There were those, some months back, who tried to characterise the Iranian reform movement as a flash-in-the-pan upsurge of the "Gucci crowd", a collective bed-wetting of the bourgoisie. They were deeply sceptical of a movement whose apparent stimulus was an allegedly rigged election, in which the losing candidate was supported by the 'Modern Right' neoliberal Rafsanjani, of Iran-Contra fame. They reminded people of the synthetic 'colour revolutions' that have taken place. And indeed, it was hard not to think of that spate of spectacles, in which often well-heeled masses turned out for big protests before either facilitating the assumption of power of a neoliberal faction, or dying out entirely. Think of the 'Cedar Revolution' - the Lebanese bourgeoisie, face-painted and out in force, towing their Syrian house servants behind them. That spectacle moistened a few crotches among Anglosphere liberals, but it was immediately outnumbered by more sizeable Hizbollah organised protests, and it didn't last as a mass movement.

The characterisation of the Iranian movement in those terms was false in several ways. For a start, notwithstanding the 'confessions' issuing from various protesters tortured by the basiji, there is no evidence of any US involvement in the 'Green' movement. Secondly, it can't be assumed that the revolt was simply a movement of the comprador bourgeoisie. Ahmadinejad had done relatively little for the working class. Moreover, far from the movement being restricted to some symbolic appearances in big metropolitan centres, the revolts spread to poor working class areas. Even if it had been a movement exclusively of the middle classes, I would have wanted it to win - to win more than it bargained for, in a sense. It was clear, though, that the revolt wasn't just about Mousavi or the sector of capital backing him, and the rebellion persisted even after the bloody state attacks on protests left several people dead and many wounded. Not long ago Al Qods day, Iran's national day of solidarity with the Palestinians, also became an opposition protest - quite appropriately, I might add. Palestine has better allies than Ahmadinejad.

Students in particular continued to speak out and protest, while the most politicised and advanced sectors of the working class were attacked. Some Anglophone readers equate 'students' with 'middle class' (wrongly as it happens), but one result of the Iranian revolution was an explosion in higher education so that it can no longer be considered a preserve of the privileged. Indeed, just as the radicalism of some students in Britain resulted in part from the matriculation of the working classes, so the radicalism of Iranian students could be said to result in part from their poor background and the miserable economic prospects that await them despite their labours.

At any rate, when Ayatollah Montazeri died a week before Christmas, it would have been reasonable to expect some upheaval. Montazeri was no leftist, though he was initially one of the Republic's 'permanent revolutionaries' working for its export internationally. At the same time, he opposed excessive vengeance against the old Shah ruling class, and helped humanise the Republic during the 1980s when it was undergoing some of its most vicious purges, notably the killing of thousands of prisoners in 1988. He opposed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and became an ally of the reform movement in the 1990s. Having criticised Ayatollah Khamenei, whose political instincts are usually reactionary, he was placed under house arrest. Most significantly, he issued a fatwa against Ahmadinejad's re-election this year. He instantly became a muse to the 'Green' movement. Upon his death, the protesters didn't mourn - they organised. Protests broke out not only in Tehran, where some reports apparently speak of protesters taking control of the streets, but also in Najafabad (Montazeri's birthplace), Isfahan, and Zanjan, where police allegedly tried to prevent memorial services from taking place. In the protests that followed, the state responded with its usual combination of tact and diplomacy. Yesterday, the day of Ashura, eight were killed and three hundred injured according to Le Monde. The dead reportedly include Mousavi's nephew. But if drowning the last protests in blood didn't work, how can the authorities assume that it will work this time? Look at these protesters:







If those writing the reform movement off as another 'colour revolution' were correct, we probably wouldn't be witnessing such scenes. There is no way that this is over. The old order in the Middle East, from the US-backed Mubarak dictatorship to the Islamic Republic, is breaking apart. A counsel of despair tells us that the only alternative to the current regime in Iran is some schlemiel maintained by Washington. However, this assumes that the current Iranian ruling class is the country's best vanguard against imperialism - an absurd proposition. The reformers are not Washington stooges, and their success would make attacks and sanctions emanating from Washington less plausible. It also assumes that no social class or coalition in Iran has the resources to build a better, more just state under the duress of pressure from the US. That has always been an excuse of developmentalist, and even 'socialist', despotisms. But there is no reason for us to accept this.

