that is, purist, Islamic missionary organisation.

    Its leader, Abu  Muntasir, fought in the jihad against the Soviet-backed Afghanistan left government.

    Initially his activities received Saudi funding.

    He recruited other ‘Mujahideen’ to fight to Holy War in countries such as Bosnia and Kashmir. It is alleged that  Jimas has also raised money to “fight in the cause of Allah”.

    Now  Muntasir poses as an open-minded moderate.

    He is,

    • A fellow of Suffolk New College.
    • Chaplin for University College Suffolk and Suffolk New College.
    • Teaches for the Workers Educational Association.
    • Is a Trustee for Ipswich Community Radio.
    • A Trustee of the Ipswich and Suffolk Council for Racial Equality (ISCRE) .
    • Was a Governor of Murrayfield Primary School (2009 – 2010)
    • Is a Tutor of the Suffolk Interfaith Resources and East of England Faiths Agency

    They even won funding from the Co-op for their ambitiously named ‘community project’ for Upper Orwell Street. That is a plan to turn a former Church into a  centre for their charitable and Islamic activities.

    They are said to be modern and open – the epitome of moderation.

    What exactly is this ‘moderation’?

    The dossier, JIMAS & Abu Muntasir,  looks closely, and at length, at Munstair and Jimas’s real beliefs.  (Full text: Here ).

    They are anything but modern.

    The document exposes the narrow-minded religious agenda of Jimas’s Salafism.

    It could be charitably described as unalloyed dogma.

    One book, published by Jimas, Living By The Law – Muhammad Ibrahim, offers an extreme defence of Sharia law – here

    Muntasir, the authors of the study assert, can be found to have made statements advocating hatred of non-Muslims – the Kuffar (notably see Page 26).

    Is this a fit person to be associated with the Ipswich and Suffolk Council for Racial Equality?

    Are their links with even more bigoted Islamism in the past?

    Hardly.

    The dossier concludes by looking at two hate-preachers, Suhaib Hasan and Salim al-Amry - invited to speak at the Jimas Da’wah Conference.

    Suhaib  is noted for saying (here),

    “Even though cutting off the hands and feet, or flogging the drunkard and fornicator, seem to be very abhorrent, once they are implemented, they become a deterrent for the whole society.

    “This is why in Saudi Arabia, for example, where these measures are implemented, the crime rate is very, very, low,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

    In a documentary to be screened on Channel 4 next month, entitled Divorce: Sharia Style, Dr Hasan goes further, advocating a sharia system for Britain. “If sharia law is implemented, then you can turn this country into a haven of peace because once a thief’s hand is cut off nobody is going to steal,” he says.
    “Once, just only once, if an adulterer is stoned nobody is going to commit this crime at all.
    “We want to offer it to the British society. If they accept it, it is for their good and if they don’t accept it they’ll need more and more prisons.”

    He has failed to weasel out of this.

    This Conference was in 2011.

    Is this is the kind of group the Suffolk political and community world should invite into its bosom?

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    Why Marx Was Right. Terry Eagleton. A Review.

    Posted in Communism, Left, Marxism, New Left, Religion by Andrew Coates on September 24, 2011

    Spiritual Comfort.

    Why Marx Was Right. Terry Eagleton.  Yale 2011.

    A Review.

    “On n’aime point à louer, on ne  loue jamais sans intérêt.” (Nobody likes to praise, we only  praise out of self-interest).

    Maxims.   La Rochefoucauld.

    Terry Eagleton considers that the  “most familiar objections to Marx’s work are mistaken”. He draws up ten, clusters of criticisms and rejections of Marx, to consider.  Eagleton concludes, that  Marx “was right enough of the time”. That there is enough rightness there to  “make calling oneself a  Marxist a reasonable self-description.” He aims not  only to show why, the reasons he can make these claims, but in  what Marx was correct.

    The present book is animated by the wish to rescue  Marxism from a premature burial. Its theory and politics are  not outdated. Marx was the  first to show the existence of the “imperceptible entity” of the  capitalist mode of production. At present this darkness is  increasingly visible.  Inequalities and exploitation are greater; “on  a global scale” capital is “more concentrated and predatory than  ever.” The working class has, in the world as a whole, grown. We  can imagine a planet in which the rich retreat behind iron gates, and  the rest of the population is left to fend for itself.  These  tangible conditions have made Marxism “more pertinent.” Marx  showed the way this capitalism arose, “by what laws it worked”  and, ambitiously, “how it might be brought to an end.” (Page xi)

    Why Marx Was Right is, then  not just concerned with defending Marx’s “understanding of human  history.” The “distinguished professor” of the private  Catholic University of Notre Dame states that today the economic system is in trouble. It has “ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe.”  That people are “talking about capitalism” is a sign of a serious  illness. The globalised free-market is plague-ridden. It has begun to  “break down”. Why Marx Was Right later concludes with the  prospect that we face the choice between “Socialism or barbarism”.  Nuclear warfare and environmental catastrophe” loom. “If we do  not act now, it seems that capitalism will be the death of us.”  (Page 237)

    The Left’s Impasse.

    Why Marx is Right begins by  asserting that what “helped to discredit Marxism” was “a  creeping sense of political impotence.” Left disillusionment after  the Fall of Communism fed off the “conviction that the future would  now be simply more of the present.” (Page 6) It was “thrust to the  margins because the social order it confronted” “waxed more  ruthless and extreme than it had been before.” (Pages 6 – 7) The  confident left of the 1970s was equally discouraged by the exhaustion of “revolutionary nationalism”, more normally called  anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. But the  “gloom” on the  left, in the era of Thatcher and Regan, followed the failures of the  decade. The terrorist adventurism of the  German ultra-left, the downward spiral of 1970s Italian ‘armed  struggle’, could only have helped underline the radical left’s  powerlessness. The left, above all in Europe, lost its position as a serious  political player. Its mass influence ebbed away, first with the  stemming of the Portuguese Revolution (1974-5), amd (for Western European Communism)  the end of the French  Common Programme (September 1977). Tthe longer drawn out marginalisation of  the ‘Bennite’ left in the UK concluded the process. Mitterrand’s first government in 1981 was unable, or  unwilling, to institute democratic socialism. It was this experience  which led some former leftists to declare themselves  “liberal-libertarians” and shout, “Vive la Crise!” to  celebrate the market. (more…)

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    Islamic Capitalism: Libya’s New Ruling Ideology?

    Posted in Capitalism, Imperialism, Islam, Islamism, Libya by Andrew Coates on September 27, 2011

    Recommended reading.

    This was very interesting last night (Radio Four): Libya’s Islamic Capitalists.

    Under Colonel Gaddafi, Libya was subject to the dictator’s so-called Third Universal Theory. Hugh Miles asks what sort of ideology is likely to dominate in post-Gaddafi Libya.

    Western media have been keeping a close eye on Libya’s governing National Transitional Council, and there have been warnings about splits between Islamists and secularists, and about Libya’s tribal society. But, as Hugh Miles discovers, amongst Libya’s new ruling class there is broad consensus about support for one ideology: capitalism.

    Gaddafi’s idiosyncratic economic and political philosophy fused elements of socialism and Islam. The suppression of free markets was at times taken to bizarre extremes with, at one point, the banning of the entire retail sector. Support for capitalism is perhaps a reaction to the years in which entrepreneurship was suppressed.

    Hugh Miles looks at the background of the new rulers and asks how Libyan Islamic capitalism might work Listen Here.

    In a change to discussions about the uprising, Western military support, and the Gaddafi regime, this programme looked at the future of Libya’s economic and social system.

    Breaking out of the Gaddafi strait-jacket is bound to open up the issue of markets, private enterprise. The ruins of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya offer many possibilities. The influence of  free-market economists and advisers in Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC), would come as little surprise - this is the dominant political economy of the decade. Not to mention the swarms of Western advisers and business representatives now in Libya.

    The interest of this well-presented programme was the sketch it offered of a symbiosis between Islamism and capitalism. The Sharia, we learnt, is not incompatible with free markets. Mohammed was, it was mentioned, a merchant. The prohibition of  interest, and moral rules forbidding trade in forbidden items (alcohol, pork, sex), are no barrier to a  throwing free-market economy. Apart from interviewees, such as Aly Abuzaakouk, Director, Minaret of Freedom Institute and  Guma Al Gamaty, UK Co-ordinator for National Transitional Council, Libya, key figures in the NTC, such as Ali Tarhouni, a former left-wing socialist, support this approach.

    Al Gamaty said, 

    Islam actually encourages people to make money, to create wealth, to be independent and engage in economic activities as traders because the more people make money, the more they can donate to the poor and help the needy.

    More contentiously speakers were allowed to declare that a constitution inspired by the Sharia would not be in conflict with human rights. Abuzaakouk said that ”Islam in general supports freedom of faith, freedom of religion, freedom of movement, freedom of expression and freedom of the economy.” This  leaves open the question of the fundamental inequality of rights that these rules lay down and the, to say the least, appalling record of modern Islamic movements and states for human rights.

    For a long period Western liberals and leftists have found a form of ‘anti-capitalism’ within Islamism. That is a radical fusion of anti-imperialism and the search for social justice. Some have expressed sympathy for Islam as a religion that can relate to the lives of the excluded better than secular materialist ideologies, like liberalism, socialism or Marxism. 

    Libya  may illustrate just how flexible religious ideologies are. Maxim Rodinson commented in Islam and Capitalism (1974) That,

    “The correlation between Islam and any particular economic system has emerged as being very largely inconclusive, at least on the plane of fundamental structures. For example it was no the precepts of Islam that created the propensity to commercial activity that is to be observed in many Muslim societies. The leaders of the Muslim expansion were traders even before their conversion, and they conquered societies in which trade was very highly developed already before the conquest, The precepts of Islam have not seriously hindered the capitalist origination taken by the Muslim world during the last hundred years, and nothing in them is really opposed to a socialist orientation,  either.”

    Libya may be swept by market enthusiasm – though as the programme noted the only real industry is oil which is the basis of a rentier economy not a real industrial or fully commercial one. Hugh Miles suggested that in Egypt, which has already experienced a bout of economic liberalism under Mubarak, there are stronger demands for state regulation. the stand of the Islamists in both cases illustrates Rodinson’s point. They adapt Islam to the economy, not the economy to Islam.

    That some speakers talked of Norway (a petrol-based state) as a democratic ideal illustrated the diverse pictures of Libya’s future – though they may well have equally shown a wish to please the BBC interviewer’s audience.

    As Islamism, a movement, in all its diverse forms, rooted in the pious bourgeoisie, moves towards its compromises with capitalism, and the West moves towards a compromise with Islamism (accepting the Sharia as a ‘cultural option’), one wonders what the erstwhile leftist admirers of this current will do.

    We suggest they read Rodinson.

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    Atzmon and the Confederacy of Zionist Dunces

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Conspiracies, Free Speech, Israel, Racism, Religion by Andrew Coates on September 30, 2011

    Pin-Up Boy.

    “When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.”


    Jonathan Swift.

    Harry’s Place does not underplay Atzmon’s délire.

    Loath as we are to publicise, or indeed to comment, on the controversy, this has to be cited (Hat-Tip  from the totalitarian Gulag lefty Tendance to Gene, original from here)

    http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/themes/hybrid-news-tts/images/ttslogo.jpg

    “Behind the headlines – conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more.”

    “Ahead of the publication of my “The Wandering Who” the entire Zionist network is in a total panic. Veterans Today’s senior Editor Gordon Duff  commented yesterday that just a ‘few books have been opposed as this one has’. He may as well be right.”

    “By Sunday night the Guardian published an appalling piece by one Andy Newman of Swindon , who, according to one of his “Socialist Unity” editors, attacked Atzmon simply to appease the relentlessly Islamophobic “Harry’s Place” public.”

    “In a final desperate attempt to jeopardize the publication of the book and to silence its author. Richard Seymour AKA ‘Lenin Thumb’,  authored a new anti Atzmon manifesto  

    “I read Richard ‘Lenin’ Seymour’s  text with interest and found out that for some reason, both ‘avant-garde revolutionary’  Seymour’s text, and Guardian’s ‘socialist’  Andy Newman’s drivel are suspiciously far too similar to the unforgettable ‘Aaronovitch Reading Atzmon’ performance at the Oxford Literature Festival. ”

    “Zionism clearly maintains and sustains  its ‘radical left opposition’ and the logos behind such a tactic is simple- ‘revolutionary’ left is totally irrelevant to both the conflict and its resolution. Hence, Zionists cannot dream of an easier opposition to handle. When the Zionists detect a dangerous rising intellect who aims at the truth, they obviously utilize and mobilize the Jewish left together with the few willing Sabbath Goyim executioners to gatekeep the emerging danger. Seymour, Newman and a just few others are always happy to slay the emerging intellect.

    “On the Jewish best seller list, it is even more popular than the Babylonian Talmud and the Torah. I guess that this is indeed a great concern for Zionists and  their stooges, but there is nothing they can do about it.”

    Indeed…..?

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    Ben Gummer, Mayor of Ipswich, Speaks.

    Posted in Britain, Conservative Party, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on October 2, 2011

    Benedict’s Band Transport Solutions.

    As Directly Elected Mayor of Ipswich The Right Hon. Benedict Gummer, MP, writes his occasional column for Tendance Coatesy.

    Last night in the Ipswich and Suffolk Club the Mayor’s (that’s, yours truly!) new Cabinet was meeting. After a  gracious and thought-provoking contribution by our legal team from Ipswich Spy we turned to local affairs.

    Lord London Road, ‘Kev’ (as he prefers to be called), hit off.

    Ipswich Street Drinkers are a nuisance.   I poured Kev a fine Napoleon Brandy (no ‘froth’ there!) and proposed that we do something about them. The Police have wisely taken it upon themselves to visit town Grog Shops and tell the owners to raise the price of all beer over 7% to £2 a can. Why not ban white cider and super-strength lager altogether? Only down-and-outs drink  Frosty Jack and Carlsburg Special.   We can all agree on that!

    Culture Chief Lady Judy Terry mentioned that whilst she was delighted that Waitrose was replacing the Ipswich Film Theatre, there was still a lack of space for new shops in Ipswich. I was pleased to tell her that there is some fantastic news for the town! At the end of Lower Brook Street the Link will take people right from the Old Cattle Market to the middle of the Orwell Estuary. A new 5 star hotel and retail area will be built with just the right kind of outlets that will attract people from London and Birmingham.

    I mentioned that Krispy Kreme doughnuts have shown interest already. Judy thought it was a fantastic idea!

    It would be amiss of me not to mention the Conservative Party Conference next week. I’ll be there (with dad!). Some ace ideas coming up!

    • Town speed limits will be raised to 90 mph – goodbye to Norwich Road, Spring Road and Bishop’s Hill early morning jams!
    • Bins will be emptied every day – Mandatory Work Activity for the Unemployed.
    • Latin lessons will be compulsory  in all schools from the age of 5.

    Floreat Ipswichona!

    Polish Anti-Clericalism on the Rise.

    Posted in Europe, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on October 4, 2011

    logo 

    The signs of the times were there but it was hard to believe this, on France-Inter this morning.

    La percée des anticléricaux polonais

    Breakthrough for Polish anti-clericals.

    Here.

    Palikot’s Movement (Polish: Ruch Palikota), is the main force pushing this.

    They may get over 5% in the coming Polish elections.

    Wikipedia gives details about this party - here.

    “Palikot is in favour of ending religious education in state schools, ending state subsidies of churches, legalising abortion on demand, giving out free condoms], allowing same-sex civil unions, the introduction of a first-past-the-post system, combining the Social Insurance Institution and the Kasa Rolniczego Ubezpieczenia Społecznego, and dissolving the Senate.

    There is some speculation that RP may form an electoral alliance with the Democratic Left Alliance in the coming 2011 parliamentary election

    However deep scepticism about Palikot is in order – here.

    Janusz Palikot – who leads the liberal populist Palikot Movement – claimed in an interview in today’s ‘ Metro’ that those studying on Humanities courses should pay for their studies. And why? Because afterwards they will be unemployed.

    Tagged with:

    Bangladesh War Criminals Accused Defender Invited to Anti-Fascist Conference.

    Posted in Bangladesh, Human Rights, Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on October 4, 2011

    These are the same person.

    Celebrate diversity, defend multiculturalism, oppose Islamophobia and racism, is organised by UAF and One Society Many Cultures and sponsored by SERTUC.

    Speakers announced for the conference Farooq Murad secretary general, Muslim Council of Britain

    Here.

    BANGLADESH IN CRISIS GOVERNMENT AT WAR WITH ITS PEOPLE

    Unfair War Tribunal rushed in despite international criticism to try people for war crimes, with possible death sentence.

    Speakers include: Farooq Murad.

    Here.

    The BBC reports,

    “A senior leader of Bangladesh’s largest Islamic party is the first suspect charged by a tribunal probing the 1971 independence struggle against Pakistan.

    The war crimes tribunal accused Delawar Hossain Sayedee of mass murder and torture among other crimes. He denies all the allegations.

    Mr Sayedee, a leader in Bangladesh’s Jamaat-e-Islami party, was arrested last year.

    The tribunal was set up in 2010 to try those accused of crimes during the war.

    Bangladesh was called East Pakistan until 1971 when a nine-month war of secession broke out leaving up to three million people dead.

    “The court has framed charges on 20 counts including crimes against humanity and genocide against Mr Sayedee,” Mohammad Shahinur Islam, registrar of the International Crimes Tribunal, told the BBC.

    “He pleaded not guilty. He claimed all those allegations were false.

    “With the framing of charges the trial has started. As a citizen, I should say this is a historic day for Bangladesh,” Mr Islam said.

    The case will be next heard on 30 October when the prosecution will make an opening statement.

    Official figures estimate that thousands of women were raped when West Pakistan sent in its army to try and stop East Pakistan becoming an independent Bangladesh.

    Last year, the Bangladeshi government set up the International Crimes Tribunal in Dhaka to try those Bangladeshis accused of collaborating with Pakistani forces and committing atrocities during months of violence.

    Mr Sayedee is among seven people, including two from the main opposition Bangladeshi Nationalist Party, facing trial. All of them deny the accusations and accuse the government of carrying out a vendetta.

    The New York-based Human Rights Watch says the tribunal needs to change some of its procedures to ensure a fair trial which meets international standards.

    The trial is likely to go on for months.”

