Monuments Are For Pigeons

Sadism, the military and Russell Williams

2010-10-28T19:35:00.011-04:00

Despite my distaste for digging into human misery, today we’re tackling Russell Williams, the Canadian Air Force colonel who has been sentenced to life in prison, including solitary confinement for 25 years, for murdering Jessica Lloyd and Marie-France Comeau, and dozens of escalating acts of depravity including abduction and rape.

Describing someone as evil incarnate doesn’t illuminate much. But there’s a method to the melodrama. By describing the murder as senseless and evil, Williams becomes evil - beyond the realm of inquiry. We must simply condemn and punish him. But what happened to those women is awful enough to warrant a few questions. Is there a link between Colonel Williams’ sadism and his chosen career?

How did a man like this prosper in the military for so many years? Prime Minister Harper said, “Obviously, this is no way reflects on the [Armed] Forces.” The Chief of Air Staff says it “troubles” him that no one knew about Williams’ behaviour. The experts have scoured his past but have found nothing. They’re quick to point out that Williams kept everything hidden: on the surface he was a loving husband. Someone as meticulous as Williams was smart enough not to get caught, and being a high-ranking officer would place him above suspicion, giving him leeway to pursue his crimes until he got careless.

The elephant in the room is the fact that this man was a career military officer. You can see how this might be embarrassing. The Canadian forces have been engaged in ‘saving’ women in Afghanistan from the Taliban for the past eight years. The Taliban are the supposed to be the ones raping and controlling women, not our troops. And yet here’s a commander whose hobby was an escalating violation of women. What's the relation between his sadism, and the violence of his employer?

I don’t think all soldiers are sadists. I have a lot of empathy for soldiers precisely because of the trauma they're exposed to, which can cause sadism, suicidal tendencies and PTSD. But if those pre-existing tendencies exist, wouldn't the army bring them out? Officers in particular have the job of breaking down personalities, making them conform to the arbitrary group discipline of a machine whose job it is to move, work and kill when ordered to.

Here are three examples.

1) Feminists have long noted the link between violence against women and military violence. Women are the object that male soldiers can prove their masculinity against. "Militarism depends on creating an other by declaring distinctions between two groups. The other is asserted to be “less than.” The other must then be controlled or destroyed."

2) An insight from James Bauhaus, a prisoner writing about the psychology of prison guards:

personalities tend to warp toward sadism as certainly as absolute power corrupts absolutely. Sadism results from there being no possibility of real accountability.

A good correctional officer is the new guy: usually one who has had no contact with the military. If he is a good guy despite military service, he's usually one who has never actually killed anyone. Extensive training in efficient mass-murder techniques tends to make life cheap, especially when it belongs to the people we are programmed to hate.

3) Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism:

Sadism originates from ungratified orgastic yearnings. The facade is inscribed with such names as "comradeship," "honor," "voluntary discipline." Concealed behind the facade, we find secret revolt, depression to the point of rebellion, owing to the hindrance of every expression of personal life, especially of sexuality. (192)

This suppression has a function:

a large part of the sadism made use of by the ruling class to suppress and exploit other classes is to be ascribed chiefly to the sadism that stems from suppressed sexuality. (384)

Note the theme: militaries, fascism and capitalism all use repression, and particularly sexual repression, to control men. That gets externalized against women, prisoners and anyone who's weaker.

There are plenty of good fiction books about the insanity of the military. Catch-22, The Good Soldier Schweik, Johnny Got His Gun. But I urge you to watch some non-fiction, Winter Soldier.

Filmed in 1972, it’s the testimony of US soldiers talking about what they did and witnessed in Vietnam. The men are confronting that they tortured and killed real people. You can see the trauma they've faced, recounting what they’ve lived with day and night. Is there really much difference between what these men did and what happened to Lloyd and Comeau? How about U.S. soldiers in Iraq? How about official UK army policy training interrogators in torture? Canadian complicity in torture? These examples scratch the surface. Williams never served in Afghanistan, but there's a disturbing parallel between the horrors he visited on women and the horrors militaries pile on civilians.

Williams' crimes were textbook suppression of sexuality and rebellion. The organisation he worked for relied on suppression. Correlation does not equal causation. But it's worth investigating why there's so much correlation, between different militaries, different wars and a depressingly consistent sadism. Because it's the worst form of hypocrisy to train people to kill when asked to, and then act horrified when one of the enforcers of that system turns that drive on those around them. The army probably didn’t create Colonel William’s sadism. But it may have provided a psychological structure that rewarded his frustrated sense of self with absolute authority. If so, two women paid for that with their dignity and their lives.

Die Antwoord - Evil Boy

2010-10-23T23:32:00.005-04:00

Die Antwoord are a South African electro-hip hop group. They've been blowing up on the internet for a few months now; I saw them live in September and they put on an amazing show. Without knowing more about South African music, I couldn't say what their influences are, exactly; but they seem to combine hip hop, rave and an artistic sensibility. I'm fascinated by the white working class Afrikaans identity - apparently adopted quite consciously by Watkin Jones, the lead singer, who has a career as a performance artist.

Their latest release, Evil Boy, features Wanga, an 18 year old member of the Xhosa tribe. The video is incredible: ornate, grotesque and hyper-sexual. For your NSFW viewing pleasure:

EVIL BOY (official) from Die Antwoord on Vimeo.

Spoiler: you will have noticed the homophobic comments. According to Boing Boing, the story is that Wanga's coming-of-age ritual includes getting circumcised. Since he refuses to be circumcised, his mates have called him gay and effeminate. By saying, I'm not a gay, this dick is for the ladies, he's rejecting the charge that that makes him less of a man. This is not a comment directed at gays.

