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1509532242
| 9781509532247
| 1509532242
| 3.94
| 63
| unknown
| May 06, 2019
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it was amazing
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The entry of people of the millennial generation into political life can be dated to the protests waves which took place in 2011. In the UK these took
The entry of people of the millennial generation into political life can be dated to the protests waves which took place in 2011. In the UK these took the form of a mobilisation against student debt involving marches and occupations and, at one point, an invasion of the Tory party headquarters in central London. Right wing cynics spout the theory of a ‘snowflake’ generation which was rejecting the call to start behaving like responsible adults. Outside this country, seen in actions like the occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York and the ‘Indignados’ who took control of Puerto del Sol in Madrid, appeared as a delayed reaction to the financial crisis of 2008 and its long aftermath. The young in the prosperous, developed nations of the world seemed to be declaring a generational war on their parents, blaming them for bringing the promise of comfortable, middle class lives to a crashing end. But is generational war the right way to characterise the conflict? In this stimulating extended essay on what he calls Generation Left, Keir Milburn offers a sophisticated alternative interpretation. Hinging on the concept of ‘class composition’, he sets out an analysis which presents capitalism as a system which periodically has to review and change the social processes that bring the working class it needs into existence. The system’s move to financialised forms of accumulation in the late 20th century made the extraction of value in the form of rent more central, requiring a working class willing to shoulder a greater burden of personal indebtedness to sustain its standard of living. Wage growth had been checked back in the 1980s by the state’s successful assault on trade unions; but for a few decades at least the income flows that made it possible to service credit card bills and overdrafts came from the increased value of the homes which working class people were now acquiring through the right-to-buy scheme. By the turn of the millennium this mechanism was no longer performing. The glut on new home building severely restricted access for millennials to the asset which their parents had depended on to support their comparatively affluent lifestyles. Young people coming into adulthood faced the prospect of being racked not just by the debts loaded onto their credit cards, but also exorbitant property rents and the lifetime of repayment needed to service loans taken out as students. Milburn argues that debt had been one of the most important means to maintain order among the subjects of capital during the post-Thatcher decades, requiring the values of the neoliberal world order to be internalised by each individual citizen. This might have gone on indefinitely but for the stupendous effects of the credit crisis that hit the world in 2007-08. The austerity that followed allowed a rupture with the ‘common-sense’ that sustained the ‘realism’ of the capitalist system. The essay traces the evolution of the new awareness of exploitation that established itself in minds of millennials. The protest movements started to look for ways in which this emerging class consciousness could engage with politics, evolving through the forms of ‘Occupy’ and the personal testimony offered the general assemblies being promoted as alternatives to conventional representative democracy. These were all processes to be worked through before the idea took hold that a long-established, though minority current already in the political mainstream could be seized and made into the means for expressing power. This was the Corbyn current that came to have its unexpected day at the helm of the Labour Party. The energies of Occupy and general assembly politics poured into initiatives like Momentum and The World Transformed. This is an exhilarating account of the new forces in contemporary politics. It does not stop at recounting history but points to the challenges of the current moment, when Generation Left will have to find the way to mend the breaches with older supporters of versions of left wing politics. These failed to renew the commitment to the change they had once advocated. A continued engagement on the part of Generation Left with the mainstream, probing its obvious weaknesses and coming up with strategies for the alliances that will be needed for the revitalisation of democratic socialism is looked forward to as the conclusion of this important essay. ...more |
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Jul 21, 2020
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Jul 23, 2020
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Jul 25, 2020
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Paperback
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1912248409
| 9781912248407
| B07KNT5Z66
| 4.09
| 671
| 2019
| Sep 10, 2019
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really liked it
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“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This piece of pessimism of the 1990s limped on into the new millennium and
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This piece of pessimism of the 1990s limped on into the new millennium and shaped the thinking of the crew who gathered around the New Labour ‘third way’ project. The glitz and glamour of a world that was being refashioned through the globalisation of capital movement led them to the question whether it was ever desirable to end capitalism anyway. Much better to grab a seat on the helter-skelter ride and see where it took us. Grace Blakeley’s book looks back on forces that shaped capitalism during these years and offers a challenge to all those who thought it could be made to support the cause of equality and social justice. The changes wrought by Thatcher’s years in office had shifted the locus of the system away from its base in manufacturing, moving it instead in the direction of banking and financial services. The difference was that, whilst factories, mines and steel mills provided spaces where working people could assert their collective power against bosses, banks and the business running the financial services provided no similar opportunities for the interests of wage earning citizens to be advanced. Rent seekers More than that, the shift meant a move from productive to a rentier form of capitalism. Profits under the former system had depended on firms investing in plant and machinery that would increase the productivity of labour. The exploitation of workforces was still at the heart of capitalism but at least under the old dispensation the boss class ran a system that brought useful goods and services into circulation. This is far less the case when financialised capitalism becomes hegemonic. Capitalist wealth accrues from the holding of assets – buildings, land, patents, stocks and shares – which in themselves create no new value but which can generate income in the form of rents. Financialisation describes a strategy in which rent seeking became the preferred form of economic activity on the part of those with resources to invest. The reforms to banking law and the structure of the stock market in the 1980s increased the amount of money seeking opportunities to earn rents whist the amount of valuable assets in existence grew at a slower rate. The result was a form of inflation that hiked the value of assets and created a series of expanding bubbles that were destined at some point to pop. The other side of Blakeley’s account is the tremendous growth in debt during this period. Household debt expanded because the position of wage earners was weakened in the UK’s post-industrial economy. But banks and finance companies saw pressure on working class living standards as an opportunity to grow their asset portfolios by offering readily available, but very expensive, credit to families wanting to finance home improvement or take foreign holidays. For some this could be secured against the windfall gains from the right-to-buy sell-off of council homes in the 1980s; for the rest credit cards and overdrafts became essential to managing tight budgets. Non-financial businesses But financialisation involved more than the extension of the power of banks and financial service companies. Blakeley explains how it changed the nature on non-financial businesses that had hitherto made profits out of selling good or providing services. Company accounts were restructured to put commitments to spending – investing in machinery or technology, maintaining buildings, even paying the wages of workers – off the balance sheets which had the effect of enhancing the value of the assets they were holding. The financialised company now set on a huge volume of things that gained in value without anything being done to them whilst having very little in the way of committed outgoings. The mantra of shareholder value meant that what counted as the gains of this system were handed out as dividends to already wealthy owners of company stocks, whilst the now invisible workforce that was still retained paid peanuts. Blakeley does more than explain how we got into this mess. Her book concludes with an eight-point plan to roll back this parasitic model and build a system where investment worked to promote the well-being of people and communities, rather than a means for the already affluent to grab larger slices of society’s wealth for themselves. ...more |
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1
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Apr 02, 2020
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Apr 19, 2020
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May 19, 2020
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1447344189
| 9781447344186
| 1447344189
| 3.51
| 72
| unknown
| Apr 01, 2018
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it was ok
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The apparent end of a role for the working class in matters concerning the governance of the countries of post-industrial capitalism is a grave concer
The apparent end of a role for the working class in matters concerning the governance of the countries of post-industrial capitalism is a grave concern for the social policy communities that place a high value on equality and social justice. This grouping has begun to swell in recent times as the understanding that the sluggish growth rates which are now endemic across the so-called 'mature' nations are responsible for the entrenchment of austerity and the impoverishment of the public sector. Despite all the evidence that the system is creaking at the seams the rich continue to get richer at an alarming rate, mainly by way of the financial innovations which have allowed them to manipulate economic development to provide ever more ways to inflate asset values and increase income from rents. Meanwhile what passes for democratic life veers in the direction of a populism which emanates from elite interests dictating the terms of the political agenda and determining the legitimacy of who is permitted to have a say. What seems to be an enhanced role for working class people in politics, measured by the fascination with the defection from the old loyalties to some form of social democracy as represented by poor people voting for Trump or the crumbling 'red wall' in northern England, is actually quite bogus. Playing a role on the politics of modern-day capitalist societies is strictly limited to waving a flag and going yaw-ya-yaw at some Johnsonian or Trumpian rally or another. Has anyone got any ideas as to how the working class can be snapped out of it and brought back to an engagement in democratic politics which might get the progressive bandwagon rolling again? Claire Ainsley has, but unfortunately none of them are new. This is a book firmly in the Fabian tradition of social democratic politics which assumes that support for the centre-left is glued together, essentially, by sensible, centre-left policies. If only things were that simple. We can agree that the very definition of ‘working class’ in the modern world is fraught with difficulty. Marxists have made the relationship of social groups to what they call the means of production the central issue, with the proletariat emerging in this scheme from a segment of society which has no means of sustaining itself other than through the sale of their labour power to the folk with the wherewithal to provide them with a wage. There’s plenty of scope for sub-divisions of this class in this analysis, with workers engagement in manufacturing industrial goods which expand productive capacity being contrasted with those engaged in making goods for direct