LENIN'S TOMB

Thursday, October 17, 2013

The soul of Wilde under anti-humanism posted by lenin

I wrote this a while ago for a collection or seminar, and I have no idea if it was ever used. But as it's one of those pointless dates - Wilde's birthday yesterday, Morrissey's autobiography published today - I think I'll post it here.

Wilde was as fond of English literalism as he was of bourgeois morality. His primary weapon against such philistinism, usually posing as ‘common sense’, was the cutting paradox. He confounded what were assumed to be facts, and even evinced a scandalously low regard for them. He was cryptic, and contradictory. He coded his desire for social and sexual freedom in euphemisms and allegories, yet in doing so placed it right under society’s nose. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that this approach was merely ludic, merely the prerogative of an artist of considerable rhetorical power, provoking and bewildering fuckwitted aristocrats. There was a real stringency to Wilde’s method, which bears on his approach in The Soul of Man.

A distinction must be made between his approach to historical truth, and his approach to artistic truth. As he insisted in his early essay, The Rise of Historical Criticism, the truth should not be sacrificed “for the sake of a paradox or an epigram”. But ‘the facts’ were not the primary concern of the historical critic. Rather, it was the general laws of history, the “higher truths” of which facts were at best samples. The truth sought in history was the relationship between general laws and their local instantiation. Artistic truth was different, its relationship to ‘facts’ more facile. As Wilde put it in The Truth of Masks, “Truth is independent of facts always, inventing or selecting them at pleasure”. The object here was subjective knowledge, which might require the subversion, obliteration or invention of facts. “Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth”, Wilde asserted. In other words, a distortion of the truth could facilitate the emergence of a more profound truth.

So, then, which is The Soul of Man under Socialism – this essay which opens with paradox and proceeds with relentless ironic subversion? Is it history, or art? In a sense it is both. It is an attempt to provide an historical basis for his aesthetic credo, and simultaneously an artistic reconstruction of his historical purview. As the critic Terry Eagleton points out, there is a surprising collusion between the high Victorian scientism of The Rise of Historical Criticism and the anarchic individualism of Wilde in “his full immaturity”, particularly in The Soul of Man. The former, a synthesis of idealism (Hegelian historicism) and materialism (evolutionary theory), deliquesced the laws of history into the laws of nature. In so doing, it corroborated Wilde’s later assertion that evolution supplied the necessary guidance for the ethical and political organisation of human societies.

For Wilde, all evolution tended toward individualism. “To ask whether Individualism is practical,” Soul of Man asserts, “is like asking whether Evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism. Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death.” So it is that “Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism.” Like other progressive Darwinists, such as Bakunin, Wilde took the view that human nature was fundamentally good, unselfish and cooperative. Left alone, humanity would get along fine; even in its individualism it would associate freely and generously. The trouble was that it was not left alone.

It followed from this that no authoritarian socialism was possible. There could be no compulsion, and everyone was to choose their own work – and by work Wilde meant “activity of any kind”, be it manufacture, sex, mode of dress, association, sumptuary indulgence, speech, and so on. It should be noted right away that such a broad definition of work calls to mind the earlier nineteenth century view of the human as fundamentally a labouring being. Compulsion in this sense, be it political or the dull compulsion of economic life, is rebuked for separating the human from her true nature, from what she really is. Or, to again recall an earlier nineteenth century idiom, it is condemned for producing alienation.

***

The basis for Wildean individualism then, was a Promethean humanism. Humanity assumed, in Wilde’s vision the characteristics of God – but of God crucified, wounded, and thus not whole. As his poem, Humanitad, concluded: “Nay, nay, we are but crucified … Loosen the nails—we shall come down I know/Stanch the red wounds—we shall be whole again … That which is purely human, that is Godlike, that is God.” The example of Christ naturally absorbed Wilde’s attention, and occupies a central position in The Soul of Man.

“What a man really has,” says Soul of Man, “is what is in him.” What is ‘in him’ is a personality that can be realised creatively. The self-realisation is impeded by possessions, as much as by need and squalor. This is why the figure of Christ as charismatic, as a fully realised personality, is so important to Wilde. His messianic rejection of worldly riches was not intended to be a commendation of life in miserable poverty, claims Wilde. “What Jesus meant, was this. He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. ... And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.’” Not for the last time, Wilde re-fashioned Christ in his own image.

