George Carlin - The American Dream

Marxism 2007: Day Five (Monday)

OK, Day Five has been hanging over me throughout a very busy week, so rather than waiting for the right time I'm going to write about it now, while I still have a million other more pressing things to do.

First up was "A history of rebel art from Dada to Banksy". I only went to part one, which took me up to 1960, but it was a very interesting discussion, led by Esther Leslie of Birkbeck College. She argued that all art is rebellious in some way because it is an imaginative act, a rebellion against the mundane order of everyday life, a reordering and reinterpretation of the world around us. But in her talk she focused more on artists who rebel explicitly against art itself and try to rewrite the rules.

She began by exploring the contradictions inherent in art - a practice that rebels against commodification and yet often itself becomes commodified, a practice that speaks to the human and the universal and yet often becomes elitist and exclusive. The Dada movement developed in opposition to what they saw as the hypocrisies of the German expressionists, who collaborated in war and inequality (many of them saw the war as a way to cleanse and renew decadent German society).

Another very interesting idea from the Dadaists was that art reinforces class divisions: it makes the worker feel small and useless against the "genius" of human culture, as they are unable to do anything as brilliant as the art which hangs in galleries for the edification of the bourgeoisie. There was a wonderful image of the painting that hangs in front of a safe in a bank or mansion as a metaphor for art covering up the lies of capitalism.

She then went on to talk about Russian artists like Tarabukin, who said art was useless and should be dissolved totally into industry, artists should go into the factories and start designing and producing useful objects, combining aesthetic value with use value. He was used for a while by Stalin and was then discarded when Stalin wanted to return to a 19th-century representational art, the traditional role of art as a glorification of the ruling class (think bucolic scenes with Stalin as a father figure, surrounded by a crowd of adoring children).

Next I wanted to see "Is the anti-capitalist movement in crisis?" by Alex Callinicos and Trevor Ngwane, but it turned out to be only Alex Callinicos. Shame, because (no offense to Mr. Callinicos) it was really Trevor Ngwane that I was interested in hearing. However, the speech did turn out to be interesting, and gave some good food for thought on the very rapid calcification and bureaucratisation of the anti-capitalist movement. Of course, there are still very successful mobilisations, particularly around the G8 summit in Rostock, but the World Social Forum in Nairobi was plagued by accusations that Kenyans were being excluded, as well as protests against the corporate sponsorship and the hotel catering being provided by companies owned by some of Kenya's most hated capitalists.

He highlighted the February 2003 worldwide anti-war protest as the high-point of the movement, something that surprised me because living in New York at the time, I had no idea that the event had come out of the anti-capitalist movement. In fact, if you had said to most of those people standing on First Avenue on a bitter February afternoon that they were protesting against capitalism, they would have turned around immediately and gone to the nearest Starbucks. I accept his statement that the idea originated in a European Social Forum meeting, but I think it's a mistake to believe that anything more than a small fraction of those millions of antiwar protesters had a beef with capitalism. Most of them were simply protesting against a patently ridiculous war. As soon as they failed to stop it, they went home and haven't been to another protest since.

The point is important, because it casts doubt on the rest of his argument, and his conclusions. From the February 2003 "high-point" of millions of people in the streets, he charted a steady downward trajectory to the present day. I think this is misleading. The February 2003 event was an anomaly, a one-off spike in popular activism due to a specific event. It was not, in my view, much at all to do with anti-capitalism, and so to label the current movement somehow a failure because it no longer attracts those numbers is not fair.

His criticisms of the bureaucratisation of the Social Forums did seem valid, though. The mechanics of the forums, where decision-making is structureless and everyone has a veto, sound good in principle but cause problems in practice. In such a framework, the only people who have the time to go to endless, long meetings are an elite group of activist groups at the heart of the movement. Ordinary people simply don't have the time or energy to take a meaningful role, so decision-making becomes dominated by an elite. This was very interesting to me given my anarchist leanings, and is certainly something I have to think through properly.

The last real meeting before the closing rally was "A rebel's guide to Rosa Luxemburg" by Judy Cox. It was a very good overview of her life and thought, and I was glad I went. One question that I wanted to ask but didn't get a chance to, though: did Rosa Luxemburg ever in her life get anything wrong? I'm just curious, because she seems to be a hero to everyone on the left. Reformers love her because she rejected Lenin's vanguard socialism, while revolutionaries love her because she insisted on the importance of working-class revolutionary emancipation against those such as Kautsky who wanted to go down the road of reforming capitalism through the democratic process. And so every time her name is mentioned, a certain reverence tinges the conversation and all criticism is silenced.

Is it because she died so tragically young? Is it a socialist version of Elvis-mania? Or, more seriously, did she just not live long enough to make as many mistakes as others. Whatever it is, I am always left just wishing someone would say something bad about her -- not because I know of any reason not to admire her, but just to break the aura of sainthood and omniscience (she predicted the gulag! She predicted New Labour!) that too often surrounds her.

