Basebenzi

I’m proud that this old blog of mine is still attracting visitors on a daily basis, six years after I last posted here.

I have started a new blog called The 1919 Review (1919review.wordpress.com) and I’m leaving one last post here to say farewell to my old blog.

Ranksavagespit.wordpress.com amassed a hundred posts which were viewed 27,000 times by 18,000 people from all over the world. Among my visitors was the great John Ajvide Lindqvist, who commented on my essay about his brilliant horror novel Let the Right One In.

I wrote some great articles here, and even within the mediocre and poor posts there are bits that I like.  The three most popular articles were:

• Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and the 1960s
• Capitalism and ‘Communism’: a Bodycount
• Opposition Groups under Stalinism

1 and 3 began life as college essays. 2 was an original post, as were 4 and 5:

• The Legacy of Leon Trotsky
• George Orwell’s Greatest Book

But I think it’s time to say farewell to this blog. Rank Savage Spit (A Sean O’Casey reference) is a terrible name – ugly, difficult to remember, confusing when typed without space bars. And was the name Rank Savage Spit, or Basebenzi (Zulu word for ‘revolution’), or sapteuq? I was never sure; I made it all up as I went along. People called it Rank Savage’s Pit or Based Benzi (which are probably better names).

My writing was sometimes crude, sometimes unclear. The last post, ‘White Noise of the Long Recession,’ is a good example. I was trying to say something important, but failing. In general I stand over the politics of this blog, though I cringe at some of the headlines and if I were to look back through these posts I’m sure I’d find statements that are too crude or, the opposite problem, too soft.

The 1919 Review, a blog about history and culture, will continue what was best in the spirit of Rank Savage Spit/Basebenzi. So if you are one of my old subscribers and you’ve just received an email notification for this post after six years of stony silence, or if you have just stumbled on my blog from googling Phil Ochs or socialism, please visit 1919review.wordpress.com.

Sincere thanks to all my readers,

sapteuq

Long hours at work and political activity have kept me from writing for a long time. Earlier this week I tapped a link on my news feed and looked into the heart of darkness of a smug layer of our middle-aged, upper-middle-class demographic who don’t realise that their time has been and gone. The feeling of one boring, baseless, offensively stupid cliché after another being droned at me was overpowering, and I had to write because I felt that there was an important lesson to be gleaned from this article, which I could articulate fully only if I started writing. I think I was correct.

The article I’m responding to was written by Victoria White in the Irish Examiner on Tuesday. It’s her two cents on Greece. A lot of rubbish has been written about Greece but this got my back up in a special way. I hope that, by the end of this article, you’ll understand why. To give an indication, in the middle of her article White says something about “the 1960s, when many of the currently influential people among the left-wing had their political awakening”. This made me wince. The 1960s were half a century ago. People who “had their political awakening” in the 1960s are now pushing 75. Later, I’ll delve deeper into why this stuck with me.

White is married to Eamon Ryan, a fact that I mention to give you an idea of the circles she moves in. Ryan was a Green Party minister in the Fianna Fáil-led government that signed the bank guarantee, got us under the thumb of the EU, IMF and ECB, and cut the first few billion before it suffered a historic collapse in the 2011 election. Wielding a still-bloody knife over the steaming chopping-block of austerity, Ryan and his Green Party companions appeared to be completely unable to understand why they were now objects of hate and contempt.

I know White is married to Eamon Ryan because it said so on his election leaflet last year. Later that year her article on the water charges movement, “Anti-water campaigners protest too much: their real goal is power,” left a deep impression in the “infuriating stuff I read on the internet” department of my brain.

This more recent article was no better. Her argument was nothing new: that Syriza had to sign up to a new austerity package because to do anything else would have led to “chaos”. But the emotional engine-room of the article was a long gloat at the expense of Greek Prime Minister Tsipras, who for White serves as a (very unsuitable) proxy for every anti-capitalist. According to White, he has been “forced to admit” that the financial system “funds” society. The arguments are very shallow: White reminds us that leaving the euro would lead to X, Y and Z problems, which would lead to “poverty”. She then informs us that to dump capitalism you must dump democracy, because people will never vote for “poverty”.

She does not pause to explain these huge leaps – Grexit to poverty, capitalism equals democracy, poverty, then dictatorship – before helpfully clarifying that a dictatorship “might be benign, but probably wouldn’t be.” As if the automatic response of a reader to the assertion that ending capitalism means dictatorship would be “But it might be a benign dictatorship!”

This ridiculous three-card trick with capitalism, poverty and dictatorship, really a blur of concepts rather than an argument, is the second-biggest hole in the argument. The biggest is the fact that White absolutely does not entertain the possibility (in fact, the certainty) that the new bailout deal might actually cause more poverty than certain alternatives. She is damned by her own attempts to appear somewhat critical: “Certain measures” in the deal, she observes, “Seem counter-productive”. She even acknowledges that there is a “vindictiveness” to it, and finishes with a mild, agnostic “hope” that “the European powers don’t ram it home.”

White would prefer if the wrecking of Greek society and the violation of its democratic wishes were done without so much “vindictiveness”, and if the devastation was wrought, but not absolutely “rammed home”. These are her personal preferences, and she expresses them mildly, and she doesn’t much care if they are met or not. This reflects all the outstanding features of the article: her smugness and glibness in favouring a deal that will be absolutely devastating for the Greek economy and society (as have all the previous deals, without exception and without doubt); her lack of criticism of the “European Powers” that are (very undemocratically) pushing it through; and her light-minded, logically paper-thin dismissal of the idea that there is any alternative, when the search for an alternative is an urgent, life-or-death issue.

But don’t worry. Victoria White is “a left-winger”, who would “vote for stringent global and national regulation of the banking sector”, presumably in some imaginary scenario where that question was put before the public by a single, all-powerful global government in an A or B referendum. In some cosmic sense, you see, she is “left-wing”. But in the here and now, in the rough-and-tumble of real, down-to-earth politics, she is in favour of putting the boot into the Greeks. With left-wingers like this, who needs right-wingers?

But the most bizarre, flabby, droning section of the article is yet to come. It’s also the most revealing. Apparently, “most of vocal members of the populist left-wing, [sic] including Alexis Tsipras, are in the pay of the very capitalist system they despise.” Here’s a major claim: the left is actually funded by capitalism. How’s she going to justify this one?

Disappointingly, White goes off in a bizarre tangent about “left-wing broadcasters, academics, teachers, politicians, and journalists – including yours truly” who have “approached capitalism like a hole in the wall that endlessly dispenses cash.” What exactly is she talking about? What does she mean by “left-wing”? Who are these members of the intelligentsia who have failed? The only examples she gives are Olivia O’Leary, academic Karl Whelan and herself.

A confused picture emerges, that may be a glimpse of the world as she sees it. It seems that in her mind’s eye, there is a group of people called “left-wingers” that consists of everyone from Olivia O’Leary to Victoria White to Alexis Tsipras to Paul Murphy. All left-wingers are intelligentsia types, and “since the 1960s… the capitalist system has been generating a lot of cash to pay them.” She concludes, from this picture in her head, that this curious and varied tribe who live on a stipend kindly given by the system of private profit, a tribe called the “left-wingers”, have no integrity. They lack integrity because they criticise capitalism (Or perhaps because they don’t criticise it cleverly enough; on this point White is not clear).

You really have to sit back for a minute to decode these paragraphs, to try to relate the various elements to things that exist in real life and actual history. Sometimes you recognise real things, although they appear in reverse. For instance, White believes that the financial system “funds” Greece – in spite of the massive wealth that Greece has poured and continues to pour into European banks to pay off odious debt and interest.