consumption, facilitating the circulation of capital, and the provision of direct services. Discussion around these themes is concerned with determining the nature of the class power that potentially resides in the proletariat, and on the basis of that understanding, formulating strategies to allow it to be realised. The Fabian tradition started from another premise. This is essentially about the abject, miserable condition of a section of the working population and the role that progressively minded, middle class people might play in raising them to a higher standard of life. Some notion of power is present in this outlook, revolving around that numerical size of this group and the role it might play in determining the outcome of elections. A revived interest in the predicament of the working class in the policy community has come about in recent years because of all the evidence that points to the fact that the group that has decidedly lost out from all the changes of the last forty years – collectively known as the turn towards neoliberalism – is large and in the range of 40 per cent of the population in a country like the UK. Yet these are the people who as recently as a decade ago were discounted as a political force, not by right wing ideologues who have always been dismissive of all talk of class tension and class struggle, but by the ‘third way’ generation of social democratic politicians. So, what do the heirs of this tradition make of class, now that they have been obliged to return to the subject? Well, it’s complicated. Getting a handle on the subject requires a well-organised social survey but fortunately one is at hand in the Great British Class Survey which came out of academic sociology in 2017. This offered up a picture of class today in which five strata lie between the extremes of the ‘elite’ and the ‘precariat’. These are made up of an established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, and emergent service workers. As Ainsley herself says the boundaries between these groups are blurred. Just why an electrician, for example, should figure as a new affluent worker but a carpenter only makes it into the precariat isn’t entirely clear on first blush. More confusing is the fact that care workers figure as typical occupations in all three traditional working class, emergent service worker and precariat categories. What is it that really decides what slot in the system you are at? The answer has less to do with occupations per se that decides this issue, but the amount of economic, social and cultural capital you command. It turns out that the electrician has a more exalted status because she is held to have moderately good economic capital, though relatively poor status social contacts, (even if they are highly varied), and moderate highbrow but good emerging cultural capital. The carpenter on the other hand has to scrape by with poor economic capital and the lowest scores across social and cultural capital. But if these are the factors that really account, can we presume that an experienced carpenter doing high end work in fitting out luxury apartments can switch class with the electrician engaged on a zero-hour contract with an insurance company to do repair work on domestic appliances? If so, this is a remarkably fluid class structure, with the boundaries between one segment and the next being constantly traversed. What about the new working class? According to Ainsley this is an amalgam of the traditional working class, emergent service workers, and the precariat. What they are held to have in common is a “similarity of economic and financial experience compared to those who are better off.” That at least explains why so-called new affluent workers are not considered part of the working class – i.e. because they have got more money and, potentially, all that brings with it. To be part of the new working class you have to be on the skids and heading in a downward direction, and your poverty of social contacts and culture isn’t going to help you neither. Ainsley has other things to say about the new working class. She reckons they are more disparate, atomised and operate with multiple social identities, making the formation of a collective social identity less possible, (except of course for social scientist who can weld a collective identity out of these fragments). The traditional working class is deemed to be older, with an average age of 66, and less likely to be from an ethnic minority background. Emergent service sector workers have an average age of 32, are more likely to be better educated, and around one-fifth is of BME background. The precariat is made up of both the young and old, the well- and less well educated, and every ethnic minority under the sun. What really shows them up is the fact they are very, very poor. How much weight should be given to the diversity component as a reason why this new working class is not able to sustain any sort of collective identity? There never has been a time when the working class existed a uniform, monolithic bloc spontaneously manifesting solidarity as its fundamental stance in society. It has always existed in fragments which were often in conflict over the distribution of the crumbs from capitalism’s dining table. The reason why this was overcome, as E.P. Thompson explained in his classic The Making of the English Working Class, was that narratives became available to literate workers in the turbulent years of the rise of capitalism which facilitated an understand of where there stood as labourers in relation to society as a whole. Methodism, the radicalism of the corresponding societies, Chartism, socialism in its various forms, all converged on a message which made revelations about the existence of exploitation and social injustice the great themes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Acting on this understanding led to solidarity, institutionalised in the rise of the trade unions, cooperativism, and, eventually, the Labour Party. The history of this process is marked less by the role that policy advocacy made in binding together the fragments of the working class than the occurrence of points of crisis which had the effect of reinforcing the new identity that wage earners had begun to elaborate that they were part of a working class that was vulnerable to being exploited by capitalism. Hobsbawm’s forward march of labour across these centuries was not a story of steady advance marked by the accumulation of progressive reforms. It was rather a time of lurches forward gained through a victory in struggle but then abruptly arrested as the bourgeoisie regrouped and checked further movement. Years would pass as tensions built up and new conflicts were generated to the point that a fresh crisis hit the system. If these led to a fresh period of progress it was because the underpinning narrative which sustained the consciousness of class and its grievances which sealed the commitment of wage earners to collectivism and solidarity. The victory of the right which led to the ascendency of neoliberalism came about because traditional trade unionism and social democracy lost the ideological resources that sustained the challenge which the working class movement had presented to capitalism. The prosperity of the post-war period, ironically achieved because welfare and corporate state limits had been placed on corporate capitalism, created the material conditions for a shift in thinking about the reasons why these good things had come about. The consumerist spread of the idea of choice encouraged some people to think that their better circumstances had come about primarily because of the sensible decisions individuals had made about what was best for themselves and their families. Meanwhile social democracy took its revisionist turn and began to proclaim the end of a capitalist system founded on laisser-faire and the maximisation of profit, arguing instead that the corporations were now partners of the state and shared its interest in planning for a better future. The consequence of this was that, as the system moved back into crisis during the ‘sixties, the labour movement was deeply divided as to what course should be taken to protect the interests of workers. Was the restoration of the competitiveness of British industry in world markets to be achieved through a programme of state-led investment, or the devaluation of the currency? Harold Wilson’s choice of the latter revealed the extent of the ideological befuddlement that now gripped the labour movement and handed the initiative to the resurgent capitalist currents eventually resolved themselves into the Thatcher-Reagan melange in the ‘eighties. Yet despite this, as Ainsley reminds us, the idea of being working class in Britain has not died. A majority of the British public still identifies as working class. With 60 per cent of people opting for this self-identification it seems that the moral values that motivated generations of working class people still assert influence today. Many of these people have the levels of educational and cultural capital that ought to raise them to middle class status and the persistence of working class identity can be seen as an attempt not to be stigmatised by the parasitic dependence on accrued assets and rent-seeking economic activity which many see as the hallmark of the more elevated classes. Or it might also be the case that behind the façade of professional status in the modern world there are anxieties and frustrations and a sense of being put upon in the workplace that can feel a lot like exploitation. Have this conversation with any university professor or NHS doctor you know and see if they agree that this might be the case. Working class identity lurks in the background and grievances continue to exist which sustain the idea that working life is still a story of exploitation and alienation. Furthermore, the whole system continues to bump its way towards yet more episodes of crisis and disjuncture. With levels of personal debt much the same as they were prior to the 2008 meltdown, a new shock to the security of affluent worker occupations anticipated from the next wave of digitised artificial intelligence, and the really big challenge from climate change on the horizon, the progressive left might be better of organising its strategies around the anticipation of these ominously looming prospects and making sure that its labour movement will be fit for that purpose, Without more encouragement to move working class politics in that direction Ainsley’s list of policy ideas is bound to look more than a little pallid. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 27, 2020
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Feb 15, 2020
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Feb 20, 2020
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Paperback
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1682191974
| 9781682191972
| 1682191974
| 4.05
| 19
| 2019
| 2019
|
really liked it
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With a subtitle like ‘Preparing for a Corbyn Government’ you might think unsold copies of this book need to be gathered for a mass pulping. It would b
