Tragic Life Stories

Wikipedia vandals for peace!

2009-04-11T19:58:00.001+01:00

When Communist Students was founded back in 2006, it was possible to hear - if you really paid attention - a hint of disquiet from the dozy Stalinists of the Communist Party of Britain. Did we not realise that they had founded their own organisation of the same name a year previously?

Well, the sad fact is - we didn’t. And neither did anyone else, because the CPB did precisely nothing with the CS name in that intervening year, and in contrast to their reasonably active Young Communist League, have done nothing more since...until now. It seems that the esteemed proprietors of the left’s dullest daily, the Morning Star, have finally attempted to jolt this stillborn front into life. Some “Communist” students were present and correct at the recent NUS conference in Blackpool, for instance - the place to be seen for all undergraduate labour-bureaucrats.

What else have the good comrades done to re-assert their claim to the name? Prosecuted indefatigably the fight for Marxist politics on the campus, perhaps? Well, no - instead, the comrades have proven their political nous by...wiping our Wikipedia page and replacing it with one of their own. The content of those two links may change drastically, of course, being that there’s an edit war on…but thanks to the exhaustive approach of Wikipedia to archiving its previous versions of pages, their version - put up by young CPBer George Waterhouse – will always be available for viewing, in all its reformist, pacifist glory.

And what a site it is – whereas ours has a photo of a bunch of CSers waving placards on a demo and looking excitable, theirs has a couple of people behind a desk at NUS conference, which – as we have noted – amounts to their entire political activity over the last four years (aside from a half-hearted swing at freshers fairs unknown in 2007). Well, you know what they say about pictures and thousands of words – indeed, I fully intend to hand into Exeter English department eight failblog pictures by way of a dissertation.

I digress – it appears our esteemed comrades not only sat behind desks, but also gave out free copies of the Yawning Star. Well, the jokes write themselves, don’t they? It’s good to know that they also struggle for “peace” – and fair play to them, they sure do look pretty peaceful behind that desk.

Well, good luck to the comrades in their newfound love of ‘student work’ – after all, approaching intelligent and eager youth with a programme of quite as exquisite bureaucratic doziness and unmitigated philistinism as the CPB’s British Road to Socialism, they’ll need it.

Back to the future of Marxist theory?

2009-03-15T02:00:00.001Z

“Understood in its full complexities, the self-criticism undergone by structuralism and semiology has had far-reaching results. The book explains how the encounter of two disciplines – psychoanalysis and Marxism – on the ground of their common problem – language – has produced a new understanding of society and its subjects…[which] produces a critical re-examination of the traditional Marxist theory of ideology, together with the concepts of sign and identity of the subject. A genuinely materialist understanding of the subject is thus developed: it is both a revolutionary theory and a theory of revolution.”

That’s from the dust-jacket of Language and Materialism, an interesting enough book, which is probably better thought of as an artefact. I may do a full review when I finish it (there’s not a great deal of it to finish, only about 150 pages), but for now it’s just worth dusting it off, like a fragment of Roman pottery on Time Team, and wonder exactly what those involved would make of it now.

It’s effectively a chemically-pure sample of Screen, a journal which now exists more or less in the form you would expect of a scholarly periodical about films. In the 1970s, however, it formed – in the Mandelite jargon of the day – a “red base” in academia that was utterly dominated by Althusserian Marxism. It’s influence even began to dominate hoary old institutions like the British Film Institute – on Mark Kermode’s film review slot on Radio 5 a few months ago, Richard Attenborough somewhat summed up the mood; he had been at a BFI symposium during its “Marxist theory phase”, and found himself bemused by a theoretical barrage from the top table. “What’s he on about?” he asked the person next to him. “Oh, it’s perfectly simple, Dickie,” came the reply. “All you need is an understanding of dialectical materialism!”

Screen loved Althusser for his theory of ideology, but also his overtures to psychoanalysis in the person of Jacques Lacan. Lacan, despite his vocal privileging of clinical analysis, could not stop himself from veering into almost every other intellectual vocation going, and came up with a bunch of useful notions about semiology (getting lumped in with structuralism for his troubles). Screen could have its cake, eat it and devour it too – ideological coding, sign systems and symptoms should be enough to keep a film critic going for years.

But there was also the sense of historical mission – finally, we were going to have a properly materialist theory of ideological utterances and cultural production, rather than the vulgar-empiricist jabs at the thing that certain classical Marxists had knocked together in their 10 minutes off actually making revolutions (Plekhanov has a particularly bad rep), as well as more interesting but again partial studies that took up more of the theoretical issues (Trotsky’s fascinating Literature and Revolution). And there’s the last sentence from my little quote: “it is both a revolutionary theory and a theory of revolution.” Marxism railroaded these comrades-least-likely-to into vigorous ideological militancy (and there was nothing more Althusserian than the sharply-drawn demarcation – the ‘continuing break’ between idealism and materialism is particularly vexatious to professional Hegelians, who rather like their idealism).

This book is full of that stuff. So what happened? At some point, Coward and Ellis refer to a key thinker in their analysis as moving towards just that sentence – the revolutionary theory that’s a theory of revolution. Good news – except that it’s Julia Kristeva, who actually moved from an initial ultra-left Maoist position rapidly out of Marxism altogether (without having read much of her work, I couldn’t be sure, but I think she was being ‘disillusioned’ by a visit to China just as this book came out in 1977). Her Tel Quel comrade Roland Barthes is also cited extensively – he was also going in a postmodernist direction, though he was mown down by a laundry van before he could renounce all ties with the Marxist tradition (or otherwise).

As for our authors, the story is a little sadder. Ellis, for his part, is still a jobbing academic – his research interests are now completely focused on television, and he has apparently spent some time as a producer. The revolutionary fire in his belly appears to be fairly well doused. Rosalind Coward’s story is somehow sadder still – after writing a significant bunch of feminist work, she seems to have ended up as some kind of journalist and written an authorised biography of Lady Di – so good it comes with a preface by Nelson Mandela. I say ‘good’, but if this execrably clunky puddle of bilge-water of an article on the subject is any indicator, then it’s of exactly the quality you’d expect of an authorised hagi…sorry, biography of – as Paul Merton used to say an awful lot – that overblown tart.

The total ideological collapse of academia in the 1980s is, I’m sure, the subject of a number of detailed studies – some extant, some yet to be written. Historians of ideas should have a gander at the curious case of this pair – from an avant-Marxist theory of the subject to Daily Mail dimwittery in a few short decades.

WTBLS, appendix 2: Talk to Frank

2008-09-19T11:05:00.012+01:00

This is an attempt to think through one of the strangest political entities presently in existence, in Britain or anywhere else - I refer to the tightly-knit group of operatives that once were the Revolutionary Communist Party, and now publish a website called Spiked! and run a think-tank called the Institute of Ideas. A little history is probably worthwhile - the RCP split, along with the mad-Stalinists-to-be around David Yaffe, from the International Socialists (today's lovely Swipes) in 1975 on issues that remain obscure to all concerned. They abandoned Yaffe when he began his spiral into open apologism for sundry bourgeois nationalists in the Third World, taking as their leader the piscine sociologist Frank Furedi (sometime cadre name Richards - he really does look exactly like a fish!).

Their political character was basically ultra-leftist - they believed that the Left had become hopelessly compromised by its support for reformist organisations, no matter how guarded, and exhibited a lofty disdain for the existing left. The latter, for its part, never quite knew how to take them - while the spikiness and rigour of some of their theory was respected, their sectarian attitude to struggles deemed 'reformist' (in particular the Miners Strike of 1984-5), along with occasional tactical-strategic turns that can only be called loopy (Furedi's contention that the RCP could overtake Labour in the 1987 elections) kept them in splendid isolation...which of course reinforced their snottiness about other militants.

After the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the RCP produced a prognosis for the labour movement that was far more pessimistic than most. It is also the prognosis from that period that most matches up to what has really happened since. Their response was a 'turn to the suburbs', an orientation towards academia and the media, which fully flowered around 1997-8, their magazine Living Marxism having contracted to the enigmatic LM, and the party as such being finally wound up. There have been shifts in the nature of their concrete activity since, but the politics has retained a stark consistency since the days of LM - a libertarianism that scorns all attempts to knock down "expectations", and demands the return of a humanity that strives to extend its powers.

Responses to the phenomenon fall in to broadly two categories. The first is a sort of hysterical red-baiting alarmism, in which their anti-green and quasi-libertarian polemics are 'discovered' to be part of some astonishing plot to sneak communism up on the world, and is common among bourgeois greens in particular. The second is the common Marxist/left view, which is that they have committed some final apostasy or another, and are basically a new version of some historical precedent or another - the Eurocommunists, the Legal Marxists...I believe that the first, hysterical reaction is actually closer to the truth, which we'll get to later.

The reason the latter folks (includoing this very blog - see Episode V) are wrong is simple. Eurocommunism was an incredible unstable formation (particularly in Britain). After the collapse of the official Communist parties, it almost immediately disappeared, and its militants became scattered along the right-wing of social democracy. The Legal Marxists, likewise, abandoned their own premises to become orthodox liberals, and ultimately Peter Struve and the like aligned with the Whites in the Russian Civil War. The reason these trends were so spectacularly harmful was that they moved right, and kept moving.

The RCP/LM/Spiked formation, however, has not done this. Its positions, if anything, have edged slightly to the left in the last decade; and their move to the 'right' was not one recognizable from many historical precedents (the two we have noted headed straight into the political mainstream, as did the 'CIA socialist' Max Shachtman). Formally, their move is more similar to that of Mussolini - but the difference in political content here renders comparisons predictively useless.

So, what is their political project? The fundamental axiom of the Spiked critique is that after the defeats of the labour movement and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, socialism has been buried alive by the bourgeoisie; and with it has gone agency as such. Humanity no longer even has the basic consciousness that allows it to authentically rebel against the attacks of the rulers. What has emerged is a 'culture of low expectations', where individuals are expected to meekly limit their consumption, their creative activity and also their grandest political aims, and instead keep on keeping on.

What, then, to do? Spiked believes that it is necessary to 'rebuild agency', to recreate humanity as aspirational to things currently beyond its reach. It is necessary to conduct ideological struggle against all who attempt to hold back humanity's spirit of adventure, so to speak. These people, needless to say, are not necessarily the ruling class - the capitalists, according to spiked, have entirely lost faith and confidence in their system, and are tied down by self-denial and angst. Their enemies include those who wish to ban smoking, the cynics who whip up 'paedo panics' and the like (but also the liberals who condemn 'mob' actions), and environmentalists.

Environmentalism is a good thing to prod Spiked with, since they have gathered such a degree of infamy over it (which, they no doubt imagine, proves them right about everything). The green movement is the most toxic element of this assemblage of all. Masquerading in the most apocalyptic rhetoric, the message is fundamentally no different from that of elites to their subjects down the ages: the capitalists who preached 'abstinence' to the workers in the 19th Century, the nuns who taught Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill at his Catholic school...That message is: your habits are dangerous and disgusting - stop that now! O'Neill and cohorts can now just about be forced to admit that climate change is at least partially anthropogenic (the same has not always been true). However, for them, the green movement is a far greater threat to humanity's future than their opponents, because the greens are part of the 'culture of low expectations' and the others are not.

At first glance, this seems simply mad - OK, so a motley bunch of hippies and lobbyists are more dangerous than the Apocalypse? But for Spiked, it makes perfect sense - if the human race were able to regain some of its spunk, it would be far better placed to avert the apocalypse through a renewal of capital-p Progress, and the misanthropic messages coming from Greens are antithetical to this, point in exactly the opposite direction (downsize, 'reduce your carbon footprint', etc).

To solve our riddle, this is not a position given to liquidation, precisely because its immediate enemy has become broadly hegemonic among the ruling class and particularly its various deputies and the like. They have all been forced to accept that climate change is occurring, and the only palatable 'solution' for them is of the 'if we all do our bit' type. The Legal Marxists' and Eurocommunists' immediate enemies were their rivals on the left, and their allies were drawn almost exclusively from the mainstream bourgeois establishment (even if, in the case of the Legal Marxists, the bourgeois establishment was subordinate in society itself). They cannot tack to the right until the bourgeoisie ditches all manifestations of their 'culture of low expectations' - they can only enact, should they desire, another lurching shift.

I have tried to outline their positions sympathetically, precisely because (along with a general trend on the Left - and Right, but they would, wouldn't they? - for intellectually lazy polemics) the responses to them have generally been impressionistic vulgarizations that fail to grasp both their problematic as a whole and, necessarily, the fundamental flaws in it. For Marxists, it seems, the almost-disappearance of any direct reference to class struggle, revolution and the like (it is all veiled in euphemistic terms that appear as a kind of kitsch pastiche of the censor-dodging in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks) is quite enough. It is, as far as establishing whether or not Spiked operates Marxist politics - but its abandonment of the public use of these kind of terms puts it no further from Marxism than the SWP.

It doesn't help that overt references to Marxism haven't simply disappeared, either. Leading RCPer Mick Hume's thumbnail profile for his Times column calls him "Britain's only self-confessed libertarian Marxist newspaper columnist" (very "Legal Marxist", it has to be said). Recent articles by spiked! editor Brendan O'Neill include "this Marxist isn't laughing" and "Starbucks and the socialism of fools", which both dig out Karl & Freddy to bash the liberal left with.

The real difficulty with approaching political questions in this way is that their attacks are confined exclusively to the domain of ideology. Beneath political demands for increased taxes on air travel, for example, they find contempt for the unwashed masses; behind multiculturalist PC outrage they find a "politics of victimhood" (which is really an ideology of victimhood - it enacts/interpellates the subject as a perpetual victim).

It is here that one finds that Furedi's "libertarian humanism" - the nutshell phrase he now self-describes as - is, like so many humanisms of Marxist extraction, also an historicism (a view that sees particular historical moments as reflecting an essence more or less evenly throughout). Concretely for spiked, the fundamental principle of the age is the battle between misanthropy and humanism, cowed submission and rebelliousness, fear and ambition - which are, really (the logic goes), three ways of saying the same thing. To be human is to build, to reach out, to rebel; a misanthrope fears his own nature and welcomes repression.

But ideology just doesn't work like that. Its constituent elements - utterances, actions, discourses - take place necessarily in a concrete social formation, which is necessarily internally contradictory as long as classes exist.When the British (and Australian) state endorsed the ITF/ITUC demonstrations in Iran, was it defending the principle of free trade unions or its meddling in the Middle East? Well, both. The latter was almost certainly the dominant influence, of course - but the official stance needed to ride on the back of the union movement. No doubt a few more wavering individuals were confirmed on the imperialists' side through this gambit - but it was not "free money", but a devil's bargain with a working class ideology.

