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180429425X
| 9781804294253
| 180429425X
| 4.20
| 120
| unknown
| Oct 29, 2024
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really liked it
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There are many worrying signs that the world is becoming a crueller and more callous place. Maybe it always was but it is not totally fallacious to ar
There are many worrying signs that the world is becoming a crueller and more callous place. Maybe it always was but it is not totally fallacious to argue that enlightened attitudes have taken root over time and progress has been made on the part of subaltern social groups in making a claim for their fair share of the benefits of living in a supposedly civilised society. Seymour uses the term ‘liberal’ to describe the world that embodied this progress which he sees slipping from our grasp. But it would be more appropriate to speak of the struggle for democracy as the concrete reason for the advance of the working classes in taking their place in the sunshine. Better still, social democracy, because it has not just been about the extension of the franchise bit-by-bit to include all citizens, but also the construction of institutions and processes which curb the tyranny of elite classes and hold their power in check. This book doesn’t give a consistent account of what constituted the liberal civilisation which is now being dragged down but the feeling is that humanitarian values that tend towards the promotion of equality and social justice are the things at stake. The criteria for judging what we are losing across the planet is the inexorable rise of parties of the right which make unabashed demands for more selfishness in the political realm – building entire programmes for government on the principle of depriving human rights and social goods to those deemed unworthy of inclusion. The growth of nationalism is one indicator of how bad things are getting. The internal fracturing of society which divides bits considered 'good' from those who need to be kept on the outer fringes has advanced a long way in many countries. The case of the former Philippines President Rodigo Duterte, whose willingness to exclude extended to hunting down those he considered unwanted by police death squads in which he claimed to participate is only one example. Perhaps even more chilling than the fact that is the fact that this savagery seems to be endorsed by a substantial majority of the Filipino population. Seymour asks whether we can define these sinister developments as fascism and offers up some useful thoughts on this. What we witnessed in the Philippines and Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and is ongoing in Modi’s India, Netanyahu’s Israel, and any number of other countries, is not yet fascism in the sense of the systems established in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, but is a large step in that direction. Before a population completely acquiesces to a totalising regime that enacts extermination and enslavement the basis of its rule it society necessarily goes through a series of processes which might end in the final Nazi configurment. These processes are marked by a descent into a degraded public mentality which produces widespread grievance against ‘the other’; the ‘lone wolf’ killer who acts on the sense of the wrong with performative violence intended to spark a social movement; the far right party securing an appreciable size of the vote; the focused opportunity, such as Brexit or ‘stopping the boats’, which gives a significant victory to in mobilising support; and then the stage of entering government, with all that is presented to use state power to deepen the fracture between the favoured and the marginalised. At this point, whether the country in question has emerged as a full-blown fascist state will hinge on whether it has accumulated enough power to scrap any residual possibility of challenge by democratic forces. As well as tracing all the steps in the travel towards fascism, Seymour’s other significant achievement is to update and deepen the Marxian psycho-analytical accounts of the allure of authoritarian political systems which were attempted in the German Nazi period by Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm. The ways in which citizens might be persuaded to love their oppressors has extended well beyond the drama of the exhilaration of parade-ground goose steps and wall-to-wall swastikas. Modern day fascists have abundant social media (as well as legacy media) tools available which encourage the oppressed individual to fall in love with the lie being sold by the new masters. Immersion in such absurdities as the QAnon conspiracy seems to have a spiritual dimension to its true believers, depriving them of the capacity to live a life outside their appalling fantasy. A good way to resist being drawn into the vortex that swirls towards fascism (and Seymour insists we all have a fascist within us) is to be doubly conscious of the direction history is dragging us. His sketch of the disaster nationalism is a resource that many of us will benefit from during days when the dangers loom ever larger, ...more |
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Nov 30, 2024
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Dec 09, 2024
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Nov 30, 2024
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Hardcover
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1804292370
| 9781804292372
| 1804292370
| 3.86
| 28
| unknown
| Aug 29, 2023
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Notes are private!
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Nov 07, 2024
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Nov 07, 2024
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0141986352
| 9780141986357
| 0141986352
| 3.87
| 759
| Jan 25, 2018
| Jan 24, 2019
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liked it
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Lot of important issues raised in this book. Foremost is a deep dive into the implications of the victory of the West in the Cold War which ended with
Lot of important issues raised in this book. Foremost is a deep dive into the implications of the victory of the West in the Cold War which ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. The tussle between the two camps raised the identity of 'the West' to the preeminent position, cemented into a solid bloc by the ideological claim of the superiority of liberal-democratic free market society. When the statist East fell something approaching free markets flooded into the vacuum, though the liberal-democratic part remains far from being fulfilled. Now that versions of the 'free' market are everywhere has the West lost its key identifying feature? Macaes says yes, and sets out the view that the universalist vocation of its leading power, the United States, is now to remain the world's leading (perhaps only) superpower. This means downplaying claims about the moral superiority of liberal democratic governance and instead investing on its capacity to impose its will across the world. The material basis for US position as a world power has been the dominant strength of its economy which proved itself across the twentieth century. But in the twenty-first Washington has emerging challenges coming from the old East, with China being at the head. Moreover, these are rising powers which are not shy in projecting state capacity as their way of running economies. The significance of Trump's second presidency is what looks like the abandonment of the US's claim to be the champion of a rules-based system of global free trade, underpinned by liberal democratic governance. In that the country is becoming much like the Eastern contenders for leadership, aiming to lift all the legalistic restraints on the exercise of power and basing it instead on doing whatever needs to be done to muscle into the top position. The concepts of 'West' and 'East' cease to exist as reference to political modes of state structure, and with it the basis for the alliances which once lined-up as Western Europe, Nato, the Warsaw Pact, and China. What remains is the pure transactional character of the judgment every country now has to make as to whether it is a US-backer, a Russian-backer, Chinese-backer, etc, etc. Decisions on these matters will be informed by geopolitical considerations as much as anything. For the most part this will centre on proximity to large markets and the role trade infrastructure that links countries. It is at this point that the idea of Eurasia emerges as a pivotal idea - an entity that only came into existence when the borders between the ideological systems of free market West and statist East had broken down. Swift transit across the Eurasian interior together with access to its vast resources has potential as the basis of a new global economy, shifting from transoceanic trade routes which have the American continent as its centre, to lands where the majority of the world's population resides. All of this has been anticipated by China, with its Belt-and-Road being its response to the challenges of creating the new trade routes. As an inducement to participate, Beijing offers the countries that lie between it and its European markets with a fast route towards economic development which is free from the fussy concern with legality and rules which have been the hallmark of the Anglo-American systems. Other players are involved in the gain which makes it difficult to reduce this scenario to one of US v China. India is the regional power with the key to access to South East Asian markets, Africa and the Middle East. Turkey and the Arab countries have their own aspirations to influence the shape of the world, and Russia sits across much of the terrain as a brooding and resentful state power. Macaes maps out many of the conflicts that are beginning to show up and promise to become even more significant as the world gets deeper into the century. The longest sections of the book sets all this out in the form of a travelogue which took the author across the lands in which a border between East and West is presumed to exist, in a search to pin it down to a precise location. But at each point he found little sense of a place were 'we' exist and 'they' start over there. Instead we travels rather societies which have always been aware of their location within relationships that extend both eastwards and westwards, which have shown capacity to generate solutions as well as live with the problems inherent within their situation. Eurasia is being constructed out of all these processes, and it would be wise for the powers-that-be to be more conscious of the issues that have to be faced up to if it does not become a new threat to world peace in the years to come. ...more |
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Oct 24, 2024
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Oct 24, 2024
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Paperback
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0896086798
| 9780896086791
| 0896086798
| 4.19
| 146
| 1985
| Sep 01, 2002
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liked it
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1912837870
| 9781912837878
| 1912837870
| 3.50
| 2
| 1946
| Mar 01, 2024
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liked it
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New edition of the 1965 book written during the heat of the civil rights movement. Zinn describes the SNCC as a youth movement emanating from college
