LeftAlign

George Carlin - The American Dream

2007-08-10T11:36:00.001+01:00

Marxism 2007: Day Five (Monday)

2007-07-13T11:59:00.001+01:00

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)

2007-07-10T20:37:00.000+01:00

"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)

2007-07-10T17:29:00.000+01:00

"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

2007-07-06T20:26:00.000+01:00

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

2007-07-05T21:49:00.000+01:00

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

2007-07-04T15:49:00.000+01:00

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!

Get in touch with your inner racist!

2007-07-04T14:02:00.000+01:00

When I lived in New York, there was a small shop across the street that was owned by a man from Afghanistan. I used to visit him in the days after September 11, and he had a bewildered, beleaguered look about him. Business was slack, he said, and the few people who did still come into his store were often either cold or abusive. Whereas on September 10 he was the local newsagent, on September 11 he suddenly became a "Muslim", and a national of an enemy country to boot.

Since then, I have been very interested in what happens to Muslims every time there is a terrorist attack and the official panic level hits "elevated" or "dark orange" or whatever it is right now. And I've noticed something different since I moved back to England, something best expressed by a guy from Kashmir I was talking to yesterday. I asked him if he'd seen any hostility in the last few days and he told me no, none at all. Then when we'd been chatting a little more, and I'd given some examples of the backlash in America after September 11, he said, "British people are not like that. They might hate you, but they keep it on the inside." Then he said something the words of which I can't remember exactly, but his point was that a lot of British people are racist, but they are mostly nice to him on a day-to-day level so he can make do with that.

This sort of makes sense to me, and it ties in with what others have told me too. Of course it's not scientific by any means, so I'd be interested to hear what anyone else thinks. But if it's true that Brits tend to be racist on the inside while Americans are racist on the outside, my question is: which is better? To express racism openly, or to hide it inside? If it's expressed, clearly it causes great pain to the recipient of the abuse, and it may also incite others to share the same views. But at least then it can be challenged in the open and exposed as the ignorance it is. If it's repressed, there's the danger that it just festers and breeds more resentment, more violence, more support for draconian, racist legislation. And you end up with a country that's tolerant in word, but racist in deed.

I am not sure about the answers to these questions, except for the obvious one that it's better neither to express racism nor to feel it inside. That's clearly the goal, but I'm interested in how to deal with the other 90% of white people who harbour racist tendencies to one degree or another. I am deeply concerned, in particular, about the danger posed by "closet" racists, those who think of themselves as liberal and tolerant because they've never called anyone a paki, but who gladly go along with racial profiling, torture camps, pre-emptive wars, assassinations, "surgical" missile strikes and whatever else is deemed necessary to keep them safe from those angry, threatening brown folk. But I'm not sure it would be that great for them all to come out of the closet either. In theory they would be challenged and defeated by less ignorant people around them. But in reality perhaps the good would be drowned out and the ignorant would gain strength. Perhaps we would simply regress about 30 years to the time when racist abuse was rife in all areas of life and even openly racist TV shows went unchallenged.

In any case, as a white man, I don't think I really have the right to provide answers, since I have no experience of being the recipient of racist abuse. My instinct is to say that when negative feelings are repressed they always multiply and become more dangerous, but I would not be the one to bear the consequences if white people were to go around expressing their hatreds and fears openly. So I'll throw it open for comments. Would love to hear some other views.

Happy July 4th!

2007-07-03T21:45:00.000+01:00

As Americans celebrate their Independence Day tomorrow by grilling dead animals and hoisting flags, I have a proposal to make for the rest of the world: let's declare our independence from America.

So many people are doing it already - the new left-wing leaders of South America are paying off their debts to the Washington-controlled IMF and World Bank and creating their own Banco del Sur so that they may finally control their own economies rather than seeing them destroyed by the prescriptions of American economists. Europe is finally shaking off the illusions of the post-World War Two, Cold War era and realising that the United States is the biggest threat to world stability and viability today. The Middle East is doing its best to pry itself out from under Uncle Sam's boot and that of it's Israeli proxy, at the cost of rivers of blood. Africans are challenging the unfair trade rules that see rich US farmers paid $10 billion a year in subsidies so that they can flood African markets with cheap goods and destroy local producers. Asian governments are quietly buying up hundreds of billions of dollars of Treasury bonds, giving them the power literally to pull the plug on the USA should they choose to do so. Only the UK is still clinging to America's coat-strings, and will probably keep doing so right to the end, a fitting fate for the nation that inflicted this cancerous sore on the world in the first place.

The "family jewels" released by the CIA last week document only a fraction of the damage done by the United States in its half-century of global hegemony. Wars started, democracies toppled, dictators installed, countless millions of lives lost, hopes dashed, futures blunted, economies irreparably damaged, environments ravaged. The world can't take much more of it. So let's celebrate July 4th by saying "Enough!" Let's declare our independence from America once and for all. Happy July 4th!

"The Muslims are breeding"

2007-06-27T12:28:00.000+01:00

It's sad that there's a site called "Islamophobia Watch." Not, as its critics would argue, because there's no such thing as Islamophobia and it's all just political correctness gone mad, but because it shows that every day, several times a day, someone makes some flagrantly ignorant, racist attack on Muslims. And these attacks are published not in the fringe newsletters of right-wing nuts, but in mainstream newspapers and magazines. So it's very sad that this site has to exist, but I'm glad that someone is drawing attention to this stuff.

Today's offering is particularly shocking. It's about a cruise sponsored by the American conservative National Review magazine, the theme of which is the takeover of Europe by Muslims. It's a familiar, and very tired, theme. Europe is being taken over by the "enemy within", turning into an Islamofascist, Sharia-ruled Eurabia. And it's all the fault of those weak-kneed lefties who, by criticizing the policies of our governments, prove that they really want to put Osama bin Laden in Buckingham Palace. Yawn. Honestly, you'd think there were enough real problems to worry about in the world (global warming? poverty? war? disease? the Daily Mail?) without having to spin entirely new ones from the cloth of your own paranoid racist delusions.

But what was particularly disturbing about this latest example was the language used. Lots of talk of breeding rates and racial purity. This is new, to me at least. This is no longer mere ignorance, but extremely dangerous ignorance. The sort of ignorance of which fascism is made. Sound alarmist? Well, I'm sorry but when people start saying "'The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they'll have the whole of Europe", I get alarmed. When they complain that "the European races are too self-absorbed to breed" but that the Muslims are multiplying quickly, I get alarmed. I think of Jim Crow, Alfred Rosenberg and a whole load of other evil shit that I thought we'd got past long ago. And I get very scared for the future of Europe -- not because of the imagined Muslim hordes massing at the gates of Vienna, but because history shows that when white people get fearful of a particular "racial" group, very very bad things can happen.

Heal Thyself

2007-06-26T23:01:00.000+01:00

If, like me, you're a meat-eater, you NEED to watch the video over at The Heathlander. Personally I love a bacon sandwich. But I am becoming more and more incapable of reconciling that with the way animals are treated. I need to be morally consistent in my life, but so often I fail when it comes down to it. I've cut back massively, I only buy organic meat, but I'm becoming convinced that it's not enough. Watching a video like that certainly pushes me closer to all-out vegetarianism.

Reading Chomsky

2007-06-26T19:12:00.000+01:00

When I first started reading Noam Chomsky's work it was with a large amount of, dare I say it, shock and awe. Every few sentences I went scurrying off to the copious footnotes, unable to believe that the US really sponsored THAT coup or financed THAT dictator or attempted THAT assassination.

Now the facts are more familiar to me, but still I usually get something new from his work, or at least new weaponry for an old idea. His piece in the June issue of Monthly Review, for example, produced two particularly interesting passages.

The first was a reminder that globalization and neoliberalism are misnomers:

Official globalization is committed to so-called neoliberalism, also a highly misleading term: the regime is not new, and it is not liberal. Neoliberalism is essentially the policy imposed by force on the colonies since the eighteenth century, while the currently wealthy countries radically violated these rules, with extensive reliance on state intervention in the economy and resort to measures that are now banned in the international economic order. That was true of England and the countries that followed its path of protectionism and state intervention, including Japan, the one country of the South that escaped colonization and the one country that industrialized. These facts are widely recognized by economic historians.

The simple fact that all the powerful nations in the world became powerful by protecting themselves economically, while the nations that were forced to open their doors to free trade are still recovering from it, is completely at odds with what most people in the West believe. Unfortunately conversations about 19th-century tariff regimes do not engage many people's attention, but the point is an important one.

The second point that Chomsky makes is also something that should really be obvious but isn't. Having explained why the US has a strategic need to control the Middle East and defeat nationalism or self-determination, and has made this the centrepiece of its foreign policy since World War Two, he says:

This is the barest sketch of the relevant global context over what to do in Iraq. But these critical matters are scarcely mentioned in the ongoing debate about the problem of greatest concern to Americans. They are barred by a rigid doctrine. It is unacceptable to attribute rational strategic-economic thinking to one’s own state, which must be guided by benign ideals of freedom, justice, peace, and other wonderful things. That leads back again to a very severe crisis in Western intellectual culture, not of course unique in history, but with dangerous portent.

I am reminded of the days before the Iraq war, when I was a student in New York and went on marches and attended debates and tried to make sense of what was happening. Try to claim that oil had something to do with the planned war and you were labelled a cynic, a hater of the West, or a conspiracy theorist. Chomsky claims that we readily attribute strategic-economic interests to our enemies, but I'm not sure that's true. I think instead we demonize our enemies so much that their actions become completely incomprehensible except as manifestations of pure evil. Thus Iran's attempts to acquire a nuclear capability are not seen as a rational response to open threats of aggression from the US and Israel, but as the crazy manoeuvrings of a radical Islamofascist demagogue.

One other thing worth mentioning is the delicious image of Blair's Britain as “the spear carrier for the pax americana,” a phrase originally coined by Michael MccGwire and one I shall also be borrowing in future.

Who's your audience?

2007-06-26T11:29:00.001+01:00

I love watching Chris Rock. He's one of the few stand-up comedians who is pretty much guaranteed to make me laugh every time I watch him.

However, watching Chris Rock videos on YouTube recently proved to be a very different experience from renting Chris Rock videos from Blockbuster. On YouTube, you get to see exactly what people are interested in. And that brings up important questions of who the audience is, and why exactly they are laughing.

For example, you see that by far the most popular Chris Rock video, viewed 1.6 million times, is a clip where he asks "Who's more racist? White people or black people?" The answer he gives is "Black people. Because we hate black people too." And he then goes into a ten-minute routine criticising all the things he hates about "niggers", his term for a subset of black people who conform to pretty much all the prejudices held by white people, by being stupid, lazy, unemployed, criminal, etc. etc.

Now, who is the audience and why are they laughing? At the live event, the audience was predominantly black. It was an internal dialogue among black people, and they were presumably laughing because they recognised some of the things he was talking about and were similarly frustrated with the SMALL SUBSET of black people who behave in ways they don't like.

