Tendance Coatesy

Left Socialist Blog

Jean Luc-Mélenchon’s weakened La France insoumise looks for Green friends.

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Fameuse photo

Friday: Jean-Luc Mélenchon shares platform with the Green (EELV)  Mayor of Grenoble Éric Piolle. 

Left populism is fizzling out. France has been one of the best known laboratories for this experiment. At one point even the English language left press  was full of article about La France insoumise and its would-be charismatic leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Dullards who expressed doubts about the patriotic side of the one-time Lambertist Trotskyist and life-long admirer of French President François Mitterrand. were regularly treated to lectures on the deeply held love of France’s revolutionary history by the French left.

Yet accusations of nationalism have dogged the rallying-point, as the controversy over anti-immigration sovereigntists such as Djordje Kuzmanovic (edged out in 2018), indicated. A regional councillor, Andréa Kotarac, went so far as to leave LFI last year to give his support to Marine Le Pen in that year’s European election.

The Catholic patriot and socialist writer Charles  Péguy, once wrote, ” Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique” – Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” In the case of La France insoumise it looks as if neither their mystical vision of uniting the people against the elite (Nous-le peuple, eux-les élites) nor their political hopes of “taking the power” are on course.

Readers of La Chute de la maison Mélenchon  by Thomas Guénolé (2019), will know that the attempt to weld together the people an epoch their leader called l’ére des peuples. have had deep problems over the last couple of years. As the political scientist and former activist, who left LFI in a storm of controversy,  wrote, the “movement” of those who ” se reconnaissent dans la démarche de Jean-Luc Mélenchon”. One cause was the lack of any democratic way of bringing supporters to that recognition other than in agreement to the leading group’s views.

“Démocratie véritable et autogestion dans les paroles, mais pilotage centralisé et autoritaire dans la réalité.”

Guénolé launched his broadside against LFI not only because it claimed to offer genuine self-managed democracy in words, but was centralised and authoritarian in reality. Having been created by the Helmsman and his inner circle, drawn initially from the party-club the Parti de gauche (PG)  (which originated as a faction within the Parti Socialiste) LFI, run as a “dictatorship” it expended people’s energy in false hope. It had become concerned with the interests of an small group, not the people of the left as a whole. It  could not be, he argued, in its present form, the basis for a real “union de la gauche” , toute la gauche”, from  the Communists, the Greens, to the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste and Lutte ouvrière, and open to potential offers from the Socialists. This was the basis, he passionately declared,  that could win elections for the French left.

The crises pictured in La Chute have not been overcome.

After having treated his 2017 Presidential score (first round) of  7 million vote (19,58 %) as his personal property, which anybody else on the left had to accept, if he cared to allow them to agree with him, Mélenchon ended up with 17 seats in the National Assembly (out of 577).

He has since seen his electoral position progressively eroded

LFI sank to 6,3% of the vote in the 2019 European elections,

This year’s poor showing in the local elections set the seal on LFI

Their

lists were for the most part eliminated in the first round or (in their rare presence) had a reduced place in the few union lists (with other forces on the left, or with Greens)  where they were present, LFI have failed to meet their targets.

Après l’échec aux municipales, La France insoumise mise déjà sur 2022

At the end of June this year Manon Le Bretton, head of their internal education department, quit her official post in the latest in a new wave of discontent

La France insoumise ne parvient pas à régler ses tensions internes

Abel Mestre. Le Monde 24th of June 2020.

At the beginning of June, Le Monde obtained an internal memo, signed by some forty executives and activists, denouncing “a way of operating that endangers the future of the movement” .

One of the inner party managers, Charlotte Girard, loyal since the days when the PG was part of the Parti Socialiste, resigned. She stated that inside LFI there was no channel to express disagreements, “ il n’y a pas de moyen de ne pas être d’accord ». 

A few days ago the French media carried stories about an opening by LFI towards other groups on the left and to left-wing Greens.

This bloke was on France Inter:

LFI are still going on about their 2017 vote:  Du côté de LFI, les cadres vantent les sept millions d’électeurs qui ont voté “Insoumis” à la présidentielle de 2017.

France Info today.

By sharing the platform with Jean-Luc Mélenchon , it is to the left wing of the environmentalists that the mayor of Grenoble (Isère) Éric Piolle sends a message….“Let us look at each other in our common fights, (…). In a family, there is diversity: we argue, we bother, but in the end (…) we have the same objectives. Our opponent it is the right, it is Macron, it is the extreme right “ , declared the mayor of Grenoble, on the occasion of the summer university of rebellious France in Châteauneuf-sur-Isère.

The France Info (above) report notes that activists from the green party EELV are considerably more sceptical.

As well they might be!

Le Monde, which did not even bother in this article to add the word “left” to the description of LFI as “populist”, continues the saga up till this week.

Affaiblis, les « insoumis » de Jean-Luc Mélenchon sortent de leur isolement

Après des élections municipales compliquées, La France insoumise profite de son université d’été pour tendre la main à l’aile gauche d’Europe Ecologie-Les Verts.

In the meantime the social democratic wing around the Parti Socialiste, in the shape of former editor of Libêration, Laurent Joffrin, have their own plans to draw in the Greens….

Galloway’s Scottish Tory-Unionist-Marxist-Leninist Alliance 4 Unity Backed by Workers Party of Britain.

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Marxist-Leninist Cadre of Workers Party of Britain Back Alliance 4 Unity.

This has indeed set the cat amongst the pigeons.

Michael Gove in talks with George Galloway to discuss protecting the United Kingdom against Scottish independence

Nationalists have reacted to the dapper Gent’s latest proposal on who should vote in an Independence Referendum.

George Galloway sparked outrage today after he spoke out about the Scottish referendum.

The controversial political figure – who advocated for Leave during the Brexit vote – said if a second IndyRef does take place then the 795,000 Scots living elsewhere in the UK must have a vote.

In 2014 those who considered themselves Scottish living outside of the country were not able to have their say. Regardless, Scotland voted 55 per cent to remain as part of the union.

In a shock move the Workers Party of Britain (leader George Galloway) – Scotland – has backed George Galloway’s Tory-Unionist-Marxist-Leninist Front, the  Alliance 4 Unity.

The Party, whose deputy is  Joti Brar from the Communist Party of Great Britain (M-L) and an active member of the Stalin Society,  has not lost its Marxist-Leninist principles. Playing a leading role in the Gallowayite bloc with the patriotic  advanced bourgeoisie they can spot anti-national pro-imperialist forces rearing their heads in Belarus.

Jodi Brar says,

Support is mushrooming for the new Galloway front:

 

Kerry-Anne Mendoza, “¡No pasarán!” alt-left doesn’t need “liberal commentators policing our resistance to Fascism”.

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 ¡No pasarán! to “Bullshit Liberal Commentators Policing Our Resistance to Fascism”.

Time was when the ‘new media’ Barons and Baronesses of the ‘alt-left’ media in the UK were talk of the day.

In fact, no time at all, since this appeared  in 2017,.

The Rise Of The Alt-Left British Media

The 2017 general election is driving record traffic to the loose collection of alt-left British outlets that are positioning themselves as Corbyn’s outriders, jumping on stories without much of the nuance of outlets that remain rooted in mainstream reporting traditions.

Jim Waterson continued,

The Canary – the doyen of the alt-left media outlets – first launched in late 2015 it was dubbed “the left-wing Daily Mail” by virtue of being written in a way that is accessible to everyone. 

Phil had a perceptive overview,

The Alt-Left: A Critical Appreciation

You know who I’m talking about. The CanarySkwawkboxNovaraEvolve Politics and Another Angry Voice have been singled out by the mainstream as the authentic voices of the new socialism that has seized hold of the Labour Party and powered it to its highest number of votes for 20 years.

What they all share is a default (and correct) assumption that the system is rigged and the powers-that-be will conspire, collude, and collaborate to forever gerrymander privilege for themselves and their cronies. 

He noted the “size of their audience”.

Alas, things didn’t turn out the way these enthusiasts hoped.

Novara (who? it’s that bloke who talks about luxury communism, or spaceships, or something), Evolve Politics (?) Another Angry Voice..

Skwawkbox, or his mates call him, Skwawky – that’s the one who’s got a bit of a UNTE leak problem, who spends his time these days campaigning to make sure no Labour government is every elected – and the Canary are still followed by a few.

Audiences are said to be in free-fall for all these outlets.

The Boss of the Canary, Kerry-Anne Mendoza,  has just got herself into a fine mess.

She’s fallen out with Owen Jones, somebody she calls a ‘kiss bottom’.

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The brave anti-fascist is not backing down!

 

Here is her really at it: kneecapping and all.

Here’s why:

Happy are the days of those who can pile into Owen Jones.

Mendoza, who was a star Corbynista, is no longer a member of the Labour Party, although she remains a leading resistance fighter against fascism.

Perhaps she hopes that being boorish will help her media vehicle regain a lost audience.

Somebody loves her:

 

This Blog Says:

More Power to You Cde Owen!

 

 

Written by Andrew Coates

August 21, 2020 at 4:47 pm

Coming to terms with Keir Starmer: the future of the “post-Corbyn Left”.

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Keir Starmer: fighting “the Block of Reaction Behind Johnson and Cummings”.

 

The last weeks have seen an outpouring from what some call a “pool of toxic emotions” about the Labour leader. In a counter-reaction there are signs are that a section of the Corbyn left is beginning to rethink.  There are influential calls to end the  self-absorption and relentless attacks against what they perceive as Labour Leader Keir Starmer’s ‘failure’.

Books, such as Owen Jones’ This Land,  are scheduled for the autumn.

This is what Owen says,

The following has been widely circulated.

It lays out some important markers.

An argument for hope — an open letter to the post-Corbyn left

Christine Berry ( previously Director of Policy and Government for the New Economics Foundation)

 Over the last six months many Labour activists will also have experienced burn-out and grief following the 2019 election result; bitterness and resentment at the revelations in the ‘Labour Leaks’ report; disappointment and despair at the turn taken by the Starmer leadership.

The piece is important and should be read through. People can make up their own minds.

Here are few highlights,

….

……it’s worth remembering that Corbyn was given a free pass by activists on many of the things that Starmer is now berated for — simply because they trusted the former and do not trust the latter. Starmer’s interview on Black Lives Matter was awful, but Corbyn promised more police on the beat — using anti-austerity politics to appeal to socially conservative attitudes rather than challenging them. Starmer was roundly abused for not committing to the party’s 2030 decarbonisation target, but neither did Corbyn: the policy was pushed and passed by members and did not make it into the 2019 manifesto (reportedly because of union opposition). Yes, of course the left must hold Starmer to account. But we can only do this effectively if we’re honest about what really marks him out from Corbyn — not by holding him up against a mythical and increasingly idealised version of the latter.

It is possible to expand this list. One of my gripes is that the good work on developing policies on taxation and social ownership was not accompanied by anything more than (fairly muted)  rhetoric on replacing Universal Credit and offering a serious set of policies on what should replace it – an issue that affects millions of people.

….

There’s no doubt about it — despair is tempting. But it’s not helpful. Despair risks turning us all into angry armchair Twitter warriors. If there’s no longer anything at stake, why not vent your rage at Starmer and his shadow cabinet, denouncing them as a shower of ‘red Tories’? The problem is that this produces a vicious cycle: in the nature of social media, the main audience for this is actually other people on our own side, who in turn feel increasingly powerless and despairing. The left shrinks down to an embittered and isolated sect that nobody else listens to.

Berry could have added that the continued taint of anti-semitism is far from absent amongst these comments.

Next,

Some are inclined to characterise the Starmer leadership as a return to unreconstructed Blairism. I don’t think this is particularly helpful. It simply isn’t yet clear what Starmer stands for. Perhaps he doesn’t even know himself. To be sure, the Labour right are doing their level best to step into the vacuum — but their victory is not a foregone conclusion. The internal debate is still raging — there are those pushing from inside for the party to be bolder and to engage more seriously with the left. Even the Labour Together report concluded that the party must retain its economic radicalism in order to win. But this debate cannot be contested if its left pole becomes fragmented, bitter and demoralised — still less if merely engaging in that debate is enough to get you loudly denounced as a shill who’s probably angling for a job in HQ.

I am not clear exactly what a “shill” is, my North American is pretty rusty. But I assume it’s to say that anybody who comes out with anything good about the Labour leader is a toady.

It is hard for anybody (and there are those of us around) who first came across Keir Starmer in the Socialist Society and Socialist Alternatives in the 1980s and early 1990s – left activism that went on for nearly a decade – to think of the present leader as a Blairite. Let alone “unreconstructed”. He then spent another decade as a respected human rights lawyer, and some of us actually know people who worked with him to boot!

But the loud-voices of factionalists (many from very unreconstructed leftist splinters) and their gulls, are not going to be answered by saying that “perhaps” Starmer does not really know what he thinks, poor chap.

Many would suggest that Keir Starmer is a left of centre Labour leader and politician – not in the latter respect as would-be ‘populist’ of the left – committed to  socialist internationalist values and human rights. It is up to his team, and our efforts as Labour members and supporters, to help him develop policies that embody transformative politics. It is also, and it is hard not to underline this too much, a good place to start by helping and supporting our elected leadership.

Berry concludes,

It might be hard to see it right now, but the UK left is still stronger than it was five years ago — and will remain so if we can find it in ourselves to act out of hope rather than rage. In decades to come, perhaps Corbynism will look like a transitional phenomenon on the way to the era-defining change we need. We have to hope so, and act as though it is true. What else is there to do?

Despite the above critical remarks there are many acute observations in the article, but one is not there:  the fact that there were people on the left who called to vote for Keir Starmer. I am one of them

From those who did not there are plenty of “cries of rage and recrimination” , so many that apart from emotions (ones that seem to have clouded the what Starmer actually said on Black Lives Matter, the word “moment” far from a dismissal was, for a start, clearly a reference in terms of expressions like “an historical moment”: “an exact point in time, an “appropriate time for doing something, an opportunity, a “stage in the development of something or in a course of events” (Oxford Dictionary).

I would like to have explored a lot more what “the illusion that our job was simply to get Corbyn into Downing Street, and the rest would take care of itself.” was. Or exactly what this means, that the present leadership is  “trying to game the UK’s increasingly decaying political system, rather than finding ways to change it. They don’t believe it is possible to win by challenging powerful interests…”

There is nothing to back up this rhetoric. It would be clearer to say that Starmer is not trying win over establishment opinion but public opinion, full stop. Whether it will be “challenging powerful interests – is politics on the left  some kind of game in which you have to prove your fighting intentions? If there is a decaying political system what is it?

The continued hand-over of public services  to useless  private companies continues apace. That would be a good place to start a political and social fight-back…

Keir Starmer is not going away.

Back in the bunker all is not well.

 

Against socialist participation in Starmer’s shadow cabinet”.

 

Thank you for supporting the motion “Against socialist participation in Starmer’s shadow cabinet”. A PDF of the motion is attached.
Please see correspondence below from the LRC Conference Arrangements Committee,  disallowing our motion on the formal grounds of being proposed by only 9 confirmed paid-up members.
One new applicant is not found on the membership database, but 5 of the 15 proposers are deemed out of time in joining or renewing their LRC membership, as they are “still to complete payment” – which appears to reflect a difficulty which applicants may encounter in navigating the membermojo self-service membership system.
Consequently, our motion is not on display on the LRC Conference web page.
Of course, we shall ask conference to overturn this decision and allow the motion to be debated.
The motion they dare not debate!

Against socialist participation in Starmer’s shadow cabinet

 

LRC Conference, September 5th 2020

 

Motion proposed by Stan Keable and another 15 LRC members 

 

It was right to condemn the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey from Labour’s shadow cabinet, another example of the ongoing anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism witch-hunt.
However, instead of calling for her reinstatement, the socialist left should use her sacking as an opportunity to discuss, debate and agree our attitude to participation in Keir Starmer’s shadow debate and agree our attitude to participation in Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet. It is, after all, committed to running capitalism, not replacing it. In effect, the shadow cabinet is a capitalist government in waiting.
RLB calls herself a socialist – she is a member of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs. We oppose the participation of socialist MPs in capitalist governments. Likewise we should oppose socialist MPs being members of shadow cabinets which do not aspire to challenge the rule of capitalism.

As Keir Hardie famously said in 1910, we need Labour MPs, “not to keep governments in office or to turn them out, but to organise the working class into a great, independent political power to fight for the coming of socialism”.

 Take the Power Labour Party Marxist!

Written by Andrew Coates

August 20, 2020 at 12:04 pm

Claire Regina Fox Campaigns for ‘Don’t Divide us’ as Calls Continue to Scrap her Peerage.

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From champion of terror to peer of the realm: who put Claire Fox ...

A few days ago this appeared in the Sunday Times,

 

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The ructions continue.

With regal disregard Claire Regina Fox seems to be devoting her time elsewhere, to appearing on Sky Press Review.

She has a new hobby, doing good works for the Spiked Front, Don’t Divide Us.

This is the would-be Baroness’ latest:

But all is not well amongst the Spiked cadres.

James Hartfield (born James Hughes, he renamed himself after the left-wing German photomontage artist John Heartfield) spluttered at the sight of the Sunday Times article and leader.

Perhaps the former full timer of the Revolutionary Communist Party can also shed welcome light on this aspect of history.

“….the amity only lasted until the IRA’s declaration of a ceasefire in July 1997. Claire and the Comrades went bat-shit crazy. The Irish people had been sold out again! History could never be vindicated until the stain of shame had been cleansed from the face of our nationhood. The ceasefire must be renounced, the war of liberation resumed!

Claire was so distressed by this misfortunate turn of events that she stormed along to the Blutcher Street home of one of Derry’s top Sinn Feiners, banged on the door and demanded an explanation. His response that she should – to use a technical term – fuck off, appeared to dampen Claire’s fervour. Shortly thereafter, she left town, possibly grinding her teeth at the crass ingratitude of those who’d abandoned the armed struggle which she had travelled so far to solidarise with.”

Times journalist and Leader Writer Oliver Kamm has written on the very same RCP.

“The bigotry, intolerance and denialism of a far-left group that has transported itself without a break on to the other side of politics shows the dangers of dogmatism across the spectrum.”

The extraordinary journey of the Revolutionary Communist Party is a lesson in politics

There is a voluminous literature of ideological converts travelling from left to right (and of a few people going in the other direction). Some of it is outstanding. Witness by Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy, is a memoir of honesty and even beauty, whether or not you share the conservative politics and Christian faith he came to embrace. But it’s much rarer that an entire political organisation transplants itself from left to right. The Japanese Communist Party arguably did so in the 1930s, embracing imperialism and xenophobic nationalism, and far-left splinter groups (such as the followers of the French communist leader Jacques Doriot) attached themselves to fascism, but I can think of no other obvious institutional case bar one.

John Rogan has replied to the latest attempt to defend Claire Regina Fox,

A Reply to Ruth Dudley Edwards.

Read the full Article (link above).

John concludes,

I’m sure there will be more discussion within Conservative ranks and articles in the press before Ms Fox swears her Oath of Allegiance and takes her seat in the House of Lords. Let’s see if it actually happens.

 

From China to Belarus, the ‘New Cold War” and the Tankies Fighting it.

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Internationalists Stand With Belarusian Democrats.

In  Exterminism and the Cold War (1982) Edward Thompson lead essay outlined the developing Second Cold War, the 1980s arms race, and the threat, most visible in the form of Cruise missiles, of a head-on confrontation between the Soviet and Western blocs. Weapons innovation had become “self-generating”. two “imperial formations”  were “exporting the means of war” their arms race and military structures had developed together, a process of “isomorphism”, both states of “military-industrial complexes” .

Thompson, and other contributors to the book called for “the resistance of peoples inside each bloc.European Nuclear Disarmament (END) attempted that task. A feature was that this, and other independent peace movements, tried to engage with independent forces in Europe from both  camps, including democrats opposed to their own  Eastern Soviet leaderships,

Is the drive to mass destruction present today? The end of the Soviet System has not meant an end to military rivalries. In the same collection of essays Lucio Magri observed that “new revolutionary forces”, supported by the New Left of the 1980s, were already evolving towards “exasperated forms of populism, incapable of furnishing any answer to real problems and therefore seeking imaginary solutions in integralist religion or regressive nationalism”. (Pag 131) . His insight could be widely extended in this millenium.

Some, however, think that the Cold War has only changed its key players,

International meeting calls for opposition to the ‘new cold war’ against China

(Meeting 25th July)

AN international cast of speakers came together on Saturday to oppose a new cold war on China, which they say is “against the interests of humanity.”

The chair, author and academic Jenny Clegg, welcomed a “truly global gathering” with people from 49 countries attending the Zoom webinar, which others were able to follow on Facebook and YouTube.

Introducing the event, author Carlos Martinez said that the US was ramping up pressure on all countries to pick a side in its confrontation with China.

US activist Medea Benjamin of the Code Pink peace campaign called for a “pivot to peace, not a pivot to Asia.”

She said that she suspected an ulterior motive when US politicians “talk free speech while shooting rubber bullets at peaceful demonstrators.

“It’s hard to take them seriously [over allegations of persecution of Muslims] when both parties have supported a two-decade war on Muslims throughout the world, torturing them at Abu Ghraib, throwing them into prisons in Guantanamo.”

US news site Black Agenda Report editor Margaret Kimberley warned: “We’re told that a million Uighurs are in prison when there is quite literally no evidence of any such thing,” cautioning listeners to remember previous scare stories about “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and babies taken from incubators in Kuwait.”

“When the US talks of human rights, remember it has more of its population incarcerated than any other nation, that its police force kills 1,000 people a year and that its military budget is bigger than the next 10 countries combined.”

The US talked “as if China were US property not a sovereign country, but that is what results from white supremacism extended to the field of foreign relations.”

And she savaged the “vassals and lackeys known as US allies that follow the lead of the gangster state.”

Academic John Ross said it was essential to resist a US administration that was “tearing up treaties,” had walked out of the Paris agreement on climate change and was trying to “force its policies on the world.”

Other speakers included The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, Tricontinental Institute for Social Research director Vijay Prashad, Renmin University executive dean Wang Wen and many more.

It is a sad spectacle to see anybody recycling 1950s rhetoric about the faults of the US to divert attention from those of the Chinese Communist Party state.  Few are those who are “serious” deny that China has  massive human rights problems, from their mass ‘re-education’ of the Uighurs, repression of trade unionists, control over freedom of speech, the “surveillance state” (We Have Been Harmonised. Life in China’s Surveillance State. Kai Strittmatter. 2019. and destruction of democratic gains in Hong Kong.

But if you wish to watch this group of well-rewarded apologists for the Chinese state you can see a video of the event here.

The idea is taking hold.

The ‘West’ is on the move.

Today the same Morning Star warns of the menaces against Belarus.

“Communist parties in Italy and Russia have warned against another US-sponsored “colour revolution” similar to those that took place in Georgia and Ukraine.” states the Morning Star in a report on Belarus,

Rival Belorussian protests take place in Minsk as EU ponders new sanctions

The Communist Party of Belorussia welcomed the “unconditional victory” of Mr Lukashenko, calling it the natural consequence of the economic growth of the republic since he came to power in 1994.

It blamed the protests on “subversive work” by “specially trained instigators, from outright fascists to inveterate criminals,” saying that it enjoyed the support of at least 18 fraternal communist parties.

It warned that “foreign puppeteers” were aiming to carry out a coup in Belarus. “It is clear that if they win, the country will face bloody chaos and landslide degradation,” a statement from the party central committee said.

Here’s a Tanky Masterclass:

A couple of days ago the paper, which describes itself as The People’s Daily, and the “daily paper of the left” carried  an attack on Paul Mason,

Socialists oppose the new cold war against China: a reply to Paul Mason

The broadside followed in the footsteps of Socialist Appeal which recently compared Mason to the “renegade Kautsky” and announced that his “Pseudo-Marxism has no place in our movement” (Storytelling, ‘culture wars’, and the Left: A reply to Paul Mason )

.

For the Morning Star writer Carlos Martinez states,

The fundamental problem with Paul Mason is that, in the final analysis, he stands on the side of imperialism. Even his support for the left Labour project – now quickly dropped in the era of Starmer – existed within a pro-imperialist framework, rejecting Corbyn’s anti-war internationalism and pushing support for Nato and Trident renewal.

But, unlike perhaps Socialist Appeal, the ” independent researcher and political activist from London ” expects to be taken seriously.

He began, “Living in the heartlands of imperialism, you learn to expect censure if you defend socialism and oppose war.”

We trust that Morning Star will soon publish critics of the stategry of UNITE the union, whose industrial and defence policy  includes backing Trident.

Rather than go further, Jim deals with the pile of ordure so I will just link to his post:

Morning Star denies Uighur genocide – spouts Beijing’s propaganda

As Edward Thompson put it, the internationalist left stands for human rights independently of “blocs” and sides. This was true in the 1980s and it remains so today.

 

 

 

 

Written by Andrew Coates

August 17, 2020 at 11:13 am

Stuart Christie, Class Struggle Anarchist, 1946 – 2020.

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Buy Granny Made me an Anarchist 9780743263566 by Stuart Christie

Class Struggle Anarchism.

 

“On Tuesday 1 September 1964, as Britain prepared to make its choice between Harold Wilson and Lord Alex Douglas Home in the General election I was in Madrid’s First Permanent Military court facing a drumhead court martial – a Consejo de Guerra sumarísimo, case No 1154 – 64 – charged with ‘banditry and terrorism.’

Spain’s secret police had arrested me eighteen days earlier in possession of plastic explosives and detonators to be used to blow up Spain’s fascist dictator, Generalissimo Fance, and his inner circle in the royal box at Santiago Bernabéu during the final of the Generalissimo’s cup. The penalty for this offensive was death by garrote-vil the grisly process of neck-breaking and slow mechanical strangulation by an iron collar and a bolt through the neck.”

Stuart Christie.Granny made me an anarchist. 2005.

Freedom News
16 hrs

Stuart Christie, one of the most influential British anarchists of modern times, has died from lung cancer aged 74.

Most famous for his attempt, aged 18, on the life of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, Christie went on to work closely with Albert Meltzer. Together they founded Black Flag, which was probably the most prominent anarchist publication of the 1970s.

His most enduring legacy will be as a publisher, founding both the Cienfuegos Press and, later, Christiebooks (https://christiebooks.co.uk/), which hosts possibly the largest open anarchist film archive available today. Christie leaves an immense body of work behind him, and is a great loss to anarchism not just in Britain but internationally.

The above announcement does not capture the depth of Christie’s contribution and Freedom will be looking to produce a full obituary in due course.

 

Here is an immediate tribute.

 

A full obituary and tribute  would give an account of Christie’s trial in Spain, his eventual release, the British state’s attempt to implicate him in the Angry Brigade, and his work founding the Anarchist Black Cross (involved at this very minute in solidarity with people imprisoned in Belarus), and the publication, while based in Orkney, of  Black Flag and the Cientifugos Press Anarchist Review.

Granny made me an anarchist  is a  reminder of the working class class struggle tradition in anarchism. Christie came from “working class Glasgow”.  He refers to a number of figures from the city’s left, including  Guy Adred of the Glasgow Anarchist Group, which went back to the 1930s. My dad, who grew up in Springburn, was attracted to anarchism when he left school at 14,  and went to work as a packer and delivery boy in the 1930s. He talked of going to listen to anarchist speakers. A Coventry member of the libertarian left group Solidarity –  which Christie was involved with in 1960, he promoted their mimeographed publication, Solidarity (Page 69)  –  told me about this aspect of the history of the Glaswegian anarchists.

Following activism in CND, and its direct action wing, the Committee of 100, Christie became an anarchist and was involved with the Glasgow Federation of Anarchists at the beginning of the 1960s. Guy Aldred was amongst the resilient veterans. He says that John T Caldwell and Guy Aldred had been “heavily involved in helping comrades get into Spain and in publishing the Barcelona Bulletin, which exposed the Stalinist repression in May 1937 of the Catalan anarchists and the anti-Stalinist POUM.” (Page 81)

Just how did an 18-year-old lad from Glasgow get mixed up in a plot to assassinate General Franco in 1964? Duncan Campbell meets veteran anarchist Stuart Christie, and in an exclusive extract from his new book Christie relates the unlikely escapade that led to him being sentenced to 20 years in a Spanish jail.

More:

Wikipedia: Stuart Christie.

Stuart Christie 1946-2020 Anarchist activist, writer and publisher John Patten

Lib Com: Stuart Christie.

Written by Andrew Coates

August 16, 2020 at 11:10 am

Open Labour’s welcome proposals for “Member-led democracy”.

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Open Labour - Home | Facebook

Welcome Ideas.

Many people in the Labour Party are tired of constant attacks on Keir Starmer

The below comes from a site which claims a close link with one of Labour’s main backers, UNITE the union,

The constant attempt to undermine Labour’s new Leader extends to this:

Some left wing activists, inside and outside Labour,  refer, constantly, to Jeremy Corbyn, his socialism, and his achievements, which they contrast with today’s Shadow Cabinet’s policies and actions.

There is still a great deal of disappointment swirling around, and a search for targets to blame.

Many critics are activists who worked to get Corbyn elected and have long supported Labour.

But some influential voices who join in,and amplify, criticisms of Labour and who wish  to “defend our legacy” are from those who only supported Labour after Corbyn was voted leader.

Counterfire which runs the better known People’s Assembly, and has great influence on the Stop the War Coalition, is one. This was their call at the end of July “Starmer’s stampede to the right means that socialists will need to reach beyond the Labour Party to build a fighting left, argues Chris Nineham.” This message can be found debated amongst those who say they will “stay and fight” and those off for some new vehicle outside of Labour.

Counterfire’s leadership were key figures in George Galloway’s Respect Party.

What kind of politics did they have? In 2004 Counterfire leader John Rees declared in 2003, “”Socialists should unconditionally stand with the oppressed against the oppressor, even if the people who run the oppressed country are undemocratic and persecute minorities, like Saddam Hussein.”(Guardian).

Rees stood on a Respect slate in the European elections and in 2006 in a local election in East London (coming second against Labour). Do they defend that legacy?

Instead of looking to the past – and this Blog could continue for a long time in this vein…..- we should perhaps take a different approach.

Yesterday Open Labour published these proposals,

Open Labour’s 11 party reform proposals for the Forde Inquiry

Our party has never been more inward-looking in this century. But this gives us an opportunity for serious self-reflection, so that we can get our own house in order, rather than continue to allow internal crises to threaten to implode our party and rupture the labour movement.

For several years, Open Labour has been pushing for internal culture change and a healthier democracy within the Labour Party. We have repeatedly expressed solidarity and support for Jewish members and sought to put pressure on the party to root out antisemitism. During the initial coronavirus lockdown, we hosted an online workshop for Young Labour members where we discussed the need for the party to become a more welcoming environment where no one is left behind

In summary these are

  1.  Co-operate with the EHRC investigation and implement its findings in full.
  2. The Labour Party should make a statement clarifying that it considers the matters of antisemitism, all other forms of prejudice, and sexual harassment to be squarely above sectarian politics; that they must be taken seriously regardless of the factional allegiances of the alleged offenders.
  3. The Labour Party must make clear at all levels that members must not dismiss the antisemitism issue as an anti-Corbyn or anti-left conspiracy.
  4. The Labour Party should implement an independent complaints procedure to depoliticise these processes .
  5. Welcome Keir Starmer’s promise to deliver antisemitism training to staff. We would also like to see equalities training delivered to party staff covering multiple forms of racism and other prejudices.
  6. The Labour Party should carry out regular staffing audits and push to diversify party staff at all levels, to identify and solve particular areas of underrepresentation.
  7. The Labour Party must work with its own affiliates, such as the Jewish Labour Movement, and other BAME Labour groups, when reforming internal processes.
  8. The NEC must draft and publish a clearer code of conduct for staff and ban explicitly sectarian behaviours of the type we have outlined, for as long as people are on the party payroll.
  9. Labour Party staff at all levels should act as neutral civil servants in carrying out the party’s democratically agreed aims, and promote a professional rather than sectarian culture.
  10. The Labour Party should formally distance itself from social media campaign accounts that propagate antisemitism or any other prejudice, and/or undermine the party’s ability to campaign against racism, whilst purporting to speak in the name of the Labour Party or parts of the Labour Party.
  11. The Labour Party should extend the use of the single transferable vote (STV) in internal elections that party members participate in.