New edition of the 1965 book written during the heat of the civil rights movement. Zinn describes the SNCC as a youth movement emanating from college campuses which was free from the legacy of older civil rights and anti-racist organisations like the NAACP and CORE. It's hallmark was direct action undertake by black students in the southern states were segregation was a constant feature of life. Lunch counter protests and the invasion of whites-only facilities in transport hubs brought about a harsh, violent response from local police authorities. The basic tactic of the protesters involved insistence on the rights provided by the 14th Amendment to the US constitution which supposedly guarantees the equal rights of all citizens regardless of race. With a team of full-time 'field secretaries' operating in towns and cities across the South, numbers of protesting students were augmented with 'Freedom Rides' bringing in volunteers from other regions to participate in actions. The sit-ins moved on to voter registration drives which aimed to increase the enrollment of blacks to become eligible to vote. In states like Mississippi. Alabama and Georgia this had long been impeded by local officials hostile to black participation. Barriers to registration were generated, using devices like long forms and quizzes about the meaning of clauses in the state constitution. Black citizens where discouraged from evening attempting to access their right to vote by intimidation and actual violence. SNCC activities organised drives to encourage registration, being scores of black citizens to state courts to begin the process. Officials responded by slowing the pace of processing to a crawl which had the effort of forcing would-be applicants to wait for hours in long lines. Hostile sheriff departments lined deputies aimed with guns, clubs and cattle prods against this in the queue, forbidding any contact with people who wanted to converse with them or provide food and water. The students and their allies appealed to the federal government - John F. Kennedy and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson being the presidents of the day - for action to ensure the rights guaranteed in the constitution. Zinn gives accounts of incidents in which local policy assaulted protesters and people registering to vote under the noses of federal officials and FBI officials without any intervention in support of the victims. The federal attorney-general, Robert Kennedy, denied that his office had the authority to intervene in cases where there was clear evidence of the violation of constitutional rights. The core of the book centres on the experiences of the student activists in the states of the deep South. It also includes a chapter of the role of white students in the struggle and their relationship with the black majority. It is hard to know whether anything like the concept of 'white saviour' existed at that time - no indication if it did is to be found in Zinn's chapter. He talks of friction existing between black activists who doubted the extent of the commitment of the white contingent but sees this as being a problem that would be overcome over time as trust and mutual respect was built up. Overall, the collaboration across the racial divide is presented as a harbinger of what American might yet become if it was able to rise to its supposed historical destiny. On the political impact of the movement, 1965 was too early to hint at the direction that might be taken. The most interesting section here is the emergence of the Freedom Democratic Party in the South, challenging the official Democrat structure which had the maintenance segregation at its core. The allocation of delegates to party conventions became another site of battle, with the national leadership showing intense reluctance to undermine the compromise reached after the Civil War, which gave Southern politicians tacit permission to maintain segregation in defiance of the Constitution. The book skates over political convictions of SNCC leaders and activists. Accused of communist sympathies by their opponents, the movement's activism in the early 60s did not stray into considerations of the tensions set up by capitalism and the country's vast pool of poor citizens. Yes, Dr King and his closest associates indicated their interest in seeing a move towards the socialisation of the economy, but at least in this account it did not seem to open up a conversation on these issues within the activist ranks. It seems that it took the assassination of King in 1968 and the rise of the militant movements associated with Malcolm X and the Black Panthers to root any sort of socialist perspective in the ranks of the civil rights movement. ...more |
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Oct 24, 2024
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Oct 24, 2024
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1839762802
| 9781839762802
| 1839762802
| 4.13
| 75
| unknown
| May 07, 2024
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liked it
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The viewpoint which places the experience of Black Americans at the heart of culture in the US is very familiar, with the rise of jazz and its derivat
The viewpoint which places the experience of Black Americans at the heart of culture in the US is very familiar, with the rise of jazz and its derivative musical forms being the iconic example. Russell extends that argument by making the case for the representation of Black people in visual culture, ranging across Blackface minstrelsy in the 19th century and the early years of epic cinema, represented in The Birth of a Nation, notorious images of lynching, the 'I can't breathe' killings of recent times, and Black memes showing up across social media. Russell sees this as an increased scope for the exploitation of African Americans and she points to some convincing examples of how that came about. But it seems to me that she downplays the tensions generated by placing images of exploitation through to torture and murder at the centre of a popular discourse. What was stirred up, for example, by the postcards which featured White people partying around the bodies of lynched victims? Did it add to the numbers celebrating, or the volume of people being added to supporters of the civil rights cause? The conclusion of her argument is that Black people should assert ownership of their images as they go into mass circulation, much in the way African American music producers established their own record labels and management structures in the 50s and 60s to escape the gross exploitation that short-changed, or downright impoverished, a generation of musicians. My thought at this point was that it would be easier to join visual exploitation to the all-pervading forms of exploitation that characterise capitalism, and work to do away with the whole shebang. ...more |
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Sep 21, 2024
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1804292338
| 9781804292334
| B0C6HJVXC2
| 4.25
| 163
| unknown
| Mar 12, 2024
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really liked it
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Christophers’ past work demonstrates a commitment to delving into the nitty gritty of the workings of capitalism, trawling though the operations of co
Christophers’ past work demonstrates a commitment to delving into the nitty gritty of the workings of capitalism, trawling though the operations of corporations and smaller scale business to show how the system is moving towards a rentier model, rooted in monopoly control of assets and out to gouge the biggest profits it can out of trading operations. This time the focus is on the electricity generation sector and all its various components. There is an urgency about placing these operations under close scrutiny because it has been made central to the agreements reached during the COP process. Switch all energy use to electricity and then decarbonise its generation sums up the ambitions of the signatory governments to keeping global warming below 2 degrees by the end of the century. The question then has to be, do we have an electricity generating centre that is up to the job? On paper it looks promising. Christophers acknowledges the significant achievement is reducing the unit cost of electricity generated by renewables below that of fossil fuel in recent years. But he challenges the idea that the advance made by the wind and solar sector in particular is sufficient to seal the deal on the direction power corporates will take in the future. His argument hinges on exposing the fallacy that is reduction in production costs that drives the competitiveness of industries – a view that is central to supply-side economics. His point is that when investors look at where they are going to put their money when it comes to new technologies the relative cost of the goods or services being produced is only one factor taken into consideration. Far more important is the size and reliability of the return on capital invested – aka profit – which they hope to pass on as dividends to their shareholders. At this point the book gets very technical. Power generation in recent decades has moved away from being regarded as infrastructure costs to be borne by the state (in the case of the US it never was) and instead has been privatised in most countries. In order to construct something that looks like a free market in which competition can be relied upon to drive down costs, governments have relied on a ‘de-bungling’ of the industry, separating into companies involved in the generation of power, purchase in wholesale markets, and distributers in local networks. Keeping all these parts working in tandem requires a consistency of supply and predictable revenues to keep all parties happy. It turns out that the unit price of energy is not a particularly important part of the equation. The issues that have to be address are considerable. One of these is the fluctuations in the cost of energy supply over the course of time periods which are typically as short as 24 hours. The industry segments this into 30 minute time slots which might during a period of low demand, be costed at £40 per MWh, rising to a high of £225 when demand reaches peak levels. In Europe most of the trading is done in spot markets, with generators bidding to be included among the successful applicants in what is known as the merit system. To be included means selling the energy produced at that time and vice versa if the bid is not accepted. Christophers explains that renewal generators suffer greater consequences for not making the cut in this system than their fossil fuel competitors. This is because the producers of renewal energy cannot reduce their costs for that time slot if they fail to find a buyer. For them, energy is produced whenever the wind blows or the sunshines, and, assuming this happens during a period when there is no buyer, then the energy is simply lost. The fossil fuel generator on the other hand is able to mitigate the loss of a purchaser by powering down their system and saving on the use of the coal or gas used for production. An addition risk for renewables comes from the times when their bid has been successful, but the wind or solar conditions do not permit the production of the electricity. When this happens contractual clauses kick in which require the company to purchase the energy they are committed to providing from another provider – either a renewable or fossil company. The consequence of this is that the revenue streams for renewable companies is much more unpredictable than that of the fossil generators. This makes them less attractive to institutional investors on whom they depend on to finance the initial cost of installing wind and solar arrays. To overcome this disadvantage renewable energy production has been depended from the onset by government support which has come in varying forms. In the US Investment Tax Credits encourage financial institutions to take the plunge in investing, with the Europeans generally favouring Feed-in-Tariffs. Christophers explains in detail what these various systems entail. They all come down to the same point however – that the huge gains in reducing the the unit cost of producing electricity by renewables has depended on some form of financial support from