    Farooq Murad is the son of Khurram Murad a leading figure (here) of the far-right Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami – its Pakistani branch. This organisation supported the Pakistani state’s attempts to crush the Bangladesh national liberation movement.

    Hat-Tip Ashik - here.

    On the Genocide, and the Genocide deniers, see here.

    Parti Socialiste ‘Primaires’ Surprise: Left Candidate Montebourg at 17%

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Front de Gauche, Parti Socialiste by Andrew Coates on October 10, 2011

    Résultats
    estimés

    Résultats
    validés

     

    Bureaux de vote 6 806/9 502 7 762/9 502
    Votants 1 952 471 2 233 828
    Arnaud Montebourg Arnaud Montebourg 337 646 voix – 17% 372 107 voix – 17%
    Martine Aubry Martine Aubry 595 806 voix – 31% 680 236 voix – 31%
    Jean-Michel Baylet Jean-Michel Baylet 11 864 voix – 1% 14 635 voix – 1%
    Manuel Valls Manuel Valls 110 664 voix – 6% 126 650 voix – 6%
    François Hollande François Hollande 756 413 voix – 39% 868 076 voix – 39%
    Ségolène Royal Ségolène Royal 132 936 voix – 7% 151 579 voix – 7%
    Votes blancs et nuls Votes Blancs et nuls 7 142 voix 20 545 voix

    **********

    “Two months ago we were credited with 5%!” Left Socialist primary candidate Arnaud Montebourg commented last night as the scale of his vote became apparent (here).

    Now  with 17% of the primary vote he swept his former boss, Ségolène Royal, into a humiliating  fourth position. Hearing of her score at 7% she was unable to contain her tears.

    One can share the joy of Montebourg’s supporters.

    This result sends the message that a radical left constituency exists in France, however hazy the contours, and whatever criticisms we could make of his backing for “démondialisation “.

    By Royal’s distress shows the result of the ‘primaries’ personalisation. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth

    François Hollande, ahead with 39%, was far from the 50% plus needed for outright victory. He will face a run off with Martine Aubry- 31%

    This morning the French media is dominated by discussion of this coming round. Will Holland make a leftwards move, on controlling finance, to appeal Montebourg’s voters?

     Will Aubry re-emphasise left-wing values?

    Will in fact the result increase the appeal of the Front de Gauche, the only credible political force which addresses the issues Montebourg raises?

    In deciding who will be the Parti Socialiste’s Presidential candidate next year, there’s all to play.

    More information on the Parti Socialiste site – here.

    Latest news – lots and lots and lots – on the Nouvel Observateur site – here.

    Clearest analysis, Rue 89here.

    *******

     Jean-Luc Mélenchon, candidate of the Front de Gauche,  has just issued a statement (here), including this:

    Je note surtout la percée spectaculaire d’Arnaud Montebourg et des idées de rupture qu’il porte dans des termes souvent identiques à ceux du Front de Gauche.

    I particularly note the spectacular breakthrough of Arnaud Montebourg. His ideas, of a political rupture, are often expressed  in terms which are identical to those of the Front de Gauche.

    Je forme le vœu qu’il n’en diminue pas la signification et la portée. J’espère donc qu’il n’accepte aucun marchandage ni arrangement de circonstances pour le deuxième tour. Quoiqu’il en soit, le Front de gauche aura son candidat au premier tour de l’élection présidentielle et je porterai avec le programme « l’humain d’abord » le projet de la sixième république, de la planification écologique, de la bataille pour juguler la finance et en finir avec le système de l’Europe du laisser faire

    I would like to express the wish that he does not weaken their importance. I hope, therefore, that he does not engage in any deals or backdoor negotiations for the second round (of the Primaries). Whatever may happen, the Front de Gauche will be there for the first ballot of the Presidential election. I will present the programme of ‘humanity first”, the project of a 6th Republic, ecological planning, the fight to deal with financial interests, and to end the European neo-liberal free-market system.

    French Socialist Arnaud Montebourg’s Surprise Score: National and International Reactions.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Parti Socialiste by Andrew Coates on October 11, 2011

    Faiseur de Roi?

    Update Wednesday.

    Montebourg  continues to send shock waves through the French political landscape.

    It was notable this morning on France-Inter that Martine Aubry has taken to attacking the ‘Gauche Molle’  (soft left – in the sense of weak).

    The Socialists’ primaries could be against the spirit of the 5th republic’s constitution, according to Nicolas Sarkozy. (Here)

    Jean-François Copé, General Secretary of Sarkozy’s UMP, noted a “proximité idéologique troublante”” between Montebourg and the far-right Front National. (Here.)

    L’Humanité estimates that the second round of the Socialists’ primary will now be played around left-wing themes (Here)

    For Britain’s New Statesman Jonathan Derbyshire observes that the French Socialists have taken a ‘left turn’ – here.

    In Germany Liberal Green Tageszeitung (here) talks of the waves his ” überraschend” (surprising) 17% score created, and ponders whether,he will back Holland or Aubry, or if he will choose at all.

    El País notes that Montebourg is now, or has elected himself, the judge between the two candidates. It adds,

    La irrupción de Montebourg, un populista moderno y dinámico que gusta por igual a la extrema izquierda y a la derecha, …. y cuyas ideas destilan un antieuropeísmo visceral apenas cubierto por una oratoria florida, ha revolucionado el anquilosado panorama político francés.

    The irruption of Montebourg, a modern dynamic populist, who appeals equally to the extreme right and left….whose  ideas distil a visceral anti-Europeanism, barely contained by a florid rhetoric, has revolutionised the French political landscape. Here.

    The  International Herald Tribune calls Montebourg, “by a hard-left candidate who has championed against globalization…” (Here)

    Olivier Besancenot (who? he?) denounces Montebourg

    “:“Je suis contre la mondialisation libérale et le discours de Montebourg sur la démondialisation est une fausse solution de remplacement à celle-là. C’est une régression de l’altermondialisation”

    I am against liberal globalisation. But Montebourg’s talk of de-globalisation is a false alternative or replacement for it. It’s a step backwards from ‘other’ globalisation. (here.)

    We await further responses to Montebourg’s new Open letter to Aubry and Holland. In this he’s asked their stands on his platform on: the control of finance capital, European de-globalisation, and the 6th Republichere.

    A debate between the two candidates will be held this evening. We shall wrench ourselves from Rab C.Nesbit to listen to it on France-Inter.

    Before we get Denis MacShane’s inevitable reactions this is worth remembering -

    A French socialist MP says he is taking legal proceedings against the Europe minister, Denis MacShane, for calling French opponents of the EU constitution “neo-cretins”.

    “We were shocked and offended by his comments,” Arnaud Montebourg, a radical campaigning for a no vote in the May referendum told the Guardian.

    “We have engaged a lawyer and will pursue Mr MacShane in the French courts for the offence of public abuse.”here.

    In fact what he said was that they were the “con-tres”.  This feeble play on the word ‘con’ (both cretin and c..t) and cotnre (against – the EU Constitution) was not well taken.

    Denis lost his Ministry soon after.

    We wonder why…

    Tunisia: Television Station Apologises to Islamists for Persepolis.

    Posted in Culture, Islam, Islamism, Tunisia by Andrew Coates on October 13, 2011

     

    Prostitute Being Dealt With By Islamists.

    At the beginning of the week The Guardian published this story (largely taken, unacknowledged, from le Monde - here)

    Islamist protesters attack Tunisian TV station over animated film Persepolis

    Islamists try to set fire to TV station that broadcast Marjane Satrapi’s Oscar-nominated story about a girl growing up during the Iranian revolution (More here.)

    The Minister of Religion expressed sadness at this attack. He urged “respect for the sacred”. – here.

    The Guardian reproduced the claim that the main Tunisian Islamist party, Enhadda, condemned the attacks.

    However they have not seen fit to delve into the party’s fuller reactions.

    Tunisia Live offers a fuller account,

    “According to Mr. Bhiri, (Enhadda)  Nessma crossed the line by airing something that attacked the beliefs of Muslims. ”We were shocked when Nessma presented such a film — this is an obvious provocation to all believers, not only to Muslims,” he said.  Unlike many other Tunisian political parties, which accused the protesters against Nessma of extremism and of threatening the freedom of expression and artistic creativity, Ennahda considered “Persepolis” to be too inappropriate to be presented to an Arabic audience. Mr. Bhiri went even further and described it as another form of “prostitution.”

    According to Mr. Bhiri, the film is not a work of art and does not represent artistic creativity in any way. In Bhiri’s opinion, presenting the film was only an attempt from Nessma to spread chaos among Tunisians, and this is not acceptable. “We consider what Nessma is doing as verbal violence. And we absolutely refuse it,” he asserted.

    Moreover, Nessma went rogue and ignored all the rules set by the government and by the Independent High Authority for the Elections (ISIE) — at least according to Ennahda’s Head of Political Office.  Bhiri elaborated: “Nessma keeps insisting on not following the laws and defying the rules…Although ISIE banned political advertisements, Nessma is still doing so.”

    Although Nessma breached the electoral law it has been never warned when other media outlet was shut for the same reason.  

    Bhiri next went on to allege that the TV channel was opposed to his party, specifically. “Nessma is not only breaching electoral laws, it is also attacking and sabotaging us, as if they were running and competing for the elections [themselves]…We don’t understand Nessma’s insistence on playing the role of a political party when it is not supposed to,” claimed Bhiri.  He further alleged that Nessma TV does not respect the ethics of politics or of journalism.

    “I have proof that Nessma is leading a media campaign against us.  They go around asking [various] people, but they never air anyone who advocates for us. If they were not intending to harm our reputation, why don’t they air both people who are with and who are against Ennahda…Why is Nessma involving itself in this electoral mess? It’s not a party to stand against us or to promote the Democratic Modernist Pole (PDM)*,” Bhiri contended.

    On the other hand, Mr. Bhiri stated clearly that Ennahda does not encourage violence against Nessma and considered the attack attempt against the channel “unacceptable.” “We are completely against the use of violence for any reason, and we don’t see violence as the solution for any sort any sort of issue,” commented Bhiri.

    Ennahda believes that it is not citizens’ role to convict and punish Nessma.  “We call for ISIE to take a firm decision against these behaviors and not to allow any further law breaching,” asserted Bhiri.  Instead, Mr. Bhiri advised fellow Tunisians to avoid the channel, claiming that boycotting the television station was the best solution to deal with such unethical media.”

    Here.

    Yesterday Agence France Press reported that the television station and apologised for its broadcast, notably for a part of the film which showed an image of god.

    Nebil Karoui, of  Nessma TV, said (Here),

    “Je m’excuse. Je suis désolé pour tous les gens qui ont été dérangés par cette séquence, qui me heurte moi-même”, a déclaré M. Karoui sur radio Monastir, en référence à une scène du film où Dieu est représenté, ce que proscrit l’islam.

    I apolise. I am sorry that people were upset by this section, which wounded me as well, M Karouni said on Radio Monastir, referring to the sequence in which god is portayed – which is forbidden by Islam.

    Enhadda, which considers Persepolis ‘prostituion’, is widely expected to form part of Tunisia’s government after forthcoming elections.

    They will no doubt be in a position, not as ‘citizens’ but as the state, to make this opinion felt. As well as their views on the Modernist Pole.

    * Left secular alliance.  

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    The Revolution Will Be Digitalised. Heather Brooke. A Critical Review.

    Posted in Culture, Free Speech, Globalisation, Internet Freedom by Andrew Coates on October 14, 2011

    Review: The Revolution Will Be Digitalised. Heather Brooke. William Heinemann. 2011.

    “Never before” Heather Brooke begins, “has the possibility of true democracy been so close to realisation.” The reason? As the hand-mill gave Europe feudal lords, and the steam-mill industrial capitalists, digital technology brings the Information Enlightenment. Through the Internet data digitalisation has unleashed a global battle. This is between “freedom fundamentalists, hackitivists and democracy campaigners”, and the “traditional gatekeepers of information” governments, police, secret services and the military. The Revolution Will Be Digitalised relates the “drama of events” in the “war” for the “first global democracy” in which “a truly free press, and a truly informed public becomes a reality.” (Page ix)

    The Revolution is made up of “dispatches” from the battle lines. Writing of her experience as a campaigner Brooke describes how disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) shook up British politics. She fought hard, inspired by American ideals of public openness to “bring the revolution home.” Getting details on how individual parliamentarians spent public money was the most difficult battle. Westminster closed ranks in its legal fortresses. FOI requests began to weaken its ramparts. But its last redoubt was only breached in 2009 when somebody simply took all the facts about MPs expenses and, with the ease digital technology allows, gave it to media. New information weaponry had made the UK’s “be-wigged and be-stockinged” officials’ defences redundant.

    State secrecy across the world, The Revolution recounts, is under fire. What has changed is outsiders’ ability to hack into encrypted data. Brooke travels to investigate the interlopers whose interest in cracking hidden codes has given them a “lever” on power. Brooke meets up with some of them, libertarian computer geeks working together in ‘hackerspaces’. She describes a culture it takes little imagination to visualise. In Brooke’s account, their belief in completely free information is probably more appealing than ‘anarchist’ “consensus based” meetings, in which all can talk for as long as they wish. This tolerance has its limits. As one interviewee says, “anyone who is not a utopianist is a schmuck.” (Page 29)

    It would perhaps be ungenerous to suggest that the utopian ideal of shared information, particularly private communications, cracked, hacked or leaked, has not fared well in the UK in recent months. The balance between the right to know, and laws against media prying, has swung back and forth. For the moment, gatekeepers have come back into fashion; hacking has lost its sheen.

    From Iceland to WikiLeaks.

    Front-line reporting is Brooke’s hallmark, or perhaps, style-book. We shift from the world-wide hacker community, full of, as one self-mockingly says, Cyberpunk heroes bent on outwitting officialdom, to Iceland where she admits, legislation passed through “real politics” begins. Birgitta Jónsdóttir MP who speaks “rough-hewn Icelandic words” was the political voice promoting attempts to make it a “transparency jurisdiction.” By 2010 a process was underway to make the country a “haven for free speech.” (more…)

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    Tunisian Islamists Turn to Violence.

    Posted in Free Speech, Islam, Islamism, Secularism, Tunisia by Andrew Coates on October 15, 2011

    Tunisian Salafists Demand End to Free Speech in Run-Up to Election.

    Agence France Press reports on yesterday’s violence in Tunisia,

    “ Tunisian extremists fire-bombed the home of a TV station chief Friday, hours after militants protesting against its broadcast of a film they say violated Islamic values clashed with police in the streets of Tunis.

    About a hundred men, some of whom threw Molotov cocktails, lay siege to the home of Nessma private television chief Nabil Karoui late Friday, the station reported in its evening news bulletin.

    Karoui’s family had only just escaped, the news presenter said as Nessma denounced the attack.

    Sofiane Ben Hmida, one of Nessma’s star reporters, told AFP the station chief was not at home when the attack on his house took place around 7:00 pm (1800 GMT). But his wife and children were.

    About 20 of the protesters were able to get inside.

    “The family managed to get out the back and are safe. The attackers wrecked the house and set it on fire,” he added.

    A neighbour, who had alerted police, said the aggressors arrived in taxis, armed with knives and Molotov cocktails.

    According to a Nessma source “only a housemaid was present inside. She was attacked and hospitalised.”

    Karoui himself said by telephone that he was shocked and devastated by the attack.

    “I fear for my family. I am scared they (the attackers) will come back,” he said.”

    More Here

    According to le Monde trouble began on Friday evening after a big demonstration by Salafist Islamists in central Tunis, and other areas, demanding Sharia law. Trouble broke out outside government buildings.

    Later a group went to attack the house of the the Head of the Nessma television channel – guilty of broadcasting the ‘blasphemous’ animated film, Persepolis.

    Le Monde notes,

    Défenseurs des droits de l’homme, militantes féministes et associations ont dénoncé, à l’approche des élections du 23 octobre, un “double discours” des islamistes, notamment du parti favori du scrutin Ennahda qui, selon eux, condamne la violence tout en encourageant en sous main les salafistes pour imposer leur idéologie à la société tunisienne.

    Human rights supporters, feminist activists, and civil society groups denounced – as elections near on the 23rd of October – the “double talk” of the main Islamist party, Enhadda, tipped to head the vote. The claim that this party has condemned the violence, while giving underhand support to the Salafists in order to impose its ideology on Tunisia.

     

    Here.

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    Tunisia: Attacks Grow Against Left Parties.

    Posted in Fascism, Islamism, Left, North Africa, Tunisia by Andrew Coates on October 16, 2011

    Islamist attacks on freedom of speech in Tunisia are growing.

    It is not just the television station that broadcast Persepolis but, in the run up to national elections,  leftist parties who are the object.

    Ettakatol : encore un local vandalisé !

     Le siège du parti Ettakatol à Hammamet fut l’objet d’acte de vandalisme la nuit du mercredi à jeudi 13 octobre 2011. En effet, des personnes anonymes ont saccagé et pillé le siège.” (From Here)
     
    The Offices of Ettakotal (Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberties – a member of the Socialist International) was,on the 13th of October. the target of vandalism. Unknown persons entered the building, and then pillaged and sacked it. 
     

    El Qotb: Les agressions et les menaces se multiplient contre ses activistes ?

    El Qotb (Modernist and democratic Pole: threats and attacks against its activists grow?

    Below describes attacks which are becoming commonplace. El Quotb members were described as ‘atheists’ and (in French translation) ‘mécréants’  heretics’.

    “Selon un membre de coordination nationale du PDM , des individus ont agressé mercredi 12 octobre 2011, dans l’après midi, deux jeunes militants du parti El Qotb, Pôle Démocratique Moderniste (PDM) dans la région de Boumhel, située à environ 15 km de la capitale Tunis.

    Cet incident n’est pas le premier en son genre, puisque les membres d’El Qotb ont subi des agressions à Aguareb aussi, et ont reçu des menaces pour le meeting de Kerkennah, prévu pour demain, jeudi 13 octobre.

    Ils sont accusés par leurs agresseurs d’être un parti de mécréants et d’athéisme, alors qu’ils prônent le modernisme et la tolérance.” From Here

    Meanwhile the main Islamist party, Enhadda, has distanced itself from the violence that took place this Friday when Salafists attacked the home of the chief of the television channel Nessma,

    But this statement was made by their leader,

    After demonstrations occurred yesterday, October 14th, in several cities in Tunisia, including Tunis, Gafsa, Sidi Bouzid and Bizerte, Ennahda denies any link with the protest against Nessma TV.