Back to spiked: an article by Andrew Orlowski finds intolerably 'misanthropic' internet piracy, thinking it a snub to the very act of creation. But it is not hard to take the exact opposite view, using perfectly orthodox spiked! logic: the pirates are great humanists, wishing only to indulge in the fruits of human culture; the RIAA, MPAA and so on are "misanthropic" for regulating access to these products, to say nothing of the utterly fearful reaction they displayed to peer-to-peer software. Which is right? Well...both! My description of the record industry's actions is perfectly accurate...but they were right to be afraid, because the infinite reproducibility enabled by p2p is an advance in the productive forces that reduces the value of their product to...zero. Every penny the music industry makes from recordings is today extorted, by ideological appeals and by state action. At the same time, if the companies go, so does the possibility of being a career musician. There simply isn't enough money in touring. The pirate's contempt for artists' interests is simultaneously a contempt for the record industry's philistinism (itself a contempt for the artists). This is not a problem bourgeois society can solve.

In assuming that ideological forms and content are coherent, spiked! utterly blunts its attack. It attacks forces repeatedly that on some level support those very attacks; instead of drawing out the endlessly dividing and recombining currents of subjectivity and consciousness, the tendencies and countertendencies at work, it obscures them under the crushing girth of its great battle for humanity's self-respect. As a result, it is locked in a loop - apart from curious far-leftists, its readership consists of a kind of self-hating section of the very liberal "chattering classes" that sit at the bottom of its esteem. Furedi, Hume and Claire Fox, perhaps, owe salaries to the RCP heritage, but penetration of its ideas into the populace at large is minimal. The greens are winning. Their infamous consistency is ultimately inconsistent - how could it be otherwise? - and so it cannot function as a real pole of attraction, even within the limits of bourgeois civil society.

There is a related philosophical problem. The late-RCP/spiked! mission is to rebuild the basic level of consciousness that Marxism requires in order to gain a foothold. But it is not a new idea to say that consciousness is inseparable from action - it appears in the philosophies of Althusser (interpellation), Gramsci (praxis), Marx (primacy of being over thought)...way back to Aristotle (a philosopher Marx held in high regard), who declared that you learn music by playing music, and you learn virtue by acting virtuously. 90% of spiked! articles are not stricto sensu interventions in the political struggles on which they comment, but excoriations of the liberal leftist ideology behind them. If the pale Green plan to save the world through the blood sacrifice of Ryanair customers is wrong, then spiked! need to tell the world what does need to be done, now that it can admit something needs to be done at all, and what forces will be able to achieve that. If George Clooney isn't going to solve the Darfur crisis, then what could?

These are questions that would not have troubled an organisation which still adhered to (any version of) Marxist politics. That is because Marxism has the one thing that the RCP left behind - the working class, the class to end all classes. By abandoning an explicit class position, the RCP abandoned any hope of picking its way through a tumultuous period for world capitalism, even if the tumult did not until recently reach the imperialist heartlands. It is not simply a matter of apostasy - this turn in their theory, though an understandable consequence of a clear-headed and correct pessimism, has been a disaster by its own standards, and has left spiked! as little more than a minor adjunct of the very culture it seeks to destroy.

Why the British Left sucks: appendix

2008-05-23T21:22:00.005+01:00

Alliance for Workers Liberty

I dismissed this lot in a paragraph way back when...but I now realise that this was grossly unfair. This is because I have dedicated whole articles to slagging off the snoozeworthy CPB, the well-meaning but poisonously mental CPGB-ML, and all the rest...but not one to the AWL, who are the worst group on the British Left, full stop. If there's a single reason why the global left would be better off if Britain just sank, drowning us all, it's the AWL.

Why? What can have gone wrong?

A long time ago, there was an Irishman - born in County Clare - who got tired of the old country and moved to Manchester. There, he joined the Young Communist League, before rapidly defecting to the more revolutionary but utterly mental Socialist Labour Leage, then the largest Trotskyist group in Britain. The SLL - and its successor, the WRP, was run by the petty tyrant Gerry Healy, whose political method consisted chiefly in beating up factional opponents, branding them state agents and muttering about having them shot come the revolution. Amazingly, our forthright hero lasted four years before being expelled in 1964, joined Ted Grant's increasingly social-democratic group, before leaving them in 1966. For the next two years, he was the patriarch of his own (very) little gang, which he lead into Tony Cliff's International Socialists. By now, for those who haven't been keeping track, he had been in five radically different groupings in less than a decade.

Our hero's time in the IS, however, was short; he immediately fell out over the IS's soft line towards British troops in Ireland, and came to believe that workers control existed in some catholic areas of Ulster. This was too much for Cliff, dedicatedly tailing factory-floor conciousness at the time, and it wasn't long before his faction was expelled.

Since then, our hero - whose name is of course Sean Matgamna - has led his own group, and become one of the main patriarchs of the British left. At the time of the split with IS, it's worth noting, Matgamna:

-Believed that the USSR was a degenerated workers state;
-Called for victory to the PLO in Palestine;
-Spunked himself over the Provos in Ireland;
-Excoriated all who did not do the same, and most who did for doing it the wrong way.

Now, after a few fusions and a few more splits, the AWL has abandoned all of that, barring the general method of the last point. Matgamna has swallowed the Shachtmanite doctrine of 'bureaucratic collectivism', and not only supports a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine (in which he is not alone), but openly identifies as a Zionist and denies the right of return; he has spent a truckload of ink trying to prove that when he called for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Ireland in the 70s, he didn't really mean it; and all who do not do the same are now 'kitsch', 'mad' or 'left anti-semites'.

The Matgamnist method is a most remarkable thing. First, you declare yourself in favour of fluffy bunnies; then you launch vicious attacks on all those who think that a call for the defense of fluffy bunnies betrays an off-colour set of political priorities; then you conclude that, after all, these people are kitsch, left-fluffy-bunny-ophobes, who deserve nothing but contempt from reasonable people. After all, who could be against fluffy bunnies?

Then, use your new evidence of the degeneracy of every other group on the left to slip in a genuinely and incontrovertibly scabby position. Say, refuse to call for immediate and unconditional withdrawal of troops from Iraq - hell, refuse to call for mediated and conditional withdrawal of troops from Iraq. When the work-experience boy at Socialist Worker deconstructs your bullshit after five minutes dope-addled thought, reaffirm the total degeneracy of the kitsch left. Guaranteed to rally any recruits stupid enough to have fallen for it in the first place.

It's barely worth going into the reasoning; point one is that if troops were to disappear tomorrow, it would be a terrible free-for-all (the problem being that the fact that we raise the demand does not mean it is going to happen - a point made by one Sean Matgamna against the IS leadership on Ireland); point two is that calling for troops out now is to share a political position with reactionary islamists (but it's alright, apparently, to share a position with George W Bush); point three is a detailed argument about the current state of imperialism, only slighty undermined by the fact that it's completely wrong (see Mike Macnair).

But it's the logical knots they tie themselves into that really start to grate. Chiefly, they claim that under the occupation there is some "space" for the workers movement to develop, which would disappear were the troops to leave. But they nevertheless insist that imperialism plays no progressive role at all, and act extremely hurt when people put that word in their mouths. Which begs the question: what do you have against providing space for the workers movement that this doesn't count as progressive, exactly? Is not acting as a bulwark against the barbarian hordes of clerical fascism, which eats trade unionists for breakfast and feminists for brunch, a progressive act? Well, it is, actually. Just admit it. No wonder that Nick Cohen thinks you're a bunch of tossers. So, whether or not he thinks he does, Matgamna assigns a progressive role to imperialism. To claim otherwise is humpty-dumptyism.

The problem is that the US occupation doesn't do these things, cannot do these things and could be unproblematically predicted from day one not to do these things (read an average Solidarity article on the issue, and it seems to have come as a surprise to the comrades!). It has built up these reactionary forces from the start, currently acts in alliance with the most powerful militias, and (lest we forget) has not been averse to some independent workers-movement-smashing operations of its own. The 'space' offered to the Iraqi workers movement by the US troops compares unfavourably to the 'space' offered to prisoners in Gitmo.

To point all this out to the comrades is like huffing and puffing at a 5 year old's house of cards. The reactions range from hysterical to bloodthirsty. And here's the thing. The AWL isn't terrible on factional rights and so on - various shades of opposition to this line have appeared in the paper, most notably the scarily-brainy David Broder. But factional rights is simply not enough. The entire political method of Matgamna is the hysterical denunciation, to bury political differences under moralistic invective. In this, he is the progeny not of his beloved Hal Draper, but of another angry Irishman, who once had a little gang called the Socialist Labour League. And if you removed from the Healy group the random expulsions and beatings, the political culture left over would be that of the AWL - a poisonous atmosphere, barely conducive to anything more than submission to the whims of the increasingly unbalanced patriarch, and utterly inappropriate to anything so vulgar as talking to other sections of the left.

What could go wrong?

2008-05-21T23:16:00.005+01:00

I will leave to the Weekly Worker the general story of the ramshackle Reclaim the Campus! conference organised by Alliance for Workers Liberty student front Education Not for Sale. Suffice to say, the organisation was qualitatively transformed from the AWL plus a handful of punky anarchist types plus a couple of slick greens into...the AWL plus a handful of punky anarchist types plus a couple of slick greens plus Revo. (Don't think any putative future Trotsky's going to be penning three volumes on ENS, somehow.)

The whole thing is set up to be thoroughly uncontroversial (though AWL majority types, fond as they are of daisy-cutters and 'surgical strikes', will no doubt be moderately irked to see written into the "new", "improved" - ok, it is an improvement - ENS's founding statement a clear call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Somewhere on capitol hill, a Texan is shitting himself, I'm sure), and indeed the first session of the day was a painfully agreeable "workshop" on "the marketisation of education".

I mean, seriously.

Get a bunch of student leftists into a room, no doubt not stupid people, with interesting and unique opinions that deserve to be tested against one another, and the first session may as well be called "why neoliberalism is, like, shit". What could go wrong? Who could disagree with that?

Well, busters, first there's the title. Marketisation of education? Is that even a word? I suppose it is, presumably meaning the introduction of markets into an economic activity where previously there were none, or fewer. But it's not at all clear that this is what's happening to education at all. Loads of things are being privatised, but that's not the same thing. It's perfectly possible for a gang of state bureaucrats to transform themselves into private owners without so much as a whiff of the market appearing anywhere in the process. Most of Blair's ghastly initiatives to hand the school keys over to dodgy evangelists and used car salesmen, after a brief and pseudo-competitive tender process, result in epically-long-lasting contracts and a n effective monopoly over insert-suburb's secondary education.

This is not to say there are no markets. School dinners are generally supplied by the lowest bidder, for instance. And top-up fees was an abortive attempt to introduce a limited kind of market among higher education institutions (which is likely to become much less abortive next year). But the transformation that is taking place - the agenda's advertised title, referring to neoliberalism, was closer to the mark - is a more general thing, organically and intimately tied by a thousand threads to the objective interests of capital in the 21st century. In places, it involves the sprouting of markets - but in a great many more, it is embodied in the failure of markets, long-term franchises, and massive extension of state intervention.

The problem with NUS, contra Sofie Buckland (whose opening, the first of three, was mostly concerned with the esteemed student union), is not that it's run by a bunch of bastards. It's that it's structurally doomed to be run by a succession of bunches of bastards, and sits in a special place in the late-capitalist social formation reserved for organisations to be run by bunches of bastards. Talking about "marketisation" actually misses the fundamental feature of neoliberalism - the contradiction between the rhetoric of market and choice and the objective necessity of intimate state funding, management and regulation of all "marketised" enterprises. It's a declassed, blind and ideological approach. (But hey, it keeps that nice Aled fellow on board, so who cares?)

There's more nitpicking to be done yet, don't worry. What about second platform speaker Tom Unterrainer, "NUT activist" (is anyone just an XYZ activist? No, of course not, and one can read countless articles by Comrade Tom on...the Workers Liberty website!)? He described, accurately enough, an increasing tendency towards directly instrumental education - A-levels in Tesco studies and so on. He appeared to be pining for the loss of "education for its own sake", the gloriously pointless humanities, the simple beauty of a well-differentiated trigonometric equation...Of course, if you put it to Tom directly, I'm quite sure he would agree that it's never quite been like that. Still, this is an assault, and since Tom is not a liberal, we assume it is an assault on a hard fought gain of the working class.

But he's wrong. It's not. The hard-fought gain of the working class is that there are schools for them at all, and that there are secondary schools, and opportunities for A-levels, and - who knows? - university...The curriculum, even (if not especially) in its less functionalist forms, is cut to measure for the ruling class. The kids learning to be Tesco cashiers today may once have been (for example) reading Shakespeare. I would rather read Shakespeare than learn what button will put through a portobello mushroom, but one does not have to be overly cynical to deduce the highly significant ideological content of the old fashioned approach.

It ultimately goes back to Matthew Arnold who, realising that the bourgeoisie was a pack of dreadful philistines and the proletariat actually developing a culture far in advance of its immediate superiors, immediately undertook to recommend the inculturation of both classes into an awareness of their proper place in the National community. Arnold was mostly concerned with the Great Tradition of English Literature, but it was not a stretch for the humanities to give their own tory-englander spins on the theme. Geography was about maps (of the Empire)...history was about chaps (of the Royal variety).

Indeed, one of the interesting side effects of the transformation/instrumentalisation of the curriculum is the death of "maps" and "chaps". Policy-makers are more interested in testing "useful" skills - it is no longer in their interests to bore children to tears with the tale of which Henry did what, but rather to do source analysis on any source worth analysing. The total regimentation of the educational process, its orientation towards successive waves of exams, has as its corollary the reconstruction of content into abstract pseudo-commodities, one as good as another. This trend is repeatedly excoriated in the tory press, who yearn for the return of culture, of shakespeare, maps and chaps. They cannot see the wood for trees - or rather, the wood is in their interests, but the trees are foreign breeds, offensive to their tastes.

Lastly, academic Sarah Motta told us about the neoliberalisation of academic departments. Much of this was uncontroversial, the same sort of stuff that Alex Callinicos, in one of his more lucid moments, detailed in his nice little pamphlet Universities in a Neoliberal World. But again, there was a tic of inaccuracy - the slightly po-mo-inclined Motta insisted that the effect was to reinforce traditional class-race-gender heirarchies in the academy. But this does not square up with the positive explosion in this period of gender studies, ethnic and race studies (and the kaleidoscopic variety of specific-minority disciplines), queer theory, postcolonial theory, subalternity, yada yada yada.