national authorities. In short, despite the lower cost of production, renewables cannot compete with fossil fuels without a financial commitment by governments to even out the playing field. Yet governments have difficulty in understanding this fundamental fact. The Cameron government in the UK was led to think that the drop in production costs had meant that renewables could compete on price alone and no longer needed support from the public purse. The uncertainty this induced has dimmed enthusiasm for investment in renewable generation with the result that decarbonisation by 2050 is looking increasingly difficult. For Christophers, it is the structure of capitalist markets that are jeopardising efforts to reach the COP carbon reduction targets. The viability of an enterprise hinges on its profitability and investors will always look askance at any proposition that cannot guarantee revenues sufficient to pay off capital costs with an adequate return for the risk assumed. Renewable generated electricity, being a natural force which can only come into existence in accordance with the laws of physics (atmospheric conditions that allows the wind to blow and the sun to shine). On that score is falls into the category of being a ‘fictitious commodity’ in Polyani’s sense of being, like the human capacity to labour or the fecundity of the land, a gift of nature rather than a good emerging from an industrial process. When it is rendered up to market forces to establish its ‘value’, this appears as a ‘price’ only when acted on by social forces which help fix its final shape. For electricity, these social forces have come about from the debundling of the industry which took place in the early days of neoliberal reform. The paradox we are now in is that continued progress towards the decarbonisation of electricity generation depends on continued financial support from government at levels which are deplored by the imperatives of the free market. This is becoming unsustainable as a backlash gathers against a sector which is failing to produce the returns on capital investment that the financial sector expects to see. The solutions seems to be that we abandon the idea of electricity that can be produced as a classic commodity in normal market conditions, and instead go back to seeing it as a part of social infrastructure, like roads, railways and harbours, which only come into existence through the political will of a community to support them. ...more |
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Aug 2024
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Aug 15, 2024
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Aug 01, 2024
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0199555834
| 9780199555833
| 0199555834
| 4.30
| 43,498
| Apr 18, 1903
| Jan 15, 2009
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really liked it
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Published in 1903, Souls of Black Folk surveys the situation of the generation of African Americans who had grown up after the end of the Civil War. T
Published in 1903, Souls of Black Folk surveys the situation of the generation of African Americans who had grown up after the end of the Civil War. The tone of the book is an appeal to a White readership which might be moved by the plight of that generation and generally takes the form of an argument about how the emancipated Negro (his term) might become a fully functioning American citizen. That they were still living below that level after 40 years was down to the continuance of the racism that had made slavery possible in the first place. In Du Bois terminology this was the problem of the ‘colour-line’, which was likely to stand as the main challenge to the coherence of American society in the twentieth century. Du Bois brings the tools of sociology to the issues he was considering and stands as a pioneering example of the light that this newly emerging social science could shed on social issues. His leading idea is that of the ‘double consciousness’ through which African American had to consider the world in which they lived. One element of this was the sense the Black people had of their own lives, viewed in much the same way as all human beings experience themselves. But in addition to this awareness the Negro lived with a highly-developed sense of the way that White American society looked on him (again, Du Bois referral point). This obliged Black individuals and communities to act in ways that did not express their essential natures but were in accordance with the prejudices of the gaze that dominated their lives. In the traditions of the South this required attitudes of simple-minded affability, ready to jump-to and follow the orders of any White who gave them and accept their fate when they were robbed and exploited. He explains how this mental adaptation to the conditions of life arose from the conditions of the slave plantation. The great majority were deprived of even basic education and coerced into accepting their fate as menial labourers who would only live at a bare level of subsistence. But the important point is made that even in these conditions the existence of a ‘talented tenth’ was acknowledged who could rise to the level of skilled tradesman and superior servants. On the plantation this group lived in close association with their White masters and mistresses, sometimes bound together by bonds of affection. The passages in the book which sketch this out can seem either naïve or complacent given the inevitable inequality between the two groups and the violence that kept Blacks in the subordinate position, even when loyalty and affection to the ruling family were apparently in play. Lincoln’s Emancipation had the ironic effect of pulling this apart causing the patronising possessive racism of the slavery period to be replaced with a desire for strict segregation, with the strata of literate Blacks who had understood the management of the estate and the Big House being viewed with intensified suspicion. Du Bois suggests that a period of transition might have been possible had the federal state acknowledged its responsibility to provide the talented tenth with the capital and other resources that would have allowed them to lead the Black population out of their subordinate position in the Southern states were they lived in greatest concentration. He considers the period of Reconstruction which ran from 1866-77 and sets out a positive case for the potential of the policies enacted by the Freedmans’ Bureaux during these years in establishing a school system and redistributing land to former slaves. But is was hindered by the refusal of Congress to provide the financial and other resources needed to increase the chance of success. The instrument of the policy was the Union Army and its officers who were viewed by the defeated Southerners as oppressive occupiers of their native lands. With philanthropic Abolitionists providing the yeast for the drive during this period, the official politics were hampered at every stage by the failure to match ambition with the resources that were needed. Though progress was made in some areas in others it was held back by a deepening antagonism on the part of Whites to the efforts of the freed people to rise to a higher socio-economic level. Du Bois advocated for an approach which made buttressing the role of the talented tenth as the leaders of the Negro people. The professions that could play this role were, first and foremost, teachers and other educators but also, given the historic role of the Black-led Church as a moral force and provider of basic welfare services, clergymen and preachers. Beyond these ranks, physicians, lawyers, business and tradespeople, journalists and similar were the calibre that he was looking to see rise. At this point Du Bois considers the perspective that challenged his advocacy within the Black community – that of Booker T. Washington and his Tuskagee Institute. Washington called for a concentration on the position of the unskilled labourer and made the raising of this character to the level of increased productivity for business interests across the South. Efforts to raise the cultural level of freed Blacks beyond this point was seen as counter-productive. Du Bois on the other hand made his pitch towards increasing the density of ‘college men’ in the community, who would go onto to educate teachers and provide moral leadership. A key issue which divided the rivals was attitude towards the enfranchisement of Blacks, nominally achieved by the Emancipation Act but in actuality resisted at state level across the South. Washington thought it a worthless project to seek to claim the right to vote, whilst Du Bois thought that involvement in the politics of the country would help secure the role of the federal state in the task of eliminating race prejudice – the only force in the country that could play this role. The sociological chapters in the book are interspersed with accounts of racism which depart from technical language and trace out the horror of the Jim Crow system. Du Bois’s account of his foot journey through Georgia looking for a school that would hire him as a teacher; the death of his infant son from diphtheria, refused attendance by white doctors in the district, and the tale of the ‘Coming of John’ – a college educated young man who fits in neither in the sophisticated urban environment of the North nor the rural district in which he was raised and becomes a victim of lynching. All this reminds you that the audience for the book was white liberal opinion, calling on the reader to face up to the consequences of the materialistic. Money-driven society which was supposed to lead to the redemption of all people. It is within this society that Black people where obliged to understand their own lives, and at the same time, understand the lives of the people who were gazing on them. It is interesting that in a later reflection on the book Du Bois suggests that he would have written it differently some decades later, after having had the opportunity to consider the insights of Freudian psychology on one hand, and the Marxist analysis of capitalism on the other. Fortunately, building on the work of this pioneer, others have had the opportunity to venture down those paths. ...more |
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Jul 17, 2024
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1804291714
| 9781804291719
| 1804291714
| 3.65
| 241
| Apr 2021
| May 21, 2024
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it was amazing
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Ho Chi Minh's years in Paris which began somewhere around 1918 (but some date to 1917 and others to 1919 is reconstructed in this extended essay in a
Ho Chi Minh's years in Paris which began somewhere around 1918 (but some date to 1917 and others to 1919 is reconstructed in this extended essay in a foot journey across the arrondissements with which he is associated. He is conjured up to the mind's eye as a 28 year old 'indigenes' living in bed-sits and earning a precarious living in different jobs, liaising with other 'Annamites' (the colonial name for the Vietnamese people), hawking a set of 'Demands' addressed to French politicians, calling on them to take heed of the needs of the oppressed. He has an identity but not a name that sums it up. Sometimes Nguyen Tat Than and then Nguyen Ai Quac, kept under surveillance by French intelligence officers who tried to get a grasp on what he was about by monitoring the people he visited and who visited him, the magazines and journals he subscribed to and the articles and letters he submitted to the press. Of particular importance was the contacts he made with activists in the French left, always trying to persuade them of the importance of making the condition of the colonies a matter of concern for their own drive for progress. The irony of his situation is noted: in Paris he was doing things which would have led to his execution by beheading in his own country. Andras sees him as a pilgrim - a person "... in league with big ideas: devotion, saintliness, grace, essence, the quest for meaning." The meanderings through the streets of modern day Paris encourages the author to reflect on the big ideas of the current time - the terror attacks of 2015 which raged in parts of the city Nguyen would have been familiar with, the gilets jaunes protests and the racism, and the desire to confront racism which shows up in graffiti across neighbourhoods. The future leader of liberated Vietnam learnt how to represent his cause to an often indifferent and sometime hostile audience during these years. At a conference of the SFIO - the leading socialist organisation in France after the first world war - Nguyen speaks up to the assembled 4,000 delegates, linking the struggle of French workers to the wider Europe and the Russian revolution and the predicament of his own people - the banners adorning the walls of the gathering calling on workers of the world to unite becomes concrete in his 12 minute long contribution. ...more |
