The UKIPisation of English politics II posted by Richard Seymour

It's only funny until you realise they're not going to stop.

Let's talk about the 'white working class'.  For more than a decade, a twin discourse about class has been building up.

'Two souls' of the working class
On the one hand, there is this melancholic representation of a forgotten, disenfranchised 'white working class'.  There were documentaries, articles, tea towel memoirs, focus groups, policy documents.  This 'white working class' was never discussed in terms of what made it (part of) a class, but always in terms of its supposed cultural tics.  I still remember, with cringing embarrassment, the spectacle of Matthew Taylor - then the head of the IPPR - patronising some skinheaded East End codger about pie n mash, and jellied eels, in the context of a documentary about multiculturalism.  This is the working class we have supposedly lost, gone with the empire, and all those manufacturing jobs: an industrious, clean, virtuous, jolly, culturally vibrant working class.  It is important to stress just how much this is a mythical mobilisation of affect.  Historically, in certain contexts, it has been possible to speak of a 'white working class' in a meaningful sense, as something that was historically and politically produced through practices like segregation.  There is no equivalent experience in the UK today.

On the other hand, there is the vicious, punitive demonisation of a section of the working class whom both the Thatcherites and Third Way politicos referred to as 'the underclass' or, in politically correct New Labour terminology, the 'socially excluded'.  Later, the idea was popularised through the meme of chavs.  These were people identified by their failure to integrate into societal norms, their 'dependency culture', their crass consumption patterns, their mobbishness, their unfamiliar speech patterns, and their moral degeneracy.  They represented the decay of 'British values'.  This was linked to racial anxiety in obvious ways, which became explicit during and after the England riots: "the whites have become black".  Even today's rioters aren't like rioters in the good old days.

This discourse began to develop only a few years after Tony Blair had declared the class war over.  It very visibly wasn't over.  However, this was because the symptoms of class were visible rather than because there was a well-organised labour movement putting class on the agenda.  And the symptoms of class life under neoliberalism did not have to be explained in a leftist idiom.

Three changes in class life
The entrenchment of neoliberalism in everyday life, with the destruction of collective organisation and the removal of social protections and provision, ensured that more and more of ordinary experience was characterised by vicious competition.   The more that competition was accepted and valorised, the more hierarchy was worshipped, and those lower down the chain treated simultaneously as potential competitors, losers who should be spat upon, and dangerous elements who needed to be controlled.  Thus, the resentments deriving from class injuries could be effectively canalised into competition and aggression toward others of the same class.

Also important was the growing stratification of the working class based on working patterns, education and lifestyle.  It had never been the case that factory workers made up the majority of the working class.  However, their experiences were sufficiently like those of other workers, that they were able to 'stand in' for the class, figuratively.  Their degree of organisation commanded respect, as did the cultural salience they had achieved in post-war Britain.  There is no such easy metonym for the working class today.  It is far easier to speak of the class in terms of cultural cliches: the estuary accent, poor education, social conservatism and traditionalism.  Skinheads, white vans, England flags, and sports tops, became synecdoches for class.  And two small businessmen, Tommy Robinson and now Daniel Ware, were able to 'stand in' for the 'white working class'.

Finally, just as important was the transformation of social democracy and its adaptation to Thatcherism.  If capitalism creates its own gravediggers, you could argue, so does the working class.  When New Labour took office, it was not sufficient for them to administer neoliberal capitalism and police its breakdowns.  They had to discipline their own working class base, and react to breakdowns as challenges to their project of transforming Labour into New Labour.  These sporadic strikes, protests, civil disobedience and occasional political defections were manifestations of backward-looking tendencies within the working class which had held back Labour's necessary modernisation.  This resort to non-market solutions was linked to the cultural pathologies producing 'social exclusion' and trapping people in poverty.   Hence, the variety of authoritarian panaceas, from the demand that British Asians 'integrate', to Asbos, to Blair's proposal to monitor potential problem children from before birth - all intended to adjust working class people to life in neoliberal Britain.

Racecraft and neoliberal dysfunction
Race, as became evident after the northern riots and the Cantle report into them, is a convenient ready-made strategy for policing the dysfunctions arising from neoliberal politics.  These riots - like almost all riots - were not about one simple issue.  Hundreds of young people became spontaneously embroiled in open combat with the police, as well as gangs of fascist bovver boys, over a range of issues.  The immediate issue was fascist provocation and police brutality.  The longer-range issues were local government under-funding, de facto segregation in local housing and service provision, and the tendency for racist local police forces to criminalise Asian youths.

The almost instinctive, learned response of the British media, the government and the Labour leadership both in Westminster and in local councils, was to boil all this down to 'race riots'.  Long before an official report was produced, local politicians and police chiefs, as well as Labour MPs, were describing a failure of multiculturalism.  It was a lack of integration, the failure of locals to internalise British values, self-segregation, and so on, which had made local whites resentful, kept the communities divided and fostered distrust of the police.

Such claims only made sense as a malevolent twist a particularly toothless kind of liberal multicultural discourse according to which racism is not about hierarchies and oppression, but rather about different groups needing to tolerate one another, get along, respect one another's right to narrate, and so on.  The malevolent twist took the form of an insidious white nationalism in which British Asians were assumed to be essentially outsiders rather than citizens, and troublemaking outsiders at that.  Thus, the problem was that British Asians had failed to tolerate whites, to respect their diversity, and to acknowledge their right to narrate.  This was when New Labour and its allied intelligentsia adopted in fully the neo-Powellite idiom that was to become its disgrace note on questions of race, nationality and immigration.  The 'war on terror' merely accelerated the trend, and ushered in the spectacle of the melancholic 'white working class', marginalised and forgotten, undermined by a new multicultural 'underclass' filled with 'feral youths' and brooding would-be terrorists.

The fertile terrain of reaction
At the early stages, this class discourse was simply one element in a complex set of racial representations that centred on culture, and particularly on Islam as the folk devil menacing British values.  It helped create fertile territory for the far right.  The BNP was the first beneficiary, increasing its votes between 2000 and 2009 by over 1000%.  Often its successes derived from effectively manipulating the language already popularised by New Labour.  For example, when the government made it a priority to 'crack down' on asylum seekers, with a range of measures from voucher schemes to detention camps, the BNP leader Nick Griffin expressed his gratitude: "The asylum seeker issue has been great for us.  It legitimates us."  And: "If Blunkett deports one asylum seeker, we can deport all of them".  Likewise, it was Gordon Brown who legitimised the "British jobs for British workers" slogan by uttering it as Prime Minister to a Labour conference.