But overall, the picture does not relate to everyday life, but rather to vague impressions of clichés based on lost things. I’ll give an example. Imagine someone who was among the 63% who voted for equal marriage in May, and is also among the 57% who boycotted the first water charges bill. Going by polling data, this is fairly likely to be a young woman from a working-class area, who is angry about austerity and inequality and who wants backward social and sexual norms to stop interfering with her life and those of her friends. That’s someone who’s left-wing. But White, in this article, views the world through a haze of cloudy notions based on caricatures of things that have passed. Her mental image of a “left-winger” is of someone in a well-paid state job who was in their teens and twenties back fifty years ago. It’s a tragedy that these out-of-touch impressions are trotted out as cutting-edge commentary.

The reference to the 1960s made me think about the impatience with the older generation that was part of the mood at that time. “Talkin’ ‘bout my Generation” and “The Times They are a-Changing” expressed this feeling that the old should shuffle off and stop droning in obsolete terms about things they didn’t get. I understood this feeling but I never really felt it myself – until recent years. I thought there was an edge of ageism and arrogance about it, and besides I knew plenty of people who were only young in the strictest biological sense, along with many who were old in age but fresh and dynamic in their character.

In recent years I have come to feel this impatience and frustration with the old, and to feel it with burning intensity – and since lectures about the 1960s generation are an example of one of those sickeningly tired and irrelevant clichés that afflict those who are old in their soul, I won’t say any more about that decade a half-century ago. Let’s say a little more about the present. The years of austerity have been a horrible time to be in your early twenties. The background noise to those years has been the droning of old establishment farts and their young imitators, whose pearls of wisdom and frames of reference have absolutely nothing to do with our lives, our conditions or the wider world as it presents itself to us. We’ve had to listen to the false prophets of the brave new “entrepreneurial” world: those who tell us we have to “invent our own job”, “sell ourselves” and “be flexible”; the university president on a six-figure salary who told young people in a graduation speech that there was “no such thing as a job for life anymore”.

It was not Victoria White’s banalities about Greece that made me want to write. It was the way she channelled this droning, gloating, smug background voice, this white noise of the long recession. Abstract claims of being “left-wing” aside, agnostic desires to “reorder the global economy” aside, White has expressed the distilled essence of this voice.

The Hunger Games was not the first film to imagine a sadistic, murderous reality TV show put on by a government to terrorise people. But unlike films such as Battle Royale, the Hunger Games series shows the people staging a revolution against that government. In Mockingjay: Part 1 Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) has sparked an uprising of the working class against the terror and exploitation of the Capitol.

At the heart of the story is a love triangle: Katniss is torn between Gale, an ex-miner who’s dedicated to the revolution, and Peeta, who’s terrified of the danger and suffering, and trying to dampen things down. As a prisoner in the Capitol, he’s on TV parroting the government’s position that all rebel actions are “senseless” and “cruel” acts of violence.

We see the workers of the Districts rising up in very moving scenes, inspired by Katniss’ acts of defiance. We see a ragged army of factory-hands holding out under the bombs of the state, and workers sacrificing their lives just to deal a blow against the ruling class. The sense of incredible, harrowing self-sacrifice is very moving.

The film deals mostly with the propaganda war between District 13 and the government. A few more snapshots of the revolt unfolding in the Districts would have been welcome. The new trend towards splitting single films into two “parts” just to make more money, as in this case, is also annoying.

Mockingjay is a film for our times, full of powerful revolutionary images. Katniss and the Hunger Games films, like the Guy Fawkes masks from V for Vendetta, have the potential to become a symbol of revolution and defiance.

Politicians and the media say that a land of milk and honey is just around the corner. The Independent claims that “We’ll thrive for a decade”. Apparently Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will grow by 5% this year and 4.2% next year. One estimate puts Gross National Product (GNP) growth as high as 9%.

We know how the government is inflating job statistics to make themselves look better: accounting tricks, emigration, lower-paid jobs, jobbridge-type scams. They’re doing the same thing with economic growth.

Imagine you work for a US-owned company and half the profits are sent back across the ocean. Every cent of those profits, even if it’s sitting in the back pocket of some American shareholder, still gets tacked onto Ireland’s GDP.

GNP is just as dodgy in its own way. Many companies have their head office here so they can dodge tax. Their retained profits get stuck on top of our GNP, even though the economic activity may be happening thousands of miles away.

Using GDP and GNP figures to prove that there’s a “boom around the corner” is like basing an entire weather forecast on a single broken thermometer. Other indicators, such as income tax receipts, the Purchasing Managers’ Index and consumption levels, give a mixed impression but overall don’t back up what the growth rates seem to say.

Low pay and unemployment mean that the demand driving all the building work may dry up. Outlook for the world economy, and so for Irish exports, is grim. When there is growth, its benefits mostly get gobbled up by debt or, in our neo-liberal economy, by the wealthy.

Put the hyped-up growth figures in context. It doesn’t add up to the picture they’re painting of spectacular growth that will undo all the devastation caused by austerity policies. It looks like a weak recovery, from a low level, with a limited basis, after a half-decade of decline and stagnation.

X-Men: First Class and Days of Future Past, well-written and clever films, have ignited in me an interest in the earlier X-Men films. The interest these films hold for us is based partly on the cool powers the characters have and the spectacular fight scenes this leads to. But as The Fantastic Four proves, CGI isn’t enough to make a film entertaining. It must have a beating heart and an active brain. The X-Men series is exceptional because of the way it treats the plight of the mutants like the real-life historic experience of racism and homophobia.

They’re not the only superhero movies with a political message. Christopher Nolan’s (thudda-dada-thudda-dada-thudda-dada) Batman films advance a deeply conservative and paranoid world-view: we have to suspend freedom and privacy to fight “terror”; movements against inequality end in chaos and bloodshed. They’re gripping but they leave you feeling negative. The X-Men films, though lighter, leave you with a more refreshing sense: equality and mutual respect are good, positive things; we don’t have to be afraid of each other.

The films are at their strongest when dealing with the prejudice and oppression mutants face: the most memorable image in Last Stand is of a young boy in a locked bathroom sawing and chopping his angelic wings down to stumps just to keep his mutation a secret from his bigoted father, who’s banging on the door.

The weaknesses and limits of the films are the weaknesses and limits of the timid, liberal outlook of the film’s authors and their negative portrayal of the “radical” side of movements for equality and freedom. I’m saying this as someone who always had more sympathy for the villain Magneto (Ian McKellen) than for the noble philosopher-king Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart).

At the climax of each film comes a moment when the good, liberal mutants, led by Xavier, have to prevent a gang of bad, militant mutants (usually led by Magneto) from attacking the US government, or non-mutants generally. The bad mutants in First Class want to trigger a nuclear holocaust. Magneto in Days of Future Past wants to kill Richard Nixon on live TV. In X2 he (quite implausibly) wants to kill all humans.

The plot by the bad mutants usually involves a conspiratorial act of individual terrorism or mass murder which will spark off repression against all mutants and thereby backfire.

But the other side of it is a bit sinister. The films seem to say: It is the duty of all “good mutants” to defend the establishment and the authorities from the crazy and stupid radical mutants. What is the real-life equivalent for all these mad militant-mutant conspiracies which the liberal mutants must foil?

We have recently seen in movie form the real-life story of how the most radical and assertive LGBT rights activists in Britain organised an inspiring solidarity campaign with the miners during their great strike of 1984-5. If X-Men was really comparable to real life, or if Pride was anything like an X-Men film, Mark Ashton and co would have hatched a plot to kill all the miners, only to be foiled at the last second by a group of closet gays who are strictly monogamous, never sleep around, never go to gay bars and never dress in unusual clothes in case they “offend” straight people.

