I. R.

A Straight Forward Choice

2009-06-19T21:04:00.005Z

It doesn't get much more straight forward than this. Either you side with those struggling against an oppressive state, facing down armed thugs and paramilitaries on the streets - those being beaten, intimidated, threatened and shot - or you side with oppression. You don't need to support the apparent 'leaders' of the movement - in fact you can find them quite repulsive - and you don't need to have any illusions about their democratic credentials. What matters is that a genuine popular movement against a repressive state is sweeping through Iran and that it brings with it the promise of real democratic gains and the extension of liberty. Movements like this develop a dynamic of their own - and one that it is often difficult for its fundamentally conservative leaders to contain. It is clear that a wide range of political and social forces are throwing their weight behind the anti-government demonstrations including the Iranian Left and other progressive forces.

This movement, and right now only this movement, can smash the most reactionary aspects of the Iranian state regime - the legally embedded misogyny, the murderous homophobia, the stonings, the hangings, the execution of children, the repression of trade unions, the incarceration of political prisoners. With (a lot of) luck it may even go further than this - this sort of struggle can take people beyond liberal demands into a much more radical consciousness very quickly.

It's deeply depressing then to see sections of the British Left equivocating and fence-sitting in relation to the anti Ahmadinejad demonstrations - refusing to take sides (although I suspect that this refusal often masks - very thinly - a preference for Ahmadinejad). Worse still, some individuals have come out openly in support of Ahmadinejad and the reactionary regime he heads. Galloway for example - who surely now shouldn't be touched with a ten foot pole.

It's clear that this is shaping up to be a watershed moment for the UK Left and one that could have very liberating effects - whatever the outcome in Iran. It looks to me like a lot of the more noxious baggage gathered over the past few years can now be, and must be, dumped and some basic principles reaffirmed. We can ditch the apologetics, the theoretical acrobatics and the bad conscience. We can start to breathe freely again.

Some socialists have chosen the wrong side - or at best, refuse to choose the right side. This is simply the logical outcome of some of the bad politics of recent years - some became so thoroughly immersed in it that they drowned. But they are clearly in a minority. Thank god.

Robert Fisk in the Independent

Robert Fisk again

Azar Sheibani in Red Pepper

Peter Tatchell in Red Pepper

Shourideh Molavi: The Socialist Project

Shop a Benefit Cheat

2009-05-09T12:44:00.005Z

New Labour take benefit fraud very seriously. Those who falsely claim benefits are picking the pockets of law-abiding taxpayers. In 2007-08 benefit thieves stole an estimated £800 million from public funds. Shop a benefit cheat here:

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/campaigns/benefit-thieves/

(Please note: Barbara Follett, David Miliband, Ben Bradshaw, Peter Mandelson etc are definitely not benefit cheats or anything. Technically, only people who live on council estates are actually benefit cheats - not cabinet ministers or New Labour movers and shakers who are legitimately entitled to milk the parliamentary expenses system. This is simply an expression of the creative, aspirant entrepreneurial and property developing spirit that New Labour values so highly and seeks to encourage more widely amongst the country's talented and ambitious wealth creators (and, especially, amongst those that donate large sums to the Labour Party). So don't report anyone with more than one home because they are not benefit cheats. And anyone who says they are is probably a terrorist).

The Human-Shaped Commodity Form

2009-04-28T15:39:00.016Z

What are these human-shaped ciphers called 'celebrities'? Who, or what, for example, is 'Brad Pitt'? 'Brad Pitt', the celebrity, is totally indistinguishable and inseparable from the various media channels and market relationships through which 'Brad Pitt' circulates and within and through which 'Brad Pitt' acquires, or is invested with, a certain reality. The celebrity individual has no reality outside of the system of circulating symbolic forms which create and reproduce the celebrity entity. There is, presumably, a real, material Brad Pitt out there somewhere who bears some passing physical resemblance to the shiny, air-brushed hyper-real 'Brad Pitt' celebrity - but he is not 'Brad Pitt'. Those who meet famous people often say that they are 'smaller in real life'. There is more to this saying than a simple description of comparative size (the living, human celebrity-symbol referent vs the actual celebrity form that circulates electronically or via the publishing industry). It is an expression of a qualitative difference - the living breathing human you might actually encounter physically is, somehow, less real than the celebrity entity with which this familiar looking human being has, apparently, some vague, but necessary connection.

The celebrity is, of course, a commodity. Like any other commodity, the celebrity must have some basis in material reality - a half-obscured physical referent to which the abstract, symbolic exchange value of the commodity (the aspect of the commodity which gives it its commodity form) must be anchored. The abstract exchange value of the commodity is, in a sense, however, more real than the material object to which the commodity abstraction is attached. The use-value of any commodity under capitalism is, in the end, only of minor, secondary importance. What really matters is that the commodity can be exchanged on the market for money-capital which can then be reinvested in the commodity production process - what matters is the accumulation of the abstract social force known as capital. There is an essential meaningless - a circularity of nothingness - at the heart of capitalism. The point of being a capitalist is to accumulate capital so that you can then accumulate more capital and so on and so on. The use-value, the physical reality, of the stuff to which the exchange value of the capital-bearing/representing commodity is linked is of no importance - or, at least, is important only inasfar as it assists or hinders the valorisation, and hence the accumulation, of the capital abstraction. Capital, in fact, almost seems ashamed of, or disgusted by, the mundane physical reality of objects to which it is umbilically bound. It constantly seeks to escape from it, to shed the material vehicles through which it passes and which bear it at certain stages in its circulation, but it can never in the end become pure abstraction.

The point of a celebrity - the function of 'Brad Pitt' - is to act as a vehicle assisting the circulation and accumulation of capital. The point of a celebrity is to sell (or provide a selling point) for magazines, films, cosmetics or any other saleable thing so that the surplus can be reinvested in the selling of further magazines, films or cosmetics (via the celebrity form). The physical reality of Brad Pitt the human is, for 'Brad Pitt', merely a slightly irritating and embarrassing thing that, unfortunately, always seems to tag along like an annoying little brother following its older, teenaged sibling - it would be done away with entirely if it were possible to do so. But capital must always have some basis in the mundane, dreary world of the real.

The celebrity commodity continually seeks to break loose from the material human being to which it is attached. It wants little to do with it. It is embarrassed by it and seeks to obscure it. The celebrity commodity is variously airbrushed, electronically tweaked, stylised and abstracted in an attempt to escape the breathing, sweating, farting being that carries it - the lumbering, oafish thing that transports the celebrity commodity from photo-shoot to film premier. But the problem for the spectral celebrity commodity is that it is necessarily intertwined with the biological being above and around which it hovers - 'Brad Pitt' needs Brad Pitt to survive.

The celebrity commodity has a peculiar physicality. It is the physical human form of the celebrity that provides it with its saleabilty and with market differentiation. To be sure, this is differentiation within a strictly limiting set of boundaries - all celebrity commodities must look roughly similar in order to circulate efficiently within the system of celebrity commodities (it should be easy to swap one 'Angelina Jolie' for one 'Nicole Kidman' on the front cover of Elle or Heat or to substitute one 'Brad Pitt' for one 'Matt Damon' as the leading actor in a film without very much friction and their broadly similar appearances assist in this process) - but they must also be sufficiently different that consumers may, on occasion, choose between them in the market. It is the physical appearance of the celebrity commodity which provides it with a brand recognition factor. This tragic reality - the utter reliance of the celebrity commodity on the fleshy creature it abhors - is transformed into a rage against that animal being. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are starved, injected, pumped, moulded, carved and beaten - the reproduction and improvement of 'Brad Pitt' and 'Angelina Jolie' involves a regime of violence against the material beings that always accompany them. The exaggerated physicality of the celebrity - the image that slavering Heat editors (in their radically cynical, anti-human activity) pore over for evidence of cellulite or acne - is accompanied by the constant reshaping and remaking of that physical form so that its appearance becomes more and more unreal, more and more symbolic and as close to the unreal image of the celebrity commodity that it is possible to get a human body.

The celebrity, then, is a bundle of paradoxes. It has no function other than as an appendage to the process of capital accumulation and no meaning or significance other than as a vehicle for capital at a certain stage in its circulation - and yet, celebrities are also the focus of wish-fulfilment and projection on the part of great swathes of the population. They are invested with all kinds of concentrated, intensified meanings and significances on the part of the voyeuristic-oppressed consumers of the celebrity commodity and yet in order to function properly they must function without meaning other than the circular, sui generis logic of accumulation for accumulation's sake. The celebrity seeks to escape from the human being that bears it but cannot since it is essentially parasitical on a living person without which it cannot survive - and, more than this, is, in a more fundamental sense, deeply reliant on the physicality of the human bearer that provides the celebrity with the basis of the image-shape necessary for market exchange and circulation. Because of this, and because the physical attributes of the human bearer cannot be totally obscured or re-represented (through a process of air-brushing, computerised retouching and reshaping etc) in the various media manifestations of the celebrity commodity, the human bearer must be subjected to a regime of violent, physical punishment and brutal remoulding through botox injections, liposuction, surgery and starvation diets. The physical dismemberment and reconstruction of the physical form of the human bearer is a necessary part of the celebrity commodity's continual attempt to transcend and escape the material being that carries it.

A Spot of Shoegazing

2009-01-22T21:29:00.005Z

Lush: Superblast (1992)

Curve: Clipped (1991)

Harry Shutt: a Crisis of Overaccumulation

2009-01-15T21:55:00.006Z

There are some really good articles in the Economics section in Red Pepper right now including one (about which I might blog another time) by Stuart Holland, the architect of Labour's left-wing 'Alternative Economic Strategy' in the 1970s and 1980s . As far as I can tell this is the first time Holland has surfaced in the UK since about 1985 which is interesting. Might there be some return of the AES (or some neo-AES) in the offing? Suddenly the idea of total nationalisation of the financial sector (which is still very much on the cards) and the nationalisation and socialisation of the 'commanding heights of the economy' under a left-Keynesian, dirigiste programme doesn't seem quite so dated or quite so far beyond the bounds of 'realism' anymore. Strange times. For me, however, the most interesting article is the interview with Harry Shutt . In the course of this interview one of the best and clearest accounts of the crisis in terms of overaccumulation of capital (although this particular description isn't used) is put forward. I'm slightly puzzled by the solutions and alternatives that Shutt puts forward at the end of the article which seem, to me, to be in awkward tension with his emphasis on capitalism's inherent and systemic tendency towards periodic chronic crises. Nevertheless here's the explanation of the crisis:

"In order to understand Shutt’s explanation for the crisis, it is necessary to take a brief detour through Marx. According to Marx, capitalism is a system of accumulation. Profits are made but can’t all be consumed by owners. Extra profits need to be recycled through the market. ‘The only way you can successfully recycle them is to either expand your existing business or diversify into another business,’ says Shutt. ‘It all depends on the ultimate consumer, consuming more and more. It has to grow, growth is built in.’ The problem is that as profits are invested into the market, generating more profits that in turn have to be reinvested, production expands until it reaches a level that can no longer be absorbed by consumers. The market is glutted, and recession results. But the destruction of capital and jobs creates pent up demand for the whole process to begin again in time.

That, in brief, is the business cycle. But Shutt’s argument is that western political leaders have, for years, based their economic strategy on avoiding or limiting the downside of the cycle, a doctrine encapsulated in Gordon Brown’s famous boast of an ‘end to boom and bust’. Credit expansion has been fuelled, household debt recklessly encouraged, state services privatised, financial institutions subsidised and regulations banished all in order to find profitable outlets for a burgeoning ‘wall of money’ generated by the system. A high rate of growth is needed to maintain this process, but can’t be sustained because of the weakness of demand in the economy.

The consequence is that money, frustrated in its search for productive activities to invest in, has turned to speculation. ‘When you get to the point that you can’t actually make profits by producing more stuff – organic growth – profits get recycled into speculation,’ says Shutt. ‘In other words, you start placing bets that certain assets will increase in value.’ And once speculation takes hold, it becomes advantageous to bring even more money into the market, because that pushes up the value of assets. Hence, the ‘leveraging’ by speculators – the borrowing of more and more money to speculate on financial assets.

‘Over the last 30 years you’ve had a progressive postponing of the evil day,’ he says. ‘1974/5 was the first financial crisis since the second world war, then you had the 1987 crash, which was inflated away by pumping lots of money into the banks. Then it was shifted offshore. We’ve had the Mexican crisis, the East Asian crisis and the Russian crisis. The big one was the dotcom bubble eight years ago. And since then, we’ve been building up to this one.’

What the prolonged amassing of this huge surplus of capital cum fraud-driven credit bubble, means, according to Shutt, is the inevitable crash – the inexorable end of the business cycle – is going to be far more severe that it would otherwise have been. ‘I think we are looking at negative growth, for an absolute minimum of two or three years and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s five or ten. That would be a depression,’ he says.

It’s not a cheering prognosis – a protracted downturn of several years with the likely side effects of military conflict and scapegoating of minorities. But Shutt hasn’t finished yet. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, or if there is, it’s very dim. He believes that that this slump will be much more difficult to emerge from than in previous downturns because traditional engines of growth are no longer available to drag us out. Remove debt-fuelled consumption and property speculation from the equation, and you are left with anaemic subsititues such as the internet, the service sector and green technology. The arguments of centre-left Keynesian commentators that the answer lies in re-regulating the financial sector and encouraging consumer spending, ignore the fact, says Shutt, that the demand for capital – the availability of new profitable productive activities to invest in – is in long-term decline, and consumer spending power has been exhausted.

‘It is easy to say that we’ll emerge from the slump eventually, but to quote Keynes, “in the long run we are all dead”,’ he says. ‘In other words there has to be a huge contraction in the meantime and the impact on livelihoods and lives is likely to be intolerable. The fundamental misconception of mainstream commentators is that people can and should be induced to consume more when they’re already ‘maxed out’ on credit. In practice it is right and necessary that they should now be forced to rebuild their personal balance sheets, which means saving rather than spending. Only once they’ve done this, probably after several years will they be able to start spending again. This pinpoints a fundamental weakness of capitalism. In order to function it requires the perpetuation of unsustainable levels of consumption in order to absorb the endlessly expanding stock of capital.’"

London Gaza Demonstration Pictures

2009-01-10T21:23:00.022Z

Rick Wolff on the Economic Crisis

2009-01-08T21:43:00.010Z

'You can't have real political democracy without economic democracy underpinning it'.

Rick Wolff is a US socialist economist. He's also a passionate and pretty funny speaker. He waves his arms around, he has a winningly dry sense of humour and, best of all, he speaks with a heavy Noo Yawk accent like the wise guys in 'Goodfellas'. Unfortunately the picture quality isn't great and the camera shakes around quite a lot - nevertheless, the sound quality is good and I found it a really entertaining lecture.

How Bad Will It Get? An Amateur's View

2008-10-24T19:21:00.007Z

I can't help thinking that most media economists and business journalists are underestimating the probable severity of the unfolding economic crisis. I don't claim to be an economic expert - far from it - and I have to admit that my feeling here is, precisely, a feeling more than it is anything else. Nevertheless all of the economic figures and signs look particularly ominous to me and I distinctly get the sense that the media are, in general, choosing to be rather more optimistic than is warranted. This underestimation of the crisis (if I'm right about it), I suspect, stems from a sort of disorientation - mainstream economists really are out at sea at the moment. Neoclassical economic theory - the hegemonic economic theoretical framework and the particular approach that most media economists take for granted (naturally) - simply doesn't provide its practitioners with the conceptual tools to grasp what is going on. Most of them know that something is very wrong with that hegemonic framework (indeed, even Alan Greenspan seems to admit that orthodox economics has been discredited by recent events), but in the dust and confusion of the collapse of this framework the tendency seems to be to assume that, partial nationalisation of the banking system and slow-motion resurrection of some strange half-forgotten beast named John Maynard Keynes notwithstanding, things will carry on more or less as normal.

In general, however, the media have been consistently (to invoke its own currently fashionable jargon) 'behind the curve' during the whole of the crisis so far. It's now widely accepted (in the days after The Governor of the Bank of England's recent headline grabbing speech) that the international banking system came within days of total 'meltdown'. To be sure, the news reports of a couple of weeks ago at the height of the banking crisis were clear that something major and very worrying was going on - there was more than a whiff of panic in the tone of some of those reports - but I don't remember anyone suggesting that the banking system was on the verge of collapse. This is why I'm a little bit sceptical about those reports today, in the wake of the publication of official ONS data showing that the British economy has contracted, which suggest that Britain is heading for a recession similar in magnitude to that of the early 1990s. Most news reports I've seen or read have made this early 1990s comparison. But why settle on this particular measure of the probable severity of the downturn? Surely there's a good chance that things are worse than that. No one can know for sure how bad it will be (largely because the economy is not some force of nature but a name we give to some aggregation of human transactions, investment and consumption decisions and other social relations between human beings - and the concrete course of its development is, therefore, ultimately unpredictable and certainly not fore-ordained), but a number of things suggest that the relatively mild downturn of the early 1990s may not be the most appropriate historical comparison.

For one thing, the world economy today has hit the skids after having been driven forward over the past couple of decades by a series of increasingly insane speculation and credit bubbles. The financialisation of Western economies, together with the level of increase in consumer debt over the past couple of decades - a 20 year stop-gap to temporarily shore-up growth while manufacturing and industry was steadily hollowed out, unable to survive the squeeze of increasing international competition under 'globalisation' in the era of cheap overseas labour costs - is unprecedented. The 1990s recession marked the end of 5 or 6 years of the Thatcher- Reagan boom. That, surely, was child's play compared to the last 16 years of continuous credit fuelled expansion.

Though the immediate banking crisis seems to have been resolved, at least for now, there's little doubt that things are going to get a lot worse in the 'real economy'. It's worth remembering that the ONC figures for UK GDP shows a contraction in the period before the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the height of the banking crisis - the effects of that crisis, then, will not show up in the 'real' economy stats for some months yet. The worst is yet to come and it will be much more than a 0.5 per cent contraction.

There are other factors we need to take account of too. One obvious thing here is that US national debt has reached unparalleled proportions. Of course, the US continues to spend astronomical sums in Iraq on a weekly basis - and one of the key contributing factors in the downturn of the 1970s, it should be remembered, was the massive level of US military expenditure in Vietnam. The dollar is highly vulnerable - any major run on the dollar, sparked perhaps by another Wall Street bankruptcy, would have serious consequences.

There has been some suggestion that a major world recession/depression cannot occur while China continues to grow and remains therefore capable of taking up any global slack. There is good reason to think, however, that things aren't quite so rosy with the Chinese economy as they might seem. This report, for example, suggests that the Chinese economy is 'stuttering' -'pausing for breath' after its Olympics preparations fuelled boom. 'Some critics', the report comments, 'say the rulers of the world's most populous nation have presided over a bubble economy that is just waiting to pop'. It would be rather foolish to assume that China will make things all right. It's worth pointing out, too, that we don't know how deep corporate-financial corruption goes in China - there is plenty of incentive for Enron style make-believe book-cooking in the 'special economic zones' of Shanghai and Beijing.

I wouldn't be amazed, then, if things turn out to be much much worse than 1990. One of the surprising things about this crisis has been how relatively sober and staid the socialist left has, so far, remained. Excepting Immanuel Wallerstein, at least, no one serious has predicted a 'final crisis of capitalism'. As Phil BC pointed out in an interesting post a few days ago, this has to be a good thing - the left almost manages to make itself look sensible and wise. I wonder, however, if, like the majority of media pundits, left wingers are underestimating the scale of the crisis - scared of being seen to exaggerate and looking silly, as the socialist left has so often before. A major recession/depression (?) would bring terrible suffering and we must hope that it can be averted, but if it came it would also bring great possibilities for political advance. Old political and economic certainties would break down (indeed they already have to a certain extent) to be replaced by a situation of flux in which the opportunities for remoulding and restructuring the ideological and political terrain would be substantial. Slavoj Zizek commented recently that politics is 'the struggle to define the "neutral" terrain' - it is, in other words, a battle to transform a particular world view into the universal, or, in Gramscian terms, a struggle for hegemony and to define the 'common sense of the age'. In periods of crisis the opportunities for rapid advances in such a struggle increase - the tempo of the day to day 'war of position' accelerates. The Thatcherites capitalised on the crisis of Keynesianism in the 1970s by waging a successful ideological war in a time of political and economic flux to redefine 'common sense' and to reconfigure 'neutral-ground' and the taken-for-granted. The left must be ready now to do something similar.

Resources on the Crisis

2008-10-22T15:35:00.003Z

There's an excellent website called Radical Perspectives on the Crisis which gathers together a largeish number of articles by economists and political theorists (and philosophers like Badiou and Virilo) on the unfolding economic crisis, as well as providing some primers on basic political economy and 'crisis theory'. It looks like it will be updated on an ongoing basis. Worth a look. Also worth a look is a site called Market Meltdown 101 where you can listen to the response to the crisis of economists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, such as Robert Pollin and Richard Wolff.

In one of the articles on the first website Immanuel Wallerstein not only predicts a depression rather than a recession but also comments, after a breezy discussion of Kondratieff cycles, that '[we] can assert with confidence that the present system cannot survive'. Well someone had to say it I suppose. Seems a bit of a rash assertion to me though.

The Financial Crisis: What Does The Left Say?

2008-09-17T14:06:00.002Z

Interesting article on the Guardian website today, providing space for several 'high-profile leftwingers' to have their say on the current crisis of capitalism (although I have to say that I've not heard of some of them - how 'high-profile' is Michael Onfray?). And I'm not sure that Jarvis Cocker, nice guy though he may be, is a major authority on leftwing politics, but never mind. The Guardian only gives them a couple of paragraphs each, but at least it's a start.

Explaining the Crisis

2008-09-16T14:07:00.002Z

Ralphie de Santos, once head of Equity Derivatives Research and Strategy at Goldman Sachs, (gosh, you can find socialists in the strangest of places) has a few interesting essays on the SSP website. This one, written before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, is a particularly informative account of the origins of the credit crunch and analysis of some of its likely effects.

This Distant Northern Sea

2008-09-01T19:19:00.008Z

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

It's a rather commonplace observation to note that there is something about looking out to sea that reminds you of the vastness of time, the brief duration of your life and the relative insignificance of anything that you have done or will ever possibly do. We've been struck by the thought ever since 'Sophocles long ago', according to Matthew Arnold, after all. There is something of the eternal about a view out to sea; you become acutely aware of time - in particular, of the deep-time of the sea's patient, grinding assault on the coastline - and yet you imagine, also, that you somehow stand outside of time, too, as you stare out at the waves. I imagine, as I look out towards the Isle of Wight, that the view has not changed very much since the time when Romans must have stared out towards the barbarian island reputedly inhabited by Druids. The shape of the island would have been more or less the same and they would have seen the same strange, low hills on the horizon. They would have seen the same grey and white shapes of the waves and heard the same constant low rhythmic roar of those waves against the pebbles. Perhaps many of those Romans imagined that other people, centuries before them, must have seen and heard similar things on that same spot.

There is something vaguely terrifying about this sense of time and timelessness - but there is also something oddly comforting about it. One of the other commonplace remarks about staring out to sea is that it is quite a calming, almost hypnotic, experience. The sea is our death and oblivion. It is the aeons when we were not alive and the aeons after we are dead, but it also represents timeless continuity and prompts us to understand that things will carry on much the same without us. It impresses us with the relative insignificance not only of our lives but also of death. It is not nihilism that grips us when we look out to sea and see oblivion.

When I walk along the coast with the dog, I often see elderly people sitting in cars which have been parked as close to the shore as the various car parks will allow. They are staring out to sea. I imagine that when I am old, not so very long from now, I might want to do the same thing. Is there a time when, close to death, the old ask to be driven down to the beach to watch the sea for one last time? Do the old neatly wrap up their lives like that? One last glimpse of eternity.

The Dark Knight

2008-08-22T19:30:00.004Z

I went to see The Dark Knight yesterday. It wasn't really a film I was dying to see, but I'd heard good things about it and the only other option was the new The Mummy action-hokum formula fest which I certainly don't want to see. I was expecting a good-ish film and a good-ish performance from Heath Ledger but imagined that a lot of the current busy heaping of praise on the film, and on Ledger's acting in particular, had a lot to do with that peculiar, slightly ghoulish, sentimentality that seems to overcome media-types in the wake of early death on the part of good-looking young actors. I still think that the quality of Ledger's performance has been a little hyped - but only a little. It is very good and so, furthermore is the film. It's nothing at all like the early 90s Batman film featuring Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Whereas that film was dark only in a cartoonishly dark sort of way and whereas in that film Nicholson hams it up to the rafters as a larger than life comic villain, The Dark Knight really is dark and Ledger doesn't play the Joker as a simple pantomime villain with extra-make-up.