On YouTube, however, the audience was very different. From the comments, it was clear that most of them were white, and used Chris Rock's remarks as confirmation of their own racist beliefs about ALL black people. There was the guy who pointed out that a better term to use would have been "porch monkey." Then there was:

"I totally agree with this guy. I hate ignorant niggas. It's stupid how they support ignorance."

"USA is fucked due to multiculturalism. EU will be fucked in 20 years due to multiculturalism. Asia will be ok. Maybe Russia too. Multiculturalism destroys nations. "

"And this is why I dont give charity money, why I will NEVER help a black person in distress, I will just walk by.They are the real racists in america and the biggest most disgusting hypocrites in the history of the world. Ive had so many bad experiences with hateful blacks that when katrina happend I smiled :) "

"Africa is like a supermarket, food all over. Whites survived and prospered with much less. The only ones not capable of surviving are the blacks. Black africa is a complete mess. And in the US? At the bottom, like everywhere. Dumb, criminal fuckers! "

And on, and on, and on. 3,611 comments. I only read a few pages, but the ignorance and racism far outweighed the isolated pockets of sense. What they liked about the video was first that Chris Rock confirmed their own belief that black people are more racist than white people (something it's clear that Chris Rock doesn't really believe if you watch the rest of his material, but how many of those people are going to do that?). And then second, they liked being able to laugh, guilt-free, at the stereotypes and prejudices that they're not allowed to perpetuate any more because of the hated Political Correctness and Multiculturalism that are destroying their society. Quite a few of the comments were by people who had nothing to say but were clearly just itching to type out the N word and post it on the internet without fear of getting flamed.

So it's clear that Chris Rock's act becomes something entirely different when posted on YouTube. To some extent, this has been the case for a long time. Videos have been available for years, and white supremacists could easily have watched them. But somehow I think most of those 1.6 million people, if they were walking the aisles of Blockbuster, would head straight past Chris Rock, simply seeing a black man on the cover and not suspecting the thrills of anti-black racism that they could indulge in by taking it out. The internet changes things: they can now search for "black people are more racist than white people" and come straight to Chris Rock.

I'm not entirely sure what the implications of this are. Should Chris Rock, or any other comedian or satirist, be aware of the way their words will be misinterpreted in the new YouTube world? Should they change their acts? Play not to the intimate, theatre audience in front of them but to the wider internet audience? It would be a great shame if they felt compelled to do that, but then it must also be a shame for Chris Rock if he strays onto YouTube and sees the twisted uses being made of his work by an audience he never suspected he would reach.

The crime of compassion

2007-06-25T20:30:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I think I have become so cynical that I am no longer capable of feeling true outrage. I have come to expect fascism, brutality and heartlessness from my elected leaders as a matter of course. But every now and then, something comes along that makes my jaw hit the floor once again. Today was one such time, and the jaw-dropper for me was learning, courtesy of the excellent SchNews bulletin, that distributing food to the homeless is now illegal in some US cities.

SchNews focuses on the case of Eric Montanez of the "Food not Bombs" collective, who was charged with "serving 30 unidentified persons food from a large pot utilizing a ladle", according to the arrest affidavit.

I suppose I should not really be surprised. After all, these measures are consistent with the criminalisation of homelessness that I saw countless times in New York. When the Upper West Side liberals praise Mayor Giuliani for "cleaning up" the city, the sweeping away of homeless people out of Times Square and into the city's margins is largely what they're talking about (along with his massive campaign of state violence against young black men).

This stuff is also consistent with the solemn announcements that are drummed into my ears every time I take the Underground here in London: "Please note that begging is not permitted in any part of London Underground." And the signs in train stations: "Do not give to beggars." Eerily reminiscent of "Do not feed the animals."

God forbid that we (the omnipresent white middle-class we) should be reminded of captialism's collateral damage as we go bleary-eyed to work for it on a Monday morning. Far better that charity be outsourced to responsible organisations with well-paid directors and glossy brochures and nice respectable offices in Soho. A direct debit is so much more comfortable than that awkward fumbling for change, that feeling of terrible guilt. After all, it's not our fault, is it? Is it? Why should we have to be confronted with such unpleasant realities?

And in any case, everyone knows that homeless people spend all their money on drugs and alcohol. They must do that, they must be somehow deserving of their fate, because otherwise there would be something terribly wrong with the world, and that's a possibility we can't allow. There must be a flaw there, something that led them to the streets, something that differentiates them from us. So far better to put them somewhere out of sight, and let those nice well-meaning, well-funded charities take care of them with whatever's left over from their marketing budget.

Speaking of collateral damage, as I was many paragraphs ago now, I wonder if the name "Food not Bombs" has anything to do with the harrassment the group has been receiving. Drawing a connection between militarism abroad and deprivation at home is extremely threatening. Operating as a collective rather than a corporate-style charity is also threatening. Citizens taking collective, direct action? Making links between war and hunger? Distributing food to unidentified persons using a ladle? Hey, these guys are practically terrorists!

The waters are rising.......

2007-06-21T19:36:00.000+01:00

Something strange is happening here. I lived in Britain for about 20 years and never heard much about flooding. There were occasional floods of low-lying areas, but mostly floods, like all other natural disasters, were something that happened in other countries.

But for the past five years or so, it seems as if every time I go on the BBC website I see a story about severe flooding somewhere in Britain. Today it's Boscastle, a village I used to visit as a child on summer holidays to Cornwall and which was apparently devastated by flooding three years ago. Yesterday it was South Yorkshire. Last week it was pretty much the whole country.

What's happening here? Is it really happening more than before, or is that just my perception? If it is happening more, is it global warming leading to more extreme weather? Is it greedy developers building on flood plains? Is it people flushing their underwear down the toilet? We need to be told.

Unfortunately, most news items I see present flooding as a simple act of God, and highlight cheerful homeowners ignoring the devastation around them and waving to the camera as they canoe to work in a suit and tie. Yes, fine. British people are great in a crisis. Big news. Didn't we get over that story in about 1941? How many times must we repeat it? Ugh. What interests me is not the brave, heart-warming acts of stiff-upper-lip, make-the-best-of-a-bad-job British fortitude, but the causes of something that I am sure never used to happen like this before. Anyone have links to some real information on this issue?

Children as possessions

2007-06-20T15:31:00.000+01:00

I was on the bus the other day when a young mother came on with a child in a pushchair. The child must have been 4 or 5 - he was almost bursting out of the chair, and his knees were up round his chin. And he was screaming his head off. Loud, piercing screams. Now I should say right now as a disclaimer: I don't have a lot of time for children. Some of the time they're cute, but mostly they irritate me. I know, I'm alienating my audience, but hey, it's the truth. Sue me.

So anyway, this kid was worse than most. It was early in the morning and his screams were so loud they drowned out even the juddering diesel of the bus and the rumbling of the traffic on the High Street.

But then, something wonderful happened. An old man turned to the child and said, firmly but not unkindly, "Be quiet." And the child was quiet, instantly.

What stuck in my head, however, was not the child or the old man, but the look of shock and outrage on the mother's face. This stranger, this absolute stranger, had dared to speak to HER son. She said something to him which I couldn't hear from where I was at the back of the bus, but I don't think it was pleasant.

But that look on her face. It was as if someone had tried to steal her handbag. And it made me realise that many parents seem to view their children as their possessions. Not human beings, who can interact with other human beings, but possessions, to be shaped and molded as THEY see fit, and woe betide anyone who tries to step in. Possessions to be admired from a distance, but not touched. Someone on TV might mouth a platitude about it taking a village to raise a child, and we might smile and nod and think what a clever phrase that is, but the next day if anyone steps too close to MY child I'll rip their head off.

This is very different from when I was a child (not so long ago, only the 1980s). I remember many times being told off by various adults, and also (lest anyone think I am purely out to punish kids) I remember being praised when I was good. And my mother would always thank the stranger for intervening - whether what they had to say was positive or negative, she thanked them for what she saw as their help in teaching her child how to behave. When I was older she told me she appreciated it because I always listened to strangers more than I listened to her.

Perhaps the difference is that society is no longer as homogeneous as it once was. Perhaps people's ideas of "good" and "bad" behaviour differ so widely that it's presumptuous of anyone to tell someone else's child how to behave. But I think, to be honest, it's more to do with the hysteria over children's safety that has gripped this country ever since the abduction and killing of James Bulger almost 20 years ago now. That hysteria is whipped up by daily stories in the tabloids of perverts, predators, pederasts and assorted other scum who want to do unspeakable things to YOUR child. It's rule number one of journalism: fear sells.

Now of course, the danger is all too real. And protection is a primary duty, possibly the primary duty, of any parent. But what happens when protection overrides all else? When children can no longer play in the streets or talk to any strangers or go anywhere or do anything without Mummy or Daddy holding their hands and shooing off the threats? What happens when these children get older and suddenly have to deal with the world on their own, with no framework for doing so other than fearful retreat? Perhaps a parent who focuses on physical safety to the exclusion of all else is like a society that focuses on military security to the exclusion of all else. In solving one problem, it creates twenty more, and ends up less secure and more fearful than ever.

Payback

2007-06-15T19:50:00.000+01:00

Many people in Britain have been wondering for the last few years exactly what we get out of the "special relationship" with the United States.

We go along with Afghanistan, we go along with Iraq, we go along with anything. We send our soldiers off to die in counterproductive wars and make our cities into targets. And we keep waiting for the moment when we get something out of being a "No. 1 ally" in the war on terror, other than a few good photo opps for Tony in front of the US Congress.

Well, according to today's Financial Times, the moment has finally arrived. We get... streamlined arms deals!! Woohoo!!!

According to people familiar with the negotiations, the treaty would represent a big victory for Tony Blair, the outgoing British prime minister, who has repeatedly lobbied George W. Bush over what has been a longstanding disagreement between the two allies.

Well it all makes sense now. Apparently the UK and Australia already get expedited approval for arms purchases from the States, but currently those poor arms dealers still have to wait at least a month for approval. Thanks to Tony's fearless negotiating, their travails could soon be at an end.

Except that the US Congress might not approve the deal, because it is concerned about Britain's lax laws governing exports to other countries. Wow, the USA, armer of everyone from Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden, is concerned that its weapons of mass destruction may fall into the wrong hands if it lets Britain have them. Our controls must be pretty damned lax.

Still, it's nice to have got something out of the "special relationship." I was beginning to think it was a bit one-sided.

Which group are you in?

2007-06-14T15:48:00.000+01:00

I am belatedly getting around to writing about an excellent post over on Colonise This! It really got me thinking, not so much because it challenged my current perspective but because it helped to clarify it. It's about how we choose to respond to a world of horrendous injustice, and Genie X proposes five broad categories of coping mechanism. Go read it and let me know what group you're in. Here's my take:

I started out in Group B, deciding that in a world ruled by money a sensible strategy would be to get as much of it as possible and then do what I like. So I became a corporate banker, and by the age of 22 I had a six-figure salary, was living in a paid-for corporate apartment in New York City, going out every night, staying in top hotels all over the world, and being engulfed by a tide of violent self-hatred as I brushed my teeth every morning.

