Left Socialist Blog
Italy, ‘Orange Vests’, “Pandemic Never Existed’.
Cast your mind back.
October 2018.
The Gilets Jaunes were a mass protest movement in France, initially demanding cheap petrol, relaxation of speed limits and low taxes they expanded into a large direct action in which serious acts of violence, by protesters, and police, took place. They developed into a larger movement in which some far-right and radical left voices were heard This is, in this Blog’s view, a fair instant summary of their ideology:
An opinion poll published by the Elabe Institute showed that in the presidential election in May 2017, 36% of the participants voted for far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and 28% for far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon in the 2017 presidential elections. Five Le Monde journalists studied the yellow vests’ forty-two directives[39] and concluded that two thirds were “very close” to the position of the “radical left” (Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Philippe Poutou and Nathalie Arthaud), nearly a half were “compatible with” the position of the “far right” (Nicolas Dupont-Aignan and Marine Le Pen), and that all were “very far removed” from economically “liberal” policies (Emmanuel Macron and François Fillon)
Some people on the British left admired the revolt against Macron. Some tried to imitate the activism of the ‘Yellow Vests. An attempt to do so, by the groupuscule that runs the People’s Assembly, Counterfire, collapsed faced with the presence of far-right Pro-Brexit supporters clad in identical colour vests (perhaps not such a coincidence….).
We have not heard a lot about the Gilets Jaunes in recent months, although they launched a ;protest as lockdown began in France.
A couple of days ago the Gilets Jaunes most fervent UK admirers, the Red-Brown Front Spiked, carried this bleat, by Fraser Myers, .
Where was the outrage when police were maiming protesters in France?
While the rioting in the US is tacitly condoned and understood as a righteous expression of anger, the yellow vests’ populist uprising was looked at with horror. The sad truth is that even when the gilets jaunes were being maimed and brutalised, they did not elicit much sympathy among the political class on these shores.
Spiked, which has recently expressed support for the far-right Vox party’s demonstrations against Cornavirus restrictions in Spain (Spain is in revolt against the lockdown. This dissent is welcome., now has an opportunity to shine anew.
CNBC reports,
Remember the “yellow vests” movement that brought France to a standstill in late 2018? Now, Italy is seeing its own grassroots, anti-government, populist movement: The “Orange Vests” or “Gilet Arancioni.”
Hundreds of protesters wearing orange vests or jackets gathered in Rome on Tuesday, chanting “Liberta’!” (“Liberty!”) to protest the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis and calling for it to resign.
Described as a “rightist-libertarian” and “turbo populist” movement by the Italian media and modeling themselves on the yellow-vested anti-government movement seen in France, the leader of the “Orange Vests,” former Carabinieri General Antonio Pappalardo, has said that the coronavirus pandemic did not exist.
The story refers to its source in La Repubblica – Il 2 Giugno dei Gilet arancioni, folla in piazza del Popolo e insulti a Mattarella – and continues,
The pandemic does not exist, it’s total bulls–t,” Pappalardo told a rally in Bari on Sunday, Italian news agency ANSA reported. “The coronavirus is not lethal, it only kills the already sick over 80s. Enough with the lies and falsehoods, you have terrified the Italian people,” he reportedly said.
Similar demonstrations were seen in Milan and small rallies in other regional capitals at the weekend. Speaking to a crowd of orange-vested supporters on Tuesday in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo — many of whom were defying a government order to maintain social distancing and to wear masks in busy public spaces — Pappalardo made similar claims, alluding to a high-profile doctor who said at the weekend that the virus “no longer exists clinically.”
“Now virologists also say that this coronavirus is nonsense,” Pappalardo told the crowd as he argued against the use of masks. In addition, Pappalardo called for Italy to return to using its former currency, the lira.
The comparison with the Gilets Jaunes is widespread.
The left wing daily Il Manifesto leads with the straightforward line that they are conspirationalists, conspis.
. Hundreds of people, many without masks, against the “government of terror” that “invented the Coronavirus”
The crowd was varied, although tattoos and shaved heads predominate. Manyare animal rights activists (especially women), and anti-vaxination campaigners. (shouts of) “Freedom and sovereignty”, “God honour and country”,
Italian Wired has denounced this demonstration of neo-fascist and ‘Orange vests” as an affront to the victims of the pandemic,
In the homeland of the Gilets Jaunes the story has reached News 24.
They describe them as “right-wing libertarian” and “turbo-populist” (an endearing expression, and not a dynamic one, it’s as if they are some kind of wonky petrol driven machine, spraying out noxious gases):
Décrit comme un mouvement “de droite-libertaire” et “turbo-populiste” par les médias italiens et s’inspirant du mouvement anti-gouvernement à gilets jaunes vu en France, le chef des “gilets orange”, l’ancien général des Carabiniers Antonio Pappalardo, a a déclaré que la pandémie de coronavirus n’existait pas.
One thing is clear, they are very keen on sovereignty.
RT, as ever reliable, is enthusiastic:
These protests have a lot in common with the German and other fringe movements against restrictions imposed to contain the pandemic.
And of course, the ideology of Spiked…
The Shower that helped Boris Johnson into Power.
Back in the happy days of January the Morning Star carried this story,
Brexit victory is opportunity to end neoliberalism, Lexiteers say.
Trade Unionists Against the EU chairman Doug Nicholls called Brexit the “starting gun to reshape our future” and a “seminal point in the history of Britain.”
He said: “January 31 is a seminal moment for trade unions and the TUC as well.
“It resets the movement to its default position: fighting for the interest of workers not in Brussels, but on the shop floor.”
Communist Party of Britain general secretary Robert Griffiths said Brexit would offer the opportunity to challenge neoliberalism and to rescue key industries.
On the 31st of that month, Brexit Day, Leave, Fight, Transform, a Communist Party of Britain, plus satellites and allies, declared,
Now Fight for Socialist Transformation
The fact that Britain is at last leaving the EU on 31 January 2020 some three and a half years since we voted to do so, is a victory for popular democracy and the real People’s vote over Britain’s political establishment and the corporate-sponsored Remain campaign.
Now we are leaving the EU, the real political struggle begins:
- To end austerity policies (mandatory for member states under the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact)
- For investment in manufacturing jobs and public services (severely restricted under EU State Aid rules)
- To bring our railways and utilities back into public ownership (which EU Single market rules were designed to prevent)
Come February and the prospect of Brexit remained sunny for the “daily of the left”.
Workers must seize this new sovereignty
DOUG NICHOLLS argues that the working class as a whole ensured the country can govern itself again thanks to Brexit – but it must now start setting the agenda
NIcholls was a leading member of Trade Unionists Against the EU.
Alas, not much has been seen of this body, once promoted by the Socialist Party, and the recipient of Arron Banks’ donations.
Many stalwarts of the Red-Brown Front of the Full Brexit have moved to other pastures.
Britain’s leading Campaigner against “rootless cosmopolitans”, another leader of Trade Unionists Against the EU haa other issues on his mind,
Leave, Fight, Transform has, in the absence of much else to say on the democratic victory they are no doubt still celebrating, taken to re-tweeting.
This is a one of their (sparse) re-tweets,
The fact is that this crowd, having encouraged support for Brexit, played a role in legitimising the Tory call to ‘get Brexit Done’, and there are grounds to consider that at least some of those influenced by them voted for Johnson. The French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, which its own dodgy sovereigntist/populist line on Brexit, carried this in March 2020, “« Je suis travailliste, j’ai voté conservateur ».Dans un article publié sur le site The Full Brexit, le comédien Chris McGlade…
This week, Brexit has returned as an issue.
Boris Johnson’s Brexit nightmare is back at the worst possible moment
CNN.
June 2020 is set to be one of the most important months in Boris Johnson’s somewhat tumultuous first year as Prime Minister.
Mired in a scandal surrounding his chief adviser Dominic Cummings and facing difficult questions about the UK having the highest coronavirus death toll in Europe, Johnson’s next month is going to be critical if he is to recapture the authority he had at the start of 2020.June is also a make or break month in the UK’s post-Brexit negotiations with the European Union. Johnson, the architect of Brexit, has made such firm commitments to not extend the transition period that he simply cannot afford any capitulation — especially with his mounting domestic issues. Weakness is not an option.
This is the crucial point,
Johnson must now spend June with one eye on complicated and fraught negotiations with the largest trading bloc in the world, while also overseeing the response to the country’s worst public health crisis in decades.
…
So if Boris Johnson is serious about wanting to avoid no deal, the combination of the talks being frozen, both sides being distracted by a pandemic and this pressing June deadline makes for a hellish start to the summer.
The British government looks as if it is prepared to hitch itself to the gibbering Bible Thumping President of the USA, ‘Mr Brexit’ rather than negotiate.
To further this aim they plan to steamroller Parliament to accept their diktat.
So much for the ‘sovereignty’ the Brexit left promoted:
Will we hear the bleats of the Brexit Bolsheviks and their red-brown allies at this response?
Sadiq Khan breaks Labour ranks to call for Brexit transition extension after coronavirus disruption
Mayor of London calls for delay beyond the end of the year so businesses and public services will not have to face ‘another cliff edge in six months’ time’
Left internationalists should back Khan’s demand.
There is of course this entirely manufactured “poll”of Brexit supporters to consider:
Radical Left Rejects Trumps Wild Claims.
There are claims that the “radical left” is behind the unrest in the USA.
This has been the headline grabbing announcement.
The claims have got stronger as the day dawns.
They’ve already got around the world.
The New York Times reports just now,
Amid a rush to assign blame for violence and vandalism, accusations that extremists or outside agitators were behind the destruction ricocheted online and on the airwaves.
But,
“..few of those pointing the finger at extremists presented much detailed evidence to support the accusations, and some officials conceded the lack of solid information.”
The NYT continues in this sceptical vein.
The point is best made here:
Spencer Sunshine is a highly respected activist and writer on the far right, with direct experience in the United States of confronting the alt-right, in its various radical forms.
Last year he wrote, after an earlier manufactured panic, the following article,
The United States is having its third wave of “Antifa panic” in as many years. Donald Trump’s 27 July tweet called for Antifa—short for antifascist activists—to be declared “a major Organization of Terror”.
Antifa is not an organisation at all, but a decentralised, leaderless movement that opposes fascism and the far-right. Although most of its work is legal and non-violent, the movement is best known for occasional street fights with extremists.
Recently in the US, Antifa has become a bogeyman among conservatives, like 1950s anti-Communism.
Numerous conspiracy theories have moved into the conservative mainstream and today Trump repeats propaganda that, until recently, could be only heard among neo-Nazis.
Spencer made this point, which is about as farseeing as you could possibly get:
These conspiracy theories include claims that Antifa was going to start a civil war; caused a train derailment; desecrate graves, and inspired a mass shooter.
Antifa panic points out the European origins of the movement, outlines the development of the far-right, from the French nouvelle droite, identitarianism, and the way the groups were inspired by the German militant activists began by forming “crews” (as in the English expression) to fight Nazis at punk rock gigs in the 1980s.
In this millennium.
The new wave of Antifa was catalysed by a 20 January 2017 protest at Trump’s inaugural rally in Washington, DC.
Here, the traditional left-wing inauguration protest included a black bloc—a normal occurrence, comparable to European May Day rallies. But the black bloc was branded as “Antifa.”
Nearby, Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer was punched on camera, and the video went viral.
During this time, the Alt-Right turned from an internet phenomenon to a force capable of large street mobilisations. A series of clashes between far-right and radical left protestors kicked off around the country.
This continued through August 2017, when a fascist-led rally in Charlottesville, Virginia ended with a car attack on an Antifa march.
Antifa’s reputation has bounced up and down in the press. Praise after the inauguration protest was followed by disparagement, and post-Charlottesville adoration was followed by condemnation.
The current wave is the third round of mainstream attacks on Antifa.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the piece is the distinction between antifa and the Black Bloc.
This is important and illustrates the deliberate confusion between the two manufactured by Trump and his allies.
Yesterday this Blog posted on the strategies of the groups inspired by Lundi Matin, and their celebration of the violent “casseurs” during Gilets Jaunes marches. We suggested that some ‘autonomists may see in US violent protests, even pillaging, parallel revolutionary efforts.
It is equally the case that French anti-fascists, many of whom were amongst the first to point to the dubious tolerance by the Gilets Jaunes of far rightists and the equally tolerant stand of some of the present day followers of L’insurrection qui vient and conspiracy-mongering red-browners , make the same distinction.
Anifa is about being against the far right, not indulging in violent dreams of creating autonomous spaces that prefigure a revolution.
Antifa, this US video points out, is not the Black Bloc.
The NYT also brings up the issue of far-right involvement,
Members of hate groups or far-right organizations filmed themselves, sometimes heavily armed or waving extremist symbols, at demonstrations in at least 20 cities in recent days, from Boston to Buffalo to Richmond, Va., to Dallas to Salem, Ore.
A common nickname for their anticipated second Civil War is the “boogaloo,” which sometimes gets mutated into the “Big Igloo” or the “Big Luau,” prompting its adherents to wear Hawaiian shirts. Many of them use Facebook to organize despite the company’s May 1 announcement that it would remove such content.
This Blog is no specialist on the US far right, but this does seem to resemble some of the lurid scenarios of their European counterparts. Guillaume Faye in particular his “, Why we Fight – manifesto of the European resistance (2011) and the (posthumous), Guerre civile raciale (2019) Faye was prone to predict wars between a variety of forces leading the great replacement’ and the indigenous Europeans. This “catastrophism” rather than the detail of Fayes prediction, seems to chime with the present alt-right mood.
Above all its the idea of creating “ethnospheres”, “groups of territories ruled by peoples who are ethnically related” that may be taking hold in these quarters. Faye is said to have had a real influence on the US far right (Key Thinkers of the Radical RightBehind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy. Edited by Mark Sedgwick. Oxford 2019).
The Red Brown Spiked site has already welcomed protests against lby the far-right Spanish Vox party:
Over a million fines have been handed out against lockdown rule-breakers. This dissent is welcome.
On 23 May, tens of thousands of people, in over 50 towns and city centres across Spain, took to their cars to protest at the PSOE / Unidas Podemos government’s handling of the corona crisis. Madrid, Barcelona, Cadiz, Cordoba, Malaga, Palma de Mallorca, Pamplona, Sevilla, Valladolid, Valencia, Zaragoza and others, which have been ghostly quiet for weeks, came momentarily back to life. The caravana protest was called by Vox, the right-wing populist party.
It will be interesting to see how UK red-brown supporters react to the US unrest, something about which Spiked is uncharacteristically quiet.
Beyond this – largely – excellent statement how should the left react to the US protests?
The populist Jacobin carries this article.
Headlines this morning are all about looting — specifically, looting in Minneapolis, after the police killing of an unarmed African-American man was caught on video. In the modern vernacular, that word “looting” is loaded — it comes with all sorts of race and class connotations. And we have to understand that terms like “looting” are an example of the way our media often imperceptibly trains us to think about economics, crime, and punishment in specific and skewed ways.
Working-class people pilfering convenience-store goods is deemed “looting.” By contrast, rich folk and corporations stealing billions of dollars during their class war is considered good and necessary “public policy” — aided and abetted by arsonist politicians in Washington lighting the crime scene on fire to try to cover everything up.
To really understand the deep programming at work here, consider how the word “looting” is almost never used to describe the plundering that has become the routine policy of our government at a grand scale that is far larger than a vandalized Target store.
It is far from clear that this offers much of a way forward.
What exactly is gained by saying, well they loot a lot more than the poor?
I doubt if those running, or using, the corner shops round here like the idea of people pillaging their shops.
Nobody, however, can doubt the depth of the crisis in the US which this piece in Jacobin trivialises.
These are just some thoughts on what is happening.
From the US Louis Proyect offers a wider perspective on the protests – to trying to locate them as agents of social change – and the potential direction of the unrest across the country.
“…..the left has to grapple with the problem of riots from now on since the capitalist class and its cops are now calculating that its goals can be met by sacrificing a few buildings. A Target store can always be reconstructed but once socialist ideas are implanted in person’s mind and he or she begins acting on them, there’s no turning back.”
The shape of the double riot is clear enough. One riot arises from youth discovering that the routes that once promised a minimally secure formal integration into the economy are now foreclosed. The other arises from racialized surplus populations and the violent state management thereof. The holders of empty promissory notes, and the holders of nothing at all.
While Clover acknowledges the difficulties of bringing these two elements together, that isn’t the major problem. The major problem is that while both participants in the “double riot” may disrupt society for a time in one or more places and play a role in broader movements for social change, neither group has much social power, or indeed staying power, over the long haul. Their very separation from production underlines their relative social weakness.
Furthermore, youth are divided by class with different aspirations and possibilities even today. Are frustrated graduate students with diminishing prospects for university tenure, or those seeking their MBA, in the same position as the less-educated youths trapped at McDonald’s or worse?
More importantly, even together youths and those in the active reserve army are a minority of the broader proletariat, even of the racialized proletariat, and even insofar as young people as a generalization are part of the proletariat at all or share its experience.
Is Clover looking at revolution won or a commune realized by and for a minority? Is this a First World urban version of Regis Debray’s 1960s guerrilla “foco,” albeit writ large and minus the central discipline? What about the democratic majoritarian political vision of socialism from below, the political form of which was suggested to Marx by the place-specific Paris Commune?
These are considerations relevant to the protests in the US. though the idea that class struggle now takes place in the street, against the forces of law and order, and can take direct action beyond – outside – work (that is, avoiding trade unions), was one of the strands of thought in Britain’s 1980s Class War Federation.
Nobody, except a gibbering Trump and his friends can see any active intervention on the left in promoting the violence around these protests.
Or can detect this,
Attorney General William Barr said that peaceful protests over the killing of George Floyd are being “hijacked” by “anarchic and left extremist groups” that are using antifa-like tactics to promote violence.
This is just one example of a hallucinatory picture of the protests:
But as Proyect notes, some on the left, in the US and elsewhere, do have a strategy that of the Black Blocs and ‘autonomists’- small and marginalised that they may be.
Cheerleaders rather than actors who are they?
The terms cover a big range of groups and splinters of groups. One has come to some prominence in recent years. Disruption of capitalism through riots and sabotage as a political strategy has a lot in common with the ideas set out by the French comité invisible (Invisible Committee).
Information and energy circulate via wire networks, fibres and channels, and these can be attacked. Nowadays sabotaging the social machine with any real effect involves reappropriating and reinventing the ways of interrupting its networks. How can a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless? How does one find the weak points in computer networks, or scramble radio waves and fill screens with white noise?
— The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection,
The French site Lundi Matin is the present vehicle of this tendency (which has undergone considerable intellectual development since the above was published, some harking back to situationism, some to Italian 1970s autonomism, and many ‘post situationist’ ideas, about ecology and aesthetics. The journal has attracted writing from Jean-Luc Nancy, Frédéric Lordon, Giorgio Agamben, and Agustín García Calvo as well as the ‘controversial'(for his past support for the right to question the Holocaust) Serge Quadruppani.
The review’s revolutionary rhetorical style evokes Guy Debord, and, the virulence of French essayists like the 19th century polemicist Léon Bloy
Those associated with Lundi Matin are said to have accompanied the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations, and, ignoring the often right-wing character, not to say conspirationalist even anti-Semitic, of a minority (often loud) of marchers, have tried to promote “insurrectionist” acts during them. The name ‘black bloc’, in this way, has become associated in the French media with some fairly serious acts of violent vandalism and attacks on shops by ‘casseurs’ (Literally, smashers).
As the leftist magazine Les Inkoruptibles indicated in 2016
Nous sommes les passants des rues, les mal-allants. Nous faisons pression en cortège, incontrôlés, déterminés. Nous sommes la Marge de la manifestation.
This year they published (January): LES GILETS JAUNES ET LA CRISE DE LÉGITIMITÉ DE L’ÉTAT.
The article notably celebrated the “refusal of forms of legal protest”, “systematic confrontation with the police.”a ” surge of insubordination”. The piece states, “The Gilets Jaunes” have courageously and determinedly carried out their acts of insubordination, including those considered to be the most violent by the authorities
There is a lot more in the same vein: gilets jaunes.
In France there have been at most a few hundred, maybe a thousand or so on occasion, inspired by these ideas out on the streets. They may be visible but they are not able to do more than smash windows and fight a bit with the police.
It is more than doubtful that even these numbers exist in the US.
Just as important is to demolish the ideological claims of this current.
Looking at the way the second round of France’s local elections is going ahead this month, and the various quarrels and re-alignments taking place in French politics, it is hard to find any undermining of the state’s legitimacy at all. Te only political beneficiaries of the Gilets Jaunes are right-wing forces, like Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, who manage simultaneously to deplore acts of violence, and to voice demands for lower taxation and looking after “our people”, the Gilets Jaunes.
It is predictable that Lundi Matin will have none of Proyect’s considerations and reservations about the effectiveness and future political impact of those protesting against police repression.
They will celebrate, as will others in other marginal sections of the left, confrontation for confrontation’s sake.
But there are no longer any “primitive rebels” as described by Eric Hobsbawm. You have to have a lot of imagination to see fighting riot police, and the over-spill into ransacking shops as “social banditry” as a precursor of a serious revolutionary uprising (Bandits. E.J. Hobsbawm. 1971.)
What is the sense of saluting looting or violence – violence against violence?
You feel the anger, but what else can be brought to this by the kind of Lundi Matin approach, or Jacobin whataboutery ? Does it prefigure a Paris Commune?
We can cheer-on as much as we like. Protests against police brutality and racism, against the US social system, are clearly heartfelt. But there is very little ‘socialist’ in clearing out shops and burning out buildings. They do not prefigure a self-organised society. These acts, carried out by the young and fit do nothing that can draw in those unable, or unwilling to get the adrenaline buzz they create, or to gather into a common endeavour for a better future won by a majority.
From this distance we should support progressive Americans and those fighting for African American rights – who no doubt also do not need lessons (as the Campaign group gratuitously offers) in “anti-imperialism”. It is noteworthy that the same anti-imperialists who state that black lives matter, seem to think that (to give an obvious example) Syrian lives do not matter.
It is unlikely that the wider public, and popular masses, welcome smashing up local stores or breaking social distancing rules in potentially lethal close gatherings. Fighting the police is not the same as protesting against police actions.
Some may suggest that US national populism will whip up a wave of fear to bolster their own support.
Tonight
WRP predicted Tory Coup back in the 1980s! (@M.Ezra Archives).
There has been much talk of ‘Nostradamus’ Dominic Cummings and his ability to predict the future of pandemics.
But the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) has a better, and proven, track record of clairvoyance.
In the early 1980s the industrial dispute in Britain’s coal fields saw the WRP work out the implications of the threat a military dictatorship posed for the working class and labour movement,
The beginning of the miners’ strike coincided with the Thatcher government’s banning of unions at GCHQ. This, and the massive police operation directed at picketing miners, was taken by the WRP as evidence that ‘the traditional system of capitalist rule through parliamentary democracy is a thing of the past. In its place is Bonapartism – a regime of crisis relying on the armed national police force, directly confronting the organised working class on the streets’.16
The WRP insisted that the miners’ strike could not be won outside the struggle for power, and that if the miners were defeated Thatcher would impose a police-military dictatorship. ‘If we don’t take the power we will have fascism’, Healy declared in February 1985, on the eve of the strike’s collapse. ‘Make no mistake, if we don’t do it, there will be fascism.
This menace has not gone away.
In 2014 the WRP again saw a UK Police State in the making:
May Launches Tory Police State (1st October 2014)
Anti-Brexit coup under way – ‘Country before Party’ means bringing in military police state!
This foresight has now shown its value.
The unions must immediately organise a general strike to bring them down and go forward to a workers government that will nationalise the banks and major industries under workers management and bring in a socialist planned economy.
Socialist revolution is the only way forward today.
“Either McDonnell must be removed as president or the LRC will be forced to throw out victims of the witch-hunt from its ranks” Labour Party Marxist.
Labour Against the WItch-hunt is effectively a bloc between the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committe), better known as the Weekly Worker group, and prominent (that is, 2 prominent people) of the Labour Left Alliance (LLA). Also included is the Tony Greenstein Party.
Greenstein has been barred from Twitter but is famous for, amongst many other things in the same vein, this Tweet:
The LLA’s supporters include,
- Tosh McDonald, former president Aslef, Doncaster councillor
- Asa Winstanley, journalist
- Jackie Walker
- Graham Bash
- Chris Williamson
- Professor Moshe Machover
Have they gone to ground during the pandemic?
No.
Labour Against the Witch-hunt informs the world today
We are pleased to announce that Labour Against the Witchhunt, in cooperation with the Labour Left Alliance, is planning a counter-conference on the ‘leaked’ report. Confirmed participants so far include Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker, Prof David Miller, Asa Winstanley, Moshe Machover, Greg Hadfield and Tony Greenstein.
LAW’s sponsors include:
- Alexei Sayle, comedian
- Ken Livingstone
- Professor Moshé Machover, Israeli socialist and founder of Matzpen
- Ian Hodson, president of the Bakers Union
- Ken Loach, film director
- Noam Chomsky, author and activist
LAW’s honorary presidents are Ken Livingstone and Moshé Machover
The Labour Left Alliance reproduces LAW’s attack on Jeremy Corbyn,
…the conference will also look at the many mistakes made by the Corbyn leadership: The report shows that they decided to support the lie that the Labour Party is overrun by antisemites. They sought to appease the Israel advocacy groups and the self-appointed leadership of “the Jewish community” and behaved as though they believed this lie. In the process they displayed an inability to recognise real antisemitism, while eagerly trying to get rid of activists like Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth and Chris Williamson, none of whom can be accused of even a trace of antisemitism.
In preparation for the conference the Weekly Worker has this Friday published an attack on John McDonnell and the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) by the Labour Party Marxist, Stan Keable.
Keable is also the Secretary of LAW.
“Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists fears that technical reasons are being used to hide rotten politics
The Labour Representation Committee’s executive has decided to ‘postpone’ the planned June 27 online conference till some time in September. Why?”
These are the key sections of the article,
…t is very likely that the real reason goes by the name of John McDonnell, the LRC’s president. The fear is surely that, if the conference went ahead, it would have been attended by many victims of the ‘Anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt. To address such a conference could end McDonnell’s glorious political career in the Labour Party with his expulsion. After seeing what happened to fellow MPs Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy, he knows that is a real prospect.
…..
John McDonnell has undergone a sickening political decay. He, like Momentum owner Jon Lansman, helped lever the Labour Party into adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s so-called ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism: a definition which equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Not only that: McDonnell supported the reactionary “zero tolerance” doctrine in the face of the blatantly dishonest witch-hunt against socialist and leftwing activists. Such treachery, such a failure to stand in solidarity with wrongly accused comrades, whose innocence he cannot have doubted, should not be passed over in silence. He certainly should have been stripped of his position as LRC president.
Keable concludes,
Keeping McDonnell as LRC president, as its figurehead, is like allowing Ramsay MacDonald to remain Labour Party leader after he had defected to lead the national (Tory) government in 1931. It will guarantee the LRC’s inability to struggle effectively for socialism (which does not appear amongst the LRC’s ‘Aims and objectives’, by the way4) or even for a “fully democratic” Labour Party (which does appear, in rule 2). As Keir Starmer’s new Blairite witch-finder general, David Evans, gears up as general secretary for a purge of the left likely to dwarf what the Labour right was able to get away with during the Corbyn period, either McDonnell must be removed as president or the LRC will be forced to throw out victims of the witch-hunt from its ranks.