I have no doubt Wanga is sincere in just wanting to defend himself and doesn't intend an anti-gay slur. I wonder, however, about the merits of translating "I'm not a gay" without any backstory. Most viewers won't know this is about him, it just looks like macho posturing, and given the recent spate of gay suicides in the U.S., more homophobia is even more unnecessary.

It could also be a big in-joke, because there are an awful lot of penises in a video proclaiming heterosexuality. Some men can be remarkably good at missing homoerotic subtext, but it's just a text here, I mean Ninja sings into a penis at one point.

I don't blame an 18 year old for not considering how his comments might be received on a different continent, nor in thinking that gay = less manly; but I wonder at the artistic director. It's great Die Antwoord are pro-queer and pro-sex; at the concert I was at, it was clear they had a large queer following (one man got on stage and kissed Ninja on the cheek; on the way out the door afterwards, I overheard a girl telling her friends, "I can't believe I slapped Yolandi Visser on the ass!") Artists aren't responsible for how their work is received, but when something is so obviously open to misinterpretation, they could try a little harder.

Still not acceptable? - The It Crowd

Victor’s Top 10 Albums of the 00s

2009-12-27T22:45:00.007-05:00

It’s the end of a decade and time to make a list. A few publications have compiled definitive Top 10 (or Top 50) album lists, so why not me? The only problem being: I don’t think I’ve heard 10 albums from the 00s: on the contrary, this decade is when I got into music made 40 years ago. So to reach 10, I’m including albums I first heard in the 00s.

This makes my list so subjective as to be nearly useless. After all, a list is supposed to provide boundaries to something: genre, timeline or fads, etc. My list delimits nothing more than my mood over the past 10 years... which, now that I look at it, is part of the brooding artist-intellectual image I try so hard to cultivate.

Darling, I tire of my absinthe - Mick Jagger, Performance

10. War & Peace – Edwin Starr

If you had a party and could only choose a single album, you could do worse than leave this on. Starr is the definition of high-energy, his band providing solid up-tempo funk while he throws everything at the wall: wailing, pidgin Spanish, he even has a chorus where he faux-cries to the rhythm. Everyone knows War (What Is It Good For?), his breakout hit, but the rest of the album provides similarly sober highlights at odds with his enthusiasm, including Time, where he muses on his own mortality while the band mimics an alarm clock.

9. Lupine Howl – The Carnivorous Adventures of Lupine Howl

Lupine Howl formed from the bulk of Spiritualized after Jason Pierce kicked them out for labour organizing. In a fair world, they would’ve become just as big as Pierce’s ego. They take the drugs and alienation of Spiritualized and ramp it up, crafting 9 blistering odes to paranoia, loneliness and all the other things one feels once the drugs wear off. The guitars are fuzzy, the vocals are processed, the jams are spacey and psychedelic, but Lupine Howl actually go one better than their predecessor, keeping their arrangements tight and never falling into the latter’s introverted morosis. (If that’s not a word, it should be.) The Jam That Ate Itself says it best: “Gonna find me a UFO and get the fuck out of here.” Sign a better contract first, boys.

8. Alan Price – Lucky Man

Yet to be ground down - Malcolm McDowell, O Lucky Man!

Price made this as the soundtrack to O Lucky Man!, Lindsay Anderson’s post-‘68 rage against the dying of the leftist light. It’s a brilliant film, detailing the descent of Michael Travis, Malcolm McDowell’s bright-eyed naïf, into poverty and disillusion. Price’s soundtrack is like McDowell’s guardian angel, singing bittersweet foreshadowing ballads about life under capitalism. Had Travis paid attention, he would’ve heard Price telling him work & life is a struggle just to survive with a smile on your face. Travis never learns; yet Price studiously avoids mawkish folk, composing bright, upbeat, poppy numbers that belie the tragedy he’s observing.

7. Keane – Under The Iron Sea

Well turned out lads

OK, OK, guilty pleasure. Keane makes solid pop songs, with an edge of self-blame, passive-aggressivity and bitterness. What could be more British? The piano floats delicately over the melody, the background choruses are hummable: I challenge anyone to find better music for a Sunday afternoon stuck in a suburb. Sure, lead singer Tom Chaplin’s breathing can get a bit laboured at times; and on occasion I just want to slap him and tell him to be happier. But since we know pop music demands that every aspect of a failed relationship be submitted to scrutiny, I can think of few groups better suited for the task.

6. The Postal Service – Give Up

This was my soundtrack to 2004, and today when I heard it in a restaurant I still knew every melody. This is a side project of Death Cab For Cutie, whom I always found too tortured and whiny for my tastes; but The Postal Service is indie rock done right. Which is to say, with keyboards instead of guitars, and unironic levity. I hate a certain species of indie rock, one that makes a virtue of an inability to sing and a middle class affectation of detachment. I want my musicians to belt it out with genuine feeling – and here, The Postal Service prove with their bouncy electro-pop that hipsters have feelings, too.

5. Sir Joe Quarterman & Free Soul – I Got So Much Trouble In My Mind

But they look so happy

This was the first funk disc I ever bought, and it’s still one of the best. Sir Joe wasn’t one of the leading lights of funk, and I suspect it’s because he was a little too honest. He sings about both social and his very personal troubles: he pays too many taxes, his girlfriend is pregnant, his job is hard. He’s even got a whole song devoted to finding one friend – literally, “Gonna get me a friend one day.” He’s like the guy at the party who corners you and insists on telling you all his problems. But backed up by Free Soul, each tale of woe is transformed into a deep, funky groove: the bassline and horns play back and forth, and in a nod to the psych-RnB encounter there’s some feedback-laced guitars to provide extra edge. From the title track: “Give me the strength to carry on, because everything I got is just about gone, and I think about it, I worry about it, I dream about it.” But suddenly you’re dancing to Sir Joe’s blues and everything’s fine again.