Another problem I had was the apparent paradox between a belief in working-class self-emancipation and an instinct to blame the leaders when it doesn't pan out as it should. (I'm concentrating on problems here but that doesn't mean I didn't like the speech - overall I thought it was great. Just don't see much point in repeating here the details of why Rosa Luxemburg is so fantastic -- you can find that in many, many places.) So, the problem I had was that Judy Cox said that the German proletariat was ready for revolution at the end of World War One and the only thing that held them back was the failure of the German socialist leaders who "failed to create a German revolution."

Well, if the German working class was truly ready to throw off the chains of capitalism, it shouldn't have mattered in the slightest what Karl Kautsky chose to do or not do. Of course, people do look to those in powerful positions and take a cue from them. But they can also choose to ignore the politicians and chart their own course. To suggest that the failure of the German revolution was all the fault of the leadership suggests that you don't actually have much faith in the working class to effect revolutionary change after all.

To be honest, I seize on this not because of Judy Cox particularly or even Rosa Luxemburg, but because this paradox seemed present throughout the event. I spent five days hearing that the working class will emancipate itself through revolution from below, and yet most of the discussion was about leadership and tactics from above. It suggested to me a kind of paternalistic attitude to "the workers" - of course they are the revolutionary heroes and we must salute them with raised fists, but they need guidance and direction from above if they are to make the right choices. The most truly socialist part of the whole conference for me was the meeting with the Argentinian workers who occupied their factories, and they wouldn't even have called themselves socialists!

Anyway, on to the final rally. Here the fist-raising and standing ovations and chanting and hymn-singing all got a bit much for me, I have to confess. To be honest I'm not sure why -- there's just something that always unnerves me about mass rallies where everyone thinks and acts in exactly the same way. The herd instinct of humanity, the overriding and bypassing of individual thought processes in favour of the collective, can be put to very good uses or very bad ones, and in history the uses have mostly been bad. Although this whole thing was extremely good-natured, I just couldn't shake the irrational fear that if a capitalist had walked on the stage he would have been set upon and lynched. Again let me emphasise, since I know things can be misinterpreted in the blogging world -- I don't for a moment think this would have happened, or that there was anything at all sinister about the gathering. It was just a feeling I had, and I recognise that the feeling is irrational and baseless but I had it nevertheless. It's something I always struggle with. Collective acts have been the most effective at liberating people, but I never feel comfortable when that collective mind takes hold. Maybe it's because I'm not really a "worker", and unlike some other people have no real interest in pretending that I am. Maybe lending support from the sidelines is my role. Maybe I don't have a role other than to get superseded and consigned to the dustbin of history. Maybe this is what makes me uncomfortable!

Well, despite the negative things I have said about the conference, I am truly glad I went. Over the five days, I can definitely say that the good far outweighed the bad. Highlights for me were the Argentinian factory workers for showing us what socialism is really all about, Slavoj Zizek for appearing to be utterly incomprehensible and yet actually communicating a lot of fascinating ideas, Michael Lowy for linking socialism and the environment very convincingly and not getting stuck in the quagmire of eco-bullshit (energy-efficient lightbulbs, carbon credits), and Tony Benn for making socialism fun.

I was also impressed by the format: roughly half an hour for the speaker, half an hour for comments from the audience, and ten minutes or so for the speaker to answer questions and wrap up. At first I was irritated by this - I wanted to hear from the expert who'd flown halfway across the world to speak to us, not from some lunatic picked out at random from the audience. However, over the five days I came to appreciate the value of this approach. Although there were some crazies and a fair number of people just taking an opportunity to publicise their pet cause, I would say the majority made intelligent and relevant comments which added something to the event and often made the speaker revise or clarify their earlier pronouncements. It also gave people a chance to get used to speaking and debating in public, and made it more of a democratic process rather than just a passive crowd listening to an expert.

And finally, with about ten events happening simultaneously for most of the conference, I am also left with a long list of speeches I would love to have heard but couldn't: The new scramble for Africa, Latin America--rising of the people, Capitalism and food, Alienation and liberation, Culture wars in Brazil, Who really ended slavery?, Class and sect in the Middle East, Pontecorvo, Beethoven, Cultural relativism, Communal living.... And I'm only up to Friday on the timetable! Can't wait for Marxism 2008.

Marxism 2007: Day Four (Sunday)

"Cuba after Castro" was a great talk, with one small problem: it wasn't about Cuba after Castro. The speaker, Mike Gonzalez, focused most of his talk on Cuba under Castro, and spent only the last few minutes talking about Cuba after Castro.

It wasn't the only speech at this conference to disregard its advertised topic, however, and the effect was not fatal. I learned a lot about the way power is wielded in Cuba, and the achievements and failures of Castro. It was probably the most balanced analysis I have heard: Cuba has become such a potent symbol of liberation that people on the left are often reticent to criticise it, particularly because there are plenty of people on the right lining up to do so. But Gonzalez struck the right balance, for me, of giving credit to Castro, Che Guevara and the rest for their tremendous achievement in liberating Cuba from the oppression of US-dominated capitalism, while not shying away from criticising the failures of the Castro regime in power.