Dodging this choice is impossible. It is either him or us.
For many people who know at least some of those involved this is sad more than anything else.
Some activists we still have respect for have got caught up in the eternal games of the Weekly Worker: the cycle of provocation/repression/recruitment.
In the meantime these tweets indicate continuing cause for concern about anti-semitism on the left.
The conference promises to interest many people with these views together.
French Left Offers Ideas for a Better Future.
On the 14th of May an unprecedented array of political figures from the centre-left (some more centre than left), the French Green Party (EELV), the Communist Party and radical ‘other-globalisation’ organisations such as ATTAC, issued a declaration that appealed for a new direction in French politics.
Titled, “At the heart of the crisis, let’s build the future” it was backed by one hundred and fifty personalities close to the left or to the ecologists , including Olivier Faure (Parti Socialiste), Yannick Jadot (Europe Écologie Les Verts ) or Ian Brossat ( Parti communiste français), called in a long public statement published in Le Nouvel Obsevateur for a “convention for a common world”
France is facing an earthquake on an unprecedented scale. The destruction of nature has encouraged a pandemic which has generated a major economic crisis, created a brutal social shock, especially for the most precarious, and a out the functioning of democracy into question. Public authorities have had that had to improvise in the face of this major crisis. The extraordinary commitment of carers, the courage of those who have worked tirelessly in the service of all and the civic spirit of millions of people confined in difficult conditions, call for the gratitude of everybody.
Right now, the issue about avoiding the worst and preparing for the future. Repairing the damage already in face of us, the defence of liberty the obligation to prepare a resilient society, these require a strong collective response. The crisis confirms the urgent need for large-scale changes. From this imperative necessity, let us give birth to hope. We are not doomed to suffer!
The statement called for a strengthening on an egalitarian basis of the French welfare state, notably in the areas of health and pensions, ‘ecological transition’ (the Green New Deal, which has been a demand of French centre, green and radical left politics for much longer than its recent UK appearance), expansive and flexible European Monetary policy, and the reintroduction of the previous Parti Socialiste government’s tax on the rich (Impôt de solidarité sur la fortune, ISF),
TRIBUNE. « Au cœur de la crise, construisons l’avenir »
Further :
Amongst the signatories were Thomas Piketty, the radical leftist, Christophe Aguiton (La gauche du 21 e siècle, enquête sur une refondation. 2017) and the former (Left-wing) Green leader, Cécile Duflot.
These supporters did not prevent the web commentator Usul, close to La France insoumise, from claiming that this was an attempt to create a post-Macron “bourgeois bloc” of the centre-left. It was, he ironically put it, a kind of pot potpourri of nice green and liberal social democratic ideas that would appeal to the metropolitan elites, and continue the centre-left project, excluding the “classes populaires”. This is the return of the ‘gauche bourgeoise.”
Usul remarked that the bloc of forces excluded Jean-Luc Mélenchon
Usul. Le grand retour de la gauche bourgeoise
Here is his, witty, Video version.
The comparison with previous efforts to create a “bloc bourgeois”, allegedly the project of the Parti Socialiste (in power, be it remembered until 2017), runs up against a number of problems.
The book from which the expression is taken, L’illusion du Bloc Bourgeois (Bruno Amable et Stefano Palombarini. 2018) refers to attempts to go beyond traditional alliances, to bring together right and left. Emmanuel Macron has rather monopolised this strategy. The alternative ‘sovereigntist’ attempt to create a political expression that can capture the ‘popular’ classes in a left populist project, that is, La France insoumise (LFI), has failed to take off.
The demand to maintain social protection that is the weakest point of the ‘bloc bourgeois’ of the French centre-left, shown by many of the PS’s labour and welfare ‘reforms’ (see Pages 114 – 146 of the L’illusion). However in another context these rights are linked to EU standards. During the UK Brexit referendum, as promoted by Another Europe is Possible, and other internationalist left forces, a pro-European strategy made inroads into the labour movement and some (urban) layers of the working class in ‘precarious’ employment by demanding that “une autre Europe possible”. The sovereigntist British left failed to defend these advances, and encouraged not just a hard right Brexit, but the victory of Boris Johnson.
A further sign of the importance of the above unity initiative can be seen on the site of the radical and democratic wing of the left, which forms an independent ally of La France insoumise, Ensemble. This appeared at the end of April and could be said to introduce the terrain on which the Nouvel Observateur declaration was made.
Fédérer au sein des gauches et des écologistes : le temps nous oblige, vite
Signed by Clémentine Autain députée (groupe LFI) , Guillaume Balas coordinateur du mouvement Génération·s , Elsa Faucillon députée (groupe communiste) , Alain Coulombel membre d’EE-LV
Many initiatives, public or not, forums and petitions have been circulating since the start of the health crisis. They carry the will to bring about a new world.
It is even harder to dismiss this appeal, (issued this week) signed by the CGT (radical left Union Federation), Greenpeace, Attac, Confédération paysanne, Youth for Climate France and many other groups),
Plus Jamais ça : 34 mesures pour un plan de sortie de crise
(see Le Monde: « Face à la crise, il faut sortir du système néolibéral et productiviste »)
In the meantime La France insoumise ploughs its own furrow, competing, it is said, with the Rassemblement national (ex-Front National): Coronavirus : La France insoumise et le Rassemblement national veulent profiter de la colère
The left sovereigntists – or “republicans” (including LFI, some of the PCF, and others, continue their own attempts to recover a political voice.
La gauche républicaine veut se réarmer idéologiquement
La France insoumise (LFI), le Parti communiste français ou la Gauche républicaine et socialiste (GRS), la petite structure de l’ancien socialiste Emmanuel Maurel ; des think tanks, comme Intérêt général ou l’Institut Rousseau ; un site, comme Le Vent se lève ; ou encore des politiques, comme Arnaud Montebourg ou Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
The overarching themes these debates raise is brilliantly discussed by New Left Review hate figure Pierre Rosenvallon France Culture: Le coronavirus a-t-il déconfiné la gauche ?
One of the main themes emerging is a return to idea of planning, and the merits of the commissariat général du Plan (CGP) that existed from 1946 to 2006,
The radio links to these articles (I do not repeat the one this Post began with):
Pour un projet social et écologiste, éditorial de Denis Sieffert, de la revue Politis.
Le monde d’après sera un champ de bataille, éditorial d’Hervé Kempf, du site Reporterre.
Un mal sanitaire pour un bien politique ? Editorial de Laurent Joffrin de Libération.
This Blog is encouraged by the serious way in which the French left is looking towards the future.
Better than own factionalists in fact…
What Now for New Politics?
Since its launch in 2015, following Jeremy Corbyn’s election, Momentum has become an important force within the Labour Party, both for its ability to organise for elections, and for the ideas it has broadcast.
Momentum’s ability to get people out to campaign has won it respect. Many people have indicated that the organisation was built around a call to support Jeremy Corbyn – a focus on an individual that not everybody on the left was attracted to, or agreed with. Others have made claims that it can be close to a party within a party, an assertion repeated by rival groups (or ‘factions’) such as Progress and the old Labour right, Labour First.
A strong point of Momentum was a wish to open Labour up to wider left culture and ideas. Associated with The World Transformed events were held where respected figures like Paul Mason and Hilary Wainwright were given a platform as well as the supporter of Labour Against the Witch-hunt and ‘anti-Zionist’ Ken Loach.
Left Populism.
It was said that Momentum drew inspiration from the Greek left party Syriza and other radical parties that appeared in the wake of the 2008 Banking crisis to oppose austerity. The 2018 World Transformed event attracted attention for starring the leader of La France insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and the political theorist Chantal Mouffe. Their speeches, and the association made between Corbyn, Spain’s Unidos Podemos, and the USA’s Bernie Sanders, encouraged the belief that Labour’s new direction was towards ‘Left Populism’.In this some saw parallels between Momentum and the Podemos social media aided ‘circles’ (Círculos). There was even talk of it being a ‘social movement’ in its own rights, as if it had independent activism that had struck deeper chords and popular support, than the Labour Party itself.
Critics observed the weakness of those left populist parties, like La France insoumise (LFI), who relied on the supposed attraction of a single ‘charismatic’ leader (as opposed to the more pluralist Podemos). They lacked internal democracy and appeared more as “rallies”, (“lieu de rassemblement” – LFI) with limited ‘electronic’ internal voting. Some made comparisons with Momentum’s own limited voting system. Supporters pointed to (in the UK) problems created by determined factionalists, and, above all, the need to remove those who supported extreme ‘anti-Zionism’.
It was not difficult to see that not everybody, including on the left, found Mélenchon or, for that matter, Jeremy Corbyn, a compelling leader, or would wish to defer to their authority.
All of these political forces have suffered setbacks, Syriza lost power in Jily 2019, La France insmoumise was down to 7,3% of the vote in the European elections, Podemos in November lost votes, and is now in coalition with the non-populist Spanish socialists, and has just had another split (with the ‘anticapitalistas’), Labour in December suffered a heavy election defeat. Sanders has now withdrawn from the Democratic Party leadership contest.
Defenders of left populism are still around. Its cheer-leaders in the US Jacobin magazine assert the abstract validity of this strategy (March 2020)
Within societies marked by multiple divisions, inequalities, and polarizations, populism thus indicates a discursive practice that aims at creating links between the excluded and suffering in order to empower them in their struggles to redress this exclusion. These discourses are articulated around “the people” as the central political subject demanding incorporation into the political community — restoring dignity and equality and honoring the commitment to “popular sovereignty.”
Left-Populism Is Down but Not Out GIORGOS VENIZELOS YANNIS STAVRAKAKIS
Chantal Mouffe, by contrast, managed to write a full page in May’s Le Monde Diplomatique defending left populism against criticisms form political theorist Pierre Rosanvallon, and its importance, in asserting this sovereignty, as a strategy during the Covid-19 pandemic, without mentioning any of these political set backs (Ce que Pierre Rosanvallon ne comprend pas).
The terms of these debates have changed, first by the election of a new Labour leader, and secondly, by the above pandemic.
After Keir Starmer’s victory in the Labour leadership elections Momentum published this statement,
THE FUTURE OF OUR MOVEMENT: A STATEMENT FROM MOMENTUM’S NCG
Momentum congratulates Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner on their election as Leader and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. We look forward to working with them to ensure the election of a Government that will carry out the kind of bold, transformational policies our country and planet so badly need.
We also want to thank Rebecca Long-Bailey for running a principled, left wing campaign full of big ideas, building on the programme she has worked on for the last four years. We were proud to support her.
……
We didn’t win – and that failure is ours collectively – but we have transformed politics for the better. While the Tories will always represent the big polluters and tax dodgers, austerity as a political project has been defeated. No major politician of any party talks about ‘belt tightening’ and ‘necessary cuts’ any longer. Investment and pride in our public services is the new mantra, if not the new reality. This is our victory. And we should be proud.
Many will have noticed that Momentum refused to give its members a chance to endorse Keir Starmer, holding a ‘vote’ on who to back in the contest that did not include his name.
What is the future role for Momentum? Who or what are they loyal to?
The present stand appears to be that they will hold the new leader, somebody they tried to block as hard as they could, “to account”.
…Keir will face pressure from the media, big corporations and the right of the party to break his promises. We have to be there to hold him to account, make sure he sticks to his promises and advances the socialist cause in the party as well as in every workplace and community.
….
Jeremy’s leadership is over and we all continue to thank him from the bottom of our hearts. His legacy is our movement seizing the opportunities ahead. As Jeremy said, there is no such thing as Corbynism. Only socialism.
……
One might suggest that those who encouraged the belief that Corbyn was a special type of new leader, and were determined opponents of Starmer are not best placed to disavow the focus on personalities above socialist politics.
In this statement Momentum sets out broad ideas on” political education” backing trade unions, and n direct action groups challenging the government on the climate emergency”, training socialist leaders, forming “renters’ unions and “with Coronavirus, we can organise mutual aid to protect those most vulnerable to the worst impacts of Tory rule.”
Many other people in the Labour Party will have thought of these ideas without help from Momentum.
Reflecting Momentum’s strongest point, the mobilisation of people to campaign in elections, they promised to continue to do all they could “help Labour win elections at every level” .
It’s one election that has opened up a new phase: the election for the Momentum National Coordinating Group (NCG).
This announcement marked the opening of the contest:
It’s time for a new generation. Why I’m not standing in Momentum’s elections
Jon Lansman
Nominations for those wanting to stand for our NCG will open at midday on Thursday 28 May and end at midday on Thursday 11 June.
“A one-member-one-vote ballot will then be held from midday on Tuesday 16 June until midday on Tuesday 30 June.
We have two main factional blocs vying for votes.
Site: ” A grassroots initiative to reform Momentum and unite the left.”
These are described as the “continuity current”.
The “refounders”.
Useful article from ‘Momentum internationalists’: What should (Forward) Momentum stand for?
More background: Forward Momentum: radical reformers or new establishment?
And, as the Newshounds of Labour List have found there is this:
The Anticapitalist Platform for Momentum
Aka, Red Flag (Plaform), (‘The Anticapitalist Platform is an initiative by supporters of Red Flag in Momentum.) Workers Power, the League for the 5th International.
On one issue, opposing Brexit, they look in the right direction,
Electoral triangulation and strategic dependence on unity with the right forced Corbyn into damaging concessions on free movement and Brexit, which disoriented the left, disillusioned voters, and strengthened his enemies.
A central focus of debate between the contenders is Momentum’s internal structures, which critics say leave little space for democracy.
Some of the rows between these tendencies and candidates have not been up to standards of respectful, polite and friendly debate that marks the Tendance Coatesy blog.
This is could be an occasion to vent these views, and looks like fun….or not
Activists demand online hustings for internal Momentum elections
“I have constituents who didn’t get to say goodbye to their loved ones; families who could not mourn together; people who did not visit sick relatives because they followed the guidance of the government. I cannot in good faith tell them that they were all wrong and one senior adviser to the government was right.”
The December Conservative Victory was followed, on the left, by many people thinking about the reasons how and why a section of the Labour vote, and a larger group of working class ballots fell in behind Boris Johnson’s Get Brexit Done campaign. Some, of the pro-Brexit and would-be populist left took the Tory triumph as proof that there position was right, and followed it with the not unexpected claim that pro-Second Referendum campaigners betrayed the masses by not taking up the anti-EU ideas which they had helped to legitimise.
There is a serious debate on how, in Gramsci’s terms,”At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties..” (1) Comparisons between the former Red Wall and the former bastions of socialism and Communism in Northern France would be made by referring to Didier Erbion’s autobiographical and sociological and literary masterpiece, Retour à Reims (2009. new edition 2018). You can read the introduction to the English translation, 2018, and some of the text here.
Much of Erbion’s book is about growing up gay. The broader political message deals with the way national populism, (the Front National, now the Rassemblement National) has garnered support in areas that were formerly left wing. In the UK, a brief surge in the Brexit Party support in last year’s European elections, perhaps bolstered by its own’red-brown’ wing, was followed by the Tories, aided by the ‘strategist’ Dominic Cummings, successfully gathering up the national populist constituency for itself, and restoring traditional Conservative rule.
One message of Retour à Reims captured is not that the left needs to articulate, give voice to, the prejudices of the electorate. That is, to give a British context, re-casting anti-immigration demands as a a slogan, “workers’ control of migrant labour” (as, say the Socialist Party or the Morning Star have put it in various forms). Nor that the left needs to organise protests that will make the right melt away – indeed they spectacularly did not disappear, but were present and influential in the Gilets Jaunes movement. It is that we need to change the conversation to areas in which the populists, nationalists, and far-right, are unable to offer answers.
Some of this seems shunted to the side by the Coronavirus pandemic. This has deeply affected everybody, across Europe, across the world. Faced with the gravity of the issue few wished to play political games.
But now we can see the development of another ‘Gramscian crisis”, a major crisis of authority with the Johnson cabinet’s failure in a “major political undertaking”. National populist slogans, hostility to the EU, alignment with the gibbering Trump, have been shown as empty.
Above all Johnson’s cabinet is visibly unable to deal with what has become the Affaire Cummings.
It is tricking down, from the Cabinet’s loss of authority, to the uncertainly and confusion about state governance of health and loosening the lockdown.
At the heart of the matter is the figure of Dominic Cummings.
The New Statesman Martin Fletcher wrote on the 24th of May an acid summary of the way the newly elected Prime Minister had dealt with the issues raised
He stated,
Under no other prime minister in living memory would Cummings be allowed to stay in his post, but this scandal has ripped the mask off this government’s face. It has exposed its true nature – its shamelessness, its arrogance, its deceitfulness, its contempt for “the people” that it claims to champion, the utter cravenness of its ministers.
Cummings himself has displayed not a jot of contrition, though he has built his career on bashing the sort of metropolitan elitism of which his behaviour is a prime example. He seems happy to pose as the “champion of the people” so long as he does not have to live like them. Using pliant journalists on rival papers he has sought to dismiss the revelations in the Guardian and Daily Mirror as “fake news”, though they were manifestly true. He has mocked suggestions he might resign in a manner that suggests the Prime Minister has no say in the matter.
Things have got a lot worse since that time.
Here are some of the countless tweets that followed the Cummings Press conference yesterday – for which the Special Adviser was 30 minutes late.
This stands out:
The way the remaining Ministers are carrying on will only add fuel to the flames,
Coronavirus: Dominic Cummings was ‘wise’ to test his eyesight with trip to Barnard Castle – Gove
Mr Gove said Mr Cummings was “wise” to make the trip with his wife and child from Durham to Barnard Castle as he wanted to “make sure he was comfortable behind the wheel” before driving back to London.
In these conditions we do not need rhetoric, Counterfire style, about the ” worst peacetime disaster in modern British history.” or the People’s Assembly’s grand claim to create, a ‘People’s HQ’ on Covid-19.” aligned around pro-Brexit forces who helped the Tories into power.
Something a lot more serious should be on the cards.
It looks as if this crisis is not going away, it is deep rooted, and needs a Labour Party not just to protest (as the People’s Assembly asserts) but to develop its own internationalist projects for the ‘major undertaking’ of facing up to the pandemic and its aftermath.
*****
(1) Page 210. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Antonio Gramsci. Lawrence & Wishart. 1973.
Update:
Who would have guessed that Spiked would say this?
While ordinary people tweet, write, and speak out about Dominic Cummings callous arrogance – and even this, First senior Tory breaks ranks over top aide’s ‘lockdown breaches‘ – there’s a brave voice ready to be put the alternative view.
Dominic Cummings broke the lockdown? Good
The hysteria over his trip to his parents’ home is driven by nothing more than Remainer revenge.
Dominic Cummings broke the lockdown? Good. Welcome to the sensible minority, Dom. According to a survey published a week ago, 29 per cent of Brits have busted out of the lockdown straitjacket and done things they shouldn’t have done. I salute these people. Sensibly and carefully bending the rules to visit one’s parents, read a novel on a beach or, in Neil Ferguson’s case, to shag one’s polyamorous lover are wonderful buds of human rebellion in this dystopia we find ourselves in. It isn’t Cummings who should be ashamed – it’s the shutdown Stalinists who are calling for his head because he dared to visit his folks.
In full fettle of a flow the great man continues,
Listening to the Cummingsphobic Remoaners in the chattering classes, you could be forgiven for thinking they did this in order to cough their germs all over every motorway and lane in the land.
For those who can be arsed there’s plenty more to read,
It’s the embittered cultural elites seeking a Brexit scalp. It is a political vendetta disguised as concern about the pandemic.
More on those ‘elites’:
In the Telegraph another figure, David Goodhart, of the red-brown Full Brexit, writes, Jim posts, on tis:
David “The Road To Somewhere” comes up with a fascinating new definition of what is – and isn’t – elitism, in today’s Sunday Telegraph, while defending Dominic Cummings: “There is an anti-elitist piety, often expressed by the academic or medical branch of the same broad elite, that refuses to accept the specialness of leaders [in case it’s not clear, Goodhart thinks that’s *bad*] … So it’s important that Mr Cummings stays. Even if his actions were technically outside the letter of the law -which is far from clear – there is surely, an extreme circumstances loophole, and more broadly we need to cut our rulers (and their top advisers) some slack.
We expect the Red Brown Front to castigate this whingeing liberal:
Here
Scuttling Away.
The Previous Story….
There is a clear message at work.
And this was well:
Comrade Mason points out the implications for the media.
Not to mention this…
The Telegraph sums up the latest state of play:
Dominic Cummings is a hypocrite whose position is “untenable”, the Government’s opponents have said, after it emerged that Boris Johnson’s top adviser breached lockdown rules.
Mr Cummings was investigated by police after he drove from London to Durham with his wife and son to stay with his elderly parents after developing symptoms of coronavirus.
A Labour Party spokesman said: “If accurate, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser appears to have breached the lockdown rules. The Government’s guidance was very clear: stay at home and no non-essential travel.
“The British people do not expect there to be one rule for them and another rule for Dominic Cummings. Number 10 needs to provide a very swift explanation for his actions.”
It’s worth remembering some of the political interventions Cummings made over Brexit.
This was late last year.
November 2019.
Summary: Tell your family and friends face-to-face: if Boris doesn’t get a majority, then Corbyn and Sturgeon will control the government, their official policy is to give the vote to millions of foreign citizens to cheat their second referendum, we’ll all get screwed on taxes, Parliament will drag the whole country into crisis, and immigration will return to being a central issue in politics instead of being marginalised by Brexit…
This was his programme of work after the Tories’ victory.
January 2020
A few examples of papers that you will be considering:
Complex Contagions : A Decade in Review, 2017. This looks at a large number of studies on ‘what goes viral and why?’. A lot of studies in this field are dodgy (bad maths, don’t replicate etc), an important question is which ones are worth examining.
Extract from this paper:
“2.1. Applications to Health
For the past few decades, the study of public health has concerned not
only biological contagions, but also social contagions concerning
health behaviors: e.g. medication, vaccines, exercise, and the ideologies related to each (Christakis and Fowler 2012). It has been found
that simple contagions do not adequately capture the network dynamics that govern the diffusion of health behaviours (Centola and Macy
2007; Centola et al. 2007; Centola 2010, 2011). Social health behaviours often require reinforcement from peers, and they are strongly influenced by cultural practices and group norms.
Dominic Cummings: If Leave had lost Brexit vote, I’d have queried result as invalid.
December 2019.
Boris Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings would have challenged the EU referendum result as “invalid” had Vote Leave lost the Brexit campaign.
According to documents seen by the Observer, the prime minister’s chief aide told the UK’s data watchdog that he would have contested the result because UK elections are “wide open to abuse.”
In an email sent in 2017 to the information commissioner’s office, Cummings, the former head of the Vote Leave campaign and architect of Johnson’s stunning election victory, said: “If we had lost by a small margin I would have sought to challenge the result as invalid.”
The UK voted to leave the EU by the slim majority of 52% to 48% in the 2016 referendum, with many Brexiters subsequently attacking the losers as “Remoaners” who refused to respect democracy. On Friday, Cummings openly criticised “educated Remainer campaigner types” for failing to understand the country and “driving everyone mad”.
And there was notably this,
In March 2020, it was reported in The Sunday Times that during a private engagement the previous month, Cummings had claimed that the government’s strategy towards the coronavirus was “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”. The spokesman for 10 Downing Street decried the article as “a highly defamatory fabrication” which “includes a series of apparent quotes from meetings which are invented”.[49] On 30 March, Cummings displayed symptoms of COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic and is reported to be self isolating. This was three days after Johnson was tested positive for the virus.[50] On 27 April, it emerged that Cummings sat in on meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) which advises the cabinet on coronavirus response.[51] Cummings urged a faster lockdown and encouraged the scientists to support the closure of pubs and restaurants.
On the latter,
Johnson’s Top Aide Pushed Scientists to Back U.K. Lockdown. (Bloomberg).
April the 28th.
Boris Johnson’s most powerful political aide pressed the U.K.’s independent scientific advisers to recommend lockdown measures in an effort to stop the spread of coronavirus, according to people familiar with the matter.
…….
Speaking on condition of anonymity because the meetings are private, the people said Cummings asked why a lockdown was not being imposed sooner, swayed the discussion toward faster action, and made clear he thought pubs and restaurants should be closed within two days.
Here
Exclusive:Video: The Full Brexit in conversation -available from the Morning Star.
The Full Brexit is a group that brings together Blue Labour, ‘anti-rootless cosmopolitan’ campaigners like Trade Unionists Against the EU’s leader Paul Embery, the Communist Party of Britain, traditional Labour Party anti-EU types, left sovereigntists, New Left Review star Wolfgang Streeck, supporters and candidates for the extreme-right Brexit Party, largely drawn from the ‘Spiked Network’ (see Bob’s Going full Brexit: from Red Front to red-brown front, )’funny money’ theorists (‘new monetary theory’)such as Patricia Pino, and assorted odd-balls, like Green Party member Larry O’Nutter, better known under his pen-name of Larry O’Hara, and even a stray (?) member of the Conservative Party,
At the end of March they launched this new initiative.
COVID-19: We’re Not In Control.
The declaration begins with this:
Seven weeks ago, Britain formally withdrew from the European Union (EU), belatedly enacting the decision of the referendum of 2016. The referendum was famously won by the Leave campaign on the slogan “Take Back Control”. This slogan resonated effectively with voters because it pointed beyond the injunction merely to restore the national sovereignty lost to the EU (see Analysis #2 – Popular Sovereignty and “Taking Back Control”: What it Means and Why it Matters). It captured widespread feelings of political alienation from the state, disenchantment with a remote technocratic elite, and widespread regional immiseration – sentiments that could effectively and meaningfully be bundled up with the injunction to restore sovereignty. For all the calumny heaped on Leave voters as atavistic and spiteful nationalists, in truth the vote to leave expressed a powerful and ultimately rational democratic instinct – that the people should rule.
The leading Full Brexit intellectuals then rant,
the new Tory police state declared overnight is strikingly uneven: freedom of assembly has been banned, but some movement is encouraged in the form of daily state-sanctioned exercise.
What we have is a post-modern police state whose biopolitical justification is the health of the population, not the political life of the nation. It is a performance of state power and authority, not its reality. Police forces in the north that did nothing to defend working class girls from paedophile gangs now use drones to enforce social distancing on citizens walking through empty countryside.
The conclusions of this distasteful stream-of-consciousness by ‘academics’Dr Philip Cunliffe Senior Lecturer in International Conflict at the University of Kent. Dr George Hoare a London-based researcher and author. Dr Lee Jones Reader in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Prof Peter Ramsay Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. are,
The people have to find a way to take control. In addition to the Brexit vote itself, the social basis for taking greater control is perhaps beginning to emerge: the 600,000-strong volunteer army for the NHS indicates a greater willingness to collaborate in the pursuit of social goods and collective ends, and a greater willingness to involve ourselves in the public good. In stepping up, citizens embarrass those who claim to lead us.