If this appears to rely on an essentialist conception of the ‘self’, at other times Wilde highlights the performative, constructive element in subjectivity. Here it is protean, decentred in a way that would seem to be scandalous to the authentic humanist. In ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’, a fictionalised essay about the obscure figure to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets are directed, Wilde’s hermeneutic focuses on the myriad personalities displayed by the boy actor, Willie Hughes, the object of Shakespeare’s fascination. The actor, like any artist, gives form to every passing fancy, realizing each whim in imaginative creation. In his later writings, Wilde jealously guarded the autonomy of language and symbol. While action was “a blind thing dependent on external forces” (The Critic as Artist), only language separated humanity from the animals. Only conscious creation provided humanity with the chance to transcend the brute laws of nature.

This adverts to the necessary role of art in ushering forth the progress of civilization. If life imitated art, it was the indispensable duty of artists, who had the advantage of enjoying a partial ‘Individualism’ under private property, to cultivate the personality of humanity. This was not to be achieved through ethical or political protest – “an unpardonable mannerism of style” as the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray had it – but through fidelity to the abstract forms of art. The past, Wilde averred, “is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.”

Yet even here, the construction of the self through imaginative performance was conceived as the realisation of what was already immanent – be it called personality, consciousness, or the soul.

***

There is a symptomatic aporia in the heart of Wilde’s doctrine. According to Soul of Man, art was not only to foreswear ethical sympathies, but should also have no reference to the prospective audiences expectations. “The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist”. Here is a credo that, like many of Wilde’s epigrams, should be read laterally. It is by no means straightforward. Wilde, as an artist, could hardly claim to take no notice of what his audiences wanted. He worked for money, to pay bills, to buy gifts, to procure sex, to live hedonistically. He was an honest tradesman who supplied a demand. His seditious literature and plays, moreover, bore all the hallmarks of possessing the ethical sympathies he derided. If the model for Wilde’s new individualism was the artist engaged in self-realisation, the ideal was far from reality.

The solution to this impasse is Wilde’s half-open, half-secret rebellion, about which we know much more thanks to Neil McKenna’s biography. The artist, striving to realise what was in him, contributed as much to an underground gay subculture as to the bourgeois literary canon. He brought references from one into the other. If The Importance of Being Earnest was a witty, socialist attack on the rich, it was also laced with sexual innuendo. It is in this context that Wilde’s rhetorical sleights of hand are comprehensible. He would offer bold, libertarian doctrines, certain to provoke, before apparently withdrawing them and declaring that it had all been an artistic illusion, a ruse, or fancy on the part of the audience. Similarly, Wilde’s rigorous evolutionism was an alibi against the censors and moralists. As Gilbert argued in The Critic as Artist, “What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type.” Repression, then, was just a futile protest against the future.

Above all, the doctrine of human self-realisation was at the heart of his semi-covert plea for sexual freedom. What was in him, what bourgeois society called ‘sin’, was affection and joy. If left alone, it would entail nothing but generosity and creativity. It was wicked and stupid to repress it. And it would be just as wicked and stupid for a socialist society to be conceived in such a way as to permit this repression to go on. People had to be allowed to choose their own forms of association, because only freely chosen associations were truly fine.

Yet it must be admitted that the buttressing of this moral creed with humanism on the one hand, and a scientistic philosophy of history on the other, led to some quite improbable conclusions. It was one thing to assert, in Soul of Man, that pain and self-abnegation could be a means to the more perfect realisation of one’s personality. It was quite another when Wilde, borne aloft on a wave of hubris, ventured: “After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace.” This was a folly that returned to mock him.

The individualism of Wildean socialism was premised on a profoundly problematic humanism. What was good for a person, Wilde claimed, did not reside outside herself; she had in the “treasury-house” of her “soul” all that was really worth having. As Wilde might have discovered, this is a consolatory doctrine: souls aren’t worth as much as all that. If there is no difference between the soul and the body, as he once said, then the soul is born prematurely and always lacking. Everything that is worth having, everything that one needs, is by definition outside oneself – in the complex social relations that even artists, with their relative autonomy, are inescapably enmeshed in. In this sense, the chief advantage that would result from socialism is that would relieve us of the need for an image of the soul.