His main area of criticism was the economy, and particularly the growing divide between the poor who subsist on inadequate state salaries and the elite who, through access to the tourism industry or other external-facing sectors, live a comfortable middle-class existence. The result is a dual economy, with two separate currencies existing side by side. The poor buy what basic goods they can in pesos, while foreigners and rich locals use a dollar-linked currency to buy luxuries (and even some non-luxuries like medicines - the basic drugs can be bought in pesos, but more specialised ones are only available in the dollarised currency which ordinary workers have no way of obtaining).

Of course, the main reasons for the hardship are the collapse of the Soviet Union, which reduced Cuba's productive capacity by 35%, and the US blockade. But Gonzalez argued that Cubans could potentially have accepted the hardship if it had been shared more equally among the whole population. Much worse than being poor is being poor and seeing others around you growing rich and living a good life. If ordinary people had a say in how Cuba was run, that would help too. But the reality, according to Gonzalez, is a highly centralised state mechanism with little power in the hands of the people and few avenues for legitimate dissent and criticism.

Again, he was clear about the reasons for this. In the context of US hostility and CIA assassination attempts, perhaps Castro felt he had no choice but to be suspicious of his enemies, and in the context of extreme economic hardship he took the decisions he felt necessary for the sake of survival. But the resulting Cuban state, while it deserves its status as a beacon for anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists around the world, is not something to be emulated in its specifics by the newly-emerging socialist states in Latin America or others that may appear elsewhere.

Next up was Tony Benn with a strange speech. I enjoyed it immensely, and felt it to be very clever, but then I looked at my notes and realised there was no real argument as far as I could see on the topic of "The left in power - possibilities and prospects." Whereas Mike Gonzalez in the first speech had chosen to answer a different question from that in his speech title, Tony Benn appeared to be answering no question at all.

I suppose it was more of an inspirational speech, a rallying of the troops, than anything else, so perhaps I shouldn't quibble. It certainly got the crowd clapping and contained some memorable lines, none of which will be as funny in cold type as they were with his excellent, rich delivery. I agreed with his plea for more unity among the left, when he read out a long, long list of all the parties: Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, Workers Revolutionary Party, Communist Party of Great Britain, Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), etc, etc, all in the rushed undertone of a mortgage advert warning that your-home-may-be-at-risk-if-you-do-not-keep-up-repayments-on-a-mortgage-or-other-loan-secured-upon-it. He then talked about the Workers Weekly, a publication that calls for unity on page one, and then denounces other leftist groups on pages two, three, four and five. Splintering and infighting is a real problem on the left, and it was good that he mentioned it.

He also talked about the need to talk less about ideology and more about meeting people's actual needs. For example, he remembered being told by Pat Stack of the Socialist Workers Party that "Capitalism is oppressing us, and we need to smash the state." His response was that if an old woman came to him and said her husband had just died and she needed his help in finding a bungalow to live in, he could say to her "Capitalism is oppressing you, and you need to smash the state." And she would reply, "That's very interesting, Tony, but what are my prospects for a bungalow?"

The speech was full of this sort of thing, and it worked extremely well. Probably not worth reproducing too much of it though - it's one of those cases where "you had to be there."

Slavoj Zizek's speech was the opposite. It would probably have helped a great deal not to be there. When Zizek writes in the New Left Review, I can take my time and digest his arguments on dialectical materialism at my leisure. When he is barking into a microphone at 100 miles per hour, ruffling his hair, picking at his shirt, stroking his beard and rustling his papers, it becomes more difficult. Given that I had worked a ten-hour night shift and come straight to the conference without any sleep, it was all a bit too much. About halfway through the speech, I lost the thread completely for a few minutes and just sat there letting the isms wash over me at lightning speed and not even attempting to fit them together. So this account will be somewhat fragmented and perhaps downright false representation of what Slavoj Zizek said at Marxism 2007. I'm hoping that a transcript will be produced at some point, although I doubt it: not even the most skilled stenographer could type that fast.

Anyway, I'm fairly certain about the first part. The topic was "Tolerance as a political category" and thankfully he did actually start by talking about tolerance as a political category. His central point was that the liberal view of racism as a question of tolerance is false and ridiculous. Martin Luther King Jr. never demanded tolerance; he demanded equality. Similarly feminists never demand tolerance from men; they want equality. For the liberal multiculturalists to demand tolerance is retrogressive; it implicitly validates the racist view that people from different ethnic groups are fundamentally irreconcilable, and all you can do is "tolerate" them.

From this he moved on to the culturalisation of politics. His idea was that in contemporary liberalism, societies are depoliticised and cultural issues are seen as the only valid ones. Further, culture itself is privatised and made into a set of personal idiosyncrasies, divorced from the history that created them. Real, vibrant, politicised culture is seen as dangerously close to fundamentalism; far preferable is a shallow identification with "culture" in the form of certain harmless customs, while remaining disconnected from the roots of those customs and happily immersed in capitalist universalism.