The authors note,

This summer, we won a landmark campaign for a fairer, less sectarian, more democratic voting system for members to elect their Constituency Labour Party (CLP) representatives to Labour’s governing body, the national executive committee (NEC). Our organisation democratically selects preferred candidates for internal elections, and our members have overwhelmingly endorsed Ann Black and Jermain Jackman for CLP Reps on the NEC, along with George Lindars-Hammond as the new disability rep and Alice Perry for the local government section. For us, democracy must be at the heart of our approach to politics. It’s good to see other groups starting to catch up to us.

 

This is their conclusion.

We must make our party a welcoming environment for all, enforce zero tolerance for bigotry and bullying, and bring our member-led democracy into the 21st century.

We need to look outwards, beyond our own ranks and we need to have a bold, radical offer to the people of these islands. If we can’t do that, then why are we here? We don’t have all the answers, and we don’t pretend that we do, but we know that these 11 proposals are key to a more tolerant and democratic party that can live up the ambitions of our supporters.

Open Labour will continue to play our part in making the Labour Party.

These are welcome ideas above all the call to “look outwards”.

See also Open Labour Site.

We hope that within the Party all sides will be interested and that, specifically, the influential group Momentum will take note of the proposals.

Here is a report from their representatives on Labour’s National Executive Committee – it has not been widely circulated, beyond inner Momentum circles, and certainly has not been seen by ordinary party members who voted in the NEC elections.

It’s from the end of July 2020.

This is a collective report on behalf of NEC CLP reps: Yasmine Dar, Huda Elmi, Rachel Garnham, Ann Henderson, Jon Lansman and Darren Williams from Labour Party National Executive Committee meetings taking place in June/July 2020.

30 June – Emergency NEC

CLP reps thanked Keir for the work Labour was doing to hold the government to account, which should be Labour’s priority. Keir was asked again about his strategy for unity, asking if he agreed with the quote from Harold Wilson that ‘the Labour Party needs two wings to fly’, and how he planned to engage the 44% of party members who didn’t give him their first preference.

The report contains this extraordinary passage: 

Keir was asked if he would take the opportunity to apologise to the black community in Britain and the rest of the world, for his interview on BBC Breakfast which reduced Black Lives Matter to a ‘moment’ and it was pointed out that this did nothing to alleviate the just concerns that the black community have about the police.

It was stated that Keir’s comments emboldened the Far Right such as Nigel Farage, dishonoured George Floyd’s memory and those organising to eradicate racism across the world.

The question was a request for a simple Yes or No answer to apologise in an attempt to rebuild trust.

Those who crafted, carefully, this “report” with this strident, hectoring, language, do not represent the opinions of many Labour members.

Instead of disagreeing with a remark about a “moment” – “an exact point in time, an “appropriate time for doing something, an opportunity, a “stage in the development of something or in a course of events” (Oxford Dictionary) – the  called for Keir Starmer to “apologise to the black community in Britain and the rest of the world.”

Momentum representatives on Labour’s NEC took a strong  stand against the SIngle Transferable Vote.

The fourth discussion was about whether Single Transferable Vote should be used for the CLP section for the NEC. A whole series of concerns were raised by left NEC members, including the most important of all that such a significant decision should be made by annual conference. Other concerns included the need for an equality analysis as the new system appeared likely to have a detrimental impact on representation, the lack of any detail about how the new system would work including the women’s quota, the potential impact on turnout given the new system could cause confusion, and a serious request for a proper argument in favour other than ‘in line with commitments made by the Leader and Deputy Leader during the recent leadership election’ it was pointed out that it was by no means a central plank of their campaigns, and most members would not even have seen any pledges made on this issue.

THis is how the report presents the change.

As one CLP rep put it, the proposal appeared to be ‘another nail in the coffin of Keir’s commitment to Party unity.’ Nevertheless the NEC voted to approve STV for the CLP elections.

It will be interesting to see if Momentum responds to Open Labour’s proposals.

Labour members will make up their own minds about whether the group’s candidates for the NEC merit their vote.

Written by Andrew Coates

August 15, 2020 at 11:24 am

George Galloway and A4U Plan to Save the Union Attract (Right-wing) Backing.

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Galloway Launches New Scottish “Unionist” Front, the “Alliance for ...

Story Revealed by Tendance Newshounds Develops.

Announced in July Galloway’s plan to fight for the Union in Scotland, now called,the Alliance for Union, A4U seems to have attracted growing and  prestigious support,

The Conservative The Critic published Jamie Blackett, “educated at Ludgrove, Eton, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and later Warwick Business School (MBA)”. He is also Deputy Lieutenant for Dumfriesshire, a few days ago.

Why Scotland needs a new party

How the Alliance for Unity plans to defeat the SNP in the bitter battle for Britain.

He has an interest,

I was one of Galloway’s early recruits and am now Deputy Leader of the Alliance for Unity. I remembered George as the most effective debater by far on the anti-separatist side in the 2014 independence referendum. And like many people from all points on the political spectrum I was despairing at the utterly abject appeasement of Sturgeon by the opposition at Holyrood since 2016.

Blackett has a grand strategy…

All new political parties say that they are introducing a new type of politics but I think we must be the first party in history to promise in effect to dissolve our party as soon as we are elected. The early signs are that people like what they are hearing. After three weeks we had more followers on Twitter than the Scottish Liberal Democrats and momentum is continuing to build. The challenge is probably not in persuading the electorate that Scotland deserves better than the separatists’ authoritarian one party state but in persuading the older unionist parties that, if we are going to restore neighbourliness to the UK and especially to Scottish communities, the pro-union parties really are ‘better together’ in what promises to be a bitter fight.

Now the prolific Jamie Blackett writes for the Conservative Spectator.

… professor Alan Sked of the LSE (the original architect of Brexit), whose home is in Easter Ross, and ex-regimental sergeant major Arthur Keith of the Black Watch. I enjoyed ringing Arthur to congratulate him with the traditional Army greeting, ‘Stand by your beds!’ and we had a good chat about the similarities between the SNP and their soulmates in Sinn Fein, with whom Artie and I have had dealings in the past.

Galloway’s Workers Party could not agree more with these progressive thinkers:

One can only wish them bonnie good luck!

George loves grand theatrical gestures; one of which was to tweet the idea that we need a big figure to bring Scotland back together again. He would offer ‘the greatest living Scotsman after Sir Alex Ferguson’, The Spectator’s chairman Andrew Neil, a plum seat if he would agree to come and be First Minister in the government of national unity. Pick up the phone Andrew!

Get to that Mobile Andy!

Have his Galloway’s old muckers in Counterfire and the Stop the War Coalition, Respect, the SWP, and all the admirers of the Bradford Spring, anything to say on the blower?

Despite speculation about potential falling-outs the Workers Party of Britain re-tweeted this

Written by Andrew Coates

August 14, 2020 at 5:22 pm

Socialist Action: Left Should not be “taken in” by “US Lies” about Uighurs in China.

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Seeking ways to tell 'My China Story'[2]- Chinadaily.com.cn

John Ross, “China has a real understanding of human rights”.

Socialist Action is a small left wing organisation, visible largely only through its web site.  It originated in the International Marxist Group (IMG).

Its best known member is John Ross, who led a Tendency (‘B’) in the IMG and was effectively the group’s leader  untright through to the creation of the Socialist League or  Socialist Action.

Others will add their own fond memories of Ross, and the Rossites, their ability to cite Lenin, at length.  Plans to ‘Bolshevise’ the organisation by schemes such as creating a ‘cell’ based structure, and later the “turn to industry”

You can read more about the IMG and related history on the excellent site, Red Mole Rising including this section, Discussing the Turn to Industry- a 1980 perspective and (more significantly, as the role of John Ross is discussed): On the Turn to Industry, the American SWP and other questions of IMG history

There were serious splits in the 1980s. The Ross faction retained the name Socialist Action and by the end of the 1980s had moved away from the Fourth International (there is no picture of Trotsky on their site) . Some of its key members, such as  Redmond O’Neill, went on to become key members of London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s inner team  after his victory in the election of 2000. Ross himself was Policy Director of Economic and Business Policy.

Not a great deal has been heard of them since the end of the first decade of the new millenium.

John Ross, apparently, ” better known in China under his Chinese name Luo Siyi  (罗思义) is a  senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. 

Ross has vocally defended the Chinese government’s policies, and the Chinese Communist Party’s record on human rights,  for some time.

Here is an example from this year.

China’s human rights record is keeping people alive: British scholar

China’s human rights record is keeping people alive, said John Ross, a British senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, when talking about China’s anti-coronavirus efforts in an interview with RT.

“All the misrepresentation and nonsense which has just come now will fade away and people will understand that China is the only country that got the virus under control,” he added.

He has tweeted.

Ross appears on Chinese official televison.

Now his helpers have sprung into action:

 

The left should not be taken in by ‘US WMD lies’ – this time about Uyghurs

Extract:

Sometimes it is necessary to wait years before the lies of US of US intelligence agencies are definitively revealed. The following outstanding piece of investigative journalism by Max Blumenthal, editor of the US website the Grayzone, is therefore extremely valuable because it catches the latest case of such US intelligence services lying in the act – this time about the Uyghurs. It shows in detail, in Blumenthal’s words, ‘the micro socio-political relationships’ in how the US security services lies about the Uyghurs were constructed and propagated. Blumenthal’s account does not need amplification and needs simply to be read in full by anyone taken in by the US intelligence services lies.

All that needs to be added here is the ‘macro’ aspect of the situation – that is why the US had to resort to the lying and falsification Blumenthal so meticulously exposes? It is because any look at the situation reveals that the US was lying.

Take the claim that there are a million Uyghurs in concentration camps in Xinjiang. If that were true there would be a mass of satellite photos that would reveal what would be the massive number of such camps and the US would be displaying them all the time. They don’t and there is only one explanation – because they don’t have such photos because the camps don’t exist. They are a fabrication of right-wing fantasist, ‘sent by God’, Adrian Zenz who Blumenthal reveals the character of in detail.

Take also the claims that ‘genocide’ is taking place against the Uyghers in Xinjiang. Take the facts.

The Uyghur population in Xinjiang grew from 5.55 million to 11.68 million in the 40 years 1978-2018 – i.e. it more than doubled. But in that period the total population of China grew by 46% while the Uyghur population grew by 110% – that is the Uyghur population grew more than twice as fast as the overall, majority Han, population of China. A very strange ‘genocide’ in which the population against which it is supposedly being carried is growing in size twice as fast as the rest of the population. We fail to recall that the Jews under the Nazis grew in population twice as fast as other Germans.

Why did this more rapid growth of the Uygur population of China than the majority Han population take place? Because under the one child policy in China, which only recently ended, Han Chinese were only permitted one child., but ethnic minorities, specifically including Uyghurs, were allowed two. This was probably precisely because China did not want to, and did not want to be seen, as discriminating against ethnic minorities. Given this situation of course the Uyghur population increased much more rapidly than the Han population. Again, it is very strange form of ‘genocide’ in which the Uyghur families were permitted to have more children than the Han Chinese. Perhaps someone will  point to which of Hitler’s laws specifically permitted Jews to have more children than other Germans?

In short, the ‘macro’ facts clearly prove that the US claims about the Uyghurs are simply lies. But Max Blumenthal has done the inestimable service of ‘catching the thief with their hand in the till’ – that is showing in detail how these lies were invented and the nature and means used by right wing fanatics, the US security services, and the US media to fabricate them. They are simply the methods that were used to invent the lies about WMD in Iraq and the non-existent attack by North Vietnam on US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin. And they were invented for the same reasons – to launch US aggression.

And what should the left do about this? They should not get caught up in spreading the same type of lies as those about WMD that were used to justify the Iraq war, and the lies that were used about the Gulf of Tonkin to launch the Vietnam war.

These are very serious claims, ones disputed by nearly everybody, including the left – with the exception of the daily Morning Star.

In the Trotskyist movement only Sam Marcey (1911 – 1998) was marked by such a turn away from workers’ democracy and towards the Chinese state.

The assertions of Socialist Action are stomach-churning.

 

Written by Andrew Coates

August 13, 2020 at 12:57 pm

Factionalism in the Time of Coronavirus Part 14: Calls for New Workers’ Party and ‘Resistance Movement’.

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It’s all happening on the Home Front! 

From what remains of the left (we hear that Momentum has revised its membership total down to 8000, from a high of 45k)  the drip drop of criticism of Keir Starmer continues, without a pause,

Momentum is trying to re-merge as a force:

 

But other strategists have been plotting the way forward.

At the beginning of August the revolutionary socialist groupuscule Counterfire which runs what remains of the People’s Assembly, and strongly influences the surviving structures of the Stop the War Coalition  carried this analysis, from the white-heat of the actuality of the revolution,

Life After Corbyn: don’t lose the radicalism

There has been some speculation that Corbyn might be expelled, and that he might then set up a new mass party of the socialist left. It won’t happen. Starmer isn’t stupid, he would prefer to keep Corbyn as a prisoner of the PLP so that what’s left of Labour’s radical left can be kept to heal and picked off one by one in the witch hunt. So if we need something new we are going to have build it ourselves.

Roy Wilkes concluded.

Plurality of ideas and approaches is positive and healthy. Plurality of sects competing with each other isn’t. And if we are going to extricate ourselves from the terrible predicament we find ourselves in, following over a century of failure to build an effective proletarian leadership, then our best hope is surely to force ourselves to come together, one way or another.

 

This is where revolutionary socialist leadership should be stepping in to the breach. It isn’t too late to change the course of history and avert catastrophe. But it soon will be.

Zooms apart there is little sign of this popping its head above the parapet.

Yet.

Chris Williamson is garnering support for his initiative, The Resistance Movement, as critics of Keir Starmer seek a welcoming political home.

Many will  relish his plain speaking.

 

They will no doubt admire how he stands up to the “Zionist” lobby,

Last week the Socialist Party called for a “new mass workers’ party”.

Labour payouts: unions must discuss political representation

the Socialist Party has called for discussion in the workers’ movement on the need for a new mass workers’ party.

A ‘major gathering’ of trade unionists and socialists is definitely needed, in the form of a conference that can democratically discuss and debate how political representation for the working class can concretely be re-established in the situation created by Starmer’s leadership.

 with or without the involvement of any particular individual, the need for a mass workers’ party that can discuss and adopt a socialist programme is inherent in today’s situation.

The Socialist Party has already initiated a call for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) to once again stand anti-cuts candidates in the next local and mayoral elections, following TUSC’s suspension of standing in the last local elections.

Presenting candidates who will fight for workers’ interests can only aid the discussion on how a mass workers’ party can be built, while in the meantime playing an important role in putting a socialist alternative on the ballot papers.

Yet, so far no answer seems to have come.

Socialist Worker comments,

Battles and infighting inside Labour reflect the party’s limits Charlie Kimber

Socialists should always be for the Labour left against the Labour right. But they also have to recognise that, even at its best, Labourism is not going to transform society.

A left that couldn’t effectively confront the right in its own party can hardly deal with the pressures of global capital and the state.

The obsession with Corbyn-nostalgia matters because big struggles are coming. Every day there is more news of job cuts and frequent predictions of mass unemployment.

The need for resistance focused on the workplaces and the streets, not parliament, is more urgent than ever.

At the moment the main energy of these factions has been concentrated on building Colvid-19 Action fronts, People Before Profit: Health Worker Covid,  and  agitating for NHS workers’ pay rises – a better way of spending their time some might say than the usual party/groupuscule building.

 

Hot on their heels George Galloway’s Workers Party calls on the masses to spurn those  “beholden to the Westminster brethren”.

 

H

Human Rights in the Age of National Populism. Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiots? Justine Lacroix et Jean-Yves Pranchère.

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Les droits de l'homme rendent-ils idiots ? - Lacroix - Pranchère ...

 Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ? (2019) Justine Lacroix et Jean-Yves Pranchère.

“This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.”

Karl Marx Capital Vol 1. Chapter 6. The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power.

Earlier this year Benjamin Ward, of Human Rights Watch, wrote,

The government’s new Attorney General Suella Braverman, its top legal adviser, is on record recently arguing that the courts’ ability to hold the government to account should be restrained, and expressing her criticism of human rights.

It’s increasingly clear that Johnson plans to water down the Human Rights Act, which keeps us safe from government harm, and make it harder for British courts to intervene when the state tramples on people’s rights.

“Human rights are no longer popular”, Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère begin Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ? with this statement from a former  judge at the European Court of Human Rights, Françoise Tulkens. That they are not a “priority” for governments. Not only have we seen national populist leaders, on both sides of the Atlantic, in practice undermine human rights protections, but scorn for  “droits-de-l’hommisme” has grown. The idea that rights-culture, rights-ideology, is a feature of the “nouvel ordre néolibérale” , an alliance between capitalist economics and social liberalism, remains influential on the left. Individual rights lead to individualism, people “sans appartenance et sans obligation à l’égard de la collectivité” (without belonging and without obligation to the collective)  The “culture of narcissism” a demand for “respect” without concern for others, undermines the family, and “respect d’autrui” (others). The “multiplication” of rights, and obsession about them,  has created bad citizens and a world of “incivilité”.

Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ? is a defence of human rights on the “champ intellectuel”. This is a crowded field. The authors begin by warning that national populism, or, as they call it,  “illiberal democracy”, puts forward an ideal of “l”homogénéité nationale” in countries like Poland and Hungary that moulds politics against  what Carl Schmitt called “the enemy”. This is in contrast to the democratic principles though by the thinker Claude Lefort. For the former Socialisme ou Barbarie thinker democracy comes from everybody, but democratic (institutional) sovereignty is an “empty” space (lieu vide)  in that no party in the name of the people can permanently occupy it.  Efforts, from identifying ‘the’ people with one party, or determining politics through a totalitarian one-party, one person, “égocrate” eats up the very incertianity that breathes life into democracy.  Lefort, as they later outline, is a touchstone for the idea that human rights are self-created, part of a long process he called the “democratic revolution”. Human rights are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to create this democratic world, one  that everybody can live in.

Lacroix and  Pranchère do not cite Jacques Rancière. But the radical philosopher’s asserted  that human rights are constantly redefined, through “dissensus”  from the “outside” by the “plebe”, the “rights of the rightless” (Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?). “In this way, the ‘‘abstract’’ and litigious Rights of Man and of the citizen are tentatively turned into real rights, belonging to real groups, attached to their identity and to the recognition of their place in the global population”.This underlines the way that those excluded from the homogeneous sovereign people of national populism create new demands. Written in 1791 Olympe de Gouges’s Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne is one such claim followed by her calls to abolish slavery,. First and foremost she demanded the right for women to be equals in politics, “A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform.” The Guillotine did not stop her voice ringing  throughout the ages.

Neoliberalism is an economic project, a belief in the efficiency of markets, not a belief in human rights. Hayek was opposed to human rights and any kind of social “constructionism”, opposing human rights in the same vein as Edmund Burke, with a experimental knowledge rooted in tradition. Only  “néolibéralisme est responsable pour le néolibéralisme.” Against this Lacroix and  Pranchère praise a side of John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Constant’s political liberalism, their resistance to authoritarianism. They can help indicate to those who draw on the human rights thought see  the need to balance “liberty and equality”.

Many on the left remain suspicious of human rights. Some of this goes back to the early years of socialism. Marx’s famous reference to human rights in Capital was accompanied by support for the “legal limitation of the working day”, a modest Magna Carta. In the passage heading the present review, Jeremy  Bentham was as an unlikely figure to muster in support of human rights. He was, the authors note, as hostile to the French Revolution’s founding declarations as De Maistre and Edmund Burke. More so in fact, in Anarchical Fallacies Critique of the Doctrine of Inalienable, Natural Rights (1796), he dismissed them” Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, — nonsense upon stilts.” Perhaps Benthan advocacy of the workhouse could be seen as a means to ensure the greatest good, through a felicific calculus of pleasure and pain, but of human rights ideology, there was none.

Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère offer this way of looking at Marx’s views. In the celebrated statement that the  “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” implies that we base on the liberty of all on the liberty of each individual, and not the other way around. (Il s’agissait bien de fonder le liberté de tous sur la liberté de chacun, et non l’inverse.” (Page 94)

Lacroix and  Pranchère are academics, who have published on political theory and human rights. They are both  based on Brussels. But, references to (mostly) French language controversies aside (they offer important insights into the writings of Marcel Gauchet for example)  Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ?  has striking echoes of near- identical debates in Britain and the anglophone world. In part this is the result of the curious reprise of US polemicist Christopher Lasch’ writings on the “therapeutic” roots of narcissistic politics,  by, amongst many others,  the French ‘original socialist’ Jean-Claude Michéa, who considers that the original fault of French socialism was to have aligned with liberalism. But, as we have indicated with PM Boris Johnson’s potential attacks on human rights legislation, these are not only issues stuck in the world of ideas. From here we move to the global ‘culture wars’, and to clashes on battle-grounds of American liberalism and conservatism, Bolsarono’s Brazil, and back to Europe’s illiberal states and national populists.

There is , it could be argued, increasing convergence between the ideas of conservatives and a certain nationalist or “sovereigntist” left. This has a more limited range, perhaps to Europe. where the stakes have involved parties of the left with  influential socialist traditions that are marginal in the USA. Every one of the book’s broader account of the claims against human rights and the “culture wars”  they are held to foster, every linkage between neoliberalism and human rights, every complaint against ‘ interfering’ laws and gender politics, is to be found on the Spiked Magazine (run by former Revolutionary Marxists ) site, Blue Labour (whose views on the family could be inserted into many paragraphs), in the writings of the Full Brexit supporters and in groupuscules like the Social Democratic Party (SDP).

Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ?  makes a case that has its counterpart in Britain, and elsewhere, despite our obvious different historical relationship to the first French Republic’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. A defence of human rights as part of a strategy of solidarity (“une politique de la solidarité”) and internationalism open to defending both individuals and social groups fighting injustice. Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère are to be congratulated on showing some of the way.

See also: Review: Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ?

 

Statement from the left-wing collective Ta’amim al-Masaref in Lebanon: ‘It is time for rage’

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Les dirigeants prévenus en juillet des risques dans le port

(Picture from L’Orient du jour.)

A statement from left-wing collective Ta’amim al-Masaref in Lebanon: ‘It is time for rage’

Comrades, we are trapped.

We are trapped between the barbarism of capital accumulation and the subsequent nonchalant greed it enables.

As our lives become more worthless by the hour, we are trapped between the military machine deployed to defend private property at all costs, and the ruling class it has vowed to uphold.

We are trapped between the death cult that is capital accumulation and its tendency to accumulate, store, bargain for better deals, negotiate and accumulate further, even at its own risk. Especially at our expense.

The August 4 blast is an immediate and irreversible ramification of the ruling class’ deliberate indispensability of the masses. The capitalist, neoliberal system was built at our expense, and always – without exception – seeks to serve the interests of the ruling class. It will never be more evident and salient than it is today the extent to which our lives are regarded as expendable and worthless.

But the blast does not propagate evenly. It rips apart working-class neighbourhoods relentless and with impunity. Wave after wave, we can feel our precarity laid bare as our windows and doors shattered, and our buildings collapsed. The explosion both accelerates our condition and decelerates business as usual. It is in this spatio-temporal reality that we are trapped.

Our livelihoods are closest to the epicentres of destruction. How could they not be, when our livelihoods depend on reproducing chaos, zombie capitalism, and our destitute condition? It slows uncovers their violence and their gentrifying displacement. As their interminable towers merely tremble, their children are kept safe by our comrades, domestic workers.

This regime functions precisely as it was constructed to: to exploit us, displace us, crush us and kill us, unapologetically and without hesitation.

They are untouchable even in defeat. They are indestructible even in catastrophe

But they are unreachable no more.

As thousands of families remain stranded and homeless, it is now our duty to occupy their luxurious homes. The ones purposefully kept empty as a form of class war, as an undying bourgeois sneer. We must occupy what they think is theirs. We must occupy what is, in fact, ours.

As this catastrophe steadily becomes militarized, it is our duty to fight against the unfolding military coup that is going to be perpetually imposed on us.

As we are living through famine, hunger, and poverty, it is our duty to supply for our comrades. To fight for food sovereignty. To divorce dependency from our bellies.

We must demand justice for our dead. For our victims.

We do not need any investigations. We know who the culprits are. Structurally, yes it is the ruling class, its third-party tradesmen, middle-men, technicians of doom, and trades of destruction.

We must form neighbourhood committees, and workers must control their own destiny, both in the production and reproduction of wealth. We must rebuild our own homes. We must share them with our comrades.

We must open public schools. Transform them into temporary hospitals for the wounded.

We must honour our dead. Celebrate their lives. Continue their fight.

We must not let them force us into normalisation. Nothing that we have lived through in our lifetimes, and in the last year, has been ‘normal’.

As we look at Palestine and Syria, we know that our struggles are intertwined, as are our regimes. Millions of Syrians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Algerians and Arabs have fought their regimes in an open war of manoeuvre that has not said its last word. We are nothing if not a continuation of this war.

We must gather the strength to emulate our comrades in 1982 who fought against the Israel onslaught of Beirut. We will fight capitalism at home as we have previously fought imperialism.

We must be inspired by our Syrian comrades who have lived through thousands of the regime’s barrel bombs and Islamist occupation.

We must draw inspiration from our Sudanese comrades in their organising and from our Algerian comrades in their perseverance.

Comrades, the time has come for us to organise and obliterate capitalism and its enablers.

It is now time for rage. For revenge. For justice. It is time to obliterate this regime, by any means necessary. We need to organise, and we need to organise now.

And with that, death to the system that kills our comrades.

Ta’amim al-Masaref in Lebanon

Beirut, 11 August 2020

This statement does not necessarily reflect the views of the Alliance of MENA Socialists.

 

More statements from the site of the The Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists

 

Founding statement,

November 24, 2017

We are an alliance of Middle Eastern socialists opposed to all the international and Middle Eastern regional imperialist powers and their wars, whether the U.S., Russia and China  or Israel, Saudi Arabia,  Iran and Turkey.  We also oppose other authoritarian regimes such as Assad’s in Syria and El Sisi’s  in Egypt as well as religious fundamentalism whether of  ISIS, Al Qaeda,  Hezbollah  or the  Muslim Brotherhood.   Although the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah consider themselves gradualists and oppose the Jihadism of Al Qaeda and ISIS, all of these organizations share the goal of establishing a state based on Shari’a Law and preserving the current capitalist order.  

We oppose capitalism, class divisions, patriarchy/sexism, racism, ethnic and religious prejudice and speak to the struggles of women, workers, oppressed nationalities such as Kurds and Palestinians, oppressed ethnic and religious minorities, and sexual minorities.  We also oppose Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.  

We stand for socialism as a concept of human emancipation and an affirmative vision distinguished from the authoritarian regimes that called themselves “Communist.”

The effort to create an Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists, originally started in March 2016 as an Alliance of Syrian and Iranian Socialists with a trilingual website (English/Arabic/Persian)  to help express the aspirations of  “the Other Middle East” and to  offer analyses of critical issues and  new dialogues and bonds of solidarity between Syrians and Iranians opposed to their authoritarian regimes.

Since the destinies of people are linked across borders, important developments in the region –some terrifying and some hopeful—have compelled the formation of a broader Alliance.  

Amongst the international press Le Monde has had extensive coverage.

These are important opinion pieces calling for international solidarity.

 

 

 

Written by Andrew Coates

August 11, 2020 at 11:50 am

Belarus and the New International Solidarity.

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Global Solidarity Needed with Belarus Democrats,

One of the most influential books on nationalism in modern times was Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.  (1983) Thinking about the nation as “an imagined political political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” a “deep horizontal comradeship”, in different styles (languages, cultures), and though the arrival of print,  in which this relationship occupies people’s minds, and through the sovereign state, were hallmarks of Anderson’s approach.

Imagined Communities was at its most convincing for the case that nationalism was not just another ‘ism’, “a system of ideas, an ideology”.  It was at its least plausible when it extended an argument against those who tried to battle against nationalisms which were plainly an ideology, part of political projects which projected a future for a national sovereign body based on the common “fellowship” of a people. Critics of Anderson, such as Eric Hobsbawm, pointed out that that the idea of People and Nation are no doubt created in this way (Including very imaginary inventions of tradition and organic roots). But “politics constantly tended to take up an remould such pre-political elements for its own purposes”. (Nations and Nationalism since 1780. 1991)

In this millennium a new generation of nationalists has learnt to “speak for dead people” to defend their nationalism and imagined sovereignty. National populisms, amongst other boasts,  claim to give voice to the People against the ‘globalist elites’. These themes have helped sustain governments like Donald Trump’s , the election of Boris Johnson, and to propel the hardline regimes of Poland and Hungary.

The left has had a hard time finding an alternative. A few, like the editors of the journal which Benedict’s brother,{erry sustained for many years, have variously welcomed ‘anti-system’ movements of all stripes against the ‘globalising’ ‘neoliberal’ European Union, and relished Brexit  as shocks to the world order, while spending their time in wishful thinking about a small American left unable to create an alternative would-be hegemonic radicalism to national populism.

Some wish to channel national feeling into left populism. Attempts to do so have not been successful, as the failure of the most explicit left-wing populist project, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France insoumise indicates. This suggests that the diversity of modern European societies may be one reason why it is not easy to mobilise and draw together  the “people” against a capitalist elite, but not as difficult to speak for one group of people against an ‘anti-national’ enemy, foreigners in general and domestic groups of migrant origin.

Reflecting on his academic career  in the posthumous A Life Beyond Boundaries (2016) Anderson spoke of his writing on nationalism.

I began to recognise that the fundamental drawback of this type of comparison, that using the nation and nation states as the basic units of analysis totally ignored the obvious fact that in reality these units were tied together and crosscut by ‘global’ political-intellectual currents such as liberalism, fascism, communism and socialism, as well as vast religious networks and economic and technological forces. I has also to take seriously the reality that very few people have ever been ‘solely’ nationalist. (Page 128)

People can be “gripped” by global cultural and political products and ideas, Hollywood, Manga comics, neoliberalism, Islamism, human rights, and democracy, As he observed, global forms of communication, created with the “telegraph and the steamship” had moved on. One word, Internet, plus, another, global travel. And another migration. We can communicate across the world not just through “supranational’ languages, like English, Arabic, Spanish, French, Mandarin, but in any language, if only through with the help Google translation. TO the Internet we can add migration, global travel, and migration.

It seems that many on the left, particularly the pro-Brexit left which prepared the ground for Boris Johnson’s message of Get Brexit Done, have been unable to grapple with the results of these underlying changes.

These are times and conditions not just for the rise of national populism, but for a new internationalism to grow.

In recent weeks we have seen support for Chinese democrats, protests against the persecution of the Uighurs, and a wave of deep empathy with Beirut.

But for some on the left the model of solidarity seems stuck on the late 19th century. That is, calls for solidarity between the peoples, each separate, and communicated to through vertically. It is suggested that people are constantly getting their support ‘wrong’, and should leave it to official channels; that our real business is with our “Own” imperialism.

This is not going to happen…..

Revolts in places across the world inspire direct support.

Here is –  clear, simple and an intensely moving – account  of one.

Lukashenko may be announced the winner. But his victory won’t last long

Let’s put this type of response in the dustbin of history:

Background Articles: Why the clock is ticking for Belarus’s Lukashenko

The opposition’s wooing of Moscow may have sealed the fate of Europe’s “last dictator”.

Belarus blues: can Europe’s ‘last dictator’ survive rising discontent?

Andrew Roth.

Written by Andrew Coates

August 10, 2020 at 12:19 pm

The Future of a Delusion, “If our whole party had united behind Jeremy, Labour could have won in 2017 and saved tens of thousands of lives. “

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Election 2017 broadcast - Chinese for labour

 The 2017 election that might have been won, if it hadn’t been for a completely different result.

In his only novel, Zuleika Dobson; (1911) Max Beerbohm recounts the adventures of a femme fatale’s visit to Oxford. All the undergraduates fall in love with her. In a final proof of their passion they “leapt emulously headlong into the water”. and “plunged into the swirling stream”.

The  lees of such a homage were as nothing to the claims now being made in the afterglow of this article.

Jeremy Corbyn accuses Labour officials of sabotaging election campaign

Ardour for Jeremy Corbyn has led people to declare that Labour could have won in 2017, and “saved tens of thousands of lives”, if only……

There are good reasons to be outraged at the way that outgoing Party Officials are alleged to have treated the incoming Corbyn team.

On the material presented there is the strongest possible case, given in the newspapers, that “clear evidence of factional activity by senior paid employees of the party against the elected leadership of the time” exists.

We wholly sympathise with Joe Ryle on that.

