Leftist Trainspotting Quiz of the Year.
“One of Vladimir Lenin’s favourite stories was about seeing a man who was squatting in the street and waving his hands wildly. At a distance he seemed to be a maniac, but when Lenin came closer, he could see that it was somebody trying to read an article in Socialist Appeal.
The same, Lenin said, was true of the Trainspotting ideological struggle.”
2021 Left Trainspotting Quiz.
1) Who wrote this about the European Union?
“It may grate that, for all its woeful shortcomings – think only, beyond England, of the place of Scotland or Northern Ireland in the composite realm – Westminster is vastly superior to this lacquered synarchy” ?
a) Brendan O’Neill.
b) Rev Giles Fraser.
c) Perry Anderson.
2) The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) has stood in a number of local elections this year. In which May ward contest were they beaten by the Official Monster Raving Looney Party?
a) Cloud-Cuckoo Land (Coventry).
b) Chessington South (Kingston).
c) Glastonbury Tor.
3) There was a nasty NIP in the air earlier this year. What marked the first electoral intervention of the Northern Independence Party in the May Hartlepool By-Election?
a) They got 0.84% of the vote.
b) They weren’t competent enough to get the NIP name registered with the Electoral Commission.
c) They beat the Monster Raving Looney Party – 0,3% of the ballots.
4) What was the name of the tendency of the French Nouveau Parti anti-capitaliste (NPA) which split in June and announced their own ‘candidate’ for the 2022 Presidential elections?
a) L’étincelle.
b) Alternative révolutionnaire communiste.
c) Courant communiste révolutionnaire/Révolution Permanente.
5) Name at least 5 people at this August radical chic Jolly in Malta
6) Which International organisation held a conference this year with delegates from Leningrad, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia?
a) International Marxist Tendency (IMT).
b) The Fourth International Posadist.
c) The Whovian Tardis Alliance.
7) Which American left-wing newspaper failed to appear for its much awaited Anniversary.
a) The Militant.
b) Workers Vanguard.
c) People’s World.
8) In Argentina the Trotskyist Leftist Worker Front (FIT), Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores – Unidad, FIT-U), won the third largest share of the vote in the November elections, 5.91% . Which of these British figures signed an international declaration of support for the Frente?
a) Alex Callinicos
b) Sebastian Budgen.
c) Chris Williamson.
9) Which of the following are now political parties in the UK?
a) The Breakthrough Party.
b) The Resist Movement.
c) Spiked.
10) Why did ‘Jack Conrad’ write in the Weekly Worker, “Tony Greenstein has abandoned any pretence of adhering to class politics: that is, the class politics of the working class” and has a ” short-sighted, philistine spirit” ?
a) A Court gave Greenstein a two-year restraining order, banning him from contacting the Labour Party disputes team.
b) Greenstein and his allies got Labour Against the Witch-hunt to ‘merge’ with the Labour in Exile Network (LIEN) and for “the newly merged organisation to “work and/or join forces” with groups including Chris Williamson’s Resist.”
c) Greenstein dislikes Philistines almost as much as he hates ‘Zionists’.
‘No Cold War’, China: The Return of the Anti-Imperialism of Fools?
The Removal of the Pillar of Shame is Heavy in Symbolism.
This act spells the intention to write the Tiananmen Square massacre out of history.
This is the lying explanation for the removal:
So much for history and memory.
Earlier this month the social imperialists of the Chinese Communist Party capitalist dictatorship issued this document, favourably reported on by their British supporters.
“CHINA published the report China: Democracy that Works on Saturday, outlining its “whole-process democracy” and arguing its political system is more democratic than that of the United States.”
The document contained these claims.
“The US has developed a system of strategies and tactics for “peaceful evolution”. It would start with “cultural exchanges”, economic assistance, and then public opinion shaping to foster an atmosphere for “color revolution”. It would exaggerate the mistakes and flaws of incumbent governments to foment public grievances and anti-government sentiments.
In the meantime, it would brainwash local people with American values and make them identify with America’s economic model and political system. It would also cultivate pro-US NGOs and provide all-round training to opposition leaders. It would seize the opportunity of major elections or emergencies to overthrow targeted governments through instigating street political activities.
In recent history, the US has pushed for the neo-Monroe Doctrine in Latin America under the pretext of “promoting democracy”, incited “color revolution” in Eurasia, and remotely controlled the “Arab Spring” in West Asia and North Africa. These moves have brought chaos and disasters to many countries, gravely undermining world peace, stability and development.”
‘The “Arab Spring” that started in 2010 was an earthquake that shook the entire Middle East. The US orchestrated the show behind the scene, and played a key role. The New York Times revealed in 2011 that a small core of American government-financed organizations were promoting democracy in “authoritarian” Arab states. A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the “Arab Spring” revolts received training and financing from US organizations like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House’.
To underline the Chinese capitalist dictatorship’s adherence to the ‘anti-imperialism of fools’ they added.
In countries forced to copy and paste American values, there is no sign of true democracy, true freedom, or true human rights. What have been left in these countries are prevailing scenes of persisting chaos, stagnation and humanitarian disasters.
And (the site cited is a marginal one, to say the least),
As suggested by the French website Le Grand Soir, democracy has long become a weapon of massive destruction for the US to attack countries with different views.
Is is a surprise that the social imperialists have attracted this support?
How should democracy be defined? December 2021.
Democracy was the focus for speakers from both China and around the world at the International Forum on Democracy in Beijing. How should we assess the concept of democracy today? And what evidence best shows the practical interpretation and application of the concept of democracy?
To discuss these questions and more, we’ve invited He Jing, attorney at GEN Law Firm; Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and president of the Schiller Institute; and Zoon Ahmed Khan, research fellow at the Center for China and Globalization.
The Schiller Institute is a front for the far-right Larouche cult.
It is, naturally, no surprise that the Chinese Communist Party gets this support.
Then there is Tel’s Nipper:
The Establishment Feared Corbyn’s Internationalism
The piece is interesting in that it shows wider, if limited, forces that self-identify with the left lining up behind the No to the New Cold War rhetoric promoted by the Friends of Socialist China..
The member of the New Left Review Editorial Board opines on foreign policy. He starts by laying into UK pro-Israel policies, “Maximal support for Israeli ethnic cleansing is the new bipartisan norm. ” And so on.
Of more symptomatic interest is that Eagleton calls for ” an anti-imperialism that surpasses moralism.”
As in,
The UK is currently gearing up for a new Cold War in which it will act as head servant to the United States, using its inflated military budget to counter Chinese and Russian influence. Last summer, Boris Johnson dispatched a warship to the Black Sea to antagonize Vladimir Putin, and sent an aircraft carrier strike group into the contested South China Sea to rile Xi Jinping’s Defense Ministry. Johnson has now joined the AUKUS nuclear pact with the United States and Australia, designed to militarize the Pacific region and escalate the arms race with China.
“In this context, it is vital for the Left to forcefully oppose the Atlantic compact while also rejecting apologia for its strategic adversaries (whose crimes, from Xi’s internment of Uyghurs to Putin’s bombardment of Syria, should not be understated).
Yet if socialists continue to confine themselves to black-and-white humanitarian crises, they will be unable to rise to this discursive challenge. The extraordinary danger of renewed great power conflict, mostly elided by progressive media outlets and MPs, calls for an internationalism with the analytic tools to confront it.”
The pro-Brexit sovereigntist continues, shedding a tear over Corbins defeat. There was “a brief moment during the Corbyn era”, one that has passed most of us actual Labour members by.
That was the time when a “national industrial strategy ” based on self-reliance was on the cards,
This strategy was to be implemented by a more active state, unshackled from the ordoliberal competition rules of the EU, that could have played a dynamic role in coaxing and directing investment.
Leaving the “ever closer union” also gave the leadership the opportunity to develop a new trade justice policy, reshaping Britain’s trading relationships to reflect the principles of global solidarity (in contrast to the neocolonial EU Customs Union, which guarantees competitive advantage for European producers). Shadow minister Jon Trickett drew up plans for an international alliance of progressive leaders, including Brazil’s Lula da Silva and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, as a substitute for Britain’s circle of oil-rich despots.
In this realm of something that never happened and was never going to happen, a banner with strange device was raised:
” This program combined a commitment to justice abroad with transformative measures at home. It was alert to the practical implications of disentangling the UK from its imperial networks — and it offered a radical vision of Britain outside the EU, bringing an end to the assumption that Brexit was an intrinsically racist or nationalist enterprise.”
Most people thought Labour, under Corbyn’s leadership called to vote Remain in the EU – but then Ollie had obviously got so close to Labour’s Chief he knew better than the Party card-carriers, commentators, and historians, though probably not the Morning Star.
Yet, Brexit took place and showed itself “racist and nationalist”.
That’s more of a proof than an article in the US left populist Jacobin…
Chile: Boric has “pledged a new order based on left-wing populism and identity politics” – Wall Street Journal.
“New order based on left-wing populism and identity politics.” – Axel Kaiser. Wall Street Journal
A few years ago you could hardly open a left-wing journal without stumbling across an article about left-wing populism. “We are currently witnessing in Western Europe a “populist moment” that signals the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. The central axis of the political conflict will be between right- and left-wing populism.” argued one of the best known theorists and would-be strategist Chantal Mouffe. ” By establishing a frontier between “the people” and “the oligarchy,” a left–populist strategy could bring together the manifold struggles against subordination, oppression and discrimination.”
With wider international implications, she wrote, “The struggle for the “hegemonic struggle to recover democracy needs to start at the level of the nation state that, despite, having lost many of its prerogatives, is still one of the crucial spaces for the exercise of democracy and popular sovereignty.” For a Left Populism. 2018) With strong national “libidinal investment” in national identifications, “mobilisation” is needed around “a patriotic identification with the best and most egalitarian aspect of the national tradition.” (Page 71)
This “construction” or “federation” of the people could take shape, some claimed, around charismatic Leaders, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France insoumise in France, Pablo Iglesias and Podemos in Spain. Mouffe claimed in 2018 that, “Corbyn’s Labour is a social democratic party which is in the process of transforming itself by adopting a left populist strategy.” She continued, “What is important in the case of Britain is to see that the aim of Corbyn, and of Momentum, is to transform the Labour Party into a popular movement. ” (For A Left Populism’: An interview with Chantal Mouffe)
Those words seem culled from a remote era. The movement-party-rally (organised in its own metaverse, with virtual democracy) La France insoumise, whose Leader Mélenchon had come to similar conclusions, was in dialogue with Mouffe. He had at least the merit of emphasising the importance of material historical forces over the theorist and Ernesto Laulau’s theories on “floating signifiers” and creating discursive “chains of equivalence” to construct The People in its fight against the Oligarchy. Materially Mélenchon had had a fillip in recent days and now stands at 11% in French opinion polls for next year’s Presidential elections – still long from being able to govern France and to act as the “chaînon manquant” (missing link) between popular movements and state power.
Many on the French left have more interest at present in explaining the less than progressive aspects of the country’s identity, and the materially well-financed rightist media and its organic intellectuals, some formerly on the left. They have shifted, or been part of the shift in political debate about the ‘nation’ and the ‘republic’, including definitions of secularism, through the arrival of forces promoting the anti-immigration ideas of the xenophobic extreme right (Comment sommes-nous devenus réacs ? Frédérique Matonti. 2021). Matonti concludes with the observation that outgoing President Macron is himself engaged in poaching (braconnage) from the right’s repetoire, including classic themes on the ‘duties’ of the unemployed and cutting down on social security.
Podemos is in government with the Spanish Socialists, once denounced as part of ‘la casta’, the politician friends of the Oligarchy. Jeremy Corbyn remains Corbyn, outside the Labour Party.
Enter Chile....
President-Elect Boric Aims to Undo Chile’s Economic Progress
His wish list, which includes ending private pensions, would destroy Chile’s capital markets.
Axel Kaiser. Opinion. Wall Street Journal.
‘Chile will be the tomb of neoliberalism,” Gabriel Boric promised after being chosen as the far left’s presidential candidate in July. His 56% to 44% victory over conservative José Antonio Kast in Sunday’s election gives him a chance to fulfill that promise.
The election was a referendum on Chile’s past four decades. While Mr. Kast backed the principles and institutions that brought unprecedented levels of prosperity, his rival pledged a new order based on left-wing populism and identity politics.
Yet the most dangerous effects of Mr. Boric’s victory may well be seen in the new constitution. The election results may embolden the radical left that holds sway over Chile’s constitutional convention, which is expected to wrap up next July. The left may come up with a more aggressively populist draft than would have been the case if Mr. Kast had won. If Chileans approve such a constitution in next year’s plebiscite, their country’s fate as another failed Latin American nation will be sealed.
(Axel Kaiser: Kaiser works for Fundación Para El Progreso, founded by the businessman Nicolás Ibáñez Scott. El Mercurio newspaper has described him as Chilean liberalism’ main exponent. He is also the first Latin American to obtain first place in Mont Pèlerin Society’s Hayek Essay Contest.)
The Wall Street Journal is no doubt ‘the enemy’, but is Gabriel Boric quite the friend of left-wing populism that the neoliberal Bible says he is?
(Extracts)
Stephany Griffith-Jones, one of the most eloquent promoters of the role of the state and public banks in the equitable development of South American economies, joined a group of advisers to Gabriel Boric, Chile’s presidential candidate, before the start of his second round campaign for the Presidency. The decision to appoint Griffith-Jones – a professor at the University of Sussex and collaborator with Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz at Columbia University in New York – is proof that Boric build on not only ideas from the 2019 protest movement, but also experts close to Concertación and Nueva Mayoría, who led the centre-left governments of Chile’s slow transition from dictatorship.
It seems that Gabriel Boric is facing a problem. He is a candidate for change, a movement that has taken to the streets of Santiago to protest the neo-liberal model. But if he wins, he will come to power in a difficult budget situation that leaves little room for progressive budget policy…
Yes. At the moment the budgetary situation is very difficult. The fiscal deficit is already at 13% of GDP… Piñera went from one extreme to another in his response to the pandemic. He did nothing at first, and a lot of low-income people were in real trouble. This is where the first withdrawals from pension funds were introduced, to help low-income people in great difficulty. [Chile’s Congress authorised raids on the country’s privatised pension funds during covid, turning them into a “piggy-bank”, with about $50bn or 25% of their value withdrawn to date.] But then, in 2021, Piñera went to the other extreme. He gave generous support, perhaps too much, to many, even people who were not so poor. And consumption skyrocketed. Chilean GDP will grow this year between 11% and 12%. The economy is totally overheated.
What should be done?
Boric has committed himself to significantly reducing the budget deficit in one year and respecting the budget already approved by Parliament. It is a sign of his moderation. In the coming years, he wants to raise taxes gradually and increase the collection of existing taxes – higher direct taxes, and lower indirect taxes. Indirect taxes, such as value added tax, account for more than 50% of Chile’s total tax revenue, well above the OECD average. There is also a commitment to combat tax evasion, which in Chile is twice the OECD average, but this requires more tax inspectors.
…..
Boric is a European-style Social Democrat. I met him first at a conference to discuss the Scandinavian model of government. He has been more on the left, but he is aware of the current budget problems and is very open to discussions with all sides. That said, he is very committed to the need for redistribution.
….
Given the polarity and rejection of the system, do you think it can be a double-edged sword to enjoy the support of the main political figures from Concertación?
No. That’s very positive for Boric. Leftists will vote for him anyway. The problem is attracting the votes of most of those in the middle. Although the most important thing is to attract young people who demonstrate, but sometimes do not vote. Participation in the first round was very low. In the past, the center and the left always worked when they merged. It can be expected to be the same this time. Boric acknowledged the contribution of the Christian Democrats (PDC) and it was a very good move. He met Ricardo Lagos [centre-left president from 2000 to 2006] and Michelle Bachelet [centre-left President from 2006 to 2010, and from 2014 to 2018]. They were wonderful to him. Much of the center and left have already joined the campaign. And the Christian Democrats support him even though they say they would not enter government with him. It is also true that the fact that Kast is percieved as disastrous made the reunion easier…
…
Boric and his supporters are very committed to the ecological transition. Chile is lucky because it has lithium, which is essential for batteries, and copper, which is essential for the enerfy transition. In addition, there is great potential for further development of solar and wind energy. It is necessary to give priority to certain sectors for that transition, supporting their development, and Kast does not understand this. Development banks must be mobilized for the green transition. And financial regulation can be used to incentivize commercial bank loans to companies with low-carbon investments.
Public investment is key. For example, Boric wants to invest heavily in building an extensive rail network. Then there is hydrogen. Hydrogen can be produced sustainably in Chile because there are many ways to generate renewable energy. We can use green hydrogen in mining to have green copper.
This article in Libération today, written party in response to Mélenchon’s claim to a link with the victorious President, also argues that Boric, who comes from the radical left, is now more social democratic:
De quelle gauche est vraiment le nouveau président chilien Gabriel Boric ? Arthur Quentin
Issu de la gauche radicale, le vainqueur de l’élection présidentielle chilienne est régulièrement comparé à la figure socialiste Salvador Allende Mais pour sortir son pays du néolibéralisme dont il fut le laboratoire, la politique de Gabriel Boric sera bien plus social-démocrate.
Coming from the radical left the winner of the Chilean Presidential election is often compared to the socialist Salvador Allende. But to take his country away from the neoliberalism for which the country served as a laboratory, the policies of Gabriel Boris will be rather more social democratic.
The programme of the victorious Apruebo Dignidad coalition changed a lot during the in-between rounds. Several liberal economists have entered it, including former director of the Chilean Central Bank Roberto Zahler. “A zealous defender of fiscal austerity” according to Franck Gaudichaud. With their arrival, the tax reform making it possible to collect 8% of the GDP promised by the candidate Boric has already been revised downwards and set at 5%. Which does not seem like much to finance the welfare state of which the future president has made himself the defender.
In the neoliberal context that is that of Chile, Boric’s proposals are nevertheless considered to be very much on the left. Ending the quasi-private pension system, for example, is a step forward. But we should not expect to see flourish a pay-as-you-go system, similar to the French one, and in which no less than 13.6% of GDP is injected. Likewise, there are no plans to nationalise the immense reserves of copper or lithium which make Chile so rich. On the other hand, there will be a slightly more severe taxes on business turnover.
It is therefore difficult to assert, as the centre-right daily La Vanguardia does, however, that Gabriel Boric “takes up the legacy of the socialist overthrown by Pinochet”, who had in his time expropriated the owners of the copper mines and nationalised the banks. However, the newly elected president never ceases to pay tribute to Allende, whether by paraphrasing him in his victory speech or by portraying himself in front of his bust during a visit to the Chilean presidency, the day after his victory. This is (perhaps) a way of arousing, in his most left-wing supporters and probably disappointed future ones, a degree of benevolence towards his decisions.
This is a good sign:
The Victory of Gabriel Boric in Chile, “The way ahead will open for free women and men to build a better society”.
Salvador Allende. “Se abrirán las grandes alamedas por donde pase el hombre y la mujer libre para construir una sociedad mejor”.
The way ahead will open for free women and men to build a better society.
Reactions.
Spanish Socialist Party, PSOE – in government with Podemos.
PSOE@PSOE·Congratulations @gabrielboric! Your victory in the presidential elections is a victory that moves #Chile towards a more just, inclusive and sustainable future.
We will be with you on this path of progress. Good luck and success!
Government representative of Spain. Congratulations @gabrielboric for your victory in the Chilean presidential elections. The Chilean people move forward with hope towards a more just, feminist and environmental future. Our countries will continue to strengthen their relations, strengthening ties between Latin America and the EU.
Podemos
PODEMOS ANTE EL TRIUNFO DE GABRIEL BORIC EN LAS ELECCIONES PRESIDENCIALES DE CHILE.
¡Enhorabuena, Chile!
The Chilean people this Sunday held a crucial presidential election for the country and for all of Latin America. Two years after the social outbreak that gave rise to the constituent process that is currently underway, and after a first round that left out the traditional parties of the right and the Concertación, this electoral milestone has taken place in a context of deep polarisation. On the one hand, the far-right candidate José Antonio Kast, who has openly supported the Pinochet dictatorship and has shown himself against the constitutional process, has carried out a campaign marked by the language of fear, hatred and defamation. On the other hand, the leftist candidate Gabriel Boric, heir to social struggles and with a leading role in the constituent process, He has maintained a discourse of hope and defence of social justice and rights for all the Chilean people, with a real project for the future for the country. In recent days, these elections have become a question of the survival of democracy in Chile, with a great mobilisation of support from civil society and the international community.
With a 55% participation, the leftist candidate, Gabriel Boric, has prevailed with 55.86% of the votes over the far-right José Antonio Kast, who has obtained 44.14%. These data make him with the highest voting turn-out president in the history of Chile. Despite the news of a boycott of the public transport system by the government of Sebastián Piñera, the organisation and popular unity behind him demonstrate that only by its own efforts can the popular masses win. The discourse of hope, the consolidation of social advances, feminism and environmentalism has conquered over fear, deepening neoliberal policies and a regression to the times of the Pinochet dictatorship. With this result, Chile opens a new political stage that is historic for the country and for the world, which promises to bury Pinochet’s legacy once and for all.
Only six months remain for the presentation of a new constitutional text that will be voted on later in a referendum. A new Constitution that aspires and aims to recognise the rights of all Chilean women and to be the voice of the historically excluded. The popular will reflected in the ballot box is an indispensable support for this process, which the future president is called to care for and protect. In addition, it has to lead economic recovery after the impact of the pandemic and the social and institutional crisis that has dragged on since the Covid outbreak of 2019.
From Podemos we celebrate, deeply, the triumph of Gabriel Boric and the compañeras of Apruebo Dignidad , and we congratulate the Chilean people for the lesson in democracy that they have given to the world, demonstrating that history really is ours and is made by the people. The result is a reason for hope for all progressive and popular forces throughout Latin America and the world. Congratulations, Chile!
There is a good article in French on the site Europe Solidaires sans Frontières.
In Chile, Gabriel Boric has given an unprecedented victory to the left (Au Chili, Gabriel Boric offre une victoire inédite à la gauche).
The victory was sweeping. At the head of a vast alliance ranging from the Communist Party to the centre-left, the ex-deputy and former student leader Gabriel Boric, 35, won by 56% of the vote against the far-right candidate, José Antonio Kast. He embodies a new left, both moderate and at odds with the forces which have ensured the “transition to democracy”. The new president pledged during the campaign to end the neoliberal legacy of the dictatorship.
Gabriel Boric handles symbols well. On the evening of his victory in the primary of the left coalition “Apruebo Dignidad” for the Chilean presidential election, on July the 18th, he marked the occasion by concluding his speech with a nod to Salvador Allende. “Soon, in all the regions of Chile, the way ahead will open again for free man and woman to build a better society , ” he promised to his supporters.
The former socialist president of Popular Unity (UP, which brought together the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, from 1970 to 1973) had said this phrase in the Moneda palace, bombed during the military coup d’etat of Augusto Pinochet September 11, 1973. That day, the hope raised by the “Chilean way to socialism”, outlined by the compañero presidente , ended in blood.
Even if the context has changed, reconnecting with the memory of the thousand days of the UP government makes sense for the young candidate of the new Chilean left. At 35 (just the legal age to claim to govern the country), Gabriel Boric embodies the possibility of a turn to the left in Chile, after three decades of “pact transition” to democracy , and alternation between the Concertation democratic (the center-left of Michelle Bachelet) and the right (including the current head of state Sebastian Piñera). His victory constitutes a break in the electoral order that had been built since the return to pluralist elections in 1989.
Update, The Challenge of Chile
The election of Gabriel Boric, a left-wing president, has consequences far beyond the country’s borders.
Extract:
Yet I remain cautiously optimistic.
Partly, this derives from the exceptional qualities of Chile’s next president. Boric was forged in the student protests of 10 years ago—and has kept faith with the tenets of that struggle, averting the temptation of being corrupted and domesticated by those in power. He has also learned the value of flexibility. It is encouraging to see him so open to dialogue, to note his willingness to recognize mistakes and proclaim himself as someone—as he said in his victory speech—who listens more than he talks. Never underestimate the capacity to prevail of a leader with genuine compassion for those who suffer, who counts on the unique gift of courage and generosity from his fellow humans.
Another factor in Boric’s favor is that a Constitutional Convention (which he was instrumental in creating) is, at this very moment, discussing a new Magna Carta to replace the fraudulent Chilean Constitution pushed through in 1980 by Pinochet and that has hamstrung reforms ever since. The unprecedented process of reimagining how the nation should be governed, of how it can fulfill the dream of becoming a truly inclusive society, is being carried out by delegates who represent the immense diversity of the Chilean people. The convention has parity of male and female representatives, is presided over by an indigenous woman, and is on its way to liberating Chile from the persistent legal and ideological shackles of Pinochet’s legacy. It has also taken pains to make its deliberations participatory and community-based—a practice that coincides with and enhances Boric’s own instincts and experiences.
Equally promising for Boric’s success is that his triumphant rise comes at an auspicious moment for the Latin American left. Argentina, Bolivia, and Perú, the three nations bordering Chile, are currently ruled, however uncertainly and precariously, by left-wing administrations. Farther afield, the election of a socialist woman as president of Honduras and the likelihood that the progressive Lula da Silva will defeat Joao Bolsonaro (a buddy, by the way, of Kast) are other signs of major shifts on the horizon. Right-wing governments in Ecuador and Colombia are in trouble, with the possibility that the former M-19 guerilla Gustavo Petro, one of the front-runners for the Colombian presidency in next year’s elections, could pull off a startling win. And Boric’s fierce defense of human rights wherever they are violated and his commitment to democratic norms and institutions—which have already led him to criticize the dictatorship of the pseudo-Sandinista Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and the travesties of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro—could assist in a needed renovation and rethinking of the left in Latin America, helping to avoid the mistakes of previous revolutionary governments.