The follow up to the rhetoric, complete with sub-Foucault and Felix Guattari stuff about the “bio-political” has been meagre.
This pseudo-academic waffle, which rivals Dominic Cummings on an off-day, is one result,
Tara McCormack and Lee Jones
The COVID-19 pandemic is not simply a public health crisis. Perhaps more importantly, it is a crisis of a whole way of governing society. The shift to regulatory statehood and transnational governance has hollowed out the practical capacities needed to respond meaningfully to genuine threats to public welfare. From being a Hobbesian Leviathan to whom citizens defer in exchange for protection, the state has become an enfeebled coordinator of multi-sectoral partnerships, desperately trying to protect itself from the public: “stay home – protect the NHS – save lives”.
Western governments’ faltering responses to the pandemic re-poses a question already raised by Brexit: can we re-learn the art of government, as opposed to governance? For those still mired in the regulatory regionalism of the European Union, the outlook seems dismal.
It looks as if a whole group of ageing left national populists, who, in the distant past, read Foucault on ‘governance’ and never got over it.
Admirer of Poland’s Law and Justice Party (Why Poland’s Law and Justice Party appeals) Paul Embery, Full Brexit pillar, Arron Bank’s- financial – friend, tweets a perkier messages reflecting his present-day hobby-horses.
Their Full Brexit’s mates in Spiked are going their own merry way:
And it’s back to attacks on “cosmopolitanism”
Meanwhile stalwart Eddie Dempsey (Transforming Britain After Brexit: Eddie Dempsey and the Divided Left. The Full Brexit) appears to have disappeared, at least from Twitter.
The Full Brexit, having helped to poison political debate, encourage national populism, and help the Tories to victory, has, in short, little new to say.
This, from loudmouth ‘Heartfield’ (born, James Hughes), former Revolutionary Communist Party cadre, Full Brexiter, and would-be candidate for the Brexit Party (he bottled out) is still dripping venom into the public space.
Why Indeed Should Anybody Join Them?
Counterfire, for those who do not know, is the principal force in the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) and the People’s Assembly (just about the only group left doing anything in the latter).
They, like the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), have a close relationship with the former Labour leader through the StWC and with Andrew Murray, his former adviser, the UNITE Chief of Staff, a member of the CPB until 2016. Lindsey German, leading Counterfire member, is the Convenor of the Coalition. Her partner, John Rees, an admirer of György Lukács and the ‘actuality of the revolution’, has been heavily involved in the leadership of the People’s Assembly (Against Austerity).
This is the latest event from the StWC.
Many people on the left are very critical of the StWC, notably for its failure to show real solidarity with those oppressed and murdered by the Assad’s regime in Syria.
They say that that the Coalition has shown no sign of supporting what democratic position there is, and that it’s failure to stand, clearly, with the Kurds fighting the Daesh genociders was unforgivable.
Starmer.
How are Counterfire bearing up after the General Election, a new Labour leader, and the Coronavirus pandemic?
Recently German has been writing – sometimes useful – articles on the government’s response to the Covid 19 crisis.
A failed government in a failed system – weekly briefing
With Britain having one of the worst records on dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, you might think some caution, humility and even a change of direction might be in order. But as the government stumbles from one failure to another it seems both incapable and unwilling to change course.
But let’s not forget the political stand they have towards the Labour Party.
German also states the following,
So it is very often up to working people themselves to defend conditions – and that means unions. They have many faults – they are often slow and cautious, marked by years of defeat and legal restriction. Their leaders are also content very often to negotiate rather than take more militant action. Their ties to Labour lead them to further caution, and this is likely to get worse under Keir Starmer’s leadership.
In February the revolutionary socialist groupuscule instructed the left,
No socialist should vote for Keir Starmer
If Keir Starmer were to win, he would take Labour back to the centre-ground that proved so disastrous for Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and social democracy across Europe and beyond. He is no friend of the left and no committed socialist should vote for him.
This is how, in April, they greeted the arrival of Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party.
This morning the new Labour leader Keir Starmer used an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme to urge the government to provide an exit strategy for the lockdown this week and suggested that schools should be among the first to go back.
It is a signal to the establishment and big business that they can trust Starmer to look out for their interests. And it’s deadly for working-class people.
Starmer’s intervention can only strengthen the government in its desire to return to ‘business as usual’ as soon as possible. No wonder Boris Johnson was so keen to invite him to government meetings – a ‘privilege’ denied of course to Jeremy Corbyn.
By May this had become:
Starmer’s foreign policy and the spirit of Blairism
Blair’s foreign policy represented a ruthless reaffirmation of this Labour tradition as the West’s ambitions expanded in the wake of the Cold War and Russia’s collapse as an imperial power of global weight. Corbyn offered a break with this tradition, inspiring many, but incurring the wrath of the establishment both inside and outside the Party. Starmer now seeks to expunge the very memory of this break. Guided by the spirit of Blairism, his foreign policy is certain to be one the Foreign Office will be only too gratified to call its own.
The hard-line pro-Brexit group has been gloating at the EU’s difficulties.
Covid-19, the crisis and the European ideal
As Europe reels from being the centre of the Covid-19 outbreak, the EU is creaking at the seams and may not recover, argues Martin Hall.
Leninism.
German has the merit of being open about her Leninist politics.
This is an example (April 21st).
Written to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Russian revolution, Tariq Ali’s book also speaks to those of us involved in contemporary politics here in Britain. A new politics has been unleashed with the electoral advances of Jeremy Corbyn and widespread revulsion at the consequences of neoliberalism, epitomised most strongly by the Grenfell Tower disaster. This era is opening up a new interest in political discussion, and with it a real thirst to know how the left can achieve its aims against the vested interests of the few, aims which cannot be achieved through parliamentary legislation but will require the systematic transformation of society.
In this debate, people will return to past experiences of working-class history, including the Russian revolution – which changed the history of the twentieth century – and to the ideas of the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. In doing so they will hopefully see past the distortions on both right and left which have so obscured and sometimes vilified that history, and see the incredibly brave, prescient and committed politics which made Russia the powerhouse of revolution.
It is hard to see what kind of role Counterfire will have in the coming months.
Serious articles, and some interventions around the pandemic, enter a crowded field.
Their political moment has passed.
There is not going to be a new Corbyn in the foreseeable future.
The role of opposition to Starmer inside the Labour Party is already taken by other small groups like the LRC and he cartel in “For a Broad Left Network“, some of whose members are not known to be friendly towards Countefire.
They have nothing to say about the fight in Momentum between Forward and Renewal factions,not to mention pro-European Momentum Internationalists. (1)
Finally we note that Counterfire has not responded to the CPB’s call for a new Popular Front involving the People’s Assembly.
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More on this: Undemocratic, backroom politics. Sacha Ismael.
May the 18th.
A new grouping, Forward Momentum, is in conflict with those who run the Momentum office (which means, in Momentum as currently constituted, run the organisation). The office people seem to be supporting a counter-initiative, Momentum Renewal. Both will run candidates in the imminent National Coordinating Group elections.
Masses Respond to CPB call for “New Popular Front alliance”.
Under the previous Labour leader, former and present members of the British Communist Party, as well as their fellow-travellers, had influence on the party and its policy.
Some suggest that pro-Brexit advisers from that tradition, such as Andrew Murray, in alliance with Blue Labour, traditionalist anti-EU sections of the party, left and (very) right-wing sovereigntists, played an important role in warding off internationalist pro European challenges.
It’s no secret that Britain’s Communists did not welcome the election of a new team under Keir Starmer, not least for his pro-Second Referendum stand.
Bear this in mind when you hear attacks on the new leader for his “Blairism” and all the rest…..
On April the 24th theCPB issued this statement.
COVID crisis and Labour’s right-turn show urgent need for stronger Communist Party
The coronavirus exposes the fundamentally anti-social nature of capitalism with its corporate greed and market anarchy’, Steve Johnson told the Communist Party’s political committee online on Wednesday evening April 22). ‘Yet, at this very time, the pro-capitalist forces in the Labour Party are triumphant behind new leader Keir Starmer, determined to push the party back to the mushy middle-ground and marginalise the left’, he warned.
Yet now things are looking up.
Like their friends, the Socialist Party, the CPB has had a boost in membership.
On the new CPB website it’s noted that they are:
The Communist Party is a growing party, it’s the Marxist party of the British working class with branches active in your locality.
In a detailed organisational report, assistant secretary for membership Alex Gordon revealed that more than 60 people had applied to join the Communist Party in April, taking recruitment to the highest level since the 2003 Iraq War.
This is the new mass line in practice:
An Open Letter to All Working People.
Early in this crisis, the Communist Party proposed:
Who’s going to pay?
One does not a Capital reading group to work that out.
The immediate tasks resulting from the new perspectives:
Facing the future
There will be future pandemics of this kind. We need to campaign in our unions, local trade-union councils, community organisations and political parties for government action to prepare for them.
You can help make that happen. There should be local meetings and national conferences to review the past and plan for the future.
The British, Scottish, Welsh and regional TUCs and the People’s Assembly should call demonstrations thanking all front-line workers and demanding an end to low pay, investment in our emergency services and no more NHS privatisation.
Cometh the Hour Cometh the Strategy:
CP PROPOSES ‘POPULAR FRONT’ ALLIANCE AND ‘TRIDENT DIVIDEND’
Reminding the executive meeting on Soviet Victory Day that capitalist crisis can lead to fascism, Mr Foster urged trade unions, trades councils, People’s Assembly, CND and other campaigning groups to build a ‘Popular Front’ alliance against Tory policies that would put the interests of monopoly capital above those of working people and their families.
Unity could be developed around a left-wing programme for public ownership, democratic economic planning and progressive taxation. It was also essential to halt rent evictions and extend the pay furlough, Universal Credit or tax credits to all workers, claimants and students in need.During the present pandemic, Britain’s Communists said workers should take collective action to refuse to accept unsafe practices or conditions during this pandemic and take every opportunity to strengthen workplace trade unionism.
The Morning Star, independent of the CPB and wholly owned by the Co-op has publicised the call!
More and more left wing activists and popular masses are recognising the leading role of the Communist Party of Britain, its allies in Counterfire, the Socialist Party and New Left Review in supporting Brexit and helping Labour achieve its December electoral result.
Anti-Starmer left members of the Labour Party should respond favourably to this warm invitation:
Join us. The Communist Party is growing faster than for decades and it is recruiting people like you. Apply your skills campaigning for education, healthcare, housing and rights at work. Learn from others and develop your political knowledge through your communist party branch. Join the CP by applying online here.
There are now 9 Political ‘Groups’ in the French Assemblée nationale.
Macron deprived of outright majority as party defectors form new parliamentary group.
France 24.
The defecting members of parliament launched their new “Ecology, Democracy, Solidarity” (EDS) group, featuring high-profile politicians including one-time Macron loyalists Cedric Villani and Paula Forteza.
Macron’s party, formed after the former investment banker won the presidency in May 2017, has suffered a string of defections in recent months by parliamentarians frustrated by his tight grip on decision-making and his pro-business policies..
They already have their own Wikipedia page (in French): Écologie Démocratie Solidarité”
It has been immediately pointed out that the group’s members do not have the kind of regional base and long term political roots in local politics that have sustained other French centrist small parties.
It said that the group is moderately on the left, and, above all, critical of Macron’s high-handed political practice.
They are also criticisms of the French President’s handing of the Coronavirus crisis.
It is announced that they intend to offer constructive proposals and criticisms of Macron’s policies and actions, and claim that they will be professional oppositionists (‘frondeurs’).
Many people, and the left in particular, would not trust this group an inch.
You only have to look at the welcome they got from centrist progressives such as these bodies (not to be confused with France’s Green Party, The EELV):
More to follow…
Starmer Won Decisive Victory..
Labour Leader Keir Starmer was backed by people from all sides of the Party, including some from the radical internationalist left.
At present most of the left are concentrating on sensible reports on Covid-19 and the government’s flawed responses.
But a few have different concerns.
As expected some people in the Labour Party, also from the left, were, and are, not happy with Keir Starmer’s election.
A handful have joined other parties.
Or as Corbyn’s best friend, the Socialist Party (former ‘Militant’) put it, immediately the Labour ballot result was known.
One enthusiast wrote…
I wish to join a true socialist party. Labour with Starmer is, I feel, going to become centrist and renounce socialist values.
Bless!
This is Britain’s most famous Vegan’s take,
The left’s future is not in Labour but in extra-parliamentary struggle .
CHRIS WILLIAMSON believes the struggle to claim Labour for the left cannot succeed
Sir Keir Starmer represents a lurch back to the days when Labour embraced neoliberalism, when Tony Blair made a Faustian pact with Murdoch’s empire and Clause IV was jettisoned, thereby expunging any commitment to socialism.
….
..that is why I am working with others to create a new grassroots movement to build capacity in communities and raise political consciousness.
The Morning Star, which prints this article is wholly independent of pro-Brexit Communist Party of Britain and is run by the Co-Op.
A different approach is taken by these groups,
DON’T LEAVE – ORGANISE
FOR A BROAD LEFT NETWORK
Joint Statement by the LRC, Jewish Voice for Labour and Red Labour.
This is their principal objective.
Socialists in the party need to work together, in coalition, now more than ever. Alongside others in the Labour Party, we will help rebuild the left around a new, national network, which will be a place to organise, educate and debate in order to deliver the socialist society we all need.
We commit to democratic and transparent organisation; working to democratise the Labour Party and the trade unions; defending party members against unjust disciplinary processes and supporting the self-organisation of groups contesting particular oppressions.
Fair enough.
You can follow the activities of this cartel of small factions through events such as this:
The Weekly Worker, concentrating on the ‘disciplinary processes’, seems determined to cause as much trouble as possible within this body, firm in the CPGB (Provisional Central Committee) control – with Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, of Labour Against the Witch-hunt (LAW).
Halt!
LAW itself is undergoing yet another internal crisis..
In the latest issue of the Organ of the CPGB (Provisional Central Committee) is said to have got the line “completely wrong”.
following the attack on Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy for speaking at an online meeting where two expelled Labour members were present, Labour Against the Witchhunt was completely wrong to call for “solidarity” with the MPs. They had, after all, defended themselves by stating they did not know who was in the meeting. A statement was issued on their behalf making it clear that they would not have taken part if they had known the two expelled comrades were present. This is to bow before, to legitimise, the witch-hunt.
Most Labour members, familiar or not with LAW’s antics, or its leading figure Tony Greenstein, will begin from very different premises.
The performance of our new leader, his ability to stand up and make telling points on the government’s handling of the Coronavirus crisis, backed by a unity team from nearly every wing of the party, has been widely seen as solid. Any left worth its salt needs to start from recognising that.
Elections for Momentum seem the occasion for another battle between different tendencies.
As it unfurls it will merit a post of its own.
But it’s another factionalist war that is worth signaling today.
Where you may ask?
More obscure than the Weekly Worker?
Yes: a sound of wailing and a gnashing of teeth has been heard from our old friends Skwawkbox.
Starmer confirms no interest in winning back leave seats
Shadow Cabinet Office minister Rachel Reeves has essentially confirmed what many working-class Labour supporters feared – that Keir Starmer’s team is essentially uninterested in winning back the more than 50 leave-voting seats Labour lost in the 2019 general election.
Followed by this “bombshell” article, by no coincidence at all aimed at a pro-European MP who has backed Another Europe is Possible.
Russell-Moyle employs Momentum founder Lansman as ‘researcher’.
Brighton Kemptown MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, now on Keir Starmer’s front bench as an environment minister, has employed Momentum founder Jon Lansman as a researcher, according to the latest Members’ register of secretaries and researchers.
Russell-Moyle was reportedly linked to an attempt to replace former deputy leadership candidate Richard Burgon as secretary of the Socialist Campaign Group of left-wing MPs as a precursor to widening the group’s membership to include ‘soft left’ MPs and argued in a LabourList article for working with the soft left.
Without his mate as Labour General Secretary, and with the leadership of UNITE said to be up for a new election, (UNITE: the race to replace McClusky begins in earnest) the Skwawky one has taken up his old trade: news fabrication.
This is Steve Walker’s latest misinformation, which you can, if you wish, read in full.
Russell-Moyle employs Momentum founder Lansman as ‘researcher’.
Skwawkbox, so far from the international left, so near to national populism…
Or so a factionalist might say..
It’s hardly surprising that this reaction has just appeared
This Review appears in the latest print edition (May/June 2020) of Chartist Magazine.
(As will be obvious, it was written before the present Coronavirus pandemic swept the world. The difference this has made make a post in itself).
“Perhaps the foremost challenge in trying to think beyond the market dystopia of contemporary capitalism” the Preface to the 2020 Edition of the Socialist Register states, is to “asses the implications of the alarming ecological conditions” we now confront. The two editors ask whether a “new strategy for structural reform that would take capital away from capital” and remake the “nature-society relation”.
In the opening essay, Stephen Mahler, Sam Ginden and Leo Panitch hail the “renewed appeal of socialist discourse”. They speculate on the challenges that would face socialist-led governments and André Gorz’s (1968) “non-reformist reform”. The opportunity to test plans for economic democracy against Gorz’s later sceptical view that the working class no longer had the capacity to organise production, and be the subject of social transformation, has, for the immediate future, vanished (Adieux au prolétariat. 1980). Today the “tens of thousands of young people” “galvanised” into groups like Momentum and the Democratic Socialists of America are digesting the Labour Party’s historic 2019 defeat and Bernie Sanders’ uncertain future.
One aspect looks set to continue, “the ‘Green New Deal’ and ‘just transition’ have become central parts of the socialist lexicon.” Indeed some are staking the survival of the Corbyn project through a dose of Ecosocialism, as offered by Rebecca Long-Bailey’s version of the Green New Deal.
Other contributors offer a glimpse into the scale of environmental and other global problems. In a thoughtful article Barbara Harriss-White probes the world’s ecological catastrophes and suggests that alarm is not misplaced. What can be done in one country, she asks, when capitalism is the problem? Carbon-reducing mechanisms are not yet up to the task. Climate change is set continue. Nancy Holmstrom is more upbeat, “Based on a global commitment to public goods/commons as the default and social rationality we can aim for the ‘buen vivir’ for all”. Many readers will agree with Harriss-White that in this area there are more questions than answers.
Amy Bartholomew and Hilary Wainwright strike a more optimistic note. Recounting their take on the refugee and migrant crisis in Greece they discover “radical democracy” in the refugee-solidarity City Plaza Squat in Athens. This “accommodation and Solidarity Space” was linked to broader anti-racist initiatives. A “radically democratic model of living together” in this one hotel, practiced “equality and freedom”. Evicted under the victorious right-wing New Democracy government, the authors see the City Plaza as part of “solidarity across struggles”.
Despite this “new landscape” there is no indication about how a radical left government, led by Syriza, under EU and home-created fiscal pressure, could deal on its own with large numbers of migrants.
One of the contributions to Socialist Register stands out. Yu Chunsen offers a brilliant account of the struggles of the “new precarious working class” in Chinese factories. Workmates, “gongyou” have established their own forms of solidarity faced with “management by stress”, workplace despotism, and trade unions which function as conveyer belts for management rule. Chunsen compares the Chinese willingness to take “collective actions” with the making of the English working class described by E.P.Thompson.
“Socialism is Back,” declares Nancy Fraser in the concluding contribution. Some people suggest that the Tory victory in Britain will see a revival not of socialism but of “left folk politics”. That is, a retreat to indignation and moral protests. Alyssa Battistoni, from the populist cheerleaders of the US Jacobin magazine, cites a long list. In the indignados, Occupy, Nuit Debout, the “London riots” Black Lives Matter to Red for Ed (Red For Education)” she sees “struggles combine critiques of wealth inequality, renewed labour militancy and attention to the spaces of daily life..” To which one can add Extinction Rebellion and the Global Climate Strike, admirable though they are. None of these have been strategies towards an electorally victorious socialism prepared to begin “non-reformist reforms”.
Andrew Coates
“
France today will reach a new stage in relaxing some of its stricter lockdown rules- a move, which started on the 11th of May, described as “Déconfinement”.
France Inter reports this morning that there are calls today, Saturday, in Paris, Toulouse and elsewhere, for the Gilets Jaunes to begin their demonstrations again.
The right to protest, in large groups (note no social distancing in picture), against “Macron’s” rule, is seen by some as a democratic demand.
Some marches, such as one in Rouen, have already been banned. For the moment reports indicate they will not defy this decision. For the moment.
British supporters of the ‘Yellow Jackets’ will perhaps find themselves in a quandary: will the back breaking social distancing (“distanciation sociale”), in France (even the rule which now stands at 1 metre) while calling for it in the UK?
To many people these protests, whatever their justified dislike of Macron, look more like the actions of the rabble backing Donald Trump than left wing activities.
Seine-Maritime : une trentaine de « gilets jaunes » délogés par les forces de l’ordre près de Rouen
Some are asking if they will return to there little folklorique camps on roundabouts.
Here
The Labour leadership election showed that hundreds of years of deep Pabloite liquidationist entryism have paid off.
Weeks training at a secret Ipswich allotment location, living on dandelion salad, nettle soup and Co-op 99 tea have toughed Cde Coatesy.
Coatesy is back.
Absolute love to all slogging their guts out for us all, too the friends,mates and Cds.
Coatesy is back.
These tossers (this tweet got 17 likes for hell’s sake, 17 too many and a full 16 talked about it!) are still around.
Now to get used to a lap-top…
Follow comrade Alastair’s advice.
Believe me this geezer is one of the truest of the true, stood with us on Europe, et j’en passe….
Alasdair Ross
“Breach of democratic-centralism for Party members to make comments online which are not consistent with our democratically agreed policy…”
This morning I saw an elderly lady buying supplies of Breakfast cereal Town centre Sainsbury’s check-out.
We spoke.
They are for for her daughter.
It is hardly worth mentioning that very simple love of her action is deeply moving.
This set in train of thought that finished at the way we lot in Ipswich stuck together during the Steve Wright murders.
A protest, initiated by two young anarchist women, gallivised the town in solidarity.
The Salvation Army, the Trades Council, Tories, Liberals, Greens, the Labour Party, Marxist parties, we all marched to defend the sex workers.
Somebody’s Daughter, was our banner.
One would hope that something of that spirit, generous and selfless, by the lady looking out for her daughter and grandchildren, would be shown at the moment.
There is no doubt that it is.
I can seriously feel it.
Across the country people have responded to the Coronavirus crisis with real solidarity.
Alas, it not much in evidence here.
This reference is to the fact that the CPB, aka, the Morning Star and its allies, like Skwawkbox, have been fearmongering.
Communist Party advice on the COVID-19 CRISIS
It is a breach of democratic-centralism for Party members to make comments online which are not consistent with our democratically agreed policy. This is as true of the Labour Party (and non-participation in its leadership ballots) and support for the Morning Star as it is of women’s rights, the EU, Brexit and climate change.
Nor is it helpful when Party members rush into the public domain with unproven theories and unsubstantiated claims about the current Corovirus (sic) crisis.
Comrades who believe that democratic-centralism does not apply to them should consider whether they really belong in a disciplined, revolutionary Communist Party.
GIven the nutters that lot attract…
Second Round May Be Postponed.
The Right wing daily Le Figaro began its report on the first round of the French local elections by citing supporters of President Macron’s Party, LaREM, (1) lamenting their set-back, “Pas bon du tout», «catastrophique», «c’est un échec»…”
******
(1) I like this Wikipedia explanation, “La République En Marche ![a] (frequently abbreviated REM, LRM or LREM, officially LaREM; possible translation: “The Republic on the move!”), sometimes called En Marche ! (French: [ɑ̃ maʁʃ]; English translation: “Forward!”,[11][12] “Onward!”,[13] “Working!” or “On The Move!”)” Some might suggest this indicates a pretty transient name for a political party.
Putting back the Second Round will create a legal headache.
Despite the bizarre conditions in which the vote took place, the left and the Greens have still something to be happy about:
The Greens (EELV) are in a good position in Bordeaux, (an historic bastion of the right) Lyon, Strasbourg, Poitiers and Besançon as wella s to keep control of Grenoble, where most of the left have gathered on a united list.
EELV are encouraged by the results:
The Paris vote was good for the left.
The Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, (LaREM) did not win in the first round in Le Havre, his Communist Opponent performed strongly.
Municipales : c’est loin d’être gagné pour Edouard Philippe au Havre
Phillippe scored 43,6 % and his Communist rival, Jean-Paul Lecoq, backed by La France insoumise, won 35,88 %. The Greens, supposed by the Parti Socialiste, got 8,3% and the far-right RN, had 7,27%.
This prediction for the Second Round may be optimistic:
The French Communist Party (PCF) is encouraged more widely (l’Humanité).
Les maires PCF de Montreuil, Gennevilliers, Dieppe, Martigues, Vierzon, Montataire, Saint-Amand-les-Eaux et Tarnos ont, notamment, été réélus dès hier.
The far-right consolidated its position but apart from Perpignan (which is personally saddening) made no gains.
There was therefore no breakthrough for the far right.
The election atmosphere is reported to have been extremely odd.
The rate of abstention was, unsurprisingly, very high:
Green surge and low turnout as virus fears weigh on French local elections
France 24.
French voters cast their ballots Sunday in nationwide municipal elections marked by record-low turnout after the government imposed stringent restrictions on public life in an increasingly frantic effort to slow the progress of the deadly coronavirus outbreak.
The report continues,
In the most keenly watched race, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo took a commanding lead with 30% of the first-round ballot, 8 points ahead of her conservative challenger; the candidate for Macron’s ruling party was a distant third.
Running for re-election in Le Havre, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe topped the first round but faced the prospect of a tough run-off vote against a united left.
The famous port, Le Havre, was Communist run City until 1995. I visited it, circa 1994, and out of curiosity, went to the union offices in the Bourse du Travail where a T & G card did wonders.
They recommended me the Town Hall, where I was received by the PCF run team with great respect, a snack, and they talked about their municipal politics.
Apart from the shock administered to Macron’s Prime Minister it is good to see how low the far-right vote was in that City.
Peter Taaffe. Socialist Party Political Secretary.
Following a very successful Socialist Party national congress the newly elected Socialist Party executive committee has unanimously agreed that Peter Taaffe will become political secretary, while Hannah Sell will become general secretary.
Peter has been general secretary since the inception of the Socialist Party, and prior to that was editor of the Militant newspaper. He will remain on the executive committee.
In his keynote speech to the Congress Taaffe issued this warning about the Labour Party leadership election,
If Starmer wins, this will represent a right-wing ‘counterrevolution’ in the party, regardless of the more ‘left’ face he has been forced to present in order to try and win the contest. With Starmer as leader it would be necessary to find another route to the building of a mass workers’ party in England and Wales.
Taaffe was GSec from 1997 until this year, 2020.
Some suggest that Taaffe has followed the lead of Harry Pollitt, who, after handing over the Communist Party of Great Britain job to John Gollan in 1956, had a new and more or less honorary job created for him, party Chairman.
The Socialist Party underwent a split last year.
In analysing this division and the history of his faction Taaffe found much to congratulate himself as he recounts in In defence of Trotskyism.
Introduction 12th of December 2019.