Operation Cast Lead was launched on 27 December 2008 on the spurious pretext of preventing Hamas rocket fire into southern Israel. It followed months of pledges by senior Israeli ministers to level parts of Gaza, and inflict a "Holocaust" on the territory. It followed Israel's most explicit violation of a ceasefire agreement on November 4th, when it launched a series of raids on Gaza. It followed the intensitification of a blockade that left 9 out of 10 Gazans living below the poverty line, with some families forced to live on grass to survive. Mary Robinson, a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and fairly conventional supporter of a two-state settlement, described how the blockade was affecting Gaza: "their whole civilisation has been destroyed, I'm not exaggerating ... It's almost unbelievable that the world doesn't care while this is happening." There is a great deal more to be said about context but, suffice to say, the aggression was merely the latest phase in a war on the civilian population of Gaza, a sustained punishment beating it was enduring for resistance: specifically, for having maintained its elected government despite a successful Israeli-backed Fatah putsch in the West Bank in the summer of 2007, which one would infer had been planned since Hamas' electoral victory in early 2006. That this punishment is continuing - of which, more later - is reason in itself to revisit the last year's blitzkrieg.

The brutality of Operation Cast Lead shocked some of Israel's most devoted supporters, and divided the pro-Israel camp. Even as it was happening, some of the most shocking accounts of IDF conduct were emerging. These included sealing off a neighbourhood, bombing and shelling it, blocking medical and humanitarian entry, and knowingly leaving children to slowly die next to their already deceased relatives. They included the targeting of hospitals and ambulances, and the repeated targeting of schools. UN casualty statistics reflected a particularly onerous burden on the civilian population - 42% of those killed, they said, were women and children. Some news reports falsely suggested that this meant that 'only' 42% of those killed were civilians, which involved the racist supposition that Palestinian males over 16 no longer count as civilians with the full protection of humanitarian norms and laws. As it happens, the re-definition of the category of 'civilian' was integral to Israeli doctrine during the war, and it was essential to their military plans. The 'Dahiya Doctrine', the parameters of which informed Israeli operations in Gaza, involved precisely this shift, as General Gadi Eisenkot explained:

"What happened in the Dahiya quarter in Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired upon. We will apply disproportionate force upon it and cause great damage and destruction there," he said. "From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases."

“This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved”. [Emphasis added]

Such genocidal logic, congruent with the promises of a 'Holocaust', was consistently expressed in Israel's methods and targeting, not to mention the uplifting sentiments expressed by IDF soldiers while defacing Palestinian homes. Since the end of Operation Cast Lead, we have had numerous reports into Israel's conduct of the operation, though less attention has been paid to the supposed rationale behind the attacks. The Goldstone Report [pdf] has documented in forensic detail an astonishing level of premeditated and sadistic violence toward civilians. It documented deliberate attacks on hospitals, mosques, and perhaps most chillingly the assault on the al-Samouni area resulting in the calculated massacre of the al-Samouni family. Focusing on 36 specific incidents of such aggression, with detailed consideration of evidence in each case, it concluded that the war had either in whole or in part been against the "people of Gaza as a whole". This was quite remarkable for such a report, produced by a UN team led by a "Zionist" who "loves Israel". It also concluded that "the operations were in furtherance of an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience and for its apparent support for Hamas". As a consequence of such conclusions, the report demanded that Israel should pay reparations to the Palestinians affected by its actions, noting that its internal structures left few avenues open for Palestinians to sue for reparations themselves. It also encouraged the UN to refer the report to the ICC, and called on the ICC to act on legal appeals from the "Government of Palestine". Predictably, the report was subject to a barrage of ignorant rubbish, suggesting that it was the result of a mission biased against Israel (forgetting that its remit actually included studying alleged war crimes by armed Palestinian groups), and that its findings were based "largely on interviews with Hamas" (utter garbage). Numerous rebuttal websites have been set up, including a rather slick one by CAMERA, with the aim of blowing smoke over the findings. But all of this is so much acting out by an increasingly bellicose and shrill minority.