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Tommy Robinson runs away from the circus posted by lenin

I am just gobsmacked by this.

Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll have resigned from the English Defence League in collusion with the Quilliam Foundation. They cite concerns about 'far right extremism', about which even laughter seems redundant. It is rumoured that up to twelve other leaders are walking off with them. This is leaving some seriously bewildered EDL supporters scrabbling for explanations. Whatever their confused answers, the hopes of some brain-sore members that Robinson's exit will clear the way for a more determined leadership seem utterly vain. This is the beginning of the end for the EDL.

But the truth is, I don't have an easy explanation either. Of course, the obvious leftist answer is 'the movement did it'. Of course: let's give credit to the antifascist movement for its efforts to contain the EDL, limit it, harry it, obstruct its development. Let's not exaggerate its successes though. The EDL has been as much limited by its own schisms and inadequacies, as much by factors such as the growing predominance of recession/austerity politics which it was unable to successfully articulate, as by anything else. At any rate, none of this can explain the specificity of this sudden lurch. Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll, both ex-BNPers, being coaxed out of the EDL by Quilliam? Quilliam, the decidedly 'spooky', state-sponsored 'counter-extremist' lobby? Quilliam, endorsing Robinson's new crusade against both 'Islamism' and 'neo-Nazi extremism'? Yeah, the movement did that.

What I will say is this. There's something about this that calls to mind those old stories on the wrestling, where the 'heel' would suddenly turn 'babyface' on a spurious pretext. Within the course of a single night's event, the transition would be effected in its entirety. It has that much plausibility. It looks like, not the inevitable implosion of a group which had reached its limits - and I do think the EDL was hitting against its conjunctural limits - but rather a strategic shift on the far right. My strongest inclination, bearing in mind that I haven't a fucking clue what's really behind this, is to expect some new populist-right venture to emerge out of this.

And the interesting thing is the people who are waiting to accept a 'reformed' Tommy Robinson. Listening to politicians like Rushanara Ali MP talk about, "well, let's see if he really fights against extremism and contributes to cohesion" and so on, one cannot help but wonder what he would have to do to permanently disqualify himself from such an honoured role. Perhaps if he murdered a small child who turned out to be the offspring of a British soldier who had just 'freed' Helmand from native control.

In the meantime, we will have to start orienting toward the new situation. The far right is splintering and re-dividing. It doesn't look like its regroupment will lead to a stronger fascist current in the UK. And yet, the basic configurations of racism and social resentment that allowed the EDL to mobilise in the first place, and which are driving support for UKIP, are still there, growing even. And I suspect the more that austerity is successfully implemented, the worse this will get. Unless we start the work of specifically preparing a broad, anti-racist offensive now.

Cybersexism posted by lenin

I finished reading this book recently. It is a short, passionate epistolary tribute to the internet, to its many thriving life-worlds, to its heterotopic spaces, its libidinal intensities, its shy, its erotic fan fiction writers, its nerds and geeks and libertine communes. The internet is real, the book insists. It is not a game; it is not just words. It is "a public space, a real space; it's increasingly where we interact socially, do our work, organise our lives and engage with politics". "It's where we live and work and fight and fuck and make friends."*

And that is the book's secret, without which it might just have been a grimly sardonic display of filthy sexist execrations, rape threats and murder fantasies which are directed at women on the internet - including, of course, the book's author. Without it, such a book could lend itself so easily to a misplaced drive to police the internet. But, while dealing bracingly and contemptuously with the hypocrisy of phallocrats who cry 'censorship', the argument is too scrupulously feminist to really embrace official prohibitions. One cannot "achieve radical ends by conservative means". One cannot blame the "imperial fuckton of porn" available on the internet, and hope, through government prophylaxis, to quarantine the threat. Censorship is not about protection, but about control. And the people it controls disproportionately turn out to be female.

No, the substance of the book's appeal is simply this: the utopias of the internet, the adventure, the danger and the forbidden fruit of the internet, have to be open to women as well. If women are dehumanised and denied "full, free access to the same channels men enjoy", then the network is simply not working. It is "broken and needs to be updated". The book appeals to those - geeks, primarily - with an interest in the internet being a genuinely free and egalitarian space. It is a call to collective action.