With a subtitle like ‘Preparing for a Corbyn Government’ you might think unsold copies of this book need to be gathered for a mass pulping. It would be a shame if that were the case. As the debate about Labour’s failure to win in 2019 increasingly devolve around the view that the party was still stuck in the 1970s, the authors here show the extent of the innovative thinking that was really underway under Corbyn’s leadership. Much of the radical thinking being passed around the various departments of party policy making concerned reforms to the structure of the economy with regard to ownership and management. While everyone knows that an expansion of public ownership was being planned, few seem to know about initiatives that aimed to increase the size of the cooperative and mutual sectors, or the work being done on ‘Inclusive Ownership Funds’, which aimed at an increase in the share of stock ownership of companies by their workforces. From this standpoint it is simply untrue to claim that Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John MacDonnell, were operating with a vision that would take Britain back to the 1980s. On the contrary, the 2017 report ‘Alternative Models of Ownership’ was founded on a profound critique of statist approaches to control and management. It favoured the diversification of ownership and the approaches to community wealth building that were being pioneered by the Preston local authorities. The misrepresentation of Labour’s position on these issues, not unexpected in the case of right wing commentators, extends to journalists with impeccable social democratic credentials, such as the Guardian’s John Harris. Berry and Guinan do a good job explaining the scale of the change the Corbyn leadership was aiming for. A solid second chapter in their book sets out perspectives on the ways in which change becomes possible in concrete terms. Ironically the example they dwell on at greatest length is that of Margaret Thatcher and her privatising government in the 1980s. They recall the role that the ‘Ridley’ plan played in mapping out the steps that a right wing government would take to roll back the post-war welfare state consensus would in the years before Thatcher won her battle to get into No. 10. The restoration of the market to a central place in directing the economy required eliminating key obstacles which the Ridley plan identified as the trade unions and the nationalised industries. The early steps to be taken, before outright privatisation, was to impose market conditions on state industries, involving setting targets for a rate of return on capital invested, the removal of price controls and recruiting a politically sympathetic leadership to the top posts. This in place the way would be set to fragment the state monopolies into smaller chunks which could then be offered up to the public under the banner of a new ‘popular’ capitalism. What are the lessons from this for Labour? The sheer clarity of vision commends itself as something to be emulated in a left wing alternative. If the Tories could place the unions and nationalised industries in their sights, then the left should raise the role of banks and financialised capitalism to the same height in its reform programme. This means thinking through stages in which, firstly, their activities are constrained, and then secondly, returning their key functions to the public domain. The first thing a labour government might do is change the remit of business culture from its current disproportionate concern with shareholder value and load in obligations to upskill workforces, adopt greener production processes and require greater transparency in areas where there is a clear public interest. The Bank of England in turn should be given targets to meet which go beyond controlling inflation by requiring in addition that it should also maintain full employment and the de-carbonisation of the economy. Other chapters set out reforms that are needed to the structure and machinery of government across what is currently called the UK. The influence of corporations needs to be systematically removed from government. The often-malign role that the Treasury plays in curbing the ambitions of other departments to do good also needs to be curbed. Its ‘Green Book’ manual setting out a deep commitment to the most sterile forms of economic orthodoxy should be torn up. Decentralised authorities in the devolved nations and English regions need to be given the opportunity to involve citizens in participatory budget-making, allowing priorities for change to be set by communities themselves. Whilst all these ideas buzzed across the ranks of Labour, and as members were mobilised into activity through groups like Momentum, the breadth of vision and activism still failed to cohere into a consistent narrative which the mass of citizens could relate to. In its absence Labour went into the 2019 election with a manifesto that could be described as a ‘wish list’ of all good things people might want for themselves, but no compelling story to tell of how all this added up to a movement for change. The outcome was a loss that meant the UK will never have the Corbyn government that the book looked forward to and whatever potential there might have been for radical change during those heady years, it will all have to be rethought through again under a new leadership. As we are doing that we should ensure copies of this book are on hand to help guide us through the process. ...more |
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Jan 10, 2020
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Jan 25, 2020
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Jan 27, 2020
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Paperback
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0374508844
| 9780374508845
| 0374508844
| 4.04
| 1,302
| 1933
| Nov 01, 1980
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liked it
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Reich confronts the thorny problem of why so many people working people in the turbulent opening decades of the 20th century sided with the elite inte
Reich confronts the thorny problem of why so many people working people in the turbulent opening decades of the 20th century sided with the elite interests that were oppressing them against people from their own social and economic background in the intense class struggles of that epoch. In Germany at that time the mass of the working class was supporting either the Communist or the Social Democratic party, but a significant and growing segment chose to back the reactionary tide which eventually brought Hitler and the Nazis to power. Why did they do that? Mainstream Marxist theory had located human consciousness in the matrix of social and economic forces which were locked in conflict as a consequence of the tensions within the capitalist system. But Reich challenged this view by pointing out that it predicted the alignment of the subaltern classes with the left, leaving only the groups whose interests were bound up with the survival of capitalism to take their place on the right side of the political spectrum. Yet a residue of conservatism existed across the whole of the working class, and in some sub-sets was in sufficiently strong concentration to tip that group into the side supporting violent reaction. His own work as a psychoanalyst working with working class youth led him to the conclusion that this came about because of the repression of the sexuality of young people through the institution of the patriarchal family. Sex was drenched in the torment of guilt and revulsion even as it was engaged in with obsessive commitment by these young people. The patriarchy had stamped parental disapproval into the earliest genital fumblings of the infant child and ever after the sense that the censorious figure of the father being ever present was carried into adolescent and adult life. Sex itself became ridden with practise that mixed pain and domination into its acts and frequently produced an inability to experience orgasm. This was crucial for Reich. He viewed the orgasm as a release of psychical energies which, in being trapped within the individual had become the source of the tension and frustrations which produced neurosis. Orgasm allowed a resetting of the animal organism and a return to a state of healthy balance. Most of these theories were a development of ideas which had already been expressed by Freud and his followers. Reich broke with them with his belief that action to address the suffering of individuals required more than the forms of talking therapies that were at the heart of psychoanalysis. Psychic health required the defeat of the patriarchy and that in turn meant challenging the structure of the society which had come to rest on this ancient form of power. Reich advocated a political response to sexual misery and this meant standing alongside the sections of the working class that were mounting the most militant challenge to capitalism. The Mass Psychology of Fascism is best understood as an account of Reich’s work to establish his work within the German working class movement during the time of the rise and triumph of Hitlerism. He first worked as a member of the Communist Party but fell foul of the intolerance of its Stalinist leadership to the ideas of the avant garde. Isolated from the association with the working class that he sought, Reich worked to establish his own ‘sex-pol’ movement to work for the sexual liberation of the masses. On being driven into exile by Hitler’s rise Reich took his vision to the Unitd States. Over there he became the centre of a cult and his ideas drifted into a mystical search for the orgasmic energy which he came to believe lay at the heart of all things. There then followed the crankery of the ‘orgone’ and the apparatus he designed which was supposed to put his patients in touch with this cosmic force. Reich ended his days defending himself against criminal charges against alleged fraud. Reich’s story can be read with a proper amount of appreciation for a radical thinker who recognised that the oppression of the mass of people was not solely based on the exploitation of their labour power, but stretched more deeply into the social forces which work to produced human beings with subordination programmed into their essence. The tragedy was that the Communist movement, affected by the isolation of the revolution which had commenced in Russia in 1917, turned its back on any association with the radicalism that had been brought into its ranks by visionaries who identified with its original aspiration in the realm of human freedom. It was not only Reich who was suffered as a consequence of the severance of his movement from communism, but communism which was diminished by repudiation of Reich and others like him. ...more |
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Aug 15, 2019
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1912248433
| 9781912248438
| 1912248433
| 3.50
| 24
| Jun 11, 2019
| Jun 11, 2019
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liked it
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A timely book that sets out to map the contours of antisemitism in the modern world. It makes the valuable point that racism can no longer be viewed a
A timely book that sets out to map the contours of antisemitism in the modern world. It makes the valuable point that racism can no longer be viewed as a relatively simple phenomenon that can be expressed as antipathy towards a group because of perceptions about their standing in a supposed racial hierarchy. It has now acquired another dimension which hinges on what a given people is seen as doing. Just as Muslims have come to be viewed negatively because of, for the example, the attire of their womenfolk, so Jews arouse continue to arouse hostility because of the perception that they are connected to the workings of financial capitalism and/or support Israel in its conflicts with the Palestinians. This multi-layered racism produces some paradoxical outcomes which particularly pertain to the position of the Jews. Kahn-Harris points out that they no longer register very highly as a group which suffers from the types of discrimination that produce social and economic disadvantage but they are still the object of a hatred which emanates across a broad spectrum of society. This hate no longer checks career progression or upward social mobility and general influence but it has taken deep root across the new social media. From that place alone it will not produce outcomes that can be measured in terms of social or economic disadvantage but it does have the power to cause deep hurt and increase the frequency of acts of violence against individuals and places of importance to their communities. A further complication arises from the fact that the intensified interest in what the people who are the objects of concern do, rather than merely what they are, means that it becomes easier to divide prospects for vilification into good Jews and bad Jews (and likewise one presumes, into good Muslims/bad Muslims, Jamaicans, Indians, and so on). It is at this point it becomes salient, in Kahn-Harris’s opinion, to talk about right wing and left wing antisemitism. The right wing stuff has more in common with the Jew hatred of old and centres on the identities which even the most secular of Jews maintain that sets them apart from the majorities they live among. The wish to be acknowledged at some level as being Jewish is taken by people from the majority communities who use race as the pivot of their own identity as an explicit criticism of what they are, and therefore as a perennially hostile fifth column in society. Left wing antisemitism is supposedly based on Jews and their relationship to capitalism, and, more to the forefront, the affinity that many in that community have with the state of Israel. Kahn-Harris gives less consideration to the capitalism side of the argument which in actuality reveals itself much less frequently in any output that can seriously be considered left wing. But the entanglement with Zionism moves us closer to the hub or the issue and the book spends most time working through its implications. Good Jews/bad Jews produces mirror opposite outcomes for rightist and leftists. The right wing likes Zionism because it validates its view that nations acquire vitality as a consequence of the homogeneity of their racial stock. The flag of Israel is often waved in the places right wingers manifest themselves, from the ranks of the Conservative party to the street level thugs of Britain First and its associates. The left on the other hand excoriates the Zionists and gives a place of honour in its ranks to Jews who declare themselves for the Palestinians. Kahn-Harris makes the correct point that an attitude towards Israel should not be made the sole defining point as to who or what is left wing. The reality of persecution across generations and the magnitude of the Holocaust has led to the formation of a consensus across Jewish communities that the establishment of the state of Israel is a positive development that requires continuing support. This should not surprise anyone capable of judging the matter objectively. The discussion that needs to be had has less to do with whether this identification is correct or not, but rather what does this actuality-existing Israel mean in the context of the dispossession of the Palestinian people and the configurations of imperialist and national-democratic forces across the Middle East region. By these standards the left will be justified in deploring the Israel-right-or-wrong stance that exists at across a wide swathe of Zionist views, but would be acting unwisely to refuse dialogue with those who still hold out hope for an Israel that has made peace with the Palestinians on the basis of a just and equitable settlement. By this measure sympathy with Zionism is not the dividing point which cannot be healed, but the start of a principled discussion between those with different opinions. After much interesting consideration of these issues Kahn-Harris’s argument dwindles to the rather weak point that fighting antisemitism means upholding the right of Jews to hold opinions with which one disagrees, with the fact of the Jewishness of the proponent of error being excluded from the subsequent dispute. Obviously true, but the fight against this particular manifestation of racism has to mean more than the liberal cliché of possibly deploring what is being said but defending the right to say it. ...more |
