Father Ted's New Year rhapsody posted by Richard Seymour

...Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

“Uncanny” posted by Richard Seymour

"...the plaited locks bore an uncanny resemblance to the alien-like monster from the film The Predator."

Meanwhile, in a galaxy not too far away, a racist gun-toting member of the aristocracy (jolly hockey-sticks division), and best fwend of future princess Kate Middleton, explains to Facebook friends how to handle real life alien-like monsters: “Just had a two-hour shooting lesson. She will now be using this skill on the top of East London high rises to help with the UK's illegal immigrant problem.”  Subsequently: “Just had a call from the old bill demanding I go in as someone has reported me for apparently making racist comments... hahaha... using my new found gun skills to control the UK's illegal immigrant population is not what I call racist.”

Everyone is agreed then.  Lesson one of the new international racial order is that murdering a bunch of foreigners isn’t racist any more (see passim).  Glad we got that cleared up.

Labels: daily mail, immigration, media, monarchy, racism, violence

The workers, united posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, cuts, tories, trade unions, united front, working class

More than mutual, I should say. posted by Richard Seymour

The vapidity of a parliamentary political landscape where capitalism is not seriously in question on any quarter, despite its worst crisis in generations, can perhaps be gauged by the way parties rush to associate themselves and their project with some brand or other. While the Tories' preferred business model is Easyjet, Labour's pre-election campaigning touted the idea of a 'John Lewis state'. Labour likes the John Lewis partnership idea as it offers a half-way house to privatization. When postal workers defeated the government and Royal Mail management over efforts to introduce privatization in 2007, their response was to take steps toward turning the mail into a John Lewis-style business. The John Lewis model is not only loved by Labour, it is gushed over by centre-left think-tanks and journalists. Not that David Cameron has any problem with John Lewis, having appointed its managing director to a team of business advisers who will instruct the government on the changing needs of British capitalism. John Lewis-style businesses have sought to profit from the Tories' privatization drive in the health service. Take Circle Health, for example - a partnership, but more than 50% owned by city institutional investors.

Indeed, what some call 'shared capitalism', where employees have share options and thus get a cut of profits, is quite a normal phenomenon in advanced capitalist economies, and many businesses argue that it improves productivity. John Lewis was founded in 1929 as an experiment in "industrial democracy", though studies of the organisation have tended to find that its democratic organs are at best "efficient consultative mechanisms" rather than genuine decision-making bodies. Internal surveys have found, contrary to the gushing of bourgeois journalists, that staff satisfaction with the company's supposed democracy has been at rock bottom for years. A recent review within the organisation sought to address this dissatisfaction by means of some internal reforms, but it obviously didn't turn it into a radically democratic workers' cooperative. The pay structure within John Lewis sees workers get a share of profits. But, like any capitalist enterprise, profit sharing is not distributed equally. In the case of John Lewis, profit is distributed according to pay scale, so management and executives get a much larger share of profits than any individual staff member. Like any capitalist enterprise, John Lewis is a hierarchy with sharp pay differentials, with the lion's share going to those who run the organisation. Like any capitalist enterprise, John Lewis engages in ruthless business practises which see it engaged in conflict with workers. Yet, it also doesn't recognise independent trade unions.

It would be a shame if protest movements succumbed to this tendency. On which note, the next UK Uncut event, called 'The Feeling is Mutual', is a celebration of businesses like John Lewis and the Cooperative Bank. UK Uncut maintains that turning the Royal Mail into a John Lewis-style partnership would be a good alternative to privatization. [NOTE: See the comments below this post for clarification/disclaimer on this]. To explain, UK Uncut has been centrally involved in organising a number of high street retail occupations, raising the question of why the rich get away with tax avoidance while the poor suffer from cuts. I think these protests have been wonderful. I am, however, less convinced by this latest move. In fact, it's rather disappointing.

I wonder if the Daily Mail can help with this? Stupid question, you might think, but they identify one of the key spokespeople of UK Uncut as one very buff 'bodybuilding fanatic' named Aaron Peters. Who he? He has been interned at (not employed by, as his Facebook information misleadingly maintains) by the Blairite think-tank Demos, and the Young Foundation, currently directed by Tony Blair's former top advisor Geoff Mulgan. Peters is no longer a Labour Party member, having recently left the party ostensibly over Ed Miliband's decision to hire a Times journalist as a spin doctor, though more basically because he supported David Miliband as party leader, whom he describes as a "class act", a "first class politician" and so on. As a supporter of trade unionists, he believes that trade unions - the largest democratic institutions in Britain - are "irrelevant". As a supporter of the student movement, he is an opponent of free education. As an activist, he champions the "dissent entrepreneur" (vomit), and advocates 'networks' and leaderless resistance in opposition to hierarchical models of political action like, well, the Stop the War Coalition - there's an interesting commentary on such ideas from UCL occupiers here.

I don't know if Peters' curious brand of politics is typical of the leaderless leaders who organise UK Uncuts. But it would explain why UK Uncut is now attempting to corral anti-cuts activists into cheering on fairly mundane high street retail outlets as a plausible alternative to privatization and cuts. It would also explain how devotees of non-hierarchical, horizontal, leaderless networks became champions of traditionally hierarchical, coercive, profit-driven business enterprise. My advice to activists - don't go and abase yourself before the Coop and JLP. You have much better things to do with your time.