Ledger's Joker is one of the most memorable film villains I've seen. What is it about his Joker? It's hard to say what's so affecting about it, but it has a lot to do with the physical postures and movement that Ledger uses to bring the character to life. The Joker slouches, round-shouldered, head pushed forward and downwards - it's a posture that suggests exhaustion or depression. There's a real sense of self-loathing and inner despair about the joker - but it's only implied and never brought to the fore. The other striking thing about Ledger's Joker is his physical awkwardness. He moves with a slightly uncoordinated jerkiness suggesting a kind of awkward self-consciousness - as if the Joker isn't quite at home, or doesn't quite belong, in his own skin. There's something about that awkwardness that is really chilling and which makes the Joker such an arresting, and memorable villain. There's something just right about it that I can't quite put my finger on. Perhaps it's got something to do with a sort of paradoxical contrast between the character's evil and his outward appearance - in the same way that an evil clown is particularly terrifying (and the Joker, of course, is a kind of evil clown complete with flaking Big Top makeup and green hair). Making the Joker move like a difficult, gauky teenager somehow increases the wrongness of the character, making his appearance jarring or grating for the viewer. I wonder, also, if there's a sense in which the Joker appears to be possessed - he's not quite at home in the skin he occupies rather like a devil animating a stolen, captive human body.

There's a definite political subtext to the film - or, perhaps, more than one. The intended sub-text concerns political corruption. The film's Gotham City is a setting fit for a disillusioned post Iraq invasion America, tired of its political leaders. Politics is the preserve of a rich elite in Gotham City (and, here, interestingly Bruce Wayne embodies the corruption of politics). In Gotham City democracy is simply 'democracy for the money bags' - Bruce Wayne, the not so secret billionnaire, can effectively choose the city's political elite by throwing lavish fundraisers to ensure their future political success. The police department is riddled with officers on the mafia payroll. The film's 'white knight' - the honest, idealistic, campaigning politician played by Aaron Eckhardt, becomes (at the Joker's hands) a monster by the end of the film.

But there's something beneath all of this too, I thought. Something perhaps unintended, which reflects the political climate of US Imperial anxiety in the era of The War on Terror and of the rise of China. It's little surprise that one of the film's villains is Chinese - a money launderer - or that the plot involves a daredevil raid to snatch this villain from the hands of the Chinese state (which harbours him when he flees from Gotham). Here, Batman represents the right of America to do what it pleases - he is its clandestine might-makes-right operative seizing the wanted terrorist from the hands of those soft-on-evil foreigners (with the active complicity of Gotham's law enforcement authorities). Batman does extraordinary rendition. There are, furthermore, several striking images in the film which - surely deliberately - echo images of 9/11 and Ground Zero. In one shot, Batman crouches on a twisted steel girder in front of a smouldering wasteland in the aftermath of a large bomb explosion. Furthermore, it's noticeable that the villains are repeatedly referred to as terrorists in this film. The Joker and his helpers are set apart from the ordinary racketeering gangs of hoodlums and their leaders (whom the Joker steadily usurps). It's clear that the Joker represents a new breed of enemy for Gotham City - not like the ordinary thugs of before who at least acted according to certain rules of honour and certain principles of rationality. The Joker does what he does without motive. He steals money in order to burn it, he revels in chaos and destruction for its own sake. Doesn't he remind you of the American understanding of terrorists - those who attack America for unfathomable (non)reasons? And once we see the Joker as Al Qaeda it's easy to understand Batman and his shadowy co-conspirators within the Gotham apparatuses of state as representatives of/ allegorical ideological legitimation for, the US's clandestine war against its enemies. The Batman does what those in positions of democratic scrutiny cannot be seen to do. He acts with their secret blessing - even though, at the end, he becomes a hunted figure as those in authority have to be seen to disapprove of his unusual, illegal methods. Batman represents the political necessity for dirty state hands in the era of Empire. The film is on his side. We are on his side. He has to do what he has to do to beat the baddies. It's an unusual film - one which speaks to the inhabitants of an anxious superpower and those of its foreign vassals and tributaries. It speaks to those who can no longer pretend to be the squeaky clean white knights of the international stage, but who must believe the new 'disillusioned' illusion that the good guys have to get their hands dirty and occupy murky depths precisely in order to remain the good guys.

Needed: Economic Regime Change

2008-07-26T18:35:00.002Z

There are some good, if very frightening, articles on climate change, sustainability, 'peak oil' and capitalism in the current edition of Monthly Review. You can access most of these articles free on the website. The Introductory article by Bellamy Foster, Clark and York is particularly impressive. The authors make the case for seeing the ecological crisis today as, in the end, a problem of political economy and demonstrate that any attempt to avert climate catastrophe that does not face up to the incompatibility of ecological sustainability and the logic of capital accumulation will fail.

Clean Ahhhrrt

2008-07-25T14:47:00.007Z

When you can't think of much to write, a ruthless clean out of, and addition to, the blogroll links, provides a nice, low effort blog filler. So:

out go various dead links and apparently deceased blogs - Dead Men Left, Pandora's Blog (shame, those two were amongst my first links), Gnus of the World (just stopped blogging - a shame), Apostate Windbag, Charlotte Street, Bartlett's Bizarre Bazaar, and Brisso99 (which seems to have been invaded, overpowered and assimilated by the site-stealing, tat-flogging web-Borg).

In come Liberal Conspiracy, Penny Red, Plattitude, Harpy Marx, The Encyclopedia of Decency, The Tired Man of Teaching and the very funny spEak You're bRanes.

Also I'm thinking of doing up the blog a bit by upgrading to the new improved sooper dooper Blogger and, perhaps, changing the name because, let's face it, 'I.R.' is rubbish. I can't work out how to upgrade, however, while maintaining the format of the links column on the right of the blog. The template doesn't seem to allow me to break up the links into different categories with headings. Anyone know how to do this? Neither will it let me keep the Haloscan comments application. Also, I'm tired of the garish orange colours on this site. I might go blue.

That is all.

Additional

That is not all. Philip points out that John Brissenden's blog isn't dead, it merely passed over to the other side - Wordpress. Link re-instated. I've also added MerseyMike to the links.

Roadkill

2008-07-19T20:53:00.006Z

Stuck in a crawling queue of traffic on the way to work, I spotted a corpse in the gutter. It was bigger than the others that usually litter the road here - squirrels, rabbits, birds and sometimes foxes. At first I couldn't work out what it was, but as the queue crept forward and my car drew level with the corpse I could see that it was a young deer. It was a sleek little thing with glossy reddish-brown fur. It lay curled up into a semi-circular shape, with three of its legs tucked up under its body. Its head pointed out into the road and where its nose should have been was a bloody hole as if the tip of the animal's snout had been rammed back in on itself. One of its forelegs had been ripped clean off and lay neatly, absurdly, at a right angle in front of the fawn's face. The shoulder end of the leg was a pinkish, stringy pulp like corned beef. The animal's eyes were closed.

On the way back home I saw that the day's traffic and the crows had reduced the corpse to a small mush of raw hamburger meat and a few scraps of skin and fur.

Around 3000 people a year die on Britain's roads. They pick those bodies up and take them away.

As I Was Saying to the Bishop of Atlanta...

2008-07-13T19:10:00.005Z

I went to a Deanery discussion in a local church this evening. I went to listen to two bishops from opposing wings of the Anglican church discuss current theological/ecclesiastical controversies - namely the ordination of gay priests and female bishops. Now as I am mostly atheist you might be surprised that I should want to attend such a meeting - but I am, after all, the country's leading bishop-spotter and therefore simply couldn't pass up this opportunity to cross two exotic specimens off my list and I am, furthermore, quite interested in the current faction-fight hoo-hah in the Church of England and allied international churches between 'liberals' and fundamentalist conservatives.

Unfortunately the African bishop scheduled to speak (a conservative) wasn't able to attend. The only speaker was the liberal Bishop of Atlanta. I didn't agree with everything he said (i.e. all the metaphysical, mystical stuff - or, in other words, most of it) but I did like what he said, find it very interesting and end up liking this guy very much. He was clearly very active in the campaign to get Western governments to drop 'Third World' debt. He was also strongly committed to gay partnerships, the ordination of openly gay priests and bishops and to the ordination of women. It was interesting (if a little bizarre) to hear someone justify these positions in relation to religious faith and scripture. He said, for example, that there was no word for homosexuality in the language in which the Bible was originally compiled and that, in fact, the word itself was a 19th Century invention (I shall have to chase this up). The implication, he suggested was that there was no proscription against homosexuality in the Bible until recent translations/rewritings of that text. He argued that heterosexual marriage was presented simply as a kind of 'model' relationship - that is an ideal type of partnership that most people (given the fact that most people are straight) would encounter/experience. This 'model' however, was not intended as a one-size fits all kind of relationship - other forms of partnership including gay partnerships were just as valid.

He also had some quite interesting things to say about African Christianity. He argued that, although usually depicted as basically literalist and fundamentalist, most African Christians were traditionally anti-literalist in their reading of scriptures and that they often altered the details of particular parables in the Bible for example in order to make them relevant to their own particular cultural context. A little example he gave here was that the Masai alter the biblical passage about sheep and goats so that the goats, not the sheep, become the metaphorical representatives of the faithful - this is because goats not sheep are the most prized form of livestock in some areas of Africa because sheep aren't well adapted to the environmental conditions. The fundamentalism that exists in Africa, he said, was entirely imported from outside recently by fundamentalist Western missionaries and was in many ways quite superficial rather than well rooted. He mentioned that some African tribes originally had valued socially allotted roles for gay people - suggesting that homosexuality was seen as entirely normal in these communities. This acceptance of homosexuality, he said, though not immediately obvious, can often be discovered under the surface in African Christian communities - though it is hidden because it contravenes the official teachings of church leaders and missionaries. It would have been interesting to hear what the African bishop had to say about this.

There were some pretty ugly contributions from the floor as you might expect. At least two speakers argued that homosexuality was a form of evil and one referred to 'buggery' in a manner which didn't suggest an attitude of Christian love. I was most interested, however, in those attendees who said that they didn't feel as if they could continue to belong to the Church of England if female bishops were ordained. The most interesting thing about these contributors was that they were all women - this was a great demonstration of the way in which people can internalise and come to identify with social relations and sets of beliefs that actually structure their own social oppression/repression. I was talking to a very nice old lady who suddenly informed me that she didn't think that women were capable of being bishops. It's sad that 90 odd years after women won the vote there are still people who think that men and women are not of equal worth. But then that's patriarchal capitalism for you innit.

I was hoping to make some kind of 'left-wing contribution' to the debate, but in the end remained silent. For one thing it's quite hard to make a contribution to a debate in which some of the referrents and taken-for-granted bases of discussion are, if not entirely alien, ones that you are unused to and which you do not yourself accept. The discussion of gay priests for example was premised on the idea that the rights and wrongs of the issue had to be deciphered from, or justified in relation to, scriptural texts. Another reason I didn't contribute, however, was that I became unaccountably nervous during the debate and didn't feel like I'd be able to make a very good point. I sometimes get this in contexts in which the airing of left-wing politics is not an everyday occurrence. I'm all right on a university campus, but away from that, and in the company of relatively conservative and/or 'apolitical' people, I often feel like I'd make an idiot of myself if I mentioned the 's' word, let alone the 'M' word. I get this in the school staffroom, too, actually. I must try to get over it - but as someone somewhere once remarked it's much harder to explain left-wing political positions to people than it is to rehearse the everyday trite and/or platitudinous position on 'current affairs', or indeed to come out with Jeremy Clarkson type reactionary chauvinist bullshit. This is because the left-wing political outlook is (in most cases) quite a sophisticated one which runs against the grain of everyday 'common sense' and which, therefore, takes quite a lot of explaining.

Oliver James: The Pathologies of Consumerism

2008-06-28T15:53:00.004Z

There's an interesting interview with the psychologist Oliver James in Red Pepper. He talks about his new book, The Selfish Capitalist - the main thesis of which appears to be the idea that consumer capitalism (neo-liberalism?) makes us depressed, ill and generally demeans us.

"Selfish capitalism... [is] characterised, says James, by privatisation, insecure working conditions, the redistribution of taxes from poor to rich and the conviction that the market can meet almost every conceivable human need. So far, so depressingly familiar. But what James adds is the assertion that wherever this system spreads, mental anguish follows.

Stagnating real wages, the growth of short-term, service industry jobs, a workaholic culture, combine with intensified status competition for consumer goods (frequently new and more expensive versions of existing items) and the exaltation of the consumption habits of the rich, to create a toxic cocktail of limited economic means and unrealisable desire. Depression, anxiety, substance abuse and low impulse control ensue.

And you can actually measure it. English-speaking countries, the epicentre of selfish capitalism, exhibit levels of emotional distress twice as high as more sheltered continental Europe....

What James regards as his ‘most interesting claim’ is that selfish capitalism does not merely leave depression and anxiety in its wake, it also actively works to destroy anything that might improve the well-being of the population ‘It is absolutely critical for everybody to go around feeling miserable, filling the emptiness with commodities, dealing with misery by trying to give yourself short-term boosts with hamburgers or drink,’ he says.

The system is ‘akin to the biological notion of natural selection’. For it to work, we have to be unhappy. Materialism produces anxiety, and anxious people consume more. It loves divorce and separation, he claims. Besides legal fees, each partner has to buy or rent a new home and get a new set of electrical essentials (TV, DVD player) and furniture. Misery equals economic growth."

I read James' previous book, Affluenza, a year or so ago. In this book James makes similar kinds of claims to those above, but fills the book with a number of case studies - close observations of a number of individuals suffering from the 'Affluenza' illness - an empty materialistic acquisitiveness accompanied by 'status anxiety' and depression. It was quite interesting, but it left me a little cold because the subjects of James' study were all very rich yuppie-types - none of whom I felt much sympathy for. There was something rather grating about the implication in this book that the victims of 'Affluenza' are all upper-middle class. The political implications that James drew out in his book, I seem to remember, were fairly weak too. The answer, he suggested was to return to a more civilised form of social democratic capitalism - a return which could be brought about by a generalised change of heart in society. From the looks of the interview, James draws the same kind of hand-waving conclusions at the end of his new book, too. He seems to be banking on the idea that the political pendulum is due to swing back towards the left and fairly soon - something close to Polanyi's idea about the regular pattern of oscillation between 'free' marketisation and state intervention under capitalism.

I'm not at all convinced that there's very much 'space' for radical social democratic reformism under capitalism today. I hope there is, but my feeling is that there isn't. To this extent New Labourites are, in very broad terms, right to suggest that 'things have moved on' and that 'the world has changed'. I'm sure there's a lot of 'space' to the left of New Labour for social democratic type reform - but not as much as there was, say, in the 1940s and 1950s. Left-wing reforms would probably run up against certain structural constraints pretty quickly, it seems to me - the particular structural constraints of capitalism at a time where there isn't much slack in the system. Thatcherism/Blairism/Neo-liberalism are very often portrayed by the soft left wholly in terms of a successful ideological offensive. Neo-liberalism, that is, is seen to be a way of thinking - a successful hegemonic strategy in the battle of political and economic ideas. But neo-liberalism has solid material foundations. It's hard to explain why it's been quite so consistently successful in the battle of ideas across the world without reference to the material problems for which it provides some sort of partial solution. Intensified global competition over the past few decades has put constant, and constantly increasing, pressure on governments to do what it can to reduce relative labour costs and social spending. Any serious left-wing politics needs to recognise the material economic context in which neo-liberalism has sprung up. Thatcher and her heirs did not just win an argument which might, in principle have gone any conceivable way. It's not just air. Neo-liberalism won the argument (largely, but not wholly) because it mapped onto the material referrents of contemporary political and economic debate - an acute and growing crisis of profit for capital. (There might have been other solutions, or partial solutions, within capitalism, of course - a dirigist form of capitalism might have prevailed for example.)

James' curiously weak politics are highlighted at the end of the article. It seems that he has been in talks with the Cameroonians. He also remarks:

‘I’m not a political economist, I’m not a political philosopher, I’m not a political administrator, I’m not all at an expert on politics. My instinct is with George Orwell in that he wasn’t a member of any political party. I’m deeply, deeply sceptical. I don’t think I’d be doing anyone any favours if I was banging a drum and urging people to vote for someone or other. I’m more interested in influence than in power.’

It's as if James doesn't think that his critique of 'selfish capitalism' is at all political - as if politics is wholly synonymous with party politics and that anything beyond that is non-political. Strange.

Nevertheless James is an interesting writer and I'd like to get hold of his book when I can. He's not as good as Fromm though.

My Interview Hell

2008-06-27T14:42:00.004Z

You wouldn't expect any job interview to be fun exactly, but the one I had a couple of weeks ago takes the prize for the most unpleasant and embarrassingly awkward interview that I've ever experienced. It was for an FE college lecturing job in North London. I have to admit that I wasn't as well prepared for some of the interview questions as I could have been, and I could have done a bit more research on current issues in FE and so on. I almost certainly wasn't the best candidate for the job - I'm not peeved about being turned down. What I am a bit narked about, though, is how incredibly unfriendly and rude the interview panel were.

The lady from personnel was perfectly pleasant and polite when she came to pick me up from the reception area. The usual questions about my journey were asked as she showed me towards the interview room. So far so good. The arrangement was that I made a 10 minute presentation on a subject of my choice from the course syllabus and that this would be followed by a 50 minute interview. I had spent several days preparing the presentation complete with Powerpoint slides and a hand out. I felt fairly confident, not too nervous. It all went wrong very quickly. I knew within 60 seconds of walking into the interview room that I didn't stand a hope of getting the job and that the whole thing was a collossal waste of my time and of a day's forfeited pay. I knew this because it was immediately obvious that the interview panel would clearly much rather be somewhere else, were not in the slightest bit interested in me, and weren't too bothered about concealing any of this - one of the panel spent the whole interview almost horizontal in his chair, occasionally summoning up the energy to roll his eyes at his fellow panelists and to make faint, half-hearted noises suggesting a state of exasperated boredom. He was probably what you'd euphemistically call 'a character' - or, as I prefer, 'a total knob-end'. The other two panelists (apart from the personnel officer who was friendly throughout) struggled to project any sense that they had warm blood in their veins and maintained an attitude of icy uninterest from start to finish. I don't know, maybe they'd only just come out of a coma or something.

Usually you'd expect your interviewers to rise from their seats and shake your hand when you enter the room - but with this lot it was just still, stony silence. Perhaps there was, at most, a slight nod of the head. They resembled a line of semi-hibernating reptiles eyeing some mildly appetising insect just out of reach - they knew somewhere in the back of their minds that they should show some interest, but couldn't quite find the energy to do anything about it. Just watch. Quite off-putting.

Anyway, after a few seconds of awkward hovering while I waited for handshakes or some other show of basic politeness, I went over to the laptop and tried to start up my presentation. As is always to be expected when using computer technology (especially someone else's technology) on a formal occasion, I couldn't get the damn thing to work for a few minutes. I couldn't find the Powerpoint application and an icon for the USB disk didn't show up on the desktop. Still, I thought I dealt with it quite well - in a situation like that you can either get flustered or you can make light of it, and thankfully I managed to make a joke out of it. No response. Not even a smile. Nevermind. Just start the presentation. Five minutes into the ten minute presentation one of the interviewers suggested I might like to finish now. I hadn't even come to the interesting part. OK, so some time was lost fiddling around with the laptop, but surely they'd realise that wasn't my fault? Anger started to well up somewhere in my chest, but, again, I managed to laugh it off. I still wasn't flustered, just a bit annoyed deep down. I'd boil about this later - but not now.

I sat down in front of the panel of stony, unimpressed faces. An iceberg would have radiated more warmth. No one asked me about my presentation. There was just an embarrassed silence for a few seconds while... while what? What was I supposed to do? Inscrutable reptile looks. Then the first question. I was asked how I would promote the college's Equal Opportunites policy in the classroom. Of course, I'm wholly in favour of Equal Opps policies and it's good that they clearly take it seriously - but what am I supposed to say about this? I managed to mumble something vague - but only after considering, for a second or two, a facetious response. 'How would I promote the college's Equal Opportunities policy in my teaching? Well I suppose I would promote it by not being a racist, sexist or homophobic bastard in the classroom.' What else can you say? The other questions were all fairly standard - although there wasn't one about my subject knowledge. They were all procedural questions. None of my answers seemed to impress. The lead interviewer recorded my answers in a manner that suggested that she was writing notes about something slightly distasteful and tiresome - like a blocked toilet or a nosebleed. If there had been any windows in the room, the other interviewers would have spent most of their time staring out of it. I started to suspect that they'd not read my application when they asked how much A-Level Sociology teaching experience I had when I was quite clear, on the form, that I had none. The end of the interview came and I was asked if I had any questions. I was tempted to ask whether it was normal in FE college interviews not to be shown around the college, see any teaching rooms, meet any students or be introduced to possible departmental colleages. How on earth was I supposed to know whether I wanted to work here or not? Perhaps I should have asked whether the interviewers were representative of the type of staff who worked there and, if so, why everyone was so bloody miserable. I asked some safe and polite questions about something I don't remember. The interview ended with another embarrassing silence. No one got up to shake my hand. Clearly I was supposed to shuffle off now. I decided to try and puncture the awkwardness by saying 'Perhaps we should do the formal thing and shake hands a ha ha' (so funny) and thrust my hand towards them. The character said something about how he 'would love to shake my hand' in a tone I couldn't mistake for anything but facetiousness. I bit my tongue.

Then the nice woman from personnel escorted me back to reception. In some ways this was the worst part, because we both had to pretend that the whole thing hadn't been a total waste of time. I still had to keep up the bright-eyed keeny act (this is very tiring for me) and express an interest in some aspect of the interview process suitable for small talk in the corridor and she had to pretend, when she told me when to expect the result, that the whole thing was still more than a formality and that I really stood a chance of being offered the job. We both knew that the other was pretending too. I found that desperately humiliating for some reason.

I Don't Get it

2008-06-18T18:33:00.004Z

Just finished reading Use of Weapons. I have the feeling that I must have missed something. OK, I understand that the twist at the end is that Zakalwe turns out not to be the real Zakalwe, but the horrible 'Chairmaker', Elethiomel. Fine. It's one of those books, however, that leaves me thinking 'what was the point of all of that'? It just seems like an account of an interesting series of events with an unusual time-frame/narrative sequence. It demands quite a lot of the reader in that s/he has to work out how each chapter 'fits' in relation to the whole and the reverse narrative half of the book allows us to come to understand the background experiences of Zakalwe in a layer by layer fashion. I get the feeling that there's more to it, though, than an interesting structure and a twist at the end. Look to Windward, for example is clearly about something - if you know what I mean. You can identify underlying themes in the story - guilt, loss, loneliness, doom. The book has something to say in addition to, and beyond, the immediate events of the plot. I didn't pick up on anything like that in Use of Weapons - is it really just an adventure story? This happened, then this happened, then this happened, twist, the end.

Most of the sub-adventures in the story seem to come to nothing and fizzle out. In fact they seem quite pointless - that war between the Hegemonarchy and the Empire that Zakalwe gets involved with, for example.

I'm a little confused about the book's epilogue too. Banks seems to imply that Zakalwe and his helper have returned to the planet on which the aforementioned war occurred. They place a nuclear device in a park and wait for the occupying army to arrive. Is there some key to the text here that I've missed? Why does the book begin and end at this point, roughly? What does the poem at the end signify?

The Culture doesn't come out of it very well - there's a pretty impressive death toll of poor bloody infantry in the book as Special Circumstances engages in a complicated process of war-mongering, war-fighting by proxy and betrayals. In the end they seem to order Zakalwe to set off a nuclear bomb (at least it's implied that SC are Zakalwe's 'masters' here). Lovely.

Perhaps the book's 'about' foreign intervention and real politik.

Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree in looking for somekind of 'deeper meaning'.

Can anyone help me out?

I really liked the description of Zakalwe's exploration of the Orbital, though. The daisy-chain making, insect bothering drone with the dry wit and casual attitude to violence is pretty good too.

David Harvey's Lectures on 'Capital' Online

2008-06-17T18:14:00.003Z

David Harvey, the radical urban geographer, has long been relatively famous in left-wing academia for his near-legendary reading group/course on Capital. Harvey is making his entire series of lectures on Vol. 1 available on his website - you can watch them for free. There are, apparently, going to be 13 installments - the first two are up already. Each lecture is two hours long (!) - but it will be worth going through the lot (I'm making tentative plans to set aside two hours on Sunday afternoons), especially if, like me, you've only ever read the first couple of chapters. It's not clear if there are any plans for similar online lectures in relation to Vols. 2 and 3 - I assume not. I suspect that, other than Marx, Engels was the only person ever to read the second and third volumes anyway.

Additional

Whoops! Just realised that I don't have speakers on my PC - balls! So I won't be sitting the course on Sundays then. Perhaps I should get around to buying some.

Teaching 'Animal Farm'

2008-05-19T15:49:00.007Z

Note: The following post is a total mess. I might restructure and beat it into shape later.

