Anarchoblogs

Here’s some music to get you in the mood for tomorrow’s feminist labour unionism double bill. Northumbrian twee folk the Unthanks performing the Testimony of Patience Kershaw.

The haunting lyrics are based on testimony to Ashley’s mines commission in the 19th century. Patience was a hurrier, pushing carts loaded with coal underground. Hard manual labour of a kind that doesn’t fit with the standard idea of women’s work. The characterisation of class politics as fixated on burly male factory workers has always been a caricature.

At times it has been forgotten and deliberately obscured but the working class has never been (just) white, (just) male or (just) straight. We’ve always been queer, female, black as well. Any workplace politics that doesn’t take this into account is incomplete.

Which is not to say that all the experiences of different parts of the working class are the same. Some workers have it better than others; while sharing the same condition of exploitation, they also are oppressed in ways specific to (e.g.) their gender. Unpicking the details of this set of (relative) privileges and oppressions gets complicated and fraught. The existing theories (intersectionality, privilege theory) aren’t wholly satisfactory. Some don’t like them because they appear to remove the centrality of the class relationship, or reduce it to just another of a set of oppressions; others dislike the overly academic language it’s couched in. But the theories attempt to describe a real, important and historically neglected set of experiences and we need to work our way through them. (Someone I know says that the only thing worse than privilege theory is the arguments presented against it.)

Given all the apparent complexity; I like being reminded that these aren’t new or abstract issues. Listen to the song and hear Patience Kershaw’s description of terrible working conditions made worse by the position she’s in because of her gender (sometimes I’m slower, and terrified these naked men will batter me); there’s even body image issues in there too (a lady sir, oh no not me/I should’ve been a boy instead). Heartbreaking in its matter-of-fact delivery and its acceptance of hopelessness.

But of course, tomorrow doesn’t have to be just the same. Come to ACE to watch these films with us from 3pm.

(This was going to be part of this post but, laziness.)

The other strand of political implications thought(*) that I took away from the film "No" was about the relationship between means and ends. It’s a classic anarchist obsession but I’m nothing if not classy, so here we go. (This one genuinely does include a massive spoiler as to how the film plays out, so break here.)

As I mentioned before, García Bernal’s character is an advertising executive heavily involved in strategising the "no" campaign’s message, which wins by presenting a positive, hopeful face to a Pinochet-less Chile. A film presenting the top-down approach succeeding in winning the election could make the film politically offensive to the mass struggles and collective action against Pinochet and other South American dictatorships. However, there’s an ambivalence in the events and character’s response to the victory which makes it a much more complex and interesting film.

On election night, the No campaign’s HQ is surrounded by the army, the results trickle in slowly, there is tension. The campaign realises that they have won only when army withdraws and the TV news shows Army generals on their way into a crisis meeting with Pinochet. When one of those generals states the (hitherto secret) results to a camera, the No campaign realise: Pinochet is finished, they’re telling him to go.

Not the people, the generals.

Most of the campaigners are ecstatic, not our hero, he appears to be in shock. The alienation he’s shown that whole night (since being caught up in a police attack on a rally in the previous scene) is now up front. He walks past the "head" of the campaign claiming personal credit in a live interview and out into the street. Only when his son gets his attention does he look happy at the result.

Why the long face? I think he’s realised that their (his) depoliticised approach has won a battle against dictatorship but retreated from the wider war for social justice that his estranged wife is committed to. The wrap-up scenes show that Chile’s next president was a figure from the Right, Pinochet and the army machinery remained in place and there was no change in the economic policies that people were suffering under. Most damningly, García Bernal goes back to work at his advertising agency alongside the boss who had run the "Yes" campaign; the boss is still in charge, GGB is back to hocking telenovelas using helicopter stunts.

The same propaganda tricks he used to help topple Pinochet are used to keep the rest of the status quo in place. By removing the politics from the message Chile enters "post-ideological" times but in fact the struggle to de-juntaise(**) Chile wasn’t complete for at least another 25 years. The film’s willingness to show this saves it from liberal cheerleading.