However, it seems likely that it was the credit crunch and ensuing recession that decisively shifted the focus of racist politics.  Islam was replaced by immigration as the most salient enemy.  Were it not for the economy still being rather parlous, polls suggest that immigration would have been the number one issue in the 2010 election.  This was when the discourse of the 'white working class' began to assume the prominence that it has today.  And just as the BNP began to collapse - the new post-crunch climate imposing challenges that the schismatic organisation failed to handle with aplomb - the EDL had arrived with its strategy of street violence.  Partly, this very spectacle was linked to a media strategy in which Tommy Robinson, evidently hamming up his educational handicap, moved in on the cultural space marked 'abandoned white working class'.  And when the EDL fell apart, it was not long before Britain First had half a million 'likes' on Facebook and was doing its bomber jacket and cloth cap routine.

Now UKIP is using the BNP's strategy in hollowed out Labour 'heartlands', talking up racialised local issues - to be precise, issues which local Labour elites have often assiduously racialised - and strongly suggesting that Labour has stopped caring about white working class people because it's too busy being politically correct and sucking up to immigrants and the EU.  And if UKIP were to fall apart, which seems incredibly unlikely, a new organisation would spring up in its place.

This is the meaning of 'fertile ground': however organisationally fractious the far right are, however much they are projecting influence insanely above their social weight, they are able to do so because the terrain has been produced over a long period.  What is more, because of the prolonged social and political crisis unleashed by the credit crunch, they have the initiative.  The dominant parties are locked in their own dynamics of stalemate and decline.  Any semblance of representative democracy is paralysed by the Westminster consensus on all essential matters.  The unions are too busy conserving whatever remains of the union premium to take the lead on anything.  And the left is shattered.  So what we get instead of a broad popular mobilisation is a kind of ersatz resistance led by a dissident tributary of the Tories; instead of class struggle, this bitterly melancholic politics of whiteness and class authenticity.

The 'white van' working class
So here we are.  The Labour leader is so utterly petrified of alienating this quasi-mythical figure, 'white van man', lest it turns out that he speaks for the whole 'white working class', that he fires a shadow cabinet member for even obliquely possibly offending them.

The government are so desperate to get in on this game that they have Michael Gove telling us that prejudice toward 'white van man' is as abhorrent as prejudice to an ethnic minority.  And Ed Miliband, absurdly, is probably kicking himself not to have thought of that line.

This is the UKIPisation of English politics.  It has been a long time in the making.

Labels: 'chav', blue labour, class, racism, white working class, whiteness

Mad dogs and Englishmen: Stuart Hall on 'Englishness' posted by Richard Seymour

My latest for Jacobin, should you be interested (of course you are):

Stuart Hall, prelate of British cultural studies, has intervened in the Labour Party’s current debates about ‘Englishness’.  He is brief, but nonetheless interesting: “I talked to Cruddas about this … I think I understand his preoccupations rather more than Maurice Glasman’s. In a constituency like Cruddas’s, where you’re fighting the far right, you have to think about those things [English identity, immigration]. But you have to be careful about how you recruit them. He came to talk to me about the New Left, which, of course, was interested in the popular language of the nation.  But I had the feeling he was raiding the past, out of context, in a way.  I do think Englishness is something we need to talk about, but it’s contested terrain that is structured powerfully against a contemporary radical appropriation.”

This is perhaps a more pointed intervention than the tone of guarded scepticism would lead one to believe...

Labels: 'british values', britishness, class, englishness, gramsci, labour party, labourism, nationalism, populism, racism, stuart hall

Marxism 2012 posted by Richard Seymour

Don't forget to come to Marxism 2012, starting tomorrow.  There is so much to discuss this year, so many arguments to have, so many people who are wrong about everything, and so much at stake.  Greece, austerity, the eurozone, Spain, the coalition, Syria, Egypt, Syriza, Gramsci, Lenin, Althusser, Chinese capitalism, Bolivarianism, the unions, the parties, the bosses, the state, revolution and imperialism.  Come.  My meeting, you should know, is this Friday at 11.45am, on 'Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism in the Liberal Tradition'.  I'll be your badchen for an hour or so, then sign books or talk politics if you want.

Labels: althusser, american anti-imperialism, capitalist state, class, egypt, feminism, gramsci, greece, imperialism, lenin, liberal imperialism, marx, marxism, marxism 2012, race, revolution, socialism, trade unions

Trayvon Martin and the history of lynching posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: capitalist state, class, kkk, lynching, racial formation, racism, terror, trayvon martin, united states, vigilantism, violence

We are all precarious: on the 'precariat' and its misuses posted by Richard Seymour

"In this article, I will argue that it is mistaken to treat the precariat as a class.  Attempts to make it into a class are theoretically incoherent, and the facts of precarious labour and social precarity are misunderstood if boxed into an ‘emerging class’ thesis.  This is important because class analyses underpin political strategies.  In the case of the concept’s chief populariser, Standing, the analysis is bound up with a particular set of political articulations and strategic orientations that are more ‘Big Society’ than ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’.  I will argue that precarity exerts effects right up the chain of class strata, throughout the working class and into sections of the middle class, especially the petty bourgeoisie.  The appellation ‘precariat’ thus works as a kind of populist interpellation, a claim I will explain in more detail in the conclusion.  This interpellation, this ‘naming’, operates on a real antagonism.  It is one that emerges between the ‘power bloc’ and the rest, particularly in the age of austerity.  The precarity built into financialized accumulation was always pushed downward as far as possible.  But it is affecting ever wider layers of people, such that only the capitalist class and a few sections of the middle class seem to be protected from it, their security purchased through our precarity.  We should embrace the concept of the 'precariat' in this sense, and use it to help found a new, radical majoritarian politics with a distinctly anticapitalist core."