But what has emerged is a far wider set of claims

They allege that in 2017 hostile officials set up a “shadow operation” in a Westminster office as part of efforts to plot their own election course, which included starving potential target seats of money and focusing resources on MPs not allied to Corbyn.

In the Independent this is stated,

The 13-page contribution, seen by The Independent, says: “Given that Labour was less than 2,500 votes in key seats away from forming a government, having won 40 per cent of the popular vote, it’s not impossible that Jeremy Corbyn might now be in his third year as a Labour prime minister were it not for the unauthorised, unilateral action taken by a handful of senior party officials in 2017.”

The messages detail at length senior staffers disappointed when Labour did better than expected in the election or polls, with some saying explicitly that they had been working against a good result for the party.

Reports  underline a “shadow operation”” aimed at “starving potential target seats of money” and factionalists giving vivid expressions of joy at Labour losing.

What kind of “shadow operation” was at work?

Were there people out there in the constituencies pouncing on party workers, thwarting their activities,  and garbling their messages?

This will come as news to those who campaigned in target seats, such as Ipswich, which was won by Labour by a highly competent well-resourced Labour team backed by members and supporters all over town.

The “separate operation” must have been so hidden in the shades, bound in the darkness, that we, in our stupid good-humoured way. failed to notice it.

Sandy Martin won this ‘target seat” for Labour in Ipswich.

Where was it during the 2019 European Elections, when Cobyn’s team was in charge?

That was a half-hearted campaign if ever there was one.

Where was this parallel wrecking centre in December 2019….?

 

 Anthony B. Masters, Royal Statistical Society Statistical Ambassador. 

The 2017 general election: not that close after all

The claim relies on the smallest number of votes changing in a specific way. It ignores that, based on the same logic, the Conservatives needed only 50 switched votes for a working majority. It also ignores the fact that constituencies are not independent events.

Far more votes would need to have shifted to plausibly change the outcome.

By the same logic, the Conservative needed only 50 switched votes to reach 321 seats. Given Sinn Fein’s abstentions, this is a probable working majority. 528 votes would have needed to switch for the Conservatives to win 326 constituencies — a Commons majority.

We should remember that constituencies are not independent events. We can also calculate what vote share would need to switch across Great Britain. How big does a uniform national swing need to be?

That also requires three assumptions. If one party increased their vote share, that same change happens in every seat. Only switching between Labour and the Conservatives occurs. Turnout does not change.

Under those assumptions, 0.04 points from Labour to the Conservatives gives the Conservatives 321 seats. Some 0.37 points in the other direction reduces the Conservatives to 310 seats.

These two switched vote shares are equal to around 13,000 and 116,000 votes across Great Britain. The Conservatives would have needed fewer switched votes than Labour to plausibly change the outcome in their favour.

There are other considerations to take into account, too. If Labour had been closer to the Conservatives in votes, then the electoral dynamics would also have changed.

In this alternate universe, the messages and targeted campaigns could have been dissimilar. Indeed, Theresa May might not have called the election in the first place.

The ‘2,227 votes’ figure appears to be a miscalculation. Suggesting Labour were a few thousand votes from “forming a government” relies on diamond-strong assumptions. It is time to bring it to an end.

Reactions are rolling in:

Where the battle lines are being drawn over leaked Labour report

There is no easy way through, however considered the response. Corbyn’s supporters are convinced by the election betrayal; many BAME MPs and members want more than just words from Starmer about tackling toxic attitudes at Labour HQ; and the officials are insistent the law will uphold their belief they have been maligned and defamed.

If there are any compensations for Starmer, it is that this will likely play out amid the political noise of coronavirus and far enough away from an election that many voters will not notice.

The Morning Star has its own explanation for Labour’s two most recent election defeats.

Editorial: The leaked report is important – but it was not sabotage that defeated the Corbyn project

The first is that the Corbyn leadership faced deliberate, planned obstruction from the Labour Party machinery from the beginning.

Evidence of this is not confined to the report, which was not a bolt from the blue. The suspension and expulsion of thousands of members during the leadership elections of 2015 and 2016 on the most trivial pretexts — an 82-year-old was expelled for having retweeted a demand that the Green Party be included in election debates — was very obviously an effort by the party bureaucracy to stop Corbyn winning.

Nor was the attempt to bar Corbyn, the incumbent leader, from standing for re-election in 2016 a secret.

The real fight was deeper,

For five years the political front line of class struggle in Britain was not between the two main parties but inside one of them — between those Labour forces invested (often literally) in the status quo, and those who wanted socialist change.

In the end, in the sense that Corbyn’s successor is not building on the socialist project but reversing it, the former won. Or rather, the latter lost.

Because the second key lesson is easily forgotten amid justified outrage over the leaked report. The socialist project was able to advance despite their sabotage. As one of the saboteurs put it on election night 2017, “they [Corbyn’s team] are celebrating and we are silent and grey faced.”

The relentless attacks did tremendous damage. But it was only when the Labour leadership allowed its own radicalism to be blunted, subordinating its socialist message to the liberal cause of a second EU referendum and prioritising parliamentary manoeuvres over mass mobilisation, that the wheels came off.

The People’s Vote marches for a Second Referendum were backed by figures like Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London, and many Labour MPs. John McDonnell addressed a Final Say Rally in October 2019.  There was radical left support from Another Europe is Possible which organised hundreds-strong contingents at protests that  drew, hundreds of thousands onto the streets.

If, as the Morning Star asserts, Labour did not engage in “Mass mobilisation” why did not they, and the rest of the pro-Brexit ‘Lexit’ (Left Exit) groups, organise their own demonstrations in favour of leaving the EU?

Perhaps they were afraid of attracting the nationalist support that lay behind pro-Brexit vote and the subordination of their socialist message to the cause of populist national sovereignty.

The daily’s own conclusion is that the left should have “grappled” with its enemies within, and that it should speak to the “whole working class” – as if working class voters were not divided on Brexit.

The Editorial concludes,

If we attribute our failure to the strength of ruling-class opposition, we may as well give up on socialism: it will never go away.

The important thing is to develop strategies to overcome it. The left did not grapple seriously enough with its enemies in Labour, but it was when it ceased to speak to the whole working class that it stopped being heard.

So the real struggle is against Labour’s enemies within.

Here’s some people with ideas about that:

 

Pseudo-Marxism has no place in our movement

All of this guff is nothing but dust being thrown into the eyes of the movement, intended to confuse and disorientate socialist activists – and, ultimately, to hide the real liberal, reactionary, bourgeois class content at the heart of Mason’s thesis.

In reality, Mason – like Kautsky – has lost his head. But at least the latter had a head to lose in the first place.

There is nothing radical to be found in Mason’s apologia for liberalism. Indeed, there are no positive suggestions for the left at all.

Most notably, in Mason’s (30-plus minute read!) essay, there is no mention of the need for the left to fight for mandatory reselection; to reverse Blair’s legacy; or to kick out the bureaucrats and careerists that have conspired against a Labour victory.

Instead, Mason has gone on record recently to defend Starmer – the right-wing Labour leader who is opening waging war on the left on behalf of the establishment, attempting to reverse all the gains of the Corbyn era.

This is a telling and textbook case study of where you end up if you abandon a class approach. The ideas of ‘culture wars’, postmodernist ‘narratives’ based on ‘values’, and popular fronts are a dead end for the movement. It is only the genuine ideas of Marxism that can unite the working class and offer a way forward.

Written by Andrew Coates

August 8, 2020 at 10:51 am

Corbyn and McDonnell Faced “hundreds” of incidents of Factionalist Obstruction – Joe Ryle.

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Who is the worst threat to Labour over the leaked report on right ...
Labour Needs to Turn its Back on All Factionalism.

Today a disturbing account of how the factional opponents of Jeremy Corbyn reacted to his leadership of the Labour Party has been published.

I saw from the inside how Labour staff worked to prevent a Labour government

The work of senior Labour staffers to stop Labour winning is only just starting to come out.

Joe Ryle Open Democracy.

Ryle has a background in climate activism and took up work for John McDonnell and Labour ” mostly unaware of all its different political affiliations and factions”.

The Evening Standard (February the 23rd 2016)  reported,

Joe Ryle helped organise for activist group Momentum in London, where some MPs fear it is behind attempts to deselect them.

He also played an active role in aviation campaign group Plane Stupid, with whom he was arrested after a protest at Stansted Airport.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell under fire for employing Momentum and Plane Stupid activist

Ryle may have been aware of Labour’s factionalism because he had been a Green Party member, and Press Officer, for Keith Taylor Green Party MEP (South East England).

GIven the way the Green Party, and the European Parliament, operate,  was it surprising to find this? ” We were in for quite a shock when we were confronted with the machine of Labour HQ.”

This tweet from John McDonnell indicates that his work was appreciated.

 

The story that has just broken will unsettle anybody, even to those familiar with machine politics.

.

Joe Ryle states,

Some of the behaviour of senior officials at Labour HQ has already been documented in the 860-page leaked Labour report. But there’s a lot more that went on behind the scenes and I think it’s important that people have the whole story.

There is plenty of detail to back his account up.

The most shocking sabotage I personally witnessed was an encounter with the notoriously difficult regional offices who were often the most ideologically opposed to the Corbyn regime. At my request, attempts were made to organise a rally for John McDonnell via one of the regional offices. Given that John was one of the most senior members of the shadow cabinet, I expected my request to be met with enthusiasm.

When I found out that the location they had chosen was in the middle of nowhere I was left flabbergasted. I was told this tactic had been used before – apparently to avoid lots of members showing up and being won round by the new regime.

There were hundreds more incidents like this that I’m aware of; press releases regularly blocked from going out, staff members briefing against Corbyn’s office, weekly planning grids leaked including the 2019 General Election grid, an almost constant refusal to share content on the party’s social media platforms and the coordination of staff resignations to damage the party. As a political first, the party’s 2017 manifesto was also infamously leaked.

Ryle continues,

.On the night of the 2017 General Election I was in the press team at the party’s HQ. I’ll never forget the deathly silence and the looks on the faces of those staffers that we knew to have been plotting against Corbyn since day one. While we celebrated robbing Theresa May of her majority, party staffers mourned in the room next door: “they are cheering and we are silent and grey faced. Opposite to what I had been working towards for the last couple of years!!, one senior staffer allegedly wrote on WhatsApp that night, according to the leaked report.

This is serious account from somebody who is well-regarded as a party worker.

It needs a proper response.

Factionalism amongst opponents of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell was rife in  key Labour Party structures.

We need to end Labour factionalism, Keir Starmer has said.

That means all. factionalism.

But is this true?

The number of extra votes in marginal seats that Labour needed in 2017 to give Corbyn a chance of being prime minister was an agonising 2,227. This will forever remain a sore point for many of us. Because as the leaked report exposed – we know that in 2017 party resources never reached many of the winnable seats that they should have, with allies of the small faction in party HQ standing in safe seats seen as the first priority.

….

Without the actions of this small group of highly experienced saboteurs, I genuinely believe we would now be three years into a Labour government investing in our NHS and public services – an outcome which surely would have better prepared the country for the Coronavirus pandemic.

The idea that Labour came within a whisker of winning in 2017 is simply not true.

NIck Tyrone, no doubt a factional opponent of the left,  points out,

No, Labour did not almost win the 2017 general election. Here’s a breakdown of why – and why this is important

I’ll give the Corbynistas their precious 2,227 votes exactly where they need them so they can take those seven seats off the Tories by one vote each. For the sake of what follows, they are theirs. So, what happens if Labour gets those seven seats off the Conservatives in 2017? They won the election then, right? No, not even remotely close.

An extra seven seats would have given Labour 269, which if you are a keen observer of British politics you will note would still have put Labour someways off the 326 needed to have an outright majority in parliament and even way short of the 321 needed for a nominal majority when Sinn Fein, the speaker, etc are taken out of the equation. More than 50 seats short in fact, which is a strange way to call something a victory. So, what the hell are the Corbynistas on about then? Well, remember they took these seven seats off of the Tories, which means instead of the 317 the Conservatives actually ended up with, they now have 310. Even hooking up with the DUP only collectively gets them 320. If you add Labour’s 269 to the SNP’s 35, the Lib Dems 12, Plaid Cymru’s 4 and Caroline Lucas, you get 321. A one seat majority over the Tory-DUP configuration! Which means Corbyn would have been prime minister! Right?

 

Written by Andrew Coates

August 7, 2020 at 11:17 am

China, Human Rights, and the New Internationalist Left.

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Image

Internationalist Left Defends Human Rights.

Human rights are criticised from two principal sides. National Populists, defend a nation’s absolute sovereign right to make laws without legal interference.  Rights legislation, national and international, are the result of a “fear of democracy”. Luke Gittos writes on Spiked, “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.”

From another side, human rights are accused of promoting and even justifying neoliberalism. The neoliberalism of a market society would only be the theoretical deepening and the  realisation of the liberal individualism of their market origins. By their absolute and uncompromising character, individual rights would only promote the figure of a bad citizen concerned only with her own interests.  Andrew Murray writes, “the preference for individual rights over the collective has come to which has come to predominate on much of the Western left, a flowering of the more poisonous seeds of personal identity and human rights” (The Fall and Rise of the British Left. 2019)

Democracy without rights is not a democracy. The majority will of the voters, as expressed at the ballot box, is not the only criterion of democracy it is only a consequence of these primary criteria of equal rights and freedom for all. wrote Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère in Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiots ? at the end of last year,

In a powerful assault on the idea that human rights are ‘bourgeois’ and individualistic Lacroix and Prancheere take up a thread running throughout the  history of the First International. Marx and Engels, despite their criticisms of  flowery phrases about “right and duties” – the weight of the late 19th century democratic and national struggles led by figures such as the Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini, backed demands for social and individual rights and legislation to protect workers’ interests. These were demands going back to the limitation on the working day to which Vol 1 of Capital devotes a whole chapter.These are rights, as they remind us, that for socialists should balance both “liberty and equality”. In this respect we could say that the Trade Union movement is one of the biggest movements for human rights in history.

By the end of the 19th century socialist leaders, such as Jean Jaurès, put democratic rights, individual and collective at the centre of their politics. Many on the left continue their work. By contrast, today “Populism” is not a defence of liberty but a claim for identity “d’un peuple homogène”(Page 17) By affirming absolute national sovereignty in the name of the “people”, a ‘general will’ that exists only through their own parties,  populists and others deny the real voices of individuals and conflicting classes.

Reviewing the book for the radical left  Lignes de Crêtes  observes that

JYP and JL methodically destroy the rhetoric of being ‘anti-system’ means being against political liberalism and  the rhetoric according to which social rights and civil liberties are the individualistic and selfish corollary of economic oppression.  and are opposed to social rights. this rhetoric definitively died with Stalin, but it is not the case, even in certain parts of the radical left, where pitting the ‘societal’  against social issues,  has become commonplace.

That socialism was a proposal to go beyond the original human rights, and was seen as a base to be extended and consolidated, and not to be destroyed has again been largely forgotten. Jean Yves Pranchère and Justine Lacroix remind us. Deconstructing certain hypocrisies based on the formal appeal to human rights is not the same as naming them as an ideological enemy in itself. At a time when it is fashionable to support autocrats like Maduro or Assad, in the name of the destruction of the Established Order, the reminder is vital.

Review: Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ?

This is the conclusion of Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiots ?

“les droits de l’homme devraient être le nom d’une politique de la solidarité, qui ne content pas compenser l’exclusion sociale par des mécanismes d’assistance, mais qui lie les libertés civiles et politiques à une reprise de la question sociale au sense le plus large, incluent les conditions du vivre-ensemble et donc la construction d’un monde commun puisse s’épanouir l’individualité de tous.” (Page 97. Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ? 2019.)

Human rights should be the name of a strategy of solidarity, one that is not just a means of fighting social exclusion by support mechanisms, but one which binds civic and political freedoms in ways that bring back the social issues in in he broadest sense, including the conditions of community life, and, as a result, building a common world in which everybody’s individuality can flourish.

Political developments have  brought China  and human rights to the fore.

We are not dealing with the limits of bourgeois ‘egotistic’ rights but an autocracy whose methods, re-education, camps, forced labour,  are intimately connected to the Stalinist tradition of Maoism.

The repression that hybrid Stalinist-Capitalism of the CCP state has unleashed is an assault on human rights.

Left solidarity is no respecter of national sovereignty, or the interests of nation states.

Labour has officially taken notice:

Paul Mason offers one of the best approaches to what the left should, and can, do.

Here are some of his points:

 

The left, and above all anyone who thinks the term “Marxism” is worth saving, should be outraged. But parts of the British left seem determined to apologise for China’s crimes against human rights and free speech.

In recent Labour meetings at which activists have tried to raise solidarity with democrats and trade unionists in Hong Kong, or with the Uighurs, they have been met by accusations that they are “promoting Western imperialism” and “media lies”.

If anybody doubts this they can see recent tweets,

https://twitter.com/Rango1917/status/1291323643310546944?s=20

Or the comments underneath this Tweet from Momentum:

Former leader of the International Marxist Group, John Ross, has joined in,

Ross’ argument, recycled from 1960s Soviet Bloc interventions at the UN, is at root that giving people better material living conditions is more important than the ‘bourgeois’ freedoms of expression. Not a very good counter to criticism of political oppression, and the lack of independent trade union rights.

The former Trotskyist has  been at it in the Chinese state media.

False U.S. accusations against China expose its own human rights problems: People’s Daily commentary

John Ross, former director of Economic and Business Policy of London, said that China has “a real understanding of human rights” and “the key human right is to stay alive.”

The right to life is among the most basic human rights enshrined in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” of the United Nations.

The so-called “human rights abuse” fabricated by some ill-intentioned U.S. politicians constitutes an affront to Chinese people’s anti-virus fight, the article said.

 

Paul Mason, by contrast, continues:

I am certain that the renewed salience of the Uighur question, which was ignored for years during the “golden era” of Sino-British relations declared by George Osborne, is in part being driven by the US’s newly aggressive stance on China. But the point of being a socialist is being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

This, however, seems beyond the two left-wing publications in the UK that appear committed to whitewashing China’s authoritarian form of capitalism: the Morning Star and Socialist Action.

He asks,

 The problem for the left remains, as it did in the original Cold War, of how to support democracy, human rights and workers’ rights in China – and in its wider diplomatic sphere of influence – without supporting the Sinophobic rhetoric and aggressive militarism of Donald Trump’s America.

He develops the theme,

What should distinguish the British left’s approach to China is knowledge of and engagement with the workers’ movement. Beyond the outright CCP apologists there is a more widespread belief, born out of lazy cultural relativism, that it is somehow imperialist or even racist for British people to criticise China’s human rights record.

This is the clinching argument,

For those of us on the left who want to maintain an architecture of thought based on historical materialism, whose genealogy runs from Marx, through the early Communist International, the “Western Marxism” of the 1930s, the New Left of the 1960s and the anti-capitalism of today, I am afraid taking a position on Xi’s actual ideology is not a luxury.

Xi’s “Marxism” is overtly and systematically anti-humanist. Its endlessly repeated loops of closed and meaningless phrases make the Newspeak of Orwell’s Oceania sound positively lyrical. The forced, televised confessions of corrupt officials are – as China expert Christian Sorace has argued – part of an attempt to create “affective sovereignty”: love of the party above the state, irrespective of what it says or does.

Human rights are universal.

They will be defended against this “Marxism”.

Xinjiang – Neither Washington nor Beijing: the Left Must Stand With the Uighurs

Ben Towse,

The international left cannot duck out just because Western powers criticise China. We cannot support our enemy’s enemy, uncritically regurgitating its propaganda as the Morning Star shamefully does. But nor can we ally with our imperialist rulers.

We must think about alliances and action independent of the ruling classes. We must reaffirm the left’s understanding of the transnational working class, and oppressed peoples, as their own emancipators. In the tradition of consistent anti-imperialism, we must look to build a ‘third camp’ that makes links and solidarity across borders, opposing all our rulers and exploiters. As inter-imperialist tensions escalate into a new Cold War, update the old slogan: “Neither Washington nor Beijing, but international socialism”.

For instance, despite harsh repression, class struggle in China continues to seethe with unofficial disputes and strikes. Far from uniformly anathematising (or idolising) the entire nation, let’s seek to reach out to this potent force of Chinese workers against the state and ruling class.

 Building international solidarity.

The Uyghur Solidarity Campaign UK, with which I’m an activist, has been formed to build solidarity in the workers’ movement and the left in the UK. The campaign has protested monthly at the Chinese embassy with London’s Uighur community (resuming this week after a coronavirus-hiatus), and in March we invaded the Oxford Circus flagships of Nike, H&M and Microsoft to protest forced labour. A solidarity motion passed at Labour conference last year; a range of union branches and PCS have joined the protests; and socialist MPs including John McDonnellKate Osamor and Nadia Whittome have got on board.

There’s much more for the campaign to do in terms of alliance-building, protest, and direct action. There are also clear international connections to make around anti-racism, state violence and reproductive freedom.

A particular goal of the campaign is worker action. From trade union history – Lancashire textile workers rejecting slave-picked Confederate cotton in the US civil war, Scottish factory workers grounding Pinochet’s jet engines, French and Italian dockers refusing to move Saudi arms in 2019 – we know capitalism’s global supply chains provide avenues for concrete action. Organised workers in businesses connected to surveillance and forced labour in China, from dockers to programmers to shop assistants, could have huge leverage.

Back this campaign!

Were the RCP/Living Marxism/Spiked MI5 Agents? Official Tendance Coatesy Statement.

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Brendan O'Neill Gets the Hump about “McCarthyite assaults on ...

Agents Provocateurs? (Cartoon by John Rogan)

Some years ago a poster on a leftist site asked,

Does anyone out there know what happened to the membership of the Revolutionary Communist Party? Have their ex-members become part of the anti-capitalist movement (God I hope not!) or have they simply gone into retirement living off their MI5 pensions?

Whatever happened to the Revolutionary Communist Party?

The question weighs like a nightmare.

On a page by Bella Caledonia there is reference  to a past of the RCP/LIving Marxism/Spiked when “many on the left thought they were a bunch of MI5 agents”.

Discussion by Spotters fails to unearth the truth about the allegation which has focused on Claire Regina Fox, Baroness Fox, in recent days.

This Blog can finally spill the beans.

M15 only tried to recruit one Warwick University Graduate, myself.

Over a haunch of Venison and a bottle of Château Margaux, at Simpson’s in the Strand, they made an attractive offer to Cde Coates.

I declined, made my excuses and left for the Drones Club.

Inside its doors I confided in Michael Ezra.

Cde Ezra said that he would have a word with Gerry Healy.

Tariq Ali came over and intimated that he too had had to turn down tempting proposals. Yet the bright-eyed firebrand had decided that his future as a leader of the World Revolution was best furthered by work with Yuri Andropov.

An ebullient Ted Grant took out a tome by Trotsky from his bulging briefcase and began to tell us all about the help that Father Georgy Apollonovich Gapon rendered the revolution.

January 9th would not have taken place if Gapon had not encountered several thousand politically conscious workers who had been through the school of socialism. These men immediately formed an iron ring around him, a ring from which he could not have broken loose even if he had wanted to.

History of the Russian Revolution. Leo Trotsky.

That was at the end of the 1970s, and anybody who can’t remember it was there.

Many things have changed.

Some suggest that in the new millenium Claire Regina Fox, and her comrade-in-arms Brendan (future Baron?) O’Neill, are today’s Gapons, leading the masses to the revolution that is Brexit.

Others point that the key role in helping Boris Johnson  “get Brexit done” is hotly disputed by groups such as the Communist Party of Britain, the Socialist Party, the SWP, Counterfire and New Left Review (that name Tariq Ali – again!).

This speculation aside, Tendance Coatesy can reveal that MI5 did not recruit Claire Regina Fix.

Bumping into my would-be handler at Poundland last week he said to me, “we would never accept anyone with a “second class degree (2:2) in English and American Literature.”

 

Written by Andrew Coates

August 5, 2020 at 4:36 pm

Tory Backlash at Claire Regina Fox’s Peerage.

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Baroness, the RCP was all a “long time ago”.

Things change.

Who would have imagined that a revolutionary leader of the stature of Bob Avakian, of the US Revolutionary Communist Party, “the architect of a whole new framework of human emancipation, the new synthesis of communism, which is popularly referred to as the ‘new communism'” would be backing Joe Biden for US President?

Another one-time Revolutionary Communist, Claire Regina Fox, has come in for some stick about her Peerage.

Her first defence was launched through the pages of the far-right daily, The Express.

On Sky News last night, where she graced the Press Review, the one-time cadre of the RCP/Living Marxism, dismissed criticism of her acceptance of a seat in the House of Lords.

“It was all a long time ago” the Warwick graduate pointed out.

She promoted the mass line of a long march through the institutions,

Her comrade-in-arms, soon to be Baron Brendan O’Neill, spent yesterday vainly trying to dampen down the uproar by shifting the debate.

Referring to the ” friend of spiked, Claire Fox”  he hectored his readers, “nobody should be given a seat in the House of Lords.” ” The Lords must be abolished as a matter of democratic urgency.” If – he sighed – such a Peerage “adds new Brexit-defending voices to a notoriously Remoaner chamber.” The “Spirit of Brexit” (speaking to O’Neill) demands that Boris gives “the people a referendum on the future of the Lords”.

Baying Brendan asks, “What about the masses’ historic call for control and influence? What about making good on ordinary people’s radical insistence on their right to influence public life?

Abolish the House of Lords

Ignoring this maximum programme, Some ordinary people, members like Spiked mates, of  the Tory Party,  are making a minimum demand for influence on public life.

Why is Claire Regina Fox getting her seat in the House of Lords?

 

Ian Birrell wrote this for the ‘I’

Boris Johnson has revealed his total moral bankruptcy with his honours list

“consider the case of Claire Fox”

She emerged as part of a small Trotskyite splinter group called the Revolutionary Communist Party that discovered the value in constant contrariness and ended up indistinguishable from hard-right ideologues. She helped run their magazine called Living Marxism, which had to shut down after it accused ITV journalists who exposed some of the worst atrocities on European soil since the Second World War of fabricating their evidence. This cabal was so desperate for attention that during the Iraq War it did not just oppose the foolish misadventure but rooted for Saddam Hussein against British troops. After the 1993 Warrington bombing, which killed two children and left 50 casualties, it defended “the right of the Irish people to take whatever measures are necessary in their struggle for freedom”. No wonder Colin Parry, that dignified father of a 12-year-old boy murdered in the abhorrent attack, condemned her peerage and lack of apology as something that ‘offends me and many others deeply.’

After citing Fox’s defence of the right to download child pornograhy, singing about killing gay men, climate denial and attack on multiculturalism, Birrell concludes,

Yet for all the revulsion at seeing this figure handed a peerage, perhaps ultimately she deserves credit for achieving so much advancement from a few offensive opinions. But anger should be directed at her new patron Boris Johnson – along with all those Conservatives who stay silent as their values are trashed before their eyes.Imagine their fury if this were a Labour appointment.

 

Informed sources say that Cde John Rogan was asked to write this piece as part of the backlash against the Bolshevik Baroness.

John Rogan says,

As I have noted, but for whatever reason, Boris Johnson’s political team in NO 10 have opted not to, all during this time Claire Fox was a loyal, long-standing member – ‘I joined the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party) in the early 80s. I’d be in it still but it was wound up at the end of the nineties.’

It would be interesting to hear what her present views are on Brighton, Birmingham and other scenes of Provisional IRA slaughter.  Will they be the same as her quote regarding the Warrington bomb last – ‘My personal politics and views are well known and I have never sought to deny them, though on this issue they have remained unaired for many years’?

Who told Boris to make Claire Fox a peer and why?

 

 

 

McCluskey’s call for a “Major Gathering” of the left: the Chesterfield Conference Experience.

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Use European Institutions to create an “alternative ‘Social Europe’.

There has been speculation on the meaning of Len McClusky’s call for a ‘major gathering’ of the left.

Posting yesterday on the 69 year old UNITE leader’s latest intervention (What is McCluskey playing at?) Jim Denham writes,

…… how much of Unite members’ money will be spent on McCluskey’s proposed “major gathering” of the left this autumn: and who exactly is going to be involved? The Observer speculates that Corbyn himself is “likely to feature.” The Counterfire crowd who have gleefully accepted Unite’s money for the Peoples’ Assembly and the Stop The War Coalition are also likely to be involved. Presumably the CPB/Morning Star will find a way to muscle in. But what about the likes of the SWP, the Socialist Party, Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker … Tony Greenstein? Might that not be just a wee bit embarrassing, for Jeremy Corbyn?

In all likelihood, McCluskey’s “major gathering” will be a passing fancy, attracting the usual suspects, before fizzling out like the Peoples’ Assembly.

Many long-term socialists have been thinking further back.

The Chesterfield Conferences of the late 1980s, which created the short-lived Socialist Movement, could be seen as model for an autumn ‘gathering’.

The 1980s were the years of High Thatcherism, the Miners’ Strike, and the defeat of the ‘Bennite’ Left in the Labour Party. Neil Kinnock was elected Labour leader in 1983 and clashed with Arthur Scargill over his leadership and conduct of the strike. Apart from Thatcher, there a substantial challenge to the party from the Social Democratic Party and Liberal Alliance. With de-industrialisation sapping its traditional working class base the  trade union movement had begun to decline. Inside the Labour Party the ‘Militant’ group was expelled. Kinnock’s main attention focused on “modernising” the party, that is, the process which culminated in Tony Blair’s Third Way.

There was no recent Labour Left leader of the party, no grass-roots body like Momentum.

Much of the Labour Left, and groups like Militant, supported traditional national roads to British socialism. They had little interest in the developing new socialist and trade union approaches to tackle Thatcher’s neoliberal reforms, and the changes that became known as “globalisation”, green politics, issues of racism and modern feminism, “non-campist” approaches to the European peace movement, or changes to the constitution that promoted  human rights.

The Socialist Conferences were forums in which these topics were at the centre of discussion.

That at least was the intention.

Here is a report on the First Conference , (Spring 1988 Radical Philosophy No 48)

Chesterfield Socialist Conference

Called by the Campaign Group of Labour MPs, the Conferencevof Socialist Economists, and the Socialist Society, this conference was intended to reaffirm and redefine the socialist project in Britain for the 1990s. In his opening address, Ralph Miliband compared it to the great Leeds Convention of 1917 when socialists met to discuss the Russian revolution. In fact, history was back in fashion all weekend. Everyone was comparing the stock market crash of the previous week to 1929.

The long-awaited collapse of capitalism, it seemed to many, had once again finally arrived. Whatever the truth of the comparison, there were certainly many clashes of the old and the new at Chesterfield. Just what is to be the outcome of these clashes was the central question that the conference posed.

The three organising groups probably had quite different expectations of what would come out of the conference, and many of the 2,000 people who attended certainly did.

A set of briefing papers were issued (available from Interlink, 9 Poland Street, London WIV 300), but unfortunately these were little discussed. The three main themes of the conference, discussed in parallel sessions, were Internationalism, Democracy, and the Economy, and although there was some good discussion of the problems that socialists faced in these areas, there was also a great deal of restatement of set positions. The main session on the economy was a good example. Robin Murray spoke at length and in detail on the massive restructuring currently being undergone by the world economy, its effect on Britain, and its implications for a socialist economic policy; with particular reference to the Labour Party’s fear of intervention in industry at the point of production, and how this must, and could, be overcome. Yet none of the subsequent contributions from the floor, which were admittedly limited by the time Murray’s speech had taken up, even addressed themselves to what had been said.

Too many people at the conference, it seems, wanted it to be a rally of the faithful, rather than the beginning of a socialist glassnost. The ‘new realism’ of the Labour Party came in for much criticism, as did the Euro-communism of the new soft left. A number of left-wing Labour MPs (Eric Heffer, in particular) used the occasion to call for more struggle against Thatcherism and revisionism~ But this seemed to beg the question rather than answer it The whole problem of precisely why people are no longer engaged in struggle, why the political terrain has shifted, and how socialism can take stock of its failures and move forward again, was never really addressed. Changes in the working class and the trade union movement were not generally accepted as being indicative of a major transformation of the political terrain. Action, rather than analysis, was what was constantly demanded.

The conference was notable, however, for the wide range of its participants. Labour Party members, trade unionists, local councillors, MPs, old-age pensioners, Green Party members, and observers from Nicaragua, South Africa and Germany, along with a variety of far left activists were all present. Interestingly, the average age of participants seemed quite high.

One group which didn’t appear to be under-represented though were the Socialist Workers Party who, along with the Revolutionary Communist Party, Workers Power, and one or two other groups, attempted to block all entrances to the conference with newspaper sellers.