So I decided to move to Group C, trying to change the world through my writing. For various reasons that hasn't quite worked out how I planned either, but I'm still plugging away at a novel while engaging in some fairly meaningless, but paid, journalistic writing. I don't do enough of the challenging=the-ruling-class things that Genie X mentions, but I'm trying.

Nevertheless I constantly find myself being dragged towards Group D, the "dropout" option. For me this mostly takes the form of travel fantasies, the idea of losing myself in an endless, pointless journey across the globe. Essentially getting as far away as possible from the society I feel so incompatible with. But over my life I've also indulged in some pretty heavy drinking at times, which I think is a form of the same thing. Drugs have never really tempted me, something I am very thankful for.

Anyway I found it a useful framework for looking at my life, as well as those of others. I think some people on the left tend to lump together everyone in a suit as the "enemy". My experience with people in various corporate environments, however, supports Genie X's thesis that the actual ruling class is very small, and that everyone else is just finding their way through the world in the best way they can. Finding a way to reach them through the fog of TV, shopping, computer games, porn, sports, adverts, cars, holidays, alcohol, drugs and all manner of other distractions is the hard part, though.

Clueless

2007-06-08T20:02:00.000+01:00

It's become clear since I moved back to London that most white British people have absolutely no idea what racism is. They persist in lumping it together with any other form of name-calling, and denounce any attempt to clamp down on it as "political correctness."

A few examples from the last couple of days, although sadly I could have written this post at pretty much any time and had equally relevant examples to hand. First the BBC writes a piece of absolute garbage entitled "Is gingerism as bad as racism?" Please don't actually read this article, as it will drive you insane. The gist is that a number of red-haired people are quoted saying they've been called names, for example journalist Sharon Jaffa says "attacking someone on the basis of their hair colour can be every bit as damaging as persecuting someone for their race or religion, and therefore, in some cases, needs to be taken just as seriously."

OK, now for part two. Reality TV show Big Brother kicks out a white contestant (Emily Parr, pictured above) for calling another housemate a "nigger." Channel 4, which runs the show, gets 922 complaints from viewers, not angry that it showed the offensive clip in an apparent attempt to boost ratings, but angry that the poor white girl was evicted for such a harmless "joke" and accusing the station of bowing to - yes, you've guessed it - political correctness gone mad.

Now anyone with a rudimentary grasp of the meaning of racism can skip this paragraph. But any ignorant white Brits who have strayed onto this site having Googled "political correctness gone mad" or "gingerism is as bad as racism" should pay attention. Racism is not name-calling. Racism is the modern manifestation of a system of oppression that stretches back for centuries. Racism blunts the life chances of millions of people around the world. Racism is about wealth distribution, job opportunities, housing, healthcare. It affects people's lives, in fact it destroys people's lives. The general rule of thumb seems to be that one white life equals approximately a hundred "other" lives. In Vietnam, for example, 50,000 US soldiers died, so roughly 5 million Vietnamese civilians had to be slaughtered to make up for it. In the most recent "war on terror", 3,000 Americans died on 9/11 and another 3,500 have died in the Iraq war; more than 600,000 Iraqi civilians have paid the price. Being called a "ginger nut" kind of pales in comparison, doesn't it? The people who suffer from racism can be African, Asian, Latino, or one of any number of indigenous peoples around the world. But those people are never white. White people, as the architects of the system, are never its victims. We might get the name-calling sometimes - "cracker" or "honkie" in America, or maybe just "white boy." Boo hoo. Get over it. Having white skin will never restrict your life chances in any meaningful way. That's why it's OK for Chris Rock to poke fun at white people, but it's not OK for a white comedian, or reality TV contestant, to poke fun at black people. When they do it to us, it's a harmless insult. When we do it to them, it's part of something much, much bigger.

OK, lesson over. To me, the reason why British people are so ignorant is very clear. The history that white British people need to know in order to function in the modern world is simply not taught. I studied history all the way from GCSE through 'A'-level up to a history degree at Oxford University, and not once did I learn about slavery. At Oxford I even focused on 18th-century British history, with a tutor who had written one of the definitive books on the period, called "A Polite and Commercial People" (!). Yet the fact that during the 18th century Britain went from being a piss-poor rock on the edge of Europe to a predominant world power, basically because of the enormous amounts of wealth extracted from the Empire at untold human cost, was kind of glossed over. We learned about nascent industrialisation, improvements in agriculture, the effect of the spinning jenny on the textile industry, etc etc. But exploitation on a scale never before seen? Millions of people worked to death on West Indian sugar plantations, whipped, beaten, raped, tortured, thrown off slave ships, dying in their own vomit while shackled together in the dark fetid hold of a ship for months on end? Not deemed worthy of serious study.

The result is mass ignorance. White British people are simply ill-equipped for a world in which the people they have got used to oppressing so casually are now demanding to be treated like human beings. So we moan about political correctness and the flood of immigrants and the danger of radical Muslims and the threat of black crime and the ridiculous tolerance of those terrible headscarves. And we have no clue why "political correctness" is necessary, or why some people might be radically against us, or why people are "flooding" to our country (hint: in many cases, we kind of screwed up theirs already). So we take refuge in anger, incomprehension and misplaced nostalgia, reading the Daily Mail and throwing our arms up in indignation at the latest ridiculous piece of pandering, then sitting back and pining for the good old days when people were polite, and you could leave your door unlocked, and neighbours would help each other out, and the rape and torture and bloodshed took place at a nice, safe, discreet distance.

Fear-based foreign policy

2007-06-07T16:46:00.001+01:00

I'm not a very quick thinker. That's why I don't post every day, several times a day, responding to the latest news as it's breaking. I prefer to let stuff percolate for a little while before forming an opinion.

Here's an example. A few weeks ago I wrote a post about white supremacists in the US, and someone left a comment asking why I was scared of them and not scared of Al Qaeda. Now, I was irritated at the snarky tone of the commenter and at a few stupid things he said (e.g. confusing Al Qaeda with the Taleban and then invoking Neville Chamberlain, that most tired of anti-pacifist jibes). So I wrote a snarky reply and thought no more about it.

Then recently I was looking at the post and its comments again and thought: in a way, he's right. I should be scared of Al Qaeda. I lived in New York for six years and recently moved to London. I work in office buildings and take public transport. I'm a target. And yet I don't feel any fear of Al Qaeda. When I think of the white supremacist guy looking at an eight-year-old boy cycling past his shop and saying "There's a nigger there I'd like to hang", it sends a chill down my spine. Clearly, based on a simple weighing of the dangers to me personally, this is irrational.

But isn't that the nature of fear? It's a deeply embedded impulse, an ancient survival instinct coming from somewhere deep inside us and bypassing the brain completely. Which kind of explains a lot of what's been happening in the world for the past five years. A lot of fear, an awful lot of irrational impulses, the brains of millions of people being completely bypassed. Instinctive grasping for flags, yellow ribbons, platitudes. Lashing out blindly, spilling others' blood to make us less fearful of seeing our own.

And our governments, rather than allaying our fears, have fostered them. Consider, for example, this video of the 2004 Republican convention, at about the height of the hysteria.

Fear has become a crux of foreign and domestic policy. Responding to an attack by a group of Saudi-funded, Saudi-led Saudis by invading Afghanistan and Iraq? Hello??? Keeping us safe from further attacks by checking our shoes and throwing out our hair gel? Arresting people for taking photographs of Tower Bridge? Torturing suspects? Bombing wedding parties? Sending the tanks in to Heathrow Airport? Devising bizarre colour-coded systems to tell us just how panicked we should be? Clamping down on Muslims, asylum-seekers or pretty much anyone foreign-looking? Using the word "security" to justify anything and everything?

Fear-based policies, all of them. Now I'm not saying the governments are afraid. They have very clear reasons for doing what they are doing. The trouble is, nobody outside Downing Street and the White House agrees with them. Keep us afraid, however, and our brains our bypassed. Fear kicks in. Irrationality takes hold. We'll go along with anything, as long as they keep us safe.

So although I'm still not sure quite why I'm not scared of Al Qaeda, I'm glad that I'm not. Although my thinking is as biased and flawed as anyone else's, at least I am doing some thinking. If I can think long enough, and not get distracted by too much bullshit along the way, maybe I can contribute something useful. But don't hold your breath. As I said, I'm not that swift.

Taking Liberties

2007-06-01T18:48:00.001+01:00

First of all, here are possibly the most chilling words to come from the mouth of a British Prime Minister since... well, probably something else Tony Blair said a few weeks ago. It's lucky we're getting rid of this fool before he buys a brand new set of jackboots.

We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first. I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong.

Yep, you read it right. Putting civil liberties first is misguided and wrong, according to an opinion piece Blair wrote in last weekend's Sunday Times. And in case you didn't get the point first time around, he restates it a couple of paragraphs later:

Their (suspects') right to traditional civil liberties comes first. I believe this is a dangerous misjudgment.

Fascist opinion pieces by outgoing leaders are scary enough, but what's more scary to me is the way that Blair's philosophy is already being put into practice by bobbies on the beat. Here's one recent example: Salam Abdulrahman, a man of Iraqi descent, was arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for taking photos of London landmarks while possessing brown skin. (Well, technically the last part was not included in the rap sheet, but what else can one conclude? How many white people get thrown in jail for photographing Tower Bridge?) Here's what he was arrested for, according to Abdulrahman anyway:

Possessing a book called Future Jihad, Terrorist Strategies Against The West by Walid Phares, possessing a press ID, using the term Al Qaida in my emails and essays, visiting a number of places in Britain, taking photos of Tower Bridge which show the structure of the bridge, and having pictures of military people.

Now regular readers will know I don't swear very much on this blog, so please indulge me just this once.

WHAT THE FUCK??????

Thank you.

Now, where to start?

1. Possessing a book, no matter how "suspect" the title, is not a crime. I own the works of Osama bin Laden, not because I want to emulate him but because if he's going around the world blowing things up I'd quite like to know why.

2. Being a journalist is not a crime. I'm a journalist, and never have I been told that possessing a press ID is grounds for arrest.

3. Using the term Al Qaida is not a crime. I've done it, we've all done it. Tony Blair does it often enough, maybe someone could arrest him.

4. Visiting a number of places in Britain is not a crime. I just don't know what to say about this one.

5.Taking photos of Tower Bridge which show the structure of the bridge is not a crime. Taking photos which do not show the structure of the bridge would be quite a feat.

6. Having pictures of military people is not a crime. Should I hide the photo of my late grandfather in his RAF uniform, just in case an overzealous cop kicks my door in one day?

Now I should point out that all these reasons for the arrest come from Abdulrahman himself. Perhaps the police do have some devastating evidence against him that he doesn't mention. Perhaps under the Freedom of Information Act I could find out, if the government wasn't trying to gut that as well.

But if the reasons for his arrest are true, then I am guilty on every single count. Hmm. Should I notify MI5? Perhaps not. Because of course, it really doesn't matter if I share 6 or 100 harmless habits with Salam Abdulrahman. When it comes down to it, I'm white and he's not. I could never be a terrorist; he is presumed to be one unless he can prove otherwise. Notice the emphasis in Blair's statements on "foreign nationals." He doesn't say it, but we all know which "foreign nationals" he's referring to. French tourists and Swedish au pairs have nothing to fear from the British police; Iraqi and Syrian men, on the other hand, had better not take any photos or mention "A_ Q___" if they don't want to spend the night in jail for the sake of keeping "us" safe.

