Well, that was an interesting evening. It seems that BBC headquarters across the country had protests and occupations - in Plymouth, Glasgow, and some other cities that I don't remember. A number of protesters managed to scale the gates to the BBC headquarters in White City (one placard read: "It's not THAT kind of White City, Nick") before the main protest actually began, thus panicking the police briefly. I believe the actual filming of the Question Time programme was delayed by a couple of hours because of the protest, and that a number of antifascists did get into the studio. (In fact, I see from the clips being shown on the BBC that the studio audience detested Griffin, as they should have done, and were far more effective at challenging Griffin than any of the creepy politicians they had on the show - especially the pathetic Jack Straw). And I also hear that Jonathan Ross was inconvenienced in some way.

By the time I arrived, the protest had swelled to several thousand people congregated on the road outside Wood Lane tube station. It was quite noisy and rebellious, and there was an inordinate number of young people there. I hear there was some rumours of violence outside the gates or something. I didn't see any violence on the part of protesters whatsoever, but the police did pepper spray a couple of kids, a few people were assaulted by coppers not wearing their numbers on their shoulders, one guy was throttled and another fellow did get his head cracked open by a truncheon. Aside from the usual police brutality, it was a straightforwardly militant, multiracial protest in the mainstream antifascist tradition. The audience passed through security gates behind plexiglass where they could see us outside protesting, and were clearly rather excited and intrigued by the whole thing. When filming ended, the protesters then marched to where Griffin's car was supposed to be exiting, and blockaded it for a while, before a number of ominous looking police vans turned up and despatched a platoon of riot cops. There were some fascists around, and a number of few Nazis wandered over from the nearby pub to taunt the protest before being chased away.

Today, the BBC will film its Question Time episode with Nick Griffin [pdf] on the panel. Protests will be gathering outside the studio at Wood lane from 5pm, and there is already reportedly a picket building up there. I don't know how big the protest will be, but I will say this: I spent some at a stall outside Holborn station yesterday, which was petitioning against the BBC's decision. The response was extraordinary: it was one of the few times that I have seen people queue up to sign petitions. The BBC directors have been musing over various possibilities in response to this. They've got the studio audience locked down, it seems: antifascists have been meticulously vetted from the audience, while BNP members and supporters will be in attendance. Yet, they're still not completely certain of their position, so they have reportedly been considering whether it is possible to move the event forward and film the show without an audience. If that's true, why bother with the panel and chair? Just put Griffin under a spotlight and give him 45 minutes to deliver his message to the kids. It has been pointed out that the arguments over Griffin's appearance are analogous to those that erupted over Le Pen's television appearance in 1984, after which support for the Front national doubled. Now Jim Wolfreys has explained in more detail the similarities between the tactics of the BNP and FN. These involve precisely the strategy of normalisation, distancing themselves from the explicit symbols, regalia and language of the traditional far right, and tapping into more socially accepted forms of right-wing politics, such as anti-immigrant racism.

We have to take note of such tactics, and make sure as many people understand them as possible. As Michael Rosen argued in a typically sharp contribution at last night's UAF meeting, fascist strategies of dissimulation are as much what they are 'about' as Holocaust denial, white supremacy and the building of a fascist terror state. Rosen pointed out that Griffin's particular use of language cannily exploits a weakness of liberalism, namely its failure to properly unpack and interrogate the concepts that it relies on. So when Griffin appeals to 'freedom', 'democracy', 'identity' and so on, he knows that this is a mystifying language that won't be challenged by the BBC or any guests they have invited. "Freedom for whom, to do what?" is a question that won't be asked tonight. Similarly, Griffin understands something about the nature of the BBC's 'impartiality'. If Griffin lies about his position, or pretends that his organisation has nothing to do with the violent EDL (which protested recently on behalf of the BNP's right to be on Question Time), he knows that he is unlikely to be challenged, since the BBC has an established practise of largely taking politicians at their word. We are used to Downing Street correspondents telling us what the PM thinks or feels, as if it was a matter of established fact, when all that has happened is that they have received a briefing from a spin doctor telling them what the PM allegedly thinks or feels. Deference is the general tone of the BBC's political coverage. And we know from past BBC encounters with the BNP that even if they lie about widely understood matters-of-fact, they won't be confronted. Griffin understands this, and knows that he will have considerable leeway to play with received opinion. Finally, Griffin understands that what is acceptable in political language depends to a great extent on the precedent set by others. When he calls for the EU to sink boats containing refugees - basically calling for the mass murder of a civilian population - he is playing on anti-immigrant sentiments and ideas already introduced into popular language by the right-wing mass media, and by the government.