These groups were very vociferous on the first day, but kept a lower profile after several women speakers told them that they were no longer prepared to put up with the brow-beating fundamentalism of their arcane breed of political behaviour, which had seriously inhibited any genuine discussion in the early sessions.

However, there were a large number of workshops where interesting and lively debate did take place, showing that beyond the smaller, organised factions there is a good deal of rethinking going on. Ecological questions and the problems of racial discrimination were acutely posed as issues which go beyond traditional socialist demands, but these were not given as much space as the set-piece speeches from the platform.

There was criticism of the dominance of the platform over discussion, and this was somewhat rectified on the second day.

The biggest gain of the conference will probably prove to be the many useful contacts which were made. At a large meeting of the women present it was decided to set up an umbrella organisation, including Women against Pit Closures, which will press for 50% representation and speaking time at the next conference. The conference concluded with proposals to establish a ‘directory’ of left organisations which could form the basis of a network of contacts, and to organise a series of smaller, regional conferences leading up to another large conference in Chesterfield next May.

In this one is reminded of the early days of ‘Beyond the Fragments’, and of the first Socialist Society conference. Both of these movements, however, declined because the commonground they assumed proved to be theoretical rather than practical. It remains to be seen whether or not the Socialist Conference can overcome this problem, and the differences between its participants that were apparent all weekend, and become the force in British politics which its sponsors would like it to be. That it exists, and that it is attempting to do so, however, can only be a good thing for those interested in the growth of independent but united socialist movement in Britain.

Richard Osborne

I was not at that event, but took part in the Second Conference (also in Chesterfield) and the Third (see above) held in Sheffield.

Much of what Richard Osborne wrote rings true for the events. Some say that Chesterfield was the place where the phrase “the single Transferable Speech” was coined.

That would be to downplay more positive aspects. A  sense of common purpose was created. Valuable face-to face discussions also happened. There were important policy advances, on green issues and human rights. The  internationalist stand on Europe was not seriously challenged by those who believed that we could “in isolation build the basis of socialism in Britain alone”.

A full account of the conferences and the Socialist Movement has yet  be written.

One aspect that should be highlighted was the way that the internationalist left put forward policies that could be said to be the forerunners of Another Europe is Possible’s politics.

Here is a document from the Europe Policy Group, Jeremy Beale: Towards a Socialist Europe.

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The Policy Paper  sets out the case for  the socialist and green left to work with other European left forces,to “replace the EU with something quite different”. In “the meantime” the idea was to work within EU institutions, “including the European Parliament, to help generate a European socialist consciousness” and to act as a focus for common action and campaigns by the left across national frontiers. The determination of capital to complete the EU single market creates the space for demands for an alternative ‘social Europe”.

The document leaves the possibility that a left UK government might find itself in “confrontation and possible rupture with the EU and its institutions” hanging in the air.

Today we know that it is the most right-wing section of British politics and  capital, its financial vultures, free trade ultras and national populists, that has succeeded in effecting a “rupture” with the European Union.

They have received objective support, and electoral comfort, from the demands of the Leave left.

This Left thinks it is entitled to attack Keir Starmer (who was a member of the Socialist Society Steering Committee at the end of the 1980s)  set the agenda for new initiatives. This is despite its role, through promoting the idea that Brexit is a good idea, in Labour’s defeat.

This is the Morning Star today….

 

Labour’s lurched right – but the left should remember its strengths as well as its weaknesses

..the mass membership of the party of labour remains committed to radical change, so increasingly are the memberships of major trade unions and — as McCluskey also observes — voters were rejecting another EU referendum rather than a socialist policy platform when they cast their ballots last winter.

The question must be how we resist the further fragmentation and demoralisation of socialist forces which were not notably united or disciplined even in the Corbyn years.

A combination of twin-track workplace and community organising on the model pioneered by initiatives like Sheffield Needs a Pay Rise with local and national action by unions, in defence of jobs and pay but also to start setting an agenda for the economy we want, is a good place to start.

It is interesting that there is no mention of any “major gathering” to top off this ‘organising’.

Were one to take place it would be very hard for socialist internationalists to sit in the same room as people who blame Labour’s defeat on its rejection of actually existing Brexit and the Party call for a referendum on the issue.

Protests Against Coronavirus “False Alarm”, Berlin, Poland and London.

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British Protest Against Masks, Vaccines and Tests.

Spiked, the magazine of Baroness Claire Regina Fox, has been at the forefront of complaints against restrictions during the Coronavirus pandemic.

These are  just a couple of the latest of a long series of their articles.

I’m worried about all the people who think science is on their side and their attempts to ‘save lives’ are worth the cost of making those lives around them miserable.

The‌ ‌real‌ ‌maskholes

‘The lockdown has caused a humanitarian tragedy’

Barrister Francis Hoar explains why the lockdown may have been unlawful.

Germany: 18 officers injured dispersing Berlin rally against coronavirus curbs

Deutsche Welle.

Berlin police said that 18 of its officers were injured, while three were hospitalized in dispersing some 20,000 people protesting against anti-pandemic measures. Many participants dismissed the coronavirus as a “false alarm.”

At least 18 police officers were reportedly injured in Berlin on Saturday as they tried to break up a large gathering of people demonstrating against coronavirus restrictions, including the face mask requirement.

Three of the officers were being treated in hospital, Berlin police said on Twitter. It had deployed 1,100 officers to monitor the rally and disperse the crowd.

As German officials warn of soaring infection numbers, the protesters remain defiant. “The virus of freedom has reached Berlin,” said one of the organisers, Michael Ballweg.

 

The politics of the event was clearly on view.

Poland:

Image may contain: one or more people, people standing, crowd and outdoor, text that says "STOP TOTALITARYZMOM"

 

Britain, largely ignored demonstration.

Guess who’s in that video clip…

 

The Palestinian flag,  the far-right tenor of  their targets (Bill Gates, Soros) and the  ‘libertarian’  tinge of the ‘patriotic Free People Alliance, indicates the political confusionism of the movement.

Perhaps, with their influence in British Politics, Spiked could publicise the British protests.

 

 

hi

Written by Andrew Coates

August 2, 2020 at 11:24 am

Kate Hoey and Claire Fox in the House of Lords: Two Old Marxist Comrades Take the Ermine.

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Claire Fox: the BBC is the 'woke' channel

Bless You Your Ladyships!

Claire Fox and Kate Hoey amongst Brexiteers to receive peerages

Kate Hoey (who claims to have been in the International Marxist Group) and Claire Fox (who definitely was a leading figure in the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) are now Peers in the House of Lords.

We – the Trainspotters’ CC –  have had learned discussion on Hoey’s association with the IMG. The most reliable sources suggest she was a “contact”.

This is the claim,

Living in London in the early 1970s she became a vice-president of the NUS.[Jack Straw was NUS president at the time]. Returning from an overseas conference, she found herself sitting next to Tariq Ali on the plane. Tariq persuaded her to join the IMG, which she did in summer 1971.

In subsequent years she used to muddy this connection by claiming that she was in the Spartacus League, a short lived youth wing of the IMG. *She was never at ease with the Irish Republican Trotskyism of the IMG and was also very inimical to Gery Lawless an IMG member at the time.

She felt that having Lawless as a member discredited the IMG. Under the influence of Brian Trench [political influence of course!] she joined the IS in 1972 but her stay there was also limited.

She joined Hackney Labour party and supported the Troops Out Movement for a period before becoming a supporter of the BICO front organisation, Campaign for Labour Representation in Northern Ireland.

Nowadays the IPR group are quiet hostile to her,dubbing her TallyHoey in a recent article!

*  Not to be confused with The Spartacist League of Britain, an offshoot of the  James Robertson (1928 – 2019) International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

.

This is what she now says of this experience, (2nd of January 2016. Guardian)

She also became vice-president of the National Union of Students, and was briefly was a member of the International Marxist Group, because it “probably had better-looking young men” than other radical-left groups.

As ex-IMG myself I cannot disagree with that!

Fox, a graduate of this Blogger’s old Uni, Warwick, has left many traces, and there  is little doubt about her background. Or her middle name, which JR informs us is Regina. There are plenty of people ready to speak about the well-paid public face of the Red-Brown Star of the Spiked-Brexit Party alliance. She has plenty of platforms already to give her side of the  story, from BBC Radio Four to a frequent, dimming, presence on Sky News Press Review.

Here she was…

There are many RCP haters around, but before signaling our close comrades here is Otto English on form:

Otto English smells something in the air tonight…

But readers of Byline Times will remember that, when Fox became a Brexit Party candidate in the 2019 EU Elections, we raised some serious questions about her suitability as a politician.

For two decades, Fox was a key member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a fringe hard-left group formed in the late 1970s. I came up close and personal with the RCP myself while a student at the University of Kent, where many of its key personnel taught or studied and it was nothing short of a cult. The group was committed to the IRA struggle and, using front organisations – including notably the Irish Freedom Movement – it pushed the cause, while apologising for its very many violent excesses.

In 1993, the IRA targeted the town of Warrington and, in the resulting terrorist attack, two children were killed. One of them, Johnathan Ball was just three. The other, Tim Parry, 12. This revolting act of murder was met with almost universal revulsion. Even in hardened republican circles it was condemned. But the Irish Freedom Movement and RCP defended it saying that “the right of the Irish people to take whatever measures in their struggle for freedom” was justified.

Incredibly, Claire Fox was selected by the Brexit Party as one of its candidates for North-West England – a region that includes Warrington. Calls from her own party rank-and-file and from Tim Parry’s father Colin to apologise for her past position on IRA terror fell on deaf ears until she was eventually ordered by Brexit Party leaders to ring Mr Parry and say sorry. She did ring Mr Parry, but still failed to recant her position.

Clearly the patriots of the North-West didn’t notice any of this as they roundly elected her to be one of their MEPs.

Fox’s key role in the RCP was a co-publisher of Living Marxism (LM) magazine – a glossy monthly that eventually folded in 2000 after losing a libel action brought by ITN. LM, which was supportive of many a despicable regime – including Serbia – had claimed in an article titled ‘The Picture that Fooled the World’ that photos of a camp at Trnopolje had effectively been staged.

Views on Monarchy and the House of Lords:

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The quickly revised Wikipedia entry calls her now:

Claire Regina Fox, Baroness Fox

I’d add that I distinctly recall Fox being bombastic about her support for the the anti-monarchy Levellers, and the  radical republican wing of Chartism, not very long ago.

The Cds in full throttle:

 

Update: Links on the RCP/Living Marxism.

SPIKED FOOTNOTES

Bob From Brockley

My post on what Boris Johnson advisor Munira Mirza and brief Brexit MEP Claire Fox have in common – a background in the formerly left-wing sect that rebranded from the Revolutionary Communist Party to Spiked – has become unexpectedly timely of late.

The RCP’s long march from anti-imperialist outsiders to the doors of Downing Street  Bella Caledonia.

One Step Beyond – Smash the Revolutionary Communist Party  Nottingham Anarchists,

The Brexit Party, the RCP and the American connection. John Rogan.

More to follow….

The pattern of rewards for Leavers, or Leavings, is one side of the Peerage scandal.

 

Then there is this:

 

 

Labour Hub:

At least three more reasons for Lords reform

By Mike Phipps

For Kate Hoey, it’s been a long journey from the heady days of the far left International Marxist Group to the red leather benches of Britain’s Upper House. It encompasses thirty years as the MP for Vauxhall, following a controversial selection process, in which Labour’s NEC imposed a shortlist which excluded the most popular candidate, Haringey councillor and Broadwater Farm activist Martha Osamor. In Parliament, Hoey was a maverick, voting against the Labour government policy on the war in Iraq, foundation hospitals, university tuition and top-up fees, ID cards and extended detention without trial. In the 2010 leadership election she even nominated John McDonnell.

But she also opposed Blair’s ban on handguns and smoking ban and supports grammar schools and fox hunting. In 2019 she was the only Labour MP to vote against allowing abortion and same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland.

But it is for her ardent support for Brexit that she is being rewarded. She even criticised the BBC for   being “embittered remainers” who were “taking delight” in “undermining our country”. In July 2018 Hoey was one of five Labour MPs who defied the Labour whip to vote with the government on a Brexit amendment, which, if passed, would have required the UK to remain a member of a customs union with the EU in the event of ‘no deal’. In doing so, the five saved the government from defeat. In December 2019’s general election, she announced she would vote in Northern Ireland for the arch-conservative Democratic Unionist Party. She has been duly rewarded.

Claire Fox is another ex-leftist who has travelled far from her Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) roots to Brexit Party MEP. But her involvement in the RCP was not just a youthful dalliance. She was centrally involved in the leadership of this weird cult for two decades, co-publishing its magazine Living Marxism, later rebranded as LM, which closed in 2000 after the courts found it had falsely accused Independent Television News of faking evidence of the Bosnian genocide. Fox refused to apologise. So why has this genocide denier been rewarded with a peerage?

Again, the answer is Brexit. Fox and her co-thinkers moved in a libertarian direction in the 21st century and regrouped around the contrarian Spiked online website. Recent headlines include “Portland has been given over to the mob: Cowardly politicians let the protests spiral out of control”, “Keep masks out of the classroom” and “The left is turning into a Woke Taliban”. In 2019, Fox became a Brexit Party supporter and was elected as an MEP. Many of her old RCP comrades are now “fixtures in the Tory press”, noted one Guardian columnist.

Dame Louise Casey may have a less murky past, but she is no stranger to controversy. Appointed as “homelessness czar” under Tony Blair, with a mandate to reduce rough sleeping, she attacked homeless charities, including The Big Issue for keeping people on the streets. She initiated a “beggars hotline”, where people could donate money to homelessness charities, rather than giving money directly to beggars. It was axed after raising just £10,000 in its first winter, despite £240,000 being spent promoting it.

Written by Andrew Coates

July 31, 2020 at 7:37 pm

Social Democratic Party Leader Warns, “Britain is turning into the Eastern Bloc.”

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In Spiked SDP’s William Clouston Warns of “rise of Pravda-truth.”.

The Social Democrat Party (SDP) was a centrist break-away from the Labour Party founded in 1981. It was created by the ‘Gang of Four’, Roy JenkinsDavid OwenShirley Williams and Bill Rodgers. A central plank of their platform was to defend “moderation” against Labour left influence, and to offer a balanced alternative to Tory and left-wing extremism. Many made their pro-European views well known as points of principle.

Stuart Hall called them the “little Caesars of Social Democracy’. The theorists of ‘Thatcherism’  said that for all their talk of “participatory democracy” they were “at present devoid of any single vestige of popular politics or popular mobilisation”. In place of pitting a simulacrum of the “people” against the “power bloc” and offering national unity around a free-market programme, they offered “participation’. This presented a potential “cross class” centrist politics. They tried to manufacture  a “compromise” to replace Thacher’s uncompromising government. (In the essays collected in The Hard Road to Renewal. Thatcherism of the Crisis of the Left.  Stuart Hall. 1998).

28 Labour MPs joined the Party, and one Tory. There was support in the Guardian. A prominent student Communist (ex-NUS President), Sue Slipman, and the SDP’s student organiser John Mumford, an ex Young Communist, joined. There were efforts from that quarter to justify their membership, and, despite Hall’s analysis, some around Marxism Today appeared to consider the “reformers” (as opposed to the ‘centrists’) in the SDP a potential part of a “broad democratic alliance” against Thatcher. It was suggested the SDPs tradition, if the economics was faulty the original ‘revisionist’ Crosland’s social programme was still of value.

The departing Labour leaders of the new Party  formed the SDP-LIberal alliance in the year they launched. At one point they were polling ahead of both the Labour Party and the Conservatives.

The SDP’s never achieved anything other than helping keeping Labour out of power. After poor showings in repeated elections it merged with the Liberals and became the Liberal Democrats in 1989.

Man of Destiny, social marketeer, David Owen lumbered on, creating the Continuity SDP .

The party was dissolved in 1990 in the aftermath of a by-election in Bootle in which the party’s candidate was beaten by Screaming Lord Sutch‘s Official Monster Raving Loony Party.

That is, if one does not count the  SDP (Canal Historique).

This has its own Wikipedia entry: Social Democratic Party (UK, 1990–present)

One reads that,

The SDP is a centrist political party combining traditions of the centre-left on economics and centre-right on defence and social issues. A formal statement of its values and aims were set out in the SDP’s New Declaration in October 2018.

 

 

David Owen has moved to the sovereigntist right.

This is a pronouncement he issued this year (if anybody was listening):

STATEMENT ISSUED BY LORD DAVID OWEN ON THE EVE OF THE UK’S EXIT FROM THE EU
FRIDAY 31 JANUARY 2020
I will celebrate with the all-Party Vote Leave referendum campaigners on Friday evening and in particular with those who spent the last three and a half years, at personal cost in time and money, dealing with the Electoral Commission and those who tried to use the law in the hope of overturning the people’s decision.

Interest has been created by the SDP move to the right, and further.

They backed Brexit. Strongly.

They live, like the People’s Brexit Backers, live in that special world where Brexit was going to a launchpad for social progress.

With their celebration of sovereignty and national identity they have entered into the confused area where left has and embraced the right: red-brown politics.

One not too far off the kind of Blue Labour ‘anti-woke’ politics of Trade Unionists Against the EU Paul Embery, backed during the Referendum by the Socialist Party and other ‘Lexiteers’.

Pouting Prelate Giles Fraser, once a leading supporter of ant-globalisation protests,  is now a member.

Rod Liddle, Satan have mercy on his soul, is another.

Rod Liddle – Journalist and SDP Member

Rod Liddle is a journalist and author. A previous editor of Radio Four’s Today programme, he is currently a columnist for the Sunday Times, Sun and Spectator, of which he is associate editor. He is a member of the Social Democratic Party

I expect a Newshawk will find some link with the Full Brexit but for the moment….

And there is this in Spiked.

Britain is turning into the Eastern Bloc

William Clouston is leader of the Social Democratic Party.

On TV, on social media and in the workplace, Britons feel they cannot openly speak the truth.

Thirty-five years on, Eastern Europe and the UK appear to have swapped places. I first saw glimpses of this after the 2016 Brexit vote, when Leave-supporting friends in academia said they were too scared openly to endorse a view held by 52 per cent of the electorate. They feared being socially ostracised, condemned as racists or sacked from their jobs.

Many of us fear speaking out precisely because we feel alone and isolated, which has allowed the forceful minority of hyper-progressives to dominate our public discourse. The most potent way to disempower them is to show to those around you that decent, level-headed people do not need to play the game of Pravda-truth.­­­

How true, how very true.

Everything evil eventually lumbers its way to Spiked.

 

 

Written by Andrew Coates

July 31, 2020 at 11:57 am

Alain Soral: Far-Right, ‘Red-Brown’ Holocaust Denier Arrested.

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Soral: in French Courts Again.

France Info reports,

The far-right polemicist and writer Alain Soral was arrested on Tuesday and then placed in police custody in Paris by the brigade for the repression of personal delinquency (BRDP) for “public provocation to commit a crime or offence against the fundamental interests of the Nation “ . His custody was extended on Wednesday. According to franceinfo, Alain Soral will be referred this Thursday to the Paris prosecutor’s office.

A preliminary investigation is underway. In question, comments that the polemicist would have made on his site Equality and Reconciliation. The content of the speech is not known. His home was then searched. The reason for his arrest, “public provocation to commit a crime or offense affecting the fundamental interests of the Nation”, targets anyone threatening to attack political actors with national responsibilities.

This is not the first time that the far-right essayist Alain Soral has come into contact with justice. In January 2019, he was sentenced to one year in prison for “racial insult, provocation and incitement to hatred” by the Bobigny criminal court. The polemicist attacked a public prosecutor on his site. Last June, he was fined 5,000 euros, with the possibility of imprisonment in the event of non-payment for having contested the existence of the Shoah.

On July 6, his Youtube channels were deleted by the online video platform. The reason: “repeated breaches of the conditions of use” .

In 2019, “Alain Soral sentenced to one year in prison for having described the Pantheon as a “kosher waste reception centre”

The list is long:

 

Soral is a convicted Holocaust denier.

The list of legal cases and prosecutions against him is long and stretches back to 2008.

Procès intentés contre Alain Soral: Condemnations.

His friendship with the ‘comedian’ anti-Semitic Dieudonné has kept him in the wider, and youthful, public eye.

In fact Dieudonné’s YOutube channel was removed just before Soral’s.

Après Dieudonné, YouTube se débarrasse aussi de la chaîne d’Alain Soral

Alain Soral is not – the least you can say – a classical fascist.

The online politics of Alain Soral

Evelyne Pieiller wrote this article in 2013, but the account holds for today.

Visitors to Alain Soral’s Egalité et Réconciliation (Equality and Reconciliation, E & R) website see pictures of Hugo Chávez, Che Guevara, Muammar Gaddafi, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin on the left of the masthead. Joan of Arc and Soral are on the right. The site, with its motto “leftwing on labour, but rightwing values”, is France’s 269th most popular, a few places behind the TV magazine Télérama.

The juxtaposition of Guevara and Putin, of Chávez and rightwing values is a sign of the confused political times. The big questions are, who stands for what and what does it mean to be on the right or left?

He has not been afraid to change direction: from (apparently brief) membership of the Communist Party in the 1990s, to the Anti-Zionist List, co-founded with the comedian-activist Dieudonné (M’bala M’bala) for the 2009 EU elections, with two years in the Front National. He stresses his “bloody-mindedness” in a way reminiscent of the late lawyer Jacques Vergès, whose funeral he attended this August.

Soral, who is also a martial arts enthusiast, is subtly but clearly a mix of eternal adolescent — his questions are intense, and he’s non-conformist in what he engages with, and ignores — and man in the street: he has the heroic, robust isolation of someone without party or support, trying to see things for what they are, despite opposition. Filmed in casual clothes, on a sofa, he is the antithesis of an academic or career politician, and picks and mixes his ideologies; this is popular online with many people who no longer have the political education from party or union membership that once shaped their views.

Many of Soral’s ideas would be unexpected on British ‘red-brown’ sites,

The new world order, “the empire”, seeks a democracy in name only, the “power of the richest” that upholds an abstract egalitarianism replacing the question of social inequality and class exploitation with societal questions, justifying this in the name of human rights.

Soral advocates “leaving the European Union, leaving NATO, and reclaiming control of our currency … to restore France’s sovereignty and give democracy some of its meaning back”, fighting the obsolescence of nation states and introducing protectionism.

Some of Soral’s principles surely strike a chord in these quarters.

His view of the nation is that, to protect the people, it should reject selfishness and “cosmopolitan profits”; this supposes that the nation has a single essence, a spirit that belongs to a particular culture, and that it must exclude amoral cosmopolitanism. Starting with a call for sovereignty in the face of supranational laws, he arrives at a near-mythic conception of the nation that will allow the creation of “a labour, patriotic and popular front against all the networks of finance and globalised ultra-liberalism” (4): what he calls a “national fraternal community, conscious of its history and culture”, uniting those who want the most equitable division of work and wealth and those who want to preserve what is good and human in the Helleno-Christian tradition, which he presumes led to the demand for true equality.

The article then enters more controversial territory where red and brown conspiracy theories of the confusionist left and right, meet. That is the world of “secret networks that infiltrate all the decision-making institutions of the empire, neutralising or corrupting political action.”

He believes that Jews are at the root of these conspiracies, linked to the rapacious US — it’s the old accusation that they are rootless cosmopolitans intent on the accumulation of capital; banks are Jewish, the press is Jewish, the destruction of national unity is Jewish. Soral hates them obsessively and sees them everywhere. He says his views are anti-Zionist, and oppose Israeli policy — but they are straight anti-Semitism, not support for the Palestinians, or mere provocation.

That is a fair introduction to Soral, although he would certainly defend the claim that he backs the Palestinians.

Soral’s ideas cover broader areas.

Soral’s views summarised:

 Soral’s ideology tends to focus on seven main themes:

More recently Soral has emphasised the ‘red’ side of his red-brown politics, backing the Gilets Jaunes.

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Soral also defends the heritage of  ‘European civilisation’.

Soral’s supporters are already protesting against the arrest.

hi

 

 

 

 

Written by Andrew Coates

July 30, 2020 at 11:15 am

What is Keirism? Labour Membership Turns to the Future.

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What is Keirism?

 

A couple of months ago people wrote that ” no one knows what ‘Keirism‘ is.”

On the 15th of July Clive Lewis MP  said,

Critics of the Labour leader prefer to use the word Starmerism.

Phil even had a whole article on the subject, reproduced by his friends in Jewish Voice for Labour.

The Weakness of Starmerism

He claims that, ” Corbynism, like its Bennite forebear, was a movement from within Labourism that pushed it to its limits, And from there, perhaps a post-capitalist anywhere?”

Now, alas,

Starmerism, if we can speak of such a thing, is getting that genie back into the bottle. It does so by ostentatiously – not a word one normally associates with Keir Starmer – gripping Tory framing without contesting it, offering weak sauce managerial criticisms where it can muster a word against the government, stamping on anything one might construe as radical or, shudder, socialist, and evacuating anything resembling hope from the Labour Party’s platform – something even Tony Blair recognised the importance of and was keen to cultivate.

While it pretends itself pragmatic, it is the most dogmatic form of Labourism. It claims to be oriented to the challenges of the present, but wants to forever impose the past on the politics of the future. Sure, the party is improving in the polls.

It might win an election on its present course (we’ll see), but going by what Keir says and does all we can look forward is the status quo under more competent management. Therefore anyone thinking what we’re seeing now is “caution” so Keir, as the new leader, can get a hearing are kidding themselves. What you see now is what we’re getting, assuming he continues to get his own way. Coronavirus plus economic crisis plus Brexit equals a perfect storm for political polarisation, and inevitably demands a response equal to the moment. If Keir Starmer isn’t forthcoming then his careful project will come to naught

Many of his comrades and fellow-thinkers are less complimentary.

At the end of June the US owned Tribune carried this article by its editor.

How Keir Starmer Sabotaged Rebecca Long-Bailey

The socialist politics Rebecca Long-Bailey represents has no place within Starmerism, as the other Left members of the shadow cabinet will realise in due course. His political project is to present Labour to the British establishment as a safer pair of hands, a less disruptive force, than even the Tories. 

The article is reproduced in his boss’s paper, the one-time left populist Jacobin, with this title:

Labour Leader Keir Starmer Sabotaged Rebecca Long-Bailey to Undermine the Left

Yet, no doubt for, amongst others,  euphonic reasons, the Starmerism word hasn’t really caught on.

Will Keirism last the course? 

Perhaps we ought to take up the suggestions of Guy Lucas-Bhana and focus on giving offering to  ‘Keirism’ a wider content for the ‘Post Covid Labour Alternative’.

Paul Mason recently asked,

His answers, open to debate begin around these ideas,

Mass unemployment is on the horizon, the undermining of local government democracy and funding are looming, Tory abolition of the Human Rights Act is  in the offing, and moves to marginalise independent Public Broadcasting are already underway. 

Labour campaigns against these threats need support not in-fighting or a lash out into another break-away like the Socialist Alliance, or George Galloway’s Respect Party.

We need the positive ideas and energy Paul Mason outlines.

 

Inside the Party the ‘fighters’ are not on the up. It looks now as if whatever word we use, Starmerism or Keirism,  Keir Starmer’s new leadership faces no serious challenge.

People are not deserting  the party en masse, although yesterday 400 devoted  an early evening to watching the ‘stay and fight’ event of Labour Against the Witch-hunt.

That kind of frontal opposition is, and will remain, a fringe activity.

Contrary to the wilder predictions of an exodus of members people seem to be joining the party.

‘More people have joined Labour than left’ under Keir Starmer, NEC says

The New European reports,

Despite claims from the Labour left that the new leader is attempting to purge them from the party, the number of members has increased compared to a year before.

Jeremy Corbyn has been credited with growing the membership numbers, with the previous high reported at 564,000 in December 2017.

 

Written by Andrew Coates

July 29, 2020 at 4:14 pm

Labour Against the Witch-hunt Hosts Debate on ‘Free Speech’.

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Chaired by Tina Werkmann of Labour Against the Witchhunt and the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee, CPGB-PCC), Labour Party Marxists,  who “works at Labour Left Alliance”.

This important event will discuss how we can fight back against McCarthyite attempts to stifle debate on the issue of Israel/Palestine – and label those unjustly expelled and suspended as ‘unpersons’ who we are not allowed to share platforms with.

No to (self-) censorship! Discuss how we can fight back and mobilise for free speech in the Labour movement and beyond.

Speakers include Norman Finkelstein, Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, David Miller, Tariq Ali and Tony Greenstein.

Many of the speakers are too well known to need further introduction.

But note this: 

David Miller, (2020)

a report in The Times detailed how Prof Miller is a director of a group known as the Organisation for Propaganda Studies (OPS), which has promoted theories about the September 11 terrorist attacks, the shooting down of an airliner over Ukraine in 2014, the White Helmets humanitarian rescue group in Syria, the anti-vax movement and the origins of coronavirus.

Ahead of a probe into his conduct, Bristol professor resigns from Labour blaming ‘the Zionist movement’

Norman Finkelstein, Verso Blog 2018:

The chimera of British anti-Semitism (and how not to fight it if it were real)

In hard to read, adjective strewn prose,  Finkelstein continues,
 
 Is it anti-Semitism to believe that “Jews have too much power in Britain”—or is it just plain common sense? (It is, to be sure, a question apart and not one amenable to simple solution how to rectify this power inequity while not impinging on anyone’s democratic rights.) Still, isn’t it anti-Semitic to generalize that “Jews” have abused their power? But even granting that a portion have been manipulated or duped, it certainly appears as if British Jews in general support the anti-Corbyn juggernaut. If this indeed is a misapprehension, whose fault is it? The tacit message of the unprecedented joint editorial on the front page of the major Jewish periodicals was: British Jews are united—Corbyn must goIs it anti-Semitic to take these Jewish organizations at their word?
Then there is Tony Greenstein…
 
Marlon Solomon on Twitter: ""The NEC's case is that Greenstein's ...
 
At least a couple of these people (including Tariq Ali)  are members of the Labour Party.
 
Image may contain: text that says "Reports Tina Werkmann, LAW's vice-chair, presented the steering committee's report of work. This noted the assistance LAW has provided to numerous members of the Labour Party who have been suspended or expelled. It was clear from the 'evidence packs' that criticisms of Israel and Zionism were used as proof of'anti- Semitism. LAW's help rebutting these the members were still shown the door, because this witch-hunt is not about eradicating anti-Semitism, but getting rid of the left, she said."
 
Reports that the Editor of the Canary Kerry-Anne Mendoza may be watching this event and could intervene have not been confirmed. 
 

Morning Star Goes Lenin, forerunner of the “broad progressive anti-capitalist alliance.”

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Communist Party #CP100 (@CPBritain) | Twitter

“Recognition of the need for a “vanguard” party.”

A couple of days ago the Morning Star, a paper independent of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and owned by the co-op hailed Jeremy Corbyn’s Go-fund-me appeal.

Corbyn’s GoFundMe success is great – what can it mean for the movement?

Starmer is rolling back the socialist policies won over five years in the party at quite a pace, but socialists should recognise both that there are more of us than there were five years ago and that the policies Labour stood for in two manifestos retain significant popular appeal.

In view of the attacks on the popular appeal behind Labour’s General Election result resistance is needed.

That should inform a fightback — one which certainly involves resisting Labour’s lurch to the right, but one which also looks to the areas where the Corbyn project was weak, where it failed to cut through. Labour figures like Ian Lavery, Laura Smith and Jon Trickett are addressing important questions on rebuilding in communities long neglected by the party.

Leaving in the air exactly what “party political form” this should take to the furrows of the labour movement, whether this ahs any friends in Parliament whatsoever.

But whether it takes party political form or not, the priority should be to organise, as workers and as members of communities, to resist the gathering storm of job losses, pay cuts and renewed austerity — and in the process build a labour movement with far stronger roots in the people, that can win for workers whether or not it has friends in Parliament.

One party political form interests the Morning Star – Leninism and the claims of the Communist Party of Britain to his legacy.

This week is the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the British Communist Party. It is being marked every evening this week, by Pandemonium, a programme of online lectures and on Saturday August 1 by Red Wedge — a centenary online gala. For more details visit www.communistparty.org.uk.

Readers on Sunday could be instructed on Lenin in the pages of the daily.

What is ‘Leninism’?

MOST of the “Full Marx” answers to date have been to do with the significance of Marxism in relation to history, philosophy, economics and the environment.