I said last week that class struggle is a turn off; but it has to be the core of our politics. There’s nothing wrong with reforms, especially ones that bring about improvements in our conditions(**) but as anarchists we recognise that there has to be more than the piecemeal ameliorations that the State can snatch back when it has the upper hand. Fighting for reforms is important, but how we fight (using libertarian methods, empowering the class as a whole, "prefiguratively") is at least as important.

(*) It’s like Mao-Zedong Thought, but wobblier)

(**) No longer being at risk of getting thrown out of a helicopter: wicked good reform.

Glasgow University Academic, anarchist and wobbly Benjamin Franks was in Edinburgh this week giving a talk to the university anarchist society on Marxisms and Anarchisms: the beginnings and ends of the schism? I managed to sneak out of work a bit early and make it along and it was well worthwhile. The talk was more academic, and philosophical than I had expected but offered a fascinating description of how the early Marxist and anarchist movements split and how Franks’ own work in political philosophy can help us understand the theoretical differences and re-discover our commonalities.

Till 1917, Franks told us, there were disagreements between anarchists and Marxists, over the role of the state, political representation and so on, but no totalising schism. Indeed, in many cases the terms communist and anarchist were used almost interchangeably, while it was common to see socialist groups selling pamphlets by Kropotkin alongside those by Marx, communists would have pictures of Marx next to ones of Bakunin in their homes and organisations worked together and held joint meetings.

Kropotkin noted a change, however, after 1907, with the increasing development of the vanguard party form – both the formation of socialist parties and more explicitly communist ones. Even so, there was still a great degree of co-operation and mutual respect until the real flashpoint of 1917: the Russian revolution and the seizure of power by the Bolshevik party. (Of course if should be noted that even then more heterodox Marxists realised the problems of the Bolsheviks centralising, bureaucratic and anti-communist tendencies; an SPGB member in the audience proudly told us they’d recognised the revolution was no longer communist by June 1918!)

Franks compared the critique of anarchism from orthodox Marxism – giving us historical quotes from Plekhanov, Lenin and Stalin (the latter two sounding almost identical) and more recent criticisms from members of the AWL and SWP – with the caricature from analytic philosophy (the tradition from which his own philosophy develops). The orthodox Marxist critique accuses anarchism of idealism, rather than materialism, of ineffectuality, of essentialism, or anti-organisation (i.e. a rejection of the vanguard party). The analytic tradition attempts to find a number of necessary and sufficient criteria to define a political philosophy, for anarchism they suggest an opposition to coercion. That’s it. From that opposition to states, police, capital and so on flow, but from that simplistic criteria it becomes easy to accuse anarchism of, therefore, believing in an essentially good human nature, such that coercion will never be necessary and an inability to deal with opposition or anti-social behaviour. Of course, these simple critiques are really straw-men, or straw-women, based on a flawed understanding of anarchism biased by the critic’s own ideology.

Following the work of Michael Freeden, Franks attempts to build an alternative framework to analyses the philosophies, based around a number of core and peripheral beliefs that must be understood as an interacting constellation, none of which can be examined on their own. For example he says the concept of liberty changes with which other beliefs are paired with it, neoliberalism places liberty with private property, Mills’ liberty is placed with self-development, and anarchist conception might be placed with equality or society. In each of these cases what we mean by liberty is thereby changed by the other beliefs that accompany it.

Franks sets out four core beliefs for anarchism: opposition to hierarchy, with associated conceptions of anti-statism and anti-capitalism, anti-mediation (a rejection of representation; the oppressed must liberate themselves), a social view of the individual and prefiguration (direct action). The interactions between this network of conceptions build the anarchist political philosophy.

Using this framework Franks describes that initially anarchism and Marxism shared many of the same core conceptions, but with the rise of the vanguard party form, Marxism’s conception of the state moved from a peripheral belief (on which Marx himself had varying positions over the course of his lifetime) to a central tenet. Marxism-Leninism begins to dominate as the orthodox Marxism, capturing state power becomes more important and they turn more hostile to anarchists and other non-Leninist socialists and communists. At this point anarchists in turn begin to define themselves more explicitly against Marxism. If Leninism is Marxism, we want nothing to do with it (of course it isn’t, but it’s understandable in the circumstances that people began to see it that way).