Finally I should make another confession: as well as apparently being a potential terrorist, I am also a thief: I stole both the title for this blog post and the picture from an excellent-sounding new film about Tony Blair's destruction of civil liberties. I plan to go and see it, if I can find a cinema screen in London that isn't taken up with Pirates of the Caribbean 3.

Enough! Enough!

2007-06-01T01:14:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Contemporary Anarchist for drawing my attention to this protest against the occupation of Palestine being organised by a coalition called "Enough! Enough!".

London, June 9th 2007, 1:30, Lincoln's Inn Fields. Be there or be apathetic.

What Bethlehem looks like now

2007-05-28T19:05:00.000+01:00

Well, I suppose gold, frankincense and myrrh were all a long time ago now. Thanks to Jews for Justice for Palestinians, here's a view of Bethlehem around Christmas last year. Notice the friendly greetings from the Israeli Ministry of Tourism.

How we used to be

2007-05-25T19:39:00.000+01:00

You may remember the vague speculation in my earlier Cutty Sark post about community being traditionally much more important to human beings than competition, and therefore being something we always reach back to even though contemporary society has more or less destroyed it. Well, as luck would have it I was beginning the somewhat daunting task of reading Chris Harman's free e-book "A People's History of the World" (all 728 pages of it) and discovered that he covered some of the same ground.

In the prologue (yes, OK, I'm a slow reader), he points out that things have not always been as they are ("greed, gross inequalities between rich and poor, racist and national chauvinist prejudice, barbarous practices and horrific wars"). He quotes anthropologist Richard Lee:

It is the long experience of egalitarian sharing that has moulded our past. Despite our seeming adaptation to life in hierarchical societies, and despite the rather dismal track record of human rights in many parts of the world, there are signs that humankind retains a deeprooted sense of egalitarianism, a deep-rooted commitment to the norm of reciprocity, a deep-rooted…sense of community.

Sometimes I need a little perspective. It's so easy to believe that things will always be this way and have always been this way. I find it a constant struggle to remember that, as Harman says in answering Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis and similar idiocies,

It would be remarkable indeed if a way of running things that has existed for less than 0.5 percent of our species’ lifespan were to endure for the rest of it—unless that lifespan is going to be very short indeed.

I hope I get to read the remaining 690-odd pages of his book before our species' lifespan runs out. I hate it when the ending is spoilt.

"Capitalism Works"

2007-05-22T22:36:00.000+01:00

When I talk about workers, particularly in poor countries, being exploited by large companies, a frequent retort is, "Well, the people want to work there. Who are you to tell them they can't? Would they be better off if the factory closed down and they were out of work?" A good example of this argument can be found in a highly irritating article in the University of Chicago's student newspaper, which complains about a proposed student boycott of Coke on the grounds that it's subjecting workers in Colombia to inhumane working conditions and the threat of paramilitary murder.

The article is irritating partly because of the condescending tone - the writer, James Wang, has clearly taken a couple of economics classes and feels entitled to talk down to the readers who don't share his intimate understanding of the wonders of capitalism. But it's also irritating to me personally because I've heard this shit too many times, and it's starting to acquire the aura of unquestioned truth.

So to borrow a stylistic irritant from Mr. Wang, let me break it down for you in a really patronising manner. Are you taking notes? Just because it's possible to exploit somebody really poor, it doesn't mean it's OK to do so. The rules of capitalism are one thing -- they do indeed dictate that there will always be people poor enough and desperate enough to take a job, no matter how bad the pay or conditions. But the rules of capitalism do not supersede the rules of morality. There's no getout clause in the Bible or the Torah or the Quran or any other religious or non-religious moral code that says "Thou shalt love thy neighbour, unless thou art acting in a business context, in which case fuck him over."

To put it simply, hiring paramilitary groups to kill or intimidate union officials is wrong. Paying people wages that will keep them in poverty is wrong. Subjecting workers to sexual abuse is wrong. Providing unsafe conditions for them to work in is wrong. These things are so deeply wrong on so many levels that it's astonishing that I should have to point out that they are wrong. But clearly the economics textbooks that Mr. Wang is reading at the University of Chicago tell him otherwise, and to be fair, as I've said, he is far from alone in his delusions.

So what is the solution? Wang and other supporters of capitalism always present two alternatives: either things stay exactly as they are, or the company closes down its factory and the workers are thrown into destitution: his conclusion is "If the anti-Coke activists have their dream and Coke closes its plants in Colombia, I guarantee you that those displaced workers will not be happy."

But there is another alternative, a "third way" I could call it. Perhaps Coke could keep its plants in Colombia open, and just stop treating its workers like shit on the bottom of its corporate shoe. Perhaps it could recognise that the extra few pesos it might end up spending on labour costs would be more than offset by the extra revenue from people who stop boycotting its products, and the costs it would save on defending itself from lawsuits. As the eager capitalists would say, that's a real win-win scenario. After all, my guess is that Coke is currently paying more for one hour of a white-shoe lawyer's time than for a year of a Colombian worker's time. So you do the math.

Again, this stuff is so obvious that it really shouldn't need mentioning. But so often I've heard this irritating defence of corporate crime, trying to put me in the position of putting the Colombian workers out of a job. I'm tired of it. Just stop exploiting workers. That's it. You don't have to close down, go out of business or put people out of work. Just treat the people who work for you humanely. Until Coke does that, I'm going to boycott it. Should be easy enough - the stuff tastes like drain cleaner anyway.

Who cares about the Cutty Sark?

2007-05-21T18:30:00.000+01:00

So the Cutty sark, a famous 19th-Century ship that's become something of a tourist landmark in Greenwich, caught fire this morning. I was up early this morning listening to the radio and was mildly sad when I heard the news. Like most children who grew up in London, I was taken around the Cutty Sark on my summer holidays more than once, although my memories of it are pretty vague and I've had no interest in going again since I've been old enough to choose how I spend my time.

I seem to be in the minority, however. The radio show was inundated with calls from distraught Londoners sharing their grief and complaining that they "just can't believe it" and are "just so sad" because this was "just part of London" and they "just can't get over it" and "just can't believe how someone could do this" (early reports indicated it was arson).

Now I'm sure some people do have really intimate memories of the Cutty Sark -- maybe they met their future life partner on it, or lived around the corner and saw it every day, or something. Fine. But I'm willing to bet hard cash that most of the people calling in and posting comments on forums have exactly the same limited connection to the Cutty Sark that I do. I'll bet that they have not visited the Cutty Sark since they were children, except perhaps to drag their own bored children around it. And probably just after making their distraught phone calls and posting their anguished feelings on the internet, they made a cup of tea, went to work and forgot about the whole thing.

Why, then, the need to establish a connection with something almost completely irrelevant to our lives? The reaction reminded me instantly of all the people who cried over Princess Diana, claiming she was like a sister to them. Or, more recently, the hysterical reaction to the disappearance of a small child on holiday in Portugal. Of course all these events are sad. But why go further? When someone you don't know dies or goes missing, why share with the world the fact that you are "praying for the family" (when you're almost certainly not) and "just can't believe it" (when clearly you can).

Perhaps it's the utter alienation so many of us feel from the society around us. Perhaps we're grasping for those bonds of community that sustained our ancestors for millennia but have been destroyed by the capitalist mode of production, if you believe Marx, or bureaucracy and industrialism if you believe Weber, or feminism and video games if you believe Jerry Falwell.

The feeling of caring for others, of suffering when they suffer and feeling joy when they succeed, seems to be very important to us. Community, not competition, is what enabled human development. Without it we'd still be lone hunters and scavengers, or more probably we'd be extinct. So perhaps the real question is not why we keep reverting to it even when it doesn't mean anything any more, but why we have decided to organise ourselves in a way that seems utterly contrary to human nature.

Orwell said it better

2007-05-18T20:50:00.000+01:00

Now that I'm thinking a little more clearly, I can recognise that the hopelessness I've been feeling lately, which reached its height this morning, stems from a very old source. Here it is:

Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation--an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire together.

Ever since I read this passage years ago in George Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier", I've been haunted by it. To me it's as true now as it was in 1937. The Empire is dead of course, but the underlying economic structure of the world has barely changed. Governors and missionaries have been replaced by free trade laws and World Bank bureaucrats, but the essential dynamic of a handful of rich nations sucking the lifeblood out of the rest of the world remains exactly the same.

The question for me is, how not to acquiesce in a system I despise? How to live in a capitalist, imperialist society without adding to the problem? Because as Malcolm X said, you're either part of the solution or part of the problem. And right now I certainly don't feel like part of the solution. In fact I have only a hazy notion of what the solution is. So I'm stuck with eating my strawberries and taking my taxis and suffering occasional bouts of self-hatred.

When I read so much left-wing writing (my own included), I can't help thinking of Orwell. Are we really trying to change the world? Or are we just trying to save our souls? As the famous anit-war slogan went, "Not in our name." The implication being, you can go ahead and do it but I'll have a clean conscience because I marched down 5th Avenue waving a placard, as I will not tire of reminding people every time I comment on the mess of the Iraq war. I'll bash Bush, skewer Cheney, ridicule Blair and feel better about myself. I'm on the right side. I'll even make sure all my rampant consumption is of the organic, fairtrade, hempwoven, conflict-free variety, and pay for it with a credit card that gives 0.5% of my largesse to charity.

But after all of this, am I free of moral responsibility for Iraq, for Palestine, for Gitmo, for Fallujah, for Abu Ghraib? Or am I just sneering on the sidelines, trying to salve my battered conscience by pretending to oppose that which is necessary for the perpetuation of my life as it stands? Am I prepared to go the extra mile? To put my comfortable little life on the line? To risk arrest or worse? Is anything less really acceptable given the state of the world? If this is not an emergency, then what does an emergency look like? Can I in all honesty call myself part of the solution, or am I just another soul-saving left-winger who in the final analysis is just part of the problem?

Band-aid applied

2007-05-18T20:18:00.001+01:00

Well, I feel a little better now. Looked through photographs covering the last year of my life while listening to a random selection of my songs on iTunes (came out as "Puppet Man" by The 5th Dimension, "Kinky Afro" by the Happy Mondays, "Easy to Love" by Billie Holliday, "You Call it Madness" by Nat King Cole, "I Need Love" by Olivia Newton-John(?!), "Sometimes I'm Happy" by Sarah Vaughan and then Beethoven's Eroica variations and Brahms's German Requiem. Something happened to me while I was looking at the photos, hearing the music, remembering wonderful places and seeing the people I love. I realised that I have a really, really good life. Yes, OK, this post is corny, so feel free to skip the rest. But it's important for me to document how I feel, because I so often get that feeling of wanting to hide away from the world, a feeling that I just can't face it any more, and looking through those photos reminded me that when I do make the effort I have some pretty memorable experiences.