    According to La Presse, Ghannouchi said that “Those Tunisians who took to the streets today to protest against the provocations made by certain media are defending Islam and do not need a tutor for that.”

    Bouazza Ben Bouazza via Associated Press adds this (here)

    Ennahda condemned the violence but at the same time spoke out against the “attacks on beliefs and sacred symbols.”

    In his interview, Ghannouchi described the Salafists and other religious parties as “brothers,” while acknowledging there were differences among them.

    But some Western observers say the party’s mixed message may be more old-fashioned electioneering than an insidious plot to trick Tunisia into a theocracy.

    Just like U.S. politicians who have one message for the party base and another for centrists, Ennahda’s candidates may be tailoring their message to their different audiences, said Chris Alexander, a Tunisia expert at Davidson College.

    “For electoral purposes, they need Ennahda to be a fairly big tent,” he said.

    Knowing how people will vote in a country with no history of free elections is a challenge. Polling — a new phenomenon here — has shown that while half of the electorate is undecided, roughly a quarter of Tunisians would vote for Ennahda, suggesting it could take between a quarter and a third of the constituent assembly.

    It’s a pretty impressive tally for a party that was hounded out of existence in the early 1990s, with thousands of its members imprisoned on terrorism and other charges, or driven into exile.

    Ennahda certainly had its flirtation with violence. Extremist elements of the group carried out attacks against the government in the late 1980s and early 1990s during the heavy crackdown, but since that time the leadership has repeatedly eschewed violence.”

    Against the Islamists only the Pôle Démocratique Moderniste stands firm,

    As Rue 89 reports,

    Le PDM est quasiment la seule formation à défendre sans ambiguïté la laïcité et l’égalité entre hommes et femmes dans tous les domaines.

    The PDM is nearly the only grouping unambiguously to defend secularism and equality between men and women. (More Here)

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    Islamophobia Campaigner Unmasked as Police Agent Provocateur.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, British Govern, Islam, Islamism, Racism by Andrew Coates on October 18, 2011

    Robert, ‘Bob’, Lambert is a well-known campaigner against Islamophobia.

    He has made no secret of his work as a long-term worker for the Special Branch. His later work has brought into the field of their work against Jihadists. Now an academic he promoted the view that a dialogue with moderate Islamism is essential.  In both capacities he has been cited and relied on by Islamophobia Watch (Here). The New Statesman has provided him with a platform to give advice on tackling anti-Muslim sentiment to the all-Parliamentary group on Islamophobia. (Here)

     Indy Media has published this (via the Spittoon)

    “Campaigners today outed the most-senior-yet police spy responsible for infiltrating environmental and social justice campaigns.

    Former Detective Inspector Bob Lambert MBE had just spoken at a “One Society, Many Cultures” anti-racist conference attended by 300 delegates at the Trades Union Congress HQ in Central London. He was then challenged by 5 members of London Greenpeace who called on him to apologise for the undercover police infiltration of London Greenpeace, Reclaim The Streets and other campaign groups – an operation he took part in or supervised over two decades, whilst rising to the rank of Detective Inspector.

    Bob Robinson (as Bob Lambert called himself at the time) was a spy in London Greenpeace from 1984 to 1988, and he went on to supervise others agents who continued with infiltration of groups such as London Greenpeace and Reclaim the Streets, along with anti fascist protests, and actions against genetically modified crops. These agents used pseudonyms, and engaged in fraudulent and deceitful long-term intimate relationships with people in the groups before disappearing without trace – a stasi-like tactic involving a gross abuse of trust which has caused great emotional damage to a number of people involved.”

    Yesterday the Guardian corroborated the story (Here)

    An academic and prominent supporter of progressive causes has been unmasked as a former spy who controlled a network of undercover police officers in political groups.

    During his current career as an academic expert on Islamophobia, Bob Lambert has regularly spoken at political rallies to promote campaigns against racism and fascism.

    However, in his previous career as a special branch officer, which lasted 26 years, he ran operations at a covert unit that placed police spies into political campaigns, including those run by anti-racism groups. The unit also disrupted the activities of these groups.

    Lambert became head of the unit after going undercover himself.

    Since becoming an academic three years ago, he has made no secret of the fact he was a special branch detective between 1980 and 2006, working on what he describes as “countering threats of terrorism and political violence in Britain”.

    However, he has kept quiet about his undercover work.

    Robert Lambert has since emerged in the campaign against Islamophobia. 

    We are opposed to all forms of racism and religious bigotry, intolerance against Muslims, and anti-Semitism.

    But Islamophobia is a term also used to attack anybody criticising Islam, and, above all political Islam. It is used against leftist opponents of theocratic regimes like Iran and far-right Islamist groups such as Hizbt ut al tahrir and Jamaat-e-Islami

    Lambert is due to speak next month at the Jamaat’s  London stronghold, the East London Mosque, which is also close to the ultra-conservative Moslem Brotherhood.

    Islamophobia muddies the waters. It makes it hard to present the case for secular politics (which advances the principle of a separation between political power and religion). It treats criticism of those who wish to impose religious beliefs on the public sphere as ‘racist’. In particular it is part of a sustained campaign of denigration against Continental laïcité.

     On Harry’s Place Lucy Lips comments (Here),

    Lambert doesn’t just cultivate narks. He supports and defends groups with horrific racist and authoritarian politics, and attacks Muslim liberals and others who oppose the politics of Islamist groups. He does so from a University Research Centre, in the press, and in public meetings. And he does so, within the political establishment, using his decades long reputation as an infiltrator of extremist groups to add authority to his policy preferences.

    Harry’s Place suggests that Lambert may have been more than a posh version of a grass.

    He may have directly inspired, or egged on, actions by groups such as London Greenpeace.

    This seems to be the line taken by the Morning Star, which today concentrates on his ‘Green’ activities.

    We are are more concerned with Lambert’s present position as an “academic expert on Islamophobia.”

    Has he gone, as some consider, so far as to implicitly sympathise with Islamists?

    This is by no means evident.

    But Lambert has played a deeply divisive role by weakening opponents of reactionary Islamism.

    Is this evidence of a continuing secret service project to divide the left?

    Here is evidence.

    In 2008 the secular Left, including Gay Rights activist Peter Tatchell, campaigned against misogynist far-right Islamist Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi who was due to visit the UK.

    Tatchell, who had criticised an earlier visit when the cleric was feted by Ken Livingstone, placed him within the camp of “clerical fascism” (Here).

    Qaradawi was eventually denied entry to the UK.

    Bob Lambert – as pro-Islamist  reported in the Guardian here - had this reaction.

     With more than a quarter century at the sharp end of counter-terrorism operations, Lambert is scarcely a bleeding-heart liberal. But he has been unable to speak out publicly until now and is deeply frustrated by the Qaradawi ban. “Qaradawi is clearly useful in countering al-Qaida propaganda”, Lambert told me this week. “He is held in high esteem: how can we think meaningfully about enlisting credible Muslim community support against al-Qaida if we’re not prepared to engage constructively with the likes of Qaradawi?”

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    Front de Gauche Launches Presidential Campaign.

    Posted in French Left, French Politics, Front de Gauche, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on October 20, 2011

    The French Socialists have selected their Presidential candidate.

    To their left the Front de Gauche (FdG) has now launched its own campaign for next year’s Presidential elections with the inauguration of its headquartersand the setting up of a 118 strong national steering committee.

    FdG candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon said he was not unhappy at the Socialist’s choice,

    Cela permettra d’éclaircir les choses, “le débat sur la grande question de l’orientation à gauche, entre une ligne démocrate et une ligne de combat incarnée par le Front de gauche, va pouvoir avoir lieu”. Son but : « secouer » Hollande. S’ancrer à gauche, récupérer l’aile gauche du PS et une partie de l’électorat du NPA déçu par la défection de Besancenot, tout en évitant ”le désastre” pour la gauche que serait l’alliance entre le PS de Hollande et le MoDem de Bayrou. here.

    This will clarify things. “A debate will take place on how the left is defined, between the line of ‘democracy’ and the line of ‘struggle’. His aim? To shake up Holland. By being anchored on the left he hopes to appeal to the left of the Socialist Party, and the voters who backed Bescencenot - now disappointed by his failure to stand again as the Presidential candidate of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste.  At the same time he warns of a ‘disaster’ should Holland align with the centrist candidate Bayrou and his party, the MoDems.

     Mélenchon promises radical measures to deal with the financial system and institute major social reforms.

     The FdG programme, L’Humain d’abord,  is outlined here. It includes plans to publicly control finance, create socially owned investment institutions, reform the EU’s treaties, and ecological planning. The FdG is also strongly behind worker and social struggles.

    The FdG has received the support of many well-known personalities and political activists.  In a political first the left-socialist (Parti de Gauche) is backed by the French Communist Party (PCF), the Trotskyists of the Gauche Unitaire, left-wing Greens and supporters of self-management (such as Les Alternatifs).

    Warning of the danger of the Parti Socialist aligning with the centre, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has announced his willingness to debate socialist prospective candidate, François Holland.

    At 9% in the opinion polls the FdG candidate outscores the French Green Party candidate, Eva Joly – 6-7 %, and is far in advance of the small left parties, Lutte  Ouvrière, 1,0 – 0,5%  and the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste – the latter, the NPA at below 0,5% , and little wider backing may not be able to muster enough support to stand in the election.

    More   Here.

    Gaddafi Died a Hero, Says WRP….

    Posted in Colonialism, Imperialism, Libya, Trotskyism by Andrew Coates on October 21, 2011

    SOCIALIST UNITY

    Leads New Unity Initiative.

    We publish this statement in the interests of left and anti-imperialist regroupment.

    The death of Colonel Gaddafi has inspired new thinking.

    Following the lead of ZANU-PF an important unity process is gathering pace, to replace the pro-imperialist ’Left’, who back ‘humanitarian intervention’ – imperialism, oil thieves and other rascals – led by John Wright of Socialist Unity.

    As comrade Wight felicitously puts it, faced with the NATO murder of Colonel Muammar  Gaddafi,

    The degenerate rump which inhabits the left in the northern hemisphere, the political detritus left behind after the tide ran out on the left’s fortunes years before, joined in the chorus of celebration alongside their respective governments. Then too depravity wore the mask of human progress.

     (More Here).

    Tendance Coatesy is resolutely opposed to degenerate detritus and critical of  depraved rumps.

    The below is a thoughtful contribution to this debate.

    “COLONEL Gadaffi was yesterday badly wounded by a NATO air attack on a convoy of vehicles outside the city of Sirte.

    It was said that he was then finished off with a shot to the head by local counter-revolutionaries or NATO special forces.

    Gadaffi died a hero, defending Libya against the NATO oil thieves.

    His heroism will inspire millions of Libyans, Arabs, workers and youth throughout the world to take up the struggle to smash imperialism.

    On the contrary, the names of those who organised his murder, and the rape of Libya, Cameron, Hague, Sarkozy and Obama will stink throughout history.

    They have destroyed Libya’s infrastructure and are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Libyans in their quest to hold Libya’s resources in their hands.

    His death will not mean an end of the struggle against the colonisers and their agents. In fact, the struggle will be stepped up by the tens of thousands of youth who will be inspired by his refusal to give way to the requirements of imperialism.

    However, there is one great and vitally important lesson to be learnt by the masses of the world from the Libyan events.

    This is never to trust the word or the actions of the imperialist powers or their diplomatic liars.

    Gadaffi’s undoing was not the result of a lack of courage or a lack of support amongst the Libyan masses as the million-strong marches showed.

    His mistake was to trust the word of the imperialist powers, in particular the word of the emissary of world imperialism, Blair, who pledged that Libya would be welcomed back into the world, provided he gave up Libya’s weapons of mass destruction.

    Colonel Gadaffi made an agreement and honoured his side of the bargain, disarming and granting big contracts to the western imperialist powers.

    They then used their re-entry into Libya to corrupt elements of the regime before unleashing the counter-revolutionary forces as NATO’s ground troops, with NATO air power slaughtering thousands of civilians.

    The major lesson from the Libyan struggle – never to trust the imperialist ruling classes – must never be forgotten by the working class, particularly in Europe, as the revolution against the savage cuts policies of the ruling classes gets under way.

    To win this struggle the working class must match the ruling class in every department, including class consciousness and ruthlessness. “

    More of this, and no doubt more to come, from, Here.

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    Tunisia: Ghannouchi, The Occult Islamist and the Guardian.

    Posted in Globalisation, Islam, Islamism, Tunisia by Andrew Coates on October 27, 2011

    Guardian’s ‘Progressives’: Sudan’s Islamic leader, Moslem cleric, parliamentary speaker and President of Sudanese Islamic National Front, Dr Hassan al-Turabi (r), Pakistani Khurshid Ahmad, leader of the Jammat-e-Islami party (c), Rashid Ghanoshi (Rached Ghannouchi) of Tunisian Tehrik-e-Islami party and Ustaz Yaser of the Afghan AIG address the media 18 February 1991

     The Guardian is now  touting the Islamists of Enahada.

    Comment is Free Editor, Seumas Milne writes this morning of ,

    “The once savagely repressed progressive Islamist party An-Nahda (which) won the Tunisian elections this week on a platform of pluralist democracy, social justice and national independence.” Here.

     Libé  publishes today today a description of Tunisia’s new rulers you won’t read in the Guardian.

    Their leader Ghannouchi is described in these terms,

    On tenant de ce double discours caractéristique du mouvement, accusent aussi ses détracteurs. Sa doctrine est «ambiguë», juge ainsi Hamadi Rédissi, politologue et président de l’Observatoire tunisien de la transition démocratique : «Il navigue entre le califat et l’état civil, entre le modernisme et la rigueur idéologique, entre l’électoralisme et l’agitation permanente. Il est capable de dire tout et son contraire. Je pense qu’il est sincèrement et profondément divisé intérieurement.» Ghannouchi se réclame de l’islamisme modéré des Turcs de l’AKP. Mais, dans les ouvrages qu’il a écrits, «les sources intellectuelles sont toujours les mêmes : Hassan el-Banna, le fondateur des Frères musulmans, ainsi que d’autres islamistes radicaux», dit Rédissi.”

    This double language is characteristic of the movement, asserts one of their detractors. Their doctrine is “ambiguous” says political scientist Hamadi Rédissi, president of the Observatory of Tunisian democratic transition. He moves constantly between the Caliphate and a Civil State, between modernity and ideological rigour, between electoralism and permanent agitation. He is capable of saying anything and its opposite. I’m convinced he is deeply divided inside himself. Ghannouchi claims he follows the Turkish AKP Party, but in his writings he always cites the same people, Hassan el-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and other radical Islamists.” More Here.

    The full election results should be declared today.

    In the meantime Le Monde notes the Islamists’ strong showing amongst middle-class electors, professionals, and its wealthy backers, as well a s support from the ‘popular’ classes – here.

    As Serge Halimi says in Le Monde Diplomatique (Here),

    Le programme d’Ennahda, qui ne remet en cause ni le libéralisme ni l’ouverture commerciale (lire « Après les révolutions, les privatisations… »), propose donc un rééquilibrage entre les investisseurs et tour-opérateurs occidentaux, et ceux, « islamiques », venus de la région ou du Golfe.

    The programme of Ennahada does not question either economic liberalism or Tunisia’s international commercial links..though it does propose to rebalance the proportion of Western investors andoc, and ‘Islamic’ ones from their own region, and from the Gulf.

    Or as Riad Ben Fadhel of the left Demcoratic and Social Pole says in l’Humanité today,

    Les islamistes ont en effet réussi cette percée sur un terreau d’injustice sociale et d’inégalités régionales. Sans pour autant offrir la moindre perspective de sortie de crise. Ils se sont contentés de dénigrer la gauche et les valeurs de progrès, de brandir l’étendard de « l’identité arabo-musulmane » soi-disant menacée, d’imposer de faux débats sur les relations avec Israël. Ils ont refusé toute confrontation sur les problématiques socio-économiques.

    The  Islamists have acheived their victory by exploiting  issues of social injustice and regional inequalities. Without that is offering the slightest indication of a way out of the crisis. They continue to denigrate the Left and progressive values, and wave the banner of Islamic and Arab identity, apparently threatened, and to impose false debates about our relations with Israel. They refuse all challenges on social-economic issues.

    Some progressives!

    Tagged with: , , ,

    Christopher Hitchens, Acknowledging the Legislators.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Communism, Culture, Imperialism, Islamism, Left, Religion, Secularism, Stalinism by Andrew Coates on October 28, 2011

    Differences and Agreement.

    Christopher Hitchens: Acknowledging the Legislators.

    Arguably. Christopher Hitchens.  Atlantic Books. 2011. Hitchens Vs. Blair. Is Religion a Force for  Good in the World? The Munk Debate. Black Swan 2011.

    Christopher Hitchens has the gift of  making you want to listen. Simon Hoggart, he recalls in conversation  after the Munk Debate, once suggested that he should write as  he spoke. This advice he has followed. The collection of republished  pieces in Arguably shows this trait in every page. Keeping a  few furlongs ahead of the reading public with his table-talk about  the giants of English and American Literature, World and National  Politics, History, Totalitarianism, Wine, Song and Women, he pauses,  at it were, to fire shots at a variety of seated ducks. Diagnosed  with cancer, and conscious of his mortality, he does not just grab  attention: he is good company.

    Pit Hitchens in public against a  predictably fatuous Tony Blair and one can see the full force of  Hoggart’s remark. During the Munk Debate the former PM  raises the hard to answer claim that religion gives “billions of  people an impulse to be better people.” It would be in order to  reiterate the point, already amply expressed, that faith can be a  drive in other directions. The New Atheist prefers the just  observation that noble works need no divine sponsor. He finds enough  “force for good” in the ethical compassion of his “fellow human  creatures.” Hitchens is even prepared to eulogise the “real  heroism and dignity in the communist movement” though “we opposed  it.” After that, Blair’s concluding casuistry, that religious  belief gives one “some sense of humility about oneself” looks  shabby.

    Only, when a degree of agreement  between Hitchens and Blair about the justice of the “liberation of  Iraq” comes up, is there an awareness of something lesser. The  “aspiration for the civilised life” justified the Coalition’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The long drawn out intellectual and  emotional conversion that led to supporting this use of Western  military power has left Hitchens subject to the torments of his new  allies, his old friends, and lends shrillness to his voice.