Finally, though, my belief that those who voted overwhelmingly for Boric may be able to meet, along with him, so many different challenges, is rooted in my personal existence. When I arrived in Santiago as a 12-year-old boy in 1954, born in Buenos Aires and raised in New York, I was soon entranced by the beauty of the land and the valor and wisdom of its people. In the decades that followed, I found a home in the vast movement for social justice that Chileans had built since independence, a movement that culminated in the democratically elected government of socialist Salvador Allende. And after the bloody 1973 coup that terminated the Allende experiment, I was amazed and inspired by how the country I had made my own managed to resist the dictatorship with enormous sacrifices and then oust Pinochet by peaceful means, initiating a transition to democracy that, with all its imperfections, has now found a leader who can help the people complete their journey toward freedom and equality.
……
Boris Johnson: the Butt of the Joke?
Le ridicule ne tue pas?
Has taking the piss ever finished off anybody?
Boris Johnson has got it in the neck:
Let’s look at historical precedent.
The Book of Esther begins with the Persian court of King Ahasuerus, ruler of the Persian Empire holding a 180-day banquet, initially for his court and dignitaries and afterwards a seven-day banquet for all inhabitants of the capital city, Shushan (Esther 1:1–9). Advanced radical scholars interpret these lines a historical fact told through a mixture of satire and buffoonery, that is, early pantomime.
King Xerxes reigned from his royal throne in the citadel of Susa, 3 and in the third year of his reign he gave a banquet for all his nobles and officials. The military leaders of Persia and Media, the princes, and the nobles of the provinces were present.
4 For a full 180 days he displayed the vast wealth of his kingdom and the splendour and glory of his majesty. 5 When these days were over, the king gave a banquet, lasting seven days, in the enclosed garden of the king’s palace, for all the people from the least to the greatest who were in the citadel of Susa. 6 The garden had hangings of white and blue linen, fastened with cords of white linen and purple material to silver rings on marble pillars. There were couches of gold and silver on a mosaic pavement of porphyry, marble, mother-of-pearl and other costly stones. 7 Wine was served in goblets of gold, each one different from the other, and the royal wine was abundant, in keeping with the king’s liberality. 8 By the king’s command each guest was allowed to drink with no restrictions, for the king instructed all the wine stewards to serve each man what he wished.
I can’t say I laughed much reading this story.
But the tale ends, according to some, happily.
There are many deaths.
Boris Johnson and his parties have featured in many jokes over the last few days.
There is of course this reality:
Whether or not the bellowing buffoon, the corrupt clown, and the dastard of Downing Street will go, remains to be seen.
Left (Apruebo Dignidad) Boric Beats Far-Right Kast in Historic Win in Chilean Presidential Election.
Good News. Really Good News!
Chileans take to the streets to celebrate leftist Boric’s election victory.
Gabriel Boric, who rose to prominence during anti-government protests, has defeated the right-wing populist Jose Antonio Kast. Tens of thousands of Boric supporters have been celebrating on the streets of Santiago.
Boric was a candidate in the 2021 Chilean presidential election. On 18 July 2021, Boric won the Apruebo Dignidad primary election in an upset against Recoleta mayor Daniel Jadue, receiving approximately 60% of the vote.[27] Prior to the primary election, Jadue had been favored over Boric in some national opinion polls.[28] Following his primary victory, Boric announced on Twitter that he would work together with Jadue during the general election in order to present a united front.[29] On 19 December 2021, Boric won the election with 56% of the vote,[7] with his inauguration due March 11, 2022.
Apruebo Dignidad, “Apruebo Dignidad (in English, Approve Dignity, AD) is a left-wing Chilean electoral coalition officially created on January 11, 2021.”
This was a good meeting on the background. Both Gonzalo and Kelly Zoomed from Chili.
Chile: how to build on two years of left-wing revolt to defeat the far right? Kelly Rogers.
The left in Chile is a complicated tapestry of parties and coalitions. In brief, Gabriel Boric is standing for Frente Amplio (Broad Front, FA), an electoral coalition formed in 2017, which brings together a large number of groups ranging from the centre left to the far left. It traces its roots to the student revolts of 2011, and many of the coalition’s MPs, including Boric, were student organisers in that period. The Trotskyist left in Chile is separate and small, though not insignificant, and the FA’s political centre is informed primarily by social movements and by a generation of activists who wanted to create a more radical electoral alternative to the Communist Party (an ironic aim, say many activists now, given more recent developments).
Boric himself is from Social Convergence, a group that merged from three smaller autonomist and libertarian left groups; slightly to its right is Revolución Democrática, the largest group in FA’s parliamentary delegation, a more reformist coalition that tends towards left social democracy; and alongside them sit a handful of other left groups: UNIR, Commons and Common Force. The Liberal Party, who are openly centrist, split from FA when it began to work more closely with the Communists.
This is also good background, Michael Chessum is also there.
London Review of Books. 3rd of December.
The left faces a series of strategic dilemmas. A successful candidate will need to offer stability after years of upheaval and division, but there is an obvious tension between stability and the politics of radical change. It remains to be seen how far Boric will moderate his programme in the hope of winning over centrist voters. The young leaders of the Chilean left have to work out how to replace the establishment without becoming it. If Syriza’s experience in Greece has been anything to go by, winning the election will only be the first test.
3 December
There is this as well…
Piers Corbyn filmed ‘encouraging public to burn MPs’ offices’.
Corbyn: Beyond a Joke.
Two prominent Brexiters are in the news.
Brexit minister’s shock resignation leaves Boris Johnson reeling
Lord Frost’s frustrated exit is yet another blow for PM struggling for control of his government
Boris Johnson was dealt another major blow to his leadership on Saturday night as it emerged that the man overseeing Brexit was resigning from the cabinet.
With Tory MPs already warning the prime minister that he would have to regain control of the government to survive as leader until the next election, it emerged that Lord Frost is to leave the government after frustrations over Brexit negotiations and broader concerns over the government’s Covid policies and tax increases.
The other was Piers Corbyn, a hard line Leave supporter whose own ‘concerns’ about government Covid policies have led him to become a public nuisance. For reasons which are not clear there is no restraining order on the man intent on carrying out what can be called harassment.
The latest story began with Tweets on behalf of Corbyn to parallel yesterday’s London demonstration against Vaccine Passports.
Things quickly developed.
This Story began to circulate widely, it is thought, when ‘Habibi’, believed to be the nom de guerre of David Toube, tweeted. (1)
Given the source not everybody was immediately sure about the claims. Well, it was there on the video. Was this really a shot taken yesterday? Yes.
The Media took it up:
As it began to sink in people had got quickly angrier and angrier.
Let us be clear: Piers Corbyn has, as Ian F points out, passed from confusionism, to red-brownism and conspiracy mongering about the New World Order, to outright fascism.
If the Police decide to prosecute and he gets slung in gaol him few people on the left will shed any tears.
BREAKING:
******
(1) Toube’s counter-extremism background is touched on at points in this article, principally about Maajid Nawaz The Charmed Life & Strange, Sad Death OF THE QUILLIAM FOUNDATION Nafeez Ahmed11 May 2021 to his credit David left Quilliam when it leading figure went off the rails in a big way. It is thought that it no coincidence that Toube’s interest in Piers Corbyn comes at a time when his former colleague Nawaz has got involved in disputes about Covid, “UNHAPPY times at LBC, where coronavirus is causing public dissension between its presenters. Iain Dale began a war of words with his radio colleague Maajid Nawaz last night, accusing Nawaz of spreading “deranged rubbish” about the pandemic. Nawaz had questioned the use of the Covid booster.” December the 14th.
Mass Demonstration Against Covid Passports.
Mass Covid Spreading Event.
In town at lunchtime today pubs and restaurants looked far from heaving. A lot more people have been wearing masks in the streets than have been in recent weeks. You can feel the mood is one of concern just by looking at people’s faces or chatting to those you know.
There have been reports in our local paper of outbreaks of the new variant of Covid.
Ambulance staff Christmas party leads to Covid outbreak
A staff Christmas party has led to several coronavirus cases among Suffolk’s ambulance workers in the last week, putting more pressure on the service.
Dozens of staff from the East of England Ambulance Service Trust (EEAST) celebrated at Trinity Park outside Ipswich on Thursday December 9.
The next day managers sent a message to staff saying someone had tested positive and anyone who attended the party should take daily lateral flow tests and upload the results to the Trust’s computer system for the next week.
According to one source the numbers testing positive after the party has been increasing all week, but EEAST would not say exactly how many were off with Covid.
“It could potentially cause a massive effect on staffing levels and pressures,” the source said, who knew of around eight cases.
This is happening across the country:
Look at this lot:
The cut of their gib alone…
Reports: Anti-lockdown protest.
Police are clashing with protesters amid a fresh wave of anti-vaccine protests in central London today (Saturday, December 18).
Protesters gathered in Parliament Square from 12pm this afternoon, where they have clashed with police before marching through central London.
Video footage shows police surrounded by jostling protesters at the ‘Freedom Rally’ in Parliament Square.
One video, shared on Twitter in the last hour, shows a group of masked police brandishing their batons as crowds of unmasked, shouting demonstrators converge on them.
A sign which reads: “A Passport is Control Not Freedom” can be seen among various placards and a Trump supporter flag in the crowd.
Thousands gather in London’s Parliament Square to protest against COVID-19 restrictions
A demonstration against mandatory vaccinations has been organised by “Take a Stand London”, “Save our Rights” and “The Great Reopening”, along with other protest groups from 12pm at Parliament Square in Westminster. The iconic location was said to be “rammed” with angry Britons on Saturday afternoon, with one witness saying on Twitter: “Parliament Square rammed with protestors!” The protest today saw people travel to the capital from across the UK and there are also rallies in Bournemouth, Blackburn, Gloucestershire, Bristol, Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast and the Isle of Wight.
And now news emerges of this:
French Presidential Elections Poll: Divided far-right (Le Pen and Zemmour) totals historic high at 29%.
Divided far-right (le Pen and Zemmour) totals historic high at 29%.
For those following French politics this is a thorough and must-read study.
The rival far right candidates, despite the issue of immigration coming at 31% third in the list of people’s concerns (after living standards, 40% and Covid 33%), seem to have been pushed aside by Vallière Pécresse of Les Républicaines. She is of the traditional (formerly ‘Gaullist’) centre to hard right and now looks to be the main challenger to outgoing President Emmanuel Macron.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon continues his decline below 10% and now stands neck-and-neck with the Green candidate Yannick Jadot The Socialist Party candidate and Mayor of Paris, Hidalgo fails to reach 5%. The rest of the left barely registers, the Communists have the same score as sovereigntist Frexit campaigner Dupont-Aignan. The Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste are at 1,5% as is left sovereigntist Montebourg. At 0,5% Lutte Ouvrière are at a level that is statistically irrelevant. Jean Lassalle despite nicking his party name from Chris Williamson (Résistons) is a centrist, far from the left.
Le Monde comments;
Two elements call for caution, however. First of all, abstention. According to our panel, 61% of those questioned declared themselves “certain to vote”, which is nine points less than in December 2016. Logically, “probable” and “potential” abstainers are 27% of those questioned. , compared to 18% five years ago. As the campaign progresses, the French will take an interest in the stakes of the ballot and some of these abstainers could decide to vote. It remains to be seen for whom.
Another very important data: electoral mobility. Our survey shows that in two months 30% of respondents have changed their minds and are part of those we call les changeurs” (literally, money changers/currency exchangers) . A significant figure.
.. if the total of all the candidates of the left, environmentalists and the extreme left is between 24% and 29.5%, it seems impossible to join together, or even co-exist, their programmes which diverge on points as crucial as ecological transition, nuclear power. , security or secularism, or even imagine that revolutionaries will line up behind reformists.
The left has been further shaken up by this announcement,
Former left-wing justice minister Taubira considering run for French presidency
France 24.
Christiane Taubira, a leading figure on the left of French politics and a justice minister in the Socialist government of former president François Hollande, said Friday she was considering running for president next year, and would give an update on her plans in January
In a video posted on her Twitter account Friday, Taubira said: “What matters is the fragility of daily life for millions of you, the uncertainties of the future, the fragmentations that are at work in French society.”
Christiane Taubira, a leading figure on the left of French politics and a justice minister in the Socialist government of former president François Hollande, said Friday she was considering running for president next year, and would give an update on her plans in January.
In a video posted on her Twitter account Friday, Taubira said: “What matters is the fragility of daily life for millions of you, the uncertainties of the future, the fragmentations that are at work in French society.”
Taubira comes across very well, “Taubira was nominated Minister of Justice by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, following the victory of François Hollande in the 2012 elections. At the time, she was one of the few black, female politicians within a prominent ministry in the French government. She soon emerged as one of the most outspoken and progressive voices in the government”.
Many people, including the writer of this Blog, like her.
However…. there are those who recall her Presidential candidacy in 2002, which some blame for fragmenting the vote at the time. “In 2002, Taubira was a Left Radical Party (PRG) candidate for the Presidency, although she did not belong to the Party; she won 2.32% of the votes.”
Taubira 2022 : le spectre d’une candidature sans projet
The left magazine Regards is not short on criticisms,
According to what generation you are from, Christiane Taubira does not evoke the same memories. There are those who remember her first steps in the National Assembly in 1993 when she supported vote of confidence in the Prime Minister of the time, a certain (centre-right) Edouard Balladur…. A year later, she campaigned alongside Bernard Tapie for the European elections, supported by the Left Radical Party (PRG).
There are those on the left who hated her in 2002 when she decided to run for president. The same people accused her of having weakened the left with her 2.32% in the first round, preventing, according to them, the Socialist Lionel Jospin (16.18%) from reaching the second round and having made the run off possible between Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen – often forgetting that among the other contenders for the Élysée Palace, there were other left candidates, Arlette Laguiller (5.72%), Jean-Pierre Chevènement (5.33%), Noël Mamère ( 5.25%), Olivier Besancenot (4.25%) or Robert Hue (3.91%).
Finally, there is the Christiane Taubira of the last two decades, the one whose voice and lyrical flights still resonate with delight in our ears, when she defended in 2001 the historic law recognizing trafficking and slavery as a crime against humanity or that in 2012 in favour of gay marriage (marriage pour tous). The same person who resigned, some time later, from the government of Manuel Valls to mark her political disagreement with his project to deprive people of French nationality (Note: initially for offences that, “constituant une atteinte grave à la vie de la Nation” serious damage to the life of the nation, essentially terrorism, after intense and complex controversy the law was not passed) – even if we forget a little too quickly that the only minister, in the Council of Ministers, who strongly opposed this announcement was George Pau-Langevin, in the Overseas portfolio.
..
Despite everything, she remains an icon of the left without really knowing the grounds or the reasons for it.
(full article via link above).
Regards is historically a Parti Communiste Français magazine, although it has a broader left basis at present.
Guardian:
Morning Star on Shropshire Tory Rout, “Labour is a Party that Hates itself.”
Starmer’s Critics Did Not Wait Long to Attack.
The Alt-left Tweets got going this morning:
Corbynista Extraordinaire Rachel writes,
Now we have Rosie Dee on the Squawking one’s Organ,
“Earlier this week, ‘Rosie Dee’ – a popular activist still in the Labour party – wrote in withering terms of Keir Starmer’s foolish squandering of an opportunity to actually oppose and set Labour apart from the Tories, when Starmer propped up Boris Johnson to save him from a Tory rebellion over ‘Covid passports’ and compulsory vaccinations. Starmer did not even demand any concessions from Johnson in return.
Now she analyses Labour’s catastrophic result in last night’s by-election as a ‘nightmare’ for the Tory PM – and for the Tory-lite Starmer:
Given the tone of some of Skwawky’s crew of commentators it’s not cups of Rosie Dee (Co-op 99) that they’ve been drinking,
It is not merely Keir Starmer who needs to go as leader. The whole rotten borough organisation of the Establishment reserves from Blair, Mandelson and Campbell et al through to the majority of the current PLP and their LA equivalents, along with their cadre of twelve year old management clones clogging up space which could be filled by people of talent and commitment to the values, both at head office and throughout the region’s all need to be expunged from the host body if that host is not to permanently expire.
We need a root and branch clearing out of the stables with room only for those prepared to do what it says on the tin when it comes to values and doing the business. No bodge jobs and no sodding waste of time and space careerists – just as applicable to some of the wastes of space self referencing so called ‘progressive’ (pseudo)’ left’ as it is with such equivalents on the right/extreme centre.
Editorial: How should we interpret the Tory humiliation in North Shropshire?
Morning Star – wholly independent of the Communist Party of Britain and owned by the co-op (not the Co-op that sells 99 Tea).
“Local factors may have played a part in the party’s collapsed appeal: the well-known Labour candidate of the last three general elections, Graeme Currie, was barred from standing for having shared social media posts supportive of Jeremy Corbyn and freedom for Palestine.”
Comment: there may be some truth in this claim,
Betrayed and abused’: Labour’s previous North Shropshire candidate not shortlisted for by-election
Nov 14, 2021 Shropshire Star,
An experienced Labour politician spoke of his “anger and revulsion” after being barred from running for the party in the North Shropshire by-election, suggesting it was partly because of his support for Jeremy Corbyn.
The Morning Star rushes to its own judgement:
“The anti-socialist stitch-up will have left a bad taste in the mouth, sapping Labour members’ will to campaign and reminding voters that Labour is a party that hates itself.“
The self-identifying Daily Paper of the Left is keen not to rejoice at the Tory defeat.
These local factors should not be of much comfort, however. For one thing, Labour’s anti-socialist purges and arbitrary disqualification of local members’ preferred candidates are Britain-wide: they are undermining the party everywhere.
For another, the stampede towards the Lib Dems is a sign of class politics in retreat.
Others would point to the Lib-Dem by-election machine’s efficient working of a constituency which has little, if any, record of class struggle, and where there was not a hope in hell of getting a Labour MP in.
The Labour leadership are likely to read the Lib Dem vote as confirmation of Keir Starmer’s view that the Tories are vulnerable on sleaze but the big challenges to the status quo represented by Corbynism and Brexit are in the past. That people want things as they are, but without Johnson.
Given that Johnson is a corrupt clown, a national populist whose election owed a lot to his personal appeal to the voters, what is wrong with landing a severe blow against him? The Lib-Dem victory undermined the popular bit of the ‘populism’. What could be better first step to getting rid of him and his party’s hold on office?
The Editorial concludes with words that could have been written any time during the last thirty years. It gives no reason to indicate that people have a clear idea of what they want, until enlightened by the Morning Star and whatever ‘radical alternative’ they, pro-Brexiteers who played their part in creating the status quo, back at the moment.
We cannot accept a return to “there is no alternative” politics when every development from the pandemic to climate change screams the need for a radical alternative from the rooftops.
But stopping it will mean rebuilding the power of organised labour step by step, workplace by workplace and community by community.
If that’s their trade union funding sorted, and everybody who wants something done about climate change in their camp, but how many divisions has the Morning Star’s friends in the CPG got in the workplace and community? A few thousand, counting fellow travellers….
Update.
Like this well-hard geezer, small businessman Steve Walker – the man they are calling the new Tony Greenstein…
“…the bigger disaster was that of Keir Starmer’s Labour. In an election created by the resignation of the previous Tory incumbent in a scandal, Labour didn’t just fail to win the seat but lost more than 56% of its vote share at the last election under the supposedly unpopular Jeremy Corbyn.
Starmer and his factional allies have, of course, been vigorously rewriting history to suggest that Labour lost the 2019 general election because of Corbyn’s supposed unpopularity ‘on the [mythical] doorstep’ and greeted Starmer’s accession as the turning point that would show how much the country was clamouring for their diseased version of Labour.…
Starmer’s taste-free snake oil has no appeal when it comes to the actual event of putting an ‘X’ on parliamentary ballot paper.
Tragically, a country in desperate need of real change has none on offer at a parliamentary level. Starmer’s destruction of the one vehicle of hope for that change is unforgivable and last night voters got the chance to deliver him the message yet again.”
From the Comments..
“I see Starmer’s policy of expelling all socialists on the pretext of antisemitism and persuading all the disillusioned Tory voters to vote for a Socialist free Zionist party of nodding dogs has failed. Big surprise that isn’t it.”
Conservatives lose North Shropshire seat they held for nearly 200 years.
Now, you see, they hang me high,
and the people passing by,
stop to shake their fists and curse;
so ’tis come from ill to worse.
A Shropshire Lad. Alfred Edward Housman
And now, lad, all is over,
‘Twixt you, your love and the clover..
Max Beerbohm – after Housman.
The Liberal Democrats have won a stunning victory in the North Shropshire byelection, taking what had previously been a safe Conservative seat by a margin of nearly 6,000 votes, and capping a disastrous few weeks for Boris Johnson.
Helen Morgan, the Lib Dem candidate, won 17,957 votes, ahead of the Conservatives’ Neil Shastri-Hurst, on 12,032, a majority of 5,925. Labour’s Ben Wood was third, with 3,686 votes. Turnout was 46.3%.
More good news:
Already the Alt-left is whingeing.
Update.
My knowledge of Shropshire is limited, Houseman’s poem, a visit to Iron Bridge (only a few years ago), walks on the Shropshire Hills and Long Mynd. So here are some informed commentaries on the result.
Lib Dem campaigners reported that Brexit was hardly mentioned on the doorstep in North Shropshire, with voters instead reporting a more general malaise with the Government and Johnson’s party.
In particular, Johnson’s dire handling of the scandal of the Downing Street Christmas parties held last year while Coronavirus restrictions were in place – so-called ‘partygate’ – was raised repeatedly by voters, many of whom appeared to have developed a visceral dislike of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet.
While in 2019 the Conservative Party prospered by portraying itself as helping voters overthrow a hated established order, it has now become the epitome of everything those same voters dislike.
These contradictions in the Brexit project were always inherently unstable. It never made sense that an Eton-educated Telegraph columnist should lead the charge against the established order from the safety of his £3 million Islington townhouse.
One hopes this is the case:
However, for a while it worked. For a while, Johnson appeared to be achieving the impossible by re-writing British politics in his own image. But, after last night’s result, the very foundations of the Conservative Party’s entire political project risk crumbling.
Both the size of the swing (the party overturned a Tory majority of 22,949) and the nature of the seat itself – it is rich in homeowners and Leave voters, and has very few Remainers or graduates, making it very friendly Tory terrain and inauspicious turf for the Liberal Democrats – make it one of the biggest by-election shocks in decades (the Lib Dem majority is 5,925).
It will send shivers of fear through the Conservative Party. Tory MPs in seats that are more favourable to the Liberal Democrats than this – a category that includes essentially almost every seat that is not called “North Shropshire” – will fear that this is a sign that they are headed for calamity. MPs in the Conservative-Labour battleground, meanwhile, will worry that they, too, have reasons to be fearful.
The biggest immediate consequence will be to further reduce the likelihood of a new
Chris Williamson Receives ‘Lifetime Achievement’ Award at ‘Real Labour Heroes’ Ceremony.
‘Labour Hero’: Chris Williamson MP hanging out with George Galloway and Lee Stranahan (currently Sputnik, formerly Breitbart).
Like the latest doings of the Stop the War Coalition the Real Labour Heroes event may have passed many readers by.
There are no doubt words to express one’s feelings at the “Lifetime Achievement Award” to Britain’s second most famous Vegan (after Morrisey):
It seems, despite everything, that there is some corner of the left that actually admires Williamson.
Hell’s bells that’s only an explanation, it’s not an excuse.
Cde Archie observes,
i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself in the wires
why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense
The lesson of the moth,
Tina Werkman, more commonly known as Tina Wekmann, will be familiar to readers of this Blog.
She is one of the people who signed the below:
Ace Reporter the Squawking one posted the details a few days before the ceremony.
Activist responds to suspension by organising awards for ‘Labour heroes’ expelled by party.
Skwawkbox.
Already confirmed to attend the evening are world-renowned film director Ken Loach, black Jewish activist Jackie Walker, straight-talking former miner John Dunn, Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) co-chair Leah Levane, Bakers’ union leader Ian Hodson, left-wing Jewish councillor Jo Bird, harassed and bullied Councillor Pamela Fitzpatrick, JVL activists Graham Bash, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Diana Neslen, Carole Vincent, Joe Attard and the son of Riva Joffe, who will be speaking on behalf of his mother – another JVL activist – who died two weeks after she was suspended. Awards for the night include Suspension of the Year and Auto-exclusion of the Year.
This Blog is not going to comment on the personalities cited above who already have their detractors and defenders a-plenty.
But Chris Williamson?
WHAT’S WRONG WITH CHRIS WILLIAMSON?
RED TORY
I want to start with Williamson’s politics. The #IStandWithChrisWilliamson online army see him as being under attack because he represents the left of the party. How does that claim stand up?
1. The time Williamson entered into coalition government with the Tories and drove through privatisation
Chris Williamson entered politics in his thirties via local politics in Derby, eventually becoming leader of Derby council. How did that go? He formed an alliance with the Conservatives, demolished council flats to make way for a 5* hotel, and supported PFI initiatives for housing, which he later said did not deliver value for money.
You are having a bleeding laugh.
Andrew Murray (Stop the War Coalition) “NATO ….is trying to seize Ukraine.”
Andrew Murray in 2014. (1)
Somebody asked what was the Stop the War Coalition’s position on the Ukraine recently.
Most people had long forgotten that the StWC existed.
It did not take long for the Twitter Newshounds to get out their gumshoes and find out what they are doing…
Andrew Murray is in a serious campist mood.