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| 1551646560
| 4.43
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This brief book sets out strident argumentation of the part of a dedicated anarchist to claim FK as a comrade. Taking aim at Max Brod’s suggestion tha
This brief book sets out strident argumentation of the part of a dedicated anarchist to claim FK as a comrade. Taking aim at Max Brod’s suggestion that his great friend was a ‘non-political writer’ Despiniadis picks through the texts of his novels and short stories, augmented with references to his diary and surviving letters to reveal a Kafka with unquestionable anarchist sympathies and an outlook on the world that was fully apart of that philosophy. The critique of the insanities of bureaucratic power is obviously central to works like The Castle and The Trial. The intensity of his vision of corridors, waiting rooms, minor officials and incomprehensible proceedings that make up the subject of these novels makes it unlikely that Kafka’s stance was a generalised alienation from the world, more to do with religious feeling than a political outlook. Despiniades reinforces his argument with the evidence of Kafka’s participation in the anarchist circles that existed in the Prague of his day. Whilst he remained a silent presence in the affinity groups that were the organised base of anarchism this cannot be taken as a mark of the marginality of his involvement. The absence of any consideration from a theoretical standpoint of the difference between thought and action in anarchism makes it plausible to view his devotion to writing as the inspiration he took from the meetings he attended. A second manifestation of alienated power which is a common theme in anarchist thinking is that of the patriarchal family. Kafka’s writing on this form of authority stretches across three principal works, The Metamorphosis, The Judgement and the first chapter from Amerika which started life as a short story entitled The Stoker. All depict troubled father-son relationships which Kafka experienced in his own childhood. The final component of Kafka’s analysis of power is the compulsion to strive for the approval of the established social order which exists across so much of his work but is best illustrated in The Metamorphosis. Samsa is crippled by his transformation into a giant insect but it seems that, in the first instance, his mortification comes from his inability to attend to the obligations of his employment. The family is deeply implicated in this fall from grace, since Samsa has to forego his role as the main breadwinner of his household. But his anguish is intensified by the loss of his ability to go out in the world and be seen as the sort of citizen who might win the approval of his society. Having read the novels and short stories it seems surprising that the view of Kafka as a non-political writer could have held sway over the years. The characterisation of Kafka as an ‘anatomist of power’ in this book goes to the heart of his absorption in the detail of human subjection. The challenge to the idea that he was driven by the alienation of human beings from an essence that is essentially spiritual rests on the understanding of a society that grinds people down specifically through its mastery of the power of castles, trials, and ultimately, the family. ...more |
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4.42
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| Oct 2018
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it was amazing
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Rodney’s book was first published in the UK back in 1972 and reflects a time when the left was much keener to explore the contemporary relevance of th
Rodney’s book was first published in the UK back in 1972 and reflects a time when the left was much keener to explore the contemporary relevance of the notion of imperialism in its analysis. For Rodney the relationship between Europe and Africa could not simply be considered as another example of one society being defeated by another in the manner of, say, the Roman conquest of Gaul or Britain. The ‘scramble for Africa’ – the military phase of the conquest – beginning in the late 19th century had been preceded by four centuries of slave trading in an unequal exchange which had weakened the capacity of indigenous African society to stand against the specific form of capitalist imperialism. Rodney insists that the nature of Europe’s relationship with Africa had to be seen from the standpoint of dialectical materialism. The concept of underdevelopment appears here as not simply the devastated ruin of a society defeated in war, but as the consequence of a reshaping of the existing social forms into something that was conducive to the expansion of capitalist market relations across the continent. The states which had been existence prior to this infiltration had their own histories of cultural and economic exchanges which linked producers and traders across the vast spaces of the continent. Slavery weakened these structures by creating new lines of ‘trade’ which ran from the interior to the coast, and from there to the slave ship and the plantations of the New World. The levels of either willingness or resistance to the sale of human bodies varied from place to place and across different times but the direction of travel across four centuries was towards a bending and reshaping of African society towards the interests of the Europeans and their commercial interests. The seventy years of colonialism produced an underdevelopment which was not merely the outcome of civilizational difference – always exaggerated in favour of the Europeans anyway. Its dialectical opposition was European development which arose from the total exploitation of African resources and the imposition of terms of trade which produced permanent obstacles to progress for the victim continent. Trade between African regions ceased during the years of colonialism. The skills of a labour force in textile production and metal working that might have been the basis for industries capable of competing with the Europeans were made redundant by the flooding of markets with mass produced goods from England, France and Germany. Minerals and agricultural produce were shipped out in their rawest forms at the meagre prices which the colonists signalled a willingness to pay. Capital did not accumulate in Africa – it was sucked out and transported to the businesses which had their headquarters in London, Paris, Brussels and Berlin. Because of this underdevelopment figures as a conscious strategy pursued by interests in the North rather than a simple gap between the economic standing between the two continents. Rodney explains how this continued after the apparent ending of formal colonial rule from the 1950s onwards and into the modern, neo-colonial epoch. African states struggle to find purchase in the world economy, searching for the areas where they are supposed to have a competitive advantage in trading terms. For many countries a great hope has been invested in the education of youth but in the period Rodney considers, ranging up to the 1960s, this was showing only uneven outcomes. But even if he was writing today, when education has gone along was to abolish illiteracy upgrade the human capital of the continent, he would have to balance this with an account of how sluggish growth has failed to create the jobs which would make use of this potentially productive labour force. As a consequence young African workers travel in vast numbers to the coasts of their continent, time not in chains, but still enslaved by the imperatives of an imperialist, neoliberal global economy. ...more |
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4.43
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Walter Rodney’s most important contribution to Marxist thinking about emergence of global capitalism will forever be How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,
Walter Rodney’s most important contribution to Marxist thinking about emergence of global capitalism will forever be How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, also published by Verso as a companion to this volume. With the advantage of his own roots in Caribbean society he was able to understand the phenomenon of under-development as the outcome of the aggressive, profit-seeking regimes imposed on his home region, rather than the inherent backwardness of the its people. His analysis added to the sketches of the role that capitalist imperialism played in transferring resources, entrenching poverty in one place and pooling prosperity in others which had been provide by Marx, Engels and Lenin. Dealing with the concrete example of Africa, Rodney laid bare the processes through which exploitation worked to extract value from the labouring classes in colonial and post-colonial societies and facilitated its appearance in the developed nations, not just as profit, but also as higher wages and social welfare and security for their working class citizens. But in addition to what might be thought of as scholarly work primarily intended to develop a line of argument, Rodney was also an activist who looked for opportunities to work alongside to with others struggling for liberation, across the Caribbean region, the United States, and Africa. The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World emerged from a series of lectures given by Rodney during the five years when he was resident in Tanzania and working at the University of Dar es Salaam between 1969 and 1974. At that time the newly independent country was trying to forge a version of socialism that was relevant to its circumstances with a predominantly rural population engaged in subsistence agriculture. The experiment with cooperative, ujamaa village structures was seen by Rodney as being analogous to the efforts made by the Soviet Union to solve the problem of the backwardness of its own rural sector during the 1920s and 30s. Working with students expected to play a role in sealing the success of the Tanzanian model, Rodney sought to provide them with a broader context rooted Marxism which would help the young country along its socialist path. Much of the content of the early lectures deals problems of histography. How does the researcher access ‘the truth’ about a particular historical event? How much is decided by the inevitable bias, forged by culture, class and prejudice which any individual will bring to the inquiry? Is there a reliable way to check the tendency towards subjectivity? Rodney’s confidence in dialectical materialism as a thoroughly scientific approach to the study of his history sets the scene for a scrutiny of the revolution which devolves on what is claimed to be the objective fact of struggle between social classes. For the basic material of what constitutes the ‘facts’ of the two revolutions of 1917 – March and October – Rodney draws on an extensive list which consists of the works of the officially approved Soviet historians whose work circulated outside the country after the 1930s, contrasted with a wide range of non-Soviet accounts, most of which are hostile to the claims made for the achievements of the Bolsheviks. In a chapter devoted to a discussion of Trotsky’s three volume history Rodney clearly finds the account he finds most congenial, explaining as it does how a contest between the classes in a country conventionally presented as backward could lay the basis for a socialist society based on the authority of the working class. All of this must have been encouraging for the cadre of future leaders of their country that Rodney was addressing back in the early 1970s. The bigger problem was how to account for the development of Soviet society in the decades after the enthusiasm for socialist change immediately after 1917. The view that the state built by the revolution had degenerated into an oppressive bureaucracy pursuing its own interests – essentially Trotsky’s interpretation from the mid-1930s onwards – is inimical to Rodney’s own wish to demonstrate the continued viability of the Soviet socialist road. Criticism of the disastrous effects of the collectivisation of agriculture, the extensive use of forced labour, as well as the sublimation of worker-led challenges to capitalism to the task of supporting the ‘socialist motherland’, is muted in the final lectures in the series. Despite these failings Rodney himself continued to pursue a revolutionary socialist line which led to his role in founding the Working People’s Alliance in his native Guyana months before his assassination in 1980. His death at the tragically early age of 38 concluded the activism of a formidable Third World intellectual who sought always to develop his work in the service of social movements struggling for liberation. ...more |