It is not that traditional heirarchies - which, let us be clear, is straight WASP males running everything - are being reinforced as such. It is rather that the real social forces clamouring for liberation of this or that group are bein undermined by the promotion of specific, disarming, discourses about them. Identity politics is a positive manoeuvre of bourgeois power to inoculate itself from the dangerous, revolutionary energy these issues carried forty-odd years ago. It pulls minorities towards itself, all the better to throttle them.

The point of this exercise is not that Sarah Motta's incomplete perspective is a pernicious influence on the left, or that Tom Unterrainer should not involve himself in fighting the Tescofication of schools, or that the difference between "marketisation" and "neoliberalisation" as theoretical paradigms for viewing developments in education is a fundamental political dividing line (as if the AWL is short on those). Rather, it's a diatribe against "obviousness" in political discourse. The choice of the cosyest imaginable topic for this "workshop" not only deprived activists of a precious hour of their lives that could have been spent talking shop on what the new ENS was actually to be: it also allowed serious theoretical errors to slip in under cover of "obviousness", and the chummy and anecdotal style of debate that followed the openings merely exacerbated the problem. Comrades, let's fight! It's more fun, and far more educational for all concerned.

Reply to Workers Power

2008-05-21T17:59:00.005+01:00

Comrades,

I am glad that you have decided to set out your differences with the Hopi project in a principled and reasonably clear manner. The document “Hands off the people of Iran: campaign for action or propaganda bloc?” (all quotations, unless otherwise stated, are from this article) compares favourably with the hysterical response of the Stop the War bureaucracy, and the internally-contradictory sect-cohering cynicism of Workers Liberty, to name but two.

Political Centres

There are differences that are not really differences, in my view. Most of the arguments on the relationship between Hopi and Stop the War are rendered effectively null – we could not intervene as a group in StWC if we wanted to (as indeed we do – it was only in response to our application for affiliation that we were excluded, remember). The exclusion of Hopi and Communist Students from Stop the War was nakedly absurd at the time, and is not worth going over again – Workers Power and Revo’s support at the time was appreciated.

It seems that the comrades behind your document are suffering some confusion over what exactly constitutes a “political centre”. This does not designate the organisational structure into which the anti-war movement is placed, but the programme at its heart. Hopi and StWC are not two different potential/actual political centres for the anti-war movement. Of those two, in fact, only Hopi has that potential - the StWC is an entity far broader than its strict programmatic adherents (remember the absurdity that the CPGB is affiliated, while Hopi and Communist Students are excluded for being CPGB fronts!). The StWC leadership, rather, is the current political centre. This was why we were excluded – we were not setting up an alternative to Stop the War, but an alternative to Andrew Murray and the SWP inside Stop the War.

This leads on to an important difference between, certainly, the CPGB and its hopes for Hopi (and the StWC) and Workers Power. Your comrades mention the run-up to the Iraq war, where you raised the slogan “victory to Iraq”. In the CPGB, our slogan was a little less direct, but substantially no more “third-campist” – “rather the defeat of imperialist forces than their victory”.

The reason for the similarity is quite simple – while Saddam Hussein and his cohorts were a direct enemy of the oppressed masses in Iraq, they certainly were not comparable in terms of the scale of their threat to the forces of American and allied imperialism, and no less dedicated to the well-being of those masses (as is blindingly obvious as the skulls pile up five years into the war, but was quite clear then after 10 years of sanctions); one does not need to be a full-blooded “revolutionary defencist” to see that.

The reason for the distinction is a little more obscure – while an unqualified “victory to Iraq” implies[1] support to the Iraqi state, political or military (I will get onto the usefulness or otherwise of that distinction later), the call for the defeat of the imperialists leaves open the question of the agency of that defeat. This is important – only a force with genuine mass popular support and participation can have a chance of defeating the most heavily armed state in the world. If the Republican Guards were to manage to bog down the American tanks in the desert and liquidate all infantry forces and shoot down enough planes, they would have needed that kind of mass support. Saddam’s forces had earned only contempt from the workers and oppressed, and thus collapsed. The comparative success of anti-US militias since then has been a function of the utter hatred of the Americans that runs through Iraqi society – in this situation, literally anyone who stands up to them can command some kind of support from the people at large. Yes, a victory for the Iraqi state would be preferable to the victory of the imperialists – but the Iraqi state was in no position to produce that victory, so enshrining that agent explicitly or otherwise in a slogan is misleading.

Anti-imperialism

The more important difference alluded to above is a general one of approach to anti-war work. “We are socialists,” your authors opine; “the STWC is a mass anti-war organisation that unites many different forces that are not - trade unions, bourgeois pacifist groups, such as CND, religious groups, including Islamic groups, Labour against the War, and so on.” The consequence is not just that linking two slogans, against the war and against the Iranian theocracy, is incorrect, but that your own approved slogan is inappropriate too, “because this would limit the antiwar movement to its explicitly anti-imperialist elements”. Rather, we should march (and do a great deal more than march, as you have correctly argued) on the demand for “immediate and unconditional end to the wars and occupations” (I would prefer withdrawal of Coalition forces, but there you go).

I believe that this is correct as far as it goes, but the reasoning is awry. It is correct because actions are not general but specific – an anti-war action is generally against a war, and if one is marching against a war, the principled demand is for the defeat of the appropriate side (your own state, or an imperialist state). The demand for the defeat of US/UK forces is, for comrades in those countries, a concrete demand for all deployed troops, tanks, ships and planes to come scurrying home forthwith. They will not do so unless they have been defeated, either by political sabotage from anti-war demonstrations or the impossibility on the ground of further serious military operations. “Victory to Iraq/Iran/wherever” is inappropriate simply because it is wrong, and implies confidence in the named state to deliver that victory.

If we are to limit our slogans to preserve the breadth of support to the anti-war campaign, then why should we stop at the “immediate and unconditional” end to deployment? Why stop at that level of principle? It would be easier to keep on board a number of good, sincere activists of the liberal-pacifist type (often people who are pro-direct action), who want a staged withdrawal to avoid “chaos”, or a UN “peacekeeping” force to replace the US for a time. It is obvious, moreover, from the circumstances surrounding the periodic cessation of the “Troops Out Now” demand that it excludes the Military Families Against the War milieu, too.

It is also the case that the forms of action have a political content of their own. To put it more concretely – it is clear that Workers Power’s demand for anti-war strikes was inadmissible for very significant sections of the anti-war movement, not least the labour bureaucracy! Bringing industrial action into the question has the necessary effect of energising the movement into one of direct class-struggle, and that is something alien to a great deal of that constituency that is not “explicitly anti-imperialist”. Should Revo not have left that demand at home, or perhaps attempted to organise strikes itself (or in coalition with other class struggle anti-imperialists)?

The watering down of slogans, in the end, is the practice characteristic of the SWP/Murray axis, and is in no way politically superior to the watering down of actions. By contrast, the task of Marxists in an anti-war campaign is to be the enemy of pacifism and other bourgeois tendencies, and turn it into an anti-imperialist movement. That means raising principled anti-imperialist slogans as much as the need for militant tactics. Although I’m glad you haven’t on a cynical level, Workers Power should be bringing “victory to Iran” to StWC AGMs! You do not need to take my word for it. Were you to consult the fundamental document of Trotskyism, the Transitional Programme, you would find plenty of calls for the Trotskyists to aggressively counterpose their own anti-imperialist programme to those of the reformists, Stalinists and bourgeoisie and, while Trotsky’s demands are far from perfect, there’s no denying that it’s heady stuff – “not one man and not one penny for the bourgeois government”; “substitution for the standing army of a people’s militia”…

What about combining different slogans, however, with different emphases – “no to war, no to the theocracy”? Here, it’s worth stepping back a little.

Imperialism

Imperialism[2] is commonly defined, after Lenin and Hilferding, as the “highest stage” of capitalism, the epoch of the fusion of banking and industrial capital into finance capital, the creation of the great monopolies, and consequently the decline of the always-limited powers of the law of value to regulate production in a rational way; consequently, it is the epoch of massive expansion of territorial empires, of the export of capital and the political domination of the world by the metropolitan bourgeoisies, and of catastrophic outbreaks of war.

This flies in the face of the obvious – it is clear that the set of territorial empires that exploded into the First World War, for example, are not novel to the epoch of trusts, monopolies etc. but go back to the very birth of bourgeois power. Many were themselves based on feudal relations, or at least a political culture borrowed from feudalism (significant elements were present everywhere but France in the 19^th Century). As manufacture and ultimately industry begins to grow, so does the need for colonies and their raw materials (particularly in the case of small countries such as Britain), but more importantly, so does the need for a world market (though this, too, is present from day one – the price of wool on the world market was responsible for the Enclosure Acts which constituted the opening shots of proletarianisation in England, described vividly by Thomas More’s Hythloday).

Just as the domestic market requires a State to enforce contracts and a generally stable environment, the world market requires order between nations. This has resulted effectively in the need for a hegemon state - first Britain, then the USA. Fundamental to capitalism is the hierarchy of nations. Competition between nations for hegemony, and the consequent increase in military production (a sector necessarily much closer to the state than others), drives the centralisation and “trustification” of national capitals, and results in inter-imperialist war. Where inter-imperialist war is rendered problematic, the fight is conducted through proxies.

A subsidiary consequence of all this is that as soon as a national bourgeoisie assumes power, wherever they are (imperialist centre or ex-colony or semi-colony), their immediate interests lie in integration into the world market. Since integration into the world economy relies on the hegemony of a state or bloc of states – that is, of the imperialist states – there is a very powerful tendency for national bourgeoisies to act in the interests of imperialism. “Left-nationalists” are isolated and dispensed with.

There are two matters of fundamental consequence for communists:

Imperialism is an unmitigated and continuous catastrophe for the workers movement. To the very limited extent it is capable of anything “progressive” (ie, the building up of productive forces in particular primarily-extractive industries in semi/colonies), it is relatively reactionary compared with the possibility of proletarian socialism. Communists must resist imperialism and imperialist actions wherever possible.

However, non-imperialist states are class-divided entities. The bourgeoisie and its “unproductive consumers” in the state-repressive and state-ideological apparatuses are objectively bound towards collaboration with one or more imperialist states – the ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’, as the Stalinists would put it, is simply a comprador class in waiting. Anti-imperialist strategy must also be co-ordinated towards breaking the masses from their rulers, through agitation on the ground and solidarity work abroad. This is the best thing about the TP on this point – the demand for the popular militia and the drawing of sharp class lines.

For these reasons, I find that the distinction between “military” and “political” support is a bit pointless. I do not believe that the standard CPGB critique – that Workers Power or whoever has no weapons or international brigades to send to Iran or wherever, and therefore their “military” support is in fact a sort of political support – really gets to the heart of the matter. It is plain that Trot “military support” is a call for actual military support, just as the CPGB is not actually a party (which has to be a serious chunk at least of the working class) but a call for a party. My objection is simply that it does not point to a politically important distinction. In the textbook case of China 1925-27, had the Comintern given only military support to Chiang instead of signing the bastard up, they would still have been physically liquidated. This was the one aspect of Mao’s strategy not worthy of the bin – he realised that the Kuomintang was an intractable enemy, and began military operations against it.

A far more useful approach, for me, is the simply-phrased demand for the maximum possible independence of the class forces of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie. In the imperialist centre, we break the masses from the war-drives of their rulers – in the semi-colonies, from the treachery and weakness of theirs. Everything else is tactics.

It is true, moreover, that anti-war work necessarily reaches beyond direct opposition to particular wars. Even the broad-as-a-broad-bean StWC feels the need to march about Trident, about Palestine solidarity – in short about imperialism as a whole, even if it does not always say so. A strategy for an anti-war movement must be a strategy for explicit anti-imperialism.

It would be perfectly legitimate, then, for Stop the War to organise or support protests against Iranian state repression, to invite communist and progressive workers, students and others to speak from its platforms – to weld together the concrete manifestations of the movement against imperialism and war in the metropolis and the periphery. Such work is anti-imperialist – it provides real support to the only forces which are objectively anti-imperialist in Iran. Yes, we can link – and march under – two slogans. The meaning of “no to imperialist war, no to the theocracy” is “no to imperialist war, therefore no to the theocracy”.

[1] I do not mean to accuse Workers Power comrades of unqualified support for the Iraqi (or general semi-colonial) state – the document makes it clear that you consider the Iranian theocracy reactionary, for example. But it is nevertheless standard practice in the English language that, when one talks of a country’s victory or defeat in a war, we are talking of the country’s state – “victory to Iraq” in 2003 meant “victory to Saddam”, not the Iraqi working
class (except in the indirect sense that the victory of Saddam would have spared them an unprecedented nightmare).

[2] In this section I substantially paraphrase Mike Macnair’s work on the subject, developed in a series of articles in the Weekly Worker (July 29, August 5, August 12) and in a number of speeches, openings and papers delivered to meetings and conferences (for example, the Critique Conference of 2007 – sound file here).

Warning: this blog posting is petty bourgeois

2008-03-29T19:22:00.003Z

The left can be a pretty cultish place. Not in the sense that it's filled with cults (though it is), but simply that being on that wing of politics involves inheriting a bunch of sub-cultural tics that look downright odd to mere mortals. My girlfriend cannot get over "comrade", for instance. Why do we insist on calling each other comrade all the time? It's like a bad film from the 1930s.

Of course, we press on regardless, often - even mostly - with good reason. Comrade is the only proper word for an equal companion in an ultimately life-or-death struggle. If it sounds a little weird to postmodern ears, it's only because this latest and most spiritually desolate stage of capitalism has made any notion of collective struggle a matter for 1970s nostalgia, and to sound weird before such philistinism is nothing other than a pleasure and a duty.

There is at least one case, however, where the tradition - such as it is - needs serious uprooting.

On the letters page of this week's Worker, one Robert Clough has a few stabs at me for being mean to that nice man Raul Castro. He claims at the end, rather grandly, to have discovered the "material basis" for my distaste for Cuban "socialism" (as Lenin said, oh please don't laugh!). it is "the privileged position of an upper section of the working class in the oldest imperialist country in the world, and the resultant tendency amongst this stratum towards a petty bourgeois political standpoint."

Let's get to the point - what the fuck is a "petty bourgeois political standpoint"?

And you do hear it a lot, don't you? Everybody is a petty bourgeois radical on the left - or at least, everybody else is. Anarchists call Lenin a petty bourgeois deviant leading the workers to an authoritarian hell - Leninists call anarchists petty bourgeois voluntarists. Orthodox trotskyists call Pabloites, Cliffites, and every other damn political species petty bourgeois, which is held to explain their enthusiasm for Stalinoid nationalists (Pabloites), their refusal to be sufficiently "defencist" with regards to the "degenerated/deformed workers states" (Cliffites), and sundry deviations and betrayals (everybody else).

