Russia has had an eventful week and it’s not even finished. First, Alexey Navalny flew back to Moscow, then he was immediately arrested upon crossing the border, and the next day his team published a video illustrating Vladimir Putin’s own corruption and calling upon all citizens to come out to the streets against the government on January 23. What is the Russian left to think of all this? Navalny is certainly not its own, but should it stay away from the protests and the brewing political crisis? We asked Ilya Budraitskis, Ilya Matveev, and Kirill Medvedev, for their opinion.
Bellend Brian Rose out on the Campaign Trail for London Mayor Election.
Bellend Battle Bus.
Here’s Bellend Central:
I am a candidate for Mayor of London in the forthcoming Mayoral and Greater London Assembly elections. Those elections are currently scheduled to take place on Thursday, 6th May, having been delayed for one year under the provisions of the Coronavirus Act 2020. I am writing to you as the Commissioners and Chief Constable of the three police forces with responsibilities and duties within Greater London.
This letter is written, on legal advice, for two purposes.
First, to emphasise my concern at the interpretation of guidance from Government (rather than the application of the law) by officers of the City of London Police Force who issued me, some of my campaign team and paid contractors of that team with fixed penalty notices (‘FPNs’) for undertaking lawful political campaigning on Sunday, 24th January 2021.
Secondly, to seek your assurance that officers under your command will not arrest, issue FPNs or direction notices to, interfere with or in any way prevent any person from lawful political campaigning, while London remains under ‘Tier 4’ or at all; and that they will not do the same to persons contracted by such teams to perform paid or unpaid services necessary to such campaign teams.
…….
I request that you, the commanders of the three forces policing London, undertake to take no steps to prevent political campaigning; and, in particular, filming of candidates around the city and the use of a battle bus to transport those candidates and their teams to venues where they will be filming together with the production teams necessary to films. We ask that you agree that you will not issue FPNs or direction notices to, interfere with, arrest or in any way prevent any person from lawful political campaigning. We ask this for the benefit of all political campaigns, to whom we ask you give like assurances.
Regrettably, it appears to have fallen to my campaign to make this request as we have been the only one whose campaigning has been interrupted. Given the continuing uncertainty over my ability to engage in political campaigning, we ask that you give these assurances as a matter of urgency; and in any event not later than by 4 pm on Friday, 29th January 2021.
Failure to do so may result in an urgent claim for judicial reviewand declaratory relief.
The reason for this exercise in Bellendery?
Life of Brian.
Former Wall Street banker Brian Rose was filming promotional material for his campaign in Southwark on Sunday when police intervened.
Mr Rose said he and six of his staff were each fined £200 and were told “campaigning was not a necessary reason” for being out.
He described confusion over campaign rules as “an affront to democracy”.
The City of London Police force said restrictions “have no exemption for canvassing”.
A spokesman for the force added: “Anyone canvassing can expect the police to enforce the legislation, which could include issuing fines.”
Mr Rose presents a media platform called London Real, where he hosts guests
Brian Benedict Rose (born May 1971) is an American-born podcaster and former banker, who has actively promoted misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. He is based in London and is a candidate in the 2021 London mayoral election. After banking he founded London Real, a podcast and YouTube channel with two million subscribers.
The podcast is titled “David Icke – The coronavirus conspiracy: How Covid-19 will seize your rights & destroy our economy.”
London Real host Brian Rose starts the episode by explaining how his last interview with Icke went viral, receiving more than 7 million listens and more comments than any other London Real episode. “That tells me one thing, people want to hear your opinion,” he said.
Your Next Mayor of London: Brian for Mayor.
Bellend Business:
Skwawkbox and the Canary under fire in Report, “Antisemitism and the alternative media”.
Canary Chief Kerry-Anne Mendoza.
Report: Corbynite sites feature far-right tropes
Lee Harpin Jewish Chronicle
EXCLUSIVE: Study for the government analyses The Canary and Skwawkbox next to other extremist outlets
The Canary and Skwawkbox, two of the websites most closely linked to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, have been found to promote “heavily negative coverage of Jewish issues” to audiences that are “associated with antisemitism”, a damning new government report has found.
An analysis of content published online by the websites revealed alarming parallels between editorial lines taken by the two sites and that of the extreme far-right online outlet Radio Albion, when it came to the reporting of stories involving Jews.
The above article is not going to be friendly to the Canary nor to Skwawkbox.
The present Blog post here is just, as Wikipedia would put it, a stub for future analysis.
The 77-page document, Antisemitism and the alternative media, which will be sent to government ministers next week, set out to explore four online websites – two that have been associated with the Labour left and two with far-right associations — in unprecedented depth in order to better understand the ideologies they promote and the audiences they were reaching.
This stands out,
The report gives further detail on the way it believes Skwawkbox, which is edited by hard-left activist Steven Walker, has promoted the viewpoint that British Jews who support the state of Israel — along with members of organisations such the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) — are a corrupting influence on politics in this country.
We await an Exclusive from Skwawky in asp on the issues.
No doubt with this template (yesterday)
#
“Mann was one of only three Labour MPs, along with Ian Austin and Kevin Barron, to defy a three-line whip and to vote for Theresa May’s Brexit deal in the 15 January 2019 Meaningful vote. On 29 January 2019, Mann was one of seven Labour MPs to vote with the Conservative Government supporting Graham Brady‘s amendment mandating Theresa May to renegotiate the Irish backstop in the Withdrawal Agreement. The other six MPs were Austin, Barron, Jim Fitzpatrick, Roger Godsiff, Kate Hoey and Graham Stringer.[47] On 3 April 2019, Mann was one of twelve Labour and ex-Labour MPs to vote alongside the Conservatives against the Cooper Bill, which had been supported by the Labour Party. Nonetheless, the bill passed the House of Commons with a difference of one vote. On 3 September 2019, Mann and Hoey were the only Labour MPs to vote with the Government in an attempt to prevent MPs from taking control of the house to block a potential no-deal Brexit, saying “I didn’t vote with the government. I voted against an amendment that is deliberately calculated to block Brexit”
New Left Group: The Harmony Party Gets Boost from Harmonious Canary.
Harmony Party: Well-Established Rumour Says Kerry-Anne Mendoza Has Joined.
One for the Spotters.
Some months the eagle-eyed contributors to Urban 75 noticed that The Harmony Party had been formed. Gumshoes found that it was an incorporated company, registered n the 29th of June 2020. Initial assessments that it was a two people and a canine job were confounded when a third member was discovered.
There was speculation that it was neo-Posadist or futurist group inspired by the collected works of Aaron Bastani. This rested on the declaration that in their world,
all Consensus of Assemblies and all Party Consensus must seek never to take a decision which will result directly in unavoidable injury to a human being, and must not, through inaction, allow human beings or humanity to come to harm…
Old hands suggest the name is a tribute to much-loved Buffy The Vampire Slayer character, Harmony Kendall
The harmonious types who run The Canary, like the ‘Mendoza’ woman, Kerry-Anne Mendoza have just now given the party a major boost on their respected and prestigious alt-news site.
A new left-wing party has put socialism fully back on the political agenda. But unlike the current Labour and Green parties, its approach is entirely different. Because member-led democracy and mutual aid are at its heart.
This is a very long and deeply researched piece, evidently the product of hard toil on the Net.
We urge those who wish to contribute to the coffers of the benchmark investigative journalists who run the Canary to click on the link below.
A new left-wing party aims to bring ‘Harmony’ to the UK
To whet the appetite, John Urquhart, for it is he, the founder of the new party, says,
I came to the realisation back in March 2020.
I’d started a mutual aid organisation called Cymbal. While handing out soup on the University and College Union [UCU] picket lines back in February and early March people kept asking about what Cymbal was, what it was for, and so on. By the end of every conversation was what I at first assumed was a joking question of “when can we vote for you then?”
I realised that people weren’t joking. People were desperate for something that would amplify their own voice. And the precariat today are not just working class but also middle class.
Here is the Harmony Party in their own words,
We’re unlike any Political Party you are familiar with.
Harmony means consensus. We’re led by our Members and Participants. We decide pretty much everything by discussion (and everything else by vote).
Action on the climate disaster and action on inequality are at the top of our agenda.
We oppose social exclusion and apartheid.
Rumour has it that Kerry-Anne Mendoza has already started an oppositional faction in the new party.
Morning Star on Capitol “Carnival” and need to fight Joe Biden “Restoration”.
British Communists have a Long History of Expertise in Fighting Fascism.
Some on the left have already begun to dismiss the assault on the US Capital as a ‘pantomime’. Or as one leading cadre puts it, ” less Nuremberg and more fancy-dress party.”
How we laughed at their antics….
The above writer, Nick Wright, stalwart of the Communist Party of Britain, CPB writes in the Morning Star.
Trump hysteria ends in anti-climax. Nick Wright.
Under Biden, as before, we need the broadest possible class-conscious coalition against the capitalist machine that intends to march the US and the world into more war and poverty — singling out Trump as a ‘fascist’ aberration only hinders that task, writes NICK WRIGHT.
Wright points out with expertise in putsches all kinds that that,,
…a coup needs decent staff work, careful planning, a modicum of secrecy and enough disciplined troops to look credible for CNN.
Trump supporters’ effort at the beginning of this month failed to meet every one of these criteria — and a question naturally occurs.
Why is the Washington political Establishment so invested in the presentation of Trump’s carnival outing as a threat to the existing order?
Hard-nosed cadres of the CPB were wondering that.
Now a bit of theatre does not just turn up and happen.
Even a bal masqué has its organisers.
Meet Trump’s Pro-Insurrection “Intellectuals
We should have known January 6 was coming, because Trumpism’s “intellectual” wing called for it, for weeks.Last December, Ross Douthat suggested that “there are two Republican Parties.” One of them governs dutifully, “certifying elections, rejecting frivolous claims and conspiratorial lawsuits, declining to indulge the conceit” that Donald Trump’s defeat could be overturned anti-democratically.
The article continues,
The other GOP, Douthat argued, “is acting like a bunch of saboteurs.” However, these Republicans “are doing so in the knowledge—or at least the strong assumption—that their behavior is performative.”
He called it dreampolitik, “a politics of partisan fantasy that . . . feed[s] gridlock and stalemate and sometimes protest but not yet the kind of crisis anticipated by references to Weimar Germany and our Civil War.”
So that brings in sense of proportion.
But saying that a real coup was not on the cards is not Wright’s principal intention.
First, he attacks the real enemy, Paul Mason.
Britain’s own prophet of impending fascism, Paul Mason, speculated immediately after the Capitol riot, “if the militias ever turn up to an event like this — and that could be as early as the inauguration — America is looking at a serious fascist challenge for power.”
In emboldened type he argues that the far right “understand the weakness of the state machine they are up against, despite its bloated, militarised character.”
In hyperventilated hyperbole Mason then went on to argue that Trump “overtly and physically reached out to the fascist element in his base and their immediate response was to take that as permission for the most shockingly violent act.”
Mason has a book to sell but — even in his chosen marketplace for fleetingly held and indisputably daft ideas — to equate this pantomime protest as a “shockingly violent act” invites derision.
Most people would agree with Paul Mason’s main argument, which is that fascists, and the far-right, were present in the gambol around the Capitol. They form an important part of Trump’s political base.
MAGA is a form of National populism, which has its counterparts in Europe – parallels with parties classes on the extreme right, such the French Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen, at present, however fleetingly, leading in the opinion polls. They, like Trumpism, are “dependent on the reactionary mobilisation of distinctive national narratives of nationhood and empire. ” None easily fits into whatever “boilerplate fascist formulae” can be found. Obviously the French far right appeal to les Français de souche, French history, and la terre et les morts, is not going to be the same as the US, with its ” racist specifics of the slave and settler state.”
Trump was in power, and with a lot more power than national populists in Poland and Hungary. There was no totalitarian state, and no mass fascist unified movement – the idea that the GOP was one hardly arises. But it was national populist, claiming to embody the Will of the People, and contemptuous of anybody who opposed it. It was socially illiberal. It was economically nationalist, encouraging others to follow, as when Trump actively backed Brexit. as Paul Mason has called it, it was national neoliberalism (Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being 2019).
The next point is to gain traction for the idea that Joe Biden is the new enemy of all progressive humanity, if not worse.
To Wright,
The forces that coalesced around Trump’s thwarted bid for a second presidency cannot be retrofitted into the commonplace conceptions of a fictionalised “fascism” to prettify Biden’s restoration regime.
Not a word on what kind of regime the Trump Presidency was. Was it a revolution, now followed by Bourbon Biden?
The final objective of the article is clear: it is to mobilise against the “restoration regime”.
The most pressing need is for the working class to act in its own class interests, the liberal outriders of the neoliberal order want us to outsource anti-fascist action to the capitalist state machine.
….
Building the widest anti-racist and anti-fascist coalition is a priority — but in undercutting the fascist appeal to workers, the principal strategic objective of the left and the working-class movement must be to become the most powerful advocates for working-class interests and against the governments of big capital.
Watch out for those liberals and socialists who collaborate with the state machine not to mention governments of big capital.
A word for them occurs, social….fascists, not enemies of fascism but objectively their allies.
O for the days of the Popular Front….
We look forward to reading Paul Mason’s forthcoming book: How to Stop Fascism Paul Mason (out in August).
******
J.V. Stalin. Concerning the International Situation
Riots in the Netherlands after Anti-Curfew Protests.
‘Freedom’…..
Rioters torch Covid testing facility as Dutch police clash with lockdown protesters in Amsterdam
Evening Standard.
Dutch police used water cannons to disperse hundreds of protesters in Amsterdam demonstrating against a new lockdown curfew that was introduced to curb the spread of coronavirus.
It comes after rioting youths set a coronavirus testing facility on fire in Urk, a small fishing village in the Netherlands on Saturday.
Third night of rioting; 151 arrested in multiple Dutch cities
NL Times (English language news from the Netherlands).
On the third night of the coronavirus curfew, the Netherlands faced its third nigh of rioting. Multiple cities saw looting, fireworks, arson, and clashes between the rioters and the police. The riot police were deployed in multiple places and at least 151 people were arrested, the police said late in the evening. In most cities, calm returned by around 11:30 p.m., NOS reports.
In Amsterdam, the unrest was centred around Molukkenstraat in Amsterdam-Oost. Rioters tried to push a police van on its side. Nine people were arrested. The police reported that the situation was under control during the course of the evening.
The French daily Libération reports on the rioting and mentions far-right involvement.
Vendredi, un premier appel à la violence a été lancé par différents groupes de la jeunesse d’extrême droite tel que Pegida, connu principalement en Allemagne comme anti-islamiste…..
On Friday, a first call for violence was launched by various far-right youth groups such as Pegida, known mainly in Germany as anti-Islamist. These young people, whom the mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, described as “hooligans”, met on social networks, affirming “war is declared” even asking potential demonstrators not to “forget not your guns ”.
Anti-Islam group Pegida may ignore rules and demonstrate in Eindhoven
Anti-Islam movement Pegida wants to demonstrate in Eindhoven on Sunday, despite Mayor John Jorritsma’s ban. The municipality fears disturbances because Pegida is planning to burn or destroy a Koran in some other way. In the past, a demonstration of the organization also resulted in riots for which three hundred officers and two riot control units had to be deployed.
Pegida said earlier that it “doesn’t care about the Mayor’s orders” and will go to Eindhoven on Sunday. The group Netherlands in Resistance previously announced a demonstration in Eindhoven but has since cancelled it. It is possible that demonstrators from that group will still come to Eindhoven to drink coffee in public under the guise of ‘The Coffee Club’ to deflect the organizers’ responsibility.
This report in English from Deutsche Welle is accompanied by a video which is essential viewing.
More videos:
National Populist Marine Le Pen Tops French Opinion Poll.
Marine Le Pen Tops Poll.
Le Monde:
Presidential: Marine Le Pen’s last chance in 2022
Seventeen months before the election, the president of the National Rally appears in the polls as the main opponent of Emmanuel Macron.
Marine Le Pen, who is due to present her New Year greeting to the press on Monday January 25, is still given as the main competitor of Emmanuel Macron, seventeen months before the presidential election, even if the political landscape is ever-changing. An IFOP-Fiducial poll for CNews and Sud Radio in June 2020 even credited the president of the Rassemblement National (RN) with 45% of the voting intentions in the second round, if it was necessary to vote immediately. And above all 40% of the voters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2017 would be ready to vote for her, and 33% of those of François Fillon (republican right-wing).
This Poll was taken seventeen months, before the French Presidential election.
Marine Le Pen’s Party Le Rassemblement National, RN, (ex-Front National) topped the 2019 European Election poll in France, winning 23,34% of the vote.
Now she is credited with 26%
Marcon remains popular, despite disquiet at his high-handed way of dealing with politics. Demands for more resources to fight Covid19 and mass protests at a new security law which will ban people taking pictures of the police in action and increase surveillance.
The classic ‘governing’ right wing (the present incarnation of Nicolas Sarkozy’s party) Les Républicaines (LR), at 16% is down from their 20.1% score in the 2017 Presidential elections.
Jean Luc-Mélenchon, at 10% is well down from his 19.58% result in the same contest.
At 7% he national populist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan is slightly up from his 2017 4,70%
There is no clear Socialist Party candidate – it could well be, to say the least, Anne Hidalgo rather than the sovereigntist Arnaud Montebourg who is ploughing his own path. Other forces on the left are likely to be more favourable to her – as Mayor of Paris she governs with the support of a wide range of left wing forces, including the Communists and Greens.
Marine Le Pen has been compared to Donald Trump.
The RN’s national populism could be say to have parallels with Make America Great Again her organisation’s origins and strategy has been very different.
TO begin with the Front National was founded by members of the revolutionary nationalist group Ordre nouveau. Jean-Marie Le Pen had a long, and violent history on a French far-right which goes back to supporters of the Vichy regime and fighters for l’Algerie Française.
As they have emerged as electoral force in the 1980s a prime aim has been to purse the long-term Front National of “ dédiabolisation“. (literally de-demonise). That is, to exorcise that past.
When Marine Le Pen took over the reins ten years ago the renaming of the party as the RN was a new turn in this long-term strategy. She further attempted to tone down her party’s language, using allusions rather than direct attacks on “enemies” of France and the French, defending the Republic despite the presence of extreme-right Monarchists around the party, supporting Laïcité while her backers are often traditionalist Catholics – a ‘secularism’ aimed against Muslims.
Dix ans de Marine Le Pen à la tête du RN: la grande arnaque de la «dédiabolisation»
Marine Le Pen has only pursued this strategy with more or less the same recipes: recruitment of executives doing well in the media – Florian Philippot was the perfect example for years – distancing himself, officially, distancing her self from extremist groups, polishing her speech to make its racism and xenophobia largely euphemistic… Marine Le Pen used the expression “national priority” rather than “national preference” , too overtly discriminating…
In 2012 they created a broader front, the le Rassemblement Bleu Marine, to attract the traditional right and former socialist sovereigntists. Yet as Mediapart notes, the core of the party remains far-right, to the point where the street fighters of the Groupe Union Défense (GUD) and extreme racists linked to Alain Soral’s Égalité et Réconciliation, have roles in the organisation.
While it has 6 deputies in the National Assembly, 1 Senator, 306 regional councillors and 827 local councillors, at 83 000 members (a figure hotly disputed, “ selon des sources internes, entre 20 000 et 25 000“.) The RN is not a mass movement. Run from the top down with a structure not far off “democratic centralism” it also not a totalitarian mass party with a military wing.
Not only is Marine Le Pen more measured in tone than Trump has ever been, but she has no militias behind her, nor supporters ready to rampage through the Assemblée National.
She is actually a lot milder than Brendan O’Neill….
And there is no French far-right mass media to compete with the British extreme nationalist press.
Socialist Workers Party (US): Democrats use false pretext of “fascist Coup” to attack, ““deplorable” workers” who “who refused to back Joe Biden for president.”