Labels: blairites, capitalism, hierarchy, john lewis, leaderless resistance, mutualism, networks, new labour, privatisation, socialism, tories

A courageous assault on hegemonic multiculturalism posted by Richard Seymour

A friend on Twitter drew my attention to Slavoj Zizek's apologia for anti-Roma racism in recent talks. It's not the first time. See here, where he explains the dilemmas of multicultralism:

There was, in Slovenia, around a year ago, a big problem with a Roma (Gipsy) family which camped close to a small town. When a man was killed in the camp, the people in the town started to protest against the Roma, demanding that they be moved from the camp (which they occupied illegally) to another location, organizing vigilante groups, etc. As expected, all liberals condemned them as racists, locating racism into this isolated small village, while none of the liberals, living comfortably in the big cities, had any everyday contact with the Roma (except for meeting their representatives in front of the TV cameras when they supported them). When the TV interviewed the “racists” from the town, they were clearly seen to be a group of people frightened by the constant fighting and shooting in the Roma camp, by the constant theft of animals from their farms, and by other forms of small harassments from the Roma. It is all too easy to say (as the liberals did) that the Roma way of life is (also) a consequence of the centuries of their exclusion and mistreatment, that the people in the nearby town should also open themselves more to the Roma, etc. – nobody clearly answered the local “racists” what they should concretely do to solve the very real problems the Roma camp evidently was for them.

This was actually a response to a pogrom which observers compared to Kristallnacht. If the police hadn't driven the gypsies out, the racist mob would have done so with fire and blades. But Zizek has no hesitation about regurgitating the classic anti-gypsy propaganda (they're anti-social, they cause trouble, they basically bring it on themselves), championing of the racist mob and its 'legitimate concerns', counterposing the decent locals to snooty metropolitan elites, channelling the resentment of the 'little man' while slandering the little man's victims. Richard Littlejohn wishes he could get away with this level of barbarism.

The Birkbeck talk concerns the use of violence and as such raised some cheers when Zizek applauded 'student violence'. In fact, much of it is concerned with Zizek's arguments on race and multiculturalism, and specifically with vindicating his stance against anti-racist left-wing critics. He refers, for example, to the controversy surrounding a recent article, which he says earned him hate mail. He complains that after the controversy no one wanted to publish his second article, a defence of the notion of 'leitkultur' against bourgeois liberalism, but insists that his position has nothing to do with right-wing anti-immigrant populism. Rather, the 'leitkultur' he wishes to defend is a common space quite different from that supported by the right-wing. These people, he says, tried to rid Europe of its Jewish population, so have no right to talk about Judeo-Christian civilization. I don't know if he's right to attribute this argument to Habermas, but the critique of the Nazis that says that they are traitors to Judeo-Christian civilization is probably not one that can be appropriated for the Left.

Zizek goes on to refer to the article cited above, which he describes with a series of artful euphemisms, before going on to describe his raciological education at the hands of his au pair. He explains that she was a social worker who had worked with Roma - "incidentally, they slightly prefer to be called gyspsies" - and: "She told me this that, of course, don't idealise them, at a certain level it is of course true, they are living in illegal camps, they are living off stolen cars, they, definitely it is true, she confirmed this for me, steal from the fields, and so on and so on." Armed with the authority of his babysitter, he thus provides the armed would-be murderers with a pretext and then proceeds to try to displace the blame for this state-fuelled pogromism onto, not the capitalist class as such, but metropolitan liberal elites. He tells the tale of a big open village in Ljubljana where rich liberals live, and describes their horrified reaction when it was suggested that the Roma move there. This proves for him that it's "very nice" to be anti-racist and tolerant toward gypsies when you have no contact with them.

"This is the limit of this liberal multiculturalism ... that's the tragedy of multiculturalism, how the whole space is constructed with a clear class dimension. It's always upper middle class or at least middle class who are blaming ordinary redneck guys for being racist, for enjoying their privilege ... The moment I mention this class dimension, I become a proto-fascist right-winger or whatever or whatever. No, I mean, again, the problem when you fight racism, it's the same as the Israeli settlers, don't focus on the poor guys, focus on the real culprits". To explain this reference, Zizek has previously argued against a boycott of Israeli settlements on the grounds that the settlers are poor Eastern European immigrants who are forced into settlements by the Israeli state. He goes on that yes, of course, the liberals are right about the racism of the poor, but "imagine a modest guy in that village, his son comes home beaten often, not too often, but there is this fear, occasional fights with Roma children, things are stolen from the field and so on and so on, there even was a murder in that gypsy settlement and what was offered to these people? Nothing, just culpabilising them."

I don't claim that Zizek is a fascist, or a "proto-fascist", for all that he seems anxious to provoke such reactions by, you know, championing racist mobs and vilifying gypsies. But in the UK, as you may have noticed, we have a "big problem" with gypsy travellers, immigrants, Muslims, etc - or rather, with the racist reaction to them. And the argument from the xenophobes and far right is almost identical to Zizek's: if the liberal elite love the gypsies and Muslims and immigrants so much, let them live with them. Similarly, his anecdotal demagogic style of discussing the issue of Roma is absolutely typical of the far right in Britain. Ironically, however, it is very liberal bourgeoisie that Zizek pretends to abhor that he sounds most like. It is the privileged liberal neo-Powellites, with their condescending chatter about the 'white working class', onto whom they can project their own malicious racist fantasies, and who then claim that anti-racism is a snooty, middle class ideology, that Zizek is channelling. It is their caricature of class, their pseudo-iconoclasm, their banalities, and their insulting rationalisations that he is imitating. In a sense, Zizek, the radical firebrand contrarian, is a bourgeois, conformist, national liberal at heart.