Or are Marvel trying to compare Magneto and co to, say, the Black Panthers, the most “extreme” wing of the black liberation movement in the United States? If so the comparison doesn’t hold up for a second. The Panthers didn’t target civilians. They engaged in community self-defence, not individual terror. They organised school meals for poor children (black and white alike).

Magneto, even though he is superbly acted by McKellen and Fassbender, often doesn’t ring true as a character. It seems that whenever he sits down to cook up some scheme, this highly intelligent man only cares about two requirements: 1 – is it visually spectacular? and 2 – will it almost definitely provoke repression against the mutant community? The films force us to sympathise with the liberals rather than the radicals by having the radicals always cook up some completely ridiculous, evil and counter-productive plot. The authors are cheating!

The outstanding exception to this is The Last Stand. In this movie, the liberalism of Xavier and co and of the writers is grating and obtrusive. In this case, I am with Magneto 100%. He bases himself this time not on a small circle of conspirators but on a mass army of mutants. His target is Alcatraz, where a weaponised “cure” for the mutant condition has been developed. It is damn clear that this “cure” has been designed to exterminate mutants, to forcibly suppress their powers. Even if he keeps saying sinister things like “the pawns go first”, Magneto is doing the right thing, the right way.

There might also be a weird “fear of unbridled female sexuality” vibe about this film, but that’s another matter.

The only thing stopping Magneto and the other mutants from destroying the cure/weapon is a posse of “good liberal” mutants. What incredible confusion must reign in Wolverine’s head! How did he conceive of the idea that they should risk their lives and kill loads of mutants just to defend the people who are trying to exterminate them?

“Quickly, guys! If we’re too late, Magneto will save us from extermination!”

Of course, there are and have been in reality plenty of movements with legitimate goals but bad, counter-productive methods. But if the X-Men films are a portrait of a struggle for equality (and I’m not saying they are, necessarily, just that’s what I get out of them), they are a false picture. On the one hand we have Xavier and co, who defend the oppressor in an attempt to maintain their comfortable position and gain “acceptance”. On the other hand we have Magneto and friends, who fight for mutant rights but “go too far” and employ counter-productive methods. Where is the force of mutants that fights the oppressor, while employing effective and positive methods, in solidarity with other non-mutant oppressed groups? Nowhere to be seen. The films come closest to this in X2, when the two sides briefly work together against a Pentagon nut who wants to kill them all.

The gobsmacking myth with which every X-Men film ends is as follows: if the oppressed try their very hardest to show the oppressor that they are “reasonable” and “responsible” then they will gain acceptance from society. Let’s illustrate the wrongness of this liberal fantasy by posing two questions relating to a real-life fight against oppression: Was it the obedient slaughter of Vietnamese people by African-American conscripts that beat Jim Crow? Or was it mass protest, organisation, civil disobedience and self-defence?

I’m open to the idea that I’m taking a light superhero movie too seriously. But popular movies do reflect ideas that are prevalent in society – and they do reinforce those ideas. When we look at some struggle for freedom, at home or abroad, and start talking about “moderates” and “extremists”, we’re making a huge mistake based on a false conception. It’s this idea, expressed in the X-Men films, that I’m criticising here.

Last summer I remember when the new pope, Francis, made his comments on homosexuality, a lot of people were saying that he was speaking out in support of LGBT people. This was a big change from Ratzinger/Benedict and his belief (stated pre-Pope-ification) that homosexual acts are “evil” and “against the natural order”.

Papal selfie

But what Francis actually said was that gay acts should be forgiven, not that they were not sinful. He still believes (and every Catholic is required to believe) that for a man to have sex with another man is a sin, that every time it happens it somehow decreases the general wellbeing of the human race.

He did say that “sinful” gay sex should be “forgiven”. But in Catholicism there is absolutely no sin that cannot be forgiven if the “sinner” repents. Ratzinger/Benedict would completely agree with Francis that this “sin” should be “forgiven”.

The change in rhetoric, the respectful tone Francis adopted – these have no doubt made life a little bit easier for gay people living in a Catholic environment. This does mark a serious change, and attempts by the church to catch up with people’s experiences and ideas.

But think about what he said, and try to square it with your own beliefs on homosexuality. This is entirely safe for me to say because there is at least a 90% chance your beliefs are far to the left of considering gay sex “sinful.”

If their officially-stated ideas are so divorced from the opinions of most people, then why is the Catholic Church so powerful in Ireland? Who are these people who think gay sex is a sin? Why do they deserve a fancy building in every parish, a say in the running of almost every school, a shout-out in the constitution, the ear of politicians and the allegiance of huge numbers of people? Why did RTE make a huge payoff to homophobes for calling them homophobes, and why did the Broadcasting Authority rule that if we have a gay person on TV talking about gay marriage, we have to have a homophobe on as well to make the counter-argument?

Another question, while I’m on a roll with all these questions: according to Catholic teaching, am I going to hell?

Maybe in the future kids will learn about Christianity in classes on ancient literature, philosophy or anthropology, and choose for themselves whether to believe it. I learned my “facts” in mass every Sunday for the better part of two decades and at primary and secondary school. Then I gave religious beliefs far more of a benefit of the doubt than they deserved, partly because I was (and still am) repulsed by Dawkins-style elitist, formalistic atheism, which was the only kind of atheism that was presented to me. The result of all this was that even at the age of twenty was still clinging to some kind of 18th-century-style “theist” radical social, William Blake-style Christianity.

Touche, Richard Dawkins. Of course this brilliant little bon mot rests on the premise that the foundational text for a massive, diverse religion, written in the 7th century, is comparable to the scrawlings of an early-20th-century ultra-nationalist crank; and a faith that has dominated huge parts of the world for fifteen centuries, running the gamut of human experience in a way nobody can encapsulate in a tweet, is comparable to the regime of industrial-scale persecution, conquest and genocide that ruled Germany for 12 years.

I am open to correction, but as far as I know about Catholic teaching (and I have read the required texts), the answer is Yes. Yes, if Christianity is true, then I am going to go to hell.

The places where dead people go break down as follows:

Purgatory is the triage area where you go immediately after death, to do penance and for the cosmic powers to decide, on the basis of this, where to send you: Heaven, Hell or Limbo. Heaven is for those who are sorry for their sins and have done penance for them. Hell is for the unrepentant. Limbo is for “good pagans” and unbaptised babies.

No, Family Guy. This is not what Purgatory is.

Limbo is Heaven without God. It’s for those who never had a chance to hear the “good news” but who behaved themselves reasonably well in life. Limbo actually sounds OK. So despite the fact that I’m not a Christian, will I go there if I’m good to other people?

No. Maybe if I was living in an isolated tribe in the Amazon rainforest. But I had a chance to hear the word of God. I had thousands of chances. I have heard the good news droned in a hundred echoing, vaulted, stained-glass buildings and taught as fact in dozens of classrooms. At this stage, most of humanity must have been at the receiving end of the word of god, whether on TV, radio, online, Gideon bibles, ads at bus stops, strange people in the street, or through school or parents.

At first, of course, I accepted it. As dogma, I would never have swallowed religion – there was too much reactionary rubbish and superstition. But in its vague liberal form (“that’s just a metaphor”, “the church has changed its position on that”) I absorbed Christianity, partly because I liked how its central figure was a radical who was tortured to death by the state but mainly because my brain had been trained from a very young age to regard these improbable stories and classical-age philosophical musings as fact. Gradually between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one it dawned on me that I was giving too much credit to a series of books written in the Iron Age. In any case by the mid-teens my “religious beliefs” had become so woolly and vague and whatever-I-wanted-them-to-be that I was already, in effect, an atheist. Dramatic as it sounds, it’s a fact: I had renounced God! And so too do most people.