“Deplorable” Worker Under Attack by Democrats and Liberals.
“The Biden-supporting woke elites pose a graver threat to the American republic than Trump did.” Brendan O’Neill.
President Trump’s ignoble exit from office has inspired a hectares of commentary. What were the origins of his National Populism and MAGA? What were the social and cultural bases of his support? Where will the Trump electorate go? Can Trumpism shed light on other forms of right-wing populism, including a link to fascism, in Europe, and the vote for Brexit in the UK?
One issue, remaining to the forefront, is what was the significance, of the Trumpian ramage through the Capitol?
The landscape in which these issues are discussed are marked by the overhanging issue of populism. A whole range of writers have discussed the divorce between liberal ‘elitism’, and the ‘left behind’. The American philosopher Michael Sandel (and author of a pioneering ‘communitarian’ study of Kant, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.1998) has attacked the “tyranny of merit”. Michael Young’ satirical ‘meritocracy” has become a real social project.
“Those at the top deserved their place but so too did those who were left behind. They hadn’t striven as effectively. They hadn’t got a university degree and so on.” As centre-left parties and their representatives became more and more middle-class, the focus on upward mobility intensified. “
The populist backlash of recent years has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit, as it has been experienced by those who feel humiliated by meritocracy and by this entire political project.”
Yet Sandel’s mild calls for social justice and equity do not come to grips with that backlash. Nor does criticising liberal ‘elites’ help when we are confronted with those who wish to celebrate populism. Those who defend La France périphérique (Christophe Guilluy), the echte British working class (Paul Embery), to the anti-liberal identity politics promoted by Spiked/Brendan O’Neill and the Brexit/Reform Party. They want to have done with political liberalism, concrete human rights, and promote an imaginary collective sovereignty.
In political shape, in elections and in government, they use the “deplorables” for their own ends. They are the ventriloquists of the people’s voice. Donald Trump was such a barker. His reign ended when his troops played out their visions in the Capitol buildings.
It is this territory that the US Socialist Workers Party, whose origins go back to the 1920s when Trotskyism first emerged in political shape outside the USSR, has entered.
Liberals use Capitol ‘insurrection’ to target political rights
Liberal Democrats and capitalist bosses are using the action by some Donald Trump supporters who entered the Capitol Jan. 6 — falsely claiming it was an “insurrection” or “fascist coup” — to escalate their attacks on freedom of speech and political rights more broadly. Their main target is not Trump, but working people.
In Massachusetts, Therese Duke was fired from her nursing job of 15 years by bosses at the UMass Memorial Hospital after being recorded on video during a tussle in D.C. the day before a relative handful of conspiracy theorists and would-be paramilitaries, confederate flag carrying rightists and a few over- enthused Trump supporters occupied the Capitol Building. Since her firing Duke has tried to launch online fundraisers to support herself, but says these have been shut down by the big tech companies.
Democratic Party politicians are trying to come up with a way to deal with what they see as “deplorable” workers who don’t think like them.
The main target of these bans and other attacks by liberals and bosses are working people who refused to back Joe Biden for president. They think such “deplorables” must be held in check. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman ran an opinion piece Jan. 10 titled, “When It Comes to Trump Supporters’ Fascism, America Cannot Afford Appeasement.”
The SWP lends a sympathetic ear to the spluttering of the ‘deplorables’, casts doubt in the event that happened when they “entered” the US legislature, and tries to turn the reaction of this rampage into a wholesale attack on ” freedom of speech and political rights” With the visionary talent given to those who grew up as Trotskyists they see “working people” as the real target.
The Party founded by James P Cannon and Farell Dobbs has not forgotten their own days of glory,
The U.S. rulers always seize on whatever opportunity they can to chip away at the political rights of working people. During World War II the second-class mailing permit of the Militant (note the SWP paper) was revoked — and several issues destroyed at the post office — by the administration of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Officials justified the measures citing the Militant’s uncompromising defense of Black rights and complained the paper reported the war as a conflict “fought solely for the benefit of the ruling groups.”
Observers of the SWP suggest that they are on a party building binge that reminds them of the days of the UK Workers’ Revolutionary Party.
There is evidence to back this up.
Workers need our own party, a labor party!
The SWP campaign is underway as conflicts between and within the bosses’ Democratic and Republican parties are sharpening. Even as Donald Trump leaves office, the Democrats moved to impeach him again, charging he instigated an attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6. They and some Never-Trump Republicans are determined to prevent him from running again in 2024. They hope to have him indicted, to attack his businesses and chip away at his ability to communicate with those who support him.
…….
The capitalist rulers increasingly fear working people, who are beginning to see that the bosses and their government have no “solutions” that don’t dump the costs of the crisis of their capitalist system on us. In 2016 and 2020, many backed Trump, another capitalist politician, hoping he would provide something different.
“Workers need our own party, a labor party, we can use to fight back and win allies,” Calero told the Militant. “The SWP is running to set an example of the fighting perspective we need in charting a course to take political power into our own hands and end once and for all the dictatorship of capital.”
Russian Protests Supporting Gaoled Alexei Navalny: Where Does the Left Stand?
The BBC reports.
Hundreds of people have been detained as police try to stop nationwide protests in Russia in support of jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny.
Mr Navalny’s wife, Yulia, said she had been detained at a protest in Moscow, where tens of thousands have gathered.
They were met by large numbers of riot police in the capital’s Pushkin Square, and beaten back with batons.
Mr Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most high-profile critic, called for protests after his arrest last weekend.
He was detained on 17 January after he flew back to Moscow from Berlin, where he had been recovering from a near-fatal nerve agent attack in Russia last August.
On his return, he was immediately taken into custody and found guilty of violating parole conditions. He says it is a trumped-up case designed to silence him, and has called on his supporters to protest.
Prior to the rallies, Russian authorities had promised a tough crackdown, with police saying any unauthorised demonstrations and provocations would be “immediately suppressed”. Several of Mr Navalny’s close aides, including his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh, were arrested.
OVD Info, an independent NGO that monitors rallies, said that more than 1,600 people had been detained during protests across the country on Saturday.
Here is another report:
Internationalists would first of all see the imprisonment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny., his poisoning, and the arrests of protestors in human rights terms.
As in this:
If this had happened in the USA or in Europe the left would be up in arms.
Here are some of the few initial left reactions:
Ken Livingstone’s team, now lined up behind the Chinese capitalist dictatorship:
Overt Pro-Putin ‘Anti-Imperialists’ tekn apart by Paul Canning:
Background:
Navalny’s Return and Left Strategy
(Extracts: follow link for full article)
Ilya Budraitskis, Moscow-based historian, political writer, and co-author of the Political Diary podcast
Navalny’s bold and precise populist strategy is in fact aimed at creating a protest coalition, with an important place reserved for the representatives of the system parties (above all, the Communists), who will refuse to play by the Kremlin’s rules and are able to conduct lively and offensive electoral campaigns. A key element of this strategy is Navalny’s rhetoric, in which the issues of poverty and social inequality have taken the place of liberal-democratic values. The high-profile anti-corruption investigations that have earned him popularity have an emotional impact on a huge audience (for example, his latest film about Putin’s palace, costing 100 billion roubles, was viewed over 50 million times by Friday), since they directly indicate the extreme stratification of Russian society. In an environment of openly falsified elections and unprecedented police pressure, electoral protest can only have an effect if it is supported by a mass non-parliamentary street movement. And only such a movement can determine Navalny’s personal fate today — if hundreds of thousands across the country do not stand up for his immediate release in the coming weeks, he will surely face a long prison term.
In my view, participating in such a movement — with our own programme and demands — is today the only chance for the Russian left. Moreover, it is the left that can most coherently express the sentiments that are increasingly pushing people to active protest: social inequality, the degradation of the social sphere (especially health care, which became dramatically apparent during the pandemic), police violence, and the absence of basic democratic (especially labour) rights.
Kirill Medvedev, activist of the Russian Socialist Movement, musician from the Arkady Kots Band, editor of Zanovo-media
But the more convincingly Navalny works with the theme of corruption and the ostentatious consumption of top officials, the more the limits of this rhetoric are exposed in a country like Russia, exhausted by inequality and permeated by class contradictions. Now the situation looks like this: Navalny is showing us the palaces of the rulers, playing with the fire of class resentment, while at the same time (together with his comrades-in-arms) promising businesses complete freedom in the Beautiful Russia of the Future. They say that the problem is not the palaces and gigantic fortunes per se, but where they come from. But of course, with the further development of this populist line, it will no longer be easy to separate the corrupt “friends of Putin” from those whom Navalny calls “honest businessmen,” but whose fortunes are just as huge, and similarly generated by illegal schemes from the 1990s and 2000s and, of course, by over-exploitation of workers. All of this opens up great opportunities for leftist politics, which, with an equally skillful combination of valor and rationality, could produce a far more powerful wave of discontent and a far more coherent program of change than Navalny’s eclectic populism.
Asa Winstanley on ‘Fabricated’ ‘Disinformation’ Claiming Chinese State Persecution of Uighurs.
Can you trust a Word this Man Says?
Asa Winstanley is a journalist, a self-styled ‘investigative journalist to boot.
You can read his material on his Blog: my latest articles here. “Most of my work is published at The Electronic Intifada.”
He has become known for this story,
Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist and associate editor at the Electronic Intifada. On Tuesday 19 January, he broke a story about Keir Starmer’s Labour Party hiring an ex-spy.
He’s a favourite with other ‘alt’ news sites.
This gives a flavour of his investigations:
The views Ash Winstanley expressed on the Chinese state persecution of the Uighurs are deeply offensive.
This is what the left is saying:
How the Left Can Oppose the Uyghur Genocide
How the International Left Can Support the Uyghur People
There is much that activists concerned with human rights violations can do to compel their states to take action. First, by lobbying our elected officials, we can pressure the states of which we are citizens to implement Magnitsky-style sanctions that target specific individuals—for example, Communist Party leaders in Xinjiang and administrators of the detention camps—implicated in the Uyghur cultural genocide.
…
The suffering of China’s Muslims may seem distant to many activists in North America and Europe. This assumption of distance is grounded in an illusion, however. Every time we turn our computer on, buy a new shirt from the Gap, or add tomato paste to our pasta sauce, we are potentially complicit in the detention, torture, and rape of Uyghurs and the slow extermination of their culture. The fact that our governments prefer to look the other way as China seeks to eradicate and coercively assimilate their largest Muslim population does not absolve us of our duty to resist. If the erasure of a minority community were taking place in our neighbourhoods and communities, what would we do? This is happening to the Uyghurs of China every day, and it is an atrocity we cannot afford to ignore.
When it comes to the oppression of minority populations, geographic distances have a way of shrinking much faster than we expect. The surveillance apparatus that China has developed for monitoring and persecuting its Uyghur population involves technologies such as facial recognition that have captured the interest of U.S. corporations as well. Ironically, this surveillance apparatus has been built with the help of U.S. behemoths such as IBM and Google. State surveillance is big business, after all. As journalist Ross Andersen has suggested, “Once Xi perfects this system in Xinjiang… [H]e could also export it beyond the country’s borders, entrenching the power of a whole generation of autocrats.” The recent $400 billion deal between China and the authoritarian Islamic Republic of Iran, which commits the two countries to close strategic and economic cooperation for the next 25 years, should be viewed in this light.
No democrat or internationalist should touch Ash Winstanley with a barge-pole.
Right Wing Extremists Step up Campaign to Save Our Statues.
Peter Whittle – Founder & Chairman
Peter Robin Whittle (born 6 January 1961) is a British politician, author, journalist and broadcaster. He is a London Assembly Member (AM) affiliated with the Brexit Alliance, having formerly been affiliated with the UK Independence Party (UKIP). He is the founder and director of the New Culture Forum think tank and host of So What You’re Saying Is…, a weekly cultural and political interview show on YouTube.
Richard Bingley – General Secretary (Former Ukip home affairs spokesman Richard Bingley and former Ukip home affairs spokesman).
Media Partners:
We are a global community dedicated to resisting threats to our heritage.
Those who wish to destroy our monuments and rewrite our history are using online petitions to help give the impression of large-scale support they just don’t have.
We are a resource to log and promote counter-petitions aiming to defend them.
‘Global’, as in North American and Britain.
This Blog has mixed feelings about getting rid of statues, renaming streets, and dealing with the legacy of empire by symbolic actions. Monuments are history. They can raise issues, not honour people.
But those claiming to stand for tradition have no right to defend the values of the past if they claim that these values are everybody’s. Empires, from the British to the Ottoman, are not something many would wish emulate today.
Trump to Launch ‘Patriot Party’…Or Not.
Ce n’est qu’un début…
Watching Trump’s Valedictory speech yesterday evening after all the bombast, greatest bombast, bombast at its most bombastic, this stuck out,
This seems to be an explanation.
We learn from the Metro something of what this may be:
Donald Trump is talking about starting a new ‘Patriot Party’ after he leaves the White House, according to reports. The outgoing president spoke with his top aides about creating a new political party last week before saying it’s only the ‘beginning’ of his MAGA movement in his farewell speech, sources told The Wall Street Journal. The informants also revealed the new party would be called the ‘Patriot Party’, echoing his election-winning promise to ‘Make America Great Again’. It’s not known how Trump would form a new political party in the US, which has been historically dominated by two parties – the Democrats and Republicans.
There will be no doubt discussion of what this may be, its relation to fascism, national populism, and the armed US far-right militias not to mention his legion of one-time toadies across the UK and the rest of Europe.
For the moment the wits of the Internet are having a field day
Brexit Britain: Government Confirms Employment Rights “Under Review.”
A Poster That Has Not Worn Well.
For Perry Anderson, a founder of New Left Review, and a professor at the University of California, ” for all its woeful shortcomings… Westminster is vastly superior to this lacquered synarchy” of the European Union.
The eminent academic and post-New Leftist without apologies, joins others who saw possibilities in Brexit. A fellow Eurosceptic, and NLR contributor, Wolfgang Streeck, known for his defence of borders, oft-cited by Anderson, put his name this appeal, The Full Brexit.
This is a group which under the aegis of the Spiked Network, brought together supporters of the Brexit Party, traditional Labour Party nationalists, defenders of Somewhere People like David Goodhart, left sovereigntists, Blue Labour, anti-cosmopolitan campaigner Paul Embery and the Communist Party of Britain. An alliance of national populist colours between ‘left’ and openly nationalist forces.
They claimed that a unique opportunity stood before the ‘left’ (that is this left alliance with the far-right Party of Nigel Farage), if only sufficient vision was found.
This lack of vision threatens to neutralise Brexit’s potential to renew our political and economic life. EU rules are not neutral: they lock in a set of neoliberal policies that tightly constrain governments’ capacity to innovate, experiment, and tackle voters’ concerns. By preventing practical redress of voters’ grievances, this corrodes representative democracy. Brexit offers a precious opportunity to change this. If this opportunity is squandered, the public will rightly conclude that voting changes nothing. Disengagement and cynicism will intensify and populism – rampant elsewhere in the EU – will surge, threatening what is left of our parliamentary democracy.
A challenge to the logic that “There is No Alternative” is urgently needed, and this must come from the left. The Full Brexit is not a political party. We do not all agree about each and every policy or document on this website. But we do agree, first, that the left’s proper role is to be the architect of a better, more democratic future and, second, that a clean break with the EU is needed to realise that potential.
The Full Brexit had many visions, none of which happened, and none of which were ever going to happen.
Others had their own plans.
Government’s Attack on Workers’ Rights the Unleashing of ‘Britannia Unchained’
In 2012, five newly-elected Conservative MPs co-authored a pamphlet, Britannia Unchained, which denounced the UK’s “bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation” and British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world”. Four of it authors – Dominic Raab, Priti Patel, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng – are now among the leading lights of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet.
Their judgement of the UK workforce was severe.
“We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor,” they wrote. “Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.”
The UK, they declared, should “stop indulging in irrelevant debates about sharing the pie between manufacturing and services, the north and the south, women and men”.
Their prescription was that, instead of learning from Germany and the Nordic states, as social democrats advocate, that Britain should copy Australia, Canada and the Asian ‘tiger economies’ of Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea – by slashing regulation and taxes.
For libertarians like them, the promise of a hard Brexit was that it would allow the deregulation they dreamed of. “If we could halve the burdens of the EU social and employment legislation we could deliver a £4.3 billion boost to our economy and 60,000 new jobs,’ said Priti Patel in 2016. What burdens she was speaking of aren’t clear, but the legislation she was referring to contains such onerous measures as paid holidays, safety at work and maternity leave – not something that most employers, never mind employees, would want to be without.
Patel and her colleagues now have a Brexit deal that allows this deregulatory bonfire – at the price of huge, costly, and for many unworkable new barriers to trade. But the UK is, on paper, free from the obligation to stay aligned with EU standards.
Update, Border Maniac Wolfgang Streek is unrepentant,
Writing from the sovereigntist Brexit ultras of New Left Review he writes today,
As to the United Kingdom, for the Lexiters Parliament rules again, unconstrained by ‘the Treaties’ and the European Court, and British citizens finally have only their own government to blame if something goes wrong: no responsibility without responsiveness.
Belgium, Flemish Parliament Honours Nazi Collaborators.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Flemish Parliament (or rather the creation in 1971 of the Cultural Council of the Dutch Community), the assembly decided, under the aegis of its president Liesbeth Homans (N-VA), to highlight 14 personalities having “contributed to the emancipation of the people and their language”. Among these rare hand-picked representatives are two notorious collaborators: August Borms and Staf De Clercq. A “scandalous” honour for Yohan Benizri, president of the Coordination Committee of Jewish Organizations in Belgium (CCOJB).
“Many young Belgians do not know the history of their country,” he laments. “You can’t fight hate speech effectively when you celebrate a shameful legacy. This effects of this message are totally deleterious. “
De Standaard also wondered last week: “Is it appropriate to honour two Nazi sympathizers, collaborators with the German occupier, including one (Borms) during the two world wars in addition?” “Wondering whether the Flemish parliament had become ‘masochist’, the daily recalled that ‘if Borms and De Clercq had achieved their ends, there would never have been a question of a Flemish parliament, or even of a democracy in general “.
The biggest group in the Flemish Parliament is the hard right N-VA. New Flemish Alliance (Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie) led nationally by Bart De Wever. and in the region by Wilfried Vandaele.
There is also a strong pres ence (outside the ruling coalition) of the more openly far-right Vlaams Belang 23 seats, which has roots in the nationalist movement, such as the Flemish National League, which collaborated with the German occupation. There is only limited Green and left-wing representation.
Flemish Parliament:
Government (70)
Opposition (54)
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De Weever is a right wing nationalist, with ‘conservative’ views on just about everything. In October 2007, in reaction to the apology of the Mayor of Antwerp for his city’s collaboration in the deportation of Jews during the Second World War, Bart De Wever said that:
- “Antwerp did not organise the deportation of the Jews, it was the victim of Nazi occupation … Those who were in power at the time had to take tricky decisions in difficult times. I don’t find it very courageous to stigmatise them now.
Bart De Wever is a fervent supporter of Catalan nationalism, and a close ally of its leading figure, Carles Pauigdemont.
De Wever : “Puigdemont est un ami que l’on ne laisse pas tomber”
De Wever: “Puigdemont is a friend that we will never let down”.
Farewell to Perry Anderson: “Westminster is vastly superior to this lacquered synarchy.” (the EU).
“It may grate that, for all its woeful shortcomings – think only, beyond … realm – Westminster is vastly superior to this lacquered synarchy” Perry Anderson Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California Los Angeles.
Briefings for Britain, a pro-Brexit site, is in love.