What sort of collective action? Well, as the book notes, women have always been subject to the surveillance of their peers and elders; thanks to the internet, men are potentially subject to this too. "Online vigilantism", wherein swarms of activists coalesce in exposing misogynistic trolls or stalkers, exploits this fact. This has its potential dark side, of course - as all collective action does. But the point is that the architecture of the internet is still being created. "Systems can be rewritten. Protocols updated. The social architecture we're building online today will be the one the next generation grows up in, and if that looks too much like the one in which we did, for all our talk of futurism, we've fucked up."

The prose in this short book has been described as 'raw'; that isn't quite right. It is as stylised as ever. There is the witty, lapidary turn of phrase, the raised-eyebrow-of-snark, the quasi-ironical flag-flying (for, as I say, nerds and the nerdile, but also for online conversation, games and fucking). These are the character traits of a Laurie Penny outing. Still, there's something to the description. The book is didactic, exhortatory even, and is less personal than one might have expected. It exults in ideas. Yet, it does feel somehow less mediated, and less constrained, and wears its bookishness a bit more lightly than, say, Meat Market. And that works. If this represents a new phase of Penny's writing, I welcome it.

*I can't prove this, but I think its probable that Penny drops the f-bomb in its literal sense more than any feminist since Andrea Dworkin.

Monday, October 07, 2013

Tea Party reptiles. posted by lenin

This is one of the most interesting accounts of the Tea Party movement in the United States thus far. Its main interpretive concept is that the Tea Party represents the rational defence of the interests of local "white notables", particularly in the South and West. (Indeed, I blogged on the Southern origins of the New Right some years back). But I just raise it because there are a few points prompted by the discussion.

1) Inter-capitalist competition, fractionalisation and stratification. In my research for the Against Austerity book, I had a look into the Tea Party successes in the November 2010 mid-term elections, and particularly at what was behind Scott Walker's success. It struck me that the sectors of capital backing him were not mostly these billionaire capitalist leaders like the Koch Brothers but largely small-to-medium sized healthcare professionals, and medium-to-large size enterprises in the FIRE sector - you know, real estate spivs, insurance companies and so on. Of course, once the fight for Wisconsin was on, he did attract some more significant support, from Fox News, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (a traditionally right-wing business front). But by and large, the support for Republican hit men came from local elites not from the dominant international corporations and not from the upper levels of finance capital which wield most influence in DC. There is a sort of permanent 'austerity' built into the genetic code of neoliberalism, and this appears to be what the major banks and businesses want. The shock-doctrine austerity of the Republican Right, the Tea Party, on the other hand, is something quite different and more likely to be rooted in the drive firms with tight profit margins to reduce tax burdens and open business opportunities within the state, while simultaneously resisting a series of 'threats' (such as Obamacare). Of course, this can't be reduced to different fractions and strata of capital - America has a larger middle class than most capitalist formations, and a significant sector of its working class is amenable to racist politics. But within the Tea Party coalition, it is these capitalist interests which are hegemonic.

2) Divisions within the state apparatuses. Local elites are mobilising effectively to gain control of strategic state apparatuses. They have little chance of claiming the executive, and would likely be encircled on all sides if they did; they aren't likely to claim the upper legislature, the Senate; they can gain a foothold in the lower legislature and make a lot of noise. But their forces are most powerfully concentrated in local state apparatuses - governors, mayors, state senators, and so on. This reminds us of the way political struggles are concentrated in the state. 'The state' is nothing in and of itself; nothing but a particular material condensation of the balance of class and political forces (the materials having been collected and condensed not just in one particular conjuncture but over epochs). It is therefore fissiparous, divided as much as the dominant classes and fractions are divided; divided as much as the social formation itself is divided. Poulantzas maintained that one could see a certain political order of dominance in the relations between state apparatuses, such that the locus of dominance at a particular moment - always partially malleable - would be the site at which the hegemonic fraction's power is most concentrated (the federal executive in this case), while subordinate fractions would be able to concentrate their forces within other subordinate apparatuses (the lower federal legislature, the local senates and governors etc). To a great extent even these successes have come through the development of cleavages in the rival Obama coalition, which was essentially a pact between the working class and the upper levels of the bourgeoisie. The Tea Party was able to occupy the spaces vacated as 'Obamamania' subsided, but did not hold them for 2012. Outside of a far graver political crisis than at present - please don't start on that DC shutdown - it is difficulty to see these subordinate class forces displacing the hegemonic class forces within the state.