….we stubbornly but correctly defended the historic role and potential of the working class in the forthcoming battles that were likely to open up internationally.
We were very soon vindicated in action in the mass revolutionary upheavals that erupted, particularly in France in 1968 with the working class reaching out for power through a general strike and organised occupations of the factories.
…
Our general approach allowed us to subsequently face up to winning and mobilising the best working-class youth, and at the same time winning a significant layer of student youth in the universities who put themselves politically and historically on the standpoint of the working class.
One would have, perhaps, to be closely attuned to the higher secrets of the Marxist dialectic to appreciate the full text.
Yet these further extracts are of some interest to a wider, lay, audience,
Marxism historically has consistently first sought to unify the working class in action – and particularly women workers with their male counterparts – at the point of production in the factories, the workplaces, in the localities and in general society. Our opponents – the long-term sectarians, together with those on the right wing of the labour movement and their quasi-left political cousins – of course deny that is their aim. But in practice this is what invariably takes place.
In war – including the class war – the first casualty is truth! This bourgeois maxim is taken for granted amongst the ruling class. However, with the labour movement, and particularly those who claim to be Marxists or Trotskyists, it behoves those who seek to represent the working class to tell the truth both about the objective situation and to seek to answer criticisms honestly. However, Lenin stressed that in Russia he had never come across a really honest labour movement tendency outside of the ranks of the Bolsheviks, the genuine representatives of Marxism and the working class.
It is impossible to answer all the myriad lies used against us. This should be kept in mind when reading some of the slanderous documents, and the language and shameful behaviour of those who supported identity politics in the ideological struggle.
Slander and shameful behaviour are not the end of it:
The starting point of the sectarians and advocates of identity politics is firstly to hone in, to seek to emphasise and magnify any differences in consciousness between sections of the working class. A Marxist and Trotskyist approach does the opposite: it seeks to emphasise what unites working people in struggle. Of course, we recognise the special oppression of different groups and accordingly formulate specific demands. But we at the same time always seek to unify in action the struggles of working people through a common programme, instilling confidence in their ranks with a strategy for victory. We recognise the points of difference where they exist, which means supporting particular demands, but also we have the responsibility to seek to enhance the general struggles of the working class, to free them from opportunist and sectarian leaders and unify them on a fighting programme.
One hopes that the youth will learn the lessons of this magisterial volume!
The answer to how to undertake this colossal task can be found – particularly by the new generation – in reading and absorbing the lessons of this book and the method of Trotsky and Lenin to forge the political weapons that will create a new socialist world.
The Socialist Party monthly, Socialism Today, drew up a balance sheet also relating to the butter debate his February.
The New Party Gen Sec, Hannah Sell, a long-standing opponent of ‘identity politics’ (Unpacking the rucksack) writes,
Featured article from February 2020 Socialism Today (Monthly journal of the Socialist Party- CWI England & Wales.
Socialists debate identity politics
The relationship between fighting women’s oppression, identity politics, and the struggle for socialism is a feature of many debates in the workers’ movement internationally. Mistakes made on this question by the Irish Socialist Party were central to the division that took place in the Committee for a Workers’ International in 2019. In the wake of the Irish general election HANNAH SELL draws up a balance sheet.
In 2019 a major debate took place in the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), the international organisation to which the Socialist Party is affiliated. The debate resulted in a split in the CWI with some of its former supporters moving in a rightward opportunist direction.
One of the main triggers for the debate was the mistaken approach of the leadership of the Irish Socialist Party (then the CWI’s affiliate in Ireland) towards the fight against women’s oppression, and its relationship to the struggle for socialism. The debate on these issues has important lessons for the workers’ movement internationally, particularly in this period where identity, rather than class, is frequently put forward as the central divide in society by individuals and forces who claim to be on the left.
Issues relating to this will come up in different forms again and again in future struggles. Just as Lenin and the Bolshevik Party would have been unable to successfully lead the Russian working class to power in 1917 without a correct approach to the right of nations to self-determination, it will be essential to future struggles to change society that a correct approach is taken to all the many forms of special oppression.
The split in the Socialist Party 2019
The Socialist Party (the group publishing The Socialist, and previously known as Militant) has split after a special congress on 21 July. So has the CWI, the international network of groups of which the SP was the pivot.
SP delegates voted 173-35-0 to “refound” the Committee for a Workers’ International by calling an international conference in 2020. The congress also declared that people continuing to support the existing CWI would place themselves outside of Socialist Party membership, effectively expelling the minority in Britain who support the (apparent) majority internationally within the CWI (bit.ly/cwi-26).
The split concludes months of bitter and increasingly public fighting within the Socialist Party (public due to lack of computer skills by some, rather than to any spirit of open debate).
The faction led by longstanding SP leader Peter Taaffe accused their opponents of “capitulating to petit bourgeois identity politics”. The opposition contended that Taaffe’s standoffish approach to feminist or other broader political mobilisations takes away the opportunity to fight for working-class politics in these movements.
Now they are moblising against the “counter-revolution”, that is those in the Labour Party who back Keir Starmer.
Coronavirus is France’s ‘greatest health crisis in a century’, says Macron
French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday said that the coronavirus epidemic was France’s worst health crisis in a century and announced that schools throughout the country would close from next week.Creches, schools and also universities would close from Monday “until further notice”, Macron said in an address to the nation on the fight against the coronavirus. He also urged all people older than 70, those who suffer chronic diseases, respiratory troubles and the handicapped, “to stay at home” if possible.But the president also said that nationwide local elections scheduled for Sunday will not be postponed.
“We are just at the beginning of this crisis,” Macron said.
“In spite of all our efforts to break it, this virus is continuing to propagate and to accelerate.”
The speech was widely welcomed and stand in contrast to the shifty response by our own PM.
Some saw something of a new “alter-globalisation” Macron.
Macron’s defence of the welfare state and need to protect services “outside the laws of the market” appeared to signal a leftward shift in the President’s politics.
Face au coronavirus, les habits neufs du docteur Macron
Sylvain Courage Nouvel Obs.
Avec des accents qui ont dû réjouir l’aile gauche de la majorité et estomaquer ses opposants socialistes et « insoumis », il appelle à « interroger le modèle de développement dans lequel s’est engagé notre monde depuis des décennies et qui dévoile ses failles au grand jour ». Sus à la mondialisation ? Macron vante désormais le service public de santé, l’Etat-providence et tous ces « biens et services qui doivent être placés en dehors des lois du marché. Déléguer notre alimentation, notre protection, notre capacité à soigner, notre cadre de vie, au fond, à d’autres est une folie », assure-t-il.”
With accents that must have cheered the left wing of the majority and come as a belly blow to his socialist and “insoumises” (La France insoumise) opponents, he put in “question the development model in which our world has engaged for decades and which has now clearly shown its flaws Is globalisation itself in question? Macron has now praised the public health service, the welfare state and all those “goods and services which must be placed outside the laws of the market” . “Delegating our food, our protection, our ability to care, our way of life, to others is, basically, madness,” he said.
Another commentator Serge Raffy argues in the same Novel Obs that Macron has turned to national sovereigntism, putting the needs of the nation first.
Coronavirus : Macron converti au souverainisme ?
Raffey argues that some of the measures, including a break from tight financial controls, may be conjunctural. Others seem as if they are part of a national moblisation, a war against the Virus, “Contre un virus malin” the malign symbol, despite itself, or a process of globalisation on its last legs.
Others were even more reserved.
In Libération
Allocution : Macron, atteint par le virus de l’altermondialisme ?
When the globalised economy appears on the brink and a financial crisis looms, Emmanuel Macron has been happy to use radical language . Thursday evening, at the conclusion of his address to the French people, the Head of State estimated that the epidemic revealed “in broad daylight” the flaws of the “development model” in which our world has been engaged for decades. “What this pandemic has shown is that there are goods and services that must be placed outside the laws of the market,” he said as the champion the welfare state, beginning with the free universal health service, “an essential asset when tragedy strikes” .
The journalists compare this to radical statements made by former President Nicolas Sarkozy faced with the 2008 Banking Crisis. The head of state at that time talked of a “refondation du capitalisme” and a sustainable model of growth, “«croissance durable».
This rhetoric re amounted to little concrete, long-term, action once the crisis passed its peak.
Others are even less happy:
(Note the use of the hard-right term “globalist”)
You can see the Macron speech here:
This response is far from isolated.
Germany is already contemplating nationalisations in the wake of the coronavirus crisis on the economy.
European authorities are increasing efforts to try to stave off the economic effects of coronavirus.
Coronavirus: Europe ramps up support for ailing firmsThe European Union (EU) will put a package of measures in place including a €37bn euro (£33bn) investment initiative.
And German finance minister Olaf Scholz said his country could part nationalise firms to tackle the crisis.
Some of these responses seem an extension of state response in line with the analysis offered last week by Phil Hearse,
Emergency government measures to combat the virus, and the development of a vaccine, are the key priorities today. But world solutions are needed, because even if the outbreak dies down in more advanced countries, it is likely to continue to rage in countries with less developed health systems. If the small number of cases in South Africa spreads, in a country were hundreds of thousand are HIV-positive with rock bottom immune systems, the impact could be devastating. The Republic’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has already warned that there will be a national crisis. If the virus rages in poorer countries, it will rebound back into countries where the virus has died down.
In the longer-term, humanity needs to ask pointed questions about the wave of pandemics that have swept the world in the last twenty years.
It would appear that, faced with the emergency, many states are responding with strong measures.
Welcome as this may be, with strong reservations about the details, it is not the same thing as a turn to the left.
Fake News Site Says, “Johnson’s aim is to allow the virus to spread until at least 90% of the UK’s population has been infected – which will involve a huge death toll.”
The fake news site says: JOHNSON’S HERD-IMMUNITY PLAN WOULD MEAN LETTING 90% OF UK CATCH COVID-19 – AND A MILLION OR MORE DIE
Johnson’s ‘herd immunity’ plan appears to mean a decision by the Tory government to stand back while – in the most optimistic scenario – hundreds of thousands of our people die.
To Johnson, Cummings and their fellow fans of eugenics, that might just mean ‘the herd’. But to you and me, that’s our loved ones, our friends, our colleagues – if we’re lucky enough to survive their plan ourselves.
The people the government says its first duty is to protect – and under that kind of a government, there is no reason at all for such optimism.
Postscript: Johnson’s refusal this afternoon to close schools, when Ireland will do so from tomorrow, is entirely in line with his ‘plan’.
Conspis are already commenting on the site,
Johnson, Cummings and the string pullers are revealing their true nature. What a tragedy that the ” moderates, centrists” Blairites, Labour first, Starmer, Thornberry et al all have played a part in these hideous people having the levers of power.
Another,
Bet those pensioners that selfishly voted Tory didn’t realise they were volunteering for a far right eugenics experiment with them as the guinea pigs.
Bet they are foaming at the mouth over their Daily Bile.
Not too long ago Swawkbox restricted itself to publishing stories attacking Keir Starmer, and Lisa Nandy , giving a platform to poor old Richard Burgon, “by far the outstanding candidate in that contest”, and this kind of piece,
Now it’s a return to the old days with scaremongering to the fore: endless stories about Coronavirus.
What old days?
These old days: “DISABLED CLAIMANTS TOLD: 2 YRS TO GET JOB OR BE SANCTIONED FOR A YEAR.” 17th of July. 2017
And this, also in 2017.
On 16 June, in an article headed “Video: Govt puts ‘D-notice’ gag on real #Grenfell death toll #nationalsecurity”, Skwawkbox took up the claim made by grime MC Saskilla on the BBC Victoria Derbyshire programme that the number of victims in the Grenfell Tower fire was far greater than had yet been officially admitted, with as many as 200 people having died.
Skwawkbox used this claim to give credence to rumours that the government was engaged in an attempt to prevent the media reporting the true extent of the disaster: “At the same time, multiple sources told the SKWAWKBOX that the government has placed a ‘D-notice’ (sometimes called a ‘DA Notice’) on the real number of deaths in the blaze.”
This was followed by a screenshot of an entry from Wikipedia, which defined a DA-Notice as “an official request to news editors not to publish or broadcast items on specified subjects for reasons of national security”. The Skwawkbox article then continued: “In effect, although voluntary, this amounts to a gag on the mainstream media — and note that it is applied for for reasons of national security only.”.
….
Faced with the collapse of its story, Skwawkbox was forced to back off and post a grudging retraction: “EDIT: the SKWAWKBOX is now satisfied that no D-notice was issued. No plain answer to this blog’s question of other restrictions on information about lives lost at Grenfell has yet been provided, but a ‘D-notice’ (or DSMA-notice as they are now termed) was not.”
Did Skwawkbox apologise for getting the story wrong and offer assurances that there would be no repetition of this stupid and provocative reporting? You must be joking. Instead, Skwawkbox’s proprietor was stung by the well-deserved criticism of his article into posting an indignant defence of his shoddy journalistic methods. In a quite astonishing display of chutzpah, he declared that he himself had been the victim of “fake news”!
Trump’s Travel Ban has “potential to cause another world depression.”
European stocks plunge after Trump coronavirus travel ban announcement
France 24.
Europe’s major stock markets fell through the floor again on Thursday after Donald Trump banned all travel from mainland Europe to the US for a month to fight the coronavirus – with the London, Paris and Frankfurt stock exchanges all falling by more than 5 percent – ramping up fears the global economy will careen into recession.
Shortly after the open, London‘s benchmark FTSE 100 index was down 5.3 percent, Frankfurt’s DAX 30 plunged 5.8 percent, the Paris CAC 40 tumbled 5.1 percent and Madrid’s stock exchange down by 5.5 percent. Switzerland’s bourse got off a little more lightly, falling by 4.8 percent.
The news came after the World Health Organization officially labelled the outbreak a pandemic and hit out at “alarming levels of inaction” for its spread.
France 24 continues,
The losses followed another brutal session on Wall Street, with wave after wave of bad news, including Hilton withdrawing its earnings forecast and Boeing saying it would suspend most hiring and overtime pay.
The Dow fell into a bear market having lost more than 20 percent since its recent high, and futures pointed Thursday to another rout in New York and Europe.
The coronavirus outbreak has left virtually no sector untouched, though travel and tourism have been particularly hard-hit as countries institute travel bans and quarantine requirements, with Italy in a country-wide lockdown.
The number of cases across the globe has risen to more than 124,000 with 4,500 deaths, according to an AFP tally.
In announcing the Europe ban – which excludes the UK and Ireland – Trump said the continent had seen a surge in new cases because governments failed to stop travel from China, where the COVID-19 epidemic began.
He said the prohibitions would also “apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo”, and “various other things as we get approval”.
However, the White House afterwards clarified that “the people transporting goods will not be admitted into the country, but the goods will be”.
The Guardian reports,
Stock markets tumble as Trump’s Europe travel ban shocks investors – business live
The Top French financial daily Les Echos. carries the came story.
Coronavirus : les Bourses européennes s’effondrent après les annonces de Trump
The whole world is affected:
This a key comment on the MSF
Some analysts were a bit more alarmed.
“The U.S. limiting entry to foreign nationals from Europe has the potential to cause another world depression again even if it is for reasons that seek to stop the spread of the coronavirus,” MUFG economist Chris Rupkey said. “Business activity is going to hit the brakes around the world and stock markets around the world are in freefall as the spread of this deadly pandemic virus has the potential to slow the global economy to a crawl.”
Coronavirus Live Updates: Trump’s Europe Travel Ban Is Met With Confusion and Anger
New York Times.
Meanwhile British national populists make this tasteless story their lead.
Spiked.
The worrying rise of ‘catastrofashion’
For a certain section of society, there is always a crisis on the horizon, whether it’s the climate emergency or Brexit. And they need us all to know they are worried about it. Coronavirus is undoubtedly dangerous, but there are serious consequences to the hysteria, too.
The usual supermarket sweeps are taking place as fearful faddists stockpile every last supply of hand sanitiser, toilet roll, paracetamol and can of preserved foods. No thought is given to those who might genuinely need those products and will now find the shelves totally empty. Meanwhile, a lifetime’s supply of Andrex and Cuticura clog up loft conversions across the country.
…..
Every era has some form of ‘catastrofashion’ and doomsday cultists. Brexit, the climate emergency and now coronavirus have acted as open invitations for the same self-absorbed, healthy, affluent and privileged few to warn us that the end is nigh unless we listen to them.
Alexandra Phillips is a former Brexit Party MEP for South East England.
Soon-to-be-new Father Galloway Appeals to Those Disillusioned with Labour.
Who’s not sick of ” clean air cycle lanes lesbians gays transexuals genders..” ?
The Workers Party is unequivocally committed to class politics. Though the fashion of the times is to divide working people along identity lines, we seek to unite them, based on their shared class interest. It is not ‘homophobic’ or ‘racist’ for socialists to focus their attention on those contradictions that concern the whole working class in its struggle for socialism. While being totally opposed to discrimination on grounds of race, sex or sexual proclivity, we declare that obsession with identity politics, including sexual politics, divides the working class.
Introducing the Workers Party LEADER: George Galloway :: Deputy leader: Joti Brar
What progressive patriot cannot agree that the British people should be rid of a “unemployed feckless rump living off cheap imported food and the plastic-electronic consumables of global capitalist anarchy”?
Disillusioned supporters of Rebecca Long-Bailey are said to be flocking to the Galloway-led Workers’ Party of Britain,
Now comes this happy news….
Firebrand politician George Galloway to be dad again at 65.
The Daily Record reports.
The Scots former MP is expecting a baby with his fourth wife, Putri Gayatri Pertiwi, who is 30 years his junior.
The baby is due in the summer and will be the couple’s third child together and Galloway’s sixth in total.
Galloway posted a photograph on social media of his wife sporting her pregnancy bump after she attended a 20 week scan.
Galloway has not let his joy stop him from campaigning…
Galloway’s Workers’ Party of Britain is on the rise:
You can see why!
The Party has appealed to the “mob” to attend:
Coronavirus looms.
But, help is at hand:
Background:
The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) welcomed the announcement made by George Galloway in the days following the general election.
This formation of the Workers Party of Britain (WPB) represents a genuine effort to break a section of workers away from the stranglehold of the Labour party, which has once again shown itself incapable of leading the British working class to socialism.
The Corbyn period of leadership was the period which should once and for all kill off the myth that with a ‘socialist’ at its head the Labour party can deliver for working people.
Though communists may recognise the truth of the above statement, as yet thousands of well-intentioned workers do not. These sections of the working class are unable to take the necessary steps alone; they need to be guided, as any student must, in drawing out the necessary conclusions from their own practical experience.
The Workers party has the potential to assist in this process, which is of historical importance for the British working class.
Lalkar extends its congratulations to the CPGB-ML and to Joti Brar, one of CPGB-ML’s vice-chairs, who was elected the deputy leader of the Workers Party of Britain at its founding congress. This meeting also elected a large 40-person members council with strong working-class representation.
….
More than ever, the political analysis of Marxist-Leninists is needed by workers in Britain. Our job is to defend principles whilst wedding Marxism to the workers.
We hope that all those whose left-social-democratic illusions now lie in tatters will join the Workers Party as a positive step towards their total political redemption; there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance
More to follow:
Chris Williamson says RLB is “Bending over backwards to facilitate right-wing saboteurs, while simultaneously doubling down against anti-racist socialists, who’ve been smeared by those selfsame saboteurs, suggests Labour isn’t a home for socialists nor a vehicle to deliver a modest socialist programme.”
The Jewish Chronicle reports,
Labour leadership candidate Rebecca Long Bailey has said that she would let Luciana Berger back into the party if she becomes leader, despite the former MP standing for the Liberal Democrats.
She told the Evening Standard: “The circumstances for what happened to Luciana were very different from an MP who was just angry with the leadership. She had a terrible time.”
Party rules exclude those who have stood in an election for a rival party or against a Labour candidate from returning as members.
Ms Berger stood for the Liberal Democrats in December’s general election in Finchley and Golders Green, after defecting from Labour in February last year due to “a culture of bullying, bigotry and intimidation”.
Ms Long Bailey added the treatment of Jewish female MPs, including Ms Berger, Dame Louise Ellman and Ruth Smeeth was “terrible” because “it should never have happened within our party. We should have done more”.
She admitted one of her “big regrets” was not reaching out to them. “I didn’t speak to Louise or Luciana or Ruth directly. I wish I had,” she said.
The candidate, who is widely regarded as the continuity Corbyn choice, also said she would like to see Alastair Campbell – Tony Blair’s former spin doctor who was expelled from the party for voting Liberal Democrat – return to the party as well, citing his “expertise”.
In the original interview in the Evening Standard Long-Bailey also would not say, despite earlier claims to welcome Jeremy Corbyn as a Shadow Minister that,
While she won’t be drawn on whether Corbyn and McDonnell would make it into her shadow cabinet, she says: “I’m friends with both of them. I’ll be in touch with them for many years to come.” She is also clear that she will not personally criticise them for Labour’s election defeat in December, and blames Brexit and how the party communicated its policies.
There’s something about hair-gel, or whatever and this:
One issue Long-Bailey felt had not helped Labour was the Party’s support for WASPI women’s demands,
She also criticised the timing of the Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) funding policy. WASPI is a voluntary UK-based organisation that campaigns against the way in which the state pension age for men and women was equalised. It calls for the millions of women affected by the change to receive compensation. “We had spent five years building up that economic credibility, costing everything to within an inch of its life. And adding that as an extra policy after the grey book went out was an ideal opportunity for the Conservatives to attack us.”
Her views on Labour Election Policies, including the Party membership’s decision to back the possibility of a Second Referendum, were, well you can make them out if you can,
On Labour’s Brexit policy shambles, she “wouldn’t pin the blame on any particular individual” but says there was “definitely a tendency to not really understand what was happening in many of our communities and understanding the strength of feeling”.
On the transsexual debate Long-Bailey stands for niceness.
Asked about those who use TERF as an insult.
I don’t like it. The whole terf business within the party hasn’t been very nice at all. It’s led to many people within the party feeling very alienated, both those who are fighting for the rights and the respect of trans people and those fighting for the protection of women and the safety of women. We need to change that culture within the party.”
This is the key section cited in the Jewish Chronicle,
She would welcome back Luciana Berger even though she stood for a rival party at the last election. “The circumstances for what happened to Luciana were very different from an MP who was just angry with the leadership. She had a terrible time.” And she would also like to see Alastair Campbell return. “He’s got a lot of expertise and capability that I wish had been there to help us prior to December.” She jokes that he could maybe head up the rebuttal unit she wants to set up to attack anti-Labour media smears.
The Progressive Patriot has warm feelings for the Monarchy,
She also says she wouldn’t get rid of the monarchy when the Queen dies. “We’ve got more important things to worry about. Anyway, I met Charles inadvertently when I was eight or nine when I gave flowers to Princess Diana. She was lovely. She didn’t speak to me for very long, but she said, ‘Now that we’ve met we will be friends forever.’”
Many of Long-Bailey’s supporters are said to be unhappy with this interview:
Followed by,
Here is one very unhappy Cde:
More to follow….
Update, Latest Polls:
“In cultural matters the old division of right and left has come to look more like two Puritan sects, one plaintively conservative, the other posing as revolutionary but using academic complaint as a way of evading engagement in the real world.”
Robert Hughes, The Culture of Complaint. 1993. (1)
Trevor Phillips has been suspended from the Labour Party for alleged Islamophobia. What looks like a parting factional swipe at a long-standing opponent of Corbynism, only adds to the culture wars. After the crisis over anti-Semitism recent weeks have seen a new battle, over Transsexuals, reach a peak. Some have demanded that transphobes be added to the list of the expelled. Defenders of family, faith and flag from Blue Labour, self-identifying libertarians, and supporters of the Brexit Party in Spiked, full-blown national populists, and radical feminists have joined together to attack demands for trans rights.
Judith Butler wrote in her critique of ‘foundational’ identity politics, Gender Trouble (2007) “If I were to rewrite this book under present circumstances, I would include a discussion of transgender and intersexuality, the way that ideal gender dimorphism work in both ways to discourses, the different relations to surgical intervention that these related concern.” At present it looks improbable that differences between gender-critical, or “materialist feminists”, and those defending transsexuals, can take place within reasonable limits.
For Blue Labour, citing the inevitable Christopher Lasch on ‘narcissism’, Jonathan Rutherford asserts that, “Like other forms of identity politics, the language of its more extreme advocates has the same mix of moral self-righteousness and ideological certainty. Scientific facts that compromise ideology are dismissed.” “Identity politics becomes the singular pursuit of self-interest detached from social obligations.” He claims, “It is a struggle that many women feel is all the more threatening because of the involvement of powerful lobby and corporate interests.” (The Trans Debate And The Labour Party)The nastiness of a minority amongst those defending absolute ‘cis’ gender has shredded that hope to pieces. The Suzanne Moore affair has opened up a breach that is unlikely to be bridged. (2)
In 1993 Robert Hughes was one of the first to suggest that Marxism, dead after the collapse of official Communism, has had an afterlife by shifting away from “economic and class struggle in the real world”, theorising instead a variety of oppressions and “discursive” articulations and antagonisms. This ‘cultural Marxism’, exploring themes from German and French left theory, has become a target for conservatives railing against “multiculturalism”. Speech codes, the “PC wars” of the 90s, and. fast-forward. Today we have Mark Lilla’s 2018 left of centre critique of “liberal identity politics” (The Once and Future Liberal), and Douglas Murray’s conservative broadside against “identity politics and intersectionality”, “the last part of a Marxist subculture” (The Madness of Crowds. Gender, Race and Identity. 2019) (3)
National Populism.
Those attracted to national populism, who disdain the causes of minorities, have become champions of identity, of the “Somewhere” plain folks against the identity politics of the ‘Anywhere” cosmopolitan elites. This strategy is not confined to the English-speaking world. “The ambition is to imitate the activism of minorities – postcolonial or LGBT – fed by French theory …..in order to serve the cause of identity” writes Nicholas Truong in this Saturday’s Le Monde (Il s’érige contre la « dictature » de la « bien-pensance » : l’essor du national-populisme intellectuel et médiatique). In France, “national populism”, a “catéchisme néo-réactionnaire”, the theme of immigration, the fear of the “great replacement”, the ‘Islamisation’ of urban spaces, up to hostility to human-rights “mongering” (droits de l’hommisme) , and the “terror” of feminist campaigns against sexual violence and harassment. The denunciation of multiculturalist “bobos” (Bourgeois bohemians) parallels British sneers, from Blue Labour, Spiked to the Morning Star at the ‘Islington left”. Truong, with good reason, compares this to French Communist language of the past century attacking the “petty bourgeois”.