Labels: enoch powell, eurocentrism, far right, fascism, gypsies, islamophobia, new racism, racism, roma gypsies, zizek

Capitalist realism vs the memory of the class posted by Richard Seymour

Simon Hewitt alludes to the value of inhabiting a tradition, as part of any anticapitalist project. This shouldn't be controversial. Human beings cannot really exist outside of tradition, though capitalism constantly tries to acculturate them into doing so. In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher draws on Frederic Jameson to riff on 'postmodern temporality'. This is a condition where "realities and identities are upgraded like software", such that any "settled sense of self" becomes impossible, such that historical memory and tradition is sacrificed to constant novelty, to "the vertiginous 'continuous present'" characteristic of late capitalism. He quotes from Jameson's 'The Antinomies of Postmodernity', the same essay in which the famous and often misremembered quotation appears: "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations." This 'perhaps' is misleading, as the argument leads directly into Jameson's arguments concerning late capitalist celerity and its effects on the political imaginary. Fisher's sample is worth quoting:

"The paradox from which we must set forth is the equivalence between an unparalleled rate of change on all the levels of social life and an unparalleled standardization of everything - feelings along with consumer goods, language along with built space - that would seem incompatible with such mutability... What then dawns is the realization that no society has ever been as standarized as this one, and that the stream of human, social and historical temporality has never flowed quite so homogenously. ... What we now begin to feel, therefore - and what begins to emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least in its temporal dimension - is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer."

No wonder that in this situation, it is "easier to grasp the progressive value of conservative or residual modes of resistance to the new thing" than to evaluate "ostensibly left-liberal positions" which "often prove to be indistinguishable from the structural requirements of the system itself". Novelty, 'reform', 'progress', constant newness are bywords for planned obsolescence, for capitalist destruction of the welfare state, education, healthcare, and so on. But Jameson may be succumbing to the cult of novelty himself here, since what he describes as an aspect of late capitalism, of postmodern temporality, is only an aspect of capitalist ideology as such. Capitalism has always venerated its constant reinvention of the wheel, as it were, while celebrating a maudlin fabrication that it calls 'tradition', the purpose of which is to blot out real, living traditions.

The relative strength of the ruling class and its dominant institutions with respect to the working class and its oppositional institutions means that there is all the more pressure brought to bear on the labour movement and the left to adopt vacuous discourses of 'modernity' (and its reliable discursive partner, 'realism'). It constantly seeks to depict the language and institutions of the Left as worse than wrong, but actually uncool, out of fashion, anachronistic. Naturally, this gives rise to the illusion that we can or should seek to jettison those embarrassing encumbrances of old - narrow 19th century notions like classes, parties and ideologies, but obviously not money, markets, credit, capital, interest, etc. But we go along with this at our peril. It is part of our subjection. Part of the means of ensuring that there will be no change.

Labels: capitalism, capitalist realism, fashion, novelty, postmodernity, reactionaries, reactionary subjectivity

David Cameron's Tea Party posted by Richard Seymour

My latest article on the Tories' cuts agenda is in the next issue of Radical Philosophy, just released. It comes as one of a number of articles on austerity, including William I Robinson on 'The Global Capital Leviathan' and Robin Blackburn on 'Alternatives to Austerity. The issue isn't online yet, but it'll be worth looking up if you can get a hard copy. Here's a sneak preview:

While ‘Tea Party’ rebels agitate for the return of ‘Austrian’ principles in the US, the Conservative Party under David Cameron is actually implementing these principles in the UK. Without prefacing their agenda with the hysterical red-baiting characteristic of the ‘Tea Party’, the Tories argue that their spending reductions are not ideologically driven but are necessary because of New Labour’s fiscal profligacy. ... In fact, the Tories are radically reinventing British capitalism and the state’s role in it, taking it further along neoliberal lines, eviscerating the last unionised bastions of British society, gradually privatizing outposts of collectivism, and redistributing wealth and power from the working class to the rich.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, conservatism, david cameron, reactionaries, recession, ruling class, socialism, tea party, tories, working class

In defence of the old hierarchies posted by Richard Seymour

The student protests blew open the question of resisting the Tories' austerity agenda, so it is natural that the tactics deployed therein should be the subject of inquiry. How was it done, what can we learn from it, and how can we repeat its successes under changing circumstances? Especially as the authorities adapt and tool up to cope with the current protests - a process that might thankfully be impeded a little bit by Liberty suing the cops over the kettling of children.