After that I'm afraid it all gets a bit vague. I know that he talked about four principal antagonisms within capitalism, which I think were biogenetics, intellectual property, slums and ecology. I think his point was that as capitalism moves beyond physical exploitation into areas where knowledge becomes as important economically as physical labour, the notion of private property becomes increasingly problematic. Hence the struggles to put patents on indigenous farming techniques or crop varieties, even to patent genes themselves, to own the stuff of life itself, to expand exponentially and deny the implied limits on private property.

On slums, he said that the slums are essentially a blank spot in many countries as far as the state is concerned, a no-go area. This, he said, creates an opportunity. If the 19th century was about politicising the industrial working class to defeat the bourgeoisie, and the 20th century was about awakening the rural populations of Asia and Africa, the 21st century will be about organising the masses of excluded slum dwellers. He saw Venezuela as a precursor to this: Chavez derived the bulk of his support from the slums, and it was the slum dwellers who defended him against the US-sponsored coup and restored him to power.

Then he talked about the ecology of fear. I think his point was that in opposing the environmental depredations of capitalism, ecology can become deeply conservative, reflexively opposing all change and progress and demanding a return to a state of natural harmony which Zizek said is mythical. He talked about the connections between environmentalists and conservative US creationists, saying that it was a natural link to make: both believe in the perfection of nature, either as designed by God or by nature itself. Both, he believes, are misguided. The lesson of Darwinism is that Nature doesn't exist -- at least, it certainly does not exist as a static, perfectly balanced thing that we humans messed up by our greed and folly. It has always changed and evolved, and will always do so. Fear of apocalypse and attempts to regress to a mythical golden age of natural harmony are not, he said, the best way to deal with the real environmental problems we face.

So, lots to chew on, and as I said I'm sure he said a lot more that I didn't manage to absorb. Although it was quite challenging to listen to, I much prefer this kind of speech to one that tells me what I already know or is just cheerleading for a cause I already believe in. There is a lot to think about here, and I am very much looking forward to reading his book "Welcome to the Desert of the Real", which I should be soon getting as a freebie for re-subscribing to New Left Review.

He also made an interesting point at the end, when he was asked an asinine question by some Socialist Worker guy who was "troubled" that a Marxist philosopher would give a speech without mentioning Marx's theory of surplus value. To me, that encapsulated the difference between the rigidity of an activist who takes one idea and repeats it ad nauseam, and a philosopher who tries to break new ground. One thing that "troubled" me about the whole weekend was the tendency of some (by no means all) of the speakers to be trapped in a time warp. It's still 1848 and the industrial working class is still predominant and Marx is still a god whose writings must be preserved on tablets of stone and memorised in all their infinite perfection and passed on in reverent tones to other eagerly attending comrades.

Zizek's polite response was that, essentially, the world has changed just a little bit since Marx wrote Das Kapital. It had even changed by the end of Marx's life, something he recognised in his later writings when he acknowledged that the labour theory of value breaks down when knowledge becomes a primary source of value. For example, he said, if you apply Marx's theory strictly to the relations between an imperialist power and a Third World country, then theoretically they are exploiting us. Unfortunately he got shouted down at this point by someone in the crowd who misunderstood, thinking Zizek was saying that Third World people are indeed exploiting us, rather than pointing out a flaw in the theory. So I didn't get to hear him explain what he meant - will have to go back to Marx and try to work that one out.

Zizek said there was still a lot to be learned from Marx, but that we must resuscitate his theory of value for the 21st century, and nobody to his knowledge has done that yet. He said it's not enough to say that we know the world is unfair and we know what we have to do; theory, he said, is important. We have to understand the world comprehensively and develop a new theory of how to change it - basically someone needs to write a Das Kapital for the 21st century. You can adapt Marx to fit new situations, but you'll end up distorting his theories so much that it raises very serious problems to which we don't have solutions yet. I think he sensed that all of this was a bit too pessimistic for the true believers in the crowd, and so he threw out a line about the enemy knowing even less than us, about Bush being stupid and about his stupidity being symptomatic of a "structural stupidity" in the ruling class in general. So the crowd was won back and he got his huge round of applause.

Marxism 2007: Day Three (Saturday)

"Engels and the rise of class society" wasn't quite what I expected. Firstly the speaker was not Mark Thomas the comedian-activist, but Mark Thomas the manager of socialist bookshop Bookmarks. And secondly, he was talking not about modern class society, but about the development of class in ancient and prehistoric societies.

Fortunately, neither of these proved problematic. He was an interesting and knowledgeable speaker, and the topic raised valuable points. His basic thesis was that the competitiveness, greed and selfishness that now seem so pervasive are actually fairly recent phenomena. For the vast majority of human history, we lived in egalitarian societies, where sharing was the primary value. So the frequently-quoted notion that human nature is inherently greedy and competitive is, basically, garbage. What we see now is due to the capitalist system we are forced to live in, not hard-wired into our souls. This is something I've speculated about in previous posts, but it was nice to have a slightly more informed opinion on the matter.