3) Ideology and rationality. Lind's analysis insists, against liberal snobbery, that the Tea Party is not stupid or irrational. Rather, whether it's filibustering, privatization or local disenfranchisement, he claims that Tea Partiers are acting rationally in defence of certain material interests. I think this needs to be refined. It is quite correct to reject the simple notion that austerity policies are thick. But there is no pristine space outside of ideology, where interests are constituted apart from representational strategies, and where the horizons of possible action are not at least partially determined by the prevailing ideas, the balance of ideological forces. For example, it may be questioned just how much of a threat Obamacare is to the 'white notables' of Texas. Certainly, some firms might stand to lose money, but this is mediated by ideology: that is, it is connotatively linked in a chain-of-equivalents to a whole series of issues from the bank bailouts to stimulus spending to unions etc. These are all linked, somehow, to the threatened revival of a social coalition behind a moderate tax-and-spend liberalism which the Tea Partiers call, with perfect Hayekian inflection, 'socialism'. To this extent, there is no way in which a pure self-interest is being defended when Ted Cruz filibusters against Obamacare: the process is necessarily saturated in ideology. It's just that this is also true of the strategies opted for by the power bloc in DC, and it is an inescapable component of political action. The mistake is to counterpose ideology and instrumental reasoning when it is clear that the American Right has never done this.

Friday, September 27, 2013

In which I am denounced by Golden Dawn posted by lenin

I wrote this. Golden Dawn, who I think some of you may know as Greek Nazi scum, didn't like it. They wrote this (rough Google translation):

A publication, indicating PARASTATE mechanism that moves in recent days against the Golden Dawn, played continuously from the websites of the regime leaves and channels, showing clearly in what becomes suspicious. The original article from the newspaper of the City of capitalists, "Guardian" and shows clearly the role of specific embassies in whole operation degradation of the Golden Dawn. It is worth noting before anything else that the publication of Marxist journalist - site owner "Lenin's Tomb" - saw the light of day yesterday, which is particularly important as you will find.
We give the first two contentious apospasmataprin move into analysis of his sayings: "although the main base of support remains in single digits and has fallen", "the only way the left is to render it useless, hampering operations."
...
The creepy the whole affair is that the journalist does not stay in the revelation of the plan rigged polls, but go even further, revealing the entire project terrorism against the Golden Dawn. As mentioned in the epilogue features is that "the only way the Left is to prevent the activities of the Golden Dawn."

"Parastate mechanism... Marxist journalist... City of capitalists... terrorism against the Golden Dawn". You get the gist. Can we get a decent translation and stick this on the next book jacket?

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

That 'niqab debate' in full posted by lenin

Recently, there was another debate about the niqab. Which, you may remember from all the previous debates about it, is a face-covering that some Muslim women wear.

And I suppose I understand the anxiety that this debate causes because when a Muslim woman speaks for herself about this issue, you don't know whether you can trust her. Because she's one of Them. And so, you get people who aren't one of Them who try to explain it*. And they're quite confusing because they often say many things that individually might constitute a perfectly valid piece of bigotry, but which together amount to incoherent bigotry. And, in one of the previous debates about the niqab, which you'll remember is a face-covering that some Muslim women wear because we've debated it previously, I tried to list some of the things that people who aren't Them say.

First of all, one of the things people would say is that They are getting 'special treatment', because they're being allowed to wear a niqab and no one else is. I'm not totally sure about the factual basis of this, but it's internally quite logical. But then, it does seem to grate quite badly against the idea that the niqab is a bad thing to wear. Which is surely the founding commitment of those who oppose the niqab. I think, giving it the benefit of the doubt, you could say that what people actually want is to be allowed to wear an equivalent of the niqab or, failing that, to deprive everyone of the right to wear the niqab or anything approximate to it. So to that extent it would be a coherent idea.