Tariq Ali’s friend and Deputy President of the Stop the War Coalition has written this for the group’s site:
BIDEN’S THREATS AREN’T ABOUT PROTECTING UKRAINE’S INDEPENDENCE. THEY’RE ABOUT EXTENDING US HEGEMONY
The danger of war presently threatens in three parts of the world – in the far east, between the US and its allies and China; in the Middle East, between Iran and the US and/or Israel, and in eastern Europe, between Russia and NATO.
The factor common to all three is the involvement of the USA. Each has contingent reasons for tension, but the underlying factor is the attempt by Washington to maintain and prolong its pretensions to global hegemony and “world leadership”. It is long-standing and bipartisan policy in the US to resist the rise of any power which could even regionally dispute US domination.
…..
Today, it is NATO that is trying to seize Ukraine by means of moving NATO right up to Russia’s borders. Already British troops are stationed in the Balkans and NATO military have moved eastwards into Poland. Biden’s threats to Putin are not about protecting Ukraine’s independence but about extending US hegemony and preventing the emergence of Russia as a rival power. While not formally bringing Ukraine into NATO the US is effectively treating it as a military partner, directed against Russia.
…
The anti-war movement must not be taken in by the anti-Russian rhetoric. One does not have to admire Putin or his regime (it is Tories who welcome corrupt Russian money in London) to acknowledge the historic ties between Russia and Ukraine and the problems left behind by the break-up of the USSR. If there is conflict over Ukraine, it is the west that bears most of the blame.
Rather than moving arms and armies eastwards, the need is to revive the Minsk process and arrive at a democratic and peaceful settlement to the crisis. Stop the War stands against the sabre rattling and against the British government’s participation in this dangerous war drive.
President: Brian Eno
Deputy Presidents:
Jeremy Corbyn
Andrew Murray
Does anybody, part from Tariq Ali, take Murray seriously?
Over 150 people attended the meeting to hear Richard Brenner (Solidarity with the Antifascist Resistance in Ukraine), Lindsey German (Counterfire), Boris Kagarlitsky (Institute for globalization studies and social movements), Andrew Murray (Communist Party of Britain), Alan Woods (International Marxist Tendency) and Sergei Kirichuk (Borotba) discuss the threat of fascism in Ukraine, the role of imperialism in the current situation and the need for a campaign in support of the antifascist resistance in Ukraine to provide a counterweight to the lies and distortions of the Western media.
French Communist Party Standing for Presidential Election..
“A fading star that is nearly politically dead” but one which continues “to radiate”. Bernard Lazar description of the Parti Communiste Français in 2005, still has some force today (Le Communisme une Passion Française).
In the first decade of the new millenium, if the Communist Robert Hue got only for 3,4 % of the Presidential ballots in 2002, and their list 4,8 % in Parliamentary elections, going down from 35 to 21 MPs, they still had real influence. PCF MPs had been part of the left “gauche plurielle” under Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin (1997 to 2002), “co-habiting’ with the right-wing President Jacques Chirac.
At the same time the radical left which some saw as the successors of the PCF, had an influence. The period saw the arrival of ‘alter-globalisation’ movements, historic highs for far-left candidates – 5,72% for Trotskyist Arlette Laguiller (Lutte Ouvrière), 4,25 % for Olivier Besancenot (Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire) in the same contest as Hue – and left-wing greens.
Many people considered that, as these election results suggested, if the PCF was declining other parties and movements of the radical left were taking its place. Phillipe Raynaud described this world as the plural far-left (extrême-gauche plurielle), covering a vogue for theorists like Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Toni Negri, revived Trotskyist organisations – the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste was formed in 2009 – to the influential association, ATTAC (L’Association pour la taxation des transactions financières et pour l’action citoyenne), which pioneered alter-globalisation before the arrival of Occupy!
But, Raynaud noted, much of its energy was negative: against economic liberalism, against both the liberal right and reformist left. Beyond this protest the writer, sympathetic to political liberalism, suggested that the left may have been able to express a wish for alternatives to capitalism that have survived the collapse of Communism, but had yet to move beyond reacting to the crises of globalisation and capitalism. ( L’Extrême Gauche plurielle. Entre démocratie et révolution. 2006).
Watching debates on the French radical left over the last weeks there was none of this ebullience. It has long been accepted that the left has to be more than a reaction against economic liberalism, and Reaction, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie being only one of many writers to make the point (Sortir de notre impuissance politique 2020). But many would be than happy were they in the position of they were in over a decade ago when radical movements from the left simply had an impact.
The Communists are not in a happy place either.
Fabien Roussel returns to the fundamentals of the PCF
For the first time since 2012, the Communist Party, Parti Communiste Français (PCF) is presenting its own presidential candidate, its national secretary, Fabien Roussel.
Since 2012, the Communists have campaigned alongside Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The alliance took shape in the Front de gauche pour changer d’Europe in the 2009 European elections when the left populist was the leader of a small break-away from the Parti Socialistes, the Parti de gauche. They got 6,5 %, above the level needed to have MEPs. In 2012 PCF members voted in favour of Mélenchon as a Presidential candidate, heading the Front de Gauche on a left-wing programme. At 11,1 % in the first round, way beyond the score the Communist Marie-George Buffet had got, running independently, in 2007 – 1,93 %.
In 2017 despite opposition from the PCF leadership whose experience of working with Mélenchon was, it is reported, not always a happy one, the majority of party members voted to back the Presidential bid of the man now leading the new party/movement/rally La France insoumise. He came Fourth in the first round, with an impressive 19,6 %.
That the PCF had changed its electoral position after a democratic internal vote of the membership indicated a very public break with the historic practice of ‘democratic centralism’ which guaranted the victory of the leadership. In 2018 the main party ‘line’ document was also rejected by card-carriers. At the XXXVIIIe Congress Secretary Pierre Laurent left his post and was replaced by Fabien Roussel, now candidate for the Presidency. What remained of the bloc with Mélenchon, the Front de Gauche, was dissolved.
The return to full PCF independence led to PCF list for the European elections in 2019, which got 2,5 % and no MEPS. This follows continuing decline in municipal politics.
La France insoumise (LFI), has lost an ally in the seasoned activists and backing from the (remaining) Communist municipalities and councillors. For the Presidential elections this means that Mélenchon’s it is struggling to collect the 500 signatures of elected officials required to enter the official race for the Head of State. At the beginning of December, LFI had only got around 300 names for Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
The PCF has around 40 000 members, and a large number of real, not ‘virtual’ activists with roots in the working class, associative life and municipal politics. If there are no formal tendencies in the party, there are groupings, ‘courants’ of some serious weight. They also include a small group La Riposte which has ‘links‘. with the British ……Socialist Appeal. (Courants actuels). The PCF, if you watch their videos, live transmissions, and read their literature have a serious and appealing left programme. In competition with 6 other left candidates for next April’s Presidential election.
The PCF’s runner Fabien Roussel stands at around 2% in the opinion polls.
Former leader calls for support for Mélenchon and gets silenced:
Has the far left overtaken the PCF?
The two candidates of the radical left, Nathalie Arthaud (Lutte Ouvrière) and Philippe Poutou (Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste) both poll at 1%.
‘Anti-Colonial’ Cult Black Hammer Unites with Proud Boys in anti-Vaxx Campaign.
‘Anti-Colonial’ Cult now in Bloc with Proud Boys.
If you thought the latest turns and twists of former radical leftist Piers Corbyn were gut wrenching bizarre take a cop at this. Black Hammer is a US ‘anti-colonial’ cult. The Proud Boys are authentic fascists.
Black Hammer Org Forms Coalition With Proud Boys to Stand ‘Against Fauci’s Mandate and the Left’.
An anti-capitalist group that has been leading protests at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Headquarters has officially formed a coalition with the Proud Boys to stand together “against Fauci’s mandate and the left.”
Black Hammer describes themselves as an “anti-colonial organization that exists to take the land back for all Colonized people worldwide!” However, as Gateway Pundit has previously reported, they have been protesting alongside Trump supporters.
Though their politics seem to fall mostly on the left, the group’s commander Gazi Kodzo has previously told Gateway Pundit that there is nothing more important to them than opposing vaccine mandates.
On Monday, Black Hammer announced the new coalition — and faced swift backlash from the left.
……
“BLM and Antifa goons immediately took to Twitter to decry our organization, and our work feeding the homeless from Atlanta, to Chicago, to Los Angeles, to Nairobi, in Kenya,” Black Hammer said in a statement to Gateway Pundit.
“Back in January, it was Black Hammer who declared war against Antifa terrorists, who were burning down Black and Brown Communities. Now, less than a year later, we are blessed to be building bridges between working class and poor people of color and working class and poor white people to stand up for our Constitutional rights,” the statement continued. “If there was any doubt that Black Hammer is the vanguard against Big Pharma and the fascist left-wing regime, we have closed out the year brushing these doubts to the roadside.”
The news article from Gateway continues and concludes with a statement from the cult, *
“The year 2022 only promises bigger and more exciting developments for Black Hammer. Through incalculable odds, fighting against liberal censorship, jail time, and social media woke mobs, Black Hammer emerges at the front of a glorious movement taking the world by storm,” the statement added.
“We know that this coalition will keep Antifa out of our communities, and the jab out of our veins,” Commander Gazi said.
Members of the group were recently arrested and had their guns and bibles seized during a prayer event just before a big planned protest against the CDC.”
Background:
The Black Hammer site and programme:
BLACK HAMMER’S FOUR PRINCIPLES OF UNITY
Views from their numerous critics:
The Devil Wears Dashikis: An Exposé on the Black Hammer Cult (Pt. 1) 13.9.2021.
The demagogic YouTuber known as Gazi Kodzo wanted to be “the leader of the anti-white revolution.” Instead they may go down as one of the more repulsive cult leaders in recent Black history
Mira Fox September 2021.
Anne Frank trending on Twitter is rarely a good thing. From January to May this year, Black Hammer, which calls itself a “revolutionary organization” working for “all colonized people worldwide,” tweeted monthly statements condemning the most famous victim of the Holocaust as a “colonizer” and a “bleach demon.” In one video, Gazi Kodzo, the founder of the organization, says “Anne Frank is white, and white equals colonizer.” He later calls her a “parasite.” Another post features a photo of “The Diary of a Young Girl” next to a fire, implying it will be burned.
The Proud Boys is an American far-right neo-fascist and exclusively male organisation that promotes and engages in political violence in the United States.
” Gateway, “The Gateway Pundit espouses politically conservative world view that support conservative positions on most issues, including abortion, national defense, small government, second amendment rights, tax policy, individual freedom and Constitutional values.”
Morning Star Says Labour’s Poll Boost, “Almost Meaningless”.
Labour Boost “Almost Meaningless”: Morning Star Hearkens Back to a ‘People’s Brexit’.
At the accession of Boris Johnson, the patricians, men and women, were at the height of their good fortune. Society and the voters recognised their superiority, which they themselves pretty calmly took for granted. They owned not only titles and estates, but donors to his cause had seats in the House of Peers, and a preponderant say in the House of Commons. There were a multitude of Government places and contrats, and not merely these, but “paid advocacy” flourished, which, until found out, members of his Party in the Palace of Westminster took not much shame in receiving. It was the good time for the Conservatives. Small blame to them if they took and enjoyed, and over-enjoyed, the prizes of politics, the pleasures of social life.
Others, sprung from the same class, took a critical view of Britain’s Prime Minister.
In June 2019, Hastings described Boris Johnson as “unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification…[his] premiership will almost certainly reveal a contempt for rules, precedent, order and stability…If the price of Johnson proves to be Corbyn, blame will rest with the Conservative party, which is about to foist a tasteless joke upon the British people – who will not find it funny for long. (Max Hastings)
“Like many showy personalities, he is of weak character. I recently suggested to a radio audience that he supposes himself to be Winston Churchill, while in reality being closer to Alan Partridge.”
Others extend this dim view of the Prime Minister to an equally dark judgement on the leader of the Labour Party.
The Morning Star opines today that Labour should take cold comfort from their rise in the polls (Editorial: As Johnson freefalls, Labour’s poll lead is almost meaningless.
Most of the recent polls show more of a shift from the Tories to the “don’t knows” than to the Labour Party, many of them electors who voted Conservative in 2019 and for Brexit in the 2016 referendum.
Some had previously voted Labour in 2017, when Jeremy Corbyn promised to honour the EU referendum result.
They have not forgotten Labour’s betrayal of that pledge in 2019 nor the name of the chief betrayer — Starmer. They don’t trust Starmer’s subsequent disavowal of any intention to take Britain back into the EU.
Who can blame them, when he has surrounded himself with shadow cabinet members and advisers whose commitment to the pro-big business, pro-market EU remains undimmed?
Editor-in-Chief Dave Spart continues,
Which brings us to the principle reason why Starmer’s bubble is just so much hot air. For many people, there is more to life and politics than Tory lies and hypocrisy, past breaches of Covid rules and even EU membership.
What is Labour saying about rising gas and electricity bills? What about Britain’s multi-faceted housing crisis? How can we upgrade our local and public services? Where should the money come from? How can we combat domestic violence? What about fairness and rights at work? What more can be done to counteract global warming?
In truth, the Labour leadership has nothing to say that is much different from the Conservatives, nothing to inspire young people and no vision of a fundamentally fairer society.
The harping on about “pro-EU” Starmer advisers and the Referendum reflects on thing: the daily was virulently pro-Leave. They claimed that quitting was a breakthrough, one that the left and labour movement would flourish in if everybody agreed to accept the result, knuckled down, and built socialism in a free sovereign Britain. Given that a section of the bourgeoisie and finance capital, and the national populist wing of the Tory Party were better placed to benefit in a Brexit they engineered this was a fantasy. A toxic one that encouraged the Conservatives in the ballot box and afterwards.
It looks as if the Morning Star still sports Widower and Widow’s Weeds at the unexpected failure of a People’s Brexit, heartily backed by the Labour Party, to happen after their successful support for a Leave Vote, along with Boris Johnson and his Party.
This is what the Communist Party of Britain believed to be close to the Morning Star, said about Labour’s 2019 Defeat,
Britain’s Communist Party blames Labour’s “Stop Brexit” stance for election defeat. December 2019.
The Labour Party secured its election defeat by shifting to a “Stop Brexit” stance, Britain’s Communist Party says.
Addressing an extended meeting of the CP political committee Monday, General Secretary Robert Griffiths said that other factors in Labour’s general election defeat should not be seized upon to obscure this “undeniable and overriding” fact.
This will be a Brexit in name only at a cost of around £33 billion ($43 billion USD)—not the ‘people’s Brexit’ that would allow a British government to support strategic industries, take transport and energy fully into public ownership, reform public procurement rules, slash Value Added Tax, regulate the labour market, and raise funds for massive investment in housing and economic infrastructure.”
For those who recall the still-born People’s Brexit idea here is another version in the House of Commons:
A PEOPLE’S BREXIT EDM (Early Day Motion)13: tabled on 21 June 2017
Tabled in the 2017-19 session.
That this House believes that the UK leaving the EU gives the opportunity for a People’s Brexit; further believes that the UK should make use of the opportunity to bring health services, railways services and postal services fully under public management and ownership; urges the Government to require procurement contracts let by public authorities to give preference to British businesses, to introduce a fair points-based immigration system, to establish devolved boards to assess local needs and capacity for immigration, to make provision about the priority accorded to British citizens for the allocation of local authority-owned housing…
Mann, JohnLHopkins, Kelvin Mr Jim Godsiff, Mr Roger Hoey, Kate Stringer, GrahamLabour Signed on5 July 2017
The ‘People’s Brexit’, in any version, never happened, and was never going to happen.
Does the Man at the Helm of the ‘Daily Paper of the Left’ have an alternative for the present?
China:
The country, according to him, is evidence that “you can run a society without surrendering to the idea that the market is always right”.
Labour Poll Booster.
At the height of the reign of Boris Johnson all was going swimmingly. People occupied with their every-day work or pleasure: my lord and lady hunting in the forest of Saint James, or dancing in 10 Downing Street, or bowing to their Merry Johnson Highnesses, as they pass in to dinner.
Hebdomadally one could espy the citizens’ wives and their daughters looking out from the balconies ; and the burghers over their beer and Mumm, rising up, cap in hand, as the cavalcade passes through London with torch-bearers, trumpeters blowing their lusty cheeks out, and sciuadrons of jack-booted lifeguards girt with shining cuirasses, and bestriding thundering chargers, or halting, mayhap, at Master Mogg’s town house of Monplaisir, which lies half-way between the Palace of Westminster, the Orrery of the Anglosphere and the Heliport for the sennight voyage to Marabella.
Those days are passed….
There are people who compare the latest episode in the Boris Johnson saga to Panto. Laugh at dotty William Moggy, boo and hiss the evil Bojo, and cheer on every new twist and turn in the Christmas Quiz, Party and Downing Street orgy. The fruit of our imaginations has taken shape in actual Christmas Pantomimes, “Most of the action in the show apparently takes place in a version of the expensively constructed Downing Street media room. And many other pantomimes across the country are joining in. In Glasgow, starring Elaine C. Smith Cinderella In the King’s Theatre, the script is filled with references to hypocrisy in imaginary celebratory ceremonies and high places.” (Dame Blame Game: Now Jokes On Boris Johnson As Panto Stars No. 10 ‘Party’ Joke)
Labour races to nine-point lead in polls in wake of sleaze controversies at No 10
Labour has its biggest lead since 2014 while a large majority of voters now think Johnson should resign.
Yet not everybody on the left is full of Christmas cheer at the moment:
Starmer: Only In The Lead Because He’s Not Boris Johnson
Keir Starmer, you are utterly intolerable. You lead in (some) polls simply because you are not Boris Johnson. That must feel good. You’re ahead because the other guy is an arsehole, and an absolute disaster. Not because of anything that you have done, but because the alternative is utterly detestable.
You see, Keith, I don’t see you as the lesser of two evils, because that’s still evil, Sir. You are six of one, and that loathsome stockpile of pissed-up inadequacy Johnson is half-a-dozen of the other.
My despair for where we find ourselves now is only equalled by my anger for the establishment bootlickers that gave us Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and Sir Keir Rodney Starmer.
They say “you get what you vote for”, and while that’s not completely untrue, a vast majority of us, the people, haven’t voted for either Starmer or Johnson to do anything from running a stall at a village jumble sale to running the country into the ground.
But you know how our ‘democracy’ works.
Frankie Howerd wisely recommended not mocking the afflicted
So we will not.
Éric Zemmour and Fascism.
Les Zouaves, Far Right Thugs Backing Zemmour.
One of the features of Éric Zemmour’s candidacy for the Presidential election has been the entry in force of the different factions of the French far-right behind his campaign. For many this illustrates that there is cross-over between his national populism and fascism. That while not backed up by a totalitarian mass party Zemmour and his ideas are part of the “fachosphère.”
A few voices disagree. They say that the polemicist is a “creature of the Establishment” and that “Zemmour indeed sounds like a fascist and has the ideas of a fascist (De quoi Zemmour est-il le symptôme morbide ? Ugo Palheta) but unlike his electoral opponent Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally party, he has no direct link with the French fascist tradition” (Éric Zemmour is no fascist – he’s the creature of the French establishment). Not only does he not come, as Marine Le Pen does , from a venerable extreme-right lineage but Philippe Marlière claims that the candidate embodies the “universalism” of the French republican tradition that the upper crust holds to. This is one whose claims to colour-blindness and globally valid values, liberty equality and fraternity, are a Smoke scéen to squash ethic differences and act as a cover for discrimination. More. The Open Democracy contributor claims that ” a racist like Zemmour can find in assimilationist republicanism a handy tool to exercise his hatred of Muslims and foreigners.”
There is a place for discussion about what has been called a Particularity (French Republicanism) that claims to be a Universalism. There is a debate about how French culture has become dominated by a series of reactionary ideas, both traditional – and confusionist mixtures of red and brown, paralleling the British Spiked – as advanced in the stimulating, Comment sommes-nous devenus réacs. by Frédérique Matonti. 2021. An calling Zemmour part of the Establishment is itself ambiguous. If his background lies in the elite, he has attracted prominent support from those on the periphery, including Gilets Jaunes such as Jacline Mouraud, the protest movement many of Marlière’s friends on the French radical left welcomed at at one point.
A more thorny issue about what the London based academic asserts about Zemmour’s Jewish heritage, “In fact, Zemmour acts like a typical ‘French Israelite’; an expression that encapsulates Jewishness as a religion, not as a broader cultural identity.” One leaves it to others to discuss this in depth but while there is little doubt that the candidate uses his own take on assimilation to attack Muslims it is far from clear how “typical” this is of “French Israelites”.
The Open Democracy polemic misses a more important point. Zemmour is not located within any form of mainstream ‘establishment’ republicanism: his ‘questions’ about the innocence of Dreyfus, his defence of Vichy – the executioner of the 3rd Republic – rule that out. Bringing the issue of republican universalism when we try to get to grips with the leader of his own party, La Reconquête, (a pre-republic name if ever there was one) obscures the nature of his debt to the anti-Enlightenment anti-French Revolution tradition.
Zemmour draws on central themes of the classic French extreme right. They include an appeal to ideas about the importance of what can be called La Terre and Les Morts (the Soil and the Dead). The threat posed by the Grand Replacement, immigration, indicates a bond to an old tradition of the far-right. This is associated not just with the author of that phrase, Maurice Barrès but to the founder of Action française, Charles Maurras and his loathing of a “la France métissée“, racial mixing. Maurras was the most explicit opponent of the republic you could possibly imagine. Action française called the Republic and Marianne La Gueuse (the harlot). Their leader was a ‘Monarchist’ (the inverted commas indicate the lack of a serious possibility in the 20th century of restoring the French Monarchy) who ended up collaborating with the Nazi occupation.
Zemmour in his most recent book, La France n’ pas dit son dernier mot (2021), traces his idea of a heroic French nation back to the early mediaeval Merovingian kings. A few years before he stated that, “Ignoring the lessons of the past and forgetting the virtues of its history, France is wrecking its state in the name of human rights and the unity of its people in the name of universalism.” («Ignorant les leçons du passé et oubliant les vertus de son histoire, la France saborde son état au nom des droits de l’homme et l’unité de son peuple au nom de l’universalisme.» Charles Zemmour et Eric Maurras, a title chosen by Libération no doubt to illustrate the two figures similarity). This is about as far from “republican universalism” as you could possibly get.
Zemmour is, many political commentators and analysts agree, not just a product of moral panic, and a shift to the right in French politics, important though that is. How can we explain his arrival ?
The Contretemps article by Ugo Palheta Marlière uses as the basis of his Open Democracy piece goes so far as suggest that the French bourgeoisie in some senses “needs” his ilk to keep the political show going, helping to ward off any real challenge to the system. In this way Zemmour is the creation of these power engaged in “la fabrication du personnage médiatique. Why? For Palheta he represents for fractions of the bourgeoisie “une possible solution de rechange” (an convenient alternative). It seems that the bosses look for a variety of agents capable of defending the social order by any means necessary (“une variété d’agents capables de défendre l’ordre social et de favoriser l’accumulation du capital, par tous les moyens nécessaires.”) They use people who appear independent, untainted with association with the discredited existing parties to keep capital accumulation working by any means necessary. Enter the first Presidential campaign of Macron. Enter Zemmour in this campaign also supported by a layer of top Bosses and welding neo-liberal economics, scapegoating Muslims, and a “ backlash idéologique anti-égalitaire.”
All of which, Palheta claims, is needed to fight some large anti-racist demonstrations, and powerful “mobilisations féministes.” The Lille University academic is a member of the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste and the Fourth International.
The right wing shift in public opinion in France has many causes, but accounting for it in terms of the media, intellectuals, and their relationship to well-financed operations by the wealthy is not a fruitful avenue. Deep changes, such as de- industrialisation, and the fall of Official Communism, have weakened the core voting bloc of the left. Post-post-Fordism, the kind of society portrayed in novels like Leurs enfants après eux (2018) by Nicolas Mathieu and autobiographical studies like Retour à Reims (2011) by Didier Eribon grapple better with the terrain on which the far right has flourished than accounts of the doings of media empires or national politics.
The fact that Zemmour is, as Marlière has pointed out before, adept at communication techniques ( which one might call “rompu à l’exercice médiatique” masks the fact that people have to be willing to listen to this message in the first place. Zemmour scores highly on issues of immigration (38%) , and nearly the same percentage (37% on ‘insecurity’, not feeling safe, worries about crime and precarious living conditions (France Info. 9.12.21). Both suggest that structural mechanisms of solidarity are not working, not that everybody is frightened by what they see mispresented in the right-wing media.
The operations of the business sector equally cannot account for the way the less well-endowed far-right is able to autonomously create its own movements in favourable conditions. Or the way reactionary ideas can be generated without support from Grand Capital. Zemmour has attracted active support from the far-right who are said to have a big presence in Génération Zemmour and no doubt in the new party La Reconquête. These include the micro-party La Ligue de Sud, to groupuscules, such as the present-day Action française, and even more extreme bodies such as La Famille gallicane, Génération Z, Les Vilains Fachos (LVF the same acronym used for French volunteer fighters for Nazi Germany), (Dans l’orbite d’Eric Zemmour, une nébuleuse de groupuscules violents d’ultradroite). All of these groups have their own structures and ideas that are hard to trace to the manipulations of capitalists manufacturing media personalities. This will have to be a fundamental part of any explanation of Zemmour’s appeal along with a more intricate description of his media and political network than the one offered in the tale about his “establishment” background.
More on the far-right (4,770 members) youth movement set up to back Zemmour:
Then there are these thugs, who are the present day form of a notorious far-right student squad, Groupe union défense (GUD):
Eric Zemmour in Villepinte: what the images show of the violence at his meeting
Le Monde. 11.12.21.