    How far has the “informal  international for the overthrow of fascism in Iraq” stood the test  of time? (Hitch 22. 2010) In this Cause, the author of  Arguably is committed to the ‘ethic of principled  conviction’. There is a tendency to disclaim responsibility for any  but agreeable consequences of Saddam’s downfall. In Arguably as a counter note, it is to his moral credit that Hitchens is  prepared to denounce the official use of torture by Waterboarding.  The complaints of Foxhole atheists against about Christian Soldiers  marching to convert Afghans are given attention, though he justly  observes that “the activities of anonymous torturers on the Bagram  base” weigh heavier. But by way of constant contrast he is  intransigent on the rightness of the invasion and occupation of  Mesopotamia. If he is uncomfortable in the ideological Green Zone it  is safer than outside.

    Hitchens considers then, that the  Iraq War was the great political watershed of the twenty-first  century. It separated out those prepared to sacrifice for freedom,  from those who stayed with the dictators. One course is set on hope,  for a democratic future, followed by a variety of courageous  individuals – a Tunisian street vendor, an Egyptian restaurateur  and a Libyan husband and father, to whose memory Arguably is  generously dedicated. The other, pursued by totalitarians – Islamists, unreconstructed Stalinists, and obdurate Leninist  anti-imperialists – is hurtling downwards to perdition. This  division crops up frequently in Arguably. It is, as we will  see, misleading and misdirecting as a guide to the contours of new developments in world politics.

    Criticism as a Calling

    Christopher Hitchens makes his most  enduring impression as a Critic who is some steps beyond his readers’  tread. The “authors and artists who have contributed to culture and  civilisation”, and others of a somewhat motley crew, are weighed  variably. Some, perhaps many, or at least their creations, are found  wanting. To get a flavour of Hitchens it’s worth citing some of  these steely excursions, though a fuller rendering would risk being  as long as Arguably. (more…)

    Paris, Christian Integrists Protest at ‘Christianophobia’.

    Posted in Free Speech, Racism, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on October 29, 2011

    After ‘Islamophobia’, now we have ‘Christianophobia’, complete with its own Wikipedia entry – here.

    As with the former, the latter is being used for all kinds of dodgy ends.

    See:

    PARIS (AP) — The city of Paris is filing legal complaints against a group of fundamentalist Christians who have been protesting a play currently showing at the municipal theater, claiming it is blasphemous, the mayor said Friday.

    Riot police have been called in to chase off demonstrators bearing crosses loudly protesting in front of, and sometimes inside, the Theatre de la Ville since the Oct. 20 opening of the play.

    “Sur le Concept du Visage du fils de Dieu” (“On the Concept of the Son of God’s Face”), by Italian Romeo Castellucci is a provocative story centering on a young man caring for his aged and incontinent father. A portrait of the face of Christ looms large onstage throughout and projectiles are ultimately thrown at it.

    Each night, police have had to defend the theater from a group of ultra-Christian protesters — organized by the group Renouveau France — who turn up with crucifixes and banners denouncing “Christianophobia,” determined to disrupt the show .

    Mayor Bertrand Delanoe said in a statement that Paris can’t tolerate “such expressions of fundamentalism and intolerance.”

    His statement said the city is filing complaints when demonstrators try to interrupt performances.

    The play has been shown elsewhere without incident, including in Poland, Italy and Spain — traditionally Catholic countries.

    Commentators backing the play contend it is not intended to offend Christ.

    The director of the theater, in the center of Paris, Emmanuel Demarcy-Moto, denounced the “odious threats” and vowed that the show must go on.

    Read more: Here.

    The report in le Monde yesterday suggested that the core of  this group is the far-right (Renouveau Français and the heirs of Action Française) with a welcome in the chruch of St-Nicholas-du-Chardonnet in Paris. Cohering around the theme of Christianity under threat, it is an attempts to outbid the more ‘moderate’ elements of the Front National. Having failed in their bid to for Bruno Gollnish to win control of the party now headed by Marine Le Pen, they have taken to direct action to pursue their goal.  That is, to pull them rightwards.

    It certainly looks similar to the friendly dialectic being played out in Tunisia between the Salafists and Ennahdad.

    The Zeitgeist Movement and Occupy UK: An Anti-Globalisation Cult.

    Posted in Anarchism, Conspiracies, Fascism, Jews, Scottish Nationalism, Sectarianism, Ultra Left by Andrew Coates on October 31, 2011

    The Zeitgeist Future: Yuk!

    Occupy Glasgow’s inability deal with an incident of sexual assault,  has created a serious controversy. From the City itself Mhairi from the Scottish Socialist Party, has described this on her Blog, and her report has yet to be properly answered. (Full post Here.)

    The gravity of this incident is illustrated by this commentator’s observation, “This horrendous rape has just shown how so many people, supposedly on the side of the underprivileged, actually see women as objects and fucktoys, incapable of independent thought.” 

    We will not comment on this further.

    But one concern has come up which relates to a wider problem about the ‘Occupy Movement’ – its tolerance towards a conspiracy cult with dodgy ideas that parallel a strain of thought  on the extreme right.

    This, the Zeitgeist Movement UK  (ZMUK),  appears to be involved in Glasgow (as they claim here and in the rest of the UK here).

    The Scottish Socialist Party’s Youth group offers this account TZM (full story Here.)

    Zeitgeist got started when a man called Peter Joseph (this apparently isn’t his real or full name, as he conceals his real identity) released a documentary called, amazingly enough, Zeitgeist (which is German for Spirit of the Times) in 2007. This film was stuck up on Google video, and quickly got loads of views. This was then followed by a sequel, Zeitgeist Addendum, the following year.

    The first film is an amalgamation of conspiracy theories: first of all, about religion, making all kinds of claims about the origins of Christianity; then a large middle section about 9/11, asserting that there were no terror attacks and they were in fact carried out by the US government. The final section is probably the most important for us to examine as socialists, because it’s about money and finance. It argues that the world is dominated by a small elite who operate through control of international finance, the media and education. This elite deliberately enslaves the rest of the world by keeping us permanently in debt to the banks by the way they operate the money system.

    The SSP then turns to the Second Film and the present ideology of this cult,

    If you try and engage Zeitgeist activists about these issues, in all likelihood they will say something along the lines of “Well, we don’t promote the first film any more, we’ve moved on to new things.” Sometime between the making of the first and second films, Peter Joseph came into contact with Jacques Fresco, a designer and engineer who has a series of plans for improving society which he calls the Venus Project. Zeitgeist now describes itself as “the activist wing of the Venus Project.” Privately, some are trying to distance themselves from some of the material in the first film, but officially it is still promoted on the main page when you google Zeitgeist, and remains most people’s introduction to the movement.

    The Venus Project advocates what it calls a “resource based economy”, arguing that there are enough resources in the world to provide everyone with a decent standard of living. The problem they argue is that capitalism deliberately makes resources scarce in order to make a profit. So far this is definitely something socialists could agree with. The project goes on to present a whole series of exciting looking sci-fi style drawings of what the high-tech future they propose will look like, which are strangely retro and remind you of concept art for 60s sci fi shows.

    Anybody looking for two minutes at the Zeitgeist US site (yes, funnily enough it’s from there!) and reading more about this “global sustainability movement” can see that it’s a culthere.

    There are some serious attacks on them by the Zeitgeist Movement Exposed  here.

    I never liked that cretin Buckminister Fuller anyway.

    Suffolk Libraries to Need Begging Bowl to Stay Open.

    Posted in Capitalism, Conservative Party, Culture, Cuts, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on November 1, 2011

    New Slimline Library Funder.

    On the future of the County Libraries, the East Anglian Daily Times publishes today a Press Release from Suffolk Council Conservative Group.

    We’ve cut and pasted the whole Tory statement, by oversight presented as an article,  below.

    The nature of this “industrial and provident society” needs investigation, and how exactly will ‘local community groups’ run libraries? Will they have a say over book purchases – over titles – over allowing, say, commercial groups to run in libraries?

    Initially however we notice this.

    Cost of libraries (projected):  £6.487m a year.

    Locally Raised money needed (or rather required) to supplement this: 5%.

    We can dismiss the mathematically illiterate claim by Ipswich Spy that this 5% means 100k across the whole County.

    But does it as the article cites, mean only 100k a year per library?

    How is this figure worked out?

    And how on earth is it going to be raised?

    By begging?

    Press Release:

    “ALL 44 of Suffolk’s libraries will remain open and be helped to flourish by a new, slim line and cost-effective organisation, if councillors approve plans put before them next week and then in December.

    The proposals would see Suffolk County Council create an Industrial and Provident Society (IPS), an organisation working with, but independent from, the county council to support the county’s library network.The IPS would hold charitable status, be able to benefit from an 80% reduction in property rates and apply for external funding.

    It would predominantly be funded by a grant from Suffolk County Council, and use its resources to provide central support to all of Suffolk’s existing, and future, libraries.

    The new model would cost a maximum of £652k to set up but would be 27.6% cheaper to run than the current arrangement. It would mean library services in Suffolk would cost £6.487m a year, as opposed to their £8.961m running cost in 2010/11, without any library closures.

    Much of the savings come from reducing management tiers and central staffing costs which would no longer be needed in the more slim line organisation. Staff currently working in libraries would be transferred into the IPS under TUPE employment rules.

    Eventually, every library will have a community group involved and having a direct say in its day to day running. Supported by the IPS, community groups will be able to opt for a level of responsibility they feel able to take on. Seven pilot projects are currently being developed and will, from April 2012, be the first of these arrangements in action. Organisations running local libraries would become members of the IPS and elect its board.

    Some of the pilot projects have demonstrated that it would be possible for libraries to raise a small amount of money through activities like fund raising, membership schemes and generating income. Local library organisations will therefore be asked to contribute just 5% of the direct running costs of their library, £100k a year in total, significantly less than the financial contributions being discussed at the beginning of the year. Through the IPS, the county council would fund 95% of the direct costs of running the libraries.

    Councillor Judy Terry, Suffolk County Council’s portfolio holder for libraries, said:

    “The model we’ve developed will put Suffolk’s library service on a strong and sustainable footing for the future. It’s fully costed on the basis of keeping the full library network open.

    “We want to free the library service from unnecessary council bureaucracy so that it can thrive and move with the times. Giving people a genuine say over how their library is run is also important and this model does exactly that.”

    Suffolk County Council Cabinet members will also be asked to decide on the future of the county’s mobile library service. The service costs £600k a year to run with six mobile libraries (plus a back up) serving approximately 7,000 people in 361 communities across Suffolk. Over the last decade, mobile library customer visits have reduced by 32% and loans have decreased by 37% – even though customers can borrow up to 20 books at a time.

    Following a six week consultation in which 1,237 people shared their views, councillors will be recommended to reduce the frequency of mobile library visits from fortnightly to four weekly and stop visiting towns and parishes that already have a library building serving the community. The majority of people who responded said the changes would not stop them using mobile libraries.”

    The print version of the EADT carries a version of this hand-out by Paul Geater. It says that “library campaigenrs” have given a “cautious welcome to the proposals.” It glosses the finances above, noting that local libraries are to be “invited” to contribute 5% to their own running costs – not the 100K above (though that figure is surely not far off if the ‘invitation’ is accepted). The Liberals and the tiny Suffolk County Labour Group are said to be more cautious than the single campaigner, James Hargrave,  Geater cites.

    The Evening Star has something almost approaching a proper report on the controversy this has initially stirred up. Ipswich Labour Council does not appear welcoming.

    But the article is not yet on-line.

    So far Holy Roller Kevin is well pleased. He is ready to stand outside Northgate with a tin yelling “alms for the poor books!”

    See this effective demolition job of the plans from Public Libraries News: Here.

    Rose Hill Readers’ eloquent  response (Here):

    On June 20th 2011, when Suffolk County Council’s Scrutiny Committee made their recommendations on the library service, Rosehill Readers vowed to “continue to campaign against library cuts and divestment.”

    Our position has not changed.

    Following today’s press release we are bewildered by the reasoning behind the Council’s decision.

    Levels of council bureaucracy has never been an issue during this consultation, it has been raised by neither the council nor the campaigners. We fail to see how the council can issue a press release that states the contradiction that they: “want to free the library service from unnecessary council bureaucracy” and “Eventually, every library will have a community group involved and having a direct say in its day to day running.”. Surely 44 extra community groups, each with input on the way that the library service should be run will result in more bureaucracy?

    SCC have already slimmed down the operation from by cutting SCC staff, the “unnecessary bureaucracy” that they have removed includes trained and professional Library Staff. What will happen to the existing staff? Will their terms and conditions be met by the new employers? Can they be assured that their pensions will be paid by the IPS?

    The Industrial and Provident Society (IPS), is a complicated means of community involvement. Why do we need a “middle-man?” Why does the County want to put a company in the middle, between the electorate and its elected Councillors? The County Council seems to be suggesting that this is better than the system we have at the moment. Is it suggesting that elected County Councillors don’t actually engage properly with their communities?

    If the County Council wants to improve community involvement with our libraries, then the County Councillors could set up a library group along with local councillors and residents for each library. This happens already with some libraries in Suffolk. The library service already benefits from the work of volunteers and could attract more. But volunteers must be used alongside qualified, experienced members of staff, not instead of them.

    The County Council is also now asking all 44 of Suffolk’s public library to compete for the same diminishing pot of charitable funding. Central Government has cut charitable funding already, and now the County Council are asking for £100,000 to be raised every year to help towards library running costs. What will happen to libraries if this amount can not be met?

    Can the council assure us that the ‘grant’ funding will remain in place in future years and that further cuts passed down from central government won’t mean that this grant is reduced or removed?

    The Council also state that community groups will “be able to opt for a level of responsibility they feel able to take on”. What will happen to the services they don’t feel able to take on? Who will ensure that levels of internet access and Top Time groups are maintained?

    As you can see, our concerns are numerous, and as previously stated, our campaign will continue.

    Charlie Hebdo, ‘Sharia Hebdo’, Burnt Out.

    Posted in Fascism, Free Speech, French Politics, Islam, Islamism, Tunisia by Andrew Coates on November 2, 2011

    Libération reports (Here),

    La rédaction du journal satirique Charlie Hebdo, qui publie ce mercredi un numéro spécial après les élections en Tunisie, a été détruite dans la nuit de mardi à mercredi par un incendie criminel, a-t-on appris mercredi de source policière, évoquant un jet de «cocktail molotov».

    The Editorial Offices  of the satirical journal, Charlie Hebdo, which published on Wednesday a special issue after the Tunisian elections, has been destroyed by arson. Police sources, announcing the news,  suggest that a Molotov cocktail was the cause.

    What, again, was the occasion for this?

    The BBC reports, “To fittingly celebrate the victory of the Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia… Charlie Hebdo has asked Muhammad to be the special editor-in-chief of its next  issue”, the magazine said in a statement.” .

    The Libé report says that Charlie had received threats on Facebook,  Twitter, and letters of protest,  on its special issue immediately as its subject matter became known.

     On the radio, France-Inter,  this morning we learnt that its Web site has been hacked into, with a message left accusing the journal of insulting the Muhammed, the ‘guest editor’ of the week. Le Nouvel Observateur (Here) says that this was from an Islamic  ”cyber-fighter” reacting against the “disgusting” cartoons of the paper.

    Le site de “Charlie Hebdo” a également été piraté, un message attribuant cette attaque informatique à un “cyber-combattant” de l’islam en réaction aux dessins ”dégoûtants” de l’hebdomadaire.

    The Nouvel Observateur makes the Tunisian connection but adds Libya. It says  the special issue was in response to the victory of Ennahada and the declaration on the Sharia as the legal basis of the state by the NTC of the latter country’s government.

    Charia Hebdo’s Cartoons Can be Seen Here.

    The hacked site showed these – interestingly in English and Turkish.

    Le siège de Charlie Hebdo incendié, son site internet piraté

    Le site de "Charlie Hebdo" piraté par Akincilar (Capture d'écran de Korben)

    Amongst the many who reacted in abhorence, including many leading Muslim figures (who naturally would not support caricatures of the Prophet), Jean-Luc Mélenchon Presidential Candidate of the Front de Gauche (FdG)  fiercely condemned the firebombing. There is a very strong declaration in defence of Charlie and secularism by his party (a component of the FdG) , the Parti de Gauche - Here.

    The French Communist Daily L’Humanité, Editor Patrick Le Hyaric, said (Here),  said “ceux qui brûlent des journaux, brûlent la liberté et la démocratie” – those who burn papers, burn freedom and democracy”.

    The present Editor of Charlie, Charb, is a supporter of the Parti Communist Français,  and the Front de Gauche (more Here).

    I add something very minor, but which  suggests that somebody, or some group, was combing the Net on Tuesday. For some reason we began to get hits on Charlie Hebdo (a post of some time back) from yesterday afternoon to midnight  (the petrol bomb was launched around 2 in the morning UK time).

    Visit record for Tuesday:

    The Zeitgeist Movement and Occupy UK: An Anti-Globalisation Cult. More stats 75
    Home page More stats 40
    Fatest Man in the World, Paul Mason, Ipswich. Tendance Statement. More stats 31
    Tunisia: Ghannouchi, The Occult Islamist and the Guardian. More stats 30
    Suffolk Libraries to Need Begging Bowl to Stay Open. More stats 30
    Christopher Hitchens, Acknowledging the Legislators. More stats 12
    Charlie Hebdo. More stats 11
    Nadia El Fani: Tunisian Islamists Attack Film Showing and Artistic Freedom Group. More stats 8
    Ni Allah, Ni Maître: Tunisian Filmaker, Nadia El Fani, Faces Islamist Wrath. More stats 6
    Paris, Christian Integrists Protest at ‘Christianophobia’. More stats 5
    Other posts 137
    Total views of posts on your blog 385

    On the wider impact:

    Before British Islamophiles, and their not-so-secret policeman friend, Bob Lambert, begin criticising Charlie Hebdo for Islamophobia we note that Weekly  is an equal opportunities taunter of religion.

     As can be seen above, the first  Front Page headline, Les Cathos Intègrists contre… refers to the Catholic fundamentalists attacking a Parisian theatre for showing a play that they didn’t like.

    Christians could well complain about Charlie’s  ’Christianophobia’.

    Mind you little seems to shame those who produce Islamophobia Watch, who indicated before it came out that Charlie was going to be  ’provocative’ by publishing this special ‘Charia’ Hebdo.

    Charlie provocative!

    Heaven forfend!

    Despite the fire the issue is in the kiosks.

    Essential background from Rue 89 here.