Perry Anderson’s evisceration of the European Union’s past and present in three long articles in the London Review of Books is remarkable in at least three ways. First, for its lucidity and intellectual richness: my summary can in no way substitute for reading the whole, which I strongly recommend. If many of its arguments are broadly familiar to critics of the EU, they have rarely been so cogently expressed, or with such controlled anger and command of detail. Second, because it comes from a leading Left-wing intellectual—though this will be no surprise to Left-inclined Leavers or to those who have followed some of Anderson’s earlier writings. Third, because it appears in a journal whose overwhelming majority of readers must be archetypal metropolitan Remainers: so all credit to the LRB’s editors. I look forward with anticipation to a flurry of Letters to the Editor attempting to reply to Anderson’s indictment. But so far, not one.
……
The final article, ‘The Breakaway’ (21 January), continues its examination of the political history of the EU focusing on Britain’s relationship with ‘the project’ from Macmillan to Johnson. Few Brexiteers, I think, would disagree with his overall interpretation. He discusses several prominent British commentators, both Remainers (noting the ‘weakness’ of their stance, attacking Leave but offering no vision of Britain in the EU, and averting their gaze from its defects), and Leavers. Among the latter, he recognizes the ‘substance’ in the ideas of our friends Noel Malcolm, Richard Tuck and Chris Bickerton, who differ in their political starting points but agree on the legitimacy of Brexit. Given his own political views, Anderson is a stern critic of the British system of government. This makes the comparison he draws with the EU all the more compelling: ‘for all its woeful shortcomings … Westminster is vastly superior to this lacquered synarchy.’
A devastating indictment of the EU
Perry Anderson offers a critique of the European Union, a history of Britain’s relation with the EU, and an account of the Referendum and the vote to Leave. The tone of that critique is summed up in these passages, on the EU Court, the Commission, the Council, the Parliament and the Central Bank. “The founding fathers of the Court, notes Anderson, included former Nazis, an Italian fascist, and a French collaborator: nearly all appointees were not lawyers but politicians…” And so it continues, ” corrupted by immunity in their occupance (sic) of power”
Those familiar with Anderson writings over the last decades, which found admirers not just in Briefings for Britain, but a former foe, who found much to relish in his anti-EU écrits, the late Roger Scruton, will no discover more than an endlessly indulged proliferation of citations, books garnered from every nook and cranny, to support the view that the EU is a bad, failing, thing, full of “tawdry episodes”, whose effects have been to “dilute sovereignty without meaningful democracy, compulsory unanimity without participant equality, cult of free markets without care of free trade..”
The length of the present LRB articles, the periodic style of the sentences, hides some crude and contentious judgements. An orrery of errors, as one of the leading thinkers of the First (pre-Anderson) New Left, E.Thompson might have said, were he not also a fervant opponent of the ‘Common Market’. Basically, there is very little of the new left left.
Politically, the two camps were divided by contrasting perceptions of what was at stake in the referendum. The Remainers consisted essentially of two groups, those who were moved principally by cultural issues and those principally by economic issues.
For the first group, composed of the young and most of the well-educated, the driving force was overwhelmingly a hostility to chauvinism – a rejection of the blind xenophobia and racism that threatened, they believed, to make Britain a suffocating prison of reaction. For the second group, leaving the EU threatened living standards, which were bound to drop cruelly on exit. Leavers were also divided into two groups. For the first, overwhelmingly located in the plebeian categories C2DE, the key issue was control over their own, and the country’s, destiny, something that could only be secured by departure from the EU. For the second, it was recovery of the independence that had been the basis of Britain’s prowess in the past. To these more general considerations, control of immigration and borders came second. Close to three-quarters of Remainers thought Britain a better country than thirty years earlier; nearly three-fifths of Leavers thought it worse.
Contrast with this, after a lengthy paragraphs on the way that, kept outside the Euro, voters felt no danger in voting to Leave.
The masses who voted for Brexit believed they were striking a blow at Brussels and the neoliberalism under which they had suffered for a quarter of a century. In reality, that neoliberalism – harsher than anything on the Continent – was British in origin, and could be overthrown without any of the instant penalties that would have been incurred if the UK had been a loyal member of the EMU. As for those who voted against Brexit, their warnings of disaster were for all immediate purposes irrelevant.
So in other word “taking control” was in Anderson’s eyes, with the unique talent for reading voters’ thoughts about “neoliberalism’, as they speak about all the time down the Duck and Dog.
Anderson describes the ‘shenanigans’ of the Second Referendum movement.
He proceeds to patronise left wing anti-Brexit supporters.
within their general mouvance, the youthful cadres of Momentum that had formed the shock troops of Corbynism shifted to an increasingly militant pro-Europeanism. This development, however, made clear a substantial gap between aspirations and abilities. That a passionate internationalism moved the new recruits to the idea of a second referendum was clear. But what kind of internationalism was it?
For a start, and a finish, not many of us can speak foreign languages….”. Among the young, an internationalism that is so largely sentimental yields solidarity with other Anglophones, of Commonwealth or other backgrounds. But in any wider or more lasting sense, sympathies without skills lack depth and staying power.” So welcome to the post New left world of the Anglosphere, joining the ERG and Nigel Farage.
Or, so the Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California Los Angeles who has spent most of his academic career in the USA, tells us.
And, well that’s our effort to work for Another Europe, it’s just not Possible….
The mysterious synarchy thwarts them. Our “mouvance” – French for a “sphère d’influence”, in orbit of – a locution Anderson struggles with instead of simply saying wider movement – has come to nought.
Reforms, it seems, don’t work, never did, but then Anderson also gave up on revolution long ago, his songes of dual power,(Arguments in English Marxism, 1980s), replaced in New Left Review, with a wholesale slow burn up of leftism and any hopes for the European left. Post-New Leftism without apologies is the new mass line.
The man who once blamed the failures and supine position of the British working class movement and the Labour Party for its deference to institutions, the UK failure to experience a Second Democratic Revolution, is now prepared to acknowledge the superiority of the Palace of Westminster, imbued with the ghost of Hobbesian sovereignty, an election system that gives result that “that bear no resemblance to the divisions of opinion in the country; an unelected upper chamber crammed with flunkies and friends of the two dominant parties; an honours system devised to reward bagmen and sycophants” to the wily manoeuvrings of Continental elitists.
A lengthy stay in Anderson’s well furnished library has shown us all up.
We could begin our re-education by reading this further marvel from Briefings for Britain,
Variable Geometry: Global Britain’s Opportunity Post-Brexit
Former diplomat Nick Busvine argues that we are already seeing positive signs of a more coherent and influential foreign policy as Global Britain begins to exploit the freedom of manoeuvre offered by Brexit.
Update
Sráid Marx has posted today, on Anderson’s fellow Lexiteers, aka the Gammon Left.
Is learning from Brexit possible?
Last week the ‘Financial Times‘ revealed that the Tory Government is working with big business on plans to tear up those workers’ rights enshrined in EU law. This would include ending the 48-hour limit on the working week; changing rules on work breaks and ending the inclusion of overtime pay in holiday entitlements. This is the list reported but there are undoubtedly others.
That this was one purpose of Brexit and its likely effect was both predictable and predicted, it comes as a surprise to no one. Yet large swathes of the Left in Ireland and Britain supported it, although much less vocally in Ireland because it is so unpopular. In any case their support for it has assisted putting in place these projected attacks and is indefensible and inexcusable.
An analysis of why they took such a position would have to look at such things as an originally opportunist position becoming hard-wired into their politics; their nationalist perspective arising from the view that the nation state will introduce socialism and come to embody it; general simple-minded opposition to the EU on the shallow grounds that it is a creature of capitalism, and the strong tendency to have a more concrete idea of what you are against than what you are for. There’s also a large dose of ignorance and stupidity involved.
The significant role of stupidity first hit me when I read that left supporters of Brexit were complaining that the negotiations on the British side were being conducted by the Tories. Further examples became clear when they, like the rest of the Brexit movement, demanded a harder Brexit as the only one worthy of the name, and for the same reason – there was no point otherwise.
Now that even a blind man can see what the future invites, what are the chances that this left will reconsider its support for Brexit and the political approach that led to it? What might this involve?
Well, much of this left also supports Scottish nationalism, which perhaps should be no surprise since this too involves an obviously nationalist project that harbours illusions in a separate capitalist state.
Read the full post through the link above.
Trump, Fascism and Democratic Socialism.
Trump’s New Residence?
There is debate on the left, across the world, on Donald Trump’s national populism and its relation to fascism. Many are now talking of David Renton’s study on the way in which different factions on the right have converged. (The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right. 2019).
One theme of the last twelve months has been the convergence of people and groups emanating from a conservative or a fascist starting point which, despite their different origins, have been working together since Brexit.
Nick Cohen writes in the Observer today,
If Trump looks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, then maybe he is one
I can see three objections to calling a large section of the Republican party pre-fascist. The first can be dismissed with a flick of the fingers as it comes from a self-interested right that has to pretend it is not in the grip of a deep sickness – and not only in the United States. The second is the old soothing “it can’t happen here” exceptionalism of the Anglo-Saxon west, which has yet to learn that the US and UK are exceptional in the 21st century for all the wrong reasons. The third sounds intelligent but is the dumbest of all. You should not call Trump or any other leader a pre- or neo-fascist or any kind of fascist until he has gone the whole hog and transformed his society into a totalitarian war machine.
Perhaps we can learn something about how to react from the history of other “pre-fascist’ movements.
For the specialist in the history of French fascism, Zeev Sternhell, the European far-right was born out of a will to break with “l’ordre libérale” in the late 19th century. One of the first stirrings was “Boulangism” 1885-1889 (named after General Boulanger). Boulanger was seen by many French people as the man destined to avenge France’s defeat in the Franco-German War. This movement was,, Sternhell argued, a synthesis between nationalism and certain forms of ultra-republican socialism (Blanquisme). anti-liberalism, nationalism (Bonapartists), with an anti-Semitic overtow, (La droite révolutionnaire, 1885–1914. Les origines françaises du fascisme.1978).
A kind of Make France Great Again movement, Boulangism was an electoral event, a coalition of candidates around a figure who would carry the “will of the people” to power against corrupt elites. They were seen to be behind Revanche (Revenge on Germany), Révision (Revision of the Constitution), and, for at least one section of their supporters, Restauration (the return to monarchy). Despite the success of Boulangist candidates never came near to winning a majority in the French election of 1889, 72 deputies against 366 for the Republican side .
Efforts to pin Boulangist ideas down in one ‘populist’ nationalist direction, nostalgia for Bonaparte’s First Empire, run up against the fact that Boulanger had not just the votes but the financial backing of wealthy Monarchists (exposed by a former supporter in Les Coulisses du boulangisme).
Despite this, some on the left, like Paul Lafarge, considered that the demands of the ‘people’ against the “les gros bourgeois” and their impatience with republican ‘réformisme’ could be turned in a socialist direction. An important section of the left opposed Boulanger, accusing him of Césarisme, the wish to override democratic procedures. For Jean Jaurès popular support for Boulanger was not just socialist aspirations gone astray, it was not socialist in any sense.
After initial electoral appearance, with support from working class districts, Boulanger himself took the stage and was urged to take power by a coup d’état.
In January 1889 Boulanger was returned as deputy for Paris by an overwhelming majority. When the election results were announced, wildly shouting masses of his supporters urged him to take over the government immediately. Boulanger declined and spent the evening with his mistress instead. His failure to seize control at the crucial moment was a severe blow to his following.
A new government under Pierre Tirard, with Ernest Constans as minister of the interior, decided to prosecute Boulanger, and within two months the Chamber was requested to waive the General’s parliamentary immunity. To his friends’ astonishment, Boulanger fled from Paris on April 1, going first to Brussels and then to London. He was tried in absentia for treason by the Senate as high court and condemned on Aug. 14, 1889, to deportation. In the elections of 1889 and 1890 his supporters received setbacks, and public enthusiasm for his cause dwindled away. In 1891 Boulanger committed suicide in Brussels at the cemetery of Ixelles, over the grave of his mistress.
Frederick Engels set out some reflections that stand up well today,
Although the Boulangist movement appeared to be ephemeral in retrospect, Frederick Engels paid close attention to it. Engels saw the threat of a Boulanger dictatorship, warning socialists in France:
The finest thing of it all is that three months after these two congresses Boulanger will be in all probability dictator of France, do away with parliamentarism, expurgate the judges under pretext of corruption, have a gouvernement à poigne and a chambre pour rire (trans. mock chamber), and crush Marxists, Blanquists and Possibilists all together. And then, ma belle France—tu l’as voulu! (trans. my beautiful France – that’s what you wanted!)
Engels recognized the danger of a Boulangist dictatorship as spelling the end not only to the socialist movement in France, but the Third Republic itself. For him, the question was not just how to analyse Boulangism, but how to fight it.
That could stand for the position democratic socialists should take towards Trump’s supporters and their assault on the Capitol.
See:
Laurence Fox (Reclaim Party) Pokes Fun at Disabled People and Covid Sufferers.
The controversial actor has been busy buying online but was told by irate twitter users that “the only thing you are going to be exempt from is future employment
Foxy’s biggest supporters come from Spiked, the ex-Living Marxism/RCP, network,
Laurence Fox and the woke McCarthyists
Brendan O’Neill, for it is her,
Disagree with the cultural elites and they will try to destroy you.
Here is another,
The culture war affects everybody’
Laurence Fox tells spiked why he set up a political party to fight wokeness.
Barely a week goes by without Laurence Fox trending on Twitter. Since his explosive appearance on Question Time earlier this year, the actor-turned-activist has made a number of controversial interventions in the culture wars. His criticisms of cancel culture have, ironically, led to him being denounced and blacklisted by his fellow actors and other media types. Now he believes that something must be done about the dominance of woke culture, and he has set up a party called Reclaim to combat it. spiked caught up with Fox to find out what he hopes to achieve.
Or as the old Red-Browners say,
This is said to be the new national populist cause célèbre.
Others take a different view.
Even a Tory MP says.
https://twitter.com/Simon4NDorset/status/1350381712803590144?s=20
As Attack on Workers’ Rights Looms, Lexit (‘left’ Brexit) is Trending…
Heavyweight Supporter of Lexit.
Lexit is trending on Twitter.
This is why:
Those from the left who supported Brexit helped the Tories win the last election, by building support to ‘get Brexit done’ and ‘take back control’.
They facilitated this.
UK workers’ rights at risk in plans to rip up EU labour market rules
Financial Times.
Post-Brexit shake-up of regulations including 48-hour week likely to spark trade union outrage.
Peter Foster, Jim Pickard, Delphine Strauss in London and Jim Brunsden in Brussels YESTERDAY 833 Print this page Worker protections enshrined in EU law — including the 48-hour week — would be ripped up under plans being drawn up by the government as part of a post-Brexit overhaul of UK labour markets.
The package of deregulatory measures is being put together by the UK’s business department with the approval of Downing Street, according to people familiar with the matter. It has not yet been agreed by ministers — or put to the cabinet — but select business leaders have been sounded out on the plan.
The proposed shake-up of regulations from the “working time directive” will delight many Tory MPs but is likely to spark outrage among Britain’s trade union leaders. The move would potentially mark a clear divergence from EU labour market standards but the UK would only face retaliation from Brussels under the terms of its new post-Brexit trade treaty if the EU could demonstrate the changes had a material impact on competition.
What was Lexit, the campaign to leave the EU on a ‘socialist’ basis?
Those on the left with longer memories than than SWP fruit flies will recall it well.
Lexit – the Left Leave Campaign
With the referendum campaign on Britain’s membership of the EU now underway, left forces have officially launched a campaign for a left wing British exit. The organisations backing #Lexit — the Left Leave Campaign include the RMT rail workers’ union, the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, Counterfire, the Indian Workers Association, the Bangladeshi Workers Council of Britain and Scottish Left Leave.
They are united around five key arguments for a left exit — against the EU’s neoliberal agenda, its undemocratic nature, and the horrors of Fortress Europe; and for a defence of workers’ rights through collective organisation and union strength, and for exploiting the crisis for the Tories that a leave vote would provoke.
There was also the hardline Full Brexit group, a red-brown alliance of the Brexit Party backing Spiked, many Lexit supporters, the Communist Party of Britain, Labour Party nationalists, sovereigntists, ‘Trade Unionists Against the EU led by anti-rootless cosmopolitan campaigner Paul Embery’ (supported by the Socialist Party) and various other odd bods.
They had their critics.
Brexit offered the public three wishes: you can take back control of your money, your borders, and your laws. Lexit does much the same with a socialist twist. Offering little more than dreams, both sides fail to realise that in an interconnected world, you can’t take back control without giving something up.
Without a proper account of the EU’s complexity and origins, the Lexiter position tends to fall into a self-made abyss of misunderstanding. And without having the class power to back up its position, a Lexit – just like Brexit – may condemn the UK to perpetual autarky and possible disintegration.
Lexit still has at least one supporter.
Sparing time from writing about happy memories of participating in the paramilitary Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklasse, KdA) in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (East Germany),leading member of the Communist Party of Britain, Nick Wright says,
We are where we are on Britain’s exit from the EU. Where we no longer confront the employers or ministers able to hide behind the conditions that EU treaties impose on member states, we face different obstacles built into the new trade agreement negotiated by a Tory government that now represents an evolving consensus between big business and the banks and the EU’s dominant states.
That this is buttressed by the new US regime waiting in the wings is a reminder that the Atlantic alliance is as much a mechanism for economic control as it is a war fighting machine.
Where we once grappled with the pro-employer judgments of the European Court of Justice, we now directly face our ruling-class court system. Britain’s bourgeoisie rightly fears an insurgent working class and we have a long history of challenging British courts with industrial action.
We expect the Morning Star to call for trade union factory militias to lead the battles!
Others have a different take.
H
Bob sums up their effect.
The Government has reacted to the FT report with a policy of staunch denial…(which means it’s true).
Business secretary has denied claims EU-based employment laws such as 48-hour week will be axed.
******
This blog has begun reading hardline Leave supporter and post-New Leftist Perry Anderson’s latest roman fleuve on Brexit in the London Review of Books……
Farage Launches Reform Party and Warns of East Germany Danger.
Self-identifying Heavyweight Journalist and Brexiteer Heeds Farage Call.
Nigel Farage has launched his new front, the Reform Party UK
Things are going swmmingly.
The New European reports,
Nigel Farage’s new political outfit has received just 2% of support in the first poll carried out since it launched.
Reform UK – which has been shortened to REFUK by pollsters – attracted a small amount of support in new polling from Redfield & Wilton Strategies.
It is currently attracting smaller backing than the Brexit Party – which would still poll around 5% even after ‘Brexit Day’.
By contrast the SNP and Green Party are on 5% of support, the Lib Dems on 8%, Labour on 37% and the Tories on 41%.
Farage has not forgotten one old friend,
But what of another, George Galloway, who is backing his own Alliance for Unity list for the next Scottish elections to Holyrood?
Looks like he has….
“Nigel Farage launches new party in Scotland to promote ‘positive case for the Union‘
Farage’s rival outfit is making waves…
Nigel Farage’s new party unveils ex Tory MSP Michelle Ballantyne as Scottish leader
Daily Record.
The defection means Farage has an elected politician at the Scottish Parliament
Ex Tory right-winger Michelle Ballantyne will lead Nigel Farage’s new Reform UK party in a move which means he now has an MSP at Holyrood.
Ballantyne quit the Scottish Conservatives in December after clashes with the leadership on policy and direction.
Galloway, who has backed Farage’s Brexit Party ( George Galloway reveals he will support Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in EU elections next month) has yet to comment.
Is there space for a new red-brown alliance, the Workers Party of Britain supplying the Red Guard for the Reform Party?
It is apposite that it is Nigel Farage who has stepped forward as the party-political voice of lockdown scepticism, with prospective Brexit Party rebrand, Reform UK. After all, it was as the leader of UKIP that he started to give expression to a similar anti-technocratic sentiment a decade ago.
*********
Trump, Democracy, Fascism and….Counterfire.
The New Brown Threat?
Many groups on the left have published useful and thoughtful articles on the Trump Riot in the Capitol. Some have looked for analogies with the 1930s extreme-right. That is not just the rise to power of Hitler and Mussolini but events like the riots of the Ligues in 1934.