In Le rappel à l’ordre (2002) Daniel Lindenberg outlined the way a group of French writers had begun to denounce May 68, human rights, feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, Islam, and “globalism” (mondialisme). These “new reactionaries” had moved from the left critiques of market liberalism to national republicanism, He suggested that anti-globalisation could serve as a crossing-point
A “crude piece of work” commented Perry Anderson. It takes no more than a few minutes to see some names, Marcel Gauchet, Alain Finkielkraut, reappear in Truong’s article, some, like Eric Zemmour, and Jean-Pierre le Goff, author of a study that is recalled or its postscript on the enduring impact of “cultural leftism” post-68, had yet to come to wider attention. Others, like the once respected historian of the French left, Jacques Julliard are much more recent entries, though one was perhaps forewarned by his willingness to debate Jean-Claude Michéa, who asserts that the original sin of French socialism was its Dreyfus Affair alignment with democratic liberal human rights defenders. That one of these figures, Michel Onfray, a self-styled anarchist and pop philosopher has extended his openness to reaction by contributing to the pages of the Nouvelle Droite Eléments, is the occasion for sadness. (4)
Realignments to the right that have yet to go so far could be seen in the UK during the EU Referendum and Brexit process. The Full Brexit brought together left sovereigntists, Blue Labour, Labour Leave, activists in Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, and members of the Communist Party of Britain. They contrasted the real popular sovereignty of the nation against the workings of the globalist EU elites. Andrew Murray has expressed the widely shared views of these sections with his hostility towards “rancid identity politics”, pitting the rights of “peoples” against the “poisonous seeds” of human rights (The Fall and Rise of the British Left. 2019)
The French new reactionaries have, Truong outlines, a strong and highly visible media presence right in the mainstream, the MSM. For those inflamed with hatred for identity politics Britain offers the consolations of Spiked, the Spectator, and the hard right press for those hostile to all things Woke, with the occasional television platform like Sky Press reviews. As interest in Brexit has waned some of this new sect of plaintitive reactionaries has taken up the cudgels against transsexuals. Elsewhere Verso Books publishes Andrew Murray, who thanks Tariq Ali for his “support and political commitment., The journal of Perry Anderson, New Left Review, is home to Wolfgang Streeck, a supporter of the Full Brexit, who believes that national borders are the “last line of Defence”….
*****
“This is a temporary phase of course, reminiscent in some ways of the days of Marx and Engels, but it is where we are at today.”
As the Weekly Worker (CPGB, Provisional Central Committee Group prepares for a major split its mighty organs are silent on the dispute.
The Labour Party Marxist is said to be in turmoil
The future of this faction, central in running Labour Against the Witch-hunt (LAW), a campaign backed by Tony Greenstein, Noam Chomsky, Alexei Sayle, Ken Loach and others, including Jackie Walker, may be in doubt.
Will LAW survive the turmoil?
Fight the Weekly Worker Purge!
By contrast this week’s, late, issue of the Weekly Worker publishes this letter by a Cde Ian Donovan.
In a measured he tone explains the background to the split between Socialist Fight (SF/Continuity Gerry Downing) and Socialist Fight (SF/Real Core, Ian Donovan)….
Gerry Downing’s pathetic letter claiming that the ‘Trotskyist Faction’ including myself were ‘expelled’ from Socialist Fight is pure fraud (February 27). He does not have a majority of full members of SF willing to vote for such a measure. No meeting of members has or will be called to do so. Nor has he been able to exclude our supporters from the international forums of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International. When he tried to do so, in defiance of the most basic tenets of workers’ and party democracy, his actions were repudiated by other comrades internationally and our supporters were reinstated. This ‘expulsion’ is dead in the water.
It is just about Gerry Downing farting out his denunciations on a stolen website, using a stolen banner. The joke is that a “unanimous vote” in his fantasy version of ‘Socialist Fight’ is when Gerry Downing, Ella Downing and his race-baiting, Islamophobic, white South African crony, Gareth Martin, each put up both of their hands. Their six hands outvoted all the members of Socialist Fight who failed to vote for Gerry’s pro-Zionist statement the last time Socialist Fight had a genuine national vote, in January. And he calls that “unanimous”! That’s where Gerry’s ‘majority’ comes from.
…….
His fascist-baiting, mendacious half-quotes are designed to ‘prove’ that those in Socialist Fight who failed to salute his fascist-baiting attack on Gilad Atzmon are worshippers of the Ku Klux Klan. …
And so it goes….until it (mercifully) ends with this:
Well, we in the Trotskyist Faction don’t accept that move to the right and will fight it to the bitter end. Gerry may have stolen our website, which our subs paid for over the past several years just as much as his did. But we don’t accept his common theft – of our website, our publication or our name. The Trotskyist Faction has its own website up and running, on http://www.socialistfight.org, or alternatively trotskyistfaction.org, and in due course we will have our own publication to replace that which has been stolen. We will continue the politics of the old Socialist Fight. Renegades and capitulators to Zionism will not be allowed to steal our banner.
Ian Donovan
Trotskyist Faction, Socialist Fight
Key documents are only just emerging on the split between Socialist Fight (SF/Continuity Gerry Downing) and Socialist Fight (SF/Real Core, Ian Donovan)….
Published on the Trotskyist Faction site:
Trotskyist Faction takes on the mantle of Socialist Fight.
Extracts:
GD, was an oppositionist in the Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party at the time of its 1985 explosion and collapse, one of many active participants. He then went through various organisations: the Revolutionary Internationalist League, International Socialist Group, the Workers International League, Workers Fight with 2 other ex-WRP cadre with varied politics, then the Committee for a Marxist Party in alliance with the CPGB/Weekly Worker.
He then founded Socialist Fight in 2009 with two other ex-ISG cadre, whom he then split from over the issue of their defence of the film director Roman Polanksi, who admitted to statutory rape of a 13 year old girl and appears from the evidence to be guilty of actual rape. After breaking with his initial collaborators he then fused his rump group with some Brazilian and Argentinian Trotskyists groups in 2013 as part of an anti-imperialist response to imperialist intervention in Syria and Libya, to form the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI). This gave an international dimension to his politics that meant it was no longer his operation.
Ploughing through the documents, which include reference to Hannah Arendt, and many, many, others, we reach this key point, “all this is just a means to an end for GD. The real target of all this rancid pro-Zionist hate propaganda was the Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism.” “In conversation with Atzmon in 2018, GD rejected criticisms of its supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ as ‘Zionism’. But now as the concluding point of his renegade, pro-Zionist faction he writes:
“We now repudiate the use of the term ‘the world “Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie”’ and the whole notion of a Jewish-Zionist imperialist vanguard as antisemitic tropes. We will in future use the term ‘Zionism’ alone in describing the political tendency within the Jewish ethnicity that commits such dreadful crimes under international law against the Palestinian citizens of Israel and those expelled Palestinians primarily in 1948, ‘67 and ‘73, all of whom have the right of return.”
Donovan does score one major point.
However, GD had a problem even with this, as he had stood on a public platform at a joint Socialist Fight public meeting in July 2017, a rather large meeting attended by around 150 people, with Vanessa Beeley, a defender of the Syrian regime and an uncritical Assad supporter, speaking in defence of Syria against the US/UK/Israel backed jihadist destabilisation and proxy war. She has written regularly for Veterans Today for several years. So in denouncing ID for sharing material from Veterans Today calling into question the legitimacy of the result of the UK General Election, GD was also implicitly attacking some of his best known work. If it was impermissible to share articles from Veterans Today, then surely it was impermissible to share a platform with Vanessa Beeley?
For those who can be arsed to read it there is plenty more!
Here is Donovan’s nemesis, Gerry Downing giving his side of the story.
Socialist Fight, Ian Donovan and the Trotskyist Faction
We have been now forced to set up a new bank account because Ian and Turan have control of the Socialist Fight bank account and this, they believe, should give them control of the group. Ian has refused to accept the votes of the majority of the group. He has decided that John Carty is not a member and his membership subscriptions are ‘donations’ and not subscriptions. My daughter, Ella, Gareth Martin, and Charlie Walsh cannot join as candidate members for six months because he disagrees with them over what Gilad Atzmon’s politics are. He has refused to bank their subscriptions that I sent to him, said I was buying their membership and he was keeping the cheques as evidence of my ‘corruption’.
Let us not ignore the outright fascism of Gilad Atzmon: “Fascism, I believe, more than any other ideology, deserves our attention, as it was an attempt to integrate Left and Right: the dream and the concrete into a unified political system. … It was “overwhelmingly popular and productive for a while because it managed to bridge the abyss between the ‘fantasy’ and the ‘actual.’”
This row would not be complete without Tony Greenstein getting his oar in:
Be Alert: Keep a Copy of this Handbook Close at all Times!
The leadership contest has revealed new contours in Labour’s ideological topography. Nick Wright.
(5 Retweets).
The former Straight left stalwart writes in the Morning Star, independent of the Communist Party of Britain and owned by the Co-op.
This article may be seen as a response to the Guardian column, The Labour leadership contest has exposed new factions in the party ( ).
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth was this section,
The orthodox left still basically wants to implement the Communist party’s 1951 plan, The British Road to Socialism, with its vision of socialism being implemented in one country by a strong, centralised national government. They lean heavily towards a pro-Brexit position, while tending to interpret support for Brexit among working-class voters as incipient class consciousness rather than tabloid-inspired xenophobia.
Followed by,
The radical left is still a very new, fragile and inexperienced tendency that has a long way to go before emerging as a mature political formation. It brings together the more libertarian strands of the hard left, the more radical strands of the soft left, and a new generation of activists from outside the traditions of the Labour party.
Wright makes a clarion call for the whole of the left to support Long-Bailey, and follow the doughty progressive patriot for better reasons than the (official) left who back her, “mainly out of sheer loyalty to her mentor, John McDonnell, that most of the radical left have supported her.”
He aims to dampen down this deviation: “Privately, many on the radical left agree with former MP Alan Simpson that the dogmatic and authoritarian tendencies of the orthodox left smothered the creative and democratic potential of Corbynism, contributing to its eventual downfall.
The Communist Party of Britain sage writes of Labour’s General Election Campaign.
The disparate elements that Corbyn’s election united has ended and the wide legitimacy that Labour’s radical programme commanded is now challenged by people who attribute the election defeat to “socialist policies” which must be abandoned.
With the help of ace-reporters Wright discovers that Labour was, at one point, on the brink of victory,
…. a wave of popular participation, an effective social media operation, skilled targeting of swing seats and a bold manifesto (along with the divisions in the Tory ranks and a weakened Liberal Democrat Party) produced a surge in support that eroded a 20-point Tory lead and took Corbyn within a few thousand votes of No 10.
We may not have noticed that, but he did!
The fault lay in a failure to respect the decision to respect the Brexit vote, something which Wight and his comrades tirelessly campaigned for.
Instead of becoming a springboard for a further assault on a divided ruling class — this itself apparent in a highly conflicted Tory Party in government — this hopeful prospect was dissipated as Labour’s activists and mass base were sidelined by a parliamentary party intent on subverting the clear decision to respect the referendum result.
Worse was to come,
Labour (was) corralled into an increasingly Get Brexit Undone policy, the way was open for Labour’s manifesto to be driven to the margins of public discussion.
The People’s Vote campaign, a middle class mass movement, had sown confusion in Labour ranks.
The success of the Remain camp in conflating “internationalism” with a kind of shared European privilege to travel, study and work freely threatens to undermine the deeper internationalism that found an expression in the mass movement against neoliberal trade deals, in the Stop the War movement, the anti-racist and solidarity action with refugees and migrant workers and the Palestine solidarity movement.
The kind of internationalism that has stood by while Assad, Russia and Iran, attack Idid in Syria, in short.
Remain, unlike Boris Johnson and the ERG, had a “neoliberal project.”
Worse the pro-EU side has echoes of fascism, foretold in ” manifesto of Oswald Mosley’s postwar racist revival”.
He cites Gilbert (above), without mentioning (surely an oversight), the passage of the British Road to Socialism,
It is to Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural and political theory at the University of East London, that we owe the insight that the leadership contest has revealed new contours in Labour’s ideological topography and that the only way for Labour to win is to ditch “Labourism.”
Writing about Labour’s so-called “soft left,” he writes: “Despite the failures of both Kinnock and Miliband, their default assumption remains that progressive government can be achieved by selling moderate social democracy to the electorate, led by a guy in a smart suit.”
Worse is to come….
It is to this inspiring standard that the recycled fragments of the ultra left now line up with the main vehicles of the Labour right wing and much of the liberal and neoliberal media.
The Morning Star writer has a warning to them:
While it might suit some to reduce much of politics to the clash of cultures, no-one should underestimate the political potency of questions of nationhood, patriotism and identity.
As in progressive patriotism.
Cde Wright ends with a stirring call for unity behind the banner of the “Orthodox Left”- including these “recycled fragments”, supporters of a neoliberal project, who admire something with the odour of Oswald Mosley “?
A dog-eared copy of Betty Reid’s, ‘Ultra Leftism in Britain’, (1969. CPGB) would surely show the dangers of the “ultra left” in their true light.
The Blair Government Reconsidered. Heroes or Villains? Jon Davis, John Rentoul Oxford 2019.
“Will New Labour in retrospect be judged to have failed for the same reasons that Very Old Labour failed in 1929 – 31, namely a refusal to break with current economic orthodoxy?”
Eric Hobsbawm. Marxism Today. November/December 1998. (‘The Death of Neoliberalism’).
In a special one-off, titled Wrong, the Editor of Marxism Today, whose End had been announced in 1991, wrote, “New Labour did not usher in a new era but more properly belongs to the previous one.” Martin Jacques was followed by other heavyweights. Stuart Hall stated that, “Labour has been quietly seduced by the neo-liberal view that, as far as possible, the economy must be treated as a machine; obeying economic ‘laws’ without human intervention”. In words that resonate today about those now asserting the need to attract pro-Brexit voters, and the “Somewhere” people he asserted that Blair’s “key constituency in the run up to the election was ‘Middle England’ – a profoundly traditionalist and backward looking cultural investment.”
In reply Geoff Mulgan defended the “open” debate about the Third Way, synthesising centre-left traditions, and Labour commitment to practical radical reform. Citing Walter Benjamin, the Demos director complained about intellectual “peaceful negativity” – endless carping from the outside. History had moved on, and Blair’s “permanent revisionism” was the future.
Accusations of resurrecting New Labour, of “Blairism” have been anything but part of a serene critique in Labour’s present day leadership contest. Voices outside Labour, relayed within, predict a defeat for the left in the wake of a Keir Starmer Armageddon. Party democracy, in the view of the Socialist Party and the SWP and some claiming to be on the Labour left, has been thwarted; the ‘Blairites’ have not been purged. A historic defeat looms. The time has come again to mobilise outside the Party….
New Labour in Power.
In these conditions is there space for an in-depth account of New Labour in power? Discussion of what ‘Blairism’ actually was, and what remains of it could hardly avoid this. Davis and Rentoul, who teach on “the Blair Years” at King’s College, begin The Blair Government stating, that Tony Blair was “the political colossus in Britain for thirteen years after he became leader of the Labour Party in 1994. He was prime minister for ten years, second only in length of service to Margaret Thatcher (11 and a half).” Yet, as they note in the conclusion, “Much of the difference between Blair and Thatcher is explained by how much they are regarded by supporters of their own party, Where Blair is reviled by many Labour voters, Thatcher is revered by Conservatives.” (Page 300) By contrast, “The purpose of this book is to assess criticisms of him and his government in a dispassionate way…”(Page 2)
The first thing that strikes the considered reader is that The Blair Government is, far too much for the politically committed reader, focused on “government works” and “how Blair run his administration”. The charge that the Prime Minister accepted the ‘Thatcher consensus’ that privatised nationalised industries, utilities and transport, introduced anti-trade union laws, and the modelling of public services after private business practice. There is little on the role of the Labour Party itself. There is nothing on the international difficulties and evolution of social democracy, which some began to compare with New Labour at tis zenith The book focuses on the “conduct of government”, issues such as Prime Ministerial versus Cabinet government, “sofa government”, the Civil Service faced with an increased role of Special Advisers (‘Spads’), that occupy this account of the nuts and bolts of Blair’s time in office. (1)
The relationship between Blair and Gordon Brown is of interest to any biographer. The independence of the Bank of England and its relationship with the Treasury gets in-depth treatment, as does Brown’s partnership with Ed Balls. . The critics’ charge of economic orthodoxy rang and rings true. In this field, PPS, Public private Partnerships, rightly attacked for critics on cost grounds and as a “hallway house to privatisation” is considered in terms of “mobilising private funds for public purposes”. (Page 224). Brown’s project, Davis and Rentoul note, was in line “redistributive market liberalism. A significant role of government is to remedy market failure in areas such as healthcare, not to intervene in the foundations of the economy (Page 227).
The Third Way.
The Blair Government does not discuss the Third Way, the social-ism, adapted to the “new capitalism” that Tony Blair, or at least his supporters, spun during his years up to government and in power. There was the emphasis on “community” sometimes drawn from communitarian political philosophy, more often from homely speeches about balancing rights and obligations, “mutual responsibility”. One responsibility dominated. People needed to be equipped with skills to compete on the global market; there should be “equality of opportunity” for the aspirational to succeed. The welfare-to-work New Deal, outsourced to private providers, fell short of offering quality training and opportunities to the majority of its clients. If the minimum wage and tax credits helped the low-paid, this – undeniably important help – went with the idea of improving individuals’ market capacity within an “open economy”. (2)
The difficulty was not only that this strategy was bound to skirt around forces pushing rising inequality, a world wide trend left-wing writers link to finance driven ‘neo-liberal’ globalisation. Public services had been kept going, even expanded in some areas, although its higher reaches became subject to stiff fees. When the “dynamism of the economy” faltered, and “boom and bust” reappeared in the 2008-banking crisis, the period of Gordon Brown’s Premiership that followed this study’s focus, these measures teetered on the brink. Eric Hobsbawm’s warning proved right as orthodoxy, with the aid of a bit of bank saving, prevailed, austerity began. The bulk of policy initiatives, or tinkering, proved not to be structural, lasting, reforms. Whatever trace of equality they had sustained vanished quickly with the return of the Conservatives to power. Schemes for sanction-ruled and pared down welfare amidst the expansion of precarious employment have erased their memory. Brexit has set in train a new form of free-market rule, national neoliberalism, backed by Boris Johnson’s national populism.
Davis and Rentoul are more forthcoming on the Iraq War. Regardless of the merits of the decision to play a full part in the invasion of Iraq, Blair acted out of “deep conviction”. He gave public support to President Bush. The issue of ‘humanitarian intervention’, one that preoccupied many people on the left at the time, is ignored. What counted is that it could be seen as poor policy, “on planning for the aftermath, he failed to consider how badly it could turn and…If a fraction of the intelligence effort devoted to weapons of mass destruction had been devoted to war-gaming the results of toppling Saddam, a better decision might have been reached.” (Page 280) Or it might not…..
The Blair Government Reconsidered is a fluent, accessible study. That said, if there’s anything that all the candidates for the Labour leadership have noted is this, the Blair years claim that “What matters is what works”. New Labour’s package of policies, though not without electoral victories that should make us pause, did not, as a whole, work.
***********
(1) The Retreat of Social Democracy. John Callaghan. Manchester University Press. 2001
(2) Alex Callinicos. Against the Third Way. Polity 2001.
London Protests Against No-Show Salvini.
Inspired by Italy’s anti-far right, and anti-Salvini movement, the Sardines, people protested in London yesterday against the visit of the Italian national populist leader to the British capital.
The fact that his flight was cancelled because of the Coronavirus did not stop people demonstrating.
This is the movement in Italy: Sardines against Salvini
Socialist Resistance.
December 2019.
A few weeks ago four thirty year olds from Bologna were complaining about the victory of Salvini’s hard right Lega (League) in the Umbrian regional elections and the danger of him winning their traditionally left of centre region in the January elections, writes Dave Kellaway. They then did something that is typical of angry thirty year olds. They went onto social media and cooked up the Sardines idea.
Put simply, it was to fill the squares of Italy with people against the Lega. The reference to the sea was twofold. Firstly, small fish group together in massive shoals to defend themselves against predators and secondly Salvini was the notorious interior minister who was happy to let migrants die in the Mediterranean by closing the ports.
As sometimes happens, the whole idea exploded on social media and the squares of Bologna and other places across the region were successfully taken over by huge crowds. A majority were young but people of all ages came too.
On December 3 there were 25,000 in Milan and tens of thousands in Florence and Naples. The weather has been as bad in Italy recently as it has been here. Given that the merest hint of rain on an Italian beach sees them emptied very quickly, this showed the strength of this movement as a sea of umbrellas covered the squares.
And: New “sardine” movement in Italy. Hugh Edwards.
Solidarity.
December 2019.
In the past few weeks, as if from nowhere, a new movement, calling itself “the sardines”, has filled the squares of Italy, originating from Emilia Romagna’s capital city, Bologna.
25,000 came out in Milan on Sunday 1 December, and there will be a mass national demo of all groups and organisational conference in Rome on 15 December.
Drawing in thousands of the young, and often very young, the dynamic of the mobilisation is focused against the reactionary racist extremism of Matteo Salvini and his party, La Lega nationale.
Radical anti-Fascists took part.
This is the Sardines UK.
Memoirs of a Critical Communist. Towards a History of the Fourth International. Livio Maitan. Resistance Books/Merlin Press. 2019.
(This review appears in the latest, March-April, Chartist Magazine.).
Livio Maitan (1923 – 2004) was a leading figure in the international Trotskyist Movement who won respect and had an influence, on the wider left. Memoirs of a Critical Communist, published in Italian in 2006, his last book, is a “contribution” to the history of the Fourth International. The Italian was, with Pierre Frank, (France) and the influential economist Ernest Mandel (Belgium), a leading figure in the main branch of Trotskyism. Maitan had, the late French Marxist philosopher Daniel Bensaïd, writes in the Preface, “a sense of humour and self-irony”, a warmth and intellectual breadth, which is far from the general picture of a Trotskyist leader.
Maitan’s book Party, Army and Masses in China (published in Italian in 1969), appeared in English in 1976. Written with an audience sympathetic to the Cultural Revolution in mind it was critical of the Chinese bureaucracy but falls far short of the robust demolition of Mao’s “sterilising totalitarianism,” by Simon Leys.
The present volume ranges much wider. It is a “history of the activities of the activities of the international leadership” of his current until his passing. Pages cover the disputes within Trotskyism during the Cold War, the anti-colonial revolutions, the 68 upheavals, the Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 1974, up to what Franco Turigliatto has called “the congress of “disillusionment” of 1995. This tried to come to terms with the fall of Communism and world-wide setbacks for the whole the left (Livio Maitan’s last book). This saw an end of hopes for democratic left-wing developments in what Trotskyists considered to be “bureaucratised transitional societies”.
Latin American Left.
Memoirs recounts Maitan’s extensive involvement with the Latin American left. The faction run by Posadas, best known today for its belief in flying saucers, but in the ‘sixties for asserting that the world revolution was now led from Latin America and Africa, was one of many to stress the importance of these countries. The guerrilla strategy of Che Guevara, who had “read, and liked Mandel’s Marxist Economic Theory”, attracted support in Bolivia, where Trotskyism had influence in the workers’ movement.
The practice of armed struggle led to intense debates across the continent, and the creation of “political-military” groups committed to armed struggle. Disputes in Argentina, where Trotskyism, continues to have an influence, took place against the background of extreme state repression, and calls for militaristic responses. The niceties of Maitan’s account, which also covers Chile and Mexico, including the row with the ‘Moreno’ tendency that continued till the 1980s, will interest specialists.
Maitan has an eye for detail. He describes the Militant leader Ted Grant carting around Marxist relics in his briefcase to quote Trotsky “chapter and verse”. Talented Rally Speaker Tariq Ali is cited as returning from a visit to North Korea in 1971 with “fairly positive opinion” about its economic development.
The American Socialist Workers Party (no relation to the UK SWP), the oldest Trotskyist party in the world, and an influence on the celebrated list of 1930s New York Intellectuals under the impact of Jack Barnes today subordinates its politics to the Cuban state. Maitan charges them with their leader’s “authoritarian behaviour” and purging their group by accusations of “disloyalty”. He does not explore allegations of ‘cultism’ and being “Trotskyist missionaries” common to those who have had contact with them in Europe.
Memoirs of a Critical Communist is far from the work of a cultist. If not always an easy read, even for those familiar with the personalities involved and the movements. From optimism in 1968 “during the heat of the action”, to criticism of one of Trotskyism most abiding traits, leaders “wedded to centralising tendencies and charismatic methods” Maitan emerges as a keen observer.
The willingness to engage with other radical movements, to rethink ideas in the light of experience, to try to build “a global anticapitalist movement” on a socialist basis, has been helped by activists of his calibre. For those prepared to plunge into the difficulties the left faces this book is an important reference point.
**********
See also: Book Review: Heroism of reason – On Livio Maitan’s “Memoirs”.
This is of particular relevance to the Chartist article:
I confess that I don’t agree with my friend Daniel Bensaid’s criticism of Livio’s discussion of Latin America: “The comments about the controversies regarding the armed struggle in Latin America may appear incomplete and partial to many of us”. On the contrary, I find these pages among the most lively and interesting of the Memoirs. Livio’s draft on armed struggle, presented at the 9h World Congress provoked as he writes, “moment of highest tension and passionate interest”, both among the Latin American delegates and the others. [4] He recognizes that prioritizing rural guerrilla was a mistake, but explains that these were the views of our main organizations in the continent, in Bolivia and Argentina. There are a few very moving pages about Roberto Santucho, the main leader of the the PRT (Revolutionary Workers Party), the Argentinian section of the FI until 1973, both criticizing his wrong views – the illusion that, by leaving the FI, he would get weapons from the “Soviet comrades” – and paying homage to an intransigent revolutionary who gave his life for the cause.
…..
Taking stock of four decades since the foundation of the FI, Livio raises the difficult question: why has our movement failed to play a leading role anywhere ? Among the reasons: the destructive splits, the negative role of authoritarian, centralist, even “Bonapartist” leaders (the list of names is too long), propagandist and voluntarist attitudes, and, for some, a dogmatic approach, exclusively based on the Russian experience of 1917, and on quotes from Leon Trotsky. But the main factor was objective: the force of attraction of the USSR, China, Cuba. Castroism had a special power of attraction for the radical left, and this led to the last split, when the SWP (under the leadership of Jack Barnes) broke with the FI (in 1990), gave up Trotskyism and uncritically adopted the line of the Cuban government.
“Brexit has both marginalised the far right but also contributed to the mainstreaming of some far-right notions around immigration and identity.”
Brexit making far-right ideas mainstream, major report finds
Independent.
‘Cordon sanitaire’ keeping far-right discourse out of mainstream politics has collapsed, Hope Not Hate says
End to the “poisonous seeds of the politics of personal identity and human rights”? Andrew Murray.
This the news today:
Britain is preparing to reject EU demands to guarantee that the country will continue to be bound by European human rights laws once the UK becomes fully independent, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
British negotiators will refuse to accept proposed clauses in a post-Brexit trade agreement that would require Britain remain signed up to the European Convention of Human Rights, leaving the door open to break away from the treaty as soon as next year, the Sunday Telegraph said.
Andrew Murray, until recently a key Jeremy Corbyn’s adviser expressed these views in The Rise and Fall of the British Left (2019).
The “imperialist left” of the 2006 Euston Manifesto, which championed the right of humanitarian intervention, claimed to base the argument on human rights. Such rights trump the “rights of nations” and justify Western, external, use of force to impose claims of human rights.