Second, another of the things that people who don't want to wear the niqab say is that it's a threatening garment. The reasons for this vary quite widely depending on what frightening news story has been circulated. For example, it might be that the niqab could cause death if used in Formula One racing. It might be used to conceal a hammer which could be used to attack a small child. In some cases the threat is more general than that, insofar as people say that to wear the niqab is to signal an empathy with terrorists. Again, I think you can fault their research if you're being very stringent, but in and of itself it does seem to be a coherent hate-speech-act.

A third thing they might say is that the Muslim women who wear this garment, which you'll remember is the niqab because of the other times we've debated it, are being oppressed. And I think the implication here is that the women don't actually want to wear it, but are actually being coerced by Muslim patriarchs into it because of a gender-opressive ideology. Or, perhaps they mean, a number of people are possibly coerced while others may choose to wear it within a context where choices are structured by a gender-opressive ideology and that therefore they don't respect that choice. It's quite hard to evaluate this because I don't know anyone who wears the niqab and I haven't done an ethnography or a study whereby I get to see all the ways in which someone who wears one might think about the niqab. And, as I say, you don't know whether to trust it anyway because it would be based on the word of one of Them. Also, I feel this is a subject I'm limited in because I have no idea what it's like to live in a society where women are sometimes coerced as to what to wear, or judged for what they wear, or where choices are made on the basis of a gender-oppressive ideology.

But anyway the basic conceit of white people saving brown women from brown men is actually one that was produced by the British Empire and it seems quite a solid piece of colonial orientalism in itself. Or, if you will, sartorientalism. Although, it is complicated by the fact that, quite often, people who aren't Muslims and don't want to wear the niqab say that the garment isn't authentically mandated by Islam. Admittedly, this is because they have looked it up on Wikipedia, which already means they have done more research than most racists. But, that does mean that they are accepting the legitimacy of standards internal to Islam, which seems to belie the secular foundations that are claimed for the critique of the niqab. I suppose giving this a generous gloss you could say that this bold attempt to comment on the texts of a religion of which one is neither an adherent or a student is motivated by a desire to persuade Muslim women that, contrary to what they may have assumed, they are not obligated to wear such an item and thus end their oppression. But that seems to me to be quite a foolish strategy for the Islamophobes because their persuasive power on this front seems to be quite limited by their lack of knowledge.

You can see where I'm going, I expect. These statements are confusing because they don't hang well together at all. You can't simultaneously think Muslim women are a threat because they wear the niqab and also are lucky for being allowed to wear the niqab and also are oppressed for wearing the niqab. I mean, I suppose that you can simultaneously think Muslim women are a threat because they wear the niqab and also are lucky for being allowed to wear the niqab and also are oppressed for wearing the niqab. But to simultaneously think all those things, that means that either you're the most subtle and sophisticated racist ever, or your racism is just a salmagundi of incoherent grunts and sentiments. And I think that if the racists were more rigorous in their thinking, they might not be so marginal everywhere except in the newspapers and on the television and in police stations and in the councils and on the streets and in parliament and in workplaces and on Youtube and Twitter and in pubs and coffee shops.

One last thing they might say - and they can become very frustrated at this point, and very belligerent - is that it's impossible to have a debate about this subject.

I don't know what to say about that.

*A friend points out the sub-heading. Read it and see if you can spot the problem.

Friday, September 06, 2013

Against Austerity posted by lenin

Coming up, this winter:

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Who is this 'we', mammal? posted by lenin

Two and a half years. Approximately 100,000 documented deaths on all sides. And despite fractures in the regime, despite some advanced forms of decomposition, there seems to be no prospect of Assad falling soon.

The opposition, meanwhile, has never cohered. It has made advances, and it has taken control of local state apparatuses - a town here, a police station there. But this has merely accelerated the fragmentation and disintegration of political authority within Syria. The one area of the country where the opposition is unified is in the Kurdish north-east, where a regional administration is governing with the support of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The formation of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces - out of a fusion between the old SNC, the Muslim Brothers, the secular democrats, the socialists, the Free Syrian Army and the Local Coordinating Committees - might suggest that some cohesion has been achieved, and that a popular interim government is ready to take power if the military balance of forces changes.