Labels: class, class politics, labour, marxism, middle class, precariat, precarious labour, precarity, ruling class, socialist strategy, working class

Salaried bourgeois on "revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie" posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, bourgeoisie, class, class struggle, immaterial labour, imperialism, rent, ruling class, salaried bourgeoisie, strikes, working class, zizek

The case of the Nazi drinking game posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: antisemitism, chauvinism, class, fascism, gaza, imperialism, nationalism, nazism, palestine, racism, west bank

Cultural materialism and identity politics posted by Richard Seymour

  If it is possible to have a cultural materialism, of the kind fashioned by Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall, is it also possible to have a materialist politics of identity?  Is it even advisable to try?  To answer the first question is to think through the meaning of Marx’s concept of the social formation as a unity in difference; to answer the second is to explicate Lenin’s thinking in saying that the person who waits for the ‘pure’ revolution will never live to see it.

  In many respects, identity became an obsession in the UK over the last ten years.  Were it not for the global economic crisis, we would be dealing mainly with the fall-out from New Labour’s crass attempt to pioneer various formats of ‘Britishness’ – from the sleek, neoliberal cosmopolitanism of ‘cool Britannia’ to the socially conservative, defensive nationalism of the ‘war on terror’.  Within that garrisoned territory existed several sub-debates and struggles over Islam, immigration, gypsies and Travellers, ‘Englishness’ and the question of the Union, the north-south divide, and of course over whether the questions of LGBT and gender rights can ever be posed adequately within the framework of the nation (versus its ostensibly intolerant enemies).

  Precisely how the left should conduct its operations within such a topography has been the subject of controversy.  Much of the left is reproached with abandoning the ‘bread and butter’ of politics (jobs, welfare, housing) in favour of ‘identitarian’ concerns with Islamophobia, Gaza and so on.  This criticism may well accept the importance of anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics, but argue that the priority given to these ‘identity’ issues that is the problem, representing both a shift in emphasis and in the locus of operation: from the workplace to the campus, from bread and butter to bruschetta and olive oil.  Naturally, this trope is far from novel.  Its pedigree has origins in the perplexed reaction to the ‘new social movements’ – those struggles oriented toward environmentalism, LGBT and women’s liberation, anti-racism and so on – by a variety of people on the social democratic and revolutionary left.  Before exploring the consequences of this view, it’s worth saying that the argument is itself usually conducted within the very cultural and identitarian terrain that is seen as problematic.  One of the better known advocates of the general perspective I’m describing is Owen Jones.  (I better spare his blushes by explaining that I’m not attributing every particular of this view to him, merely the broad outlines.)  His book, Chavs, is among other things a cultural counterblast against an emerging reactionary common sense that vilifies working class people.  The ‘community politics’ that he sees the BNP exploiting, and argues that the Left should learn from, is formed by a politics of identity and a valorisation of the ‘local’.  So, although this general style of argument introduces a division on the left between those who orient toward culture, and those who orient toward class, and although it is prefaced by a certain ‘economistic’ materialism, it necessarily occupies a decidedly culturalist problematic.

  In response to the culturalisation of class, then, is it possible to counterpose a materialism of culture and identity?  The grounds for a materialist approach to culture were outlined in Hall et al’s (Gramscian-Althusserian) Resistance Through Rituals:

  “In modern societies, the most fundamental groups are the social classes, and the major cultural configurations will be, in a fundamental though often mediated way, ‘class cultures’. Relative to these cultural-class configurations, sub-cultures are sub-sets—smaller, more localised and differentiated structures, within one or other of the larger cultural networks. We must, first, see subcultures in terms of their relation to the wider class-cultural networks of which they form a distinctive part. When we examine this relationship between a sub-culture and the ‘culture’ of which it is a part, we call the latter the ‘parent’ culture. This must not be confused with the particular relationship between ‘youth’ and their ‘parents’, of which much will be said below. What we mean is that a sub-culture, though differing in important ways—in its ‘focal concerns’, its peculiar shapes and activities—from the culture from which it derives, will also share some things in common with that ‘parent’ culture. The bohemian sub-culture of the avant-garde which has arisen from time to time in the modern city, is both distinct from its ‘parent’ culture (the urban culture of the middle class intelligentsia) and yet also a part of it (sharing with it a modernising outlook, standards of education, a privileged position vis-a-vis productive labour, and so on). … Sub-cultures must exhibit a distinctive enough shape and structure to make them identifiably different from their ‘parent’ culture. They must be focussed around certain activities, values, certain uses of material artefacts, territorial spaces etc. which significantly differentiate them from the wider culture. But, since they are subsets, there must also be significant things which bind and articulate them with the ‘parent’ culture. The famous Kray twins, for example, belonged both to a highly differentiated ‘criminal sub-culture’ in East London and to the ‘normal’ life and culture of the East End working class (of which indeed, the ‘criminal sub-culture’ has always been a clearly identifiable part). The behaviour of the Krays in terms of the criminal fraternity marks the differentiating axis of that subculture: the relation of the Krays to their mother, family, home and local pub is the binding, the articulating axis.”  (pp 13-14)

  Firmly domiciled within class formations, culture forms and divides them along multiple planes and down as many hierarchical vertices.  Of course, it would be mistaken to see cultures as merely class-bound, either in their parent- or sub-cultural form.  The practices that comprise a culture or subculture are often available to and accessed by members of more than one class.  These practices, and the ‘maps of meaning’ that express the lived relationship of one class to its life situation may be appropriated and reconfigured by members of another for its own purposes, in what one might call ‘trench raiding’.  The military analogy is chosen to convey the fact that such raiding crosses a line of antagonism and struggle, not of mere difference.  This accounts for the resentment toward those crossing such lines – ‘hipsters’, for example.  A greater degree of complexity arises where lines of difference become antagonistic in oppressive situations.  Suppose you’re a white person who is considered to be ‘acting black’.  In most cases, this would be a deeply weird suggestion.  It is unworldly to think of a given set of cultural practices as being exclusively ‘black’.  But for racists, ‘blackness’ is a pathology passing through the vectors of music and popular culture to white youths, who are then said to have become ‘black’.  That is the basis for a certain folk racist explanation of the summer riots, memorably articulated by David Starkey.  At the same time, from a different perspective, such ‘acting’ can be seen as a form of racist parody and condescension, or a simple theft in a cultural war - albeit perhaps not without buying into a certain cultural essentialism and the attendant idea that culture is something that can be policed.  Whatever judgement we reach on those criticisms, however, what is important for the purposes of this argument is that we notice the line of antagonism and the ways in which this structures the processes of transmission and appropriation.