He attacked the standpoint that “articulated the preference for individual rights over the collective, which has come to preponderate on much of the Western left, a flowering of the more poisonous seeds of the politics of personal identity and human rights.”(Page 97)
The thrust of anti-human rights ideology can be seen on the national populist Spiked site run by the ex-Revolutionary Communist Party network.
Human rights: a reactionary cause. Luke Gittos.
The movement for human rights was born of a fear of democracy.
In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, many Remainers were keen to emphasise that leaving the European Union (EU) did not mean leaving the remit of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). As they saw it, retaining the human-rights regime was a means to retain some vestige of what they perceived to be the progressive European project. It was as though they felt, in the aftermath of Brexit, that all was not lost as long as they could hold on to human-rights laws. Hence, human-rights proponents were keen to highlight the fact that the Human Rights Act was passed into English law by the UK parliament and did not represent a law ‘imposed by Brussels’ – a retort they find useful when the human-rights regime is called ‘undemocratic’.
The conclusion is simple, “The existence of a human-rights framework owes everything to postwar elites’ attempt to exert economic and political control over the heads of European peoples.”
This is a complete fabrication.
The human rights demands of social movements, theorised by writers such as Claude Lefort and Étienne Balibar, are written off as they are part the culture of narcissistic complaint. Leftort , in Essais sur le politique : XIXe et XXe siècles, 1986, argue that the political dynamics attached to the affirmation of human rights could not be dismissed as part of the “formal” democracy, but reached into the development of the social basis of democracy. IT is possible to see the limits of legal rights, as the early 19th century writings of Marx on the issue indicated, but also to consider that the fight for rights is, as Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère put it, “a source of disorder and egalitarian reordering” (Was Karl Marx truly against human rights? 2012.)
In a similar vein Balibar has written of the “operation of inventing rights, or of continually setting their history back into motion..” Masses, Classes and Ideas,1994. During the last decade Balibar has written of the convergence of citizenry and humanity, both in human rights documents and in the political imaginary (La proposition de l’égaliberté. 2010)
More radically the cultural critic of political theorist Jacques Rancière’s account sees human rights emerge through political action and speech. They are products of excluded voices that seek to enact equality as speaking subjects and demonstrate inequality within the social order: ‘the Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not’ (Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? 2004).
Many argue that, to illustrate the point, that the trade union movement, which came from “outside” the political system, is the biggest movement for human rights in history.
From the radical internationalists to figures like Keir Starmer human rights have become an important part of the politics of the left.
But what are these fights without legal recourse?
Agreements like the European Convention on Human Rights exist to give at least some reality to these the demands of the powerless.
Bexiteers assert that only national, sovereign, states, can guarantee rights – an argument that goes back to Edmund Burke, and taken, as a counsel of despair, by Hannah Arendt in the wake of the Second World War and the Shoah.
These positions, taken up and simplified by sovereigntist ideologues many Brexiters, of right and left, have wished to detach themselves from any such international obligations. based on humanity, not nation states.
It is no accident that Boris Johnson and his adviser Cummings attack the European Convention, and assert national sovereignty over human rights. National neoliberalism, national populism, and national rights….
Those who argued in favour of such unlimited national sovereign rights, and wished that Labour had a made a deal collaborating with the Tories in Brexit, can now see where their stand can lead.
What a People’s Brexit they have helped bring into being…
Breaking, if offered a frontbench job under the new leader Corbyn would graciously accept the shadow foreign secretary role.
Rebecca Long-Bailey received two major boosts for her campaign this weekend.
The senior commentators of the Weekly Worker publish this statement.
“David Shearer of Labour Party Marxists urges a tactical vote for Rebecca Long-Bailey – despite her monarchism, vague politics and accommodation with the right.”
We in Labour Party Marxists are clear that, despite the resignation of Jeremy Corbyn and the clear move to the right in the party, the space for the left to operate and argue in can be defended. This means voting for Rebecca Long-Bailey for leader and Richard Burgon for deputy – but vote with your eyes open. Expect nothing from an RBL leadership – except betrayal and further moves to appease.
There follows stuff about ‘Zionism’.
You;d have already guessed it.
Long-Bailey said she supported separate Palestinian and Israeli states, “so I suppose that makes me a Zionist, because I agree with Israel’s right to exist”. Would she have argued in support of apartheid South Africa’s right to exist?
The arm of the CPGB (Provisional Central Committee) then tackled an issue which many may have missed, although the Newshounds of this Blog noticed the new People’s Princess showing off her touching Diana picture.
Then there was the February 17 Channel 4 TV hustings, when candidates were asked how they would vote in a referendum on keeping the monarchy. Lisa Nandy replied: “I’m a democrat, so I would vote to scrap it”, although she did not think it was “the priority as a country” to do so. And even the expected leadership victor, Keir Starmer, said he would “downsize” the monarchy. But on this Long-Bailey was more reactionary than the two candidates to her right. She stated categorically: “I wouldn’t vote to abolish the monarchy” – after all, there were “more important things” to be done.
As if to accentuate this position, on February 23 the Sunday Mirror ran a story (accompanied by a touching photograph) about how in 1988 Long-Bailey, when she was just nine, had presented a bouquet on behalf of her school to the late princess, Diana Windsor.2 The tone of the article was entirely sympathetic, and it read as though the Mirror had dug up this information completely independently. But the Daily Mail’s subsequent online headline began: “Labour hopeful Rebecca Long-Bailey reveals photo of her meeting Diana” (my emphasis).3
I suspect that is accurate. Long-Bailey is trying to appeal to the Labour right and wants to show just how ‘respectable’ she is.
Steel hardened cadre Sherar has a go at the vagueness of the programme Long-Bailey offers,
So “socialism” merely means a “better life” – to be achieved by people working “together”.
Her “green industrial revolution” is equally vague: it will be “the aspirational socialist project, around which we build a winning majority for change”. It will bring “social justice” and “good, green jobs to every community”. As for concrete proposals, forget it.
Eagle-eyed Cds, they finish by noting this,
Another witch-hunt?
Of course, RLB adheres absolutely to political correctness and so will quickly sign up to each and every call to end discrimination against minorities – without, it seems, bothering too much about the detail of what some are proposing.
So, along with Emily Thornberry and Lisa Nandy, Long-Bailey has signed up to a statement drawn up by the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights, which labels organisations like Woman’s Place UK “trans-exclusionist hate groups” for their insistence that there are only two biological sexes. According to the LCTR, such an insistence is “transphobic” and Labour members who support it should be expelled.
…..
It is essential that those claiming to be on the left – not least Rebecca Long-Bailey herself – should renounce this witch-hunt (along with any new one relating to ‘transphobia’). However, even in the absence of such a renunciation, it is essential , as I have stated, to remain focused on the central battle over the nature of the Labour Party itself: the aim must be to transform it into a united front of the entire working class, free of all pro-capitalist elements.
Breaking update:
The rumour from our ace-reporters is that, the UK’s number one sectarian and (relatively newly) entryist group is splitting, with a prominent member expelled. What next for the Weekly Worker Group?
In a lesser boost this has happened: Jeremy Corbyn comes off fence to back Rebecca Long-Bailey in race for Labour leader
The Standard reports,
Jeremy Corbyn abandoned his pledge to stay neutral during the Labour leadership race as his protégé fights for second place.
The current Labour leader said Rebecca Long-Bailey would have his “absolute support” in a video released on her social media today.
In the clip, showing Ms Long-Bailey being interviewed by Mr Corbyn in Westminster, she tells him: “And obviously, when I’m leader of the party, you’ll be there supporting me as a green revolutionary.”
He replies: “Absolute support.”
This the latest in Corbyn’s efforts to support Long Bailey,
Independent.
On the donation issue,
Responding to Mr Corbyn’s comments, a source in Sir Keir’s campaign team told The Independent: “The campaign publishes its donations in line with the law and rules set out by the Labour Party for this contest. The first tranche were published last month.
“We’ve submitted our next tranche to the parliamentary authorities and expect it to be published next week.”
But all eyes will be on this demand.
Labour leader also says he would prefer shadow foreign secretary job if offered role on successor’s frontbench.
In a surprise intervention, the Labour leader also insisted he will not be “disappearing” when his successor is unveiled, and said if he is offered a frontbench job under the new leader he would prefer the shadow foreign secretary role.
All’s fair when you need to give advice to Labour on selecting another winning leader!
Delhi Riots: Mosques and Huts Burned, Children Attacked, at Least 2 Dead in Mustafabad
Naomi Barton and Avichal Dubey
At least two mosques in the northeasrt Delhi neighbourhood have been vandalised and attacked with stones, reportedly by a Hindutva mob. Elsewhere in the area, masked men shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ torched Muslim huts.
New Delhi: The Mustafabad area in north east Delhi also saw violence on Tuesday evening as a Hindutva mob attacked the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protest site, injuring sevhttps://twitter.com/SAsiaSolidarity/status/1232951475896307712?s=20eral people including children.
According to residents, a mob of around 50 men gathered in the area and began to pelt stones.
At least two mosques in the area have been vandalised and attacked with stones, by the same mob.
Residents told The Wire that men armed with rods and pistols gathered outside the mosques in the area and attacked them. At the time, several children were inside the mosque and were attacked.
The locals rescued several children from the mosque and some have severe injuries. The Wire saw a 15-year-old boy with severe head and leg injuries being rescued from inside the mosque. He was unable to walk and claimed that he had been attacked by rods.
According to locals, around 20 people have been injured in the violence at Mustafabad. Several people have received gunshot wounds. At least one person has died and was brought dead to a local clinic while two others were brought injured. The Delhi high court was told that a second person has also died in Mustafabad.
The Wire has visuals of the dead and the injured at the clinic, but is refraining from publishing them at this time.
In the area, several houses and shops have been set on fire and continue to be ablaze.
AAP member Amit Mishra tweeted a video of violence from Mustafabad, which was later retweeted by the region’s AAP MLA Haji Yunus.
There is this outrageous reaction, News 18.
Delhi Violence LIVE Updates: Union Home Minister Amit Shah, in his first comments since the deadly violence broke out in Delhi earlier this week, on Friday accused the opposition of provoking riots over the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). “Congress, Mamata Banerjee, SP and BSP are all opposing the CAA,” he said. “They are saying this will take away the civil rights of minorities. Why are they all lying?”
Shah’s statement came at a rally in Odisha even as the death toll in Delhi rose to 42.
Women Against Sexual Violence and State Repression (WSS)
India: WSS strongly condemns the State Sponsored Hindutva Violence in Delhi!
In light of the extraordinary situation with which we are confronted, WSS strongly and unequivocally condemns the BJP-RSS-Bajrang Dal led violence. We also condemn the inaction and silence of the state and central government in the wake of the violence. We demand:
1. Immediate restoration of law and order, de-escalation of violence, and fulfilment of the duties of law enforcement agencies.
2. The Delhi government must immediately begin serious efforts to restore the right to safe living of the Muslim community – men, women, children – in these violence-wracked neighbourhoods and across the city. All efforts must be made to ensure that those who have been forced to flee are able to return and live in their homes safely.
3. The Supreme court should take suo moto cognisance of the violent situation and act urgently to contain the violence.
4. The state should be providing immediate medical relief on site, in homes of the injured, and ambulance services to those injured. People trapped in these areas should be provided rations by the state government, in light of the destruction of their homes, livelihoods and property.
5. Immediate and stringent action against BJP ex-MLA Kapil Mishra for inciting violence, as well as all individuals and policemen seen engaged in stone-pelting and beatings.
6. The ongoing violence should be investigated by a SIT.
7. Immediate resignation of the Delhi Police Commissioner Amulya Patnaik, Delhi LG Anil Baijal and Home Minister Amit Shah.
UK’s Corbyn condemns violence against Muslims in Delhi
Labour chief and leader of the opposition in the British parliament, Jeremy Corbyn, has condemned violence against Muslims in Delhi by extremist Hindu groups linked with the ruling Bhartya Janata Party (BJP).
In an exclusive interview with Geo News, the Labour leader said he’s saddened and shocked at the killing of innocent Muslims in Delhi riots, initiated by the extremist Hindutva groups linked with Narendra Modi’s government.
“I am totally shocked by what has happened and totally deplore the killings that have happened. I stand by those who have protested for their rights. They have the right to protest and they have the right to disagree, that’s what a democracy is all about,” he said.
“The basis of international law has to be the universal declaration of international human rights which of course guarantees and protects the right of religious freedom and assembly and the right of equality before the law of citizenship,” he added.
When asked about his views on the ruling party BJP supporting a progrom against Muslims, the Labour leader said all faiths are equal and no faith has the right to attack others.
“There has to be a basis in every society that there is no supremacy of one faith or ethnic group over another. That’s what a democracy is all about, equality before the law irrespective of your ethnicity of your faith.”
Finally there is this:
And this:
There have been further strong reactions to this cartoon, followed by a belated retraction.
Last Sunday the Morning Star issued a statement.
An apology for the cartoon published last Tuesday
The Morning Star apologises unreservedly for the publication last Tuesday of a cartoon which was offensive to trans people.
The cartoon had not been authorised for publication and its appearance in the print edition represents a failure to follow our own procedures for approving submissions. It was removed from online editions of the paper the same day, as soon as it was seen by the editor.
A notice was sent round staff on Tuesday reminding them of the process by which cartoon submissions must be approved before publication and we are determined that such a lapse in standards will not recur.
Again, we apologise for the offence caused by this cartoon, especially to our trans contributors and readers whom we have let down.
The Metro picked up the story:
Newspaper apologises after transphobic cartoon sparks outrage. Lucy Middleton
A newspaper has been forced to apologise after printing a transphobic cartoon this week. The picture, published in socialist paper The Morning Star on Tuesday, shows a crocodile slithering into a small pond containing newts. In speech bubbles, the newts can be seen saying, ‘But you can’t come in here! This is our safe space!’ The crocodile then replies: ‘Don’t worry your pretty little heads! I’m transitioning as a newt!’
Critics of the cartoon, drawn by Stella Perrett, accused it of perpetuating false stereotypes about trans people being predatory and dangerous to others in society. One person on Twitter wrote: ‘Could barely believe my eyes seeing this dehumanising, fascist imagery in a socialist paper.
Mumsnet became involved in the controversy,
This statement is interesting:
Kristina Harrison (prominent gender. critical transwoman, WPUK supporter) just posted this on Twitter – apparently it was published in the Morning Star.
KH wrote “This cartoon appeared in The Morning Star earlier this week @M_Star_Online It is a horrific, generalised demonisation of trans people which does not belong in a civilised society, let alone a socialist newspaper. I condemn it utterly. Trans people & progressive opponents of identity politics are owed an unequivocal apology, an explanation & reassurance about what action is being taken to ensure that the line between fierce but legitimate argument and bigotry is never crossed again. Totally unacceptable. (not posting a direct link as I don’t want to facilitate any pile on against Kristina, clearly this is a sensitive personal issue for a transwoman).
Comments are supportive of KH so far. I thought it’d be a good topic for discussion here – does this ‘demonise trans people’ or does it baldly illustrate safeguarding concerns with self-ID? Is it different from the popular/accepted(?) ‘Fox identifying into the henhouse’ analogy? Hopefully we can keep things civil and respectful with no personal criticisms of Kristina.
The issue for many has not been about the freedom to offend, but the why a self-identifying left daily chose to publish this material.
The Morning Star is no defender of the absolute right to say what you want about anybody.
This is what one of their columnists said about the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper-Casher murders in 2015,
Muslims held to a double standard
….some faux-left journalists who gave enthusiastic backing to the Blair-Bush wars and are now equally gung-ho about giving the widest possible circulation of material intended to enrage Muslims.
B52 liberal Nick Cohen accuses of cowardice those choosing not to carry anti-Muslim cartoons and alleges that radical Islam is winning successive battles, including effective introduction of a blasphemy law by means of self-censorship.
……
Why should running images of Mohammed be seen as the acid test of commitment to press freedom?
Powerful people’s wealth has prevented more stories from being published than pressure from any religious quarter.
Charles Windsor’s recent success in the pulling of a TV programme examining his finances exposes the reality behind claims of unlimited media freedom.
Would our freedom of expression be enhanced by publication of cartoons depicting Jesus being buggered by the Holy Ghost or a naked Muslim woman with a piece of blue cloth protruding from her anus and the comment that burkhas can be worn but only on the inside?
The only thing worse than publishing such puerile work would be reacting repressively by banning it.
But,
Why would any left-wing journalist or cartoonist jeopardise that essential by insulting fellow workers simply because they can?
Women’s Place UK criticised the cartoon on reasonable grounds:
The crocodile cartoon that appeared in the Morning Star this week works against the respectful debate and discussion to which WPUK is committed – it was misjudged and offensive and it is right that the Morning Star has apologised.
WPUK has been calling for respectful discussion since our inception and it is to their credit that the Morning Star has hosted many articles from different viewpoints on the subject which have enabled this discussion to take place. These articles have brought a clarity to such discussions.
We are grateful to those trans people who have worked with us, spoken at our meetings and supported the sex based rights of women and girls. Their solidarity has meant so much to so many and we stand beside them now.
We have been the subject of much offensive imagery and we have always condemned it. We are happy to do so now.
Let’s move forward progressively and in solidarity.
23rd February 2020
UNISON has responded:
Left-wing newspaper that published ‘vile transphobic cartoon’ slammed by UK’s largest trade union
Pink News.
The Morning Star was condemned this week for printing a “dehumanising, fascist, transphobic” cartoon – and now, Britain’s largest trade union has said that the newspaper has sunk to “a new low”.
UNISON, which represents staff who provide public services, said the “shocking, vile, transphobic cartoon” saw “the paper sink to a new low”.
“When I saw the image shared on social media over the weekend, I assumed it had been published in the Daily Mail, not for one moment did I think the dreadful drawing had appeared in the Morning Star,” wrote Liz Snape, UNISON’s assistant general secretary, in an open letter to the newspaper’s editor, Ben Chacko.
Snape added: “Images like this peddle the dangerous myth that trans people are a threat, when they’re the ones whose safety is most at risk. The irresponsible publishing of such appalling images does nothing to make them feel more secure.
“By publishing this hurtful cartoon, the publication so many trade unionists support and hold dear risks appearing no better than the right-wing media they despise.”
Solidarity has published this analysis:
Morning Star depicts trans people as predators
The Morning Star (linked to the Communist Party of Britain) has been forced to apologise for printing a transphobic cartoon by Stella Perrett, published in the print edition of Tuesday 18 February.
The cartoon depicting a slavering, slithering crocodile ogling terrified and defenceless newts and invading their “safe space” with the excuse that the crocodile is “transitioning to a newt”. The cartoon is grossly offensive, showing trans people as predatory and deceitful and cis women as weak and in need of protection.
As the cartoon circulated online, trade union LGBT+ groups began to organise against the Star, calling for withdrawal of union funds. A petition was set up by PCS Rainbow Collective which attracted hundreds of signatures in a few hours. The Morning Star was called out on Twitter.
The cartoon was removed from the online version of the paper with an apology claiming it “had not been authorised for publication and its appearance in the print edition represents a failure to follow… procedures for approving submissions.” The apology doesn’t explain how the cartoon was commissioned and printed without the editor noticing. The apology also skirts around the fact that the cartoon was not an aberration, but a logical conclusion of a longstanding pattern of the Morning Star publishing transphobic articles. The moral panic around “protecting women’s spaces” from trans women stems from seeing trans women as innately dangerous and threatening to cis women.
…………
The cartoon has shone a light on the official labour movement’s extensive funding and support for the Morning Star. According to the Star, Community, CWU, FBU, GMB, NUM, POA, RMT, and Unite are represented on its management committee.
It has yet to be seen if the apology is enough to dampen the calls for unions to distance themselves from the paper. I certainly hope not. The Morning Star should be made to account for its scapegoating of an oppressed minority, dividing workers against each other and propagating the myth that our rights run counter to each other.
Though our unions fund the paper, most of us do not regularly read it and would be shocked by the lies that flow readily from its pages. As well as transphobic cartoons, activists in Boycott the Morning Star have unearthed cartoons by Stella Perrett containing antisemitic caricatures which were published in 2016.
The paper repeats Chinese state lies to cover the persecution of the Uyghur people, one of the Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region. It celebrated the “liberation” of Aleppo by Assad. It repeated right wing lies about migrants driving down wages.
Reactionary, conservative politics dressed up as left-wing are the bread and butter of the Morning Star. It is about time our unions stopped paying for it.
While this furore continues the following event in planned.
The presence of anti-rootless cosmopolitan campaigner and stalwart of the Arron banks backed ‘Trade Unionists’ Against the EU (supported by the Morning Star and the Socialist Party) Paul Embery is causing concern.
This is a recent Embery tweet:
Dolchstoßlegende: Labour stabbed in the back by its anti-Brexit membership.
A couple of weeks ago the Morning Star published this assertion,
…in my view Starmer doesn’t seem electable at all — with his anti-Brexit views I don’t think he has a hope in hell of winning back our heartlands.
It was Starmer who was at the heart of our Brexit volte-face between 2017 and 2019, the biggest reason we lost 2.5 million votes. He has done nothing to own this calamity of the highest order and doesn’t seem to be able to accept his huge role in it. If he can’t see the problem how on earth can he try to put it right?
The author, Rick Evans, is apparently a Labour Party activist linked the ‘Red Labour’.
These are his politics:
But the claim that Labour lost the election because of Starmer is not an isolated one.
The pro-Brexit Counterfire makes the same charge,
Labour lost Leave constituencies because it became a Remain party, with Starmer and others mounting pressure on the party leadership to support a second referendum, and stating that they would campaign for Remain regardless of what was in any prospective Labour deal.
Starmer argued that this was the path to victory for Labour. In reality, it was a disastrous approach that alienated traditional Labour voters and drove them to the Tories. It’s difficult to defend Starmer’s leadership credentials when he was behind such a great miscalculation.
It looks as if the former supporters of George Galloway’s Respect Party are preparing for possible defeat and a return to their political isolation.
This is their more recent description of Starmer’s politics:
Starmer sides with Trump against Assange: expect more of the same if he’s leader
….unquestioning loyalty to the establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. But they can also expect Sir Keir to be a dumb centrist who will be out manoeuvred by the Tories…
Apart from Counterfire mocking the mute, this is the kind of catch-all rhetoric we can expect from their side in weeks to come.
At is core is a new Dolchstoßlegende, that Starmer stabbed Labour in the back by supporting the massive protests against Brexit.
It has equally expressed in an intellectual version.
New Left Review Editor and Brexiteer, Susan Watkins imagines, with the blessing of hindsight, that Labour could have let Brexit pass under Boris Johnson,
Placing the Labour leadership candidate within the “Remainer elite” who “betrayed” the working class she suggests that a better way would have been to follow the wiles of Harold Wilson and allow Labour MP’s to back the Tories and ignore the decisions of their Party Conferences.
The Parliamentary Party, acting alone (without reference to democratically agreed policy on the ‘tests’ on an acceptable Brexit deal, and favouring the option a Second Referendum), could, by
…giving Labour mps a free vote on Brexit legislation in 2019, ‘according to their conscience’, as Harold Wilson had done on the divisive 1975 referendum on the uk’s entry into the Common Market. With the ‘northern group’ voting for the bill and two dozen Labour abstentions, Johnson would have been denied the chance to make electoral hay out of the obstruction of Brexit, and the prospect of combating a much weaker Tory administration would have lain ahead at the next election. A Labour government could then have fought for an open immigration policy, or its own recalibration of the eu’s ‘four freedoms’.
Lexit Left’s Responsibility for Defeat.
In reality the Lexit left share in the responsibility for Labour’s defeat: they sided with the hard right in voting for Leave, and encouraged the illusion that there was a “People’s Brexit’ waiting to emerge from the break with the EU. That is, they encouraged the very pro-Brexit feeling that Remainers like Starmer are alleged to have ignored, and let the red to blue switch-overs with a ready-made justification for their vote.
Not only did an alternative socialist Brexit not happen, it could not happen.
The Brexit project was part of the very hard-right, national neoliberalism, aligned with the “‘outward-orientation’ ” of sections of capital, “in the era of bubblenomics”, which was, and is “above all Atlanticist. ”
With this as the backdrop, Watkin’s strategy had been ruled out by the domestic political landscape as condensed in the House of Commons.
The idea that Labour could have left pro-Brexit MP’s vote, en masse, for the Leave legislation, was dead in the early years of the 2017 May government.
The option that The NLR Editor and friends have dreamt up was, it’s becoming clear, was already not on the cards.
Mike Phipps, in a review of this book, May at 10, by Anthony Seldon, indicates why.
These are the relevant sections of the article:
Some Party activists have suggested that Labour should have voted for Brexit to get it out of the way so that the 2019 general election could have been about issues less divisive for Labour voters and members.
There are several problems with this analysis. First, to have called for a vote for May’s particular form of Brexit would have collaborated in creating the bonfire of workplace rights and environmental safeguards that would follow leaving the EU. Secondly, it would have split the party down the middle, with most members and MPs opposed to Brexit. Thirdly, with some Labour MPs already breaking the whip, any attempt to impose a hard Brexit on the parliamentary party would have provoked not just more defiance but possibly a challenge to the leadership, Fourthly, it was only in April 2019 that the May government indicated a preparedness to negotiate with Labour – but there was no real willingness to move towards Labour‘s proposal for a permanent customs union.
Worse, the government was by now falling to pieces. Seldon suggests that Labour’s front bench was in intransigent pre-election mode, but the reality was that the talks ground to a halt when May’s own departure was being briefed to the media, with no commitment that any agreement reached would be honoured by her successor.
Mike continues,
Should Labour have adopted a different position to the compromise it made with itself over Brexit?
Leavers say it should never have floated the idea of a second referendum, which indicated contempt for the 2016 verdict of the voters. Remainers say Labour should have come out for a People’s Vote earlier, pointing to the slump in the Labour vote in the 2019 EU parliamentary elections and the rise in support for Remain parties such as the Lib Dems and the Greens.
The debate will rumble on in relation to the 2019 general election, but two things should be borne in mind.
Firstly, Labour’s position on Brexit was not seen by voters as the principal reason for rejecting the party in 2019.
Secondly, whatever position Labour might have adopted, it would probably not have changed the course of events prior to the election, which were not controlled by the party’s leadership.
This are the standout points,
The assumption that if Labour had somehow got Brexit out of the way, it could have fought the general election on different terrain overlooks the obvious point that, with Brexit done, there may not have been an election in 2019 at all, or 2020 or 2021. Johnson gambled in 2019, but he would have preferred to call a general election when the polls could give the Tories a clearer lead.
True, it would not have been the ‘Brexit election’, but the mobilisation of nationalist sentiment and the weaponisation of the Labour leader’s patriotism are themes that the Tories have used repeatedly in the past and are still exploiting now post-election. We shouldn’t be surprised: the rise of authoritarian nationalist conservatism is a global phenomenon challenging social democratic parties across the world.
He concludes,
With hindsight, we can see we were a long way from that and much more political and practical preparation was necessary after 2017 to make it possible. Furthermore, the absence of industrial struggle or a more generalised upsurge against government policy over the last nine years should have told us that there was something fundamental missing in the combination of ingredients that might bring a socialist government to power. Instead, we suffered a colossal defeat – and one from which we have to learn lessons.