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3.93
| 85
| 1942
| 1959
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it was amazing
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A novelised account of the author's experiences during the Sino-Japanese war in the 1930s. There's a love story at the heart of it, with Pao, a playma
A novelised account of the author's experiences during the Sino-Japanese war in the 1930s. There's a love story at the heart of it, with Pao, a playmate from childhood years in Beijing (Peking in this book), encountered as an adult during the turbulent years when China was torn apart by the factional activities of warlords. Pao has by now become a militant of the Kuomintang and has been selected for military training in England. Han decides to serve her country as a nurse midwife and also has opportunities to study for this position in the same country. They return to China in 1938, arriving in Hong Kong but en route to the provisional capital of Nationalist China - Chungking, located among the mountains of Szechwan. The chapters follow their journey, firstly to Hankow, a part of the region that also included Wuhan. Han dwells on Chinese scenes, including her own marriage to Pao on arriving in the city, and the festivities that follow. But the Japanese air forces are raiding the city and it is clear that it will shortly fall to their army. Pao is attached to the military central staff and moves in the orbit of Chaing Kai-shek, who at this time she clearly idolises along with this wife, Chaing Soong Mei-ling. The privations of the retreat through China, moving by plane and road journeys through Nanyu and Hengshen are vividly described. Japanese air raids terrorise the stages of the travel and they move with a vast crowd of refugees who are in competition with one another for food and shelter. Han is called on to provide services as a nurse and midwife, operating in squalid conditions. Temples and monasteries provide accommodation on occasion and the serenity and ancient routines of Buddhist worship contrast with the horrors of war. As well as big the capital of the beleaguered Chinese Republic, Chungking is also Han's ancestral home and the residence of a large branch of her family. She spends pages explaining Chinese family relations, with its pyramids of second uncles and third aunts, and the significance of the honour the dead generations continuing to hold for the living generation. But this is still the backdrop to a ruthless war that has followed her and her husband into the heart of China. The story hints at political tensions in the republican camp, with groups of young 'intellectuals' declaring themselves in support of the Communist resistance being waged in provinces to the north. Han professes herself indifferent to these disputes, on the grounds that as long as they fought for a free China it was fine with her. Her husband, however, is a KMT loyalist staunch in his support of the Generalissimo. No mention is made of the Xi'an Incident, which had taken place in 1936, just prior to the period covered by this book, when Chaing was seized by his own officers and compelled to cease his military action against the Communists (ostensibly allies since an agreement in 1935) and concentrate on fighting the Japanese. It was in the subsequent civil war between the Nationalist and Communists that her husband died in action. Whatever the extent of her affections, she became a firm supporter of CCP rule and the leadership of Mao Zedong. ...more |
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0745345166
| 9780745345161
| 0745345166
| 4.21
| 1,248
| 2023
| Mar 20, 2023
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Read the Left Book Club edition. Interesting piece which seems to be written in the emerging 'salvage' current (works which salvage lessons and experi
Read the Left Book Club edition. Interesting piece which seems to be written in the emerging 'salvage' current (works which salvage lessons and experiences of second-half 20th century progressive social struggle). In this case what is being revisited is the interest in moving beyond the confinement of human intimacy to the bourgeois nuclear family and liberating it to a position where if can be experienced in wider communal contexts. Rosa opens up the argument with a lament about the worsening state of mental health in contemporary life and the growing role of a dubious 'happiness' industry in providing sticking plaster care. And that is only the soft focus end of the business. For those who can't afford an app that links them to an online therapist there is the Mental Health Act, which empowers the police to enter homes and restrain, arrest and detain anyone going through an episode of distress. The Anti-psychiatry movement that flourished in the 60s and 70s had seen the way the wind was blowing and offered an alternative explanation for poor mental health, which was seen as having its roots in the emotional repression of the nuclear family. 'Wellness' - meaning the right to be well (?) - was seen as a common good which had to be struggled for collectively. From this point the book moves on to look at the ideology of romantic love between, ideally, a man and a women, which establishes the structure in which babies can be born and children raised. More might have been said about the his history of romantic love and how seldom it has appeared across the generations as a practical form of living life. Its heyday in countries like the UK, from where Rosa draws most of her examples, was in the 1950s and probably didn't last much longer than this brief period of years. Itself the product of a generation of men whose normal lives had been interrupted by having to go off and fight in wars and women who had lived through the years of deprivation and terror bombing, when the hope that all might be redeemed by collapsing into the arms of the pre-destined 'right one'. By the 1960s many of these marriages were coasting towards acrimonious separation or sustained with the aid of alcohol or Valium. Rosa surveys how things stand with the marriage market as it currently exists, replete with commercial dating apps and a dream of finding Mr/Ms Right fuelled by Love Island-type reality shows. When the relationships established by these means goes to bust the wreckage is picked over in the law courts to establish whether blame can be attributed to either party, using the ancient concepts of betrayal and adultery to mete out the appropriate forms of punishment. Meanwhile society moves further and further away from any concept of a mutually sustaining relationship with facilitates rather than impedes the capacity to live out the hope of freedom. Then onto the children who are raised within the constraints of the nuclear family, or whatever remains after it has broken down. The evidence that children are more likely to flourish in communal households with adults other than the biological parents on hand to provide attention and care is abundant but this presumes types of housing, with multiple rooms and large shared spaces for dining and recreation that few of us can afford. The advantage of these extended relationships is acknowledged in the cliche about it 'taking a village' to raise a child but less is said about the work of the past century to whittle down communal intimacy and reduce everything to the binary ideal of a man and woman as care providers. The practices of aboriginal people as the providers of these enriching experiences is simultaneously exoticised and marginalised in industrialised societies, with the communities that withhold these traditions deprived of their lands and resources that enable them to be lived out. A final chapter precedes the books conclusion which delves in the way overdeveloped countries deal with advanced age and the inevitability of dying. Society has used religion to soften the hard facts of our personal extinction but to many these seems like evasion - hiding behind the claim for a life after death - rather than truth-telling. The book argues that even the finality of life can be faced up to by facing it as collective experience, in which the dying person is accompanied through the final stages by others with whom they have shared parts of the whole of their lives, with all the appropriate forms of care, including ritual, which might bring the subject to the final end. In keeping with do many books which urge radical rethinks of social practices, the book calls for 'abolition' of the oppressive feature being considered - in this case, the family itself. It acknowledges the likely reaction to this as a slogan, with resistance from those for whom family life in its present form is experienced as sustaining, and in any event a better option than the alternative, which is likely to be loneliness and isolation and loss of opportunities for sexual relations and the affections gleaned from have a partner and raising children. Insisting on abolition in the face of these moods seems overly purist and the argument can be advanced equally well by calling for the transformation of the family by embedding it within a communal setting. But the book's central points, that intimacy is critical for human happiness and would be more rewarding if experienced in more extensive networks of care and affection, remains solid and convincing. ...more |
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1804543365
| 9781804543368
| B0C6929W85
| 3.75
| 48
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| Jan 11, 2024
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really liked it
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The fight against inequality has become the rallying cry of the centre-left in Britain and the rest of the over-developed world in recent times. There