As the Soviet Union begins to be exposed, after 1936, particularly after 1956 and again after 1968, many orthodox Marxists break with the USSR and with the rise of the New Left more libertarian forms of Marxism push to the fore, for a while. With the apparent failure of this movement in the 1970s, however, we see a "return to Marx", which is really a "return to Lenin" and potential regrouping fades.

In the end, it seems like much of orthodox Marxism is still wedded today to a party form we inherently oppose (see groups like the SWP or AWL e.g.) but perhaps with some of the student movements, the re-appearance of the IWW (once a bastion of class unity between Marxists and anarchists) and some of the other network focused, anti-hierarchical movements appearing today there is hope for renewed co-operation in future. On the basis of class unity, not a spurious "left unity", of course.

The Oscar-nominated film No starring Gael Garcia Bernal claims to tell the story of the only dictator ever to be voted out power: General Pinochet of Chile. It’s visually striking and for a politically-themed film the story is unusual: it focuses on the details of the television advertising campaign in favour of a "No" to Pinochet vote in the referendum of the early 1980s. It’s worth watching in itself but here I want to write about what it says about political campaigning (do I need to put a Spoiler Alert here because I’ll give away the ending if I say that Pinochet is no longer in power?)

They take the negative "No" and turn it into the positive "No more!" and further than that, they reject the "this guy is a bastard" approach to the odious, mass-murdering crook. Testimony of abuses, torture and everyday misery are sidelined in favour of making people feel positive. I got to thinking how I’ve always hated the phrase "class struggle" to describe my politics. Accurate as it is, necessary qualifier that it is, still it takes two words with unpleasant associations and bolts them together to conjure images of school bullying or failure to fit in(*).

Why would anyone want to get behind that? (**)

Anarchism’s emphasis on freedom and individual / collective liberty is a much better selling point. Everyone loves Freedom (***), to the point where that word is fought over and captured by those who take it from us. "Free markets" and "freedom of choice" are parodies of real life under consumer capitalism. Every bampot right-wing "libertarian" who wants the "freedom" to own wage-slaves. Every CBI gobshite that cuts workers’ protection in the name of "freedom from red tape." We should be jealously defending it from them and emphasising it more in our activities.

Freedom is ours, it’s always been the anarchist thing. And it goes beyond shallow individualism. We want freedom from work, freedom from want and freedom from toil. I can’t be free to be my best self if I’m in a community that’s stunted by need, racism, or sexism. No-one is free until we all are free.

That’s real economic freedom: anarchist communism.

(*) is it just me? You make your own associations then.

(**) even before we get into "anarchist" with all its mad-bomber baggage…

(***) Yeah, OK. Not everybody.

Still trying to digest all of the interesting things said at Thursday’s two talks, never mind yesterday’s packed event on Belarus. There should be recordings of the SolFed and Anarchist Black Cross meetings available in the future, so I want here to draw out some of the politics implicit in Mark Fisher’s Slow Cancellation of the Future talk. (These are more disconnected notes than tightly-argued essay.)

If you were to summarise the talk’s thesis, you could say "shit political situation has lead us to a shit cultural situation". Essentially, capital’s need for constant novelty for new consumer products has run up against its need for endless growth in terms of volume and new markets. There’s now no "outside" spaces for it to grab new value from. In the musical realm this means nothing creatively new or surprising has been produced "since 2003", only variations on old themes. Whereas there’s always been "nostalgic" culture, now even what’s presented as new and experimental is old, cf Arctic Monkeys, Oasis(*).

"Nothing created any year this century would sound alien or surprising to an audience from the mid-1990s" was one of the soundbites that provoked a prickly response from the young creative people that were the bulk of the audience(**).

I also liked his opposition of "popular modernism" against post-modernism, though I freely admit to knowing little about cultural theories. I understood popular modernism to be the entry of experimental, implicitly progressive themes and ideas into popular forms. He points to post-punk as the clearest example of that. Also, discounting an emphasis on the avant garde in favour of the mainstream was an interesting point. Did we lose faith in peoples’ intelligence around the same time as collective action and institutions like workplace solidarity was being systematically destroyed? Does that lead to an insularity and lack of confidence in radical politics?