One point that the Goldstone report also emphasised was that the punishment of the Palestinian population was continuing in the form of a blockade, which it considered to be "collective punishment". On Sunday, a new report [pdf] by numerous NGOs including Amnesty, Christian Aid, CAFOD, Oxfam, Trocaire and Medical Aid for the Palestinians looks at the impact of the blockade. Its main conclusions are shared by the International Committee of the Red Cross. It finds that all attempts to regenerate Gazan society and economy since Operation Cast Lead have been frustrated by the ongoing blockade. Most of the $4bn of international donor money has not been spent, not for lack of determination, but because the conditions of the blockade make it impossible to carry out the necessary reconstruction:

"the civilian population and the United Nations and aid agencies that aim to help them are prohibited from importing materials like cement or glass for reconstruction in all but a handful of cases".

The inability to reconstruct damaged homes has left tens of thousands displaced, some living in tents.

"And this is to say nothing of the backlog of need from those homes severely damaged in previous military actions, those new houses left half-built due to lack of materials and existing properties condemned as unhygienic or unsafe to live in that cannot be replaced."

Not only are homes not being rebuilt, but power stations necessary to maintain production, keep hospitals and public services functioning, and maintain sanitary water, remain destroyed. Israel regularly refuses to allow generators into Gaza. And industries are going idle. 120,000 jobs in the private sector were lost because of the blockade. Even before Operation Cast Lead, "98% of industrial operations in Gaza were idle because of the blockade". Because of the destruction to power stations, sewage systems and water piping, 8,000 people lack any access to piped water at all, and the remainder of the population has to suffer sporadic supplies when the power cuts out as it regularly does: water shortages and power cuts are particularly liable to take place during winter. The shortage of clean water is causing a shocking rise in diarrhoea, which is behind 12% of young deaths.

The blockade has reduced the categories of goods entering Gaza from approximately 4,000 to about 35, and those items that are theoretically allowed in (some medicines, basic foods and humanitarian supplies) are subject to arbitrarily shifting restrictions. The blockade had also severely restricted agricultural production, and Operation Cast Lead destroyed 17% of cultivated land in Gaza. Israel's imposition of a depopulated 'buffer zone' "inside of the walls and fences surrounding Gaza" has resulted in between "a quarter and a third of Gaza's agricultural land" being subsumed into the 'buffer zone'. The combined effect of Cast Lead and the ongoing blockade has been to put 46% of Gazan agricultural land out of production.

While southern Israel "blossoms", Gaza is constantly regressing in its ability to reproduce itself as a society and economy. Earlier this year, a leaked UN report said that the ongoing blockade was resulting in a process of "de-development", with "increased aid dependency" among the population - already, 75% of Gazans depend on food aid to survive. The report by Amnesty et al concludes, with language that is becoming all too familiar, that the blockade amounts to "collective punishment". It is worse than collective punishment, and that tag will simply not do any more. Baruch Kimmerling has characterised Israel's war on the Palestinians as 'politicide': an attempt to wholly destroy the fabric of any potential Palestinian state. But, as Martin Shaw has written, the proliferation of -cides with respect to the crimes of war - femicide, democide, infanticide, etc - really adverts to the genocidal logic that they are all too often embedded in. The logic of Israeli policy vis-a-vis the Palestinians is dictated by its twin drives to maintain control of Gaza and the West Bank with the long term aim of incorporating both as official Israeli territories, and its determination to remain a 'Jewish state' with a substantial Jewish majority. Either the Israeli state must give up one of these goals (and no one is applying sufficient pressure to make it do so), or it must find a way of disposing of the Palestinian population. Ethnic cleansing is one such means. Imposing conditions such as are intended to make life and its reproduction almost impossible, and unbearable, is another. The war on the population of Gaza is an attempt to break Palestinian resistance by means of destroying, in part, the aforementioned population.