Engels explored these points through his 1884 book "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", in which he shows that the class society only developed when societies started to settle in bigger towns and introduce the division of labour. Before that, all members of the society contributed to its welfare in similar ways, and so there was no need for inequality. If some were better hunters than others, they would gain prestige not by boasting about it but by sharing their food with others. Women were valued because they performed the vital "gathering" role, a much more reliable means of sustenance than hunting.

All very interesting, although I wish Thomas had also addressed the issue of what happens in the transition to more complex societies. If class divisions and inequalities are not an inherent feature of early societies, fine. But we are not hunter gatherers any more, and have no desire to be (well, I don't anyway. Tesco may have its faults, but I prefer it to a confrontation with a mastodon). So although class is not inherent to human nature, it does seem a fairly uniform feature of the more technologically developed societies in the world. Why is this? Could it have been any different? Answering these questions may help in our ongoing struggle to find an alternative to the class society today. To be fair, however, it was probably beyond the scope of this particular talk.

Continuing the historical theme, I went next to "Africa before the slave trade" by Gary McFarlane. To be honest, this was a big disappointment. Perhaps the problem was that it is such a huge subject. He was trying to cover every major civilisation in Africa over thousands of years of history, and the result was that the talk became a recitation of facts with very little relevance or depth. These people traded salt with some other people who produced betel nuts, this town had extensive earthworks, that town had beautiful pottery. To make it worse, he had clearly not prepared at all. He had an enormous pile of papers on his desk and kept shuffling through them with much umming and ahhing as he decided what to talk about next. I'm sorry, but if you're going to talk about the history of an entire continent in 40 minutes, you have to prepare. Bringing along your course notes and reading out bits at random just doesn't cut it. I don't feel as if I learned anything, which is a shame. Perhaps choosing just to give a snapshot of Africa in 1500, rather than covering its entire history, would have been good. Or pick out just a few civilisations and talk about them in more detail. Or shoot Gary McFarlane and get someone else to do the talk.

Next I went to "Accumulation - the driving force of capitalism" by Joseph Choonara. Unfortunately Joseph Choonara looked about twelve years old, and after my disastrous experience on day one I decided to cut and run. Sorry Joseph! Very unfair, I know, but I just couldn't face another dud. So I went instead to Socialism and Democracy by Tom Hickey, but after waiting for 20 minutes we were told he wasn't coming due to a bereavement. Sorry Tom. So I hurried off to catch what was left of "Gun crime - who is to blame?" As I feared, the answer was predictable. Racism, schools, the government, the media and slavery were to blame. All of this is true, but I learned nothing new from the event, which was why I didn't choose it in the first place. There were no suggestions for dealing with the problem - just lots of "the government should..." and "the schools should..." and "the media should..." Well I'm sorry but the government won't and the schools won't and the media won't. So what can WE do? I find that blaming racist institutions, as true and valid as it is, has the effect of disempowering the individual. If the institutions of the state are failing young black men, why rely on them for a solution? Let's create our own institutions, our own schools, our own media. I would have loved a real discussion of some creative solutions, rather than a mere listing of all the facts that everyone in that audience knew to be true before they walked in.

Finally I went to see Richard Seymour on "What's wrong with conspiracy theories?" In fact I'm not that interested in conspiracy theories, but the speaker is the author of a blog I like and I was curious to see what he was like as a speaker. Quite good, as it turns out. I particularly liked the first part of his speech, which was about the ruling classes using conspiracy theories themselves, for example Hoover in Cold War America seeing reds under every bed, or Burke and other conservative commentators on the French Revolution dismissing it as a conspiracy of a few ringleaders taking the gullible masses along with them. It is thus a way of delegitimising popular discontent and mass movements. Think of modern-day strikes or protests where the authorities target the "ringleaders". There's a good summary of this part of the speech on Seymour's own blog.

Unfortunately, however, most of the speech and almost all of the comments and questions afterwards were focused on 9/11 conspiracies, which he was basically concerned with debunking. It soon became clear that this was some kind of internal debate in the Socialist Workers Party, the organisers of the conference. They were concerned with how to speak to 9/11 conspiracy theorists, a topic of no interest to me whatsoever. In fact, 9/11 conspiracy theories are of no interest to me whatsoever. Did the government know? Did they arrange it? I don't know. What I do know is that they have killed 600,000 people in Iraq. Even if they did kill 3,000 Americans, it kind of pales in comparison. Unless, of course, you subscribe to the 100:1 rule I mentioned in a previous post (1 white life = 100 "other" lives).

Another thing I know is that we are never going to find out "the truth about 9/11" by going on the internet. If the U.S. government is clever and duplicitous enough to kill 3,000 of its own citizens, it's probably clever enough not to put the evidence on the internet. You can study shadows on grainy photos all night looking for evidence that the plane was coming from a different angle or that there was no plane at all or that a particular kind of explosive was used. But you might as well just masturbate. The whole thing is a ridiculous delusion, narcissistic in its obsession with becoming the next Woodward and Bernstein, lazy in its refusal to go beyond surfing the web for answers, and utterly racist in its assumption that the hypothetical murder of 3,000 white people is more important than the real, indisputable murder of 600,000 Iraqis. I was disappointed that Seymour cut short what was starting to be a very interesting speech in order to pay so much unwarranted attention to this bullshit.