It is now completely alien to me to believe that the Bible is holy and contains immortal truths. I might as well bow down before the Baghavad-Gita or, to pick up the book on my desk, The City and the City by China Mieville. It happened to be the Bible that I was in thrall to, not because of the value of that book, but because in the first millenium AD, when people didn’t know any better, the Catholic Church spread all over Europe; and because in Medieval times the Church was an essential and powerful part of the social order; and because in modern times it has persisted in a weakened form; and, finally, because in Ireland the capitalist system developed late and weak, and the rich and powerful in this country have had to lean, medieval-style, on the church.

…with terrible consequences.

So I heard the word of God, and I have renounced Him. The only thing that will make me reconsider is if, following death, my consciousness awakens in some strange place that looks like Purgatory, and if, after I’ve had a good look around and talked to a lot of people, I have convinced myself that it is in fact Purgatory. The folks there will ask me to repent my sins. I will not repent having sex outside marriage. I will not repent campaigning for a woman’s right to choose. I will not truthfully say sorry for renouncing belief in God. So I will be sent to hell.

Do I deserve hell for these “sins”?

First off, it’s easy to develop a cartoonish, comical kind of vision of hell from images in South Park, The Simpsons, etc.

This helps us to forget what a sick, horrible and cruel blackmail the idea of hell really is. As James Joyce recalls being told as a child: In hell, “by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.”

Do I deserve to be tortured cruelly for eternity? Do the vast majority of the human race deserve to be tortured horribly for an inconceivable length of time? Is this just?

Back to Joyce:

“Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! […] Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; […] and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended.”

Those who still cling to religious beliefs must confront this question. Christianity teaches us that all but the tiniest portion of the experience of a soul (those periods spent on Earth and in Purgatory) is spent in one of three places: Heaven, Limbo or Hell. Because they have committed “sins” that they will never be able to truly admit were bad, and because they have ignored “the word of God”, the vast majority of humans in existence in the world today will end up in Hell. For eternity.

Some more general musings…

The argument, “If there is a god and he’s good, why do horrible things happen on Earth?” pales in significance next to this question: If there’s a god and he’s good, why do horrible things happen disproportionately to people who are poor, non-white, gay, or female? If god allows bad things to happen to test us, why does he subject rich people to much easier tests?

But both pale in significance next to this one: If there is a god and he’s good, why does Hell exist? If religious beliefs are positive and a force for good in the world, why have great minds spent precious brain cells imagining this terrible place?

Jesus says that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. That is to say, it’s very, very difficult, practically impossible. But if any such kingdom exists, it is actually impossible for me to enter it. That’s because it’s impossible for me to accept that it’s a sin for a man to have sex with a man, or that it is a sin for a person to doubt the historic and scientific validity of Iron-Age manuscripts once they have been presented to him or her.

And if churches change their teachings and say that being gay isn’t a sin anymore, or announces that on closer inspection hell does not exist, then where are the “eternal truths”, and what is the use of religion? In any case that just reeks of improvisation and wishful thinking. If it’s a thing so woolly that you can twist it to mean anything, isn’t it just a mind-game?

I write this because I know kind, intelligent and sympathetic people who have Christian beliefs. I have known priests and nuns who showed me great kindness and who have done wonderful and positive things for the human race. Now if I was Richard Dawkins, I would just say those people are stupid, and I’d say they’re evil and stupid if they happened to be Muslim. But I’m not Dawkins. With an understanding of the history of churches as powerful institutions and religions as powerful sets of ideas operating in a class society, I think it’s more effective to pose rational arguments. In the Christian cosmic order, acts of love between two women are a sin, for which these two women will be condemned to eternal torture if they don’t truthfully say and believe that they’re sorry they ever did it. I don’t think any religious person I know, outside of a dogmatic fringe considered lunatic by everyone else, can really stand over that.

Travel back in time to the musical wasteland of the early 21st century!

Download the latest in our series of compilation albums revisiting the history of popular music. Take a twisted tour through the byzantine maze of the millennial male’s sexual hang-ups!

The original names of these great songs were lost forever in the Great Internet Collapse of ’34. But, painstakingly collected from nameless music files, they have been renamed after careful study by music experts and cultural historians.

[Note: Experts say that many of these songs might still exist in some form as folk tunes in isolated rural communities. If so, it is possible that their original names are preserved in the memories of the elderly. The Historical Records Co-operative would appreciate any suggestions as to what the original names of these songs might have been.]

1. Rich white boy ponders failed relationship

2. Rich white boy ponders failing relationship

3. Rich white boy with banjo ponders failed relationship

4. Please increase the volume of the music, because it is currently the wrong volume

5. Dancing on a dance floor is enjoyable

6. Woman approves of abusive partner

7. Woman professes to enjoy violence during sex

8. Domestic violence (Happens because I love you too much)

9. Hearty celebration of my wealth and power in contrast to my humble origins

10. Hearty celebration of my wealth and power in contrast to the humble circumstances of others

11. Hearty celebration of hedonistic lifestyle #1

12. Hearty celebration of hedonistic lifestyle #2

13. Hearty celebration of hedonistic lifestyle #3 (In which the singer names the seven days of the week according to the pre-revolutionary calendar)

14. Hearty celebration of hedonistic lifestyle #4 (In which the singer mentions the mysterious custom of using drinks with high alcohol content for purposes of oral hygiene)

15. Rape apologist anthem

(Note: This final track is a compilation of what seem to be quotes from creepy, horny, drunk men, sung in falsetto and set to minimalistic music. While debate still continues, most experts agree that it was probably compiled for documentary purposes, and due to its offensive content and lack of musical merit, could never have been regarded as a real song.)

A while ago I came across a horrible facebook page called “Nationalists of the World Unite”. Just to give you an idea of what it is, it called for the “smashing” of “cultural marxists”, tries to prove that humanity did not in fact originate in Africa, and complains about “Zionist Jewish propaganda and multi cultural madness”. It’s an anti-migrant, nationalist page – arguing against the evidence of all human history that nations are like pigeon-holes and things just get hopelessly muddled if we mix things around. 

To this day, it still has as its profile picture the dust jacket for George Orwell’s Animal Farm. When I first came across it I saw, laughing, that the moderators had also posted a huge status praising George Orwell for exposing the “globalist” agenda with his 1945 novel. I saw with satisfaction that there were a whole load of posts from people with brains in their heads, along the lines of “Orwell was a socialist you idiots! He went to Spain during the Civil War and put his life on the line to fight and kill the likes of you. He was totally opposed to racism, nationalism and fascism.” (Not an actual quote.)

The Contradictions of Orwell

This idiotic social media page, and the reaction to it, get to the heart of Orwell’s contradictions as a writer and the contradictions in his politics. The man who was shot in the neck by fascists while on the frontlines as a member of the militia of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification is today chiefly remembered for Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four. These books are read and spoken of as if they prove once and for all that socialism is evil and that anyone who speaks of equality or freedom is a Stalin-in-waiting or a useful idiot.

The frontlines of the Spanish Civil War, on which Orwell fought in 1937.

In fact these novels were written not as a critique of socialism but of Stalinism, of the oppressive political regime that developed in the Soviet Union, which we have written about several times before. But even though his two most well-known works are so often misunderstood, this contradiction makes Orwell an attractive writer for many: he was a committed socialist who was critical, without mercy, towards the Soviet Union, proving to a generation with zero illusions in Stalinism that Socialism was not tied to that regime and therefore that its time did not pass when the wall came down.