We also have to understand something about the other player involved: the BBC. Its director-general, Mark Thompson, doesn't understand what is wrong with having the BNP on Question Time. He says it would be censorship not to have the BNP on Question Time. This is a man personally responsible for refusing to broadcast the DEC appeal over Gaza, a decision he presumably does not consider to be censorship. Yet the rationale he presents is at variance with the facts and with BBC doctrine. First of all, he says that the level of BNP support demonstrated in the Euro elections is sufficient to mandate an appearance by the fascists on Question Time. This is disingenuous, since we know that the BBC have been angling to arrange an appearance on the show by the BNP for a couple of years now, well before the recent election results. Secondly, it isn't true that the only consideration here, even in the BBC's own terms, is the demonstrated electoral support of a particular party. The BBC is owned by the public - all license fee payers are 'subscribers'. For that reason, despite its paternalism and instinctive sympathy for power, it has to at least answer to the public in some way. It has developed a set of discourses and practises that interpret its public service remit - the two key ones being 'trust' and 'compliance'. Those presenting and producing programmes have to get clearance from 'compliance' - a producer, an editor, an executive - who will approve or decline potentially troublesome incidents in a programme. Rosen pointed out that one example of 'compliance' at work was exhibited in a recent programme about King George VI. Because old George had a stutter, he was depicted as having a stutter. It had to go to compliance who advised that there was 'too much stutter' in evidence. So, there is no such thing as 'free speech' in the BBC: editorial controls are vast and intricate, and in this case deferred completely to any possible concerns of George's daughter, the current tinpot monarch, and her disgusting and illiterate family. As regards 'trust', the BBC requires that viewers - subscribers, co-owners in a sense - trust whatever appears on the BBC, and everyone who works for the BBC has to commit to upholding that trust. Trifling controversies, such as the Ross-Brand affair, constituted a breakdown in compliance and a breach of trust. So, the idea that hosting a fascist politician, with an explicit commitment to purging Britain of all of its non-white citizens, is in any sense uncontroversial by the standards of the BBC itself, is utterly false. What the BBC are doing is breaking with their own conventions to promote a fascist party before millions of people.

The third party we have to understand is New Labour. Gary Younge reminds us that when we see that fascist spouting off on national television to an audience of millions, those principally responsible for disseminating the racist ideology about Muslims that the BNP so ably exploits are the New Labour hierarchy. Jack Straw, who is to appear on the show with Griffin and promises to be really rather stern with him, is a cardinal offender. It was he who didn't want to talk to a constituent who was wearing a niqab, though he evidently feels up to chatting politics with a Nazi who is committed to driving every last non-white person out of Britain. It was he who, as Jerry Dammers of The Specials pointed out at the UAF meeting, insisted that Asians should speak English in their own homes. Dammers asked: "If Straw moved overseas to a country where English wasn't the first language, would he stop speaking English to his family? Of course he wouldn't. What racism!" And Straw is a man whom we are supposed to look to as a champion of antifascism in this debate. Indeed, a whole number of dubious opponents of fascism are emerging these days. And while one is happy for the BNP to be attacked by anyone and everyone, sometimes the stench of hypocrisy accompanying such attacks mitigates their force. A particularly poignant example are those army generals who want to murder Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, but don't want their good name to be besmirched by association with the far right. Aside form the questionable anti-racist credentials, army generals have a pretty poor record, historically on antifascism. All of this reinforces the point that one can't rely on the great and the good facing down fascism on our behalf. The tradition of antifascism that has been effective in the past has been that involving the grassroots authorising themselves and taking action independently to stop the fascists, regardless of how much the media demonised them, and regardless of how much the bourgeois politicians pleaded for such matters to be left in their hands.

We live in interesting times. The hawkish governor of the Bank of England is railing against the City, and the government's failure to fundamentally reform the financial system. He is railing against the debt/speculation model of the economy that has been in place for decades, and which both Labour and the Tories have sought to conserve. He notes that taxpayer money is now being used to fuel another speculation bubble, and that economic outcomes for millions of people depend on the activities of a small, powerful group of institutions whose profits depend on risk and instability. True, his agenda is a conservative one that fits neatly into the coming Tory administration's theme of an 'age of austerity'. Yet, it does express more than that, coming as it does amid some dubious talk of 'green shoots'. For example, last Wednesday's Evening Standard exulted, in response to a rise in share prices, the value of Sterling, and in City bonuses, that "Britain bounces back". That sort of short-sighted cheerleading already looks stupid. Bear in mind that industrial production in the advanced capitalist economies contracted at least as rapidly in 2008-9 as it did in 1929-30. The fact that the states governing these economies are committed to continuing with stimulus plans for the foreseeable future is indicative of how deep they think this crisis can go. King's warning shot suggests that he knows how tentative any recovery signs are. Meanwhile, other forces on the right are drawing some novel conclusions. Niall Ferguson, a neoconservative known for his hostility to marxism, has even been bigging up Bukharin and Lenin's critique of state monopoly capitalism, albeit in the name of some chimerical 'free market'.