The thing with the petty bourgeosie is that they're a class fraction perpetually "on the way out", so to speak - while bourgeois states usually attempt, with varying degrees of success, to artificially sustain this fraction, through appropriation and redistribution of a certain portion of the gross surplus value in the form of tax breaks, subsidies and indirect means (eg denial of planning permission for supermarkets), the tendency is for the petty bourgeoisie to occupy a very insecure position in society. They're neither one thing or the other.

So, what are petty bourgeois politics? On a very banal level, one can expect shopkeepers to support political measures which will keep them in business - but just as communism does not follow from wage demands, the fully-articulated positions that one associates with the petty bourgeoisie do not follow from a requirement for subsidies. The result is that, beyond a certain minimal anti-corporate standpoint, the petty-bourgeois is objectively rudderless. The concrete conjuncture in which she finds herself overdetermines her political standpoint - she may be a fascist, a communist, a Thatcherite, a social democrat, a liberal, a Pabloite, a Cliffite, even (sorry boys and girls) an Ortho-trot. In short, every political position is petty-bourgeois, which is another way of saying that none are.

So, the accusation I face - that I express, through a failure to defend a nationalist-stalinist tourist trap with a nice health service, a petty bourgeois political standpoint - is the ultimate non-statement.

Is there a political cuss-word to be had out of that unfortunate class fraction? Yes. There is a defining characteristic of petty-bourgeois politics - its heterogeneity, not just at any given time, but through time as well. A good petty-bourgeois will swing wildly from position to position, thinking with his gut rather than his brain. This phenomenon can be observed in the existing left - notably the Cliffites, but also the Pabloites and the Healy strain of Trotskyitis. Even now, we should be wary of thinking this 'proves' anything. This is an essentially descriptive epithet, not a theoretical one. It does not follow in any meaningful sense that Cliffism naturally tends towards a petty bourgeois base, still less that it represents anything like the objective political interests of the petty bourgeoisie. If we call John Rees a petty bourgeois leftist, we mean in an impressionistic and polemical way that his methods remind us of that class fraction, or we are talking bland waffle.

Conclusion: enough with this "petty bourgeois" shite, comrades!

Paul B. Smith, line by line

2008-01-16T12:12:00.000Z

He's at it again...humanist hatchet-man Paul B Smith is once more putting his desire for "politeness" in the workers' movement into practice by...spreading malicious gossip about everyone's favourite French avant-Marxist (well, mine anyway), Louis Althusser. I originally wrote a letter back, but then there's only so much you can fit into a letter. So here's a good old fashioned, messageboard-style point by point demolition. Chunks are numbered for cross-referencing and stuff.

I. Liam O Ruairc follows Althusser in thinking that Marx’s ideas were incoherent and in need of “reconstruction” (Letters, December 6). As a result, concepts crucial to understanding Marx’s political economy, such as contradiction, abstraction, essence, abstract labour and surplus product, are air-brushed from his account of Althusser’s “continued relevance” to politics.

In Reading Capital, Althusser admits from the start that they have not made an "innocent" reading, that they read Capital "as philosophers". His project was not to refine the concepts of political economy (abstract labour, surplus product, although he does make claims about them here and there) but to deal with the philosophical and epistemological assumptions of Marx's project. That is what he is "reconstructing" - any reconstruction of the concepts themselves is implicit, and they are certainly not wiped from history. It is a bit like accusing a Marxist literary critic who cites the bit from Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique... about Greek art of wiping out Marx's political economy. It's just not a matter of primary interest to a literary critic, and it is myopic to expect it to be so.

As for those "philosophical" concepts cited above, Smith is simply lying. How does one talk about Althusser without mentioning his seminal essay "Contradiction [hint hint] and Overdetermination"? Large parts of Reading Capital are dedicated to the nature of abstraction, and the relation of abstract thought to its object, and discussions of essence and how that can be conceived. Smith may not like the conclusions, but it is fiction to pretend that these concepts to not occupy key positions in the Althusserian corpus.

II. Instead, Liam recommends students to start using sociological jargon like interpellation’ and ‘habitus’. As such, he is successful in proving that Althusser continues to be relevant to the social democratic politics informing the writings of sociologists such as Therborn and Bourdieu.

Mee-ow! We shall see this bizarre fixation on "sociologists" (what bastards!) crop up here and there.

Anyway, just as nobody is in favour of dismembering unborn babies and sucking them out with a big tube (as opposed to a woman's right to choose), nobody is in favour of jargon. But this really is ridiculous. Jargonistic as compared to what? As compared to Hegel? Hegel, the very master of the labyrinthine retooling of idiomatic expressions? As compared to Marx, father of surplus-value, surplus-product, departments I & II, simple and expanded reproduction, etc etc?

Jargon is one of those things that happens to other people. Or perhaps it is not the jargon Smith objects to, but the sociology? Unfortunately, "interpellation" is a product not of sociology but of psychoanalysis (an intellectual affliction which has, alas, also claimed Smith's beloved Erich Fromm), and "habitus" is not an Althusserian concept which influenced Bordieu, but a neologism coined by the latter himself.

III. Althusser is useful to those who wish to abolish Marx’s distinction between false and true consciousness and argue that ideology is an all-pervasive excrescence of social structures such as schools and the family. Althusser’s ‘reconstruction’ enables sociologists to teach Marx without reference to commodity fetishism, a category essential to understanding the ideology of bourgeois society. It justifies teaching a sociology - purporting to be Marxian - that makes little or no reference to Marx’s political economy.

Althusser is also useful to those who - like the man himself - are revolutionaries in an increasingly neutered reformist milieu which they wish to turn around somehow. Althusser has influenced social-democrats, yes - he has also influenced Trotskyists, Maoists, Eurocommunists, post-modernists, anarchists and everybody else. Althusser has been a major influence on that nasty old sociology - and political theory, and anthropology, and literary criticism, and film theory...

Again, this is startlingly hypocritical. I do not claim to know exactly what Smith's views on Hegel are, but he cites in [I] various concepts with specific Hegelian usages. He should reject this "jargon" - it is useful to theologians of the World Spirit! And that is to say nothing of the mass mangling of Marx's own texts quite apart from any misfortune they may have met at the hands of the Althusserian movement - the "special issue" of Euro bible Marxism Today that came out in 1998, its participants by then paid-up New Labourites, full of paeans to the market, nevertheless found a page for a David Edgar piece full of glowing praise for Marx's prescience of globalisation.

No extenuating circumstances for our Louis - all the sins of the world's sociologists are found to be "seminally present" in his concepts!

Onto the point about ideology - it's just about the only bit of honest theory we get in the entire letter. Still wrong, though. Althusser does not abolish the distinction between "false" and "true" consciousness - he certainly does not consider socialist humanism to be equal to his own ideas, for example. What he does do - which the cult-of-Man humanist morons can't - is provide an account of the startling effectivity of ideology, the mechanism by which it works. It answers the question: "where is ideology?" with a revolutionary answer - that it is embodied in rituals and practices. Kneel and move your lips in prayer...

IV. Liam points out that Althusser denounced structuralism as ideology. In order to gain academic credibility, Althusser distorted Marx according to linguistic criteria borrowed from structuralism. This inconsistency is an example of the man’s dishonesty. What Stalinism attempted to do in reality - the reduction of individuals’ consciousness to atoms subject to impersonal, overwhelming bureaucratic forces, Althusser - appealing to the authority of Marx - attempted to do in thought.

This is two points haphazardly lumped together...or rather, it is no point at all. Althusser borrowed no "linguistic" criteria from structuralism. Many Althusserian film critics, particularly the Screen group in the early-to-mid-70s borrowed these "linguistic" (more properly semiotic) concepts...from Christian Metz. Terry Eagleton, a literary critic, borrowed them from Roland Barthes. Althusser not only denounced structuralism as "ideology", but carefully distinguished his concepts from similar ones in the structuralist corpus (eg, the tortuous distinction between combinatory and combination in Reading Capital - essentially, "Marx's" [ie, in Althusser's reading] concept of combination does not leave the places between the structural determinations "empty", and provides for the dominance of certain elements). What more does this man have to do?

There is one serious link between Althusser and structuralism, and that is Jacques Lacan, who used a number of retooled structuralist concepts in his psychoanalysis. He also, however, used a great deal of Hegel (and even, despite being a right-wing Gaullist, adapted Marx's surplus value to "surplus enjoyment"). It would be necessary to actually dig through Althusser's writings to find references to signs, signifiers, signifieds and so on - and, being that clearly Smith is too busy to actually read anything about what he slags off, take it from me, mate - they're just not there.

Smith also develops his point about Althusser on ideology here, introduced in [III]. It needs only to be said that Althusser saw ideology not as rending people apart but sticking them together, producing out of individuals "subjects" which were participants in social life. Yes, capitalist ideology subjects the "subjects", to coin a phrase - but capitalist ideology is not a smooth whole, and breaks apart under stress. Otherwise we would not have communist ideology. The point is that man will always have an unconscious, "ideological" level, whatever class interests hegemonise it - the idea that we can escape from this, go back to pre-Freudian fantasies of rational man who merely needs to be "told the truth" (which obviously he does), is to revert to vulgar economics or secular theology.

Take your pick.

V. In effect, Althusser’s method was a form of subjectivism. It permitted readers to project whatever they imagined to be the case onto a particular text. This was popular with lazy students with well honed literary skills seeking approval and employment within bureaucratic institutions. It enabled Althusser to pretend to be an expert on Marx when, in reality, he was a fraud. In his memoir A future lasts forever (1995), he admitted he knew almost nothing about the philosophy of
history or about Marx.

Lazy? Moi? This is little more than incoherent ranting, a product of Smith's comically scatterbrained imagination. Althusser was popular with "students" - his own students, whom he demanded must read Capital not just in translation but in the original German (what slovenly layabouts!), and the PCF's student organisation, then radicalised and teeming with feverish Maoists (indolent freeloading scum!). Indeed, Reading Capital is peppered with quotes from Marx, with key words quoted in German. Whatever the 1980s Althusser thought on the matter, he had clearly read it, and closely, and in the original, and come to an understanding (correct or otherwise). All of this is irrelevant - Althusser's philosophy lives in his texts, and he constantly warned against "taking an author's word for it" on what their texts actually do.

And in that memoir, which flits between hallucination and autobiography, written when he had entirely abandoned Marxist philosophy for an "aleatory materialism" which supposedly linked Democritus to Spinoza to Marx to Heidegger, he also claims to have met and had a nice chat with Charles de Gaulle in the street. Quoting a man at his most delusional against him at his most lucid - the philosophical method of champions.

VI. Liam forgets to mention that the nature of Althusser’s project was to deny that there was any continuity between the thought of the early Marx of the Economic and philosophical manuscripts and the later Marx of Capital. In particular, he held that the concept of alienation was absent from Marx’s later work.

No, he held that the concept of alienation had a different epistemological status after the break, and believed after 1968 that there were odd humanist holdovers in all works apart from the Critique of the Gotha Programme.

VII. A superficial linguistic approach confirms such a reading. Marx does not use the
term ‘alienation’ in Capital. However, the concept is self-evident in Marx’s theories of exploitation and class. Liam must prove Marx’s incoherence in this respect if he is to give the “full defence of Althusser’s project” he promises.

That would be the theory of class that consists of three preparatory paragraphs at the end of Capital v3? The theory of exploitation which is based on the specific mode of appropriation of the surplus product by the capitalist? Both can do without alienation in the Feuerbachian sense. If you want Liam to "disprove" anything, you must establish it first. Or shall I demand you prove the non-existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

VIII. This project - separating a ‘humanist’ early Marx from an ‘anti-humanist’ later Marx - was motivated by the needs of a Stalinism under attack from the left as a result of the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968.
Students with access to the Manuscripts (and later the Grundrisse) were challenging Soviet dogmas of diamat and histmat. Moreover, following the work of Erich Fromm and others, they were using Marx’s concept of alienation to develop critiques of the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and China.

The comedy extravaganza begins in earnest. Where to start? Firstly, I suppose, by re-iterating - for the 400,000,000,000th time - that in the French communist party, Althusser was that "attack from the left". He was the PCF's most tireless campaigner against the forward march of opportunism and popular frontism.

And who were his most implacable opponents? HUMANISTS! Roger Garaudy specifically used the beloved "manuscripts" and selective readings of the Grundrisse to argue for evolutionism and alliances with Catholic soft-lefts. This man was the PCF's official philosopher, at the time Althusser was writing his pathbreaking first essays. He was immensely powerful; his bureaucratic tendencies unnerved even his fellow party bureaucrats, who moved to curb his power eventually (but not before affirming their commitment to marxist "humanism").

And that Erich Fromm - forget all this "developing of critiques" and assorted nonsense. What was his political character at the time? A fervent supporter of Democratic presidential hopeful, Eugene McCarthy, allied with bourgeois pacifist anti-war agitation. Who were his philosophical allies? In large part, writers from the Eastern Bloc, who were at least state-tolerated and often state-promoted. Marxist humanism became basically the official "philosophy" of the Khrushchevite USSR, an intellectual gloss on its phony destalinisation, and the justification for Khrushchev's declaration of a declassed "state of the whole of the people", and the justifications for ever further prostration to bourgeois politics in other countries.

But never mind! Fromm and the humanists may have been social-democrats in all but name, but Althusser sort of influenced some sociologists!

VIII. Althusser loyally upheld the doctrine of socialism in one country. The fact he was sympathetic to Mao’s China - a regime responsible for the deaths of possibly 70 million of its citizens - does not contradict this fact. Moreover, like some other Stalinists, he never broke intellectually or emotionally with a Roman catholic upbringing, seeking an audience with pope John Paul II in 1979.

Althusser was indeed loyal to "socialism in one country". But there is nothing about overdetermination, interpellation, structural causation or any other Althusserian concept which is tied to that. In the France of the late 1960s, Maoism meant the feverish excitement unleashed by the cultural revolution, a scenario where for a while it really looked to some like the masses were taking charge in China. They were wrong, and many others were not fooled. The only significance of this detour is to demonstrate that implying Althusser (who pseudonymously wrote just such a paean to the cultural revolution) is a stalinist in the sense of abject fear of the masses is a deliberate distortion of the actual record. And, as for that last point, Terry Eagleton has argued for various homologies between Althusser the Catholic and Althusser the Marxist, in that "superficial" "linguistic" manner Smith so abhors; but unlike some other Stalinists - of the Humanist variety - he did not argue for philosophical concessions to catholicism.