The fight against inequality has become the rallying cry of the centre-left in Britain and the rest of the over-developed world in recent times. There are good reasons why that should be the case. The advance towards more equal societies in industrialised countries which marked the decades immediately after the second world war was halted in the 1970s and thrown into reverse from that date onwards. For a long time the ideologues of neoliberal capitalism insisted that this was not something anyone needed to worry about. An absolute increase in inequality was not a problem in itself providing a ladder of opportunity existed which allowed the brightest and most hardworking of the have-nots to rise above the station they were born into. Complacency has allowed the conservative establishments of the wealthy nations to believe this was still the case, even when the evidence was increasingly demonstrating that this was not the case. Liam Byrne has joined this debate with an intelligent book that reviews much of what has been argued about over growing inequality on recent times. He leads readers through the maze of economic analysis which point to the drivers of inequality in recent decades. The crucial point is that the growth in asset prices over the period 1970 to today - including housing and land, pension funds and trusts, and other things which generate rents for the holder – has far outstripped the value of income derived from earnings. The killer stat shows that, whilst wages have increased income thirty-six- fold over the last fifty years, increases in the price of the homes we live in have multiplied sixty-five-fold over the same period. Assets generate their own forms of income, called rents, which economists tell us are an excess payment made for a good or service over and above the cost of its production. Asset owners receive rents simply because they own something, rather than worked to produce or improve it. In Britain today the bulk of rent-bearing assets are held by people who gain control over them in periods when the gap between income and property prices was much smaller. In the main these are the ‘baby-boomer’ generation, born after the war, who benefited from an economy offering full employment, affordable housing, and a welfare state providing free health and education to all. The boomers got a further boost to their wealth in the 1980s when the right-to-buy policies of the Thatcher government, combined with the opportunity to cash in on the sell-off of publicly owned companies and mutual businesses meant further cash transfer to their accounts. The opportunity to transform these prizes into investments in buy-to-let property and well-padded pension schemes has sustained the wealth of this generation into their final years and leave a tidy pile to be picked up by their fortunate offspring when they finally shuffle off. All this means that inequality is now locked in place by the famous equation that Thomas Piketty has exhaustively demonstrated – that the return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of the economy – meaning that the wealth of society is relentlessly transforming into the wealth of those lucky enough to own rent-bearing assets. Byrne provides a highly readable version of the argument which sets out the need for measures which counter the grab for all the available wealth made by property owners. He calls for a ‘civic capitalism’ to replace the system currently in place, with the leading role being given to a ‘creative state’ geared up to producing well-paid jobs in the high tech and creative industries that are on the horizon. will be producing the well-paid jobs of the future. A chapter on company reform aims to curb the short-termism fostered by the mantra of hiked-up shareholder value being the sole legitimate objective of business. He calls for a right to ‘Universal Basic Capital’ as the cornerstone of modernised social security, riffing on the popularity of Universal Basic Income but preferring a lumpsum transfer of wealth between the generations rather than a regular income. And there is interest in the thorny issue of wealth tax in there as well, with a call for a ‘moral tax code’, which deal with the multiple exemptions of tax liabilities enjoyed by people with over £10 million in assets. Byrne the ex-Blairite and now, presumably, Starmerite Labour politician places a lot of hope in the activism of millennial and Gen Z people as the force which will drive the reforms he advocates. I can certainly recommend that they read this book, but asking for confidence to be placed in the instinctively small ‘c’ conservatism of the present-day Labour party to achieve these ends is something that many will shy away from. ...more |
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9798888900727
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| 4.35
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| Feb 06, 2024
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Open Borders, or No Borders? Joseph Carens’s distinction between these two ideas gets muddied in this book and with it the possibility of a political
Open Borders, or No Borders? Joseph Carens’s distinction between these two ideas gets muddied in this book and with it the possibility of a political strategy to advance the rights of migrants at borders is lost. Washington admits a soft spot for the sort of social life which flourished in border regions, where cultures of different kinds rub up against each other. Preserving this does not require the strict policing of the border, with all the modern paraphernalia of immigration and customs control reducing contact between people to an irreducible minimum. For intercultural contact to be a net positive it rather needs mature and sophistic citizens who are conscious of the fact in crossing a border they will meet people who do not necessarily think and behave like them. As we are learning at the present moment, strictly policed borders seem to require an enormous commitment to expenditures and resources which can only be justified by hyping up the experiences of contact with others as something inherently undesirable and to avoided wherever possible. But the elites who run modern states don’t necessarily believe their own propaganda that tightly controlled borders are needed because foreigners are so often devious and untrustworthy people. The higher level justification for ever-tightening immigration controls is the assertion of relations of power between nations competing with one another for access to resources in global markets. This is the reason why the supposed virtue of being able to impede the entry of others onto one’s territory is seldom accompanied by a firm upholding of the right of other countries to stand in the way of its own nationals going as freely as possible across the planet. The capitalist order of things dictates that states which can optimise access to the resources held by other countries, with control concentrated in a cohort of actors who can traverse the globe at will, will have the advantage over nations of the second, third and lower tiers who are left scrabbling to fill in complex forms and paying inordinate visa fees. Washington brings out this power relationship between imperial and neocolonised states and makes a strong argument about the numerous forms of disadvantage it creates. He frames much of this in the contact of climate change, brought about by the fossil fuel profligacy of the Global North, and the catastrophies it will entail for the nations of the South. Open Borders becomes an argument for reparations for the harm done over the centuries by slavery and colonial domination. What is less convincing is his claim for a strategy for forcing a step down from policed borders to the openness which will benefit everyone. He agrees that this will be gradual, with the mobilisation of political forces that can challenge the building of walls and the incarceration of would-be migrants, but how this relates to the moods of the demos at any time or context is only loosely sketched out. Overall, he relies on ethical and moral arguments which are adapted in accordance with various audiences – ranging from church goers through to right wing libertarians in a chapter setting out twenty-one arguments for open borders. This is okay in and of itself, but a work which is aiming to integrate a progressive argument for open borders ought to have more focus on what is happening among subaltern social groups, and offer ideas on how these can be fused into a coherent case for radical change. More work to be done on that! ...more |
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1839760559
| 9781839760556
| 1839760559
| 3.34
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| Jan 30, 2024
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We are used to thinking of capitalism as a world of commodities - motor cars, dishwashers, carrots, golf clubs, etc - which, in exercising our soverei
We are used to thinking of capitalism as a world of commodities - motor cars, dishwashers, carrots, golf clubs, etc - which, in exercising our sovereign will as consumers we accumulate in great piles all around us. Voss's argument invites us to supplement this view of the world by acknowledging that these things acquire their use value by being a part of a system that transcends their atomised state of being. Moreover, the system element of their utility has increased as capitalism has matured into its late stage. She cites the example of an aeroplane - once just a thing constructed out of plywood and wire,was piloted by a person with no aids other than a joystick and a couple of foot pedals. Navigation was undertaken by peering over the side of the cockpit and attempting to make sense of the terrain unfolding below. At some point assistance in landing the thing might be required, but that was accomplished by low tech means - a person waving a flag on the ground to indicate where it was safe to come down. This is no longer the case. The flight of a modern day aircraft requires a melding with a technology that maps across national and international territories, with different sets of complex rules depending on whether you are flying at 5000, 10000 or 30000 feet. This is a dynamic system, requiring the plane to be continually broadcasting information about itself to technologies which operate at ground level, and in return to adjust your journey in line with the instructions you receive. The value and utility of flight is conditioned by the extent to which your flying machine fits in with this complex system. The same can be said of motor cars and seafaring. Voss sets this out in chapters that consider the place of road vehicles and ships in her view of the systems that set the conditions for their operation. If planes, cars and ships have something obviously in common - ie they are all modes of transport - her argument is not limited to these examples. In a chapter of the digital payments systems that have been conjured into existence in order to meet the special needs of the adult entertainment industry, she is shows how even pornography couldn't function today without a special system that enables it to rake in a profit. All of this is intriguing and Voss sets out her take on systems with anecdotes that are frequently amusing. But her argument seems limited to an appeal that we need to be more aware of the systems in which our lives are slotted into, but is in danger of this 'awareness' becoming an end in itself: or perhaps the point of inspiration for an art installation, which is another stronger to her bow alongside being a researcher and writer. Does her analysis point to a path dependency with regard to the direction of technology, which limits what can be designed and invented to the role that is plays inside the ever-extending systems? She suggests that this is the case, and that anyone interested in creating technology that moves beyond fitting into the prevailing system, perhaps to subvert the exploitation and oppression of a hierarchical capitalist system, has to start thinking deeply about systems and how they configure our lives. ...more |
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1912837749
| 9781912837748
| 1912837749
| 3.71
| 161
| May 11, 2021
| Dec 2022
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Easy to read as a handbook for activists looking for a way to engage with local democracy and work through strategies aimed at bringing about progress