It was bound to happen sooner or later. I was told that I'd be teaching Animal Farm to Year 9. I winced inwardly at the news. It doesn't help that the class has two English teachers and that the other one, besides me, is the deputy principal with (as far as I can gather) the broad political views one would generally expect a senior manager at a comprehensive school to hold - mostly default social liberal but with distinct leanings towards status quo conservatism and the veneration of authority. After all, as an orthodox Marxist acquaintance of mine likes to say, 'being determines consciousness'. The teaching of Animal Farm usually ends up invoking some vague, almost metaphysical notion of 'human nature' which it seems is necessarily at odds with the demands of just egalitarian social structures. Staggeringly glib 'lessons' or 'truths' about the inevitability of failure for radical projects of social change are almost always extrapolated with an appropriate effortlessness. The signs are that it won't be any different this time. I checked the class's books to see what they had done with their other teacher and wasn't wholly surprised to see that they had been given a preparatory mini-lesson in Totalitarianism in which the names Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler had been grouped together as examples of 'ruthless leaders' with the clear implication that they were all much of a muchness and that, moreover, liberal capitalism (although it's fairly safe to assume, actually, that the word 'capitalism' wasn't mentioned) should not be tinkered with or else Horrible Things will happen. What exists is nice and good and right - it is synonymous with freedom and democracy. The Bad People are not in charge. We don't have any dangerously silly ideas about material equality around here. The most annoying thing about these notes is not so much that (some implied) moral equivalence was drawn between Marx and Lenin, on the one hand (and I'm no big fan of Lenin) and Hitler on the other (although that's galling enough), but the historical ignorance on display - Marx wasn't ever a leader of anything very much.

I mentioned to the other teacher that I had misgivings about teaching this book - I tried to say, as tactfully as possible, that I was a socialist and that I found the lessons and meanings that are usually drawn from Animal Farm to be spectacularly glib ones. It wasn't too surprising that the immediate result of this confession was that I had it pointed out to me that, 'as a professional, I mustn't bring my political views into the classroom'. The assumption, here, of course, was that a socialist political outlook is a crude, lumbering and unsightly sort of thing that one tends to lug around and, whenever one gets half a chance, to shove it into other people's unwilling and protesting faces. A socialist political outlook is a clumsy, bulky contraption that tends to get in the way and obscure a clear view of things. A socialist political outlook is the sort of thing that sensible and practical people choose to do without - a bit like they choose not to read books through the lenses of antique telescopes. The other main aspect of the same assumption is that non-socialists don't have strong political views and don't, as a matter of course, bring them into the classroom. This will come as startling news to anyone who's ever been into an RE or History classroom, often full of pictures of the historical heroes it's fairly safe for good liberals to quote and admire - Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy, for example. No politics in the classroom there. No sir. None at all.

But liberals and conservatives, more often than not, think that their thinking is not political - at least it's not Political with a capital 'P'. Whereas left-wing thinking is bound up with a cumbersome ideological straight-jacket that shapes, squeezes and constrains all mental activity, the liberal and conservative is entirely free from Ideology. But all successful ideologies are necessarily invisible. A successful ideological framework appears, precisely, not be an ideological framework at all, but a straight-forward, value free (and therefore unremarkable and uncontroversial) description of how the world really is. For this reason most people who support (and, indeed, most of those who simply accept - unthinkingly or resignedly) the current political and economic configuration of society like to imagine that their beliefs are, somehow, 'ideology free.' One of the central ideological underpinnings of conservatism, of course, is the idea that conservative thought has no ideological underpinning. But one cannot step outside of ideology any more than one can jump out of one's own skin (I think I may have nicked that phrase from Eagleton). Nevertheless the dominant ideological framework has a powerful draw to it - it seems, on the surface of things at least, self-evidently true. It appears to grasp and articulate solid reality - just the way things are. This is because the ideological framework(s) in question allows you to go with the flow. It doesn't demand much bothersome critical thinking or continually subject its bearer to various pangs of guilt, frustration or feelings of anger. It fits nicely with the world around it and doesn't keep nosily turning over stones and pointing to all the nasty creepy crawlies that emerge. Such an ideological framework that appears not to be an ideological framework might for example allow you to watch the new Sex and the City film without being disturbed by the insistent suspicion that it is, more than anything else, a tacky celebration of vapid, shallow, consumerist, elitist individualism somehow managing to masquerade as 'feminism' even though it represents the partial perversion and commodification of what feminism stands for.

I digress. It is possible to teach Animal Farm as a socialist with a fairly clear conscience. After all the main target of attack - Stalinism - is a deserving one. Furthermore, the famous ending of the novel - where the animals look from pig to Man and from Man to pig and cannot tell the difference - is, surely, just as critical of, and damning about, the humans (i.e. the capitalist powers) as it is of the pigs. In addition, it's clear that the author's sympathies lie with the rebellious animals when they turf Jones out of Manor Farm - even if, as it becomes clear, further on, he thinks that the revolution is necessarily doomed to degeneration and failure. Indeed it's perfectly legitimate to point out, while teaching the book, that Orwell regarded himself as a socialist and, of course, took up arms in Spain against Franco. Orwell claimed that his story should be regarded as an attack on Stalinism 'from the left' and that the Right's attempts to appropriate it for their own ('common sense', 'anti-ideological', 'non-political') political purposes were illegitimate. Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that, despite Orwell's protestations to the contrary, Animal Farm is, at root, a profoundly conservative book. It is impossible to ignore the central message of the story - the one that overwhelms the reader - i.e. that radical social change is bound to end in disaster because the irredeemably selfish, scheming, power-hungry and callous nature of human beings always asserts itself in the end. The pigs - Napoleon and Squealer, particularly, turn nasty for no reason other than the fact that this is, somehow, in their natures. The pigs, of course, are us - or, at least, us given the slightest sniff of power. There is no serious reference to the various concrete material factors that may have constributed to the rapid degeneration and failure of socialism in Russia. Things go wrong in Animal Farm because it is pre-ordained that they go wrong. It is written in the genes. My personal opinion is that Animal Farm is an awful book - it's philosophically and politically simplistic, resting on hand-waving appeals to some odd, half-articulated, semi-metaphysical entity, stuffed to the seams with conservative normative assumptions, called 'human nature', and it's horribly mean to pigs.

There's an interesting review of Animal Farm here.

Iain M. Banks - Sci-Fi and Socialism

2008-04-27T12:25:00.003Z

"Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces. The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.

Of course, there is a place for serendipity and chance in any sensibly envisaged plan, and the degree to which this would affect the higher functions of a democratically designed economy would be one of the most important parameters to be set... but just as the information we have stored in our libraries and institutions has undeniably outgrown (if not outweighed) that resident in our genes, and just as we may, within a century of the invention of electronics, duplicate - through machine sentience - a process which evolution took billions of years to achieve, so we shall one day abandon the grossly targeted vagaries of the market for the precision creation of the planned economy.

The Culture, of course, has gone beyond even that, to an economy so much a part of society it is hardly worthy of a separate definition, and which is limited only by imagination, philosophy (and manners), and the idea of minimally wasteful elegance; a kind of galactic ecological awareness allied to a desire to create beauty and goodness."

From 'A Few Notes on the Culture' by Iain M. Banks.

Barbarians

2008-04-27T11:50:00.003Z

A space traveller is briefed by his ship's sentient 'Mind' about the barbarous social conditions on the planet he is to visit:

"The thing to remember, Gurgeh," the ship interrupted quickly, "is that their society is based on ownership. Everything that you see and touch, everything you come into contact with, will belong to somebody or to an institution; it will be theirs, they will own it. In the same way, everyone you meet will be conscious of both their position in society and their relationship to others around them.

"It is especially important to remember that the ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which sex and class one belongs to, one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one's labour or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In the case of males, they give themselves most totally when they become soldiers; the personnel in their armed forces are like slaves, with little personal freedom.... Females sell their bodies, usually, entering into the legal contract of 'marriage'...."

Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

Unfortunate and Regrettable

2008-04-24T19:11:00.003Z

Gordon Brown has described the NUT strike as 'unfortunate and regrettable'. Funny that, because I've always thought that almost the entire history of the Labour Party is best described as unfortunate and regrettable. Things have been especially unfortunate and regrettable since 2003 when NuLabor made the unfortunate and regrettable decision to invade Iraq. Unfortunately and regrettably at least 100,000 people died as a direct result of that invasion. It is unfortunate and regrettable that NuLabor has been aiding and abetting kidnapping and torture for several years. It is unfortunate and regrettable that the gap between the richest and the poorest in the UK today, under a Labour government, is the widest it has been since the Second World War. It is unfortunate and regrettable that while NuLabor can somehow manage to find billions of pounds to spend on war and another £50bn to bail out the banking sector, it can't find enough money to pay public sector workers enough to keep up with the rate of inflation. It is unfortunate and regrettable that the party of Aneurin Bevan has become the party of Digby Jones and, worse, that oily, hairsprayed, right wing neo-liberal git, Ed Balls.

NUT Strike is an Opening Shot

2008-04-24T16:03:00.007Z

Went to the NUT organised rally in Southampton City centre today. It certainly beats teaching Year 9s. Might do it more often. I would say there were around 200 people at the rally - not massive, but not bad either. In addition to NUT strikers, several representatives from PCS, UCU, UNISON and two workers from UNITE were there too. Some coastguards reps were also there - coastguard staff on the south coast are on strike today and have organised two previous strikes in the past few weeks. The man from NUT central office was clear that this was likely to be the first strike in a long term campaign, not a one-off. NUT leaders seem pretty serious about this. He said something about one of the right wing papers (might have been the Telegraph - but I can't see anything on their website) comparing the NUT to the NUM in the 1980s and warning that it must be smashed. This is, of course, a totally absurd comparison - for one thing teachers aren't being beaten up in the streets and neither are they facing unemployment and utter ruin - but it does suggest that the ruling class is quite worried about the example the NUT is setting for other public sector unions at a time when the economic climate looks to be pretty bad and steadily worsening. I picked up a rather hopeful leaflet from the Socialist Party calling for a 24 hour public sector general strike - well, things aren't exactly at that stage, but they are, nevertheless, getting quite interesting. Currently, 1.5 million civil servants are consulting on a below inflation pay offer and their unions are recommending that they reject it. Another million workers in the NHS are consulting over a similar pay offer.

The TV news reports, predictably, contain much gnashing of teeth in relation to the 'disruption' the strike has caused children and their poor, long-suffering parents. Strange how single mothers in particular have suddenly become so popular - interviewed about the difficulties the strike is causing them. The media doesn't usually simper over them so much. Strange, too, that for some reason the media doesn't seem interested in the intolerable disruption caused to parents by the closure of many schools on election days. Will the news reports on the 1st of May feature the plight of young mothers as they try to organise child care for the day, or wail about the disruption to children's education as their schools are turned into polling stations for the day? Probably not.

I've decided not to vote in the forthcoming council elections. The Labour Party candidate is a teacher and was not there at the rally. In fact I don't think she was on strike. Another reason not to vote Lib Dem surfaced today, too. BBC News report that Lib Dem smoothy (and Education Spokesman) David Laws, wants teachers' unions to be bound to a no strike agreement. Well done Lib Dems - anything else you could adopt from Mussolini's politics while you're at it?

ADDITIONAL
Just watched the local news' coverage of the strike and Southampton rally - it was generally positive, even sympathetic. Good to see that most of the parents interviewed supported the strike. There was a priceless moment, however, when a parent who didn't support the strike told the interviewers how worried she was about the negative impact the strike might have on her daughter's performance in the upcoming 'STATS exams' - not quite worried enough about these exams, it seems though, to have bothered to find out what they're actually called or what they actually are.

Pathologies of Defection

2008-04-19T15:30:00.004Z

There's a wonderful article by David Edgar in the Guardian Book Review today. Edgar surveys the current crop of 'defection literature' (Cohen, Hitchens, Arnove et al) produced by ex-leftists moving right (Decents) and is decidedly unimpressed. Employing the discourse of Enlightenment and Human Rights and so on, the defectors are in fact, Edgar argues "seeking to provide a vocabulary for the progressive intelligentsia to abandon the poor" - just as previous generations found high sounding reasons to provide cover for a headlong dash into reactionary blimpishness.

In relation to the 'unholy alliances' Hitchens and others point to (usually fabricated, exaggerated or otherwise distorted), Edgar has this to say:

"All of the great progressive movements of the 20th century in the west - solidarity with republican Spain, the building of welfare states, the civil rights movement in the southern United States, the war against apartheid in South Africa - were led by an alliance between progressive intellectuals and the victims of oppression. The civil rights movement in particular allied secular Jews (often with communist backgrounds) from the north with black Christians in the south. The difficulties of that relationship were demonstrated when - after victory was largely won - blacks asserted the need for an all-black leadership of one of the main civil rights groups. Later, feminists properly criticised the leaders of the Black Panthers for the sexism of both their political practice and personal behaviour. Despite all that, does anyone think the creation of the alliance which successfully desegregated the American south was a mistake?"

The one annoying thing in Edgar's bit is that, along with many other Guardian writers, he will keep referring to the Left as 'progressive liberalism'. Progressive liberals are on the left, of course, and I've got nothing in particular against them, but the term doesn't really fit the Left as a whole - most of the more radical sections of which do not think of themselves as liberals at all.

Public Sector Workers on Strike - Although Mostly Teachers to be Honest

2008-04-15T20:58:00.009Z

Details of rallies across the country on the 24th to coincide with a national strike by the NUT and others can be found here on the NUT website (I joined). Looks like us humble teachers will be joined by the UCU, the PCS and UNISON. We really want the FBU to join us though, because everyone loves firemen. Nurses would be good, too. And vets.

Still, it's not bad as it is as far as a first round of public sector strikes go - and there are likely to be more given the fact that NuLabor is busily attempting to make public sector workers pay for inflationary pressures. The snivelling, unprincipled, union bashing, Thatcherite, CBI loving, Investment Banker pleasuring, Pigby Jones employing bastards. Those inflationary pressures, and economic difficulties more generally, furthermore, don't look likely to go away any time soon, what with spiralling food prices on world markets, that there credit crunch thing, the US economy going down the shitter and the neo-liberal hegemonic consensus rapidly coming apart at the seams. Interesting times. It may well be a little bit like the 1970s only without the bad hair or glam rock.

What a Choice

2008-04-12T21:33:00.003Z

In the upcoming local council elections I can either vote for a Labour Party candidate, a Lib Dem or a Tory. So the choice, then, is between a centre-right party, a centre-right party or a centre-right party. Now, obviously I would rather drink a gallon of sick than vote Conservative. That leaves me with not much of a choice. Should I bother to vote? I don't think I want to vote Lib Dem. They're just so... naff. I suppose the local Labour party isn't necessarily the same as NuLabor is it? In fact I think I might know the Labour candidate (I know someone of the same name) - and if it is her then she's very nice and probably a bit Old Labour (you can kind of tell can't you? If someone seems fairly kind, thoughtful, generally decent and works in the public sector then it's a fairly safe bet they're not NuLab). But still, the thought of voting Labour at the moment makes me feel like crying.

It's at times like this that I realise just how desperate I am to move back to a city - any city (except Birmingham, obviously). At least there they tend to have a token Lefty of some kind on the ballot paper. Mind you, it doesn't really matter does it? Sorry... had a bit of an ultra-left moment there.

The Olympics and Politics

2008-04-07T21:17:00.007Z

Like most relatively well adjusted people I am not in the slightest bit interested in athletics. The thought of spending several days watching people trying to jump slightly higher than each other, run slightly faster than each other, or throw something slightly further than anyone else is not exactly my idea of thrilling entertainment. I can't understand why anyone would take it seriously. I mean, fine, if it's just done as a bit of a laugh, involvement in pointless competitive activity can pass the time quite nicely (late night Mario Kart- now that was fun)- but why on earth would anyone want to spend their time watching these fools gurning, and grimacing, heaving and weeping as they try to beat one another at running quite fast, as if it's something really important?

Nevertheless, I have been quite interested in all this torch running business (it's quite reminiscent of the primitive football they used to play in English villages isn't it?). I've been heartened to see the mass protests in London and Paris against Chinese repression in Tibet. There has been some debate on other Left blogs about the rights and wrongs of the Free Tibet campaign - some of it enlightening and some of it downright bizarre. I'm quite aware that Tibet before the Chinese invasion was never the mystical, 'spiritual' utopia of the Hollywood liberal imagination, where wise, enlightened monks lived in some Idyllic pre-Industrial harmony with contented peasant folk and easy-going mountain yaks. It was, apparently, a backwards feudal nightmare in which a small, parasitical religious elite lived off a fat surplus extracted from peasant labour. Nevertheless, it should go without saying that Chinese Imperialism is just as unpleasant as any other kind, and that if the people of Tibet want to be free of Chinese oppression they have every right to demand it without being shot down in the street by the trained thugs of the grotesquely misnamed 'People's Liberation Army'.

I've been irritated by the reactions to the protests of those athletes and celebrities taking part in the torch carrying. Amongst the various banalities you would expect to hear from someone who has devoted their life to running round and round really really fast, (almost always introduced with the words 'Well, as an athelete...' - as if being an athlete provides them with a clearer perspective) you will usually hear them say that they think that sport and politics should be kept apart. The other thing they say (including, I'm afraid, Konnie Huq, of whom, shall we say, I'm quite a fan) is that they decided to do it because they're big believers in the 'Olympic ideals' and simply hadda. None of this washes.

What are these Olympic ideals anyway? Presumably they include the ideal of being a psychotically competitive bastard and the ideal of having an obsessive fixation on grinding one's opponents' faces into the dirt. For some reason, though, lots of people seem to think that the Olympic ideals are humanistic, internationalist and aim to promote harmony and understanding between nations. Even if this is true, however - if the Olympics do actually help Americans to grasp the fact of their common humanity with Ethiopians, over-riding and dispelling all residual national chauvinism, even while they punch the air chanting USA! USA! - aren't these ideals inherently political? The idea that sport has nothing to do with politics rests on the charmingly quaint notion that politics is what goes on inside parliamentary chambers and government buildings and not much else, as if politics can be compartmentalised and kept neatly separate from those other boxes labelled 'economics', 'education', 'the private sphere' and 'shopping' (this is, of course, a characteristically bourgeois idea).

Politics, however, suffuses everything - wherever human beings enter into social relationships directly and indirectly there is politics. You cannot keep politics out of anything - it's always already there. In any case, what could be more political than a world competition into which national governments plough millions and millions of dollars to prepare their athletes for victory - in which the whole point seems to be the tallying of medals and the ranking of nations by the number of golds, silvers and bronzes their representatives have won? Isn't politics immediately, overwhelmingly, visible in sports stadiums filled to the brim with people frantically waving national flags at each other? What people really mean when they say that politics and sport should be kept separate is that they don't want the wrong sort of politics to weedle its way into sport. They don't want the sort of smelly, unsanitised, unsettling politics that concerns itself with oppression, poverty or exploitation to enter into the arena. They don't want people making Black Panther salutes on the medals podium for example - it's very hard to find corporate sponsors for that sort of thing. It's hard to package. It doesn't sell commodities.

The Indie has a couple of interesting articles today, by the way. On the matter of the Olympic torch they inform us that:

"There is a two-word answer to those who think the Olympic torch is a symbol of harmony between nations that should be kept apart from politics – Adolf Hitler.

The ceremony played out on the streets of Paris yesterday did not originate in ancient Greece, nor even in the 19th century, when the Olympic movement was revived. The entire ritual, with its pagan overtones, was devised by a German named Dr Carl Diem, who ran the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. "

In the second, the paper raises a question that has been bothering me for a couple of days - just who are those blokes in the blue and white tracksuits? The TV reports hardly mentioned them. Are they Chinese secret service or what? Isn't it a bit odd that the British police have allowed the Chinese to police the Olympic circus on UK soil? Why is the BBC saying nothing about them?

An Unseasonal Visitor

2008-04-06T13:37:00.006Z

You don't often stumble across snowmen of this quality by the seashore on the south coast of England at this time of year.

I snuck up on him this morning while he was out scavenging for carrots (luckily, I happened to be downwind of him). I managed to get this shot just as he spotted me - you can see how surprised and alarmed he is to see me. Unfortunately he scurried off into the long grass before I could get another picture.

Snowmen have been known to stop off here during their long annual migration to the Arctic, but I've never heard of a sighting as late as April.

Strike Advice

2008-04-05T12:26:00.006Z

I've been employed as a teacher in a secondary school for the last few months on a temporary contract. I left a couple of weeks ago to give myself time to do my PhD corrections (don't fucking ask). I've accepted the offer of more work next term.

As you may have heard the National Union of Teachers are, rightly, organising a national strike on 24 April over below inflation pay rises (i.e. pay cuts in real terms). The NASUWT and other teaching unions, however, will not be striking with them. Unfortunately I'm in the NASUWT which may leave me in an awkward position. I should think that it is most likely that the school at which I work, along with most other schools across the country, will simply close for the day. However, there is a chance that some schools will expect non-NUT members amongst their staff to come in that day and teach their classes (and perhaps provide cover for absent NUT teachers).

Clearly, I don't want be involved in any strike breaking.

Just thought I'd ask this blog's knowledgeable leftie readership what I should do. Obviously, I'll refuse to cover lessons for NUT strikers. I assume that, even though I'm not in the NUT, coming into work that day to teach my classes (not covering others) is still, effectively, helping to break a strike (??). As far as I'm aware the NUT will not be picketing at school gates and there is nothing on their website about what they're asking members of other unions to do. The NASUWT don't offer any information about this either.

What do you suggest? What is the relevant trade unionist ettiquette here?

Why Sane Radicals Would Much Rather Not be Radicals

2008-03-29T15:03:00.007Z

"Like the spotty, overweight and paralytically shy, radicals would rather not be the way they are. They regard themselves as holding awkward, mildly freakish opinions forced upon them by the current condition of the species, and yearn secretly to be normal. Or rather, they look forward to a future in which they would no longer be saddled with such inconvenient beliefs, since they would have been realised in practice. They would then be free to join the rest of the human race. It is not pleasant to be continually out of line. It is also paradoxical that those who believe in the sociality of human existence should be forced on this very account to live against the grain. To the cheerleaders for Life, it seems unwarrantably ascetic. They do not see that the asceticism, if that is what it is, is in the name of a more abundant life for everyone. Radicals are simply those who recognise, in Yeat's words, that 'Nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.' It is not their fault that this is so. They would rather that it was not."

Terry Eagleton

As Eagleton remarks somewhere else, sensible socialists would like nothing else than to be the conservatives of the future - not in the sense that they secretly plan to join the Tory Party and the local golf club on their 40th birthday, but in the sense that a radically transformed socialist society would be worth conserving, and its traditions worth upholding, with all the blimpish, blustering, swaggering complacency with which Boris Johnson defends the present status quo. If you're a radical simply for the sake of being 'a radical' then you're a fucking idiot.

Elsewhere

2008-02-18T22:02:00.003Z

I have a guest post up at The Daily (Maybe). It's a slightly turgid and overwritten piece focusing on the 'Credit Crunch' and media responses to it.

Is Fashion Racist?

2008-02-17T16:54:00.003Z

Well, yes. No surprise there then. We'll just add it to the list of the fashion industry's vices - effectively promoting anorexia and bulimia, sexualising young children, encouraging/normalising solipsistic vanity (or some anxious approximation/simulation of it on the part of most fashionistas), celebrating idiotic superficiality and making a lot of people feel very unhappy about not conforming to an unattainable ideal of male/female attractiveness, getting older etc.. Fashion has made a sizeable number of deeply unimpressive and indeed deeply unpleasant people very rich. Such is the genius of capitalism. Perhaps there are some people employed in the 'industry' who aren't shallow, grasping, materialistic wastes of good oxygen, but there can't be many who could stomach such an existence for very long (strangely, the people who actually manufacture the clothes - the maquiladora proletarians of the Third World and the minimum wage workers of the First - aren't usually thought of as part of 'the Fashion Industry'; they're not quite 'glamorous' enough).

Perpetual Desire: Human Nature Under Capitalism

2008-02-10T19:39:00.000Z

Every once in a while you may come across a lush oasis in that otherwise barren desert known as the Sunday Observer. There, amongst the smug, facile and myopic commentary-on-autopilot churned out by the Nick Cohens, Andrew Rawnsleys and Christina Odones (all of whose weekly output is, somehow, simultaneously infuriating and bum-clenchingly tedious to read) you can stumble across something thoughtful - an article into which the producer has clearly put some degree of time and effort. Jeremy Seabrook's article is, in fact, so bloody good that I felt that I simply must log into my Blogger account for the first time in four months and cut and paste the whole thing in. It doesn't really say anything that those of a socialist persuasion wouldn't have thought about before - but Seabrook says it so well.

The Poverty of Nations

"Why do the richest societies on earth constantly harp on their poverty? There is apparently never enough money to do all the things we would like to do. Every institution in Britain complains about "resources" (a word always qualified by "limited" and now a synonym for money) - the BBC, universities, the health service, educational provision, policing, the fight against crime, and especially, of course, the war on poverty. Scarcely a day goes by without some sombre warning about budgetary constraints, the non-existence of the bottomless purse and the illusion of the free lunch.