4. Vicki Anderson – Message From A Soul Sister

Anderson was part of James Brown’s back-up band; while you can hear his influence on the extended jams and call-and-response, Anderson outshines her roots with her biggest asset, her voice. She tackles gospel-inflected soul, straight-up funk and lugubrious ballads, and the whole time she sounds like she’s standing back from the mic so she doesn’t break it. When she does let loose, like in the civil-rights themed In The Land of Milk and Honey, it’s pure longing and regret. This is not music that’s ashamed of its feelings: Anderson shares her rage and joy, and the lush orchestration is barely enough to channel it. For everyone who thinks any piece of rock music produced in the last 20 years has ‘soul’, this should be required listening.

3. Isaac Hayes – Hot Buttered Soul

Real men like cats - Isaac Hayes, Truck Turner

Isaac Hayes was the ultimate in masculinity, before that meant getting oiled up and finding a fellow MMAer to hug. If you thought you were in love, or lonely, your feelings were only margarine to Isaac Hayes' rich creamery butter. Hot Buttered Soul only has four songs, because that’s all the Man needed to express sorrow, lust, regret and love, respectively. I won’t try to describe how smooth his voice is, or how masterful his stage presence in. (Watch Wattstax to see him in 1973 at his prime, when he was the most popular RnB singer ever.) But a brief description of Track 3 will suffice. Hayes takes the most famous ballad about emotional immaturity and running away, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, and transforms it into the tragic story of a young man who devotes his life to passion and gets his heart stomped on. At the moment he discovers he’s being cheated on, Hayes breathes, “Baby, momma – why?” and thrusts more pathos into that single syllable than every single James Blunt, Nickelback and Celine Dion song put together. Check out his 19 minute arrangement for an even more epic emotional ride. The strings and his own saxophone playing are top-rate, but they’re strictly a backdrop to Isaac Hayes’ soul, which we’re lucky that he shared with us.

2. Roots Manuva – Run Come Save Me

We actually need production justice, but I'll forgive him

I realize having only one hip-hop album on this list qualifies me for What White People Like – so be it. Roots Manuva is consistently the most creative hip-hop artist on either side of the Atlantic. His deep, dub-inflected beats draw as much from Jamaica as America, veering close to Tricky’s weed-fogged haze without getting lost in it. His lyrics betray a complex, political understanding of the music industry, social problems and his Black British identity. Witness (1 Hope) was the big hit off that album and remains as infectious as H1N1; Swords In The Dirt is frighteningly danceable, while Sinny Sin Sins tells a languid tale of the contradictions of growing up Baptist. When the bass kicks in, you have to move, but you don’t have to wince at the words.

1. Manic Street Preachers – Know Your Enemy

The Manics, in happier - er, earlier days

Despite having an insane amount of fun seeing the Manics in October, I actually don’t think they’ve had that good a decade. Lifeblood was forced; Send Away The Tigers felt like a belated stab at the teen market; and let’s forget the embarrassing covers compilation Lipstick Traces. Their last truly good album was 2001’s Know Your Enemy, in which they’re in top form, musically and politically. It sees a return to a heavier, angry sound after the stadium anthems of the late 90s; this has to be connected to their subject matter, which draws on a range of artistic and cultural references to alienation, McCarthyism and imperialism. If it sounds complex, it is, which allows the album to yield repeated listenings without getting tired – I’ve had this on heavy rotation for 9 years and it still stands up. The guitars and rhythms are hard and driving but never overwhelming. My personal favourite, Freedom of Speech Won’t Feed My Children, sees them lambasting celebrity liberals for celebrating democracy while ignoring capitalist exploitation (“We love to kiss the Dalai Lama’s ass, cos he is such a holy man, Free to eat and buy anything, Free to fuck from Paris to Beijing”). What’s not to love?

Runners-up: actually, a lot of hip-hop should be on this list. Blackalicious’ Blazing Arrow, Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, Dizzie Rascal, The Streets. Hard-Fi deserves special mention for making anti-capitalist pub sing-a-longs. Jarvis Cocker’s solo work shows the impact of maturity on talent. Ah well – next decade.

For the next cut

Party like it's a swine-flu pandemic!

2009-04-27T23:39:00.003-04:00

The pandemic you were waiting for is on its way. Swine-flu began at a pork-processing plant in Mexico and has spread around the world. It's now a Level 4 threat: not yet a pandemic, but the World Health Organization says "there is now sustained transmission of the infection from human to human. It is two phases short of a pandemic... to raise the threat level further would require evidence that the virus was strong enough to infect whole communities across the globe."

And if not, why not? - Newswipe

I've written how our culture is suffused with catastrophe. People are faced with multiplying economic, social and ecological crises. They're unable to understand them as different facets of one larger crisis of the capitalist mode of production. Swine flu fills an existential void: we know it's a few minutes to midnight, and here's proof. Never mind that good old regular influenza kills a million people a year, and there are dozens of infectious diseases ravaging poor countries at any one moment. Swine flu is affecting us in the wealthy countries, so we have to care.