February 6, 1934
On February 6, 1934, the radical Édouard Daladier presented his new government to the Chamber of Deputies.
It was the pretext for a violent anti-parliamentary demonstration which would make the Republic tremble and ultimately bring about the union of the Socialists and the Communists, until then contested by the latter.
..
These leagues – mass political movements – brought together discontented people of all stripes. They had multiplied on the right and on the left, on the margins of parliamentary parties, thanks to the economic crisis .
They benefitted from the support of three influential right-wing or far-right weeklies: Gringoire (600,000 readers), Candide (Pierre Gaxotte, 300,000 readers), Je suis partout (Robert Brasillach, 100,000 readers).
They equally benefited from the support of a newcomer, Philippe Henriot (45), elected deputy for Bordeaux a few months earlier. A strongly Catholic militant on the right, anti-Republican, anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic, an excellent orator, he called three times in January 1934, at the rostrum of the Chamber of Deputies, to “sweep away the Republic” (under the Occupation, he would put his voice at the service of Radio-Vichy ).
Wikipedia says,
The 6 February 1934 crisis was an anti-parliamentarist street demonstration in Paris organized by multiple far-right leagues that culminated in a riot on the Place de la Concorde, near the seat of the French National Assembly. The police shot and killed 15 demonstrators. It was one of the major political crises during the Third Republic (1870–1940).[1] Frenchmen on the left feared it was an attempt to organize a fascist coup d’état. According to historian Joel Colton, “The consensus among scholars is that there was no concerted or unified design to seize power and that the leagues lacked the coherence, unity, or leadership to accomplish such an end.”
There are many differences between the mass — far-right of the 1930s and today.
The obvious point is that the Washington riots were not stimulated by an outgoing President.
The next is that national populist ideas, MAGA, fascist white nationalism, and modern conspiracy theorists have had plenty of time to develop since the 1930s. Observers point to their diversity, from a kind of Brexit Party nationalism, to ‘paleo-conservatism’ , in the writings of Patrick J. Buchanan (The Death of the West,2002) and Stephen Bannon , founder of Breitbart, and and chief Trump strategist during the first 7 months of his regime., to the overt racism of Jared Taylor, a theorist of White Identity (White Identity, Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century 2011).
There is this as well:
Several prominent activists were spotted inside the building, and others flew Q-themed banners inside and out.
Others have some of the ideas of ‘identarian’ politics, and even the ‘libertarian’ identity politics of traditinal ‘somewhere’ people propagated by groups like the British Spiked network and others who reject ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ .
Finally, despite the existence of armed far-right militias in the USA they do not have the hundreds of thousands of members that the 1930s Ligues in France, as in other European far-rights of the time, had. Nor is their experience of combat echoed outside of the small numbers of Veterans in the American armed services. They, unlike the totaliarian parties of the past, are also decentralised.
This debate in continuing. Others have looked further back to ‘Bonapartism’ and the Boulanger movement in France for analogies between today’s Trump supporters and populism across Europe and the world.
Most of the left considers that defending democratic institutions against the far-right is a priority, in the US, and everywhere.
The reasons are simple.
In the UK the radical left has stood many times on College Green outside Parliament, in tens of thousands for anti-austerity protests. The internationalist left has joined million strong protests against Brexit which have ended in the same place. We have lobbied our MPs. We have been at meetings inside the Place of Westminster.
Outside London we have protested against government and council policies. Suffolk protests outside the County Council have ended with protestors attending the council meetings making the decisions to implement cuts. In Ipswich we have stood outside the Tory MP of the time, Ben Gummer. He invited us, trade unionists, including members of left socialist and Marxist groups, into his office. We had an amiable, if animated, discussion.
We are democrats.
We do not ‘storm’ Parliament: we want power, not endless protest.
Democracy in its present shape may be imperfect. We are not bound by tradition. The past is not a law code. But if some geezer is going to tell me that the vote I cast in the ballot box is less important than their protest, I would the first to object.
Step forward another approach.
Counterfire is a British groupuscule which believes in the ‘actuality of the revolution’.
It sees it itself as standing at the epicentre of world events, and is prepared to offer its advice to left wing movements across the world.
Their best known members are John Rees and Lindsey German, prominent in the People’s Assembly and the Stop the War Coalition. More recently Rees has emerged as a figure defending Julian Assange.
They have just published a post by Kevin Ovenden, who used to be George Galloway’s bagman. Ovendon advised the French left not to vote for President Macron against Marine Le Pen during the 2017 Presidential elections, He, graciously, was prepared to fight against the far-right, to the last French activist if….Marine Le Pen took power.
Now he offers a strategy to the US left.
He argues against putting trust in bourgeois institutions,
As with the last effort, this move comes not because Trump has violated the rights of racial minorities, launched drone assassinations abroad or attacked the civil liberties of ordinary Americans. It is because he has tampered with the ruling class settlement – undermining US alliances abroad (Russiagate) and authorising a riot at what they call “the temple of US Democracy” on Capitol Hill.
Many on the US radical left have been quick to point out that this “sacred place” was built upon slave labour, sustained by robbery of US workers enforced frequently by extreme violence, and is the cockpit of projecting big power interests against weaker countries.
In other words, the Capitol is hardly worth a piece of piss its defence.
This is his answer,
A left based upon an insurgent politics and mass activity, capable of changing the overall political constellation.
We should all wish our friends in the Belly of the Beast the very best and do what we can to help. The biggest part of that is acting wherever we are to construct our own insurgent left in mass movements of resistance that are not contained by the old politics.
Sure…..
Not having the gumption to offer advice to the US left in general, I will give an opinion on this type: ignore him and Counterfire.
Covid Conspiracy Theorists Claim to Launch Social Media Platform.
Group Claims not to be “Nutters’.
Coronavirus Act 2020 shone a huge light on all of the failings of the government. Many people felt that the restrictions that the government places on our lives, at the drop of a hat, were not reasonable or proportionate. We felt as though we did not have a voice or were labelled as “conspiracy theorists.”
ARE YOU A VICTIM OF COVID CRIME
If you have been affected by the government’s actions of the last few months, you might want to consider reporting a crime to your local police force.
To find out more about the crimes we believe have been committed and how to go about reporting them to the police, please read through the information on the tabs below. At the end, if you decide you would like to report a crime, you’ll be asked to provide your contact details so we can send you a crime report template and an Evidence Bundle to give to your local police station.
They retweeted this yesterday:
And this:
Specialists in Conspiracists will find this of interest.
Another venture.
A friendly commentator offers this analysis of Save Our Rights U,K (SORUK)
SORUK has its problems. Its leaders are inarticulate, seem to have no professional background and there is something odd about them. Its speakers have mixed levels of effectiveness. Gareth Icke can be a half-decent public speaker. His father David, though charismatic and at times compelling, is associated in the minds of many with eccentric and fringe ideas seen as ludicrous by some. Now I’ve read some of his work, and though he asks a number of sound questions, provides evidence for questioning mainstream narratives and is very assiduous, some of his ideas are somewhat bizarre and his use of words like “the psychopaths” in rallies is only preaching to the converted: his language is too incendiary to be persuasive, when what we need most is persuasion and accessible sophistry (rather than the doctoral-thesis, convoluted intellectualisms of people like Sinead Murphy.)
Piers Corbyn, though eccentric enough to become a national treasure and undoubtedly super-intelligent, again, is too passionate to persuade. Now, this is not to suggest for a moment that none of the things these guys are doing is worthwhile: quite the opposite. There’s nothing wrong with being a public speaker who doesn’t have an Oxbridge background and a Ph.D in Hegelian philosophy. In this day and age it’s absurd to suggest social caveats of this kind on public speakers. But we are in an impasse. Though we desperately need demonstrations, bigger and better, more unity and more power, am I alone in feeling there is something vaguely problematic about SORUK and that we might be able to do better? Would more of us support them and take them seriously if they had a more polished brand? Or are we content to hide in the bunkers like me and write stuff on social media to try and fight a long battle?
I’m aware that there is something a bit sanctimonious about what I’m saying. I can hear you saying, “Just a minute, when were YOU last in a demonstration?” And you’re right, of course. But what we need is some sort of effective, cohesive movement. If we had a live movement that attracted as speakers people like Brendan O’Neill, Douglas Murray, Peter Hitchens, Sir Desmond Swayne and Lord Sumption, would it gain more followers and be more effective?
A comment on this ever so sane and ever so reasonable post but an entirely sane and reasonable person reads,
I agree to a lot of what you say. I wish we could have Peter Hitchens, Sir Desmond Swayne and Lord Sumption, Nigel Farrage etc. talking at rallies.
Cancel Trump: The National Populists Strike Back.
New Oligarchies and their Woke Mobs threaten Brendan O’Neill.
The National Populists were taken aback by the storming of the Capital.
Attempts to describe the events as the work of a tiny bunch of rambunctious chaps and chapettes pushing a little too far the idea of MAGA, started immediately.
A hefty dose of whataboutery from their side, evoking everything from the presence of People’s Vote campaigners against Brexit on College Green, to this, from a renegade former Labour MP, and member of the democratically elected House of Lords followed.
Now they have a cause.
This is what the Trumpists British claque are screaming.
Foxy: from the Reclaim Party.
Now noted red-brown-nose Brendan O’Neill writes.
Twitter’s suspension of Donald Trump is a chilling sign of tyranny to come.
The new capitalists’ cancellation of the democratically elected president of the United States is a very significant turning point in the politics and culture of the Western world.
O’Neill continues,
There is danger in the current moment. It comes not from horn-helmeted idiots and racist scumbags (surely slightly misguided populists? Editors’ note) who paraded through the Capitol Building for an hour, but from those who wish to turn that despicable incident into the founding myth of a new era of woke authoritarianism.
The business and political elites, determined to crush the populist experiment of recent years, will busily launch wars on ‘domestic terrorism’, clamp down on inflammatory speech, purge from the internet and from workplaces anyone with ‘incorrect’ thoughts, and blacklist those who believe populism is preferable to technocracy.
They’re already doing it. The Biden administration isn’t even in power yet and this is already happening. Imagine how emboldened the new oligarchies and their woke mobs will become once Biden and Co are ruling. Brace yourselves; the purge is only beginning.
Foxy can barely contain himself,
Farage, Foxy and Brendan O’Neill are in a very dark place.
We know where’re they’re coming from and feel their pain.
Update: Another blow to the Spikeys and their mates:
Trump’s Last Days: Europe’s National Populists and some Far Rightists distance themselves from the President.
British Trump Admirer.
How things change:
Capitol riots: Boris Johnson condemns Donald Trump for sparking events.
Donald Trump was “completely wrong” to cast doubt on the US election and encourage supporters to storm the Capitol, Boris Johnson has said.
The UK prime minister said he “unreservedly condemns” the US president’s actions.
For those who watched it on Sky yesterday this was a telling moment.
Biden said his granddaughter had sent him a picture as rioters swept through the Capitol of armed security lining the Lincoln Memorial during an earlier Black Lives Matter protest.
“She said, ‘Pop, this isn’t fair. No one can tell me if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol,'” Biden said. “We all know that’s true. And it is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable.”
Now even the most solid old friends are deserting Trump.
Only a couple of days ago a leading figure of the European far-right, Marine Le Pen was refusing to accept that Trump had lost the election.
Now…
Le Capitole envahi, Marine Le Pen rompt avec Donald Trump
Le Pen and the National Rally must withdraw their support for Donald Trump ” was am appeal signed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. A Rassemblement National (RN) delegation was in the United States in November to support the Republican candidate.
The president of the Rassemblement National waited until Thursday, after the events of the day before on Capitol Hill, to recognise the victory of Democrat Joe Biden. Only Thierry Mariani and the radical ex-FN supported the rioters.
..
.on the .the radical far right, ex-FN(Front National) figures, such as Alexandre Gabriac and Yvan Benedetti, and members of the groupuscule Génération identitaire welcomed the hallucinatory scenes that took place inside the Capitol,
..
Marine Le Pen explained, on the contrary, that these people are “extremists, who tried to interrupt the democratic process.” I do not confuse these extremists with the 72 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump and who do not want to be associated with this type of behaviour.
In Spain the far-right party Vox, has been criticised for its past backing for Tump.
They have responded with a lengthy whinge about not taking lessons on democracy from te left, and affirming, against the right-wing Partido Popular, that they stand for law and order.
This is wider report ,from Al Jazzera.
How Europe’s far right responded to pro-Trump Capitol riots
Right-wing politicians, including Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, the far-right Dutch opposition leader Geert Wilders, Trump’s long-time British ally Nigel Farage and Italy’s far-right League party leader Matteo Salvini, denounced the protesters’ actions.
Unlike German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, however, they stopped short of pinning some blame on Trump.
Meanwhile, others were notably silent.
At the time of publication, populists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic had not commented on the violence, which many viewed as an assault on the symbol of American democracy.
Slovenia’s nationalist Prime Minister Janez Jansa, who in November congratulated Trump for “winning” the vote against Biden before an election result, denounced the violence in the US Capitol, adding he hoped American democracy would “overcome this crisis”.
“All should be very troubled by the violence taking place in Washington D.C.,” the leader of the right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party tweeted. “Democracy presupposes peaceful protest, but violence and death threats —from Left or Right— are ALWAYS wrong.”
The Trump movement, the call to Make America Great Again (MAGA), now looks like a millstone for its European admirers.
The Red-Brown site Spiked is trying to save what it can.
Not being familiar with US politics, this, on the consequences of the events in the Capitol, is, despite its often glib language, worth considering,
The goal is a realignment of power within the Party with more traditional capitalist interest groups like NAM and the Business Roundtable as well as with the Koch family, long uncomfortable with Trump.
….
That’s one side of the split. The other is more dramatic: the True Trumpists have become a de facto third party, bunkered down heavily in the House of Representatives. As Trump embalms himself in bitter revenge fantasies, reconciliation between the two camps will probably become impossible, although individual defections may occur. Mar-a-Lago will become base camp for the Trump death cult which will continue to mobilize his hardcore followers to terrorize Republican primaries and ensure the preservation of a large die-hard contingent in the House as well as in red-state legislatures. (Republicans in the Senate, accessing huge corporation donations, are far less vulnerable to such challenges.)
…
Freed from Trump’s electronic fatwas, moreover, some of the younger Republican senators may prove to be much more formidable competitors for the white college-educated suburban vote than centrist Democrats realize. In any event, the only future that we can reliably foresee – a continuation of extreme socio-economic turbulence – renders political crystal balls useless.
..
The US far-right are suggesting this:
Trump: The Death of Populism.
Populist Rabble in the Capitol.
America shaken after pro-Trump mob storms US Capitol building.
Guardian.
America was shaken on Wednesday as a mob of Donald Trump supporters staged an insurrection at the US Capitol building in Washington DC, storming the debating chambers and clashing with armed police.
Four people died in the unrest that rocked the capital on Wednesday, Washington DC police said, including a woman who was shot dead by the US Capitol police. Three others died in “medical emergencies”, the DC police chief, Robert Contee, said.
The siege was among the worst security breaches in American history and came after Trump had earlier urged a crowd of protesters to march on the Capitol and undo his November election defeat.
One thing should be clear; after yesterday: populism is dead.
The nationalist and neoliberal regime of Donald Trump has tried to cling to power by inciting mob violence against basic democratic institutions. Their “people” is now shown as a band of far-right wingers prepared to use force to enforce their views. Putschist, they have gone down in history as the most shameful political force in this century’s US politics.
Who is now going to remember their supporters across the world?
Or not:
Another national populist comments,
Just look at the state of the Trumpists:
So:
Hong Kong: Urgent Appeal for Labour Movement Solidarity with Arrested Democracy Activists.
Labour Movement Solidarity with Hong Kong Trade Unionists and Democrats!
Dozens of Hong Kong pro-democracy figures arrested in sweeping crackdown
More than 50 people, including pro-democracy politicians and campaigners, have been arrested in early-morning raids across Hong Kong in an unprecedented crackdown by authorities that was condemned as a “despicable” assault on freedom.
In a police operation involving more than 1,000 officers, the 53 individualswere detained under the national security law (NSL), accused of “subverting state power” by holding primaries for pro-democracy candidates for the Hong Kong election. The election was ultimately delayed by Lam for a year, purportedly because of the pandemic.
Le Monde also carries a detailed report:
Vaste opération policière à Hongkong contre l’opposition prodémocratie
Les arrestations de dizaines de personnes dans le cadre de la récente loi de sécurité nationale seraient liées aux primaires organisées par l’opposition l’été 2020.
Here is an appeal.
Paul Mason is amongst many who immediately responded.
Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary has responded.
Latest:
h
Skwawkbox: We Could be Enjoying Corbyn’s “Heavenly Brexit Deal” if it weren’t for…..
Beam me up Walky!
(Thanks David).
As Morale Officer on the USS Coatesy, voyaging across the galaxy, it is our job to keep spirits high in these difficult times.
Japesters have tried to spread glee amongst our foes by proclaiming that Keir Starmer had resigned.
The anti-Labour ‘alt-news’ site, Skwawkbox, spends most of its time attacking the Labour leader and the party:
Small, businessman Steve Walker is believed to have support from UNITE the union for his efforts to undermine Labour.
By all accounts the more bile, the more bellows of joy come from the bilious old grunters.
The latest episode, classed, “things that never happened’, beats previous attempts to keep the troops happy.
…..without sabotage by the Labour right, Keir Starmer’s manipulation of the second-referendum pipe-dream and the shameless abandonment of proper journalism by the so-called ‘mainstream’ media, the UK could have been enjoying the ‘heavenly’ Brexit deal agreed in principle in 2019 by Jeremy Corbyn and the EU.
Travelling from Somerset to Kent? Don’t forget your Kent Access Permit
His little band of wits are rollicking already,
For wry amusement, I understand some drivers refer to this permit as a Kermit. It mildly amused me as Kermit is of course that very well-known friendly frog and it seems you need your Kermit before you can enter Kent in order to hop across the Channel … well, it amused me anyway 😛
How we laughed!
Human Rights and China: Uyghur Solidarity Campaign UK.
The Internationalist Left supports Human Rights everywhere.
Human rights have been at the centre of left politics since 1789. Some people think that because Marx criticised civic rights under capitalism, and, in “On the Jewish Question” (1843) considered them a product of bourgeois political culture. That they are themselves bourgeois
“The rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community.” Robert Fine, Marx’s basic criticism was that within political society people were seen as co-operative, while in their economic roles they were competitive, individualistic and egoistic. In short, the theory of rights expressed the division and alienation of human beings. Robert Fine defended socialist approaches which tackled these limitations.
As Paul O’Connell points out, for Marx, in his early writings,
the limited form of political emancipation provided by the attainment of the rights of man ‘certainly represents a great progress. It is not, indeed, the final form of human emancipation, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the framework of the prevailing social order.
He adds,
throughout their lives both Marx and Engels, while entertaining no illusions on the matter, wrote repeatedly in defence of the rights to free expression, protest and the right to vote.
And,
the Provisional Rules of the First International, which Marx also wrote, begins with the affirmation that ‘the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule’.43 The Rules further ‘hold it the duty of a man to claim the rights of a man and a citizen, not only for himself, but for every man who does his duty’.
ON THE HUMAN RIGHTS QUESTION
Paul O’Connell.
The First International brought forces together, many of them from a labour movement which had been formed in the mould of (in Britain and Ireland) of the ideas of Tom Paine’s the Rights of Man (1791). French socialist parties of like the Parti Ouvrier Français, POF) founded in 1880, also adopted this language.
More recent debates on human rights which began in France the 1970s have raised the issue of how human rights are defined by people themselves. Writers have considered how the demand for rights affects political society and creates new movements and institutions which shape the ‘community’. For some abstract human rights are not a political strategy only serve to cover up what would today be called liberal military interventions and wordy domestic statements. But for the philosopher Jacques Rancière, human rights have been embodied in movements have come from the oppressed, the, the demos, the people who have had no rights, those outside existing insitutions.