First principles
These are not the first examples of ideological disorientation that I have had cause to comment on. Neoliberalism has not been over-ridden as a growth strategy yet, but its intellectual sustenance is increasingly threadbare. Perhaps it is time to go back to marxian first principles. At least, I'd like to do that, as much as to help me process the ideas as anything else. What does marxism tell us about capitalist crisis? Capital enjoins us to start with the things being bought and sold, commodities, and asks us to consider what is novel about them. Any good that you possess, be it a DVD or your ability to perform mental and physical labour, can become a commodity if you just enter it into circulation as a good to be exchanged. You put the DVD on eBay, and advertise your availability and CV on Totaljobs or whatever, and both goods are instantly commodities. And if you do decide to exchange a good, you want to exchange it with something of equivalent value. Marx puts it thus: "To the owner of a commodity, every other commodity is, in regard to his own, a particular equivalent, and consequently his own commodity is the universal equivalent for all the others." If you sell your DVD for a fiver, you figure that the goods which could be bought with that fiver are in some sense equivalent to the good you've just sold.

But this value is a mysterious kind of substance. It isn't the subjective value that a good might have for an individual, as that can hardly be the basis for an exchange of equivalents. It isn't 'use value', in other words. There has to be another 'exchange value' which all commodities have, and which render them commensurable with one another. I was told by teachers that the value of goods traded on the market was determined by supply and demand: a healthy supply and poor demand would reduce prices, and vice versa. Yet, supply and demand merely equilibriates the system: it accounts for price fluctuations but not for the underlying value that they fluctuate around. If you assume perfectly equivalent supply and demand, you still have to account for why the price settles at a particular rate and not another rate. For Marx, as for the classical political economy that he was trying to reformulate, the source of value is in labour. The exchange value of a commodity is determined by the "average amount of socially necessary labour" embodied in it. That is, if a coat is of equal value to a mobile phone, this reflects the total amount of labour that has gone into making each good. A good can be very useful to us without having any exchange-value. Air is obviously a use-value of supreme importance, and it would be difficult to support a mortgage and an average-sized family without it. But to make it saleable, you would have to - in Lockean terms - mix your labour with it, or buy someone else's labour to mix with it. You could, say, make 'air in a can' with certain unique properties not found in nature, thereby producing it in such a way that it would both have an exchange value, and a use value for the potential market that would enable one to realise that exchange value.

It is worth pointing out, en passant, that even at its most abstract, Capital is always historicising. So, for example, Marx traces these conceptual operations - use value, and exchange value - to the historical origins of markets themselves out of barter between different communities. As the productive capacity of each community develops, "the need for foreign objects of utility gradually establishes itself. The constant repetition of exchange makes it a normal social act. In the course of time, therefore, some portion at least of the products of labour must be produced with a special view to exchange. From that moment the distinction becomes firmly established between the utility of an object for the purposes of consumption, and its utility for the purposes of exchange. Its use-value becomes distinguished from its exchange-value."

The money fawcet
If, for the sake of this argument, we accept this account of value, then the mystery only deepens. For we are constantly exhorted to believe in another account of value which clashes with it: the 'golden egg' theory. Save your money, you are told, or invest it, and it will just magically increase in value. Buy a private pension scheme for a fraction of your weekly earnings, and when you retire you can have a lavish, hedonistic lifestyle that would make Jan Moir choke with fury. Better yet, save enough money to use as start-up capital, become a capitalist and one can, with sufficient nous, acquire enough dough to get Lord Mandelson's telephone number. Something very nebulous and mystical about the process of abstaining from immediate consumption, and entering this money into circulation as money-capital, causes it to produce a 'surplus value', above and beyond what was originally invested. In neoclassical accounts, this added value is a reward for abstinence. That might serve as a moral-religious justification for profit, but unless we just assume that God, or Providence, or the Geist actually intervened to produce this bonus, it doesn't actually work as an analysis. The added value must come from somewhere, and we have already accepted that the source of value is labour.