To a visitor from outside our market society (an increasingly implausible tourist in a globalised system), the rhetoric of perpetual indigence might come as a shock, given the highly material excesses that accompany it. We are always having to tighten our belts, make sacrifices, go without, cut our coat according to our cloth. There is always some privation to be endured, some penny-pinching measure to take, some curtailment of our plans. Treats must be foregone, merited rewards postponed. The present panic over the impending (or avoidable) "recession" has expressed itself in apocalyptic terms - this is a time of mortgage famine and credit drought, a tsunami of bad loans, people drowning in debt, "the stench of fear and insecurity" according to one market analyst, an imagery of sickness and debility, of plagues, contagion and collapse.

This solemn perspective is bound to be reflected in people's view of the world. There is never, even at the best of times, enough of anything to go round, and not only money: there is also a lack of recognition, a want of respect, an insufficiency of regard, an absence of consideration, a shortage of appreciation. Celebrities never get quite enough attention; the famous are always in search of more publicity. Even the rich - whose incomes have grown prodigiously in our time - dwell, not upon the power their money bestows upon them, but on all the things they still cannot afford. There is always someone in a better position, with greater prestige, of higher status and regard in the world. A state of chronic wanting, if not want, is now the common condition of early 21st century humanity.

The most privileged people on earth dwell upon the coveted goods, sensations and experiences from which the slenderness of their means estranges them. Why has the wealth of the rich world set up such an unassuagable obsession with what remains always just out of reach? How does our plenty produce such a feeling of penury, our prosperity of deprivation?
Of course, economists, like philosophers, have answers. The satisfaction of basic needs, it is claimed, simply reveals second-order wants and desires, while the fulfilment of these only uncovers new, hitherto unsuspected layers of need. The answering of these, in turn, lays bare yet more abstruse yearnings. It is all perfectly explicable. This, the grim justification goes, is human nature, the one, the only, unalterable in a world in which every other aspect of nature is supremely malleable.

Human longing has always been without limits. Throughout recorded time, the richest have professed themselves unsatisfied, even when their wealth and power were absolute. They lamented that they could not command love or longevity; they could not acquire characteristics they did not possess; could not purchase health or attain contentment. This serves as a useful last word, and sets a term to argument.

Questioning this last resting place of conventional wisdom is overdue. The limitlessness of human desire has rarely been a preoccupation of the poor, whose longings have concentrated on the material qualities of the full belly and protection against the elements. Aspirations towards the infinite have, in any case, usually been taken care of by religion, which traditionally warned against attempts to aim for what cannot be realised in this world; exhortations to which the mighty have usually assented, although this has rarely prevented them from seeking the satisfaction of their own every whim in the here and now.

What are the insistent fangs of insufficiency that gnaw at the heart and psyche of everyone in the rich world, if not the internalised mechanisms of the need for perpetual economic growth? Human need and economic necessity have changed places, so that no one can say with any certainty where the circulation of the blood ceases and the cashflow begins, whether the rhythms of the heart mimic moments of boom and bust, or how the rise and fall of our life's breath follows the seasons of production and consumption. Our version of "human nature" is a very particular one, for it demands conformity with the nature of capitalism.

The universal sense of impoverishment in rich societies is simply the subjective expression of an objective need for more; a need as vast as it is impersonal, for it is the essential characteristic of a system and not of humanity. We are all poor in this scheme of things, for our own frail individuality is pitted against measureless engines of global production. It is now our destiny to gain as much of this abundance as we can cram into one poor limited lifetime. To frame our response in moral terms, as some do, is mistaken. Greed, avidity, eagerness for experience, sensation and novelty are names, not of vices or virtues, but of the urgencies that we inhabit and which inhabit us - the impulse towards perpetual growth and increase; "development" it is sometimes called.

This is the mirror image of a now archaic urge not to lay up treasures on earth where moth and rust do corrupt; for the amassing of treasures in this life is now our human purpose, the using up of as much of the earth's substance as can be contained in that cramped, overcrowded space that our lives have become; for in this way, we serve the greatest need of all, which is the unstoppable energy of economic growth. The cultivation of continuous dissatisfaction and constant disappointment is the motor of this majestic machine.

"The poor you shall have with ye always" used to be regarded as a sorrowing biblical comment on the natural state of things. Whether or not it ever was "natural", it has certainly been brought to a high art by human contriving; so much so that we have, through the mysterious alchemy of wealth, all become poor; a poverty destined to remain forever incurable, since it is inseparable from the peculiar dogmas of wealth-creationism; a faith from which few people in the world now dissent."

Moral Realism

2007-10-22T19:26:00.000Z

Strategy without morality is a machiavellian calculus, of no interest or use to a real socialist movement. Stalinism reduced Marxism to that, power without value. Morality without strategy, a humane socialism equipped only with an ethic against a hostile world, is doomed to needless tragedy: a nobility without force leads to disaster as the names of Dubcek and Allende remind us. What socialism needs today is moral realism - with equal stress on each of these terms.

Perry Anderson

What It's All About

2007-10-21T20:02:00.000Z

Forget the 'international community' and other mythical entities. Beneath the euphemisms and fairy stories cooked up for popular consumption, international politics is brutal, ugly and decidedly non touchy feely. It's about the bottom line. It's about capital accumulation - safeguarding what you've got and attempting to create opportunities for expanded accumulation in the future. All states endlessly jostle for power - political, military and economic (the former two as means to economic ends). The capitalist imperative is accumulate or die. States must look after their relative economic (and, therefore, political and military) standing or they will suffer dire consequences. You don't want to fall behind in global competition. Look at Africa. The (grotesquely perverted) discourse of freedom, democracy and human rights in the realm of international politics provides the contemporary ideological terrain upon which competing states now manoeuvre - it provides the ideological raw resources upon which they draw in order to fashion superficially convincing narratives with which to justify and legitimise brutal, unsentimental power politics. It provides, that is, ideological cover. It also provides, of course, something for liberal intellectuals to do.

One of the strange things about the US ruling elite is that they are quite open about what they're doing - if you know where to look. The liberal ideological discourse that serves as both distraction and legitimation is so hegemonic and so faithfully reproduced in the mainstream media (especially in the US it should be pointed out) that US policy intellectuals - the high priests of imperial realpolitik - can write with extreme frankness about the aims and methods of US grand strategy in the full knowledge that little of this will find its way into the popular consciousness.

Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard is well worth a look. Although written in 1997 it pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq and the currrent confrontation with Iran. Brzezinski was of course National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter and is still extremely well connected (sorry did that make the US elite sound like mafiosi hoodlums?). He's also a cold blooded murdering bastard. But still, it was all for freedom, democracy and etc. And he's a Democrat so that's all right. Brzezinski explains, quite matter of factly, that the key to continued US imperial dominance is control over the 'Eurasian' land-mass (Central Europe, through the 'Middle East' to the pacific coast of Russia and China). "how America 'manages' Eurasia is critical", Brzezinski argues:

Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources.

... Two basic steps are thus required: first, to identify the geostrategically dynamic Eurasian states that have the power to cause a potentially important shift in the international distribution of power and to decipher the central external goals of their respective political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to attain them;... second, to formulate specific U.S. policies to offset, co-opt, and/or control the above...

...To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.

The interesting thing about US Empire is that, unlike previous empires, American imperialism is, for the most part, non-territorial. Empires in the past physically occupied their imperial territories. The US need not do this. It rules by means of 'protectorate' military alliances, military intimidation, and, importantly, through control of the international financial institutional architecture. It also rules, interestingly enough, by turning its capital account deficit to its own advantage (along the lines of that old adage about massive debtors having blackmail-type power over their creditors).

None of this, of course, is to reject those principles of 'freedom', 'democracy' and 'human rights' that contemporary nation states claim to uphold. It's just to say that when those nation states claim to be upholding them in their international diplomacy they are usually lying out of their arses. Giving those ideals substantive content means going beyond liberal platitudes and the phoney discourse of ruling elites. Making them real means confronting the logic of contemporary capital accumulation.

Room For 15,000 More Names

2007-10-12T17:28:00.000Z

From BBC News;

"The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales have attended the dedication of the new national Armed Forces Memorial.

The £6m stone circle in Alrewas, Staffordshire, bears the names of 16,000 service personnel who have died since World War II. ...

There is room for 15,000 more names to be carved on the Portland stone walls of the memorial... "

'Savage Capitalism' and Ecosocialism.

2007-08-29T16:31:00.000Z

I'm very very impressed by the pullout section on 'Savage Capitalism' in the Sept issue of Socialist Resistance (pdf.) (scroll down to pp9- 16). This is a link from the MacUaid blog. It's a well written, well argued and highly accessible (without being simplistic) account of how capitalism is producing environmental crisis which it cannot itself solve and an introduction to 'ecosocialist' ideas. This is just the sort of propaganda that left wing groups should be producing.

That Iraqi Interpreters Affair

2007-08-28T20:03:00.000Z

Neil Clarke's article of 10 August in which he attacked a blog/petition campaign for the granting of asylum to Iraqis under threat from death squad retaliation for working for occupation forces certainly kicked up a bit of a stink. I'm sure most visitors to this blog will be aware of the various manifestations of that stink. I usually agree with much of what Clarke has to say, but this particular article left a rather bad taste in the mouth. The implication of Clarke's article is that 'quislings' deserve everything that they get - ie that they should have the back of their skulls pierced by electric drills and die slow agonising deaths. Although he is careful to point out in the comments below the piece and in follow up commentaries on his blog that he does not favour or support attacks on civilians or want to see any of the 'collaborators' killed, it's surely clear that his call for these people to be denied asylum in Britain is, effectively, to favour the meting out to them of lynch (electric drill) mob justice.

Clarke, of course, refers to the interpreters as 'traitors', 'collaborators', 'quislings'. They may, in fact, be all of these things. But Clarke's self-righteousness here is monumental. Who can say what motivated/motivates these people - perhaps some of them were/are the pantomime villains of Clarke's imagination, selling-out their fellows in return for bags of the oppressor's blood money. But perhaps some - most - the vast majority - were motivated by other less cartoonish thoughts and hopes. Perhaps some of them really believed that the coalition were going to bring peace, democracy and prosperity to their country. Perhaps some of them were desperate for money to feed their families. Perhaps some of them saw their loved ones shredded in market place bomb attacks and thought that the best way of stamping out such atrocities was to throw in their lot with the British army. What would you or I do in their situation (and, of course, 'there but for the grace of God...'). Apparently, Neil Clarke knows exactly what he would do. Neil Clarke would be a heroic anti-imperialist fighter or something. Of course he would. And so Neil Clarke, safe somewhere in Britain, has nothing but contempt for the cowardice of the 'quisling traitors'.

There is no contradiction in opposing the war and occupation and favouring the granting of asylum to all of those Iraqis who, for whatever reason, have thrown in their lot with the British Army. It seems to me that the anti-war Left should vocally support the right of these people to asylum in Britain (along with their families) not least because a government that is jointly responsible for the current blood bath in Iraq should be forced to do what it can to clear up the mess that it has made. The British should pull out of Iraq, but the very least the British government can do for those Iraqis who have worked for it and who face reprisals is to offer them a home in the UK. To leave them behind to face a terrible fate would be to exhibit the same brutal indifference to the fate of Iraqi civilians that the government displayed when it went along with the invasion in the first place.

In a follow up piece on his blog, something rotten which remained half submerged in the original Guardian piece comes bubbling and burping to the surface. In this blog post Clarke gets all indignant that 'the British tax-payer' should be asked to pay to re-settle Iraqi interpreters in the UK:

"The idea that the British people, the majority of whom did not want the Iraq war, should have to pay the price for it, not only in terms of the billions of pounds already spent, but also in the terms of the extra-cost of resettling Iraqi refugees fleeing the hell-hole the policies of the warmongers have created, is outrageous."

That this argument is a thoroughly reactionary one should be bone-crunchingly obvious. That a Left wing commentator should be falling back on such an argument ('these cowardly foreign 'quislings' coming over here, living off our benefits, taking our tax-payers' hard earned money' etc etc) is extremely depressing.

I've signed the petition (which has been pushed, amongst others, by Blood and Treasure - an opponent of the war). I don't like some of the wording of the petition - but then again I don't like the thought of people who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time being tortured to death.

2007-07-31T14:54:00.000Z

Another Musical Interlude

2007-07-28T14:09:00.000Z

If you can stand the amateur video some You Tube denizen has cobbled together to accompany it, this is worth a play. It's from the new Interpol album. Yes, it's been done before - it's a strange mix of Joy Division and the Pixies. They do it well, though. I can't listen too much to the CD at the moment because it makes me too depressed - will play it to death once I finish that thing which shall not be named here.

Capitalism, Crisis and Wellies

2007-07-23T12:22:00.000Z

Capitalism has a tendency towards occasional highly disruptive crises. These can stem from a number of factors (although they often combine and are difficult to separate out). Amongst these factors are 1) the tendency for the organic composition of capital to rise (the good old TRPF), 2) problems of over-accumulation of capital, 3) intensifying international competition driving down general rates of profit, 4) uneven development and sectoral imbalances leading to bottlenecks, over-production, mismatches of supply and so on, 5) financial market instability leading to panic, capital flight and 'contagion' and 6) (while remaining wary of the Glyn and Sutcliffe thesis) we might say that high wages can constitute a drain on the rate of profit.

There's another distinctively 21st Century type of capitalist crisis emerging however - ecological crisis. This is a 'non-economic' kind of crisis given rise to, in great part, by capitalism's driving imperative - accumulation. Capitalism, as Kovel and Löwy point out, is a 'system predicated on the rule: Grow or Die!'. Could it be that while the last great global capitalist crisis - the inter-war slump - was often represented, symbolically, by those photographs of unemployed men in flat caps standing around in the sooty streets of the industrial north, the next big crisis will, later, come to be symbolised by images of people in wellies wading through flooded villages, towns and cities?

Race, Gender, Class and 'Erection Guy'

2007-07-23T10:24:00.000Z

Two wonderful articles in today's Guardian. Gary Younge points out that the left-liberal love affair with Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama is based on an inadequate 'identity-politics' understanding of progressive political struggle. Younge doesn't mention the 'c' word, but it's clear that's what he's getting at - US politics is the politics of capitalist democracy par excellence in that issues of class and structural economic inequalities have been almost completely excluded from the political frame of reference.

Charlie Brooker has produced what I think is one of his finest pieces so far. It's about the various personalities - 'Night Guy', 'Morning Guy', 'Booze Guy' and others - that jostle for control of his brain:

Most men have their own Night Guy, not to mention a Snack Guy, a Mindless Channel-Surfing Guy, a Lie-in Guy and several hundred Procrastinating Guys. We could be possessed by any one of them at any time. Worst of all is Erection Guy - the most goal-oriented, driven individual imaginable, prepared to do absolutely anything to achieve his aims. Erection Guy will lie, mislead, cajole, persuade and even beg if necessary. And the closer he gets to his objective, the more demented and demeaning he'll become - until the Mission Accomplished sign lights up, and he abruptly vanishes, leaving his owner back on Earth, blinking and somewhat embarrassed, like a volunteer in a stage hypnotist's act who's just been finger-clicked awake to discover they've been impersonating a chicken for the past 10 minutes. Erection Guy doesn't deal with the immediate aftermath. He never volunteers to go and get a bit of tissue. He simply goes back into hibernation, leaving you to make faintly disinterested small talk for a few minutes until Snooze Guy shows up to hammer your eyelids shut.

What's Going On Here Then?

2007-07-20T18:22:00.000Z

One of the problems about blogging - especially those prone to mental spirals of second guessing other people and what they may think about you and what they might think about you if they knew that you were thinking about what they might think about you etc etc (all of this is essentially introspective, of course, despite the putative focus on readers 'out there') - is that when you make some sort of announcement about what you are doing or going to do, you feel obliged to follow it up later and tell your readers how it went. You are never quite sure whether you are simply revealing your own essential narcissism in providing readers with some form of 'update' on your own progress - did anyone really read what I mentioned below? does anyone really care about what I said about it anyway? if I explain what has happened will I then look absurdly self-important - as if I imagine visitors to this site give a monkeys about what I said or what I have done?

Anyway, given that I (rather unwisely it turns out) indicated that I was about to submit my thesis (which I now struggle to refer to without the prefix 'that fucking...') and have not yet, as promised, filled this site with acrobats, lions and fireworks, I feel that some explanation is in order.

The explanation is that I have not yet submitted that fucking thesis. I was, as indicated below, proof-reading the damn thing (and thought, therefore, that I was all finished apart, perhaps, from some minor typo correcting) - so when I was reading through the penultimate chapter and lost all confidence in one of the major arguments and realised that I needed to do a little more work on it, you can imagine that I was a little disappointed. That is, of course, an understatement - I was (and am, though it's getting better) rather upset about it. Still, after some considerable degree of distress and something verging on sustained round-the-clock, mild- to-medium terror which lasted for about a week(and in these situations, a blow to the confidence can quickly spiral into a process in which you lose all confidence - which, indeed, in this case, it did) I now feel able to face the thing and tinker around with it again without feeling that I want to run off into the woods, never to return to civilisation. Don't know when I'm going to submit. I'm not far off. I just have to improve what I argue in one of the chapters and then make sure that it still fits well into the rest of the thesis. I think I need a break from it though, before I can make that final push - so I'm going South (not running away - I'll be travelling in a dignified and controlled manner for the most part) to the sea, where the friendly dogs run free, where the mums cook you meals and where fewer people ask me every day whether I have handed in my fucking thesis yet.

What I've learned from this whole thing, is that it's never wise to make public predictions about when you're going to finish a piece of work.

Bishop-Spotting 2007

2007-07-07T13:02:00.000Z

It's General Synod time again at York University. I'm a bit too busy at the moment to bishop-spot properly this year - normally I'll draw up a little check-list and sit outside central hall for a couple of hours a day. This year, I'm just making occasional forays across campus at the sorts of times when the bishops and lesser clergy gather in polite clumps on the walkways. I've not seen any celebrity bishops yet. Sentamu would be a good spot, as would be the Bishop of Liverpool and the holy goat of Canterbury. I'll keep my eyes peeled. I haven't seen this unsavoury chap yet either - one must always remember that although bishop-spotting is fun, some of the blighters aren't so harmless. One mustn't become too frivolous in this game.

I've noticed this year that you can normally estimate the rank of clergy fairly accurately by the size and type of their crucifix. The administrative ranks at the General Synod - the photocopier-tenders, message-runners, ushers and tea-brewers (mostly nuns, curates and small parish vicars) - tend to wear small, unostentatious silver-metallic crucifixes. As you get higher up the hierarchy (Canons, Deans and Archdeacons) the crosses get slightly bigger and the chains get chunkier. Bishops usually go for a large mock-rustic looking crucifx (wooden and slightly rough - as if it's been fashioned by shepherds without access to precision wood-cutting instruments) and, very often, the crucifx will have some sort of embellishment - a half-circle at the top (like an ankh) or an extra small beam crossing the main beam diagonally. This mock rusticity plus ornamental embellishment is just showiness masquerading as modest simplicity if you ask me. It's like putting a hot-tub in the front garden of your semi-detached while naming it 'Old Farmhouse Cottage'.

I find nuns strangely fascinating. I think most non-nuns probably share this fascination. I'm not sure exactly what it is. It might be their painfully nice nicey-ness that makes you feel a mixture of half-disdain, half-shameful admiration in their presence. You feel like you'd like to share a nice cup of tea and current bun with a nun but tell her, at the same time, that she really ought to stop all this silly being-a-nun business. I once, rather gallantly, helped a nun in distress. It was last winter but one on a very icy morning - the pavements were pretty treacherous. I was walking down Micklegate Street near where I used to live and I saw two elderly nuns coming towards me. It's strange - I knew immediately that this slippery pavement was simply no place for a nun, and that frankly they were asking for trouble. Sure enough, within seconds of me thinking this, one of the nuns slipped and tumbled habit over sensible shoes, landing flat on her face on the pavement with an unpleasant thump. There was even a bit of blood coming out of her nose like in a film. I did that stupid thing that you normally do in these sorts of situations which is to stand over her and ask 'er... are you all right?' in a rather embarrassed and awkward way. Clearly she wasn't all right. So anyway, after a few seconds of self-conscious dithering, I called an ambulance on my mobile and then went and got a chair from one of the offices near to the accident spot for her shocked friend to sit on. After two or three minutes a pharmacist from a near-by chemists came out and took over. Then the ambulance came and took them away. So, anyway I'm pretty sure I probably saved this nun's life. But did she thank me as she was being stretchered into the ambulance? No. I'm still pretty sore about that actually. I'm fairly certain, however, that most nuns have better manners and so I don't hold it against the whole profession.

Alex Petridis on Interpol (and Editors)

2007-07-06T18:15:00.000Z

I am rather fond of Interpol and indeed of Editors. Alex Petridis provides a rather rude review of the former's new album which incorporates a few digs at Editors, too. I like Petridis' unkind, waspish humour though (I'm sure it was him who memorably described Mika - that intensely irritating twit with the doe-eyes who sings god-awful 'songs' in a teeth-on-edge-setting falsetto voice - as 'like Kenny Everett pretending to be the Bee Gees. Only not funny.') and, to be fair, he does land a few well-aimed punches on the two bands. He's completely right that you can't listen to either Interpol or Editors without thinking 'this really is very very much like Joy Division isn't it'. I'm not quite sure how Petridis manages to detect something like the voice of Cilit Bang's Barry Scott, however - 'you listen to Editors with the creeping fear that, at any moment, the songs might be interrupted with a deafening cry of "BANG! And the dirt is GONE!"'. As far as I remember Barry Scott speaks in an hammy, over-excited and high-pitched shouty voice (which is, apparently, deliberately intended to make you hate Barry Scott so much that you can't get him out of your head - meaning that Cilit Bang is always, always, there, lurking in the back of your mind - the ultimate in brand awareness and brand recall) whereas the Ian Curtis-esque lead-singers of Interpol and Editors sing in gloomy, stentorian booms. It's probably comedic license.

Anyway, all of this provides me with an excuse to put an Interpol video on here by means of the hi-tech You Tube internet video playing device (which creates a rift in space while simultaneously generating a wormhole dimension bridge between this site and the You Tube data banks many many miles away).

By the way, I have nearly submitted my thesis. Expect things to go wild on this site from about the middle of next week. I'm going to have acrobats and lions and fireworks. I still have to do all the proof-reading, however, which is perhaps the most tedious job known to humanity.

The Tree Fell Over!

2007-06-15T12:22:00.000Z

There are several trees just outside my office. One of them appears just to have keeled over during the night. Either that or I missed the most incompetent tree-felling attempt of recent history (and if someone did chop it down I will hunt them down and kill them because it was a lovely tree - you never know with university management - they just can't stop building stuff). Anyway, it smashed through a wall and is now standing more or less upside down on a small lawn. It's quite the most exiciting thing to have happened around here for a long time - the area is roped off with 'incident/do not cross' type tape and everything. All the undergraduates have been overcome by a kind of atavistic exhilaration and are wildly jumping up and down on the grass, shrieking and building twiggy shrines and altars for the Elements or the great god Pan or something.

However, on a more sombre note, there's a palpable sense of shock amongst all the small animals in the area. No birds are singing.

PS - sorry about the quality of posts recently. I am very busy.

Important Information (about zombies)

2007-06-11T19:10:00.000Z

(Just fast forward through the opening credits).

He Was Quite Sensible You Know

2007-06-07T16:28:00.000Z

"What is needed for the revolution are men* of sober mind, men who don't cause an absence of bread in the bakeries, who make trains run, who provide the factories with raw materials and know how to turn the produce of the country into industrial produce, who ensure the safety and freedom of the people against attacks of criminals, who enable the network of collective services to function and who do not reduce the people to despair and to a horrible carnage. Verbal enthusiasm and reckless phraseology make one laugh (or cry) when a single one of these problems has to be resolved even in a village of a hundred inhabitants"

Gramsci

* And women too, of course, as I'm sure old Antonio meant to say.

Might Be Interesting

2007-06-07T14:54:00.000Z

Tony Benn's on the BBC Question Time panel with Melanie Phillips tonight.

Oh, and in Paris Hilton news, the lovely Paris Hilton has been released from jail on the medical grounds of being too rich and famous to stay in jail for very long. Unfortunately for the other prisoners of Los Angeles this medical condition is not known to be contagious.

Paris Hilton

2007-06-05T13:54:00.000Z

This is just an experiment to see if my hit count increases.

Apparently it's of great interest that someone of absolutely no interest who has never done anything interesting and has nothing interesting to say (but who happens to be blonde, thin and extremely rich) is going to prison.

A Musical Interlude

2007-06-04T22:51:00.000Z

Back when they were good...