…the Rights of Man become the rights of those who have no rights, the rights of bare human beings subjected to inhuman repression and inhuman conditions of existence. They become humanitarian rights, the rights of those who cannot enact them, the victims of the absolute denial of right. For all this, they are not void. Political names and political places never become merely void. The void is filled by somebody or something else. The Rights of Man do not become void by becoming the rights of those who cannot actualise them. If they are not truly ‘‘their’’ rights, they can become the rights of others.
The most celebrated original instance of those who had no rights demanding rights is Olympe de Gouges. She wrote the Déclaration des droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne in 1789 in response of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man which denied female suffrage, and kept patriarchal laws in place.
A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform
For her opposition to the Terror Olympe de Gouges was guillotined.
“Yesterday, at seven o’clock in the evening, a most extraordinary person called Olympe de Gouges who held the imposing title of woman of letters, was taken to the scaffold, while all of Paris, while admiring her beauty, knew that she didn’t even know her alphabet…. She approached the scaffold with a calm and serene expression on her face, and forced the guillotine’s furies, which had driven her to this place of torture, to admit that such courage and beauty had never been seen before…. That woman… had thrown herself in the Revolution, body and soul. But having quickly perceived how atrocious the system adopted by the Jacobins was, she chose to retrace her steps. She attempted to unmask the villains through the literary productions which she had printed and put up. They never forgave her, and she paid for her carelessness with her head.
The democratic revolutions of the last centuries, described by writers such as Claude Lefort and Pierre Rosanvallon, have seen many of the right-less making new demands. The Trade Union movement, based on class struggle, can be seen as one of the greatest human rights movements in history.The women’s movement, the gay movement, and green movements, have expanded the range of what we think of as rights.
We should not just fight for our rights, but as internationalists defend the rights of those deprived of rights.
This is a cause we should back.
And this: Uyghur Solidarity Campaign UK
For everyone’s safety and due to the Tier 4 coronavirus restrictions in London, we unfortunately can’t hold our usual monthly protest at the Chinese embassy on 5 January. But that doesn’t mean the campaign stops – read on for events and activities coming up!
“Terror Capitalism: The Enclosure of Uyghurs in NW China/Xinjiang”
Online talk & discussion with Darren Byler
3pm (UK time) Saturday 9 Jan
More info & free registration
Researcher Darren Byler will be speaking to open a discussion about the factors of profit and power behind the regime of repression, surveillance and forced labour to which the Uyghur people are subjected. This is part of a series “China & the Left: Critical Analysis & Grassroots Activism” hosted by Gongchao. Attendance is free but please register!
Write to free tortured, imprisoned journalist Zhang Zhan
Citizen journalist Zhang Zhan has been imprisoned and tortured in China. Her crime? She was charged and convicted of “picking quarrels and provoking quarrels” after travelling to Wuhan last spring and reporting critically on the government’s response to COVID-19.
This is not only an assault on freedom of speech and of the press – in the middle of a pandemic, the ability to scrutinise public health measures is a matter of life and death. Please support Amnesty International’s letter-writing campaign to demand her release.
Write to MPs: end Uyghur forced labour, end all forced labour!
If you haven’t already done so, you can still email your MP and the UK Parliament’s Business Committee to demand new laws clamping down on the global corporate giants exploiting forced labour – not only in China but around the world. Please see our letter-writing guide.
Follow and share our social media
Please help spread the word about our campaign by supporting us on social media! Follow us and share our posts on facebook, twitter and instagram.
Academy of Ideas, Baroness Fox (Spiked Network) linked to new education scandal.
Baroness Fox of Buckley Charity, Battle of Ideas, linked to new Education Scandal.
Bob from Brockley has been running this thread on Twitter,
Today he focused on this, a story that broke at the end of December 2020.
Further questions were raised over payment of an invoice totalling £14,400 from the Academy of Ideas – the team of which includes Baroness Fox of Buckley – in relation to Battle of Ideas, a charity the trust has “a number of connections with”, the report states.
Another report gives from more details,
Former Cameron adviser’s free school rapped over ‘improper’ appointment of principal’s associates
John Dickens.
A damning investigation report also found the East London Science School Trust broke finance rules by handing out undocumented pay rises to senior staff.
People with connections to the school’s principal – David Perks –were “improperly” appointed into leadership roles and payments to a debating firm, run by Baroness Fox of Buckley, were also questioned.
This is the section dealing with the ex-Revolutionary Communist Party, now Baroness, Claire Regina Fox and ladyship’s ‘Charity’. ,
The investigation found the trust has “a number of connections” with the Battle of Ideas charity. But investigators could find no evidence to show how potential conflicts of interests over a £14,400 payment to a company linked to the charity – the Academy of Ideas – were managed, or whether it was a related party transaction. The cash was paid in advance of event in November last year.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (formerly Claire Fox) set up the Academy of Ideas, which convenes the annual Battle of Ideas debating festival. Perks is on the Battle of Ideas committee, where he has acted as chair, a speaker and author since it was set up.
Alastair Donald, co-convenor of the Battle of Ideas festival, told Schools Week the payment was for sponsorship of events, which included the school’s logo on promotion materials, tickets and a promotional stall.
The trust has been told to take “urgent action” to resolve the issues. A separate financial notice to improve states it should consider joining a strong multi-academy trust. If not, it must improve its governance in line with the latest model funding agreement.
2019,
‘Pro-Brexit, anti-feminist, anti-environmental’ videos from Hackney charity WORLDwrite spark concern
Not to mention:
Galloway Advocates Voting Tory in ‘Tactical Vote’ guide.
Galloway’s Old Friends…..Halcyon Days….
Here’s another old mucker:
Last year Galloway hit the headlines with this:
Daily Record.
The left-wing firebrand is confident of a leading a new single issue pro-Union movement in to the Scottish Parliament.
Former Labour MP George Galloway said he’s prepared to work with the Tories if it means ending the SNP’s grip on power at next year’s Holyrood election.
The left-wing firebrand believes his new Alliance for Unity can return several MSPs in 2021 due to voters’ disillusionment with the big pro-Union parties, who he claims have become “anonymous”.
Here is latest
The dapper gent shrugs this off:
Will his old friends comment?
Piers Corbyn announces he will run for London Mayor.
Strange Days.
Corbyn, who think that antifa and Black Lives Matter are financed by George Soros, and that the ‘globalist’ elite is behind the Covid-19 ‘hoax’, and the ‘New World Order’ is generally classified as on the extreme right conspiracy fringe.
Wikipedia offers a long list of his contemptible ravings,
This COVID-19 virus is a hoax. There may have been something around in China, was it the same thing, was it a bio-weapon, who knows. But it was used to unleash the most monstrous power-grab the world has ever seen. And what we have got to do, we have got to break their lockdowns, break all their measures or we lose. We are not just walking around protesting, saying to the Government please do this, please do that. We are not protesting, we are fighting, in order to break every move they make
More recently he has been in the news for this.
Jeremy Corbyn’s brother compares COVID-19 vaccines to Nazi atrocities
Jerusalem Post.
Piers Corbyn, the brother of former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, has been circulating leaflets around London — including the highly Jewish-populated area of Barnet, comparing the UK government’s coronavirus vaccination campaign to the Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
On the front page of the leaflets appeared a picture of the infamous gate at the entrance of the Auschwitz death camp, but instead of the Nazi slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ was written ‘Vaccines Are Safe Path To Freedom,’ taking a headline from the Evening Standard newspaper and distorting its message, the Jewish Chronicle (JC) reported.
Which is why his fellow far-rightists have already complained about this candidacy.
Maybe Jeremy Corbyn will say something about this Mayoral Candidacy/
.
“No Holding Back” (Ian Lavery) argues in favour of Hardwiring “Thatcherite economics into Britain’s permanent relationship with the EU.”
Argued for a vote in favour of the deal,
The Hard Brexiteers of the Morning Star have published this extraordinary editorial this morning.
The road to socialism is not paved with corporate treaties between capitalist states.
After registering the Johnny-come-very-late Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition to the Brexit deal they note that this,
grim assessment is shared by the authors of the No Holding Back report, Ian Lavery, Jon Trickett and Laura Smith, who state that it “hardwires Thatcherite economics into Britain’s permanent relationship with the EU.”
Like Corbyn, they note that protections against “regression” on workers’ rights are heavily qualified.
Their analysis highlights parts of the deal which point to potential Tory plans to privatise the NHS and the maintenance of EU competition and state aid laws that prohibit strategic economic planning and many forms of public ownership. It also points to threats to British manufacturing hidden in the “rules of origin” details.
They nonetheless argue for a vote in favour of the deal, on the grounds that the consequences of opposing it would be even worse.
Worse than what?
We shall not know but they backed the Thatcherite deal.
Here is their ‘analysis’
But the future is yet unwritten. There is much in the Agreement which remains untested and as we have seen there are provisions for review, challenge and amendment. The task facing the whole Labour Movement is both to create a post-Brexit vision which can lead us out of the multiple crises which our country faces, and then to fight like never before for a different world.
The rest of the Morning Star’s piffle outlines why everybody is wrong unless they oppose the EU.
They conclude,
The road to socialism is not paved with corporate treaties between capitalist states.
Quite right comrades!
The anti-monopoly alliance, a massive movement for popular sovereignty, that’s the way forward.
Already popular committees are being organised on the Ipswich estates.
Watch this space!
The Brexit Vote, the Pandemic and the future of British Capitalism.
Forward with Johnson?
The Guardian reports today,
Labour will make a clean break from its divisions over Europe and will not seek major changes to the UK’s relationship with the EU, Keir Starmer has told the Guardian, vowing to shift Labour’s focus to “Britain in the 2030s” rather than the battles of 2016.
Evoking Tony Blair’s election slogan of “forward not back” on the eve of the vote on the post-Brexit trade deal, Starmer said he wanted to lead a party that was focused on the future – saying it was unlikely Europe would even feature on his party’s election leaflets.
The Labour leader, who said the aim of his first year had been listening to voters about the party’s general election loss, said his party would now begin to spell out its vision of a future Labour government. Starmer said 2021 would be the time to define his vision and values as a future prime minister – with a focus on the economy and the NHS.
In a nod to his angry backbenchers, dozens of whom are expected to refuse to endorse the Conservative deal, Starmer said he knew there were difficult choices, but said the vote for the deal would bring some closure.
The Brexit vote today will be far from a “closure”.
The Morning Star, which fails to report the support of John McDonnell for the Another Europe is Possible declaration, says,
Another Europe Is Possible and Labour For A Socialist Europe organised the statement opposing the deal, which has received support from both wings of the party.
Signatories include ex-cabinet minister Lord Adonis from the Blairite wing of the party.
The statement warns that it is the duty of the opposition to provide proper parliamentary scrutiny and to set out an alternative.
“That task gets harder if opposition parties fall into the trap of rallying around this rotten deal,” it said.
“We are witnessing an act of vandalism against our livelihoods, our rights and our horizons.
“We call on Labour, the labour movement and other opposition parties not to support the Tories’ Brexit deal when it is put to a vote in the House of Commons.”
Other signatories are said to include former MEPs, councillors and local activists.
Labour is the only opposition party supporting the deal, with the SNP and the Liberal Democrats having said they would vote against it.
With Labour support, the EU (Future Relationship) Bill is expected to be passed comfortably today after MPs and peers debate and vote, with the legislation being rushed through in
They give space to one source which refuses to oppose the deal,
Communist Party of Britain general secretary Robert Griffiths said: “Successive British governments should have been investing in ports, customs services, strategic companies, R&D, local supply chains and exports, regardless of Brexit.
“We need a comprehensive strategy to rebuild our industrial base in the English regions, Scotland and Wales, in the interests of workers as well as business.
“Ironically, only outside the EU can we use state aid, public ownership and capital controls on the scale necessary to implement such a strategy — a reality not recognised by die-hard anti-Brexit Labour MPs.”
The Marxist-Leninists of the Morning Star are said to be taking advantage of the new post-Brexit terrain to build a mass movement to assert popular sovereignty against ‘monopoly capitalism’ .
This will not happen. What we are seeing a change in the mode of regulation of British capitalism comparable to that created by the Thatcher ‘revolution’. This is not the lifting of burdens imposed by the EU, but the imposition of new burdens in the sovereign UK: the opportunity for free-booting capitalists to plunder the public purse, attack workers’ rights, and to cream off financial profits.
That is, the Brexit deal is an important stage in creating a more liberal form of capitalism in Britain, glossed with the nationalist ideal of an “anglosphère’ of trading free-market nations’.
That ideology aside what form of capitalism is involved?
The development of modern capitalism during the pandemic has been analysed differently by Robert Boyer, a left wing economist of the ‘School of Regulation’. This autumn he published, Les capitalismes à l’épreuve de la pandémie (la Découverte).
To Boyer there are different forms of capitalism, engaged in competition. The obsolete concept of monopoly capitalism does not figure in his account of how these capitalisms is developing.
In this book Boyer argues that the Covid pandemic has acted as “an accelerator of transformations already underway in the long term”. On the one hand, there a transnational “platform capitalism” centred on the exploitation of information. For this regime of accumulation, and mode of regulation, globalisation has to continue its momentum, and that nationalist withdrawal and the return of borders do not take place. Opposite is another form, different types of state-driven capitalisms which, driven by those left behind by the opening up of economies, intend to defend the prerogatives of the nation-state, including in the economic field“, were born these last twenty years.“Ideologically reinforced by the pandemic” since it was necessary to close the borders and recognise the importance of the State during the crisis.
Transnational capitalism has broken up and transformed national production systems and helped polarise societies between social groups which have benefited from the competition between different countries and regions (“concurrence des territories et les autres”) and those who have seen their living standards stagnated or get worse. (Page 183)
Boyer argues that there is another possibility the emergence of a capitalism centred on health, ecology and education in certain developed countries, notably in Europe.
In Une pandémie, deux avenirs (Le Monde Diplomatique. November) Boyer has argued that,
On the one hand, the Covid-19 has already changed a number of types of behaviour and practices: the structure of consumption has registered the risks of face-to-face relationships ; work has been digitalised, allowing both temporal and geographical disconnection from the tasks that produce a dematerialised good or service; the international mobility of people has been durably hampered ; and global value chains will not emerge unscathed from efforts to regain some national sovereignty over the production of goods deemed strategic. The modes of regulation will be transformed, with little chance of a return to the past.
He concludes with these possible futures,
A first future could result from an alliance between digital techniques and advances in biology to result in a society of generalised surveillance which institutes and makes possible a polarization between a small number of rich people and a mass of subjects rendered powerless by the abandonment of the democratic ideal.
The second future could result from the collapse of such a society. The dislocation of international relations and the failure of the fight against the pandemic by purely medical means (treatments, vaccines, or on the contrary obtaining collective immunity) show the need for a social state which becomes the guardian of a democracy extended to the economy. One that, in the face of health threats, strives to strengthen all the institutions necessary for collective health and sees education, lifestyle and culture as contributions to the well-being of the population.
The success of a growing number of national experiences could eventually make it possible to build an international regime centred on global public goods and ” commons “. Without which national regimes cannot prosper: transnational trade regime, financial stability, public health, ecological sustainability. One thinks of the advance taken by the Scandinavian countries, whose social-democratic-inspired capitalism favours investment in essential public services and the consideration of environmental imperatives.
The British government’s strategy is clearly at odds with the second “social” outcome: the European Union, many would argue, could offer a potential framework, larger and stronger than ‘national experiences’ Boyer refers to . Europe’s ‘functionalist’ model may have serious difficulties, but they are as nothing to what lies in store for us under the new UK regime. Our national experience will be the opposite of the policy of the common good. It will be focused on the benefits to Boris Johnson, his party cronies, his business backers, and the their national populist constituency, at the expense of everybody else. Its management of the Pandemic, and the money creamed off by the friends of the Tory Party, richly illustrates this. There is, in short, a national dystopia here, one of no doubt many….
As Manuel Cortes says,
Labour MPs must ignore Keir Starmer and vote against this rotten Tory Brexit deal
it will make our economy smaller, and as a result we will be poorer, with fewer jobs being created. But this is not just about our economic wellbeing, as important as that is. It’s also about our cultural and social lives being impoverished. Ending freedom of movement and our participation in the Erasmus programme will narrow our horizons and experiences.
some on the left say that we shouldn’t take sides in what is effectively a fight within the capitalist class. And this might be the right strategy if we had the forces to ensure the creation of a new socialist dawn. But when this isn’t the case, we shouldn’t be neutral. We must argue for a relationship with the EU that gives working people the greatest confidence to fight for something that’s better – not worse – than their current lot. The higher unemployment and lower living standards that the trade deal will deliver will do nothing of the sort. It also keeps in place – lock, stock and barrel – the legal framework that has led to the privatisation of public services and attacks on workers’ terms and conditions – a reason many “lexiteers” backed withdrawing from the EU.
Michael Roberts asks in The Brexit Deal,
What about the impact on working people? On leaving the EU, what little British labour has gained from EU regulations will be in jeopardy within a country which is already the most deregulated in the OECD. The EU rules included a 48-hour week maximum (riddled with exemptions); health and safety regulations; regional and social subsidies; science funding; environmental checks; and of course, above all, free movement of labour. All that is going or being minimised.
…
But maybe the UK can confound these dismal forecasts, as the government claims, because UK industry and the City of London can now expand across the world ‘free from the shackles’ of EU regulation. And it is increasingly clear how it thinks it can do this – by turning Britain into a tax and regulation-free base for foreign multinationals. The government is planning ‘free ports’ or zones; areas with little to no tax in order to encourage economic activity. While located geographically within a country, they essentially exist outside its borders for tax purposes. Companies operating within free ports can benefit from deferring the payment of taxes until their products are moved elsewhere or can avoid them altogether if they bring in goods to store or manufacture on site before exporting them again.
In sum, the Brexit deal is another obstacle to sustained economic growth for Britain. But the COVID pandemic slump and the underlying weakness of British capital are much more damaging to the UK’s economic future than Brexit. Brexit is just an extra burden for British capital to face; as it also will be for British households.
Do accept that our future lies under the boot of transnational digitalised capitalism, in these miserable conditions, or do we refuse to agree?
The Brexit Deal and the Left.
Morning Star Backs Left Populist Call for ‘Popular Sovereignty’.
This week the Brexit Deal with be voted on in Parliament.
Sir Keir Starmer is engaged in a last-ditch attempt to persuade his MPs to back the government’s Brexit deal as he faces up to half a dozen frontbench resignations.
Labour Party whips were calling round MPs yesterday and will continue today to convince them to vote in favour of the Future Relationship Bill in the Commons on Wednesday.
Calls to oppose the deal have come from the internationalist left.
The radical left campaign, Another Europe is Possible says,
The position of a Labour leader, presenting an alternative government, is not the same as activists and MPs who wish to vote on principles. A Cabinet in waiting may be disposed not to prolong the misery of negotiations Those with long-standing anti-Brexit activism say, why should any left party back any form of Brexit, and particularly one offered by Johnson.
Conditions are further complicated in that many Corbyn supporters seem wrapped up in their own unhappiness. If they could not run the Labour Party, then nobody should be allowed to succeed. They relish anything that can be seen as weakening Keir Starmer’s position.
It is to the credit of the Morning Star that they tackle the Brexit issue itself, although as David Walsh points out, it is unlikely they have read the 1000 or so (2,000 with appendixes) page agreement.
Big battles ahead on rights, left warns as vote on ‘weak’ Brexit deal nears
Morning Star
The Communist Party said that the trade agreement is a compromise between the interests of British state-monopoly capitalism and those of German and French monopoly capital — represented by their states and the EU.
In a statement, party general secretary Robert Griffiths and international secretary John Foster warned that the new deal frees Britain from the sovereignty of the EU — but not from the sovereignty of big businesses.