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Oct 10, 2019
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Oct 14, 2019
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1786637553
| 9781786637550
| 1786637553
| 3.58
| 970
| Jul 10, 2018
| Jul 10, 2018
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really liked it
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Written in the tradition of the polemical political pamphlet, Mouffe offers a crisp and direct analysis of the impasse of leftist politics in the libe
Written in the tradition of the polemical political pamphlet, Mouffe offers a crisp and direct analysis of the impasse of leftist politics in the liberal democracies. Noting the disarray of both social democratic and Marxist parties, she roots this their floundering in a failure to come to grips with the historical moment - the 'conjuncture' in Althusarian terms. An analysis of populism crystallises understanding of what this conjuncture actually is. The populist moment "signals the crisis of the neoliberal hegemonic formation ... progressively implemented in Western Europe through the 1980s" (p.11) "The core of this new hegemonic formation is constituted by a set of political-economic practices aimed at imposing the rule of the market ..... and limiting the role of the state to the protection of property rights, free markets and free trade." (11-12) This system moved into deep crisis in 2008 with the near collapse of banking and credit and has opened up an interregnum - "... a period of crisis during which several tenets of the consensus established around a hegemonic project are challenged." (12) The fact that a "...solution to this crisis is not yet in sight characterises the 'populist moment' we find ourselves in today." (12) She has already defined populism, following Laclau, as "... a way of doing politics that can take various ideological forms according to both time and place, and is compatible with a variety of institutional frameworks." (11) Most crucially it can come in both right and left wing forms and work in ways that range from authoritarian through to radical democratic. The argument goes on to explain how traditional forms of parliamentary democracy have been drawn into the crisis of neoliberalism, becoming in effect the 'post-democracy' desribed by Colin Crouch. She quotes: "The fundamental cause of democratic decline in contemporary politics is the major imbalance now developing between the role of corporate interests and those of virtually all other groups. Taken alongside the inevitable entropy of democracy, this is leading to politics once again becoming an affair of closed elites, as it was in pre-democratic times." (13) Mouffe adds her own perspective on post-democracy, seeing it arising from “… the agonistic tension between liberal and democratic principles, which is constitutive of liberal democracy.” (16) The ascent of neoliberalism, with the limitations it imposes on state action and the reduction of the spaces in society where citizens could contend with one another, together with the demise of the democratic values of equality and ‘popular sovereignty’, has brought us to the place where we now are. She goes on to note the emergence of protest politics of the ‘Occupy’ kind as a “… signal of awakening after years of relative apathy.” (19) but argues that the refusal to engage with political institutions has limited their impact. (19-20). Her proposal for a left populism is intended to address this critical defect and bring the perspectives nurtured in the anti-globalisation movements into the political sphere. The guiding strategy aims for the federation of “…. the democratic demands into a collective will to construct a ‘we’, a ‘people’ confronting a common adversary: the oligarchy.” (24) The idea of a ‘chain of equivalence’ is aired at this point, which takes the demands of workers, immigrants, the precarious middle classes and others, are allows each social fraction to see its grievance mirrored in the predicament of others. A chapter titled ‘Learning from Thatcherism’ shows how this task of creating a chain of equivalence was taken up in the 70s and 80s to bring the complaints and frustrations of small business operators into alignment with big capital and a part of the working class. The result was the creation of a post-Keynesian hegemony which facilitated the dismantling of indicative economic planning and much to the welfare state. Mouffe opines: “To learn from Thatcherism means realising that in the present conjuncture, the decisive move is to establish a political frontier that breaks with the post-political consensus between centre-right and centre-left. Without defining an adversary, no hegemonic offensive can be launched.” (36) So, the left needs a project which establishes a ‘frontier’ between itself and its opponents, generates ‘chains of equivalence’ which allows subaltern groups to share their grievances and build solidarity, but is also salient at the level of mainstream, democratic politics. Bringing these components of strategy into alignment is a means to the forging of a new consensus that can go face-to-face with neoliberalism. But what is the project she has in mind? The answer is the radicalisation of democracy itself. Why this? Because she identifies the processes which have produced the subordination of so many social groups as the feature of neoliberalism which the left is called to react against most immediately. But being forced into a subordinate position does not in itself generate antagonism to the prevailing order. For that to happen Mouffe argues that a ‘discursive exterior’ is needed “…. from which the discourse of subordination can be interrupted.” (42) This exterior is to be found in the “…. main political vocabulary in Western societies…” which are still in place to challenge subordination. – the ideas of liberty and equality. (42) From Mouffe’s Gramscian perspective, “The objective of hegemonic struggle consists in disarticulating the sedimented practices of an existing formation [ie parliamentary democracy] and, though the transformation of these practices and the instauration of new ones, establishing the nodal points of a new hegemonic social formation.” (44) She argues that articulating democracy with equal rights and the ‘social appropriation’ of production and popular sovereignty with “… command a very different politics and inform different socioeconomic practices than when democracy was articulated with the free market….” (44). But, controversially for some on the left, her advocacy of radical democracy does not aim for a break with pluralist liberal democracy. “Its objective is the construction of a collective will, a ‘people’ apt to bring about a new hegemonic formation that will reestablish the articulation between liberalism and democracy that has been disavowed by neoliberalism…” (45) Her arguments goes through another Gramscian concept, of the ‘integral state’, which is seen as including both civil society and the political society. (47) “In this view, next to the traditional apparatus of government, the state is also composed of a variety of apparatuses and public spaces where different forces contend for hegemony.” (47) These are spaces that “… can provide the terrain for important democratic advances.” (47) The fate of the state is not to ‘wither away’, “… but a profound transformation of those institutions to put them at a the service of a process of radicalisation of democracy.” (47) The aim of is not the seizure of the state, but to become the state. The book then goes on to consider some of the issues contingent in the task of constructing a ‘people’. Mention is made of the need for a radical democratic concept of citizenship, with the importance of collective action being of its concepts. Mouffe sees the need for “plurality of engagements” (67) which involve actions at the ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ levels. She references both Podemas in Spain and La France Insoumise as existing movements which are acting on these principles. A final point that needs to be mentioned is her insistence on the ‘affective dimension’ to politics which is required for the citizens to identify with the project. (72) This means shifting the left’s commitment to a rationalist approach to politics to one which works with Freud’s understanding of the human mind divided into the conscious and unconscious. Personality is constructed around elements that lie outside the consciousness and rationality of agents. The implications of this for left politics is that the identities which will play a part in forging democratic change will include the element of “affective libidinal bonds”. (73) She quotes Freud: “A group is clearly held together by a power of some kind: and to what power could this feat be better ascribed that to Eros, which holds everything together in the word.” (73) Conclusion: Mouffe maps out an approach to left politics which builds democracy into its essence. It holds out the possibility of achieving radical change – to the point of mounting a challenge to the centrality of capitalism in the modern world – but also mounting a defence of democratic values. All in all, a valuable contribution to an important debate. ...more |
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Jun 30, 2019
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Jul 18, 2019
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0670092304
| 9780670092307
| 0670092304
| 3.77
| 443
| 2018
| Jan 28, 2019
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really liked it
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China’s entry into the WTO set-up back in 2001 was seen by the strategists of neoliberalism as a great way to tame the communist beast and shackle the