In this vein, Laurie Penny's recent articles, following on from her reporting of the student protests, have highlighted what she takes to be the novelty of the protests and thus the increasing irrelevance of "the old left" with its "traditional hierarchies" and "strategic factionalism". It's a pity that this came with condescending swipes about my party, the SWP. As one Twitter sage put it, writing on CiF about how awful those Trots are may not be as revolutionary as Laurie thinks it is. I don't intend to get bogged down in that subject, however, as I don't think this is fundamentally about the SWP. It's about the secular decline of mainstream institutions of the Left, most notably the Labour Party - it was Labour's offer to be the 'voice' of students that inspired Penny's disdain. The fall-out from that decline, and how we respond to it, is the issue. It's also a shame that Laurie has indulged in this tendency to speak as if she does so on behalf of a whole "generation" of protesters. I'm not accusing Laurie of actually believing this - it's a journalistic cliche, a USP. But it's also bloody annoying - worse, it plays into a destructive myth of inter-generational conflict. (There's a critique of this sort of cliche here). Still, if the aim was to provoke a conversation, it has certainly done that - see here, here, here and here, for example. In addition to the blogs, Alex Callinicos of the SWP responded here.

The SWP's newspaper, Socialist Worker, is totemic of a broader set of issues that Laurie raises. Thus, she says: "Stunningly, the paper is still being peddled at every demonstration to young cyber-activists for whom the very concept of a newspaper is almost as outdated as the notion of ideological unity as a basis for action." Setting aside all defensiveness, let's concede that the far left has been rather slower than its competitors to embrace the internet and harness its latent promise. In fact, as far as the UK goes, fascists were actually quicker to see the opportunity than most others. Even so, the traditional use of paper sales in high streets, at protests and at workplaces is now complemented by the full repertoire of websites, Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo and Youtube, as well as blogs and various link-sharing devices. So this is only incidentally about technology, and more fundamentally about the forms of organisation that they engender.

The substance of Laurie's argument is that the student movement works best by following anarchic, leaderless principles, by emphasising spontaneity and unity in action over specific grievances, and by de-emphasising grand narratives. The old left can be useful inasmuch as it participates in this mode of organising, but obstructive when it cleaves to older, hierarchical methods, based on "deference" to the decisions of a conference or a collective leadership. The issue of the print newspaper is raised as a symptom of this wider question. A political party which communicates by selling newspapers isn't engaging in the kind of open-ended dialogue that is facilitated by social media, for example. Instead, working within a closed ideological terrain, it produces a univocal message devised for one way communication. By means of this imposition, it seeks to "control" the resistance. This is a hierarchical way of organising drawn from a pre-internet paradigm.

But, says Laurie, the means of oppression have been "deregulated". Thatcher, Reagan, Blair et al undercut traditional working class forms of organisation by decentralising and deregulating capitalism, while keeping the working class atomised and divided into traditional communities of mutual suspicion. Overcoming this means "deregulating" the resistance, making it anarchic and "inclusive". In a word, the paper and its embedded principle of leadership should be - is being - superceded by cybernetics, the wiki, and its embedded principle of spontaneous, leaderless, non-hierarchical engagement. This is nothing less than a complete "re-imagining" of the Left.

This is a sweeping, dramatic set of claims, but it glosses over some important facts and problems. Worse, I fear that, for all the limitations of the 'old left', the call to 'deregulate' resistance may be more of a symptom of neoliberalism than a solution to the problems it poses. Among the facts that are glossed over is the role of leading cadres of experienced activists in bringing direction to the movement. The Daily Mail, the Tories and the police have a tendency to reduce such protests to nefarious 'ringleaders', and such ideas form the basis of 'intelligence-led' policing which is resulting in raids and young people being intimidated by coppers. So it's important not to reduce the movement to a few tightly knit groups of revolutionaries, 'professional demonstrators' and 'troublemakers'. But the fact that leadership doesn't work that way doesn't mean that there has been no leadership. Left-wingers, student union members and trade unionists from various political backgrounds, including the far left, have put their repertoire of knowledge and experience at the service of the students movement. This knowledge was accumulated as a result of their affiliations and unglamorous groundwork in the trade unions, past protests, leafletting and even high street paper sales. Without this, the recent occupations and protests would have been the poorer.

Still, even setting this to one side, with the student protests we have had a situation where the first nationally significant response to the Tories' cuts came from students, especially the poorest students - from the 'banlieues' of Britain as Paul Mason put it. They were not necessarily affiliated to political parties, or to the National Union of Students, or to any trade unions. Due to the weakness of the labour movement and the Left, they were largely not called to action by leafleting campaigns or billboard advertisements. Rather, they relied on Facebook groups and social media to coordinate their actions. Insofar as tens of thousands of people are willing to spontaneously sign up for protests and turn out, this is all very well. But what if that ceases to be the case? What if, as could happen very quickly, large numbers of people stop showing up, out of fear of police intimidation, out of frustration with diminishing returns, or out of demoralisation? Then the hard work will once more fall to that small number of committed activists who are embedded in existing structures - trade unions, socialist parties, Labour, student unions.

I think it is a weakness, rather than a strength, if an atomised populace without the support of large institutions becomes overly dependent on social media. The neoliberal solution to capitalism's problems could not have been imposed if the institutions of the labour movement and the organised left had not first been hammered by a combination of concerted employers' offensives and especially a centralised state apparatus. The fruit of that ruling class offensive, the erosion of trade unionism, left-wing community organisation and parties, is one reason why it has fallen to small groups (often drawn from the far left, by the way) using social media to coordinate protest dates etc., while the role of the mass of protesters has been merely to turn up and join in. Far from actively participating in the organising of these events, the majority have actually been excluded by their dependence on social media. The means of their inclusion must now be the subject of urgent negotiation and collaboration.