“Under the new agreement (Title IV), capital will remain free to shut down operations and invest anywhere in Britain and Europe, regardless of job losses, regional inequalities and the requirements of balanced economic and social development,” the statement said.
The CP called on the labour movement and trade unions to begin a “united struggle for popular sovereignty at all levels in face of a wider economic and social crisis that is already reaching unprecedented proportions.
The Morning Star does not reproduce the full statement by the CPB (its name, not the ‘CP’ cited above).
Here is a relevant extract from Challenge.
The labour movement and its trades unions must now begin a united struggle for popular sovereignty at all levels in face of a wider economic and social crisis that is already reaching unprecedented proportions – a crisis which Britain, as currently subjected to ‘free market’ big business sovereignty, has proved woefully unable to control. Big battles lie ahead in the fight for jobs, incomes and public services. Free trade agreements between Britain and other countries which include provisions for greater privatisation of public services, or for incoming investors to overturn the democratic policies of the central and devolved parliaments, must be resisted.
If that sounds a lot like Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his talk of an L’Ère du peuple in which ‘people’s struggle for popular sovereignty against ‘elites’ or the as Star pits it “big business’ and monopoly capitalism, that’s because it is. Who exactly the people in the ‘popular’ and what kind of sovereignty, plainly national, this means is left hanging in the air. The ideas here are clearly sovereigntist, priority if given to the national sovereign state. There are, besides Mélenchon’s left populism, right wing, very right wing, national populists.
Is it that of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen de 1789?
Article III – The principle of any sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation. No body, no individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
Article VI – The law is the expression of the general will. All the citizens have the right of contributing personally or through their representatives to its formation. It must be the same for all, either that it protects, or that it punishes. All the citizens, being equal in its eyes, are equally admissible to all public dignities, places, and employments, according to their capacity and without distinction other than that of their virtues and of their talents.
In 2016 Mélenchon’s rally published a programme, l’Avenir en Commun .It promised to put an end to the economic “pillaging” of the Nation . He opposed privatisations, ‘public-private’ partnerships’ and the effects of social dumping. In “défense de notre souveraineté industrielle”, “protectionnisme solidaire” was offered. La France insoumise has been in favour of a new Sixth Republic in which such measures can be taken. Is the Morning Star about to adopt a strategy for a new Republic here? Have they found a solution to the global economy, globalisation, and neoliberalism through a state of a special republican type?
It would be interesting to speculate that reconciliation is taking place between the CPB and the former Trotskyist Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The ‘eternal candidate’ is hoping to stand as a candidate (for the third time) in the next French Presidential election.
While waiting for classification from the Marxist-Leninists of the CPB, do the Morning Star call for opposition to the deal?
Not a word.
“Big battles lie ahead in the fight for jobs, incomes and public services,” the statement said. “Free-trade agreements between Britain and other countries which include provisions for greater privatisation of public services or for incoming investors to overturn the democratic policies of the central and devolved parliaments must be resisted.”
MPs will vote on the deal on Wednesday, and with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer ordering his MPs to vote in favour, it will most likely be approved by Parliament. However, reports have suggested that some shadow ministers are poised to resign in order to defy a three-line whip during the vote.
Unions have warned that workers’ rights need “levelling up” in the deal.
Do they tell us how Labour should vote in Parliament, even a recommendation?
No, GMB acting general secretary Warren Kenny is cited saying the unions will defend workers’ and their members’ interests. “TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said that while the deal is “better than nothing,” she warned that it will not protect jobs and “puts hard-won workers’ rights on the line.”
The same paper has already told the left what to do.
The Brexit deal: priorities for the socialist left
MUCH has been made of the fact that the long-awaited Brexit deal is the first in the “modern era” to erect barriers rather than dismantle them.
The sorrowful tone in which this observation is made implies that Britain is shutting the door on progress and openness. For EU diplomats that is logical enough. It is more worrying when socialists raise the same lament.
The Morning Star has no sad words or regrets for its campaigning for Brexit, which helped the present Bosses’ deal get underway.
This “modern era” is the era of neoliberalism that began in the 1970s with Reagan, Thatcher and the “big bang” that removed regulation of financial markets; in Europe this era saw the evolution of the modern European Union through the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties.
Nothing better illustrates the dominance of liberal ideology across the left than the doublethink that allows people to decry the destruction of industry, the rollback of labour rights, the privatisation of public services and the erosion of democratic accountability that have taken place over the last five decades while championing the institutional developments that have accompanied them.
No doubt Thatcher was acting on instructions from the European union, as was Reagan.
They continue,
The left has not, historically, been in favour of “frictionless” markets that equate to unregulated capitalist power.
Socialists should not, therefore, mourn the mere (how mere? ) existence of barriers.
There is little (how little? to celebrate in the details of the agreement that have so far been revealed. This is unsurprising. The agreement was negotiated between representatives of British and European capitalism; the interests of British and European workers were not on either party’s agenda.
Indeed, since the referendum was first called the Brexit question has been framed as a “civil war within capitalism.”
Efforts have been made – by this newspaper, by organisations such as Leave, Fight, Transform, for a time by Jeremy Corbyn, as at his Coventry speech in 2018 – to promote a Brexit vision with democratic and anti-monopoly interests at its heart, but it has never gained a wide hearing. When it was sunk within Labour by the People’s Vote operation the future of the entire Corbyn project was sunk with it.
The visionaries lost out, the People’s Brexit joined a long list pf things that never happened and were never going to, and their pro-Brexit campaigning helped one side the civil war, the battalions of the ERG, Brexit Party and Johnson.
There are still reasons to be cheerful.
And departure from the EU does show that a globalisation process along rules written by giant corporations is not unstoppable.
Unity behind the leadership of those who backed one capitalist camp is needed…
Since 2015 the left has allowed Brexit to divide the working class into two camps, both under capitalist direction. Our departure from the EU must prompt us to build a united labour movement focused on the fight for socialism.
The Morning Star has done its best for one pro-capitalist camp.
See the other camp:
Labour must not support Johnson’s deal
Shiraz.
The Brexiters failed to negotiate a deal over four and a half years, until the very last minute, because it is impossible to get what they want – full license to cut social and environmental standards below EU levels, and raise barriers high against people moving between here and the EU, together with smooth trade flows. They went to the brink in negotiations again and again in order to squeeze out the nearest approximation to their impossible demands.
The EU has conceded much, giving the Tories license to cut some standards with only a proviso that if they do it too much then tariffs may be put on British exports.
Labour should not back a deal on that basis. It should not allow the Tories to blackmail Labour by saying “approve this crap deal, because otherwise it’s no deal! No time to consider alternatives!” Still less should Labour positively call on the Tories to do that! Even if we can’t actually stop the Tory deal now, we can raise a voice against it.
Verso Publishes Interview with notorious Anti-Semite: Houria Bouteldja.
God will open other ways for us – inshallah.
A couple of weeks ago Verso published a reverential interview with this type.
‘The witch, that suits everyone’: Interview with Houria Bouteldja
Why do your critics accuse you of being anti-Semitic?
To start with, they should know what anti-Semitism is. Secondly, they cite for example my story about the little boy wearing the yarmulke [from the book Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/whites-jews-and-us): ‘The worst thing is the look in my eyes when I pass a child wearing a yarmulke in the street. That furtive moment when I stop to look at him. The worst thing is the disappearance of my indifference towards you, the possible prelude to my inner ruin’], saying that this is anti-Semitism. Except that I am not talking about myself as an actual anti-Semite, but the process of becoming an anti-Semite (‘the possible prelude to my inner ruin’), which is what I say in the text that I fear.
Moreover, I dare to say, as Frantz Fanon said: ‘A society is either racist or it is not.’ Being myself an element of this society, I am affected by racism in one way or another. And that is true of all other oppressions.
So, in the remarks that you are attacked for you speak as a French person, with the legacy of what France has done to Jews, while people who criticise you have seen a sign of so-called ‘Arab-Muslim anti-Semitism’?
Yes, in this passage, I am talking about my relationship to Jews as a product of French society. The society in which we all live. I am talking about the degradation of the relationship between Indigenes and Jews. I am thinking about [neofascist and fake “anti-Zionist”] Alain Soral, about how more and more Indigènes become anti-Semitic because they live in a racist society. That it is the nation-state that imposes a hierarchy in which Jews are in some sense better treated. The Indigènes de la République know that Jews are also a kind of Indigène. But the ordinary Indigène thinks that there is no reason why Jews should be cossetted and not them. Then there are integrationist Indigènes who, instead of questioning the White hierarchy and supremacy, want to simply take the place of the Jew.
Make of this gibberish what you will.
There is a gradual evolution of Jews towards the right and towards Zionism, whereas previously they were on the far left. That is not essentialising. Given the assumption that a society is racist or not, then a society is either anti-Semitic or not. Given that we live in an anti-Semitic society, we are probably more or less anti-Semitic.
Here is the same racist scum ‘imagining’ what is Israel, Mediapart this week.
Palestine was not colonised by populations claiming to be part of Judaism but by Tatars who claim (why not?) Tatarism.
It was not Herzl who wrote “State of the Jews” in 1896 but a Tatar.
The participants of the first Zionist congress in Basel which took place in 1897 were not Jews but Tatars
The Balfour Declaration written by the British Foreign Minister on November 2, 1917, is not addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild as the main financier of the Zionist movement but to a Tatar.
The first settlers, better known under the name of “lovers of Zions” (1880), were not Jews but Tatars.
Verso’s heroine refers to the case, this week, of the filth that was poured on Miss Provence, a contestant in the national beauty competition who was subjected to a torrent of abuse for her Jewish origins, *
Making anti-Semitism a national scandal and minimising negrophobia is in fact worse than the famous “double standards” that we use on all occasions. It is even worse than the expression of dubious philosemitism. It is in fact, to organize the war between the “racialised” Jews and the natives, to point out and deliver the Jews to the native vindictiveness (precisely the experience that Miss Provence has just lived) while making invisible the root causes of structural racism whose anti-Semitism and negrophobia are inseparable.
Verso should follow Mediapart after the reaction when they published such vile trash.
Ce billet a été dépublié par la rédaction de Mediapart car il ne respecte pas la Charte de participation.
**************
Update:
* The runner-up of the Miss France 2021 competition has been subjected to a torrent of anti-Semitic abuse on social media, prompting outrage and a police investigation.
April Benayoum, 21, was awarded second place in the pageant during a televised ceremony on Saturday.
She revealed her Israeli origins in an interview at the event, leading to anti-Semitic attacks on Twitter.
See: Victimisation, complotisme et antisionisme… Étrange soirée indigéniste à Ménilmontant
“Au cours d’un débat dans l’émission Ce soir (ou jamais !), le politologue Thomas Guénolé interpelle Houria Bouteldja, également invitée, en déclarant : « Il y a une partie de l’antiracisme, et cela me fait beaucoup de peine de dire cela, qui est devenue raciste. Je parle de vous Madame Bouteldja. » Il poursuit en accusant Houria Bouteldja d’être raciste, misogyne et homophobe, en citant les divers propos et écrits de cette dernière sur les Juifs, les Blancs, les femmes, les couples mixtes et les homosexuels.
Chris Williamson develops a Tony Greenstein Obsession.
I
Lord Voldemort and Chris Williamson.
It is the sad duty of this world-rated Blog to chronicle the exemplary evolution of one-time Labour MP Chris Williamson, the darling of the ‘left’.
Once a rated supporter of Tony Blair, who put his ideas into practice in local government, then some Labour MP nobody had heard of, but a loyalist placeman , then an Assadist critic of universally loved Jo Cox, and the White Helmets, an ‘anti- Zionist’ (at they call it these days), best mate of TUSC, the Socialist Party (for how long?) and the pro-bosses’ Brexit RMT, a backer of Colonel Gaddafi, now the country’s most famous Vegan (after Morrisey). He has come to this.
The Tendance is surprised that this new bloc is not already written about on the New Left Review Blog Sidecar, the favourite of every tosspot on the left, and other ‘alt’ blogs.
We are however sure that the Williamson’s new bloc, with the Monster Raving Greenstein Party will not last long.
Je suis pour le communisme
Je suis pour le socialisme
Et pour le capitalisme
Parce que je suis opportuniste
100th Anniversary of the Congress of Tours: the Split that Created the French Communist Party.
Congrès de Tours. December 1920.
The Tours Congress was the 18th National Congress of the French Section of the Workers’ International, or SFIO, which took place in Tours on 25–30 December 1920. During the Congress, the majority voted to join the Third International and create the French Section of the Communist International, which became the French Communist Party in 1921.
This was the reaction of tendency which became the French Communist Party, le Parti Communiste Français (PCF).
In December of 1920 the French Socialist Party held a congress in Tours to decide the question of whether or not to join the Communist International. Supported by Marcel Cachin and L.- O. Frossard, and opposed by old-time leader Jules Guesde and the former Dreyfusard and future head of the Popular Front government Léon Blum, the Congress voted overwhelmingly to support entry into the Comintern. L’Humanité, the newspaper founded by Jean Jaurès, and which now became the official organ of the PCF, carried the following account.
Violence is often nothing but the most obvious sign of strong and sincere convictions. So if bourgeois newspapers delight in publishing this morning that “violent incidents” marked yesterday’s meeting of the congress, we have nothing to be surprised about. It’s not in the serenity of academies or tribunals that the destiny of the revolutionary proletariat is decided: it is in the fever and tumult of action.
By 3,252 votes out of 4,763 — a majority of more than two thirds — the Congress of Tours voted for the membership of the Socialist Party in the Communist International. Our emotion is great in writing these lines. At long last French socialism is publicly and solemnly breaking with the out of date traditions of the Second International; with the humiliated, as well as humiliating routine of a purely electoral, purely parliamentary socialism which, under the pressure of historical circumstances, ended up by reducing revolutionary Marxism, which they claimed to be inspired by, to the role of a “king who rules but doesn’t govern.”
The Second International has been dead for a long time — dead since August 4, 1914 — four days after Jaurès. Alas, it was one of those dead who have to be killed. Take off your hat for its remains as they pass by. Let us pledge ourselves to the immense obligation we have assumed to the coming revolution in joining the Communist International.
The response, cinglante, of Léon Blum is so memorable that many of us know many of the original words almost by heart,
The second International Congress held in Moscow last July had the visible appearance of a sort of constituent assembly. (Uproar) My voice is naturally very weak. I am, moreover, very tired, like all of you, and it would be physically impossible for me to surmount, by the strength of my lungs, this tumult and these violent interruptions.
The second International Congress at Moscow had, then, to all appearances, the character of a sort of constituent assembly. In all areas, the doctrinal as well as the tactical, it formulated a set of complementary resolutions. The whole set forms a sort of architectural structure, entirely patterned after a single design, in which every part is related to every other. It is impossible to deny the power and even the majesty of it. You are in the presence of a totality, of a doctrinal ensemble. Thus, the following question is posed: Do you or do you not accept this body of doctrine formulated by the Congress of the Communist International? And to accept – I hope there will be no divergence of opinion on this point – to accept means to accept with mind, heart, and will and with the intention of strictly conforming, in thought and action, to the new doctrine.
Any other kind of adherence would be a comedy, unworthy of the Communist International and unworthy of the French party. You are in the presence of a totality. “There is not even room to quibble over this or that detail. It is a question of looking at the unifying theme, the central idea. It doesn’t much matter if your acceptance entails this or that reservation about a detail. There is no trickery or deception in that. But if you contest the doctrine in its essentials, you really have no right to accept with second thoughts or mental reservations, to say “I agree, but I only pay lip-service, with the conviction that this is nothing but a joke, and that tomorrow the party will continue to live and to act as it did yesterday.” We are all agreed in rejecting such an interpretation. (Applause) The Congress may believe this of us. With an effort at intellectual impartiality and honesty that no one here will deny, we faced the problem squarely and said to ourselves: “Studying the texts of the Communist International, its theses, its statutes” – and I will not dwell on the difficulties and really excessive slowness with which we were given each of the materials under discussion – “can we or can we not accept them?” For us to accept would really mean to accept in the strongest possible sense of the word. We had the duty of making that textual examination.
… What is the result? It is twofold. First of all (and I believe there will be no disagreement about this), we are in the presence of something new. Some have tried to prove the contrary, and perhaps will try again. I remember the meeting of the Federation of the Seine when I was responding to Frossard, who had made the most ingenious and clever effort to combine the communist theses with the traditional principles of the Socialist Party. I tried to show him that those theses reflected a force, a will to construct something new, differing entirely from the essential tenets of the traditional socialism we had until then known and practiced. I remember that the most qualified delegates of the Third International supported me. “It’s true,” they said. “That is what we think; that is what we want. It is a new socialism that we want to create in our country and in the whole proletarian world.” That is what Lenin and Trotsky have said. It is what you yourselves said when returning from Russia. For example, Cachin, in the last letter that he sent from Moscow, spoke of a break with the past. Trotsky, in the most recent document that the Communist Bulletin has published, said that it was a new party.
…
What is the new party that you want to create going to be like? Instead of a popular will formed at the base and rising by degrees, your regime of centralization involves the subordination of each organ to the one which is hierarchically above it. It entails an executive committee at the top to which everyone is subordinated, a sort of military chain of command whose orders are formulated at the top and transmitted from one rank to another down to the mere members in their sections. The autonomy of groups and federations? That, the theses will tell you, is a heresy pure and simple and must be excluded from communist organization. … Alongside public organization, underground organization.
In lines that echo throughout the ages, Blum described what a socialist party is,
Your vocation is to gather together all the proletarians of all countries. There is no other limit to the size of the Socialist party than the number of workers and wage-earners. Our Party was therefore a party with as large a recruitment as possible. As such, it was a party of freedom of thought, for the two ideas are necessarily related. If you want to group all workers, all wage-earners, all the exploited in a single party, you can only unite them around simple and general slogans. You will say to them: “All those who want to work to change the economic system, all those who believe, for this is the foundation of Marxism, that there is an ineluctable connection between the development of capitalism on the one hand and that of socialism on the other – all of you are socialists. If you are with us in this task, your act of faith is completed. You are socialists.” Within this credo, this essential affirmation, all varieties and shades of opinion are tolerated. ..
Speech at the Socialist Party Congress at Tours, 27 December 1920
There is an excellent documentary which an algorithm on FB has alerted people to this week.
Congrès de Tours. 1920 : la naissance des deux gauches – Documentaire (12/12/2020)
Watching it, there are not just pictures but newsreel images of the delegates outside the Hall, it is more than striking just how male the participants were.
The present General Secretary of the PCF Fabien Roussel is interviewed here, reproduced on in Mediapart.
Congrès de Tours: 100 ans après, le communisme « plus que jamais d’actualité »
Le communisme est « plus que jamais d’actualité face aux crises » sanitaire, économique et sociale, affirme le secrétaire général du PCF Fabien Roussel qui n’écarte pas une candidature communiste en 2022, dans un entretien à l’AFP pour le 100e anniversaire de son parti.
Communism is “more relevant than ever in the face of the present day health, economic and social crises”, says PCF secretary general Fabien Roussel who does not rule out a communist candidacy in 2022, in an interview with AFP for the 100th anniversary of his party.
The PCF got 2,5% of the vote in the 2019 European Elections.
The Tendance wrote, a few years ago, a piece on a recent biography of Léon Blum.
How the Revolutionary Communist Party got the Media Strategy that gave Birth to Spiked.
Who Needs Left Politics When You Can Be Spiked.
Spiked is today known as a proponent of right-wing identity politics, the ravings of horney gobbed Brendan Cor Blimey O’Neil (‘The shocking cruelty of cancelling Christmas’) its closeness to the Tory Party leadership, its dalliance with the Brexit Paty, and well-hard geezers and gezerettes coming up with stuff like this,
This is one of their latest, by laugh a minute funster Andrew Doyle, on a Canadian psychologist, somebody I, the European left, and anybody who is not into parochial North American culture, have never heard of.