But often you’ll come across the term “Marxism-Leninism.” What’s that “Leninism” bit about?

Sometimes it’s explained as “theory” (Marx) and “revolutionary practice” (Lenin).

But that would be far too simple. Marx and Engels did initiate the theoretical analysis of class society — particularly capitalism — and its dynamics.

Not being a Leninist but a First International Marxist I may have a few points of disagreement in the following.

Lenin emphasises the need for determination in implementing Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” during the initial phases of socialism if the ultimate object of the revolution — a classless society characterised by “to each according to their needs” can be achieved.

The intermediate phase, argues Lenin, must be characterised by a genuine, participative, democracy at the level of the workplace and communities, which will replace the need for a coercive state.

Following the revolution and the establishment of Soviet power Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder (1920) also focuses on issues (and individuals) of the day and again emphasises the difference between (short-term) tactics and (long-term) strategy.

Within the new post-war context of “existing socialism” (still threatened by counter-revolution and Allied and Japanese wars of intervention) and the defeat of socialist movements elsewhere, Lenin emphasises the need to work with other progressive forces in a broad progressive anti-capitalist alliance.

Not many people would say that Lenin worked during the first years of the Soviet government towards a “genuine, participative democracy”. Perhaps a historian will unearth for us as well to the 1920s use of the latest CPB term “broad progressive anti-capitalist alliance” in the ‘actuality of the revolution’ following the Great War.-

Down to the message: there is a library of critiques of Leninism, the invention of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ and Lenin’s own political practice from the left by Marxists, Democratic Socialists, Social Democrats and Anarchists. This specious account of ‘Leninism’ is a disgrace.

To begin with what was ‘”post-war” “existing socialism” from 1918 onwards (many would add that many Leninists talk of this time not as socialism but as part of the ‘transition’ to socialism)?

Whatever the causes, civil war or party messianic intolerant structure, including Lenin’s belief that he was able to read the runes of HIstory, it was about as far from democratic socialism as you could possibly get.

In Soviet Russia the Spring and Summer of 1918 began with the “arrests and harassment of non-Bolshevik activists”. They and the Socialist revolutionaries, were removed from the Soviet CEC. Yet they continued political activity. They focused on the defence of “the rights of labour” and the “defence of trade unions, with as a backdrop plans to make unions agents of “labour discipline” and “compulsory labour service” or the “militarisation of labour” exalted by Trotsky in Terrorism and Communism (1920). With their position set out in What is to be done: The Menshevik Programme July 1919 they had had a wider echo, Marcel Liebman and others record, within the official bodies .

For Trotsky the Mensheviks had in 1917, “together with the bourgeoisie, declared civil war against the Soviets”. In the Winter of 1920-1 the Mensheviks were systematically suppressed.

Two Years of Wandering is shot through with insights into those years of upheaval, the gaoling and exile of “thousands of socialists and non-party workers who (had) been so bold as to doubt the divine infallibility of the Bolshevik authorities, with all their fantasies, scandals, petty tyranny and occasional 180-degree turns. “(Page 53) From the famous 1920 visit of the British delegation to a meeting addressed by Printers’ leaders and Mensheviks, which criticised the “terrorist dictatorship of the minority”, the last Congress of Soviets at which the opposition was reluctantly tolerated, to the crackdown after the Kronstadt (1921) which marked the beginning of systematic elimination of dissent, the Mensheviks were disorganised. (3) A party that “had adapted all its tactics to the struggle for an open existence despite the Bolshevik terror.” was unable to mount any effective challenge (Page 98).

Dan was in prison during the Kronstadt revolt, which, when the news of this, following a strike wave, reached them, convinced those arrested that they were about to be shot. There were indeed mass killings. A gaoler, ‘S’ regaled Dan with tales of massacring whites. He also had this anecdote, “some Jewish trader they had arrested on suspicion that the leather he was carrying in his cart had concealed weapons under it. There were no weapons, but before letting the trader go, he wanted to have his ‘little joke’ at the expense of the ‘bourgeois’ so he stood him against a wall and ordered that he be shot – but they fired blanks. They did this three times – just to they could bring a little happiness to their prisoner when they told him he was free to go – although he could easily have died of heart failure.”(Page 121)

Sent to Remand gaol, Dan observed waves of new arrivals. Protests and demonstration were followed “on each occasion, a few intellectuals and party workers, together with hundreds of grey, non-party workers, would pass through the prison. There were tramway workers, workers from the Skorokhod, Obukhov, Putilov and Rechkin factories – all of working class Petersburg.”(Page 138) Conditions deteriorated, but perhaps what was most striking is that “once entering a Soviet prison, nobody can know even approximately how long he will be in there and how the imprisonment will end.” (Page 142)

Two Years of Wandering. A Menshevik Leader in Lenin’s Russia. Fedor Il’ich Dan. Francis King. Tendance Coatesy. Review.

But this may be to wander into the actually existed history of the Soviet Union.

What really matters for the writer of the Morning Star article is Britain,

Lenin argues that British communists should unite into a single Communist Party, that they should participate in elections as part of the process of replacing Parliament with truly democratic system of soviets, that Pankhurst’s insistence that “the Communist Party must keep its doctrine pure” was mistaken, and that while he could not deal with the question of affiliation or non-affiliation to the Labour Party, a new Communist Party should work closely with the Labour Party while retaining ““complete freedom of agitation, propaganda and political activity.”

Translation for today: the British Communist Party should continue to “work closely” with the Labour Party, and be treated with respect for condescending to do so,  while being as unpleasant as it likes about Keir Starmer and any other rapscallion renegades leading the party.

The article concludes.

So, what is “Leninism” today? Lenin’s great contribution was the development of both theory and practice in the very specific circumstances of the period either side of the Russian Revolution.

As Jonathan White argues in an online lecture for the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School, we can learn an immense amount from the study of that period.

(Note, indeed, see above book from Francis King)

For those who claim the term, Leninism is practical revolutionary action based on a strong theoretical understanding in the context of specific existing circumstances — an antidote to those for whom Marxism is something purely theoretical.

But in this it is also, arguably, an unnecessary “ism.” Both Marx and Engels always argued for the unity of theory and practice.

Changing the world at the same time as interpreting it are inseparable goals. And their recognition of the need for a “vanguard” party (the subject of another answer in this series) is explicit in Marxist theory and practice.

In their Communist Manifesto, communists, organised into a revolutionary party, represent “the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country; that section which pushes forward all others” to establish a society “for the many” as a key stage in the transition to a classless society.

There is another famous quote, from the 1864 First Clause of the Rules of the First International,

That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves; …

The Principle of Self-Emancipation in Marx and Engels .Hal Draper.

Written by Andrew Coates

July 27, 2020 at 5:04 pm

Paul Mason, setting out an Agenda for “The future of the Labour left”.

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“The future of the Labour left? “

A few days ago it was cheering to read this interview with Pablo Iglesias in Le Monde.

The leader of the radical left party, Podemos, believes that the Europe Union  has turned its back on austerity and neoliberal economics.

Spain should be the main beneficiary, along with Italy, of the European recovery plan. Are you satisfied with the deal?

It is a turning point: a historic renunciation by Europe of austerity and a way of facing the economic crisis diametrically opposed to that of 2008. There will be no “men in black” [officials of the “troika” – European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund and Commission – sent to Greece during the sovereign debt crisis], nor budget cuts. A few years ago, “eurobonds” and a united and common approach to the economic crisis seemed unimaginable. The neoliberal dogmatism that has done so much harm to Europe and its populations, especially in the South, has finally been corrected.

Iglesias does not skirt around the problems Podemos faces in with its governing partners, the Spanish Socialists (PSOE), its poor showing in the regions where there were July local elections (Mixed bag in Spain’s first pandemic elections) nor the difficulties it has faced with the “cloaques de l’Etat” who did all they could to prevent Podemos entering government.

But, give the context of the pandemic, the EU turn, agreement on a coming new Spanish budget framework,  and an expansionist “neo-Keynesian” economics will be steps in the right direction. Talking of Catalan, Basque nationalist and regionalist movements the  radical politician looks forward to a potential République plurinationale et solidaire”. Le Mode described Iglesias as a “Pillar of the Spanish government” – though an article just beneath it noted disagreement on PM Sanchez’s arrangements with the centre-right party Ciudadanos.

The interview was picked up in Spain.

 

Back in Brexit Britain the left’s debate continues to be occupied by those who make this (US) gesture.

The rapid accumulation of Jeremy’s defence fund isn’t just a reaction against vindictive elites, it’s a protest against the Labour leader too.

On Jeremy Corbyn’s Defence Fund

By contrast Paul Mason has written on the issues that preoccupy Pablo Iglesias.

The Labour Party faces a historic challenge: the Covid-19 pandemic has triggered state intervention, bailouts, massive borrowing, direct income support and central bank money printing all across the world. And it’s not over.

Paul Mason covers this, without the emotion-charged language that is leading many to recoil from the left.

The Labour left is demoralised and divided. Some activists are leaving the party; others want the left to become an organised opposition to Keir Starmer, producing a continuous negative commentary from the sidelines. The Labour right, and their backers in the British media establishment, are only too happy to fuel this anger with continuous trolling and calls for a purge.

The writer-activist speaks for a constituency that stands apart from any of the above,

I’m part of a left that wants to engage with Starmer’s project and to help shape it, defending its core agenda of climate, social and economic justice from the inevitable pushback from the party’s right, and by solving through practice the strategic problems outlined below.

There is a favourable political landscape inside Labour.

The Labour Together election review gives us an opening: it says the strategy most likely to bring victory in 2024 is the offer of radical economic change, combined with a new narrative and activism aimed at communities currently alienated from progressive ideas, plus a more professional party.

The left’s job is to (a) define what this big change agenda means (b) start fighting for it independently through our activism; and ( c) extend party democracy.

This Blog cannot underline too strongly the boost that Paul’s open-minded suggestions could give to left-wing morale.  They are agenda-setting ideas how the left could build a credible alternative to Conservative rule. They offer the terms for fruitful debate.

The Left, the Party and the Class is a landmark.

The thing to do now is decide: does the anti-capitalist left want to be a component part of the project Labour members voted for, criticising the front bench where needed, and maintaining our distinct organisations, but pushing the whole party towards a radical economic change agenda?

Or does “stay in and fight” mean fighting the leadership and each other, in an atmosphere constantly poisoned by right-wing media trolls? In the end it’s up to us.

Spot on!

Written by Andrew Coates

July 26, 2020 at 11:03 am

Grime artist Wiley: Temporary Ban from Twitter following anti-Semitism ‘accusations’.

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Image may contain: 1 person, text that says "Wiley accused of antisemitism after likening Jews to Ku Klux Klan topping Chart-topping grime rapper compares Jews to the Ku Klux Klan as '2sets of people who nobody really wanted to challenge' BANLIEUE"

Temporary Twitter Ban for MBE Wiley.

The tweets began in the late evening yesterday.

Wiley’s Twittering Machine showed few fluctuations, trends, peaks and troughs.

It was all low-points. An on-line horror story.

I doubt if anybody would call Wiley’s tweets a sign of “new fascisms (that) are emerging round micro celebrities, mini-patriarchs and the flow of homogenised messages.” (The Twittering Machine. Richard Seymour. 2019.)

The tweets were stream-of-consciousness anti-Semitism.

If like this Blog you had not heard of Wiley before you will not forget him now.

 

 

 

Anealla Safdar, the European editor of Al Jazeera news blasted the singer – and suggested he has been racist before.

She tweeted: “Unsurprisingly, Wiley, who told British Asian pop star Jay Sean ‘I will throw Bombay potatoes on you’, ‘Your mum makes a dodgy korma’ and ‘I will slap off your dad’s turban’, in 2011, is an unhinged racist. But he still was made an MBE in 2017.”

MIrror.

Now:

Grime artist Wiley given temporary ban from Twitter amid anti-Semitism accusations

Grime artist Wiley has been given a temporary ban from Twitter and been dropped by his management company over accusations of anti-Semitism.

The musician posted a screenshot on Instagram this morning, showing he had been given a temporary Twitter ban but will be allowed back into his account later this morning.

He also posted a video in which he said “crawl out from under your little rocks and defend your Jewish privilege”.

However, the social media platform has been accused of “ignoring anti-semitism” because his tweets are still visible 12 hours after they were first posted.

Update: Musically informed post on Shiraz: 

Wiley: two wrongs never make a right

Written by Andrew Coates

July 25, 2020 at 11:02 am

Anne Applebaum, “Performative Authoritarianism” and Populism. Some Thoughts.

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Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism – A ...

 

“Those, however who were always truculently at loggerheads with their teachers, interrupting the lessons, nevertheless sat down, from the day, indeed the very hour of their matriculation, at the same table and the same beer, in male confederacy, vassals by vocation, rebels who, crashing their fists on the table already signalled heir worship for their masters.”

Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia.  No 123. The Bad comrade.

““By the early 1950s, all was grey. ”  Anne Applebaum revisited the lands of the post-war Soviet glacis, ” War-damaged capitals of the ‘ancient states;’ of the region, to use Churchill’s phrase, were patrolled by the same kind of unsmiling policemen, designed by the same socialist realist architects and draped with the same kind of propaganda posters (Iron Curtain. The Crushing of Eastern Europe. 1944 – 1956. 2012.

Applebaum portrayed the violent imposition of Soviet rule over Eastern Europe,”The nascent totalitarian states could not tolerate any competition whatsoever for their citizens’ passion, talents and free time.”(Page  185) Totalitarianism aimed to create “politically homogeneous” societies. “They “really did think that sooner of later the working-class majority would acquire class consciousness, understand its historical destiny and vote for a communist regime.”

In Red Famine, Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017) Applebaum wrote of the 5 million who perished in the Holodomor (Hunger-extermination in Ukrainian) alone. In 1933 starvation hit the USSR as Stalin’s forced collectivisation reduced the peasantry to forced labourers and destroyed agriculture. In this country,  mass starvation reached a peak, a “famine within the famine” that she argued was “a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.”(Page 193) 

Both books, and her earlier Gulag: A History, (2004), are memorable indictments of Soviet-led Communism. They  are challenging works for those seeking some saving aspects in the regimes of ‘actually existing socialism’, or consign this recent past to history.

Applebaum has now turned her attention to populism.

Writing in the Washington Post during Donald Trump’s election campaign  in 2016 she looked at new political wave.

..this loose group of parties and politicians — Austria’s Freedom Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the UK Independence Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, Poland’s Law and Justice, Donald Trump — have made themselves into a global movement of “anti-globalists.” Meet the “Populist International”

What was the programme of this new international? Appelbaum used something of the tone taken a couple of years on in Madeleine Albright’s warning about modern ‘fascism’,  somebody who ” claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary – including violence – to achieve his or her goals” (Fascism. A Warning, Madeleine Albright. 2018.) Like the former US Secretary of State she underlines the lack of limits, that is disrespect for the normal rules of law, of populists. They may not be fascists but…

the parties that belong to the Populist International, and the media that support it, are not Burkean. They don’t want to conserve or preserve what exists. Instead, they want to radically overthrow the institutions of the present to bring back things that existed in the past — or that they believe existed in the past — by force. Their language takes different forms in different countries, but their revolutionary projects often include the expulsion of immigrants, or at least the return to all-white (or all-Dutch, or all-German) societies; the resurrection of protectionism; the reversal of women’s or minorities’ rights; the end of international institutions and cooperation of all kinds. They advocate violence…

Appelbaum’s latest book is, or at least, as a paint it, as much about her former friends and colleagues who have joined this “populist international”, as the national populism itself. A world of highly educated, hosts and hostesses, those of her circle in Eastern Europe, above all Poland (her husband’s home country), bravely stood up to disintegrating and increasingly powerless Communist states, and achieved the ends of liberalism with the regimes’ demise. Many of them, amongst her Republican circles in the US, in Poland and Hungary have moved to Trump and the national populist right  of the Law and Justice Party and  Orbán. They are both ornaments and technicians of governments that claim, or aim to, overthrow globalising elites. The word she uses for them is, “collaborators”.

Is “their fealty to the new order”, a conversation with Nick Cohen suggests,  the result of a “lust for status among resentful men and women, who believe the old world never gave them their due”? Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit. Or are their career paths,  one might suggest to an author who uses Adorno’s studies in the “authoritarian personality”, following the mundane tracks of youth becoming part of authority?

The nationalist strain in the views of her British Conservative, ‘Burkean’ friends, the charming dilettantes of the Spectator, and the winsome, if self-regarding, Boris Johnson, were  a hidden ideology in full view.

The late Roger Scruton, caught up in the author of Reflections on the Revolution in France‘s contract between the “living and the dead” and Barrès’ “la terre et les morts” was a nationalist whose final books repeated a message he had polished over decades.

When we wish to summon the ‘we’ of political identity we refer to our countryWe do not use grand and tainted honorifics like la partie or Das Vaterland. We refer simply to this spot of earth, which belongs to us because to belong to it, have loved it, lived in it, defended it, and established peace and prosperity within its borders.”( Where We Are. The State of Britain Now. Roger Scruton.  2017) 

That  should have been obvious.

One does not have be seized with class hatred (although it might help) to nod at James Bloodworth’s review of the book,

While Applebaum and her friends were revelling in the triumph of liberal democracy in the 90s — breathing in the pieties of the new world from the rarefied atmosphere of Manhattan cocktail parties, diplomatic lunches and garden parties at the Spectator — deindustrialised regions in Britain, America and parts of Europe were being devastated by institutional breakdown, poverty and despair. But this is surely pertinent to any discussion of contemporary populism; as Michael Lind has written for UnHerd, “the heartlands of populism are often deindustrialised former manufacturing regions such as the North of England and the American Rust Belt”.

Who paved the way for the populists?

To explain populism is an ambitious research-programme. It raises a pile of issues, as the score of so books on the topic reviewed on this Blog alone indicates.

Her articles and reviews of the new book suggest that Anne Applebaum has important things to say.

But on the evidence the writer and historian seems to begin from the assumption that this turn is recent, located if not entirely in the last decade, at least not stretching much beyond the present century. But  how far back can one go to find the political and social origins of right-wing populism?

 

The vocabulary it uses has  contorted origins. Elites, a term whose sociological and political use has roots in the Italian far-right writer Vilfredo Pareto and “oligarchy”, in Robert Michels’ iron law, could be seen as positive terms, as well as an inevitable bind of democratic politics. Who knows, somebody outside management studies might rediscover the merits of the Pareto Principle of concentrating on the minority that is the best,

Another issues comes from that many European populist parties have indeed had electoral weight only since the beginning of the new millennium. But there is an important exception. Marine Le Pen’s National Populist party, the Rassemblement National (RN), first peaked under her father’s leadership in the 1986 French legislative elections,  9.8% of the vote and (under Proportional Representation) 35 seats in the National Assembly.  Since its rebranding as the RN in 2018 the rally  is trying to move from the ‘anti-system’ far right to a less extreme right that poses as a national government-in-waiting.

A convincing account of the RN’s electoral performance over the years (Marine le Pen in 2017 Presidential contest received  the largest share of support of all French parties from working class voters, a statistic that is not unchallenged.)  and prospects cannot be written in terms of phrases about a new populist international and the “seduction of authoritarianism”. To cap this, there is the phenomenon of “red-brown” support, former leftists who now identify with national populist identity politics, and (in the case of France, and the UK), back populist parties, most visibly the British Brexit Party of Nigel Farage,

Yet, there is a rejoicing in left-wing heaven at repentant republican Appelbaum’s criticisms of Donald Trump’s “performative authoritarianism” and European national populism.

One can find a degree of common ground in the need to combat rather than understand it. The left populists who hoped to funnel the streams of resentment into their own channels of popular and socialist sovereignty, often seem to forget that point….

 

From the Decline in Working Class Politics to Labour’s ‘Civil War’.

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Labour CIVIL WAR: Keir Starmer already facing party revolt ...

What We Don’t Need is a Labour “Civil War”.

After the Conservative landslide at the December elections there has been a flood of commentary about the decline of traditional support for the Labour Party.

Phil offers an outline.

The  collapse in class consciousness on the part of millions of working class people who’ve entered into retirement over this last decade was a long time in the works. It was assiduously deconstructed, deracinated and deposited in the receptacle of history.

The one brake on this process preventing the collapse from happening earlier was not their links to the present, i.e. the lives of their offspring, but the living relations to the past. Their parents were their conscience, a reminder not only of where they came from but their exposure to a set of values that hadn’t changed: a collective and small p political culture of working class consciousness with a fidelity to local community, the union, and, crucially, the Labourist reflex.

As this generation dies they fade into memory and the obligation to vote the right way dies with them. Indeed, some might have felt a frisson of transgression when they ticked the box next to the Tory candidate back in December, but ultimately what mattered more to them was feeding the fears and delusions and cruelty inculcated in them over the past 40 years.

Obligation and Class Consciousness

He suggests that, ” we have the rise of conditional and transactional politics. To put it simply, larger numbers of people vote not out of party loyalty but because parties are offering and doing something they want.” (Conditional and Transactional Politics).

This voting behaviour was observed back in 1971 by Barry Hindess in The Decline of Working Class Politics. After having seen that within the Labour Party “the determination of local policy is now very largely in the hands of activists in the more middle-class areas”, and that politics, at that time did not offer a choice outside of a narrow consensus (a 1960’s version of “post-politics”),

the electorate are now less likely to vote out of a sense of class solidarity and more in terms of a sober calculation of material avantages. (Page 148)

The idea of ‘instrumental politics”, the rise of calculation made by ‘affluent workers’ in the 1960s, and, even more prominently  during the Thatcher years, might offer some explanation for the detachment of people from class to individual voting. Blair and Brown made an appeal to this hard-headed constituency in order to restore “trust with the public”. They claimed to offer progress, a capacity to compete in a globalised world, based on what Peter Mandelson has called, a “A constructive partnership with business.” (Revolution revisited.2002)

Nobody would present the last election as a battle within consensual limits. Nor was what people “wanted’ and voted for clearly based on economics. Political scientists may talk of historical support patterns becoming “unglued” and the way that Johnson “Though Johnson was widely unpopular, his party also moved to the centre on economic issues, a strategy that helped sideline Corbyn’s class-based appeal. But, he “emphasised the largely identity-based fight over Brexit.“(Vox)

What did those whose identity politics led them to back ‘Get Brexit Done’ and to “Unleash Britain’s potential” cast their ballots for?

Taking Backing Control looks like a lifebuoy many new Tory voters grasped at when pinned down and asked what they were backing.

The cultural reasons for this support would be better looked at in terms of a wider shift away, with different degrees of sympathy amongst different electorates, to national populism across Europe, That is, while the UK Conservatives  are a special case (not least as the oldest political party in the world) , they share part of the ideology that, as two authors sympathetic to the ideas expressed state, “”national populists prioritise the culture and interests of the nation, and promise to give voice to a people who feel that they have been neglected, even held in contempt, by distant and often corrupt elites.” Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, (National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. 2018)

It could be suggested that one way to look further at he forces behind this it is through comparative studies, looking at similar de-alignments in countries whose working class history and politics resembles in some ways Britain’s.

One book is Didier Erbion’s Returning to Reims (2018, original,Retour à Reims 2008/2019)

“I tried to understand this milieu in which I had lived, my parents’ milieu, which traditionally voted for the Communist party, and how they came to vote for the Front National, why their vote was transferred to the right and the extreme right.”

Erbion does not just focus on support for the far-right, but on the wider ‘transactional’ switch in working class support for political parties, including for the classical right-wing President Sarkozy (and which could be extended to a minority who voted Macron not Marine Le Pen).

Bearing in mind these parallels, which could be extended to more volatile, and declining support for social democratic, socialist and (the largely vanished) Communist parties across Europe,  might offer a better beginning than staying within British politics.

Civil War.

Will the left follow Phil and ask the kind of cliché-free questions he, and others, have put on the table?

For the moment this is overshadowed by this news.

Labour is now in the throes of what the Guardian today calls a “civil war” (Antisemitism settlement plunges Labour party into civil war).

Labour’s decision to pay a six-figure libel settlement to ex-staffers who claimed the party was failing to deal with antisemitism has plunged the party back into civil war, with Jeremy Corbyn publicly condemning his successor’s decision to settle the case.

Corbyn’s statement caused astonishment among the litigants in the libel action, with the Panorama journalist John Ware confirming to the Guardian that he was “consulting his lawyers” and raising the prospect of another costly court battle over Labour and antisemitism.

The anti-semitism issue, made worse by some people’s hard-line anti-Zionism, and a fringe that indulges in conspiracy theories. are serious problems.

The ‘Hobbyist’ left, which is said to have dominated Labour politics in ways that Hindess (who wrote in 1971,  at a time when leftist influence inside the Party was at a low point) could not have dreamt, has come in for a great deal of criticism. Those who believed that they were bringing the fight against the ‘Iron law of Oligarchy’ into Labour structures, are sorely disappointed.

Apart from a divisive, and futile,  battle against ‘Starmerism’, a range of hobby-horses are being run. The American inspired Black Lives Matter movement has some real targets. But other culture wars, cancel culture, a pile of words stacks up about issues that are as clear as mud . Some of the ideas floated are as odd as the 19th century socialists who were interested in Theosophy. Or worse.

Momentum Camden Calls for NEC Motion of No Confidence in Keir Starmer

Starmer’s statement that he needs “unconscious bias” training, is both an admission and misdirection: His racism has been conscious and consistent and has no place in an antiracist party. In the process he makes racism a personal psychological problem and not a systemic social disaster.  He has brought the Labour Party into disrepute with some of its most loyal supporters, BAME communities.”

This is a superb motion I will try and use the motion in a blog post.#

If this is one side….

We do not need this civil war.

There is little doubt however that laying the blame on Corbyn will only help those who wish to turn back to the days when Peter Mandelson and his friends ran Labour policy for ‘apirational’ people.

 

“Taking Back Control”: Brexit, Putin, to Free Trade in Public Services, and Low-Quality Food.

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Boris Johnson urges Brits to vote Brexit to "take back control ...

Getting Brexit Done means “Taking Back Control”……

During the EU Referendum those who backed Leave talked of “taking back control”.

There were those on the left who denounced the EU as a “capitalist club”. They wanted a “People’s Brexit”, a ‘Left’ Brexit.

The former Labour MP Ronnie Campbell spoke for his camp when he said he wanted to “take back control of UK laws, taxes, budgets, and public spending”.

For the alliance of Blue Labour, the Communist Party of Britain, Labour Lexiteers, members, and supporters, of the Brexit Party, The Full Brexit, the phrase  gave voice to a “popular revolt against the status quo”.

“The Leave campaign’s slogan, “take back control”, resonated with millions of people whose interests are no longer represented in British politics.” Brexit, and the restoration of National Sovereignty, gave the UK the “opportunity to reshape Britain for the better”.

After the result the Lexit (pro-Brexit left) campaign issued this statement.

It began, 

The Leave vote is above all else a rejection of the entire political establishment by millions of working class people who have been left to suffer austerity for decades with few defenders among the mainstream parties.

The Leave-Fight-Transform (Pro-Brexit) campaign from the same stable asserted in August 2019 that,

the left must ensure the 2016 referendum result is implemented, so that the UK breaks with the treaties, institutions and laws of the EU as well as the structural racism of Fortress Europe.

Locating the origin of racism in the EU was a bold move, one yet for Brexit Britain to challenge.

But it looks as if the break with what is left of the its treaties, institutions and laws is underway.

In a statement on Brexit Day (3rd of February 2020), the pro-Brexiteers issued a statement on the ” likely terrain for the battle”.

They predicted a “crisis in Britain’s ruling class”, a phrase battle-hardened leftists find handy for any time in history.

A trade deal with the US looked fraught “with tensions”. But some light for the left was there, “Johnson wants to be free to engage in state investment. That requires a ‘Canada-plus[i]’ deal with the EU.” A step forward. “This new vision, brought on by economic necessity and the wishes of a section of British capital, as well as by the political reality of how Johnson won his majority, is rather different from the delusional, harking back to empire vision beloved of Tory Brexiteers in the European Research Group.”

Things were not so bad (compare above “crisis”). Indeed, “…much of British capital is confident that it can cope with whatever happens in post-Brexit Britain, providing the City of London’s banking and financial interests are kept safe.The EU, they predicted, would negotiate a way out. The Tories would try to respond to the “concerns” of those who voted for them.

The Brexit left claimed that conditions for a real struggle looked bright: “What couldn’t be done has been done: a major country has broken with the largest trading bloc in history.” After Labour’s historic election defeat, the post-Brexit terrain offered an  “opportunity for the left.”

Today there are two major news stories about “taking back control” Brexit-style.

The first is on the post-EU trade negotiations, 

MPs have defeated an attempt by Tory backbenchers to ensure parliament has a vote on any post-Brexit trade deal.

An amendment to the Trade Bill currently going through the Commons would have given MPs and peers a say on any new agreement signed by the government.

Jonathan Djanogly, the Conservative MP who led the rebellion, had argued that the US congress approves similar deals.

 

He accused the government of taking a position of “less scrutiny than we did as a member of the EU”, because EU trade deals are subject to a vote in the European Parliament.

Free of EU ‘neo-liberalism’ the government can agree with Donald Trump to open up UK public services to US businesses, and our shops to low quality American food.

Brexit is said to offer many more such opportunities.

It seems that Jeremy Corbyn had the clairvoyance – along with hundreds of anti-Brexit commentators – to foresee this.

Yet, as this tweet indicates…

Then we have this:

This story is still developing.

We note that Arron Banks, who gave money to ‘Trade Unionists Against the EU”, a campaign led by Paul Embery, a supporter of the Full Brexit, and promoted during the Referedum by the Socialist Party, gets a mention,

Government rejects ISC’s call for inquiry into Russian interference in Brexit referendum.

Here is the statement from the Committee itself.

Press release from the Intelligence and Security Committee, July 21:

There have been widespread allegations that Russia sought to influence voters in the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU: studies have pointed to the preponderance of pro-Brexit or anti-EU stories on RT and Sputnik, and the use of ‘bots’ and ‘trolls’, as evidence.


The actual impact of such attempts on the result itself would be difficult – if not impossible – to prove. However what is clear is that the government was slow to recognise the existence of the threat – only understanding it after the ‘hack and leak’ operation against the Democratic National Committee, when it should have been seen as early as 2014.


As a result the government did not take action to protect the UK’s process in 2016. The committee has not been provided with any post-referendum assessment – in stark contrast to the US response to reports of interference in the 2016 presidential election. In our view there must be an analogous assessment of Russian interference in the EU referendum.

Observers predict that the Morning Star is about to carry a story attacking ‘anti-Russian hysteria” and “Putin Bashing”.

(1) Report: 

Case study: the EU referendum

Morning Star Defends China Against Labour “enthusiastically climbing aboard the New Cold War bandwagon”.

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“Labour is enthusiastically climbing aboard the New Cold War bandwagon.” Morning Star.

In 2019 the Morning Star carried this story.

What did British Communists make of ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ in 2019?

EARLIER this year Communist Party of Britain (CPB) representatives took part in a joint delegation of Communist parties from northern Europe and North America following an invitation from the International Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

CPB general secretary Rob Griffiths was accompanied by women’s officer Carol Stavris and national election officer and executive committee member Jonathan Havard.

There were also two delegates from the New Communist Party and three from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist Leninist). There were other Communist Party representatives from Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the US.representatives from Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the US.

The Communist Party of Britain (CPB) delegates took a serious, if broadly sympathetic, approach to the Chinese Communists’ claim to be building socialism. It discussed efforts to deal with environmental and social problems.  The report was not uncritical of Chinese policies on using private enterprise, above all on the lack of fully independent trade  unions.

But in recent weeks the daily, wholly independent of the CPB, has been warning about a New Cold War and anti-Chinese propaganda.

Not just that, it has printed some extraordinary material, attacking Labour’s defence of human rights in China.

A few days ago, as the issue of China has been taken up by the Labour Party, the Morning Star published a strident  article by Carlos Martinez.

What are the politics of the writer?

In 2018 Martinez published on his site Invent the Future this defence of the Chinese regime.

Is China Still Socialist?

The evidence indicates that China continues to be a socialist country.

If the first century of human experience building socialism teaches us anything, it’s that the road from capitalism to socialism is a long and complicated one, and that ‘actually existing socialism’ varies enormously according to time, place and circumstances. China is building a form of socialism that suits its conditions, using the means it has at its disposal, in the extraordinarily challenging circumstances of global imperialist hegemony. No socialist experiment thus far – be it the Paris Commune, the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Mozambique, or indeed Bolivarian Venezuela – can claim to have discovered a magic wand that can be waved such that peace, prosperity, equality and comprehensive human development are achieved overnight. China is forging its own path, and this is worthy of study and support.