To be fair, he denounced the conspiracists himself for similar reasons, and said the only way we'd get to the truth was by overthrowing the government. I agree, but I think there's also a quicker way: old-fashioned reporting. Talking to people, developing sources, following leads. If it was a conspiracy, a lot of people must have known about it, and a lot of those people are probably quite pissed off about the US government right now after the failures of Afghanistan and Iraq. They might be willing to talk. This is how every major conspiracy was uncovered in the past. Think about Gary Webb exposing the CIA's operation to bring crack to the ghettos, or Woodward and Bernstein uncovering Watergate. The question to me is why today's media are not doing this. I think there are a lot of reasons. Reflexive support for the government, inability to believe their own government capable of such a thing, unwillingness to piss off the sources they rely on for news, the dominance of advertisers, cost-cutting and the consequent reluctance to let a reporter spend months on an investigation that might come to nothing. Maybe, like me, they don't see it as that important compared with reporting on the real crimes being committed by the US government every day. But it's clear to me that the truth will only come out in the near future through a dogged piece of investigative reporting. Otherwise it'll be the revolution that Seymour hopes for, or a release of official documents in a hundred years time when nobody cares any more. But Googling flight manifests is a complete waste of time. And talking about people who Google flight manifests is an even bigger waste of time. And writing about people who talk about people who Google flight manifests is... Oops. Sorry. I'll stop now.

Marxism 2007: Day Two

The day started perfectly. A last-minute programme change and poor organisation meant that only two other people turned up to hear Ernesto Gonzalez and Andres Lofiego talk about their experience with occupying a printing factory in Buenos Aires. Sad for Ernesto and Andres, but lucky for me, because it turned the event into an intimate conversation rather than formal speeches.

It was fascinating to hear them talk about the occupation, particularly because apparently none of the workers were revolutionary or even left-wing - they were quite conservative in fact. It made me realise what people are capable of when circumstances force them to change. Ernesto was one of eight remaining workers in the Chilavert printing factory in 2002 - most of the others had left as Argentina's economy collapsed and the factory owner had not paid them for months. The ones who stayed were the older workers, the more loyal or faithful ones who believed that things would turn around. Well, they did not. The factory went bankrupt and they all lost their jobs.

But rather than accept this, they occupied the factory. They reasoned that they were owed months of wages, and as workers they had a stronger claim to the factory than any other creditors. The police came in massive force to evict them, but the neighbourhood rallied round to protect them, throwing up barricades in the street and putting their own bodies in the way, betting correctly that the beleaguered government would not dare to start a confrontation with a large group of middle-aged women, especially as people like Andres Lofiego were there with cameras to document everything.

Although the police did not use force in the end, they did continue to blockade the factory for months, stopping any delivery lorries from getting through. A neighbour helped, though, by knocking a hole in his wall and letting the workers pass through the books they had printed, and then taking them off in his car to deliver to the customer. This went on for several months before they were able to join with other worker-occupied factories in Buenos Aires and lobby the local government for a law recognising their right to run the factory. They eventually obtained this, and are still running the factory today as a workers' cooperative. The legal status was a little complicated, something slightly short of outright ownership, but enough to enable them to run the factory by themselves without owing rent to anybody. Anyway, it was fascinating to hear the story unfold. They basically had no ideology, no plan at all, but all they knew was that they had to keep on working to avoid the destitution that was engulfing many around them. They couldn't let the factory die. I bought a book of photographs of the occupied factories, "No Pasar" by Andres Lofiego (printed and published, of course, by the Chilavert Cooperative!).

Next was Ghanaian activist Mani Tanoh speaking about the legacy of Kwame Nkrumah and the dream of African liberation. He praised Nkrumah's strategy, laid out at the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, of mass mobilisation of workers and peasants to defeat colonialism. This was spectacularly more successful than the previous elitist movement of academics and professionals who confined themselves to polite petitions to the King. By 1951 a general strike in Ghana had catapulted him to leadership of the country, and by 1957 independence was won.

Tanoh was very critical, however, of what Nkrumah did once he gained power. He said Nkrumah posited the state as the only line of defence for the Ghanaian people against Western imperialism, and claimed any criticism of the state was a dangerous act of disloyalty. In 1964 Nkrumah declared a one-party state, and since he was head of the ruling party for life, that meant that effectively he was the ruler of Ghana for as long as he pleased. Everything was done in the name of the workers and peasants, but these classes were embodied in the person of the President. Dissent and class treason were made synonymous, and crushed. Tanoh drew a parallel with Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe today, saying that by blaming every act of dissent on Western imperialism and demanding total unity in the form of obeisance to the state, he makes the same mistake as Nkrumah. In both cases, Western powers are certainly interfering (Nkrumah himself was eventually brought down by a CIA-backed coup). But ordinary people also have real grievances which they are not allowed to express without being labelled traitors and supporters of Western imperialism.