    Charlie to remain ‘free-thinking’ – reaction of  Sylvia Coma from the Editorshere.

    Libération today has offered Charlie its pages to publish a special issue (Here): 

    Tagged with: , ,

    Libya and the Left.

    Posted in Colonialism, Imperialism, Islamism, Libya by Andrew Coates on November 6, 2011

    From the latest Chartist Magazine.

    Andrew Coates on the rise and fall of a kleptocracy and what the future holds
    Libya ‘could become an example for mutual respect, mutual compassion, mutual love among humanity.’ (New York Times. 2.10.11)  Optimism, if not always as exuberant as Aref Nayed’s, is widely echoed.

     

    The Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya has crumbled. In Tripoli and Benghazi the National Transitional Council (NTC) holds the reigns of power. Colonel Gaddafi is dead. A new beginning appears possible.But, as the Libyan people look for justice they face many challenges before anything resembling Nayed’s dream can be fulfilled. Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt the West was directly involved in the change of regime. Daniel Kawczynski, Conservative Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Libya, has heralded Western military help given to overthrow Gaddafi. ‘Britain, as in Kosovo, has taken the lead’. President Sarkozy is under the impression that France played that role. How did this come about? The Tunisian people drove their autocrat, Ben Ali, out in January 2011. Egypt followed.  The Libyan opposition launched their revolt in mid-February. They faced a violent counter-attack. Gaddafi’s troops were soon on the point of crushing the Benghazi heart of the popular insurrection. UN Resolution 1973, to protect Libyan civilians through a no-fly zone, met calls for help on the ground.

    From liberal quarters there was welcome and relief.Reaction on the left was more mixed. Many were viscerally hostile to UN sanctioned NATO involvement. But in a widely discussed article Gilbert Achcar argued that if there are no guarantees against  ‘transgressing the mandate’ nobody can “just ignore a popular movement’s plea for protection.” (Z-Net 25.3.11)  No convincing alternative existed. French left Presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon supported the resolution. He too warned of deeper entanglement, and backed ‘nothing but the resolution’.For some on the left, America was behind both Downing Street and the Élysée, and has used the UN as a cover while it manipulated the uprising to get a grip on the Libya’s resources.

    Gilbert Achcar disagreed ‘The idea that Western powers are intervening in Libya because they want to topple a regime hostile to their interests is just preposterous. Equally preposterous is the idea that what they are after is laying their hands on Libyan oil. In fact, the whole range of Western oil and gas companies is active in Libya…’ Perry Anderson saw less direct motives. The Arab spring had initially caught Western governments wrong-footed. They were now determined to get on the right side of history.  Intervention would be ‘icing on the cake’, ‘more of a luxury than a necessity’ that would help burnish the West’s ‘democratic credentials’. (New Left Review. March/April, 2011)

    The West has played a very direct part in modern Libyan history.  In the 20th century it began with a brutal Italian colonial occupation. Opposition, inspired by the Sanusiyya Islamic order, was strong. From 1923 to 1931, when the Italians publicly hanged him, Mumar al-Mukhtar led armed resistance. This was viciously crushed. It is estimated that during Italian intervention and rule between 250,000 and 300,000 people died from ‘all causes except natural ones’, from a total population of 800,000 to one million. Italy’s ‘Fourth Shore’, Quarta Sponda, was settled by Italian farmers, and was run entirely in Rome’s interests. The Italians created neither a local bourgeoisie nor did they employ locals in the administration. 

    Italian rule ended following the Axis defeat in the Second World War. There was no anti-colonial fight. The creation of an independent Libya was, as Dirk Vandewalle notes, ‘at the behest of the Western powers’. (A History of Modern Libya. 2006) Cold War geopolitics came into play. The United Kingdom of Libya, proclaimed in 1951, ruled by King Idris al-Sanusi, was, he adds, a ‘valued client’ of the US, not to mention Britain. A nominal parliament existed, but political parties were banned. With exploitation of vast oil reserves those in power monopolised a major part of the considerable revenues. The alternative offered by Nasser’s Egypt became attractive. His nationalisation of the Suez Canal and successful defiance of Britain, France and Israel is said to have inspired Gaddafi. The military coup that brought the Colonel to power in 1969 was seen to embody the nationalist Arab Revolution of the decade. 

    Libya’s ‘socialist society’ began with wholesale nationalisation and the expulsion of foreign troops. Political opposition was outlawed in 1972. In 1977 Gaddafi announced a state ‘directly managed by its citizens’, that replaced the ‘dictatorship’ of parties, the Jamahiryya.

    Yet 2003 saw rapprochement with the West.  In 2004 Tony Blair visited Gaddafi in his tent paving the way for commercial and military deals. By 2005 the Libyan economy was liberalised, and the US returned. Academic links with the West were established, notoriously with the LSE and Third Way guru, Anthony Giddens. 

    Gaddafi’s socialism was a strange hybrid of Rousseau, Arab nationalism, Islam and his own whims. Socialist autarky, and anti-imperialism, for a population of around four million, was a creaking affair. Libya, effectively a rentier state, was locked into the global economy. After defiance, agreements with the West were not surprising. The Revolutionary Committees, the base of the People’s Congress, had begun to run out of any remaining utopian zeal.  The regime lacked mechanisms for fundamental democratic change. The Leader depended more on members of his own family, tribal allies, and collaborators of the security services. It became a kleptocracy.

    The Libyan regime’s repression, cruelty and the control of everyday life have been sharply exposed, as its citizens are free to tell their stories. With up to 10% of the population informers, surveillance was as total as under Eastern European Stalinism. The horrors and massacres uncovered at the top security prison, Abu Salim, indicate the dark side of this police state.

    The National Transitional Council is a heterogeneous bloc. Former Gaddafi allies, and ex-members of the armed forces, mix with human rights activists, business figures, and Islamists. To many observers falling back on basic loyalties has now accelerated. Patrick Haimzadeh singles out that the central difficulty of the National Transitional Council remains dealing with the multiplicity of regional and tribal allegiances. (Le Monde Diplomatique September 2011) Unlike, say, Tunisia, which has a long-standing civil society, a trade union movement, and left, as well as Islamists, there are no strong democratic counterweights to the government. With this in mind elections will be difficult. 

    A discouraging sign is that the NTC has not always conducted itself democratically. The killing of former Gaddafi Minister turned Commander Fatah Younis remains a blot.  Their forces have committed excess. 

    Those on the left, who put the accent on supporting the oppressed Libyan people, rather than on opposition to Western intervention, have reasons to be concerned. Recently BBC Four’s Analysis discussed Libya’s Islamic capitalists. (26.9.11) Islam, we learnt, was not opposed to commerce, or capitalism, though demands the zakat (alms-giving) to ensure social justice. From the NTC, Ali Tarhouni  – a former socialist – endorsed the opening up of the country to business in religious terms. 

    This economic policy is not unexpected given Libya’s position in world markets, and the West’s backing. But how will it deal with inequality, the rights of migrant workers, and the employment of its own disaffected young people? What will the social policies parties put forward? Will Islam also be the answer? The BBC programme contained interviews with increasingly influential supporters of Sharia law. Such prospects are less than encouraging. 

     

       

    Subscribe to Chartist (Here) – may of the journal’s articles are not on-line, including the excellent Books pages, and the series on forerunners of the modern left: Chartists, radicals, and early socialists.

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    Tehran: French Fascists Received With Honour By Islamist Regime.

    Posted in Fascism, Iran, Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on November 6, 2011

    Le  « Parti Solidaire Français « de Thömas Werlet  (ex-Droite socialiste et groupuscule particulièrement violent,  qui développe un programme mettant en avant des thématiques « nationales » et « socialistes »)  a été reçu avec les honneurs par Husseini  le ministre de la « culture » d’Ahmadinejad.

    The ‘Parti Solidaire Français’ of Thömas Werlet (former Right Socialist and member of a particularly violent groupuscule with a ‘national Bolshevik’ cultural and social line) has been received with honour by Husseini who is Ahmadinejad’s Minister of Culture.

    Here.

    Hat-tip Solidarité Irak.

    Wertlet has a history of good relations with the Iranian Theocracy, including meetings with the French Ambassador - more here.

    The  Parti solidaire français is a hard-line neo-Nazi group. It is nationalist, anti-universalist, anti-zionist, anti-communist, and anti-capitalist. It defines itself as   ethno-différencialiste. It is hostile to free-masonry and virulently opposed to homosexuality. French Wikipedia article here.

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    November 30th Strikes and Protests: Ipswich Moblisation Underway.

     


     

    “Work longer, contribute more, get less back”, Roger MacKay, President of Ipswich Trades Council summed up the Government’s public sector pension plans.

    Last night over 35 Trade Union activists attended an Ipswich Mobilising meeting for the November the 30th day of strikes and protests against the Liberal-Conservative Coalition’s plans to cut pensions and raise the retirement age.

    Identical events are being held across the country.

    The key concern was to make November the 30th a great success, to spread the unions’ message to their membership and the wider public, and to organise an Ipswich march and rally.

    The meeting resembled many of the well-attended Suffolk Coalition for Public Services meetings.

    It drew representatives of all the main local public sector unions, and anti-cuts activists.

    The audience was made up of ordinary trade unionists, people concerned about the implications of the pension plans as part of a wider erosion of the public sector.

    A priority was given to combating the argument that the public sector were privileged.

    As “misery loves company” some people think that everyone should suffer.

    The meaning of this is clear: a  reduction in public sector  rights heralds a drive to the bottom everywhere.

    Knowing many present I would say that they are people who have stood up for others. I was going to say that they are loving parents and continue in this vein.

    But you take it from me – they are part of the best in this (large) town.

    This was a labour movement meeting. The main trade unions – UNITE, PCS, UNISON, and the NUT were there, and people from them spoke – to the point. Other unions were present, the GMB and Postal workers, the CWU. The Fire Fighters, from the FBU, sent support. There were people from left socialist parties and the Labour Party. Support from the local and regional Labour Party for November the 30th was welcomed, as was the backing of local Labour councillors.

    There was discussion of practical arrangement for the march and rally (from Endeavour House to the Corn Hill) during the day on the 30th. We will have town centre stalls to collect for a petition and distribute leaflets giving our point of view.

    The Chair, Margaret, from the NUT spoke on the relevance of November the 30th of the much wider European crisis underway.

    In Britain drastic cuts in public spending – which offload debt from the government onto the population - are the Coalition’s response.

    Earlier in the day I attended a picket outside Suffolk County Council’s Endeavour House.

    This was to protest against their plans to give public libraries to an Industrial and Provident Society – sack staff and make local people contribute 5% of their running costs by charity fund-raising.

    Someone from the County Council came out to ‘listen’ to the protesters.

    She mentioned that as cost-cutting that local people might find their own ways of dealing with cleaning the libraries. She did not appreciate my suggestion that this would mean users dusting the library shelves.

    We note that Cameron announced yesterday an imaginative plan to plug the gaps left by the cuts.

    The Unemployed for more 2 years will soon have to do 30 hours a week unpaid community service as the Guardian reports.

    This just about sums up the Coalition’s programme.

     

    Ipswich Homeless: a Growing Scandal.

    Posted in Cuts, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on November 18, 2011

    A couple of minutes from my front door there is an encampment of the homeless.

    They are just across the road from Saint Edmunds House – some of the County Council offices.

    One used to wonder about how rich people in poor countries live with people on the streets – that is, turning a blind eye to the misery that is just in front of them.

    Wonder no more: this is going on in the heart of Ipswich.

    What is being done to help these people?

    Not a lot.

    They have been there for about a month.

    A list of the relevant people I (and others) have contacted to get them some aid would be long.

    Very long.

    I note that the abandoned site they are living in is built over Ipswich’s equivalent of London’s St Gilles Circus.

    That is the historic slum district of the town.

    Welcome back to people living in slums.

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    White Material.

    Posted in Culture, Films by Andrew Coates on November 24, 2011

    White Material is a 2009 French film directed by Claire Denis and co-written with Marie NDiaye.It was shown on BBC Four on Sunday.

    Isabelle Huppert is in it. Earlier on Sunday she received an achievement award for World Cinema which was broadcast – here

    (Readers of this Blog may have noticed few posts in the last week – that is because Suffolk Library syustem is currently reverting to its permanently malfunctioning state making it impossible to add such luxurires as proper links – the above had to be pasted in full, spell-check and add YouTube videos donl;t work, and now it’s making it hard to put a Post as ‘sticky’)

    Huppert is one of the greatest actresses going, and Claire Denis is a brilliant feminist leftist film-maker.

    In this film Huppert’s role is Maria Vial, a struggling French coffee producer in an unnamed African country, who decides to stay at her coffee plantation in spite of an erupting civil war.

    It is marked by just fragmented, horrible, confused and the fighting is marked by atrocties of the kind that take place in many lands in Central Africa and the Coastal regions next to it.

    It is not a sweeping look at the deeper causes of these conflicts, such as Blood Diamond.

    It illustrates how horrific conditions are from the ground.

    There are no anti-imperialist good-guys or much goodness flourishing at all – except some quiet and desperate people trying to help each other faced with terror.

    A humanist and realist film of rare quality.

    But all the more effective for that.

    Get the DVD if you missed it.

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    The Muslim Brotherhood and its British Friends.

    Posted in Colonialism, Fascism, Imperialism, Islam, Islamism by Andrew Coates on November 24, 2011

    Hard not to be moved by events in Egypt.

    What the solutions are to this, a highly complex country with highly complex politics, are hard to determine.

    Some however have little doubt: that a National Unity Government – which would inevitably be led or at least, be strongly influenced by the Moslem Brotherhood – should provide an answer.

    Some of these people claim to be on the left (Here).

    This claim to back a tradition based on socialism, anti-capitalism, secularism and universal human rights and then to advocate tactical support for a right-wing pro-business theological party with a violent fascist fringe, is odd.

    The Moslem Brotherhood once with a toehold in power – before elections – would be (as the commenter on French Radio France Culture which I am just listening to suggests) unlikely to let go of power.

    The one thing one say with certainty is the Moslem Brotherhood are not of the left.

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    France: Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste Candidate Credited with 0% of Vote.

    Posted in European Left, French Left, French Politics, Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste by Andrew Coates on November 25, 2011

     

    NPA: seul contre tous? Ou simplement seul?

    According to the latest French opinion Polls the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) candidate, Phillipe Poutou has gone down from 0,5% of voting intentions to 0% Here.

    “Inconnu du grand public – fin octobre, seuls 3 % des Français étaient capables de citer son nom comme candidat du NPA, selon un sondage TNS-Sofres pour Canal+ –, M. Poutou est crédité de… 0 % des intentions de vote dans les sondages récents.”

    Unknown to the general public, at the end of October only 3% of French people were able to cite his name as the NPA candidate. According to a recent poll by TNS-Sofres Canal+ Mr Poutou is given….0% of voting intentions.”

    I thought this worth signaling.

    We’re beginning to feel a bit sorry for the pleasant enough chap

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    Morocco: More ‘moderate’ Islamist gains.

    Posted in Islam, Islamism, North Africa by Andrew Coates on November 27, 2011

    “Morocco on Sunday awaited final results from elections in which moderate Islamists emerged as the dominant political force, the latest religious party to achieve huge gains on the back of the Arab Spring.

    With 288 out of the 395 seats up for grabs in the lower house of parliament awarded, the Justice and Development Party (PJD) captured 80 seats in the election, Interior Minister Taib Cherkaoui said Saturday.

    That is nearly double the 45 seats won in Friday’s polls by Prime Minister Abbas el Fassi’s Independence Party, which finished second and has headed a five-party coalition government since 2007.” From Here.

    Libération has announced that the Islamists are ready to form a government – here.

    Abdelilah Benkirane, le chef du PJD, à son arrivée au siège du parti à Rabat.
    This party, as its name indicates, claims to be in the same line as the Turkish right-wing party of the same name.

    Leftists generally call the party the “King’s Islamists” or, less politely, lacqueys of the Commander of the Faithful – eg here.

    Let us note in passing that this Party’s leader, Abdelilah Benkirane was a member from 1976 to 19181 of the hard-line reactionary Chabiba Islamiya which was responsible for the murder of a number of leftists, including, Omar Benjelloun,  and the Communist Abderrahim Menioui.

    I shall disregard the main English language discussions of this party, always ready to bend an ear to sympathetic right-wing Islamists, and note this in the French language version of Wikipedia,

    Le Parti de la justice et du développement (arabe : حزب العدالة والتنمية, transcription : Hizb al-εadala wa at-tanmia) (PJD) (Here)

    “Ce parti est considéré comme conservateur. Il est connu pour son opposition à l’occidentalisation des mœurs marocaines soit disant dans le but de garder et renforcer l’identité marocaine. Le parti a toutefois adopté un ton beaucoup moins véhément depuis les attentats du 16 mai 2003 à Casablanca, perpétrés par la mouvance terroriste. Le parti travaille dès lors sur une image de respectabilité, afin de ne pas nuire à ses succès électoraux. C’est ce parti qui, aidé par d’autres conservateurs, a fait pression sur le Palais et la commission Mennouni pour que la liberté de conscience soit supprimée de la nouvelle constitution de 2011.

    This party is considered to be conservative. It is known for its opposition to the Westernisation of Moroccan morals, claiming to protect Moroccan identity. The party has adopted a much less virulent tone after the 16th of May 2003 Casablanca bombings, that originated in the terrorist movement. From then on the party, to safeguard its electoral successes,  has sought to create a respectable image. It is this party, helped by other conservative forces, that put pressure on the Palace and Mennouni Commision to suppress reference to freedom of conscience from the 2011 Constitution.

    Oh well, what’s freedom of thought….

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    Lauren Booth, Atzmon,and Anti-Semitism.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Conspiracies, Fascism, Racism by Andrew Coates on November 28, 2011

    This image is Cross-Posted from Tony Greenstein’s Blog:

    On why Tony says this see Here.

    We would not comment on this virulent dispute except…it concerns Gilad Atzmon.

    He is an issue which has come to preoccupy the broader movement.

    There is a general consensus on the left that Atzmon is an anti-Semite.

    To some people’s annoyance this view extends from the hard left to the soft, from committed serious anti-Zionists like Tony Greenstein to Harry’s Place. (More from latter here)

    To me, Atzmon increasingly looks like a British version of Dieudonné. *

    Quite frankly this issue is too serious to be ignored.

    Tony has made a long-standing case that she is seriously politically deranged.