A friend drew my attention to this story at the BBC. [Note: since this post was first published, the story has been substantially edited. See below.] It alleges that one Jonathan Hoffman appeared at a SOAS debate on Palestine and, when he mentioned his name (they helpfully point out that it is of German-Jewish extraction) he was booed and called 'Jewish' as if it were an insult. This is the video:



The BBC doesn't mention that there are Jewish people on the panel and in the audience. Steven Rose is Jewish, and Ronnie Kasrils is also of Jewish descent. Several members of the audience identify themselves as Jewish, and are subject to no racist opprobrium. The BBC doesn't mention that Jonathan Hoffman is a member of the Zionist Federation, and is responsible for some of the most disgustingly racist apologias for Israel's attack on Gaza last winter. That is why he was booed. Readers of Jews Sans Frontieres will be familiar with some of his work. They also cite an 'anti-racist' campaigner as a source for the claim that the hostility to Hoffman was racist, and that he was attacked for being 'Jewish'. The BBC doesn't mention that the campaigner, Raheem Kassam, is an executive member of Conservative Future, the 'youth wing' of the Conservative Party. They incorrectly identify his organisation, Students Rights, as a group of 'anti-racism' campaigners. In fact, their explicit remit is to "counter political extremism", and threats to "free speech". The latter includes the attempts by some students to prevent military recruitment on campus.

Update: Raheem Kassam has asked me to clarify that while he was a member of Conservative Party, he no longer is, having allowed the membership to lapse a year ago. As such, he is no longer on the executive of Conservative Future.

Update II: The original BBC story has been substantially edited. The headline has been altered, and 'balancing' quotations from those present at the meeting have been introduced. The head of Student Rights, who I can confirm was not present at the meeting and only viewed the online footage, was initially the only source cited in the story. Student Rights is no longer referred to, falsely, as a group of 'anti-racist' campaigners. A success for those complaining, I think.

Hopenhagen, schmopenhagen. Yesterday, the papers were awash with claims that the US, the almighty saviour of mankind, had stepped in at the last moment to deliver the world from eco-death. Well, that may be putting it a little bit strongly. To avoid such an eventuality, global carbon concentrations need to peak in 2015, and gradually return to 350 parts per million, thus avoiding a global temperature rise of more than 2 degrees. That isn't what is on offer. Instead, this veritable god, in the person of Hillary Clinton, laid down the new world order in bold headline grabbing commandments. First, the US would not reduce its carbon emmissions below 3% on the 1990 levels by 2020. Second, in order to protect the poor countries from the ravages of climate change, the US would launch a fund of up to $100bn a year specifically earmarked for that purpose. Now, such a solution is clearly amenable to one of the denialists' favourite last resorts: namely that, even if the environmental catastrophuck (copyright Malcolm Tucker) is man-made, then the most appropriate solution is not to try to stop it by restructuring global systems of production, but to adapt to it. That way, there won't be any nasty socialist surprises in the post. In this case, the US was simply telling the most likely victims that those most responsible for the problem would not meaningfully try to solve it, but would send a little compensation cash to make its effects a little more bearable.

That cash will probably end up in those dollar reserves that Third World countries have been compelled to amass over the last decade, thus making them net creditors to the world's superpower, but forget about that for a second and think about this:

Now, I told you - didn't I tell you? - that this summit was going to be a flop. Half of the world's species facing extinction while the planet both burns and floods looks like a flop to me. Bear in mind that the Stern report is relatively conservative in its estimations. Recent research by the World Wildlife Fund suggests that the arctic ice-caps are melting much more rapidly than previously anticipated and that even an average global temperature rise of 2 degrees could be catastrophic. It may be enough to reach that tipping point where the year-round arctic ice disappears for good. Melting permafrost will unleash enough methane to cause a major extinction event. Islands will be submerged, southern Africa will dry up, and global hunger will surpass its already disgraceful levels. And it isn't just those unpleasant poor people down south you've got to worry about (though you see how the politics of climate change is already being structured by imperialism). As Mark Lynas has pointed out, if you increase average temperatures in the sea in that fashion, even with a 1 degree global temperature increase, you get more hurricanes, more frequently, and much closer to home for Europeans. You also get dustbowls in previously fertile food-growing areas across North America, which wasn't particularly fun when it happened last time round. You get soaring temperatures in Europe, more extreme and death-dealing summers, water shortages as precipitation declines in the Mediterranean region.