Jordan Peterson: how the left manufactured a folk devil
We need to redress the widespread historical ignorance that dilutes the terms ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’ to meaningless slurs. We need to restore critical thinking in our education system to counteract the ongoing degradation of public and political discourse. We need to consider how anyone above the age of 16 believes that throwing insults is an effective form of rebuttal
This is today’s must-read on where they came from, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Living Marxism, which became the Institute for Ideas and Spiked.
A death in the ‘Leninist’ family: an internal RCP debate from 1995
Lawrence Parker.
It was an absolutely bog-standard ‘bureaucratic centralist’, ‘Leninist’ sect that had many undemocratic and obnoxious features in common with the rest of the British revolutionary left.[i] The RCP’s current iteration, Spiked, was not the product of an uber-confident leadership boldly seeking out new intellectual avenues; it was rather the result of an ignominious collapse all too familiar in the historical itinerary of the British and international left (which doesn’t of course mean that Spiked need have turned out as awfully as it has done). Even in its last flickers of life before dissolution in 1996 there were still obviously supporters and members of the RCP who were thinking as Marxists: diagnosing the failures of its then leadership and attempting to extrapolate lessons for the future.
This post must be seriously read (via link above).
A few extracts,
Furedi had saddled the RCP with a doom-laden theory of the post-Soviet world that stressed the decimation of the working class as a historical actor, the decline of collective action and a subsequent destruction of human reason. While this enshrined certain truths about a period of reaction, the angular, one-sided and sect-like nature of these theoretical responses seemingly choked off any real collective or organisational aspirations the RCP once had.
This is crucial, it concerns James Heartfield (born James Hughes (he modestly took the name of the great German montage artist for his own).
Several contributors seem to presage some of the dross inherent in what would become the Institute/Academy of Ideas/Spiked. Thus, in one of the few positive references to the NMH campaign, Jenny Davey from Leeds boasted about how the RCP had managed to get on local radio during the VJ Day anniversary coverage to put an alternative slant across. Even if it had failed as a revolutionary organisation some of the RCP were beginning to learn that they could percolate their ideas across the mainstream media, particularly if those ideas were perceived not to be intrinsically linked to a viable revolutionary collective.
This was summed up rather well by James Heartfield: “In many ways, the more radical the criticism – granting that the criticism is detached from a revolutionary project – the more reactionary its conclusions will be.” But it was this lesson that those around Furedi who broke up the RCP in 1996 seemed most disinclined to regard and, as for Heartfield, we do wonder if he mused over these lines at all when he initially chose to stand for the Brexit Party in the 2019 European parliamentary elections.
They have not just become detached from the left, but in the opinion of his Blog, have followed a whole range of people in Europe, many originally on the radical left, who have adopted a blend of right-wing nationalist identity politics with calls to the defend native working class culture against cosmopolitan liberalism. The pull of these ideas, national populism, is greater than the marketing strategy of Spiked. That a raft of French writers, like Michel Onfray and Jean-Claude Michéa, can go in the same direction, illustrates this.
Read Onfray’s version of Spiked:
Tendance Coatesy says: better read the post by Lawrence Parker.
See also.
Chris Williamson backs “incredible social policies” of Colonel Gaddafi.
Red-Brown Williamson admiring the murderous dictator Gaddafi.
Britain’s most famous Vegan may be at odds with his new best friends in the Socialist Party. The group which, with the RMT union, leads the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition TUSC, recently welcomed Williamson into their fold (Ex-MP Chris Williamson joins TUSC to challenge ‘resurgent Blairism‘)
This was a body that campaigned for Brexit, and voted with the hard right to Leave. They backed Paul Embery, campaigner against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and Latte coffee and his Arron Banks funded ‘Trade Unionists’ against the EU’.
The Socialist Party in England and Wales (SPEW) are not quite as keen on Gaddafi.
….at times, Gaddafi had claimed Libya was socialist, but it couldn’t accurately be described that way.
Gaddafi wielded dictatorial power and enriched himself and his children. The oil industry began to be re-privatised in 2003, just before Gaddafi announced the end of Libya’s nuclear and chemical weapons programmes.
Williamson on the conspiracy behind anti-semitism crisis.
Here is the regime Williamson admires,
Gaddafi was a skilled political manipulator, playing off different tribes against each other and against state institutions or constituencies. He also developed a strong personality cult.
More and more, his rule became characterised by patronage and the tight control of a police state.
The worst period for Libyans was probably the 1980s, when Col Gaddafi experimented on his people with his social theories.
As part of his “cultural revolution” he banned all private enterprise and unsound books were burned.
He also had dissidents based abroad murdered. Freedom of speech and association were absolutely squashed and acts of violent repression were numerous.
..
Libya’s particular form of socialism does provide free education, healthcare and subsidised housing and transport, but wages are extremely low and the wealth of the state and profits from foreign investments have only benefited a narrow elite.
Anybody on the left who aligns themselves with Williamson, admirer of deceased dictators and conspiracy theories about anti-semitism, is going down the same red-brown route.
Free Speech? Contradictions: from Laurence Fox to Cambridge Free Speech Row.
Latest Victim of Laurence Fox War on Free Speech.
Laurence Fox and his Reclaim ‘Party’ have been on a roll recently.
With some fellow swells he celebrated Christmas early with this fête,
Champers was served for the free speech warriors.
How we laughed!
Now come a melt and he’s blocking people’s freedom of expression.
Still – he’s happy:
Foxy is not the only one who’s got in a pickle with arguments about free speech.
The Guardian publishes this article .
The free speech row at Cambridge will restrict, not expand, expression
Hateful or discredited viewpoints explicitly targeting minorities do not merit debate in any institution that values freedom of thought.
One imagines they savoured that line, long and at length.
The academics continue,
Free speech can become a Trojan horse to gain space and attention for retrograde ideas that do not really merit debate. Pretending that all ideas must always be treated as equally valid and worthy of discussion in the idealised “marketplace of ideas” allows discredited ones – such as race science – to be covertly rehabilitated.
This Blog takes the standpoint of Kenan Malik, one these academics attack.
Commentator Kenan Malik, for example, has welcomed the vote as evidence that “one can tolerate something while also challenging it”.
This is what Malik said, and could not have been put better.
Ideas can be tolerated without being respected. The distinction is key
As with tolerance, this aspect of respect has also shifted in meaning. Many now demand that we should respect not just the individual but also his or her beliefs. “Since human beings are culturally embedded,” the political philosopher Bhikhu Parekh argues, so “equal respect for persons… entails respect for their cultures and ways of life”.
This conflation of people, cultures and beliefs is a dangerous move. It is what racists do in refusing, for example, to recognise the difference between criticism of Islam and hostility to Muslims. Drawing a distinction between people and ideas is essential both for the equal treatment of people and for the capacity to challenge and change ideas.
As with tolerance, this aspect of respect has also shifted in meaning. Many now demand that we should respect not just the individual but also his or her beliefs. “Since human beings are culturally embedded,” the political philosopher Bhikhu Parekh argues, so “equal respect for persons… entails respect for their cultures and ways of life”.
The next paragraph focuses on a major issue.
This conflation of people, cultures and beliefs is a dangerous move. It is what racists do in refusing, for example, to recognise the difference between criticism of Islam and hostility to Muslims. Drawing a distinction between people and ideas is essential both for the equal treatment of people and for the capacity to challenge and change ideas.
In other words, we can follow Voltaire (Traité sur la tolérance) in arguing for tolerance,.
Toleration is the prerogative of humanity; we are all full of weaknesses and mistakes; let us reciprocally forgive ourselves. It is the first law of nature.
La tolérance, c’est l’apanage de l’humanité; nous sommes tous pétris de faiblesse et d’erreurs; pardonnons-nous réciproquement nos sottises. C’est la première loi de la nature.”
At the same we can agree with his call to fight religious (or other) abuses, “Ecrasez l’infâme’!”
We can admire religious individuals and their acts of kindness – goodness is too important to be a matter of faith – while criticising, even mocking, the beliefs the hold.
Priyamvada Gopal and Gavan Titley consider that “hateful or discredited ideas” targeting minorities should not be permitted – perhaps they could suggest a list of these ideas, a black-list that they coud draw up to be used as the basis for what is and what is not permitted.
Yet they also back the right to take more direct action – the original focus of No-Platform (at least in our bit of the leftist circles in the 1970s). Which is not the same as ‘cancelling” ideas.
Or as say ” The right to object to, and protest against, invited speakers is itself an exercise of free speech, enshrined in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.”
We do not need a lachrymose defence of stopping somebody expressing views we dislike or oppose on the basis of people’s hurt feelings.
One wonders why this gets signalled out?
Cambridge’s recently adopted wholesale the IHRA definition of antisemitism – a move that the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, has demanded of all universities. Yet, like the Prevent duty, this imposed definition poses serious dangers to both free speech and academic freedom, as they both withdraw certain kinds of political speech from the supposed “marketplace of ideas” and reclassify them as punishable political acts.
The two sides of the scholars’ argument: the assertion that certain views do not “Merit” debate in certain “institutions”, and the defence of protesting freely, voicing disagreement, against them are in plain and simple conflict.
Just like Laurence Fox they are caught up in the contradictions they talk about.
Minister for Women and Equalities Liz Truss Speech Attacking “Foucault” and “Post-Modernism” Cancelled by Government.
We’ve all been ‘aving a laugh about this today.
‘Bonkers’ Liz Truss speech pulled from government website
The Independent.
Rant about Foucault replaced with note saying content has been redacted
….after appearing in full yesterday on gov.uk, by Friday lunchtime large swathes of the speech had been cut and replaced with a note saying that “political content” had been redacted.
One such redacted passage, which included a bizarre rant about French philosopher Michel Foucault, read: “While we were taught about racism and sexism, there was too little time spent making sure everyone could read and write.
These ideas have their roots in postmodernist philosophy – pioneered by Foucault – that puts societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours.
“In this school of thought, there is no space for evidence, as there is no objective view – truth and morality are all relative.
Was Michel Foucault a ‘post modernist’?
The word came into social theory and political usage in the 1980s (it has a long history in architecture and literature) with Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, (La Condition postmoderne 1979). Lyotard announced the end of ‘grand narratives’. Lyotard professed a preference for this plurality of small narratives that compete with each other, replacing the totalitarianism of grand narratives”.
Number one was Marxism, un récit of progress, the rise of the working class, and the socialist – Marxist – vanguard party, which he now rejected. He did have something to say about science, which nobody can remember, among the lines of how knowledge became accepted within a scientific community.
While he had a background on the left, including a Marxist phase associated with Socialisme ou Barbarie, Lyotard did not speak about “societal power structures” still less labels. Many argue that his views, that there was no all-absorbing ‘meta-lnaguage’ was a democratic stand, accepting a plurality of different viewpoints, and indeterminacy” rather than totalitarian certainty, was simple pluralism (See for example, the essays, when he was still read, in Judging Lyotard. Editor Andrew Benjamin 1992).
Lyotard acknowledged his debt to Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose latter philosophy influenced the Ordinary language philosophy school, emphasising the everyday usage of words and word ‘games’ popular in Oxford during the 1940s, Not doubt Liz Truss would have a word to say to the revolutionary Oxford graduates of the 1950s.
One of the best intellectual biographies of Foucault, The Lives of Michel Foucault by David Macey (1994) has no index entry for Postmodernism, Foucault talked of ‘regimes of truth.’ emphasised the way power (in his sense, a positice force, linked to some ideas from Nietztsche) and what is accepted as ‘real’ are mixed, “‘power/knowledge’ to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding and ‘truth’. He used the concept of a “discursive formations”, an idea that he had developed from his earlier work The Archaeology of Knowledge, and put them within both subjective and objective power structures. Power in his sense meant both the capacity to create and the ability to override opposition, an every-present force of its own.
What this argument seems to mean is that what is presented as a truth and what is presented as ethical can be looked at through the ways they are accepted and are part of social structures. It does not say that truth as such is “relative”. Were this case everything Foucault tried to show as an ‘archiviste’ and ‘généalogiste’ working in libraries and archives would have been a waste of time and he could have just concocted his writings up while sitting in his bath (a view which some hold..).
Many people have seen in Truss’s comments the old far-right claim that ‘cultural Marxism‘ is at work behind these ideas. Alt-Right Ipswich Tory MP Tom Hunt has been one peddling this idea recently.
Foucault was no Marxist – his work is directed against Marxist theory. There is no space for class conflict, exploitation and modes of production in his theory. Efforts by Nicos Poulantzas to synthesise a picture of Foucault’s disciplinary power into a Marxist account of the state have left little lasting imprint (L’État, le pouvoir, le socialisme, 1978).
His own contacts with the left wing prisoners’ campaigners rooted in Maoist Marxist-Leninism ended with a convergence between himself and the figures from that camp who became the violently anti-Marxist nouveaux philosophers. While initially backing human rights campaigns for dissidents under Soviet rule, and supporting the Vietnamese Boat People, Foucault took a much further rightward turn when he saw in the Iranian uprising against the Shah a new revolutionary force to celebrate: Islamism.
Foucault’s stand in favour of Khomeini and Shia Islamism has earned the lasting hatred of progressives.
“The Western liberal Left needs to know that Islamic law can become a dead weight on societies hungering for change. The Left should not let itself be seduced by a cure that is perhaps worse than the disease.-Atoussa H. Iranian feminist, in response to Michel Foucault, November 1978
Foucault and the Iranian Revolution Janet Anfray and Kevin B. Anderson. 2005
(Download for free)
Jeremy Stangroom on Michel Foucault’s political naiveté.
Foucault was precisely seduced by the popular uprising in Iran, which he claimed might signify a new “political spirituality”, with the potential to transform the political landscape of Europe, as well as the Middle East. Thus, for example, in his October 1978 article, “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?”, he adopted an almost mythic rhetoric to describe the revolutionary struggle:
The situation in Iran can be understood as a great joust under traditional emblems, those of the king and the saint, the armed ruler and the destitute exile, the despot faced with the man who stands up bare-handed and is acclaimed by a people.
And he added reassuringly that nobody in Iran envisaged bringing about a political regime in which clerics would have a controlling or even supervisory role. Rather, the popular uprising was aiming towards a “utopia” or “ideal”, which involved a notion of “advancing toward a luminous and distant point where it would be possible to renew fidelity rather than maintain obedience.” He added that in pursuit of this ideal, “the distrust of legalism seemed to be essential, along with a faith in the creativity of Islam.”
In the particulars, Foucault was effusive:
Islam values work; no one can be deprived of the fruits of his labour, what must belong to all (water, the sub-soil) shall not be appropriated by anyone. With respect to liberties, they will be respected to the extent that their exercise will not harm others; minorities will be protected and free to live as they please on the condition that they do not harm the majority; between men and women there will not be inequality with respect to rights, but difference, since there is natural difference. With respect to politics, decisions should be made by the majority, the leaders should be responsible to the people, and each person, as it is laid out in the Quran, should be able to stand up and hold accountable he who governs.
As I say, we on the internationalist hate that Foucault.
Let us also mention this, (Tendance Coatesy)
At the time Maxime Rodinson discerned the potential in the clerics for the totalitarian exercise of that power in the Iranian movement. If he charged Foucault with ignorance about the ambitions already apparent in Islamism, from the Moslem Brotherhood onwards, others have questioned the ‘anti-modernist’ project itself. In a comprehensive study of these writings, Janet Afray and Kevin Anderson (Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. 2005) ask ““Did not a post-structuralist, leftist discourse, which spent all of its energy opposing the secular liberal or authoritarian modem state and its institutions, leave the door wide open to an uncritical stance toward Islamism and other socially retrogressive movements, especially when, as in Iran, they formed a pole of opposition to an authoritarian state and the global political and economic order?”
Tariq Ali Attacks John McDonnell and Welcomes Prospect of “Independent Labour Party” Breakaway,
Tariq Ali, “a Sniff of Spring”.
I met Tariq Ali on an underground Train,
Like a bloated Red Mole in considerable pain,
He said he’d been there since a quarter past nine,
Trying to Find the Majority Line.
Refrain.
IMG, IMG, the Fear and the Dread of the Whole Bourgeoisie,
IMG, IMG, Volumes and Volumes of Bankrupt Theory.
East End Music Hall Song, 1970s.
How we used to love that ditty, down on the Mile End Road!
Now Tariq Ali has popped up again, a master left strategist. New Left Review have launched a Blog, Sidecar, a rival to respected organs, such as TC and Shiraz. Who should be one of the first off the starting bloc but Tariq Ali, Starmer’s War.
The young upstart begins by noting that, “the forces unleashed since 2008 are still in flux.”
How true, how very true.
He turns to Labour,
Then came the 2017 election, which saw a Labour vote higher than the last two achieved by Blair, depriving May of her majority. Many party officials and MPs were hoping for a crushing Labour defeat. Their disappointment could be seen on their faces. The BBC and Guardian were equally distressed. How could this have happened? An informal agreement was reached. Everything possible must be done to make sure Corbyn was defeated. It was. He was.
Labour’s 2019 defeat was not all down to this crew, he wisely adds.
The very active public campaigner for Brexit, who cast his ballot to Leave, notes that his wishes should have been followed by Labour but were not,
I’ve argued before that Labour should have stuck to the line that the referendum result had to be respected, adding that since it was not of their making,
Alas, it was the dammed McDonnell who fudged it,
The weakest link turned out to be Corbyn’s supposedly loyal ally and Shadow Chancellor. But John McDonnell – hailed by the soft left as ‘the most radical politician of his generation’ (see Jeremy Gilbert in OpenDemocracy, Owen Jones in the Guardian, James Butler in the LRB) – had already shown his colours at the time of the Manchester bombing in the run-up to the 2017 election
The former Red Moler continues in this vein for some time, some very long time,.
McDonnell, ” caving in to the well-funded Remainer lobby – led, of course, by Keir Starmer,” Starmer, O Starmer! ” “claque “”the rights protected were mainly those of police and spies” ” KCB for his efforts”,.
Once with Starmer’s hands on the levers of power, , “The Tory-voting Jewish Board of Deputies – if not the hyper-corrupt, hard-right Netanyahu himself – was given veto power over Labour foreign policy.” ‘If not’, a sage addition to the thought… Now, ” the real feather in Starmer’s cap would be expelling Corbyn from the party.” ” Starmer’s purge is neither competent, professional, lawyerly or sober, but ill-considered, clumsily executed and open to legal challenge.”
After this cascade of adjectives about a real problem, Labour suspensions and expulsions that many, rightly oppose, Ali comes to this damming finale.
Just like Blair and Brown, he offers no serious opposition to Conservative policies and sucks up to Washington. Then, it was Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, mutatis mutandis, it is China. In July Starmer met up with US Secretary of State Pompeo to reassure him that Labour was back on the rails. As proof, he told Pompeo that Britain needed to be harder on China, not just banning Huawei’s 5G technology but imposing sanctions on Chinese officials suspected of human-rights abuses.
Such a bad idea…
What is the right response to the Starmerism?
There are three years left before the next general elections. An Independent Labour Party with even half a dozen MPs and a membership base of perhaps 50,000 – that number have left already since Starmer took over – could mark a real advance.
Ali sees light at the end of the tunnel, Corbyn has moved:
His newly announced Peace and Justice Project is a positive move; amid the winter gloom of Starmer and Covid, a sniff of spring. It is a multi-issue initiative, open to those inside and outside the Labour Party, in the UK and abroad; over 20,000 people have signed up already. There will be teething troubles, no doubt, but the creation of a new political platform and online movement is a step forward.
Let us pass over the attack on John McDonnell, a serious internationalist politician genuinely liked by many on the left. What exactly are the forces Ali imagines in his Independent Labour Party? Tina Werkmann’s new network? Labour against the Witch-hunt led by Jackie Walker, the Weekly Worker and Tony Greenstein? Lord Voldemort, Chris Williamson, and his mates in TUSC? The Staliniens of the CPB, and his mate Andrew Murray? Democratic Socialism Alliance (DSA) forum? The likes of Massoud Shadjareh, a stooge of the Iranian regime and one of the backers of Corbyn’s New Project? Counterfire? They couldn’t even run a coffee shop…..