Easy to read as a handbook for activists looking for a way to engage with local democracy and work through strategies aimed at bringing about progressive reform. Drawing on diverse experiences, from Mondragon, Cleveland, North Ayrshire, North of Tyne, Wales and Preston the core idea is that of 'community wealth-building'. This boils down to mapping the terrain of a given political/geographical area to look for the ways in which 'wealth' can be stopped from draining outwards into wider circuits of capital accumulation and kept with local communities. For UK activists the model is the small city of Preston in Lancashire. A reform-minded council got things going by looking for 'anchor institutions' within the area of its administration which had sufficient power within the local economy to re-shape supply chains around providers in the the immediate vicinity rather than beyond. By 'anchor institutions' the authors mean things like the NHS, universities, regional banks and large employers with strong ties to the area who can be persuaded to source their supply chains from local providers. Assuming this can be done, the strategy anticipates that the procurement process will soon butt up against the limits of what is available to take on this activity and, in normal circumstances, would mean going back to suppliers beyond the region. At this point the Preston model asks what might be done to stimulate local activity to fill these gaps. This could be be everything from outreach to established firms to see what scope there might be to repurpose their businesses to provide the goods and services required; encourage local entrepreneurs to establish wholly news business for this purpose; and, most radically, stimulate activity to set up worker cooperatives and other types of mutuals to do the same thing. The book cites impressive statistics which demonstrate that the outflow of capital can be significantly reduced by these means with benefits showing up in terms of expanded employment opportunities with higher wages for local people. As a consequence of pursuing these strategies the local council in Preston claims its city is an outlier in terms of its economic vibrancy in a region otherwise scarred by de-industrialisation and the outward drift of the young to larger cities. Presented in this way an obvious limitation is that the Preston model works in a limited set of circumstances – notably in a district with a strong sense of civic identity, perhaps a sense of communal grievance, compact enough to make information about its assets transparent to the local community, and still having enough of these to constitute a firm anchor for the economy. The authors might argue that the basic elements always exist to function as a viable model – it is a question of whether local activists are savvy enough to get the whole thing going. By way of encouragement the book outlines other examples of the community wealth-building approach applied in different sets of circumstances. The local government regions of North of Tyne, North Ayrshire, London Borough of Newham are all considered, alongside the devolved Welsh government. As experiences of community wealth-building extends across these different situations the language is modified, with ‘foundational economy’ replacing ‘anchor institutions. But the principle is the same. The virtue of the approach is that it presents an opportunity to at least do something in what otherwise would seem to be a bleak situation. It encourages thinking about a struggle for hegemony over local politics, with forces representing community well-being taking ascendency over wealth extraction by cynical capitalist firms. But does it promise a place of stability, where civically-minded folk can hold the ring indefinitely against the vampire squids? Clearly not. As long as capitalist interests prevail over the larger economy even versions of the Preston model which are successful for a period will be undermined and defeated if they do not raise the stakes of the struggle to a higher level. So the Preston model ought to be presented as a transitional strategy, aimed at resisting the logic of capitalist accumulation in a given set of circumstances, but always requiring an increase in the political consciousness of subaltern classes if the successes achieved locally are to move forwards. The book does look that far ahead. With so much of the community wealth-building approach inspired by a mutual aid tradition which is itself most firmly located with anarchism it might be that it looks towards a spontaneous eruption of confrontation with national and global capital once there is a sufficiently large network of Preston model local councils. If so it is hard to see what grounds for confidence there might be in that hope. Localism does not have to shape up as a left wing fore for progressive change. It could settle down in the old groove of Fabian gradualism which once saw the municipalisation of the gasworks as the inevitable march towards socialism. Or it could double-down on its heavy investment in civic pride and become an haven for everything local, set in permanent warfare against the global and the foreign. It is best to be alert to the risks that might be entailed with the Preston model in order to resist them when they rear up. ...more |
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1913546357
| 9781913546359
| 1913546357
| 4.25
| 12
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| Jan 01, 2023
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really liked it
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Author is Dominic Davies The lament of ‘broken Britain’ has been heard loud and clear over the years of the twenty first century and has been incorpora Author is Dominic Davies The lament of ‘broken Britain’ has been heard loud and clear over the years of the twenty first century and has been incorporated into the campaigning strategies of parties of the right, left and centre. The Conservatives blame a selfish, south-east England-based metropolitan elite who have hoarded all the wealth to themselves. Their malign influence can only be counted by a concerted effort to ‘level up’. What does Labour believe? Apparently, the need to greater competence across all areas of government, guided by the iron-bound observance of Rachel Reeve’s fiscal credulity rules. Whatever cash might be dredged up to address infrastructural issues is likely to be paltry and scarcely scratch the surface of what is actually needed. Dominic Davis sets out an invigorating critique of the policies which emerge from both the ‘levelling up’ and austerity-lite approaches of the two main parties and instead works with the insights gleaned from such radical geographers as Doreen Massey and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Massey was always asking ‘what is this place for?’ when she looked into the potential it might have for improving the lives of the people who lived there. Wilson Gilmore continues to excavate geographical space ts by scrutinising the ways its structural features benefit some interests, while at the same time restraining the chance for freer and more fulfilling existence for others. The broken promise of infrastructure is analysed in this book initially from the standpoint of the author’s hometown of Stoke. Famously consisting of six separate towns that were knitted together in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution by innovations in the manufacture of ceramics, whatever the city might have might possibly have become was always limited by the demands that industry placed on the towns, rather than its people. The enterprise established by Josiah Wedgwood churned out products that could be traded across all corners of the world but the people who made them struggled to cross the few miles that constituted their home town. The infrastructure that made this possible served the interests of capital rather than people. On a larger scale exactly the same could be said for the country of the United Kingdom itself. The metropolitan centre of a world empire, investment in its infrastructure – roads, canals, railways, harbours and ports – was geared to moving commodities outwards and into world markets. In parallel to this, other elements of infrastructure have aimed at inhibiting the movement of people, with the consequence that they are trapped in regions were poverty is endemic and the opportunity to escape – that is to move from it – is deliberately limited. Examples of these infrastructural failings include extravagantly priced public transportation costs, the unaffordability of housing in high income areas, police action aimed at deterring vagrancy, and evermore rigorously enforced immigration controls. Davis’s commitment to the abolitionist perspectives of the radical geographers makes him an opponent of any restriction on the right of people to freedom of movement. But at the same time the chaotic swirl of the masses seeking to find the places where they can live in freedom is not what he is aiming for. The areas of policy innovation he wants to see discussed and implemented is rather how to make the places where people live now more conducive to a fulfilling existence. This is the really big context in which all thinking about infrastructure ought to be located and developed into concrete policy. This type of infrastructure should be seen as an enhancement of freedom but not the sort that is the province of the self-contained, atomised individual which is the ideal entrenched in libertarian capitalist ideology. The promise of infrastructure, if it has any such thing, is the empowerment of people to live and act as participants in a community. Freedom is a place, or so the book tells us. This turn in reasoning might raise the risk of the discussion reverting to the communitarianism that works against internationalist political perspectives. The emphasis given to opposing the neocolonialism of contemporary capitalism, with the whole of a third chapter bring given over to this issue, makes if clear that Davis’s sympathies do not go in that direction. But how does the formulation of freedom as a place help hold the line against tendencies like Blue Labour, for whom place-centred politics means clamping down on immigration? There’s an answer to that question, but it might not be found in its entirety in Davis’s argument as it currently stands. ...more |
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0804797412
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| 0804797412
| 4.29
| 347
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| May 15, 2018
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Suddenly an essential work to understand the current situation in the Israel- Gaza war and indeed the entire Middle East region. The atrocities perpetr Suddenly an essential work to understand the current situation in the Israel- Gaza war and indeed the entire Middle East region. The atrocities perpetrated on 7th October confirmed for many the suspicion that Hamas was another Islamic terror group in the mould of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. The book was written well before these events and the author concluded that, at the date of publication in 2022, Hamas had been contained within the Gaza strip and the Israeli strategy of managing the predicament of its 2 million habitants at a level just above a humanitarian disaster but well below the hope that the population might prosper. But though prepared to use terrorist tactics against Israel it could not be defined purely and simply as a movement hellbent on mass murder. Hamas has to be understood as both a political movement as well as a militaristic strategy. The movement has its origins in resistance to the Palestine Liberation Organisation's move away from struggle to reclaim sovereignty over the whole of historic Palestine back in the 1980s. It drew on associations with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to proclaim a strategy of resistance by drawing on Islamic values, with the notion of Jihad to the forefront. It developed its early work through educational and welfare activities on one hand, with the addition of the militancy which came from identification with Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a fighter who had been active in the campaigns against Zionist settlement in the 1930s. By the time of the first Intifada against occupation which began in late 1987, the proponents of what became Hamas had established a formidable network of supporters prepared to challenge the dominant tradition within the PLO, represented by the Fatah movement of Yasser Arafat. The split deepened after the Oslo Accords were brokered in 1993, in which the PLO formally renounced