This raises hard problems. One of Laurie's objections is to grand ideologies. As she puts it, it doesn't matter if you're a socialist, a Blairite, a liberal, an anarchist, etc. What matters is whether you're ready to be be on the frontline, in the struggle. That's fine as long as the only issue is, how do we stop this cut, this fee rise, this 'reform'? As long as it's something as simple as that, then unity in action is assured. But as soon as things become more complicated, as soon as we have to think about whether we need unity with firefighters, tube workers, immigrant groups, etc., and as soon as the issue of more far-reaching social change comes up, there are going to be real, obstinate differences of principle which emerge. Then decisions have to be made. Can we still work together, and if so on what basis? Can we suppress certain differences to achieve a common goal? At what stage does the suppression of real differences become counter-productive, or even unprincipled? If these matters are to be resolved democratically, then we can't avoid traditional means of organising.

And here, it is worth defending the old hierarchies to some extent. Hierarchy, as Terry Eagleton once pointed out in his polemic against 'postmodernism', is not identical with elitism. It is, as much as anything else, an ordering of priorities and tasks, a division of labour, which is indispensable for radical political organisation. This is not to say that there hasn't been elitism on the Left. This isn't to say that all the old hierarchies are defensible. Sexism, racism and imperialism have been among the flaws of large parts of the European Left in the 20th Century, and I would be the last to claim that these have been completely overcome despite the civilizing effects that past struggles have had. But there is nothing about hierarchy per se that is objectionable. On the other hand, there is such a thing as the tyranny of structurelessness. In the absence of hierarchies structuring priorities, ordering tasks, and giving democratic expression to political differences, there is a danger that the sole structuring principle is that 'might makes right'. That is, whoever is best organised, has the most resources and is best equipped to usurp the cultural capital of protest can end up effectively dictating terms and taking it over, without being accountable to anyone. And if others don't like it, well, they know what they can do - precisely nothing. As slow and cumbersome as the formal structures of trade unionism and party conferences can be, they also have the advantage of that in principle elected officials can be fired, leaders deposed, policies overturned, misbehaviour investigated, and so on.

Lastly, and speaking from experience, I would like to assure Laurie that the role of newspapers is not quite what she thinks it is. Parties don't sell papers expecting that the dissemination of ideas in hard copy will by itself change the world. The newspaper is there when the internet isn't. The newspaper is a way of overcoming atomisation, giving complete strangers the occasion to stop and talk to one another about political ideas. You stand in a street, or in a workplace, asking people to stop and buy a copy of the newspaper not so that they will take it home and passively absorbe its contents, but so that a minority will stop and talk to you about what's wrong with the world and where we can go from here. It's a way of building up a network of real life relationships in a way that the internet can't yet replicate, much less replace. Those networks, built up through unglamorous daily toil, are the rock on which much larger movements are built. And that's only possible because of durable party and trade union hierarchies which have survived the locust years and come out ready for a fight.

Labels: austerity, cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, journalist, socialism, students, swp, tories, trade unions, tuition fees

Hitler Youth Christmas Special posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: authoritarianism, christian right, lenin's tomb bans christmas

Tommy Sheridan, the SSP and the future of the left. posted by Richard Seymour

Tommy Sheridan has been convicted of perjury and will now probably go to jail. The imprisonment of Sheridan was the only plausible result of this perjury trial. It was undoubtedly the one sought by police and by News of the World. It may not have been the result sought by members of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) who helped to instigate the perjury case. And those who leaked and sold materials to the press may not have had prison in mind. But it is the logical and necessary result of their actions, and their vociferous expressions of relief at the verdict are notable. And it is a setback for the Scottish Left. To speak frankly, I do not see the SSP having much of a role in its repair, for all that it contains some immensely talented, charming and principled people.

The SSP was once the envy of the radical left. A thriving model of socialist unity in action. It was based significantly, perhaps too significantly, on the personal credentials of Tommy Sheridan, whose inspiring lead in resistance to the Poll Tax first gave him the stature he subsequently enjoyed. It was natural that when the tabloid press came after the SSP, they would focus on Sheridan. And as they could not attack him for his politics - or at least if they did it would make little difference - they tried to attack him over his personal life, his sexual conduct. Sheridan's response was to initiate libel proceedings. I think most of his defenders consider that this was a crazy thing to have done - the bourgeois courts are a risky terrain for socialists, in which the odds are almost always stacked against you. Nonetheless, he won the support of the majority of the party for his position, which was that the attack on Sheridan was an attack on the party. But the SSP executive panicked, forced him to resign as national convenor and indicated that they would not support him in his libel case.