IX. A necessary condition for explaining Althusser’s unhappy consciousness is that he was a victim of the mental health system of oppression. He suffered depression, therapy and electro-shock treatment throughout his life. He had 15 mental breakdowns from 1945 to 1980. In 1980 he murdered his wife and was incarcerated in a mental hospital.
This is, of course, in no way sufficient.

Gossip. A bit like a prosecutor saying, "of course, it would be bang out of order for me to mention that the defendant has a long history of convictions for..."

X. A complete explanation needs to account for how it was that his ideas had such a huge appeal during the 1960s and 70s. This was a period during the cold war when Stalinism was successful in defeating revolutionary movements in France, Czechoslovakia and Portugal. At the same time, the Soviet Union and China were supporting national liberation movements in Africa, Asia and South America.

Why yes - that does account for the appeal of Althusser's anti-stalinism.

XI. It is therefore understandable that Althusser was able to masquerade as an academic authority on Marx for so long. He was able to capture the imagination of activists and intellectuals caught up on the fashionable radicalism of the period, many of whom were reluctant to study Marx in depth. Most of these people had illusions in the progressive nature of nationalism and leftwing social democracy - policies supported by communist parties throughout the world. As a result, they gained little or no knowledge of Marx.

Yes, if I was reluctant to study Marx in depth, I would certainly pick up a book which gets barely ten pages before ordering me to read all four volumes of Capital - in German.

At a time when there is the potential for a revival of revolutionary socialist ideas amongst students, I find it disturbing that, instead of calling for a revival of the study of Marx and Hegel, authors such as Liam O Ruairc and James Turley should uncritically acclaim the discredited anti-Marxist sophistry of Louis Althusser.

"Revival"? The study of Hegel has never stopped. New editions of Lukacs appear all the time. I fully endorse the study of Hegel, and have begun such studies myself. Althusser, despite his various positions on Hegel being a veritable bundle of bent sticks, and at a time when he was denying the very existence of causality, declared Hegel "the starting point for all of us", and that "one could spend a lifetime on him alone" (in a letter, anthologised in Philosophy of the Encounter).

What is abundantly clear, however, is that Smith has never bothered to study in any depth the Althusserian corpus - that or he has not the theoretical faculties to even basically comprehend it. As someone with either experience with or ambitions to read Hegel, a far denser and more complex writer, I sincerely hope, for Smith's sake, that he is merely dishonest.

the Althusser FAQ episode two

2007-12-18T23:43:00.000Z

Given that I'm getting accused all the time of being an "apologist" for cantankerous French "Marxist-Spinozist" Louis Althusser, I thought I'd try on some tricks from more experienced apologists. So, with no apologies *rimshot* at all to Stop The War conference's "best in show", Somaye Zadeh of Campaign Iran, here are three and a half lies about Louis Althusser.

Lie number one: Althusser was a hardline Stalinist, widely disseminated among the new (and the decrepit) Hegel-o-trots. Althusser was, in the broadest sense of the term, a Stalinist. He was a member of the Parti Communiste Français until his death, and referred to the Soviet bloc as the "socialist countries" without qualification. Fine. The problem comes when people attempt to impute to him various other Stalinist positions that were not really his at all. He was not a popular frontist, and indeed the political stake of his theoretical anti-humanism was maintained at keeping any PCF alliances within the working class (just as his humanist rival Roger Garaudy was aiming at precisely the opposite, using theoretical humanism as a bridgehead to get "Christian Lefts" and the like on board).

Lie number two: Althusser was a Eurocommunist, as sneakily imputed by his hatchet job biography on the Marxists Internet Archive (this is, of course, a website who for a long time refused to even acknowledge anybody associated with the Stalinist bloc as "Marxist" at all, placing them instead in the "reference" section alongside Montesqieu, Fourier and Foucault. I suppose a little theory-police shite here and there is a small price for such an incredibly useful resource). As noted in lie 1, the substance of Althusser's political intervention in the PCF was keeping it about the proletariat and scuppering the cross-class nonsense that was then hegemonised by the Euros. Try again, boys.

Lie number three: Althusser considers dialectics "mumbo jumbo" or some such. Althusser in fact simply claims that there is a very important development that separates Marx's dialectic from its Hegelian predecessor, concerning the epistemological relationship between a real object and its corresponding thought object. On the one hand, empiricists consider the thought object to be an internal characteristic of the real object; on the other, Hegelians believe the object is internal to thought. Dialectical materialism breaks out of both, and conceives knowledge as a production.

Lie number three and a half: Althusser considers Hegel "mumbo jumbo". At the end of his life, by which point he had rejected causality itself in favour of a theory of "random encounters", Althusser was still able to say of Hegel that "he remains the fundamental reference point for everyone, since he is himself such a 'continent' that it takes practically a whole lifetime to know him well" (Philosophy of the Encounter, 2006. Tr. GM Goshgarian, Eds. Francois Matheron and Oliver Corpet. London: Verso, 2006. p229). Entire monographs
could be, should be and have been penned on Althusser's "eloquent silences" over Hegelian philosophy, and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that there is "another Hegel", a "Hegel-for-Althusser" that he missed. To claim, however, that he dismissed Hegel in some crude fashion is idiotic, and treats his philosophy with a far larger dose of smug contempt than even the most boorish Althusserians (cough cough Hindess & Hirst) showed Hegel.

Global Shitties more like, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

2007-09-06T23:35:00.000+01:00

Something that didn't get in to the Weekly Worker, thanks to the bastards closing the exhibition before we went to press and thus negating the point somewhat. Oh well...

Global Cities: The Suicide of Empiricism

Given that the abiding tenor of exhibitions in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall is towards monolithic and consummately single-minded displays, exemplified by Ólafur Elíasson's Weather Project with its permanent hazy sunset, it is a surprise to find in its great expanses so muddled and contradictory an entity as Global Cities, which fills the gap between two such spectacular displays. The form of the exhibition, such as it is, involves large wall displays and videos pronouncing (apparently) detailed statistical analyses of the lives of ten major cities in the world – London, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, Tokyo, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Cairo, Istanbul and Shanghai – in terms of size, speed, density, diversity and form. In addition, there are displays of video art adding “anecdotal” flesh to the bones of “hard” statistical evidence. In a largely separate area, one finds a series of installations commissioned specifically for the exhibition.

A crisis of method

There are serious difficulties at all levels here. Firstly, the presentations of statistics are the ultimate in bourgeois empiricism. Beyond the standard usage of statistics as a descriptive tool, they become, in a bizarre twist on the Romantic Will, a kind of pseudo-divine creative and motive force in the lives of the cities themselves. One may first, for instance, look at the obviously arbitrary choice of the cities themselves – does Sao Paulo have more to tell us about urban existence than Rio de Janeiro or Caracas, Los Angeles than New York, etc? What, furthermore, makes the 5 holy criteria – density, speed and so on – the appropriate “thematic lenses” for such a study of urbanism? (For a Marxist, there is at least a silent sixth in “class”, but one would not expect such an inclusion in an exhibition with a raft of corporate sponsors.)

This specific issue is brought out most sharply in a particular set of diagrams illustrating the arrangement of buildings in selected square kilometres of five or so of our chosen cities. In a moment of delirious self-parody, these selections are openly arbitrary – we have a suburb of Los Angeles, a group of high-rises in Shanghai, a crowded sprawl in Cairo...why have these square kilometres been chosen? The answer is simply: because we say so. Dig beneath even the most superficial signs of “objectivity” and “science”, and one finds what the great French philosopher Jacques Derrida would call a “moment of madness” - a stubborn and utterly irrational imposition of an agenda. The method distorts the result, which in its distortions acts as a justification for the method.

Similarly, we find statements such as “15 children are born in city X every minute; by 2015 this will rise to 20”. Will it? What is entirely erased from this question is human agency, whether defined in the traditional liberal individualistic way or in theories of class and other group agencies. What is the subject of history for the curators? The numbers as such, it seems – moving themselves...

A crisis of identity

This disavowal of agency sits uneasily with the scattered video exhibits, obviously designed to paper over the cracks by “humanising” the urban experience. The best of these work by undermining, or reflecting the absurdity of, the project of the exhibition as a whole. One video shows worshippers traversing the perilous walkway over rough seas to the Haji Ali mosque off the coast of Mumbai. The camera is fixed on a particular 50 yard stretch. We cannot see where they are going or from where they are coming. This activity, rendered into a completely meaningless and masochistic action by the lack of context, is an excellent parallel for the erasure of origins and agency perpetrated by the statistical evidence.

Elsewhere, we have banal interviews with Londoners conducted by an artist sketching them, some overly worthy shots of Mumbaikars lacking in basic sanitation systems, and so on – it seems, really, that since the exhibition is in Tate Modern, the curators felt they should probably get some art in there somewhere.

Then, we are left with the specially-commissioned exhibits – most are conspicuously banal. The wooden spoon for the whole show, without a doubt, goes to Nils Norman's severely misjudged and gratingly didactic “reclaimed” street furniture, whose satirical bite – such as it is – would barely pass muster on a slow news day at Adbusters. At the opposite end of the scale, we have two redeeming features: Nigel Coates' “Mixtacity”, a diorama of the proposed Thames Gateway developments with household objects, toys, mantelpiece ornaments and even faintly surreal pseudo-organic forms as an alternative skyline; and the architect Rem Koolhaas' displays in the “new urbanism”. The former is playful without being self-conscious, and if it pushes the characteristically post-modern enthusiasm for kaleidoscopic diversity a little too obviously, it offers, through its magnification of the objects of everyday life, a critique of the exhibition's obliteration of agency.

Koolhaas, meanwhile, delivers a simple three-wall collage of photographs and adverts from around the world, acting as support for a thoughtful text on the relationship between contemporary architecture, public service and private capital. His ideological framework precludes any thoroughgoing solution, but the problems are posed intelligently. It is, furthermore, just about the only mention capital gets in the entire show.

Global Cities suffers because it does not know what it is for. The statistical and artistic elements are clearly intended to complement each other in some way, but the mechanicist, self-justifying empiricism of the statistics leaves no room for anything else. The rest of the exhibition, therefore, simply grates against it. Where it succeeds, it succeeds against the pernicious ideology of the statistical displays. An illustrative but frustrating fudge of the problems facing the urban world.

PR And “The Kids”

2007-08-07T19:50:00.001+01:00

As most comrades will be aware, the small British group Workers Power and its network of clone-parties the League For the Fifth International (LFI) has recently fallen on hard times. Last summer, a minority consisting largely of the group's most experienced and talented activists were ejected, forming around a new and impressively shiny publication called Permanent Revolution (as the “PR supporters network”, or PRN). Not long after that, its “independent” youth group REVOLUTION (popularly called Revo) was forced to expel whole layers of non LFI-affiliated youngsters – again, including whole national sections, such as that in Germany. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that the PRN would have to confront the question of youth organisation anew. Sure enough, this has happened, firstly in an open letter to iRevo's founding conference last yearⁱ, and now in a full article in the latest issue of PRⁱⁱ. both by leading (and not, it is probably fair to say, particularly young) figure Stuart King.

Youth organisation today

Firstly, the good news – King's logic flows from a very important fact: the lack of mass communist parties (Lessons, p37). Where such parties exist, it may be perfectly permissible, tactically speaking, to organise a youth section which is effectively within the party, subject to the same discipline as everybody else. In such circumstances, young comrades will naturally gravitate towards the party anyway, because it would be the expression of communist politics from the campus to the streets. Such a party, furthermore, would have to maintain full minority rights, and so “discipline” would not be the sort ofchafing, rigid regime we have come to expect.

However, this is not the scenario confronting youth and adult parties alike in 2007. Thus, the decisions of the Bolsheviks on the subject are largely of peripheral value, since they were confronting a very different era. It is good, then, that King uses as his starting point the 1938 positions of the American Socialist Worker's Party, for decades the largest and most important Trotskyist group and at the time operating under the authority of Trotsky himself. King notes that youth organisations “aim to attract large numbers”, whereas a revolutionary party will – barring a “mass revolutionary struggle” - attract only a few young people as such.

“Organisational independence, political subordination”

Nevertheless, King rejects calls for complete independence of the youth leagues. This could imply that “democratic-centralist fractions of the revolutionary organisations should not be allowed in the youth movement if they sometimes demand democratic centralist discipline over their youth members” (Letter...ⁱⁱⁱ). His preferred formula is “organisational independence, political subordination (or 'solidarity')”. This means that the youth group must have its own conferences and so on, at which policies should be debated and consensus won if possible. It may even take “some positions at variance with the adult organisation's program” (Lessons p37, my emphasis). However, the basic line would be the same.

This all is backed up with various tidbits from leftist history – Lenin calling for “complete independence” during WWI (to break the youth from the social chauvinist parties), through various Comintern resolutions culminating in the “organisational independence, political subordination” formula. He cites approvingly the Comintern's rearranging of a youth conference to ensure victory of the united front policy as evidence of the efficacy of OI-PS.

It should now be abundantly clear that this policy is essentially absurd and completely contradictory. If “political subordination” allows the adult party to rearrange conferences in order to force through votes, exactly what does “organisational independence” include? What, precisely, are the young cadres free to “organise”? How does this differ from the LFI Revo faction's unprincipled manoeuvrings? (King does have an answer of sorts to the latter question – more on which later.)

In my view, the whole gamut from the third congress of the Comintern, through the American SWP, through to the LFI's early relationship to Revo and finally King's articles all try to have their cake and eat it. On the one hand, the PRN know there is no point in simply setting up a youth “trotskyist cadre” organisation and do not wish to do so. They acknowledge that the majority of younger leftists have not “come up” through traditional communist or trotskyist groups but in fact through the ever-more-influential anarchist movement, and that the battle for partyism and vanguards must be won. For this reason, they wish for the youth to keep a degree of independence. On the other hand, however, they want to have the youngsters there for them, as another layer of footsoldiers. They want the youth group to have some kind of connection to the mothership, and this means (for an orthodox trotskyist) some kind of theoretical agreement. The youth group is to be of the revolutionary party but not in it.

The aforementioned actions of the Comintern pose it all very sharply. The OI-PS model lopes on quite happily as long as the Comintern can rely on winning all the important votes. They can make a show of convincing the youth rather than handing down the line. Nevertheless, when it comes to crunch time, the crisis cannot be resolved within that framework. Organisational independence implies control over the programme, or what else are the youth organising? Political subordination implies the adult organisation “trumps” the youth equivalent, otherwise how can they be effectively subordinated? There was no middle way in this dispute, then – either the Comintern acted as it did, or the CYI declared full independence. (iRevo's denunciation of this framework as “Maoist” is more true than they perhaps think – what was the paradigmatic bit of Maoist “philosophy” but the rejection of the Hegelian 'synthesis' in favour of catastrophic conflict, one side “devouring” the other “mouthful by mouthful”^iv? The OI-PS line disavows such an event but leads right to it.)