At the 3 degrees rise predicted by the UN on the basis of current negotiating positions, you can declare the game over. That is potentially the tipping point beyond which it is impossible to regain any control over global temperatures, the point at which positive feedback mechanisms cause temperatures to increase exponentially. I cannot adequately describe the full horror of such a scenario - the food shortages, the droughts, the floods, the fleeing of millions of people from newly uninhabitable territory, the intensified geopolitical competition over basic resources, the extinction of half or more of the species on the planet... it's just unthinkable. But, as Copenhagen shows, unthinkable horror is exactly what the rulers of the world have in store for us.

Obama, 2009: "I Did Not Run for Office to Be Helping Out a Bunch of Fat Cat Bankers on Wall Street"

Oh yes, you did.

Rod Liddle has been churning out sub-BNP racist provocations for a while now. The latest, taking a horribly violent criminal plot as its cue, issues the following judgment on 'multiculturalism':

It could be an anomaly, of course. But it isn’t. The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.

Defending his comments, he offered the argument that he wasn't talking about race but about 'multiculturalism'. He went on to explain:

My argument is much as it has always been; that the creed of multiculturalism is largely to blame, the notion that cultures, no matter how antithetical to the norm, or anti-social, should be allowed to develop unhindered, without criticism.

There is no good reason to take this argument at face value. For a start, Liddle may be fantastically ignorant and complacent on many levels, but I suspect he is aware that his claims are straightforwardly statistically false. The point of ranting in such an off-hand racist fashion isn't to be precise, it is to 1) get Liddle some more notoriety, 2) hurt the targets of such abuse, and 3) get people talking about race in a particular way that benefits the racists. I also doubt that Liddle is unaware that 'race' and 'culture' are not neatly separable in his tirades. Indeed, that is the whole point. Here I disagree with Sunny - Liddle is unlikely to be confused. Rather, he knows exactly what he is doing. The attack on 'multiculturalism' is the right's main way of rehabilitating certain racist ideas. He would also be aware that white people, who are not subject to the same collective insults, are disproportionately represented in certain types of criminality and anti-social behaviour. (Cf. Bonnie Greer's retort that "the overwhelming majority of paedophiles, murderers, war-mongers and football hooligans are white males and all we got in return was beans on toast and Top Gear".)

The occasion for the rant is crime, but that is not the issue at stake. If it were, then all sorts of unwelcome complexities would arise. If you really wanted to discuss the origins of criminal behaviour, you wouldn't start by talking about either 'race' or 'culture'. For one, few people who use such terms can specify what they mean by them beyond some vague indices or anecdotes. What are the precise dimensions of a 'culture' that supposedly yields violent crime, for example? No one knows. Something about rappers and absent fathers, possibly. We all know how to use phrases such as 'culture of dependency', 'culture of blame', 'culture of violence', etc., but these are miasmic conceits designed to retail a particular kind of reactionary politics. Their vagueness is their virtue. Indeed, without wishing to dignify the discussion by endowing it with serious theoretical merit, we can at least acknowledge in passing that in understanding crime, both how it is constructed and how and why it is carried out, there are all sorts of issues involved that do not correspond to the bigoted obsessions of the commentariat. So, the point is not violent crime. The aim of such bombast is to resurrect some antique racial stereotypes that hold black people to be, whether by endowment or 'culture', rapists, robbers and murderers.

I note that the Spectator's editor, Fraser Nelson, has defended Rod Liddle's 'right to offend'. What he is talking about is the right incite racial hatred, which you certainly don't have and which is a monstrous right to claim. Anti-racist legislation has been conceived and passed precisely to thwart any such 'right'. It is because of this that the far right have had to be extremely careful about how they couch their propaganda in public, as noted by 5CC. But if Liddle can purvey such racially defamatory claims without consequence, then why would the fascists hold back? Especially if all they have to say in their defence is "I'm talking about culture, stupid"?

Having a previous article of mine reproduced over at Black Agenda Report (apparently it has been nominated for some award) reminded me of an important essay on the Rwandan genocide that I read a while back, and which is worth citing here. Written by two academic researchers who were briefly involved in assisting the ICTR's research, Allan Stam and Christian Davenport, it discloses an intriguing tale of how they reached some surprising findings, and the efforts by the ICTR prosecution and the Rwandan government to cover them up. The key points:

Much of this is unsurprising, and the authors do not venture too far into the political context of the war, but it bears out some of the arguments I have previously made.