Michael Lowy then spoke after lunch about ecosocialism. Unlike the disastrous "ecology" talk yesterday, this one contained some real content. Lowy was quite a dry speaker but at least he was lucid, and most importantly he had something to say. Lowy pointed out the disturbing trend among world leaders towards talking about "adapting" to climate change. He highlighted a recent "Green Paper" produced by the European Union that said essentially climate change can't be stopped so we have to adapt by building sea walls and relocating coastal towns inland, but don't worry, there will be great business opportunities in all this reconstruction!

His point was that we can do better. Capitalism can't, clearly. It's own leaders have concluded that it can't, and they are right. A system that measures success by growth in GDP, the amount of stuff produced, is completely incompatible with an age in which we need to cut down drastically on the amount of stuff we produce. Hence ecosocialism as the solution (the 'eco' added because socialism has also traditionally had a tendency to emphasise the production of large amounts of stuff, just under new management).

Lowy pointed out that scaling back on what we produce doesn't necessarily have to reduce our quality of life. Most of the growth in GDP does not improve our lives one bit. The entire arms industry could go, for example, as could a large number of the gadgets and fashion accessories that we didn't know we wanted until some advertiser told us we did. More important areas of production, like education, healthcare, food and housing, could be increased. It's about priorities. We should not let a group of business executives decide our priorities, nor should we let a technocratic state bureaucracy do it a la Soviet Union and Five Year Plans. We should decide our priorities by democratic planning. Vote on how much public transport you want this year. How many schools. How many hospitals. Trust the people to make the right decisions with the information available. If they're free from the bombardment of advertising and corporate propaganda, and if they feel that they have some control over their lives and the political process, Lowy believes they will vote wisely.

As with all ideas that hinge on revolutionary transformation, he faced the question of how we get from A to B. His answer was that people do not learn through reading the learned articles we put together in left-wing magazines and books. Instead they learn through their own experience. So we must support even the smallest campaigns, the tiniest baby steps towards the goals we believe in. Because if these struggles are successful, those involved in them will have their consciousness raised, will believe that they can achieve things, and will take the next step themselves. Lecturing people and thrusting pamphlets in their face, or refusing to get involved with day-to-day issues because the participants are not revolutionary enough, is counterproductive and doomed to failure. A utopia doesn't come about by waiting for it or even writing about it - it comes about through people building it brick by brick.

Finally Stathis Kouvelakis spoke about "France in revolt." He was essentially exploring the apparent paradox in French political life: mass hostility to neoliberal policies (demonstrated time and again through strikes, student protests, the "no" vote to the European constitution, etc.) and yet electoral success for the most right-wing presidential candidate in decades. His explanation was that social resistance does not automatically produce political results. Somebody (i.e. left-wing political parties) needs to step in and translate popular discontent into the political arena, to give voters a realistic option.

The left-wing parties in France failed spectacularly to do this. The Socialist candidate Segolene Royal spoke out against almost everything the left believes in and proposed draconian law and order policies like sending young offenders to military boot camps. And on the far left there were four separate candidates, splitting the vote and making it impossible for any of them to have a chance. Kouvelakis said that in politics there can never be a void; when a political vacuum starts to develop, someone fills it. The left failed, so Sarkozy stepped in, offering a strong, authoritarian, law and order campaign which at least offered a solution to France's problems, no matter how unpalatable to many people.

So, he said, we should never be content with single successes on social issues. We should always push to take popular mobilisations one step further and achieve concrete political effects. Otherwise the momentum dissipates and the moment is lost, allowing the right to step back in and offer its familiar promise of strength, order and economic growth.

Marxism 2007

I am attending the oddly-named Marxism 2007 conference for the next few days. I say "oddly-named" because the Bearded Wonder himself doesn't get much of a look-in as far as I can see - the usual broader left-wing causes like Iraq, Palestine, racism, the environment, etc., seem to be covered much more extensively than the Grundrisse.

Anyway, it started today, and the offering was mixed. First up was a speech on the environment by someone called Alison Smith, and I'm sorry but it was dreadful. There was nothing in the speech that I disagreed with, or that anyone in that audience could have disagreed with, and that was probably what was so dreadful about it. No new information, no ideas, no different perspectives, no plans of action. Just a recitation of how capitalism and neoliberalism are really bad things and inevitably mess up the environment. And the delivery was as flat as a hedgehog in the fast lane of the M25. To be fair, she was very young, and so I feel a little bad about being so critical. But she had no business opening a major conference.

What was worse, the comments and questions afterwards made the speech look good by comparison. Never in my life have I heard such ill-considered, self-centred drivel. For the second time in two posts I find myself reminded of George Orwell, who wrote in the Road to Wigan Pier about "the horrible--the really disquieting--prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England." Looking through Orwell's list now, actually most of the things he complains about actually seem quite unobjectionable (fruit-juice drinker??), and probably there's nothing much wrong with the weirdos who got up to speak today. I suppose I'm just too conventional. But I can't help it: the high crank count at these events does bother me.