What does this have to do with the state of the world? Nothing, really. My dilemma remains totally unresolved, and it will likely not be too long before I end up right back where I was earlier this afternoon. I suspect that dilemma will be with me for a long time. But the hopelessness has passed. If I want to change the world, I must first change my life, and I'm not going to do that by locking myself in my flat and wallowing in self-pity. I'm probably not going to achieve a lot anyway, but I've got to make the effort, and for fairly arbitrary reasons to do with some nice photos and a serendipitous string of songs which I normally wouldn't like very much but which hit my mood just perfectly, I feel as if I can make the effort now.

I must remember this afternoon for my fiction writing. Clean resolutions are for soap operas. Reality is never resolved -- the characters just muddle through their unresolved problems in bizarre, random ways. And it doesn't get much more bizarre or random than discovering salvation through Olivia Newton-John.

Hopelessness

2007-05-18T16:25:00.000+01:00

Sorry for the lack of posting this week. I've been afflicted by an all-encompassing sense of hopelessness lately when I think about the world, and blogging has seemed pointless. I look at all the people absorbed in the minutiae of their North London lives, knowing that their way of life is dependent on the suffering of millions of people around the world and not caring or doing anything about it. And worst of all, I know that I'm one of them (no, writing a blog doesn't count as doing something). At times like this I wonder if our grandchildren will ask us how on earth we lived this way. I feel that urgent action is needed, and yet everything I think of doing seems futile.

Anyway hopefully this will pass soon and I'll find a way back into my normal groove of forcing myself to keep putting one foot in front of the other without quite knowing why.

The Vocabulary of Protest

2007-05-13T19:37:00.000+01:00

Some day I'm going to compile a list of all the adjectives used by journalists writing about protesters. Sometimes protesters are irresponsible, obstructive or stubborn, other times they are aggressive or violent, and usually the word anarchist crops up sooner or later.

What's interesting about these adjectives is that they are never chosen by the protesters themselves. Rule number one of journalism - represent all sides fairly - goes out of the window when people have the temerity to express their opinions outside the officially sanctioned method of putting an X in a box twice a decade. Pacifists are described as anarchists, anti-capitalists are communists, environmentalists are eco-terrorists. Always the actual aims of the protesters are obscure. (note: in this post I am talking about the "mainstream" media -- people at places like Indymedia often do a better job of interviewing protesters, for reasons that will hopefully become clear.)

The reason for these strange and inaccurate descriptions is that journalists get their information from "official" sources - police, corporations, academics, the government. These sober voices pronounce their carefully reasoned judgements on the motley mobs of crazy people out in the streets below, and the journalist dutifully transcribes. The result: a hopelessly biased story that sounds perfectly fair and neutral.

It's not always the journalist's fault, though. As I've discovered, an individual can only do so much within a large news organisation. A story, once submitted, goes through editing by sometimes dozens of people, so that the story can often change beyond recognition.

Reading this story on a Greenpeace protest against over-fishing of cod, for example, I thought at first it was a classic example of lazy journalism. A legitimate protest about an important issue had been completely overlooked, and the headline was an echo of the fishing industry's view: "Greenpeace protest 'was suicidal'".

On closer reading, however, I felt a little sorry for the reporter. He or she had actually spoken to the protesters and got their side of the story, including the claim that a trawler failed to change its course and swept them aside as they were in the sea holding their protest. There was even a quote from campaigner Willie Mackenzie:

The fishing industry and politicians have ignored the scientists and continued to batter cod stocks. We're in the North Sea to save the cod from extinction. We've had to take action today to stop cod being caught because otherwise it will disappear from the seas and our dinner plates.

The trouble was, this quote came right down at the bottom of the story. Research has suggested most readers only pay attention to the first couple of paragraphs of stories, so positioning is critical. And positioning is ultimately determined by editors. Most importantly, reporters (at least in the places I've worked) have no say over the headline, and often don't even find out what it is until the story's published. The headline sets the whole tone for the story, in this case that the protesters were suicidal and the poor fishermen were put at risk by their crazy antics.

Imagine, for example, a simple experiment in editing: the same story with the same facts, but with the order reversed. It begins by quoting Greenpeace saying its protesters's lives were endangered by the fishing boat refusing to change course. The fishing industry response comes at the bottom, so that they are the ones who appear to be on the defensive. And instead of "Greenpeace protest 'was suicidal'", the headline reads "Trawler 'was reckless'".

Same facts, very different story. So much for journalistic neutrality. Who knows, maybe the reporter did actually file a piece similar to my 'alternative' version, and had it switched around by the editors. If that happens often enough, the reporter will probably stop even interviewing the protesters altogether, just sticking to the "official" sources that will go down well with his editor. Then you'll end up with something like this.

Whatever...

2007-05-10T18:34:00.000+01:00

Can I bring myself to write about Tony Blair's long-overdue departure? Do I have the energy? The interest? Barely. I'm certainly not going to go into a long, earnest assessment of the pros and cons of his reign.

The reason? Very simply, this is not news. It's a classic example of what Daniel Boorstin described as a pseudo-event. It's an event created for the media, choreographed for maximum publicity and maximum benefit to the organiser. It's an event that would have no meaning whatsoever without the presence of cameras, microphones and reporters with notebooks. It's a manipulation of the press. Every single reporter and photographer who attended the announcement today would have known that everything about it was fake, from the slight catch in the voice and the bullshit "hand-on-heart" sincerity to the focus-group-perfect crowds with the token females and minorities shoved to the foreground.

But equally they would have known that they had to cover it. It would take a courageous editor indeed to put out a front page tomorrow morning without any mention of the Prime Minister's resignation. That's why the pseudo-event works so well, and has become the dominant form of story generation in the modern newspaper. And that's why it's so dangerous -- it works only because of the power of the person generating the event. A powerful person saying something of absolutely no value is inherently newsworthy; a lot of powerless people saying something important is not newsworthy (unless of course they turn violent -- then you can have some great stories about scary anarchists creating havoc for us normal hard-working folks). Blair has perfected the art of the pseudo-event in a way few others have since Ronald Reagan. I guess in that way it's a fitting end to his reign.

So I'm not going dwell on it any further. I am not going to examine Blair's "legacy." I am not going to debate whether a period of relatively strong economic growth outweighs 600,000 dead Iraqis. As Blair himself says, history will judge him on that. I'm not going to examine how the speech was a perfect blend of Clintonesque false sincerity ("Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right") and Bushite God-tinged patriotism ("This country is a blessed nation"). To do all that would be to afford the whole nauseating affair too much attention. In fact, I hesitate even to press "Publish" on this post. Even to explain why I'm dismissing this pseudo-event seems to be spending too much time on it.

But hey, I've spent the time already, so why hide it?

The Burkini Affair: a follow-up

2007-05-08T20:56:00.000+01:00

Just wanted to do a quick follow-up to the story of Manal Omar that I posted a few weeks ago. (Brief synopsis: woman tries to wear Islamic-style swimsuit in British fitness centre and all hell breaks loose.)

Islamophobia Watch points out a very funny letter written by a Linda Allan of Bath in response to the article.

Well, maybe not everyone will find it funny, but I get a kick out of unbridled ignorance. I love the way, for example, Ms. Allan says that "In this country we are able to dress, or undress, exactly as we see fit" and then only TWO SENTENCES LATER says "Don't be surprised when people mock you and pass comment on your totally inappropriate clothing for swimming."

Uhh, somebody help me here. Wasn't Ms. Omar dressing exactly as she saw fit? Or perhaps Ms. Allan's collective 'we' does not extend to her. Perhaps 'we' see fit to wear Western-style bathing suits, and 'you' had better just get used to it.

I suppose this attitude is not surprising, since it comes right from the top of our society. Witness Tony Blair's message a few months ago to immigrants, saying that tolerance is a British value, and that consequently immigrants must conform, or fuck off (well, words to that effect anyway....)

Happy Bank Holiday!

2007-05-07T13:32:00.000+01:00

Why, exactly, does it have to rain every Bank Holiday Monday?

Personally, I blame the name. Bank Holiday. I mean, who names a public holiday after a bank? Do banks have any good connotations for anybody? I'm surprised we don't get hit with a £29 service charge every Bank Holiday.

Why don't we just do like the rest of the world and call it a public holiday?

Actually, while we're at it, perhaps we could dispense with the religious roots as well - after all there's nothing very holy about a day off work.

So my proposal is: "Day of Transient Freedom from Capitalist Wage-Slavery."

Do you think that would catch on?

Terrorists I am scared of

2007-05-06T21:26:00.000+01:00

I lived in New York through 9/11, orange alerts, red alerts, purple alerts and all the rest, and never really felt a visceral fear of Al Qaeda, any more than I felt afraid of the IRA living in London during the bombing campaign. The danger was real, of course, but perhaps because of the way the governments in both countries manipulated and amplified the threat to suit their own purposes, I soon became quite blase.

The kindly-looking old guy above, however, scares the living shit out of me. He's the owner of the "Redneck Shop" in Laurens, South Carolina, and according to this article he said of an eight-year-old boy cycling past his shop "There's a nigger there I'd like to hang."

The occasion of his comment was a convention of the white supremacist Aryan Nations group. Other comments from the meeting:

Hispanics "breed like rats, worse than niggers, and send their money back to Mexico. Only thing I got for them is a bullet right between the eyes. Ship their dead butts back to Mexico."

"The biggest lie besides the Holocaust is that Jews are the chosen people. Satan is their father."

"Blacks are soulless mud people who never had Yahweh's breath of life."

"You want to see blood in the streets? I DO!"

Fortunately their numbers are not large - probably no more than a few hundred. And they split into two factions recently - one group hates Jews so much that they support Al Qaeda because they see it as "doing the Lord's work" in killing Jews, while the other hates Jews but not quite enough to overcome its hatred of Arabs. With so much hate flowing around, it can understandably be complex work deciding who to pin it on.

The group was also weakened according to the article when it "lost a $6.3 million lawsuit brought by Victoria and Jason Keenan, a mother and son who, while looking for a lost wallet on a lonely Idaho road, had been chased, shot at and beaten by Aryan Nations guards. The Keenans' offense? The guards fantasized the two were militant Jews; they were, in fact, of Cherokee descent."

The numbers are small, but the potential for violence is clearly real. And it was people with similar views who were responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing (although funnily enough white men were not scapegoated after that, as Muslims have been since 9/11).

Even more worrying to me than these fringe lunatics, however, are the much larger numbers of people who share similar views, albeit in less extreme form and less openly expressed. Scroll down to the bottom of the article, for example, and read the two comments left by readers. You might, as I did, expect to see people expressing shock, outrage and things like that. Instead you'll see them complaining about affirmative action and saying that black people are racist too.

It's these people who are terrifying to me, almost as much as the owner of the Redneck Shop. Because while the redneck is out lynching the kid on the bicycle, it's these resentful, angry, uncomprehending white people who will stand by and do nothing. And in case anyone thinks this shit is confined to America, check out the support for the British National Party and their ilk, as well as a previous post of mine on Noel Martin, a Jamaican-born Brit who was paralysed by neo-Nazis in Berlin. With people like this around, and Islamophobia on the rise, it's more important than ever for people of good conscience to state loudly and unequivocally that this stuff is abhorrent, hateful and just downright ignorant.