As it transpired, not only did they not give him broad backing, they agreed to testify for News of the World. In justification, they claimed that Tommy Sheridan had no right to sue for libel because the allegations were true. They argued that he had no right to expect them to lie for him, and that he was putting his ego and his reputation ahead of the fortunes of the socialist left. But, even assuming that every word of the News of the World's claims were true (an assumption which I am only prepared to entertain for the sake of argument), and even if you believed that Sheridan's libel prosecution was a mistake, to actively assist the News of the World in court was not only unnecessary but self-destructive. It meant that, as witnesses on oath, they had an interest in seeing Sheridan lose and the Murdoch press win. It was always clear that a large part of the Left would consider this unforgiveable behaviour, a form of political scabbing, and that such actions would tear the hitherto united and growing socialist left in twain (twain at the very least). It is also now known, as a result of this perjury trial, that in addition to testifying for Murdoch, leading SSP member Alan McCombes secretly went to the Sunday Herald with a 'sworn affidavit' three days after Sheridan was deposed as party convenor, stating that if Sheridan had not resigned they would have "put certain information into the public domain which would have forced him to resign". This wasn't just comrades put in a difficult position. From the second the anti-Sheridan faction coagulated in the SSP executive, it pursued its quarry ruthlessly - a point that becomes more clear as time goes on.

When Sheridan won his libel case, the News of the World was out for blood. But the anti-Sheridan faction in the SSP was also overwrought. They immediately went on the offensive. In the wake of the case, numerous leading SSP members suddenly publicised their view that sexism had been rife in the SSP - though they had apparently failed to act on this belief until then. A former SSP activist wrote in The Guardian that the issue was about gender rather than class, and that Sheridan's victory was a victory for machismo. She alleged that Sheridan had used misogynistic language about SSP members, describing them as a "cabal of women". This misrepresented, perhaps intentionally, an open letter from Sheridan to members of the SSP which used the phrase "cabal of comrades". But it contributed to a political mythology, which is still propagated to this day, and which casts Sheridan as a misogynist.

And this has remained an important part of the SSP's rationalisations for their methods. The current issue of Scottish Socialist Youth, for example, revels in Sheridan's conviction and depicts him as a "mad shagger", and the sex clubs he allegedly visited as tantamount to brothels - thus he is characterised as a macho prick, availing himself of (what some would see as) some of the worst forms of female oppression. Just one point about this. If it is indeed the case that Sheridan's alleged actions mark him out as a chauvinist, then it is time for SSP members and apologists to stop pretending that the allegations against him were solely to do with personal morality and thus not at all to do with the politics of the SSP. By their own account, the allegations were definitely political, and definitely damaging to the SSP.

But this sort of narrative re-framing would be no more than natural behaviour among people who had allowed personal bitterness to overtake their political judgment and made quite a few angry opponents of former supporters in the process. At this point, with News of the World beaten, Sheridan and his supporters took it as a good time to vacate the remnants of the once great and now greatly reduced SSP. What then happened defies belief. Members of the SSP conspired to instigate a perjury prosecution, by bringing materials to the police and the media (for a considerable sum of money, naturally) that would incriminate Sheridan.

George McNeilage either recorded a private conversation and sold it to News of the World for £200,000, or he participated in a fake intended to implicate Sheridan in perjury, and sold it to News of the World for £200,000. Then Barbara Scott produced a handwritten minute of unusual detail, which many members of the executive of the time don't recall seeing before, from a meeting which purportedly proved that Sheridan lied, and marched down to the local constabulary of the Lothian and Borders police with that minute. The invocation of principle in a case like this can be dangerous. But I like to think that I know an issue of principle when I see it, and I think on principle it is aborrent and reprehensible to make yourself a police informant or sell a former comrade to the newspapers, even for the sake of something as important as a factional vendetta.

A prosecution was initiated. Once again, leading SSP members bore witness, but this time for the prosecution. Of 42 prosecution witnesses, 24 were SSP members, 16 from the original executive. Were it not for this footage, those minutes, and that testimony, Tommy Sheridan would be a free man. Were it not for a this extraordinary factionalism, the News of the World and Lothian and Borders police could not have hounded and persecuted Sheridan and his wife. He is now expected to go to prison.

This is a setback, as I said. Anyone who believes otherwise is not living in the real world. But Scotland also saw one of the biggest protests against the cuts after the comprehensive spending review. It is going to be at the forefront of resistance to Tory austerity. And if the major electoral vehicle for the Scottish radical left now lies in tatters, its former star now heading to jail, there will be ample opportunity to rebuild the Left. And in that future Left, I do see a role for Tommy Sheridan.

Labels: media, news of the world, rupert murdoch, sectarianism, socialism, ssp, tabloid frenzy, tommy sheridan

Not as sold posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, cbi, cuts, neoliberalism, recession, tories

The Assange allegations posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: imperial feminism, patriarchy, US imperialism, wikileaks

John Pilger - The War You Don't See posted by Richard Seymour

John Pilger - The War You Don't See from The War We Don't See on Vimeo.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, imperialism, iraq, Israel, pilger, US imperialism, zionism

Class, orthodoxy and psephology posted by Richard Seymour

This is by way of being an extended footnote to some previous arguments. I have argued that the Tory base is dramatically narrowing in the UK due to social polarisation under late capitalism. Actually, John Ross has long been on this case, detecting its effects back in the early 1980s. This is due largely to the loss of mass support among the 'skilled working class' and the professional middle class. Their present strategy is thus about reorganising British capitalism and their position within it, so that they can restore their role as a hegemonic party of capital. At the same time, I've said, the centre ground is contracting under the impact of the gravest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, such that - even if Clegg hadn't cuddled up to the Conservative leadership - the Liberals' nuptials with the electorate were always likely to be brief. Thirdly, I've argued that the crisis would present the possibility of an historic reversal of the split in the Labourist coalition. This of course depends upon the claim, widely rubbished in mainstream psephological literature, that class remains an important explanatory feature in voting behaviour.