Line-dancing

Another well-known feature of Maoism is its elevation of the struggle between political lines to a near-cosmic force to which all trifling matters of organisation, epistemology and the like are to be subordinated. King certainly does not take such a histrionic view of things, but the determining factor for him does seem to be 'political perspectives'. For instance, we have his summary of the split in Revo, its “roots of the trampling on the independence of World Revo lies in the LFI’s political perspective and tactics” (Letter). The catastrophism embodied in the LFI's line led directly to the crisis in Revo. Things would, clearly, have been much better had the LFI leadership taken a more sober view of things.

However, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks reined in the youth in the early 1920s, this was principled and within the bounds of the party/youth relationship. Why? Because the youth were arguing against the allegedly correct line of the “united front”. The principled nature of the comintern's action, then, lies in the fact that they were “right” about the united front.

No doubt there is some truth in King's analysis of the Revo split. It is a general feature of political perspectives that they form into political practices, and a specific feature of catastrophism that it leads to a dramatic tightening of the chain of command. Like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, terrified of being late, the party must subordinate all other concerns to getting the best spot on the barricades. What he seems unable to concede, however, is that comrades in Revo had no way of challenging such perspectives, and no way of forging their own, for as long as they were under the cosh of OI-PS. The choice for revolutionary youth, it seems, is to try their best to hitch their wagon to the least swivel-eyed adult party on offer, and then hope the latter don't try anything stupid as long they're in a “politically subordinate” position.

Not good enough.

A balance sheet

King's analyses have the merit of not underestimating the complexity of the issue - one of the advantages of running a bureaucratic SWSS/Student Respect/Revo style regime is that you get to cut this Gordian knot without much bother. However, his resolution of the problem essentially amounts to a theorisation of such regimes. The balance he proposes is no balance at all but a dormant volcano, which will erupt the minute a dispute erupts on which the adult party, in its wisdom or stupidity, shall give no quarter. It is a recipe for splits, but more dangerously, driving potential activists away from the movement altogether.

The only ways out of the deadlock, as I see it, are an openly cadre-based group entirely subordinate to the party programme, consisting of full party members, which has a specific remit within the party's division of labour for youth work; or cutting the organic link entirely, and using youth groups as “neutral zones” between different parties and trends who struggle openly to define everything, from strategy to tactics to programme. Whether or not party fractions act under party discipline is up to the parties themselves. This certainly does include the possibility of a “hostile takeover” by a less scrupulous organisation, but it also includes the possibility of resistance to such a takeover. The OI-PS line amounts to writing the takeover into the youth organisation's genetic code, and frustrating all attempts to break this logic well in advance.

iStuart King, “PR letter to iRevo conference on October 7 2006” (http://tinyurl.com/38pekk )

iiStuart King, “Lessons of Revolution”, in Permanent Revolution #5 Summer 2007. Also reproduced are two articles by members of iRevo and the leadership of the dissident German Revo section.

iiiHe then asks the question, “is this in fact [iRevo's] position? It should be noted that the suggestion is dismissed by iRevo as “ridiculous” (http://www.anticapitalista.com/irevo/?p=43&language=en). King himself comes much closer to this when he cites approvingly the “graduation system”, whereby youth who join the Party leave the youth section after a year or so (Lessons, p39).

iviRevo, “Declarations of Independence”, in Permanent Revolution #5 Summer 2007; Mao Tse-Tung, “Talk on Questions of Philosophy” in On Practice & Contradiction, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2007).

The Althusser FAQ

2007-06-26T22:16:00.000+01:00

The problem with being Althusserian in this day an age is that his entire intervention was based on a confluence of intellectual fashions, trends and otherwise "facts on the ground" that, while more or less forgivable in the 70s, have become drastically unappealing since. And the thing with passed trends is that they have a habit of attracting more criticism than is due - Depeche Mode always get thrown out with Duran Duran.

This - along with the absolute, miserable hatchet job the poor bastard received at the hands of an unimaginative MIA writer - is why I have decided to put together a little pack of myth-busting aphorisms. Thus!

Who was Louis Althusser?
Louis Althusser was born in Algeria. His family, strictly Catholic, moved to France while Louis was still very young, and he hung around in the catholic milieux in Paris. When the Second World War broke out, he joined the army - it was during detention in a prisoner of war camp that he first came across communism, and he became - by 1948 - a loyal member of the Parti Comuniste Francais. At the same time, his reputation as a prodigious student of philosophy culminated in a tutoring post at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. He was eventually to become a professor there.

Contrary to his image as a withdrawn scholastic figure, Althusser intervened actively in the life of the communist party - however, stalinism is as a stalinism does, and often this meant he was forced to "out-philosophise" the leadership instead of taking them on politically, which would have entailed immediate expulsion. This problem led to his endorsement of by his own measure disastrous political lines, most infamously the PCF's scabbing on the workers and students during the evenements of 1968. And contrary to the rather bizarre implications of the aforelinked MIA debacle, he represented the staunchest and, but the late-70s crunch time, the most public defense within the PCF of revolutionary politics and opposition to the fetid opportunism of the Eurocommunists.

Always struggling with mental illness, his life was shattered when, in 1980, he fell into a depressive rage and strangled his wife to death. His work rate dropped, and he too finally copped it in '90.
What's his point?
Althusser really arrived at a time when Marxism was losing ground to a new intellectual fashion, structuralism. Taking after the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralists turned up everywhere in intellectual life claiming that meaning existed in the relations between elements, and interpreting everything in terms of elaborate "sign systems". Althusser became intimately involved in bashing out an accord between structuralism and marxism (and later on in his life, "post-structuralism" and "post-marxism"). He borrowed a term from Freud, "overdetermination", to argue against naive concepts of histrical causation ("historicism"), arguing persuasively that the 1917 revolution represented a paradigmatic example of thingsnever happening as they are "supposed" to, that historical forces identified by Marx and Engels can combine in a kaleidoscopic and surprising way - this diffusion of causality is characteristically structuralist. He became most controversial, however, for his lacerating attacks on "Marxist humanism". (Unfortunately, as with any time of reaction, this latter has become near-orthodox within marxism.) Later in his life, he began to doubt the very fact of causality, elaborating a theory of "random encounters" he called "aleatory materialism". While this is certainly a very dodgy position, it is worth noting that this was used by him as supporting evidence for very stringently "marxist" politics - the dictatorship of the proletariat, anti-reformism and so on.

So what's so bad about humanism anyway?
Humanism is a difficult term to pin down. Strictly speaking, it is a term that endorses a central "essence" which makes a human a human, that there is a "human-ness". Classical humanism, for example, sought to re-admit the nobility of classical society into the conjuncture of Renaissance and Enlightenment culture on the basis of the universal humanity revealed in ancient texts. Humanism of this kind lies behinds liberal theories of human rights, among other things.

Humanism also has a very imprecise usage, which essentially means "nice and fluffy". Thus we find those who turn towards "Marxist Humanism" characteristically emphasise the passages in Marx which seem most full of all-conquering spiritual rage at the, natch, "inhumanity" of it all. It is, obviously, philosophically underpinned by elements of humanism proper - cf. human rights again.

Althusser excoriates both "varieties" of humanism. He first noted that the rise of "Humanist" scholarship in the USSR and Stalinist bloc is specifically linked to the revisions of Marxism propagated by the post-Stalinists (rather than those offered by Stalin himself, although he was not averse to wheeling out humanism when it suited him - the philosophical backup for Zhdanovschina, for example, was provided by that awful bloody man Lukacs; and an essay by Maxim Gorky, entitled "Proletarian Humanism", recommends the "extermination" of homosexuals). He characterises it as essentially "ethical idealism", and sure enough such movements always end up obsessed with timeless "ethical" principles - even that old Althusserian Terry Eagleton has now decided he's going to waste our time with Aristotelian virtue theory.

The problem with Marxist-humanism lies simply thus - they focus overly on the "early Marx", the works of 1842-44 where he focuses on the problems of alienation and other fluffy hegelian matters. This basically ignored everything that is unique about Marx. If one is going to adopt a socialist humanism, why be a marxist? Why not take after one of the great utopians, William Morris and the like? Why not be a Bertrand Russelite? Marx's great discovery was that socialism must have a scientific basis, or it will never be more than coffee house daydreams.

If one goes a step further than denouncing the resultant symptomatic 'heresies' and rejects humanism as such, one has then to account for the matter of agency some othjer way - Althusser's answer involves ideology. Traditional Marxist views held it as simply "false consciousness", people believing X to be the case when in fact it was Y. Althusser suggested that ideology is more important than that - that it is the 'zero level' of subjectivity. One cannot exist in social life unless one "knows the rules" - ideology provides these basic structural features of social existence.

Doesn't that mean we're completely boned as far as changing things goes? Only if ideology is a self-consistent closed system. Which it isn't. It inherently fails - the ideology produced by capitalist society points beyond itself.

Remember, we're not dealing with an immaculate fiction cooked up consciously by devious members of the ruling class, but the structures of subjectivity arising out of an immensely complex social system riven with contradictions. Even if ideology were, in that way, "perfect", it would be in contradiction with the evidence of our own eyes - it would be, in other words, more vulnerable to destruction than an "imperfect" ideology.

TBC

I wish the Lord would take me now...

2007-04-07T22:23:00.000+01:00

Well, it takes a lot to generate in my icy breast sympathy for Manchester United fans, but somewhere between scenes of horrific police brutality in Rome and...well, over to you, Martin "One Gobshite To Rule Them All" Kettle...

Football is for foul-mouthed people who should get a life.

Yes. You heard the comrade, you disgusting proles. Fuck off. And best of all, the future............is golf.

Golf?

Golf?

What the fuck is wrong with this man's brain that he can consider golf to be a "people's game"? When has golf ever been played by anything other than the ruling class of the day? It's like a rite of passage. The day your revolution is complete is the day you commence work on your handicap (whatever the fuck that means - explain it to me adequately and I'll paypal you twenty pence). It certainly fits quite nicely up with bourgeois values. Why has our reprehensible turncoat picked this over similarly paced and mannered games such as cricket? Cricket is, for a start, too popular. Some smelly poor people like it. The barmy army even drink...whisper it...lager, instead of a nice pinot noir. but above all, cricket - like football, like other games unencumbered with hooliganism such as rugbies union and league, basketball and so on, but utterly unlike golf - is a team sport. Too "tribal" for you, Marty? Well so was class politics. Funny that.

The biggest joke of all is that, in decades, this man has not propounded a single remotely leftwing position, but still claims to be a "progressive". The punchline is that, in spite of everything, his primary evidence for this is that he - you know - used to be a communist. Communism is dead, except to the extent that it functions as an alibi for my reactionary crap. Keep that bitch on life support, nurse - there's a round of privatisations coming up and I've got some 5th columning to do.

Jesus H Christ in a chicken basket.

The fucking moon.

Chairman Bob...again.

2007-04-07T22:21:00.000+01:00

Well, after one fawning editorial too many, I have finally been prodded into action. Which is to say, a sternly worded letter, as only the English know how. Thus!

Comrade editors,

I read with interest, among other things, the lead testimonial of your "special issue" on Bob Avakian, entitled "The Crossroads We Face, The Leadership We Need". I write, it must be said, from a somewhat distant position with regard to your party and paper. I am English, and I have no organisational or direct political ties to the anti-revisionist movement here, let alone the RIM which apparently lacks a formal British section. Nevertheless, I have taken an interest, mostly historical, in the American Maoist tradition, which gathered immense steam in the same period when my own tradition – Trotskyism – was making headway on this side of the pond.

It can also not be overstated the significance that the success or otherwise of the Marxist left – whatever species – in America is of the utmost concern to comrades throughout the world: not simply in the matter of principled internationalism, but in the very real effects that upheaval in the world imperialist centre cannot but have elsewhere. When America goes to war, Britain follows, and everywhere else suffers one way or another. So what follows is meant in a comradely spirit, in the hope that the American movement might beat the odds and take the lead in dismantling the imperialist system operating in large part out of its own backyard.

It is a boring but true enough commonplace among the more naïve parts of the far left that the principal difficulty facing our movement is its disunity. The old "two trots, three factions" joke still has a resonance, but it's not, nor has it ever been, just us. In fact, as many of your own more experienced cadres will surely attest, the ultimate failure of the 1970s New Communist Movement was, at least partially, due to the inability of participants to reach an agreement for principled unity. Had the thousands of energetic comrades who made up that movement been able to do so, things may have been radically different when the onslaught of neoliberalism set in. As it is, instead of punching with one fist, the New Communists poked with a hundred pinkie fingers. With that in mind, we can say that building such a unity is still the overriding priority. Of course, such tasks are not as easy as they sound – even the most sectarian organisation can agree that, in principle, the left must be more united, but in practice scupper all such efforts by insisting on their own terms beyond what is reasonable.

It is for this reason that I ask for the Avakian cult to end.

As the man himself might say, "'He didn't just say cult, did he?' Oh yes he did." The treatment the esteemed chairman enjoys from his charges goes beyond...well...esteem. I fully expect, to the extent that I expect any sort of reply, a defence along the lines of "we're not idolising him, he really is that good" - a defence one might expect from the followers of Jesus, or the more rigid and uncompromising Stalinists of the Bill Bland school. But the fact is, no progressive party, to my knowledge, in the imperialist countries has this relationship to its main leader. My own group, as a fairly typical example, is the CPGB. There is a member of the CC called Jack Conrad who writes at greater length than anyone else, provides the most persuasive leadership of the milieu and has written most of the party's books. Yet he is never introduced as a great leader; his articles get the same kind of lead-in as anybody else, and so on. The same goes for pretty much every other group with a main figurehead – from the CPUSA to the Spartacist League. Can you imagine the CPUSA's website carrying the boxout "Our Ideology is Marxism-Leninism. Our Vanguard is the Communist Party USA. Our Leader is Chairman Webb"? Not likely – and not just because they're awfully quiet about Marxism-Leninism nowadays.

The waste of human energy notwithstanding, it does not bother me when David Icke's followers behave in this way. It does not bother me when Alex Jones' followers behave in this way, or any other conspiracy-theorist or religious wing-nut for that matter. But for the RCP to over-promote Chairman Avakian is another matter, because it brings this phenomenon into the Marxist left. Thus, it becomes our problem in a more immediate sense.