Yet, we have also said that exchanges in the market take place as an exchange between equivalents. If that's true, no one should end up with more value than they started with. We can't have it both ways. So, if a capitalist employs labour, he buys a person's labour power for eight hours a day for precisely its exchange value (setting aside odd examples of de facto slavery, partially voluntary wage systems involving tips, etc.), no more and no less. But what is the exchange value of labour power? On the basis of what we have said, it must be the amount of labour required to reproduce it, ie the socially necessary labour embodied in that combination of goods and services that will enable a worker to return to work the next day and perform her duties in a normal way. So, where does this surplus value come from? How does one extract value from the consumption of a commodity?

Marx's answer, of course, is that labour is a unique kind of commodity in that it has the capacity to produce more value than it is actually worth on the market. You know how that goes. If you're employed in medium-sized service sector company that supplies goods, say market research, to other companies, they typically include the cost of your labour in the bill. If you ever see this bill, and the breakdown, you're likely to find that the cost of your labour is substantially higher than your wages. Merely as an anecdotal example, in a firm I worked for some years ago I discovered that when I was seconded to a sister organisation for a week or so, they charged that sister organisation £40 an hour for my services. I wasn't being paid £40 an hour, though I was being paid the correct market rate for my labour power (which was less than £10 an hour). So, there was a gap between the exchange value of my labour power and the value produced by my labour.

Class struggle, and the composition of capital
This distinction between labour-power, the "aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being", and labour, which is the exercise of those capacities, is clear enough. It is the former which the capitalist purchases, and the latter which produces his surplus value. That is the exploitative basis of the labour-capital relationship, the main axis of class relations in a capitalist society, and of course the basis for constant struggle. This struggle isn't just collective, in the sense of trade union bargaining over wages, or left-wing political struggle for reform or revolution. It is more often than not individual, in the sense of cutting off work early, taking long breaks, arriving late, throwing sickies, working slow, wasting time on the internet, etc. Parenthetically, the latter comes with a certain kind of shifty, guilt-ridden disavowal. I recall at a previous workplace, where individualism and competitiveness predominated, if someone was caught skiving by the boss they would always try to rationalise it to the rest of us. They either didn't understand that everyone but the most deluded and dedicated workhorse was doing exactly the same things, or they maintained the pretence of being part of a 'team' because they were careerists. Anyway, the basis of surplus value and thus of profits is labour. The largely notional values that circulate in the stock market, are all derivative of values produced by labour.

Yet, there's another problem right away. Capitalists wouldn't be capitalists if they didn't want to augment that value as much as possible. They operate in a competitive system, and they have to invest some of their profits in new means of increasing their surplus value throughout each cycle of production. They can find ways to make the workers go faster, labour harder, and so on, though always at the risk that some of them might get truculent. Here, another distinction is of use: between constant capital (machines, equipment etc used in the production process) and variable capital, which is the human input. If investment in a labour-saving device will enable a capitalist to produce more goods and vie for a greater market share, while expending less on that variable capital (labour power), then this is the sensible thing to do. This drives technological innovation, though it also drives job losses - eg, while American commentators have been given to blaming job cuts on international competition and outsourcing to China and Mexico, the major source of job losses in recent years has been downsizing by American companies. Yet, if every capitalist acts in this way, as it seems to be sensible for them to do, then the aggregate amount of socially necessary labour embodied in the goods they produce is depressed, thus depressing their exchange value. This means that there will be a tendency for capitalists to find it increasingly difficult to realise their original investment plus surplus. In the long term, profits are likely to decline as the ratio of constant to variable capital (which Marx calls "the organic composition of capital") increases. This can be offset by various factors. Among these are the opening up of new avenues for investment and thus new deployment for labour, and financialisation, which can equilibriate the system by redistributing investment and supporting consumption. Financial innovation also opens up new investment opportunities, with speculation on future profits, speculation on that speculation, the sale of debt, speculation on the profits from the sale of debt, speculation on that speculation, etc. Yet, if these countervailing tendencies prove insufficient to offset the overall tendency of the rate of profit to fall, then investment will decrease, employment will fall, consumption of all goods will decline, and the economy will cease to grow. Without growth, capitalism is in crisis. The only way to restore growth is to destroy capital - through war or protracted depression - and resume the whole process of accumulation.