Analysis of photos and videos of the candidate’s meeting confirms that the Zouaves Paris, a violent group, played a central role throughout the day.
The article demonstrates in depth the key role of the Zouaves. The groupuscule is named after French light infantry units belonging to the African Army, ” associated with the image of the battles of the Second Empire.
To the best of one’s knowledge the ‘universalist republicans’ opposed the Second Empire of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, even if only a small radical cohort amongst them opposed French colonialisation in the early years of the 3rd Republic…
Oh, and Zemmour’s poll support has not stopped getting lower: he is now down to 12 % (from a high at 17%).
Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), 32 Votes in Rotherham (but beat the Lib-Dems…).
32 Votes in Rotherham.
TUSC is, it says on their site “a coalition for the millions not millionaires”. The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition stands in elections, “offering the opportunity to trade unionists, community campaigners, socialists and others, to stand candidates under a common anti-austerity banner distinct from the mainstream, capitalist establishment politicians.”
At present TUSC is essentially a coalition between the Socialist Party (ex-Miitant) and itself, with formal support from the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT). What the present day RMT backing amounts to, given that the only easily accessible material from them calling for a TUSC vote dates from before the election of Jeremy Corbyn to lead the Labour Party, is a matter of speculation. The union’s public Net material does indicate any campaigning for TUSC. At all.
TUSC has attempted to broaden its basis. There is also some kind of alliance with Chris Williamson and his micro-party Resist. These TUSC allies, who have voted to register with the Electoral Commission, came the fore recently in reports that they had officially been at meetings of George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, and a Rally by the WPB in Birmingham also attended by the former MP expelled from Labour after rows about anti-Semitism. There are efforts to get other confetti from the world of small left parties and breakaways from Labour into the TUSC fold.
It seems that this has developed as part of their latest campaign for “People’s Budget’s”. This idea is to draw a wish-list of what a local Council should spend, money no object, “based on the needs of local communities.” The latest Socialist carries these reports,
Birmingham People’s Budget
Birmingham TUSC hosted an initial forum to discuss the pressing issues facing working-class communities in Birmingham on 27 November. The meeting looked at what steps could be taken by Birmingham City Council, and how to campaign for the necessary funding from central government to carry them out.
In attendance were members of ten trade union branches, including RMT, Unite, ASLEF, CWU and UCU, the chair of the Birmingham branch of Acorn tenants’ union and the local coordinators of TUSC and the Workers Party of Britain. Save Our Schools West Midlands also sent a written submission.
Southampton People’s Budget
Southampton TUSC hosted a People’s Budget meeting on 13 November. The meeting invited representatives from the trade unions, Labour councillors, councillors from Alton in Hampshire who have resigned from Labour, the Breakthrough Party, the Workers’ Party and other community organisations.
Those unfamiliar with the way the Socialist Party operates could look at its 2018-9 split. This – extended to its international fronts – was over issues of independent feminist campaigning or, as the SP leader Peter Taaffe put it, “capitulating to petit bourgeois identity politics”.
Nobody imagines that this would ruffle Galloway’s feathers, nor will TUSC’s record of campaigning for Brexit and its link during the Referendum to the hard-line Brexiters like Paul Embery and his Arron Banks supported ‘Trade Unionists Against the EU’ . Others on the left may not find this kind of language or anti-EU politics sympathetic. The fact that inside the SP they were unable to disagree democratically over such issues and had to fissure into rival groups says a lot about the way the SP internal regime operates. That may also put many people off working with them.
The group in the UK which broke with the SP during this dispute is called Socialist Alternative SA (part of a majority of what was Taaffe’s ‘international’, the CWI, the rival alliance is now called ‘International Socialist Alternative’ while the ‘Taafites’ are the ‘Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI)). SA are not part of TUSC. Stop me if you have given up on that one….
Here is how TUSC’s electoral campaigning is faring.
SWALLOWNEST – 9 DECEMBER 2021
AUGHTON AND SWALLOWNEST RESULT
(From Newshound David…)
Election of a Borough Councillor for Aughton and Swallownest ward on Thursday 9 December 2021
I, Sharon Kemp, being the Returning Officer at this election, do hereby give notice that the number of votes recorded for each Candidate is as follows:
| Name of Candidate | Description (if any) | Number of Votes* |
|---|---|---|
| Jack Bannan | Yorkshire Party | 35 |
| Louisa Kathryn Barker | The Green Party | 59 |
| Mark Lambert | Liberal Democrats | 14 |
| Paul Marshall | Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition | 32 |
| Julia Helen Mitchell | The Conservative Party Candidate | 496 |
| Gavin Peter Shawcroft | Rotherham Democratic Party | 15 |
| Robert Paul Taylor | Labour Party | 645 (ELECTED) |
In Liverpool recently TUSC had the excuse for a poor result (84 votes.6.08%) because of the presence of a candidate from a local independent left electoral coalition, Beacon Liverpool, “For Municipal Socialism” (Peter Furmedge – 171 votes 12.38%) in one of the contested council seats (Kirkdale). (1)
What’s their excuse this time?
***
(1) “standing as a non-party candidate but on a Beacon Liverpool manifesto.” It’s time for some new politics in Liverpool
New political party in Liverpool aiming to take on established order
Beacon Liverpool will face off against the Conservatives, the Green Party, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Trade Unionist & Socialist Coalition in November.
Boris Johnson: the Débâcle and the Left.
Boris Johnson: “boozy” Christmas party held in Downing Street last year.
Anybody can have parties in their house without them noticing. In the Festive Season I often come downstairs to find empty bottles of Leffe and Corbières with no idea of how they got there or who drank them.
Or perhaps the government was aware of the famous Downing Street parties. Dancing at parties, one learns from a guide to Statecraft, “may be an introduction unto the firste morall vertue, called prudence”. The Boke named the Governour (1531) set out the correct way of life for members of the English governing class. Every daunse taught honour and courtesy.
Thomas Elyot’s plan for gentlemen’s sons, to be “trained in to the way of virtue with a pleasant facilitie”, to bear authority in the realm, is, it is said, required reading for top Conservatives and government aides. It was no doubt such training sessions that took place at Number Ten. They can hardly be censured for such public spirited activities.
Others take a dimmer view. “Tory MPs ‘having conversations’ on how to oust Boris Johnson” reports the Telegraph.
The Morning Star, gives a voice to Ben Chacko (Can the rage at Boris Johnson be turned into a real left counterattack?). The graduate of St John’s College Oxford, a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and Editor of the Daily Paper of the Left, discerns a mood of “Us and Them” in these affairs. The successor to William Rust traces this to smouldering revolt against the “elite” fuelled by the feeling ” that ordinary people are the despised playthings of a footloose political and corporate elite — that has repeatedly shaken British politics over the past decade, finding voice at first on the streets through the Occupy movement, later at Westminster with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and a mass-membership socialist-led Labour Party and then with the Brexit vote rejecting four decades of economic strategy by successive governments.”
Insurgent politics, he opines, are the answer. From where? Labour lost in 2021 because, he continues, it did not become “the champions of a Brexit vote” Indeed “Labour seemed determined to thwart” Brexit, which, one supposes in this train of thought, ought to have been backed. Whole heartedly. If not more.
Starmer, as Chacko familiarly calls the Labour leader, “has seriously undermined Labour’s ability to put pressure on Tory MPs. By persecuting and disenfranchising the members, he has largely disarmed a mass movement that showed in 2017 it could deliver despite wall-to-wall media hostility and misrepresentation.”
This persecution of Labour’s membership has reached the point that the Party ” has demoralised and disorientated an organisation.” Look at the way they call on the rozzers to sort things out! “Labour’s referral of the Christmas party to the police is the worst possible approach.”
Labour, phew! Instead, “we need to pose an independent socialist challenge to the Tories based on this crisis.” Calling on the “the fury of workers”.
Led by whom, one might ask? “If the left — in and out of Labour, through the unions and campaign groups — raises the pressure in the right way, the results could be significant.”
Indeed…but one thing is certain, this will not be the work of those nostalgic for a People’s Brexit that never happened and was never going to happen.
The alt-left Skwawkbox ignores Wallpaper-gate, Party-Gate and Boris Johnson, but carried yesterday a no less important story, Starmer shredded over ‘simpering’ response to Johnson birth.
The other leading alt-left voice is indisposed:
Meanwhile:
A MILLION SIGN UP TO CHRISTMAS RAVE – 10 Downing Street. FRIDAY, 24 DECEMBER 2021.
No social distancing required. Bring Who you like. Bring your own Nibbles and drink.
This event, which from FB had got flagged in the MSM yesterday, keep on growing with 1,1 Million responses this Morning.
Going: 452.3K Interested: 610.6K.
Met Police Responds To 900,000 People ‘Attending’ Christmas Day Rave At Downing Street
The Met Police have allegedly responded to a message on their Instagram account asking if they had been made aware of the 900,000 people ‘attending’ a Christmas Day rave party at Downing Street.
Tens of thousands of people want to attend a Christmas rave event at 10 Downing St that is being advertised on Facebook.
Some of today’s Front Pages:
Tony Greenstein’s ‘Crowd Funder’ Closed. He Alleges ‘Zionist Pressure’ At Work.
Bankrupt Crowd-Funding to Publish “a Very Special Book”.
The Zionist Bookburners Get to Work as My Crowdfunder Gets Taken Down
The Sprucest Man on the Brighton Promenade has a little teaser for us to solve:
“First a riddle. What is the difference between Joseph Goebbels and the Zionist Lobby? Answer: Goebbels burnt books after they were printed. The Zionists try to burn the books before they are printed.”
He continues,
“The decision by Crowdfunder on Tuesday to cancel my appeal was not only predictable but I predicted it.
Hello Tony,
Your project on Crowdfunder has been flagged as breaching our guidelines. Upon review our team has confirmed that based on the information available the project is in contravention of Crowdfunder’s terms of use.
Unfortunately this means we must now close this project, refunding any pledges back to the supporters. We hope you understand that we have a duty to uphold our Terms of Use and guidelines, in the best interest of the Crowdfunder community.
Greenstein notes,
As George Orwell observed:
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
The exact same thing happened to Hannah Arendt, the greatest political scientist of the last century, when she published her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.
“If you want to help defeat the Zionist Censorship Machine please donate in any one of the following ways”:
1. You can send a cheque made out to XXXXXXX (redacted) to me at PO Box 173, Brighton BN51 9EZ
2. You can send a donation to (Reducated).
3. Put Used Notes in a Paper Bag and Give to ‘Honest Arthur’ @ Hole in the Wall. Brighton.
Whether or not this is all true, who knows. It does seem odd that a man who has been declared bankrupt by the Courts only a few months ago is asking for money for a new project…..
One awaits support from Chris Williamson (who has yet to tweet on this) and comment from Greenstein’s one-time prime outlet, the Weekly Worker.
This is only the latest hiccup in Greenstein’s career.
Only a few days ago.
Breaking, Exclusive to the Weekly Worker:
“Joseph Goebbels: has LPM really adopted the same tactic as the chief Nazi propagandist?” (Caption in the Weekly Worker above the article below)
Not a liquidation?
“Abandoning any pretence of class politics, Tony Greenstein defends what he calls the ‘merger’ of LAW and LIEN and advocates yet another ‘transitional’ halfway-house broad front.” (Headline, perhaps not the one of Greenstein’s choice).
The successor to Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, Tony Greenstein, writes:
“Goebbels is reputed to have said that, the bigger the lie and the more often it is repeated, the greater the chance that it will be believed.1 It seems that those who have taken up arms against the merger of Labour Against the Witchhunt and the Labour In Exile Network have adopted the same tactics.”
The Transgender Issue. Shon Faye. A Left Review.
The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice, Shon Faye. Allen Lane 2021.
“The demand for true trans liberation” writes Shon Faye in the Preface to The Transgender Issue, “echoes and overlaps with the demands of workers, socialists, feminists, anti-racist and queer people”. Interviewed in the bi-monthly Huck just ahead of the book’s release the author said, ” transphobia is a direct product of capitalism, racism, and state power.” At the end of a strongly argued exploration of a “century of injustice” Faye says that justice, “trans liberation” “the gleaming opulence of our freedom”, cannot be won “under capitalism”.
Chapters from Trans Lives Now, to The State are impassioned, and convincing, accounts of the difficulties faced by trans people. They face “marginalisation, prejudice and oppression”, ostracism, the “long tradition of sensationalist, degrading exhibition” and an unreformed British system “built around specialist gender clinics” for transition-related care. The bureaucratic process this requires in the UK, influenced by the background of the diagnosis of ‘gender dysphoria’, she comments, is easier to manage if you are “middle-class, educated” “with a university degree who speaks with Received Pronunciation”. Access to puberty blockers, through the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) for example, means lengthy negotiating, illustrated by the case of Henry, born female, a process fraught with difficulties. These obstacles ought to be done away with; medical discrimination and abuse must, she declares, not just end but trans healthcare should be “revolutionised urgently.”
The Transgender Issue is critical or “corporate diversity” programmes and leaving trans liberation to charities and NGOs. She talks of a “long history of state valence and suppression”. And yet, Faye asserts, some feminists, step forward Julie Bindel, talk of the Police capture by the ‘trans-Taliban.” “While te idea that a shadowy trans lobby or ‘Taliban; has achieved institutional capture of the police is a delusional conspiracy, part of the creation of a ‘folk devil’ in moral panics” she conceded that there “are legitimate criticism” to be made of a trans movement getting too close to the policing services. (Page 167). There is a history of hostility and something that she calls “whiteness and white supremacy”. On the highly emotive issue of trans people in prison, that is women’s prisons, she states that claims of trans-identity must be respected, claiming that in any case violence is endemic in gaols. In any case the “prison industrial complex” described by the American radical Angela Davis to describe her country’s system, should go, “ultimate liberation and well being of all trans people, right down to the most vulnerable, depends on moving to a world with no prisons at all.” (Page 188)
“Gender Theory”.
Faye is a partisan of the gender theory take on Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement that one is not born a woman, one becomes one. The writer of Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), as she added later, referred to the creation of “la féminité” (femininity, womanhood), and masculinity and virility (la masculinité, la virilité). (1) “Our sex bodies never exist outside social meanings”, she continues, “The gender critical feminist idea – that there exists an objective biological reality which is observable to everyone in the same way and distinct from that, a constructed of subjective gender stereotypes that can be easily abolished – is an oversimplification. “(Page 240) De Beauvoir’s statement points in many directions, both towards this take, to the biological foundations of sex, personal history (beautifully explored in the volume of her autobiography Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée 1958) and the social construction of our identities, sexual and social.
Is it “biological essentialism” to say that genetics exist? That there are no doubt many examples of how gender is socially defined. The odd-sounding “cis” as a prefix (Latin, “on the same side as”) in ‘cisgender” to describe males “born with a penis” who are “not transgender” is one attempt at social categorisation. Does this have such weight as to do away with biology? It does not seem likely.
The Blog Irish Marxist summarises the principal objection,
(Kathleen Stock criticises the idea…) the sexes are social constructions (and not biological constructs) such that language and the words we use don’t refer to an independent and prior reality but are ‘productive’ or ‘constitutive’ of that reality. Marxists are conscious that there is an independent reality – we are materialists – but aware that humans are also a part of that reality and that their thoughts and actions interpret and shape that reality.
Stock is referring to Judith Butler for whom “there’s nothing ‘underneath’ or ‘before’ language that would secure linguistic reference to something ‘outside’ of it.” For Marxists there is something ‘underneath’, ‘before’ and ‘outside’ that make their understanding of the world and political programme to change it relevant and realistic.
Gender Critical Feminists have argued that, “Sex matters”, defended women’s spaces and opposed the Gender Recognition Act and have been sceptical, if not more, about loose legal gender self-identification. Faye asserts that the question of women’s spaces is “central to transphobic discoure” She says, TERF (Trans exclusive Radical Feminists), “no longer solely denotes women with left-wing radical feminist politics (including the revolutionary political lesbians who left their male children behind to live in all-female separatist communes). Now it is applied to any transphobic troll or bigot of almost any political persuasion..”(Page 229) The appliers are in this manner given free-rein to shout it as they will. There is no proper discussion of the hate-campaigns and harassment waged against feminists who disagree with the stand taken by Faye and her side. Instead there is a heap of media quotes from opinionated UK feminist journalists, paid to give gut-reaction pieces, and smears linking this side of feminism to the national populist and religious right.
“Transphobic Feminism”
The dominance of ‘Transphobic feminism” is we learn a “peculiarly British phenomenon”. They do things better in “other Anglophone counties”, in the US above all, where, apparently, anti-trans feminism originally came from, it has withered. “Inclusion” is now the norm amongst American feminists. The dominant liberal idea of equality of opportunity in these circles, one cannot fail to note, is one current of thought that is perfectly at home with trans-acceptance. The “colonialism of mainstream UK feminism” reflects, she suggests, the heritage of Empire and ignorance of how colonialisation imposed a “strict gender binary of men and women”. How lucky the US feminists are to have escaped the legacy of Imperialism!
“The intellectual justification for transphobia on the left” Faye concludes, “is usually framed as concerned about a mythologised ‘trans ideology’ which is individualist bourgeois and unconcerned with class struggle.” (Page 263). Yet, she continue, most trans people are working class, and “the oppression of trans people is specifically rooted in capitalism”. The best that The Transgender Issue can come up with to back this claim is that capitalist production is rooted in the “different categories of men’s work and women’s work” (such as housework, child-rearing and emotional labour)”. These are features of many modes of production that predate capitalism, aside from a few people’s ideas of a hypothetical primitive communism. A proper look at the system operating today, after, primitive accumulation, wage-labour, the private ownership of the means of production, the forms of imperialism in a globalised world, the circuits of Capital, surplus value, all the categories of Marxist theory, developed and transformed in the present (post?) ‘neo-liberal’ stage of accumulation, are beyond the book’s horizon. Explaining how the ‘trans issue’ can be worked into all this would be indeed be a valuable effort.
As with the idea floated of abolishing prisons, sometime, there is little plausible detail on the strategy of anti-capitalist trans-movement. It would not be leap to suggest that for Shon Faye class struggle appears to mean something like this:
A huge step forward for trans protest in Britain. Charlotte Powell December the 4th.
The demands set out by Transgender Action Block are:
- An informed consent model of care
- Abolition of the segregated Gender Identity Clinics
- No more segregated pilot schemes
- Resume prescription of puberty blockers to trans youth
- Equity of treatment in all aspects of healthcare
Trans struggle is class struggle – it is a struggle for life
One of the Transgender Action Block organisers gave a speech focusing on the class nature of medical transphobia. She described how the state demands that everyone, including cis people, operate within strictly binary categories of gender. Navigating the expensive and gatekept legal requirements of transition is labyrinthine for trans people who identify as women or men, impossible for those who identify as nonbinary. Meanwhile, accessing timely healthcare is only an option for the mostly white and middle-class trans people who are able to go through private clinics. The forces that condition trans peoples’ lives and entrap us are the same forces that maintain class oppression and capitalism.
These are decent proposals for reforms. There is no plan to fight capitalism as system as such. For all Faye’s off-putting rhetoric, and disagreement about ‘gender’, many people can support the demands.
Fights for people’s rights have historically expanded outside of traditional definitions of ‘human rights’ such as Jacques Rancière and Claude Lefort have, in different ways, argued. The original declaration of human rights at the start of the French Revolution in 1789, the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen was answered by the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne) of Olympe de Gouges. She perished on the Guillotine. Gender critical feminism has its own claims to this emancipatory tradition. It is not going to be silenced by those who try to shout it down.
*******
(1) “On fabrique la féminité comme on fabrique d’ailleurs la masculinité, la virilité. “
This is a summary of what De Beauvoir thought about feminism:
“Dans les deux sexes se jouent les mêmes drames de la chair et de l’esprit, de la finitude et de la transcendance, les deux sont rongés par le temps, guettés par la mort, ils ont un même essentiel besoin de l’autre ; ils peuvent tirer de leur liberté la même gloire ; s’ils savaient la goûter, ils ne seraient plus tentés de se discuter de fallacieux privilèges ; et la fraternité pourrait alors naître entre eux.
In both sexes, the same dramas of flesh and spirit, of finitude and transcendence are played out, both are eaten away by time, watched over by death, they have the same essential need for the other. ; they can derive the same glory from their freedom; if they knew how to savour it, they would no longer be tempted to discuss false privileges; and solidarity could then be born between them. ”
Left Votes For Liberal Democrats in North Shropshire?
Can socialists ally with liberals and Liberals? Political liberalism is founded on the consent of the governed and equality before the law, democracy, human rights, and defence (in the terms of one of the French founding figures, Benjamin Constant, the “Liberty of the Moderns” to pursue a private life in civil society, outside of public interference, determined by their own goals.
This is perhaps the best side of liberal political theory. Many people on the left will also be familiar with the later writings on socialism of one of the founding figures of liberalism, John Stuart Mill. Mill (criticising views summed up by the exiled French socialist Louis Blanc, with whom he was personally acquainted), for proposing an alternative to capitalism run by ” one central authority”. “In Communist associations” he wrote, ” private life would be brought in a most unexampled degree within the dominion of public authority, and there would be less scope for the development of individual character and individual preferences than has hitherto existed among the full citizens of any state belonging to the progressive branches of the human family.” This comment, like those of Constant, who referred to the period of the Terror during the French Revolution, has resonance after the experience of Stalinism and totalitarian regimes.
Yet, given the problems and the poverty of the many under capitalism he argued that, “The result of our review of the various difficulties of Socialism has led us to the conclusion that the various schemes for managing the productive resources of the country by public instead of private agency have a case for a trial, and some of them may eventually establish their claims to preference over the existing order of things, but that they are at present workable only by the élite of mankind, and have yet to prove their power of training mankind at large to the state of improvement which they presuppose.”(Socialism.1879. Posthumously published ).
Some argue that this is a basis for piece-meal reform, if not a forerunner of the synthesis of political liberalism and social democratic egalitarianism that has marked the British Labour Party. This is an opening to a wide debate since it is hard to see how socialist goals of equality, and the abolition of classes can be achieved without a wholescale change in the way goods are produced, exchanged and distributed, and the ownership by one section of society of them, and their enrichment at the expense of others. This would be a revolutionary change, not directed by an elite, but by the people without these privileged rights.
At the same time those on the left who oppose Stalinism, totalitarianism, and illiberal national populism – democratic socialists – have common ground in defending human rights and civil liberties with currents of European liberalism that uphold these principles.
Step forward the British Liberal Democrats.
This is a political party, not liberalism as a trend of ideas within political theory.
Today the Guardian Editorialises:
The Guardian view on a byelection test: Labour voters should back the Lib Dems
Some years ago, at the start of the new millenium, an early version of Liberal Democrat Watch appeared. It had avid readers in Ipswich, and in other places where the Liberal Democrats were in local government. The County Town of Suffolk saw a coalition between the Conservatives and the Lib-Dems; it predated the Coalition in national government. It was not a happy time. They agree to Tory policies (the larger group on the Borough), cuts to services, efforts (that failed) to part flog off the municipally owned bus services to the usual chancers, and an attempt to destroy the local art cinema run by the council, and sack staff, it rankled that an important section of the Lib-Dem councillors had been Labour, leaving, for some, because the party was not left wing enough. One of the Libs (who claimed he had been CPGB at one point, then Labour) ended up more recently as a supporter of the Brexit Party and a rabid one at that….
That site is still going:
This revives some memories.
Usual Lib-Dem “Poll”:
It’s all the same campaigning we know too well:
Then there is this:
Wait for their campaign tactics..
The local Labour campaign is not quietly giving way to their fellow opposition party: internal polling has been released that shows the Tories have a seven-point lead on 40%, Labour is the runner-up on 33% and Lib Dems are in third place on 11%. It rivals the Lib Dem internal polling that found them in second place and Labour a distant third.
Protests at Mob Lynching of Sri Lankan Priyantha Diyawadanage Accused of Blasphemy in Pakistan.
Reports struggle to express the depths of this public mass murder.
A brutal mob killing of a Sri Lankan man accused of blasphemy in Pakistan has sparked protests in both countries, with Pakistan’s leader condemning the vigilante violence.
Priyantha Diyawadanage, 48, a factory manager in the city of Sialkot, was beaten to death on Friday and his body set alight.
More than 100 people have been arrested so far, said Pakistan PM Imran Khan.
He has described the incident as a “day of shame” for his country.
The victim’s family in Sri Lanka have told the BBC they are in despair.
His wife, Nilushi Dissanayaka, called on both Pakistan and Sri Lanka’s governments to conduct a full investigation to “bring justice to my husband and my two children”.
“I saw that he was being attacked on the internet… it was so inhumane,” she said.
Videos of the lynching proliferated across social media over the weekend, and showed scenes of the incensed crowd dragging Mr Diyawadanage from his workplace and beating him to death.
They then burnt his body, and several people in the crowd were seen taking selfies with his corpse.
The violence had begun after rumours spread that Mr Diyawadanage had allegedly committed a blasphemous action, in tearing down posters with the name of the Prophet Muhammad, local police chiefs said.
But a colleague, who rushed to the site in a bid to save him, told the Associated Press of Pakistan that Mr Diyawadanage had only removed the posters as the building was about to be cleaned.
His wife has also denied the blasphemy claim.
“I totally reject reports that said my husband tore down posters in the factory. He was an innocent man,” she told the BBC.
“He was very much aware of the living conditions in Pakistan. It is a Muslim country. He knew what he should not do there and that’s how he managed to work there for eleven years.”