I implied earlier that the cult is an obstacle to socialist unity. This is for the simple reason that, for the left to be united effectively, it must be united within a party. A "movement of movements" is not good enough. It is much easier, furthermore, to organise in the latter way; but in the long term, such coalitions fizzle out when their initial stimulus recedes into history. The RCP, therefore, should be seeking to bring smaller groups into itself, or fuse with larger "rivals" on a formal basis. This cannot be done while a party leader is promoted in this aggressive way. There is no chance whatsoever of other left parties, or even many individuals, accepting unity on the basis of subordination to any leader in this way. The leadership, by contrast, must be accountable to the membership and representative of it. It must be a collective body which provides for some sort of argument over the direction of the party, not a single chairman beavering away at his researches and handing down the line. On point after point the cult is an obstruction to unity – it makes the RCP seem an unattractive partner, and provides various formal and organisational obstructions which will scupper the best will in the world.

In fact, it seems to me that Avakian's reputation is done more harm than good by this sort of thing. Your article implies that he is the only leftwing figure to offer coherent challenges to various bits of conventional wisdom about communism being dead, American democracy being great and so on, without in fact bring up a single issue which isn't the stock in trade of every Marxist periodical in the Western world. Anybody with any experience on the left will see through this immediately. I listened to his interview with Michael Slate, who introduced his contribution on the Stalin question as "original and provocative thinking" - imagine my surprise when Avakian came on and basically repeated the standard Maoist position on the matter. I don't think it's particularly terrible for Maoist leaders to, shock horror, take some cues from Mao here and there. It is not even as though Avakian does not make citations when he does so. But in implying that such things were created ex nihilo by him, the Cult undermines the man, and allows people to dismiss his work – whatever its real merits – out of hand. "Oh, he's that guy with the cult, you ain't going to read that, are you?"

Your article proposes: "the question...is NOT "leaders vs. no leaders"—the question is what kind of leaders, with what kind of goals and methods." Fine, but this is not the only question. There is also the question of the leaders' relationship to the rank and file and to the class at large. The Revolutionary Communist Party does not, on the whole, have a bad leader in Bob Avakian. He is indeed a good communicator who has gone through immense personal sacrifice for the cause, and he has been able to openly self-criticise when positions are changed, which is all too rare. But on the second question, the RCP has got it disastrously wrong. I implore you to reconsider this course, and join with other communists of all trends on a principled basis in destroying this brutal capitalist system.

Comradely,

Jim Grant

The Chairman Bob Phenomenon

2007-02-02T22:28:00.000Z

Sometimes, it seems, the entire purpose of the "Marxism" group on here is to indulge in endless debates on the Marxist value of Maoism. Thread after thread, the same old arguments - die4oil bawling about the fat, useless white Amerikkkan working class; trots of all kinds pulling their hair out; and henry and Jay pimping their supreme overlord, Chairman Bob Avakian of the Revolutionary Communist Party. And it was there that one guy linked, in that rather robotic manner that Bob-cultists do, to the fellow's voluminous website of rather epic talks.

Avakian's roots are typical of American Maoists - while in good old Blighty thr principal beneficiaries of the New Left '68 generation were us Trots, our transatlantic cousins looked enviously over the Pacific to the Cultural Revolution and that plump little fellow with the sharp tongue. How many Party Headquarters there were to bombard...Avakian came up through SDS, via the Revolutionary Youth Movement, and led the largest section of that to form today's RCP; a Maoist group remarkable principally for still being there, after the Sino-Albanian split and the nouveaux philosophes and everything else. As a figure, he's unassuming, photogenic for a man of his age, good looking in a beret. He swears. He watches sport. And he talks, a lot, at length.

At a lonely moment, hurting for something to listen to while playing Breakout, i found myself digging out that URL. I wanted to hear him defend maoism, preferably without the historical whitewashings one hears so often from that quarter. I wanted to see what they thought separated them from the trots and revisionists and capitalist roaders and anarchists and everything else.

What's initially remarkable is how little overt maoism actually gets into it. Oh, sure, it's fairly common currency nowadays for a far leftists to engage in some crude demagoguery and "dumb down" their revolutionism for petit bourgeois consumption. But he does not do this. He just doesn't sound particularly Maoist. The only thing that comes up to that end a lot is the Maoist view of contradictions - there are antagonistic contradictions, which must be resolved through class struggle, but there are also contradictions among the "people" (that is, the social basis of the revolution) which, although not necessarily confrontational, must be dealt with somehow to avoid serious problems further down the line. You wouldn't know it unless you already knew it.

In fact, it strikes me as rather suspicious the absence of serious issues like the historic failure of those societies Bob deems to have been "socialist", the role of cultural revolution and nationalism in Maoist discourse and so on. For a guy who can find three hours to talk darkly about the NBA being fixed (probably the best fun out of the lot of them, sort of like some crank in a bar going off on one), he sure as hell has problems with his own 'patch'. At one point he dismisses the "Trotskyite" version of internationalism before proposing as the correct path something that any Trotskyist could happily sign up to. What makes you different, Bob, apart from the specific origins of American Maoism?

What's extra interesting is the small-scale personality cult the little bastard's got going. The RCP rank and file are notorious in America for the rather "uncritical" attitude they maintain towards their bossman, and on the face of it, it's difficult to see - this is not some Greek hero, but a foul-mouthed, corner-of-a-pub hectorer of the first degree. A more down to earth political leader is difficult to imagine. However, this is exactly the holding pattern for the Stalinist "leader" figure. Zizek pointed out in some lecture that the difference between the fascist and stalinist dictator is that the latter will applaud the empty space he just vacated after leaving the podium, being as he is only the embodiment of the people's will. Stalin joked with workers on public appearances. It's just how it works.

The biggest obstacle to a serious engagement with Mao's work is Maoism as such. One cannot seriously examine Mao's view of contradictions, or the idea of a cultural revolution as an ongoing safeguard against counterrevolution, without first dropping all the Maoist baggage - endorsement of Stalin as a progressive figure, slightly David Duke esque approach to casualty figures, sectarian approach to other tendencies and so on. There may be something in it, but there won't be much left when we're done.

Why The Left Sucks WORLD TOUR! 1

2006-12-25T23:21:00.000Z

It Began In Amerikkka: The Maoist Internationalist Movement

In the big list of weirdos and vagabonds that litter the history of any movement, the Left included, some really stand out. Posadaists, for example, are acracking old bunch - a strange crew of Trotskyists who, via one of the all-time great abuses of dialectics, essentially believe that nuclear armageddon is a pre-requisite to socialism. It's more common, however, to find such grinding fruitcakery among the Maoist movement, and - perhaps with the exception of the Khmer Rouge - the MIM is definitely the highlight of the bunch.

Who are they? Basically, they're a bunch of academics who decided to form a political party in the mid-80s. Their unique selling-points are numerous - most superficially obvious is their somewhat nonsensical approach to spelling, whereby the United States of America is rendered as "United $nakes of Amerikkka", woman and person as "womyn" and "persyn", Western Europe as WeSStern Europe (see what they did there?). Reading an MIM article, one constantly has to pinch oneself that these are not sexually frustrated 14 year-olds doing this, but fully grown, apparently-intelligent adults - particularly if you happen to be reading one of their legendary video game reviews. They are also all celibate, since sex under patriarchy is (duh!) always rape.

Their most famous fetish, however, is a more fundamental one. MIM has come to the conclusion that the American - sorry, Amerikkkan - working class has been entirely bought off by imperialism, and no "domestic" revolution is possible. Rather, the whole third world will have to have a big revolutionary jamboree, and invade the imperialist countries. Yes. You read that right. It's really up there with Xenu and the Celstial Teapot, isn't it? Some even go that bit further and demand that the entirety of the U$A (and presumably, everywhere else lucky to have a nomenclatural remix) be turned into one big gulag. This, it must be said, is not the mainstream opinion in the group - but neither side of this debate seems able to answer the burning question: what is the point of being a MIMaoist party in a country which has no need of one? Why, to put it bluntly, don't they all bugger off to Gambia or whatever?

Membership: Well, there can't be many of them (wouldn't that completely prove them wrong?). Their terror of the State knows no bounds, so they act all anonymous like those hacker dudes in the X-Files - articles are written by" MIM Comrade #XYZ". (Bit like the Khmer Rouge.)

Of course, a meaner man than I might interpret this irrational fear as a desperate bit of posturing from a group simply dying to appear completely radical and revolutionary, but whose political fetishes can neccessarily lead their practical work no further than bigging up liberal femin-o-lawyer Catherine MacKinnon.

Pros: I'm glad somebody's reviewing computer games. I mean, who hasn't played C&C: Generals and thought to oneself - is this the most imperialist computer game ever?

Cons: See all that stuff up there.

Verdict: Fruitcakes.

Guess who's in the weekly worker...

2006-11-24T23:26:00.000Z

OH NO NOW EVERYONE KNOWS MY NAME AND ROUGHLY WHERE I LIVE

Why The British Left Sucks in 2006: Episode 9 - Loose Ends

2006-10-23T23:28:00.000+01:00

To round off the series, a look at the ones we missed.

Socialist Party of England and Wales: Used to be Militant. Used to be big. They ran Liverpool back in the day - see episode 8, i forget which one. Anyway, since they left it's all gone a bit pear shaped. There was a nasty period between 1995 and 2001 where basically bits were dropping off all over the shop. To my knowledge, none of the resultant groupings made much impact, and the group has somewhat stabilised, mostly good people and a good working class base but basically reformist.

Socialist Party of Great Britain: a bizarre entity, which is one of the oldest socialist groups in the world. Extremely sectarian, they have a habit of disassociating themselves from every conceivable point of contact with actual working class struggles or other workers' parties. Mostly harmless. A great piece of left apocrypha runs thus: at some point in the 70s or something, the SPGB looked at their membership returns and were appalled. They decided that there could not possible be that many good socialists in Britain,and promptly expelled a load of people.

Alliance for Workers Liberty: nee Socialist Organiser, nee International-Communist League........basically, Sean Matgamna and posse. They used to be ortho-trots, as far as i can tell, but have recently become shachtmanites. Which is to say, a little bit "wobbly" on the question of international affairs. They have a rather dim habit of being a bit too easy on Israel, and a bit too harsh on Islam, and one would not be surprised to see a number of AWL comrades 'do a hitchens'. In fact, one of the founders of the neo-con "left" group behind the Euston Manifesto, Alan Johnson, made that trek himself (and reckons it was perfectly logical, as you would).

World Revolution: Ultralefts. You gotta love them. These guys number probably in the low teens, and spend most of their days accusing other parties of being parasites on the workers movement. Which is very magnanimous of them, all round.

Class War, SolFed, AF: the three main anarchist organisations. Sometimes it's difficult to slide a cigarette paper between them, although they'd no doubt disagree. Class War, for their part, appeal mainly to teh punx with their Crassish artwork and mordant humour. Solfed are more explicitly syndicalist (n00b note: trades-union obsessive). And AFed are just...AFed. All are largely of the decent school of anarchism, based on a critique of class society and all that jazz, and refreshingly free of Crassish lifestylism and squat-obsessions (although CW threaten to renege on that score occasionally). As a lapsed council communist,I have my criticisms of anarchism, another time perhaps - but i nevertheless hope to see you all at Trafalgar Square on a certain saturday.

And with that, the series ends. I hope it was as fun for you to read as it is for me to not have to write anymore.

Comradely greetings, tls

Why The British Left Sucks in 2006: Episode VIII - The Labour Party pt 3

2006-09-19T23:33:00.000+01:00

The Labour Party pt 3: Deep Entry

Not the latest Jenna Jameson 'spectacular', unfortunately, but the conclusion to our trilogy within a trilogy of trilogies. We now poke our heads towards a dying breed - those far leftists still entered in the Labour party.

The only remaining group of any significance is the Grant(RIP)-Woods faction, which is one of the split-spawn from the old Militant Tendency. Militant, once upon a time, were big fish. Apart from the communist party, they were the largest far-left organisation in Britain - and unlike the communists, they even had three members sitting in parliament at one stage.

Well, sort of.

Because, thanks to the bureaucratic regime inside the LP, you're not allowed to organise openly as a faction. But what you are allowed is a newspaper. So, Militant was "officially" Militant, a party magazine of Trotskyist leanings. The "central committee" was the editorial board of said magazine. And because of these conditions, things were often awkward for them. Of course, nobody was fooled. And it only took until the mid-80s for someone to grow a testicle or two and decide to propagate a good old stalinist purge. Fighting on many fronts, including the excellently-named Operation Icepick, a motley coalition of tankie Stalinists, eurocommunists and proto-new labourites basically booted them all out.

But the thing with booting someone out of an open-membership party is that, well, they can always just join again. And they did, over and over and over again. Then, in the early 90s, the majority of the "editorial board" and the "readership" got fucking tired of this shit. It was agreed that entrism would be abandoned. A small group around golden-age main man Ted Grant were too attached to Labour, and broke off to pursue their deep entry fantasies.

Nowadays, the 'open' party is led by Peter Taaffe, and goes by the name Socialist Party of England and Wales - which can be appropriately shortened to SPEW - and has gone through all manner of strife and fragmentation. The Grant group has remained homogenous and split-free, although Grant finally bought it two months ago (me and Ted share a birthday! freaky deaky...), bequeathing it all to his disciple, brusque Welsh polyglot Alan Woods.

And what does the scion inherit? Well, a small national organisation, a paper called Socialist Appeal, a natty website and a rather larger and more influential international organisation. The thing with the Grant-Woods group is this - they are completely, deeply committed to entryism in the most passionate sense. A young Swedish comrade recently declaimed to the "Marxism" myspace group "ENTRISM IS MY LIFE!" which is, admittedly, an extreme (and likely extremely badly translated) example. But what obviously does not get considered is the specific conditions - the difference between entering the Labour Party and the Pakistan People's Party. In applying the tactic scattershot to everything, they obviously get varying success - they had an MP in Pakistan for example, a veritable Dave Nellist of the subcontinent, but they're hilariously irrelevant in the States. Apart from the rather random distribution of their support, there are other consequences of their fixation. Back when the geocentric universe was starting to look shaky, desperate orthodox astronomers started creating incredibly complex "orbits" for the various heavenly bodies, trying in vain to shore up an increasingly obvious folly. And so Woods continues to grasp nettles with the determination of a retarded ginger child - socialism can be achieved at the ballot box, with an 'enablnig bill in parliament'; chavismo is a "revolution" in progress; etc, etc, etc. But what he cannot countenance is the most important truth of all - strategy and tactics are not metaphysical constants. You pick them according to their utility. Entry in Britain is not a useful strategy, and - as it happens - has almost never been.