Destruction of capital
So, here we are in this disastrous consummation of neoliberalism, which itself was negotiated and imposed as a solution to a crisis of profitability that emerged in the 1970s. Profitability throughout the neoliberal era has been sustained by repressing real wages (in the leading industrial economy, they didn't rise in real terms for thirty years), breaking down the bargaining power of labour, increasing the crude rate of exploitation (longer working hours, productivity deals, etc.), and financialisation. Lower wages meant consumption had to be supported through debt, and financialisation meant that investment was increasingly dependent on Wall Street. That debt/speculation arrangement is what has just collapsed. According to Andrew Kliman (paper with detailed empirical evidence here [pdf], some further arguments here), the underlying problem that arose in the 1970s was not resolved. Insufficient capital was destroyed in the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, in contrast to the immense destruction of the Depression and WWII which resulted in the prolonged post-war boom. In that sense, the current crisis was merely deferred for a generation.

Kliman is interesting on the theory of crisis for a whole number of reasons, but mainly because he is one of the few economists to defend the labour theory of value in its marxian variant. I said earlier that, for the sake of argument, we would accept that Marx's theory of value was correct and proceed from there. One outstanding problem with the theory, though, has always been the 'transformation problem'. How do we get from exchange values, which we don't see on a daily basis, to prices, which we do? This is a crucial question. Bear in mind that the account of crisis that I have just sketched, with a pained and slightly comical expression on my face, depends on the idea that the prices of the goods sold on the market will not be sufficient to recoup the original investment, as the 'organic composition of capital' rises. To establish this, we need an account of how exchange values become prices. Many economists argue that no function can be established that will transform exchange values into prices. If that is the case, then Marx's crisis theory is presented with a serious problem. Prices may be decoupled from values in such a way as to render the latter a merely metaphysical construct with no relation to the real economy.

Marx's answer was presented in Capital Volume III, chapter 9. In it, he dealt with an issue arising from his previous analysis: if the organic rate of capital differs from industry to industry, the profit rates should vary considerably Yet, the observable tendency is for profits to equalise across economies. Marx argues that this is because investment flows between capital sectors to the most profitable areas - thus increasing the amont of goods produced, reducing prices, and lowering the overall profit rate - and away from the less profitable areas - thus decreasing the amounts of goods produced, raising prices and profits. While surplus value is redistributed through market transactions and realised in different ways, a 'general rate of profit' is formed. Thus, capitalists determine the price of their goods by looking at their input costs and adding a mark-up based on the general rate of profit obtained in that economy. In aggregate, then, the total price of commodities produced will equal their total value; the total profits will equal the total amount of surplus value produced. Thus, a wholistic view of the economy gives us the basis for transforming exchange values into prices. This account has been subject to numerous criticisms, mainly on the grounds that Marx inconsistently applies the transformation, failing to transform the values of inputs (constant and variable capital) into prices. Kliman defends Marx's account against these charges, though, arguing for what he maintains is an internally consistent picture of Capital that also conserves the argument concerning profit rates.

I raise all that, aware that Kliman's account remains controversial. Resolving such issues is far from my competence, but it's worth being acquainted with these arguments because if we are going to account for this 'age of austerity' that we face (actually an age of naked class war in which the rich are trying to place the burden of this crisis on us), we have to develop a consistent and viable theory of capitalist crisis. Despite the aporiae of marxian political economy, no other competing theory has come close to accounting for the empirical evidence of the crisis-ridden nature of capitalism.

As a certain amount of contrived hysteria over the coming national postal strike circulates, there are two questions of absolute importance to bear in mind. What does Royal Mail's management want? And what does the government want? One part of the answer to these questions was furnished by BBC Newsnight last week (see report here), after an internal Royal Mail document was leaked to the programme. Entitled 'Dispute: Strategic Overview', the document lays out the plan for forcing the union to accept Royal Mail's terms for 'modernisation'. If the union did not accept Royal Mail's terms, management would just proceed to implement them regardless. The upshot of a complete success by Royal Mail management in this dispute would be the effective de-recognition of the union: forcing through major changes without negotiation with the workforce is exactly what companies without union representation are able to at liberty. This strategy, the document reveals, had the government's approval.

So, this is the first point: when you hear government ministers urge the CWU to 'return to the negotiating table', the reality is that Royal Mail management are the ones refusing to negotiate, with government backing. The business secretary and prince of the Brighton prom, Lord Mandelson, has already tacitly acknowledged the existence of the document, and ruled out the use of ACAS to arbitrate the dispute. The CWU has made repeated overtures, which have been rebuffed. This tendency on the part of Royal Mail's management to ignore conciliation and adopt bullying tactics is one reason why the vote for strike action was so overwhelming: 76% voted 'yes' for strike action.