In the Star article he gives a hostile account of the Labour Party’s defence of human rights.

Labour should not be parroting Trump’s anti-China cold war rhetoric

In the interests of peace and progress, we need to push for respectful, friendly and mutually beneficial relations with China, says CARLOS MARTINEZ.

After outlining President Trump and US politicians ‘bipartisan’ approach against Chinese “predatory” economic practices” and the

 zany and totally unfounded smear about the forced sterilisation of Uyghur women.

Martinez turns to the UK.

We find that, “Boris Johnson government, instinctively Atlanticist and desperately pursuing a post-Brexit trade agreement with the US at almost any cost, is largely parroting Trump’s line.”

What concerns the writer is that the Labour party has gone along with this “zany” pile of accusations about brutality,  attacks on democracy and  “China Bashing”.

Those of us who stand for peace and for mutually beneficial cooperation between Britain and China might hope that the Labour Party would provide some meaningful opposition to the government’s reckless behaviour. Unfortunately the indications thus far are that Labour is enthusiastically climbing aboard the New Cold War bandwagon.

The reaction at the Party’s highest levels has been deplorable.

Shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy has been actively promoting anti-China propaganda and pushing the Tories to take a harder stance against China, for example urging that action be taken against British businesses that are “complicit in the repression” in Hong Kong (ie that don’t actively support the riots).

While Nandy’s words might bring disappointment to socialists, progressives and peace activists, they were at least welcome in certain quarters: notorious right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes celebrated the “welcome change in Labour Party policy – standing up to, rather than cosying up to despotic regimes.”

There is worse.

Nandy’s position is however positively nuanced in comparison to that of Stephen Kinnock, Shadow Minister for Asia and the Pacific, who accuses China of promoting its “model of responsive authoritarian government” worldwide. Kinnock describes the ‘golden era’ of Sino-British relations, inaugurated during the Cameron government, as being an “abject failure” in which Britain had “rolled out the red carpet for China and got very very little in return”.

He asserts that Labour is joining in the “US-led New Cold War on China.

It therefore seems that the Labour leadership in its current incarnation is moving towards unambiguous support for the US-led New Cold War on China. It’s particularly demoralising that, with a few honourable exceptions, most notably Diane Abbott, the Labour left isn’t currently putting up any serious resistance to this dangerous trajectory.

To cap it all,

While very few Labour MPs have spoken of the dangers of a New Cold War, John McDonnell has recorded a histrionic (and hopelessly one-sided) denunciation of the Chinese state’s alleged mistreatment of the Uyghur Muslims. Apsana Begum has repeated these tropes in parliament, claiming that when the Chinese government celebrates its successful suppression of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement’s murderous bombing campaign, its “definition of terrorism is troublingly vague”. The usually-excellent Claudia Webbe has called on the government to “oppose state-sanctioned violence” in Hong Kong, choosing to ignore the United States-sanctioned violence of separatist protesters.

Martinez concludes,

This is all frankly disastrous and worrying.

The Morning Star has continued in this vein.

Anybody might think the Morning Star and the Communist Party of Britain is still in mourning over its loss of  influence over the Labour leadership.

Others will still be reeling at the claim that reports of human rights abuses in China, and the horrific treatment of the Uighurs, are “zany”.

 

Written by Andrew Coates

July 21, 2020 at 11:17 am

The Labour Party Takes a Stand: Impose Human Rights Sanctions on China.

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Uyghur Solidarity Campaign lol

Labour Movement is Taking a Stand.

Lisa Nandy Shadow Foreign Secretary says,

This afternoon we expect the Foreign Secretary to suspend our extradition treaty with Hong Kong. This would be a welcome step, but we must do more.

 

Keir Starmer statement,

China: Keir Starmer urges Boris Johnson to impose human rights sanctions

‘What we have argued for is sanctions in this country against Chinese officials who have been involved in human rights abuses’ says Labour leader

 

Here is the Labour Leader.

The respected journalist Ian Birrell writes in the ‘I’ today,

We are witnessing a genocide of the Uighurs – it’s time for action, not apathy

The world said never again, and yet it is averting its gaze from the mass incarceration of Muslims in China.

The world can no longer have any doubt over Beijing’s grotesque activities in western China. This is not “deradicalisation”. It is an attempt to eliminate an ethnic group, which is the textbook definition of genocide – and it is increasingly well-documented in leaked records, snatched videos, personal testimonies and even those piles of impounded hair.

As the echoes from history grow louder, we should remember the warning of the great Hannah Arendt, a writer and thinker forced to flee her German birthplace by the Nazis, that evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.

These are some labour movement initiatives:

Paul Mason and Lura Parker writes,

Labour must speak on China with a distinctive voice, which genuinely seeks to defend human rights – not just in parliament but across the movement. That’s why we’ve set up the Labour Movement Solidarity with Hong Kong (UK), an alliance of people from all wings of the party who want Labour to take consistent action in defence of democratic rights in Hong Kong.

They continue:

In some parts of the labour movement, there is ignorance and denial about what the Xi regime is doing. The Morning Star newspaper, funded by UK trade unions, regularly casts the Hong Kong protesters as reactionaries. It has downplayed Hong Kong police brutality, even showcasing pleas from pro-Beijing stooges on the LegCo to supply them with tear gas, and actually justifying the national security law.

We should instead have a strong, principled alternative voice inside our movement, which can simultaneously tell the truth about Beijing’s attacks on human rights – from Hong Kong to Xinjiang, where a million Uighur people have been herded into “re-education camps” – and oppose Trump’s anti-Chinese rhetoric and racism.

Written by Andrew Coates

July 20, 2020 at 4:27 pm

The Fall of the House of Andrew Murray? UNITE’s McCluskey Succession Battle Hots Up.

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Jeremy Corbyn Defends Labour Campaign Role For Ex-Communist Andrew ...

Andrew Murray, “Leaving the EU” was a “democratic impulse” 

In the 1970s it used to be said that, “The Communist Party can float an idea early in the year. It goes to trade union conferences as a resolution and it can become official Labour Party policy by the autumn. A few years ago we were on our own, but not now.”

These days the group that claims to carry the flag of British Communism, the Communist Party of Britain, has more modest achievements.

UNITE’s chief of Staff, Andrew Murray, who belately left the CPB in 2016, after joining the old Communist Party of Great Britain in 1976, followed by active membership of  the party linked to the Morning Star, has had more modest successes.

He has taken against “the poisonous seeds of the politics of personal identity and human rights”,  “rancid identity politics”, the “newly declared culture war”,  and the “Brexit derangement syndrome” of those opposed to leaving the EU (Pages 97, 214 – 5. The Fall and Rise of the British Left.) 

Apart from Spiked, always ready to denounce the Woke Taliban, Murray’s bundle of views on these issues is not popular.  On the left they seem to have been swept to one side, above all by the Black Lives Matter movement, which, is clearly one for human rights and has been accused, by right-wingers of waging a “culture war”.

This is no doubt a reason why Murray has backtracked a little.

The working class has become, he writes in Tribune this weekend(Class Politics After Corbyn), largely a “sociological classification”, a”mass of wage labourers without collective institutions or an ideological project”. In Marx’s early terms, it is a “class in itself” but not a “class for itself”.

The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.

The Poverty of Philosophy (1847).

In the absence of this unity, and political direction,

The space has been filled to some extent by what is now termed ‘identity politics’. Mention the term and right-wing columnists will start foaming about the demands of women and black people, above all, to have their identities as such recognised, and the specific and intensified oppressions which have shaped that identity addressed. The labour movement may have been ahead of the curve here, but not by very much.

In fact, identity politics has an ancient pedigree within class politics. For example, the Labour Party in the East End of London was bitterly divided in the 1930s between its large Jewish and Irish elements. The former were stalwart opponents of fascism at home and abroad, while the latter were not, due largely to the influence of Catholicism — indeed, priestly influence won much of the Irish element in Stepney Labour to a pro-rebel or at least neutral position in the Spanish Civil War.

At this point Murray wanders further into history, and finds solace in abstract reference to ‘imperialism’, “As in the USA, any approach to class politics has to be framed not just by the eternal verities of exploitation but also by an acknowledgement that the working class has been shaped by the experiences of imperialism and its concomitants of racism and relative privilege on a global scale.”

The left was indeed ahead of the curve but not because it confronted cultural clashes in the past, which one could extend to religious and national differences in Scotland and cities like Liverpool.

The 1980s, a formative time for Murray’s faction, Straight Left, was caught up in debates begun and collected in The Forward March of Labour Halted? Eric Hobsbawm,  (1981) Tribune’s editor Ronan Burtenshaw  may, like many, assert that with 80% of people today working in the Service Sector they are still objectively working class. But Hobsbawm was right to indicate that the decline (if not vanishing) of heavy industry  and  manufacturing, the closely knit politics based on work and community has effects which we can see today.

As Hobsbawm wrote, “the development of the working class in the past generation has been such as to raise a number of very serious questions about its future and the future of its movement.”

Murray visits the North and meets people who have difficulties with the use of migrant labour. A ” brand-name retailer had established a warehouse creating around a thousand jobs — but few if any were advertised in the local job centre. Instead, the work was subcontracted to a labour agency which recruited exclusively in Poland. ” This example could be found around the country, and not only in the ‘left behind’ areas.

Only wishful thinking can ignore this. There is no easy answer. There is nothing on the horizon  like the kind of struggles portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) on the exploitation in the Chicago meat-packing industry, which could draw different nationalities together.

But for Murray there is a common cause that united at least some people, Brexit. 

I asked: ‘When people around here voted for Brexit what problem did they think they were solving?’ The answer: ‘Everything.’

He continues,

The desire for an alternative reality attainable through democratic endeavour remains alive, despite the marginalisation of the concept of political alternatives throughout the neoliberal era.

Leaving the EU was the issue that this desire came to hang its hat on in many areas. This was a democratic impulse which Labour, despite a radical leadership committed to popular initiative, got itself on the wrong side of. These are the people Labour left behind in the dash to support a second referendum.

 Murray was a key Corbyn adviser, drafted in to help on issues such as Brexit (“Labour should stay neutral in Brexit ‘culture war’, warns Corbyn ally“. October 2019)

He is not ‘neutral’ now.

Taking sides for Brexit – that is dividing people – is a stand, Murray claims is to be against an institution which is “an effective constitutional bulwark against democratic choice in its member states on major economic questions.”

In other words, all the reasons why people voted for Brexit, and one hopes that even the UNITE Chief of Staff is aware of less noble ones than democracy,  are less important than this.

Arguing backwards from what he sees as the neo-liberal nature of the EU onto the intentions of Brexit voters Murray claims they were following a “democratic impulse”.

The urge may have driven them to support a campaign backed by the free-market right, the fancy may have taken them to dream of a People’s Brexit as a stage on the British Road to socialism. But somehow, just somehow the ” democratic empowerment” of the vote now leaves Labour with new possibilities, away from “liberal fiat” ” It now falls to Keir Starmer to lead the long march from the security of North London to the battleground industrial hinterlands.”

That a majority of people in work voted to stay in the European Union, that manufacturing and industry (such as it is) are hit by Brexit, that many working class people backed Remain out of hard-headed self-interest, including an interest in the protections offered by the EU’s ‘liberal’ legislation, is beneath Murray’s radar.

Above all, if it was conflicts over , and dislike of the use of migrant labour is a form of “class politics”, then what kind of political class for itself is being created?

It is hardly one of class unity.

The trade union movement has been called the greatest movement for human rights in history, but what kind of sectional rights against others is he responding to?

What kind of future, what kind of bread-and-butter improvements can be campaigned for on that basis?

Is it a surprise that Murray’s team is  breaking up?

Last week the hard right Express ran this story,

LABOUR PARTY civil war could be in the offing, with a fierce critic of Sir Keir Starmer edging towards a breakthrough in the battle to succeed Len McCluskey as general secretary of Britain’s biggest trade union, Unite.

..

Last week Mr Beckett issued a warning to the Labour leader, accusing him of punishing the working class for the coronavirus crisis.

He tweeted: “Boris Johnson & Keir Starmer, I have a message for you both.

“We won’t stand idly by while you dump the pandemic fall out on the working class.”

Mr Beckett has been tipped to see off the challenge of Steve Turner, a union official that has played a leading tole in industrial disputes involving industry sector giants British and Bombardier.

Beckett is proud of this record,

Things did not go according to plan.

 

 

 

Written by Andrew Coates

July 19, 2020 at 11:15 am

Communist Party of Britain Celebrates 100th Anniversary of the Founding of Communist Party of Great Britain.

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Virtual Beano Planned by CPB (Register Here)

“A middle aged man in a shabby raincoat stood outside the TUC’s central London headquarters that cold November morning in 1991 selling the Communist newspaper, the Morning Star, The Morning Star had dedicated supporters prepared to turn out in all weathers to sell the paper. But this was a bad morning – he sold only 18 copies.”

“Yet 213 people passed him on their war into the TUC for a meeting – the forty-third and last Congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Henceforth CP). They were there to wind up their party after seventy-one years and created  a new organisation which rejected mst traditional Communist beliefs and ways of working”.

The Enemy Within The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party. Francis Beckett. 1995.

This month the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) is celebrating ‘100 years’ of the Communist Party.

Where will you be on 1 August? On that day, one hundred years ago, in the wake of war and revolt across Europe, Britain’s Marxists formed a new kind of revolutionary political party. It served only one master, the workers. It was a party the rich could not buy.Its members could be found in every arena of class struggle,

Their General Secretary Rob Griffiths, a former lecturer, was a leader of a faction around the Morning Star which fought a bitter battle to retain control of the daily. Names from the later stages of that factional struggle, ‘Straight Left’ (Andrew Murray, Seumas Milne, both part of the inner Corbyn circle), Socialist Action, Tariq Ali (thanked by Murray for his “support and political commitment” in last year’s The Fall and Rise of the British Left), and the Leninist, forerunner of the Weekly Worker, appear in Francis Beckett’s postscript.

Many dispute the claim that the present Communist Party of Britain is the inheritor of the CPGB.

That’s as it may be.

But few people are aware of, or care, about what happened to their temporarily victorious rivals in the old CPGB, from their rapidly fading Democratic Left, New Politics Network to Unlock Democracy..

A common view on the left is that the CPB was, until the December General Election, preparing to celebrate its first return to political relevance since the 1970s, when the CPBG’s Industrial Organiser Bert Ramelson exercised influence within the trade union movement.

In 1973 Ramelson said: “We have more influence now on the labour movement than at any time in the life of our party. The Communist Party can float an idea early in the year. It goes to trade union conferences as a resolution and it can become official Labour Party policy by the autumn. A few years ago we were on our own, but not now.”

In the 2019 book written by Andrew Murray (who until 2016 was a member of the CPB), he railed against the “preference for individual rights over the collective” “the poisonous seeds of the politics of personal identity and human rights”,  “rancid identity politics”, the “newly declared culture war”,  and the “Brexit derangement syndrome” of those opposed to leaving the EU (Pages 97, 214 – 5. The Fall and Rise of the British Left.) 

Alas. After December’s result Murray’s work fell stillborn from the press. Yet if it did not hearald the triumph of a Labour government a few of the ideas it floated  have become popular, at least amongst the contributors of Spiked. 

The CPB, which advocated not voting Labour and abstaining in the 2019 European Elections, has mulled over the  election result.

For them Brexit was a key issue,

Labour’s fatal abandonment of its principled position over Brexit, was most concentrated, where the Brexit Party gained a strategic wedge of votes, where the Red Wall collapsed and where the Tories were able to mobilise people who don’t usually vote.

Labour’s 2019 loss: hard truths for the right wing NIck Wright.

Put simply, anything other than accepting the Brexit Referendum result was wrong. Allowing the hard-right Brexit project to get a hold was the way forward. Promoting the Communist Party of Britain’s own pro-Brexit, ‘People’s Brexit’, position, would have doubtless been a bonus.

Or as Murray – who was a key Corbyn adviser on Brexit, explicitly says in the Morning Star’s sister journal, the US Jacobin owned  Tribune,

 

Leaving the EU was the issue that this desire came to hang its hat on in many areas. This was a democratic impulse which Labour, despite a radical leadership committed to popular initiative, got itself on the wrong side of. These are the people Labour left behind in the dash to support a second referendum.

Class Politics After Corbyn Andrew Murray.

There is no recognition of the role the pro-Brexit stand of the anti-EU left, including the CPB, played in legitimising the Get Brexit Done message of Boris Johnson, and helped carry him to election victory.

In response to Labour’s defeat the CPB now call for a new Popular Front.

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.

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.

They have not forgotten an internationalist approach to the culture wars:

Culture wars and the UYGHURS

Years ago, communist party historian VG Kiernan wrote a path breaking book, the ‘Lords of humankind’ in which he mapped the culture wars of imperialism, with crude attempts to capture high moral ground, as a prelude to wars of greed and land capture. A thesis worth remembering when trying to make sense of the current propaganda war against People’s China, in which Muslim believers are reported to be forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, with women forcibly sterilised. The current press campaign against China, follows a path of cultural racism and imperialism.

The Morning Star itself devotes much of its space to the old theme of attacking the Labour Party.  Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer is in their sight. They are happy to publish would-be damaging outbursts,

Len McCluskey says Labour leadership looks like uninspiring team of ‘middle managers’ while Britain teeters on brink of worst recession since 1930s

Sir Keir would only win an election with the left’s support, he said, dismissing theories of the left’s “demise” as “greatly exaggerated.”

Mr McCluskey urged Labour members on the left not to become “demoralised’ and called on Sir Keir to stick to the policy pledges he made during his campaign to replace Mr Corbyn — including renationalisation of utilities and rail, a green new deal, abolition of tuition fees and higher taxes for top 5 per cent of earners — to promote party unity.

He revealed that he would push for a meeting of left-wing allies in coming weeks.

Anniversary Reading.

There is much to say on the 100th Anniversary.

Perhaps we could begin by looking at the history of the CPGB.

There is, it hardly needs saying, a vast literature on the CPBG and British Communism. There are many many important books to look at.

This Blog would recommend Raphael Samuel’s The Lost World of British Communism (2006) to those who wish to begin to look at the CPGB’s history.

Samuel describes the final years.

CLASS POLITICS: THE LOST WORLD OF BRITISH COMMUNISM (PART III)

The schism in British Communism, like many of those in Marxist political formations, resembles nothing so much as a war of ghosts in which the living actors are dwarfed by the spectres they conjure up. The debate on the ‘British way’—the major issue at the 1977 Congress when the present schism first emerged—echoes the never-resolved debate on ‘parliamentism’ which nearly paralysed the cpgb at birth; while the argument for the ‘broad democratic alliance’ mirrors the turn from the ‘class against class’ politics of the Comintern’s Third Period (1928–34) to those of the Popular Front—an analogy which has been strenuously promoted by the supporters of Eurocommunism.

..

Totemic importance is attached to its long-term programme, The British Road to Socialism—‘the most comprehensive strategy for the Left in Britain’—despite its origins in now suspect notions of ‘People’s Democracy’. ‘Democratic centralism’ is strictly insisted upon, being used not only to expel individual dissidents but, in the case of London and Lancashire, to dissolve entire Party districts. The Party continues to despatch fraternal delegations and to take comfort from the success (or relative success) of brother or sister parties. (The Japanese Party seems recently to have joined the Italian as a possible model.) The cpgb goes through all the motions of being a great national party. It fields candidates at general elections, even though, to judge by the results on the 11th of June, it no longer has even the semblance of local support; it launches economic and industrial ‘strategies’ even though there are no longer factory branches to carry them through; it publishes statements on the issues of the day even though there is no longer a daily paper to print them.

The hatred and contempt with which each side treats the others—as also the bewilderment and distress of the silent majority of Party loyalists—seems now to exceed that in the Labour Party at the height of Bennism. In the Eurocommunist camp, as then on the Labour Left, it is typically expressed in generational terms—‘Why don’t you just die?’ was the shout of one of the new wave ‘pluralists’ when, at a recent aggregate, an old-timer attempted to speak.

One book that should be read as essential background  is Paul Flewers, The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union 1929-1941 (2008) It is a brilliant account of reactions within Britain to the Soviet Union during the industrialisation and forced collectivisation programmes of the 1930s.

It is hard to project yourself mentally back to the years which shaped the CPGB, whose influence outside of left circles only really took off in the 1930s.

Claude Cockburn’s The Devil’s Decade (1973), is a book (by a key supporter at the time)  about the 1930s that gives the broader political struggles that shaped the CPGB, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement and their role backing the Republic during the Spanish Civil War and the “Unity” campaign with Labour. Cockburn’s revealing autobiography I Claude (1967)  This goes from Cockburn’s deep involvement with the CPGB and international Communism, up till his final break – the repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Cockburn is witty without losing an appropriate  sense of the gravity.

There is also  novel covering a later period, The Rotten Elements, (1969) Edward Upwood,

…the second book in Upward’s The Spiral Ascent trilogy and continues the story of Alan and Elsie Sebrill a few years after the first one. When it was first published this book was subtitled A Novel of Fact because one of its aims was to give an historically accurate picture of policies and attitudes in the British Communist Party during the late 1940s. The phrase rotten elements was sometimes used in the party to refer to members who deviated seriously from the correct party line.

The previous novel ended as World War II was starting. This one starts some time after the end of the war. Elsie and Alan are happily married with two children, a boy and a girl. Both are committed members of the Communist Party and Elsie is the branch secretary of the local party. However, there is a problem. Both – but Elsie in particular – feel that the Party is deviating from the correct Marxist-Leninist line.

….

Alan and Elsie raise the issue of the Party in Britain deviating from the true Marxist-Leninist path. There are several doctrinal issues here but two are key. Lenin had always maintained that true communism could only be obtained by the violent overthrow of capitalism, imperialism and the bourgeois state. The British party clearly seems to be deviating from this view. Related to this is the attitude to the Labour Party (which, at the time this novel takes place, was the governing party in Britain). The view of the Sebrills is that the Labour party is a bourgeois, imperialist party and must be overthrown to bring about true revolution. The British Communist Party line seems to be that it is merely one stage on the way to communism and that the party can collaborate with it, if it and they are moving to a more socialist system.

Apart from The Enemy Within, this Blog would also recommend another of Francis Beckett’s books, Stalin’s British Victims, Sutton Publishing, 2004

In his new book, Stalin’s British Victims, Beckett researches the stories of four women who suffered under Stalinism. He shows just how far the leadership of the British party was aware of what was going on, and demonstrates the almost indestructible ideological commitment that led communists to deflect, ignore, explain or deny the evidence of their own eyes.

The most poignant story that Beckett tells is of Rose Cohen, co-founder of the CPGB and admired by the party leader, Harry Pollitt, who went to live in Moscow with her Russian husband in the late 1920s. In 1937, first her husband and then Rose herself were arrested. Pollitt, Beckett establishes, interceded for her with the authorities, but to no avail. She was tried, sentenced and quickly executed for being a British spy. Years later her niece Joyce Rathbone set out in search of her lost cousin, born in the same year as herself and brought up in Stalinist orphanages, forbidden to talk about his parents.

So Pollitt and his fellow party leaders knew that old comrades were being despatched by Stalin, and thought some of them innocent enough to want to try and save them. They also experienced the brutal snubs delivered to those foreigners who poked their noses into Stalin’s purges. However, as Beckett shows, this did not prevent Pollitt’s strenuous public defence of the Moscow trials. In March 1938, three months after Rose received a bullet in the base of her skull, Pollitt declared in the Daily Worker that these trials of “political and moral degenerates” were a “mighty demonstration to the world of the power and strength of the Soviet Union”. Did he think Rose had become a “degenerate” and that her dawn extinction in the Lubyanka was a salutary lesson to the world about the revolutionary resolve of the first workers’ state?

David Aaronovitch. New Statesman.

There is little to say about the moral credibility of the Party’s past after that.

Written by Andrew Coates

July 18, 2020 at 11:28 am

Galloway Launches New Scottish “Unionist” Front, the “Alliance for Unity”.

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Image

Galloway to Unite all Scottish Unionists.

 

Even experienced Galloway Watchers find it hard to keep up with the latest initiatives from the dapper gent.

We expected this:

George Galloway: UK ban on Huawei is national self-harm. China’s riposte could devastate the ailing British economy

But this……

GEORGE Galloway has suggested that a Unionist alliance will defeat the SNP in the 2021 Holyrood elections.

The pro-Independence National reports,

The former Labour MP announced his plans to return to Scottish politics last week.

He tweeted: “My plan is simple. The pro #Unity candidates don’t oppose each other in the constituencies and we form joint lists for the 2nd vote. If we do that we win. The SNP loses. The era of Grudge can be at an end #Alliance4Unity”

Support is growing for the wizard plan.

There is one problem there, a small one no doubt for the socialist stalwart.

The Tory Party in Scotland is often known under its full name of the  Conservative and Unionist Party, as a two second Web search confirms.

If there is one thing my Scottish Labour Party (activists and supporters) family hated more than the Scottish Nationalists (SNP), it’s the Tory Unionists.

Not exactly an unusual take on the left.

But then neither is loathing Nigel Farage, who is also one of Galloway’s best mates,* along with the curious gang who cadre his Workers Party of Britain, notably the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist).

 

*George Galloway backs Nigel Farage’s new Brexit party

 

George Galloway, Keith Bennett, China and “Elite Grooming”.

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Keith Bennett | The Marxist-Leninist

Keith Bennett, “political Groomer”? 

In the latest Private Eye there is a piece, “Elite Grooming” about the 48 Group Club.

This is how the Club describes itself.

The motto of the 48 Group Club is ‘Equality and Mutual Benefit’ and it echoes the words of Zhou Enlai, China’s much-respected Premier from 1949 to 1976, who first used that phrase in 1953. Over the ensuing years, this commercial group, funded by its members, grew to be the most respected name in China-Britain trade, a name well known throughout China. The Group provided support and consultancy services to British companies entering China’s markets.

PE leads by saying that one-time members, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson ad Jack Straw have recently sought to distance themselves from this body. It is “accused in a forthcoming book of “grooming Britain’s elites to advance Beijing’s interests”.

This is a story that has recently run in the Mail, (5th of July)  “Blair, Peter Mandelson and Jack Straw have been linked to club which is objecting to book that claims to reveal how China is infiltrating the West.” The Mail (8th of July) has also claimed, “Former chancellor George Osborne ‘is linked to the pro China 48 Group Club’ amid claims the organisation is ‘grooming’ Britain’s elite with Beijing propaganda.”

The PE article concentrates on the deputy of the body, one Keith Bennett.

Bennett, the Eye points out, is a “an old stalwart if the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)” (CPGB, M-L).

The article lists Bennett’s membership of the Stalin Society, “full-on Pyongyang propagandist” who was “also honorary clerk to the all-party parliamentary group on North Korea”. There is also his role in the Hands off China Campaign and attacks on the “imperialist media” who “never tires of attacking China over its so-called ‘human rights violations”.

The piece  does not go into the way that the CPGB (M-L) supplies the cadres of George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, an organisation no doubt not yet on the radar of the “imperialist media”.

What are the politics of this group?

The ferociously pro-Brexit ‘party’ has this vision of the future,

In tandem with these measures will be the coordinated action of workers and government to ensure that the ever-increasing productivity of labour, arising today from the development of robots and artificial intelligence, is put at the service of lightening the drudgery of work and not replacing the working class. We reject a future of parasitism where the British people, through the operation of the City of London, degenerate into an unemployed feckless rump living off cheap imported food and the plastic-electronic consumables of global capitalist anarchy.

Introducing the Workers Party

 
Galloway has his own history of co-operation with Bennett.

Here he talks of him as a “comrade and friend”.

Galloway interviewed Bennett 14 months ago.

Keith Bennett of the Hands off China Campaign speaks on George Galloway’s Weekly programme “The Real Deal” on Press TV.

Here is the Deputy Leader of the Workers Party of Britain, a long-time CPGB (M-L) cadre.

Wikipedia states that the CPGB (M-L) faces this allegation

The party receives funding in donations from businesses owned by Central Committee member Keith Bennett, a business magnate and consultant with investments and factories in China. There is suspicion that the funding from business interests in China is the main reason behind the parties refusal to criticize the Beijing regime for abuses of workers.

Former MP Chris Williamson is another person now orbiting in Galloway’s circles.

One has to ask: is there some kind of ‘anti-elite grooming” going on here?

…..

More on China from Jim: 

China, Trump and Huawi: my enemy’s enemy is not always my friend

Labour NEC: Tendance Factional Guide to the Candidates.

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NEC Elections for CLP and BAME rep's - South Lakes Labour

Labour List today offers a survey of the Over 170 members standing in Labour’s NEC elections. 

Our top-team of experienced cadres has been working hard overnight on our own guide to the Candidate Statements 2020.

Slates, commonly known as ‘factions’.

Labour to Win.

This is the slate of   Progress and  Labour First.

Progress scores a few points for left-wingers in two areas, it “opposes Populism” and takes an anti-Brexit line. However, it was “founded in 1996 to support the New Labour leadership of Tony Blair”. It defines itself as a voice for “Progressives“. This is a term with a long history, back to the American ‘”progressive era” (1890s to 1920s)  fellow-travellers of the old Communist Parties. At present it is used by people as varied as American liberals (those called ‘left-wing’ by Trump supporters) , backers of the former Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, and France’s centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

The word today is without serious local attraction or resonance in British politics and the left in the rest of Europe.

Most of the ideas of Progress are as vacuous as the SWP’s hopes for revolutionary socialism, “Most of all, we believe the United Kingdom is a country of which we could all be truly proud. It contains all the ingredients for a country that could help people to get on and make the most of life.  What we need are new ideas, new leadership and a commitment to change the way that Britain works. We have faith, that given the potential that our country has, we all have real reasons to be hopeful about the future of our community, our country, and our world.” (Our ambition for our country).

Labour First is a factional instrument of the old Labour Party right. “Labour First is a network which exists to ensure that the voices of moderate party members are heard while the party is kept safe from the organised hard left, and those who seek to divert us from the work of making life better for ordinary working people and their families.”

Its factional record is poor (New Statesman 2015),

Labour First, founded in 1988, is a pre-Blairite pressure group seen as the voice of the party’s traditional right. Headed by campaigner and former councillor Luke Akehurst, this faction supported ABC (Anyone But Corbyn) in the leadership election, while Akehurst himself backed Yvette Cooper. In the deputy race, it emphasised its ties to Tom Watson

They claim to be Keir Starmer’s best friends. This kind of claim to closeness to the winner  is familiar on the left amongst the groups that discovered  warmth for ‘Jeremy’ after many years of attacking the Labour Party as a pro-capitalist organisation.

Left-wingers are certainly right to accuse this alliance as drag backwards to the kind of centrist politics that lack bark and bite. They are expected to try to perform the role of left groups in demanding an ever-growing list of demands on the Labour Leader to follow their own ‘moderate’ politics, not his, or those of the largely left-leaning Labour membership.

A factional point to note is that the Progress/Labour First  list supporters do not advertise their slate’s existence in their candidates’ statements.

Luke Akehurst (perhaps their best known candidate) says simply, “I recommend also voting for Baxter, Paul, Payne, Singh Josan, Tatler, and Black, Griffin, Sherriff.”

This contrasts with the rival left list,

Gemma Bolton says,

I am supported by the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance. I am fighting for a socialist Labour Government that will deliver the radical change we need.

Please also support Yasmine Dar, Ann Henderson, Nadia Jama, Laura Pidcock and Mish Rahman.

Their principal rivals are backing the above.

They are the

Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA).

The first point to note is that the CLGA was originally a genuine ‘centre” and “left”alliance (Note, the Tendance was involved in this).

The Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance’s founding groups were originally Labour Reform, a centre-left democratic group within the Party founded at a meeting in Birmingham in November 1995, and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, the left wing democratic grouping, who subsequently brought in other more left-wing groupings from within the Labour Party. Private talks with trades union representatives to build a broader base had failed on union demands and this initiated the inclusion of a much broader Left group from the grassroots, including Labour Left Briefing [Liz Davies] and the then-Editor of TribuneMark Seddon. Successful efforts were also made to include the Scottish Left.

While the original CLGA Co-ordinator, Tim Pendy, (Labour Reform), is at present languishing in the wilderness of the red-brown Full Brexit, and something called the ” Democratic Left Movement” many of the players are still around on the left, notably Ann Black.