I'm waiting for the racist backlash to begin, when Mexicans start getting blamed for this crisis. In fact the pork-processing plant is owned by an American multinational with a shoddy environmental record:

Smithfield, which is led by pork baron Joseph W Luter III, has previously been fined for environmental damage in the US. In October 2000 the supreme court upheld a $12.6m (£8.6m) fine levied by the US environmental protection agency which found that the company had violated its pollution permits in the Pagan River in Virginia which runs towards Chesapeake Bay. The company faced accusations that faecal and other bodily waste from slaughtered pigs had been dumped directly into the river since the 1970s.

Survivors. I started watching the 1970s version of this and am now glad I stopped.

$12.6 million in exchange for decades of pollution - what's that, Smithfield's breakfast conference budget for a few fiscal quarters? The industrial meat industry is notorious for overcrowding, effluent run-off and overuse of antibiotics. Mike Davis brilliantly dissects their logic:

Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

The problem is not farm size per se: it's that economies of scale are only economical when environmental costs aren't considered. NAFTA devastated Mexico's rural economy, so it makes sense Mexicans would be happy to welcome an American agribusiness and not look too closely at what, after all, are industry-wide standards. Davis goes on to show this outbreak has been predicted for some time:

Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly.

A lot of things are - Japan: a story of love & hate

But investment wasn't made in public healthcare or preventative medicine - which might affect the business practices of the agribusinesses so precious to the economy. Nor were rich countries willing to aid poorer nations' healthcare systems, particularly not after spending the last 30 years privatizing them. The villagers at the epicentre of the swine-flu outbreak knew something was wrong a month ago, but no one listened to them:

Residents of the town of Perote said at the time that they had a new, aggressive bug — even taking to the streets to demonstrate against the pig farm they blamed for their illness — but were told they were suffering from a typical flu. It was only after U.S. labs confirmed a swine flu outbreak that Mexican officials sent the boy's sample in for swine flu testing.

We face a patchwork of regulations and vaccine availability, based on the ability and willingness of governments to pay. And how much is a government going to spend to prevent something that might not happen?

This may not be 'the big one', but one thing's for sure: it's not a natural epidemic. It's another capitalist crisis, to be lined up alongside global warming and foreclosures. I don't mean there are men in tophats in a back room, rubbing their hands and plotting the downfall of the world's poor. I mean that capitalism, as a system, is completely unable to take account of long-term consequences. A pandemic would shut borders and further cut trade, deepening the recession, making things worse for everyone. But the rule for all capitalists is profit or die, which means agribusiness cuts corners, governments cut costs and Big Pharma funds medicine, not prevention. Crisis is inevitable and people - particularly poor people - die.

Mmm, that's a tasty metaphor for capitalist greed! - Soviet Toys

Finally, even a pandemic has its plusses and minuses. Minus: I'm smack in the middle of the swine flu's target age range:

The new strain seems to be more lethal to those in the 25 to 45 age range - an ominous sign, as this was a hallmark of the Spanish 1918 flu pandemic that killed tens of millions worldwide. Younger people were probably hit harder by the 1918 flu virus because their immune systems over-reacted.

Here I thought I was making myself healthy: all that exercise, all that fruit and Vitamin D pills, and I was just toughening up my immune system so it'd overreact and kill me when the swine-flu hit. But that's the plus as well: if a healthy immune system is a danger, then I should be drinking, smoking and taking as many drugs as I can. That way the swine-flu will course through my body like a nasty hangover. I'm off down the pub to get immuno-compromised: who's with me?

"Are we safe yet?"
"Dunno, let's have another to be sure." - Looks & Smiles

Ian Tomlison, Susan Boyle and Keri Ferrell

2009-04-19T13:49:00.001-04:00

The only link between them is they're all on my mind this afternoon.

1) Ian Tomlinson

On April 1, protestors gathered in London to demonstrate against the G20 leadership of the capitalist world. The police responded by 'kettling' them into tight spaces and not letting them leave, much like corralling cattle. Those who got in the way were beaten, like Ian Tomlinson, a 47 year old newsvendor who was on his way home. He collapsed and later died.

Ian Tomlinson on his last walk.

At first the police claimed they helped Tomlinson when he collapsed, but protestors threw bottles at them. The right-wing net trolls leapt all over this, calling the demonstrators monstrous and subhuman. The cops investigated themselves and found nothing wrong; a coroner called the cause of death 'heart attack'. But flaws soon emerged in the story, chiefly because someone filmed Tomlinson being struck by the police. Soon things began to unravel. An independent investigation was launched; the officers involved were suspended; a new autopsy was conducted, finding the cause of death to be abdominal hemmorhage - internal bleeding. At this point, we may be looking at the first time (to my knowledge) a police officer could be charged with manslaughter.

Anyone who's ever gone to a global justice demonstration knows the police don't hold back from beating and bloodying those who get in their way. But this appears to be the tipping point where suddenly the demonstrators' stories start being believed. The head of the independent commission is reminding police they're the servants, not the masters of the people, and he credits videos by protestors' mobile phones with the evidence needed to prosecute.

Just some bad apples.

It's sweet to see naive liberals up in arms about heavy-handed policing - it means they thought everything was working fine before. But more significant is that the words of hundreds of protestors over the years mean nothing. Even the police murders at Genoa only led to assault convictions. However, video evidence is enough to start heads rolling. All those new surveillance technologies interfere with the state's ability to suppress dissent. And as a society, we fetishize technology to the extent that it supplants the evidence of real people who, being 'biased', can't be believed.

2) Susan Boyle

She's the 47 year old Scottish spinster with a learning disability who spent her life looking after her mother and has never been kissed. Then, on Britain's Got Talent, she bucked expectations and proved she could sing.