  Where does ‘identity’ fit into all this?  It is common to address the subject in the terms of particularism, in contrast to the universalisms that form the basis for rival political projects such as socialism and liberalism.  This would suggest that identity is bound to a specific culture or sub-culture, its political radius extending no wider than the boundaries of cultural form in which it is embedded.  Even more scandalously from a certain perspective, the notion of identity seems to be bound to the bourgeois individual, the self-sufficient, self-sustaining Cartesian subject.  Yet identity is a much more slippery concept than this would imply.  It is not distinguished only by its affirmation of the culturally, or politically proximate, but also by the process of identification which involves the perception of, for example, shared interests.  And interests are interesting things: they can be expansive, or narrow; inclusive, or aloof.  Identity politics is a ‘politics of location’, certainly.  But where one is situated in the social formation has consequences for how far one can see.  I seem to recall from somewhere that it was Angela Davis who urged readers to imagine the capitalist system as a pyramid, with heterosexual white male capitalists at the top, and black, gay women prisoners at the bottom.  Each struggle by those at the bottom would also lift those further up, such that the more subaltern one’s situation, the more potentially universal one’s interests are.  The marxist understanding of the working class as the ‘universal class’ hinges partially on this strategic insight.

  ‘Identity politics’ is usually treated as an unwelcome narrowing of horizons, a reduction of the political field to competing particularist fiefdoms – in a word, the identitarianisation of politics.  But it is also possible to arrive at the same subject from the opposite direction – the politicisation of identity.  The tendency of capitalism is to multiply the number of lines of antagonism.  And if certain identities are goaded into being, or take on a politicised edge, because the system is attacking people then it is clear that ‘identity politics’ is not a distraction, or an optional bonus.  The fact is that ‘identities’ have a material basis in the processes of capitalism.  And just because they are constructed (from that material basis) doesn’t mean that they are simply voluntary responses to the life situation they arise in, which can be modified or dropped at will.  Thus, it is not realistic to tell people – “you have the wrong identity; you should think of yourself as a worker instead”.  To speak of capitalism is to speak of a system of unity in difference, a complex unity structured by antagonism.  In any concrete capitalist formation, the forces that emerge to support oppositional and leftist struggles will usually be coming from some identity-position; and usually more than one identity-position, as the lines of antagonism intersect and the fields of politicisation overlap.  As Judith Butler argued in her essay, ‘Merely Cultural’, the Left can respond to this in two ways.  Either it can try to construct a unity which is based on the exclusions of what I might call, for convenience, a pre-1968 Left: a unity which suppresses or demotes gender, race, etc as being of secondary, derivative importance.  But this will not work: the genie will not go back in the bottle, and all such efforts would result in would be a divided and more defeasible Left.  Or it can try to construct a unity in difference, negotiating between identities, acknowledging them as starting points which give rise to certain forms of politicisation and which can potentially be the basis for accession to a universalist political project.

  Of course, the objection to this might be to remind me of what I only just said (or quoted) a few paragraphs ago: the fundamental division in any society is class (ie, not gender, not race, not religion, etc).  And if that is the dominant antagonism, then it must follow that class struggles have a strategic priority over other struggles.  It is morally satisfying, but stupid, to pretend that all identities – class, race, gender, religion, etc. – are equivalent.  This means that some must be ‘of secondary, derivative importance’.  But such an objection, were it offered, would be prestidigitation.  First of all, it inserts the essentialist approach that it seems to argue for in its precepts.  To say that a form of oppression is derivative of a more fundamental class antagonism is to fall back on that animating illusion, the ‘expressive totality’ in which all the phenomena of a social formation are collapsible into its essence.  Secondly, more importantly, we recognise explanatory hierarchies, and thus strategic hierarchies.  From the perspective of socialist organisation, some identities are pernicious; some are indifferent; and some possess valuable resources.  That’s a hierarchy.  But what is at issue, and what is being illegitimately conflated with the above, is the claim that the injustices of oppression are not ‘bread and butter’ as it were; ie somehow less ‘material’, or less ‘fundamental’ than class injustices.  Because they are seen as not partaking of the same processes of material life, as not contributing to the reproduction of productive relations, then their resolution can be seen as extraneous to class struggle, as desirable but ultimately not part of the material base in which real politics is conducted. 

  This is a tendency, to put it no more strongly than that, which we can see creep back into certain left (mainly social democratic) discourses.  It is one whose logic, which many of its advocates will resist due to their better nature, tends toward a racially and sexually ‘cleansed’ class struggle, in effect a narrow struggle of straight white men in the imperialist core over their living conditions – ie, not a class struggle in any recognisable sense. It would be a rather parochial form of identity politics.  Not only is this rebarbative on its own terms, but it’s actually useless to the people it would seem intended to help, the ‘white [straight, male] working class’.  In the concrete struggles arising against cuts in the UK today, quite often the starting point is some form of political identity that isn’t simply ‘socialist’ or ‘liberal’.  Those signifiers may designate a wider political-strategic divide that forms the terrain in which political identities work.  But quite often, people will join a protest “as a student”, “as a trade unionist”, “as a black woman”, “as the mother of a jailed rioter”, and so on.  Their political identities will reflect sectional interests, cultural formations, particular experiences of oppression, etc.  But these are, as I say, starting points.  And a creative, politically intelligent response to identity politics has to begin, to some extent, where the forces on our side begin. 

  A materialist politics of identity is one that recognises the corporeality of identities, their involvement in the metabolic interactions between humanity and its environment.  Acknowledging that they are part of a lived, material process yields the further acknowledgment of their durability but also of the versatile ways in which they can be operationalized.  It means treating identities as forces to be cooperated with, negotiated with, argued with, learned from, and ultimately (one hopes) fused into a universalist project, that being a revolutionary assault on capitalism.