The evidence that class motivates voting behaviour is actually very robust. Robert Anderson and Anthony Heath's study of class and voting in the UK between 1964 and 1997 looked in vain for real evidence of what psephologists call 'electoral dealignment'. Using their 7-grade 'social class' model (which is not unproblematic), they found the following correlation:


You can see the trend. The Tories' most ardent supporters are consistently among the petit-bourgeosie and the 'upper salariat' (which includes managers, professionals and administrators in large companies). Labour's core support is among manual workers, both skilled and unskilled. As I've pointed out before, this also holds for all general elections held since 1997. But this correlation would require further interrogation before it becomes an explanation.

For example, right-wing Labourites tend to insist that the working class core of Labour's vote is, though economically left-wing, socially conservative. This is their explanation for how voters in former Labour heartlands defect to the BNP - it's a socially conservative revolt of the 'white working class'. Thus, from their perspective, it is both necessary and true to the proletarian cause to spread racism and hatred toward immigrants and minorities. If this claim were accurate, the consistency with which the core working class vote has stayed with Labour through thick and thin, refusing the serenading of the Tories, and the fact that the BNP's inroads into working class communities are principally achieved by winning over former Tory voters, would present a real mystery. But it is not accurate. As other critical work has shown, social conservatism and liberalism have less to do with class than with cultural capital, ie education. Socially progressive attitudes are not an attribute of the rich, but of the educated; reactionary attitudes are not an attribute of the poor, but of the uneducated or poorly educated. This is why, for example, Cameron has had to adopt a more socially liberal facade. He can't win by wooing the know-nothing bigots of the petit-bourgeoisie. The Tories want to win back the sorts of professionals and skilled workers who have been to university and simply aren't up for deference and social authoritarianism.

***

Arguments for the demise of the relevance of class are hardly new. Throughout the postwar era, we were continually told that class was, in different ways, increasingly obsolete. Anthony Crosland argued from the Labour Right that the division between the management and ownership of capital meant that a direct conflict between workers and owners no longer existed. Instead, a new managerial class had taken over, and society was going to become a lot more stable as a consequence. In fact, Crosland was regurgitating the conclusions of American rightist political economy (Daniel Bell, James Burnham) and sociology (Talcott Parsons).

Communist Party member Sam Aaronovitch's terse polemic, The Ruling Class, was one of the better ripostes to that argument. Unfortunately, the salient points of Aaronovitch's later career would include the Alternative Economic Strategy (failure), Eurocommunism (failure) and a son called David (erm...). Subsequent research on class, for example by John Scott, also helped demolished this ideologeme. Even so, and all throughout the height of class conflict in the 1970s and 1980s, the Tories consistently argued that class was no longer relevant in the new meritocratic order. Thatcher, as a good Hayekian, argued that 'class' was a communist concept, and that to even talk of 'classlessness' was to concede the terrain in advance. In the same period, the emergence of But the argument that class was over really took off between the defeat of the miners and the collapse of the USSR, when Labour, the trade unions and the right-wing of the Communist Party were united in cognisance of the 'new times' and the need for a 'new realism'. It was in this period of reaction that the arguments for 'electoral dealignment' first came to the fore.

The new orthodoxy had it that class was losing its ability to produce solidaristic communities united in political struggles, due to the prolonged experience of relative affluence. As a consequence, class was being replaced by other, structural but non-class factors such as private vs public sector employment, wage earners vs the unemployed, home ownership vs renting, car ownership vs public transport users, and other sources of sectional or individual interest. At the same time, even those structural interests were giving way to 'issues' - voters now preferred to act as consumers, choosing parties based on issue preferences.

Marshall et al's Social Class in Modern Britain (1989) was a riposte to such arguments by way of an extended study of 'class consciousness' and its effects on political behaviour. It concluded that class remained the single most important structural factor in determining ideological conflict in Britain. But although it was far from alone in its findings, such studies tended to be buried under an avalanche of vulgar, triumphalist declarations that all conceptions of class - marxist, weberian, pluralist, etc. - were superfluous historical detritus. At its most sophisticated, this theory was expressed by Terry Clark and Seymour Lipset (1991), whose conclusions precipitated a surfeit of literature expanding on, and generally approving, the idea that social class has declined in relevance since WWII. On the conventional Alford Index, it was assumed that working class voters would side with leftist parties and middle class voters rightist ones, and it was on the perceived decline of 'class voting' on that index that Lipset and Clark staked their case.

There have always been dissidents. In the UK, Geoffrey Evans has always maintained a sceptical defence of the relevance of 'social class', though not from a marxist perspective. His studies of voting, ideological conflict and class in the UK have been consistently inconvenient for those of the Blairite persuasion who would like to see class interred with the USSR. Psephologists like Anthony Heath have similarly argued that while the relative size of different 'social classes' may have altered, the relationship between social class and political attitudes remains firm. Others pointed out that the 'decline of class' thesis depended on crude measurements based on manual vs non-manual workers - the 'cultural/status' model of class which I've criticised elsewhere. And, as I've previously mentioned, the great unwashed generally seemed unconvinced by the decline of class, with supermajorities registering support for the view that there is a class war going on in this country.