I know it's corny. The whole thing looks staged: for one thing, why do the audience leap to their feet as soon as she starts singing? And Tanya Gold makes the excellent point that the drama of redemption wouldn't work unless we judged her for being hideous - and therefore a talentless hag - in the first place. Moreover, her story lends itself to the worst sort of merit-based triumphalism: the narrative that 'the little person can succeed against all odds' is very handy to capitalist ideology in a recession, when little people are getting stomped on. But that said, I found her performance touching. And maybe the 30 million youtube hits show people are willing to identify with the underdog, not the glamorous and powerful.

3) Kari Ferrell

Keri Ferrell. Pic used without permission, but that's kind of the point.

Kari Ferrell is the 'hipster grifter', a 22 year old Korean-American wanted for defrauding hipsters of $60,000. Coming out of the Salt Lake City punk scene, she used her sexuality to gain friends and borrow money from gob-smacked young scene boys (and some women.) Then she moved to Brooklyn, talked her way into a job at Vice Magazine, and went through a series of boyfriends, borrowing money from them and repaying them with cheques from a closed account. She's now on the run again.

I find Ferrell fascinating for a number of reasons. Firstly, she cultivated the hipster aesthetic: she even has a tattoo on her back that reads "I love beards." Secondly, she sounds less like a calculating fraud artist, and more like someone with borderline personality disorder: she told numerous friends she was dying of cancer, to the point of showing them bloodied kleenexes which she'd apparently coughed up blood into. She sounds like someone who desperately needs drama and the attention that flows from it. Thirdly, despite my ongoing dislike for hipsters, I don't think that having skinny jeans and plastic-slat sunglasses means you deserve to be ripped off. (Except if you work at the evil, reactionary Vice Magazine - in which case you deserve everything you get.) But she was smart enough to speak the hipster code, and inveigled herself into the scene by looking and speaking the right way.

Asian, therefore cute, therefore harmless? - Cibo Matto

Finally, she's a young Asian woman who doesn't fit the proper image of aggressive huckster. The stereotypes of race and gender she falls under are 'cute, exotic and harmless'. Cibo Matto, the 1990s alt-rock fronted by two Japanese women, struggled with the trope, which dictated that no matter how much funk & hip-hop they incorporated into their act, they were seen as 'quirky' first and musicians second. Ferrell made the best of what she was given. That doesn't make her a folk-hero, but if a desperate, needy woman found herself in a world that trusted cute, Asian women, I don't think it's her fault if she used that to her advantage.

Edit: a friend of mine forwarded this to me - frickin hilarious:

Movie Review - Shaft in Africa

2009-04-16T22:17:00.001-04:00

Most people know Shaft through his epynonymous first movie, in which Richard Roundtree plays John Shaft, hard-boiled private dick who'd risk his neck for a brother man. Shaft and its sequel, Shaft's Big Score, followed a predictable course in which Shaft fights both gangsters and police suspicions to right wrongs, save his life and get the girl.

Shaft in Africa takes the franchise in a completely different direction. An international gang of people smugglers replace the small-time hoods. Shaft is whisked from Harlem to Africa to pose as an immigrant labourer, and track down the traffickers exploiting young Africans. After many adventures he makes it to Europe, where he lives in an overcrowded tenement in Paris with other illegal workers. He must battle the smugglers to free the migrants - but not before their tenement is set on fire.

You read correctly: Shaft in Africa is a drama about the plight of illegal migrants sold into slavery in Europe. It could have been made yesterday; tenement fires in Paris are common, where undocumented workers are warehoused in sub-standard conditions to this day. To my knowledge, Hollywood has yet to touch the issue; the British film Dirty Pretty Things broached the topic of illegal workers in 2005, but the politics were a pale pink next to Shaft. In the former, Chiwetel Ejiofor sums up the immigrant experience with, "we are the people you do not see. We are the ones who drive your cabs. We clean your rooms. And suck your cocks." Which is true, but doesn't say why it's happening.

Compare this to Shaft, who encounters a smuggler overcharging him and the Africans for an overcrowded room in a tenement:

"Fellows, I take care of everything. Now, this room cost you each 100 francs a month.

We only earn 200 francs a month. For this room, we pay half.

No space in Paris. Very costly. No room, you in street. In street, police come. Ask questions, send you home. But how you go home? No money! So: go to prison. Lock up. 100 francs a month, everybody stay happy."

That's a good summary of the undocumented worker's condition: as long as you're illegal, the threat of deportation keeps you silent. At one point the smuggler shows his evil capitalist colours and rants, "I've given thousands of jobs to Africans and they don't complain. But because of that black bastard and that troublemaker Shaft I've had to leave this country!" Later, a French police sergeant tries to mollify Shaft after a fire in the tenement fire kills some of the Africans:

"The law will punish him, monsieur."

"Fuck the law. What is the law doing about the shitheads who charge 100 Francs a month to stay in a craphouse like this? Why don't you really clamp down on the slave trade? I'll tell you why. Because the black ghettos of Paris is as far away from the Champs Elysee as 125th Street is from Park Avenue. You need a bunch of poor bastards to work on your roads and your goddamn kitchens. So don't lay any of that 'law will punish you' shit on me!"

Shaft connects exploitation, racism and ghettos to the profit motive. No One Is Illegal couldn't say it better. And this wasn't some earnest documentary, it was an action film: though it lost money, the movies were popular enough that CBS tried to leverage Shaft into a TV series. We know illegal immigrants are the first to be targeted during a recession - imagine the impact of mainstream audiences encountering Shaft's sympathetic portrayal today. For that alone, Shaft in Africa is worth watching.