China’s entry into the WTO set-up back in 2001 was seen by the strategists of neoliberalism as a great way to tame the communist beast and shackle the country to the free market. The stirring up a new round of global super-power tension seems to be a marked departure from a line of development and progress that was intended to take the world in other directions. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms back in the 1970s led to China becoming a supplier of cheap goods to the developed world which was beginning to revel in the joys of outsourcing. Production took root in the newly established Special Economic Zones which were making use of the country’s abundance of hard-put peasant and working classes. It was a win-win for politicians who saw globalisation as a way for the Global North breakout of its own logjam of low rates of profit and stagnant productivity and at the same time equip the countries of the developing world with new tools to overcome poverty. China has been outstanding successful in accomplishing the second of these tasks, with something like 600 million of its citizens being taken out of the direst standards of want and need over a period of time when economic growth has attained rates of 10 percent a year plus. But this very development has presented the country’s autocratic rulers with a set of new challenges which have sown the seeds of new, profound tensions being introduced into global capitalism. Bruno Maçães book setting out the nature of this challenge to the world order is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the vitriol behind US hostility towards Huawei’s role in building 5G mobile communication systems and the raft of Beijing policies that have been designated ‘belt and road’. His starting point is the fact that China has reached the end of economic growth based on a cheap labour force manufacturing cheap goods. It now has a population in which modestly prosperous households make up the largest segment, and who are devoting a large share of their new wealth to the education of their offspring. Chinese workers are expecting something better out of life than the sweated labour on offer in companies linked to foreign transnationals. Maçães explains that China needs a leg-up to become an economy producing the high-tech goods in innovations in robotics and AI for which the world is becoming ever more hungry. But production for this world means working with the global value chains (GVC) that have splayed manufacturing and services out into a thousand pieces spread across a hundred countries, all coordinated by a powerful centre which can command the various parts to deliver according to its own strict standards. The leadership in Beijing looks outwards and sees the prospects for building the cross-border networks it needs to assemble for the sake of its own GVCs as lying in the barely realised potential of central Asia, which in turn opens up routes to the south and south-east (Pakistan, India, Indochina) and westwards along a new Silk Roads to West Asia and Europe. It becomes too easy to envision the belt and road strategy as a simple opening up of trade routes, but Maçães insists it is far more ambitious than that. The idea of the ‘belt’ needs to be understood as a region in which transport, communication, goods manufacture and service provision is integrated in accordance with the standards required to produce value in a chain which ultimately be captured by the China to which all parts of its unique GVC ae directed. The ‘road’ refers to maritime connections which link Chinese ports to the rest of the world. Maçães gives us a clear picture of the moral world view which justifies these plans to the Chinese Communist Party. In contrasting this with more the forms of imperialism which stemmed from the European powers he suggests that this can be seen as ‘Confucius versus Machiavelli’. Machiavellism is essentially amoral being concerned with the preservation of the power of the prince. Later modifications of the idea tell us that, if good emerges from this it is an unintended consequence of the pursuit of selfish interests, guided by the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. Confucianism, on the other hand, is saturated with morality. The Confucian ruler is enjoined to treat the welfare of the people as the highest value, but also that the people who benefit from this state of affairs must yield respect and obedience to the helmsman of their fate. By this standard the countries corralled into the belts and road of the Chinese world order will be expected to show the proper deference to the new emperors in Beijing. Despite all the nuance, the Chinese world order is likely to be experienced in much the same way as the other world orders which have beset the planet since the Europeans set sail from their own peninsular back in the 15th century. Countries which now seem to be benefiting from substantial investment from Chinese sources that are tied to the modernisation of industry and infrastructure will find themselves burdened with impossible levels of debt should their growth rates fail to reach the clip required to ensure repayment. Expect the belt and road to stir up more discontent and friction in the future, and not all of it coming from the direction of Washington. ...more |
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Apr 23, 2019
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Jun 16, 2019
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1564110397
| 9781564110398
| 1564110397
| 4.00
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| Jan 01, 1992
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it was ok
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Hagiography of JJ Rawlings based on his role in the 1979 and 1982 coups in Ghana. Rawlings presented as a saint-like figure motivated by hatred of cor
Hagiography of JJ Rawlings based on his role in the 1979 and 1982 coups in Ghana. Rawlings presented as a saint-like figure motivated by hatred of corruption and a desire to serve the ordinary people of his country. The book was originally published in 1986 and includes no comment on the economic crisis that overwhelmed the country in 1983 - caused by Rawlings imposition of price controls which benefitted urban workers but caused hardship for the 70% of the country who farmed the countryside. The early attempts to run the country through mass mobilisation came to an end and Rawlings's faction - the Provisional National Defence Council - governed autocratically, bowing to accept loans from the IMF with the condition that structural adjustment programmes were undertaken. It would be good to find a more rounded assessment of Ghana's history during the 1980s and after which doesn't reduce everything to naive stories of heroes and villains. Can anyone recommend something like that? ...more |
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May 04, 2019
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May 25, 2019
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1784785318
| 9781784785314
| 1784785318
| 3.86
| 444
| May 01, 2016
| May 01, 2016
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liked it
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This would have been a very topical book when it was first published in 2016, at a moment when the world was trying to come to terms with the election
This would have been a very topical book when it was first published in 2016, at a moment when the world was trying to come to terms with the election of Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party. It obviously rolled off the presses in the days before the referendum result and certainly had no chance to consider what a general election in 2017 might mean for British politics. The world looked oh-so-much simpler back then. For Seymour the thing that has to be explained is the strangeness of what he calls the rebirth of radical politics. How had this perennial outsider come to sweep his way to the leadership of the Labour Party? For those whose perspective is dominated by a structural analysis that can’t see beyond the role that this political formation has played for a century in sustaining one of the possible versions of liberal/social democratic capitalism, his achievement in winning the leadership is nothing less than a perverse anomaly that will play out either as a joke or tragedy, after which history will resume its proper course. Corbyn is a politician who has played a highly marginal role in the mainstream of political discourse precisely because he thinks that capitalism is a problem that needs to be solved by ushering it out of existence. This is now a position that is registering a great deal more sympathy among people active at some level in political life. This group – predominantly young, well-educated, and hard-pressed by the insecurities of the jobs and housing markets – had shown itself ready to respond to an appeal for a more radical turn which Corbyn’s candidacy represented. The so-called radical centrism espoused by Tony Blair, and which was the stance adhered to by New Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and even, if you didn’t think too deeply about it, the Cameron wing of the Tories, had become damaged goods as a consequence of the record of the 2010-15 coalition government. Ed Miliband’s convoluted attempts to breathe life into Labour had convinced few and the thoroughly disappointing result of the 2015 general election inclined a larger group that nothing positive was going to come from any of the other remnants of the Blair-Brown years who still hung around Parliament. The stage was set not, paradoxically, for a complete newcomer to rise to the top, but rather a battle-scarred veteran who’d spent years opposing the cliques who were now proving themselves to be so utterly inadequate. Seymour looks in detail at the ‘Project Fear’ that was the last-ditched attempt by Corbyn’s opponents to derail the leadership election victor that was obviously coming his way. The first to peel away from orthodox Labourite thinking was an important section of the trade union leadership. Despite their role in propping up politicians from the centre-right these people had got little reward for their loyalty. All candidates associated with the Blair-Brown ascendency were committed to keeping the anti-union laws passed during the Thatcher years in place. Corbyn offered more though his commitment to ending the laws that prevented unions from acting to support the interests of their members. After this crack in the centrist monolith space opened up for the hundreds of thousands of ordinary members of the party, who had been given a vote under reforms promoted by Ed Miliband which made leadership elections an issue to be settled by a vote of the entire membership. Miliband has assumed that a ‘wisdom of the masses’ operated in this area which would produce outcomes that favoured the sort of moderates who had the approval of various factions of the Parliamentary party. It was a view formed by the judgment that the era of mass party membership was over and the natural size of dues-paying supporters would be in the order of 200,000 – 250,000. This irreducible core was likely to be made up of people willing to assume the burden of ‘responsible’ participation in politics, being committed to parliamentary proceduralism and possibly careers in local government and maybe a punt at being an MP. What it didn’t allow for was the influx of new members, taking membership over the half million mark, with a sizeable proportion being made up of people profoundly disappointed with centrist politics. So, Project Fear failed and the left could bask for a while in the belief that radical politics was resurgent. Seymour account moves on with chapters on the crisis of British politics and the reasons why Labour wasn’t working to fulfil its mission to advance the interests of the working class. This involves a fairly solid account of how social democracy had lost traction as a consequence of the changes wrought by neoliberal globalisation and Labour’s floundering experiments with a ‘third way’. It opens the way to the final chapter in the book which concerns the prospects for Corbyn’s leadership and the role it might play in consolidating the rebirth of radical politics. His argument centres on what he sees as the central dilemma of the Labour Party, and the role it has come to play as an articulator of the idea that labour has special interests that needed to be advanced, and its chosen for doing this through the parliamentary arena. The only power that labourism has respect for is that which is bequeathed on its representatives by elections which have been conducted strictly in accordance with the law. This means that even a radical leftist has to advance programmes which go a long way to placating the concerns that the propertied classes might have that their interests will be challenged. Moreover, since the rights of property have energetic and loudly vocal defenders in the media and other parts of the ideological apparatus of the state, then Labour’s protest that it can indeed by trusted has to be expressed in the most strident terms. Seymour sees this as an insurmountable obstacle for Labour’s left wing. He is as confident as any right wing commentator that the party is doomed to electoral defeat when the next general election took place – at the time of publication scheduled for June 2020. His hope is that in the meantime, Corbyn uses the platform he has been given to work with the angry millennials who had flocked to his cause. The best outcome is that a new generation of committed socialists emerge from the experience of these years, presumably building a base for their activity and influence that extended beyond the orthodox electoral machine. This perspective needs to be re-thought in the light of the outcome of the surprise general election Theresa May called in 2017. Confounding all the expectations of mainstream commentators the result was not the disaster for Corbynism that had been predicted, but a remarkable advance in electoral terms which saw the Labour share of the vote rising by 10% and eradicating the majority that May had had for her Conservative Party in Parliament. Labour’s centrists were thrown into immediate disarray. The electoral disaster they expected was supposed to have provided the spur to the party’s membership finally waking up and taking the action needed to ditch Corbyn. Instead they found they were being led by a leader who had missed becoming prime minister by a whisker, with the blame for falling short plausibly attributed to their undisciplined