I merely belong

2007-05-05T18:09:00.000+01:00

When I lived in the USA, I was always amused and confused by people who puffed out their chests and said how proud they were to be American. Now that I'm back in London, the government here declares its intent to instill a sense of "Britishness" among its insufficiently jingoistic people.

None of this has ever made any sense to me, at least not since I was a child and too young to know any better. Since I have been able to think for myself, I've always been puzzled by flag-waving. Of course I am British. I have no intention of denying that. But what does that really mean? And how is it possible to be proud of a purely random event? I'm reminded of a Chris Rock stand-up routine where he asks patriotic Americans, "What, you're proud because you happened to drop out of your mama's pussy in Detroit?"

Part of my problem with patriotism has to do with what Britain stands for in the world, the crimes of slavery and genocide it has committed in pretty much every corner of the globe. That makes pride pretty much impossible for me.

But I think it's also more than that. Even if Britain had historically been a positive influence in world affairs, spreading justice and freedom and all that good stuff, I still don't think I would feel any real sense of national pride. After all, I would not have made those great contributions myself, and merely being a passive beneficiary based on an accident of birth doesn't seem to be a cause for pride. I'm proud of things that I have achieved in my life, and I feel a connection with people whose values I share, not those who happen to belong to the same tribe.

I was reading the London Review of Books the other day and came across an interesting piece on Hannah Arendt. Apparently she received a lot of criticism from people in the Jewish community for her famous description of the high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann as merely a banal, careerist functionary. Gershom Scholem wrote to accuse her of lacking "Ahabath Israel: 'Love of the Jewish people'. " Arendt replied:

You are quite right – I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this ‘love of the Jews’ would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person. To clarify this, let me tell you of a conversation I had in Israel with a prominent political personality who was defending the – in my opinion disastrous – non-separation of religion and state in Israel. What [she] said – I am not sure of the exact words any more – ran something like this: ‘You will understand that, as a socialist, I, of course, do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people.’ I found this a shocking statement and, being too shocked, I did not reply at the time. But I could have answered: the greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good can come out of that? Well, in this sense I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or
argument.

Her second point goes beyond my own thinking about nationalism, and I think it is very important, and not only for Israel or Jews. A people that believes only in itself is, by definition, blind to other moral claims, whether by rival groups or by laws or gods. It will act in what it defines as its own national interest, no matter what the consequences for others who are not fortunate enough to be part of the group. It will follow its own course blindly, so focused on its own self-love that it cannot love, understand or learn from others. As Arendt says, what good can come out of that?

More mindless killing

2007-05-04T21:26:00.000+01:00

To continue for a moment the theme of senseless killing for squalid and trivial ends, I'm reading a book of essays by Texas Death Row inmate Gene Wilford Hathorn. He's been on the Row for 21 years now, and has watched 250 people go to their deaths. In the first essay, he tells how the 24-year-old man in the cell next door (a 17-year-old at the time of his crime) has petitioned the dental department to extract a health tooth, partly as an excuse to leave the cell, and partly because he wanted to feel the ache in his gum, the adrenaline rush that he gets from feeling pain.

This son of two heroin addicts, one of whom, his mother (with whom he confessed he shot heroin before his incarceration) is presently confined in the Texas women's prison, is so psychologically flawed that pain validates his existence. The more our keepers abase us the more this boy wants to hurt, as physical pain is his method of frustrating the encroachment of emotional anguish.

Hathorn points out that killing runs right through America's history, from the killing of the Native Americans through slavery, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam.

The killing nature permeates our country's young heart, and if there are no wars to fight, other Americans -- provided they are not wealthy or influential -- are sufficient targets for society's wrath.

Reading the essays (and I've only just started) makes me think about two things. The first is what the death penalty does to its victims. Being locked up for 21 years contemplating your own death, having executions scheduled and then postponed, appeals moving forward and then back, is in itself a cruel and unusual form of punishment, even before the killing itself.

I took a look at the Texas Death Row website, perused the long list of "executed offenders" and read their heart-rendingly simple last statements -- some expressing regret for their crime, others still protesting their innocence, most taking comfort in God, Jesus or Allah. The website also lists the crimes, some of them truly horrific, like shooting an old couple in the face to rob them of $52 and some beer. But I cannot accept that killing the perpetrator is the right answer. Even if the system worked it would be inhumane, and the evidence is that it doesn't even come close to working.

The second thing I think about is what it does to other people. What about the people who work on Death Row. The jailors, the wardens, the doctors and dentists. What about the guy who sticks in the needle? Are they just regular people trying to make a living? What do they talk about when they go home to their families? What does working in a killing factory do to a person?

And Hathorn describes very eloquently the other people who are affected - the friends and families of those condemned to die.

Imagine looking into the eyes of someone who will be dead in a few hours, someone you've known fo years, and there is nothing you can do to help him. Imagine grasping for something to say and finding nothing ... Imagine he and his family having their final visit, stomachs clenching with dread as the time for the guard to say, "Wrap it up!" draws near. Saying their last goodbyes, the children -- who may be sons or daughters, grandchildren, or nieces and nephews -- understand that they will never see the man alive, but do not understand why. Their wails as adult relatives lead them away are ghastly.

How about a little humanity?

2007-05-03T20:42:00.000+01:00

Does this sound familiar? A war in the Middle East launched for obscure reasons. The justification changing constantly according to what ministers think can "sell" it to the people at any particular time. Disregarding the United Nations. Bombing people in order to protect them. Being surprised when such brutality does not win the hearts and minds of those who have lived through it. A "villainous" policy, "so appalling that human language can hardly describe it", one that "will take us many years to live down."

Well, all of this comes not from Iraq 2007, but from Suez 1956. The person skewering British foreign policy is Labour politician Nye Bevan, not... (oh wait, there are no politicians with the principles to make such a speech in 2007). The speech was reproduced the other day in the Guardian as part of a series on great speeches.

What struck me was the sheer circularity of events. Fifty years ago it was Britain trying to ride roughshod over the Middle East and suffering an all-too-predicable backlash. Now it's America, with Britain providing additional cannon fodder. Does nobody read history? Or are they just so arrogant they believe that it will be different this time?

As a matter of fact, reading history is not even the real issue. You didn't even have to know much history to know that the government was lying in 2003, just as it lied in the 1950s. Millions of people knew it. The only people who didn't, it seems, were future Democratic Presidential candidates.

For when all is said and done, whether the war was about oil or WMD or Niger yellow-cake, it was clear that it was wrong. I'll let Nye take it from here:

I resent most bitterly this unconcern for the lives of innocent men and women. It may be that the dead in Port Said are 100, 200 or 300. If it is only one, we had no business to take it.

Now there's a sentiment that you won't hear from a politician in 2007. These days they dismiss not even hundreds of deaths but hundreds of thousands of deaths with a shrug. Yet Bevan's position is really one of basic humanity. He continues:

Do honourable members begin to realise how this is going to revolt the world when it passes into the imagination of men and women everywhere that we ... ourselves set the example. We ourselves conscript our boys and put guns and aeroplanes in their hands and say, "Bomb there." Really, this is so appalling that human language can hardly describe it. And for what? The government resorted to epic weapons for squalid and trivial ends.

Poor Nye. Suez pales in comparison to the squalour and triviality with which infinitely more destructive weapons have been deployed during the past six years of the "War on Terror." Before Guantanamo, before CIA rendition flights, before Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, the architects of this war would have been well served by reading another Bevan observation:

The social furniture of modern society is so complicated and fragile that it cannot support the jackboot. We cannot run the processes of modern society by attempting to impose our will upon nations by armed force. If we have not learned that, we have learned nothing.

Fifty years later, millions of people around the world have learned Nye Bevan's lesson, and opposed the war in Iraq from the moment it first started to be marketed. There are millions more who haven't learned a thing, however -- they swallowed the nonsense about "weapons of mass destruction" whole, cheered on the tanks as they performed their video-game war heroics on CNN, and grew all misty-eyed at made-for-TV moments like the toppling of Saddam's statue and the dramatic rescue of Jessica Lynch. They are what Bevan in 1956 called "the unthinking and unreflective who still react to traditional values, who still think that we can solve all these problems in the old ways."

I remember all the talk after September 11 about how the world would never be the same again. Then a few weeks later, America bombed Afhganistan, set up Guantanamo Bay, started torturing, bombing, killing. Business as usual. Its leaders only knew the ways of the jackboot, what Bevan even half a century ago was calling "the old ways." We know there are better ways, more effective ways, more humane ways. How long before we have the courage and the numbers to force those in power to use them?

A million words ...

2007-05-03T00:26:00.000+01:00

That thing about pictures and a thousand words is one of the biggest cliches out there, but sometimes it is very apt. Saw this cartoon in the May issue of New Internationalist (it's not on the web yet, but it was so good I had to scan it).

Remembering Haymarket

2007-04-30T22:57:00.000+01:00

I am often too cynical for my own good. So I am taking time to reflect on the fact that on 1st May 1886, thousands of workers in Chicago went on strike to demand an eight-hour day. The police attacked them, their leaders were hanged, and the bosses went on the offensive. They must have thought they had achieved nothing.

But then the newly-formed American Federation of Labor took the cause forward, publicized the Haymarket massacre, and a couple of years later the Second International in Paris heard about them and decided to organize international protests in favour of the eight-hour day and the Haymarket martyrs.

Now 121 years later, May Day is being celebrated everywhere from Nigeria to Bangladesh to the Philippines to Colombia to Indonesia to the USA to right here in London and probably a hundred other countries that I'm too tired to link to, having just worked a 13-hour day (can't win 'em all). I often find myself too scared to do anything that will put me on the line, but the Chicago workers did it, even though they were risking a lot more.

I also want to remember that all the benefits I enjoy as a worker today are due to people fighting for them in the past. I never really feel the benefits, but I'd feel them if they were taken away - pensions, benefits, safety laws, minimum wage, a host of employment laws, etc. As I discovered in a bitter and ultimately unsuccessful union fight at my old newspaper, employers will do anything they possibly can to wrench these things away. We have to cling on with all our might. We have to fight back. I just don't know where the fight is going to come from when everyone seems too distracted by reality TV to take any interest in reality.

American left-wing blogs are myopic

2007-04-29T13:52:00.000+01:00

I'm very new to blogging. I go out into the world and look for blogs that I might be interested in -- things that are left-wing, radical, socialist, environmentalist, anarchist, etc. The name "LeftAlign" is a clue to my general outlook. To my surprise, I discover that:

1. 90% of the blogs I find are American.
2. 90% of the posts I read start with "The Bush Administration...."

The first part I'm not so bothered about. As I get used to navigating the world of blogs (sorry, I can't bring myself to use the word "blogosphere" just yet), I'm sure I'll find a wider set of writers from around the world.

But the second part does bother me. Reading those hugely popular left-wing American blogs, you could be forgiven for wondering whether a world actually existed outside the US (except as a set of political battlegrounds on which to score points against the Bush Administration when it fucks up, e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan).