There's another reason to see the film. It's obvious you don't watch a movie named after a euphemism for a penis for progressive gender politics. His character is defined by his sexual prowess - though I suspect that, like a lot of blaxploitation films and hip hop afterwards, much of that is braggadocio, not meant to be taken seriously. Which is what makes Shaft in Africa so fascinating: it elevates Shaft (pun intended) to the status of a sex god. And not because he's good in bed, but because his penis is so large. It's like Shaft as told by Rainer Wolfcastle; there's absolutely no subtlety.

Shaft meets the girlfriend of the head smuggler, and she tries to seduce him:

"How long is your phallus, Mr. Shaft?"

"My what?"

"Your cock."

"Baby by now it shrunk down to 20 inches..."

"You can usually tell by the size of a man's nose. Or the length and thickness of his thumbs. I always look for a man with a prominent nose. And long thick thumbs."

"Baby you're not turning me on. I got too many things on my mind."

Of course he relents, telling her "Baby my nose may not be too prominent, but I got two of the longest, thickest thumbs..."

And it gets better. Shaft meets an African princess, whose culture dictates she has her clitoris amputated on reaching 'womanhood'. She soon learns the ways of Shaft:

"Were you disappointed I wasn't a virgin? Hmm?"

"Hell no baby, you had some good teacher."

"John, this is hardly the time to talk about it, but I've made an important decision. Because of you."

"Well, my daddy told me, he said John, the one time you should never ever make an important decision is right after you've made love."

"It's about my clitorectomy."

"That's an important decision all right."

"February comes, I'm not going to let them do it."

He didn't even have to send her to Clitoraid. Shaft's penis is so great, he can overturn entrenched cultural traditions with it. Yes, Shaft features a black man being objectified for his animal sexuality; yes, it reduces women to slavish conquests. But at this point my analytical ability breaks down and I'm simply dumbfounded that something like this could get written and filmed. Shaft is not a lover, he's a force of nature with transformative sexual powers... who's a friend of exploited migrant labour. Watch it and deconstruct it if you can.

Book Review - Days of Hope, Andre Malraux

2009-03-24T21:27:00.002-04:00

Days of Hope tells the story of a panoply of revolutionaries as they struggle against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The book spans the events of 1936: Franco's initial uprising against the Republicans, and the repeated military engagements leading to Franco's unsuccessful attempt to take Madrid.

This is a military history of the Spanish Civil War, which is the book's strength and weakness. Malraux is an incredibly gifted writer. He takes us through breathtaking vistas of Spanish countryside, and the bombing of civilian Madrid, with a confident pen that contrasts the stark horrors of war with the small details of everyday life. The narrative weaves like a camera between dozens of different players:

"All the morning," Moreno said, "I've felt as if an earthquake were taking place." He meant that it was not so much fear of the fascists that gripped the crowd as the sort of terror a cataclysm inspires; the idea of 'giving in' never entered their heads - one doesn't talk of giving in to an earthquake.

To a jangle of bells an ambulance sped past.

A black crash and the glasses on the tables sprang up like toy rabbits into the air and landed tinkling back amongst saucers, spilt liquor and V-shaped splinters from the windows. The panes had caved in like drum-heads as the bomb exploded on the boulevard outside. A waiter's tray toppled over, bounded on the floor with a thin clash of cymbals, muted by the silence.(314)

It's impossible not to be drawn in by the chaos. I haven't felt so gripped by a war narrative since playing Call of Duty 2.

This isn't solely due to Malraux's descriptive skill. Characters take long pages to explain their motivations. The Negus, a bearded anarchist, rails against all authority; Manuel, a young Communist officer, grows to accept his responsibilities as a leader; Slade, an American journalist, tries to stay aloof from the barbarity around him. Dozens more share their thoughts - and these are not normal thoughts. Well-crafted statements on politics, morality and philosophy emerge fully-formed in casual conversation. It took me months to read Days of Hope, because I kept getting lost trying to follow the complex threads of discussion. Malraux can be justly accused of making his characters mouthpieces for his own views. But to his credit, the ideas he's promulgating are bold.

This is the biggest strength of Days of Hope. In these post-ideological times, it's hard to remember that millions of people flocked to different revolutionary banners. Malraux's characters talk about the relation between Party and state, what makes someone pick up a gun to fight for socialism, the role of revolution in history. These are all conversations I've had with individuals: Malraux puts them on an epic scale, where they belong. If anything, the current capitalist crisis may provoke others to return to these questions:

"For a thinker, the revolution's a tragedy. But for such a man, life, too, is tragic. And if he is counting on the revolution to abolish his private tragedy, he's making a mistake - that's all... There aren't umpteen ways to fight, there's only one and that's to fight to win. One doesn't engage in a war or revolution just to please oneself." (339)

It would be easy to leave the story there, as a tale of intelligent bravado, content in misty nostalgia for the days when the Left pulled its weight in the world. But it's precisely this focus on war and heroism that mark Days of Hope as flawed.

First of all, there are no major women characters. Women are spoken of fondly by the soldiers, and here and there they appear as themselves - mainly elderly peasants fleeing the bombardment. I'm against including characters for what they represent, but it's an historical fact that women fought in the front lines in Spain. Their absence makes Malraux's work less the manly treatise on brotherly sacrifice he wants it to be, and more an attempt to deny women's place in history altogether.