It is not as simple as that. It is true that the regime is militarily backed by Russia, but it clearly retains a significant degree of popular support, from which it has been able to forge a counter-revolutionary armed force with which to defeat its opponents. It is not, and never is, purely a military calculation: the revolution has failed to spread because it has not won politically. And this is because despite what some people would call 'top table' agreements between leaders, there is very little practical unity on the ground between anti-Assad forces. It is this which has given a certain space to the salafists, so-called 'Al Qaida in Syria' (Jabhat al-Nusra), to punch well above their weight. Of course, the idea that the opposition is dominated by a few thousand salafists is as implausible as the idea that when US boots land on Syrian soil their major foes will be 'Al Qaida'. It's horseshit. But it is better organised and more efficient than many of the other groups, it does get involved in most major anti-government actions, its politics are extremely reactionary, and it bears responsible for some of the worst war crimes.

Now we are potentially on a war footing*, with the ostensible issue of the conflict being the use of Sarin nerve gas in the suburbs of Damascus. Think about this gas. It works by causing the muscles to spasm, causing your respiratory system to stop working. It literally renders you helpless. There is nothing you can do except die, through a sequence of convulsion, vomiting, defecating and urinating until terminal suffocation. That is the grim end that hundreds of pale corpses reached in Damascus. It is true that hundreds of people are dying grisly deaths every day in Syria. It is also true that war crimes, some committed by the revolutionary forces, are a routine occurrence. It is true that most of the weapons used by the regime are indiscriminate in nature - shelling, cluster bombs, thermobaric bombs. Still, I think there's something specifically obscene about this type of attack. It solicits attention; and it says 'fuck you'. I don't claim to know who carried out this attack. And the fact that we have bounced into 'humanitarian' war before, on the pretext of certain salient atrocities, is reason enough to maintain a wary caution about official attributions of responsibility. Still, this atrocity has been used to push the button for 'intervention'. And, as we all know, 'intervention' solves all problems everywhere, ever.

What are the possible justifications for war, then?

1) Punishment. This strikes me as the most futile idea in the history of war. The concept of punishment has always been futile, but in this case it is woefully underwhelming and incredibly vague. How much 'punishment' exactly would be sufficient? If you bomb a police station or a barracks, is that enough? If you bomb a palace or two, will that do it? How much is enough to express the disapproval of 'the international community' at the use of nerve gas? Yet, staggeringly, this is the main justification for war being reported. I now suspect Robin Yassin-Kassab was correct when he said that the idea was to save face.

2) Tilt the balance of the war in favour of the opposition. It seems highly unlikely that this would be the goal of any such intervention. After all, it would take more than a few scuds to do that. As I said, the balance of forces is necessarily, though not exclusively, a political problem. And indeed one aspect of that political problem is likely that significant sections of the Syrian population regard the revolutionaries as too dependent on external support. If the US intended to overcome that, it wouldn't be enough to bomb a few targets; it would have to start funnelling arms in a serious way directly to the opposition. It would have to start sending in special forces to start training opposition fighters, and bring a load of cash to buy favour and keep the influence of well-organised jihadis at bay. It would have to think about bombing strategic targets. Given how entrenched the regime appears to be, it would have to seriously consider the possibility of significant aerial and ground commitments. 'Mission creep' would be an obvious peril, and the military leadership of the US is, I suspect, profoundly wary of this.

3) Regime change. This is the most obvious goal in a way, but it seems unlikely again. They would need a government-in-waiting, and the opposition is too fragmented to be that; the bourgeois leadership doesn't have sufficient control over the base, and is too divided among itself. The Obama administration has recognised the opposition as the legitimate government of Syria, but it has been extremely lukewarm. So if regime change did become the goal, they would have to find a way to knock the opposition into their desired shape - the 'interim government' that Hollande claims it is - and fast. Then they would have to be prepared for precisely the sort of escalating commitment that the Pentagon and imperial planners would do a great deal to avoid. This is to say nothing of whether such means would actually reduce the amount of civilian incineration and slaughter, which seems extremely unlikely at best.

4) 'We have to do something'. This argument isn't an argument. It's just one step up from 'think about the children'. If you're thinking 'we have to do something', just do yourself a favour and fill your mouth with cake or something. And anyway, as I was saying, who is this 'we', mammal?

*The UK parliament voted against war tonight, with Labour voting against the government. David Cameron, summoning up his immense, salesmanlike dignity, said: "It's clear to me that the British parliament and the British people do not wish to see military action; I get that, and I will act accordingly." He might actually have to resign. Well, fuck my socks.