In this connection, bear in mind what a future in Royal Mail without strong union representation would mean for a postal worker. It has been announced that Royal Mail has scrapped its anti-bullying week. The reason why this measure, among others, was introduced in the first place was because Royal Mail's management culture is one of the most retrograde in the whole of UK industry. Not only is the use of bully-boy management typical of the way Royal Mail handles disputes. It has long been part of the culture of management at sorting offices and depots across the country.

In 2001, an inquiry into Royal Mail's industrial relations by Lord Sawyer, Nicholas Underhill QC, and Ian Borkett of the TUC, was initiated by both the CWU and Royal Mail management to find ways to reduce the frequency of conflict (you can read the full pdf document here). This was after a series of unofficial actions brought sections of Royal Mail to a standstill - 95% of work days lost in 2000-1 were due to unofficial strikes beginning locally and then spreading through wildcat action. The report started from the assumption that workers' militancy was the problem to be averted, expressed disapproval of excessive worker involvement in managerial tasks, and was sympathetic to Royal Mail's 'modernisation' project. Yet, its findings highlighted an abysmal "authoritarian" culture in Royal Mail management, with managers insisting that workers ask for permission just to go for a slash or get a drink of water. Management knew how to apply punitive measures, even where they were inappropriate, but not much else. More senior managers, they found, were of a similar mentality. They refused to punish or confront "unacceptable behaviour" by frontline managers, evidently because they didn't find such behaviour to be "unacceptable".

What kind of behaviour might be hinted at in this cool terminology? Well, in 2003, it was disclosed that some 20% of staff had suffered bullying in the form of physical and mental abuse. Sometimes the abuse has taken on racist dimensions. In 2002, management had to make an unprecedented pay out of £100,000 to the family of a black postal worker who was driven to suicide after racist bullying by a group of managers. In another significant case, Mahmood Siddiqi was awarded almost £180,000 after it was revealed that he had been the subject of racist bullying for years that was condoned by managers on at least ten occasions when they might have acted to prevent it. Consider what might happen, with that sort of management culture operating without the constraints of a strong union. And think about that whenever you hear about 'union bullies', as you surely will.

Another part of the picture is that management want to reduce the cost of labour, to enhance the company's capacity as a profit-making institution. The inquiry led by Lord Sawyer acknowleged that aside from working in an unpleasant environment, postal workers traditionally suffer from low pay. The CWU points out that the average pay for a postal worker is much less than the average for skilled workers, even though managers enjoy lavish pay settlements with bonuses rivalling some of those bestowed on the oligarchs of the City. Royal Mail management would like to reduce workers' pay even further if they can, with proposed pay caps costing some workers £180 a week. This issue has been fuelling strikes across the country recently. (Royal Mail managers have responded to the strikes by scabbing). So, aside from job cuts, Royal Mail's current strategy involves forcing through a pay freeze, which is a de facto pay cut, while insisting on compulsory - but free! - overtime.

The next part of the story has to do with what the government intends to do with the postal service. Had Mandelson had his way, part of the Royal Mail would already be privatised. That had to be shelved last year, in part because of opposition from the backbenches. The major source of opposition to the privatization programme, though, is the organised Royal Mail workforce itself. So, in preparation for a renewed privatization drive, the government wants to decisively beat the union. Now, Mandelson has been very clear that this part-privatization proposal is just the first step toward full privatization. As Blair's secretary for trade and industry, he had always wanted Royal Mail "to be progressively private, even if if initially part of the company stayed in the Government's hands".

Already, the introduction of private competition has allowed companies like TNT and Citypost to bid for Royal Mail's more profitable contracts, while still using the Royal Mail's socialised infrastructure to actually deliver the mail. That has clearly been done in such a way as to make Royal Mail uncompetitive, and to blackmail its workforce into accepting changes that may not be for either their good or that of customers. Thus, in respect of the current strikes, The Guardian has reported - falsely, as it turned out - that the Royal Mail had lost a major postal contract for Amazon. The moral is clear, and cited by government ministers everywhere: strike, and people will just find other ways to get their mail delivered. Royal Mail managers have also claimed that the amount of mail being handled has declined, and that this in itself justifies substantial job losses in adaptation to a changing market. But postal workers have spotted the ruse behind this:

These myths - about union intransigence, about the economic necessity of job losses, about the superior efficiency of private competitors, etc. - are being deployed for the purposes of turning a low-cost public service provider into a marketplace of competing providers in accordance with the extraordinarily resilient neoliberal orthodoxy. This brings with it the usual problems - soaring costs, as companies seek to make a profit, duplication of capacity as they fight for market share, and poorer service as low paid, casualised and de-unionised workers are less committed to the job, and less likely to have the time and training necessary to develop their skills. Royal Mail, for all its faults, is one of the last bargains in town. Less than forty pence for a first class letter to anywhere in the UK is nothing. What else would you spend that money on? You couldn't even buy a pint of milk or a Mars bar with that money. Additionally, as much as businesses might whine when there is a strike on, capital makes a big efficiency gain with Royal Mail, especially if they use the metered mail service which gives them a further discount. Admittedly, the Royal Mail is not as cheap as America's socialised mail service, where a first class letter can cost as little as $0.44 (£0.27). But we can't all be as communistic as the yanks.

Don't waste your time going to visit the Daily Mail website to read that Moir article. You can see the whole thing here. (Then, if you are moved by Charlie Brooker's column, you can complain here). As you'll have gathered by now, Mail columnist Jan Moir decided to use the death of singer Stephen Gately to suggest that something terribly sinister is afoot when gay men have relations. Gately died of natural causes, and the coroner's report confirmed this. Moir, though, smells a rat, and for once it isn't a co-worker. She induces that the cause of Gately's death must have actually been 'unnatural', in some sense related to his 'lifestyle'. (Can I just ask, in passing, whether my banal sexual and sumptuary habits amount to a lifestyle? Just curious.) Somehow, quite mischievously apparently, this was construed as homophobic. For, as Moir explains:

"The point of my column -which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read - was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all."

Yes. Unanswered questions. About the viability of gay relationships, particularly of 'civil partnerships', in light of the "ooze" of some supposedly "dangerous lifestyle" disclosed in the death not only of Gately, but also of Matt Lucas' partner, Kevin McGee. Those kinds of unanswered questions. Only a sick, politically correct, fascist bastard would construe that as evidence of homophobia. In fact, it's just common sense:

It seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death - out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger - did not have a bearing on his death.

Coroner reports are all very well, but they can hardly be expected to deter the unflabble and infallible inquisitive instincts of the Daily Mail glitterati. And anyway, Moir clarifies that civil partnership stuff:

In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships - the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting - have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.

Pause for a second and think about this. Moir is "on record" as supporting civil partnerships. That makes her practically a gay rights activist, for fuck's sake. Can you be so intolerant as to deprive a committed Stonewaller of the right to just ask some questions just because it might be a little bit inconvenient to your worn out ideology? Oh, sure. Some of you might have noticed the part of the article where Moir specifically contests the idea that civil partnerships are "just the same as heterosexual marriages", citing two recent celebrity deaths and the "dangerous lifestyles" they supposedly resulted from as evidence of her thesis. You might have even noticed that she appears to take exception to gays "always calling for tolerance and understanding". And, no doubt, in yet another affront to taste and manners, you are already forming your ignorant, ill-conceived opinions about her supposedly contradicting herself in a flatfooted attempt to evade responsibility for having written something vile. You might even be calling her a lying piece of shit at this point. But that's just because you are part of the conspiracy:

In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.

Quite. This is an orchestrated hate campaign, mounted by you-know-who against a tolerant, inclusive, committed supporter of the gay community. She's not a homophobe, she's just asking questions. Incidentally, something odd happened earlier in the week. A perfectly healthy gay man died, painfully and horribly, in the middle of Trafalgar Square. His lifestyle was definitely related to the cause of his death. I hope Moir will not be put off by this spiteful campaign, and will take the time to examine this case and its implications for those tolerance-begging, understanding-seeking types in our midst. More power to her typing finger.

Guest post by redbedhead:

I suppose it shouldn¹t come as a surprise that the biggest of the big banks in America that sucked up tens of billions in government aid are now rolling in profits. That¹s how this game works. Thus, JPMorgan has just reported a 580% profit increase over last year to a whopping $3.6 billion third-quarter profit. The reason is, purely and simply, ­ that the money that the US government pumped into the banking and financial sector has created a new Wall St. bubble ­ with stock prices rising by nearly 50% to top the psychological benchmark of 10,000.

The actual meaning of that number is a mystery to most of us not initiated into the occult world of the stock market. But the basic gist is that there's a lot of cash floating around and people are doing to the stock market what they did to the housing market ­ bidding it up, out of relation to the value of the assets that they represent. The trouble is, in the real world, the shithouse is still burning. Community banks in the US, which make their profit by loaning money to people to buy houses, finance small businesses, other consumer loans, etc. are tanking badly. These 7,000 banks have collectively lost about $2.7 billion. And many are outright failing:

"Ninety-eight banks, mostly small, have failed so far this year, and regulators predict the harvest from the current recession is less than halfway complete."