While the Lexiteers may have helped soften up opinion for the Tories their influence was far from decisive. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that, while it did have some effect (above all in letting convinced Labour turncoats with a ready excuse for their ballot), that, “Labour’s position on Brexit was not seen by voters as the principal reason for rejecting the party in 2019” Leadership is the most cited reason for not backing the Party.
Mike is also right to underline that Labour politicians of any side were, a minority in parliament, able to determine the way the issue played out as the election agenda was set, “whatever position Labour might have adopted, it would probably not have changed the course of events prior to the election, which were not controlled by the party’s leadership.”
Brexit has not gone away, at least in Labour debate.
Starmer comes under fire from Long-Bailey and Nandy over Brexit
Guardian.
Labour leadership hustings saw frontrunner criticised for party’s ‘tone-deaf’ approach
Long-Bailey implicitly condemned Starmer’s Commons-based tactics against Theresa May’s minority government, saying: “Unfortunately, we focused a lot on what was happening within Westminster, and didn’t convey what we were trying to do to our community. And that led to a lack of trust.
“It took so many other things down with it. So in the election, when we should have been talking about jobs, aspiration, industry, what the future will look like, we were talking about Brexit and trying to justify our position, which was confusing.”
Speaking later in the event, Nandy said Labour’s problem with Brexit was that it “took all the wrong lessons from what the public were trying to tell us”.
She said: “Brexit was a real problem for us, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And the reason it was a problem was because our response was so utterly tone-deaf.”
The “public” were not one group. Labour, as a party of over 500,000 members is part of the public, so are those who filled the streets protesting against Brexit, mass currents of opinion and street activity, the latter the”movementists” of Counterfire ignore, or denigrate.
This drew a measured response,
…Starmer vehemently rejected this analysis, saying that “fairly or unfairly, rightly or wrongly”, Corbyn’s leadership was the number one issue on the doorstep, as well as what he called “manifesto overload”.
Starmer said: “Whether what was in the manifesto was right or wrong, there was too much. There was a tipping point, and it didn’t matter whether it was good or bad, because people didn’t believe we could deliver it.”
“And every team was talking about what was coming up on the doorstep, the big issues. And there was complete uniformity across the country; it was number one, the leadership. Fairly or unfairly, rightly or wrongly, anybody who was in that campaign knows that was the number one thing that came up. I’m not saying it’s right; I’m just saying let’s be honest about it.
The second thing was Brexit, of course. But that came up differently. If you were campaigning in the Midlands, it came up in a particular way. If you were campaigning in Scotland, it came up in a completely different way. But it did come up, I accept that.
The third thing that came up – this is not me, this is the teams reporting to me – was the manifesto overload. Now, whether what was in the manifesto was right or wrong, there was too much. There was a tipping point, and it did not matter whether it was good or bad, because people did not believe we could deliver it. And once you got past that point, there was no coming back.
And I’m really sad to say, but in all honesty antisemitism came up … It came up as a values issue and as a competency issue.”
Exactly.
The Tweet that “provoked anger” says RT.
The comment probably refers, in the first instance to this report.
Paul Mason may, though I doubt it, be referring to this thought-provoking article,
Like it or not, Stalinism remains a live force in the UK labour movement. Martin Thomas.
Stalinism is a live political current today, and a reactionary one. The central place in the Labour Leader’s Office of Stalinists such as Seamus Milne and (until he resigned this week) Andrew Murray, and the support for the Morning Star by a number of national trade unions and many Labour MPs, are dangers.
Better if we had a better word than “Stalinism”, which suggests only a school of thought, and probably one defunct. Even though Milne and Murray were members of the most diehard Stalinist faction of the old Communist Party in the years before its break-up (“Straight Left”), and give no evidence of a shift in fundamental views since then, they don’t blazon themselves as Stalinist: few have, since 1956.
Better if the large historical phenomenon were not labelled with the name of an individual, especially since, as we’ll see, the role of Stalin himself in it was anomalous.
“Stalinism” is, however, the best-available single word for:
• a form of society modelled on the stabilised version of the outcome of Stalin’s counter-revolution in the once worker-ruled USSR, and exemplified today only by North Korea and Cuba
• the ideology which sees that form of society as the good and available alternative to capitalism (usually calling it “socialism”)
• the political formations shaped around that ideology.
Long-Bailey supporters are outraged and, after inventing their own version of Paul Mason’s comment, have their own theories about the dark forces at work in his Tweet..
NOTE: Mason said that, “the Stalinists who destroyed Corbynism are backing RLB”, not that those who back her are Stalinists.
Others are fuming at the attack on the candidate they call the up and coming People’s Princess.
No wonder RT, sparing a moment from boosting Putin, gallantly leapt to Long-Bailey’s defence!
British journalist ridiculed online after lashing out at ‘Stalinists’ within Labour Party
Mason – a vocal supporter of Labour’s second referendum Brexit policy, which many party members blame for PM Boris Johnson’s landslide victory in December – hit out at those planning to vote for Rebecca Long-Bailey as Jeremy Corbyn’s successor.
The former BBC and Channel 4 News journalist took to Twitter on Monday as voting for a new Labour leader got under way. He urged Labour members to vote for pro-EU, center-left candidate Keir Starmer, calling it a “no-brainer” of a choice and branding those opting for Long-Bailey – the democratic socialist candidate – as “Stalinists.”
Mason’s swipe at members opposed to Starmer – the supposed ‘unity’ candidate –provoked anger from many Labour supporters on Twitter. Many of those who took a pop at Mason saw his comments as anything but ‘unifying.’
He also received a backlash for blaming certain Long-Bailey supporters for having “destroyed Corbynism,” with some taking aim at him over pushing for a ‘people’s vote’ or second referendum on Brexit. One person tweeted: “Who are the Stalinists? It was the People’s Vote fanatics like you that destroyed Corbyn.”
Others ridiculed his somewhat over-the-top characterization of those who had the temerity to disagree with him, with the irony not being lost on some of his critics. One Labour supporter sarcastically tweeted that he should learn the true meaning of ‘Stalinist’, adding: “The clue is, it’s not someone disagreeing with you or being left of you… I mean, the Teletubbies are left of you right now.”
Here is Paul Mason’s most recent article on the issue of Europe.
With the UK’s European door closed, it’s open season for xenophobia
This Blog wholly agrees with the following analysis:
Labour—still reeling from its election defeat—does not look well equipped for this fight. Since Jeremy Corbyn’s party lost the election, its hard left, incapable of facing up to its own failures to connect with working-class voters, has heaped all blame on Labour’s pro-European wing (and implicitly the 80 per cent or so of its members and voters opposed to Brexit).
Rather than resisting this blame game, two of the three remaining contenders to succeed Corbyn have gone along with it. Lisa Nandy—an MP for an ex-mining constituency—and Rebecca Long-Bailey have suggested it was the fault of the pro-Remain left, and its figurehead, Keir Starmer, that Labour couldn’t connect with elderly, English-nationalist voters.
Starmer—who looks set to win the leadership contest—has responded by assuring everyone that the Brexit debate is over, though he will go on fighting for a close relationship with Europe during the coming talks.
What much of the Labour left does not want to recognise is that the debate over Brexit has simply transmuted into a debate over sovereignty and immigration. The purpose of Johnson’s rhetoric is not to bounce Europe into a deal—it is, as it was before, to provide a casus belli for a no-deal Brexit in December, and tar Labour and its allies with the brush of cosmopolitanism.
Moral collapse
In an atmosphere where parts of the British left are frantically trying to renew their nationalist economic credentials, to ‘reconnect’ with the towns Labour lost, there is a real danger that the party will morally collapse in the face of Johnson’s anti-European propaganda.
The principled course of action is clear: to oppose the UK negotiating position, as set out, in Parliament; to hold out the prospect of a new, strategically close relationship with the EU; to vote down the new immigration rules, and to build solidarity with the three million EU citizens already in the UK.
Of the three Labour leadership contenders, only Starmer has committed to fight for the principle of free movement. The only way to honour that principle would be to seek to amend the immigration bill in a way that gives extra points to EU citizens, removes language restrictions and gives EU workers already in the country full citizenship rights in the UK, including the right to vote.
Racism factor
And it’s time to be clear about what the British left is facing. I understand why politicians are reticent to say this, but it’s very clear that, for some of the 900,000 habitual Labour voters who switched to the Tories, racism was a factor. Certainly Corbyn’s reputational suicide played a part, as did concerns over Labour’s ultra-radical economic programme. But Johnson is the first Tory leader since Thatcher who has played on Empire-nostalgic racism.
We either fight this morally and politically, or we accept it. On the Question Time programme, the young Asian left academic Ash Sarkar waged that moral fight magnificently. She told the racist woman: ‘The facts don’t care about your feelings.’ And she defended migration, not just on grounds of economic functionality: ‘It is a human story that’s got worth and cannot be measured in GDP.’
The encounter crystallised a cultural conflict which is set to continue. The British left needs to get ready for that conflict—not duck out of it.
Here
The Twittering Machine. Richard Seymour. The Indigo Press. 2019.
This month Benjamin Griveaux, candidate for Paris Mayor from President Macron’s party, La République en Marche, stood down. Peter Pavlinski had posted on the Internet a video of the Macronist stalwart having ‘virtual sex’. Images of the candidate tossing himself off in a previous online exchange with the Russian exile’s girlfriend, Alexandra de Taddeo, had been taken, without, he claims, her knowledge, from her computer. Published on Paveninski’s site, Pornopolitique, it looked like a victory on the Web for those challenging what Richard Seymour in the Foreword to his new book calls the monopoly “formerly enjoyed by media and entertainment companies”. Pavlinski called it a blow against the “hypocrisy” of politicians.
The Twittering Machine is “an attempt” “to work out a new language into what is coming into being” in this “new techno-political system”. The title is short for the whole range of digital platforms. The book is a sustained critique of the “techno-utopians” dream of “creative autonomy” that has gone with the rise of the “bloom of the web”. Beyond being an “addiction machine” it has important political effects. Nobody is any doubt that the Affaire Griveaux would not have happened without the Net’s “ubiquitous publicity. This may be added to the growth of what Seymour calls “cyber-cynicism”.
Debate has raged over making public these “sextos”, and more online regulation, with some defending the confidentiality of intimate relations ( Griveaux scandal revives France’s will to regulate social media). For others it illustrates how “connectivity” can become the fantasy of sharing solitary pleasure. Others relate it to the #MeToo movement, ,#BalanceTonPorc, and the way sexual issues, from harassment, and rape to infidelity, are no longer considered private in France.
Political Twilight Zone.
Less noticed internationally is the presence of Juan Branco. The author of Crépuscule (2018) and self-styled leftist he is one of the lawyers for Julian Assange. The advocate now represents Pavlinski and is, in effect, part of his public voice (Le Monde. Derrière la chute de Benjamin Griveaux, enquête sur le rôle d’un trio sans foi ni loi.)
Announcing the twilight of President Macron, the book (initially available for free on the Net) has been fiercely criticised on the left for its portrait of high-society plots, the international ‘Gotha’ of the international, elite schooling, moralism, dislike of ‘degenerates’ and venom against homosexuals. Crépuscule is studded with lengthy passages on the networks and manoeuvring of one gay man, Gabriel Attal, charged with organising Macron’s youth wing. For at least some this would-be Revolutionary Prosecutor looks more at home in the world of far-right ‘anti-globalists’ and 4Chan than the left. It comes as no surprise that Branco vaunts how, on Twitter, he had exposed media cover-ups of the oligarchs’ activities. (1)
Richard Seymour offers a way of looking at how figures like Branco and Pavlinski have become political players. Some readers will be disappointed at the absence of discussion about Lenin’s Tomb, Race-play BDSM and the merits of poking fun at people with severe facial injuries. But they will find that the author puts such “anti-celebrities”, the “propagandists of human failure” in their place. Seymour has also written a thoroughly readable thoughtful book.
Trolls and Trolling.
Many of the stories set out in The Twittering Machine, are more tragic than the fate of Benjamin Griveaux. Between our addiction to the instant rewards of ‘like’ on Facebook, the ‘community’ run for profit, the surveillance capitalism, we have the space where trolls gloated on young people’s plight and helped drive them to suicide. The taunting of Océane, her death in front of a high-speed train, her “protest” against an ex-boyfriend’s rape, her remote father, “a profiteer in the sex industry”, and society, made us weep. Seymour, in a sensitive account, talks of the yearning for popularity, for renown, and puts charge of self-regard in its place, “complaints about narcissism are almost always, as Kristin Dombek writes, about the ‘selfishness of others’.” (Page 94) In this world of intense self-promotion come moments of pack hunting. Vigilantes react against the baiting. “Trolling, and the backlash against trolling, is for the most part good money.” (Page 123)
Citing Jean Baudrillard it becomes clear that in a world of simulacra there is a “darkly dystopian potential”. In “post-truth politics” “new fascisms are emerging round micro celebrities, mini-patriarchs and the flow of homogenised messages.” Racist propaganda has “compensatory, antidepressant effects”. The Islamic State, ISIS, another “far right social movement” based on religious-racism spread on the Web with “snuff videos”, “It self-consciously incarnated the antithesis of everything liberal modernity stood for” (Page 187) These “collective hallucinations” have real effects, far-right murders, Daesh’s genocidal state. And there is the first “Twitter President” Donald Trump….
Digital Democracy?
Can the Internet still have progressive potential? The Twittering Machine cites the role of the early pre-Net French system, Minitel a videotex online service. Seymour says that this played a role in student protests way back in 1986 – although while present out of solidarity at many of them, including the most violent, I failed to notice its impact. Have its successors now become a “sub-hegemonic practice” keeping us in line to the “emerging techno-political regime”? This is at least is certain.
Yet, it was not the technology used but that anti-democratic folk politics principle of “consensus” decision-making that hampered movements like Occupy, accelerating their own lack of a political strategy that could have an effect. The scope of “digital democracy” remains open. Parties organised digitally, like La France insoumise, have their own ways of blocking dissenting voices, by prohibiting any organised opposition. It is impossible to imagine the modern left without social media platforms, Blogs, YouTube, web sites, even Instagram, and the use of Twitter during protests.
In its opening chapters The Twittering Machine speculates on the “subterranean” drives that attach us to a world in which “we are all scripturient”, writers of texts. The seemingly detached cyberspace in which letters are typed is equally one where we work “without remuneration the better to sell us as a product” (Page 215) Behind lies a taste of B.F. Skinner’s behaviourist ‘utopia’ for business, as surveillance capitalism shadowing the Twitter Machine. Behind the digital revolution and the time consuming Monster, the ‘Chronophage’, is profit from human lab rats. .
The Twittering Machine raises more questions than than it offers plausible conclusions. No left activist in the heat of a political struggle is going to leave behind her mobile, tablet, laptop, or PC and stroll in “the park with nothing but a notepad and a nice pen”. Nobody who wishes to express his or her views is going to rely on speaking or the postal system. Perhaps the “post-Baudrillard” writers, Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serrory are onto something when they write that amongst the promotion of the self, and the aesthetic capitalism on Facebook and the Net, may also inspire people to see in themselves their own artistic desires, that it may also allow personal creativity outside of mass consummation and simulacra. This leaves a place for a “utopia”, not exclusively of writing, but certainly fit to occupy the “dreamspace”. (2)
******
(1) Crépuscule ou l’erreur de la confusion. À propos de l’idole Branco “Ajoutez aussi –- car tout y est — ses pulsions homophobes, qui transparaissent dans une note où l’effondrement de notre civilisation est associé à deux figures gay — Gabriel Attal et Edouard Louis — si dissemblables qu’on se demande ce qui peut les réunir si ce n’est l’homophobie de l’auteur et le vieux thème de la décadence homosexuelle.
On the alt-right use of the Internet see: Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right Angela Nagel. 2017 Zed Books.
(2) Pages 479 – 480 Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serror. L’esthétisation du monde. 2013. Folio.
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See also, RS 21.
Review: The Twittering Machine Mark Murphy
It is important to note that the last major book ‘left-wing’ book that gave an account of the impact of social media on our politics was Angela Nagel’s Kill All Normies. The problem with her writing is that it is less a description of the material circumstances of our current digital predicament and more of a moralising screed against the current state of left-wing politics. Likewise, before Nagel, we had Exiting the Vampire Castle by Mark Fisher, who began tracing the jouissance (toxic pleasure) laden tendencies that social media brought out in the left. He tells us that the Vampire Castle – his metaphor for the horror story of social media – is driven by a ‘priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.’ The problem with Fisher and Nagel’s work, in short, is that they have both become a resource for those who moralise against moralism rather than explain our addiction to moralism.
Seymour’s work is vital because he refuses to be drawn into any form of moralising. The psychoanalytic insight, which underpins Seymour’s work, therefore resists externalising, moralising and fetishising the return of the writing repressed. Instead, he argues that it needs to be looked at honestly as we are a part of it whether we like it or not. Against the all too common ‘techlash’ theme, he argues that social media does indeed bring out fascistic and conspiratorial impulses, but it has also given a voice to the marginalised. Moreover, even if the Twittering Machine does give the marginalised more voice, it does so at the expense of handing power to huge corporate entities like Google that monetise our attention.
This Guardian report is deeply concerning.
UK left activists attended events with far right antisemites
Former Labour party members have regularly met elements of the far right to discuss and propagate antisemitic conspiracy theories, an undercover investigation has found.
Infiltration of the conspiracy theorist group Keep Talking found that Jeremy Corbyn supporters and confidantes of former Labour MPs have attended meetings addressed by Holocaust deniers.
During one gathering in London last year, suspended Labour supporters heard James Thring, an infamous antisemite linked to the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, speak openly and unchallenged about Holocaust denial.
A covert recording of Thring at the meeting captured him claiming that no deaths were recorded at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp, where 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were systematically murdered.
…
Among ex-Labour members at Keep Talking events – though not the one attended by Thring – was Elleanne Green. Once a Labour member in Westminster, Green founded the secret Facebook group Palestine Live, exposed in 2018 as featuring Holocaust denial and theories that Israel was responsible for 9/11.
Corbyn and other senior Labour party figures had been members of the Facebook group at various points since its creation in 2013. Green, suspended by the party in July 2018, accompanied ex-MP Chris Williamson to court when he sued the party in an antisemitism row. Undercover investigators first noticed Green at a Keep Talking event in September 2018.
A number of names, familiar to those who’ve followed the issue, and recognise that Labour has indeed had a problem with some anti-semitic activists, appear in the article:
During the meeting at which Thring spoke, on 5 March 2019 at a Kentish Town cafe, ex-Labour party member Peter Gregson was the guest speaker with a speech titled: “The loss of freedom of speech on Israel, thanks to bogus antisemitism claims.”
…
Gregson, who was thrown out of the GMB union and suspended by the Labour party over antisemitic allegations, has founded a group called Labour Against Zionism and Islamophobic Racism (Lazir).
Also present in the audience was Ian Fantom, co-founder of Keep Talking and a 9/11 “truther”, who has appeared alongside Piers Corbyn, older brother of the Labour leader, at a Keep Talking event.
Footage taken during the Kentish Town meeting has also identified Gill Kaffash, former secretary of the Camden branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, whose membership application was rejected by the Labour party in 2016 because she had promoted Holocaust revisionism.
Other Keep Talking attendees include Holocaust denier and far-right activist Alison Chabloz, who the Jewish News reported in 2015 became a supporter of the Labour party and “declared loyalty to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in several blog posts”.
Chabloz was convicted of antisemitism in 2018 after publishing videos of herself singing antisemitic songs denying the Holocaust at a meeting of the London Forum, a far-right organisation with links to the US alt-right.
Another speaker at Keep Talking meetings was Israeli writer Miko Peled, who addressed the group after appearing at a Labour party conference fringe event in Brighton in 2019.
During a Labour party conference in 2017 he reportedly told a fringe event that: “This is about free speech, the freedom to criticise and to discuss every issue, whether it’s the Holocaust: yes or no, Palestine, the liberation, the whole spectrum.”
The other co-founder of Keep Talking, Nick Kollerstrom, is a Holocaust denier who has referred to “storybook gas chambers” when describing Auschwitz.
This might give a clue that this not an isolated fringe:
Labour MP apologises for backing ‘antisemitic’ jazz musician
Guardian. 21.12.2018.
Chris Williamson promoted petition in support of Gilad Atzmon, who denounced ‘Holocaust religion’.
And,
Beeley is a regular on RT:
Further Background
Hope not Hate. 5.3.2018.
Keep Talking, run by Ian Fantom, is an obscure London-based group for conspiracy theorists of all types, ranging from Holocaust deniers, climate change deniers and 9/11 ‘Truthers’. The group had organised a series of six events at Conway Hall on Red Lion Square in London.
The first event in a run of six – due to take place tonight – was to feature contributions from the infamous Holocaust denier Nick Kollerstrom, who takes organising duties at the meetings. Kollerstom has called the 9/11 attack in New York ‘a constructed, fabricated event’ and argues that the 7/7 attacks in London were a ‘false flag’ terror attack.
However, he is best known for his denial of the Holocaust, after the publication of an article titled ‘The Auschwitz Gas Chamber Illusion’ on the website of the infamous denial organisation the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. In it he claimed that there was “never a centrally-coordinated Nazi program of exterminating Jews in Germany. Lethal gas chambers did not function in German labour-camps, that’s just an illusion.”
Here is more:
Labour Candidates for “Party of Peace” Ignore Syrian War Crimes.
Nobody can say they did not know this was happening: it’s been on the television every night.
Oz Katerji writes,
We’re going to see a massacre on a scale that has never been seen during this entire war.” These are the words of UN deputy regional humanitarian coordinator for Syria, Mark Cutts, speaking to Sky News about the Assad regime’s ongoing Russian and Iranian-backed slaughter of Idlib.
For years the entirety of the international community has had exhaustive and irrefutable proof that Syria’s dictatorship has been carrying out a campaign of human extermination against its civilian population, with a death toll in the hundreds of thousands. There is indisputable evidence that the regime has been responsible for using chemical weapons and deliberately targeting hospitals, UN aid convoys, paramedics, schools, civilian homes and civilian infrastructure.
This regime has used starvation, torture, rape and displacement as weapons of war. How much worse can it get? Idlib is home to three million Syrians, one million of them children, with the overwhelming majority of the population already displaced from other parts of the country. How did those people end up in Idlib?
The Syria Campaign is deeply concerned.
Our co-fouder, Abdulaziz almashi, was on Sky News today to talk about the current situation in Idlib. He says the international community must come together to stop the upcoming massacres in Idlib. #IdlibUnderFire #SpeakUpForIdlib
Yesterday the Morning Star headlined,
Long-Bailey and Burgon the only candidates to declare Labour should be ‘party of peace’
People would be forgiven for thinking that when it comes to issues of war and peace the Labour Party candidates had taken an interest in the worst civil war of the 21st century, Syria.
The article continues,
The candidates were asked whether they each agreed that recent wars waged by Britain have been “disastrous” and whether they, if they were to be elected in leadership roles, would call for an end to foreign policy based on “wars of aggression.”
The letter also had questions over whether Britain’s foreign policy should be independent of the US, whether the candidates would support the immediate withdrawal of troops from the Middle East, and if Britain should end arms sales to oppressive regimes.
Not a word on Syria there but,
Ms Long Bailey’s response was received on Thursday. She said that outgoing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn apologising for the party’s role in the Iraq war under Tony Blair’s premiership was a “moment we should all be proud of, but never should have been necessary.”
She added: “Not only must Labour be a party of peace, we must have an internationalist approach that we can achieve peace and global justice and through this ensure global stability.”
Ms Long Bailey also condemned arms sales to Saudi Arabia, spoke against “outsourcing” foreign policy to the US and Donald Trump’s “one-sided attempt to impose an unjust solution on Palestinians,” and in favour of “ridding the world of nuclear weapons.”
Mr Wakefield said that it is important that the next cohort of Labour leaders are anti-war to reflect the membership.
It concluded,
“Anyone who wants to lead the party needs to show that the previous Labour government’s record on these issues was a disaster, and that they would follow a different course,” he said.
“It’s disappointing that we haven’t heard from the other candidates, and it’s not a good sign going forward.”
Leadership candidates Sir Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy, and deputy candidates Dawn Butler, Angela Rayner, Dr Rosena Allin-Khan and Ian Murray had not responded to the letter at the time the Star went to print.
In fact about the only theme one can see is that these candidates support “Don’t Bomb Syria”.
It is not forgotten that the liar tweeting below got support from some sections of the British left, including former MP Chris Williamson.
This moral bankrupt expresses the only issue that matters to some of these “anti-imperialists”:
This, meanwhile, is happening:
Communists Advising on Labour Strategy: “Starmer’s base is, “metropolitan stratum that derives from socially liberal and economically unadventurous middle-class values”.
The Morning Star, wholly independent of the Communist Party of Britain and owned by the Co-op gives prominent space to the views of one Nick Wright, responsible for the Communist Party of Britain’s media work, (and a former member of Straight Left) on Labour Party “contradictions”.
Two poles of understanding seem to be emerging. On one hand we have a liberal pole of which the best exemplar is Starmer. This is gaining an impressive number of constituency nominations in meetings which, by some accounts seem older and reinforced by those who departed the scene after Jeremy Corbyn renewed his leadership and now see their Thermidor.
“Thermidor”, a word that has strayed from Trotskyist supporters of Red Flag to the Morning Star (” Starmer represents the victory of the Thermidorian reaction”)
The word was used by Trotsky to refer to the way Stalin establish his power to rein in the Russian Revolution. It quickly fell out of use when it was pointed out that the ‘Thermidor’ which put an end to the Terror in the French Revolution, was not only inappropriate for a rule that vastly expanded the terror in the USSR, it referred to the way one fraction of radical bourgeoisie and its allies, during the bourgeois revolution was replaced by another, bourgeois,fraction. (1)
WHat on earth this has to do with the Labour Party leadership election is even less clear.
Is Wright suggesting that Corbyn led a bourgeois revolution, or a new Soviet Revolution and that its gravedigger, Starmer, is in the wings?
One the other hand we have a more explicitly socialist pole given clearest expression by Rebecca Long Bailey.
What is important here are the bat-squeaks. These are emitted at such a high frequency that to hear them requires devoted attention. Comrade Starmer has doubled down on his pledges to respect the Corbyn heritage and presents a package of policies modelled in all surface appearances on the most distinctive elements in the 2017 and 2019 manifestos.
Cde Wright battens onto his favourite candidate, continuing the permanent revolution,
These, by contrast, are the politics we need,
….a more thoroughgoing critique of capitalism, encapsulated in classically class-conscious language and predicated on an assumption that fighting for these policies is an existential challenge to the main features of contemporary British capitalism……
Rebecca Long Bailey has made a good job of clothing this class perspective in the kind of thought-out detail that can convince the electorate. Her command of the Green New Deal, which she authored, must be a central feature of Labour’s pitch whoever comes out on top in the leadership contest.
The Green New Deal has not been a surefire winner for European left parties.
Benoît Hamon scored 6.36% of the vote in the French Presidential election, as the Parti Socialiste candidate, after making this, dubbed “ecological transition”, a central part of his platform.