And the fact that the likes of Ali ‘welcome’ such a move, Ali, International Marxist Group, Yeltsin supporter, Liberal Democrat, Green, and more recently Jeremy Corbyn’s best friend.
Corbyn Interview with the Canary: Critics of the alt-news site have their say.
Tonight on Alt-News Site the Canary.
Jeremy Corbyn’s launch of the Peace and Justice Project was flagged up first in the US left populist magazine Jacobin. Jacobin has published some serious articles . And there are other writers… Corbyn was interviewed by David Border, an admirer of Jean-Luc Mélenchon…
Today we have this, another exclusive:
The Canary was founded, and is run, by a former Labour Party member Kerry-Anne Mendoza. It is a ‘News site’.
It is not universally liked on the left, or considered left wing.
Here is some background (2019) to the Canary explaining why.,
The Canary has always had been more then willing to embrace conspiracy theories ranging from the Syrian Chemical Attack to claims Laura Kuenssberg was a speaker at the Conservative Party conference.
This isn’t surprising. While she may have tried to play it down since The Canary hit the mainstream Mendoza has always been a conspiracy theorist as her now deleted blog shows.
She has promoted the old far right favourite of a secret padeophile network and openly promoted the conspiracy film Zeitgeist.
So it’s not surprising that The Canary have had issues with antisemitism, whether promoting a play written by an antisemite or putting unabashed antisemites on their writing staff.
The post, thoroughly researched and written from the radical left, concludes,
As I have demonstrated, The Canary is not a project that should be supported in any way. From its business model to its conspiracism it’s a barrier to meaningful left growth, not a path to it.
It should also be recognised that this isn’t the first time we’ve had this issue with alternative media. The previously useful resource Indymedia degenerated into racism and conspiracy theories, in large part due to Atzmon supporter and police informant Roy Bard/Freethepeeps. For any left media project larger than a few close comrades serious discussion on how to stop this happening needs to take place.
More recently:
Pro-Corbyn Website The Canary Blames ‘Political Zionists’ After It’s Forced To Downsize
Huffington Post.
A leftwing pro-Corbyn website has blamed “political Zionists” after it was forced to downsize due to a fall in advertising revenue.
This is one of the articles that prompted the crisis.
The inconvenient truths that prove it is not anti-semitic to compare Israel to Nazi Germany
The harsh truth is this: those people turning their heads and disowning the rights of Palestinians today would have done exactly the same to European Jews during the Holocaust. They would have believed the propaganda, they would have absorbed and espoused the same bigotry, they would have tacitly or overtly gifted their complicity.
Here is some more material on Mendoza.
Bob from Brockley:
More (a thread):
Cde Paul Canning:
The response:
There is a lot, a real lot, more.
The Mail carries this story:
Jeremy Corbyn’s peace project is backed by supporter of controversial hate preacher Abu Hamza
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Massoud Shadjareh is the founder and chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission and appears in a promotional video for Corbyn’s initiative
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Shadjareh has previously criticised the extradition of hate preacher Abu Hamza to the United States and voiced support for the Iranian regime
Hip Ginslinger Julie Burchill Gets Cancelled.
Ginsligner Birchill in the Culture Wars.
The Culture Wars have claimed another victim, Julie Birchill.
Here she is, for those many people who not remember, or have never heard, the name of a National Treasure.
Julie Burchill@BoozeAndFagzSunday Telegraph columnist, author of WELCOME TO THE WOKE TRIALS, Constable 2021. Fun-loving feminist and terrific TERF. Pronouns: ‘Oi, you!’ and ‘THOT’
Today everybody’s favourite Auntie has been caught up in the heat of the battle.
It was all going swimmingly:
Until:
Her national comrades at Spiked have already begun defending the hippest ginslinger on the Brighton shingle.
Brendan O’Cor blimey Neil.
Burchill, Fleet St legend and contributor to spiked, was writing a book called Welcome to the Woke Trials. It promised to be a typically insightful and acerbic dissection of the hysteria and intolerance of wokeness. But it is no more. The yellow-bellied folk at Hachette Books have pulled the plug after Burchill got into a Twitter spat with Ash Sarkar.
O’Blimey sagely notes,
One can of course question the wisdom of bringing Islam into a discussion about Rod Liddle and teenagers.
The Sage of Spiked concludes,
Woke trials, indeed.
The verbally incontinent charmer had been a-tweetin’
This Blog had managed to forget whatever we once knew about the Brexiteer, Commonwealth loving, South Coast Deck-chaired Birchill for many a year.
We could not care less if her publisher cancelled her, though as a point of principle we do not defend, were it possible, shutting up the shrill voice of any opinionated right-winger. Her right to josh about bent bannas, the “Remainers … getting a parasexual thrill out of their mortification. People are getting high imagining a dystopia.” She can have a laugh about self-identifying left wingers like Ash Sarkhar, who is not, in point of fact a left-winger from our internationalist left. Others can say she is talking cack, bordering on racialism, and can cancel her book contract
This is not a cause célèbre.
Update: The Guardian has the story now (well after top Newshound Coatesy):
Morning Star Urges Labour to Campaign for Brexit…
“Socialist state aid in the service of a planned economy….was for a few years a real prospect in Britain.”
Part Four of our much-loved Series, Things that never happened.
The Morning Star, independent of the Brexit ultras of the Communist Party of Britain and owned by the co-op, puts a marker down today.
Editorial: Labour must finally campaign for a Brexit that strengthens popular power
IT turns out that the self-imposed deadline for the conclusion of the Brexit talks dissolved as quickly as Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen’s after-dinner mints.
The wits of the Morning Star, who spurn bourgeois after-dinner mints, continue.
The issues at stake in the negotiations between the EU and our government are whether the substantial body of trade between the two entities will be conducted under Word Trade Organisation rules — which include constraints on the marketing and pricing strategies of both states and enterprises — or under a compromise formula which will include some of the constraints the EU itself places on market and pricing strategies.
Note John Rogan reminds us what the mass line of the CPB is,
They stated it clearly here — “ ‘Britain should leave the EU on WTO [World Trade Organisation] terms’, Communists propose.” (28 January 2019). A “WTOBrexit” is also known as “No Deal Brexit” as it is how we will trade with the EU if we leave without a deal on 31 October. The CPB have opposed all Article 50 extensions and continue to do so. Their vision of how the Irish border would operate after leaving the EU is on World Trade Organisation terms,”
This is the present state of play.
It is a negotiation and both actors have played endlessly with end times language. Nevertheless, in the end commerce will continue with countries in the EU and profits will unfailingly flow.
How true, the tendency for the rate of profit to decline, aside, the capitalists will be capitalists!
Innocent Remainers be warned!
Morning Star intern, Dave Spart, points out their errors,
the remorse of Remainers are a mirror image of the autarkic outrage of the barmy Brexit faction on the Tory fringes who thought Johnson really was one of them rather than an infinitely malleable instrument of ruling class consensus.
Should Labour oppose the Tory Brexit?
The Star gives the alternative view.
But the logic of Labour’s positioning — set out with clarity by Sir Keir Starmer — is that Labour will go along with whatever arrangement the EU and Britain arrive at.
This represents a missed opportunity to give a clear view of what kind of trading relationship would better serve the working people of Europe.
Which is to put the case for a socialist planned economy, the key issue at stake – for the Lexit mob and the Morning Star, though not for anybody else – when they lined up with Farage and Johnson to back Brexit.
Miliband would be better arguing the case for socialist state aid in the service of a planned economy that puts job security with high-skilled and well-paid work at the centre of a green industrial strategy. This was for a few years a real prospect in Britain.
That was and remains, the economic rationale for a break with the neoliberal logic of the EU that would begin a political challenge to privatisation and open the way to a common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
National neoliberalism, the actually existing Brexit can be wished away.
Labour in Parliament, no less than the working class and the labour movement, must find a way to channel the great desire for democratic decision-making and a break with privatisation and profit-seeking into practical proposals that transform the Brexit-to-be into an opening for popular power free of big business and the banks.
Brexit, it is well known in Star circles, was all about that. “great desire for democratic decision-making and a break with privatisation and profit-seeking” and nothing about xenophobia, racism, the project of an ‘anglosphere’ and the interests of that fraction of capital that funded the campaign to Leave and has now has its mouthpieces running the Cabinet.
Here’s a different take,
An Irish Marxist Blog
This means that the strategy of the British Labour Party of supporting Brexit through supporting or abstaining on the deal in Westminster will put it on the wrong side of history and make it joint owner of the disaster. The referendum and tortured path since have demonstrated again and again that Brexit is toxic. It will entail untold attacks on the working class, its rights and its standard of living. The Labour Party should not be looking to be a donkey that blame can be tagged on to.
The division of workers along national lines shows how reactionary Brexit has been by inevitably promoting division within the British working class itself. We can see this through the millions of workers opposed to Brexit and the rise of Scottish nationalism, nurtured by the idea that one variety of British nationalism is somehow qualitatively better than another. Already in England we see demands for some sort of autonomy for certain regions like the North of England, as if there was a geographical solution to a problem arising from the system that crosses all borders. It is as if nothing has been learned from the failure of proposing the fix of devolution for Scotland as the solution to austerity and decline.
On the Left, the so-called Trotskyists are saying it could all have been different when it couldn’t; while Stalinists wallow in their own nationalism, in their demand for national sovereignty and their own version of (nativist) identity politics.
Here’s one Beano to celebrate the Morning Star’s contribution to Brexit:
Enjoy!
Corbyn Launches Peace and Justice Project, CLPs said (Skwawkbox) to be talking of affiliating.
CLPs are already planning to table an affiliation motion at their next CLP meeting (Skwawkbox)
The fullest story about the initiative was on the left-populist US site Jacobin,
Jeremy Corbyn: Why I’m Launching a Project for Peace and Justice
The Interview was conducted by a Mr Cde David Broder, celebrated for this study, in July this year, in the prestigous pages of the Weekly Worker, Organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee).
Here is an extract from the Jacobin interview.
You’ve devoted five decades to international solidarity work, most often in direct opposition to the British governments of the day. Without getting into the details of your suspension, these last few months have brought a particular McCarthyism. Is there something new in this — is it different from what the Left suffered in the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher?
JCThere’s always individual pressure on people that speak out. Last night we did a discussion about Tony Benn. His daughter Melissa gave a lovely message about him, and spoke of the abuse their family had from the right-wing media. Hostility toward the Left by very powerful, very right-wing media sources is not new.
In 1907, Keir Hardie did a world tour. He went to the USA, Australia, India, South Africa, then he reported back on it at a massive rally in the Albert Hall. His tour was followed by the Daily Mail, which condemned him for supporting Indian people over the British Raj, and for opposing the racism in South Africa. He was roundly abused. The Left in the 1930s, when George Lansbury was Labour leader, was roundly abused; Nye Bevan was abused.
But the reality is, if you get a message across which challenges the undemocratic power of some media sources, and the injustice and inequalities within our society, then they’re going to kick back. I know that. I’ve suffered all this nonsense for quite a while and no doubt will continue to do so.
But it’s a price worth paying, if it gets out a message of social justice that gives people hope and optimism.
The movement is already receiving hopeful optimistic support from top news site, Skwawkbox Blog, run by ace reporter Steve Walker,
Members in a range of CLPs are already planning to table an affiliation motion at their next CLP meeting. Hundreds of CLPs have already voted in solidarity with Corbyn or expressed no confidence in Keir Starmer and acting general secretary David Evans. Similar numbers could ultimately affiliate to Corbyn’s new Project.
Here are some of the doughty human rights supporters flocking to the new organisation, leaving comments on Skwawky’s site,
Starmer is untrustworthy + a parasite + treacherous + desperate to let Johnson’s racist 1% operators feel safe and secure to continue oppressing the most vulnerable EVERYWHERE + continue fermenting social unrest + stealing resources – oil, diamonds, gold, rare earths, historical artefacts, art, EVEN SYMBOLS – LIONS in Trafalgar Square…eg coats of arms… everything… stolen by Tories for Tories before they were called Tories. Call them common thieves. That’s what they are. Today Tories hand £BILLIONS to chums exploiting Covid-19. Bandits. SIR Keith Starmer ? ? ? silent 🔴
And,
Way to give Starmer the big finger, Jeremy!
I think the whole thing is brilliant.
I wanted him to make a break and form a new party but this is so much better – sends exactly the same message but gives them no grounds or opportunity to fight back.
Open to be corrected but I see no reason Project can’t rapidly be converted to Party if the sudden need arises – preparations should probably begin immediately – can imagine Brexit OR Covid crashing the Tory clown car any time from first quarter next year.
Genius move though – I don’t drink but I’d buy a night out for whoever thought this up.
I can’t stop chuckling 🙂
Is this the basis for a New Party?
Absolutely agree. Build it from the ground up, and sheer weight of numbers joining could bring the inertia for a new Party in the near future. Genius move IMO.
Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement of a new initiative called Peace and Justice is very welcome. It will hopefully become part of a wider burgeoning of left-wing politics outside the suffocating confines of Westminster.
You can book tickets to the Zoom launch here. You can sign up to be a supporter to receive regular updates. Twitter account, here.
Counterfire: “the Tories will not deliver the Brexit that people voted for.”
Not the Brexit We Voted For!
Part 3 of our popular series, Things That Never Happened.
After the Morning Star, and Socialist Worker, Counterfire enters the No Deal Brexit fray.
Blame Game:
But part of the reason there was any credence to Johnson’s claims was thanks to the pro-Remain campaign incessantly obsessing that Johnson was trying to sneak in a no-deal in 2019. Labour’s opposition was hamstrung by the Remain-at-all-costs brigade, and failed to back the initial calls for a general election, despite the fact it had been calling for since June 2017. So when Johnson did in fact pull a deal out of the hat, he wasn’t the one with egg on his face.
It would have been different but,
Neither a deal nor no deal under the Tories are going to be good, as both will be used to attempt a turbo charging of capitalism via deregulation. In Tory hands, the removal of the EU’s neoliberal shackles will give them space to erode further workers’ rights and environmental protections.
Corbyn was right, and it was inching towards Remain lost the election.
What is clear is that Corbyn’s promise to end the ‘rigged economy’ terrified the EU, so Labour moving ever closer to Remain had the effect of allaying the EU’s fears and making it increasingly unlikely that it was ever going to have to negotiate with a socialist, anyway, as astute observers in Brussels would have analysed the likely electoral effect of Labour’s position.
Faced with hundreds of thousands protesting against Brexit in 2019 Counterfire leader John Rees warned against Labour drifting in that direction.
He took the view that Second Referendum demonstrations were led by the wealthy to further the aims of the “overwhelming majority of big capital” It was a “middle class movement” with a “vanishingly small” union presence (where it was before it began to vanish was not described). It was a “variant” of a “mild (as yet)” mass fascist or populist right wing” groundswell. (Here).
Some suggest Counterfire were jealous, they could not organise their own People’s Brexit demonstrations.
There were some mass pro-Leave marches….
But that’s all in the past.
Today Johnson has to, or should, stand up to the EU,
But even though Johnson is not committed to public spending, redistribution and nationalisation, it’s hard to see how he can concede on this point without having to admit that the EU will maintain a level of control on how Britain is run.
So, in other words, getting out of the EU is a good thing, ending EU ‘control’, the bad thing is that the Tories are in charge of doing it.
This article ends with this,
Whatever the outcome, this government clearly has no legitimacy. And whatever happens, there will be a price to pay. We need to be prepared to fight against any attempt to put this cost on working people and to get this shower out of power.
So what did they vote for in the Referendum? The Lexit Brigade and Labour Leave cast their ballots with the Leave campaign, the far-right UKIP, Leave.EU (which became Grassroots Out) and Vote Leave (endorsed by Conservative Party Eurosceptics). The largest of these groups, Vote Leave has come to dominate the present Johnson government. One assumes that for Counterfire they do not count, they were not the “real” voters whose views the the revolutionary Marxist groupuscule has a special link with.
As far was one can tell Counterfire welcomes being free of the ‘shackles’ of the ‘neo-liberal EU’. The sovereign nation now unchained is, nevertheless, behaving badly. Perhaps this group thinks it will play a leading role in getting rid of the wrong “shower” in charge and get their shower into power. Reports indicate their presence in factional manoeuvres designed to create a split in Labour, through a variety of vehicles, which their merry band can join.
To left wing internationalists getting rid of chains of Brussels was always about the neo-liberal hard-right project of the European Reform Group and the dream of a new ‘anglosphere’, trading and cultural ties with the English-speaking capitalist nations.
The Tories Brexit agenda is not a policy but a project. It is anti-worker but not anti-state. It puts up new barriers to trade with Europe, but seeks deregulation and marketisation ‘at home’. It wants the state to spend big to support big business, especially in tech, is addicted to outsourcing and is disdainful of the public sector. This is pushing Britain towards a new, authoritarian, ‘crony capitalism’. As this becomes unpopular, the other aspects of the Tory agenda – the migrant bashing culture wars and ethnic nationalism – will become more and more important to sustain their political support.
The possibility that Brexit would be anything else never happened.
Send in the Gunboats! Britain Playing Hard for Deal with “Sick man of Europe”, the EU.
Did Sally Scallop Die in Vain?
Wednesday. The Express.
EU’s final insult! Brussels chiefs mock Boris Johnson with DOUBLE FISH Brexit dinner
EU chefs mocked Boris Johnson by dishing up a double helping of seafood at his crunch Brexit negotiation dinner in Brussels last night.
With fishing quotas one of the biggest areas of dispute in the UK-EU trade talks, the Prime Minister and his team were served scallops and turbot at the head-to-head hosted by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The shellfish starter, accompanied by pumpkin soup, in particular risked being seen as a coded jibe given the so-called Great Scallop War clashes between British and French fishing crews in the English Channel in 2012.
The Mail.
Now comes la réponse, foudroyante.
The Mail, today.
Armed with cannon and machine guns, they will patrol the English Channel and Irish Sea to stop illegal fishing.
In a dramatic ratcheting-up of No Deal contingency planning, Wildcat and Merlin helicopters are also being placed on standby to help with coastal surveillance.
- Prime Minister Boris Johnson yesterday warned a No Deal Brexit was now ‘very, very likely’
- Royal Navy gunboats armed with machine guns could be deployed to patrol English Channel and Irish Sea
- Wildcat and Merlin helicopters are also being placed on standby standby to help with coastal surveillance
The Mail continues in this vein:
They say that under a radical People’s Brexit, or Lexit, the water in the North Sea, Irish Sea, and the English Channel would have turned to lemonade, sprats would have grown to the size of whales, and Scallop fisheries, under workers’ control and Popular Sovereignty, free of neo-liberalism, would have flourished.
The River Orwell would be bordered by kilometres of Oyster beds, run by Ipswich based self-managed cooperatives.
Yet this has happened,
Brexit: A tired Britain prepares for a new era
Deutsche Welle.
Bryony Rudkin, a deputy leader at a local council in Ipswich on the eastern coast of England, paints a daunting picture. Rudkin lives near Felixstowe, which is the UK’s largest container port. Port authorities are currently dealing with a logistical nightmare with ships unable to unload the large amount of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) that was ordered. Containers full of PPE now pile up in the docks of Ipswich.
“What people are saying is that it’s not going to get any better with Brexit, and effectively we are going to be like Kent – a lorry park. What you think about Brexit depends on where you are in the UK. It’s kind of in your face, quite physical with these containers which tells us that it’s not going to be very organized,” says Rudkin.
Rudkin says she’s aware that some people’s views have changed, which is also evident from the results of 87 combined polls compiled by the project“What UK Thinks.” Polls show that people would have voted for the UK to remain in the EU. However, those DW spoke to haven’t changed their minds.