The reasons why are straightforward, with loan delinquencies sitting at a record 4.35 percent and climbing ­ and real estate development loans have rocketed to 16 percent. Amongst homeowners, 7.35 percent were delinquent ­ - another record. In previously frothy markets like south Florida the freefall is continuing. According to one real estate agent foreclosures have risen by 25 percent compared to last year and the trend is higher. It is certainly possible that the present round of profit reporting ­ including a positive report from Intel Corp. boosting share earnings and projecting an extra $1 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter could in fact herald a recovery. But it¹s also the case that, like previous recessions ­ going back to the Reagan arms boom ­ this one will have been ended by laying the basis for the next one.

In particular, what we have seen in recent decades is a game of debt ping pong, with debts being shunted back and forth between governments, private individuals and the corporate sector (including banks). Until that debt can be dealt with it will act as a drag upon the economy and create other problems that will increasingly limit the ability of governments (in particular the US government) to act. My own view is that in the short to medium term, once the present round of "irrational exuberance" wears off ­ and I don¹t think it will last long once stockbrokers remember that there¹s a real world ­ will see us return to an extended period of stagnation. Some of the weaker centres of the system - droopy old Britain, for instance ­ may experience Icelandic types of crashes. As Nouriel Roubini might say, this ride ain't half over yet.

The latest analysis from what used to be known as the Senlis Council says that 80% of the territory of Afghanistan currently experiences "heavy" insurgent activity. 17% experiences what they call "substantial" insurgent activity. And a mere 3% of the territory, in a region called Sari Pul where the dominant language is Dari Persian and the dominant ethnicity Uzbek, experiences only "light" insurgent activity. The number of insurgents, as estimated by the US, has risen from 7,000 in 2006 to about 25,000 today, which slightly more than the total number of insurgents reported killed.

The figure offered by the US seems likely to be a sizeable underestimate. This 25,000 or so insurgents are supposed to be ranged against almost 65,000 ISAF troops, 45,000 non-ISAF American troops, 9,000 British troops and purportedly 100,000 members of the Afghan National Army (most of whose troops are probably working for the ruling pro-US warlords). The implication is that a combined army of over 200k troops armed to the teeth and with godlike aerial power to back them up can't thwart an insurgency of an eight of the size with comparatively poor weapons and no air force. There must be a substantially larger hardcore of insurgents, and a very large periphery in the supporting population. This is what is so illogical about the continued pretense by US-led forces that their foes are an unpopular rump. They may once have been, but evidently now command the loyalty of broad social layers, perhaps comprising a majority in places such as Helmand. Still, if the figures nonetheless correctly identify a trend, then the insurgency has more than tripled in size since 2006.

Not only are the insurgents growing in number, the sophistication of their attacks is increasing. For example, a recent attack on a military outpost in Nuristan killed eight American soldiers. Another attack on a UK base in the Helmand province killed a British soldier. These are just samples from the dozens of weekly attacks that strike occupation forces. Now, Obama - anxious to justify that Nobel prize, no doubt - is looking at the idea of buying off a section of the insurgency, just as Bush was able to do with a layer of the Iraqi resistance. The alternative is the McChrystal plan of sending up to 60,000 more troops, which is known to divide the Democrats and will force Obama to rely on GOP support if he wants to push it through. The assumption behind the idea of paying insurgents to fight on the American side, though, is that the majority of those fighting the US take up arms because it pays well. Perhaps that's true of some, but the reality is that what has escalated the insurgency from being a relative nonentity into a force that could (so military leaders predict) defeat the combined occupying forces is the mode of rule and repression that the US has developed. The client-state of warlords, the air war, the selective 'war on drugs' are all mainstays of the occupation, and can't easily be dispensed with. Moreover, the success of this strategy in the 'Sunni triangle' depended on the occupiers' ability to coopt the leadership of some of the disarticulated networks of military resistance that characterised the Iraqi insurgency. The leadership of the insurgency is nowhere near as divided in Afghanistan, and the 'neo-Taliban' are waging a smarter war than those fragmented groups that have been fighting in Iraq. The only realistic option for those still committed to this war is escalation. However, that then raises the question of whether America's allies are prepared to throw in more troops and money - an issue over which NATO has divided before.