Labels: class, class and race, class consciousness, class politics, class society, class struggle, culture, culture wars, identity, multiculturalism, multiculture, racism

Strategies for the anticapitalist transition posted by Richard Seymour

#Occupy is an interesting combination of a kind of protest, a direct action and an organizing forum from which further actions can be planned and launched.  The biggest of the 950 protests and occupations today has been in Puerta del Sol (which is absolutely packed), where one of the first such occupations was launched, explicitly taking inspiration from Tahrir Square.  Reports from many of these dozens and dozens of occupation sites today suggest that there are detailed tactical discussions going on, organised along painstakingly consensual lines.  (Dan Hind has written an elegant introduction to the model of the People's Assembly being deployed here.)  But just as consensus is about procedure not goal, so #occupy is a tactic, and not a strategy.  And the meaning of a tactic varies drastically depending on the strategy into which it's integrated.  The return of, if not an actual socialist offensive, mass antisystemic movements means that strategy is back on the agenda.  At the same time, the pursuit of more immediate agendas has allowed a modus vivendi to emerge among potentially competitive groups, but it has also meant that the strategic question tends to be suspended in practice.  So, before moving on to the rest of the Poulantzas stuff, I just wanted to sketch out a few observations on the relevance of strategic thought to this movement. 

For the sake of argument, I'll assume that this movement is basically aimed at transcending capitalism somehow.  I'm aware that this is not a realistic assumption. The immediate demands of the movement have been for plausible reforms, while the long-term goals of the occupations have yet to be resolved.  It's too early for that to have happened.  But it's not possible to speak of strategy without assuming shared goals, so I'm assuming a shared commitment to some form of anticapitalist transition.  Computing the possible scenarios for such a transition is not utopian thought, in the negative sense, but the most hard-headed labour of conceptualisation.   It involves descending carefully from the most abstract hypotheses, through a series of mediations, to the most concrete determinations.   At the most abstract level, this can include rigorous conceptual work on something as apparently esoteric as value theory.  We saw with the (sometimes heated) discussion of Poulantzas that defining 'non-productive' labour with reference to the extraction of surplus value, and then deciding whether it belongs to the working class, has potentially profound political-strategic consequences.  Negri's account of value and the concept of 'immeasurability' has a similar role in co-determining certain of his strategic orientations.

I say strategic thought is not utopian 'in the negative sense', because one of the authors best known for utopian thinking, William Morris, also put the same impulse to work in elaborating strategies for the transition to socialism.  (Here I'm cribbing the discussion from Perry Anderson's Arguments Within English Marxism).  Morris' work preceded the long strategic divide between revolutionaries and reformists, but the problems he addressed himself to were exactly those that would cause the divide, and he had sufficient foresight to see it coming.  For the sake of brevity, I'll say that he generally (not without complexity) took the side of revolution in this debate.  He argued that the structural unity of the capitalist order was such that it could not be gradually reformed out of existence.  The parliamentary system, he suggested, could potentially be used by revolutionaries but would usually be of greater use in sustaining the 'fraud' of the rulers and securing the acquiescence of the ruled.  And he argued that the capitalist state would have to be opposed by a counter-power, a commune, a Committee of Public Safety representing the combined power of the working class, forming a rising new pole of legitimate authority that can "be sure that its decrees will be obeyed" rather than those of Westminster.  He thought it would be a violent process, largely because of the insurmountable opposition of the capitalist state.   And he foresaw one of the most important conditions for revolution: the decomposition of the state in a situation of dual power, as sections of the army break away and support the revolutionary government.

I'll leave the thumbnail sketch of his views there, and just draw your attention to what I think anyone could learn from this.  For what is at stake in Morris' exposition is a detailed, insightful analysis of the nature of the problem - class society, the capitalist mode of production, capitalist class power, state power, ideology, and their intersection - as well as of the possible agents of opposition (the working class and its allies), the potential forms of power that they might have (the commune, the Labour Combination, the Committee of Public Safety) and the difficulties they could face (ideological illusions, poor leadership, a greatly superior opponent, etc).  And while Morris doesn't himself subject each plank of his thinking to exacting critical enquiry, nor press his analyses to the most abstract points - it's a piece of futurology, not sociology - those organising for the anticapitalist transition would necessarily have to develop a rigorous body of analysis along those lines.  That's what the project of historical materialism, and the profusion of strategic concepts such as 'hegemony', the 'united front', and so on, is essentially about.

So, we have a movement that is undertaking a great challenge, that of creating a viable movement to create a viable, systemic alternative to capitalism.  It is not committed to a single route to that end.  This is no disadvantage in itself for the time being - it is only disadvantageous if the question of strategy is neglected when it needs to be debated.  But the methods of organising being settled on, the assemblages of agents organised around them, and the manner of their inclusion, do bear a strategic freight.  Implicitly, for example, the decision to occupy a public space and 'reclaim' it is an attempt to create a form of direct democracy that recognises the undemocratic nature of the capitalist state.  Or, again implicitly, the fact that these germinal communes are being created in squares and not in workplaces indicates that, whether or not class is recognised as a central antagonism behind this struggle, productive relations do not form a direct strategic locus for the organisers  There are a number of similarly implicit strategic arguments one could draw out from this movement and its tactics thus far.  But the point is that it remains implicit as yet.  The issues will become more explicit as the agenda of the movement advances, its problems become more complex, and the conditions of viable unity are more and more urgently on the agenda.

Labels: anticapitalism, capitalism, class, class struggle, socialist strategy, strategy

Poulantzas and socialist strategy - part I posted by Richard Seymour

Nicos Poulantzas' detailed and sometimes difficult writings on fascism, dictatorship, the state, capitalism and social classes, were all written with the goal of elaborating strategic concepts to assist the advance toward socialism.  This series of posts deals with some aspects of Poulantzas' thinking on political strategy (the whole corpus is obviously far too rich and varied for me to anatomise here), beginning with a look at his ideas on class and class alliances.  The idea is not simply to see what, if anything, we can find useful in his strategic conclusions today.  It isn't even to decide whether we should agree or disagree with his ideas (Poulantzas' relationship to Eurocommunism will come up consistently, particularly in the final post in this series).  It is mainly to look at the method, the steps involved in the development of his strategic concepts.  It is to see what complex strategic thinking looks like.  If nothing else, in a period when strategic thought on the Left is recovering from a long quietus (see the late Daniel Bensaid's wonderful essay here), the theoretical depth and novelty of Poulantzas' arguments would make him an important contributor to the emerging debates.