For Macintyre, this appeal to individual conscience was a leftover of Lutheranism. In the hands of the Lutherans, morality was reconstructed as a series of "divine fiats", "totally arbitrary" edicts that appeared to have no basis in the needs of human communities. With the decline of religion, these fiats were no longer divine, and all that remained was their compulsory but entirely arbitrary nature. This was in stark contrast to the pre-Enlightenment Aristotelianism that, even in its degraded scholastic version, provided a basis for moral thought in human need (cf Thomas Aquinas). Or, more precisely, it rooted morality in “the more permanent and long-run of human desires”. Macintyre hinted here at some of the basic moral problems that have come to define his work, specifically the difficulty of formulating moral questions properly in the post-Enlightenment era.

In A Brief History of Ethics, he provided a (Eurocentric, or rather, Hellenocentric) account of transforming moral habits rooted in changes of social structure, from Ancient Greece to modern Europe. Later, in After Virtue, written after he had ceased to be a marxist and had come to view the working class as possessing insufficient resources for solving the problems of modernity, he elaborated his compelling argument as to why the Enlightenment project had failed with respect to morality, and why it had to fail. Enlightenment philsophers sought to rationally ground moral claims, but did so on the basis of an unsustainable normative commitment to individualism. Thus, in Enlightenment philosophy the attempt to derive 'ought' from 'is' always fails. Either one lapses into Humean subjectivism (the default position of Anglo-American philosophy), consigning morality to an unavoidable but empirically unjustifiable sentimental response to the world, or one attempts to reproduce divine fiats at another level, as per the Kantian categorial imperative. For Macintyre, the Aristotelian tradition of deriving morality from a conception of 'human nature' had to be the starting point for any rationally grounded morality.

There is an understandable scepticism about attempts to appropriate Aristotelianism for revolutionary socialism, and a justified reticence about grounding questions of political justice in some other sphere (morality, biology, etc). How could one justify conceiving of a 'telos' without a designer, for example? How could one root moral arguments in human purpose, if the very idea of human beings having a purpose is incoherent? Even so, although no 'natural' fact about human beings entails any one particular programme, it is difficult to raise questions of political justice without stumbling on moral issues. For example, theories of justice often rely on the idea of 'desert'. Rawls points out that no one is entitled to advantage on the basis of their innate talents - no one deserves talents, having done nothing to earn them. This is an argument against disingenuous 'meritocratic' justifications for inequality, and it is a good point to bear in mind. The problem with this is that such formulations of 'desert' contain implicit normative claims that require justification in themselves. Why, a social Darwinist might say, should morality be about desert rather than excellence and achievement? Is desert even a coherent category, or isn't every apparently deserved accomplishment merely the result of physiological and social processes that the subject did not create or initiate? Doesn't 'desert' rest on a particularly liberal conception of agency? (Well, that's just off the top of my head, but I'm sure you could think of ways in which commonplace normative assumptions might be problematised). This is why the attempt to rethink morality beyond the horizons of liberal thought is so exciting.

My reservations about relying on a concept of 'human nature' to formulate such a morality were partially discharged on reading Dependent Rational Animals, in which Macintyre emphasises our animal nature, and particularly our lifelong dependency and vulnerability. While in a certain version of capitalist ideology (raised to its savage apotheosis in neoliberalism), one is encouraged to relegate dependency to the bookends of life - infancy and senility - and undertake life decisions as a sovereign individual, a moment's thought discloses that our condition is permanently fragile, and permanently needful. Therefore, the mutual, cooperative, selfless and nourishing associations that we concede are necessary in our very young and very old years can be regarded as being desirable throughout life. Knowing ourselves to be animals, susceptible as they are to disease, misfortune, accident and predation, we might conceive of a morality based on a long term collective interest in our well-being, which excludes exploitative or oppressive relations.