terrorism and staked out its claim for a Palestinian state based on 18 percent of historic Palestine. The Accords set out a roadmap towards the establishment of the state which required the Israelis to withdraw from territory occupied in the 1967 war - namely Gaza, The West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel refused to take measures in line with its commitments under the roadmap and instead embarked on a measures which aimed to contain the activities of the PLO leadership which had been allowed to return to Palestinian territory. The second Intifada erupted in September 2000 and the upsurge in moods favouring resistance to acts of repression in the occupied territories gave further impetus to Hama's stronger stance. But Baconi argues that it also led to a revaluation of the political stance of its leadership based on the fact the Oslo Accords had been discredited and the Zionist willingness to hold on to territory which was not central to its mission appeared to be diminishing. A Cairo Declaration issued by the Hamas leadership in 2005 indicated agreement on a Palestinian state on the the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem as an immediate goal for the movement, together with a commitment to participate within a reformed PLO. This paved the war for participation in elections to the legislative assembly of the Palestinian Authority in 2006 in which Hamas emerged as the largest party. International forces supporting Israel, with the US to the forefront, reacted strongly to Hama's advance. The Arab countries fell in line with the US demand to cease funding for Palestinian civic activities and the Israeli government withheld the $55 million a month in taxes and customs duties it was collecting on behalf of the PA. It had withdrawn from direct occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005 and in favour of a policy of containment at distance and this was double-downed on with the construction of fences and strict border checks at all points of entry. Baconi describes this as maintaining the Strip at a level just above that of humanitarian crisis but below that where development was possible. Hamas responded by building an economy based up smuggling through an evermore extensive network of tunnels through which all essential goods - everything from medicines, building material and military equipment - were moved. A parallel development involved building a network of diplomatic support for its resistance primarily through its links with Qatar. As this picture builds up we get a stronger sense of Hamas as a sophisticated social and political movement with clear and distinct political and military wings. The book is very sparse with regard to parallel developments in Israeli politics other than to say that it remained implacable in its refusal to recognise a partner among the Palestinians with whom it could negotiate a peaceful future. We do get a depressing account of military incursions and bombing campaigns over these years: Operation Bronze (2001), Operation Colorful Jersey (2002), Operation Defensive Shield (2002) Operation Determined Path (2002), Operation Continuous Story (2004), Operation Days of Penitence (2004), Operation Cast Lead (2008), Operation Hot Winter, Operation Pillar of Defence (2012), Operation Protective Edge (2014), and on and on. The outcomes of all this action has been death and injury for thousands of Palestinians, the destruction of physical property and relentless downgrading of infrastructure. In 2022 this got us to the point where Baconi could declare Hamas contained and pacified, suggesting that this represented a stalemate unlikely to be broken anytime soon. And then came 7th October, a shock which showed across an appalling few hours the price that was paid, firstly by murdered and abducted Israelis, and latterly by tens of thousands of Palestinians for the agregious error in believing that the Palestinian situation was being 'managed'. A terrible story which will have consequences for Palestinian and Israeli people in the first instance, and the rest of us in the long haul. ...more |
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Hardcover
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1788739744
| 9781788739740
| B085BSVXWP
| 4.13
| 116
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| Nov 24, 2020
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1839768169
| 9781839768163
| 1839768169
| 3.41
| 22
| unknown
| Apr 18, 2023
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Marx’s views on communism have not received anything like the revival of interest in recent years as his analysis of the capitalist system. Scholars a
Marx’s views on communism have not received anything like the revival of interest in recent years as his analysis of the capitalist system. Scholars and activists have returned to the voluminous writings associated with Capital in the period after the recession of 2008 for the obvious reason that his work still had much to tell us about the contradictions within the workings of a system that, once again, was returning to frequent periodic crises. But the idea that these would lead to its replacement by communism was a notion strictly for the birds. Even so, there have been theorists working with conceptions of a post-capitalist order which have been prepared to revisit the idea, even if they have preferred sheared it of its Marxian association with the materialist dialectic. Garo’s book examines the work of leading representatives of these currents for the purpose of demonstrating their failure to grasp the nature of capitalist crisis and the character of the social forces which need to be assembled if a transition towards any other form of social order is to be possible. In the course of making her case she also tackles the questions as to why Marx’s consideration of what a communist society would look like was so sparse and elliptical, usually accounted for by the fact that he didn’t have time in the years left to him after drafting all the volumes of his opus. On the contrary, argues Garo, it was because the central figure in the elaboration of materialist socialism had no fixed idea as with regard to the critical features of the new order other than the fact it would involve the reappropriation of the forces of production by the people, organised as a classless, democratic social force. The business of organising communism should be left to the folk who would get humanity to the point of overthrowing capitalism. Having shown the level of creativity to get to that point they could be trusted to come up with the alternative in much the same way as the Parisian working class improvised its Commune in 1871. The range of post-Marxian radicals she takes to task extends from Alain Badiou, Ernesto Laclau, Toni Negri and others whose common features are a repudiation of the central role of the working class in fighting for change and a fundamental reconsideration of the state as the focal point of class struggle and parties and unions as modes of organisation. Among these, Badiou’s work is considered as a perspective for an ‘eruptive’ communism which sees change as predicated, not on the condensation of multiple social conflicts into a single point of pressure, but as sets of singular events, each erupting from their own ‘site’. He objects to ‘the idea of an overturning whose origin would be a state of the totality’. The ‘event’ does not sanction the intervention of leftist activists but stands on its own as a predicate of what is possible. He critiques socialism as an attempt to order events into a schema which supports its own, compromised, place within the established order. Socialism is not to be considered, in the manner of the Leninist Third International, as a stage en route to communism but as a relapse into mediations of state power. As an idea it has a primitive universality which exists as a militant tenacity which repeats ‘the egalitarian passion, the idea of justice, the desire to break with the accommodation of the property department, the deposing of egotism, intolerance for forms of oppression, the desire or the cessation of the state.’ The merit in this, according to Garo, is that it provides an account of the enduring appeal of communism that is displaced from parties and the clutter of manifestos and strategies they bring with the mode of organisation and allows it to be told instead as a timeless tale of heroic episodes and inspired individuals, becoming a fable of revolution even when its possibility seems wholly absent. Laclau is considered as a thinker who places issues of leftist strategy at the heart of his work. The notion of populism has central place across his trajectory. Garo argues that this emphasis leads to an uncoupling from any perspective of ‘determinative transformation’ – ie where the end being sought plays a role in determining the strategic route to that goal. Abandoning the hope of transformation Laclau ends up calling for the integration of his version of radical politics into the institutions of liberal democracy. Drawing on Althusser’s concept of ‘over determination (itself borrowed from Freud) Laclau treats class struggle as a secondary contradiction of the capitalist formation. Because of this, popular democracy has no precise class content even it is “the domain of ideological class struggle par excellence.” This adds up to the view that classes have no fundamental interests to defend, even if periodically they enter into struggle during periods of episodic tension, such as high unemployment or the inflationary erosion of the value of wages. The strategies which are called into play during these periods are not intrinsically connected to a form of struggle that reveals an alternative which elides with class interests (ie socialism). Rather, the forms of struggle intrude externally and consist of opportunities for traction within the field of democratic action. These do not present themselves spontaneously but can only be constructed by the populist leadership which is able to pick its way through the maze of opportunities and avoid blind alleys. As Garo puts it, Laclau’s populist socialism “depends exclusively on the judicious selection of one demand or ‘interpellation’ among others, depending on its potentially catalytic virtues as regards the set of existing demands.” This avoids any idea that it is liberal democracy itself which is deeply implicated in the crisis of late capitalism, and hence is on crisis itself. As Garo puts it, Laclau aims to ‘circumvent’ the crisis of democracy rather than confront it. Garo returns to Marx’ critique of political economy to get a perspective as to whether class consciousness has a material basis, as opposed to being a hangover from its roots in Hegelian idealistic philosophy. The critical sections here are in the sub-section of chapter two headed ‘Capitalism disassembled’ and ‘Is Labour Power a Commodity?’ Laclau answers the last question in the negative, on the grounds that labour power is not constituted by purchase, but by being set to work – which he sees as a process external to its constitution as capitalist labour power. Garo’s retort is that this ignores the sections in Capital which analyse the labour contract as “the legal form of class domination that combines equal right, violence and resistance by wage earners to the transformation of this power into a simple capitalist commodity.” Yet despite this apparent commodification being forced on the worker it can never be completed because it is aligned with other areas of social life – life the reproduction of human life - which resist commodification. The Laclauian desire to commit to a free flow of radical democratic possibility has its attractions because it increases the range of possibilities that belong to the territory of political strategy. Freed from the sense that transformation has to follow a route predetermined by class interests that are hardwired into society, radical left populism seems to prise open terrains of activity that do not exist for more orthodox forms of Marxism. But for Garo this expansive realm is an illusion because it leads directly back into liberal capitalism democratic forms. In the event that the contradictions of the class-state are not confronted then the logic of exploitation will prevail and the interests of the working class, understood even as only secondary contradictions, will be stifled, and pushed back. Onto the work of Toni Negri. Garo sees his work and that of his co-thinkers, as hinging on the view that capitalism has undergone a radical mutation which has rendered Marxian labour value theory obsolete. “It is no longer conceived as the contradictory site of capitalist exploitation and resistance to alienation that must construct its political path; it is instead a vital, gushing, fundamentally inalienable power.” (pp 96-7) It has already exceeded the confines of capital and is now defined by cooperation and network intelligence. The term ‘multitude’ defines this collective power, working to transform the conditions of social production. Negri sees the idea of communism as centring on opposition to the state and therefore is equally against public authority as well as that of private capital. What rises against both these is the power of the ‘commons’. However, no mass mobilisation is required to forge a break with capitalism since labour has already transcended its bounds. What is now required is ‘democratic governance and a decent administration’, plus a universal basic income. All of this, for Garo, represents a “wildly optimistic presentation of the new forms of cooperation [and] obscures practices of domination, both traditional and novel, the managerial instrumentalization of competitive relations between wage earners and the unparalleled global expansion of capitalist commodification.” (pp 103-4) In the place of a revolutionary break Negri opts for “autonomy wrested from institutions, paving the way for a communist ethic that involves generating the values of love and poverty.” In a fourth chapter Garo tackles ideas about communism in Marx’s work. Her major point is that Marx never dealt with it as a schema for a finished, alternative society, but rather as the process of emergence from the contradictions of capitalist society. Though he clearly had the view that a communist society would be one without economic classes and exploitation, private ownership of the means of production, a state structure and it would increase democratic self-organisation in all aspects of social life, it would develop in this direction as a consequence of a protracted, antagonistic class struggle to overcome the contradictions of the system it was superseding. The book traces the evolution of Marx’s thought on these themes from his earliest days as a young Hegelian through to the work of his mature period. Communism became for Marx and his intimate collaborator Engels, a radical choice which signified a break with their own hesitations over the dynamics of revolutionary social change. Garo describes a “complex duality” that combined a social project that remained to be constructed and a “modality of militant commitment”, but without conflating the two (p.138) In later work Marx abandoned the idea that there could be a strict correlation between class relations and “partisan logics.” He is also devoted more time to considering the colonial situation and the global expansion of capitalism, producing a strategic thinking which aimed at guiding class struggle at points which exceeded the conquest of state power. (p. 169). For Garo, this capacity to reflect on the “mediations of radical emancipation going beyond the logics of organisation and the seizure of power” that is lacking in the politics of the left today. Communism is the strategy for ending the domination of capital. As such it is proscribed in the process of transformation and not in preconceived dogma. They key moment is the process of capitalist exploitation, which takes hold of previously existing forms of domination and makes them a part of the reproduction of capitalism itself. In making all forms of social activity subject to the valorisation of capital the worker experiences alienation from her own social being. But whilst capital struggles to make labour a commodity it cannot accomplish this final state, with the resistance on the part of the worker collectively generating the force for communism. “…capitalism, despite all its efforts, cannot reduce labour-power to a commodity and manufacture its own docile, anesthetised foot soldiers. For the labour-power connected by the logic of value is, and remains, in all modes of production the means o self-development, the site of formations capacities for self-development but also aspirations to a different life. While capitalist exploitation and domination are indeed exercised at the level of labour-power, resistance to domination that cannot be total is also manifested there. On condition that it is developed into a collective force and a project, the resistance is forever reviving and nurturing the desire for radical social change.” (p179) Garo summarises this by saying that the “spring of resistance” to capitalism lies not in the opposition of living labour to anonymous accumulated dead labour (Negri’s thesis) but in the “ever more acute contradiction between the purchase and sale of labour power, on the one hand, and its formation as concrete individuality on the other.” (p180) The challenge for communist strategy lies in structuring this contradiction to enable this transcendence to another mode of production via the destruction of class domination. Communism aims for “an integral social reappropriation in the course of a decisive confrontation with bourgeois power in all its dimensions – economic, political, social and cultural.” (188) The idea of ‘socialism’ emerges from this engagement with bourgeois power. Adapted from mid-19th century social democracy, Marx saw it as a political victory that would win time for ‘collective, autonomous decision-making’. The conquest political power opens the way for the intensification of class struggle for reforms to which capitalism – still extant but subdued within the socialist state - will not submit without a fight. In a section dealing with the Gotha programme, Garo argues that Marx was hostile to the idea of detailed manifestos and felt that instead what was required as a ‘minimum programme’ which would outline ‘a project for abolishing capitalist relations of production, the division of labour inseparable from the, and a democratic supersession of the juridical viewpoint, which contaminates even the most political socialist traditions.’ (p198) The key to moving beyond the conquest of political power towards a revolutionary process of transformation was mass mobilisation and the invention of ‘original institutional forms’, of the kind seen during the Paris Commune. In the final chapter Garo explains the structure of her book, which she describes as ‘anti-chronological’ in that it begins by reviewing the work of relatively recent critical works and then goes on to consider communism as intimated in Marx’s writings. Whilst the contemporary work registers the crisis of late capitalist society it also reasons from a standpoint that sees the failure of the working class to rise to the level of a revolutionary challenge to its existence. She sees them as having three essential features in common: one, the explore classical points of alternative to capitalism, but isolate one from another making their respective hypotheses incompatible: two, they distance themselves from the inherited forms of the class struggle, thus making their work critiques of Marx and Marxism: three, they attempt to ‘repoliticise theory on its own terrain, though this fails to overcome the uncoupling of critical elaboration, political intervention and social reality.’ (p220) For Garo, the construction of an alternative requires not just concrete proposals, ‘but the ability to conjoin them with a programme of radical transformation and individual aspirations as they exist today, for the purpose of creating the political force and unitary momentum they lack.’ (p221) Her reassertion of a critique of revisionism – its rejection of a central role for the working class, value theory, dialectical materialism, etc – is very familiar. The effect of this has, she argues, been to sever politics from activism which aims at achieving social transformation. The post-Marx communist seems to have catapulted itself into a whirl of exciting ideas that hinge around the notion of liberation, but which also coincide with the moods that have been incubated within post-modernism and globalisation. With so much on offer in this dazzling marketplace there is no need for a social movement working to transform the conditions of life. Communist practise looks different from one revisionist thinker to the other but what they have in common is the sense that it will emerge from deep-thinking individuals making the correct combination of choices that are offered up in the modern world which will tend towards more freedom. Garo brings her line o reasoning to a close with a return to the communism of Marx, with a line through Lenin and Gramsci, in which the ‘mediation’ of the communist ideal was constantly reconsidered in the light of a practice that aimed to bring an awareness of their nascent power to working class and its allies. In all, a thorough engagement with some of the most influential ideas on the post-Marxist left in recent years, though not always an easy one! ...more |
Notes are private!
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Paperback
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1786630214
| 9781786630216
| B01I85OZG8
| 4.40
| 4,572
| May 02, 2017
| Apr 02, 2017
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A good read if you want to bring yourself up to speed about the currently raging events in Palestine-Israel. Pappe writes as a non-Zionist Israeli con
A good read if you want to bring yourself up to speed about the currently raging events in Palestine-Israel. Pappe writes as a non-Zionist Israeli concerned with setting the record straight as to why Palestinian and Jew have been locked in such violent conflict since the founding of the Israeli state in 1948, and before that in tensions between Zionist settlers and the people they had planted themselves among. His fundamental contention is that the conflicts arose because of the settlers' drive towards becoming the dominant social, economic and cultural force in the region, reducing the Palestinians to minority status and removing as many as possible from the cities and land where they had lived for generations. Justifying the mass expulsions and driving Palestinians either from the country altogether, and confining those who remained in enclaves in and around the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem required the generation of myths which Pappe summarises as having 10 core elements - Palestine was an empty land at the time of the Balfour Declaration; the Palestinians voluntarily left their homeland in 1948; Israel had been left with no choice but to go to war with its Arab neighbours in June 1967. He goes on to consider the failures of the Camp David Accords and the official reasons for the many attacks on Gaza which pre-date the current assault on the strip. Pappe writes as a Jewish Israeli who is concerned about the position of the community in which he was born as much as the plight of the Palestinians. Nobody should live with the fear of being 'driven into the sea' but the security that all need will only be achieved in a pluralist society in which everyone has the right to move freely 'between the river and the sea'. He sees no prospect that a two-state solution could be made to work in the interests of both communities. His call is for a united Palestine-Israel - secular and democratic, in which Jews and Palestinians can build a common future together. ...more |
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