One thing that I think he didn’t emphasise enough in his talk was the action of capture that has taken place by Capital in the two things he pinned as being key in the development of culture: novelty and negativity. Novelty is clear enough: consumerism always needs new products. We get "new" products, musically, now, but they aren’t novel.

Negativity is a harder thing. Fisher says that it’s part of the essential drive to create something artistic. For me, though, emphasising this as something lacking now misses the point that it is another characteristic that was formerly radical but is now mostly reactionary. The easy form of negativity now is "nothing ever changes so what’s the point," lazy nihilism that is no threat to anything but your mental health. (And which shades into detached postmodern hipster ironism, a profitable niche for people that have the luxury of not having to give a shit.)

After the talk, the idea of popular modernism in my head, I found myself listening to Stereolab’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup, from the mid-1990s and a good example of utopianism, experiment, pop and politics. (Or, an old man returning to the music of his youth, because things were better then.)

(*) — yes these are old examples, but this shows how long the slump has been.

(**) — To an ageing music nerd with no artistic leanings, their ability to crack Fisher’s "well show me it, please," was hilarious.

Hey, why not choose both? Thursday evening offers two talks at convenient intervals with cheap falafel to be found on the way between the two venues.

First, at 5:15 there’s Mark Fisher

“Blogger and Author of Capitalist Realism, Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, and contributor to The Guardian, Frieze, The New Statesman and Sight & Sound, Mark Fisher is among the most acute and respected cultural and political commentators writing today. On Feb 28, he will give a lecture entitled ‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’ as part of the History of Art department at Edinburgh University’s Graduate Research Seminar series. Free and open to the public [at Edinburgh Art College, Lecture Room 1, Minto House, 20 Chambers Street]

Then at 8pm, SolFed are launching their Fighting for Ourselves book at ACE with a talk and discussion.

We are living in times of unprecedented attacks on our living conditions on all fronts, of rising social tensions and sometimes violent eruptions of class conflict. And yet if anything, the surprise is not that there has been riots and the odd strike, but that there have been so few. How are we to make sense of this. How are we to fight back, to take the initiative? Against capitalism, what do we w…ant to put in its place? The 20th century discredited state socialism, and rightly so. But with it, a whole history of international class struggle, of revolutions and counter-revolutions, victories and defeats, spontaneous uprisings and vast workers’ organisation has been eclipsed too.

The book aims to recover some of the lost history, in order to set out a revolutionary strategy for the present conditions.

Belarus ABC talk poster

A speaker all the way from Belarus will discuss the revitalisation of anarchism in the country and the extraordinary state repression they have suffered, with anarchists making up nearly a half of all ‘political’ prisoners. Find out how the Belarus Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) is supporting anarchist prisoners and what you can do to help.

4pm-6pm Saturday March 2nd 2013 @ The Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH7 5HA

Edinburgh Anarchist Federation will be hosting a speaker from the Anarchist Black Cross in Belarus who will be talking about the severe state repression and harsh imprisonment faced by anarchists and other comrades. At present the Belarusian ABC are supporting five imprisoned comrades facing years in jail due to their political activities.

These convictions form part of an ideologically driven repression of anarchists in Belarus. They follow the revitalisation of Belarusian anarchism in the past few years. Unlike in some other ex-Soviet Union countries and other modern dictatorships, anarchists do not form a minor part of a dissident prison population consisting of the usual pro-democracy and anti-corruption activists. They in fact make up just under half of the ‘political’ prisoners in Belarus. This is partly because it is possible to have sentences revoked if you admit your guilt and write to the state asking forgiveness, which the five will not do.

The Belarusian ABC has campaigned consistently for them to be released and, in the immediate term, for them to be allowed visits, medication, letters and literature, and raises money for solicitors’ fees and to buy the comrades’ food. Supported by the International of Anarchist Federations (IFA-IAF) they are undertaking a tour of France, Italy, Germany, Spain and UK, to raise awareness and spark further solidarity. The latter have a good chance of success because Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko has expressed a desire for the country to be allowed to join the E.U. There are rumours that this may be considered if human rights in the country are addressed.

Event on Facebook

Event on Indymedia

"You mean I'll have to... get a job!??"

we wrote about last year, most notably his conviction for threatening tenants. The BBC say:

A landlord has been refused entry on the landlord register – making it a criminal offence for him to rent out property in Edinburgh.