The Morning Star had a short but to the point article on the lynching concluding,
In Pakistan, anyone who insults Islam risks the death penalty.
The country’s laws prohibit disturbing a religious assembly, trespassing on burial grounds, insulting religious beliefs or intentionally destroying or defiling a place or an object of worship.
Mr Khan said that he was overseeing investigations into the attack, adding: “Let there be no mistake, all those responsible will be punished with the full severity of the law.”
This is how many people across the world feel.
Éric Zemmour Rally: Far Right Beat Up Protestors.
Yesterday at Éric Zemmour’s Presidential launch rally Protestors from SOS-racisme were met with violence.
“Activists who unveiled T-shirts on which was written “No to racism” were attacked.”
The victims of far-right thuggery seem to have counted for little in some of the British media.
BBC.
The incident in which Mr Zemmour was attacked was one of several violent clashes during the event, held at a convention centre north-east of the capital Paris on Sunday night. (BBC).
The hall holds 12, 5000, 10,000 chairs for the Zemmour meeting were filled. Eric Zemmour en meeting à Villepinte, un brun flippant Libération,
Le Monde reports this morning:
Violence at the meeting of Eric Zemmour: the right and the far right denounce the “provocation” of SOS-Racisme
Several activists of the anti-racist association were attacked on Sunday during the first meeting of the far-right candidate in Villepinte, after wearing T-shirts forming the message “No to racism!” “.
This is Zemmour’s new party: Reconquête
Lors de son meeting, Éric Zemmour lance son parti “Reconquête!”
Declared Bankrupt Tony Greenstein Appeals for Funds to Publish “a Very Special Book – Zionism During the Holocaust”.
Chris Williamson Backs Greenstein Call For Funds for Book On “Zionism During the Holocaust”.
A Crowdfunding Appeal to Publish a Very Special Book – Zionism During the Holocaust.
Please Give Generously to My Crowdfunder – Don’t Let the Zionists Silence the Truth About Their Record,
A professor recently remarked to me how strange it is that virtually none of the thousands of books and articles on the Holocaust deal with the relationship between the Zionist movement and the Nazis.
We all know where this is going.
Questions are being asked about how Greenstein is able to do this when he is a declared bankrupt.
Bankruptcy Orders
GREENSTEIN, TONY
PO Box 173, BRIGHTON, BN51 9EZ
Tony Greenstein also known as Anthony Greenstein and also known as Anthony Nathan Greenstein of current address unknown, England lately of (a) PO Box 173, Brighton, BN51 9EZ; and (b) 81 The Brow, Woodingdean, Brighton, BN2 6LP currently unemployed
In the High Court Of Justice
No 159 of 2021
Date of Filing Petition: 1 June 2021
Bankruptcy order date: 14 July 2021
Time of Bankruptcy Order: 10:46
Whether Debtor’s or Creditor’s Petition—Creditor’s
Name and address of petitioner: CAMPAIGN AGAINST ANTI-SEMITISMPO Box 2647, LONDON, W1A 3RB
K Jackson 1st Floor, Spring Place, 105 Commercial Road, Southampton, SO15 1EG, telephone: 03030031735
Capacity of office holder(s): Trustee
14 July 2021
I have written a book ‘Zionism During the Holocaust’ which is highly controversial topic. I am having to self-publish and I am asking you to..
£560
£6,500 target26 days left8%
Jean-Luc Mélenchon Launches Presidential Campaign. On ‘Le populisme de gauche – Sociologie de la France insoumise. Manuel Cervera Marzal.’
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on his third bid for the Elysée, held his first Presidential campaign meeting at La Défense today with a call for a “union populaire” a “union par la base” (unity from below) against the Right. The 70 year old’s opinion poll rating stands at between 8 and 10%. That gives him the top score of the 7 French left candidates.
Yet if these divisions were not enough the leader of La France insoumise (LFI) has yet to create a full-hearted union with the majority those who have backed him in the past. The principal allies of LFI, Ensemble (who have 3 MPs), have yet to come out with clear support, as the tendency known as Ensemble Insoumis.es has complained. In an effort to bring some genuine unity to France’s left the “primaire populaire” continues to try to bring together people behind a vote for a common presidential candidate (Présidentielle : forte de sa dynamique, la primaire populaire espère toujours rassembler la gauche). This is unlikely to happen.
As it stands it looks unlikely if anybody on next year’s ballot for France’s Head of State from the Greens, Socialists, Communists, Trotskyists, or LFI, will get enough support to get enough to challenge Emmanuel Macron, Marine le Pen, Éric Zemmour, although Mélenchon may beat the new standard-bearer of the traditional right-wing party, Les Républicaines, Valérie Pécresse, who hovers at just over 10%.
Confronting the far right.
How can the left make its presence felt in this environment? The left-populist US magazine Jacobin has just published The French Left Is Struggling to Win Back Voters Who’ve Turned to the Far Right by Manuel Cervera-Marzal. The article is devoted to the way LFI has tried to deal with the rise of the far-right in France, “Mélenchon’s approach is especially a response to the rise of the National Front (FN), and its mounting strength in blue-collar France. ” He suggests that “Despite its limitations, a left-populist strategy does in certain contexts seem able to allow the Left partly to reduce its distance from the working classes. Yet confronting the far right on its own terrain — on its preferred themes (immigration, security, nation, sovereignty) and in its own press organs (Valeurs actuelles, BFMTV, etc.) — is a highly risky operation, with little results to show.”
The Liege University sociologist has written a revealing study of the problems of La France Insoumise which ranges much further than the failure of its efforts to win over the irate and people inclined to the far right. These, difficulties – which indicate why the challenger for the Elysée is a divisive figure for the left – are deep-rooted. They amount to a serious democratic deficit. They cast doubt not just on its ‘left populist’ efforts to win over angry voters who opt for the far-right in the ballot box (‘fâches pas fachos’).
Le populisme de gauche – Sociologie de la France insoumise is an in-depth analysis of Mélenchon’s party-movement-rally. It evokes the leader’s career (from the Parti Socialiste, and four independent organisations before creating LFI in 2016), and his ‘charismatic’ impact, but the study’s joints and stays go beyond Mélenchon himself. That is, to the different dimensions that define a political party: its strategy, ideology, electorate, its structure, how it operates, and the way it talks to people, or, to use a word employed by left-populist theorist Chantal Mouffe, its “discourse”. It is punctuated with observations from LFI activists including those holding positions in the movement. They are often unnamed, for reasons which quickly become clear. Cervera-Marzal concludes with comparisons with the history and concept of populism and the French case of “un populisme de gauche à l’européenne”.
Internationally La France insoumise is best known for the call “to rally ‘people’ from different political and ideological backgrounds against the ‘oligarchy’ theorised, with ideas about the “networked world” in which The People becomes an actor by networked connections, in short books such as L‘Ère du peuple (2014). Classical Marxist ideas about class are sucked up inside the broader picture of a political and social, “popular” struggles against the ‘caste’ the globalising elites. He uses symbols of French national ‘revolutionary’ pride, like the Tricolore, and the Marseillaise is sung at his public meetings. For some time these declamations included favourable references to the Révolution Bolivarienne in Latin American, though following failures (to put it no higher) in Venezuela this is less prominent today.
‘Charismatic Leader’.
Mélenchon the man is famous as a talented orator who evokes the French Revolution and often illustrates his perorations with poems, calling himself “le tribun-poète”. His celebrated charisma is not universally admired. His last attempt to enter the Elysée in 2017 won a more than respectable 19,58% but still only 4th place in the first round. Outbursts of anger at, famously shouting “La Republique est moi” at a police officer wishing to seize documents from LFI’s HQ, are, Cervera-Marzal alleges better taken by activists and some of the “classes populaires” than the middle class. Others, one may remark, consider his aggressive outbursts ridiculous from the elderly gent.
But by far the most striking aspect of the present study is how people are organised inside the structures of the LFI ‘movement’. “Le mouvement n’est ni vertical, ni horizontal, il est gazeux” (the movement is neither top down, nor horizontal but effervescent) declared Mélenchon. This fizzing organisation has only three actual members, Manuel Bompard, Marie-Pierre Operandi and Benoît Schneckenburger, who form the legal entity “l’association France insoumise”, the Office, “le Bureau”. There is no vote and will never be a vote on Mélenchon’s self-proclaimed leadership. The 500, 000 or so people who have, at one time or another, clicked on the Net and networked with the movement are supporters nothing more. (Page 211) The yearly Conference, the Convention Nationale (two thirds attending are selected by lot, not elected) has no real debates and is described as “un show de rock stars”. On the ground LFI is organised in self-financing “groupes d’action” (the money largely goes on centrally run Net-based campaigns); activists have considerable autonomy on how to apply the line, deciding by consensus – votes are forbidden. Tendencies and factions are not permitted. You can be booted out without explanation or the right to appeal. There is not even a show-trial.
Harassement of Staff.
Cervera-Marzal says that LFI is made up like an onion, concentric circles, with an inner core, not a top down pyramid. This is not perhaps the best way to describe what is often chaotic operation, without people knowing who made what decision. National offices and support for the Parliamentary group work poorly paid staff to the bone and are the scene of abusive behaviour, “violences sexistes et sexuelles”.
Mélenchon has periodic ‘Maoist’ clear-outs of older cadre, though, the author asserts that he is not a megalomaniac who controls everything, an impression one may have got from Thomas Guénolé, La Chute de la Maison Mélenchon : Une machine dictatoriale vue de l’intérieur (2019). Rather he wishes to be free from any constraints, able to do whatever he wishes. In an interview with Slate this is repeated and called “« anarcho-césarisme » : une grande liberté de la base se conjugue à une immense liberté du leader” (anarcho-Ceasarisme, freedom at the grass-roots with a huge freedom of the leader) “The result, as signalled early in the study is a structure with the imprint of a 5th Republic presidential monarchy rather than a self-managed republic (Page 46). Disagreements do exist, but, as he goes onto remark, the “absence of democracy, the absence of pluralism, opacity, informality and organised chaos” do make it an attractive model (Page 96).
At its creation in 2016 LFI claimed 500,000 supporters. Few of them were active on the ground. Of those that were large numbers melted away after the 2017 elections. Le populisme de gauche estimates that the present figure for the number of committed activists involved is about 9,000, although that number is bound to be reinforced by those willing to lend a hand as next year’s Presidential contest approaches.
What kind of people voted for Mélenchon and LFI, which has (including Ensemble which has independent structures), 17 MPs, 5 MEPs (but a low score of 6,3 % in 2019), 25 Regional Councillors, though largely invisible in the 2020 local elections during which it backed “initiatives citoyennes” (citizens’ initiatives lists)? The present study, putting an end to the efforts of the MP for the Bouches-du-Rhône efforts to claim he owned the 19,58 who backed him in 2017, indicates an electorate that is “composite, infidèle et volatile” , heterogeneous, unfaithful and volatile.
Populism.
The concept of populism, the ‘people’ as a political subject against its enemies is discussed through various stabs at laying it out as an ideal-type. It breaks-down, it is argued, as an empirical generalisation covering such disparate phenomena as Narodnik movement, the US People’s Party, Latin America., Trump, Brexiters, European national populists such as Viktor Orbá. Others would say that national populism, which focused on the Nation and its foes, globalisers and immigrants and promotes national sovereignty, is a useful term. As can be, in a general way, the expression, left-populism. This Cervera-Marzal argues has some use, a political current that, in Europe, looked for way between the old far-left, seen as outdated, and social-democracy, considered corrupted, social liberal and having run out of steam. This strain, at least in France, has a “republican” wing, but also evident in forms of ‘red-brown’ cross-overs that emerged in Britain during Brexit, and fed a ‘confusionist’ drift to the right.
How Corbyn fits into this is far from obvious, one point being, as he notes, is that Labour is a mass party with democratic structures independent of any Leader. Membership requires payment, not just “quelques clics” – and enables one to vote on conflicting resolutions and internal office holders, including for opponents of Jeremy Corbyn. Another is the word the ‘people’ in UK left discourse tends to be submerged within the widest definition of the working class, corresponding to the French ‘classes populaires’.
Constructing an ideal-type (which is a way that can indicate differences as well as similarities) of left-populism, runs into a number of further problems despite its utility as shorthand for a left that is wider than Marxist emphasis on the proletariat and the theme of a rebellion against the political system and those that dominate it.
First up, the Spanish Podemos, for example, often said to have emerged in tandem with LFI, has developed more democratic structures beyond ‘virtual’ Net based politics, from, as he puts it, their already self-organised and convivial ‘circles’. It is equally in coalition with the social democratic PSOE. Next Podemos has had is splits, from the break-away of la Izquierda Anticapitalista to Iñigo Errejón, and his allies in Más Madrid. Its ‘charismatic’ leader Pablo Iglesias, who has faced criticism on the Hispanic left for holding his own ‘Court’, left politics this year without the party collapsing. It is hard to imagine LFI continuing after such splits and without Mélenchon. Finally, leaving aside the experience of the Greek Syriza, and the importance of the Portuguese alliance of radical left and social democrats in the Bloco de Esquerda, it is hard to see any useful generalisations emerging at present about what is, Cervera-Marzal states, a political recipe that no longer pays dividends.
Robert Michels asserted that “Who says organisation, says oligarchy.” Yet what kind of oligarchy is built by La France insoumise and other networked parties – the most famous in France being La République en marche (LRM) of their nemesis Emanuel Macron – limited companies run to mobilise a constituency of on-line sympathisers? This book is an important step not just in analysing La France insoumise but in looking at these, much wider, changes in the nature of politics and political parties.
Le Populisme de gauche. Sociologie de la France insoumise (La Découverte, 2021).
Workers Party of Britain (Galloway) Local Election Launch with Chris Williamson and TUSC (Socialist Party/RMT).
Labour Against the Witch-hunt (LAW) was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever, about that. The register of its burial was signed by the Weekly Worker undertakers, and the chief mourners, 4 former members of the Steering Committee.
Implacable December politics. As much mud in the hamlet of the divided left as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, named Galloway, waddling like an elephantine lizard to merge up in the cul-de-sac of the amorphous socialist movement. If you can juggle the metaphors.
Friday saw a gathering of saurian socialists: Galloway, Williamson and …TUSC (Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, chief backers, the Socialist Party, ex-Militant, and the RMT – National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers). (1)
Organised by the group they call, “George Galloway’s nationalistic Workers Party and his lieutenants in the Stalin Society” – the pro-Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), Vice-Chair Joti Brar. Also Vice-Chair of the Workers Party of Britain.
More news from Birmingham Workers Party of Britain.
Attended by (see above) Chris Williamson, ex-Labour MP, and the newest best friend of the man they say slew LAW, Tony Greenstein.
It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the winter of despair.
You can see a bit here.
And here.
Birmingham: “the Workers Party, which has already selected challengers for Brandwood & Kings Heath, Bordesley & Highgate, Balsall Heath West and Alum Rock. Balsall Heath East, Sparkbrook, Shard End, Bordesley Green are all in the process of selection.”
(1) Via JR, update.
What role for Galloway?
Socialist Party, 5th of July 2021.
The Socialist Party fights for steps towards such a party by participating in the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) which enables trade unionists, community campaigners and socialists from different parties and none, to stand against pro-austerity establishment politicians under a common banner and an agreed platform of core policies.
It was an important first step for the post-Corbyn era that, in the May 2021 elections, TUSC was able to stand over 300 candidates. At the same time we argue for the trade union movement to take steps towards founding a new mass party.
Will George Galloway be able to play a role in the development of such a party? The Socialist Party has in the past criticised Galloway for creating a too narrowly-based appeal aimed specifically at Muslims, rather than the working class as a whole. While this has allowed him to make electoral breakthroughs, winning elections first in Bethnal Green and Bow, and later in Bradford West, he has not consolidated a base or, eighteen years after his expulsion from Labour, built a stable organisation. The lack of a consistent class-based approach, or roots in the trade unions, or a democratic structure, have all been major obstacles to him doing so.
In Batley and Spen his official election propaganda seems to have attempted to appeal to all working-class voters rather than Muslims alone. However, some of his personal statements appear to have been trying to win votes on a reactionary and divisive basis: such as, for example, tweeting that he is a “straight white man with six children”, particularly when he was standing against an LGBTQ+ woman. Or tweeting that he would not stand “for the BBC trying to teach our young children that there are 99 genders“.
Galloway has a history of these kind of divisive comments, which should be opposed. But the biggest obstacle to him playing a positive role in the formation of a mass workers’ party in Britain is his record on crossing class lines and backing pro-capitalist candidates.
He rightly lambasts the Labour right wing for turning Labour into a pro-capitalist party, yet just two months ago, in the Scottish parliamentary elections, the Workers’ Party and Galloway stood as part of the “Alliance4Unity” which recommended tactical votes for various pro-austerity politicians, including ten Tory constituency candidates. One of them, Jackson Carlaw, was leader of the Scottish Conservatives from February to July 2020. Plus, in the 2019 European elections, Galloway publicly backed Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
One of the most burning issues for the workers’ movement is the need for the working class to have its own independent voice rather than being politically disenfranchised as it is now. All kinds of debates will take place on how to achieve that, in which the role of fighting trade unionists will be critical. But what is clear is that no public figure can take that process forward by backing candidates of the capitalist Tory party, or Farage and other right-wing populists of his ilk. For George Galloway to play a positive role in the formation of a new party – which his own vote shows the potential for – he would need to adopt a different approach.
Éric Zemmour Flees Paris for Sunday Presidential Launch at Villepinte, “Impossible n’est pas Français”.
Zemmour Flees Paris Under Anti-Fascist Pressure.
Zemmour’s Sunday Rally at the Zénith in Paris has been displaced to somewhere or other in the Parc des Expositions de Villepinte (in the suburbs, Seine-Saint-Denis). The far-right candidate’s henchmen claim this move is because of the large numbers who are expected to attend (the hall has a capacity of around 7,000 and they claim 19,000 wish to be there).
Others tell a different story. The primary reason, Le Parisien says, is concerns about “security”.
The CGT, Solidaires and anti-fascist activists had promised to demonstrate in the direction of the Venue to “silence Zemmour”. The Council of the 19 th arrondissement of Paris, where the Zénith is located , had warned police officials of a “risk to public order.”
Left associations (Paris-Banlieue Antifascist Action) also called for blocking access to the Zenith meeting from noon, with the slogan “Let’s block the Zemmour Zénith!” .
Demonstrations to protest against Zemmour will still take place:
The main march, with the CGT Union Federation, will take place in Paris, on the route already agreed on,.
Another, to directly protest against Zemmour’s launch, will happen at Villepinte, where police sources predict confrontations with the extreme-right. Some activists have already begun false bookings to the event.
RETROUVONS-NOUS DIMANCHE À VILLEPINTE CONTRE LE MEETING DE ZEMMOUR ! ➡️ RDV dès 12H gare RER B Parc des Expositions’
For his campaign slogan Zemmour has taken to looking at the Les Citations pour les Nuls (Quotations for Dummies):
« Impossible n’est pas français » est une citation prêtée à Napoléon.
“Impossible is not French”, a quote attributed to Napoléon.
“Cancelled” (Channel Four), “Sacked, blacklisted, ostracised, no-platformed…”
“Cancel culture from all sides.”
Last night outside all was darkness, wet and cold. Inside on television, Richard Bacon presented a programme on Channel Four, Cancelled, which promised to warm up the viewing public. “Sacked, blacklisted, ostracised, no-platformed: from comedy stand-up to trans rights, and race and academia, a look at cancel culture from all sides and how it’s affecting our lives”.
There was a stab at an uproarious spoof. What could be called A Woke Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Language at a business exhibition stand offered a feast of preferred gender pronouns and an ingenious system for toilet facilities to cater for an abundant number of sexual identities. How we laughed.
Bacon, whose pronouns are ‘he’ and ‘him’, spent time, if not more, talking about his misadventures with Charlie. Something of a right Charlie, he/him reminded those who had long forgotten that “I was publicly shamed after Blue Peter,” and forced to hand in his Blue Peter badge. Yet pre-Twitter (1998) he had no pile-on, no “cancellation” …and, you’ve already lost interest.
This is a shame. For those who watched it the programme was not a platform for a Laurence Fox given free rein to talk about “extreme political correctness”. Nor was there too much time on a comedian we learn is called Dave Chappelle or gleeman Jimmy Carr. For a moment I thought art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon was part of that troupe.
There were some serious issues raised, though we did not get more a glimpse of what the attacks on J.K. Rowling have meant.
As in:
There was also a transgender activist who plausibly explained why people can feel angry enough about gender critical feminists to protest against them.
At the end we had a swift look at the campaign to get rid of the Blackboy Clock in Stroud, statue removing, and the renaming of university buildings. Which we’ve all heard before.
The Culture War looks like it’s not taking place:
Sadly not:
“Liquidating” Labour Against the Witch-Hunt: the Inside Story of the Bust-up.
Comrades and Friends…
In a battle which has been compared between the Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Lilliput, which, readers will recall, resulted in six and thirty moons of war with neighbouring Blefuscu, Labour Against the Witch-hunt has been “closed down”. Or merged, as the other side would put it, with the Labour in Exile Network (LIEN).
“Last Friday night members of Labour-in-Exile-Network voted by 31-8 to merge with Labour Against the Witchhunt. The following night LAW, at its first All Members Meeting for 3 months also voted to support a merger, albeit by a narrower but decisive majority of 47-27 with 12 abstentions.”
Now for the Alternative View:
Merging into a cul-de-sac (Weekly Worker)
“Derek James of the Labour Party Marxist argues that this is no time to give up on the fight against the witch-hunt. Nor will the attempt to form an amorphous socialist movement get anywhere.”
In an egg-shell the fight is about Greenstein and some surprisingly numerous allies (in Big-Endian terms), winning at a meeting which resolved to put LAW and LIEN together, effectively winding up LAW as distinct public body. As the sprucest gent on Brighton Pier said, ““LAW has outlived its usefulness.”
(extracts)
“Comrade Greenstein said that there was little that LAW could do to resist the witch-hunt and that the immediate task was to build a socialist movement that could keep together the 150,000 party members who had left Labour since Starmer had become leader. In due course, when the time is right, he suggested, this would lead to the formation of a new party. But what sort of party and programme are we offered?”
Speaking for the views of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Provisional Central Committee (CPGB-PCC, better known as the Weekly Worker) ‘James’ continues for some paragraphs, which those interested can read at length and at leisure through the link above.
The rub,
“Treacherous Role”.
Our critique of the as-yet-unnamed merger project is both political and strategic. The leadership of LIEN includes comrades who are uncritical supporters of Corbyn, do not understand his treacherous role and will not countenance a word said against him, whilst others who support the merger are openly and correctly critical of Corbyn’s surrender to the right during the witch-hunt. Hardly a recipe for harmony.
More plausibly,
“Whilst for many the merger is simply a case of huddling together in a cold and hostile political environment or continuing the headless-chicken ‘politics’ of ‘action, action, action’, others have a more clearly defined aim. Although it appears that, in arguing that the new initiative should work or join forces with other “like-minded organisations”, options are being kept open. In practice the general line of travel into a new broad-front grouping and political dead-end outside the Labour Party is clearly signposted. “
As in:
See also:
Stay and fight and fight again ..
A call that went unheeded: opening remarks by Graham Bash to LAW’s final all-members meeting.
I have not engaged with the resolutions before us today – and will not do so – and apologies if I am forced to leave before the conclusion. But a word of caution. We need firmness of principle, but we also need to try to reach out beyond our own small bubble. We need to go far beyond the unity that is being proposed today.
As always, the motor force of change will come from class struggle, from the fights against austerity, against racism, against climate change – in the trade unions and in the broader social movements. Our task as a left is to look outwards, build movements of resistance and try to give these political expression – within the Labour Party if we may, outside if we must.
Comment.
This is about the most accurate summary of the failings of the course of action proposed by the Greensteinites,
We do not believe that LAW can be effective if it is part of a much less focused and politically diverse organisation like LIEN, which has committed itself to Corbyn’s 2019 and 2017 manifestos. There are half a dozen groups with similar soft-left programmes – all small and entirely ineffective. Building yet another one on the same political basis is unlikely to lead to another result!
….
The motion commits the newly merged organisation to “work and/or join forces” with groups including Chris Williamson’s Resist. He is in his own unity negotiations with the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition and George Galloway’s nationalistic Workers Party and his lieutenants in the Stalin Society. That is not a serious strategy.
Why we resigned
Given that the people who has resigned are Jackie Walker, Kevin Bean, Stan Keable and Tina Werkmann, we would also ask how this merger is going to find new well-known figures and people with administrative competences.
One also notes that poor, if not worse, relations with the Greenstein faction seem to have precluded including their side of the story in the pages of the Weekly Worker.
The Man on the Brighton Pebbles says (TG Blog),
It is unfortunate that the majority of the LAW Steering Committee, having lost the argument and the vote have resigned rather than accepting the view of LAW members. Their argument is summed up in this week’s Weekly Worker (that is, last week’s, we await the latest Greensteinite bulletin on these matters) that we are ‘Deserting the Fight’. No comrades we are refusing to allow the fight against Starmer and his neo-liberal politics to be confined to simply machinations in the Labour Party.
…
The creation of a unified organisation is not the ‘liquidation’ nor the closing down of LAW. There is nothing LAW could have done that it can’t do in a merged organisation. LIEN is obviously committed to fighting the witchhunt and always has been.
LIEN already has a Witchhunt Analysis Group amongst 7 other groups. LIEN is already far more active over the witchhunt than LAW. There is obvious room for an 8th Anti-Witchhunt group.
Happier Days.
Éric Zemmour, Presidential Candidate.
A French Nightmare.