I should make it clear that Poulantzas' views evolved and altered in ways I can't properly summarise.  Suffice to say that there is an important shift between an early historicist phase, which I won't go into, a structuralist phase, evident in books such as Political Power and Social Classes and Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, and a later phase where he gradually abandoned some of his Althusserian commitments, which can  be seen in Fascism and Dictatorship and his final book, State, Power, Socialism.  (Althusser's maligned influence deserves some recuperation - fortunately, Gregory Elliot's superb revision of his legacy has been reprinted recently).  I should also say upfront that many of the criticisms that follow are 'immanent', taking Poulantzas' marxist framework for granted and faulting him for not following his precepts through to their logical conclusion.  This isn't to attack Poulantzas for departing from revealed wisdom in "some holy text" as he might have put it, but simply to judge his writing by standards he himself adopts.


Part I: Classes, the 'new petty bourgeoisie' and class alliances
According to Poulantzas, socialist strategy is weakened by a failure to properly grasp changes in the class structure of contemporary capitalism: "it was on this question, among others, that, as we now know, the socialist development in Chile came to grief."  The major development that warranted attention was the growth of "nonproductive wage-earners, i.e. groups such as commercial and bank employees, office and service workers, etc., in short all those who are commonly referred to as 'white-collar' or 'tertiary sector' workers".  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 193)   There was a tendency at the time to assess this in terms of the 'embourgeoisement' of the working class and thus the dissolution of hard class boundaries.  Others, like the French Communist Party (PCF) to which Poulantzas adhered, theorised this group as an 'intermediate stratum' within a series of strata that exist independently of either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie.

Poulantzas holds that it isn't sufficient to describe this layer as a strata: the "class specificity" of this group had to be grasped.  It could not just be subsumed into the wider categories of bourgeois and proletarian either, because the effect of this was to dissolve both categories by compelling theorists to introduce new theoretical determinations that weakened their explanatory power.  Theorising them as simply part of the extant middle class tended toward the same conclusion, since such accounts regarded the middle class as a "stew in which classes are mixed together and their antagonisms dissolved, chiefly by forming a site for the circulation of individuals in a constant process of 'mobility' between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat."  The result was that classes simply ceased to exist as classes.  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 194-9)


The starting point for his own analysis was the structuralist framework that he took over from Louis Althusser.  Thus, he explained that the concept of class refers to "the overall effects of the structure on the field of social relations and on the social division of labour".  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, p. 199)  This structure comprises several distinct regions: "everything happens as if social classes were the result of an ensemble of structures and of their relations, firstly at the economic level, secondly at the political level, and thirdly at the ideological level".  (Political Power and Social Classes, NLB, 1975, p. 63)  This draws from Althusser, who holds that the capitalist mode of production comprises an articulation of distinct economic, political and ideological levels.  Classes must be determined by all three levels - at least, so the early Poulantzas claims.  Importantly, however, the economic level bears the strongest freight of determination here.  It is in the structures of 'economic exploitation' (the appropriation of surplus value by the bourgeoisie), 'economic ownership' (the power of the bourgeoisie to dispose of economic resources for various uses), and 'economic possession' (the power of the bourgeoisie to organise and determine labour processes), that class is determined first and foremost.

Poulantzas draws an important distinction between class determination and class position.  The former is an objective determination: the working class is such due to its situation within the matrix of the capitalist mode of production.  The latter is relational and partly subjective.  A class can adopt a position that converges with that of another class, without altering its objective class determination.  For example, a section of the working class (Poulantzas cites the fabled 'labour aristocracy') may take a position identifying with the bourgeoisie, but "the adoption of bourgeois class positions by a certain stratum of the working class" would not "eliminates its class determination".  Class position has some bearing on class determination, however.  Classes are "reproduced according to the reproduction of the places of social classes in the class struggle".  This, of course, leaves open the possibility that the class struggle will fail to reproduce the places of social classes, or will radically disrupt their efficient reproduction.  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 201-3)


Poulantzas chooses to define non-productive wage earners as the "new petty bourgeoisie", asserting that "they belong together with the traditional petty bourgeoisie".  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, p. 204)  Defining the petty bourgeoisie correctly, he argues, is "the focal point of the Marxist theory of social classes" because it shows that "relations of production alone are not sufficient, in Marxist theory, to determine the place a social class occupies in a mode of production ... It is absolutely indispensable to refer to ideological and political relations".  (Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism, NLB, 1974, p. 237) So, it's clear that in identifying a "new petty bourgeoisie", he is making both a strategic political intervention which will have profound consequences for the elaboration of class alliances and hegemonic manouevering, and a theoretical intervention in the sociology of classes.

But on what basis does he identify this "new petty bourgeoisie" as a class apart from the working class and akin to the "traditional petty bourgeoisie"?  Poulantzas asserts that the layers that Marxists have traditionally identified as petty bourgeois - small property owners who do not exploit wage labour, or only very occasionally - are actually transitional elements proper to pre-capitalist modes of production: this is why Marx expected them to be subsumed over the long-term into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  (This has in fact been an observable trend.)  Yet, the "new petty bourgeoisie" identified by Poulantzas seems to be very different - it is not a mass of small producers, but wage earners who do white collar work, mental labour, but do not contribute directly to the production of surplus value. Despite the fact that they are waged, Poulantzas says that their non-productive status excludes them from the working class.  To explain this position, he cites Marx to the effect that the distinction between productive and unproductive labour is "not derived from the material characteristics of labour ... but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised."  Thus, "productive labour in a given mode of production is labour that gives rise to the dominant relation of exploitation of this mode ... productive labour is that which directly produces surplus-value, which valorizes capital and is exchanged against capital"  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, p. 211)  Thus, those who perform non-productive labour do not produce surplus value and are thus not central to the reproduction of the dominant relation of exploitation under capitalism.  This, for Poulantzas, excludes them from the working class.