It is the first time the city’s council has refused such an application.

It was made after the Regulatory Committee heard Mark Fortune’s submission to be entered on the register of fit and proper landlords.

I have to confess I’m a bit confused about the number of different bans, appeals and convictions Fortune’s racked up in his career but it does look like this could (finally) be the end of the line for the arrogant bully. (At least until he returns behind a front company.) And no action would have been taken without campaigning by Fortune’s victims, through EPTAG and other routes.

No doubt our meeting on Wednesday will touch on this and the lessons that we can learn to stop other landlords from causing misery in the first place.

Anger over the "bedroom tax," like that we reported on recently has reached politicians’ ears and prompted some typically spineless mithering and platititudes. Responding to a call for action from Govan Law Centre’s Mike Dailly, an SNP person says "we can’t do anything, blame Westminster" and a LibDem says "fuck ‘em we’ve got a bank bailout to pay off"(*).

It’s clear that people concerned about this unjust and brutal unfolding farce should expect no help from politicians except what they are forced into. Rebounding effects from this policy can perhaps be seen in the fact that tenants in Cedar Street, Glasgow are having to fight a 9.1% rent rise in the space of two years. They deserve you support, read on to find out how.

This campaign has been launched in response to Queens Cross Housing Association’s proposed rent increase of 4.6% this year, following on from a 4.5% increase last year. This comes at a time when many people are already struggling to make ends meet – wages and benefits are frozen or decreasing whilst basic living costs are still on the rise.

Many residents are unhappy with Queens Cross already due to a range of issues, from essential repairs not being carried out to tower block lifts breaking down on a regular basis. Many of the flats in the area have not been properly insulated and as a result residents cannot afford extortionate heating bills. There are still problems of damp and mould in many flats, which clearly has a knock-on affect on people’s health and well-being.

QCHA announced a ‘consultation’ period which ends on 8th February, though many were rightfully skeptical as to how much they were going to be listened to. As a result, residents called a public meeting on 1st February which was attended by representatives from the Housing Association. Despite being confronted with angry residents who had a range of objections to the plans, Queens Cross seemed unable to justify the proposal and unable to answer a straight question!

In the days since that meeting we have launched a petition to show Queens Cross the strength of feeling against this proposal. We have been knocking doors, talking to our neighbours about the situation and collecting signatures. We also have a separate online petition so that those who live outside the area can show their support.

This Friday 8th February, on the last day of the ‘consultation’ we will be meeting outside the Cedar Court flats and going together to the Queens Cross offices to hand in our petitions.

Ways to help

1. Sign our online petition. Please say so if you live locally.
   http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/no-to-queen-s-cross-housing-association-rent-hike.html

Call / fax / email QCHA and then comment below with what you and they saidTel: 0141 945 3003      Fax: 0141 945 2429      Email : contactus@qcha.org.uk

Come on Friday when we hand in the paper and online petitions and invite your friends too.Assemble 1:30 Friday 8th February outside 65 Cedar St. Middle of the 3 big grey tower blocks with red and blue striped sides behind Lidl on Maryhill Rd, 5 minutes from St George's Cross.http://www.facebook.com/events/211339209003805/

(*) I’m paraphrasing

Been catching up with podcasts in the last fortnight, including the excellent CyberUnions, a mix of Free Software an politics that could only be more aimed towards me if it was soundtracked by Albert Ayler.

They manage to cover websites and technologies that I haven’t heard of and they do it accessibly. One recent episode discussed LittleSis.org, which I like the look of a lot. It describes itself as:

a free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government.

We’re a grassroots watchdog network connecting the dots between the world’s most powerful people and organizations.

Like a more data-driven wikipedia focussed on "who bought company X which did Y and sold Z to A while preventing workers at B from organizing". The potential as a resource for solidarity unionism and actions seems huge. Imagine a company like Atos, involved in the Work Capability Assessment but with fingers in many pies. Or G4S.

The only drawback is that thus far, there’s not much UK-related info on the site and the way they say they want to grow (linking content to what’s already there) may make this slow.

However, go there and take a look. CyberUnions were talking about using the software for their own purposes. It’s well worth keeping an eye on.