What made me write this blog post is the fact that I have just finished reading Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, his memoirs of his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War. I can say without a doubt that it is the best book Orwell ever wrote. It bridges this contradiction. Nobody can possibly mistake this book for a right-wing anti-communist scare story. It is at the same time searingly critical of Stalinism. 

Orwell on the Spanish Civil War

Orwell arrived in Barcelona six months after a working-class revolution thwarted Franco and his “stuffy clerico-military reaction.” He writes: “Men and women armed only with sticks of dynamite rushed across open squares and stormed stone buildings held by trained soldiers with machine-guns.” In Barcelona, when Orwell arrived, the working class was “in the saddle”, or appeared to be. There was no more cringing, boot-licking, snobbery or waste.

CNT was the Anarchist-influenced trade union, FAI the Spanish Anarchist organisation

While the introduction by Julian Symons repeats time and time again that Orwell was a “romantic”, Orwell never romanticises the revolution. He describes events without any filter for gruesome, absurd and horrible details. But he is utterly inspired by his experiences in spite of the horrors of war, an inspiration that does not wear off but comes out far stronger after months on the front-lines:

“For the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of classless society. In that community where no-one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like… The effect was to make my desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before.”

A column of the POUM militia in which Orwell served

Cynicism refuted by experience

An idea floats around and comes to the surface quite often, the idea that cynicism and hopelessness are the result of experience of the “real world” and of “human nature.” Homage to Catalonia refutes that in the development it chronicles within the brain of its author. Orwell, cynical by long habit, is made un-cynical in many ways by going through “beastly” experiences in Barcelona and at the front line. He becomes much more political, not less. 

Coming across the array of parties and initials – CNT, FAI, POUM, PSUC, UGT, etc – Orwell was initially “puzzled”:

“…my attitude always was, ‘can’t we drop all this political nonsense and get on with the war?’ This of course was the correct ‘anti-Fascist’ attitude which had been carefully disseminated by the English newspapers… But in Spain, especially in Catalonia, it was an attitude that no-one could keep up indefinitely. Everyone, no matter how unwillingly, took sides sooner or later.For even if one cared nothing for the political parties and their conflicting ‘lines’, it was too obvious that one’s own destiny was involved. As a militiaman one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn an enormous struggle that was being fought out between two political theories.”

A war within a war

This struggle is laid out very clearly in Homage to Catalonia and is worth outlining here. The war began in July 1936 with a working-class uprising against Franco’s coup. Orwell makes it clear that these workers, like him, were fighting not simply for “democracy” but for improvements in their everyday lives, for control over the land and the factories, for a socialist society. Within the anti-Franco camp there was a struggle, at first hidden, then suddenly open. On one side were the liberals, the Stalinist Communist Party and the social democrat/labour party equivalents, who wanted to prevent any revolution taking place and defeat Franco in the name of “democracy”. On the other side there were the Anarchists and the POUM, and with them huge sections of the working class, who saw the revolution and the winning of the war as one and the same task.

Orwell at first inclines toward the Stalinist-liberal side. But as time goes on and he sees the struggle explode into open fighting on the streets of Barcelona in May 1937, he comes around very strongly to the other side. First, by making the war a war for socialism rather than an abstract “war for democracy” (abstract because the Republican side had instituted a military dictatorship against all forces to the left of the Stalinists), the anti-Franco forces might mobilise the support of workers in other European countries, much as the Bolsheviks did during the Russian revolution.

Barricades in Barcelona, May 1937. Fighting erupted behind Republican lines when the “liberal” government, with Stalinist support, moved against the anarchists

Secondly, by declaring Moroccan independence, the Republic could open up a whole new front in Franco’s rear – but it did not do this for fear of threatening the investments of European millionaires in Morocco. “The best strategic opportunity of the war was flung away in the hopes of placating French and British capitalism,” writes Orwell. 

Thirdly, the attempts to suppress the Anarchists and left-wing socialists were harming the war effort, not helping it; Orwell describes police patrolling in Barcelona with supplies the militias on the front are bitterly starved of and completely denied. “I suspect it is the same in all wars – always the same contrast between the sleek police in the rear and the ragged soldiers in the line.”

Immaculately-dressed, well-armed Spanish “Assault Guards” kept order behind the lines while militiamen suffered on the frontlines with poor weapons and low ammunition.

When this conflict came to a head, it took the form of a “reign of terror” against the Anarchists and left-socialists. Orwell tells tales of betrayal, imprisonment, disappearance, paranoia, lies and murder that give 1984 a run for its money, and are completely true. 

The last note on the political lessons of the book: the Spanish Stalinist leadership, the Spanish liberal capitalist class and the USSR collaborated in this reign of terror. This much is made damn clear. These crimes did not happen because of “human nature” and Orwell leaves no room for the assumption that they happened because the Stalinists were “too extreme” or “too left-wing”. The best arm of the anti-Franco forces was broken without mercy and by the most disgusting methods, the ground was laid for a fascist victory, and this was all done in defence of “liberal democracy”.

Another contradiction

Orwell’s insight and honesty did not win him friends in the literary world. Gollancz refused to publish Homage to Catalonia because of its criticism of the Stalinists. When it was published, by Secker & Warburg, only 1500 copies were printed. By the time Homage to Catalonia was reprinted in 1951, not all of this tiny number of copies had been sold. 

Of course, by 1951, the late George Orwell had won worldwide fame as the author of Animal Farm and 1984. It is doubtful that this second printing would have been made if these two novels had not drummed up a market for everything with Orwell’s name on it. So, while I’m here arguing that Homage to Catalonia is by far his best book, I’m well aware that without those two other books, which I have serious reservations about, I most likely never would have read a word of it. Another glorious contradiction.

Weaknesses of 1984

Another little bit of explanation is necessary. I hear some of ye ask, who am I to question the brilliance of 1984 and Animal Farm, in favour of some obscure recollections of Spain that would have never survived without those two great works, among the greatest of the whole twentieth century? Besides, ye may well say, they aren’t even anti-socialist at all, they are anti-Stalinist: didn’t Orwell explicitly write “My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism”?

Sure, sure. But I will cast the first shadow of doubt over the 1945-1949 period in which he wrote those books by relating the fact that, in amid those years, Orwell provided a list of people he suspected of being communist sympathisers to British intelligence. I don’t know too much about the details, but whatever they might be, this act of proto-McCarthyism by someone who calls himself a revolutionary socialist would come out looking pretty disgusting. Another way of looking at it is that this apparent champion of individual liberty collaborated with a paranoid surveillance state. It makes us at the very least wonder what his state of mind was like in these years, what kind of political roads he was travelling down, and in what ways he might have changed since the 1930s. I will leave that to the experts and simply say that it makes you wonder. 

A clue to the next point of criticism is that those works have been so consistently misunderstood by so many millions of people as an attack on socialist ideas. Let’s face it: they were wide open to misunderstanding. Look at 1984. The oppression of the USSR is magnified tenfold and stretched over the whole wide world. There is no explanation of how this came to pass. The “book within a book” by Goldstein doesn’t really provide any explanation beyond a kind of fatalism. I have argued elsewhere on this blog that the poverty, backwardness and isolation of Russia, along with its nine years of total war, laid the basis for Stalinism. How else can we explain how things fell apart so badly?