    For the past 6 years, a number of us have been warning about the danger posed to the Palestine Solidarity movement by Gilad Atzmon, an ex-Israeli jazz player, and the small group of people around him. Four years ago we introduced a motion at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign AGM to formally dissociate ourselves from Atzmon and the Deir Yassin Group, led by holocaust denier Paul Eisen. Unfortunately PSC dismissed our fears and the motion was heavily defeated. Today they are having to face up to the consequences of that decision.

    Which can be summarised in Lauren Booth’s reaction (here),

    This week, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has revealed itself to be ethically compromised at the highest level.

    In recent months it has become clear that the central office of the PSC, are increasingly pandering to the whims of Israeli hasbara activists. Joining with the likes of the rabid Zionist site Harry’s Place in efforts to silence some of this movement’s most outspoken and popular, thinkers.

    This is followed by meandering about a media plot between these forces to silence this “popular” “thinker” and his “academic”   writings.

    All we can say is: fuck off Booth!

    *******

    * From Wikipedia: né. M’bala M’bala (born 11 February 1966), generally known simply as Dieudonné, is a French comedian, actor and political activist  Initially a leftist and anti-racism activist, he has moved to the far right of the political spectrum of France, developing close political and personal relationships with the Front National party and its leader Jean-Marie Le Pen as well as with prominent Holocaust deniers such as Robert Faurisson; however, he claims to be leading a ‘justified fight’ against Zionism, and Israel which he deems racist and oppressive.[1] Dieudonné has been condemned in court several times for antisemitic remarks (see below “Court convictions“). Since 1997, Dieudonné has regularly stood in parliamentary and European Union elections as a candidate at the head of fringe or splinter parties, and has tried and failed to run for two French presidential elections (2002 and 2007).
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    Ipswich November 30th Demonstration and Rally.

    Demonstrate.

    Update Wednesday: the official Police Figures for the March were 1,200!

    All the unions were present, UNISON, UNITE, PCS, GMB,  the Teachers’ Unions NUT and NASUWT, the UCU, and a host of others (that is, ones whose names I’m not too familiar with!).

    The Firefighters had a banner. As did Ipswich Labour Party (many prominent local councillors were there) nand Suffolk Coastal Labour Party. There was a big contingent from Save Suffolk Libraries.

    We had people clapping us in Tavern Street.

    One elderly woman came up and congratulated us as we moved towards Lloyd’s Avenue.

    I was one of those carrying the SERTUC Banner at the Front of the March and only really grasped just how many we were until I turned at that point.

    We filled a large part of the Corn Hill. From the steps of the Old Town Hall you looked at a see of union flags and home-made placards

    The speeches were to-the-point and well-put. Richard Howitt could not attend but sent a message of support.

    There had been pickets across town.

    There will be fuller reports in the media and from the Trades Council later.

    But just to say: this really was the people of Ipswich on the march.

    Assemble 11.30 am Russell Road, Ipswich.

    March 12 midday through Ipswich Town Centre

    RALLY – Ipswich Cornhill at 12.45 pm

    SPEAKERS: Megan Dobney (SERTUC Regional Sec) Kerry Fairless (PCS Regional Chair), Graham White (Sec Suffolk NUT) and other Union speakers. Richard Howitt MEP and David Ellesmere (Ipswich Borough Council).
    Local NUT information here.

    South East Region of the TUC (SERTUC) list of all marches, rallies, and other events on November the 30th in East Anglia and beyond here.

    This is well-worth signaling.

    Ipswich Labour Party believes:

    • Everyone deserves a fair pension, and is entitled to security and dignity in retirement.
    • If the government get their way, public sector workers, struggling to balance the books after a pay freeze and with the cost of living rising, will have to pay more and work longer for pensions that are worth less. That is not a fair deal.
    • Everyone should be able to pay into a fair pension for their retirement.
    •  There should be a fair deal on pensions for public sector workers, and the Labour Party should develop policies to make pensions better and fairer in the private sector too.
    • Ipswich Labour Party resolves:
    • To back public sector workers in their campaign against the government’s unfair triple attack on public sector pensions, and to support the day of action on November 30th.
    •  To add our name to the statement of support on the unions together website, and to encourage our members and elected councillors to do the same.
    •  To write to local union branches to notify them of our support, and to ask them to get involved with the CLP.
    •  To attend the Ipswich campaign rally on 30th November, and take the Ipswich Labour Party banner to show our support.

    John Cook
    Secretary/Agent
    Ipswich Labour Party.

    It is good to see labour movement unity, from the unions, anti-cuts campaigns, and parties, in Ipswich.

    This day of action is important not just to defend pensions and living standards but to fight back against wider Liberal Tory austerity plans and the Market State.

    Ipswich November 30th Day of Action: Brief Report.

    Posted in Conservatives, East Anglia, Ipswich, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on November 30, 2011
     
     

     

    Ipswich November 30th Demo.

    On extreme left of Photo: Tendance next to Megan Dobney

    Thanks to Steve.

    The official Police Figures for the March on the day were 1,200. The Evening Star says 1,600 and Ipswich Trades Council (comments below) says 2,000.

    EADT report on the Day of Action in Suffolk here – the print version is much more comprehensive.

    You could tell something big was afoot as we assembled outside the County Council Offices in Russell Road.

    Massed trade unionists, friends, comrades, old faces and new, and the popular masses milled listening to the sound of Bob Marley’s Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights!

    Before we set off there were brief speeches, by Teresa Mackay of the Trades Council and Margaret Boulaitis of the NUT, who explained why we were there, and how good it was to have so many come along.

    All the unions were present, UNISON, UNITE, PCS, GMB,  the Teachers’ Unions NUT and NASUWT, the UCU, and a host of others (that is, ones whose names I’m not too familiar with!).

    The Firefighters had a banner. As did Ipswich Labour Party (many prominent local councillors were there) and Suffolk Coastal Labour Party.

    There was a big contingent from Save Suffolk Libraries.

    We had people clapping us in Tavern Street.

    One elderly woman came up and congratulated us as we moved towards Lloyd’s Avenue.

    I was one of those carrying the SERTUC Banner at the Front of the March and only really grasped just how many we were until I turned at that point.

    We filled a large part of the Corn Hill. From the steps of the Old Town Hall you looked at a sea of union flags and home-made placards

    There was a message of support from French Trade Unions.

    Richard Howitt (MEP) could not attend but also  sent a message of solidarity.

    The speeches were to-the-point and well-put.

    Megan Dobney (SERTUC Regional Sec) led off and made the union case crystal-clear.

    I was struck by the UNISON speaker who indicated why later retirement meant a heavy burden for many in stressful or low-paid work,

    David Elesmere the Labour leader of the Borough Council  and PPC for Ipswich said that private and public sector workers should stand together.

    There had been many pickets across town.

    We can afford decent pensions, and this latest move was a pay cut and tax designed to plug the deficit.

    There will be fuller reports  from the Trades Council and unions later.

    But just to say: this really was the people of Ipswich on the march.

    While some may now boil over in impotent rage (see comments here)  the important issue now is to continue the fight to overturn the policies of Liberal-Conservative government.

     
     Another photo from Steve C. 
     

     

    After November the 30th, the Labour Movement and the Market State.

    A Different Kind of Tea Party

    The New Politics of the Labour Movement and the Market State.

    “All men are Brethren, Equality, Liberty and Fraternity. Heroic citizens – The thunder notes of your victory have sounded across the Channel, awakening the sympathies and hopes of every lover of liberty….Accept our fraternal salutations and our earnest wishes that the French Republic may triumph over its enemies and become a model for the imitation of the world. Vive la République!

    An Address from the Ipswich Working Classes to the People of Paris. Spring 1848 (1)

    On November the 30th over 1,600 people assembled on the same spot that the Ipswich working class Chartists met in 1848 to support the French February Revolution. They were part of a popular movement that has fought and is fighting a serious threat. The Day of Action was called to defend public sector workers’ pensions. But the issues run deeper. The Liberal-Conservative Coalition has not just imposed austerity. It tearing apart the foundations of British democracy – from publicly run services to the Welfare state. Protests have been wide ranging, from students, anti-cuts campaigners, and trade unionists. Nor is this a purely national cause. Solidarity from the French trade unions, who face the same challenges, was heard from the steps of the Old Town Hall. But are the protesters able to give shape to the kind of radical vision that their forerunners from both countries hoped for in the mid-19th century? That is, for the “République démocratique et sociale.”

    The leaders of the Labour Party claim to offer an alternative to the Liberal-Tory government. Before the November 30th Day of Action, Ed Miliband worried about “irresponsibility” of people at the top. The Labour leader criticised “a system of irresponsible, predatory capitalism”. Instead, he said, we need “productive, responsible behaviour”. We should be “rewarding the right values, not the wrong values, in our economy”. Faced with this, “Labour is determined to construct and to lead a coalition which includes business and civil society to make the case for a responsible economy, fairer society and a more just world.” (Observer 6.11.11) Miliband has expressed sympathy for the November the 30th strikers. But does this reliance on “business and civil society” challenge the assumptions behind the Cabinet’s efforts to dismember the social foundations of the state?

    Liberalism, Red Tory, Blue Labour.

    The Coalition came to being as “socially liberal” and “economically liberal”, as the key Liberal Democrat player David Laws asserts. (22 Days in May. The Birth of the Lib Dem-Conservative Coalition. 2010) Other themes have come to the fore. The themes of ‘Red’ Tory Phillip Blond, apparently against the grain of both kinds of liberalism, have entered into the Coalition’s rhetoric. In the name of civil society, he criticised the statism of neo-liberalism, the power of finance, and the left’s centralising. (Red Tory. 2010) Fiscal austerity was introduced at the same time as the ‘Big Society’. This is, as is increasingly clear, not just talk (though there is plenty of that). It is a strategic attempt to shift in the political landscape in favour of the ‘divestment’ of the state from its public obligations, and an effort to offload responsibilities onto “business and civil society.”

    Blond, the Red Tory argued for an injection of virtue into the economy, “while prices and wages would continue to be the outcome of supply and demand, supply and demand would be subject to ethical considerations.” In a similar vein Blue Labour’s Patron, Lord Glasman, calls for a politics of the common good”. Instead of Progressivism enforced by the state, we should have “reciprocity, association and organisation as fundamental aspects of building a common life”. (The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox. 2011) Challenging the ‘capture’ of the state by finance this would be based on a very responsible economy and state, based on the principles of localism and association. The Labour leader’s own reference to the importance of ‘values’ in the economy, and criticism of the banks, stands within the Red-Blue effort to create a consensus for “business and civil society”.

    Miliband’s entrance into this terrain is fraught with difficulties. While both the Red Tory and the Blue Labour Benefactor are marginal to direct policy-making (with Blond’s disgrace leaving him a figure of fun) some of the ideas they promote have had an echo in government policy. David Cameron has cited a “revolt against the top-down statist approach of recent years.” (Observer 13.02.11) He talked of “devolving power” to the civil society, though called it “big”. Civil society in this context implies the personal, the commercial and the associative and the ‘third sector’. There are plans to make public services into ‘mutuals’. In local government there have been real transfers of public assets to private bodies, not just contracted out companies, but to ‘social enterprises’, ‘provident societies’, ‘employee owned’ providers (managed as conventional businesses), and ‘co-operative’ bodies owned and run by ‘community’ figures. These are considered part of the “localist” agenda that would challenge the “centralism” of British governance.

    There are few signs of new realm of freely chosen institutions; indeed their main feature is that they have limited democratic structures and fewer wider responsibilities. Economic liberalism remains strong through the contracting out process, with companies, not ‘associations’ taking over the state. Nor, where civil society is held to take responsibility has greater democracy resulted. A visible case, amongst hundreds, is that in Suffolk this will mean a reduced library service taken out of public hands. An ‘industrial and provident society’, will be under only indirect council control, reliant on increasing numbers of volunteers, and partly funded by charitable fund-raising. Throughout the central and local state a parallel world of oligarchy, charitable dependence, and profit making is replacing democracy, universal rights, and disinterested service.

    The last Labour Governments prepared the ground for the commercial and localist assault on democracy. It failed to challenge the Conservative Governments’ wholesale privatisations of the 1980s. By the 1990s the practice of hiving off public service delivery had extended to core state functions. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown vastly expanded the Private Finance Initiative, ‘leasing’ infrastructure from private firms, and outsourced many of its services, such as consultancies, and ‘public-private’ partnerships (Plundering the Public Sector David Craig and Richard Brooks. 2006) Over time important social programmes were farmed out to private companies and (to a much lesser degree)‘social’ enterprises, voluntary bodies and charities, such as the New Deal for the unemployed) over a million people). Its own ‘centralism’ was buttressed by experiments in directly elected Mayors, and the expanding realm of unaccountable ‘local’ Academy Schools.

    The state tried to decrease its direct responsibilities for people’s broader well-being by encouraging them to look after themselves, a process involving ‘education’ and increased surveillance of the poor. People on benefits learnt that in return for any rights they had responsibilities to the state. To the theorists of the Third Way investment would not be in direct state services but indirectly, to enable people and communities to compete on the global market.

    The Liberal-Conservative Coalition has continued on this path. But it has used the fiscal crisis to radicalise the process. They have claimed the Labour failed to shrink the state enough, that it retained control over targets and the running of its contracted out functions. Its welfare plans had let an ‘underclass’ grow by paying people benefits when they were not working. They aim to further increase responsibilities for the poor, and to enter into their private lives. It is undertaking a radical dismemberment of the Welfare State and transferring as many as possible directly accountable public functions to private hands. The Market State hives off essential services to contractors. Paid for out of taxation a state-dependent bourgeoisie is now made up of “service providers”, with increasing influence over the political agenda. Through ‘localism’, municipal authorities are replaced by unaccountable oligarchies. Cuts in public spending are further shrinking the responsibilities of government. Appeals are made to greater private benevolence – Charity. The changes in public sector workers’ pensions are part of a wider scheme to reduce state responsibilities and to make it easier to give their employment over to private hands. (more…)

    Euro Crisis: French Socialist and Other French Left Responses.

    Posted in Capitalism, European Left, French Left, French Politics, Front de Gauche, Parti Socialiste by Andrew Coates on December 6, 2011

    http://cdn2.wn.com/pd/04/e5/a7f549085b5ef480161f8fd1e2b4_grande.jpg

    What’s François Holland’s Duty?

    The media is full of the Euro crisis, and the German-French response.

    French Socialist Party presidential Candidate, François Hollande, makes this comment which risks being ignored by the British Press – which concentrates on Sarkozy and Merkel.  (here).

    “Les propositions de nouveau traité, conjointement lancées lundi 5 décembre par Nicolas Sarkozy et Angela Merkel, n’ont fort logiquement pas convaincu les socialistes. A commencer par leur candidat François Hollande. “Face à une crise de confiance, ce n’est pas l’annonce d’un traité quel qu’il soit, à 17 ou à 27, qui peut être de nature à redonner aux citoyens et aux marchés une vision, explique au Monde M. Hollande. La réponse doit être immédiate. Ce qui est attendu par les marchés, c’est une intervention massive de la BCE [Banque centrale européenne], la mise en place des eurobonds ou un renforcement du fonds de stabilité financière qui deviendrait une banque. Aucune de ces mesures n’ayant été prise, l’annonce d’un traité ne peut être le règlement d’un problème immédiat.”

    The New Treaty’s propositions, jointly launched on Monday the 5th of December by Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, have not convinced the Socialist with their logic. Beginning with their candidate François Hollande.  “Faced with a crisis of confidence, it’s not the by announcing a treaty, from  17   to 27 (in the future), that one can give the markets and the citizens a vision” He explained to Le Monde. “The response musty be immediate. It should be an intervention by the Central European Bank, issuing Eurobonds, and reinforcing the financial stability fund, which should become a bank itself. None of these measures that have been taken announcing a treaty will solve the immediate problem.”

    Pour le candidat socialiste, le traité pose “deux problèmes”: “Le premier, c’est que le traité ne pourra être ratifié que bien après la présidentielle. Le second, c’est qu’il n’y aura pas de majorité pour voter la révision constitutionnelle” qu’il implique.

    For the Socialist Candidate the treaty poses “two problems.: “firstly, the Treaty cannot be ratified until after the French Presidential elections (next May). secondly, there will not be a majority to vote for a constitutional change” he added.”

    That France has a Presidential election next year – on the 22 April and 6 May 2012 – throws any agreement in doubt.

    The Parti de Gauche, whose leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon (7,5% in the Polls)  is the Presidential candidate of the Front de Gauche (FdG) , has denounced the “pantomime” of these negotiations.

    Mélenchon has said that this proves they were right to campaign for a ‘Non’ vote in the 2005 Referendum for the original Constitutional Treaty which created the structure within which the Euro was launched.

    Mélenchon argues that Holland still agrees with the budget constrictions that caused the present Euro and debt crisis. He notes that in the past this issue of approaching elections did not stop the Parti  Socialiste from agreeing to the Lisbon treaty, or indeed other measures that created the financial corset within which countries are straining within now. (Here)

    The Gauche Unitaire,(also part of the FdG) meanwhile, has been discussing this week with the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste’s (NPA) Gauche Anticapitaliste  Current in an effort to end the “isolation” of the and get them to join in the Front de Gauche (with all its own difficulties). They welcome that this tendency is willing to act without being constraiend by the NPA’s majority,  (“déterminé à agir sur le champ politique sans être prisonnier de l’orientation majoritaire du NPA.”

     

    The GU’s  position revolves around the creation of a radical left in the broad left and labour movement, which can offe an alternative to Holland and the PS leadership.  The latter’s failure to deal with Euro crisis, and inability to offer a left-wing strategy that could help deal with this, and the neo-liberal assumptions that have helped ceate it, overshadow present day European politics. Therefore the French left should not build a strategy based on the potential ‘treachery’ of a possible Socialist President (or we can note the idea that the FdG is itself complicit in this by reaching agreements with the PS on the Election’s Second Round).

    It has to begin one now.  (here)

    Summarising the present crisis they say

    “Le choix entre une orientation sociale-libérale et d’adaptation aux exigences du capitalisme, d’une part, et, d’autre part, une orientation de refus de l’austérité et de transformation sociale radicale se concrétise en une confrontation vigoureuse, que les développements de la crise vont exacerber. Celle-ci  traverse toute la gauche, et elle est à l’oeuvre, non pas pour l’après élections de 2012, mais bien dès à présent.”