Well, the above ramblings are by way of a preface to my discovery of a new volume of Macintyre's early political writings, including his period in the New Left and the IS group. Edited by Neil Davidson and Paul Blackledge, this extraordinary collection, entitled Alasdair Macintyre's Engagement With Marxism, demonstrates the importance of his early marxism to his ongoing philosophical labours. The pleasurably terse and argumentative style that is so familiar in his philosophical writing is forcefully on display in a bewildering variety of contexts - arguments with left reformism, discussions of British capitalism, social democracy, nuclear weapons, Gaitskell and clause 4; thumbnail critiques of figures such as Sartre (whom he obviously admires, but regards as profoundly ignorant of the real situation of the working class - perhaps Ian Birchall can tell us how accurate this is), Marcuse, Lukacs, Mills, Williams and Deutscher; a dissection of the Sunningdale agreement (a 'colonial solution'); theological exposition, etc etc. It also contains 'Notes from the moral wilderness', and extracts from 'Marxism and Christianity' among other important texts. The book is, in a way, a settling of accounts, as the introductory essay makes clear. Macintyre's marxism was disparaged by revolutionaries at the time, who saw his position as leading inevitably toward reaction, and is all too often reduced to marginalia today. Yet it is difficult to peruse his engagements with the problems of liberation in a world bissected by Stalinism and US-led capitalism without seeing how much this early emancipatory impulse drove his interrogations into ethics and morality. That Macintyre is no longer a marxist, moreover, does not mean he has made peace with capitalist modernity, albeit he is now as likely to be championed by conservative thinkers as radicals. It is actually the very disdain for modernity that continues to give his writing a powerful critical edge.

One of the most interesting meetings at the very well-attended Historical Materialism conference was that addressed by Kim Moody on the effects of crisis on labour. (I should mention that the meeting was also addressed by two Turkish comrades on the impact of recession on female labour but, alas, that is for another post). For, although organised labour threw its weight behind Obama's election, it has so far been unable to extract much advantage from it. The two key policies that labour was pressing for was healthcare, and the Employee Free Choice Act. But the union movement in America has been in crisis for upward of thirty years now, and it has yet to recover. All the major unions have experienced substantial declines in membership, all are experiencing a profound financial crisis in part because they had investments that have turned to ordure during the crisis, and all are trapped in an impossible model of 'business unionism' that has consistently crippled the American working class. American labour has thus lacked the ability to put enough pressure on Obama to see its key policies through. Obamacare is proving to be a corporate-driven shambles, and the EFCA will be seriously watered down.

Moody tracked the origins of this crisis to the late 1970s when, beginning in 1979, there was a sudden nosedive in membership, strike rate, NLRB negotiations and - as a consequence - wages. Part of the background for this sudden crisis of unionism in 1979-81 was that the union leadership had expended much of its energies combatting the rank and file insurgencies of the Sixties and Seventies that had challenged the norms of business unionism, thus evaporating activists energies on internal struggles. The dependence on the Democratic Party machinery was also fatal. The AFL-CIO helped Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, with the promise of a labour-friendly bill, but it was filibustered and contained. And when Chrysler was going under, labour depended on Carter to organise a bail-out and thus engaged in its first, fatal, pre-Reaganite round of concessionary bargaining. Job losses were conceded and the union movement subsequently lost members and leverage. It was already ripe for plucking apart by the time Reagan destroyed the air traffic controllers union.

This nosedive in unionism reached a plateau by 1982 and it facilitated a wave of restructuring and spatial re-organisation in American industry, including auto, steel, meatpacking, trucking, mining, telecommunications and building. The US steel industry alone lost a quarter of a million jobs by the end of the 1980s, as larger firms downsized and smaller groups such as Birmingham Steel and Oregon Steel pioneered new successful models of accumulation. As in Europe, the manufacturing sector shed jobs in bulk and waged a bitter but often successful war against shop floor organisation. Through intensified labour regimes and technical innovation, capital was able to raise productivity while wages remained static rather than rising with productivity gains as had been the case in previous decades. Between 1973 and 1998, productivity in US industry rose by 46.5%, but the median wage fell by 8%. (Figures from Harman's Zombie Economics). Notwithstanding a brief period of growth at the end of the 1990s, real wages continued to fall in the Bush years, and are still falling while productivity has soared during this crisis. (Though, typically, a number of US economists writing in the New York Times have taken the opportunity to argue that US wages are actually far too high and should be reduced to the global "market-clearing rate"). The intensification of work included a crude increase in the rate of exploitation by way of increased working hours, so that the average labourer in the US worked almost as many hours in 2004 as a Mexican worker (1,824 and 1,848, respectively). This process, technically known as 'class struggle from above', did facilitate a substantial recovery in aggregate profit rates until about 1997 - not to the levels of the post-war boom, but certainly above the troughs of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (For figures, see David McNally, 'From Finance Crisis to World-Slump: Accumulation, Financialisation and the Global Slow Down', Historical Materialism, 17.2).