He won a 3,27% and no seats in the 2019 European election after his splinter group, Génération.s ran a list in co-operation with DieM25 and others, which centred on the issues, called the “federalist European Green New Deal”.
The Podemos breakway Más País, led by Íñigo Errejón has also given priority to the “La transición ecológica”.
After repeated failure (in the 2019 Spanish General Eleciton they got 2.40% of the vote 3 seats in the Spanish Parliament) they have now retreated back to their Madrid bases, or “put in a draw” as the Spanish press puts it, “Errejón guarda Más País en un cajón“).
But nothing douses Wright’s ethusiasm for Long-Bailey.
What a contrast, he laments, with Keir Starmer,
Starmer’s particular appeal (as was Thornberry’s) to a spectrum of opinion that wants to move on from, away from, or even reverse Corbyn’s positions is clothed in the cultural and linguistic signifiers of a metropolitan stratum that derives from socially liberal and economically unadventurous middle-class values.
As they say down at the Slaughtered Lamb, “wot bleeding linguistic signifiers are these? How do they, deal with the Brexit “contradiction between working-class priorities and middle-class values”? More like Starmer embodies “the class interests of the dominant section of Britain’s capitalist class underpinned the Remain campaign and the People’s Vote device.”
In a master stroke Wright show’s the issues at stake, “if this leadership contest results in a more-clearly articulated distinction between the liberal pole in Labour politics and the class-politics pole so much the better.”
On Lisa Nanday he has these kind words,
But the logic of her challenge has compelled her to re-energise several strands of traditionally reactionary politics in British Labour. The result is a cacophony of conflicting messages which are acquiring coherence only by her now more-precisely articulated reactionary ideas.
This Blog will not deal with his further reflections as surely the news turns that, hope against hope, a window opens for Labour to “emulate Corbyn at his best.”
Rebecca long-Bailey is said to be gladdened at this response to her heartfelt appeal.
Labour can look forward to Corbyn’s winning advice for a long time to come!
Meanwhile in East Anglia:
The signatories include Ipswich council leader David Ellesmere, the leader of the Labour opposition at Suffolk County Council Sarah Adams and the Labour group leaders on both East and West Suffolk councils Peter Byatt and Diane Hind.
Here
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(1) On this point, and why Trotskyists questioned the term see: Chapter 1. Michel Lequenne. Le Trotskisme, une histoire sans fard (2018 edition)
The pro-European, internationalist, left is backing Keir Starmer.
The internationalist left, as indicated by Laura Parker’s public stand, is moving towards Starmer.
Laura Parker: Why I’m backing Keir Starmer for Labour leader
She was at the 2018 AEIP National Conference.
Parker’s support reflects the way that radical human rights supporters and internationalists have their place in Starmer’s unity campaign.
More support for Starmer comes from Susan Press, a well-known and respected figure on the Labour left.
Susan Press, Keir Starmer for Labour Leader
It is hard to part company with comrades on the left but the truth is it was crystal clear we were heading for catastrophe and we didn’t have an oven-ready candidate experienced enough to replace Jeremy. Had the result not been such a disaster, there was a lingering if unlikely hope that John McDonnell (who had actually wanted to be Leader and would have commanded support still) might be persuaded to stand. But that ship sailed with Johnson’s 80-seat majority.
These days I am not just a Labour Left activist. As a councillor for the past six years I represent a ward in West Yorkshire with two food banks and a lot of deprivation. But there are also people who are doing OK, people who didn’t vote for us last time or even vote at all. We need all of them on board to stand any chance at all of clawing back ground – let alone forming a government.
Does the PLP bear any responsibility for this? Sure they do. However the turn the Party as a whole took after the so-called chicken coup by MPs didn’t just lose us support. It spawned a bunker mentality and understandable determination to protect the leadership from the top right down to the grassroots. It got toxic. Very. Any criticism of Corbyn and you were a Tory. Anti-semitism was an invention (trust me as a member of the NCC, it wasn’t). Any concerns about election prospects were dismissed on an increasingly hysterical social media amid the cries of ‘bring it on’ and JC4PM. To be frank a lot of it was delusional. And as much to blame as Brexit for what followed.
This is Susan’s analysis of what we face at present.
So here we are with another leadership campaign. But it is not 2015. What made that campaign so amazing was its message of hope and authenticity from someone who had spent his life in the labour movement. Someone who didn’t have to keep saying the s-word as everyone knew he was a socialist and always had been. We wanted a fundamental shift in the Labour Party after years of watering down our values and we were right even if it went wrong in the end. Hindsight is easy and luck wasn’t on our side as neither was the media but that has always been the case even if this time it was unprecedentedly vile. A lot of mistakes were also made by the LOTO office according to those closer to the coal face and all that will no doubt be revealed in due course. However there has been a game-changing shift. Which may help us in the difficult years ahead.
Not one of the leadership candidates could in all honesty be described as on the right of the Party. And whatever silliness is being said about ‘ true’ and ‘proper’ socialists, after 40 years on the left of the Party I am not buying the line there is only one candidate we can vote for. Truth is there is not a batsqueak policy-wise between them.
So like that well-known Blairite Paul Mason I am voting for Keir Starmer – the candidate who has best chance of inspiring trust and convincing the unconvinced to come home to Labour. Who can cope with the pressure and take Johnson apart at the dispatch box and hold him to account when Brexit unravels. And, with no disrespect to the others, someone with a much longer track-record of standing up for human rights and social justice.
Keir Starmer received another big boost to his leadership bid when Laura Parker wrote a piece for LabourList yesterday about why she was endorsing him. Why is this significant? Parker was national coordinator of Momentum until just two months ago, and previously worked as Jeremy Corbyn’s private secretary. As you will know, Momentum is backing Rebecca Long-Bailey for the leadership and its chair, Jon Lansman, is director of her campaign.
This news is also remarkable when you think that Parker was working in the Labour leader’s office at the time that the mass shadow cabinet resignation and subsequent leadership challenge took place in 2016. These factors make Parker’s support the clearest realisation so far of Starmer’s broad appeal within the party – and it offers another example of the recent fragmentation of the Labour left. Of course, it would be remiss not to note that Brexit – with Parker and Starmer being on the same side – continues to play a huge role in this shake-up of factional allegiances.
The warring fragments of the left opposed to Starmer are still at it!
The Morning Star compares Starmer to Neil Kinnock…..but in reality they are speaking for Kinnock’s pro-Brexit son.
We have been here before. Back in the 1980s when Kinnock became leader he believed in public ownership, he believed in unilateral disarmament, he had principles — or so we thought. But by the time his second general election came in 1992 he had long jettisoned them (and we still lost).
At this stage I have less faith in Starmer than I did when Kinnock became leader in 1983. You see it all comes down to who appears more electable.
This ‘betrayal narrative’ shows just how desperate the old comrades of Andrew Murray (who has just left as a Corbyn top aide) have got.
They ignore the damage their own pro-Brexit campaigns, reflected through the influence of the ‘corridor clique’ around Corbyn, have been to Labour’s vote in the December election.
The revolutionary socialists of Counterfire are another group of crystal ball gazers.
They consider, after a heap of slurs on Starmer’s human rights record, and the claim that being against the hard-right Brexit project was wrong, that,
If Keir Starmer were to win, he would take Labour back to the centre-ground that proved so disastrous for Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and social democracy across Europe and beyond. He is no friend of the left and no committed socialist should vote for him.
Unlike the left’s friends of the less than a hundred strong Counterfire.
Let Brexit Be Done!
“Holloa, my republican friend, d—n it, that’s a nasty lick you’ve got, and from one of people too; that makes it harder to bear, eh? Never mind, he’s worse off than you are.” It was, 1814, the time of the French Restauration. London had been celebrating a visit by His Sacred Majesty, the Bourbon King Louis the 18th. Zachariah Coleman a Dissenter and Radical, had not doffed his cap as the French King appeared. Hit by a burley Drayman’s fist, saved by the intervention of the above Major, the hero of The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane (1887. Mark Rutherford, W.H. White) could stand for the left after the blow of December’s General Election. We are still reeling as the People have cheered, or at least, voted, Boris Johnson into office.
In Britain’s Decade of Crisis, Susan Watkins talks of this present-day “restoration”. “The Tories are back in office with their largest majority since the 1980s, thanks to the long-ignored northern working class”. Like the Bourbons, the PM’s “ traditional ruling-class persona” gave the trappings of “decisiveness, vitality, enjoyment”. Rolling these phrases the Editor of New Left Review sees no cause to revise her judgement on the Leave victory in the 2016 Referendum. “Critics of the neoliberal order have no reason to regret this knocks against it, against which the whole global order establishment – Obama, Merkel, Modi, Junker, to Xi – has inveigled.” (1)
In another return to the old order New Left Review clutches at Tom Nairn’s portrait of British capitalist development. The “rising bourgeoisie was absorbed into the existing aristocratic state and civil structures”. “The world dominance of the City of London served to divert investment away from the northern industrial regions: higher returns were to be found overseas.” To cut a long, and contentious, story short, the country ended up with this: “While London remained the financial capital of Europe, ‘outward-orientation’ in the era of bubblenomics was above all Atlanticist.”
In other words, leaving the EU was not a knock to the neoliberal global order, or to “southern-based financialised capitalism”. Those gaining from “bubblenomics”, some of the funders of the Leave movement, show that much. The multinational state, Nairn’s bugbear, which he calls by the laborious name of Ukania, may be under strain. Watkins cites the ‘Scottish Rebellion’. She does not mention the sage’s speculation that “the breakup of Britain will be accompanied by the dissolution of its heartland or Southern nationalism into a larger European entity”. (2)
UKIP’s ‘National Independence” movement.
A belated English national independence struggle, led by UKIP, and with wider roots in the Northern Rust Belt, fuelled the demand for Leave. “England without London”, the alliance of the “disaggregated” working and middle classes who backed Leave, the ignored “will of the working class” given voice in Tory support is the result. But like the former mining and industrial districts of Northern France that have turned to Marine Le Pen, this is an alliance of the less-well off with their betters, the traditional reactionary wing of the right. French and British legitimists may add colour to the bloc; former mining families, self-pitying pathos. Racism, xenophobic, the germs of popular base for national populism, could be cited. They are not. One equally suspects that Simon Kuper is onto something when he talks of the “middle class anti-elitist” as the vanguard of Leave support, not the working class and poor ‘left behind’. (3)
Britain’s Decade of Crisis skirts over the movements against austerity that grew after the 2008 Banking crisis and state cuts. The People’s Assembly, run at the top by the small left group, Counterfire, funded by trade unions, such as UNITE, it galvanised and brought together grassroots protests. Prefiguring the election of Jeremy Corbyn, anti-austerity campaigns brought together left activists, local councillors, trade unionists and a big slice of community groups. Many involved joined the Labour Party – actively encouraged by the unions, and the transitional stage of supporters’ membership – under the new leadership. Some saw this as the basis for Labour insurgency, a challenge to “capitalist realism” in civil society. Yet, paradoxically or not, the anti-austerity movement began to fade the moment Jeremy Corbyn was elected and Momentum was floated as the new ‘social movement’. There is little doubt that placards and demos can only go so far when confronted with Council budgets and the Fortress of the DWP. (4)
Labour, Corbyn and the Media.
Watkins jumps to the challenge “from the Labour Left under Jeremy Corbyn: an appeal to redistribute wealth and recast foreign policy, distancing the UK from NATO’s wars.” We learn little about how Labour’s team prepared to turn these policies into a digestible form and the criticisms they faced, up to, and during the election about the unintelligibility and volume, of their plans Indeed the difficulties that the ‘Corbyn project’ faced are externalised.
We hear a lot about how the Parliamentary Party tried to frustrate Corbyn, and a great deal, a very great deal about the media’s hostility to Labour. The “Labour leader came under an unprecedented three-way assault—from the establishment intelligentsia, from his own parliamentary party and from opponents of his anti-war foreign policy.”
Nobody pointed out, that blaming foreign wars, with barely audible qualification, for the Manchester bomb attack – mass murder – was factually and politically doubtful. Nobody questioned Labour’s failure to give more than tepid support for Syrians killed by Baathist, Russian and Iranian forces, or do anything to back the Kurds, to back democrats against Assad, was reflected the ethically bankrupt ‘anti-imperialism’ of key Corbyn advisers. Nobody mentioned it in New Left Review!
Instead the issue of anti-semitism loomed over all others. She concludes“… given the scale and toxicity of the establishment onslaught, besides which the concoction of the Zinoviev Letter in 1924 appears the work of amateurs, the first duty is to salute the moral integrity of Corbyn and his courageous Jewish allies.” This no-holds, no concessions, defence offers little to resolve an over-commented issue. It is hard to credit that Corbyn supporters who reacted with as much vitriol as their critics helped resolve the issue, or that the way some treated the Labour Party as a place to play out their absolute anti-Zionism, was not the best way to deal with a predictable attack from this quarter, helped.
“The media’s anti semitism campaign represented a damaging assault on Corbyn’s Labour from above.” Far from the only one, but Watkins is eager to go for the next issue. “Brexit hurt the party from below—dividing it from an important section of its historic voter base.” Again, without surveying the influence of those called the Corridor Cabal, who backed Brexit even more enthusiastically than Watkins, or the turn outs on some of the biggest mass demonstrations ever seen in Britain, for remaining in the EU, she concludes, “ Instead of proposing an alternative solution to the crisis, as in 2017, Labour was the main force blocking the implementation of the popular vote, in a defence of the status quo—aligned with the Supreme Court, the House of Lords, the ‘Remainer elite’.”
Let Brexit be Done!
Any attempt to stop Brexit was not only doomed, it frustrated an alternative. “Corbyn could have avoided this position by giving Labour mps a free vote on Brexit legislation in 2019, ‘according to their conscience’, as Harold Wilson had done on the divisive 1975 referendum on the UK’s entry into the Common Market. With the ‘northern group’ voting for the bill and two dozen Labour abstentions, Johnson would have been denied the chance to make electoral hay out of the obstruction of Brexit, and the prospect of combating a much weaker Tory administration would have lain ahead at the next election.”
In other words, Labour should have let Brexit pass. The Northern patriots would have been appeased, Johnson, his key policy given the green light, his own remain opponents tossed aside, and pro-EU protesters rattled, would be in a mess. Or “much weaker”.
With the blessing of hindsight Zachariah Coleman should have tipped his hat to the Bourbon King.
Having cheered him on his way, the Dissenter would only have to wait till 1830 to see the elite gone, and a fine musical, Les Misérables, written to celebrate it.
What now for Labour and the Left. Momentum, according to some reports, has frazzled out. Long-Bailey looks unlikely to hold the Corbyn candle. The pro-Corbyn left is fragmenting. “The new left keeps open the prospect of taking the fight to the terrain of the future with bold solutions for inequality, climate change and the international order, as the Corbyn leadership tried to do” states Susan Watkins towards the conclusion of the New Left Review Editorial. This looks like a rerun of the alter-globalisation folk politics of the past, without any prospect of power.
What constituencies should the new left and Labour address? Reworking the themes of the Somewhere and Nowhere people, the Metropolitan and the Periphery, the political and electoral cartography stands as this: For Paul Mason, the progressive alliance of the future lies squarely with the ‘internationals’, the young metropolitan professionals of the Remain camp. For Wolfgang Streeck, the national level offers the only effective basis for democratic accountability, for calling the ravening forces of capital to order.” Paul Mason, internationalist, opponent of right-wing populism and “national neoliberalism”. Wolfgang Streeck, star writer for New Left Review, member of the alliance between left sovereigntists and Brexit Party supporters, the Full Brexit, the man who thinks national borders are the “last line of defence”…. The Editor leaves little doubt about where her support goes….(5)
*****
As an example of how the pro-Corbyn left is splintering this could not be better:
Here
“I now repudiate the use of the term “the world ‘Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie’” and the whole notion of a Jewish-Zionist imperialist vanguard as antisemitic tropes.”
Narked on Nietzsche, Angst on Amazon, the world Trotskyist Movement has been torn asunder in recent days.
Note:
To be honest, from what this Blog hears and can see, Gerry Downing is what he says.
Is he a lost sheep returning to the fold?
That is less clear, but this is a welcome step in the right direction.
The issue of anti-semitism can lead came on the BBC only last night.
In France the weekend saw this event:
Meetings on Friday February 14 and Saturday February 15 in Paris 13th: Holocaust denial and the left, an anti-Semitic lie for the cause?
The meetings went into not just holocaust denial on the ‘left, but the wider issue of left-wing anti-semitism.
…il existe un négationnisme de gauche. Porté depuis 1945, par des militants dont l’histoire politique a commencé dans le camp des progressismes et des révolutions sociales, dans les avant-gardes politiques et culturelles, et dont l’antisémitisme a été nié, toléré, et même approuvé, parfois largement. De Rassinier à Dieudonné, en passant par certains courants d’ultra-gauche qui ont finalement abouti aux mêmes horreurs que les courants staliniens qu’ils prétendaient critiquer, le négationnisme a trouvé divers prétextes pour tenter de s’imposer comme allié de gauche : le pacifisme, la dénonciation de l’antifascisme comme suppôt du capitalisme, l’antisionisme.
Holocaust denial exists on the left. It’s been borne, since 1945, by activists whose political history began in the camp of progressivism and social revolution, in the political and cultural avant-garde, and whose anti-Semitism has been denied, tolerated, and even approved, sometimes widely. From Rassinier to Dieudonné, passing through certain ultra-left currents which ultimately led to the same horrors as the Stalinist currents they claimed to criticise, Holocaust denial found various pretexts to try to assert itself as an ally of the left: from pacifism, the denunciation of anti-fascism as a support for capitalism, to anti-Zionism.
Now we learn:
On the Crisis in Socialist Fight and my own responsibility for it
By Gerry Downing 17 February 2020
Extracts: I accept the central line of the document below by Alonso from France that sets out my responsibility for the crisis in SF. I also accept his judgment on Ian Donovan’s lurch to the right since 2015:
When the fusion in 2015 only took place, I did not examine too closely the politics of Ian’s Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism in 2014, which I now repudiate. [1] The second mistake was to accept too easily, again without serious examination, the assurances Ian gave me that Gilad Atzmon was not antisemitic and was indeed only a left wing Jew who defended the Palestinians by denouncing his own ethnicity. I made no political concessions in the interview with Atzmon in January 2018 and I was entirely correct in the first paragraph but no longer agree fully with the ending of the introductory statement to the article.
After a far closer examination of his politics I now think he has no place in the struggle against Zionism and can only do damage to the cause of the Palestinians by painting opponents of Zionism as fascists. I now believe he is not only racist and antisemitic but also a left fascist ideologically.
……..
I made the ill-considered concession because I had lost two Trotskyist militants from SF who were politically educated in the history of Marxism but who capitulated to the right wing pressures. I desperate needed someone who understood the history of the Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism, at least to a certain level and so made that alliance with Ian, which I now recognise as opportunist. It is in general impossible for Marxist theoreticians to encounter another that agrees with him or her on every detail; Marx and Engels had differences and so had Lenin and Trotsky, nonetheless the former had close enough agreement to found the science of Marxism and the latter enough to lead the Russian Revolution to victory.
…
Subsequent arguments saw Ian defend Atzmon’s admiration for Ku Klux Klan man David Duke. He wrote to me on Facebook:
“If you understood why Political Zionism is worse than Apartheid and Jim Crow you might gain some insight. Clue: read Moshe Machover on different types of settler colonialism. If you understand that, you might understand why (Alan) Dershowitz (arch Zionist) is worse than David Duke. Some forms of colonialism are genocidal. Some are not.”
…
In September 2019 I encountered a post forwarded by one Devon Nola which contained the following sentence:
“One of the first new laws created by the Jewish Bolsheviks when they took over Russia was to make “antisemitism” punishable by jail or death. Despite its freedoms, the United States is now following in Russia’s footsteps, with Jews like Chuck Schumer leading the charge.” [3]
The subsequent defence of this outrageous fascistic post, the notion that the Russian Revolution was a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy and other far rightist positions, many that repeat the propaganda of the White Armies and the Nazis against the Russian Revolution, by Devon Nola and Gilad Atzmon demonstrated to me that they were enemies of Trotskyism and socialism in general. [4] This shock and subsequent acrimonious debates with Ian and his Trotskyist Faction convinced me that this political current was, in fact, left Strasserite-Mussolini fascists. Ian Donovan and his Trotskyist Faction made it an absolute principle to defend this fascistic current.
Here he declared himself a fascist. As these arguments developed it became clear Ian had developed a full blown ideological outlook in lockstep with Atzmon
Gerry Downing states,
Draft Theses on the Jews rejected now repudiate the use of the term “the world ‘Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie’” and the whole notion of a Jewish-Zionist imperialist vanguard as antisemitic tropes.
More: Alonso’s comment from France
It was not that anybody followed the Socialist Fight “line” in the first place, but the way it reflected the existence of a Red-Brown trend that concerned people.
The further evolution of Donovan will be of interest.
This is his immediate response:
This has to be the most pathetic, humiliating document I have read in many years in politics.”
..
There is nothing new about this behaviour. All revisionists and betrayers of Marxist politics always behave like this. You will be exposed just the same way as previous betrayers.
Labour in vain? – weekly briefing
Lindsey German, on “ Post Corbynism” .
The leader of the revolutionary socialist Counterfire is already retreating from Long-Bailey.
And what’s more, she has, in-between defensive remarks based on her own group’s unique standpoint, begun to talk sense.
The main thrust is to undermine the claim that Long-Bailey is the ‘real’ left candidate to lead Labour.
The problem for the left however is that Rebecca Long-Bailey is not continuity Corbyn enough. She advocates the use of nuclear weapons. She declared herself a Zionist at the Jewish Labour Movement hustings. And she has signed a statement over trans policies in Labour which contradicts the manifesto pledges, and which threatens to lead to a witch-hunt against some feminists. I understand the pressure that she is under, but we can see from the experience of Jeremy Corbyn himself over the past four years that giving in to pressure doesn’t mean it gets easier further on down the line.
Lindsey German may be wrong to highlight ‘Zionism’ as a be-all-and-end-it all issue.
She ignores the pressing issue of Syria. Many would like to see Labour leadership candidates confronted with the need to support the Kurdish fight and that of democrats against Assad and wider Middle East. Other democratic struggles, across the world, are pressing, from Hong Kong to South America.
Labour’s whole flawed foreign policy needs dropping.
As Rohini Hessman says,
The attempt by the Corbyn team to cover up the brutality of Russian airstrikes in Syria illustrates what I call their pseudo-anti-imperialism: opposition only to Western imperialisms while supporting non-Western imperialisms like Russian imperialism and Iranian regional imperialism, which share responsibility with brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad for over half a million dead and over half the population displaced in Syria.[17] Putin’s is a far-right regime which has provided funding and other support to neo-fascist parties throughout Europe,[18] and to far-right politicians – including Trump – in the rest of the world. Evidence has emerged that it has supported Boris Johnson too.[19] One reason why it has bombed Syrian civilians and democracy activists in support of Bashar al-Assad is to entrench its power in the Middle East; but another is to support its neo-fascist allies in Europe by giving them an ‘enemy’ to demonise, namely millions of Syrian refugees fleeing for their lives.[20] It is disturbing that Corbyn’s team would want to cover up the crimes of such a regime; equally disturbing is the implicit contempt for Syrian working people struggling against unemployment, poverty and authoritarianism.
…
It is important that the Labour left – and indeed all socialists – abandon the simplistic notion that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ which has been used to support anti-Western tyrants and imperialists, and take a consistent position in solidarity with all struggles against oppression and exploitation. They need to be able to deal with complexity; to understand that it is possible to oppose military assaults on Iran and sanctions that hurt ordinary Iranians, and at the same time oppose the repressive, extreme right-wing Islamic regime; to acknowledge that prejudice against Jews is racist and antisemitic, but denying Palestinians the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is also racist, and campaigning for those rights is not antisemitic.
German continues on Long-Bailey,
She will get the majority of the left’s votes, although some of those will go to Keir Starmer, who is tacking very much to the left at the moment. His support for Owen Smith back in 2016, his record at the DPP, his ultra-remain politics, are all on the back burner for the next month and a half. Lisa Nandy is the most right wing of the candidates and has already signalled retreat on nationalisation. All three of the remaining candidates have distanced themselves from Jeremy Corbyn in a number of ways, even though December was clearly a Brexit election and even though there are many signs that Labour’s policies were, and remain, popular.
This is where it get sticky.
The Brexit election…German means an election in which Counterfire backed Brexit, and, with the help of a rag-bag of parties like the Communist Party of Britain, the SWP, left sovereigntists, ‘traditional’ Labour nationalists helped confuse politics by supporting an imaginary ‘People’s Brexit’.
‘Remain’ was the right policy for internationalists, the prefix “ultra” signifying Counterfire’s annoyance at the consistent and principled influence on the left and the Labour Party of groups like Another Europe is Possible.
German opines further on Labour’s popular policies,
Equally fanciful is the idea that the left-wing policies put forward by Corbyn were unpopular. Indeed if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then we should look at the way in which Johnson’s government is scooping up a number of these policies and claiming them as its own. We’ve already had the nationalisation of Northern Rail, and rail nationalisation is likely to go much further. Now Johnson has declared massive spending on bus services, something that Corbyn was ridiculed over just a couple of months ago.
As has been said time and time again, such clear policies were swamped in the sheer volume of announcements the Labour Party put out.
The faith in Corbyn, a man with many merits, but not a charismatic leader for most of the population, is disintegrating.
Is this one answer?
Rebecca Long-Bailey would offer Jeremy Corbyn a place in her shadow Cabinet
The need to remove the failed team, the “corridor cabal” that botched an already hard election battle, and to build a united Labour party, would suggest otherwise.
One threat has emerged.
On trans issues German says,
It should be possible for socialists to discuss these issues and reach a position which opposes all oppression. The trans debate in the Labour Party is in danger of ending up in a bad place if it does not do this. Some of the pledges put out by the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights are in my view unacceptable, especially those calling organisations like Woman’s Place UK transphobic, and calling for expulsions of transphobes (presumably including members of WPUK). What I find most worrying here is that women who are good socialists are being branded as transphobes because they have a different perspective on women’s rights and trans rights, and that there are repeated moves to close down this discussion. This is being done in an authoritarian manner through threatening expulsion. We have already seen protests at WPUK meetings, attempts at no platforming women such as historian Selena Todd, and attempts to sack women who disagree.
This leads to a situation where it is impossible to move the debate forward. Labour’s manifesto called for full support for trans rights, but also for retention of rights relating to women as a sex under the 2010 Equality Act. Both Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey seem to have dropped this approach in favour of signing the pledge. Laura Pidcock’s eminently sensible call for discussion led to a stream of abuse directed at her. It really has to stop.
For a very different view (this Blog tends to agree with German on this issue but this is an important, heartfelt, article) see:
What’s Wrong With Woman’s Place?
There have been few more bitter struggles on the left in recent years than the conflict between those who support trans inclusion and those who style themselves as Gender Critical and refuse to accept that trans people should be socially or legally treated as their aquired gender.
Our society asks a lot of political leaders and their advisers. We should try to cut them some slack