    The choice is between a social-liberal stance, and adapting to the demands of capitalism, on the one hand, and, on the other, a stand which refuses austerity and pushes for radical social change. This is taking shape at present.  The development of the crisis will exacerbate this. This clash is going to affect the whole left, and is already  happening now. It is not something which will only occur after the Presidential elections”

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    Prostitution: France Votes to ‘Abolish’ it.

    Posted in Europe, Feminism, French Politics by Andrew Coates on December 7, 2011

    Des manifestants le 6 décembre 2011 devant l’Assemblée nationale à Paris. (© AFP Lionel Bonaventure)
     
     

    The Objective is a “society without prostitution” (“une société sans prostitution”) according to French National Assembly Resolution adopted on the 6th of December.  

    Droite et gauche ont voté mardi à l’Assemblée, avec un rare consensus, en faveur d’une résolution réaffirmant ”la position abolitionniste” de la France en matière de prostitution. Présentée par tous les présidents de groupes politiques à l’Assemblée, cette déclaration de principe devait être suivie dans la soirée du dépôt d’une proposition de loi, très concrète celle-là, sur la pénalisation des clients, à l’image de ce qui se fait en Suède depuis 1999.

    On Tuesday the Right and Left voted in the National Assembly,  in a rare consensus, in favour of a resolution that stated the “abolitionist position” concerning prostitution in France. Presented by all the leaders of the Parliamentary groups in the Assembly this declaration should be, in principle, followed by a detailed legislative proposals concerning the punishment of protitutes’ clients, following the Swedish example, in force since 1999. More Here.

    Support was by no means unanimous. Deputies called it “demagogic”. Others pointed to the negative effect it would have on street workers and their rights.

    Feminists like Elisabeth Badinter have criticised the law.

    The AIDS campaigning organisation Act-Up and the Syndicat du TRAvail Sexuel (Strass)  demonstrated outside the Assembly.

    They denounced the resolution as an attempt to “pénaliser les clientEs des travailleurSEs du sexe.“(here)

     

    It is worth noting that Ipswich Trades Council, in the light of the Ipswich sex-worker murders, passed a resolution calling for the decrimalisation of prostitution.

    This was subsequently adopted by the National Trades Councils (TUC)  Conference.

    Books, Blogs and Journals of the Year.

    Posted in AWL, Britain, Culture, European Left, Ipswich, Labour Movement, Marxism, New Left, SWP, Theory by Andrew Coates on December 9, 2011

    http://oxfordstudent.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/chavs.jpg

    Now is the time for all major international intellectual publications to list their books of the year.

    As one of these, we have extended this to Blogs and Journals.

    Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class by Owen Jones

    The political book of the year. Beginning with unpicking the ‘chav caricature’  Owen goes to the fault lines of British political and social culture. His defence of class politics, backed up by impressive on-the-spot investigation and research, has hit the mainstream. As David Cameron defends the interests of the City (and Wall Street) against ‘Europe’ it’s as well to be reminded of how life is really lived in this country.

    Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore is the historical study of the year. Montefiore is now presenting a three-part series based on the book on BBC 4. He does not only describe the better known history of the ‘Holy City’, and well-known cruelties of the Roman occupies and the Crusader invaders. Montefiore also reveals the archeological doubts about ‘King David’s’ city, King Solomon’s magnificence. He does not flinch from describing  oppressive blood-stained Islamic rulers, such as Zangi the Bloody, either. Guaranteed to offend just about everyone -  an invigorating read.

    Embassytown by China Miéville. Science fiction can more than the reading-matter of the cast of the Big Bang Theory . Miéville, a member of the SWP, combines high seriousness, wit and philological imagination in his story of the “polyvocal exots” , the Arieka. It’s not just enjoyable; this book actually makes you think.

    La Carte Et Le Territoire by Michel Houellebecq . Houellebecq ’s most playful and optimistic novel. It ends with France becoming a vast museum and the tired life of a cosseted pointless artist who dedicates himself to the artistic reproduction of a world nobody wants to live in, “consacra sa vie à la reproduction de représentations du monde, dans lesquelles cependant les gens ne devaient nullement vivre ”.

    Blogs.

    We signal the sad discontinuation – or suspension – of A Very Public Sociologist, Splintered Sunrise,  and the irrepressible Stroppy Blog.

    Dave’s Part  pursues a vigorous public debate, and very readable posts, on key political issues for the Left. Socialist Unity , while going adrift on Iran – part of its tenderness for the pious Islamist bourgeoisie, and publicising pantomime dame, George Galloway – produces useful contributions to trade union and anti-cuts politics. Harry’s Place  bores the arse off everyone with its obsession about Israel, and reheated indignation about leftist totalitarians. But it publishes worthwhile criticism of muddle-headed thinking on Islamism and the far-right and shows concern for social issues.

    Rosie Bell  shows continued fineness of spirit. Delicateness is not always a feature of Shiraz Socialist but it produces informed insights into the movement, particularly the inner workings of UNITE union, and much on international issues that others ignore. Organised Rage equally brings news to our attention that we’d miss otherwise,  particularly obituaries of left figures. Harpy Marx is a significant Blog that underlines the importance of welfare issues and poverty. Anti-National Translation is well worth a regular looking at. The Spanish Prisoner has become a must-read for its film reviews – up there with Philip French and Mark Kermode, to exaggerate only slightly. Obliged to Offend is a heartening  read, as is Representing the Mambo. 

     

    The Ipswich Blogosphere is only now developing. Ipswich Spy offers a place for Benedict Gummer MP to ingratiate himself with his Leader, and Liberal Democrat Councillors to make fools of themselves. A Riverside View  offers interesting pictures of lamp posts and  Corn Hill drains.

    Entdinglichung is one of the most valuable, multilingual, left resources around. Poumista also covers many countries, bringing to our attention the often forgotten heroes and heroines of the independent left.

    Bob From Brockley is the clear front-runner in the UK. Bob writes acute commentary, principally on British politics, and offers a stunning range of material and Blogging links.

    Journals.

    New Left Review continues to publish significant material, including important articles by Perry Anderson and the much-liked Robin Blackburn. It also provides a platform for ‘m’as-tu-vu’ Tariq Ali. This year the Norfolk Squire reminisced about meeting Malcolm X in Oxford. This is perhaps an improvement on his homage to Mao-Tse-Tung in 2010. This  defence of the Chairman’s  ’globally positive’ balance-sheet thankfully stopped short of Tariq’s recollections of when he dined with him over a bowl of chop suey.

    Historical Materialism publishes Marxist research, overwhelmingly useful but sometimes ponderously academic. The review-article section is fluent and memorable. International Socialism prints a surprisingly large number of well-argued articles, amongst the perennial wishful thinking of the SWP.  Alex Callinicos  is always worth reading. Richard Seymour seems at long last to be outgrowing his slipshod ideas on the ‘new racism’ and ‘liberal murder’. New Interventions  (no Web-site) offers an independent forum for left debate, and is increasingly successful in this aim.

    The Weekly Worker is essential reading for any serious leftist, with reportage on the left, serious  theory, and in-depth international coverage.  Labour Briefing has come to life with recent political upheaval. The Alliance for Workers Liberty‘s, Solidarity publishes, amongst other material, reports on areas, such as the North African left, not found elsewhere. The lesser-known The Commune offers a wide-range of reports also not found elsewhere with open-minded explorations of the politics of self-management. Country Standard is mid-Blog and Journal, and covers rural and class issues from the left. Red Pepper has finally taken up welfare campaigns.

    But it is Chartist which is clearly a winner this year. Its editing has become sharper and clearer, its debates focused on the issues that matter in UK politics, from British backed military interventions, localism, the Big Society, to Europe.

    Chartist is now a must-read.

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    Ben Gummer M.P on EU Crisis: Speak for England Mr Cameron!

    Posted in British Govern, Capitalism, Conservative Party, Conservatives, Cuts, East Anglia, Ipswich, Suffolk by Andrew Coates on December 10, 2011

    Very Pro-Patria.

    The Right Hon. Ben Gummer Ipswich MP, Editor of the Evening Star and Honorary Borough Mayor,  writes his regular column for Tendance Coatesy – the Premier Ipswich political Blog.

    Some on the Ipswich left say that Benedict should be taken out and shot in front of his family.

    We disagree, and this post shows why Benjy is widely respected in Ipswich.

    “It’s been one whirlwind of a week. Last Monday the Cabinet came to Beacon Town Ipswich!

    I wanted to show them the boost we’re getting from the brand new betting shops and pawnbrokers that are springing up all over the place.

    But this proved impossible.

    Instead we went to Rendlesham Forest where they could see the UFO Visitor Centre – ready for some new investors in Suffolk’s future to arrive.

    Then it was back to the Suffolk Club in Northgate Street.

    Ably assisted by my staff, Nigel Pickover and Paul Geater, Ministers met some brilliant people who are helping to boost Ipswich!

    Friday (‘Freedom Friday‘) will stick in people’s minds.

    Those who stayed a-bed will regret not being of the band of brothers who stood up for England against the Brussels Faceless Bureaucrats.

    David Cameron’s magnificent fight-back against Merkel and Sarkozy, alone against those who’d do this country down, hit the right note.

    As the poets said, of this “Sceptered Isle”  ”This fortress built by Nature for herself.” “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!”

    “It’s the “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll.”

    Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!

    Now I realise Tendance Coatesy is ‘anti-capitalist’ – I read Chomsky you know!

    But where would be without the City of London and public spending cuts?

    That’s why I signed a letter calling for Dave to protect the Square Mile from ‘Johnny Foreigner’ as my good friends in UKIP would say!

    Without the Banks and the Financial Industry(more here)  there’d be mass unemployment, closed shops in Ipswich Town centre, people begging and sleeping in the streets, and the ‘Wine-Rack’ would never have been built.

    David Cameron speaks for the People of England! “

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    The Stupidest Right in the World: Cameron’s Tories.

    Posted in Britain, British Govern, Capitalism, Conservative Party, Europe, Ipswich, Nationalism by Andrew Coates on December 12, 2011

    Two Very Stupid Friends.

    “The Stupidest Right in the World” (‘La droite la plus bête du monde’). Describing Cameron’s Tories Jean-Pierre Jouyet, did not mince his words on France-Inter this morning.

    The British P.M rejection of any agreement with the EU continues to echo. Jouyet, the  ’Eurocrat’, was careful to talk of the UK party in power, and not the British people. The observation is based on the judgement that Cameron has got absolutely nothing from slamming the door to Europe. Apart from the warm words of his supporters.

    Jouyet  applied to the UK Conservatives  a phrase often used in France to describe their own Right-wing parties.

    Undoubtably he is unaware of the 19th century English nickname for the Tories, “the stupid party”.

    The full quote, from John Stuart Mill, goes, “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.”

    We would adjust this: “Although it’s not true that all conservatives are stupidly anti-European, it is true that most stupid people are.”

    The Tory argument was that, “European Union proposals pose a grave threat to Britain’s financial services industry.” (here) - as supported by Ipswich MP Benedict Gummer (Gummer’s expertise in the business-world derives from his experience working for Dad in a ‘Consultancy’ firm based in Queen Anne’s Gate – Sancroft).

    In the Observer, Will Hutton summarised the fault-lines in the position of the British Government and their baying anti-EU supporters,

    Much of British finance in whose name Cameron exercised his veto – routine banking, insurance and accounting – was wholly unaffected by any treaty change. The financial services industry in Britain constitutes 7.5% of GDP and employs a million people; the City represents perhaps a third of that and, in turn, that part threatened – if it was threatened at all – some fraction of that. This is a tiny economic interest. If the coalition is serious about rebalancing the British economy, it is preposterous to place a fragment of the City at the forefront of our national priorities.

    Unfortunately that is exactly what Cameron has done domestically. ‘Financial services’ have played a key role creating the Market State. Clegg may moan on his partners’ attitude to a new EU treaty (and no doubt the Euro). But the priorities and influence of this fraction of the City have tumbled down throughout the state. They have determined the pattern of sell-offs and transfers affecting the entire system of governance - from welfare to municipalities. The City profits directly from these – at the expense of public services.

    We. do not see any patriotic squeals from the Tory Backbenchers about that.

    Hutton continues,

    The detestation of the EU is largely irrational – even if very real. Britain enhances its power and de facto sovereignty through membership; it loses it by becoming the creature of the financial markets and the City of London so beloved by Conservatives. If the EU suggests policies we don’t like, there are opt-outs and compromises galore, hardly the anti-democratic monster of sceptic imagination.

    If this loathing  is more emotional than anything else, it is culturally deep-rooted on the British Right.

    But as hypocritical as you could possibly find.

    As Hutton says,

    None of the eurosceptics baying for a referendum objects to Mayfair, Kensington and Knightsbridge becoming ghost towns owned by foreigners, nor to swaths of our great companies and brands falling into foreign ownership. This loss of control and autonomy is fine. But to make common cause with our European neighbours to enlarge our capacity to act in the world causes collective heart failure.

    Is this entirely irrational?

    Many of the leading anti-European ideologues and much of the anti-EU media are  in foreign hands, from Murdoch to the ally of The US Tea-Party, former Defence Minister, Liam Fox. They represent the interests of global capital,a nd politically the American Right. They hate ‘socialist’ – Christian Democratic and Social Democratic - Europe for its regulatory stand that they perceive as against their money-making interests. The Tory right are in this sense, the true “parti de l’étranger.”

    Some lackwits on the left think that the European Union is just a capitalist club.

    There have been long-standing reasons to oppose the way the EU is structured, from its competition policy to its failure to raise social standards, and even, in some cases, helping weaken them by encouraging the break up of socially owned enterprises.

    The slash and burn attack on the social state and the wholesale privatisations in Greece show the EU at its worst.

    Today there are reasons to be opposed to any treaty which enshrines strict Budget controls. And giving power over state financial regulation to the European Courts.

    There are, to say the least,  reasons to be opposed to a non-democratic European Union – because we support an open democratic social Union!

    We want the left to coem to open up the EU to our priorities not the bankers.

    We cannot do this by betting on a fictitious “sovereignty” of the UK Parliament – dwarfed by the City Cameron defends.

    This has to come from something with the weight of a United Continent – A European Social Republic.

    At the moment our thoughts are elsewhere.

    There are even greater reasons to hate in our innards the xenophobic anti–European right.

    In politics and culture alone we are European through-and-through.

    British democratic socialism is deeply influenced by German and French socialism – to cite but two lands.

    And our first, and perhaps greatest, National Poet, Chaucer?

     G.K.Chesterton once described him, “he was profoundly English, and therefore partly French.”

    Chaucer was also somewhat Italian – as anybody who reads the Canturbury Tales knows.

    Arab Spring a US-led Plot: Morning Star Article Alleges.

    Posted in Colonialism, Conspiracies, North Africa by Andrew Coates on December 13, 2011

    http://strangetimes.lastsuperpower.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Arab-Spring.jpg

    US Export, Morning Star Alleges.

    Is this the worst article ever to appear on the Arab Spring?

    From today’s Morning Star (here)

    Exporting Freedom. Colin Todhunter .

    “It’s a familiar scenario. A major political event occurs and the mainstream media opts for simplistic explanations.

    Take the so-called Arab Spring for instance.

    The overriding narrative is about how Facebook and Twitter has changed that part of the world.

    The premise is that widespread, spontaneous, grassroots uprisings spread within individual countries and then from one country to another, largely as a result of the use of social media technology.

    However, what we were not informed of was the extent to which many of these events had been managed and preplanned.

    In many ways the Arab Spring is reminiscent of the earlier revolutions in Eastern Europe which occurred following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    Also portrayed by the media as grassroots uprisings, many of those “revolutions” were in fact destabilisation regime change operations – funded and orchestrated by the US.

    Although many independently acting ordinary folk did actually become involved, they ended up being highly disillusioned with the outcome. But the West got what it wanted – pro-western governments in power.”

    “The turmoil in Libya and now in Syria are spin offs from the events in Tunisia and Egypt. And it doesn’t take much to appreciate that events across that part of the world are turning out to be favourable for the US.

    That’s because it has had its fingers all over the Arab Spring since before day one. While the mainstream media homed in on the role of Facebook and Twitter in the Egyptian uprising, little if anything was said about the US government’s role, through its various foundations and institutes, in actually promoting the use of social media technology among the young and encouraging political activism in the Arab world.”

    “French-Canadian Ahmed Bensaada’s new book Arabesque Americain documents the links, funding and main figures behind pro-democracy organisations in over a dozen Arab countries, including Egypt, Lybia, Tunisia and Syria, which were financed by the US.

    Indeed he identifies the specific pro-democracy groups by name and the exact amount of US funding each received. Hardly a series of autonomous, grassroots uprisings as the media would have us believe.

    Notwithstanding the genuine desires, frustrations and grievances that propelled many ordinary folk to eventually join in and take to the streets, much of the Arab Spring seems to have been backed by a US policy of destabilisation.”

    There is more, much more, in the same vein.

    Comment is perhaps superfluous.

    We  note that Todhunter claims to reject conspiracy theories: here.

    “When people do actually conspire to shape events, they do so within a framework that conspiracy theorists fail to appreciate. For example, corporations conspire to produce price cartels, media barons conspire to dominate and state-corporate interests embark on military jaunts to control markets and resources. But this has to be placed within the wider context of the logic of capitalism and the need to maximise profits and exert influence. Consequently, the compulsion to survive, compete, dominate and pursue profit casts long shadows over virtually every social and cultural institution, from government and politics to education, law, agriculture and entertainment.

    Few conspiracy theorists and their followers appreciate this and merely speculate about the intentions of and existence of groups of people acting together in unison. So, at one extreme, we have the belief that giant lizards from outer space are to blame for purposively bringing about the economic crisis or indeed just about anything else you care to think of. While some take at face value the belief in the lizard conspiracy, some critics (of David Icke in particular) regard it as a metaphor for the manipulation of the world by Jewish people. “

    In other words, the US Conspiracy to destabilise the Arab world, bring out millions onto the streets, and overthrow dictatorships,  has a reason.

    The fact that the US supported groups out to get rid of these regimes – as did practically every political force in the world from left to right, from Islamist to Secularist -  is, one assumes not the point.

    So Todhunter offers not a “conspiracy theory” but a fact.

    Bring back the Green Lizards say we.

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    Bangladesh War of Independence Anniversary: Shahzeb Jillani on BBC Radio 4.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Bangladesh, India, Islamism by Andrew Coates on December 14, 2011

    Shahzeb Jillani has produced a programme on the Bangladeshi war of national liberation.