Having said all this, their exclusion from the working class (and from the bourgeoisie) leaves them in a middling position.  It doesn't automatically mean they are part of the petty bougeoisie and, as noted, they are very different from traditional petty bourgeois in terms of productive relations. The unity of traditional and new petty bourgeois layers is secured, Poulantzas argues, within the political and ideological regions where they have similar effects.  That is to say, in the polarised situation created by the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, they occupy an intermediate position.  Their 'negative' definition, arising from their exclusion from the two' fundamental' classes, means that they are not a 'fundamental' class, have no long-term interests in this struggle, and will tend to vacillate as a consequence.  They will also converge on certain basic ideological positions: their hatred of the rich combined with fear of proletarianisation will tend to lead them to "status quo anticapitalism" where they embrace property but oppose monopolies in favour of more opportunity and competition; this segues into the second position which is an aspirational faith in "the myth of the 'ladder'" of opportunity; the third is an unwavering belief in the class-neutral position of the state, "statolatry".  Because of their shared political and ideological positions, then, they comprise a single class.   (Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism, NLB, 1974, pp. 237-44; Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 206-12; Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 169-70)

Critics of Poulantzas' class analysis point out that it involves a break with Marx's own method.  The whole conception is built on what appears to be a non-sequitur: that is, an illegitimate extrapolation from certain arguments in Marx.  It is not clear, even from Poulantzas' selected quotes, that Marx excluded 'non-productive' labour from the working class.  Indeed, there are several passages that suggest that the division between mental and manual labour that Poulantzas focuses on is not central to Marx's definition of class.   Poulantzas' analysis of the new petty bourgeoisie attributes to politics and ideology, more than one's objective situation within the productive matrix, a determining role in one's class position.  Not only is this incompatible with Marx, it also contradicts Poulantzas' own statements to the effect that there is an objective class situation that is more important in defining classes than their orientation in any "concrete conjuncture of struggle".  (Quoted, Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, p. 164).  Even within a recidivist structuralism, Poulantzas' argument seems odd.  Recall that in his early work he did insist on the idea that class should be determined at all three levels of the mode of production, but insisted that the economic level had the primary determining role; here, he not only puts the primary determining role at the level of ideology, but he denies any but an indirect economic input.

Lastly, some absurd conclusions appear to follow from Poulantzas' narrow definition of the working class: for example, assuming that the working class only includes those engaged in direct productive or extractive industries, some 70% of the US workforce would be petty bourgeois, and only 20% working class.  (see Alex Callinicos, 'The "New Middle Class" and socialist politics', in Chris Harman and Alex Callinicos, The Changing Working Class: Essays on class structure today, Bookmarks, 1987, p. 19)  Nonetheless, the strategic conclusions that follow from Poulantzas' class analyses are clear.  Poulantzas took from Gramsci the idea that hegemonic struggle was the normal form of political class struggle in a capitalist society.  He argued that the working class needed to build hegemonic alliances similar to those built by the bourgeoisie.  But if the working class does not form a clear majority, then it is arguably in need of a particular kind of hegemonic cross-class alliance: the Popular Front. Thus, for Poulantzas, the need to win over the petty bourgeoisie was central to the anti-monopoly, anti-imperialist alliances behind Union de la Gauche in France, as well as the possibility of the anti-dictatorship alliance in Greece turning into an anti-imperialist and anti-monopoly alliance.  (Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, p. 149)  Given the outline of the petty bourgeoisie's political and ideological dispositions that he has given, this will tend to require the dilution of any agenda for socialist transformation.  Poulantzas was operating on the left-most end of Eurocommunism, and did not go as far down the road of eschewing class politics and anti-imperialism as some did.  Yet, concessions to the economic policies and political tactics of fractions of the bourgeoisie (the 'interior' or 'domestic' bourgeoisie, which may or may not exist), as well as to the purviews of the petty bourgeoisie, were essential to his strategic perspective.


Before leaving the subject of class, it's worth stating that one of Poulantzas' most telling insights concerns the way in which 'class interests' should be understood.  Here, he rejects the idea the idea that such interests can be determined from the relations of production themselves.  The historicist (Hegelian) problematic sees class as a subject of history, with interests that can be inferred from its role as a factor in historical transformation.  This raises the problem of how a class becomes aware of those interests and moves from being a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself.  It also raises the deeply problematic notion of "false consciousness", to explain how a class fails to grasp its own interests.  Instead, Poulantzas argues that 'class interests' are not computable outside the field of 'class practises' in a given conjuncture.  That is to say, at any moment in the development of the class struggle there will be a series of 'objective' and 'subjective' factors which limit the working class's possible range of actions.  These form a 'horizon of action', defining the maximum possible advances against opposing classes at any given moment.  One of the determinants of this horizon is the form of political representation that the class has, which means that the 'interests' of a class in a given moment are susceptible to modification by political intervention, even if the objective circumstances have not changed.  (Political Power and Social Classes, NLB, 1975, pp. ; Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 153-4)  As Jessop points out, this puts the emphasis on "strategic calculation" rather than objective, given facts.  It also has certain political consequences, inasmuch as it avoids the potential elitism of parties or their intellectual cadres presuming to be the bearers of an objective, historically given truth. 

The ensuing posts deal with Poulantzas' ground-breaking work on the state, his arguments on the power bloc, and finally his orientation toward Eurocommunism.

Labels: class, eurocommunists, middle class, poulantzas, ruling class, socialism, socialist strategy, working class

Cameron's immigration spiel posted by Richard Seymour

Me in The Guardian on Cameron's latest immigration spiel:

The increasing frequency with which Cameron is turning to immigration as a rallying theme is arresting. He needs it to inject excitement into a dysphoric party faithful and revive the flagging ideological props of the administration. He sidelined the anti-immigrant xenophobes before 2009. Now his speeches are increasingly littered with demagoguery – anecdotes about forced marriage being used to evade immigration controls being an example of note-perfect Powellism – and pander to the chauvinist sentiment once characterised by Christopher Hitchens as "John Bullshit".

Cameron may grow more attached to such rhetoric as the ideological self-confidence of the government evaporates, and as it becomes more embattled by adverse economic and political conditions. But the danger for him in doing so is that he isn't very good at it. His "toughness" looks ersatz because it is; his promises seem phoney because they are; he is unconvincing because he is unconvinced by his own rhetoric. There are others on the right who know better how to play with this fire, and Cameron is arguably giving them the ammunition with which to depose him when the time comes.