For that matter, it's also not clear whether a world exists outside Washington D.C. for these folks. Everything is about the Bush Adminstration, or what John McCain said today, whether Barack Obama is a smoker or not, whether Scooter Libby lied over Valerie Plame and whether Karl Rove put him up to it and... WHO CARES?????? Never mind Azerbaijan, even Alabama is invisible to these people. They're so myopic it's amazing they can even see the keyboard in front of them to type out their inane, childish "Bush is an asshole" drivel.

OK, deep breath. Calm down. Breathe.

OK. I feel better now. I think that little venting of spleen was very helpful for me - hope you don't mind. Now on a more rational note, I understand that we all are more concerned with our immediate surroundings than with distant events. It's natural. I will write more about London and the UK than about Botswana. Fine. But I will also write about other places.

In fact, looking back over my first month of blogging I see I've written about Tanzania, Venezuela, Jamaica, Sudan, Germany, China, Palestine, Iran, Iraq and, yes, the USA.

I did not set out to do this. I have not made any special effort to be "inclusive." And I mention it now not to seek praise for embracing diversity. I mention it because to me it seems utterly natural to take an interest in the world. I did it without thinking. Indeed, this seems to me to be one of the biggest advantages of blogging. If I wanted to talk about local politics, I could go nextdoor and chat with my neighbour. It's only in the blogosph... no, still can't say it ... in the blogging world that I could talk with, for example, environmentalists from Aotearoa. That's an interaction I would never have had before, and I find it fascinating and enriching.

I am also interested in ideas, which are completely absent from the American left-wing blogs I've read. What do we mean by socialism? How can we put it into practice in the modern world? What about anarchism? Feminism? Radical environmentalism? Is there, potentially, a link between these disparate ideologies? Are the problems of environmental destruction perhaps linked with patriarchy, neocolonialism, consumerism and authoritarian rule? What are some alternative ways of organizing ourselves as we struggle to find a better way than the profit motive?

All of this seems, to me, far more interesting than the day-to-day evils of the Bush Administration and what Joe Lieberman may or may not have said on "Meet the Press." And I can't believe that there is not one blogger in the entire United States who is interested in looking beyond the tired Republocrat slanging matches and embracing the other 99% of the globe.

Come on, somebody, help me find the good leftie bloggers! I know they're out there!!

International Workers' Memorial Day

2007-04-28T22:52:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Aotearoa-based Spanblather, I have discovered very belatedly that it's International Workers' Memorial Day today. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there were 5,734 fatal occupational injuries in the USA in 2005.

In my time as a journalist in the US I used the databases available online at OSHA to get stories of horrific workplace accidents - workers with limbs caught in machinery, crushed under forklift trucks, poisoned due to inadequate safety gear, etc etc. The companies were often found liable, and fined a few hundred dollars. Yes, that's the going rate for a worker's life in America. Regulation does very little to protect them, and believe me, the free market does a whole lot less. Funny how we never hear about them in the media either, even though the numbers outweigh those of most full-scale wars.

5,734 dead every year in the US. How many in the rest of the world?

Library cuts

2007-04-28T21:14:00.000+01:00

I love libraries. Always have. I could spend all day in a library, working my way through the stock. I even love the weird library smell (what is that? It's not the smell of books, because bookshops don't smell like that).

So I was upset to see my local library in Crouch End, London borough of Haringey, featured in a Socialist Worker article about library cuts. Here's an anonymous Haringey librarian quoted in the piece:

“It’s about deskilling – getting rid of professional librarians. I think this is preparing the ground for privatisation. They want to get casual workers in to do as much as possible.”

Let me get this straight. We can spend £100 billion on a shiny new nuclear submarine that we will never, ever, in any circumstances use. We can spend £8 billion completely fucking up Iraq and Afghanistan. But we have to save a few grand by firing trained librarians and replacing them with a few minimum-wage fifteen-year-olds.

Why can we never afford social services? Our local hospital was bulldozed recently, and it's not clear if a new one will ever be built. Alexandra Palace just up the hill, "The People's Palace", is set to be sold off to a millionaire property developer to be converted into a luxury hotel complex. It seems that everywhere I look, there's an assault on what is free. As the article points out, libraries are about everyone having access to culture. Free access. The National Health Service, or what's left of it, is about everyone having access to healthcare. Ally Pally was supposed to be about everyone having access to leisure facilities. Now we're dismantling everything that's free, that's shared by all, and making it private, accessible only to those who can pay the entry fee. And it's always done in the name of saving money, even though it always ends up being more expensive.

Oh, and to complete the whole hypocritical head-trip, a couple more tidbits. The head of Haringey library who is pushing the cuts was earlier this year awarded the MBE for "services to local government." And the education minister recently announced that 2008 will be an official "year of reading" ... for those who can afford it, presumably.

P.S. Thanks to Library Campaign for the picture.

Strange experience in a public toilet

2007-04-27T21:24:00.000+01:00

I was coming out of a public toilet in central London today (Paternoster Square, near St. Paul's, if anyone's interested), when I saw a strange sign on the door: "Images are being recorded for security purposes..." (so far so good) "...and for possible marketing and advertising by vicinitee.com" (erm, what?).

Will I soon be starring in a TV commercial as "guy standing at urinal"??? I've emailed the company to ask, so stay tuned to find out...

(A side issue: upon seeing that sign, for the first time in my life I actually wished I had a camera phone instead of my beaten-up old Nokia. Probably won't last though - I'm a cheapskate at heart.)

Rip Your Heart in Two

2007-04-26T20:20:00.000+01:00

The Sunday papers often have sad stories. People with cancer, children needing transplants. Tug-at-the-heart-strings-over-your-tea-and-Cornflakes stuff.

This Sunday's Observer was different, though. The story of Noel Martin doesn't tug at your heartstrings -- it rips them out of your body, shreds them and stuffs them in your face as you bawl steaming hot tears of pain and anguish.

Titled "Why I just can't go on living", it tells how Martin, a Jamaican-born Brit, was chased by neo-Nazis shouting "nigger piss off" as he was driving through Mahlow, a small town south of Berlin. They threw a 44-lb concrete block through the window of his car, forcing him to crash into a tree. He went into a coma, and when he woke up he discovered he was paralysed from the neck down.

This was ten years ago. After a decade of living in what he describes as a "prison", needing round-the-clock care, taking four hours to get up every morning, and also watching his wife die of cancer, he now plans to travel to Switzerland, which has liberal suicide laws, drink a cocktail of drugs and "shut my eyes and wake up in another world."

The response of a neo-Nazi interviewed on German TV? 'It's fine by us if he goes and buries his carcass in Switzerland.'

If you're not bawling yet, go and read the article. Then, if you still have any heart-strings left, buy Noel Martin's book, "Call it my Life" (although I can't find it on Amazon or anywhere, except in German). This story is so horrific it's taken me days to write about it, and even now I don't think I've done it justice. The way life has treated him I'm not surprised he wants to kill himself -- I probably would have done it a lot sooner. I hope he finds something to live for before he gets that cocktail down his throat though.

Good on you, Hugh!

2007-04-26T19:42:00.000+01:00

It's not often that I support violence, but in this case I completely support Hugh Grant, who is in trouble for throwing a tub of food at a photographer.

I mean, seriously, how many photos of celebrities leaving their houses do we really need? Is it necessary to put these people through hell just so that the newspapers and gossip mags can have a few more non-stories to fill the gaping void for the 53 pages between the attention-grabbing front-page piece and the sport on the back page? And is it necessary to prosecute a prissy celebrity for losing his temper with a photographer who I am sure was intruding on his privacy?

I know there are people in the world with far bigger problems than a pampered film star, but this just really pissed me off for some reason. It's all so unnecessary. I think there should be a special law allowing people to kick the shit out of the paparazzi without fear of arrest.

If it's good enough for Einstein...

2007-04-24T20:55:00.000+01:00

It's funny how conservatives always complain about left-wing thought dominating academia. They set up absurd organisations like Campus Watch dedicated to rooting out liberal bias, and hound anyone who dares to criticise capitalism, the government or the status quo in general.

Could it be that there is in fact no "sinister" conspiracy to subvert our youth? Could it be, in fact, that intelligent people - people who teach at university level - are drawn to socialism/liberalism/leftist ideology because it makes sense? Could it be that these same intelligent folk reject free-market conservative trickle-down every-man-for-himself ideology because it's bullshit?

Consider, for example, Albert Einstein. Widely considered a genius, one of the most intelligent people ever. And he was a socialist. Here's an article from the inaugural issue of Monthly Review in May 1949, entitled Why Socialism? Some good points to chew on: the current system of property ownership is based on conquest, on domination of the weak by the powerful. The purpose of socialism is to move beyond this "predatory phase of human development", and therefore he thinks that the science of economics which describes this present state is of little value.

Einstein then describes the crisis of his time, which sounds a lot like the crisis of our time:

The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

He finishes by lamenting the "crippling of the individual" through wasted labour, forced mass unemployment, ceaseless competition, and sees the solution in a socialist economy in which "the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion."

Now the "planned economy" part I'm not so sure about. And indeed Einstein does foresee the problems in this (of course he does, he's Einstein!):

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

Almost sixty years later we still haven't come up with a good answer to this. But it's more important than ever that we try. Now that we understand how capitalist consumerism is inconsistent with our continued survival as a species, now that we have a better understanding of the damage caused by the racism and patriarchy that are inseparable from capitalism, now even more than in 1949 it's clear: There Is No Alternative to ending capitalism.

Land Day

2007-04-23T22:57:00.000+01:00

Apparently it was Palestinian Land Day a few weeks ago. Palestinian blogger LamaK has a very poignant take on it, pointing out how close Land Day is to April Fool's Day.

on the 31st you celebrate the Lands day, to remember how your country (or palestine in case your not Palestinian), has been ravaged as a land, stolen as a country, confiscated as an identity, so you celebrate the day, as away to say NO, to say i do NOT accept, i will NOT surrender...Then on the 1st of april, you celebrate Aprils Fool, to remember that not everythinbg is for real, that sometimes its ok to lie, that we always say things that we dont mean...intentionally, that life isnt always true to us, that sometimes saying a lie is not that bad, but actually funny, and traps the person in a state of laughter, at least for a couple of minutes.Suggestion: make the two days into one, this way, its more meaningful !!!

Mao: Crazy or not so Crazy? Discuss.

2007-04-23T22:13:00.000+01:00

Monthly Review has one of those articles on its webiste that makes you sit up and take notice. It's title: Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward?

My immediate response: well, yes, he did. But I think it's always good to question immediate responses, and the author Joseph Bell does a good job of showing that a lot of the sources relied upon for famine statistics have a distinct anti-Communist bias.

Unfortunately I don't have the energy to wade through all the analysis of grain production figures and the thousands of words of justification, so I have no idea whether Bell is convincing in his ultimate argument that many of the Great Leap Forward policies were actually good for China. Indeed, I got a distinctly uncomfortable feeling as I read about the wonders of flood defenses and terracing in a period when many people were starving, even if it's not quite as many as we have been told.