Labour List sums up the present line-up

The CLGA comprises Momentum, which is the biggest membership organisation, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD), thought to be the second largest, plus the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) and Red Labour.

The smaller groups include the Labour Briefing Co-operative, Labour Assembly Against Austerity, the Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Kashmiris for Labour, Grassroots Black Left and new joiner Labour Women Leading (an alternative to the Labour Women’s Network).

Jewish Voice for Labour has some admirable activists in it – and this is said from first hand acquantaine.
But its reputation is associated with these positions (conveniently summarised on Wikipedia, though extremely well known to many).

JVL has defended former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone,[5] supported Jackie Walker[36][37] as being a victim of a “vituperative campaign… based on this sliver of quasi-fact”,[38] deemed accusations of antisemitism against Moshé Machover as “ill founded”,[39][40] opposed and condemned the expulsion of Marc Wadsworth[41][42] as being “punished in advance of investigation and hearing of the case”,[43][44] welcomed the lifting of Derby North MP Chris Williamson‘s suspension[45] and called the National Executive Committee‘s ruling not to endorse him as a Labour candidate for the 2019 general election a “dangerous development for everyone who stands for justice for Palestinians and for democracy and freedom of expression in Britain, including within Labour”.

Many people would defend Moshé Machover and, perhaps, Marc Wadsworth. Those behind Livingstone, Walker, and, above all Chris Williamson, will be fewer in number.

It is to be doubted if their endorsement will help the slate win wider support.

On their candidates not many people on the left, and certainly not socialist internationalists and democrats will wish to be associated with Yasmin Dar’s past  participation public celebrations of  the Iranian regime’s anniversary.

The other candidates of the CLGA,  Ann Henderson, Nadia Jama, Laura Pidcock and Mish Rahman have serious supporters.

The AWL comments,

 Laura Pidcock has taken a pro-Brexit position. What about broader internationalism? Yasmine Dar has repeatedly attended Islamist events celebrating the “Islamic revolution” in Iran, i.e. the Islamist counter-revolution that crushed Iran’s workers, women and national minorities.

Lara McNeill and Ellen Morrison are both linked to the Stalinist left in Young Labour and have been actively involved in witch-hunting the socialist left and shutting down democracy in sections of the party and left where they are active.

Smaller Lists.

Another  group of candidates are running with the Tribune label.

This is not associated with the magazine of that name, now owned by ‘left populist’ US Jacobin. The UK ‘Tribune’ specialises in attacks on Keir Starmer and claims that the ” Israeli “secret services” are involved in Labour Party politics (“The shame of the new ‘Tribune’ and its editor“)

Tribune group of MPs

The Tribune group of MPs, not to be confused with Tribune magazine, has endorsed three ex-parliamentarians as NEC members’ section candidates. This is the grouping in Westminster that was reformed in 2005.

The Tribune group is chaired by Clive Efford. As a whole, it was not critical of Jeremy Corbyn during his leadership, apart from the party’s handling of antisemitism at that time. It fully supports Keir Starmer.

  • Theresa Griffin – Former MEP for the North West (2014-2020)
  • Paula Sherriff – Former MP for Dewsbury (2015-2019)
  • Liz McInnes – Former MP for Heywood and Middleton (2014-2019)

Open Labour is particularly worth noticing,

CLP rep candidates:

  • Ann Black – Former NEC member (2000-2018), South East regional board member, Oxford & District secretary
  • Jermain Jackman – British singer (winner of The Voice UK), founder of the 1987 Caucus (a collective of young Black men in Labour)

Experienced Cde DW says there are good  reasons to back these candidates:

… Dave Anderson, the former Blaydon MP who stood down in 2017 and appears to have distanced himself from any faction, and a fascinating note from one Aram Rawf who says “In twenty years I have gone from being an asylum seeker on the back of a lorry to being a Labour councillor.” What he does not say, is that he won office for Labour in the hostile environment of Thanet, the place that Farage coveted for his abortive career on the green benches

Labour List covers some of the other Independents (see article), though far from all.

Surely one outstanding candidate should have been included?

Brian Precious.

The Tendance recalls the Cde’s writings on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,

 L and M assert that social antagonisms emerge when identities are threatened, rather than when they are fully constituted – contra the classical Marxist (Hegelian) formulation of a general antagonism and showdown between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in advanced capitalism. L and M proceed to critique the Marxist understanding of antagonism in terms of “contradiction” , rejecting it on the basis that, for such a conception to be viable, it requires the presence of things which are absent in an antagonistic situation: namely, fully constituted identities: Logically, in order for proposition A to be contradicted by proposition not A , we must, in the first place, have “fully A” and “fully not A” .But in antagonism, identities are in a state of flux: Two things which are in antagonism to one another are in a situation where the “partial presence” of one of them prevents the coming to full presence of the other, and vice-versa. Think of looking at one thing close to your eyes and another thing far away; you can’t focus on them simultaneously: The sharpness of one produces the blurring of the other.

..

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have deepened, enriched and updated the revolutionary tradition.

Spectrezine.

Now Cde Precious says,

Our 12.12.19 debacle was caused by a disastrous shift in our Brexit policy and a ferocious media campaign attacking Jeremy Corbyn personally. Antisemitism was massively exaggerated so as to be weaponized. This created the fear and intimidation typical of a witch hunt, as in Arthur Miller’s “” The Crucible “”.

On 12.12.19 we went down to our worst defeat since 1935. The big difference between our 2017 near-victory and our 2019 disaster is the change in our Brexit policy. It is long past time we faced up to this elephant in the room.

On 23.6.16 many Labour voters didn’t suddenly become xenophobic little-Englanders. They voted leave as they saw the EU as a threat to jobs, services, houses and democracy.

Only Labour has the policies to answer these worries. I am totally committed to our 2017 manifesto and our 2019 manifesto without the suicidal Brexit shift.

Still crazy after all those years!

Update:

On the wilder fringe Skwawkbox has yet to issue his instructions on who to vote for in the NEC elections and has decided to devote himself full time to attacking the Labour Party Leader.

 

 

 

Written by Andrew Coates

July 15, 2020 at 11:32 am

Momentum: Issue of Trans Rights Continues to Shake Left Labour Slate.

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Trans Rights, “Conversations on the issue are currently ongoing”.

 

An indication of their negotiators’ position can be seen here.

 

Sonali Bhattacharyya Retweeted

Jon Stone
@joncstone
Majority of women support self-identification for transgender people, poll finds

Indications are that the joint list was hard to create.

Scattergood’s statement is welcome for admitting that the 8 Hours negotiations were “difficult” and it does not take much imagination  to see what kind of ‘factors’ might have been behind this, above all the unrelenting hostility of fringe groups, Jewish Voice for Labour, Red Labour (“Red Labour will call out attacks on the left, backsliding on policy, the top down operation of the leader’s office“)  and sections of the Labour Representation Committee towards any form of accomodation to the present Labour Party Leadership.

This section from the statement from the latter groups is worth noting,

All three of our organisations argued strongly for the inclusion of Jo Bird following her impressive performance in the recent by-elections to the NEC. We share the disappointment of all Jo’s supporters that she is not on the slate and we will be holding our left candidates to account in terms of opposition to the witch hunt against the left and other important issues Jo highlighted.

9th of June: NEC Elections – response to the united left slate

The present controversy over Trans Rights – that is the alleged positions of some of the candidates on the list – is unlikely either to make the slate credible for the wider left or to resolve the controversies the diehard anti-Starmer factions wish to create.

Observers consider that the left of the party would be better working out a positive strategy of developing new policies to deal with the Coronavirus crises, the challenges that Brexit poses for internationalists, and a socialist alternative to the Johnson national populist ideology and its use of state intervention.

This is a good start,

A plan for the recovery should be rooted in real-life experiences, and should be able to be expressed in a language people recognise. The sorts of plans that for example the Women’s Budget Group has put forward for a “care-led recovery”, making the case for investment in care work to create jobs, or the proposals from Autonomy and others for radical changes in how, when and where we work speak to the fundamental issues raised by the crisis. Instead of the grandiose promises of the Tories, Labour can develop an economic programme keyed to the fine-grain detail of people’s lives and experiences.

Fighting “backsliding” and the organisational efforts to unite what is turning out to be a diverse groups of political forces opposed to Starmer is not a step in that direction. 

Particularly as this looms:

Written by Andrew Coates

July 14, 2020 at 10:17 am

Keir Starmer: Poll Boost for 100 Days of Leadership.

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Starmer is doing better in the polls than his predecessors.

Net scores for leaders at around 100 days: Ed Miliband -21 Jeremy Corbyn -32 Keir Starmer +24 First impressions matter in politics, and Starmer has made a good one. (Chris Curtis).

Today sees many accounts of Keir Starmer’s first 100 Days as Labour Leader.

On Labour List Sienna Rogers writes (100 Days of Starmer) that,

The new leader has adopted a softly, softly approach to opposing the government and a ruthless one for internal party politics.

He has forged a slim but reliable majority on Labour’s national executive committee, replaced Jennie Formby with a general secretary who is widely considered to be on the party’s right, and sacked his Corbynite leadership opponent from the shadow cabinet. The Labour frontbench has been thoroughly overhauled, both in terms of who’s on it and the tone that they take in interviews. The leadership has slowly ramped up criticism of the Tories over Covid-19, but caution is still the watchword for media engagement.

She continues,

The core objective of Starmer’s team appears to be ‘detoxifying’ the Labour brand. If we’re assessing these 100 days on that basis, the leader’s brilliant personal approval ratings certainly give cause for optimism – but the party has some catching up to do, still lagging behind the Conservatives in voting intention despite their calamitous response to the crisis.

Faced with the divisions on the Labour Left, with a substantial fringe unable to accept Starmer’s legitimacy, it looks probable that the Labour leader will consolidate support on the National Executive Committee after the forthcoming internal party elections.

Toby Helm in the Observer yesterday (100 days on, Keir Starmer’s quiet revolution takes hold) accurately reflects the reactions on the wider left  to Starmer’s “ruthless” actions inside the Party..

Laura Parker, who has backed the internationalist Another Europe is Possible campaign, is cited,

.”….there has been no mass resignation from the membership, says Laura Parker, the former national coordinator of Momentum, because Starmer stood on a leftwing programme which he has stood by.”

She asks, 

Why would people leave when the centre of gravity has shifted? It may not have shifted as far to the left as some people want. But it is an anti-austerity, pro-common ownership party. It is a pro-peace party, and it is not a ‘relaxed about the filthy rich’ party – far from it,” said Parker.

She believes it is probably too early to judge Starmer, as Covid-19 has drowned out everything else and given the new Labour leader no real chance to show his true policy colours. But she sees definite signs that the entire movement wants to come together under him if it can.

“The vast majority of people do want to turn a page,” she said. “That does not mean the left is about to abandon all its principles, but there is an appetite for building more harmonious relationships.”

Indeed. We could do without the contrived attacks on Starmer’s “Blairism”and the claims of a wave of activists leaving, instead of a few individuals and a a hostile mood amongst those who placed high hopes in Corbyn.

But there is room for the kind of strategic questioning offered by Peter Kenyon in the left journal Chartist,

Peter Kenyon looks forward to a dismal future for Britain and its children post-Brexit

Labour remainers are engaged in one last bid to persuade Labour Party leader Keir Starmer to speak out about Brexit. It is a difficult ask. The new leadership wants the Tories to own the issue. But how to fix that in the minds of voters?

…..

Starmer needs to make a statement, without necessarily calling for an extension, about the consequences of Johnson’s plate-spinning. Lastly, now is the time to remind voters that there is no sector of the economy that will benefit from maximum divergence except the disaster capitalists represented by the current Cabinet.

In framing a starker set of messages about the future, they will need to be targeted at those newly-elected Tory MPs from so-called ‘red wall’ seats. Make them squirm. Unbelievably, they won their seats with promises of hope. What hope can there be for their constituents and their children when their local manufacturing base is having its heart ripped out by the Tories? Divergence from the EU means just-in-time supply chains will be wrecked with delays at ports, and the risk of tariffs. This is just one of the consequences of Johnson’s ‘fuck business’ policy. Agriculture is similarly at risk.

On the more radical left (also from the internationalist Another Europe is Possible anti-Brexit campaign) Michael Chessum also appears in the Observer Toby Helm article.

He says, 

For now, though, the party, like the country, is getting to know Starmer. Michael Chessum, a former member of Momentum’s steering group, says the sacking of Long-Bailey and appointment of Evans have split the left and caused irritation.

“But,” he said, “most members are probably willing to tolerate this, as long as the new leadership honours its promise to maintain Corbyn’s radical policy platform. The question is whether Starmer can really do this while at the same time completely changing Labour’s personnel and tone.”

Michael delicately refers to the self-righteous blasts that followed Long-Bailey’s dismissal,  a reaction that has only served to isolate the professional anti-Starmer current further.

This is how some of them reacted:

Today they are reduced to this:

Susan Press, a long-standing activist on the left of Labour, reflects a more widely shared take.

The anti-Starmer left, many of them from groups  inside and outside the Labour Party favourable to Brexit and whose campaigning against the EU helped bring Boris Johnson to power,  have struggled to find more than a role.

They are reduced to this kind of snipping:

Today Labour supporters and activists are beginning to digest this in full.

Conner Ibbetson writes,

Starmer vs Corbyn: how does Labour’s new leader stack up?

Since taking office as leader of the Labour party, Sir Keir Starmer has been presented with a tough set of challenges; unite the party following a crushing general election defeat, tackle the issue of antisemitism, and win back Labour’s key voters. Add to that list the COVID-19 pandemic and a resulting surge in support for the Government, and you’ve got a truly monumental task ahead of you – so what do Labour voters and the general public make of him 100 days in, and how does he stack up against his predecessor?

This is a crucial point:

Distancing himself from Corbyn could prove a winning strategy for the new Labour leader. When compared to Corbyn, Starmer is seen as universally more appealing to both Labour voters and general voters, by both the general public and Labour voters themselves. Overall, 60% of the public think Starmer best appeals to the general voter, compared to 56% who think he appeals to Labour voters more than his predecessor.

Among Labour voters, 73% back Starmer as most appealing to the general voter, while only 7% still hang on and say Jeremy Corbyn had a better appeal.

When it comes to who Labour voters think best appeals to the party, the majority still side with Starmer (65%) however 14% of Labour voters still opt for Corbyn.

Looking at younger adults under the age of 25, while a sizeable portion back Starmer in both cases, the group is split (40% and 39%) on which leader they see as most appealing to general voters and labour voters respectively.

Ibbetson concludes by saying that voters consider that Starmer has moved the party to the right, “a third (35%) of the general public thinking Starmer has already moved the Labour Party more towards the political right, with only 3% saying he has shifted the party towards the left. Approaching a fifth (19%) say the Labour Party has remained in the same place for now.

This will doubtless crop up frequently, “Among Labour voters, two fifths (40%) say Keir Starmer has shifted the party towards to the right, with 18% saying the party has stayed the same under his leadership.”

A poll is not a political analysis, and one would hesitate to call all of Corbyn’s policies, or rather his lack of clear ones on issues like Universal Credit or foreign policy, the gold standard of left wing politics. 

 

Written by Andrew Coates

July 13, 2020 at 4:31 pm

We Need to Talk About Jacobin – “Srebrenica massacre” “used to justify more war and US intervention”.

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Image may contain: text that says "J Jacobin @jacobinmag The Srebrenica massacre, which started on this day in 1995, was a tragic event. But for the last twenty years, it's been used to justify more war and US intervention. The Srebrenica Precedent jacobinmag.com"

“Helped justify later interventions, including the ongoing strikes against ISIS.” Jacobin.

To commemorate the anniversary of the Srebrenica Mass Killings the US left magazine Jacobin, which owns the British ‘Tribune’, published this piece:

The Srebrenica Precedent DAVID N. GIBBS

This article has one central theme:

…the widespread belief that Serb forces had committed genocide played a critical role in legitimating the idea of humanitarian intervention, in the Balkans and throughout the world. After Srebrenica, US interventionism would increasingly be presented as a genocide prevention enterprise.

Viewed from a humanitarian standpoint, the US response to the Srebrenica massacre was a lethal fiasco. But despite the ugly facts of the episode, a mythology emerged from Srebrenica that emphasized the supposedly benign character of US intervention. In this telling, US policy was the savior of the Bosnian people and the defender of human rights more generally.

Gibbs has little analysis of the break-up of Yugoslavia (nor why some on the left opposed this) and sees everything through the lens of ‘humanitarian intervention’.

There is a second theme.

The Srebrenica massacre was surely a horrific act, but did it constitute genocide? In a controversial 2003 decision, the ICTY tribunal answered in the affirmative. Its determination that the Srebrenica massacre amounted to genocide has been widely questioned among academic authorities on the topic.

His article does not exactly deny genocide but calls the Srebrenica mass ethnic murder a “massacre”  and, ina  range of claims, which specialists can address, seeks to apportion blame more widely. How far this is true is, as indicated, a matter for those with deep knowledge of the history of the events. This is an extremely partisan field and since some of the people engaged in it are, let’s just say, not friends of the Tendance all one can say is that Gibbs offers only an interpretation. Bu then Gibbs is, to be it politely, somebody who has ploughed this furrow for over a decade. The approval of the World Socialist Web Site indicates it…

But the article has a political intention  for the present day.

If one applies the Gibbs criteria, the ” deliberate mass killings of exceptional size and scale, generally in the range of the hundreds of thousands or millions” where would leave the recent genocide of the Yazidis? The UN Commission of Inquiry stated in 2017, ““The Commission of Inquiry calls on the international community to recognize the crime of genocide being committed by ISIL against the Yazidis and to undertake steps to refer the situation to justice,” said the expert panel in a statement marking the third anniversary of ISIL’s attack on the Yazidis.”

As stated, the article has this much wider purpose,

Twenty years later, Srebrenica is still shaping US foreign policy. NATO interventions in the Balkans served to legitimate both the Atlantic Alliance and US hegemony, and the new language of human rights and genocide prevention has helped justify later interventions, including the ongoing strikes against ISIS.

For Gibbs, channelling his inner ‘anti-imperialism of fools’, the US Western help for the Kurds to fight against Daesh is the “fault” of the West’s claims to stand for human rights. Aiding the Kurdish SDF in its stand against the genociders of ISIS was a Western “intervention”, part of its “hegemony” justified in the name of the “language” of humanitarian intervention which can be traced back to reactions to Srebrenica.

It’s as if an act of mass murder is somehow the ’cause’ of every kind of Western intervention, every kind of duplicitous ‘human rights’ language, a kind of pennant of Western hegemony.

It’s as if there is something “new” about human rights.

If human rights are universal then surely there are times when they can “trump” formal national sovereignty?

Humanitarian intervention can, as the Kurds in Kobane (to cite just one example) know, can be a demand from the people themselves.

Gibbs’ way of looking at mass murder as the bunting of species arguments in favour of preventing genocides  is distasteful to say the least.

Such a conclusion perhaps only tops the rest of this curiously timed article.

What does this show about Jacobin?

It indicates  a deep crisis of moral direction.

Jacobin,  “a leading voice of the American left”, lost its way sometime last year.

A vocal supporter of “left populism” in Europe, and Bernie Sanders in the US, 2019 saw defeat after defeat for its favourite parties. Protest Party, and “lieu de rassemblement” (rallying point) for the People Against the Oligarchy La France insoumise went from 19,9% for the candidacy of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the French Presidential contest of 2017 to 6,3% in the European elections. The Greek left party Syriza lost control of the government in July to the right-wing New Democracy.  In Spain Podemos went from 69 seats in the 2015  Congress to 35 after last November’s General General Election. In December the British Labour Party was beaten in a Tory landslide, a party some saw in terms of right-wing national populism.

These were not just temporary setbacks.

In La Chute de la Maison Mélenchon (201(9) former LFI leading activist, the political scientist Thomas  Guénolé, described the rally as a virtual democracy run top-down  by its  would-be’charismatic’ leader. “La France insoumise , c’est moi” (Page 121). (1) Guénolé pointed out that the sociological breakdown of LFI electoral support could not be seen as a new bloc, or “articulation” of the people; it closely resembled the vote for François Hollande, the former Socialist president elected in 2012.

In La Chute Mélenchon’s  failure,  as the Tribune of the People, the embodiment  of the Republic (famously saying “la république, c’est moi”), was to follow his own bent and the advice of those who believed in left-populism. He refused  to recognise the electoral basis of his momentary rise in left-wing voters who saw him – as the other parts of left fragmented , with many going over to Macron’s centrist La République en Marche, as the best placed on the left to oppose the far-right Marine le Pen. As the author puts it,  “he said he united the people, but in reality he briefly brought together the voters of the left (“a dit qu’elle unissait le peuple, mais ce qu’elle a fait, ‘c’est unir l’électorat de gauche” Page 224).

THis did not last. Mélenchon has never been able to negotiate as an equal with other left parties and groups. In the recent French local elections he had to recognise his uneven local implementation and accept a secondary role on a few lists with other left forces, leaving his own party as a marginal player.

LFI represents, as Guénolé indicates, the failure of left populism to replace the division between right and left by one which pits the “99%” against the “oligarchy”, the Casta, the “elite”. Its decline cannot be put down to the personal faults of  bombastic  leader raised in the sectarian school of the Trotskyist current known as Lambertism and years of internal Parti Socialiste factionalism. The political strategy of trying to seize national sovereignty in the name of a federate people has not led to a single electoral victory. Those who float the idea of some kind of ‘progressive nationalism’ and a dose of this populism, to help the British Labour Party regain its lost support, have lost any European model to follow.

Podemos, a democratic party willing to negotiate a left coalition with Spain’s Socialist Party, the PSOE, has discretely dropped this left populist’ core. Left Populist theorist and amateur politician Chantal Mouffe set down a benchmark for the current in her book, ” in conversation with Íñigo Errejón”Podemos: In the Name of the People (2016) Errejón now runs his own micro-party Más País with 3 MPs in Spain’s National Assembly. Podemos has also seen the split away of its leftist wing, la Izquierda anticapitalista (June 2020. Anticapitalistas leave Podemos.)

Despite these set-backs (we would leave it to those familiar with the US to write on Sanders), and the wider issues of what happened to the ‘populist’ left in Latin America, Jacobin nevertheless published this during the pre-lockdown Spring,

Left-Populism Is Down but Not Out

GIORGOS VENIZELOS YANNIS STAVRAKAKIS

We argue that it is not the populist core that is responsible for this outcome, but instead the leftist one.

(Left) Populism does not necessarily entail a form of reformist politics. It is, rather, one way with which a leftist programmatic package (regardless of its degree of radicalism) can develop its capacity to form coalitions, articulate demands, and mobilize supporters in order to construct a collective identity and acquire a form able to undermine the status quo within representative systems. In this sense, all communist, socialist, social-democratic, and radical-leftist projects can be populist, too. A Left program which, let’s say, pushes for redistribution, free health care, or free education can frame these demands in a populist way, i.e., by aiming to regain popular (neither national nor class) sovereignty.

A more restrained analysis, has been made by Lewis Basset.

The Left Must Address a Historic Crisis of Representation

A broad survey of the left-populist parties that have attempted to wed themselves to extraparliamentary movements reveals today little but vacated intent. Podemos’s “circles” have all but disappeared, LFI’s equivalent failed to develop, while Momentum in the UK functioned not at all as a social movement and only a little better as an intraparty faction. But it would be a mistake to blame all this on leadership “betrayals.” Rather, both leaders and movements are limited by an atomized social context.

Elsewhere, economic growth and employment levels had finally begun to recover, while “centrists” had found a source of continuity via Emmanuel Macron in France, Pedro Sánchez in Spain, Joe Biden in the United States, and, perhaps, Keir Starmer in Britain. But the dynamics of this new and profound crisis will provide the context in which popular demands will again go unanswered — and in which new alignments of voters can once again emerge.

Make of that what you will.

In the meantime perhaps in despair Jacobin’s European Editor backed the losing side in the recent Momentum faction fight.

Others suggest that Jacobin’s loss of political direction is more serious.

 

*****

(1) A fuller account of this book would deal with Guénolé’s personal dispute with LFI, and issues with, for example, the running of its media operation, Le Média and financial skullduggery. See La chute de la maison Mélenchon”, autopsie de la France insoumise Par Hadrien Mathoux.

Guénolé’s Petit guide du mensonge en politique, (

Hagia Sophia: Target of Erdoğan’s National Populism and Culture Wars.

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Turkish court rules Istanbul's Hagia Sophia can revert to a mosque ...

 

Religious and National Populist Culture Wars.

The BBC’s Orla Guerin reports,

A change is coming to Hagia Sophia, which has endured since the 6th century, outlasting the Byzantine empire and the Ottoman era. Now, once again, it will be a mosque. But Turkish officials say Christian emblems, including mosaics of the Virgin Mary which adorn its soaring golden dome, will not be removed.

Making changes at Hagia Sophia is profoundly symbolic. It was Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, who decreed that it should be a museum. President Erdogan is now taking one more step to dismantle Ataturk’s secular legacy, and remould Turkey according to his vision. The Turkish leader – who presents himself as a modern day conqueror – is making no apologies for the change. He says anyone who doesn’t like it – and plenty abroad don’t – is attacking Turkey’s sovereignty.

Reclaiming Hagia Sophia plays well with his base – religious conservatives – and with Turkish nationalists. Critics say he’s using the issue to distract attention from the economic damage done here by the Covid19 pandemic.

But many in the international community argue that the monument belongs to humanity – not to Turkey – and should have remained unchanged. They say it was a bridge between two faiths, and a symbol of co-existence.

The progressive  Peoples’ Democratic Party, the HDP,  (Halkların Demokratik Partisi (HDP),  Partiya Demokratîk a Gelan) [party, (an associate member of the Party of European Socialists ) which holds 58 seats in the Turkish National Assembly, has condemned the move.

THis is already being greeted by religious reactionaries.

Religious prejudice overrides history.

The significance is lost of nobody who knows the history of Turkey, and  for people across the world who care about our common cultural heritage.

Secularists have made their views known.

This is the motive:

Turkey’s ruler  Recep Tayyip Erdoğan  and his organisation, the Justice and Development Party (: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi), illustrate a national populism prepared to go further than culture wars against democrats and religious minorities.

The hounding of dissidents, the imprisonment of political opponents, and his blood-stained interventions in Syria and against Kurds across the region, not to mention his open use of Turkish forces to bolster his preferred side in the Libyan civil conflict (Erdogan Is Libya’s Man Without a Plan.) , are more significant than this move to stake his claim as an international leader of hard right Islamism.

Yet this bigoted and deeply insulting move is noxious in itself.

 

 

Written by Andrew Coates

July 11, 2020 at 11:47 am

Factionalism in the Time of Coronavirus Part 13: George Galloway to “return to Scottish Politics”.

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George Galloway claims he will return to Scotland in RT clip | The ...

Galloway to Work His Magic in Scottish Politics.

Lucky 13 for George Galloway:

Former MP George Galloway to return to Scottish politics after row over border

George Galloway is planning to return to Scottish politics after becoming involved in a social media row over a proposed quarantine for tourists arriving in Scotland from England.

The former Labour MP confirmed to The Courier he is to move back to Scotland after a weekend of debate on Twitter, sparked by a group of protesters who staged a demonstration at the Scottish border.

 

It’s hard to say that George Galloway is  a factionalist.

His own party, the Workers Party of Britain,  is staffed by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) who stand for monolithic unity and spend their leisure hours watching Box Sets of the Speeches of North Korea’s hereditary Marxist-Leninist Monarchy.

Better to say that Galloway is a man of many ventures.

There were those happy days of the marches against the invasion of Iraq,  a  leading role in the Stop the War Coalition and cosy  meetings with John Rees and Lindsey German. Then…..Mr Galloway went to Washington! The dapper gent had a  distinguished Parliamentary career after the Bethnal Green earthquake that “gave birth” to the Labour Party all over again,  and the regime-changing Bradford West Spring that made the city an “Israel-free zone.” Galloway declared that he would rejoin the Labour Party if Jeremy Corbyn was elected Leader. Only jealousy in high-places stopped this dream coming true.

A man of many parts Galloway has shaken up British political, cultural and intellectual life. His friendship with Nigel Farage helped heal the divisions opening up in the UK over Brexit.  There were his much-loved house-sharing escapades as a madcap cat. A well-regarded manual, the Handbook for Fidel Castro, was a world best-seller.  There was a successful theatrical venture, Dusty Springfield, the Musical. There was the project for a series of children’s books, set amongst the Spice islands of Indonesia, “Red Molucca the Good Pirate.” 

Now we learn George Galloway is to return to lead his ain folk.

The move is widely seen to cap a successful political career and rewarding personal life.

Campaigning has already begun:

Watch out Scotland!

 

 

 

 

Factionalism in the Time of Coronavirus Part 12: Left NEC Slate Faces Transphobia Row.

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Labour NEC elections to open 11 July and conclude in November ...

 

It was already controversial, but hours and hours of negotiating (8 ! hours)  resulted in a united left list for Labour’s NEC: Labour left groups agree single NEC slate of six CLP rep candidates – without Lansman.

Labour List’s Sienna Rodgers comments,

It was understood that Momentum co-founder and former chair Lansman had hoped to be endorsed by the CLGA for the upcoming NEC elections, as he vowed to focus on his NEC duties when stepping down from the organisation.

They are:

  • Ann Henderson
  • Gemma Bolton
  • Laura Pidcock
  • Mish Rahman
  • Nadia Jama
  • Yasmine Dar

….

 

Now a new row has broken out over one of the agreed candidates.

The candidate is accused of Transphobia.

The news is just breaking, and her name is emerging: 

 

Background:

NEC Elections – call for a united left slate

Jewish Voice for Labour, Labour Representation Committee and Red Labour, are working together with the other nine organisations represented in the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA) to arrive at a list of candidates that every party member can be assured will stand firm in defence of the policy gains of the Corbyn period: for a democratic party equally accessible to all members regardless of their background; for open selection for all post holders; and for natural justice, transparency and fairness in internal processes.

We and other CLGA member organisations are currently reviewing prospective nominees for the nine CLP places on the NEC, with the proviso that it may be better, strategically, to nominate a smaller slate of 6 in order to maximise the vote for left candidates.

The two largest and best-established left groups – Momentum and Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) – bear a large part of the responsibility for ensuring that this time there is no factional wrangling of the kind that has undermined left unity over the last two years. Other groups involved need to play their part in generating the purposeful and flexible spirit necessary to select a set of able and principled candidates that all will support.

Working together, Jewish Voice for Labour, the Labour Representation Committee and Red Labour have become influential actors in this important, complex and fast-moving situation. We will do our best to keep members informed, and to campaign actively for the success of the unity slate of left candidates.

While all this is happening many people are looking at this list which unlike the above is actually “centre left”.

Given that there are 9 CLP posts up for election there is space for people to vote for the 6 ‘list’ candidates and 3 others……

In the meantime Skwawkbox is working hard on his full time job of attacking the Labour Party,

Breaking: resigning council leader’s explosive video statement accuses Starmer of hypocrisy and Labour right of racism, corruption, cover-ups, perjury, misogyny – and hounding her out

Here

Written by Andrew Coates

July 9, 2020 at 1:15 pm

A ‘New State Capitalism’ Post-Covid 19 ?

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The Unexpected Reckoning: COVID-19 and Capitalism - YouTube

Is a ‘New State Capitalism’ on the cards?

Without a doubt, Trump and the Brexiteers did not foresee needing state ownership of industry and explicit state direction to achieve their goals. There are plenty of ways the state fosters, guides, and shapes private capital. Capitalism is never without the state, except in some libertarian utopia. State ownership just makes this relationship more explicit.

March the 26th 2020. The Specter of State Capitalism. Ilias Alami. 

Editorialising in the March/April issue of New Left Review the radical left journal peered at the effects of the global pandemic.

It found, to at least the learned New Leftists’ surprise, that Covid-19 had rescued the role of the Nation State.

….the political agencies taking charge, one by one, are nation-states, summoned back from the secondary status to which laissez-faire ideology had consigned them—and now resuming, as if in war time, their foundational responsibility for public safety. The virus has been a Rorschach test for ruling parties and national-political cultures alike. In the us, a bellowing hypochondriac in the White House, ambitious state governors honing their profiles, a bi-partisan Congressional bail-out for big business and tougher sanctions on Iran. In the uk, Churchillian sentiment plastering over critical shortages and medics’ deaths. In the eu, assorted neoliberal regimes squabbling over how to press home their prior political agendas.