Orwell gives us no real explanation of why the whole world came to be covered in totalitarian darkness. Why must a boot stamp on a human face for eternity? 1984  is a brutally exaggerated portrayal of the spineless lying, toadying and arse-kissing that went with Stalinism, of which Homage to Catalonia gives a real-life example. It is not a prediction of the future. It is rather a portrayal of some horrible aspects of modern, 20th-century life, a life in which the individual lives under the ominous shadow of huge apparatuses of state and capital. I remember reading a bit of Anthony Burgess’ 1984 Revisited. Burgess, a total right-winger, puts forward a very insightful argument. This is that 1984  is basically about Britain during World War Two. All the elements of the story were part of everyday life during the war, though in a less acute form. 

1984 has given us all the vocabulary we need to denounce today’s NSA surveillance, and any kind of oppression, bullshit or hack-ism. In that sense it’s very valuable. I agree that it’s brilliant and deserves its reputation as a classic. Same with Animal Farm. The two are satires on authoritarianism in general and Stalinism in particular. But there are several important things that they are not.

They are not a serious analyses of Stalinism – of why it arose, what it constituted, why it collapsed, and how we prevent it happening again.

They are not a refutation of socialism. Their author was a socialist, and even if he wasn’t, they wouldn’t stand as such.

They are not true stories. I know it seems absurd to point this out. The thing is, I have often found when researching the actual means of oppression used by real-life Stalinist regimes that a preconceived schema derived from Orwell has hindered my understanding. 

They were not intended to be any of the above by Orwell himself. 

last of all, they are not Orwell’s best work. That award belongs to Homage to Catalonia, which finds Orwell in the thick of revolutionary events, fired up by them, able to observe the greatest heroism and the worst treachery with his own eyes and portray  them in his uniquely evocative way. Scenes, characters and atmospheres are recreated brilliantly. The author makes a journey from a facile black-and-white impression of the war to a profound political insight and understanding of the interplay of factions and revolutionary dynamics. At the end of the heart-rending tragedy of Spain, he emerges stronger. “Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.” As a historical document, as a literary work and as a political argument, Homage to Catalonia is Orwell’s finest work. 

I’ve just watched the first two seasons of the BBC’s very enjoyable modern take on Sherlock Holmes. Moriarty, the villain (Andrew Scott), was admirably written and acted, with his posh Irish accent, his “absolute psycho” character (writer Stephen Moffat) and his insatiable mania.

But there was a problem. This was a problem with the whole conception of the character and the mysteries he sits at the centre of. I first recognised this problem when Moriarty did something that has become compulsory for every 21^st-century villain: the Joker in The Dark Knight, Bane in its sequel, Loki in Avengers, the baddie Silva in Skyfall…

He deliberately got himself captured so as to engineer a fiendishly complex, far-fetched escape, all for some negligible purpose that was clearly not worth the risk or the trouble.

Then I started to think about this a little more. The 19^th-century Professor Moriarty went after Sherlock Holmes because the great detective was threatening to uncover his secret criminal organisation. The 21^st-century Moriarty went after Sherlock Holmes for his own amusement.

It’s effective and scary, once in a while, to see a villain who is motivated only by some inner sadistic drive, who is a psychopath, whose powers of planning and organisation are almost supernatural. Now, I’m not a massive watcher of films and TV shows, but I think I can discern a trend towards this kind of villain becoming the rule, not the exception.

It’s a shame, because Scott, Moffat and Gatiss’ Moriarty is so brilliantly acted and written. But his underlying motivation and nature is becoming a cliché. His prototype, to my mind, is Heath ledger’s equally brilliant performance as the Joker. The only explanation of his desires and motives is that he is like a “dog chasing cars”. He does it all for fun. He’s evil because he’s evil. Holmes and Moriarty have more or less the same conversation as the Joker and Batman: “You complete me.” says the Joker. “Without me, you’re nothing,” says Moriarty.

This is interesting the first time, but boring when it becomes a rule. Rather than being real characters, formed by and a part of the world around them, the villain becomes an essential, cosmic, metaphysical force of evil. Instead of applying a Sherlock-Holmes-like brain to the problem of understanding this villain, we are asked to bow down before a profane mystery that is beyond the grasp of our feeble human minds.

It’s pre-enlightenment stuff. Good versus Evil. Eternal battle between irreducible forces. Fair enough in The Lord of the Rings, which you know is set in a fantasy world. Not fair enough in a “gritty, realistic, modern” reboot of Batman or of James Bond. It fits in even worse in Sherlock Holmes, which is supposed to be all about the application of scientific thought to apparently baffling crimes. “I have been tempted to look into the problems furnished by nature,” says Sherlock Holmes in “The Last Problem”, “Rather than those more superficial ones for which our artificial state of society is responsible.”

And don’t get me started on the crimes themselves. Villains these days have thinly-disguised supernatural powers. The Joker can manufacture huge numbers of bombs secretly, then go on a rampage setting them off in all manner of bizarre places he could not possibly have planted them. He even times his one-liners precisely to the moment before the explosion. He times his bank robberies perfectly to coincide with the line of yellow school buses.

The absurd far-fetchedness of Silva’s plan in Skyfall is perfectly summed up half-way through this video and in this older post. It’s just stupid and impossible. The precision and logistical effort required would strain the most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet, and the rewards are so trifling for this huge effort.

Of course, if the villain’s motivations need not be explained, then why should we think we have a right to understand his logistics? Cosmic forces of evil go hand-in-hand with supernatural powers.

Batman Begins impressed me because there was an internal consistency to it all, everything was explained within the rules of the game, no logistical leaps were made, and everyone’s motivations were made clear. Not bad for a superhero movie. Bane was a much better villain than the Joker as well, but again at the start of the film we were subjected to effectively supernatural powers and a pointless get-captured-and-escape stunt.

When the villain can do anything, there is no awe, surprise or dramatic tension. Internal consistency breaks down, and nothing is beyond possibility. When the villain can do anything, what stops him killing the hero? Screenwriters have solved this problem in a very unsatisfying way: often, the hero is cornered and defeated and the villain could kill them, but chooses not to, just to play some complicated and far-fetched game for their own satisfaction. The characters’ motivations can be twisted any way that suits the writers. A real conflict does not take place. Anything goes.

Is this all down to laziness? Like when Charles Dickens had a character die due to “spontaneous combustion” in Bleak House? I think it’s partly down to laziness. But only partly.

There’s no simple explanation but if you forced me to advance a theory, I’d say that villains with supernatural powers and/or no motivation beyond a desire to do evil reflect the stories we are told in the media.

George W Bush at one point stood up and said of Al-Quaida, “They hate freedom. They love terror.” The dead, bloodied face of Gaddafi was on every front page, as was Bin Laden’s. Remember the capture of Saddam Hussein and his dental exam? It has now become acceptable to be horrifically racist against people from North Korea, just because of the crimes of their government, crimes which some government allied to the US would get away with. Mass shootings in the US are written off as being due to insanity and evil, when actually there’s a lot more going on.

More shockingly, the 2011 riots in the UK were publicly blamed by the Prime Minister himself on “gang culture”. Idealistic explanations are preferred to material ones: young men not rooted firmly in the holy and sacred institution of the traditional family listened to too much hip-hop and got ideas. People who move country to flee violence or to find a job are presented as scroungers, or worse, as an invading army. Tube workers, air traffic controllers and waste collectors apparently go on strike because they’re greedy.

In the media, “enemies” of every kind have become cruder caricatures than the crudest Hollywood villains. It’s no surprise that even accomplished screenwriters have taken the liberty of making their villains cruder still.

We are dealing with a middle-class culture and media that has lost its patience with the demands of science. Sociological explanation is out of fashion. Attempts at linking outrages to the society that produced them are shouted down with utmost impatience as so much naive whingeing and dodging of personal responsibility.