Kudos to Bell and the Monthly Review, however, for having the balls to take on a subject that most people on the left would quite understandably prefer to pretend never existed. If anyone has the energy to read the whole of Bell's article and work out whether he's really got his facts together, please let me know.

I almost agreed with David Cameron!

2007-04-23T20:22:00.000+01:00

I had a real shock just now. Read a BBC News story about David Cameron talking shit, and actually found myself agreeing with part of it. (Well, at first I admit I was distracted by wondering how the man's forehead could be so huge, but then I focused and found myself agreeing.)

His basic point was that ASBOs are not working, and that an improvement in behaviour will come from allowing people more responsibility to control their own lives.

So far, so good. I actually agreed with David Cameron! But then I thought to myself, what does this man mean by responsiblity? Does he believe in giving more power to local communities to run their own affairs? No. More importantly, will he deal with the economic disenfranchisement of millions of young people that is behind almost all anti-social behaviour? Hell no, if it means shaving a penny off corporate profits. Will he actually make a concerted effort to reach out to people on the margins of society and give them a reason not to go out and stab someone? Not on your fucking life.

More likely, I think, "responsiblity" to him means forcing more people off welfare and into low-wage, dead-end jobs so that they at least fuel the economy for a few years before they get too fucked up and are thrown on the scrap heap. In other words, another recycling of the "compassionate conservatism" that we've heard somewhere before.

So you needn't worry about me. I saw through it. David Cameron is still a twat, and he has a big shiny forehead as well.

In-Dependence from Bondage

2007-04-23T17:57:00.000+01:00

This book seems worth reading. It looks at the work of Claude McKay and Michael Manley, an interesting combination, and more broadly at the effects of globalization on the African diaspora.

My only real view of Manley up to now has been his interview in the excellent film Life and Debt. But I remember clearly his frustration and anger at being forced into borrowing from the IMF on unfair terms, at being forced to trade with the US and Europe on unfair terms, and at the inability of other oppressed nations to come together and support each other.

He struck me as a true internationalist, someone who wanted to reach out to other leaders and create an alternative world order based not on profit for the rich but on meeting the needs of ordinary people. He seemed to understand the need to overthrow the white hegemony that was holding his country back, and you could sense the sadness at his ultimate failure to do so. Looking forward to reading this book to learn more about him, and to see how the author Lloyd McCarthy carries off the difficult but very interesting task of comparing poet with politician.

Link to buy the book.

Getting better all the time...

2007-04-22T22:58:00.000+01:00

I suppose now the Red Cross can be added to the list of dangerous subversives who deride the war in Iraq for their own crazy left-wing reasons. After all, they have released a report cataloguing the sheer horror of life in Iraq under American occupation.

The Red Cross, as always, is careful not to apportion blame - its reputation depends on its perceived impartiality. But the title of the report, "Civilians Without Protection: The ever-worsening humanitarian crisis in Iraq" and the contents, divided into sections such as "A conflict that spares no-one", "Sliding to disaster", "Medical care under threat", "Dirty and scarce - the water crisis", kind of suggests that the US occupation is not an unmitigated success.

Yet the lunatic right continues to deride anyone who criticises the war as a defeatist. And Bush himself pretends that everything is going really well, it's just that the liberal media refuses to report it. In a speech on Friday, for example, he said "When a family decides to stop depending on militias to protect them or a young man rejects insurgency and joins the Iraqi army, it doesn't usually make the evening news."

So now the Red Cross is also part of the conspiracy to cover up the successes in Iraq? It's getting to be quite a big conspiracy these days...

I'm too speechless to compose a title for this

2007-04-20T19:20:00.000+01:00

This Islamophobia is astonishing! Well, really, I shouldn't be astonished given the generally fucked up state of the nation, but I am. Manal Omar went swimming in an Islamic-style swimsuit, something she has done all over the world, but it caused a clamour among the ignorant bigots at David Lloyd's fitness club in Oxford.

Really, what is wrong with Muslim women wearing what they want to wear? It's 2007. You feel threatened? Intimidated? Grow up.

Guardian Books

2007-04-20T19:07:00.000+01:00

I should read this more often. It actually has some interesting stuff. This week there's Paulo Coelho on the Seven Deadly Sins, and some interesting pieces on writers I haven't heard of but would like to try, like political fiction writer Richard Flanagan.

And the Digested Read is fantastic!

Absolutely mindless

2007-04-18T15:06:00.000+01:00

I think Lord Acton was wrong: power doesn't corrupt. It lobotomises. Consider Michel Platini, for example. Gifted footballer, intelligent analyst of the game, articulate opponent of Lennart Johansson when campaigning to be UEFA President, complete moron as soon as he's elected.

My evidence for this slur? His speech awarding the 2012 European Championships to Poland and the Ukraine, and more specficially this:

"Today Poland and Ukraine have been chosen by the Uefa executive committee to host Euro 2012 and they are surely a worthy winner.

However there are no losers today, rather only bids that have not won this time round."

This piece of nonsense immediately put me in mind of the White House flak who called the failure to catch Osama bin Laden (remember him?) "a success that hasn't occurred yet."

Is there some PR firm out there pushing this as the latest cool way for politicians and bureaucrats to avoid using uncomfortable words like "loss" and "failure"?

Please don't tell me we'll soon be hearing that there are actually no poor people in the world, only millionaires who haven't got rich yet. No starving people, only fat people who haven't eaten yet. No collective denial of global warming, only an acceptance that hasn't occured yet.

Maybe soon there will be no free thinkers at all -- only future politicians who haven't been lobotomised yet.

Fortress Europe

2007-04-17T21:25:00.000+01:00

From United Against Racism comes this list of 8,855 refugees who have died throughout Fortress Europe since 1993. The amount of drowning, suicide, murder and starvation on this list is overwhelming. Yet the only time the newspapers write about these people is to complain of the "floods" of migrants claiming British benefits and stealing British jobs.

Novel Award

2007-04-17T21:16:00.001+01:00

I will enter this contest by October.

Also the Jo Cowell Short Story Contest (8 June), the Keats-Shelley prize (30 June), Wellington Town Council (31 August), City of Derby, Arabesques Press call for entries.

Financing Terrorism

2007-04-17T21:11:00.000+01:00

This is a bit old, but I wanted to make note of it so I can find it again later. From Narco News: Chiquita admits making payments to Colombian death squads.

Oh, and also this from ABC News: US has been funding anti-Iranian terrorist group Jundullah.

Great news!

2007-04-17T20:09:00.000+01:00

I write letters for Amnesty International. I have done (on and off) for many years, usually without any expectation of achieving anything. Every now and then, however, I get some good news. Today, for example, I received a letter saying that three men detained in Sudan for their political beliefs (they are members of the Sudan Liberation Movement) have now been released without charge.

The three men (Abulgasim Ahmed Abulgasim, Zakaria Ahmed Abulgasim and Mukhtar Ali Ahmed) had been the subject of an "Urgent Action" by Amnesty a few weeks back, and I wrote letters to the Sudanese authorities with the usual feeling of dread. Today's letter reminded me that sometimes this stuff works. Perhaps the Sudan government would have changed its mind and released these people on its own, but I doubt it.

Spending five minutes writing a letter actually changed the lives of three men in Sudan. The power of collective action: my five minutes along with your five minutes and hundreds of other people's five minutes convinced a government to change its policy. That's very powerful. I wish everyone who reads this post would join. Amnesty could do with a couple more members.

Classless Confusion

2007-04-17T18:41:00.000+01:00

The Nation has an analysis of globalisation in its upcoming issue that is almost very good. I say "almost" because although he makes some excellent points, the author William Greider creates all kinds of confusion by studiously avoiding any mention of class.

Now I know that it's not fashionable to talk about class any more, but sometimes it's indispensable. Greider's main point is that globalisation has been good for the capitalist business class in the U.S., but bad for the working class. Except that Greider doesn't actually use this terminology, preferring instead to spend 3,000 tortuous words talking about "national interests", "America" or simply "us", and writing such jaw-dropping sentences as "If free trade is a win-win proposition, Gomory asked himself, then why did America keep losing?"

Hmm, America as the loser from free trade. I think the cotton farmers in Burundi, sweatshop workers in Kuala Lumpur or about 5.5 billion other people could have a few problems with this view. But the confusion is unnecessary. He could instead have said that globalisation hurts workers, both in the U.S. and abroad, and benefits the global capitalist class who exploit their labour.

By making the U.S. as a nation into the "losers", he risks perpetuating the myth that the enemies of U.S. workers are Mexican/Guatemalan/Thai/Vietnamese workers. The reality is that the enemy of both groups is the class which exploits them both. But to make this connection you have to use the dreaded concept of class with all its fusty Marxist associations, and this is something even a left-wing magazine like The Nation seems unfortunately loath to do.

Suing the poor

2007-04-17T15:14:00.000+01:00

As if botching a water project in one of the world's poorest countries weren't bad enough, UK company Biwater is now taking the Tanzanian government to court for cancelling its contract. Here are a few things that make me want to hand in my British passport right now:

1. Water privatisation was imposed on Tanzania as a condition of debt relief.
2. Biwater has opposed the tribunal taking place "on African soil."
3. Before the original contract was signed, the British government gave British consultancy Adam Smith International £273,000 of UK taxpayers’ aid money to produce pro-privatisation PR to convince the sceptical Tanzanian people of the benefits of handing over their water system to Biwater (and of the benefits of paying US$102 million to Biwater over 10 years).
4. Tanzania is the 162nd poorest country in the world out of 177. 38% of people don't have access to safe water (great job, Biwater!).

Thanks to the World Development Movement for drawing attention to the case beginning at the Hague today, which Biwater not surprisingly tried to keep out of the public eye.

Venezuela is (debt) free

2007-04-16T21:04:00.000+01:00

Venezuela has now paid off the last cent of its debt to the IMF and World Bank, according to this article in Monthly Review Zine.

Of course, Chavez got lucky with oil prices going through the roof in the last few years. But it's certain that previous regimes would not have used the windfall to pay off the nation's debt - the profits would have distributed among the ruling elite.

That's what is often missed in Venezuela analysis. Chavez's predecessors used Venezuela's oil wealth entirely for their own benefit. That's why Chavez was elected, and re-elected, to power. And that's why he's considered so dangerous by the "international community." They were quite happy when the Venezuelan elite squandered the country's wealth on buying new houses for themselves in the south of France, keeping the country weak and therefore controllable from Washington. But paying off debt? Speaking out against the "Washington Consensus"?? Charting your own course??? This man is a dangerous demagogue and must be stopped!

Quiz: What do your eyes show about you?

2007-04-16T20:07:00.000+01:00

Usually I think online quizzes are stupid, but I liked this one... Maybe because the results are not completely offbase for once...

You scored as Eyes full of Pain. People tend to overlook you, which makes you feel less worthy of their attentions. You sometimes wish you could just disapear from the world around you. You have been hurt very badly in the past and you just wish that someone would understand you, and what their cruelty is doing to you.

Eyes full of Pain

83%

Passion

42%

Mysterious

33%

Diamond Eyes

25%

What do your eyes reveal about you?(PICS!)
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