Éric Zemmour’s most recent book La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot (2021) is self-published by the Maison d’édition Rubempré. The far-right polemicist named his imprint as a tribute to the novelist Honoré de Balzac and the central character of his masterpiece, Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions), Lucien Chardon. The ambitious provincial writer becomes, by assent of the Restored Monarchy, Lucien de Rubempré, “a cowardly and unscrupulous character”, able to play with women’s affections and a large fortune, in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes.
Few French commentators who have alighted on this name and the fondness of the polemicist for the author of la Comédie Humaine have failed to remark that from being the toast of Paris, Lucien, “le dandy et le poète” ends up shunned, accused of fraud and theft in cahoots with the identity-shifting criminal mastermind Jacques Collin. In gaol, overcome with remorse, rent with a “fièvre de suicide” he hangs himself. Recounted in detail, it is a deeply affecting passage. “One of the greatest tragedies of my life,” wrote Oscar Wilde in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying, “is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.”
Yesterday our modern Rubempré (whose fall one can only hope will be worse than Balzac’s famed protagonist) announced this, putting an end to a threadbare game about whether or not he would officially aim to be France’s Head of State.
This Blog has published quite a few posts about Zemmour, which we have no need to repeat.
One of the best overviews is offered by the Fondation Jean Jaurès (suitably named after a nemesis for the man who has cast doubt over the innocence of Dreyfus) by the specialist on the far-right JEAN-YVES CAMUS.
ÉRIC ZEMMOUR : UN DISCOURS QUI LIBÈRE LA PAROLE EXTRÉMISTE
The Origins of the Zemmour Candidacy.
“The first sign of the polemicist’s presidential ambitions dates back to the creation, in January 2021, of a website entitled “I sign with Zemmour”. According to the investigation of the daily Liberation and the weekly L’Express , it comes from the entourage of the mayor of Orange, Jacques Bompard 1and more broadly from the La Ligue du Sud, the micro-movement he founded in 2010. The former member of the Front National (1986-1988), which broke with Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2005, is a major actor on the “right outside the walls” working since the end of the five-year term of President Sarkozy to the constitution of a union which brings together those who, within the FN / RN and the conservative right, agreed to put an end to the ostracization of the camp lepenist (that is Le Pen, fille et père). He is also a follower of the “great replacement” theory, as shown by the motion for a European resolution that he tabled in 2015 as a member of the National Assembly 2. In his explanatory memorandum, we find two major themes of Eric Zemmour’s campaign: that of immigration-invasion and that, consequence of the first, of “massive immigration [which] resulted in an explosive and dangerous situation for civil peace and the future of France ”. “
Camus offers an extremely detailed account which is certainly one of the best available.
This is also highly recommended, by a radical left writer who is a critic of right-wing and left-wing populism.
This is equally important, how the upper-levels of the bourgeoisie are showing a degree of good-will towards Zemmour, invitations to speak at elite clubs, bosses’ organisations, and how some of the liberal left (Marcel Gauchet, Luc Ferry, Jacques Julliard) have shown more than an interest in the way he has raised ‘real issues’:
In the last few days Zemmour has stalled in the opinion polls.
One of the reasons has been his response to a forceful female critic during his visit to Marseille, which has drawn comparisons with former President Nicolas Sarkozy who once told somebody who refused to shake his hand during a visit to the Salon de l’agriculture, saying it would dirty him, “Eh ben, casse-toi pauv’ con” – fuck off you pathetic tosser.
It seems that Zemmour is fond of the C word (one meaning is the same as the one in English), calling television presenter Gilles Bouleau a “connard” (stronger than con), yesterday.
A Harris Interactive poll for Challenges credited Eric Zemmour with 13% of voting intentions, far behind Marine Le Pen (19%). The polling institute gave it at 18% just a few weeks ago.
(1.12.21. Eric Zemmour candidat : bousculé sur TF1, vidéo polémique, sondages en berne… ça part mal
Then there is this:
Still Zemmour has some friends.
Oscar Wilde’s other famous literary judgement concerns Charles Dickens and The Old Curiosity Shop.
“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”
Let us hope that Zemmour’s candidacy ends badly so we can also break out laughing.
And please, do not forget this:
Massive Row as Labour Against the Witchhunt and Labour-in-Exile-Network Vote to Merge into a Single Organisation.
Breaking: Resignations from LAW, Jackie Walker Kevin Bean, Stan Keable, Tina Werkman.
Breaking, Exclusive to this Blog and Tony Greenstein.
Labour Against the Witchhunt and Labour-in-Exile-Network Vote to Merge into a Single Organisation.
TG reports, hot-foot (today).
“Last Friday night members of Labour-in-Exile-Network voted by 31-8 to merge with Labour Against the Witchhunt. The following night LAW, at its first All Members Meeting for 3 months also voted to support a merger, albeit by a narrower but decisive majority of 47-27 with 12 abstentions.
It is unfortunate that the majority of the LAW Steering Committee, having lost the argument and the vote have resigned rather than accepting the view of LAW members. Their argument is summed up in this week’s Weekly Worker that we are ‘Deserting the Fight’. No comrades we are refusing to allow the fight against Starmer and his neo-liberal politics to be confined to simply machinations in the Labour Party.
Motion 1 in favour of the merger was passed with one amendment. The second motion, opposing the merger, moved by supporters of Labour Party Marxism therefore fell automatically.”
opponents of merging the two organisations wanted people to believe that LAW today is the same as it was 2-3 years ago. That simply is not true. In the past 6 months LAW has done relatively little other than with LIEN. On LAW’s own website there is no activity registered since the Resist at the Rialto in late September. The fact is that there is next to nothing we can do to fight the witchhunt inside the Labour Party because there is no democracy left.
Comment:
LAW has not got wide support for many reasons, including ambiguities on anti-Semitism such as this (2020), “The anti-Israel activist Norman Finkelstein has told a meeting of the Labour Against The Witch-Hunt group: “I don’t know what a Holocaust denier is” – while backing what he said were “statistical, scholarly questions” around the question of whether six million Jews died in the Shoah. The American left-wing icon also heaped praise on the discredited Nazi apologist David Irving at the virtual event, describing him as a “very good historian” who “knew a thing, or two or three.”
Greenstein, who is another explanation of why LAW has not had wide support, gives the lowdown on the reasons why the Communist Party of Britain (Provisional Central Committee/Weekly Worker) through its front, the Labour Party Marxist (LPM) and its allies, opposed this move:
LPM has always taken the position that there is nothing in between the Labour Party, a bourgeois workers party in their eyes, and a revolutionary Marxist Party. All or nothing and they get nothing.
In other words, one probably the factor behind their view, was they would not wish a new left Labour grouping to emerge – the idea vaguely supported by some of those calling for the merger behind the talk of organising “inside and outside” the Party – within which they could not hope to have much influence. Greenstein notes, “the CPGB didn’t always take this position having participated first in the Socialist Alliance, Respect and Left Unity.”
This is the rub: the was the people and forces involved in LAW have spent their political lives in incessant switching from group to group, alliance to alliance, micro-party to micro-party. With one consistent force, the CPGB (Provisional Central Committee) stirring the pot.
Here is their view on the affair,
Deserting the fight
(Weekly Worker)
“The drafters of this proposal do not say it, but what they are calling for amounts to the liquidation of LAW and giving up on Labour as a site of struggle – particularly stupid with the witch-hunt finding ever new victims and the signs that Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and others of a similar ilk, might, at last, be willing to put up some kind of fight (note the excellent December 5 ‘Expulsion Rebellion’ initiative of Defend the Left). Organising ‘inside and outside Labour’ is simply smoke and mirrors, which blows away and shatters as soon as it is tested by the elementary questions of trade union affiliation and electoral choice. Do we, as comrade Greenstein has, call for trade unions to disaffiliate? Do we, as comrade Greenstein has, call for a vote for George Galloway? And to what point? Backing candidates of the nationalist Scottish Socialist Party, affiliating to Tusc, supporting the ‘left’ version of Brexit and immigration controls?”
The likely result is a further political degeneration into the British left’s worst habits: the substitution of piecemeal activism ‘in the movements’ for high politics (the only vaguely concrete political basis offered is the unqualified affirmation of XR and BLM). Decades under the influence of this particular drug have left us entirely unable to cope with the attacks of our enemies, because we have lost our instinct for the importance of mass political organisation and institutional strength.
Those with longer memories than fruit fly Tony will recall the Campaign for a Marxist Party and the CPGB-PCC’s own “worst habits”.
The Campaign for a Marxist Party was a campaign (founded 4 November 2006) run by the CPGB-PCC and other organisations on the British left for a political party with explicitly Marxist goals as part of a rebuilt workers’ international. Its members were Critique (who proposed the campaign initially), CPGB (PCC) and the Democratic Socialist Alliance. The Irish Socialist Democracy group welcomed the CPGB (PCC).
In November 2008, it was announced that the CPGB (PCC) would move to wind up the campaign at its December AGM.[15] Having done so, it claimed it will establish a new committee to promote “unity of Marxists as Marxists”.[16] A minority of members objected to the dissolution of the campaign including in published articles by Dave Spencer, Phil Sharpe and Steve Freeman
The Wiki entry does not mention the participation of the publication New Interventions and the Republican Democratic Group (Steve Freeman, above). There was a journal, Marxist Voice edited by Dave Spencer. Amongst many interesting contributions had a prescient article France the Left disunited, Andrew Coates, which truth be told could have been the title of anything about the French left, any time over the last 40 years.
The view many took is that this was the umpteenth proof that working directly with the Provisional Central Committee in political project was a dead-end. They would always find a way to promote their own project, to recreate a Communist Party, led by themselves. Nothing wrong with that, and, with appropriate distance, they are far from the worst on the left, with often interesting ideas, best explored in the abstract realm of ideas.
Once you get down to political strategy and political campaigning..well in every single case Greenstein cites, Greenstein notes, the Socialist Alliance, Respect and Left Unity, they, that is ‘Jack Conrad’ and the CC, have been endless source of division and mico-party building.
Then there is this problem, flagged by Bridget St Ruth, Crawling from the Wreckage: All over again. (on the break up of the Campaign for a Marxist Party. New Interventions. Spring 2009).
Why do this small groups always row? Step forward the presence of “Incessant Jabberers, Chronic Oppositionists Determined Differentiators, Long-term Feudists”, and one can add to this from one’s own list, Tony Greensteinites.
This is pretty well known on the small group left. As one specialist in such matters, and a doughty factionalist himself, once described them
“All the people of this type have one common characteristic: they like to discuss things without limit or end. The New York branch of the Trotskyist movement in those days was just one continuous stew of discussion. I have never seen one of these elements who isn’t articulate. I have looked for one but I have never found him. They can all talk; and not only can, but will; and everlastingly, on every question. They were iconoclasts who would accept nothing as authoritative, nothing as decided in the history of the movement. Everything and everybody had to be proved over again from scratch.”
James P. Cannon. ‘The Lunatic Fringe’. In The History of American Trotskyism.
Conclusion.
Greenstein observes that Tina Werkmann (a former CPGB-PCC member) was against this merger:
For reasons that are not clear, Tina reversed her position and put out a paper Why a merger between Labour Against the Witchhunt and Labour In Exile Network is a bad idea.
As Cde Werkmann is, in some senses Labour in Exile Network (LIEN) this new lash up looks dead in a ditch.
Verbal fisticuffs are already breaking out:
On the LAW Steering Committee Whatsapp group Tina posted:
This feels very much like a hostile takeover and the only outcome is that it will close down LAW. Pretty shitty outcome.
On the LAW Facebook page Tina declared that the proposal to merge was a ‘Hostile takeover, really. Not sure it serves any purpose apart from closing down LAW.’ To which I responded that:
‘The Steering Committee opposed the merger. The members voted for it. Yes the members have taken LAW over as they realise it was going nowhere fast. Labour Party Marxists wanted to preserve LAW in aspic as a trophy that does very little.
You remind me of Bertold Brecht’s satirical poem “Die Lösung” (The Solution) in which he portrays the East German communists, after crushing the 1953 German Workers Uprising of wanting to abolish the people and start again
Leaving aside the fact that Tina herself was proposing what she now calls a ‘hostile takeover’ this is unbelievably arrogant.
Labour in Exile Network had ambitions to be a mass organisation and was given uncritical boosts in the Morning Star and the anti-Labour Skwawkbox. Given the 74 who participated in this vote that has not happened. Will the new orga work formally with the Labour Representation Committee? Nothing is less certain. Labour Briefing, which is aligned with the LRC, has not had an on-line edition since September.
Update, Meeting to organise new merged group:
UPDATE: JACKIE WALKER RESIGNS FROM LAW.
| Join statement Why we have resigned from the steering committee of Labour Against the Witchhunt Following the vote at LAW’s all-members’ meeting on November 27 to merge with Labour In Exile Network (by a vote of 47-27 with 12 abstentions, all votes and motions here), we have decided to resign from LAW’s steering committee. We cannot support the view that the struggle against the Labour witch-hunt is over, or that “LAW has outlived its usefulness”, as Tony Greenstein, the proposer of the motion to merge, put it. The witch-hunt in the Labour movement is expanding every day and a campaign like LAW still has a vital role to play. We do not believe that LAW can be effective if it is part of a much less focussed and politically diverse organisation like LIEN, which has committed itself to Corbyn’s 2019 and 2017 manifestos. There are half a dozen groups with similar soft-left programmes – all small and entirely ineffective. Building yet another one on the same political basis is unlikely to lead to another result! The prevalent view in LIEN is that Labour is ‘dead’. While Starmer has been doing his best to close down all avenues for political intervention by the left, we should not underestimate that many working class people still see it as ‘their’ party – and therefore we need a strategy to continue the fight in Labour (which includes working with groups outside Labour). We cannot simply run away from that struggle. The motion commits the newly merged organisation to “work and/or join forces” with groups including Chris Williamson’s Resist. He is in his own unity negotiations with TUSC and George Galloway’s nationalistic Workers’ Party and his lieutenants in the Stalin Society. That is not a serious strategy. The recent expulsions from Labour of Graham Bash, Jo Bird and Pamela Fitzpatrick, as well as the ongoing reluctance of much of the official Labour Left to speak out against the witch-hunt, proves how necessary a single-issue campaign like Labour Against the Witchhunt still is. Thanks to all comrades who have fought in this battle with us over the last 5 years. In solidarity, Jackie Walker Kevin Bean (beankevin1955@gmail.com) Stan Keable (keablestan@icloud.com) Tina Werkmann (tinawerkmann2014@gmail.com) This statement is also available online here. |
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Campaign for a Marxist Party:
- For the use of Marxist method to analyse global capitalism and its effects on the working class and to devise a programme for a planned democratic socialist society against the market. Be honest and bold with Marxist ideas.
- For internationalism and the re-building of a Marxist Workers’ International. For the maximum solidarity with workers in struggle throughout the world.
- Socialism can only come through the self-emancipation of the working class. This means a political struggle for the fullest possible democracy against capitalism and within the workers’ movement – the Trade Unions and socialist parties. For the accountability and recallability of leaders and for full liberty of tendency, platform and faction. Against bureaucracy, elites and the bureaucratic centralism of the sects.
- We recognise that social democracy collaborates with capitalism. Reformism is a dead strategy and we are against attempts to pretend to be reformists or to put forward any notion of intermediate stages towards socialism.
- We recognise the counter-revolutionary and anti-human nature of the Stalinist regimes and Parties. We seek to undo the damage done to Marxism by Stalinism.
- We recognise that the continuation of capitalism threatens the future of humanity and the planet – for example in wars, poverty, disease, ecological disaster and the exhaustion of resources.
- The CNMP will have a membership structure and will encourage members to participate in the broader working class movement against collaborationist policies and for the programme of working class political power.
Debates:
- Conrad, Jack (13 November 2008). “Exploring agreements and disagreements”. Weekly Worker (745). Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee). Retrieved 25 October 2015.
- ^ Godwin, Mary (11 December 2008). “Something serious needed”. Weekly Worker (749). Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee). Retrieved 25 October 2015.
The 2008 annual general meeting, held in London on December 6, agreed a motion proposed by the national committee to dissolve the campaign. As the motion explains, some members of the CMP intend to establish a committee in the new year with the aim of promoting the study of Marxism and the unity of Marxists as Marxists. Not the unity of Marxists in yet another crazy halfway house project.
Piers Corbyn Releases His Xmas Hits Chart Bid.
There is an anti-Vaxx sticker on a lamp-post by Bond Street next to the old County Hall in Ipswich near where I live. This year there’s been a spate of similar stickers round the centre of town. This one has plumbed the depths: it’s a protest against vaccinating school children. In other words, using the youngest to further their own frenzy against public health measures.
Piers Corbyn and his mates have got a reputation recently for targeting schools in their own campaign, “Anti-vaxxers have begun concentrating on kids, with Piers Corbyn yelling at London pupils in an try and scare them off getting the jab”
Is this the latest attempt by Conspiracy Corbyn to attract a youthful audience?
Here is Corbyn’s Impresario:
This would be sad were it not more than a joke.
Corbyn is sometimes compared to the ‘Protein Man’, Stanley Green, who would parade down Oxford Street with placards calling to eat less fish, bird, meat, cheese, egg, bens, peas nuts and sitting and selling Eight Passion Proteins. A man with odd, famously odd, views, that did not harm to anybody.
But Corbyn is not just an eccentric. Nor has his relentless turn as bad penny been without consequences: his lies have helped stir the pot for a whole range of anti-Lockdown types, not just limosine libertarians but the hard far-right.
The former (very former) comrade from the International Marxist Group and brother of Jeremy Corbyn looks like the fascist that he has become.
Like the tasty geezer in the picture above.
Update: in the MSM now:
Experts wade in:
Brawl between Hong Kong democracy and pro-Beijing activists at Gerard Street Protest against Against anti-Asian Racism.
Rally marred by allegations of attacks by “pro-PCC thugs” on democracy supporters.
Chinese emigrants in London fought each other in group brawl.
A Chinese protest against racism in London has descended into a brawl as participants fought with Hong Kong emigrants who criticized them for ignoring human right abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang province.
At least one man was arrested as a dozen people got into a brawl in Chinatown on Gerrard Street on Saturday.
The rally — “Stop Racism! Stop Anti-Asian Hate!” — was organized by a human rights concern group Min Quan Legal Centre and several groups of Chinese businessmen and students.
Although East and South-east Asians are the third-largest minority in the United Kingdom, they are under-represented in the country. Due to racism, London’s Chinatown is struggling with a drop in sales, vandalism and boycotts.
However, a group of Hongkongers turned up at the protest, saying the organizers are pro-Chinese government and ignored the controversies in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
Activist Simon Cheng Man-kit earlier pointed out that among the organizers, The Federation of UK Fujian Chinese and London China Town Association, published ads in newspapers to support the “patriots rule Hong Kong” principle.
The group of Hongkongers shouted slogans such as “stop genocide in Xinjiang.” They said they supported denouncing racism, but wanted to address racism within China as well. The group of around 50 people were called “cockroaches” and booed.
When the protests came to an end in the afternoon, a dozen people got into a fight for two minutes before they were stopped by the police.
A video of the fight can be seen here.
London police have arrested one Chinese man so far. Witnesses are urged to make reports to identify those involved in the fight.
Tony Blair, The “War on Woke” and “From Red Walls to Red Bridges”.
“Blair calls for Labour to reject ‘wokeism’”. The papers have taken up the polling survey ‘From Red Walls to Red Bridges: Rebuilding Labour’s Voter Coalition’ by Peter Kellner on the basis of Tony Blair’s comment in the Foreword, “We should openly embrace liberal, tolerant but common-sense positions on the “culture” issues, and emphatically reject the “wokeism” of a small though vocal minority.” This is no throwaway, “in 2019 – this time with the far left in control – we suffered our worst defeat, and for pretty much the same reasons, but this time without that engraved Labour vote.” underlines the Third Way Labour leader. “The leadership should continue to push the far left back to the margins. The country must know there is no question of negotiating the terms of power with them.”
The Mail, in case anybody has the wish to unlink the two, binds left and woke together,”Tony Blair has urged Labour to ’emphatically reject’ wokeism and push the party’s hard-Left factions ‘to the margins’ if it is to win power again.”
The former Labour Prime Minister has every right to speak for himself in the publications of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. He is not alone. There have been unconfirmed suggestions that Blair has followed his ally, centrist President Emmanuel Macron. The French head of state has got his Minister of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer to set up a Think Tank to fight “le wokisme”. (C’est quoi le « wokisme », cette idéologie que Jean-Michel Blanquer dit vouloir combattre ?). Supporters of New Labour must look with envy at Macron’s la République en marche (LRM) which is not only solidly based on the centre ground, has no internal elections, whose policy is decided by the movement’s leaders, and whose election candidates are selected by a centrally appointed ” commission d’investiture”.
The report, produced under the name of Kellner, who was educated at one point at what was known, while he was there, as Minchenden Grammar School in the most prosperous part of Southgate North London, and who is married to Labour politician Catherine Margaret Ashton, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, stands on its own merits. It is based on canvassing from Deltapoll – which questioned more than 2,500 former Labour voters and more than 3,000 who remained supporters.
Political analysts will look at the study in depth. It covers an issue at the heart of Labour strategy, “Peter Pulzer, one of the most eminent political scientists of his generation, wrote in 1967: “Class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail.” He was right at the time. But in subsequent years, the links between class and voting began to fray. Today they have largely gone, their disappearance marked by the Conservative gains of 2019 of an array of traditionally safe, “red-wall” Labour seats across the Midlands and northern England – from Bishop Auckland (County Durham) to Bolsover (Derbyshire), Wakefield (Yorkshire) to Wolverhampton (West Midlands).”
But the study does underline the point about the culture wars, wokeism onwards: (Executive Summary).
So-called cultural issues, such as Brexit and immigration, have contributed to Labour’s recent problems. This is despite the fact that British attitudes have become steadily more liberal in recent decades on a range of issues: the death penalty, abortion and homosexuality, but also on race and immigration. Labour maintained its clear majority support among manual workers in the early post-war decades despite the views of its core voters on these issues, not because of them. Liberal reforms were tolerated as long as voters were confident the party would deliver on jobs, homes, health, tackling poverty and boosting pensions. Today that confidence has gone. Economics no longer trumps culture.
The Conclusion of the report (PDF) says,
Just over 18 months after electing a very different leader from his predecessor, the party’s reputation remains toxic among far too many of the voters it needs to attract. Voters of all stripes want a government that helps ordinary workers, pensioners and the poor, but too many think Labour prefers to defend minorities instead of tackling Britain’s everyday economic and social problems. It’s not so much that these target voters are obsessed by the cultural battles that Labour is doomed to lose. Rather, it is that Labour has gained the reputation of fighting the wrong battles by choice. It risks the most damning of political verdicts: irrelevance to people’s daily lives.
A few provisional points can be made.
The political debate about the decline of working class politics goes back some time, as far back as (at least) Barry Hindess’ The Decline of Working Class Politics 1971. This was framed in very different terms. Hindess wrote of the Labour Party, “the determination of local policy is now very largely in the hands of activists in the more middle-class areas”, and that politics, at that time did not offer a choice outside of a narrow consensus (a 1960’s version of “post-politics”).
Today we have (Red Walls to Red Bridges):
Labour has failed to adapt to the loss of its historic, core voter base: manual workers in heavy industry, belonging to a trade union and living in council homes. Labour’s collectivist politics used to chime with the lives of millions of its voters. The death of heavy industry, sale of council homes and the rise of consumer society all undermined Labour’s traditional appeal.
Labour’s failure to adapt has been masked by Britain’s growing middle class, which has in turn increased support for the party over the long term. Demographically, the new dividing line in British elections is age, together with education. Labour does best today among students and graduates aged under 30, and worst among non-graduates aged over 50. These long-term demographic forces lie at the heart of Labour’s failure to retain its so-called red-wall seats.
It is striking that in Deborah Matterson’s Beyond the Red Wall (2020), travels, talks and interviews with the ‘left behind’, this is recorded,
“Listening to Red Wall Votes talk about social class – with the conversation generally revolving around their own working class status I was struck by the intensity of their sense of belonging to that class…None of the Red Wallers that I spoke to were employed in traditional manufacturing industries any longer, although most were manual workers, with the men typically working in construction. Some were now working on what was described by people in Darlington as the ‘service sector’ -baking, retail or class centres. Others were in the ‘public sector’: local government or health, often caring roles with most of the women in very location I visited seemed to do.” “their social class was the key to their identity and a badge of pride.” (Pages 85-6)
If there was one culture war that sticks out in Matterson’s book it is Brexit. This figures from the Introduction, “Leavers thought Remainers were ‘out of touch’ ‘politically correct’, ‘superior’ and ‘stuck up’. and the Conclusions: they wanted the Tories to “Stick to your promise”, “the first and most frequently heard piece of advice.”
There would be no paradox of those angels in marble who are proud of their class identity and loyal to the bosses’ party and Brexit if we began by recognising that there has long been a strain or working class conservatism, going back to the first limited franchise for the upper reaches of workers under Disraeli (Angels in Marble: Working Class Conservatives in Urban England. Robert McKenzie. 1968)
Deference in modern terms has, some suggest, been replaced with a willingness to follow the lead offered by the right-wing pack that set itself up in the Leave campaign against “globalist” “cosmopolitan” “elites”. Attacking the “politically correct” the “woke”, covers under which to attack minorities, and backing Brexit, a totem to wield against all the previous objects, has let loose a new wave of identity politics, this time from the right. Some Blue Labour figures, such as Paul Embery, and one-time liberals, like David Goodhart, a whole slew of them in The Full Brexit, have taken the idea that the need to defend a vision of a rooted indigenous people, working class brave sons and daughters of the soil, against cosmopolitans and ‘globalists’ at work in institutions like the European Union.