But making these kinds of dumb, individual explanations for terrible events is dodging the responsibility of using your brain. The purpose of the decline of the villain in fiction is to shield writers and viewers from a world that is difficult to understand without asking questions that are considered radical, and to explain the problems of that world by reference to embodiments of absolute evil. It’s unsatisfying as entertainment, unless the satisfaction you’re looking for is nothing more than a confirmation of lazy prejudices, and freedom from the responsibility of using your brain.

A blogger got a lot of hits recently for calling any Irish person who complains about Ireland a “whiny bitch.” It argued that since Ireland is a better place to live than many others, and that now is a better time to live than many others, nobody should complain about inequality, austerity, backwardness, misogyny, injustice, corruption or the fact that homelessness has hit record levels. Actually all those things are just what I’m assuming the author means, because he never specifies exactly who the “bitches” are and what they are “whining” about (beyond some gobsmacking reference to the economy being “out of the woods”). Probably because any real engagement with the issues Irish people are angry about would have made mincemeat of his central argument that things are basically OK.

Ahh, Ireland. Green fields, lovely music, happy people. Stop whining. 

Coming only a weeks after the most anger-filled elections in many decades, which saw historic upheaval, to come out with an article saying that the majority are wrong to be angry and should just “STOP” <SMACK> strikes me as an act of someone totally disconnected from reality who doesn’t know or care about the conditions most people are living in. The massive anger of people is written off as some bizarre feature of Irish people that we’re always “begrudging” and complaining, etc etc. Check out some of the Youtube comments on this video and you’ll get another prime example of this genre of anti-complaint complaining.

Martin Luther King, and other assorted “whiny bitches”

Imagine if said blogger had written his piece in the 1900s or in the 1950s. The “whiny bitches” of those times, to whom every criticism made in the blogger’s “open letter” apply 100%, would include Jim Larkin, the suffragette movement and Martin Luther King. Those complacent fools ranting about the “whiny bitches” and telling them to shut up and count their blessings, conceding at most that sure, maybe 50 years ago you had something to complain about, are not remembered, or only remembered as idiots. Most importantly, if we look at it this way we can see how stupid their complacent world-outlook is.

The whiniest bitch of all, Jim Larkin, is given a gentle reminder by the cops that for all the squalor and exploitation of contemporary Dublin, at least he is not living in the ancient Aztec Empire having his heart ripped out as a sacrifice to the sun god

I don’t want to focus on this ignorant blog post in particular but on the general world-view it expresses. It’s a complacent attitude that says that most things in the world are fine, most problems are resolved. It is not quite “the end of history” (even the author of that phrase, Fukuyama, has backtracked on it), but we are, according to this world-view, at the very least in the mopping-up phase of history.

The point of my article is to give some snapshots to prove the point that massive changes are afoot and even greater changes will take place in the lifetime of a young person today. Everything we take for granted will be tested and a lot will be found wanting, and a hell of a lot is going to change, for better or for worse. The seven facts I highlight are not necessarily the most significant topics in the world. Some are minor. I could have gone on to 10, 20, or 30 facts but I decided to keep it short. They are selected because they’re graphic indicators of the shape of the present. My writing will be short on analysis. The idea is to provoke thought.

My purpose is not to show that things are shit, thereby disproving the idea that things are good. That would be easy, but boring and depressing and ultimately meaningless. Some of them are very bad things. Some are very good things. Some have good and bad aspects. A disproportionate amount are about Ireland, to prove that there’s no magical wall around us, but the main perspective is global. Their purpose is to excite us, to broaden our perspectives on the future, to get across the idea that titanic events are unfolding, that history is all to play for, that the stakes are high, and that you have an obligation to play a role. Do not fear radical change, because radical change is already taking place, and has to take place; do not fear catastrophe if we try to change the world, because catastrophe is a defining feature of today’s world and catastrophe is what the capitalist system has in store for us increasingly if we leave it in place. Do not listen to those who spread apathy and complacency.

If, despite my best efforts, the shape of the present depresses you, don’t mistake it for the future. Put the horrors of the world firmly in their place with the words of a revolutionary when he contemplated this very question a hundred years ago:

“– Surrender, you pathetic dreamer. Here I am, your long awaited twentieth century, your ‘future.’

– No, replies the unhumbled optimist: You, you are only the present.”

 1. Revolution and mass struggle on a historic scale

The years 2010 to 2014 have so far seen a wave of mass movements, protests and revolutions that has spread over oceans and continents on a scale wider than the 1989-91 uprisings against Stalinism. The map below shows in red the countries that have seen full-scale revolutions and civil wars, like Egypt, while yellow denotes a country where significant upheaval and mass movements have happened. An example is the UK, from the sacking of Millbank Tower in 2010 to the riots in summer 2011.

The incredible thing is, there are probably a good few more countries where massive events unfolded, which I’m just not aware of. I’ll take any corrections and suggestions in comment boxes. What I put as yellow, what I put as red and what I left out are up for debate. What’s undeniable is the spread and depth of events that would have been totally unbelievable just a few years ago. Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2011 was “The Protester”. And the Protester has not vanished. 2013 saw a renewal of struggle in Egypt, Turkey and Brazil. In the US, the struggle unleashed by the Occupy movement is visibly rising again on a higher level. All this points to the fact that conditions today are intolerable for vast numbers of people, and that people have the power to change them.

 2. Back to the 1930s: Nazism

Golden Dawn in Greece are not a kinda-far-right party. They’re don’t say “I’m not racist but…” They are Nazis of the Third Reich variety. And they’re one of the most popular parties in Greece. They beat up and kill migrants, LGBT people and left-wingers, over half of the riot police voted for them, they’re arming and training militarily and, though they’ve suffered from a crackdown, they’re still there.

Hungary’s Jobbik, an anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-Roma party with a brutal military wing, is in government. The protests and battles in Ukraine fell in many cases under the leadership of far-right and neo-nazi groups, many of them now holding positions in government.

These are not isolated or short-lived developments. They’re rooted in the economic, social and cultural crisis of the capitalist system. They are widespread and deep-rooted.

They’re growing because liberals and conservatives alike have no answer for them. Only a socialist force with a mass base, uniting people along working class lines rather than bogus national lines, can cut across them and beat them. That’s happening too.

 3. The rise of socialists and the workers’ movement

In November last year a Socialist, Kshama Sawant, was elected to Seattle City Council with nearly 100,000 votes. She’s the first socialist in over 100 years to sit in that chamber. No sooner was she elected than, thanks to mass pressure from the streets which she based herself on, built and assisted in every way, big business in Seattle was forced to pass a $15 an hour minimum wage law.

This isn’t an isolated incident either. Since the Madison, Wisconsin protests and the Occupy movement, the US has been in a grassroots political ferment. Strikes for $15, protests against racism, socialist and labour electoral challenges, all unimaginable just a few years ago, are challenging the status quo in the US.

It’s not confined to the US. The European parliament elections in May 2014 saw a massive rise for the GUE/NGL group, which represents mostly strong, genuine socialist organisations, unlike the thoroughly establishment, big business “Socialists and Democrats” group. Amid all the fear of Golden Dawn in Greece, it’s often forgotten that the highest-polling party in Greece is the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza), which was on 4% a few years ago and might form a government within a few short years.

 4. Ireland: The withering of the three gombeen parties

Speaking of the May elections, upheavals in Ireland are reflected in a distorted but undeniable way in election results.

In 1981 the three main parties who have swapped power between each other since 1927 got over 91% of first-preference votes.

By 2007 things had changed, but not by much. They got 79% between them.

In 2011 there was a violent shift. At the same time that presidents-for-life Mubarak and Ben Ali were being ousted in Egypt and Tunisia, February 2011 saw the party that ruled Ireland for most of the century, Fianna Fáil, trampled under the feet of voters. But the main beneficiaries were the other two main parties. So the three got 72% between them.