In the latest issue of journal (No 123 May-June 2020). the economist Robert Brenner leads with an article outlining that the US response has focused on the public safety of one group above all others. A “corporate bailout”, a”Billionaire coronavirus bonanza” is  the description of the US government’s handling of the economy during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Escalating Plunder offers an overview of how pro-Trump businesses have taken advantage of public largesse  during the pandemic. Benner asserts that  “the success of so many famous non-financial corporations in securing loans at artificially reduced prices that has made the headlines, it is actually the lenders, the financiers, who have benefited most decisively.” He observes that the Trump Presidency has not taken control of the economy in the process, “The persistence of such a hands-off approach to the economy’s leading producers and financiers on the part of the bipartisan political-economic establishment at a time of such profound crisis.”

The conclusion? That this “plunder” means that  redistribution of wealth is the main effect of a primary political intervention in the “assets markets” and the “whole economy”.

This is the politically driven intention, the

way that they can assure the reproduction of the non-financial and financial corporations, their top managers and shareholders—and indeed top leaders of the major parties, closely connected with them—is to intervene politically in the asset markets and throughout the whole economy, so as to underwrite the upward re-distribution of wealth to them by directly political means. This is, indeed, what Congress and the Fed have accomplished with their large-scale and extended corporate bailout in the face of plunging production, employment and profits. The politically driven upward redistribution of wealth to sustain central elements of a partially transformed dominant capitalist class, as the response to a seemingly inexorable process of economic deterioration, has been at the heart of the politico-economic evolution which has brought us to this point. What we have had for a long epoch is worsening economic decline met by intensifying political predation.

At a Zoom meeting this week, which the writer of this Blog participated in, the political and economic effects of the crisis were talked about.  Many suggest that there are more radical changes underfoot than “Predation”.

The left is beginning to talk of government measures as steps towards a kind of “state capitalism”. That something similar to a war-time command economy might be in the making, at least in Britain and the rest of Europe. As mass unemployment looms other perspectives have also appeared.

It looks as if moves are being made to consolidate the ’emergency’ state-led economy on a longer-term basis.

The Outward ‘Bounce Back‘ recommends,
  1. Introducing new fiscal rules that delay the Conservative Manifesto pledge to have debt falling as a share of GDP to 2024, but maintaining the Government’s commitment to keep debt interest below 6% of GDP.
  2. Sweeping tax reform now to ensure borrowing is brought under control equitably and without harming growth. This means reviewing the 1,100 tax reliefs that exist, focusing tax rises on accrued wealth, including by revaluing council tax, removing distortions in the tax system, for example those that favour large digital firms, and announcing a long-term review of the tax treatment of debt and equity financing. Any immediate tax cuts should be focused on cutting the cost of employment through reducing the burden of employer NICs, rather than a VAT cut aimed at boosting  consumption.
  3. Establishing a new Restructuring Agency, modelled on the Industrial Revitalisation Corporation of Japan, to manage the estimated £30 billion of government-guaranteed loans that are expected to go bad and ensure the high levels of corporate debt generally do not become a drag on investment and the economic recovery.
  4. Investing £30 billion directly into high growth companies, such as the British Business Bank, British Growth Fund and British Patient Capital, using convertible loans that can be turned into equity if not repaid, to ensure firms can assess capital to invest without just taking on ever more debt.
  5. Rapid action to prevent labour market scarring, by hiring 13,000 Universal Credit work coaches, targeting job subsidies on absorptive sectors and guaranteeing every young person a chance to earn, train or serve their community.
  6. Establishing a new Right to Retrain for adults, including a £50,000 repayable loan, available to all adults without a degree at any stage of their career for full and part-time students, funded via the National Skills Fund.
  7. Double Further Education funding and launch a radical wave of reform of the sector to give colleges five years of funding certainty, improve take up of higher value subjects and to rationalise qualifications.

It’s not hard to see that some of these policy proposals, above all a “Restructuring Agency” and  direct investment (‘picking winners’ as free-marketeers used to call it) and the “debt for equity swaps” raises the issue of state capitalism explicitly.

It confirms that Alami (above: The Spectre of State Capitalism)  seems to have hit on something early,

COVID-19 and the generalized economic crisis it has catalyzed may hasten changes toward explicit forms of state capitalism in the West. Yet, a decloaked state at the helm does not necessarily mean a more progressive and just economic system (just like it does not mean a move toward state socialism). Who will bear the brunt of the costs of the current transformations, and who will benefit from the consolidation of the ‘new’ state capitalism, will be the outcome of a tense political process.

Researchers are beginning to think along these lines.

The rise of State Capitalism in the post-COVID-19 era

In this article, which appeared a couple of days ago, Christopher Dembik offers an interesting angle,

Marxism, which has been the subject of renewed interest since the GFC, defines state capitalism as a social system combining capitalism with ownership or control by the state which basically acts like a single huge corporation. It differs from Communism in the sense that in a state capitalist system, private property continues to exist alongside a big government that dictates the path the economy is heading to. State capitalism has been around for almost as long as capitalism itself. In 1791, Alexander Hamilton, first ever U.S. Treasury Secretary, presented an ambitious project to protect America’s infant industries with tariffs from international competition. It marks the birth of the idea of educative protectionism which will be theorized a few decades later by the German economist Friedrich List after a stay of a few years in the United States.

The author roots changing forms of state capitalism in recent developments,

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, Eurasia Group’s president, Ian Brenner wrote a celebrated book in which he claims that the GFC announces the end of the free market. His bold statement turned out to be partially correct. During the turmoil, Western governments had to play a bigger role in the economy as driving force for recovery, but they disengaged themselves very quickly as soon as the economy showed signs of picking up.

Dembik argues that, “This time is different”

State capitalism might become a more permanent state of the economy, at least in some countries, due to the nature of the current crisis, which differs from previous ones, mainly for two reasons. First, it is not a “normal” recession. While on average 60% to 70% of businesses are hit in a “normal” recession, the COVID-19 crisis has affected almost 100% of businesses in some countries where strict lockdowns have been implemented. Coronavirus scars and depressive effects will persist longer than most believe. Policymakers, with a massive inflow of liquidity into the economy, have delayed and postponed a lot of pain but they have not eliminated it. The second economic wave is about to start, characterized by massive unemployment and an unprecedented number of bankruptcies.

In countries most exposed, the relative share of the private sector in the economy will dramatically decrease, consecutively leading to a bigger public sector which will employ directly or indirectly a big chunk of the workforce. In addition, governments are likely to rely increasingly on quasi-permanent subsidies to protect domestic companies and appease social discontent resulting from the crisis.

The effects of climate change could also further destabilise the economy.

Second, another crisis will emerge soon with potential ripple effects more devastating than the coronavirus. CO2 levels in atmosphere reaching a new record and Artic oil spill caused by melting permafrost are two unpleasant reminders that climate change has not taken a break while we were focusing on the pandemic. Many people might consider big government is the only way to tackle the consequences of climate change and especially avoid leaving the poor even farther behind.

So where does this leave the ‘new state capitalism’?

Interventionism, of the kind advocated by the Onward group, and (potentially) an economy directed with aggressive  sovereignty towards the European Union, is being put in place at the same time as the privatisation of public services and ‘openness’ towards the government’s friend in the White House, and low-quality US imports,

The Pro-Privatization Shock Therapy of the UK’s Covid Response

Rachel Shabi

The outsourcing bonanza has coincided with Britain’s tense talks with the European Union over the terms of a new, non-member relationship. The Brexit transition period, during which Britain is still following EU rules, concludes at the end of the year. Negotiations to resolve myriad difficult, outstanding issues have already been set back by the pandemic, yet Boris Johnson has refused to countenance an extension. For Leave.EU hardliners, a no-deal Brexit is not unwelcome: it would, as they see it, set the nation free to forge ahead as Global Britain, a sort of deregulated “Singapore-on-Thames,” as some Brexiteers have enthused.

One result – not in line with previous cases of Naomi KLein’s ‘Shock Therapy‘-  may well be to reinforce what Paul Mason has called “national neoliberalism“.

The policies of the government only loosely resembles some war-time measures only in the sense that public debt is used to boost the economy. There is no direction of labour, or of production. It is only ‘state capitalist’ in the sense that the government is (temporally) paying wages (the furlough scheme), for those in employment, and  encouraging the provision of capital, it has little power over the use of capital.   Competition between different capitals is far from over. If it is theoretically possible that some kind of 1960s interventionist policies may become embedded in government policy, these will be to encourage enterprises, not to control them.

What seems to be shaping up is an economy, in the UK, organised by the state for the protection of the internal market, social handouts (for now) to stave off mass destitution and unemployment, gifts (including discounted eating out)  to shore up the electoral base of its  national populism,  and plunder (“a handout of pandemic contracts to the private sector”) for the government’s crony capitalists.

Nothing in this anaemic  ‘state capitalism’  is a step towards socialism.

Boffy says,

It’s inevitable that governments are going to have to bail out aircraft producers, carmakers, airlines and airports.  Those bailouts are going to run into hundreds of billions of Dollars, Pounds, Euros etc.  There is no reason that the EU is going to help bailout British companies as Britain heads for Brexit.  The EU as a $14 trillion economy can easily mobilise the resources to bail-out its strategic industries, even running into tens or even hundreds of billions of Euros, though it will require large-scale borrowing, leading to a sharp rise in interest rates to do it.  But, Britain with its puny $2 trillion economy will struggle to do so.  But, unless the UK government does borrow and find the funds to bail-out these industries, they will go bust, and it will lead to a more rapid concentration of capital in the EU.  The funds the government is going to have to find for these bail-outs are huge, dwarfing what Sunak has already spent, and promised yesterday.
When the UK government bailed out the banks and finance houses in 2008/9, the total cost came to £2 trillion.  The financial sector accounts for a disproportionately large part of the UK economy.  Even so, imagine the total cost then of bailing out the rest of the economy, or even just a large part of it.  When the initial proposals for bailing out the banks were put forward, the original figures were only a fraction of what the actual number turned out to be.  That was the case just in Britain, but, as Sraid Marx described it was done quite deliberately in getting approval for bailing out the Irish banks.
The cost of bailing out large parts of the UK economy which is facing going bust as a result of the lockdown, unless such bail-outs occur, will make the bail-outs of the banks seem like small beer.  The total cost is more likely to be around £20 trillion.  British workers are going to be paying the price of this insane policy of lockdown for decades to come in the form of higher unemployment, and all of the health problems that goes with it, as well as slower growth, resulting from the need to cover the interest payments on all of this debt.

Written by Andrew Coates

July 9, 2020 at 11:19 am

Cancel Culture. “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”. From Rowling to Chomsky.

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alex (@alex_abads) | Twitter

“The task of Marxist politics is to defend these freedoms” – Ralph Miliband.

JK Rowling joins 150 public figures warning over free speech

BBC,

Some 150 writers, academics and activists – including authors JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood – have signed an open letter denouncing the “restriction of debate”.

They say they applaud a recent “needed reckoning” on racial justice, but argue it has fuelled stifling of open debate.

The letter denounces “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism” and “a blinding moral certainty”.

Several signatories have been attacked for comments that caused offence.

“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” says the letter.

US intellectual Noam Chomsky, eminent feminist Gloria Steinem, Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and author Malcolm Gladwell also put their names to the letter, which was published on Tuesday in Harper’s Magazine.

The appearance of Harry Potter author Rowling’s name among signatories comes after she recently found herself under attack online for comments that offended transgender people.

A comrade writes (B),

 I don’t have an issue with the principles outlined in the letter, but I really think the idea of ‘cancel culture’ is perpetuated primarily by people who are performatively ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’. Like that person yesterday who was decrying mathematics as western imperialism on one side, and the likes of Andrew Doyle and Julie Burchill on the other. They feed off each other.

This looks like the best way to look at this.

When we come down to it, one of things the socialist left should do is to stand with liberal principles on issues of freedom of expression and non-conformity. Surely the bedrock of the diversity is multiple standpoints.

Marxists like Ralph Miliband took this view.

..the civic freedoms which, however inadequately and preariously, form part of bourgeois democracy are the product of centuries of unremitting popular struggles. The task of Marxist politics is to defend these freedoms; and to make possible their extension and enlargement by the removal of their class boundaries.”

Page 189 – 190. Marxism and Politics. Ralph Miliband. Oxford 1977.

To our shame this powerful tradition on the left has been overshadowed by the legacy of left regimes which turned their backs on civic freedoms.

You could say that the present dispute is much more minor, that it’s the hobbyist left versus the media version of the national populists. “Stifling debate”, moral panics, hysteria, controversies, like the TERF wars and the Western (if not US dominated) rows over racism (which ignore present-day Africa to begin with), the nationalist baiting, and the Brexit Party supporting Spiked, are more concerned with “speech and thought” than anything else.

Yet it’s hard to deny that restriction on debate, people being howled down, getting into serious difficulties for their opinions, not their acts,  has become a problem.

Are these only culture wars?

People mention that in the US you can get sacked at the drop of the hat – one fall out from these attacks – without any real employment protection.

It is also the case that this is not an issue confined to the lands directly cited by the authors of the letter, or just a matter of cultural “conformity”.

It only takes a minute to look at countries, from the, Russian Federation politics, China and Hong Kong, to Erdoğan’s Turkey, to see limits on freedom of expression leading to court sentences and prison.

Human rights, and expression is one of them, are the bedrock of the left.

I do have a serious problem with Chomsky though….and not just because he’s a supporter of Labour Against the WItch-hunt:

 

And this,

Not to mention those who shunned Charlie Hebdo…

American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky views the popularisation of the Je suis Charlie slogan by politicians and media in the West as hypocritical, comparing the situation to the NATO bombing of the Radio Television of Serbia headquarters in 1999, when 16 employees were killed. “There were no demonstrations or cries of outrage, no chants of ‘We are RTV’ […]“, he noted. Chomsky also mentioned other incidents where US military forces have caused higher civilian death tolls, without leading to intensive reactions such as those that followed the 2015 Paris attacks.

Here’s the letter.

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate

Harper’s Magazine.

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Momentum, “must and will lead criticisms of Keir Starmer” say new Co-Chairs.

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Momentum replaces Lansman with firefighter and climate activist co ...

Momentum new Co-Chairs: Gaya Sriskanthan, co-chair of Labour New York and  Andrew Scattergood, West MIdlands Firefighter.

 

With a new leadership in place Momentum has lost no time in setting out its future plans.

Gaya Sriskanthan, co-chair of Labour New York, who has been based in America working on a variety of Climate Justice initiatives,  since 2010, and  Andrew Scattergood FBU West Midlands regional secretary write in the US owned Tribune, that they will back “workers and trade unions locally, on the ground and where it matters”, including in the Tower Hamlets dispute between a Labour Council and its employees.

The new leadership intends to make it a priority to tackle the newly elected Labour Leader.

We must and will lead criticisms of Keir Starmer, especially if he continues to attack the Left, dismiss vibrant social movements for systematic change, such as Black Lives Matter, and abandon the radical policy that so many Labour members, and much of the wider country, want.

They conclude,

We must continue to develop transformative socialist policy and set an agenda for change. We must organise in every region and nation, in our CLPs and in support of workplace struggles. We must scale up political education and candidate training, to help support a new generation of socialists.

Over the two years of our term, we are determined to make Momentum a vital hub for all of this, and if you are a member, or if you are considering becoming one, we invite you to get involved. We are only just beginning.

Labour List has also reported that Sriskanthan intends to “deepen Momentum’s links with US progressive forces” – though who they are and what they are doing after Bernie Sanders’ withdraw from the Democratic Party race remains to be clarified.

Another vision outlining ambitious plans for Momentum comes the New Socialist side in the Guardian yesterday.

This is a recent New Socialist Editorial:

Editorial: The Sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey  June the 25th

“The sacking of Long-Bailey requires a drawing of a firm line. Socialist Campaign Group members on Labour’s front bench should resign.”

Solidarity with Palestinians and with Black people in the United States, victims of a single imperial system, is a basic principle for socialists. In sacking Long-Bailey for the flimsiest reasons Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner have shown what they think of this solidarity. It’s time for members of the Socialist Campaign Group to make clear what they think of them.

In the Guardian this week Tom Blackburn, a  founding editor of the same New Socialist  writes – one assumes after having slightly calmed down…

This pandemic has shown there is still a vital role for Momentum in the Labour party

the fundamental problems with Momentum today are rooted in its lack of political clarity, as previously argued by Momentum Renewal candidate Max Shanly. Originally rushed into being in 2015 to defend Jeremy Corbyn’s embattled leadership of the Labour party, Momentum has struggled to develop any substantial objectives beyond this original purpose.

Many would consider that the editor of the journal named after the Labour Party’s 1980s Theoretical Journal, the New Socialist, shows little respect for Momentum founder Jon Lansman. Lansman created Momentum as an arm of the left inside Labour’s grassroots to support Corbyn after mature reflection on the weaknesses of the 1980s left.

The intention, clear to anybody with familiarity with the failures of the main left organising group of the time, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy,  was the create an outward looking group that would avoid the factionalism, divisions, and rule-book thumping style of this part of the “Bennite” Left.

Blackburn  outlines, not without regret, that Momentum worked by supplying “the Labour left’s organisational muscle for winning votes at party conferences and in candidate selections, provide an auxiliary PR operation for Corbyn, and turn itself into a well-drilled election campaigning machine.”

 

It is hard, if not impossible, to imagine how it could have been anything else.

 

Momentum had got a lot of people together to support Jeremy Corbyn. That was its attraction. Many of them had exaggerated hopes about  Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral chances, and a rose-tinted take on the politics he embodied uncharacteristic of the critical left. Not a few admired him intensely.  What kind of political, New Socialist, debate, discussing the pros and cons of whatever the Corbyn leadership decided, could Momentum engage in?

 

The tiger-like defence of everything Corbyn and his circle ever said about Israel and Palestine, or ‘Zionism’, indicates that this was not a vehicle for “socialist political education” or developing independent left-wing policies and ideas.

 

Momentum did not develop further into a virtual rally, a fan-club peddling an intellectual defence of ‘charismatic’ ‘left populist’ leadership in the mould of JeanLuc  Mélenchon‘s La France insoumise. Although it was a bad sign when he was an honoured  guest at a Labour Conference fringe meeting of  World Transformed in 2018, and presented as as close counterpart to the former Labour leader.

 

That’s all to the good – as the way such movements can react to criticism illustrates: Jeremy Corbyn should never have apologised over anti-Semitism claims, says French far-Left ally

 

Momentum was, in effect, a CLDP plus: factionalism plus effective work in helping Labour at elections.

Blackburn, regardless, returns to the hopes of the past envisages an ambitious future for Momentum,

if it is to find an effective post-Corbyn role, must go much further. Its local branches, largely withered on the vine, need to be revived. With Labour’s community organising unit facing an uncertain future under the new party leadership, it may be left to Momentum to fill the void as best it can (albeit with much more limited resources). In addition, it will need to offer a lead with regard to socialist political education, organising in constituency parties, helping to build new labour movement institutions organically rooted in working-class communities, and strengthening bonds with the trade union movement.

Momentum has already launched a programme for recruiting and training left wing Labour council candidates, and this should be developed further.

No doubt Labour Council leaders and councillors across the country will already be rejoicing at this prospect.

Yet, it’s still back to the old factionalism.

For starters, it is now faced with the unenviable task of engineering a single leftwing slate for the impending elections to Labour’s national executive committee (NEC). The NEC elections that took place concurrently with the recent Labour leadership contest saw leftist votes splintered hither and thither among rival Corbynite candidates, handing the party’s right wing a majority which (unlike the left under Corbyn) it has not hesitated to use.

In the last few days Momentum  has begin to outline how it will put forward candidates for Labour NEC. to take part on the eternal inner-party struggle.

There will be no “open primary” to choose candidates, people who put themselves forward will be decided by the NGA, and then presented to the CLGA (the oddly named Centre Left Grassroots Alliance, the title being a relic of when it was a genuine bloc of Labour Reform and various groups on the Left, including the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy).

As can be seen below, they cannot resist having a dig at the “right of the party” for not giving them “enough time” – a point made by the new co-chairs, Sriskanthan and Scattergood (“As a newly-elected NCG, our priority right now is to deliver a unified Left slate for the National Executive Committee (NEC) elections. The punishing timeline imposed by the Right of the party has left us no time to pioneer open primaries for Momentum (though we will in time), so our focus now is on delivering a united Left slate of committed socialists that can win. “).

I might be wrong on this but aren’t these elections held around this point every year?

A more ambitious programme of work is outlined in the Clarion.

Momentum: what needs to change?

Mohan Sen.

Along with ideas about supporting workers’ struggles, building links with left campaigns (Labour Campaign for Free Movement, Black Lives Matter), and “getting Labour campaigning again”, from holding vast Zoom meetings to  a “real world decision-making conference” Sen states,

Momentum’s public message is, generally speaking, lowest common denominator anti-Toryism and soft social democracy, cut with bits of Stalinism and extreme statism (eg presenting the police as “heroes” and any activity the existing state as socialist). It will obviously take a while to seriously sort that out, through serious political argument.

Pushing for Momentum to seriously promote working-class and liberation struggles and socialist policies and demands (like taking over the banks as part of transforming the economy in a “Socialist Green New Deal”) will help. In any case, recognition that the political message is inadequate and needs shifting is necessary.

Today, on Labour List, Sabrina Huck makes the case for putting trans rights at the forefront of Momentum’s strategy.

The challenges ahead for Momentum’s new leadership

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Last month it was announced that the Tories will row back on plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act. Instead, the government is planning to bring in new legislation to ‘safeguard’ women’s spaces like refuges and public toilets. A new white paper is rumoured to be published at the end of July. It is safe to assume that bitter battles will be fought over the new white paper and the legislation that derives from it. Keir Starmer has so far been ambiguous on trans politics too, so there is a worry that the party will not step in to speak up on the issue. In this case in particular, it is important for the organised Labour left to campaign and apply pressure on the frontbench to make a stand.

On the evidence the post-Corbyn Momentum looks like set to continue an inward looking group without wider appeal.

You might begin to think that the description “Hobbyist” might have a use.

Unkind commentators suggest that Momentum would be wise to follow Karl Marx’s actions when the First International was falling apart. He transferred the  General Council to New York City.

Written by Andrew Coates

July 7, 2020 at 4:57 pm

A Left For Itself. David Swift. Review: Left-Wing Hobbyists and Labour’s Future.

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Left for Itself, A, Left-wing Hobbyists and Performative ...

 

A Left For Itself. Left-Wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism. David Swift. Zero Books. 2019. 

Neil Kinnock – one of his rare memorable statements – once said (roughly) that the left talk amongst themselves in a way they would never do to a stranger next to them at a bus stop. As the ‘culture wars’ reach new heights over Defund the Police, a slogan that takes learned explanation and knowledge of US politics, a left-wing backlash Labour Party against ‘Blairite’ Keir Starmer reaches a low crescendo, and outrage spreads over J.K.Rowling’s latest intervention in the debates over transexuality, it is hard not to feel some agreement with Labour’s one-time leader. 

David Swift, the author of For Class and Country, The Patriotic Left and the First World War (2017), begins his polemic against “left-wing hobbyists, performative radicals and the ‘identity’ left’ by stating, that the “great radical movements of the twentieth century” trade unions, feminists, by “people of colour and gay people” “were always dominated by those who needed to change their own lives”. Today it would seem that the “post-materialist” politics predicted by sociologists in the 1970s rule a left that has little connection to neighbourhood and work.  

Today often, “left wing activists are there through choice, sometimes to campaign for abstract issues that don’t affect them or anyone they now”. The result is that the British left is dominated by those pushed by “altruism” instead of need. They are a new “labour aristocracy” pushing their “elite culture and esoteric concerns”. A chapter on Gender Identity, ends with words on “trans warriors”, another on the cultural tastes of “post-modern leftism” underlines their isolation. “For left wing hobbyists are their identity, their raison d’être, and the source of their self-worth”. Obsessed with “language, semantic and aesthetics”, stuck in their niche, they are unable to concentrate on “getting into power and improving people’s lives.” 

Swift, the historian, draws on the far-from unknown chronicles of the British labour movement. He offers evidence of pro-Empire opinions, anti-Jewish and anti-immigration views, from Henry Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation’s rants against “Jewish money lenders” to trade unions and the Fabians. He also suggests that the left continues to ignore the surge of patriotism and anti-German feeling in all classes, including the “working class left” during the First World War.  

For Swift those who come from long-standing socialist families often remain as insulated from the hard facts about this history as the most recent student of Discourse Theory. This is hard to believe. My English grandfather, a Clarion Cyclist, joined up in 1914, swept away by patriotic fervour and no doubt the specious arguments of the author of Merrie England. Sparse in his words about that conflict, having been in the trenches, they were restricted to the kind of comments found in Henri Barbusse’s harsh front line account Under Fire (1916). They were not reflections on patriotism. Nor has this background led – as far as can tell from many years of activism on the left this is the norm – many to ignore conflicts over immigration. There were bitter rows over Enoch Powell extending from workplace (or in my case, my North London Comprehensive) to relatives. It would be easy to extend the story up to the present. It would take a very isolated, or wilfully ignorant, activist to ignore that. 

For some years our comrades have taken apart the “anti-imperialism of fools”.  The term was coined on our quarter of the left.  A Left For Itself has little trouble dispatching the Bubble Bolsheviks, from Seumas Milne to others in the previous Labour leadership. Criticism of Israeli policies and solidarity with the Palestinians has developed beyond traditional internationalist support to become an “all-consuming obsession”. The majority of the left ignored the atrocities of Daesh (a small fringe regarding them too as “anti-imperialist”) and continue to ignore the mass killings and torture carried out by the Assad Regime in the Syrian civil war. One can agree that this part of the left has a “White Knight syndrome” that ignores a virulent strain of anti-semitism, that has grown in tandem to a wider sue of conspiracy theories ‘complotism”.  

Is there a way forward by recognising people’s deep attachment to Britain, and the “more reactionary aspects with patriotism in the UK” and to the monarchy? What kind of “radical patriotism” might be developed? One of the greatest socialist leaders of the last century, Jean Jaurès, once said that too much internationalism drew people away from their country, and that a lot of internationalism took them back. The word Jaurès used, was “patrie” a better one would have been “pays”, country, territory, people, region, carries broader meanings than La Patrie, the fatherland, or the Nation. It’s where we live and grow to love, revile, learn its history, carry the memories of the past, and to which we become deeply attached.  (1)

The quiet affection that we have for these things close and dear to is what makes us. At the same time we are “citizens of the world”. The effects of migration, cultural mixing, and planetary Web interaction – are part of the immediate world we live in. Recognising this, by aligning internationalist values with where we are, could be called rooted cosmopolitanism.   

National Populism.

The difficulty for the left is not just that few on our side are emotionally stuck on the Royal Family and the Union Flag. It is that the ‘nation’ has become a lot more than background. The word is part a political project, National Populism, the people standing behind their national identity against the ‘globalist elite’.  The idealism of the Hobbyist Left is as nothing compared to those prepared to vote for abstractions like Sovereignty, Brexit, and freeing ‘Britain’ from the globalist European Union.   

What kind of future could the left offer if it defines itself towards the Nation rather than the “economic ill-winds” that are blowing in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic?   The experience of left populism, which has followed Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau in attempting to ‘articulate’ the left’s strategies with the ‘affects’ of the people for the Nation, is one of electoral failure. The current’s best-known parties, Podemos and La France insoumise, are in electoral decline in France and Spain. This suggests that adopting radical left nationalism is not an easy way out.  

A Left for Itself might seem to be a horse from the Spiked stable. The ex-RCP magazine cites the book on Gender issues.  This impression is bolstered by the book’s endorsements from Matthew Goodwin, the joint author (with Roger Eatwell) of a book not unsympathetic to its subject, National Populism (2018), and Eric Kaufmann, author of White Shift (2018) about immigration and ethnic change and argues for a new cultural contract, and “multivocalism” that includes “white identity”.  

Yet, at least one hopes, this support could be misleading. It’s the message that counts. There is absolutely no doubt that those who prefer the politics of street theatre and the seminar to the hard work of building support for left politics in the broad population have played a role in Labour’s election defeat.  

When “right wing populists are on the rampage” the left should listen to David Swift’s provocative, well-argued, polemic. Not only to disagree, but to help us turn our backs on Performative Radicalism.  

 

(1) “Un peu d’internationalisme éloigne de la patrie, beaucoup y ramène.”

Counterfire to Spearhead Fightback Against Labour’s Keir Starmer.

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Fighting “Starmer’s rightward shift” “in the workplaces, the communities and on the streets”.

Last week the Convenor of the Stop the War Coalition (StWC), Lindsey German, asserted,

…there is no road to success for the left inside Labour.

The battle is on: and the left can’t win in Labour – weekly briefing

She observes,

Perhaps the most important reason for the failure of Corbynism was that there was none of the ruthlessness towards the right that we now see being used against the left.

We are informed that

Many Labour lefts backed Starmer despite the fairly obvious writing on the wall. This was for a variety of reasons: the shock and demoralisation of defeat and the call for ‘electability’; the continuing Brexit debate (where the People’s Vote campaign did real damage to the Corbyn left); the promises of Starmer that he would unite the party; the continuing rows over antisemitism.

These look pretty convincing reasons to have backed Starmer.

Most socialist internationalists (unlike Counterfire) opposed Brexit and saw no reason to go along with the pro-Brexit supporters around Corbyn.

Is anti-semitism within Labour, a hysterical ‘anti-Zionism’ with plenty of complotism around it that shades and indeed is, full of prejudice, an imaginary problem?

Most people think it is neither manufactured nor dreamt up.

The issue remains open as to what role the left can find within the Labour Party

But those who intend to make a hobby of “fighting” in the party have lost before starting.

Few wish to listen to them and their loud-mouthed insults.

So perhaps German is right to say that,

the fight is going to be outside of Labour, and organising inside will be an extremely pale shadow of that, with very high likelihood of failure on every major front.

The future is to go back to the left strategies of the early years of the new millenium,

We desperately need a mass socialist party in Britain, but Labour is not going to be it. At present there is no such party on the horizon, however there are hundreds of thousands who would identify with it. There are also major struggles ahead as we face unemployment, pandemic and attacks on workers. The building of such a party will most likely come from working in those campaigns and perhaps with an organised split from Labour (although this is unlikely to contain MPs). It has to be centred on those struggles and not on electoralism.

German has learnt a lesson from the massive electoral failures of previous efforts to create a “mass socialist party” outside of Labour: its inability to do well through “electoralism” – the ballot box.

Her comrades have plenty of experience in this area, one thinks of  the prominent role Lindsey German and John Rees played in George Galloway’s Respect Party….

The piece ends, “whether you stay or go, the key thing is to fight.”

How many battalions do these people have?

Counterfire runs what remains of the People’s Assembly, and has an influential position within the Stop the War Coalition, now comments on the actuality of the Revolution.

It has now launched an appeal on the lines sketched by German.

Starmer takes Labour right: It’s time for an extra-parliamentary left

In a statement the groupuscule (around 100 members) states,

Counterfire energetically supported the Corbyn project while always pointing out the pitfalls and the limitations of a purely parliamentary strategy for change. It’s very important now that we are clear about the new situation. Starmer’s witch-hunting of the left, his positioning as a reasonable and loyal opponent of this calamitous government shows that the attempt to transform Labour has been defeated. But this doesn’t mean that the phase of popular opposition is over.

Pausing to note the Tories’ “arrogance and incompetence” and the Black Lives Matter protests, they state,

..the fight is on. But it’s not going to be fought in the Labour Party, it is going to take place in the workplaces, the communities and on the streets.

This leads them to assert,

We urge everyone who is sickened by Starmer’s rightward shift to get involved in this kind of mass politics – building workplace organisation, supporting the People’s Assembly, fighting every cutback and closure on the ground.

Counterfire urges the creation of  working class movement.

Counterfire has been at the heart of the resistance since we launched just ten years ago. Our online support is growing daily, our website is read by tens of thousands every week, but we need active, participatory socialist organisation everywhere to create the kind of working-class movement that can win.

Counterfire is now committed to organising  “a dynamic extra-parliamentary left in every part of the country.”

Extra-Parliamentary, that is, as an alternative to the Parliamentary Road to Socialism, the Labour Party.

Some might suggest that a major factor in this turn is that Lindsey German and John Rees – and their ex-(and present) Communist Party of Britain mates – no longer have the ear of a friendly Labour leader who put up with their enthusiasms, rages, and belief that politics is decided by street theatre.