Thought for the Day

2007-05-31T15:08:00.001Z

One of the most fascinating things about the US foreign policy elite is just how brazen they are - just how ready they are to say, quite openly and explicitly, what exactly they're up to. It's almost as if they're compulsively driven to brag about their real-politik scheming and manoeuvring in the hope of being 'caught' and held accountable for what they have done - in the same way that serial killers leave notes for the police. The fascinating thing, however, about the media and about mainstream political and 'current affairs' discourse in general is just how it manages not to see or hear these brazen pronouncements from the architects of US foreign policy. It's quite amazing, isn't it, that while Kristol, Friedman, Kissenger, Brzezinski (still in the loop) are absolutely clear about the real-politik calculations, risks and (perceived) interests that drive foreign policy in the Middle East, Europe, in relation to military deployment and development, in relation to international economic 'restructuring' and management and in relation to international security structures and alliances, the media manages to remain almost wholly oblivious to these very lucid (and easily obtainable) pronouncements, preferring, instead, to focus on the comforting certainties of democracy vs. authoritarianism, openness vs closed societies, economic 'modernisation' and 'flexibility' vs rigidity, pre-emptive defence vs international law, muscular liberalism vs liberal caution, national 'sovereignty' vs 'special relationship', 'the world is a complex place' vs bold assertion of universal human rights.

Here's one of my favourites (I'm sure you have your own):

Today’s international system is built not around a balance of power but around American hegemony. The international financial institutions were fashioned by Americans and serve American interests. The international security structures are chiefly a collection of American-led alliances. What Americans like to call international ‘norms’ are really reflections of American and West European principles. Since today’s relatively benevolent circumstances are the product of our hegemonic influence, any lessening of that influence will allow others to play a larger part in shaping the world to suit their needs . . . American hegemony, then, must be actively maintained, just as it was actively obtained.

(Robert Kagan and William Kristol , National Interest, Spring 2000).

Globalisation Theory

2007-05-29T14:14:00.000Z

I've just finished reading Justin Rosenberg's 'Globalisation Theory: A Post-Mortem'. It's possibly the best thing on 'globalization' I've read. Quite a few people have recommended it to me - including Badmatthew - but I've only just got round to reading it. If you're at all interested in globalisation - and interested in an analysis which quite comprehensively debunks the claims not only of the so-called 'hyperglobalisers' (the end of the nation state is nigh) but also the rather more sophisticated and restrained (self-styled) 'transformationalists' ('the end of the nation state as we know it is nigh' - transfer of 'sovereignty' to multiple sites of power, global governance, cosmopolitan democracy and all that shite) - and in fact 'transformationalists' like David Held and Tony McGrew are Rosenberg's main targets - then this is highly recommended.

Unfortunately I've come to Rosenberg's work a bit late - I have no intention of changing the argument of my thesis at this very late stage. If I'd got round to reading it sooner I probably would have tackled the stuff I've got on capitalist internationalisation (a term I prefer to that awful word 'globalization') differently. Ah, well. I've been trying to squeeze a theory of 'globalization' (ie - an account of the acceleration of capitalist internationalisation in the 1990s) particularly out of Poulantzas' Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (or at least Panitch's reworking of that stuff) and Gowan's The Global Gamble - that is, an account which focuses on the 'transformative effects' of inward FDI on the 'host' country's relations of production married to Gowan's account of the strategic reconstitution of US international hegemony under Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush 2 (which involved the promotion of 'globalisation' as a form of indirect, 'non-territorial' US imperialism). Between you and me, it's a bit creaky. Especially since I once asked Gowan what he thought of the Panitch/Poulantzas stuff and he was a bit dismissive. Never mind.

Part of the trouble is that I've been trying to fit what I've been saying into David Held (et al.'s) classification of the different approaches to the analysis of globalisation - 1. Hyperglobalisation, 2. Sceptics, 3. Transformationalists. I've never been happy with that classification - not least because it's rather self-serving on Held's part - he is of course a 'Transformationalist' and therefore rather superior to those crude hypers on the one hand and flat-earther sceptics on the other. Rosenberg shows quite convincingly however, that the whole approach Held and others promote is inherently flawed and presents, instead, an account of 1990s globalisation focusing on the intersection of two (interrelated) historical developments - the slowdown of the post-war boom + the collapse of the USSR. Globalisation Theory captured the zeitgeist of the time - but mistook temporary developments (the speeding up and extension of transnational flows of various kinds as they raced to fill the vaccuum created by the collapse of state socialism and social democracy) for signs of the emergence of an epochal shift in economic/political/cultural development.

28 Weeks Later - Not Very Nice

2007-05-17T20:23:00.000Z

Went to see 28 Weeks Later last night. I'm not sure I enjoyed it. It's a good film (although not as good as 28 Days Later, in my opinion) - but let's just say that watching it is something of an ordeal. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it might be more enjoyable to drink several tins of Red Bull and then stick your head inside a very loud cement-mixer for an hour and a half.

I rather like horror films (well, good ones anyway) - but this one seemed to me to go a bit far. Not sure I can quite put my finger on it - but let's have a go. The worst thing was the relentless noise - loud, crashing noises designed to make you jump and feel like someone is tearing off your fingernails at the same time. A bit of that's all-right - but if it goes on almost without respite for the duration of the entire film it gets wearing. It's not as if it's even very clever or sophisticated - it just tires you out and makes you want to leave the cinema for a bit of peace and quiet. And I'm afraid if a director does the ya-boo made you jump fright bit (with extra-loud crashing noise accompanyment) more than twice in the same film (let alone 5 or 10 times as in many minutes) I just find it deeply irritating - not terrifying, irritating.

There are some memorable scenes in the film - I think the initial extended scene in which Robert Carlyle abandons his family and flees for his life in terror through the countryside was fantastic (there's a bit almost reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where hordes of pursuers appear over the crest of a hill and bear down on the hero sprinting for an escape vehicle - except rather more scary and not very funny). As most of the reviews I've read point out, the shots of an abandoned, desolate ghost-town London are very impressive (although the first film did much the same thing).

I wasn't really very impressed with the film's super-charged gore factor, though. One of the best things about the first film was that it had quiet bits in it in which an understated psychological kind of horror came to the fore. In the second film, however, it was all running, shooting, crashing and slashing. There's a scene in which an infected Carlyle gouges out the eyes of his wife - completely unnecessary, I thought - and just deeply repulsive rather than horrifying. These things usually work best if suggested rather than filmed in close-up. Furthermore, the original film worked particularly well I thought because the soldiers who rescue the main characters become the bad guys of the film - the director subverts convention in that the figures which in other films might represent safety, protection and the restoration of order, are transformed into monsters (worse than the infected). In the second film, however, the forces of order spend most of their time charging around, blowing things up and shooting people in a rather uncomplicated and one-dimensional fashion. OK, there's some ambiguity towards the US troops in the film - they end up trying to wipe out the repopulated London colony in order to contain the virus - but they do this out of panic, incompetence and sheer super-power heavy-handedness rather than out of any sophisticated or complicated moral ambiguity - they're no Christopher Eccleston. 'What do you expect?', the director seems to ask with a shrug - 'it's the US army and the US army just charge around blowing everything up given half a chance. It's not their fault'.

I suppose I'm glad I saw the film and on balance I'd recommend it. Just don't watch it if you've drunk any caffeine in the past 24 hours.

Every Cloud....

2007-05-16T15:55:00.000Z

Apparently, John McDonnell is about to concede defeat - according to Labour Home (picked up via David Osler).

This is a big disappointment and a setback for the Left as a whole. Furthermore, it looks to me like it's curtains for the Labour Left. It's a(n) historic moment really. Undoubtedly Labour Left die-hards will continue to bang their heads against their favourite wall - but, effectively, it's all over.

I heard somewhere (wish I could remember where) that even Tony Benn has said that if McDonnell fails to make it onto the ballot paper, then the Labour Party as a vehicle for socialism is dead. If it's true then that's really something very significant indeed.

The (very thin and filmy) silver lining, I suppose is that any left-winger with any sense should now start to look elsewhere. Perhaps the task of building an independent and democratic socialist alternative to Labour can begin in earnest now. This is the end of socialist political pre-history in the UK. Probably.

PS Bloody hell, I still can't link. This is all Google's fault!

John McDonnell

2007-05-15T12:06:00.000Z

It's great news that it now looks very much like Brown will be facing a challenge for the Labour Party leadership from John McDonnell. As most of those not involved in puffing up the McDonnell campaign will tell you, McDonnell doesn't stand any chance of winning. Nevertheless, I think that this does present the Left with a wonderful opportunity to get many of its ideas across to a larger audience than it can usually reach. It appears to me that there are several things that McDonnell and his supporters might try to get across:

1. Focus on the huge income and wealth inequalities that have continued to grow under New Labour. Britain is now more unequal than at any time since WW2. McDonnell needs to point out that inequalities matter. He might even widen this issue out a little and talk about global inequalities - how these have increased enormously under the neo-liberal world regime.

2. McDonnell will certainly, and rightly, concentrate on the Iraq war and occupation - but there might be some advantage in trying to shift the terms of the debate on this matter a little. I have never (or seldom) seen any mainstream news or current affairs programme talk seriously about long-term geo-strategic and 'great power' manoeuvring in relation to Iraq (or Iran). The debate seems stuck in this rather bland Lib Dem type 'did Blair lie?', 'has Blair sacrificed British foreign policy independence?' rut - but both of which seem to me a bit of a side issue.

3. Point out that tackling global warming will necessitate much more than tinkering with the rate of carbon emissions. It seems to me that capitalism and ecological sustainability are, at the very least, in tension with one another. It's very difficult to see how our planet is compatible over the long-term with an economic system based on the logic of perpetual growth.

4. Brown seems to be pitching his campaign in terms of 'a new seriousness in politics' - a rejection of spin, PR manipulation and much of the nauseating stuff that characterised the Blair years. McDonnell can outflank him quite easily on all of this.

5. It might be a good idea to puncture this whole ridiculous idea which the media appear to have taken to heart about Brown somehow being 'responsible' for economic boom. He isn't. Perhaps McDonnell might point out that the boom has been based mainly on consumer credit - fictitious money - what sensible people might actually refer to as a bubble.

6. Privatisation - McDonnell will be good on this anyway.

It seems to me that there is no point in attempting to 'moderate' the McDonnell campaign - the media and the Brown campaign will, inevitably, characterise him as 'hard-left' and continually refer back to 'the bad old days' of the 1970s and the 1983 election defeat and so on. The best thing to do, I think, would be to try to put Brown onto the back foot with a bold campaign focusing perhaps on the above issues and others such as pensions rather than getting stuck on the defensive, attempting to field questions pitched on terms favourable to Brown.

I certainly hope that the far-left can refrain from sniping and sectarian attacks. I have a lot of sympathy with the argument made by David Miliband's dad amongst others that periodic revivals of the Labour Left function in the end to prevent the emergence of an effective left-wing challenge unencumbered by all those things which doom the Labour Left to ineffectiveness -working within a party which has always been dominated by the right-wing and which was never a socialist party (despite the mythology of the Labour Left) but an alliance between radical liberals, trade unionists and a tiny smattering of socialists. However, this isn't the 1980's -this isn't really a serious fight for the soul of the Labour Party as it was in the days of Benn and Heffer. In today's context, a strong McDonnell campaign is in the interests of all the Left whether inside the Labour Party or not - it just might help to re-energise the Left and disseminate our ideas a little more widely than they have been for the past 25 years.

PS. For some reason Blogger won't let me create any weblinks at the moment - there's normally a toolbar thing at the top of the editing page which now seems to have buggered off. Anyone know anything about this?

Who Will Come and Save Us Now?

2007-05-07T16:33:00.000Z

I'm Not Sure About That Actually

2007-05-03T15:33:00.000Z

Have a look at Daniel Davies' piece in 'Comment is Free.' I usually like what he has to say, but this article strikes me as a little misjudged. Davies' heart is in the right place, of course, but it surely is rather worrying that the BNP appear to be picking up support at local democracy level in some places in the country (and as someone suggests in a comment posted below the article, 'anyone visibly non-WASP ' can be forgiven for feeling particularly anxious about it). Davies' point about the correlation between the apparent rise in support for the BNP on the one hand, and the ongoing effective purge of the hard right from the Conservative Party under Cameron seems quite a good one (and I have to say, as an aside, that his comment that 'for most of the last 30 years the average British unconscious fascist has assumed that his or her natural home was in the Conservative party' hit the right buttons and made me giggle). Nevertheless, it is worrying that many of those on the far-right who might previously have voted Tory now feel able (or compelled) to vote for an explicitly far-right group. It is something qualitatively different. I'm not sure, either, that it's accurate to say that the BNP is picking up all or even most of its support from disgruntled ex-Tory voters.

We've had 3 or 4 BNP electoral leaflets through the door in the past few weeks (never seen that before) - the last leaflet doubled-up as a window poster for supporters to demonstrate their voting intentions. Thankfully, I've not seen any of these on display, but the provision of window posters suggests a certain amount of confidence on the part of the fascists.

I have to admit that I forgot to register to vote this time. I feel quite bad about it because the BNP appear to be making an electoral push in the York area.

The Worst Morning of my Life....Ever (2)!

2007-04-30T15:51:00.000Z

I had the worst morning of my life today - well, apart from that time about 15 yrs ago, maybe, when I woke up to found that my pet Guinea Pig had died in the night.* I can't really go into the details, but it involved 1) being told (effectively) that I was going to have to re-do my entire thesis and 2) being told that it was likely that I was going to get a court summons.

Thankfully, Bad Thing number 1 now no longer looks as bad as it did, after a panicked visit to my main thesis supervisor (who wasn't the person who introduced me to Bad Thing no. 1 this morning). It's more or less sorted out. Although I still feel something like I've just had a near-death experience. Not very good for the confidence however.

Bad Thing number 2 involves non-payment of council tax, me not being able to pay it, me not being eligible to pay the full amount anyway, and me not being able to get the council to alter the bill until information I have no access to is passed to them. I'm the only person on the bill at the moment and in order to get other eligible tenants onto the bill (and therefore the amount I owe reduced and the deadline for payment rolled forward) I have to get them to get me some information so that i can pass it to the council. Strikes me as absurd that a) I have to chase other tenants for stuff for the council (isn't that the council's responsibility?) and b) I get a court summons if my fellow tenants don't get the information in time. What can I do about it? I would pay the full bill and then seek to recoup some of the money, but I simply don't have the amount owing. I went to the Citizens' Advice Bureau about this last week - very helpful, but nothing they suggested seemed to wash with the council. Wheels are now moving, but it's going to be tight if I'm to get this stuff to the council before the court summons is delivered.

Anyway, never mind. It doesn't look so bad now. I was about to do some serious flouncing this lunch-time. I was about to flounce off from my PhD (I'm just not prepared to rewrite it all at this late stage - I thought I was about 2 weeks away from submitting at 10 am this morning, then the bad thing happened and then it got better again and I think I'm close to submitting again, although substantially demoralised) and about to flounce off from the council offices in a theatrical state of dismay. In fact, come to think of it, I did do a little bit of flouncing in the council offices when the lady at one desk told me that I would have to go and see another department with my query since they didn't deal with the matter even though Citizens' Advice had told me something different. In fact the lady at the second desk (after having informed me that 'Computer says no' - sorry, that was below the belt) suggested that I physically threaten my housemates in order to get the information I needed. I think she was joking and remember finding it very very funny indeed - although I was probably half hysterical at that point and would have laughed wildly at just about anything.

I have to admit that I'm not normally very good with stress. This morning, however, was quite the most stressful experience I can remember (especially Bad Thing number 1). I was really considering jumping under one of those advertising billboard tricycle things (jumping under anything heavier would have been far too dangerous - it wasn't quite that bad).

* It was kept in a special hutch in the back garden with two others and we had to keep it in a separate section because the other two kept attacking it quite viciously. I woke up one morning to find that it had died - but what upset me most was that it had crawled to the chicken wire dividing its section of the run from that of the other two so that (I imagine) it could die as close to the other Guinea Pigs as possible. That really got me. I was a sentimental child.

Boooooo

2007-04-29T16:56:00.000Z

This Duckworth Lewis fellow has a lot to answer for.

This Country Is Going to the Dogs

2007-04-27T14:23:00.000Z

I saw a young man, today, in skinny tight jeans, white slip on shoes and luminous pink socks. I'm all for a bit of 80s retro in moderation, but I'm sorry that's just going too far. I suppose it could have been worse - one luminous pink sock, one luminous green. It's best to nip these things in the bud, however, and I shall be writing a letter to the Home Secretary.

On the same going to the dogs theme - did you see that Douglas Murray bloke on Question Time last night? He pretty much out-PeterHitchened Peter Hitchens. I have never seen a more blimpish figure on that panel. He looked like he was on the edge of exploding throughout much of the discussion, spent most of his time scowling, sulking, huffing and exaggeratedly raising his eyebrow at everything in sight. He affected an air of utterly exasperated disdain at just about everything the audience said and he didn't speak so much as sneer his words out of his mouth. The only time he apeared to be enjoying himself was when he suggested that the NHS should be abolished. I hope they invite him back, because I found him very funny. I don't know why, but I find reactionary blimpishness of the Peter Hitchens school highly entertaining.

Is it Spring Already?

2007-04-26T15:45:00.000Z

I'm still here in case you wondered.

Editing and cutting... panicking slightly... recovering... editing and cutting. Should submit very soon. Planning what I'm going to do when I finish (very little of which I am likely to do).

In place of a substantial post, let me refer you to something interesting elsewhere. If you've not already seen it, Murray Smith's essay published at Socialist Unity Blog is fantastic - a sensitive, sane, measured piece of writing about the state of the Left today.

The Crisis

2007-03-29T12:26:00.000Z

I've found the reporting of the 'hostage crisis' over the past few days intensely irritating. For one thing - and let's get this straight - for the moment, they're not 'hostages', they're prisoners. To say that is not to lend any justification to Iranian actions (we don't know who's right about the measurement of territorial boundaries), but it is to use a rather more impartial term. But the word 'hostage' fits the narrative better - since, as we all know, the Iranians just can't help taking hostages. History shows. They're always taking hostages. It's what they do. They don't need a reason. They take hostages because they're uncivilised and volatile and they hate, hate, hate. All this is implied - it's there under the surface - in media reports. The British military's story is taken at face value, while the Iranian version of events - that British military personnel were arrested for making an incursion into Iranian waters - is treated with high scepticism.

Now I don't trust the Iranian government's version of events anymore than I trust that of the British government. Who knows? None of us.

What I am quite sure about, however, is that driving forward the media's shrieking sensationalised 'international crisis' mongering is the tacit assumption that we simply can't have this uncivilised nation taking British people - yes BRITISH people (!!!!!) - captive. That's the real scandal.

The thing that really gets me, however, is all the stuff about the female 'hostage'. It's incredibly sexist, really isn't it? The assumption seems to be, firstly, that a woman (being by nature a weak creature who needs male protection and etc) simply cannot cope in that situation (although, thankfully, there'll be some strong British lads with her to give her a slap to snap her out of it if she starts getting too hysterical). Secondly, it seems that keeping her capitive is an incredibly beastly thing to do - because she's a mother. Think of the children(!!!) the media implore. Well, aren't any of the other captives parents as well? What about their children? Aren't they worried too? Further, this lady has been away on a ship (possibly for months on end) for goodness sake - she's in the fucking navy!!! It's not like the Iranians have directly snatched her away from her kids. The media seem to be quite happy to have female sailors zipping around in heavily armed gunboats in the Gulf - but now a female in the armed forces has been captured, we're back to the 19th Century and the papers are working themselves up into a frenzy because a helpless, blushing, English rose is in mortal danger (which, of course, she isn't).

Now, like any other half-way civilised human being, I hope no harm comes to these captives and I would like them to be released soon. I'd rather they hadn't been taken captive. In fact, come to think of it, I'd rather the Royal Navy weren't pissing around in the Gulf. But let's think on this for a minute. Does anyone really think that any harm is going to come to them? I can't see it. Does anyone really think that the Iranians are going to hold them for years on end? I can't see that happening either.

When this little crisis is over and when the bombs and missiles start falling on Iran, let's see if the papers have pictures of Iranian women on their front pages and headlines imploring us to think about the mothers and their little children.

Cricket World Cup

2007-03-21T13:48:00.000Z

I'm enjoying the Cricket World Cup. Part of the enjoyment, I have to say, is the near absurdity of some aspects of this competition - terms like 'power plays' and 'super-8s' applied to cricket make me giggle every time I hear them. There's something a little ridiculously theatrical about the colourful team kits, too. I'm a great fan, incidentally, of the New Zealand kit. If you've ever wondered what Darth Vader would look like at the crease, just watch New Zealand in bat.

The thing I really like, however, is the juxtaposition of try-hard razzmatazz (the costumes, the 'power plays') with ramshackle cricketiness - the often more or less empty stadiums, the TV shots of spectators reading newspapers rather than watching the match, the beer bellies (have you seen team Bermuda?), the team captains falling into potholes, that sort of thing.

Many of the games have been pretty entertaining. I especially enjoyed the Ireland - Pakistan match recently where the Irish somehow managed to win the game with the last ball.

Unfortunately, this competition is likely to be remembered for the death of the Pakistan coach - Bob Woolmer - rather than Vaughan's pothole incident, or Dwayne Leverock's athleticism. It's been announced today, that Jamaican police are treating Woolmer's death as 'suspicious'. Sounds like it might have been suicide (surely cricket hasn't stooped so far that coaches now get bumped off for losing).

Look At Me Everybody

2007-03-12T14:03:00.000Z

I've got something in the latest issue of Historical Materialism.

Sort of.

Specifically, I get a mention in footnote 19 of Alex Callinicos's and Sam Ashman's essay on 'Capital Accumulation and the State System'. My mum is very proud.

You have to start somewhere. Out of tiny chestnuts mighty oaks do grow.

Hot Fuzz

2007-03-11T13:38:00.000Z

Went to see Hot Fuzz last night. I have to say that I was pretty disappointed. It's not bad but it certainly wasn't as good as I had expected. It has its moments - the last half an hour or so is a gloriously over-the-top Tarantino-esque shoot-out and very entertaining. That last portion of the film is reminiscent of Desperado - only set in a Somerset village and featuring cops exchanging gunfire with machine gun toting little old ladies (although, of course, Channel 5 got there first with Suburban Shootout). Nick Frost is as amusing as ever and gets most of the best lines in the film. Pegg, however, isn't very funny at all. Whereas Frost plays the same sort of character he always plays (naive, boyish, day-dreaming, hero worshipping) - Frost's PC Danny is essentially the same person as Mike in Spaced and Ed in Shaun of the Dead - Pegg doesn't get to play Tim/Shaun this time. So, while Nick Frost can play to his strengths (and, yes, give the audience what they paid money to see - I paid to see Mike/Ed and Tim/Shaun in a cop buddy film spoof), there's very little that Pegg can do to find comedy in his character, Nick Angel, because Angel is a straight-laced, straight-faced and rather robotic sort of character.

I have to say that the first half an hour of the film is almost spectacularly dull, and the following hour isn't much better. There are a few laughs (mostly Nick Frost) but a lot of it is rather forced and I'm afraid we've seen most of the set-piece gags before - the fence vaulting slap-stick is essentially the same scene as the one in Shaun of the Dead (although I'm told that this is an intentional in-joke). It starts hotting up a little, however, when the grisly murders start - and the blood and gore special effects are actually pretty good. The first hour and half of the film is made interesting only because of Pegg's and Wright's trade-mark multiple film references, nods and spoofs.

There are plenty of comic actors in the the film besides Pegg and Frost - Adam Buxton (from Adam and Joe), Bill Bailey, Kevin Eldon (Big Train), Olivia Colman (Peep Show), Stephen Merchant and Steve Coogan - but almost all of them are completely wasted and given little more than deeply forgettable cameos and bit-parts.

I'm afraid I find Edgar Wright's direction style a little grating in this film. I quite like the fast, punchy editing in Spaced and Shaun of the Dead but in this film a lot of it is just uncomfortable to watch - as if Wright is trying to force his editing cleverness down your throat. There's a sequence in the film every time someone is arrested where quick fire frames of the suspect's mug shots are shown, with aggressive, discordant music in the back ground. I found that frequently repeated sequence teeth-grindingly uncomfortable as if I was being violently assaulted by means of disorienting noise and image - Guantanamo Bay style torture isn't really my idea of fun.

If you haven't seen it, I recommend you wait for the film to be shown on TV and just watch the last 30 minutes or so.

Baudrillard is Dead

2007-03-07T17:53:00.000Z

I can think of a number of cheap quips - but the Guardian's obit does it all anyway.

I think the obituary is quite fair - after the initial cheap shots, anyway. For what it's worth I think that Baudrillard's early work is really good, although I'm not sure if I'm convinced by it. The idea that under advanced consumer capitalism commodities must possess 'symbolic value' in addition to use and exchange values seems to have quite a lot of force to it. Baudrillard got there long before Naomi Klein.

I'm with Christopher Norris, though, on the later stuff - his famous declaration that the first Gulf War 'never happened' was, I think, politically and morally irresponsible. This isn't to say that Baudrillard doesn't make some good points in that infamous work - clearly, (post)modern* warfare is, in many ways, media spectacle. Doesn't mean that there aren't real people really being pulverised and eviscerated in the explosions shown on our TV screens, however.