But the pollsters whom the pundits listen to still want to cleave to orthodoxy, even when it manifestly fails to predict or explain real world political developments. This is one reason why the Miliband leadership has its occasional moments of interest. As much as he doesn't want to talk about the 'working class' in front of the capitalist media, instead restorting to euphemisms about the 'squeezed middle', his leadership pitch was explicitly based on asserting the centrality of reviving the working class base of Labour's coalition, and thus was a tacit recognition that the post-class ideology of the Third Way was moribund. And as the movement against the cuts springs into life, that opens up a space for all sorts of critical perspectives.

Labels: capitalism, class, class consciousness, class politics, elections, labour, liberals, middle class, psephology, ruling class, tories, working class

EDL turns on students posted by Richard Seymour

The EDL has so far been an organisation that united violent rightists, racists and outright Nazis in a common cause against British Muslims. But in the recent past, it has started to denounce trade unionists and disrupt left-wing political meetings, and with this shift is becoming much more like a traditional far right street organisation, though not yet one with sufficient cadres to actually control the streets anywhere. Unite Against Fascism argues that the EDL is doing this because the fascist core is trying to ideologically harden its membership and supporters. This makes sense in terms of who and what the EDL are. In my ISJ piece, I argued that the Nazi strategy in the EDL was analogous to past strategies of fascist paramilitarism:

What appears to be happening is that the organisational and “intellectual” spine of the organisation is being supplied by organised Nazis while the foot-soldiers are recruited from among football casuals and other violent right wing, but non-Nazi, groups. This is not the first time that such a tactic has been pursued. The National Front used to infiltrate and mobilise skinhead and football hooligan groups during the 1970s in order to attack the left and ethnic minorities. It is also analogous to the general tendency by fascist organisations to use paramilitaries, comprising many who are not ideologically committed fascists, both as weapons against opponents and as socialising institutions that can help produce a disciplined fascist cadre.⁷⁶ This is one reason why it is a mistake to simply dismiss the EDL as thugs who can be dealt with by police as a public order issue.

I see that the BNP has declared that its strategy for the future will be much more oriented toward street activity, as its 2010 general election failure has made the electoralist approach resoundingly unpopular with the membership. Again, this would be congruent with a strategy of hardening the political support of the organisation. But there may be more to the EDL's turn than pressure from the fascist hardcore. I think there will be an element of competition and antagonism between different factions in the EDL - its schismatic nature was made clear when Paul Ray and Tommy Robinson were issuing Youtube threats to one another. And perhaps the aim is to make the EDL a broader rightist political movement than the BNP can be. Perhaps, as the cuts take hold, and the anti-cuts coalition emerges, the EDL may be trying to position itself at the helm of militant reaction, waving the flag and sticking up for authority when the traditional parties of the right don't seem able to do so. However that turns out, it is vital that as the EDL broadens its targets, the coalition organised against the EDL and like-minded groups broadens commensurately. If the EDL want to have a go at students, organised workers and the left, rather than just beating up Asian women and smashing up shops, they'll find themselves rapidly outnumbered and outgunned.

Labels: bnp, bnp scum, edl, english defence league, fascism, islamophobia, nationalism, racism, reactionaries

Imaginationland posted by Richard Seymour

Imagine it was North Korea, says China.  Imagine it was Iran or Zimbabwe or Burma.  Among scenes of 'violence', with police lashing out at protesters landing one in hospital with a serious brain injury, there is some shocking footage: 

The scene: a mass demonstration in Tehran/Harare/Rangoon/Pyongyang/&c. The police are filmed shoving a 20-yr-old demonstrator with cerebral palsy from her/his wheelchair & dragging her/him across the pavement, to the horror of onlookers. Footage of this event is sneaked out & publicised. Accordingly, Iranian/Zimbabwean/Burmese/North Korean/&c state broadcasters cannot ignore it. Forced to report it, they stress, however, that there ‘is a suggestion’ that said demonstrator was ‘rolling towards the police’.

  Oh yes, imagine.  Hold your breath.  Make a wish.  Count to three.  And enter a world of pure imagination.  And now imagine if the chief of police in the capital city of any of those countries, having claimed that the protesters were fortunate not to have been shot dead, announced that it was planning to ban all marches against the government on the spurious pretext of ‘violence’ by protesters.  Imagine this isn’t the normal response of capitalist states to dissent outside of anomalously stable periods of class compromise.  Imagine that the already impoverished political democracy is about to take a nasty turn to the methods of the police state.  Imagine… imagine… imagine…

Labels: education, education maintenance allowance, liberal democrats, metropolitian police, police, police brutality, police state, students, tories, tuition fees, universities

No confidence. posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: aaron porter, austerity, cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, nus, students, tories, tuition fees, universities

Shameless posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, bbc, cuts, education, metropolitian police, police brutality, protests, students, tuition fees

Agents provocateurs posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: agent provocateur, cops, education, education maintenance allowance, metropolitian police, protests, students, tuition fees

Police attack on disabled man posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, cuts, metropolitian police, police brutality, tories