carping and petty rebellion. What are the lessons to be learnt from this? Is it the case that there is indeed a parliamentary road to government power for the Labour left, which is there to be achieved by one final push that moves the share of the vote from 40 to 40.5, or even 41%? If this is the case then it would not be productive for the left to scrutinise the leadership and its politics for any possible defects that require correction if the party is to remain faithful to socialism. With the prize to clearly in sight, and so likely to be gifted by a psephological miscalculation or another poorly drafted Tory manifesto, then the job of the left is to keep the membership hyped into a state of eager anticipation through deftly crafted social media activity. This indeed is the line taken by the majority faction in the Corbynite Momentum movement. This is a calculation badly upset by the fact that the political agenda that Corbyn has had to respond to has lain outside his comfort zone issues of austerity, jobs insecurity and growing inequality. Instead the leadership has had to contend with the messy business of Brexit and all the threats that it has posed for Corbyn’s grip on approval ratings from his millennial supporters. His conviction that electoral success will depend on bringing working class voters in the ‘left behind’ regions back into the Labour camp has stopped him from acceding to the demand from the younger cohort of more recent supporters to work towards a reversal of the Brexit vote. The noisy clamour coming from the clash between the Brexit and Remain factions has worked to reduce the options to the choice on the left to either ‘Lexit’ or the overthrow of the referendum result. Both courses of action require the sowing of delusions of one sort or the other among the public. Lexit requires the fantasy that a democratic national community is within reach which will be empowered to take all the decisions necessary to provide the British people with rising living standards, a comprehensive welfare state simply because that is what they want and deserve. The People’s Vote lobby on the other hand makes most sense if you truly believe that the EU is a source of beneficence, even it does need a few improving tweaks. A more honest approach would be frank acknowledgment that we are in the mess we are in today because the EU took a turn towards neoliberalism back in the 1990s that was every bit as decisive as that taken by the Atlantic powers a decade earlier. Recovery from our current low point requires a stance equally critical of the pretensions of the new nationalism that is taking a grip on the thinking of so much of the population, and also the pro-market, pro-plutocracy policies which are the mainstream in the EU institutions. For the left, the position most consistent with this is one that forces a disengagement with the herd-thinking demanded by the EU combined with an insistence on the right to participate in a single market which British citizens have helped to create alongside their continental counterparts across five decades. Translated into practical politics this looks as close as dammit to a customs union plus. Advocacy of this perfectly defendable position has looked as far as could be imagined from electoral-politics-as-usual for the Corbyn leadership. In not making itself beholden to either Lexit or Remain it has pleased very few and provoked rebellions that have driven many in the party into polarised camps. There is no real sign that any significant part of the explicitly socialist segment of the party has been prepared to develop arguments that will bolster the intellectual case for Corbyn’s position. It is complexities of this sort that seem unanticipated in Seymour’s position. His reduction of the challenges before Corbyn-led Labour to electoralism versus principled socialism leaves out all the dimensions of difficulty that have been thrown up by real life. Appreciation of socialist theory is a necessary but insufficient guide to the decisions and actions that have to be taken as militants try to work their way through to a politics that begins to put capitalism into a box and opens the way to a renewal of class conscious, democratic progress. In a country like the UK socialist need to work within a broader labour movement which continually throws up options for policy and action which do not easily reduce to either the ‘correct’ or the ‘treacherous’. This means that a relationship with the Labour Party will never be a mere tactic until something better comes along, but a commitment that will necessarily span generations, in the hope that a way forward to a post-capitalism, socialist society will eventually become clear. ...more |
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A history of the use of fossil fuel by humans could start sometime around 3,000 years ago, a time when we know the Chinese at least were burning coal.
A history of the use of fossil fuel by humans could start sometime around 3,000 years ago, a time when we know the Chinese at least were burning coal. Pirani eschews this deep history approach. His account deals with the period from 1950 onwards, when use of coal, oil and gas escalated to the point where what was consumed in half a century equalled and surpassed all consumption before that date. What has been driving this increase? Neo-Malthusian commentators put it down to human population increase. Back in 1950 there were 3.5 billion people on the planet: the current number is double that. Isn’t that a sufficient explanation for the huge increase in the use of fossil fuels? Pirani points out that it is more complicated than that. The use of fossil fuels to generate electricity and drive vehicles has increased most rapidly in the developed countries of the OECD, where population increase has been modest or even flat-lining. Among the nations of the global south wood remains the most widely used fuel to generate heat to warm rooms and cook. He also asks us to think more critically about the often-quoted examples of industrial development in China, India, and the ‘tiger’ economies of the Pacific east. Much of the growth of output in these countries has serviced the needs consumers in the Global North rather than their own citizens. Researchers into the greenhouse gas effect of fossil fuel consumption now use consumption rather than production-based accounting, meaning that the energy cost of a mobile phone owned by a person in Britain but manufactured in China figures on the British side of the balance sheet rather than the Chinese. For Pirani the key point is that fossil fuels are consumed “by and through technological, social and economic systems…”. Even if population is to figure as a factor explaining what has been going on since 1950 we still have to understand that this is an impact that is heavily mediated through these systems. This history of fossil fuel consumption really has to be understood as a history of the way energy has come to be produced in societies and economies that function as a part of a globalised capitalist economy. Human beings once produced the energy they needed by drawing on resources available in the immediate locality. Once this had meant wood gathered from local forests, peat from adjacent moorlands, the power of harnessed animals, and the kinetic energy of wind and water. In time this was replaced in countries which had undergone industrialisation by electrical power, but even here its generation was through power stations which serviced the towns and region where they were located. This began to change after 1950 when power was distributed through networks – national grids – which increased the degree of separation of producers from consumers. This shift was allowed electricity to take the form of a commodity, traded on the basis of the profits it could make through exchanges in energy markets, rather than its immediate use to the people who needed it to power workplaces, heat and light homes, etc. The opportunity to make a profit out of supplying energy encouraged private investors to step in to finance increases in capacity, which produced a price structure favourable to businesses that wanted to consume power on a large-scale. The scale of the investment required to generate electricity for these needs required state subsidy which maintained an affordable unit cost for the purchaser and an acceptable rate of return on investment for the capitalist. These relationships, between producers for networks, consumers drawing on power from national grids, and governments pump in money to keep the whole system running, all depended on the essential premise that the fuel needed to generate all this power would remain cheap and abundant. The exploitation of oil for petroleum-based energy needs is essentially the same story of the radical severance of producers from consumers. Pirani takes from this the cue for a radically difference energy policy, which requires this rift to be overcome and the power needed for human communities to be generated on locally-available wind, hydro and biomas. ...more |
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Asad Haider begins his discussion of contemporary identity politics in a discussion of the ‘Black Feminist Statement’ produced by the Combahee River C
Asad Haider begins his discussion of contemporary identity politics in a discussion of the ‘Black Feminist Statement’ produced by the Combahee River Collective, active in the Boston area between 1974 and 1980. This document has been credited for providing one of the most powerful critiques of the wider feminist movement for its failure to consider the position of women subject to the dual oppression of gender and race discrimination. The statement included the fateful pronouncement that, “We believe that the most profound and potentially radical politics comes directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” This seems to be the first time that the term ‘identity politics’ had been used to describe a current of political thinking, which the CRC would proclaim as “potentially the most radical” approach to change. It is not difficult to see where this development in critical thinking came from. Marxist politics in the countries of late capitalism had taken the predicament of the industrial working class as its major theme. The criticism that this had led to the marginalisation of large sections of the population like women and black people had been around for decades, but during the 1970s there was the growing realisation that the process of deindustrialisation and outsourcing of production to developing regions was diminishing whatever residual claims to precedence that might be made for the working class as viewed by leftist tradition. It was time to explore the possibility that new forces for change were being produced among people whose oppressions were rooted in societal structures that were much older than capitalist exploitation – with the patriarchy of the family and the racism of the community being the immediate targets in view. Opponents of this approach have complained that the generation of multiple sites of oppression – and more of these came to prominence as queer politics opened the door to consideration of the multiple types of gender dysphoria – works to undermine the possibility of solidarity across society. Haider sets out the case for exonerating the socialist lesbian feminists of the CRC from this charge (in the UK authors of the ‘Beyond the Fragments’ made the case for solidarity across the realms of oppression). The Boston collective was all in favour of turning up on trade union picket lines but argued for using this as an opportunity to add the exploitation of working class women as drudge labour in the private household to the list of things in urgent need of rectification. The defeats for the working class of the years after 1980 across the capitalist world mounted and there was little sign that this strategy of ‘uniting the fragments’ was having any success. Trade union battles for the rights of workers declined as the numbers of members of an industrial organisation went into steep decline. At the same time the vitality of the ideological critiques of ‘the fragments’, as well as their organisational influence over aspects of legislation, all increased. Neoliberal capitalism saw no reason to go to the barricades over issues like women in the boardrooms or equal marriage, even as it redoubled on its work to crush an appearance of grassroots, workplace organisation. It was obvious, argued those so inclined, that there was a close and even causal connection between the rise of lobbying activity based on so-called identity issues and the erosion of working class power. But, as professors of logic work hard to remind us, coincidence is not causation. The decline of the capacity for solidarity across society was not caused by the rise of the radical, fragmentary character of movements for change, though the aspects of the relationship between these and multiple other factors were certainly reinforcing. Haider suggests that the loss of the capacity for solidarity has much more to do with the displacement of the concept of capitalism from critical thinking in the later decades of the 20th century. This is a capitalism that has to be understood not just as an economic formation, but as a social force which picks up and integrates the older forms of oppression into a system which runs them alongside its own addition to human oppression – the exploitation of wage labour. The issue is not, and never has been, the identities which human beings forge for themselves as they strive to make sense of their world. Having a identity is essential to all people, and these do not come as a gift from biology, but develop from our nature as social beings. If there are aspects of identity politics which seem to retard the prospect of solidarity across and between oppressed groups it has more to do with concessions made to the view that capitalism offers up a route to liberation, rather than constitute its main obstacle. Moving beyond the fragments means, as it did for the socialists of the Combahee River Collective, getting back to the point of understanding that ending the ascendency of the capitalist form of society is crucial to the task of moving towards the liberation of all. ...more |