Labels: 'integration', chauvinism, class, immigration, john bullshit, racism, the meaning of david cameron, tories

Liberals and reactionaries posted by Richard Seymour

Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (Verso, 2011), and Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford University Press, 2011)

I was speaking alongside Domenico Losurdo and Robin Blackburn at a launch event for the former's book at King's College some while ago. Losurdos' latest, Liberalism: A Counter-History, is an investigation into the limits and exclusions of liberalism. A salient point, which marks the beginning of one of his inquiries, is the fact that the three bourgeois revolutions conducted in the name of liberty and equality, were followed by a staggering increase in the global slave trade.

Three interesting problems arose in this discussion. The first is that it is a mainstay of marxist accounts of liberalism, and certainly central to C B Macpherson's analysis, that the core of it is property rights. This is not Losurdo's position, exactly. When a questioner from the floor asked about this question of property rights, he argued that what defined liberalism was not property, but the logic of exclusion. He mentioned the example of Palestinians who were expropriated at every opportunity by Israelis in the name of certain liberal values. And indeed the tension in Losurdo's narrative centres on how far liberalism can be made to expand on its revolutionary promise.

I still think that property is central here. For a start, the expropriation of the Palestinians doesn't disturb the principle of property rights. Property rights have always been structured in such a way as to allow white Europeans to expropriate non-white non-Europeans, from Locke to Vattel onward. After Katrina, the property rights of working class Americans, especially African Americans, were cancelled by fiat - but this didn't disturb the basic politico-legal order of property rights. In fact, I would bet on the idea that the state authorities and companies who carried out this expropriation worked very hard on devising a legal justification for this theft. Moreover, it is the nature of capitalist property relations, to which liberalism is committed, that builds exclusions into liberalism. The second difficulty concerned the distinction that Losurdo wished to draw between radicals and liberals, which is not always a stable boundary - for example, William Lloyd Garrison took liberalism to its most radical conclusions in opposition to racial slavery, the colonization of Indian land, and the oppression of women, but he by no means departed from liberalism (indeed, he refused the term 'wage slavery', supported capitalist 'free labour' and tended to be suspicious of unionism).

The third, related issue arose over the question of what, or who, counts as a liberal. Losurdo argues the case in his opening chapter for seeing the pro-slavery statesman John Calhoun as a liberal. Robin Blackburn disputed this, arguing that it involved far too expansive a definition of liberalism - Calhoun, he said, is a conservative.  Blackburn's concern was that Losurdo was risking a sectarian position, failing to acknowledge and that this wasn't resolved by cordoning off some liberals as 'radicals'.  Jennifer Pitts' recent review in the TLS takes this criticism much further, and in a much more hostile direction.  What I would say is that, taken as a whole, Losurdo's book is more appreciative of liberalism's merits than might appear to be the case from some of the tendentious readings - which, in a counter-history, has some validity.  His conclusions are not indiscriminately hostile.

Part of the problem here is that conservatism in its modern sense takes its cue from liberalism. Burke drew from Smith, almost all US conservatives draw from Locke, and modern conservatives are almost all influenced by classical liberalism. So, if Calhoun himself based his arguments on liberal precepts, which he certainly did, does this mean he is a liberal? There is also a deeper theoretical issue when discussing people like Calhoun. Antebellum slavery, some would argue, was a non-capitalist formation. That's a core part of Charles Post's argument in The American Road to Capitalism, written from a 'political marxist' perspective: that the US before the civil war was based on a combination of different modes of production - slavery, petty commodity production, mercantile capital, etc. The interaction between these different productive forms drove the expansionism of both north and south, eventually leading to Civil War.  (Some of these arguments were debated on a recent Facebook thread and recorded by Louis Proyect). John Ashworth's classic two-volume marxist history, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, makes the argument that southern political thought was largely pre-capitalist, drawing on classical republican ideologies because they happened to be conducive to the preservation of slave relations. Indeed, he maintains, the Democratic Party when it first emerged was anticapitalist - 'Jacksonian Democracy', based centrally on the valorisation of the white, freeholding farmer, could challenge the power of the banks and commerce in the name of agrarian interests while also being profoundly opposed to strong state intervention in the economy. So, was John Calhoun a liberal, because of his strong individualism and hostility to the over-concentration of central authority, or did liberalism merely provide part of the vocabulary for the defence of conservative interests?

This vexed question, of the relationship between liberalism and conservatism, receives a sustained treatment in Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind.  I have written a review of this for future publication, so I will make no detailed attempt to summarise its arguments here.  Suffice to say that, for the purposes of this discussion, there is no doubt for Robin that Calhoun is a conservative.  But what does being a conservative entail, then?  The image of conservatism as anti-modern, traditionalist, evincing a preference for the familiar and for gradual evolution, is one that he, like Ted Honderich, C B Macpherson and others before him, disputes.  The original conservatives - Hobbes, Burke, Maistre - are contemptuous of tradition, largely because of its inability to meet the challenge of revolution.  What they are conserving is not a traditional order (as mentioned, Burke was already a free market capitalist), but hierarchy, dominance, unfreedom: they are reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries.  To be effective counter-revolutionaries, conservatives must incorporate the ideas and tactics of the enemy.  They must speak in the language of the people, "make privilege popular", "transform a tottering old regime into a dynamic, ideologically coherent movement of the masses". 

Conservatism is thus not distinguished by its ideas which, with the enormous exception of race, it largely borrows from elsewhere, nor by its tactics, but by its praxis.  It would follow that it is not Calhoun's republican, pre-capitalist 'states rights' ideology that makes him a conservative, any more than his defence of private property makes him a liberal.  It is his attempt to arouse the South in response to the abolitionist danger, his attempt to conserve hierarchy against mass democracy, that makes him a conservative.  Liberals, you may say, have also been known to defend hierarchy and racial supremacy.  This is true, but liberalism does not pivot on the defence of hierarchies and domination; that is precisely why it devises 'exclusion clauses'.  Indeed, it is because of liberalism's much vaunted commitment to humanitarian and egalitarian values that 'the liberal defence of murder' is a hypocritical ideology, riven with tensions that aren't usually present in the rightist equivalent.

Labels: capitalism, class, conservatism, counter-revolution, liberal imperialism, liberals, racism, reactionaries, reactionary subjectivity, the liberal defence of murder