The model of business unionism that persisted and still persists involves the acceptance of capitalism not just de facto but in explicit ideological terms - the language of class politics is specifically eschewed. It involves reliance on the Democratic Party which is, both in terms of its outlook and leading personnel, a capitalist party, not even a reformist party akin to European social democracy. It involves bureaucratic top-down methods of organising and growth in which the latter is the preserve of 'professionals', long-term sweetheart deals, no-strike agreements, and the exclusion of would-be members if they do not belong to existing bargaining units.

The effect of this depoliticised, professionalised model of unionism is not only to forestall struggles but to substantially weaken them where they arise. Moody gave the example of auto-workers striking at a BMW plant who met with European trade union delegates. They explained that they were not against the company - they liked the company - but they just wanted a voice, a seat at the table. The delegates said 'they're going to get beaten', and of course they were beaten, because they didn't understand that it was a class conflict not a family quarrel. Another problem facing US workers is the one I mentioned in a previous post - older forms of community-based workers' organisation have suffered because labour is much more mobile than before. American workers can travel a hundred miles to get a job now, whereas once it was common to live within walking distance of work. Moreover, they are unlikely to work at the same plant, where common union representation would signify a common struggle. They are atomised, fragmented, and dispersed. The only workers' constituency that resembles those old communities is among immigrants.

The formation of 'Change to Win', which was supposed to break with the more bureaucratic methods of the AFL-CIO, did not augur a new period of growth. This was in part because the split didn't involve any substantial political or tactical disagreement. It was entirely driven by the unions' respective leaderships. The Change to Win federation essentially accepted the same model of recruitment as the AFL-CIO, based on professionalised campaigns and economies of scale. The SEIU, one major constituent of the Change to Win coalition, was supposed to have recruited tens of thousands of new members, but its net growth after factoring in losses amounted to approx. 10,000 - not really that large given that the SEIU represents 1.8m workers. Its leadership has publicly eschewed any idea of class politics, instead vaunting that old shibboleth, 'partnership'. And it has increasingly resorted to carrying out raids on other, smaller unions - a nasty and rightly scorned tactic in the labour movement. The UAW and USWA unions experienced losses. Only the smaller unions have made gains. There are positive developments, however. Unions are changing their attitude to immigration and increasingly looking to organise the 12 million Mexican workers in the US. The SEIU, despite its commitment to business unionism, did take some pioneering steps in this direction with its famous janitors campaigns in the 1990s. (The campaigns featured in Ken Loach's Bread and Roses). But it has not organised a great deal in the South, which is ripe for a recruitment drive, and where tentative efforts in, eg, the meatpacking industry have met with success.

Moody has long advocated a version of 'social movement unionism' to combat the conservatism and limitations of the 'business unionism' model. Rather than reserved for members of bargaining units, unions should be thrown open to all - not least those many workers who regularly volunteer their time and efforts to help union recruitment drives, but are not union members themselves. The unions should campaign on broader issues and be integrated into larger campaigns rather than restrict themselves to narrowly 'economic' issues. We had a glimpse of this with Seattle and after, and with the massive organisation of immigrant workers in 2006, subsequently crushed under a wave of ICE raids and horrendous repression. But as yet the model of business unionism has not been broken with on a large scale and, as a result, recruitment still doesn't make up for lost members, and union density continues to decline. It will require a painstaking accumulation of forces before the necessary shift can take place, but it would also require an ideological break with the Democratic Party to be sustainable - now a much more delicate and difficult matter with the Obama executive. To the extent that white workers break with Obama, it may just as well be to the right as to the left.

(Yet another whinging, pessimistic post. Where is the Hope? Where is the change-you-can-believe-in? Tsk.)