*Argghhh, dirty!Must wash hands.

A Pinch and a Punch, First of the Month!!

2007-03-02T19:53:00.000Z

Bollocks. It's the 2nd.

Never mind. You can have a pinch and a punch anyway. That's all right. Don't mention it.

Some interesting things:

1. Interview with Lynne Segal in today's Guardian.

2. China 'sneezes' and the global financial markets get the shits. Or something like that. I said this was going to happen all along didn't I? Yes I did. Of course, all of this is explained away in obfuscatory, mystificatory terms by media economics correspondents and 'City analyists'* - it's all about market 'correction' you see (i.e. it's all the mysterious but benign work of the invisible hand of the magic Adam Smith fairy sprinkling its magic market correcting moondust and, er, you shouldn't trouble your silly little heads about it) . I haven't seen any pictures on TV of City traders sitting on steps with their heads in their hands looking thoroughly dejected like in 1987. Obviously things aren't quite that bad yet, then. It will be interesting to see whether the US economy slides into recession in the coming weeks and months, though.

3. I'm reading Will Hutton's The State We're In and The State to Come at the moment. Never really read them before. They're actually quite good rollocking reads - or, at least, as close as you can get to a rollocking read on the subject of economic growth and investment. I have to say that I normally prefer Iain M Banks.

* In Elliott's book (with Dan Atkinson) The Age of Insecurity, it's pointed out that one very successful City analyst used to prepare briefings about projected future economic trends over the coming three months by adding up various stats from the previous 3 months and then dividing by three. This is what they get paid for. Do not believe the bastards. They don't really know what they're doing. As Elliott and Atkinson suggest, economics - particularly economic 'analysis' resting on neo-classical assumptions - isn't a 'science', it's witchcraft and soothsaying.

Sharing the Blame - Masking the Reality

2007-02-17T13:50:00.000Z

Just wanted to flag up Jeremy Seabrook's excellent recent Guardian article. He really puts his finger on something that has been nagging away at me for a while - something I couldn't articulate.

Whenever I see reports on environmental degradation on BBC News (or, I suppose, any other channel) I'm irritated by the tone of the report, which, inevitably suggests that we are all, somehow, to blame. The reporter almost always affects a kind of downbeat presenting style which implies a kind of representative penitence - as if he or she is speaking for us all and that we all ought to be blooming well disappointed with ourselves. The guilt, it is implied, is a collective, human guilt - 'oh', the reporter, seems to sigh, 'we flawed humans had better change our ways... dear, dear, yes we had'. I always think of 'orginal sin' when I see these reports - as if the media think that environmental degradation stems from humanity's in-built tendency to be bad. Of course, the attribution of guilt to humanity collectively - the attribution of guilt to our 'human nature' - effectively lets those who may be more guilty than others off the hook. In fact, I think it's unhelpful to point the finger at individuals - it's better to point to social structures, ways of living, ways of producing and consuming. It is these things that we should identify when we look around for something to blame (and change, one hopes) - and it is the reality that these things are to blame for environmental destruction that the media's attribution of guilt to 'human nature', effectively obscures.

Seabrook writes:

"The almost universal recognition of the potential disaster of climate change... ascribes the causes to "humanity". Human activity, mankind, man - these generalised entities have been the great reshapers of the planet and its fragile atmosphere. This dispersal of blame diffuses responsibility, and permits the culprits to embed themselves in the global population to escape the consequences of their actions.

....

An inclusive first person plural is always invoked when the world faces catastrophe. It is rarely in evidence when the "fruits" of wealth-creation are being distributed. We are all in this together. Both rich and poor are threatened. There is nowhere to hide from global warming. Every country must be "on board", on the far from agreeable voyage to a future land of sustainable harmony.

The "we" - the bogus unity invoked by privilege - masks the reality, namely, that the poor are going to pay disproportionately to put right wrongs of which they have never been beneficiaries.

....

To efface the "footprint" of "mankind" upon the earth would require a contraction, or at least a different kind of economic activity, one which ensures a more modest use of, and more equitable distribution of, resources. This is the most frightening prospect the leaders of the rich world can imagine; even though it might guarantee a secure sufficiency to the hungry and wanting of earth and serve as cure for the excesses, addictions and violence of those who have more than enough.

This is indeed a pivotal moment. Decisions made now may well determine the fate of the earth and all its peoples. But to provide for the sustenance of the poor remains the most urgent priority. It is disingenuous to give way to lachrymose exaltations about the fate of humankind and our menaced habitat, while not addressing the cruelty of a world economy worth $60 trillion annually, which leaves hundreds of millions to expire in sight of global plenty, even while the rich look in vain for ever more expensive and marginal pleasures to augment their value-added discontents."

I read Seabrook's peice and thought 'Yes, that's exactly it. That's what it is'. This discourse of collective human guilt in relation to impending ecological disaster is, of course, only the latest manifestation of one of the central ideological props of liberalism/capitalism. Liberalism tends to obscure the material differences between people through the trumpeting of some abstract, formal and largely fictitious equality between 'citizens'. Class differences, actual inequalities of wealth and power, are surreptitiously removed from the political frame of reference. The attribution of guilt to humanity in terms of global warming and so on, function along the same lines. The poor, the starving, the disenfranchised are all equally as much to blame as SUV drivers, frequent flyers and etc since the ideological gendarmerie of capitalism have no desire to point the finger at the real culprits.

Hello

2007-02-11T15:28:00.000Z

I've been away from the blog for a while. Sorry about that. I am trying to finish off my PhD. All I'm doing at the moment is writing - stopping only to eat, sleep and go wee wee and poo poo. Sometimes I sob too. Soon be over.

Thought I just ought to show my virtual face here for a bit. Still keeping the blog going and all that.

Some stuff:

A Feminist has asked me to flag up a forthcoming march. She seems to be under the impression that I get loads of hits. I'd better do it though or she'll probably chop my balls off or something. Here's the link.

Not much else to say at the moment really. So I'll just put up a couple more links and insert some banal commentary (well, it's what blogs are for). I know, I'll talk about films and stuff.

Went to see Notes on a Scandal a couple of weeks ago. Brilliant film. Fantastic acting. Would recommend it to anyone. Except my mum, cos it's got a teacher shagging a schoolboy in it.

Looking forward to seeing Hot Fuzz. There was an amusing article by Simon Pegg in yesterday's Guardian about English and American humour. It contains a remark which I found myself giggling about for a long time (although it's possibly work related hysteria). Talking about the influence of Friends and its effect on the English psyche, Pegg remarks; 'Could it be any more ubiquitous?' Ha ha ha. The general argument of the piece seems about right, too - that English and American humour is pretty similar and that, contrary to popular myth, actually the Americans do do irony. It's just that we do it a bit more. Pegg rightly points to 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' (pretty pretty good) and 'Arrested Development' - two of the best comedies around recently. He also points to 'My Name is Earl', however, which I have to say, leaves me rather cold. It's just not very funny.

Finally, glad to see Prison Break back on.

Bad Goody

2007-01-19T13:30:00.000Z

As I think I have admitted before, I'm rather partial to a bit of CBB. Not sure why really - it's a good mind-numbing end the day, I suppose, after a hard day's intellectualisin'. So it would be a bit odd if I didn't stick my oar in to the debate over the current CBB world political crisis.

It's been absolutely clear (at least it seems clear from the heavily edited and cleverly juxtaposed CBB 'highlights' programme - always remember that the producers need to construct 'storylines' in order to keep the viewing public hooked) that Goody, O'Meara and that whatsername have been bullying Shilpa Shetty in an extremely nasty way. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that there has been a racist element to this nastiness.

It strikes me that the abuse Shetty has been suffering is not motivated primarily out of racism. The racist remarks, I think, have come in the main because the bullies couldn't think of much else to say. The girls' antagonism towards Shetty isn't rooted in Shetty's 'race' - it's just that they've seized on her Indian nationality as a kind of stick with which to beat her over something else. This doesn't mean that the abuse isn't racist of course and doesn't make it any more acceptable. The bullying, it strikes me, arises primarily out of sheer jealousy and a feeling of inferiority. People like Goody, O'Meara and whatsername simply don't like highly attractive, successful and articulate women who don't seem interested in them. They are all 'celebrities', you see, and the worst thing you can do to a 'celebrity' is fail to provide them with the requisite amount of fawning attention that they have come to expect - the effect of this refusal is considerably greater if you yourself are a 'celebrity', too. I'm not saying that Shetty is some kind of hero here - clearly she's a rather vain person from a pampered background - she's just a little too aloof and remote for the bullies. They can't quite understand her. They feel uncomfortable in her presence. The nagging thought that the 'worth' of their celebrity isn't that great becomes a little more unbearable.

I'm in two minds about the way this row is going. It is, I think, clearly a Good Thing that racism is clearly completely unacceptable to most of the Big Brother audience. One can't help remembering that the Big Brother voting audience has displayed a rather progressive strain of opinion in the past - voting a gay man (Brian) the winner a few years ago and a transexual (Nadia) the winner a couple of years back. I have even heard it said that Brian's win reflected a sea-change in public opinion about homosexuality - a gay man wouldn't have won something like that a few years before. You can't ignore the circus sideshow aspect of the programme however. It's the whole point of course. One gets the impression that Nadia was voted the winner more on account of her childish shrieking and melodrama value than for anything else. What the show wants to give you, want the audience passively demand and what the votes reward is 'entertainment value', of course, more than anything else. It's a freak show. One has to view the public 'anger' about Goody and other in this light. There is a certain pleasure to be had in focusing in on Goody as a hate figure. She's a pantomime villain now.

Apparently Endemol aren't allowing the public to attend the eviction process tonight. We know why this is - it's because a certain proportion of the crowd will turn up to take great pleasure in booing, jeering and perhaps even pelting things at Goody. Perhaps she deserves it. But it's rather sad isn't it, that this person - this circus freak par excellence - has been built up, made into a millionaire on account of her 'stupidity' (actual or not) and will, over the next few days, be mercilessly ripped apart and destroyed. What does it say about us - those of us who, to some extent, have taken, and will take, pleasure in this process? Real outrage about racism has, I think, very little to do with it. Goody's racism simply provides us with an excuse to boo and hiss and have a thoroughly good time.

As an aside - one thing which has struck me while listening to the 'conversation' of the bullying trio (yes, I know I'm a voyeur as much as anyone else) is just how much time they spend discussing whether or not someone is 'genuine'. The question of whether or not someone is 'genuine' and 'being herself' seems to be, for some reason, of paramount importance - more important than any other personal attribute, achievement or behaviour. It is incredibly odd, isn't it, that on planet celebrity - a world of smoke and mirrors, make-up, image, PR - the matter of being 'genuine' is so important. What can they mean? It seems to me that one must affect the behaviours and pose of the 'genuine' in order to thrive in this environment. Being 'genuine' has become the most important aspect of a celebrity's manufactured image.

Capitalism and the Ecological Crisis

2007-01-17T13:27:00.000Z

When I attended the Socialist Register session on ecological crisis at the Historical Materialism conference recently I carted along with me a certain prejudice. I expected to be told that capitalism could find no solution to this crisis - but I was wrong. As I reported in a previous post at least one speaker, Daniel Buck, suggested that capitalism might well find a 'solution' to the fossil fuel pollution/global warming crisis under the pressure of looming catastrophe. As far as I remember, none of the other speakers claimed that capitalism was completely unable to dig itself out of the hole it has dug itself into. It may seem strange, but I found this deeply disappointing. The notion that capitalism is driving us to disaster and that the very logic of this system prevents us from finding a solution while we remain within its confines has become akind of anchor - the anchor in fact - which keeps me at least loosely tied to the idea that a complete alternative to capitalism is both necessary and possible. It is possible simply because it is necessary (if you see what I mean). Without this thought at the back of my head - the assumption that sooner or later humanity is going to be forced out of sheer necessity to throw off the sick (and sickening) system that we currently live under if it wants to survive - I'm afraid that capitalism must stretch on and on into the endless future.

That's why I want to get this sorted out asap. If anyone knows of any good books from a left perspective which come to a firm conclusion on this matter I'd like to know of them. Can you, dear reader, recommend one?

While I'm on the subject, the Socialist Register has put three new essays online (at least two of them are from the current edition of the journal). They are excellent. One of them at least (by Barbara Harriss-White with Elinor Harriss) comes to the firm conclusion that capitalism cannot fix the problem it has created - so let's cut to the conclusion - one that I find (perversely) pleasing and a source of hope:

Capitalism is not fixing the environment. It is not able to, either in theory or in historical practice. [ftnote*] Market-driven politics has ensured that renewable energy remains far from the point where it might start to form any kind of technological base, either for an alternative model of capitalist development (in the UK or in an engagement with large developing countries which are about to enter a highly polluting phase of industrialisation...), or for the remoralised and equitable allocations argued for by Altvater. In energy, there is no sign of the politics able to generate a new kind of social, non-market regulation of money and nature. Sustainable capitalism is a fiction and the politics of renewable energy are merely a reflection of the fiction.

* Not in theory because of the logic and thermodynamics of capitalist growth; not in practice because of its path dependence; and because of the contradiction between the pace of physical system dynamics and that of the global economy.

Giles Fraser

2007-01-15T13:35:00.000Z

This guy is interesting. He's the Vicar of Putney and a lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford. I've seen a couple of his articles in The Guardian now and was deeply impressed by both of them.

In the first of his articles that I saw Fraser has a pop at Mel Gibson's new bloodfest Apocalypto, arguing that:

Apocalypto is a prequel to The Passion of the Christ, just as determined by Gibson's disturbing theological worldview and just as infatuated with the connection between blood and salvation. It's another Christian snuff movie, but most reviewers haven't the theological literacy to spot it.

In today's article he argues that most Christians support gay rights. I'm not sure if that's exactly true - I would guess that most churches (as in the organisations) are in favour of gay rights - rather than most individual Christians (and of course it depends what you mean by gay rights), but it's an interesting article nonetheless.

It's worth a look through his previous articles, too.

This Life + 10

2007-01-03T22:21:00.000Z

I had been looking forward to the 'This Life' ten-years-on-special for as long as they had been hyping it up on BBC2 – a period in which they’d repeated all of the original episodes in a late night slot to whet the appetite of old (and growing older) fans. I quite enjoyed the programme last night, but I have to say that the glorious one-off return was, overall, rather a disappointment. The programme’s main shortcoming was that so much of it was so utterly, utterly preposterous. One of the major attractions of 'This Life' in the 90s was its casual take-it-or-leave-it realism – the fact that nothing very dramatic happened in most of the episodes, the fly-on-the-wall documentary style jerky, hand-held camera shots. The best thing about it was that the characters were, in many ways (and allowing for the fact that, apart from Ferdie and a few minor characters, they were all lawyers, trainee lawyers or ex-lawyers and therefore relatively privileged) quite ordinary and unremarkable. It was a mark of This Life’s realism that its long running storylines revolved around Egg’s indecision about what he wanted to do with his life, Milly’s indecision over whether or not to cheat on Egg, and Miles’ and Anna’s mutual unrequited housemate love. The most dramatic moment of the two series came when Milly punched Rachael at the end of the last episode. By the end of the second series of most drama-soaps quite a lot more than that would have happened – probably at least two murders, a lottery win, and some sort of shenanigan involving amnesia and the arrival of a hitherto unknown psychopathic identical twin on the scene. So it was a bit of a shock to find that, 10 years later, the loveable slacker Egg had become a best selling author (and at the start of the programme was seen being interviewed by that bloke off Newsnight Review), that the sharp-witted, no-nonsense Warren had become some sort of (wannabe) Carol Caplin type ‘life-coach’ (p’shaw) and that, best of all, Miles had thrown in a career as a barrister to become a business tycoon and successful hotelier with a huge Jane Austen type 18th Century mansion somewhere in the rolling English countryside (as you do).

What total bollocks. The storyline, too, packed in a whole series of rather unconvincing ‘dramatic moments’ – as if the writer was making up for all that lost time between 1997 and 2006. Warren appeared to try to kill himself (and then turned out not to have intended any such thing – oh ho ho you guys), Miles’ preposterous trophy wife (more about her later) stormed out of the mansion in a fit of jealousy and left him, Milly was thrown by an out-of-control horse (a staple of the Neighbours end of episode cliff-hanger stock), Anna and Miles declared that they loved each other and got it on before deciding that it just couldn’t be because their love always was and must be doomed, Egg took a boat out onto Miles’ ornamental lake and threw, amongst other things, the disk or something containing the details of his forthcoming book into the water in some sort of romantic gesture and Miles decided to leave everything and go travelling when it turned out that he was bankrupt after his car and most of his furniture was repossessed. Too much.

The programme was filled up with cliché too, I thought. The presentation/characterisation of Miles’ Hong Kong fashion model wife bordered on racist stereotype. She was an archetypal ‘oriental’ beauty – an outwardly meek and submissive wife, but brimming inside with barely repressed jealousy and rage at any woman who came near her husband, and driven to marry Miles, too, it turned out, out of gold-digging ambition. Of course she very quickly blew up into some mysterious rage early in the programme and stamped out of the mansion screeching something unintelligible in the way that Western ‘orientalist’ prejudice imagines that ‘far-easterners’ inevitably behave. Furthermore, Miles didn’t seem that bothered by it – she was only a piece of mansion furniture, a lifestyle accessory anyway. A rich man can always get another one. Another cliché involved the presentation of Egg as novelist. Like all novelists, of course, Egg tends to write in bed wearing only his boxer shorts.

In addition, the programme, I thought, was spoiled by a certain sort of trite comeuppance-ism. The obvious thing here, was the treatment of Anna. Now I never really liked Anna. She was feted in the late 90s (inasfar as it is possible to fete a fictional character) as some sort of ‘post-feminist’ pin up – a self-reliant and sexually predatory young career woman. But this elevation of Anna to the status of sex-war heroine always stuck me as a little absurd. She was for me, simply, a rather unpleasant character – like any self-centred, sexually predatory male. There’s that old debate within feminism isn’t there, about whether or not liberation will come when women have adopted the worst characteristics of the stereotypical aggressive, selfish, manipulating macho male. However, despite my indifference towards that character, I thought it was rather depressing that she was given a kind of family values comeuppance in 'This Life + 10'. She turned up at Miles’ stately home desperate to have a baby and slightly hysterical – she had realised her true life’s vocation which, you see, being a woman, was to be a mother. She regretted, it seemed, all that career woman stuff and had come to see the error of her biological function denying ways. A shame. In addition, there was some suggestion, too, that Warren had HIV – which as a gay man, of course, he was always going to get sooner or later. He was shown taking a series of tablets rather reminiscent of anti-AIDs drugs. I might be wrong, here, because the tablet taking was presented at one point in terms of some sort appendage of his ‘lifestyle coach’ quackery (which of course, as a frivolous and vain gay man, Warren would be particularly susceptible to) – but, surely, the whole thing suggested anti-retrovirals? Moreover, Ferdie (another gay man) started the programme in a coffin (where he remained – although the unconvincing dramatic possibilities that a returning undead Ferdie presented to the writer must have been very tempting) – the cause of his death was never mentioned. Miles, too, got a kind of comeuppance when his possessions were taken and his Empire crumbled (although I approved of that one).

Another thing to have got my goat about the programme was the unnecessary insertion of drug taking and constant wild swearing into the events. The earlier series were famous for their depiction of drug taking and for the language of its characters. But it just seemed forced in this programme. There was absolutely no point to Egg taking cocaine on the steps of Miles’ mansion in the programme – it was as if the writer thought that she just ought to include it since it went with the This Life territory. But it just looked silly. Similarly, the constant swearing seemed completely forced. I don’t mind people swearing, of course, but the rate of fucks, shits and cunts in the dialogue felt totally unrealistic and rather token – again, as if the writer felt that she just ought to include as much of it as possible. But people just don’t talk like that.

Finally, Miles’ hair was about the most unconvincing thing in the whole programme. Owners of Hotel Empires and Mr D’Arcy stately homes simply don’t go around with a haircut modelled on Aslan the lion’s.

So, overall, a disappointment. Although I dare say that if they do a 'This Life + 20' I’ll watch it.

More HM Stuff - Poulantzas, Miliband and Others

2006-12-19T18:51:00.000Z

Warning - this is likely to be a little scrappy.

I have a few sheets of paper with scribbled notes taken at the Historical Materialism conference last week still to write up here. I've written up the notes on the plenary session on China in a post below. I have yet to write up some notes from a few sessions on Poulantzas, a session on Miliband, one on ecological crisis and one on the international state system today. I thought I had better write these up while the memory is still vaguely fresh.

Poulantzas

Poulantzas, it seems, is sexy again. There is, apparently, a significant re-awakening of interest in Poulantzas in Left academia at the moment. For a while (the last 20 -30 yrs or so!) the old boy was regarded as a little old hat. Yesterday's sensation. Outmoded. Rather unfashionably 'structuralist'. Now, however, he is set to make a big wowee comeback. A bit like Peter Andre I suppose. That's very very good news for me. Bob Jessop commented, at the start of his paper that Poulantzas would, very soon, come to be regarded as one of THE major figures in political theory of the 20th Century. I suppose Bob Jessop would say that, wouldn't he? But it doesn't seem a particularly wild prediction to me. So read your Poulantzas if you want to be hip (although I advise you not to attempt Political Power and Social Classes unless you are really, really sure about it).

Clyde Barrow presented an interesting paper on the matter of Poulantzas' supposed 'Althusserian' theoretical foundations - a paper delivered, rather bewilderingly, in an American deep south accent. I can't be sure, but I should think that Barrow usually speaks with a deep south accent, rather than saving it for the delivery of papers on Poulantzas. It's quite odd, at first, listening to someone who sounds not completely unlike Deputy Dawg talking about the structural configuration of different modes of production - but one gets used to it after a while. I liked Barrow very much - seemed like a really nice guy.

Basically, Barrow's argument (and one with which I fully agree) was that people are wrong to pigeon-hole Poulantzas as an 'Althusserian'. I certainly get rather annoyed when people dismiss P's later work for 'incorporating substantial Althusserian residues' - even if it does (which I don't think it does in any meaningful sense - what, exactly, are 'Althusserian residues' anyway?) there is a real wealth of stuff in State, Power, Socialism which people tend to miss if they are busily hunting for Althusserian left-overs. I suppose most people would agree that P had made a significant (if not decisive - which I think he had) break with Althusser with the publication of SPS - but Barrow wanted to push this further and argue that even the early Poulantzas (you know, the Poulantzas in his 'Althusserian phase' - that one) is not, in any significant sense, working within an Althusserian paradigm (or should I say 'problematic') - (No, I shouldn't).
Barrow pointed out that there are very clear differences between the early P and Althusser and Balibar. Althusser and Balibar operate with what Barrow described as a 'Platonic' conception of the constitutive elements which go to make up a mode of production in their structuralist schema. Althusser argues, basically, that each mode of production is made up of a particular configuration of pre-existing elements - 'the economy', 'the political' etc. (an analysis which seems rather to mirror liberal categorisation). They reproduce the capitalist assumption that the economy is an autonomous entity - a spontaneously self-reproducing thing into which the political/state intrudes from the outside if it has anything to do with it at all. Poulantzas, however, starts his analysis at the level of the mode of production - rather than at the level of transhistorical 'ideological', 'political' or 'economic' elements of reality. So, he is not best pigeon-holed as Althusserian. And he is better than those clueless schmucks, Althusser and Balibar.

Jessop's paper aimed to convince us that P's State, Power, Socialism is a 'modern classic'. I completely agreed with him. In fact I agreed with him so much that I forgot to make any notes. What I remember of his presentation, however, is his argument that the section of SPS on 'Authoritarian Statism' is a remarkably prescient account of 21st Century politics - in particular, it is impossible to read this chapter without thinking 'Blimey, you're describing Blairism there even though you were writing in 1978, you remarkably prescient old fox, you'. Read it and see what I mean. The only thing P gets wrong is that he fails he anticipate the Thatcherite/Reaganite turn - he suggests that the politics of his near future would involve an extension of state ownership rather than privatisation and that 'economic' questions, would therefore, become increasingly 'politicised.' In that sense it is very much a book of its time - the 1970s. But, again, read it - and tell me that the stuff about managerialism, the hollowing out of politics, the creation of unaccountable, semi-militarised 'parallel state systems', about the increasing concentration of political power at the apex of the state executive does not describe what we have today. P, of course, goes further than this. He doesn't just 'predict' this process - he provides an intricate account of just why such a process would unfurl.

I have a scribble at the top of the Jessop page which tells me, by the way, that Althusser refused to publish an early work by Poulantzas because it was 'too historicist.' More ammunition, then, for the Poulantzas-as-not-an-Althusserian position.