In May 2014 the three parties considered a “safe pair of hands” by the establishment got a mere 56.5 between them.

This is easily the biggest electoral upheaval since the 1920s. I’m not one of these people who’s obsessed with elections, but they do very definitely reflect trends in society. To return for a second to the blogger, Unshaved Mouse. Did people turn against the three main parties because of a sudden epidemic of “whiny-bitchitis”? Do such upheavals happen in contented, happy countries?

 5. Sci-fi dystopia levels of inequality

Based on a true story

Imagine a double-decker bus with 85 people on it.

Now try (and fail) to imagine 3.5 billion people, half the population of the world, a fair proportion of all the humanity that has ever existed.

Now imagine that the un-visualisable mass of people have as much money between them as the total population of that double-decker bus.

That’s the world we’re living in. If it was in a science fiction movie or a dystopian teen novel, you’d say “ridiculous.” It’s so horrifically unconscionable, such a waste of resources and a denial of human potential, that even the rich are uncomfortable about it, and some fear the rest of us coming after them with pitchforks.

And just in case you think this only applies to the difference between “developed” and “developing” countries, inequality within the advanced capitalist countries is just as striking.

 6. Nation-states collapsing and redefining

We can’t take anything for granted, even the lines on the map. The emergence of South Sudan is a small matter next to the other border changes that are on the cards. The world is right now going through the biggest shift in borders since 1989-91.

It now looks like the vote on Scottish independence in September is likely to be defeated, though who knows what can happen in the intervening months. What’s certain is that the existence of the UK in its present form is up in the air. If the vote is defeated, Scotland will still get maximum devolution, and the demand for independence may reassert itself more strongly in the future, especially if the Tories win in 2015 or the UK leaves the EU. The referendum is likely to register that at least 40% of the people of Scotland want independence. The knock-on effects on other countries are hard to predict.

Nearly half of Scots want independence – even though the UK has such a fair and balanced media

But this is small fry next to the dramatic changes in other parts of the world. This year Crimea was annexed by Russia. Eastern Ukraine is under the rule of a Russian-aligned government that is hostile to the Ukrainian state. Towns lie in ruins. Many have died.

Last month an Islamist army of a few thousand swept across northern Iraq, conquering it from the Shia-dominated government. The Iraqi and Syrian states are collapsing. The Kurds have now to all intents and purposes independent. If there’s something to the boasts of ISIS, their reach may even extend eventually to Palestine itself.

 7. Chinese workers demanding their due

China is an enormous country, and you can easily imagine how even the biggest protests are put in perspective by the geographical size, economic power, huge population and powerful state. The state has a definition, “mass incidents,” that encompasses protests, strikes and civil disobedience. Even taking into account how big the country is, the sheer number of “mass incidents”, mounting year-on-year, is staggering:

1993: 8,700

2005: over 87,000

2010: 180,000

50,000 recently went on strike at one of those enormous factories where all our shoes come from – illustrating how closely connected China is to production and consumption the world over, and how large-scale events there would have deep effects all over the world. Commentators have been buzzing for years with overblown predictions of the emergence of a Chinese middle class to solve the world economy’s problems with demand – but they should be more interested in the emergence of an organized, active, militant Chinese working class. The last time this class raised its fist politically was 1989 when it shook the Chinese state and raised the idea of a political revolution to secure both democratic rights and a socialist economy. Since then, massive changes in the Chinese and world economy have made this class potentially the most powerful social force in the world.

A party that used to be left-wing and represent working people, the Irish Labour Party has catapulted to the right in the last 30 years or so, like all of the old social-democratic parties. Today they make occasional noises about “protecting the most vulnerable in our society” but to all real, practical intents and purposes they are practically the same as the right-wing parties. After a roasting from voters in the local elections, they’re going into a tailspin, flailing around for a new leader.

Commentators are talking about a “left-right divide” opening up for the first time in Irish politics. Labour is on the wrong side of this. If it stays on the right, it will continue to wither because if you want a right-wing party, why bother with a crap, double-speaking one? Meanwhile, if it tries to struggle onto the left side of the divide, it will only fall into the chasm between the two.

Its luminaries don’t seem to understand any of this. Some really think that Joan Burton can save the party by “explaining” to people what Labour is doing in government. The problem is, people know damn well what they’re doing: providing a feast for the rich and powerful while trying (and mostly failing) to grab a few crumbs for everyone else.

Others talk about trying to make the people “feel” the recovery. There’s a reason why the recovery has been, and I predict might be more so in the future, more radicalising than the crisis. When people were suffering from cuts and unemployment and new taxes, they could at least say to themselves, “Well, this is a crisis, it’ll be over soon.” But Labour think the recovery has a long way to run. Well, substantially, this is the recovery. As the fella asks in the movie, has it ever occurred to them that this is as good as it gets? Most working-class people are not feeling the recovery because, well, there is no substantial recovery for working-class people. The whole strategy for the last 6 years has been directed at producing a recovery for the rich. You can’t get the working class to “feel” the recovery without the aid of a hypnotist.

The “jobs recovery” has been based on emigration, low pay and free-labour “internships”. The fiscal “recovery” has been based on giving everything to the banks and bondholders, and taking everything from the people.

To finish this brief look at the Labour Party crisis, I want to relate that Labour TD Dominic Hannigan had this to contribute to the debate:

“This is about brand recovery… If we want to survive, we have to re-engage with our customer base.”

(Sunday Business Post, June 29th)

And that is precisely why they are unlikely to survive.

Today the media announced the breaking of two records. The number of refugees in the world has topped 50 million, the highest number since the end of World War Two. The number of people sleeping rough in Dublin last night hit 154, the highest number ever recorded.

We are living in the middle of a terrible human tragedy. From the street outside your door to the fences and seas that surround “Fortress Europe”, the system is failing humanity on a horrifying scale.

Thousands die trying to make it to countries where life is less unbearable. There is a list of 17,306 people who have died trying to travel to Europe from desperately poor and unstable countries. This didn’t happen just because of evil people smugglers who pack them onto boats. It happens because “democratic” Europe has been turned into a fortress with border controls and a militarised border police that exist to persecute poor people trying to migrate. This has led to horrible situations like the mass drowning allegedly committed by the Greek Coast Guard last year. More broadly, it’s because most of the world is difficult to exist in, entirely because of political and economic forces beyond the control of most people.

154 sleep on the streets of Dublin while landlords rake it in through cripplingly high rents and the state creates millionaires through Rent Supplement. This gives the complete lie to the Irish Independent’s stupid line of argument that Dublin city is benefiting more from the recovery than the rest of Ireland:

“In Dublin’s fashionable business districts the bars and restaurants bustle on a Friday night as well-dressed young workers pour out from their hi-tech workstations in search of tapas and craft beers.”

The recovery is one-sided, but it’s not a geographical division, it’s a class division. And it’s not just that they’re powering ahead and we’re struggling. The truth is, our misery is their gain. “Surging property prices” is not a good thing for the vast majority of people. Their “divided nation” feature mostly interviewed business people, and RTE never seems to take its cameras very far from the Grand Canal Docks.

I argue for radical economic and social change – for the economy to be owned, run and managed democratically by working people, for an end to classes. Some people respond that massive changes can result in disasters and upheaval. But look at Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, CAR, Sudan, Somalia. Look at your small town’s dead and depressed main street, or the pair of runners sticking out from under a blanket in some side-street in Dublin city. Upheaval and disaster are not a risk, they are a reality. A great human tragedy and catastrophe is unfolding all around us, and it compels us to take action.