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This is a brief review of the anarchist political tradition, set out over four sections. 'Notes on Anarchism' draws heavily on Daniel Guerin and Rudol This is a brief review of the anarchist political tradition, set out over four sections. 'Notes on Anarchism' draws heavily on Daniel Guerin and Rudolf Rocker's work, setting out an unabashed defence on the tradition and contrasting it with the meagre record of state socialism. The argument seldom rises above the level of asserting the centrality of liberty to the task of emancipation of the working class. It cites Rocker's view that anarchism was located at the 'confluence' of socialism and liberalism. This mixing of the currents was necessary because 'liberal ideals' were 'wrecked on the realities of capitalist economic forms.' This glosses over the important point that liberalism was marked at its birth by the social forces that were emerging in 17th century Europe, which brought everything from Hobbes's Leviathan state and Lockean political economy to the forefront of ideas about liberty. The bourgeois class that acted as the midwife of liberalism seldom felt the need to migrate in the direction of socialism . The logic of capital, private property and the market offered them the space they were looking for where they could live without the interference of the state. In the 20th century another libertarian thinker, Robert Nozick, could offer up a theory that worked with the capitalist ethic inherent within liberalism. Chomsky fails to specify the social and economic conditions that would have opened the way from classical liberal ideas to libertarian socialism. The closest we get is his insistence on a dynamic bound up with the struggles of working class people, which he sees as opening up perspectives based on free association and collectivism. The longest part of the book presents an account of the Spanish Civil War which sees the fate of the republic as being sealed by the repression of the social revolution in the towns and countryside which was underway in the period around 1936-7. Drawing heavily on Orwell, and others not necessarily sympathetic to the anarchist cause but who were at least prepared to acknowledge the dynamic energy that collectivism brought to the defence of Spanish democracy, Chomsky refutes other mainstream liberal and Communist historians who saw nothing wrong with the suppression of the working class movement. Interesting as this is, it falls a long way short of a generalised theory of a libertarian road to socialism. Insofar as Chomsky offers up any thoughts about practical politics post-WW2 they tend to look like a rather mundane defence of reformist, welfare state social democracy. For a more better stab at the joining the traditions of liberalism and democracy to egalitarian social change, look to the work of Bowles and Gintis, among others. But the chapter I liked best was 'Language and Freedom', Chomsky's famous lecture delivered in Chicago in 1970. Here he argues that the drive on the part of human beings to secure their own freedom has its roots in human nature, no less. We are creatures whose facilities are inherently limited by the nature of out species, but it is precisely this limitation which creates the tension between "necessity and freedom, rule and choice" which is the source of our creativity as a species, our capacity for communication, and the meaningfulness of our actions. This is an argument that raises the libertarian viewpoint to its highest level, and makes it necessary to continually revisit anarchism for inspiration on how human beings might achieve the liberty that they seem to be striving for. ...more |
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The social science of geography concerns itself with the way the world is structured into particular places and the ways in which they are connected w
The social science of geography concerns itself with the way the world is structured into particular places and the ways in which they are connected with one another. It asks questions about the social and economic forces which have produced a city like Manchester, for example, and the relationship it has with its immediate hinterland, the rest of Britain, and just as crucially, the rest of the world. Some of these places seem better fitted than others to channel protest against the world is, and to act as platforms for radical change. The city of Paris shows up at frequent intervals as a space in which revolution is precipitated, with implications not just for France but also the rest of the world. London, on the other hand, has place where social and economic forces are gathered by ruling classes and then sent out across the planet to build empires of one sort or another. Routledge is interested in the conditions which facilitate movements of protest against a world order made up of the commodification of the creative energies of human beings to turn it into property and capital. This short book reads like a guide to the strategies that might be used by campaigners to turn the spaces and the networks in which they function into more effective means to fight back against the logic of markets and to bring about real change. With chapter titles like ‘Know Your Place’, ‘Stay Mobile’, ‘Extend Your Reach’, and ‘Feel Out of Place’ he offers up scores of examples of protest movements across the world which have acquired traction because of the thought and consideration given to the special components of their actions. They are a diverse group. The achievements of Global South peasant farmer resistance to the encroachment of the state and its mega-projects are jumbled together with protest against the types of speculative development which displaces working class communities in the old countries of capitalism, and the ‘Rebel Clown Armies’ which pit themselves against the representatives of global elites whenever they gather in the G8+ meetings across the world. As a taster for the perspectives opened up by a radical geography perspective it does its job well enough. At a moment in time when leftist politics often seems like a one-dimensional fan club for the candidates are on offer as leaders it gives us at least a hint of what the additional capacities and layers of resistance that will be needed if we are to seriously challenge capitalism. ...more |
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In large parts this is a fairly academic review of the concept of hegemony, stretching from the ancient Greeks to East Asia. The sections most pertine
In large parts this is a fairly academic review of the concept of hegemony, stretching from the ancient Greeks to East Asia. The sections most pertinent for left political theory - the reason why I read it - are pretty well confined to a few chapters dealing with the idea in the context of Europe in the pre- and post WW2 periods. Informative undoubtedly, and the foray into neo-Confucianism adds a small amount to the westerner's understanding of East Asian political thinking.
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Anthony Barnett is best known for his work as protagonist of a democratic revolution which, when it takes place, will provide the people of these nort
Anthony Barnett is best known for his work as protagonist of a democratic revolution which, when it takes place, will provide the people of these northern European islands with the sort of constitutional arrangement which will make their rulers accountable. Though influential with the Charter 88 movement he set up thirty years ago to campaign for a written constitution, and through the openDemocracyUK website which he cofounded in 2001, Barnett’s ideas have been treated with something close to contempt by ‘practical’ politicians operating in the established mainstream. Those disdaining Barnett’s enthusiasm for things like electoral reform and a legal basis for popular sovereignty dismiss him as a metropolitan chatterer who stands aloof from ‘bread and butter’ issues which are supposed to be the content of ‘real life’. ‘Ignore democracy issues at your peril’, is the response that has been coming back across the years: ‘One day your neglect of the system which is supposed to make our governors accountable to the people they govern will come back and bite you’. That day came about in the small hours of Friday 24th June 2016, when the result of the referendum on membership of the EU became clear. Barnett’s argument is that the slim vote in favour of Brexit came about because of the frustration which the people-of-England-without-London felt on precisely this issue of the way in which they were governed. That segment of the UK population that lives in English towns with populations of less than 300,000 had good reason to feel this angst. Over the years since the 1980s they had been exposed to the debilitating effects of globalising economic policies which stripped away a large part of the industries which had provided their communities with decent jobs and opportunities for life. He persuasively argues that the anger and disillusionment with the way they were governed was displaced onto the EU and its Brussels-based commission, rather than the Westminster government which has been the real driving force behind neoliberal open markets and the constraints placed on the public sector. He tests this thesis against the response of people in other parts of the UK which had a devolved executive authority which has had some capacity to deflect the worst of what government from No 10 has had to fling at them during this time. The evidence for this proposition comes from the referendum results in Scotland, Northern Ireland and London. Devolved governments in the first two and a powerful executive mayor in the third had helped sustain a viewpoint which saw the real source in the creation of austerity and hardship in the shape of the immediate protagonist of national and regional authority as being Westminster rather Brussels. Wales, with its majority 52.5 to 47.5 percent vote in favour of Brexit, seems to subvert this take on the matter, which Barnett hints as coming from the fact that it is a ‘long-colonised and linguistically divided country’. But it was in England-without-London, with 46 million inhabitants, and an 11 per cent vote in favour of Brexit, which swamped the pro-remain majorities in the parts of the UK with devolved government. Barnett argues from this that the historic failure to devolve government to the English regions had contributed to the widespread feeling of ‘they’re not listening to us’, evident throughout these recent years of populist agitation, to be deflected onto Brussels and the EU rather than Westminster. He sees the governments led by Blair and Cameron as playing an active role in sustaining this delusion; each creating an aura around themselves that they were acting in the UK national interest, and shared the frustrations of the British people whenever their aspirations were apparently blocked by some EU regulation. The book deserves a wide readership among the left in the UK. There is much to be picked over on points of detail in Barnett’s analysis, but his grand thesis that the UK is a poorly governed country, equipped as it is with a constitution that fails to place power close to the people and grants the ruling elites the maximum discretion to do as they please, has to be right. The struggle for a better democracy ought to be as much a part of the left’s programme for change in the UK as opposition to austerity and the socialisation of the economy. This book hints at what this advocacy for democracy might look like. ...more |
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