In his paper, Peter Thomas argued that, if anything, Poulantzas is best thought of as a Gramscian. He focused on the final chapter (first published as an article in NLR) of SPS (a brilliant if flawed attempt to draw out the practical strategic implications of his theory of the state). It focused on Poulantzas' reading of Gramsci's conception of the distinction between 'state' and 'civil society'. Thomas argued that Poulantzas wrongly attributed to Gramsci, the idea that the state is 'a closed place' - a self-contained entity, separated and distinct from 'civil society', whereas the whole thrust of P's argument in SPS is that the state is a social relation and that it is therefore continually modified by changing balances of social forces - that 'the state is traversed from end to end by the effects of popular struggles' (I'm quoting from memory there, so that's probably wrong - but it's something like that. I am, of course, too lazy to go and get the book from my office.) Poulantzas' and Gramsci's understanding of the state, Thomas suggested, was much closer than Poulantzas thought. Thomas also provided, along the way, an incidental critique of Anderson's 'The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci' - one of the most celebrated and thorough analyses of Gramsci's thought. I wish I could remember what the criticism was exactly. There is some flaw in Anderson's approach - no can't remember it. Drat.

Miliband

One of the main things to emerge from the Miliband session was that - just as it makes little sense to categorise Poulantzas as an Althusserian structuralist - it is a mistake to think of Miliband as an 'instrumentalist'. There are countless 'Introduction to Political Science/Theory' books, where Marxist state theory is framed in terms of a 'structuralist/instrumentalist' debate and in which the NLR Poulantzas-Miliband debate is wheeled out as the structuralist-instrumentalist bun fight par excellence. The NLR Poulantzas-Miliband (and Laclau sticks his big waggling oar in at one stage, too) is actually pretty unenlightening. In fact its a bit shit if you ask me. Miliband and Poulantzas simply talk past each other. Poulantzas starts it by (unfairly) accusing Miliband of being a crude instrumentalist and Miliband responds (quite understandably) by arguing that, 'Well, Mr Poulantzas, you are just a structuralist abstractionist and you talk bollocks'. So it's Poulantzas' fault. Miliband, however, was not an 'instrumentalist' - his 'instrumentalist' book, The State in Capitalist Society is an intervention in a particular debate and can only be understood properly in that context. What Miliband was trying to do in that book, was to prove 'pluralism' wrong on its own terms, by pointing out the continuing salience of class and showing that power (particularly the levers of state power) was/were not evenly distributed amongst social groups.

In fact (as Paul Wetherley stressed in his paper) Miliband does provide a fairly robust account of the 'structural constraints' which state agents encounter and which tend to safeguard capitalism from political courses of action which my have the effect of weakening it. See his NLR essay, State Power and Class Interests for example. But even in The State in Capitalist Society Miliband is quite clear that the state is not capitalist simply because of the class background of senior state managers (the argument wrongly attributed to him on a frequent basis). In fact he provides a whole chapter on 'structural constraints' in that book!

Interestingly, Barrow (in his Miliband paper) suggested that the category 'instrumentalism' was invented almost arbitarily by Gold, Lo and (Erik Olin) Wright in a graduate paper they had published in Monthly Review in 1975 (‘Recent Developments in Marxist Theories of the Capitalist State’). They simply made up the category for the sake of convenience and proceeded to dump a few theorists into it. For some reason, the term became popular and the categorisation of Miliband (and Domhoff - who, amusingly, produced, at some point, an essay entitled 'I am not an Instrumentalist') just stuck. An interesting question then - have there ever been any Marxist 'instrumentalist' state theorists?

Paul Blackledge began his paper on Miliband by sticking his tongue out at my girlfriend, causing her to go into an uncontrollable giggling fit for the duration of the session. The substance of his paper consisted of the argument that Miliband's position on socialist strategy in the last chapter of Marxism and Politics (1977) is flawed since it is based on a faulty view of the relationship between Leninism and the Popular Front strategy. It seems to me that Blackledge is right about Miliband's conflation of Leninism with Popular Front strategies. However, I wasn't convinced by his argument. He got a bit of a telling off from Hilary Wainwright and Leo Panitch looked distinctly hostile. The argument (as I remember) from the floor was that Miliband (and other New Left figures such as E P Thompson and Raymond Williams) objected to Leninism for reasons that could not be boiled down to Miliband's mistaken reading of Popular Front politics. They (Miliband, Thompson, Williams) never made the leap into Leninism/Trotskyist politics (even though they produced some fearsome critiques of both Stalinism and parliamentary labourism) quite simply because they just didn't like the look of Leninism or Trotskyism. Seems about right to me actually. Miliband didn't have an 'incorrect' or 'partial' or 'incomplete' analysis of Stalinism or reformism or whatever. He didn't make the leap because, very simply, he was just waiting for something rather more agreeable to come along.

Peter Burnham presented an interesting paper on Miliband's Parliamentary Socialism - a classic which every left-leaning member of the Labour Party should read. Burnham's argument, which seems about right to me, was that Miliband oscillated throughout his life between calling for battle within the Labour Party and calling for the building of a new party. I wonder if this oscillation wasn't at all conditioned by his dislike of Leninist parties - the thought, that is, that all of those (in many ways) rather unattractive Trot parties out there had cornered the extra-Labour Party market as it were so, bollocks, we'd better look again at the Labour Left.

This post is now far too long. I'll end it there. I may write up the Ecological crisis and the international state system stuff in a couple of days.

Additional

This post is probably best described as a 'splurge of consciousness' rather than a coherent summary of a set of academic papers. I'm sorry. But it's late, I'm tired and it's nearly Christmas.

Rapid News Reaction

2006-12-18T16:56:00.000Z

Arse.

HM Conference

2006-12-16T14:02:00.000Z

I said I'd write up a little report on the Historical Materialism conference (pdf.) last weekend. So here it is.

First of all, I have to say (a little shamefacedly) that I didn't make it to the paper on George A. Romero - the one I was enthusing about before I went. The problem was that this paper was presented at 9 O'Clock in the morning and that I had been out a-boozin' the night before. It just didn't work out the way I planned. Never mind.

One of the difficulties I encountered at the conference (apart from the absolutely mad starting times - 9 in the morning... 9 in the morning??!!) was that there was just too much to take in. This isn't a criticism of the conference of course (no one was forced to attend all the slots after all). I suppose I am just trying to register my disappointment about the particular limits to human concentration and endurance. I found that by the last slot in the evening my mind had turned to slush and that I really couldn't take in what anyone was saying. I'll just provide a synopsis here, then, of those papers which I attended when still in full possession of my mental faculities and which I found particularly interesting (and during which I remembered to take notes).

The most fascinating set of papers - a plenary session on 'China and the Future of the Global Economy' - was by far the best attended. It was held in the dungeon pit of the UCL Students' Union (at least I think that's what it was) and was absolutely full to bursting. The speakers were Andrew Glyn, David Harvey and Simon Clarke. I'm afraid that I didn't take any notes on Clarke's speech because he spoke last and by that time my capacity for concentration had collapsed. Glyn's paper consisted really of a run through of a set of facts and figures about Chinese growth and its significance for the global economy. His main argument was that the huge reserves of cheap labour in China would progressively undermine wages and living standards in the advanced West. He also argued interestingly, that some of the old Marxian predictions about a progressive declining share of income for labour under capitalism, although they seem to have been confounded over the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries, would over the course of the next few years be proved right - ie that this prediction was right in terms of long term tendencies.

Glyn started by pointing out that the centre of world capital accumulation is now shifting from the US and Europe to China (and to India, too, although to a lesser extent than to China). At the moment the level of China's exports is no larger than Japan's - but of course China has huge capacity and, in particular, a huge labour force (or, at least, potential labour force - it has a huge reserve of rural peasants yet to be proletarianised). The key thing to understand about Chinese growth, and its potential for further growth, Glyn pointed out, was the level of wages in that country. Despite huge growth in the Chinese economy and despite rising levels of productivity there has been no increase in wage levels in that country as compared to US wages (not sure what the time scale is here - the main thing is that wage levels are held down much lower than rates of productivity gain and much much lower than in the US and Europe). The rate of profit in China is about twice that of the US and Europe. So, Glyn pointed out, China (and India) are a huge pole of attraction for foreign investment. Glyn admitted that there was not yet the flood of investment going to China that you might expect (more on this later) - FDI from global north to global south (which of course includes China and India) is still only about 4% of the level of FDI between countries of the north. But an increasing share of global FDI was now going to China and India and this, Glyn argued would soon turn from the 'trickle' it was now to a 'flood'. He pointed out the rate of growth in capital stock in the north from 1945 to the mid 60s was about 45%. It is now about 2 - 2%. Under these conditions China and India with much higher rates of growth and rates of profit will look increasingly attractive to northern investors. In other words the working class in the north is doomed. As is the welfare state and anything else which reduces the 'competitiveness' of the northern economies in relation to those of the booming economies of the south.

Glyn finished up by providing a kind of periodisation of the fortunes of northern labour. He pointed out that labour's share of income in the period from the publication of Smith's The Wealth of Nations to the publication of Marx's Capital was declining (and this, of course, shaped Marx's analysis). However in the period up until the 'profits squeeze' of the 1970s labour's share of income improved. It was in this period, of course, that Crosland and others argued that the injustices of capitalism had been (or were in the process of being) ironed out - that Marxist economics were outdated. But since the 1970s labour's share of income has been falling again. Competition from low wage economies in this period has been one factor (amongst many) in this drop off in the share of income going to labour. Now, with the emergence of China as a global super-economy boasting low wages and relatively high productivity levels and rates of profit, labour's share of income in the north will start to drop off dramatically.

All very doom and gloom. However, Alex Callinicos made the point from the floor that low wages are only one (very minor) determinant of investment levels. He pointed out that if Glyn's thesis about a coming slump in western living standards was true we would expect to see much more than a 'trickle' of northern FDI going to China right now. In fact there are many factors which investors hold to be more important that wage levels when deciding on where to invest - these include proximity of the place of investment to affluent markets, the level of skill of labour, the infrastructural provision on offer and the political and economic stability of the place of investment. In fact Glyn's argument seems to replicate a lot of the wilder claims of the 'hyper-globalists' in the globalisation debate of the 1990s. Glyn's argument was quite comprehensively dealth with by 'sceptics' such as Hirst and Thompson in that debate to my mind.

Harvey was up next. If you've ever read the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto - you'll know that it provides the most extraordinary grand sweeping vision of historical development - a vision, in particular, of the merciless dynamism of capitalist development. It manages to be electrifying and terrifying at the same time. Well, Harvey's speech was a bit like that. I can't really do it justice here - but he provided a description of Chinese growth in terms that just made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. It was this sweeping description of the development of economic and political forces which are quite out of control.

He started out by telling us how he explained the concept of over-accumulation to his students. Quite useful I thought. What he does is he tells them to imagine a day in the life of a capitalist. He or she starts off with x amount of capital and (if things work out how they should) he or she ends the working day with x amount of capital plus a bit more. The problem for the capitalist, then, is to work out what do do with this extra capital - how to absorb the surplus. He or she will, under pressure of competition from rivals, have to find a productive outlet for it. This happens, of course, day after day, week after week, with the capitalist having to find something to do with an accumulating amount of extra capital. There come periods when there is so much surplus that capitalists simply can't find outlets for it and the system becomes unstable. The other problem is that capitalists will have invested a lot of this surplus in building extra capacity - and there will come a point when this capacity becomes surplus to requirements - ie they just can't shift the stuff they are producing and they just don't need those 5 extra factories. Harvey argues that one method of dealing with these crises of overaccumulation is for the state to take on responsibility for the absorption of the surplus in order to stabilise the system (the other option I suppose is to induce or allow some sort of mass devalorisation of capital - a slump - to get rid of the surplus and get rid of inefficient capitals). He argued that quite often the surplus is absorbed in projects of massive urban regeneration. In 1848 the French state dealt with a crisis of overaccumulation by re-engineering Paris - famously, the boulevards of that city were greatly widened and the narrow streets of Paris cleared out. Similar re-engineering of city centres has occurred in New york, Los Angeles and Chicago. The 20th Century rise of the surburbs, Harvey argues, was a response to overaccumulation crises.

But the absorption of capital isn't simply conducted at national scale. There is also an international dimension - Harvey argues for something called a 'spatial fix' where excess capital is diverted overseas to a new 'space'. Harvey's argument was that the epicentre of global surplus absorption - the current point of 'spatial fix' - is now China. There is a massive project of construction and development going on in that country. Harvey has, apparently visited China on a few occasions - and he describes the rate of construction there as absolutely 'scary'. It is a boom economy completely out of control. It is Chinese demand for materials that is driving the world economy. Apparently it's Chinese demand for copper, for example, which is driving the growth of Chile and China is currently consuming half the world's cement supplies! But much of this frantic construction in China is unnecessary. Harvey pointed out, for example, that in one valley in China (don't know how big) they had built 5 airports in the past few years - when they only needed one. There are many other examples of unsustainable construction. Harvey pointed out that in one small village he visited the local authorities were building a state of the art school and hospital which, as I remember, was far too big for local requirements. But of course, not everyone in China is enjoying the fruits of the boom - as Glyn pointed out, the Chinese working class is being paid extremely low wages. Interestingly, though, the new Chinese rich are not just from the government bureaucracy or well connected party members. Some peasants were wise enough to draw up contracts with construction firms - so that, in return for giving their land over for appartment construction, they arranged ownership of, say, the first floor of the building and have now become quite rich in renting out the rooms to incoming labourers. Those labourers of course work 12 hours a day or something, often don't get paid (because construction firms go bust all the time) and live in squalid conditions. As an aside, Harvey referred to a conversation he had with some Chinese new rich party members - he asked them what they thought of the growing inequalities in their country. He was told that they deserved their money because they had worked hard to attain it. As Harvey pointed out - clearly, very few people in China have ever heard of the concept of surplus value.

Anyway, Harvey's argument was that there is now massive over-investment in China - that there is a growing crisis of over-accumulation in what is now the epicentre for the absorption of the global surplus. Already, he pointed out, the Chinese are starting to expand outwards - to look for their own 'spatial fix' - they are expanding car production abroad for example. In another aside Harvey told us that he (in his capacity as a rep of a US university) had been offered 60 million dollars on the spot by a Chinese vice-chancellor (or whatever the Chinese equivalent of that role is) - it was to go his university and in return, staff from his university would work for 6 months in the year at the Chinese university (clearly, the Chinese universities want US knowledge). It shows just how much excess money there is sloshing around in China.

Harvey finished up by pointing to the huge environmental problems being stored up by this out of control growth. Things aren't great in China ecology-wise it seems. He also pointed, of course, to the hugely unstable nature of this global arrangement. There was some cross over between Harvey and Glyn in that Harvey also pointed out that the only way that the US and Europe could compete with this rousing giant in the long run would be to force down the wages of its workforce. He ended his speech with a suggestion. It was that the only alternative to this out of control nightmare was socialism or something.

Anyway, this post is now far too long, so I think I'll leave the rest of it for another time. I still want to write something up about Poulantzas and Miliband briefly - and also the Socialist Register stuff about ecological crisis.

Google Can Bog Off

2006-12-15T20:03:00.000Z

Blogger.com users will have noticed over the past couple of weeks that they are being encouraged to update their Blogger templates - and that in order to do so you must first register for a Google account. Of course all of this hard sell is pitched in terms of how very lucky we are to be given such a wonderful opportunity, followed by a casual 'oh-by-the-way you'll have to take out a new account to do so'. Yes, I know it's free - but I don't want a Google account. All of this, of course, has something to do with Google's recent acquisition of Blogger.com - which, in turn, has something to do with capital's tendency towards concentration and stuff.

I was fairly sure that the Blogger's polite invitations to its users to join up with the new master would become progressively more and more of a Godfather type of offer - you know, the ones that the invitee can't refuse. And do you know, I was right. I think. It seems that you can no longer log on to your Blogger account in the Blogger comments boxes in order to leave a comment. You have to do it through a Google account. I tried to leave a comment on a couple of Blogger blogs today and it just wouldn't let me sign in. Bah.

Luckily there's always Haloscan what like I've got. But what's next? The bastards.

Bean-Counters Will Not Save the Planet

2006-12-14T17:24:00.000Z

Derek Wall has a very interesting critique of the Stern Review in this month's Red Pepper. I recommend that you read it.

"Stern’s solution to climate change will make the average economist swoon. Sir Nicholas and his team have reached for their micro economic textbooks in the way that a Midwest preacher would reach for the bible. Economists are not centrally concerned with the ‘end of civilisation’ as we know it, social justice or ecological sustainability. They are out to maximise ‘welfare’. Conventional economics is based on utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number. Costs must be minimised and ‘benefits’ maximised. Costs and benefits are measured in cash terms. Where supply and demand curves meet, overall benefits are maximised.

Viewed in these terms, environmental problems come down to unpaid costs. For example, the motorist pays the private cost of the car, petrol and other expenses of keeping on the road but does not pay for the ecological and social costs of car use. Economists argue that by calculating the monetary costs to society of pollution, congestion and the other ills from car use, and then making the motorist pay, efficiency can be restored.

Stern takes this approach. Climate change costs money, the cost can be measured and added to the price of all the things we do that lead to climate change. If consumers choose to pay and continue wrecking the planet, so be it."

There was a discussion of 'ecosocialism' at the HM conference I went to a few days ago, to mark the launch of the Socialist Register 2007, which, this year, focuses on the (rather pressing!) issue of ecological crisis. One of the the questions the participants addressed was that of whether capitalism could find any solution to the looming environmental crisis. Interestingly the various speakers disagreed about this - at least one, Daniel Buck, suggested that capitalism might well find a 'solution' to the fossil fuel pollution/global warming crisis under the pressure of looming catastrophe (incentive and all that). He did suggest, however, that this solution would come at the cost of the further commodification of the environment, of the further exacerbation of international inequalities and would involve a significantly authoritarian dimension. The other participants disagreed. I'll see if I can write this up more fully in a few days. Really busy at the moment. I've got loads of notes on the Harvey/Glyn/Clarke plenary session on Chinese growth and the global economy (in which Harvey, in particular, was fantastic) which I hope to write up in some detail on this blog when I get a chance. The gist of the Harvey argument was that the rate of over-accumulation and developing over-capacity in China is of huge proportions - in his words it's absolutely 'scary'. He brought in his notion of 'spatial fix' - the idea that capital must continually expand in spatial terms and colonise new territory in order to avert crisis - in a really interesting way.

Do You Like George A Romero?

2006-12-07T14:11:00.000Z

I'm just printing out some abstracts and papers for the Historical Materialism conference. There's a very short paper on '"Just in Case Society Crumbles": George A Romero and Marxism' by Marco Maurizi which I intend to read on the train this afternoon. It looks good. As a rule of thumb, I would say anything with zombies in it is usually a good thing. Except food, obviously. I wouldn't want zombies in my tuna and mayo sandwich. I thought some of my readership might be interested in having a look at this paper.

You can get to the papers and abstracts from here. Click on the name of the author for a pdf file. The full papers are towards the bottom of the page.

As a Poulantzas anorak, I would also recommend, in particular, Bob Jessop's paper on why Poulantzas' State, Power, Socialism is brilliant. See also Clyde Barrow's paper.

Now I Am Famous.

2006-12-06T21:57:00.000Z

One of my blogposts has been included in The Blog Digest 2007. Apparently, the book could well be the biggest selling Blog Digest publication of 2007. It might well be purchased, perhaps even read, by literally many people.

Apparently Boris Johnson's done a review of it, too. Or maybe he hasn't. I'm sure I read, somewhere, that Boris Johnson had reviewed the book. Anyway, Boris Johnson might have reviewed it - and if he has, then that must probably mean that this book is going to be big. Andy McNabb big. Boris Johnson wouldn't just review any old shit, you know. Not that I'm particularly bothered about Boris Johnson. I'm not one of those people who is impressed by a book simply because Boris Johnson might have done a review of it. I'm just saying that Boris Johnson, as a book reviewer, is not to be sniffed at. He's a very capable reviewer of books. I'm not actually sure whether Boris Johnson's review of the book, if he did indeed produce one, was favourable or not. But I'm fairly sure that he liked the book. If he was deeply offended by it, or thought it was really really stupid he probably wouldn't have reviewed it would he? Reviewing a really really stupid or deeply offensive book just eats into one's mistress boffing time and is not, therefore, a rational course of action. If I was Boris Johnson and had the choice of reviewing a really really stupid or offensive book on the one hand, or, on the other hand, having a quick shag with Petronella Wyatt or someone, I would probably choose the latter. If I was Boris Johnson, that is - if it was me I would probably review the really really stupid or offensive book because a) I could do with the money, b) I don't fancy Petronella Wyatt, c) I am not so stupid as to attempt to develop some sort of romantic relationship with slightly unpleasant journalists working for The Spectator and, d) if I was a book reviewer I would be very conscientious about my job, unlike that flighty, unreliable Boris Johnson character. So, anyway, I'm sure that Boris Johnson's review was favourable, if indeed he did one, and that, therefore, the book is looked upon with admiration by Spectator types who, although I may not agree with them about the key causes of inflation or about the nature of unemployment and although I do not fancy Petronella Wyatt, really know a good book when they see one.

Anyway, being an insufferably holy lefty, of course, I am not in the business of advertising. I am definitely not advertising this book or anything. If you want to find out more you can have a look at Chicken Yoghurt - the proprietor of which blog, Justin McKeating, was responsible for putting together and editing the book. And he's done it very well, too.

Anyway I'm off to London for this HM conference thing.

Chavez Wins!

2006-12-04T13:34:00.000Z

Really good news.

Green Left report:

The wealthy elite, which back the opposition and own the media, are terrified of the growing radicalisation of Venezuela’s working people. Chavez explicitly made the elections a referendum on his stated goal of constructing a “socialism of the 21st century”, and dramatically deepening the revolutionary transformation of the country. Yet again, the working people sent a powerful message: there should be no return to the past — the revolution must continue.

The elite are running out of options.

Note the ominous tone of that last line, though.

Meanwhile

Larry Elliott has a piece in today's Guardian about the gathering financial crisis in the US. He suggests that the only real option the Federal Reserve has is to cut interest rates and risk higher inflation. This should have the happy effect of cutting the price of US exports, leading, therefore, to increased US manufacturing competitiveness. But, surely, there is a reason why the Federal Reserve has refused to take this step for such a long time - one which, as far as I can make out, neo-classical orthodoxy would recommend (because market forces, supply and demand, tend, spontaneously, towards equilibrium innit). Elliott doesn't mention this, but (in my limited understanding) US global hegemony depends, in great part, on its financial clout - on Wall Street's centrality to the whole financial system and on the dollar's status as the world's preferred trading and reserve currency. Peter Gowan refers to the system of US hegemony the 'Dollar Wall Street Regime' for good reason. If the dollar is weakened significantly then so is the DWSR and so, in turn, then, is US power. Maybe I've got this all wrong - but the current crisis isn't just some technical concern with exchange rates, inflation and manufacturing competitiveness. The crisis runs much deeper than that - the dilemma the Federal Reserve faces incorporates extremely important geopolitical and hegemonic concerns. That's why the Federal reserve is dithering, it seems to me.

Dislaimer: of course, you shouldn't listen to me because I'm not a trained economist and I don't really know what I'm talking about.

There May be Trouble Ahead

2006-12-02T18:18:00.000Z

The frontpage of the Indie, today, focuses on the weakening dollar. It's now worth about $1.9848 against Sterling and $1.3180 against the Euro. The signs are, apparently, that the dollar is set to tumble even further. Larry Elliott suggests that there are 3 major reasons for this pressure on the US currency.

Firstly, the US is running a colossal current account deficit, [$869bn (£450bn, €664bn)] which it funds by borrowing money from the rest of the world. Secondly, the economy is clearly slowing following the steady increase in interest rates from 1% to 5.25% since 2004. The boom in the housing market that artificially inflated growth a year ago has turned, predictably to bust. Thirdly, the differential between US interest rates and those in the rest of the world is narrowing. Despite all its tough anti-inflationary rhetoric, the Federal Reserve will not raise rates again.

Clearly (?), it's the second factor here which has been the catalyst for this anxious selling of dollars (perhaps someone can put me right, here, if I'm wildly off). The visible slowing of growth in the US economy has made the underlying weakness of the US economy (the first factor Elliott mentions) much more pressing, while the Federal Reserve's reluctance/inability to raise interest rates even more (because to do so would further damage US manufacturing competitiveness I suppose) means that they cannot offer further inducements to traders to buy dollars to plug the growing trade deficit gap. So, what we have might here, then, is the start of a vicious spiral downwards for the US economy. As Elliott concludes, the "dollar's weakness is no flash in the pan; it is the start of something big."

The FT provides further reasons to suspect that the US economy might soon be in for a little tumble. There is, apparently:

growing talk of global central banks diversifying their foreign exchange reserves away from the US currency. One factor supporting the dollar has been huge purchases by foreign central banks. Since 2001, global currency reserves have soared from $2,000bn to $4,700bn according to the IMF, with two-thirds of the world’s stockpiles held by six countries: China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Russia and Singapore.