Secondly, the focus on war shrouds a bigger point. Of course it was a war - but what marked Spain was that it was also a revolution, against the bourgeoisie, landed property and the church. The tragedy of Spain is that the Communist Party, under directions from Stalin, turned the revolution into a regular war between armies. Arrayed against the combined forces of Franco, Italy and Spain, it was a war they were bound to lose. Land and Freedom makes this point well, as does Homage to Catalonia.

However, Malraux is telling the story of the war and the Communists and anarchists who fought it. The revolution, when it does get mentioned, is the domain of starry-eyed idealists who are long on enthusiasm and short on discipline. Here's an exchange between two officers, Garcia, a leftist, and Hernandez, a Catholic officer in the Republican army. Garcia tells him

"Because you have to live politically, you have to act in terms of politics; and your duties as an officer bring you every moment into touch with politics. Whereas the cause you have in mind is not political. It is based on the contrast between the world in which you live and the world of your dreams. But action can only be envisaged in terms of action. The business of a political thinker is to compare one set of hard facts with another... our side or Franco's; one system or another system. He is not fighting against a dream, a theory, or another Apocalyptic visiion."

"It is only for a dream's sake that men die."

"Hernandez, the habit of thinking about what ought to be instead of what can actually be done is a mental poison... Moral 'uplift' and magnanimity are matters for the individual, with which the revolution has no direct concern; far from it. I am very much afraid the only link between them, as far as you're concerned, is the prospect you may lay down your life in the cause of both." (183)

In revolutionary Spain, comparing "one set of hard facts with another" led to the Communists disbanding revolutionary brigades, and unleashing secret police terror on anarchists and non-Communists alike. It led to a ban on factory and land take-overs by workers, and returning property to the hated clerical aristocracy - all in the name of discipline.

Malraux was not an arm-chair intellectual. He organized shipments of planes and crews from France to fight for Spain, and toured America to raise money for the Republican cause. However, he famously ended up a Gaullist, and in Days of Hope one can see the roots of opportunism, 'the end justifies the means' which changes the ends altogether, from liberation to dictatorship. That does not detract from the novel's power or beauty, but it is an object lesson in the dangers of losing sight of one's goal.

In the single passage Malraux names women revolutionaries, the journalist Slade is caught in the bombardment of Madrid by fascists. He hears a "rhythmically uttered phrase":

At last Slade guessed what it was, though he could not catch the words. He had heard the same rhythmic chant a month previously. In response to words he could not hear, that human gong was beating out: "No pasaran." Slade had seen La Passionaria, dark, austere, widow of all the slain Asturians, had seen her leading a fierce and solemn procession marching beneath red banners inscribed with her famous phrase, Better be a hero's widow than a coward's wife, had heard twenty thousand women chanting, in answer to another long, incomprehensible phrase, this same refrain: "No pasaran." He had been less moved by them than by this smaller, but unseen, crowd, whose desperate courage rose towards him through the smoke-clouds of the burning city. (331)

This is the strength of Malraux's work: whatever his trajectory, he understood not only the battle for human freedom, but how it's a battle for ordinary people to fight and win.

The End Is Nigh, Part Two

2009-02-23T15:54:00.002-05:00

(Read Part One here.)

Examine the above ad for a moment. It’s quite clever, ironic and nihilistic. But this isn’t post-millenial angst for the jaded, post-everything generation: it’s from 1980.

30 year old Doomsterism sounds exactly the same as Doomsterism today. If you keep harping on about catastrophe, your predictions may one day be borne out (in a distorted, ahistoric way.) But as Keynes said, in the long run everybody dies. This gets you no further to understanding reality, let alone changing it.

Peak Oil
Reality of late has not been kind to the Doomsters. Remember last year’s oil price spike? Peak oil advocates predicted further rises. The spectacular drop in prices to $40 a barrel, less than half of last year's spike, has done nothing to dent their enthusiasm. Rather, the dip is simply due to volatility, and it won't last. Oil will hit $300 a barrel, and then:

"It will be a slow deterioration in our quality of life, in the reliability of transportation, in the availability of certain foods as well as price spikes for food," [author Andrew] Nikiforuk said.

"It will cause pandemonium in both the public and private spheres."

Something to look forward to?

Peak oil predicts rising oil prices, and then the exact opposite happens. I'd kindly suggest that blaming everything on "volatility" is intellectually bankrupt. As a friend pointed out to me, even a stuck, broken clock is right twice a day. Since the Doomsters can't even explain the symptoms of what they're seeing, they certainly can't understand the cause.

After all, the Doomsters have been predicting crises for decades. Yet when the biggest crisis in the post-WW2 era hit, it had nothing to do with finite resource supplies, and everything to do with toxic debt and an overaccumulation of surplus capital. The social conditions of production caused the current crisis: the contradiction between the use-value of what humanity produces, and the profit that capitalists expected to make on that production. Surplus profits fuelled massive speculation, as capital that couldn't be invested profitably today sought future profits in esoteric futures.

Hand it over

Capitalist radicals
Where did the Doomsters get the idea that capitalism is based on physical, technical conditions of production? For all its counter-cultural cachet, this comes straight from bourgeois economics. According to every neoclassical economist, capitalism is a straight adding-up of land, labour and capital. Workers, landlords and capitalists bring what they have to the market, and receive the value of that contribution in wages, rent and revenue. This led to any number of technical 'fixes' for capitalism by its apologists: change the amount of inputs, free the market and let it regulate production, or regulate the market to adjust for disequilibrium. But for god's sakes leave the system as it is.