Anyway, things got much better in the second event. Ghada Karmi, a veteran Palestinian activist, spoke about the case for a one-state solution. Essentially her argument was that a separate Palestinian state in the territory allotted by Israel would simply not be viable. She said Israel is intent on keeping the settlements in the West Bank, as well as the whole of the Jordan Valley (which is crucial because of water rights), and claimed that by the time you add in all the roads and infrastructure of the settlements, this would equal 50% of the West Bank. The remaining half would be tiny islands of Palestine separated from each other by Israel-only roads. The best agricultural land would be in Israel, the water aquifers would be in Israel, and Palestine would be so scattered and hopeless that it would not survive as an independent state and would have to confederate with the neighbouring state of Jordan. It would also be impossible, of course, for the Palestinian refugees to return to a land that could not even support the existing inhabitants.

Further, she said that even if by some miracle Israel agreed to withdraw from the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, the existence of a state exclusively designated for one people would be wrong. She described it as a step backward, completely anachronistic in an age when all over the world people are moving across borders more freely than ever before. The solution, in her view, is a state in which Jews, Christians and Arabs live together in peace. It may sound idealistic, but in the history of the Middle East it has been the dominant model. Only the creation of the Israeli state and the displacement of the Palestinians changed all that. Security would no longer be an issue, because Palestinians would not have a reason to be suicide bombers. Clearly it would not be easy, but she argued quite convincingly that it would be more viable than a two-state solution, and certainly more so than the non-solution in place today.

Tomorrow I'll be learning about Nkrumah and the dream of African liberation, Ecosocialism, and Rosa Luxemburg among other things. What I'm looking forward to most of all is hearing Slavoj Zizek on Sunday talking about tolerance as a political category. There's also Tony Benn, Gary Younge, Paul Gilroy... Can't wait. Unfortunately Istvan Meszaros cancelled - was looking forward to hearing him :(

Shorthand thinking

Newspapers face a fundamental design problem. They need to put headlines in huge, bold letters to grab the attention of would-be readers, and yet they have very narrow columns.

The solution is to abbreviate remorselessly, creating new words, or new meanings for old words, if necessary. Thus, for example, "conspiracy" becomes "plot", "consider" becomes "weigh", and "investigation" becomes "probe", a word always uncomfortably reminiscent for me of colonoscopies. "PM weighs bomb plot probe" is the kind of nonsense that results.


The problem has become acute in the last five years because the buzzword of the age, "terrorism", has 9 letters and is thus annoyingly long. So we shorten it to "terror", a word with a completely different meaning. "Terrorism" means actions designed to create fear among its victims. "Terror" is the emotional reaction to terrorism. It is not synonymous with terrorism. The distinction is important. When we say we are waging war on "terror", we are launching air strikes and missiles against an emotion. This is absurd, and it's hardly surprising that it's not working out too well.


Some may argue that we all know what is meant. Terror is simply a new shorthand for terrorism. Well, I think that language is important. When language is distorted and fuzzy, thinking tends to be distorted and fuzzy too. Actions tend to be ill thought out and unsuccessful, unforeseen consequences tend to arise. Stop me if any of this is starting to sound familiar.

As George Orwell wrote in an essay on "Politics and the English Language" in 1946, "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

Sorry, George, but things have got a lot worse since you left us. To move on to just one more example out of the dozens I could give, "Islamic fundamentalism" is clearly far too long to appear in a news article, let alone a headline. So, to save column inches, "Islamic fundamentalism" becomes "Islamism", which very quickly becomes "Islam". So rather than tackling the problem of small groups of fundamentalists, we try to tackle the "problem" of Islam, a diverse religion of more than a billion people. On the morning after the recent failed terrorist attacks here in London, for example, the Daily Express editorialised against not violence or terrorism or extremist hate speech, but against multiculturalism. The considered opinion of "The World's Greatest Newspaper" (their quote, not mine) was that we can avoid future car-bomb attacks by banning Muslim women from wearing the veil. Is that fuzzy or distorted enough for you?

I singled out the World's Greatest Newspaper, but in fact the reaction to the "terror" attacks has been a stream of utter garbage on all sides. Shorthand language results in shorthand thinking. Ideas are abbreviated to fit into a small space, not nurtured and allowed to breathe and grow. Perhaps salvation lies in widescreen TVs. But I doubt it. After all, 24-hour news channels ought to provide a forum for true, rigorous, in-depth analysis of issues. Instead they provide the familiar rushed, slapdash half-hour nightly news package and repeat it 48 times.

Orwell in 1946 thought there was hope for the English language: "The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble." Unfortunately he then gives examples of cliches which have been stamped out by concerned defenders of the English language, and most of them (e.g. "leave no stone unturned") have since returned. I wonder if we have reached a point now where our thoughts have become so foolish and our language so ugly and inaccurate that there's no real hope for an improvement. Unless.... unless... I have an idea! Let's declare War on Language!