This is what the talk about class can mean, defence against outsiders. It would need a lot more probing, but instead of solidarity amongst the new working class, those in service sector, public sector and manufacturing, not to mention precarious workers, one possibility on offer is a backward march to a cultural identity. This is not a class “for itself” with goals to improve the wider lot, a forward looking grouping of people based on inclusion, but a subordinated group grounded on exclusion.
Britain has not gone as far as France in this direction but readers of Christophe Guilluy’s most recent book. Le temps des gens ordinaires (2020) will be aware his defence of the “heartland” of the “classes populaires” against “l’idéologie dite progressiste” of elites, the defence of diversity for minorities. Guilluy cites Brexit, a victory for “des gens ordinaires” (ordinary people) over “des classes supérieures ” a triumph of left-behind Britain over London. He ends, as such polemics do, with a lengthy call to further regulate (restrict, end?) immigration. From Zemmour to Marine Le Pen the demand has been taken up..
Guilluy offers a highly ideological gloss on Brexit, but there is no doubt of its importance.
This is what Red Bridges says
One of the paradoxes of Britain today is that on a great range of issues, we are far more liberal (or, perhaps more accurately, less illiberal) than 40cor more years ago – but that a liberal outlook is more likely to lose votes. The Brexit referendum and the two general elections since show what can happen when the central question concerns national identity rather than economic and social progress – especially for older, once-solid Labour voters who have now deserted the party in such large numbers. In 1966, the voters of Smethwick reversed their 1964 decision. Labour regained the seat on a swing of 8 per cent. This time, culture mattered less, and the constituency behaved like the rest of Britain.
Can Labour achieve today what it did in Smethwick 18 months after losing the seat? The party might wish to say nothing about immigration,post-Brexit relations with the EU and national identity, but silence on such matters is unlikely to work during a fierce election campaign. Our research suggests two goals for the party. The first is to distinguish nationalism from patriotism – two distinct values that the Leave campaign so successfully fused together during the Brexit referendum. The second is to link patriotism to a compelling plan for improving people’s daily lives. Labour is unlikely to win any argument for closer ties with the EU, or more liberal immigration.
A serious plan for improving people’s lives is a priority for any Labour leadership. Some many consider that patriotic enough without having to use the word – which nobody has ever managed to distinguish for any long period from nationalism. The quiet love and respect for people, the ‘classes populaires’, the working people, and those unable to work, the retired, and the left behind, is a hallmark of the best in the Labour Party and democratic socialism. Does Blair wish to boot out every single Labour activist who believes in these ideas?
We can criticise cultural campaigns whose objectives (as in much US inspired ‘woke’ movements and in Tony Blair’s Third Way) are equality of opportunity not equality of conditions for all. We can get annoyed at cancel culture – democratic socialism is based on freedom of thought and expression. We can be irked by forms of academic and political liberalism that turn illiberal as the rows about gender politics show.
But a campaign against Woke to follow the lead of right-wing identity politics?
This is to take up the themes of the worst kind of politics, whose direction Christophe Guilluy indicates all too well.
As political commentator, David Walsh says,
Too much reliance on focus groups is bad politics. I once spoke to a Millbank (as it was) staffer who told me “Inevitably after about 6 minutes a loud mouth racist emerges and everybody else there shrinks into themselves” He hated them and could not understand how some took them as gospel. Famously, John Smith went to his first one as party leader, left after an hour of CCTV and never went near one again.
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(1)”a representative sample of 2,075 adults online throughout Great Britain between 10 and 12 September 2021. This was boosted by 6,104 further online interviews conducted between 14 September and 6 October, targeted to reach larger numbers of particular group”.
Masks Back, Anti-Lockdown Movement too.
This would be funny were not Fox now again calling for people to ignore Masks.
Now if there’s one thing worse than Johnson it’s…
How long before this Public Nuisance gets in on the act?
LETTER TO KEIR STARMER: DEFEND ALL MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES (Another Europe is Possible).
Another Europe NC Members have written to Keir Starmer expressing grave concern at his comments on migrant Channel crossings.
25th November 2021
Dear Keir,
Your comments on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (Friday 19 November) in relation to the situation of people crossing the Channel in an attempt to reach the UK are of grave concern to all those who seek the protection of the rights of refugees and migrants.
It was deeply disappointing to hear you, as Leader of the Labour Party, mirror the dehumanising language of the Conservative Home Secretary Priti Patel. Instead of highlighting the cruelty of the government’s border control policies, or dispelling dangerous myths about people arriving in the UK, you made it clear that your main concern about the governments’ approach was that it was failing to be as tough on migrants as it had said it would be.
You won the Labour leadership in no small part due to your work as a defender and promoter of human rights. Your leadership campaign included an unequivocal commitment to putting “human rights at the heart of foreign policy” and making the U.K. “a force for international justice”.
Labour members, voters and the country as a whole should expect a leader of the opposition – who is a human rights lawyer – to challenge the reactionary and xenophobic stance of a government which is deliberately undermining the recognised principles of international human rights.
As thousands of desperate people remain deliberately trapped at the Polish/Belarusian border and others drown crossing the Channel, you should be making the case for safe and legal routes for those claiming asylum – in Europe and in the UK. You should be exposing the human rights violations of pushbacks at sea, demanding that the U.K. fulfill its legal and moral obligations and supports other countries to do the same.
Instead, in criticising the government only for its failure to implement its regressive policies with sufficient vigour, you have further entrenched the idea that migrants themselves are a problem – and not the governments’ callous and cruel approach to migration policy. This same position has been repeated over recent days by the Shadow Home Secretary.
Aping and encouraging the worst aspects of Conservative far-right populism will do little to promote Labour’s electoral chances whilst it will cause further damage and division in our society.
Yours faithfully,
Laura Parker, Labour International CLP & Another Europe is Possible NC
Nick Dearden, Another Europe Is Possible NC
Luke Cooper, co-founder, Another Europe Is Possible
Shaista Aziz, Labour councillor for Oxford City Council
Mary Kaldor, Professor of Global Governance, LSE
Hilary Wainwright, co-editor Red Pepper
Glyn Ford, Former MEP
Julie Ward, Former MEP
Niccolo Milanese, co-founder European Alternatives
Cat Villiers, Film Producer & Another Europe is Possible NC
Zoe Williams, Guardian journalist and co-host of the Another Europe Podcast
Alex Fernandes, Another Europe is Possible NC
Alena Ivanova, Another Europe is Possible Campaigns Officer
Dave Levy, Another Europe is Possible NC
Ana Oppenheim, Another Europe is Possible NC
Peter Radcliffe, Another Europe is Possible NC
Seema Syeda, Another Europe is Possible Communications and Campaigns Officer
Tom Walker, Another Europe is Possible NC
Following the tragic deaths of at least 27 people in the English Channel – including children – it is time for serious action. We cannot stand by and let this Government’s harsh rhetoric and ill-thought-out approach go unchecked.
This Government’s policy of grabbing cheap headlines and blaming the French authorities while paying them millions of pounds to build fences around the Channel ports has not worked. Now people fleeing conflict, persecution and war have paid the ultimate price. We know from the warehouses overflowing with donations for Afghan refugees that the public believes in the right to seek safety. That same public cannot stand for this.
Instead of trying to blame people seeking safety for its own failures, this Government must step up to its responsibilities and focus on saving lives.
For a start, parliamentarians must rethink the Nationality and Borders Bill. Not only will these new laws take a wrecking ball to the very principle of refugee protection, but we know they are unworkable. They will push desperate people further into the arms of smuggling gangs and will only inflame our international partners who we need to work with to ensure people seeking sanctuary can do so safely.
We also need a cast-iron commitment from this Government that it will not pursue its policies on offshoring or pushbacks, which will cause even more harm and make deaths in the Channel even more likely.
Above all, this tragedy shows how urgent it is for this Government to work with its international partners to create more routes to safety for refugees. This Government demands refugees take official routes, but for most people, these simply do not exist. Refugees are left with little option but to arrive here hidden in a plane or lorry or crammed onto a small boat.
We are calling on this Government to make a long-term commitment to:
- create a compassionate asylum system that treats all people seeking asylum in the UK with kindness and dignity
- resettle at least 10,000 refugees each year from around the world
- reinstate the Dubs Agreement to protect child refugees from exploitation
- expand family reunion so that more people can be reunited with their loved ones
- introduce a humanitarian corridor
We ask the Government to sit down with people who’ve gone through the asylum system, and their advocates, to create a new, more compassionate, and effective process which puts safety first. Now, if ever, is the time to do so.
From comrade Martin Rowson:
After the Johnson letter to Macron relations between Paris and London are at their lowest
News from the Spotting Front Line: Chris Williamson to start “real socialist Party”, denounces anti-racist group Hope not Hate, Labour Against the Witch-hunt in Vicious Internal Battle.
Fall Out in Labour Against the Witch-hunt.
Chris Williamson has been busy recently.
His Orga, Resist, has decided to launch itself on the path to a new socialist party.
Britain’s most celebrated Vegan is the creator of the definitive recipe for the radical peasant dish, Vegan Carrot Cake.
Now he’s off to new cuisine: attacking anti-racists and anti-fascists.
It’s a good moment to boost Greenstein who is said, according to well-established rumour, to be a bit down in the dumps in recent days.
The South Coast’s most celebrated struggler has his plate full this week as he engages in a war to the death, or bun fight, with the CPGB (Provisional Central Committee). It’s no secret that it’s over the future of Labour Against the Witch-hunt (LAW). The united front that brought together Jackie Walker and the Brighton Battler, the support of Ken Loach and Noam Chomsky looks as if it’s about to fissure, permanently.
Why Labour Against the Witchhunt & Labour-in-Exile-Network Should Merge
“With the Collapse of the Corbyn Project there is a clear choice between Building a Socialist Movement or Retreating into the Politics of Sectarianism.“
Frying it up non-sectarian sauce, Greenstein states,
The blame for this state of affairs can be laid at the feet of Jeremy Corbyn and Lansman’s Momentum. It was they who accepted the false ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative of the right-wing, that Labour was ‘overrun by anti-Semitism’. It was they who supported the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism. It was Corbyn and Lansman who supported the expulsion of Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson and myself.
Now who could possibly be against this “merger” of Labour Against the Witch-hunt (LAW) and Labour in Exile Network (LEIN)?
The LPM (Editor’s note for those already lost, Labour Party Marxist, led for many years by Cde Ken Keable), which is the Communist Party of Great Britain, which produces the Weekly Worker. It is a small group of around 30-40 members which has stayed approximately the same size since it was formed from The Leninist over 30 years ago.
Their strategy, if it can be called that, is to form a mass revolutionary Marxist party which will, with the support of the unions, force the Labour Party into becoming a ‘united front of a special kind’. In the meantime LPM simply writes off the hundreds of thousands of people who joined the Labour Party after the victory of Jeremy Corbyn and the millions who voted for the 2017 manifesto as having the ‘wrong’ politics. There is a complete failure to understand what the Corbyn project represented and how to build on it.
LPM is therefore fiercely opposed to such a merger or indeed any attempt to build the left other than temporary alliances with already existing left groups like CLPD or LRC in the Labour Party. It dismisses all attempts to build anything outside the Labour Party as a Labour Party Mark II.
In measured tones the seaside resort’s most celebrated dapper gent states,
“What they are advocating, behind their talk of Solidarity with all victims of the Labour witch-hunt! Step up the fight! is nothing less than an abandonment of any fight whatsoever. “
At the meetings on November 26 and 27 Esther Giles and myself will be moving a motion calling for the ‘consolidation of Labour Against the Witchhunt and Labour-in-Exile-Network into one organisation’.
There will therefore be a clear choice facing members as to whether or not to continue the fight against Starmer, but not necessarily on Labour Party terrain since that has now become enemy territory.
This is an Open Letter hammering out the line of Greenstein and the faction, Carel Buxton, Roger Silverman, Esther Giles, known as GB-SG (Non-Continuity).
In the unlikely event of anybody being interested further here is the Weekly Worker rival line:
Deserting the fight
Plans to close Labour Against the Witchhunt and form yet another amorphous broad-left outfit are not only, by definition, unprincipled: they are bound to fail, writes Paul Demarty
we have a call to abandon ship. This constitutes the effective basis of the motion, presented under the names of Tony Greenstein and Esther Giles, which will be debated at LAW’s all members’ meeting this Saturday.
Radical Left Battles Over the Communist Party of Britain’s Young Communist League.
“Visually striking assertions of communist identity”.
Lawrence Parker is probably best known on the left as the gumshoe who uncovered the funding of the CPGB (Provisional Central Committee). It turned out to be that they owned the copyright on the much-loved Wurzels’ hit, ‘I’ve Got a Brand New Combine Harvester’. (The CPGB-PCC, The Wurzels and me). (1)
in recent times, that is October, there was this spat this year with Gerry Downing in the pages of the Weekly Worker,
Gerry writes: “Comrade Parker is clearly nostalgic for Uncle Joe, as the title in his piece of October 16 – ‘The Communist Party of Britain disappears comrade Stalin’ – shows. In challenging the view of former CPB member Andrew Murray that ‘violations of socialist democracy during the Stalin period’, which were ‘a shameful blot on the proud history of the communist movement’, he points out that this ‘existed alongside a contradiction: the Soviet Union, despite these abuses of democracy, was still adjudged to be a socialist society and one where the ‘positive features of the socialist experience would far outweigh the negative ones’.”
There a longer intervention, of sufficient importance to get even more widely noticed than what they are already calling the Downing-Parker debate, was this, part of a series of interesting articles:
Young Communist League general secretary denounces critics as ‘saboteurs’ (November the 17th).
Correspondence – the Communist Party of Britain, the YCL and Stalin (October the 11th).
Now Cde Parker returns to the fray with a post that may succeed in its intention, to piss off other groups, largely the AWL, though also the (back to its birth name) Workers’ Power (WP).
British Trotskyists take notice of the Young Communist League
The British Trotskyist left has been forced to sit up and take notice of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and its associated Young Communist League (YCL). I guessed this would happen sooner or later because the sight of hundreds of young people marching under red banners, shouting revolutionary slogans and being sympathetic to the historical legacy of Stalin strikes at the existential heart of Trotskyism’s current crisis. If Trotskyists think about this then, surely, in their eyes, they should have won such forces after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the concurrent, although incomplete, disintegration of the ‘official’ communist movement? Who can forget Peter Taaffe of the Socialist Party and his truly gormless idea of the ‘red ‘90s’? But much of the Trotskyist left shared versions of this ‘us next’ mentality and I have documented such matters on this blog in relation to the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The whole idea of a revitalised YCL, which most Trotskyists understand under a pejorative and simplistic rubric of ‘Stalinism’, will be sending shivers of horror through various factional centres in relation to what such happenings reveal about the attractiveness, or otherwise, of various Trot sects and groupuscules.
I shall leave it to Cdes Sacha and Jim to respond, if they see fit, to the measured criticisms made in this, long, aesthetical post, “all the residual appeal of Jim Davidson reciting Macbeth. “social-imperialist AWL”, “such hysteria”.
But this, on Workers’ Power (WP), part of the League for a Fifth International is intriguing:
While the YCL comrades refer to their ‘party of a new type’, WP has historically referred to itself as a ‘fighting propaganda group’, which has a set of, ahem, remarkable similarities with the CPB/YCL variant. In both organisations, open factions are banned, public debates between comrades are rare and the membership is generally expected to parrot the group’s line. The rider here is that the CPB has a slightly better culture of open debate between its members than WP in that it at least publishes its low-level congress discussion every couple of years; unlike in WP where any attempt by members to debate publicly would be treated as an act of treason. If the “splits between Stalinists usually lead nowhere” where have recent splits from WP led other than to weaken and demoralise a much-diminished mothership, form a useless and defunct group such as Permanent Revolution and fritter away other cadres into ‘good causes’? This then is the depressing balance sheet of the bureaucratic centralism that has infected both Trotskyists and ‘official’ communists in brutal contradiction to the democratic and open traditions of our movement.
The Weekly Worker, for which Cde Parker used to write, is again behind the curve: there is nothing on this row in the latest issue.
The YCL claims a massive 450 members.
**
(1) “there has been much discussion on the left about the financing of the CPGB, with many dubious explanations being advanced. In order to scotch these rumours I can reveal that, many years ago, Mark Fischer bought out all the copyright on songs by The Wurzels. This has been a constant source of finance for the CPGB over the years, and cider is indeed now obligatory at their many social gatherings. So the next time you’re reading some tedious diatribe from Jack Conrad, think about “I’ve Got a Brand New Combine Harvester” and raise your glass with me. I hope that clears it up.”
Éric Zemmour Faces Street Protests, With More to Come.
Planned Meeting Faces Protests.
In the Conclusion to his self-published selfie, La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot (2021) Éric Zemmour speaks of how his homeland has often faced death. On each occasion an invader has swamped her soil by armed force, occupying whole slices of the territory. There have been civil wars. A section of “nos élites” has taken the side of the “empire of the moment” against the people – in the name of a “universalism” gone astray. The empires were in succession, British, Spanish and German..
Yet, he perorates on the page, each time La France found a Man of Destiny (“Homme Providential”), Joan of Arc (sic), Bonaparte, de Gaulle. Each time, he continues, choked through with emotion, a handful of French people has gathered together around the principles that have guided the nation for a thousand years, whether it be the Capetian Monarchy or the Republic. Their names? Sovereignty of the nation against the empires, sovereignty of the state against the feudal barons, sovereignty of civilisation against the barbarians (“barbares”).
Across the world, the patriot thunders, the Great Nations have returned to their glorious past. The Russians have brought together the Czars and Stalin, China has synthesised Confucius and Mao, Turkey has fused the Ottoman Empire with Ataturk and the Islamic Umma, Britain has championed Peppa Pig World, Moses and the noise of an accelerating car.
Okay I made that last one up, but this writer is already bored with Zemmour’s opinons…
Despite his admiration for Joan of Arc and rude words about the British Empire ,Éric Zemmour has found friends in the UK. Fellow hard right nationalists that is,
Eric Zemmour: Macron’s nemesis taking France by storm
“..Zemmour looks down at a copy of The Spectator and cocks his eyebrows at the unflattering cartoon of him on the cover. He decides he doesn’t care. ‘It takes a lot to offend me, you know,’ he says. He then leafs through the magazine making polite and appreciative noises. ‘Ah, Doooglas Murray!’ he exclaims. ‘I like Doooglas Murray very much. We’ve exchanged ideas.’”
What are his views?
“His plans include reintroducing border controls, suspending Schengen border-free rules for two years and, according to a member of his team in charge of European topics, ignoring rulings from the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union — despite France being bound to the latter — on issues such as immigration and government subsidies.” (Politico)
A public meeting will be held in Paris on December 5 at the Zénith, which could, according to his entourage, be the first meeting of a campaign for the presidential election.
Visit to Geneva yesterday, 300 people came to listen to Zemmour.
.
Also, yesterday, Geneva: “We hate Zemmour”.
And not everybody in France loves Zemmour.
Call for a Protest against Zemmour on the occasion of his Zénith meeting, by the CGT Union Federation’s Paris wing.
The Far-Right and the ‘Covid Sceptic’ Bandwagon.
Piers Corbyn Shown the Door.
The presence, and in important cases, the leading role of the far-right in protests against restrictions brought about to deal with the Covid pandemic, has been widely reported. The hard core have propagated the view that efforts to stop the spread of the virus are part of a ‘globalist’ plan, run by a Cabal of various bodies, Big Pharma, an opportunity fabricated by those planning the Great Reset of Capitalism (after the expression prominent at the 2000 World Economic Forum).
A widely broadcast video, Hold Up, Retour sur un chaos by French conspiracist Pierre Barnérias claimed that the virus was created in “l’Institut Pasteur before being sent to Wuhan. On-line it was seen by over two million of people in France and elsewhere. The film compiles a variety of false claim “These include the supposed futility of face masks, claims that hydroxychloroquine is a proven remedy for Covid-19, the theory of links to 5G mobile networks and the notion of a totalitarian global government – known as the New World Order – bent on enslaving the people.”
During Lockdown there were protests in many countries, including Ireland and the UK. Their theme was ‘freedom’ from health based restrictions but included conspiracists and the far-right. No formal rightist presence was noted, although the robust anti-vacinne actions called by ‘Official Voice’, “a collective forum of like-minded truth seekers”, in September had a quasi-militarist look about them.
When in France the government introduced the Health Pass (Pass Sanitaire) large demonstrations took place. On the 17th July 100,000 marches across the country, initiating public demonstrations which reached a peak of 237,000 in the middle of August before declining to a few thousand in November. The leading role of Florian Philippot, former henchman of Marine le Pen put the leader of his own far right party, Les Patriots, back in the limelight. “When Philippot was addressing the Paris rally and introduced a man called Benjamin onto the stage, saying, “He got vaccinated, but that was his choice,” there was an awkward moment of hesitation in the crowd, Le Figaro reported. It then erupted into cheers when Philippot said, “But he’s against the health pass!” as Benjamin ripped up his vaccination certificate.” (France 24).
Phillipot’s association with the anti-Health Pass movement was joined by the participation of other extreme-right groupuscules. Their presence went with the anti-Semitic symbols and placards of some protestors, (asking Qui ? ‘Who’ said to indicate a cosmopolitan plot behind the Macron/Cazeneuve measures). This did not deter some left-wingers from joining the upswell, sometimes on the very same ground. For them it was an issue of civil liberty. Jean-Luc Mélenchon called the Health Pass, and other moves, Une addition de sottises sans nom, dans une inefficacité totale et une brutalité absolue.” (a pile of nonsense, completely ineffective and totally brutal) while dissociating himself from the racist presence. The La France insoumise Presidential candidate rejected being lectured to by the Macron political “caste” and complained of having to put up with the far right and anti-Semites on the rallies, ( France Info, “de devoir supporter l’extrême-droite et les antisémites.) Some suggest that the motive of this section of the left was to make a populist appeal to the remains of the gilets jaunes movement which has supported the movement.
At present France’s far-right is engaged in a battle for next year’s Presidential elections. In the duel between Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen Covid issues have come up. The former has winked towards the anti-Health pass movement and has promised to abolish the Health Pass, adding, that boosters will be only for the over 65s. The candidate of the Rassemblement National has called to end the obligation of health care workers to be vaccinated and an easing of restrictions. Florian Philippot has announced his own Presidential candidacy, around the call “le rétablissement de toutes nos libertés” (re-establish all our freedoms) which barely registers (Présidentielle 2022 : Florian Philippot candidat 16.11.21).
The issue has come to the fore across Europe with the weekend demonstrations in Austria, the rioting in the Netherlands, and outbreaks of violence during a Brussels march.
Today the US NBC sums up the most recent developments.
Far right spies an opportunity in Europe’s new wave of Covid pain and protest
A new fault line is emerging in Austrian and European politics: whether or not a party supports Covid restrictions.
The Vienna rally was organized by the far-right Freedom Party, the third biggest political party in Austria, which experts say has used the pandemic to further its anti-establishment credentials and re-establish public support after a high-profile scandal.
“STOPP Impffaschismus,” (stop vaccine fascism) one sign in Vienna read. “Kontrolliert die Grenze, nicht euer volk,” (control the border, not your people) another said — just some of the slogans mixing vaccine skepticism with right-wing ideology.
Austria has become an explicit case of direct far-right involvement in these issues.
What of the UK?
Piers Corbyn is still at it.
Gender ‘Debate’: J.K Rowling Receives Death Threats.
BBC
The author, who has been criticised for her views on trans issues, has reported the matter to police.
Police Scotland said they had been made aware and inquiries were ongoing.
In a now deleted social media post, one of the group said the photo had been removed after they had received “threatening” messages online.
In her own Twitter thread, Rowling said the image depicted the three activists in front of her home, “carefully positioning themselves to ensure” the address was visible.
She said: “I want to say a massive thank you to everybody who reported the image to @TwitterSupport. Your kindness and decency made all the difference to my family and me.
“I implore those people who retweeted the image with the address still visible, even if they did so in condemnation of these people’s actions, to delete it.”
Rowling sparked controversy in June 2020 for posting tweets which took issue with the phrase “people who menstruate” – she objected to the avoidance of the use of the word “women”.
In a lengthy blog post, the writer of the Harry Potter books said her interest in trans issues stemmed from being a survivor of abuse and having concerns around single-sex spaces.
Critics said her views “diminished the identity” of trans people, while stars from the Harry Potter films, including Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, distanced themselves from her comments.
*****
Some people make light of people standing outside somebody’s home to protest against them.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this story a few days ago was this:
Iglesias, who has since left the leadership of Podemos and politics, was targeted by the far right. The man organising the daily protest outside his house was Miguel Ángel Frontera, an ultra right activist and a sympathiser and voter for the far-right party Vox.
Frontera even took video recordings on his mobile of the inside of the residence:
There have of course been worse cases of harassment outside people’s homes, in the Basque Country, not to mention the North of Ireland.
The principle though, of protesting against somebody at their own address, the one where they live, is a very bad one. As can be seen, it can be used by all kinds of political forces.
The opponents of Rowling respond:
Anybody who wants to read what Rowling actually thinks on the issues should begin here.
J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues. (2020)
(Extracts from a long piece).
This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity.
For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.
My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain.
……
It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”
Oppose the Expulsion of Pamela Fitzpatrick.
“I received yesterday afternoon a letter from the Labour Party expelling me as a member of the party. My offence, that I spoke to Socialist Appeal in May 2020 about why I had applied for the role as General Secretary of the Labour Party. Labour proscribed Socialist Appeal this summer and has retrospectively applied the rule.