Anxieties over reserve diversification have been around for at least six months, with central banks in Russia, Switzerland, Italy and the United Arab Emirates announcing plans to cut the proportion of dollars held in their reserves. A shift by central banks away from dollars would remove a key source of financing for the US deficit.

... speculation is increasing that China, which is thought to hold 70 per cent of its foreign currency stockpile in dollars, is considering a fundamental change in its reserve allocation. Mitul Kotecha, head of foreign exchange research at Calyon, the French bank, [said] “The Chinese authorities are becoming increasingly nervous about holding too many dollars,” ...

If the Chinese and others sell their dollar holdings - ie refuse to prop up the US's deficit - then (in my understanding) that's it for the US economy. It's had it. I suppose it's not in the interests of the Chinese and others, however, to pull the rug out from under the feet of the US economy very rapidly - a US crash, means a world crash. They'll want to manage the decline of the US as an economic superpower (and that's what this amounts to) as carefully as possible. The thing about capitalism, though, is that it's notoriously difficult to manage in such a way - the anarchy of the market and all that.

A Dereliction of Duty

2006-11-28T19:09:00.000Z

Oliver Letwin is coming to York University to make a speech on 'Why Toleration?'. It's the big keynote annual speech type thing organised by the Political Philosophy/Theory branch of the Politics Dept. Every year a fairly well known figure comes in to make a speech on the niceness and goodness of toleration mmkay. I really should go. All of the previous ones that I have attended have been very interesting and very well done. But I'm afraid I just can't face this one. Even the thought of free wine at the after speech reception type thing (it's a tough life, academia) doesn't quite do it.

Funnily enough I wouldn't mind seeing Letwin speak. Sure, the man's a complete twerp. But he is, at least, an engaging twerp. He's an interesting twerp. He's an articulate twerp. I just cannot stand the thought of sitting in a lecture theatre half full of braying undergraduate Tory boys and Tory girls and half full of doddering old hangemandflogems from the local Tory party branches. I just cannot stand it. I'll burn up. It won't be good for my health. I'll spend the entire duration of the lecture thinking hateful thoughts.

I'm afraid I can't go. The trouble is that it feels like I am running away.

HM Conference 2006

2006-11-25T16:44:00.000Z

Finally found some details online about the Historical Materialism conference this year. You can download a pdf file with details here. I've got my cheapo train-ticket and have arranged cheapo accommodation with a London dwelling friend. The conference is going to be a fairly cheapo affair, too, since there isn't a fee - only a suggested donation rate, which I interpret as something that doesn't necessarily apply to cheapos like me. All it will take is little bit of skillful collections bucket dodging every now and again. Of course, I'm only only joking.

Some highlights:

David Harvey on 'Accumulation by Dispossession and Capitalism Today'
Ben Fine, 'Economics Imperialism and the Prospects for Political Economy'
Peter Hallwood, 'Haiti 2004: the Perfection of Neo-Imperialism?'
Alfredo Saad-Filho on Marxist and Keyensian critiques of neo-liberalism.

Other people I'd like to see speak include, Andrew Glyn, Bob Jessop, Peter Gowan, Elmar Altvater, Leo Panitch, Daniel Bensaid, Hilary Wainwright and Werner Bonefeld.

I note there's a Socialist Register plenary session on 'Eco-Socialism, Democratic Planning and Political Strategy' (with Greg Albo, Frieder Otto Wolf and Hilary Wainwright) which, I hope, might help to dispel some of the doubts I have expressed about democratic planning in the comments box in the post below.

Liberal Anaemia

2006-11-23T14:06:00.000Z

I have been thinking a little more about what it is that I find so unsatisfactory about liberalism (in the philosophical sense - it's obvious what's wrong with 'economic' (neo)liberalism - although whether one can make a clear distinction between these two strains of liberalism is matter for some debate. It's quite easy to argue that the two go hand in hand - and modern philosophical liberalism, in my opinion, often functions as a kind of 'ideological shell' for neo-liberal 'economics', precisely because, more often than not, liberal political philosophers have absolutely nothing to say about capitalism - as if it doesn't exist. There is, therefore, an implicit, unspoken apology for liberal capitalism - it is taken as a given). I read a paper, recently concerning (amongst other things) 'deliberative democracy' - and something became quite clear to me. Deliberative democracy, like 'cosmopolitan democracy', is a vague, foggy conception of the 'good society' which a lot of left liberals seem to be bandying around at the moment. There is nothing particularly uncongenial about 'deliberative democracy' - in fact I'd be rather in favour of such a social and democratic arrangement. What's so deeply unimpressive about it is the fact that it's so nebulous. What would be the concrete political institutions in which deliberative democracy could be embedded? How would it work, precisely? What, if any, are the political, economic and other obstacles to its functioning in contemporary societies/states? How might it be set up? What are the political and economic obstacles to the creation of such a thing? These questions, of course, do not concern most liberals in the slightest, because liberalism is a politics free-zone. There isn't, as far as I can see, the slightest interest in strategic political questions (ie. how do we get it?) or in specific analysis of the concrete institutional stuctures necessary for the functioning of such an arrangement (ie. how would it work, exactly?*). Its this absence of politics, this luxurious contemplative passivity, this treatment of social/ethical questions purely in terms of a kind of intellectual parlour-game that annoys me.

I find myself in agreement with the general principles, the ethical drift, of egalitarian liberals. I think we are on the same side in these terms. I am a socialist because I am fairly convinced that it is impossible to realise those principles in any meaningful way within a society in which market forces, the law of value, governs. I am a socialist because I can see that there are deeply embedded structural obstacles in capitalist society to the establishment of a just, egalitarian and democratic society. I was radicalised, not because I liked the idea of being a radical or because I had some a priori attraction to the idea of class struggle or the expropriation of capitalist property. I was radicalised because it occurred to me that in order to have any chance of overcoming the obstacles to the establishment of a just society one needs to get politically radical (whether one likes it or not). There is no way to abolish poverty without taking on the power of private property. Even relatively modest reforms run up against the logic of capitalist accumulation - it would be difficult for a relatively radical left labour government to carry out a programme of redistribution and nationalisation without being subjected to a run on the currency, spiralling inflation, an investment strike, disinvestment of FDI and so on. In other words, capital has power of veto over capitalist democracy. It's this that liberals don't see, or don't want to see. How does one overcome capital's power of veto? You have to resist it, you have to confront it, you have to take it away. You have to act quickly and decisively, you have to build a movement capable of taking it on. Anathema to liberals of course - we are getting far too political.

One can, like Jurgen Habermas, for example, spend one's time building up the moral and philosophical case for some kind of cosmopolitan democracy, some 'transnational civil society' in today's 'Post-National Constellation' (cough, bollocks, cough) - but this is simply pie-in-the-sky unless you analyse the obstacles and constraints on the construction of such a thing and unless you concern yourself with questions of political strategy. Otherwise it's just glorified navel gazing.

This is the thing. Liberals won't like to hear this, but it is socialists who are the realistic ones. Liberals are the utopians and dreamers.

* Although, come to think of it, I would make exactly the same kind of criticism (the latter one I mean - socialists are very good at the former) of Marxists, here.

David Coates

2006-11-14T15:33:00.000Z

I've just found this little treasure trove of resources and because I'm an egalitarian kinda guy I'm going to share the wealth with you, my electronic friends. David Coates is an extremely good left wing political economist. On his home page are a variety of recently published or yet to be published articles which you can download for free. I haven't read all (or very many) of them yet, but I would recommend that you have a look at the top essay on the list: "The Category of Labour: Its Continued Relevance in Social Theory".

Unfortunately I can't quote any of it here, since Coates makes it quite clear that he doesn't want anyone quoting any of this unpublished stuff without permission.

Jarvis Cocker

2006-11-10T17:22:00.000Z

Apparently Jarvis Cocker is going to 'launch a direct attack on the iniquities of global capitalism' on 'Later With Jules Holland' tonight. Should be interesting. I imagine it involves being very rude about Geldof and Bono.

Let's hope he sorts out those iniquities by tomorrow morning.

Additional

Nothing of the sort happened. The Radio Times is an organ of liars and scoundrels.

Let's Have a Heated Debate!

2006-11-09T18:44:00.000Z

Do you wear a red poppy? Answers below, please. I'm just curious.

I wrote something about this last year so I might as well link to that rather than chug through it all again. Every year, however, I am forced to rethink my position a little bit - to re-justify it to myself. I'm not wearing one this year, by the way. I thought about getting a white one, but they seem a little bit naff to me (is that a bad thing to say?) I associate them (white poppies) with absolute pacifism, and while I have nothing in particular against pacifism, I ain't one myself.

Additional

Richard Gott on poppies and remembrance:

"Poppy-wearing... has become required dress for establishment figures - as though the poppy was itself a military medal. "

"The Cenotaph was originally designed... as a temporary wooden structure. The military opposed its permanent site in the middle of the highway, since it obstructed their parades."

Bello on China's Boom

2006-11-03T18:39:00.000Z

I've just come across this website - Global Alternative - which is the internet website of the Russian Institute of Globalisation Studies. The director of the institute is Boris Kagalitsky, who happens to be one of my favourite political theorists.

It looks fairly good so I'll add it to the sidebar. There's an interesting essay by Walden Bello which I would recommend. I don't know enough about the world economy to offer much opinion on what he says, but it seems convincing. He argues that growth in the US and Chinese economies are bound up in a simbiotic relationship which can only really end in tears for both parties. China's amazing rate of growth depends upon US consumption of its goods while US consumption is effectively financed by "Beijing's lending the U.S. private and public sectors a significant portion of the trillion-plus dollars it has accumulated over the last decade from its yawning trade surplus with Washington". Clearly this makes for an unstable kind of relationship. One thing I didn't realise about China is that there is huge overcapacity in that country. China's strategy is to maintain its growth by holding down wages - but as Bello points out this can only exacerbate the problem of excess capacity because of the limits to domestic consumption determined by the fact that Chinese workers are paid low wages. Bello suggests that at some point the Chinese economy will face a severe crisis of overproduction and since the health of the Chinese economy is so important for US health, too, and since the US economy is central to the global economy the reverberations from such a crisis will be severe.

A Capitalist Paradise

2006-10-31T19:49:00.000Z

I saw a TV documentary about Dubai a few months ago. I remember it fairly well. It focused on the lives of some British expats 'working' there. They were living the life of Reily - a constant whirl of hedonistic society events, of hob-nobbing with millionaires, film stars and supermodels - all in a highly paid and, of course, tax free environment. Most of these people, it should go without saying, were deeply unpleasant and (it seems fair to add) almost entirely worthless people - but there was a certain seductiveness about the lifestyle they led. There was also a certain seductiveness about the self-image, the self-descriptive narrative of 'entrepreneurial' flair that these people articulated towards the camera. They were living it up because they had the 'get up and go' to secure a job in Dubai - because they worked hard as a 'party-planner' or property developer (or whatever) in an environment in which ambition and 'risk-taking' was very well rewarded. One couldn't help wondering towards the end of this hour long documentary in which we got to follow several 'self-made' and extremely wealthy ex-pats (beautiful people all of course) around the luxurious tax exempt shopping malls and around their huge pent house apartments and hotel rooms, whether there wasn't something to be said for this capitalist paradise - whether us lefties had got it all wrong. Doubt. Maybe, if we stopped moaning and developed some personal initiative, maybe if we dropped our tut-tutting ways and flew out to the UAE, we could have it all too. This lifestyle, after all, as ex-pat after ex-pat was eager to remind us, was just there for the taking - all you needed was the 'drive to succeed' and a 'can do attitude'.

At the end of the documentary, however, the second programme of the series was trailed. It indicated the conditions of the people on whom the wealth of Dubai is built - the masses of poorly paid and poorly protected 'guest workers' who toil in the oil fields and who work as servants in the houses and hotels of the rich. It was only a brief trailer, but it punctured the 'too good to be true' tone of the documentary quite violently - it was, indeed, too good to be true. This capitalist paradise turned out, precisely, to be a paradise for the capitalists - while for the rest (dare we call them the 'proletariat'?) things weren't quite so rosy.

In the latest NLR, Mike Davis has a wonderful (although deeply enraging) piece on Dubai. He describes the architecture of the place as 'Speer meets Disney on the shores of Araby' - an exotic playground for the rich which manages to be both kitschy utopian and deeply sinister at the same time. It's quite amazing what those disgusting fuckers - the rulers of Dubai - go in for. They are, apparently, building a series of islands in the sea in the shape of a map of the world - and the mega-rich are invited to buy a 'continent' for their own amusement. He provides us with a powerful description of the lives and working conditions of the 'invisible' inhanitants of this paradise, however - the faceless workers who build and maintain this unreal, nightmarish world:

The great mass of the population are South Asian contract labourers, legally bound to a single employer and subject to totalitarian social controls. Dubai’s luxury lifestyles are attended by vast numbers of Filipina, Sri Lankan and Indian maids, while the building boom (which employs fully one-quarter of the workforce) is carried on the shoulders of an army of poorly paid Pakistanis and Indians, the largest contingent from Kerala, working twelve-hour shifts, six and a half days a week, in the asphalt-melting desert heat.

Dubai, like its neighbours, flouts ilo labour regulations and refuses to adopt the international Migrant Workers Convention. Human Rights Watch in 2003 accused the Emirates of building prosperity on ‘forced labour’. Indeed, as the Independent recently emphasized, ‘the labour market closely resembles the old indentured labour system brought to Dubai by its former colonial master, the British.’ ‘Like their impoverished forefathers’, the London paper continued, ‘today’s Asian workers are forced to sign themselves into virtual slavery for years when they arrive in the United Arab Emirates. Their rights disappear at the airport where recruitment agents confiscate their passports and visas to control them.’

In addition to being super-exploited, Dubai’s helots—like the proletariat in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis—are also expected to be generally invisible. The local press (the uae ranks a dismal 137th on the global Press Freedom Index) is restrained from reporting on migrant workers, exploitative working conditions, and prostitution. Likewise, ‘Asian labourers are banned from the glitzy shopping malls, new golf courses and smart restaurants.’ Nor are the bleak work camps on the city’s outskirts—where labourers are crowded six, eight, even twelve to a room, often without air-conditioning or functioning toilets—part of the official tourist image of a city of luxury, without poverty or slums. In a recent visit, even the uae Minister of Labour was reported to be shocked by the squalid, almost unbearable conditions in a remote work camp maintained by a large construction contractor. Yet when the labourers attempted to form a union to win back pay and improve living conditions, they were promptly arrested. Dubai’s police may turn a blind eye to illicit diamond and gold imports, prostitution rings, and shady characters who buy 25 villas at a time in cash, but they are diligent in deporting Pakistani workers who complain about being cheated out of their wages by unscrupulous contractors, or jailing Filipina maids for ‘adultery’ when they report being raped by their employers. To avoid the simmering volcano of Shiite unrest that so worries Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Dubai and its uae neighbours have favoured a non-Arab workforce drawn from western India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines. But as Asian workers have become an increasingly restive majority, the uae has reversed course and adopted a ‘cultural diversity policy’—‘we have been asked not to recruit any more Asians’, explained one contractor—to reinforce control over the workforce by diluting the existing national concentrations with more Arab workers.

Discrimination against Asians, however, has failed to recruit enough Arabs willing to work at the lowly wages ($100 to $150 per month) paid to construction labourers to meet the insatiable demands of the exploding skyline and half-built mega-projects. Indeed the building boom, with its appalling safety record and negligence of workers’ most basic needs, has incubated Dubai’s first labour rebellion. In 2004 alone, Human Rights Watch estimated that as many as 880 construction workers were killed on the job, with most of the fatal accidents unreported by employers or covered up by the government. At the same time, the giant construction companies and their subcontractors have failed to guarantee minimum facilities for sanitation or adequate supplies of potable water at remote desert labour camps. Workers also have been exasperated by longer commutes to worksites, the petty tyranny (often with a racial or religious bias) of their supervisors, the spies and company guards in their camps, the debt-bondage of their labour contracts, and the government’s failure to prosecute fly-by-night contractors who leave Dubai or declare bankruptcy without paying back wages. As one embittered labourer from Kerala told the New York Times, ‘I wish the rich people would realize who is building these towers. I wish they could come and see how sad this life is.’

As Davis comments, 'the deep thinkers at the American Enterprise and Cato Institutes must salivate when they contemplate the system of classes and entitlements in Dubai.' Dubai is the 'free market' at its purest. It is distilled capitalism.

A Gratuitous Attack on the Decents

2006-10-27T13:21:00.000Z

Daniel Davies gives the hapless, disintegrating pro-war Left a swift kick in the nadgers. It's not big and it's not clever - but it is quite amusing.

This was always about saying "me too" to neo-conservative adventures, in the wholly quixotic belief that it would be possible to subvert them for progressive ends at a later date. It's the central organising delusion of the Henry "Scoop" Jackson Society at Cambridge University; the belief that the wise old owls of the British liberal establishment are capable of leading their energetic Yank counterparts through sheer force of intelligence. If Blair's relationship to Bush is that of a sparrow on top of an elephant pretending to be giving directions, then the pro-war British Left is a flea on top of the sparrow.

Additional

More along the same kind of lines from Crooked Timber.

Eagleton on Richard Dawkins and Jesus

2006-10-23T18:04:00.000Z

I think I've said before that Terry Eagleton is, by far, my favourite cultural theorist. I've yet to read an Eagleton piece which isn't immensely entertaining and with which I significantly disagree. His recent piece, in the London Review of Books, is an absolute stonker. I command you to read it! The purpose of the article is rip into the 'fundamentalist atheist', Richard Dawkins - and he leaves blood on the walls.

I can't help reproducing this part of the article - in which Eagleton provides us with a rather more sophisticated description of the activities and values of Christ, than the caricature imagined by Dawkins.

Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.

The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough.

The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people. It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’, was rather more judicious and dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing, mispunching Dawkins.

Funny, Eagleton makes him sound a lot like a proto-socialist radical. The point, here, I suppose is that Christ is not necessarily best interpreted in the way that crude anti-religious zealots tend to. Neither, it should be added is he best understood as the bloodless, de-radicalised, passive, resigned and, above all, politically safe figure that most Christians would be comfortable with - especially those Christina Odones amongst the faithful.

Jehovah's Witnesses

2006-10-21T13:37:00.000Z

It was just as I had finished wrestling with the front door today, trying to get the damn thing to lock, when I saw them coming down the front drive. They were, unmistakably, evangelists of some kind or another - a pair of smartly dressed disciples, each with a black leather carry case tucked sensibly under the arm. I was trapped. I braced myself for the inevitable spiel - the salesman's doorstopping technique, where the seller keeps talking, playing on the victim's ingrained politeness and fear of appearing to be rude by telling the talker that s/he should just go away. Actually they were quite nice. They weren't coming for me you see, but for my housemate who had been stupid or hungover enough to engage them in interested conversation a few days before. They handed me a few magazines. Jehovah's Witnesses. You've seen one of these magazines and you've seen them all - a photograph of a sunrise/sunset on the front cover, pictures inside of happy nuclear families playing with tamed, vegetarian lions in some millenarian, heavenly future, an article on 'relativism'. I said thankyou very much and I would certainly give them to my friend when I saw him.

Of course, they were interested in me, too - inasfar as one can really be interested in just one more miserable heathen wretch amongst a whole city - country - world of the fallen, amongst whom one must fish for souls from time to time in order to appease one's terrible, inscrutable master. I told them I was an atheist (I lie actually - I'm agnostic). I wasn't sure if it was a good idea or not, because, surely, they had their 'I'm an atheist' retort off by heart and lined up ready to go. Luckily, they didn't launch into anything and I managed to get away with a quick introduction to some of the topics in the magazines I was holding. Foolishly, I gave them my first name. Perhaps they'll come knocking for me next.

Still, I must say that there was something about these two that I quite liked. The talker was a woman in her forties - quite self-depreciating (a little joke about not understanding the science in the magazines - science??) and softly spoken. The young man with her was clearly a traineee, learning the holy ropes - he didn't say much, but he seemed fairly pleasant. There was none of the explicit fanaticism I often seem to encounter amongst these types - that penetrating gaze, that clear, excited drive to bludgeon one's opponent/potential convert into polite agreement.

Quite clearly, creationist religion is nonsense. I'm sure that the 'science' in the magazines is very firmly of the 'pseudo' variety. Evangelist Christianity is an escape, a cop out, a crutch - for people who want to know (or, more specifically, who want to be told) the Truth, who want a ready-made, all encompassing, doctrine of absolute certainties with which to comfort themselves, who want to avoid having to think very hard, who must have a world in which everything happens for a reason and in which everything is imbued with some some immanent meaning - a bit like orthodox Trotskyists (ffnerk). However, I can't help feeling some admiration for those people who actually go out and knock on doors, or stop people in the street. OK, you might respond that they're only doing it for their own salvation - that they're selfish bastards really. I'm not sure that's completely true, actually - it's certainly not all there is to it. I have a feeling that such arguments tend to rest implicitly on a crude 'rational choice' kind of schema in which people only act out of self-interest. People on the Left surely have reason to avoid such crudities. Yes, they are annoying and silly - but (and this is why I have some sneaking admiration for them) it's not easy to do what they do - it takes some bravery to go out and attempt to engage complete strangers in religious conversation. I have, on occasion, handed out various kinds of political leaflets in the city centre. I always find it excruciatingly embarrassing. I felt like I was laying myself bare, in a way. It's difficult to deal with the inevitable 'fuck offs' and incomprehending stares - although these are actually quite unusual. I imagine it's quite a lot harder for evangelists - so hats off to them.

Bad Timing

2006-10-20T13:30:00.000Z

I like Clare Short. Her timing, though, is dreadful. She didn't resign from the front bench before the Iraq war, along with Robin Cook, when she could have. I'm not so sure of this myself, but it's often commented that her resignation could have prevented the war. Perhaps. She managed to delay her resignation, however, until it would have minimal political impact.

It appears that, today, Short has resigned the Labour whip. The Guardian reports:

In a letter to the party's chief whip obtained by Guardian Unlimited, the outspoken ex-cabinet minister said that she wished to become an "independent Labour MP" and remained "a convinced social democrat".

Why now? Why not join the McDonnell campaign for goodness sake? McDonnell needs all the Labour socialists and social democrats - a radical thing to be in the Labour PLP these days - he can get. He's not going to win - we all know that, but he can push the case for social democracy/socialism - make it just visible again on the mainstream political agenda. Imagine the boost McDonnell would have got amongst the LP membership from a Short endorsement. She would have made much more of a political splash this way than by wandering off to become an independent. If and when the McDonnell campaign is defeated - that would be the time to go. The timing is all wrong. She just can't seem to do anything right.

Multiculturalism

2006-10-15T20:37:00.000Z

I have been known to complain an awful lot, from time to time, about the extremely hard life I have to lead. I was watching a documentary about Brazilian street kids the other week and, I tell you, I was muttering to myself 'oh yeah, you think you've got it hard, begging for food and dodging police bullets, but you just try writing a doctoral thesis - oho yes, then you'll know hardship my little friends'. Every once and a while, though, I realise how just privileged this lifestyle (yuck) can be. I was at a little gathering (yuck) last night at which 15 people were present and amongst those 15 there were people from 11 different nationalities - British, Italian, French, Chinese, Greek, Polish, Mexican, Nigerian, Korean, Pakistani and a (rather tipsy) Turkish Cypriot. You just wouldn't get that anywhere else but at a university. Or at airport customs.

I learned a couple of interesting things from the French guy by the way, which I insist on sharing with you. I had always assumed that the French nickname for the English - 'le ros bif' - was an English fabrication. I thought that it was just rather too polite and affectionate for a real derogatory term. I thought that it was probably just what the English told each other about what the French called them - the real term being too horrid to admit. It turns out, however, that it is true - that's really what the French call the English when they are being rude. Secondly - and this is the biggie - according to my French chum the stereotypical view of the English character amongst the French is not, as we imagine, one of a cold, aloof, sexually repressed lot, avoiding each others' eyes and saying 'sorry' a lot. Apparently, the French regard the English as much more sexually liberated than the French themselves. I was pretty surprised by this. Maybe he was just being nice or something. It's true about the French thinking we have crap food, though.

Right, I'm off for a burger and chips and a quick sashay down the highstreet in my leather hotpants.

End Game

2006-10-13T12:16:00.000Z

A few days ago the media was full of reports that around 600,000 Iraqis have died as a consequence of the war. As I'm sure you'll have seen, that's about 2.5% of the population. Most of the dead are (were) young men - a generation of Iraqi males, then, has been pulverised, shot up, incinerated and ripped apart.

Today, the headlines consists of reports that the head of the British Army thinks that British forces should be withdrawn from Iraq, and news that a coroner has concluded that an ITN reporter was murdered by US forces. Terry Lloyd, his interpreter and his cameraman were executed, it seems, for the crime of refusing to take their places as tame journalists, 'embedded' within the Coalition propaganda machine.

It is impossible to ignore the sense that the flood barriers have been breached. It's the end of the road. There's no where left to go, now, for the makers of this appalling conflict - or, indeed, its supporters.