    Boundaries of Blood was broadcast last night  (Here).

    He describes how nine months turmoil in ‘East Pakistan’ Bangladeshi “separatists” (fighters for national liberation), India intervened. The war then lasted 13 days.

    Jillani, who was born in Sind, Pakistan,  summarises this, “The defeat of the Pakistani army on 16 December 1971 was a triumph for India and the Bengali insurgents it had assisted.”

    Although the programme was sensitive and throughly researched it is unlikely to appeal to all Bangladeshis or supporters of their great war of national liberation.

    The atrocities committed by the Pak army were reported, but ‘balanced’ by reference to attacks on supporters of Pakistan. The scale of the genocide was left undecided - over 2, 3 million deaths? or less?

    It was left uncertain.

    Above all there was no reference to the present trial of Bangladeshi collaborators with Pakistan. That is, those who enrolled in the mass-murdering Razakars. They stand accused of War Crimes.

    This perhaps summarises some of what took place (here):

    “…… we were told to kill the hindus and Kafirs (non-believers in God). One day in June, we cordoned a village and were ordered to kill the Kafirs in that area. We found all the village women reciting from the Holy Quran, and the men holding special congregational prayers seeking God’s mercy. But they were unlucky. Our commanding officer ordered us not to waste any time.”

    Assisting the Army were Bangladeshi Islamists, such as supporters of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a brother party of the Pakistani Party of the same name.

    They continue to have a strong domestic base, with support in the UK. Here they enjoy a role in ‘community leadership’  in the East End of London.

    It is to the Pakistan’s great honour that a man like Lt Col Abdul Qadir Baloch can criticise the army’s actions during this war.

    But sadly there is little evidence that this honesty is widespread. Some of the interviewees on the programme spoke of the reports of killings and other atrocities as “propaganda”.

    In Pakistan Jillani reports,

    One might expect that the Pakistani army’s failure in 1971 would have diminished its power in the country. But in my lifetime, its influence in shaping and running the country has grown exponentially.

    In Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven (2011) one can detect absolutely no Pakistani remorse for the army’s mass murders. No apologies for its racism – that the regarded the Bangladeshi people as inferior, tainted by Hindi culture, and, clearly disposable.

    The Pakistani willful denial of their role in the war’s  slaughter some in Britain claim that all this was “long ago” and no longer relevant. A few even suggest that Bangleshis who bring this up are playing politics.

    Heroic figures of the struggle for national liberation, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (here),  and the fighters of the Mukti Bahani, are not, however, forgotten by the progressive peoples of the world.

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    Front National, Anti-Semitism, and Israel.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Fascism, French Politics, Israel by Andrew Coates on December 15, 2011

    French Far-Right Visits Israel.

    From the Le Monde Blog on the Far-right.

    “Louis Aliot, vice-président du Front national et codirecteur de campagne de Marine Le Pen, de retour d’une visite en Israël, a assuré, mercredi 14 décembre, sur France Inter que son parti n’a pas de “passé antisémite”.L’on dira que le numéro deux du FN à la fois joue avec les mots et a la mémoire courte.”

    Louis Aliot, Vice-President of the National Front and co-director of Marine Le Pen’s campaign, has just returned from a visit to Israel. On Wednesday, the 14th of December, he asserted that his party has no “anti-semitic past”. One could say the Number 2 of the FN is playing on words, and has a short memory.

    Roland Gaucher. François Brigneau, Léon Gaultier, Victor Barthélemy are just some of those who have been FN’s members and who have had a collaborationist, Vichy,  past.

     François Duprat, a Shoah denier, killed in the 1978 car bomb, was particularly influential in the foundation of the party.

    And without extending the list (see the Blog), what of the previous FN leader?

    Jean-Marie Le Pen avait aussi été condamné par la cour d’appel de Paris en 1993 pour son “jeu de mot” de 1988, “Durafour crématoire”, visant le ministre Michel Durafour. Six ans plus tard, en 1999, il le sera par la cour d’appel de Versailles pour avoir répété, en 1997 en Allemagne, ses propos sur les chambres à gaz, “détail de l’histoire”.

    Jean-Marie Le Pen was prosecuted by the Court of Appeal in 1993 for a “pun” of 1988, “Durafour crématoire”, – against the Jewish Minister Michel Durafour (‘Cremation’). Six years later, in 1999, he also appeared in the Court of Appeal,of Versailles, for  having repeated, in Germany, his remarks that the gas chambers were a “detail of history”.

    More Abel Mestre and Caroline Monnot’s Le Monde Blog on the French Far-Right Here.

    It is reported that the trip was made with this individual,

     ”Michel Thooris. Ce dernier, qui entretient des rapports avec le parti d’extrême droite Israel Beitenou, est très lié aux militants pro-sionistes israéliens.”

    He has links with the Israeli extreme right party, Israel Beitenou, and has close ties with pro-Israel Zionist activists.

    This attempt to claim support for Israel, and to build common ties, is not without opposition within the FN. As already suggested there are historic anti-Jewish currents within the party, and on the non-FN French far-right there are ”anti-Zionist’ individuals and organisations.

    From Israel Haaretz reports on Aliot’s visit,

    On Monday, he also met with “a few elected officials and political figures who prefer not to be named.” When pressed, he confirmed that none of the elected officials were Knesset members. On Tuesday he plans to visit churches in Bethlehem.

    The high point of Monday’s activities was his meeting in a Jerusalem hotel with 40 French Jews he said had invited him in order to hear Le Pen’s platform. Marine Le Pen is the daughter of National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, a far-right nationalist and former presidential candidate who periodically made xenophobic, anti-Semitic statements

     (Here)

    In the Opinion Polls on voting intentions for next year’s Presidential elections Marine Le Pen hovers at around 13- 14%

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    The Better Angels of Our Nature. Steven Pinker. A Left Enlightenment Review.

    Posted in International, Labour Movement, Left, Marxism by Andrew Coates on December 16, 2011

     

    The Sleep of Enlightenment Reason Produces Monsters.

    The Better Angels of Our Nature. The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes. Steven Pinker. Allen Lane 2011.

    The Better Angels begins, “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history, believe it or not – and I know that many people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.” (P xxi) The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker’s claim, elaborated over nearly 700 pages, has ruffled more than a few feathers. It raises issues that resound throughout our political and ethical practice. The Better Angels is more than a study of human aggression: it is part of a renewal of Enlightenment nerves. How convincing is it?

    The Better Angels’ conclusion could serve as its premise, “For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline in violence is an accomplishment we can savour, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilisation and enlightenment that make it possible.”(Page 696) But what are these ‘forces’ of civilisation and why should we appeal to the Enlightenment? The book navigates an enormous amount of material, from statistical evidence of violence, to explorations of social and individual psychology, to establish its assertion that violence has declined, and that the ‘civilising process’ continues. But it is in the Rights Revolution, an expanding circle of moral empathy, the appeal to human and not Divine, Reason, that is, the pillars of Enlightenment thinking, that it finds its most solid foundations.

    Angels and Demons.

    Pinker lists 5 Inner Demons, 4 Better Angels and 5 Historical Forces that have promoted or hindered, human flourishing and aggression. Weaving them together is a narrative of the ‘Civilising process’. Long-term “changes in human personality structures” towards “affect controls”, offers us a portrait of gradual improvement. (The Civilising Process. 1979) Pillars of this development are the Humanitarian Revolution and the Rights Revolution, fostered by thinkers and the way their concerns spread out through “moral momentum”, “from the abolition of slavery and torture to civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights.” (Page 473) The early wish by French philosophe Condorcet (1743 – 1794) for a mathematical, statistical, basis for social science, finds a new expression in Pinker’s use of statistics to illustrate, or prove, his arguments on ethical progress.

      (more…)

    Christopher Hitchens: a Tribute.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Britain, Capitalism, Culture, European Left, Free Speech, Religion, Secularism by Andrew Coates on December 16, 2011

    We are sadened to learn of Christopher Hitchen’s death.

    Rosie Bell expresses this  far better than I can so I will link to her moving post – here.

    This Blog has often written about him, his wit, his books, and his opinions.

    Here are some extracts,

    Arguably. Christopher Hitchens.  Atlantic Books. 2011. Hitchens Vs. Blair. Is Religion a Force for  Good in the World? The Munk Debate. Black Swan 2011.

    Christopher Hitchens has the gift of  making you want to listen. Simon Hoggart, he recalls in conversation  after the Munk Debate, once suggested that he should write as  he spoke. This advice he has followed. The collection of republished  pieces in Arguably shows this trait in every page. Keeping a  few furlongs ahead of the reading public with his table-talk about  the giants of English and American Literature, World and National  Politics, History, Totalitarianism, Wine, Song and Women, he pauses,  at it were, to fire shots at a variety of seated ducks. Diagnosed  with cancer, and conscious of his mortality, he does not just grab  attention: he is good company.”

    Rest of the Post here.

    October 28th 2011.

    Hitch-22. A Memoir. Christopher Hitchens. Atlantic Books. 2010. 

    Christopher Hitchens is one of the most talented polemicists of the last decades. The former International Socialist, left-wing journalist “as someone who had spent much of his life writing for The Nation and the New Statesman” he became an enthusiast for Humanitarian Interventions, and assembled “an informal international for the overthrow of fascism in Iraq”. After calling for war on Saddam Hussein, he “stopped calling himself a socialist in 2002”.

    To most people of the left, Hitchens has been thereafter associated with Neo-Conservatism. There are others who still appreciate him, and are saddened at his present cancer, even while opposing liberal internationalism by force. For all how his “loss of faith” remains a striking, and in many ways unresolved, issue. In god Is Not Great (2007) he said his belief in Marxism could not survive the “onslaught of reality”. That its “intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories” “were in the past.” That it was “no longer any guide to the future” and, as a “total solution” had led to “the most appalling human sacrifices”. (Page 153) But is this all there is to say? In the New Statesman he has been cited as remarking that he has remained in some sense a Marxist “but not Socialist”.  Hitch 22 concludes “Karl Marx was rightest all when he commended continual doubt and self criticism” (Page 424).

    The rest of the Post  here.

    9 Aug 2010


    Latte Labour’s Post is, amongst many  many people’s Blog comments on Hitchen’s, worth reading: here. Though we hardly agree with it.

    Kim Jong-il: A Socialist Obituary.

    Posted in Communism, Stalinism by Andrew Coates on December 19, 2011

    Dead, but the Dynasty Continues – for now.

    Kim Jong-il, the “dear leader” still venerated by many in North Korea but reviled abroad, has died aged 69, state media announced on Monday morning. ” reports the Guardian.

    The overwhelming majority of socialists, Marxists and leftists, do not care an iota about the death of this figure.

    The French Communist Daily, L’Humanité,  says the Leader died of ‘overwork’ (surmenage).

    It descriibes him the following terms,

    Dictateur à la tête d’un régime totalitaire dont on ne sait que peu de choses, il a organisé un véritable culte autour de sa personne (voir la vidéo). C’est aussi l’homme qui a doté la Corée du Nord de l’arme nucléaire, déstabilisant la région et provoquant une rare hausse des tensions avec les pays voisins. L’importance des ressources investies dans le militaire, la volonté d’autosubsistance du pays comme les blocus internationaux font que sous son règne, la Corée du Nord a connu une terrible famine, dont on ne peut estimer le bilan.

    A dictator, at the head of a totalitarian regime about which we are badly informed, he organised a true personality cult around himself (see video on site). He was also the person who equipped North Korea with nuclear arms, which destabilised the entire region and provoked a rare rise in tensions with all his neighbours. The diversion of funds to the military, the drive for self-sufficiency, and international sanctions, provoked a famine, whose extent we are still not able to gauge.

    In place of this, what would we like to see?

    We would hope that this death brings closer the moment when  the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) will fall.

    That democracy will come to the people of this country.

    Others take a different view (at least officially),

    Liu Weimin, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said,

    “We were distressed to learn of the unfortunate passing of the senior-most North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, and we express our grief about this and extend our condolences to the people of North Korea. Comrade Kim Jong-il was the great leader of the North Korean people and a close friend of the Chinese people. He made important contributions to the development of socialism in North Korea, and the development of friendly, neighbourly and co-operative relations between China and North Korea. We hope the two countries could carry on working together for peace in the Korean peninsula.” (BBC)

    The Morning Star Readers & Supporters Group takes a very different line to their French Communist  comrades,

    “Solidarity and condolences to the people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea over the loss of leader Kim Jong Il. Viva DPRK!”

    *******

    Another whole-hearted, genuine, expression of grief comes from this quarter,

    The  Friends of Korea, New Communist Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party (M-L)- I note Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party is linked to the Friends.

    Below is an extract from their recent ‘seminar’ on the regime.

    “This Seminar convened to celebrate the 66th anniversary of the foundation of the Workers’ Party of Korea conveys to you its warmest and most fraternal greetings. It also wishes you the very best for your continued successes on the occasion of the 14th anniversary of your election as the General Secretary of the Party, and on the occasion of the 85th anniversary of the formation of the Down-with-Imperialism Union by the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung.”

    Now the RCP (M-L) have issued this,

    “NORTH KOREA: FROM COMMUNIST PARTY GREAT BRITAIN, ML. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nqscnaZ8kNA It is with great sadness that we learn of the death of Kim Jong Il, leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, General Secretary of the Workers Party of Korea and son of legendary freedom fighter Kim Il Sung, who was born nearly 100 years ago on 12 April 1912, and who led the struggle of the tiny but defiant Korean people to defeat that imperialist goliath US imperialism.” (Hat-Tip – Lee)  

    A member of the Friends of Korea, of Indian origin, once said to me that as ”Westerner” I could never understand why people supported the Kims.

    Let us discard the cultural patronising this claim involves.

    North Korea’s tyranny is not hard to grasp.

    It is a form of military Stalinism – ‘Communism’ in quotation marks’.

    The template was the first decades of the Chinese People’s Republic.

    As Frank Dikötter  describes this in the recent Mao’s Great Famine (2010), the state was run on the military model that had successfully triumphed in China against the Nationalists and Japanese.

    North Korea sharpened this model during its war with the South.

    Does this mean that we should think of the DPRK as a land of autonomous obeying their Socialist Sovereign?

    Dikötter  describes how during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, faced with mass starvation and economic collapse,there was ferocious opposition.  Peng Dehuai, a military leader himself,  paid with  his life for this. Others too perished in the purges that followed.

    By their willingness to resist, the Chinese seem to have less differences  to anybody else’s  political history  than some might think.

    The evidence from South Korea, in films, reporting and literature, is that they are indeed similar to ourselves: there a right, a left, a workers’ movement, and people’s lies are extremely similar to our urban existence.

    I suspect that the people of the DPRK would be the same given a chance.

    They too have experienced a Great, and very long-standing, famine.

    When the DPRK crumbles to dust, we will know in full of those who nobly resisted Kim Jong-Il,  his family and his ‘party’.

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    Armenian Genocide Denial to be Made Illegal in France.

    Posted in Anti-Fascism, Fascism, Free Speech, French Politics by Andrew Coates on December 21, 2011

    It looks probable that this Thursday the French National Assembly will make denying the Armenian Genocide illegal in that country.

    It will be punished by up to 1 year in Prison and a fine of 45,000 Euros.

    Turkey is furious about the move. The country offers  no official recognition of this mass slaughter.

    Ankara has reminded France of its own colonial crimes.  (More Here)

    Holocaust denial is already a crime in France.

    Wikipedia summarises the law,

    “In France, the Gayssot Act, voted for on July 13, 1990, makes it illegal to question the existence of crimes that fall in the category of crimes against humanity as defined in the London Charter of 1945, on the basis of which Nazi leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal  at Nuremberg  in 1945-46. When the act was challenged by Robert Faurisson, the Human Rights Committee upheld it as a necessary means to counter possible antisemitism.”

    This extension of the legislation is not without complications.

    France has already recognised the Armenian genocide.

    That is  a good step.

    But what of other genocides?

    In Darfur?

    Those who make straight-forward denials of the Concentration Camp programme of extermination and the Einsatzgruppen’s murders  - the systematic negationism of the far-right, on the Shoah, are not hard to single out.

    But elsewhere the position is less clear.

    What will constitute denial is hard to gauge.

    Norman Stone, the British Historian, has often tried to downplay the Armenian killings.

    Is he in the line of fire?

    The whole issue is full of the heavyiest difficulties one can imagine.

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    Belgian General Strike in Public Services a Great Success.

    Posted in Belgium, Europe, European Left, Labour Movement by Andrew Coates on December 22, 2011

    The Belgium general strike in the public sector has been called in protest at pension reforms.

    ” Aucun train, bus, tram ou métro ne roule en Belgique. « On peut déjà parler d’un grand succès », estime la CGSP. “

    No train, bus or trams are running in Belgium, “We  can already talk of a great success” say the Trade union federation, the CGSP.

    « La grève est un grand succès », estime la CGSP

    © Pierre-Yves Thienpont – L e Soir

    Le Soir – here.

    Dec 22 (Reuters) – Belgian workers in public transport, schools, hospitals and government buildings went on strike on Thursday in protest at pension reforms in the new government’s austerity plan to reduce the budget deficit.

    The Belgian rail system stopped operating from late on Wednesday evening and other public services including buses, trams and the metro, as well as postal deliveries were shut down in the 24-hour strike.

    High-speed international train services were already hit on Wednesday.

    Eurostar, which operates between Brussels, Paris and London, said it would not be able to operate its services to Belgium for the duration of the strike. It would offer a limited service to the French city of Lille, near the Belgian border. Passengers would then have to use a bus service to reach Brussels.

    Thalys, which operates trains from Paris through Brussels to the Netherlands and Germany, said no trains would be running on Thursday.

    The international airport serving Brussels said it did not expect any disruptions to air traffic, but advised travellers to check flight details regularly.

    Many officials from European Union institutions headquartered in Brussels rescheduled travel earlier in the week to avoid the labour disruptions ahead of the Christmas break.

    Belgium’s new government is trying to raise the effective retirement age, currently averaging about 59 years, by raising the age at which workers can claim an early pension. The official retirement age is 65 years.

    The pension reform is part of the 2012 budget plan to reduce Belgium’s public sector deficit to below the EU limit of 3 percent of gross domestic product next year and to reassure investors that Belgium has its finances under control.

    Ratings agencies Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s have both cut their ratings for Belgium in the past month, citing concerns about its high debt, slow economic growth and the cost of rescuing its financial sector, notably banking group Dexia .

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