The party has been such a huge part of my life for so long I wanted to take time to think about what has happened before I told people. “
*******
The Morning Star reports,
THE latest victims of Labour’s alleged witch-hunt against socialists urged the left to continue to speak out against the “oppressive regime” within the party today.
Local councillors Pamela Fitzpatrick and Jo Bird, who were expelled from Labour last week, were guests on the Not the Andrew Marr Show, hosted by Labour Grassroots’ Crispin Flintoff.
Ms Fitzpatrick, who represents Harrow and is a former local Labour group chair, accused the right of the party of expelling her to protect the “small group of men” at the heart of the abuse.
She also revealed that her expulsion had been briefed to the media, despite Labour’s insistence that those expelled maintain confidentiality.
“We’ve got to encourage [people to speak up] because keeping your head down is not working,” she said.
Ms Fitzpatrick accused those running the party of “abusing our processes,” adding: “They have no grounds to expel me, but they’ve done it anyway.”
Ms Bird, a councillor for Bromborough on the Wirral in Merseyside, said that she was “delighted” to have finally been expelled from the party.
“I feel free, I’m free from this ridiculous oppressive regime that the Labour Party has become.”
Yesterday Labour national executive (NEC) members Laura Pidcock and Nadia Jama submitted a motion to the NEC pointing out that a ban on “support” for various proscribed organisations had not defined what support meant, and that retrospectively applying it to discipline members for actions prior to the ban contravened natural justice.
Labour witch-hunt victims call on socialists to speak up about ‘oppressive regime’ in the party.
Comment:
No doubt some people will try to find a way to smear Pamela Fitzpatrick but the fact remains that the charge against her is that she gave an interview to a small circulation paper of the tiny group Socialist Appeal, before it was proscribed. Nobody is suggesting that she is a member of this organisation.
This Blog notes as well that the expulsion of Jo Bird comes at a time when moderate left voices are expressing deep concern at the exclusion of Jewish members.
More:
Perhaps Labour should (also retrospectively) investigate Keir Starmer for writing in Socialist Alternatives, a group aligned to the Tendance marxiste-révolutionnaire internationale (TMRI). The TMRI was considerably to the left of Socialist Appeal. Its leading figure Michel Pablo (Michel Rapitis) had been involved in actively supporting the armed liberation movement in Algeria, the FLN, which successfully overthrew French colonial rule.
(from The Left in Paris)
He was one of the first to make contact with the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and began to organise solidarity action (the so-called “suitcase carriers” who assisted the FLN with publications and transferring funds.
One of the ‘bag carriers’ was Jakob Moneta (1914-2012), who was a Trotskyist employed as the trade union representative at the West German embassy at 28 Rue Marbeau. He used his ‘diplomatic bag’ to transport documents for the FLN.
Pablo was personally involved with two more ambitious ventures – setting up an arms factory in Morocco where Trotskyist engineering workers from France and elsewhere worked, and a project for forging currency; for the latter he was arrested and jailed in the Netherlands in 1960.
After Algerian independence in 1962 Pablo became an adviser to Ben Bella until his being overthrown in 1965.
The War in Algeria
Declaration of Michel Raptis at the Amsterdam Trial
(14 November 1961)
Put on trial for his part in a plot involving the fabrication of counterfeit money, Pablo and his comrades took advantage of the trial and used it as a political forum.
I don’t have a strictly private life. For many years the apartments I’ve lived in with my wife were open to the members of our organization, to our friends and our political sympathizers, to a great number of people. During the war and the Nazi occupation of Europe, Israelites or men of the Resistance of all nationalities hunted by the Nazi services naturally found refuge at our home. When the Algerian revolution began in 1954, and Algerian militants were in turn pitilessly hunted down by the police services and terrorists under the orders of colonialism, my wife and I told the Algerian comrades to do us the honour of considering our home at their entire disposal. It was the same in Amsterdam.
We hope to continue in this way until the end of our days, today aiding our Algerian brothers to the best of our abilities, tomorrow our black brothers of Angola and South Africa, our Indio brothers of Latin America, our brothers from everywhere, oppressed and exploited men fighting for the liberty and dignity of man.
Brussels: Violence at Demonstration against Covid Restrictions.
Riot police in Brussels clashed with people protesting on Sunday at new Covid restrictions in Belgium. Police fired water cannon and tear gas in response to a group of participants throwing projectiles. At least 35,000 took part in the demonstration against a ban on unvaccinated people from restaurants and other venues.
The march was called “Ensemble pour la liberté”. According to La Libre Belgique a number of marchers were hooded and carried Flemish nationalist flags and symbols – associated with the far right Vlaams Belang and the hard right wing Nieuw-Vlaamse of Bart De Wever (a key ally of the Catalan nationalist independentists).
Dans cet affrontement, plusieurs manifestants portaient des cagoules et brandissaient des drapeaux nationalistes flamands.
The Tweet below notes the presence of the extreme right:
Gender-Neutral Pronouns and the Gender Debate.
In Johnathan Rée’s illuminating work, Witcraft, The Invention of Philosophy in English (2019) he recounts the contribution of a 16th century English clergyman, Ralph Lever. The cleric objected to the use of Latinate and Greek words in English wit and speechcraft. In place of these “inkhorne terms” than nobody could understand, the maxim “every proposition is either an affirmation or a negation” should be, “every simple shesay..is either a yeasay or a naysay.” Made up of “true and auncient English” it would replace the language making a “mingle mangle” of our “native speache”. Logic and Dialectic would give way to the “self-explanatory term Witcraft”. As for “the latine worde, called a Conclusion. I call it an Endsaye, bicause it is a saying that maketh an ende of a reason.” (The arte of reason, rightly termed, witcraft, teaching a perfect way to argue and dispute. Made by Raphe Leuer. Seene and allowed according to the order appointed in the Queenes Maiesties iniunctions. 1573,
Alas, Lever’s vocabulary never caught on.
Today we have a new effort to reform our “native speache”.
What are the 78 Gender pronouns? Bob Cut.
Gender traditionally was associated with a person’s sex which was assigned to them at birth. In every societal structure, there are predefined gender-based roles, assigned to their binary genders. Binary genders such as man and woman used pronouns such as he, she. This predefined structure of gender, classified people based on their appearances, attitudes, and restricted expressions. Those who fell outside this pre-determined structure, were often outcast, dehumanized, and suffered greater misfortune in the hands of the public, and were mocked, or humiliated. In such a society, the self-expression of individuals was considered less important. Mostly it depended on how well the person behaved in conforming to these ideals, which the society had dictated.
In a modern societal structure, however, the gender norms are much more complex and are made much more inclusive for the LGBTQ+ community. It the important of building a community where everyone is accepted and are inclusive of each other without prejudice and move forward and build a better society. Even in workplaces, employers prefer using gender pronouns as a step to be more inclusive. The civil rights for LGBTQ+ commonly ensure the usage of gender pronouns, the violation of which can be considered workplace harassment. It is very important to ask someone what their preferred pronouns are and this could make them feel less intimidated and feel more comfortable in any stress-prone environment and provide a general sense of acceptance and give the comfort of a community.
The gender-neutral language was introduced to English by feminists Casey Miller and Kate Swift. Their work was written to encourage inclusive language, as an alternative to the existing sexist language which was not inclusive to women.
Neo Pronouns were also introduced which were used differently from the traditional gender pronouns such as he/she/they and incorporated the Spivak pronouns for gender-neutral and non-binary individuals.
These are the common gender pronouns used
| Subject | Object | Possessive | Possessive pronouns | Reflexive |
| (f)ae | (f)aer | (f)aer | (f)aers | (f)aerself |
| e/ey | Em | Eir | Eirs | Eirself |
| He | Him | His | His | Himself |
| Per | Per | Pers | Pers | Perself |
| She | Her | Her | Hers | Herself |
| they | Them | Their | Theirs | Themselves |
| Ve | Ver | Vis | Vis | Verself |
| Xe | Xem | Xyr | Xyrs | Xermself |
| Ze/zie | hir | hir | hirs | hirself |
I merely add this point (familiar to many of those who have taught English to speakers of other languages),
A brief history of gender neutral pronouns
Now, in English, the word “they” is used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun – even though some critics argue that “they” should really only be used to refer to plural nouns.
But these identifiers are nothing new and have actually been used throughout the history of literature.
Examples of the singular “they” being used to describe someone features as early as 1386 in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and also in famous literary works like Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 1599.
“They” and “them” were still being used by literary authors to describe people in the 17th Century too – including by Jane Austin in her 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice.
While these pronouns weren’t used historically to define people as gender neutral, ‘they’ was used to specify a role being undertaken by a person.
“You could say that somebody was say, a teacher, but you didn’t know whether that teacher was male or female,” Dr Emma Moore, a professor of linguistics at the University of Sheffield, tells Radio 1 Newsbeat.
But she says it was from the 18th century onwards that people started using male pronouns when describing someone of a non-specific gender in writing and this marks the time when opinions on what pronouns should be used started to change.
Kathleen Stock Row Over Transsexuals Continues as Investigation Looms.
The Kathleen Stock affair continues.
Raising Prof Stock’s case in the upper chamber, Labour peer Lord Hunt of Kings Heath said: “She has been vilified by colleagues, abused by students, unsupported by a union and really let down by a university, which was far too late to defend her.
Other academics in many other universities are facing similar abuse, particularly women, for basically gender critical views.”
He added: “However much legislation you have, you need to have confidence in our universities to show some strength in defending their academics. What is the Government going to do about that?”
University to be investigated after Kathleen Stock forced to quit. The Argus (Brighton).
At the beginning of this month Sráid Marx (An Irish Marxist Blog set out a highly recommended set of summaries and reviews of three important books on the Transgender issue: Three books on Transgender politics (1 of 4) – Material Girls.
Outlining Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls he notes an approach to one of the main issues at stake. It does not appear unreasonable. You can agree or disagree.
..she sets out what she thinks is a “more helpful and detailed account” that involves, for a misaligned female gender identity, a strong psychological identity with a “particular female or with femaleness as a general object or ideal.” This, she says, “fits well with first-hand testimonies about experiences of gender dysphoria.” She argues that it does not then have to result in the medical and surgical intervention demanded by some trans activists.
She defends the traditional concepts of what a woman is and its necessary employment for how we live, including its importance for other concepts that are important, such as mother, daughter, lesbian etc. She notes the radical revision to our understanding of concepts if adult human males could be considered as mothers, sisters and daughters, and adult human females considered as fathers, brothers etc (although some advocate removing words such as mother).
But in order to be trans-inclusive this would have to be the case. And if this was the case, it would require new words, for example, for those who are not only mothers but also adult human females etc., although these new words would also necessarily be trans-exclusive. A new word for lesbian would be required not only to denote same-sex attraction (if ‘sex’ is understood as equated to gender and not biological sex) but sexual attraction to those with a female body.
The issue of language is a relevant one. It can be seen how the fashion for new, non-binary, words has reached France.
French speakers remark that this pronoun is a nightmare for all kinds of reason, starting with grammer: how is it conjugated for 3rd person pronoms disjoints, eux, elles? What happens to the accords of gender in reflexive verbs in the third person, ils se sont frappés, elles se sont frappées? Iel se sont Frappé(e)s Iel se sont frappé.e.s (you cannot do a “point médian” that is a stop in the middle between two letters, with ease on most keyboards (example of its use, « les salarié·e·s »).
But I pass that over for the simple reason that languages grammatically coded for gender are not the same as English ‘natural’ gender. So in French a recruit (that is, say, for the Army) is always une recrue (feminine) while amour is masculine in the singular and (still in older literary French) feminine in the plural… More obviously nobody (though some researchers, after a great deal of trying to find it, talks of a vague feminine association for some words) thinks of a Table as a female because it is La Table.
No doubt things would not have got so fraught in what apparently some on the US left call ‘TERF Island” were it all about row involving what somebody from a different philosophical tradition demanded, to ” rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. (Rectification of names. Confucius). But as this interview in the Times indicates, a lot more has come to be at stake.
Many of the statements Kathleen Stock makes are reasonable, though one can certainly disagree with them, until she comes out with ones which are not.
The Times Interview (Extracts) commences well.
Here is a good starting point:
“Just as Stock was coming out, postmodern gender theory was migrating from US and British campuses into public policy. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler asserts that the concepts “male” or “female, “man” or “woman”, are not scientific categories but social constructs. From this the trans writer Julia Serano extrapolated the concept of “gender identity”. “Being a woman” is a nebulous inner feeling unconnected to biological sex.”
Stock saw the attraction of these theories. “It means we can change reality through our words alone. That’s a sexy idea. It also places philosophers at the heart of everything because they get to produce the ideas that generate the world.” But Stock had been schooled in female biology by her physiologist mother, Jane, who drew reproductive diagrams to explain periods. (Stock’s sister is a research obstetrician.) She was appalled that gender theorists didn’t care about the real-world consequences of their ideas. “Their minds slide away when you say, ‘Yes, but hang on a minute. There are male rapists in women’s prisons because you changed the categories.’ ”
Male Rapists in Prisons does not sound to most people as something designed to further calm discussion.
This gives a flavour of her views, something which is equally (surely?) contentious.
Following that first blog, Stock was interviewed in the Brighton Argus where, discussing single-sex spaces such as changing rooms, she noted that the vast majority of trans women retain male genitalia. “This is a fact,” she says, “but it was treated as the worst thing I could possibly say.” (Stock’s friend, Professor Mary Leng, calls such a statement of unacceptable truth a “reverse Voltaire”: ie “I agree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death to prevent you from saying it.”)
There again it is hard, even for the softest hearted, to feel much sympathy with those doing this.
“That’s where everyone at Sussex’s ears pricked up.”Academics, especially in English and gender studies, began to organise. The chair of the LGBT staff network – “where I was trying to make friends as a new lesbian!” – petitioned against her. “It was very hostile.” Students formed a Facebook group to discuss how to get her fired and faculty members would post in solidarity. Blogs compared her support for single-sex spaces enshrined in the Equality Act to Jim Crow segregation. Open letters condemning her passed from desk to desk and friends would come under intense pressure to sign. When Stock organised a staff-student forum, trans activists leafleted to try to stop her speaking. In January, when Stock was made an OBE, 600 philosophers signed a denouncement.
“Did anyone ever argue with her in person? Stock laughs. “They come up to your bosses. They write to your managers. They used every bureaucratic mechanism against me. But it was very passive-aggressive. It was never, ‘I disagree with you. Let’s argue about it.’ When Stock challenged her most vocal academic opponent to a debate, “She said that my position was beyond rational discussion.”Over three years, campus life grew ever more toxic. Many times Stock resolved to step back and say nothing. “But I would go to bed and just fume until 4am then get up and write a blog defending myself. I’d press send and feel an enormous catharsis. I had to keep meeting every blow.” Moreover, her Catholic upbringing made her feel this “no debate” trans activism was a form of religion. “It involves special holy days, ceremonies, rituals, mantras and performing acts of ritual self-abnegation. I can see it completely.” Which frames Stock as a heretic.”
Perhaps things pass me by but one has yet to witness this here, no doubt in remote places like Ipswich (an hour from London on the train).
One leaves this to those familiar with the milieu to respond to this, which on the face of it sounds dreadful.
She was still convinced her logical arguments would persuade fellow philosophers. “But that didn’t happen because the men were all, ‘I’m not going anywhere near that.’ And the women were all, ‘Heretic! Burn her!’ It’s women who have really pushed the persecution.” Why? “Partly because in academia now there’s a career incentive to virtue-signal, to promote yourself as an ethical activist figure.”
If the previous comment about “holy days” is an indication “logic” is not her only weapon.
As lockdown began, Stock started to write Material Girls, which seeks to analyse gender theory using philosophical tools. It is so unflinching you can see why some are incensed. Stock compares trans identity to an “immersive fiction”. She insists she is not saying a male living as a woman is “deluded or lying or there’s anything wrong with this. You’re participating in an activity that can be really life-enhancing. However, it also has limits. And there is a difference between fiction and truth.” Stock points out she taught trans people throughout her career, always using their preferred pronouns. “I’ve had emails from former trans students saying, ‘I respect and support you. Thank you for everything you did for me at Sussex,’ and, ‘Your class was my favourite.’ ”
This is the kind of thing, dramatic effects removed, that makes you wonder about some people’s ability to make fools of themselves,
Material Girls was published in May, but it was not until October, when in-person teaching resumed, that protests intensified. Stock started noticing stares as she crossed campus, how colleagues stopped talking when she approached. “Trans flags appeared on faculty doors. There were lots of rainbow masks… Performative compensation for the mere presence of me.” Then an Instagram group called Anti Terf Sussex formed to plaster the campus with posters and stickers, let off flares, protest in masks at an open day. Until Stock was sacked, they said menacingly, “You’ll see us around.”But it was the statement from the University and College Union that finally made her quit. The university’s outgoing vice-chancellor had firmly supported her academic freedom (far too late, says Stock) but the UCU instead declared its support for trans students’ right to protest and, while opposing “summary sacking”, refused even to state her name.
Tired of confrontation, she has no desire to return to British academia since every university has “people like those at Sussex, who’ve got a light in their eyes, who want social justice according to a very narrow conception that does not involve employing me”. She has agreed to be a founding fellow at the University of Austin, along with other heterodox thinkers such as Bari Weiss, Steven Pinker and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But this new institution is at the “nascent germ of an idea” stage, and she’s received a one-off sum but not a salary and won’t move to Texas.
I have yet to find a newspaper article about Stock in French….yet.
US Far-Right celebrates Kyle Rittenhouse Acquittal as Protests break out.
As French Presidential would-be candidate the national populist hardliner Éric Zemmour receives the backing of the violent outer fringes of the extreme right (the latest, Les Vilains Fachos, to add to la Famille Gallicane, who train in forests by shooting at caricatures of Jews, Muslims and Black people) and the far-right prepares to demonstrate today in Austria against new Covid measures, a reminder that racism and fascism are international phenomena that extend across the Atlantic. (1)
Sat, 20 November 2021,
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Portland police Friday night declared as a riot a demonstration downtown against the acquittal of a teen who killed two people and injured another during a protest in Wisconsin.
The protest of about 200 people was declared a riot after protesters started breaking windows, throwing objects at police and talked about burning down the Justice Center, KOIN TV reported.
The protesters gathered following the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, 18, in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Rittenhouse, now 18, killed Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, then shot to death Anthony Huber, 26, and wounded Gaige Grosskreutz, 28, in the summer of 2020 during a protest over the shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, by a white Kenosha police officer.
He claimed self-defense and was acquitted of all charges, including homicide and attempted homicide. He used an AR-style semi-automatic rifle, a weapon authorities said was illegally purchased for him because he was underage.
“Here in Portland especially it’s reasonable to expect there will be some type of reaction to the verdict,” Lovell said during a general news conference scheduled before the verdict was announced. “We’re supportive of peaceful protests, people exercising their First Amendment rights.”
Here’s a look at what others said:
Sandy Chung, executive director of Oregon ACLU, released a statement: “Our hearts and souls are heavy. We have so much anger, sorrow, and despair for the repeated violence and lack of accountability perpetuated by systemic racism and white supremacy. This jury verdict shows us again that anti-Black racism remains deeply embedded in our country’s consciousness and systems, including the legal system.”
Kyle Rittenhouse verdict – live: Protests across America as Biden ‘angry and concerned’ by decision
Kyle Rittenhouse has been found not guilty on all counts in his homicide trial, after four days of tense jury deliberations. The 18-year-old became visibly emotional as the verdict was read, seeming to cry and hyperventilate before hugging one of his attorneys.
Conservative politicians around the country celebrated the decision, with GOP congressman Madison Cawthorn offering Mr Rittenhouse an internship, and telling supporters to “be armed, be dangerous, and be moral” while exercising the right to self-defense.
Others, like writer and critic Roxane Gay, said the decision “emboldens white supremacist vigilantes.”
The White House on Friday said it was in touch with law officials in Kenosha, Wisconsin, about the controversial verdict, with press secretary Jen Psaki telling reporters, “We are supporting any effort towards peaceful protests.”
Mr Rittenhouse, 18, was facing five felony charges for shooting three men in the aftermath of police brutality protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin on 25 August 2020.
Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley called for any protests following the verdict to be peaceful.
“We ask that all members of the public accept the verdicts peacefully and not resort to violence,” he wrote in a statement on Friday.
Former president Donald Trump congratulated Rittenhouse on Friday, who is scheduled to speak with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.
(1) From
Zemmour’s tiresome ‘when-will-he-finally-declare’ campaign is is said to be running out of steam as he struggles to win over the necessary local elected figures for his Presidential nomination and his organisation looks decidedly shaky. From the best sources (Libération) ….Les équipes d’Eric Zemmour doutent, sa campagne marque le pas
Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) win 84 votes (6.08%) and 54 votes (3.74%) in Liverpool Council By-Election Breakthrough (they beat Tories and Liberal Democrats!).
3,74% and 6,08% Breakthrough – Beat Tories and Liberals!
Labour has cruised to victory in three Liverpool City Council by-elections.
The ruling group comfortably held its seats in Anfield, Clubmoor and Fazakerley – with two former councillors returning to the authority.
Clubmoor
Matthew Smyth – Labour – 787 votes (54.50%) – ELECTED
Liam James Buckley – Liberal Party – 324 votes (22.44%)
Laura-Jayne Wharton – Independent – 167 votes (11.57%)
Ann Barbara Walsh – Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition – 54 votes (3.74%)
Peter Cranie – Green Party – 45 votes (3.12%)
Stephen Fitzsimmons – Liberal Democrat – 34 votes (2.35%)
Wendy Rose Hine – Conservative – 33 votes (2.29%)
Kirkdale
Dave Hanratty – Labour – 852 votes (61.69%) – ELECTED
Peter Furmedge – 171 votes (12.38%)
Maria Teresa Coughlan – Green Party – 160 votes (11.59%)
Roger Bannister – Trade Union and Socialist Coalition – 84 votes (6.08%)
Katie Maria Burgess – Conservative Party – 57 votes (4.13%)
Jenny Turner – Liberal Democrat – 57 votes (4.13%)
Roger Banister representing TUSC stood for Liverpool Mayor in 2021. He got TUSC – 2.88%
| Labour | Joanne Anderson | 38,958 | 38.15% | 7,535 | 46,493 | 59.2% | | |
| Independent | Stephen Yip | 22,047 | 21.79% | 10,032 | 32,079 | 40.8% | | |
| Liberal Democrats | Richard Kemp | 17,166 | 16.79% | | ||||
| Green | Tom Crone | 8,768 | 8.67% | | ||||
| Liberal | Steve Radford | 7,135 | 7.05% | | ||||
| Conservative | Katie Burgess | 4,187 | 4.14% | | ||||
| TUSC | Roger Bannister | 2,912 | 2.88% | | ||||
| Registered electors | 336,382 | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Turnout | 101,173 | 30.51% | ||||||
| Rejected ballots | 3,978 |
*****
George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain won a respectable increase of 2,2% in a Canterbury by-election
Result for Gorrell ward Canterbury District Council by election 18 November 2021Green 1149 + 10.3%Labour 803 – 6.0%Tory 608 + 0.2% Workers Party of Britain, Colin Barry Gardner, 58 2.2% + 2.2%
Whitstable voters elect first ever Green Party councillor to Canterbury City Council.
Voters have elected the first ever Green Party representative to a local authority in a historic victory.
Clare Turnbull bagged a decisive win at the by-election in Whitstable last night after scooping more than 40% of the vote.
Clare Turnbull (Green) earned 1,149 votes (43.9%) – 346 ahead of her closest rival, Dane Buckman (Labour), who had 30.7% of the vote share.
The Conservative Party’s Stephen Spencer got 608 votes (23.2%) and the Workers Party of Britain candidate, Colin Gardner, earned 58 (2.2%).
While the Greens have reason to celebrate winning in a hitherto safe Labour seat in Bohemian Whitstable, the future does not look rosy for left-wing mirco-workers’ party TUSC and Galloway’s red-brown alliance with the Marxist Leninist CPGB (M-L).
The Socialist newspaper, 17 November 2021
An appeal to trade union members to stand as anti-cuts candidates
Working-class people need our own political voice, as part of our toolbox to help us stand up to attacks from the Tories and bosses. That includes in local councils. In May over 6,500 councillors are up for election round the country. Whether your union is affiliated to the Labour Party or not, you can stand as a candidate.
The Socialist Party is part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), an anti-cuts electoral alliance including the RMT transport union, executive members of other unions, former Labour MPs and many individual socialists. TUSC is organising meetings to campaign for councils to set budgets to meet the needs of working-class people, not do the bidding of the Tories. These meetings will start to gather together socialists, trade unionists, community campaigners, working class and young people, who are prepared to stand in the elections.
Please consider moving this model resolution in your union branch:
1. This [union branch] believes that despite talk of “levelling up”, it is clear that the Tory government and bosses intend to continue to make working class people pay for their crises. This includes attacks on jobs, pay, conditions and services, alongside tax hikes and price rises. As part of this, we anticipate further austerity being inflicted in local government, which is responsible for over one fifth of all public expenditure.
2. We agree that we oppose Labour councils continuing to carry out Tory cuts.
3. [We acknowledge that our union is affiliated to the Labour Party/does not currently have any political affiliation]
4. Nonetheless, this [branch] resolves to encourage our members to consider standing as anti-cuts candidates in the council elections scheduled for May 2022, noting that there is nothing that prevents them standing as candidates, in a personal capacity, for any party which truly supports trade unionist and socialist principles.
Given their election results in the former Liverpool heartland of the Socialist Party (ex-Miliant) it looks like this call will fall flat.
Tendance Coatesy 