The story of Militant and Socialist Appeal is an important one, and tells us much about the Labour party. They failed because the host organism had no truck with symbiotes and parasites - they were forced to operate clandestinely, and as a result could not be open to anyone. If you hide from the Party bureaucrats, you hide from the proletariat by the same stroke. They couldn't win - should they become significantly successful, their enemies on the right (and for that matter, as in Operation Icepick, the left) would simply boot them out, and so it came to pass. Sneaking around in a club, violating the entire dress code and being obnoxious will not result in a long night out. Being a Trot in the labour party is simply not worth the arse-pain.

Taafe said of the LP at the time of the 'open turn' that it had previously been a worker's party and thus worth entering, but had now degenerated beyond recovery. He was unable to face a more crucial truth - Mili could never have gotten further than they did with entry work. Labour didn't change, but he did.
Grant, god rest his soul, was nothing if not consistent.

Why The British Left Sucks in 2006: Episode VIII - The Labour Party pt 2

2006-09-05T23:49:00.000+01:00

The Labour Party pt 2: The Pink Brigade

Contrary to popular belief, and the wank fantasies of Stephen Byers, there is still something which can be called a Labour Left. It's not what it was, of course - most of the fiery, inspiring old guard are long retired or six feet deep, and the labour Right's force-march has had the knock-on effect of dragging most people, to some extent, with it. But there is something nonetheless.

When tories began to accuse the Labour party of being in thral to the "Marxist left" around the turn of the 80s, Raymond Williams noted with a certain bitterness that the motley bunch encompassed by that somewhat wishful phrase - left-Fabians, fellow travellers, CND activists and so on - used to just be called "social democracy". And such are things today. On the one hand you have serious committed socialists - Tony Benn may no longer be in parliament but he is Labour through and through, and John McDonnell (the man charged with mounting a suicidal leadership challenge against Gordon Brown) is notably red, one of the few MPs to call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. But then, one hears Ken Livingstone described as a Labour left, which he manifestly isn't, and never really has been for that. Frankly, if you claim "Red" (hah!) Ken, then there's no reason not to include Roy bloody Hattersley, and your definition of the "left" of the party amounts essentially to "anyone who isn't Stephen Byers".

The principal factions involved nowadays, apart from the ever-deteriorating Tribune milieu (which, incidentally, is a fucking shit paper - I mean, do they bother to spend more than 5 minutes writing it? Is proofreading just one of those things that happens to other people?) are probably the Labour Representation Committee, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and those around the Labour Left Briefing rag. Refreshingly, these groups are porous and perfectly capable of co-operation. They, and others, sponsor a small parliamentary fraction (the Socialist Campaign Group), which will be useful on the McDonnell warpath. The LRC has even managed to get a youth section going (although, so has the 50-strong trot group Workers' Power...).

But none of this makes their fight significantly easier. As noted in pt 1, the energy for their activism is generated by the conviction that New Labour is an aberration, a cancerous growth distinct from the normal tissues surrounding it, and removable with few after-effects for the host. Au contraire, mon petit cherie! They face a bloody struggle, not only against the overt neoliberal elements but also the ballast, the soft-left of the party who are terrified of losing their posts, seats and their salaries. They will soon run up against their blinkers and the enormity of their task. How successfully they can respond will likely determine their fate over the next generation or more.

My Favourite Rightwingers: The British Chav

2006-09-05T23:43:00.000+01:00

OH YEAH, LOOK AT HIS MAJESTY!
You can see that shit on the beck of a coin, can't you? Fabulous. Yes, it's the wonderful phenomenon of the "chav" under discussion here - sort of. And thing one about them - back in the day, there were plenty of names for the sportswear-clad, alcopop supping youths that fill shopping districts after dark up and down the country. Down 'ere in Devon, they were kevs. Glasgow had neds, Belfast spides, and so on. But then! Something horrible happened. Yes, it's the liberal middle-class Londonistas again. (Yep, that's what this is really about.)

Looking up from her bowl of Country Crisp one morning, Jenny Guardianista noticed that young Toby had come home from school with a bloody nose - probably as a result of being a smug twit called Toby - and, upon asking the neighbours who these strange creatures who worshipped Fred Perry actually were, discovered in horror that they were people who paid for ringtones, smoked and ate food that probably wasn't organic. The local term happened to be chav (a sort of portmanteau of "cheltenham 'ave-not", or perhaps "Council-Housed And Violent", which should clue you in to the real content of the mass-hatred they receive). And because she's godawful yuppie scum, it became everyone's local term.

The chav is the generic signifier for absolutely everything that is a square peg for contemporary ideology. They are not interested in living healthier lives, reducing their carbon footprint or "ethical consumerism" - which is to say, in the self-aggrandising asceticism which has temporarily displaced political discourse in the West. (Slavoj Zizek notes that what really bothers us about smoking is not any genuine concern for our own health - sitting in a smoky cafe for an hour is no more toxic than walking down a busy road - but that the Other has the temerity to place a cigarette to her lips, inhale deeply and enjoy it.)

There is, of course, a dark side to this - the average chav is racist, although it is not the systematic racism of the fascist so much as the insecure lashing out of the playground bully. They are pulled, as the disavowed excess on the social body, in extreme political directions - and this means fascism as much as anything else. But again, it must be acknowledged that this is our fault too - the Left has become dominated by this suffocating Liberal smugness, a middle class ideology intent on keeping those below down there. These lost, benighted souls are precluded from the club ultimately because they fail to show sufficient enthusiasm for hybrid cars.

They tell the elitist not so much things about herself as her inadequacy confronted with the realities of life - total impotence in the face of capital. When we hear the old line about more votes being cast for Big Brother than in the general election, it underscores the unmentionable - that they're right not to vote in (these) general elections, that the choice between Gordon Blair and David "look at my shiny bike" Cameron is so utterly insignificant that the outcome of X Factor really will make a bigger difference to their lives, and ours.

Leaving these millions of people to the BNP might be the last mistake we ever make.

Why The British Left Sucks in 2006: Episode VIII - The Labour Party pt 1

2006-09-04T00:21:00.000+01:00

The Labour Party Pt 1: The Head Of The Snake

It will not have escaped even the slow members of the class that the current prime minister of our fair, binge-drinking, puke-stained isle is a fellow called Tony Blair. The astute reader will know that he is one of the most hated men in the entire world. Somewhere between lining up behind George Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq and...no, that's pretty much it, it has become abundantly clear that this man is a bit of a chode. The British and other interested parties will also have acknowledged that he rules in the name of Labour. You know, us. The workers. And also that he really, really, really hates us.

Now, the question on everybody's lips is - how? How did a large group of allegedly leftwing people somehow let this apocalyptic scumbag have the keys to the Jeep? I mean, you can hardly accuse the fellow of not giving fair warning. The rabid support for Neil Kinnock's purges, the business with clause 4...every chance he has been given, Tony has said in essence "I am right-wing, and I consider you, party comrades, to be the worst kind of belly-crawling insectoid shit. I will ignore you when I am not abusing you. And still you will bow to my will when the crunch comes, every time."

Of course, that's a little unfair on the party...sort of. Because, although you'd never know it from the sort of coverage the issue gets from Labourite and ex-Labourite lefties, it ain't just Blair. To start at the head of the snake, it's worth a look at the parliamentary party. There are 23 MPs in the "Socialist Campaign Group". These vary from Michael Portillo's platonic lovebird Diane Abbott to the genuinely leftist likes of John McDonnell. That leaves, ooh, 330 MPs unaccounted for. Take away a handful of tribunites, and we are left with 300, say, who are Blairite, Brownite or "soft left". For the most part, the soft lefts will toe the government line in their adorably spineless manner. In that sense, it makes it difficult to estimate exactly how many hardcore New Labourites sit on the benches. But it is not hard to see that they add up to a significant number. Just think of every cabinet minister Blair's ever had - all his own chaps or sops to Brown. Must be about 50-80 there alone. Add in the victims of the Guardian's old "Top Toadies" feature, and you have another 20. Nowadays, the blairite-to-brownite proportion is shrinking, but they're both, in their essentials, exactly the same. With a reliable buttress of 200 or so yellerbellies as cannon fodder, they're well-rooted, well-organised and well-entrenched. When Tony Benn tells his audiences that the Labour party has somehow fallen into the hands of these strange interlopers and it is enough to ditch a few choice scumbags, he deludes himself. Doesn't matter how the Party got here - it's still seriously, royally fucked.

my favourite right-wingers vol.1: Jeremy Clarkson

2006-07-10T00:18:00.001+01:00

I can't drive. I have had a provisional license for a few years, but could never find any particular motive to go through the whole rigmarole of learning and doing a test 8 times and buying a Vauxhall Nova and pulling over into the hard shoulder at 1am after its carburettor spontaneously combusts for the 400th time. On top of that, I rather like not having one. I like walking to places, I like riding my bike, and in spite of the best efforts of Thatcher and the Thatcherspawn, I rather like riding trains to places too. In fact, there are only two enticing things about learning to drive - the thought of playing some klezmer at earspltting volume out of a full-on pimp-my-ride style £800 car stereo in suburban lanes at 3am, and a presumably renewed appreciation of Top Gear.

Top Gear, like the Decemberists and Nietzsche, never really seems appropriate to any historical constellation. It's always out of touch. Men watch it, but furtively. Women mutter disapprovingly of it, but nurture secret crushes on Richard Hammond. I, for my part, have been unswervingly loyal to it (well, you know, when it's on...) since the age of 10. It's changed a lot since then. Mainly, it appears to have nicked its 'new' format from Blue Peter. Always out of touch...

Its most implacable foe is, of course, the Guardian, the flagship rag of the foul organic chocolate-chomping, rooibos tea-swilling "left"-liberal scum.. This particular constituency, the sort of folks who think David Cameron must be an alright bloke because he rides a bike, leaves the guardian with little choice but to forgo offering real solutions to real problems and instead whine about Jeremy Clarkson. See this tv-crit word-puke for a start, in which Sam Wollaston seems to think that a TV program about cars should be entirely free of jokes about cars.

Clarkson, for his part, fucking loves it. And yes, he is funny. He's also completely self-aware. "This car just smell of man," he intones at one point. "As soon as you get in you want to go out for a curry and a fight." In fact, the whole dimension of irony seems to get completely missed by self-important Guardian types. Hate to go back to Wollaston's whine above, but he notes that they promise 'big changes' for the new series, and their big change turns out to be a dog who doesn't actually do anything. (A sneaky nod to Blue Peter, maybe?) He then complains that there actually haven't been any changes at all, which is simply spellbindingly stupid. Look, Sam, THE WHOLE POINT OF THE FUCKING DOG WAS TO HIGHLIGHT IN AN AMUSING WAY HOW THERE HAVEN'T BEEN ANY FUCKING CHANGES DESPITE THE BLATHERINGS OF NOTTING HILL CUNTS. That is what we, on planet Earth, call a joke. Nice, too, to see them - in the same episode - take a swipe at David Cameron for using their test track for a photo-op. "Jeremy and I agree on many things, but the environment isn't one of them," the Tory Nick Griffin smarms at a fawning cameraman. "You got that right, sonny," grins Clarkson in the studio.

In fact, if there's one genuine service JC offers society, it's puncturing this awful, self-satisfied air around certain strata of society to which Cameron now plays with all his might. Mainly, I'm thinking of cyclists. Cyclists REALLY hate Top Gear because Top Gear thinks we're cunts. And you know what? Top Gear's right about cyclists. We really are cunts. We demand to be taken seriously as road users, despite going of necessity at dangerously slow speeds - and then, as soon as we hit a red light, it's over the pavement! Our reckless disregard for the rules of the road is matched only by our contempt for those who dare infringe them in a car - who hasn't had 'al qaida' fantasies upon seeing some white van double-parked across a cycle lane? Yes, riding a bike - far from being some morally fibrous , envirnmentally conscious, karma-earning activity - is in fact the closest the average person comes in their daily life to clinical psychopathy. Long may Top Gear reign, that Clarkson might continue to knock us down a few pegs.

Why The British Left Sucks in 2006: Episode VII - Martin fucking stupid fucking Kettle

2006-04-05T00:16:00.000+01:00

What is your name!? Martin fucking stupid fucking twatting arsehole Kettle.

What is your quest!? I made some vague references to eurocommunists in episode V. Here is the real deal. He writes in the Guardian, proclaiming socialism 'dead' sans evidence, and urging the Prime Minister to continue with his vital Privatisation Of The Week (PotW), although of course this will be referred to as 'reform', or in the runup to a significant parliamentary session, 'vital reform'.

What is your favourite colour? That of buttercups on a summer's day - yellow through and through.

You might remember me from... He may have pissed you off in the Guardian. In the 80s he may have pissed you off in "Marxism" Today. if not, either you're too cynical for the Guardian and too young for MT, or you should be reading another blog.

Pros: Doused with enough petrol he'd liven up bonfire night.

Cons: You see, our Marty grew up a fervent Communist. And although he may emphasise 'democracy' and 'individual freedom' today (and who does he think he's fooling?) he has in essence preserved the core of what made the old CPGB such a ghastly institution. He believes that, because he is in the majority in the Communist Party of Martin Kettle, he is infallible, and since he has this (not as unique as he would like) experience of giving up on communism without giving up on the Party, he has a sound basis for proclaiming all our marxism(s) invalid, without brooking dissent towards his laughable arguments.

Overall: Martin Kettle is to my humble myspace as Tiesto is to ishkur.com. He cannot be sent to Vorkuta soon enough.

Why The British Left Sucks in 2006: Episode VI - Insert Womble/Ewok Joke Here

2006-03-27T01:15:00.000+01:00

What is your name!? The WOMBLES. This stands for White Overalls Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggles, and is the closest thing to a sense of humour ever to emanate from them.

What is your quest!? They're "lifestyle anarchists". Which means that they consider "anarchism", "lifestyles" and "quests" to be hopelessly authoritarian. They make up the numbers at demos, and squat. And that's enough for them. Oh, good.

How many of you are there!? Not many, one hopes. Besides, how many people could you talk into prancing around in costume at a march?

You might remember me from... If you're a cop, i hope you remember beating some of them up. London Anarchists will no doubt have many brain-bending encounters to relate. One dude I know related the story of their 'contribution' to a campaign against the closure of a bus stop - 'buses get people to and from work, so you only want to stop the closure because you don't have a critique of work.' Amazing, isn't it?

Pros: Anarchists make better lovers.

Cons: Whenever you hear some patronizing trot blather on about 'petit bourgeois anarchists', IT'S THEIR FAULT. They look stupid on demos, they talk stupid on the internet and they're about as far from the standard anarchist milieu - down to earth folks with a handle on their communities - as is possible without being Margaret Thatcher.

Overall: Petit bourgeois anarchists.

(People who are actually interested in anarchism should look to the AF, SolFed and Class War. Hell, if you're into this sort of post left bollocks, go for CrimethInc instead. at least they know a joke when they see one.)