This is pure fantasy, peddled by the powerful. Marx saw that the system was not neutral: it grinds on because people have no choice but to participate. They have nothing to sell but their labour power. Capitalists regulate production - but they do so individually, trying to determine social need in a chaotic war of all-against-all. Wealth gets created socially, and appropriated individually. Or more prosaically, stolen by the capitalist class from the workers.

"Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face 'No admittance except on business.'" Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 6 - Straight Time

The system is governed by power, a set of social relations of exploitation. Physical, finite limits matter to the extent that capitalists will grab whatever they can to compete. But the causes and effects of crisis are purely social. Even when physical limits begin to impose themselves on the capitalist system - like global warming - the winners and losers are determined by who has command over capital.

It's your fault
Recently, a Doomster on a Guardian.co.uk comment box enthused that the recession was a chance for us to correct our ways: we'd been over-using our resources, but Mother Earth was giving us a second chance. Here's a milder version from Nikiforuk et al:

"Save your capital. Reduce your consumption. A lot. Make yourself accessible to mass transit," Hughes said. "And forget about buying things at Wal-Mart that were shipped here from halfway around the world."

"You prepare by walking more, operating one vehicle. You prepare by buying more food locally and talking to your friends about getting engaged in the political process," said Nikiforuk. "Oil has made us fat and lazy.

I'll forget for a moment the ludicrous idea that any of us have capital to save. The important point here is his moralism. Once the crisis hits - and he's talking about the oil crisis, not the recession - the solution is changing individual behaviour. This is the essence of capitalist ideology: we're sovereign consumers. Those who don't shift their market preferences are "fat and lazy". Blame the individual.

Why weren't you saving your capital? - Soy Cuba

In his denunciation of lifestyle anarchism, Murray Bookchin gives a marvellous account of those who substitute how they live for political struggle:

“Today, dabbling in primitivism is precisely the privilege of affluent urbanites who can afford to toy with fantasies denied not only to the hungry and poor... but to the overworked employed. Modern working women with children could hardly do without washing machines to relieve them, however minimally, from their daily domestic labors". (49)

Apparently - Sexjack

Of course, the fantasists of doom have no understanding of where hunger, poverty or environmental destruction come from, other than vague notions of ‘industrialism’ and technology (though not, apparently, when it comes to the machines making their canning jars, cycling parts or solar panels.) They want to do away with the washing machines – and thus they want to do away with the working women and children who use them. The catastrophe literature seethes with barely-veiled contempt for the people who don’t ‘get it’ i.e. everybody else. Carlsson quotes an ecologist who argues

“’our whole society is like a teenager who wants to have it all, have it now, without consequences.’ A culture that simultaneously glorifies and fears adolescence while promoting a shallow hedonism is perfectly suited to the mass consumerism that underpins modern capitalism.” (72)

We’re teenagers who don’t think about the consequences. We turned into sheeple because of consumerism: “People were encouraged to express their individuality by owning distinctive products, from cars and clothes to furniture and books, a process that helped turn ‘the masses’ into self-expressing individuals committed to their uniqueness rather than their shared realities.” (173) Somehow, as soon as we got bright, pretty baubles to look at, we forgot about struggle.

Too many Midnight Madness sales - Deadset

To be fair, there’s a kernel of truth in this: consumerism is a compensation for the alienating conditions of work we’re forced to do. But it doesn’t erase the contradictions. Chief among those is that consumption is not a bad choice by stupid people - it’s a strategy for capitalist expansion. As Ernest Mandel argues, capitalism must “create a genuine world market for all its commodities instead of only for the luxury goods which were traded internationally in the pre-capitalist age. The cheap mass production made possible by capitalist large industry was the most important weapon in this process” (310).

Note the past-tense: mass production and mass consumption have already happened. They’re not a choice. Why? Because “Capital by its very nature tolerates no geographical limits to its expansion. Its historical ascent led to the levelling of regional boundaries and the formation of large national markets, which laid the foundation for the creation of the modern nation state.” (310)

The potential unleashed by mass production is enormous

Racist localism
National markets? Nation-states? What do people who just want to grow their own vegetables and chortle as the urban masses revert to cannibalism have to say about that? Nothing: back to the catch-all answer, catastrophe. It will shear – or, more accurately, cull – the sheep. The move to ‘small and sustainable’, argued for by every Doomster and localist, never says what to do about the large population which would assuredly become unsustainable, as soon as those basic industries shut down. We just need fewer people. Eric Schumacher, founder of Buddhist economics and author of the much-lauded, ‘pacifist’ Small Is Beautiful, denounces large-scale production and has this to say about the people drawn into it:

the movement of populations, except in periods of disaster, was confined to persons who had a very special reason to move...
But now everything and everybody has become mobile. All structures are threatened, and all structures are vulnerable to an extent that they have never been before.” (51)

Why can't you understand how irresponsible you are?

If you believe catastrophe is inevitable from industrialism, technology and size, then the answer is to keep people from pursuing those things. Local communities for local people. Self-described left-winger Lyle Estill has this to say of people who come from far away: “People who live in a community have a vested interest in strengthening that community. Those are the ones who accept and receive local currency. People who live far away take their expertise, and their spending power, home with them each night.” (173) Why not make it simpler and just say, “Immigrants take our jobs.” Because that’s the racist, anti-immigrant argument Doomsterism boils down to. If you think that people can choose their own role in capitalist economy, then they are at fault for choosing to move – for being too greedy and wanting to consume more. Workers don't have a right to travel where capital does: they should stay put and starve.

The Doomsters live in a comfortable bubble inside the imperialist world. They don’t see the barbarism that envelopes the poor everywhere and can posit their fears of collapse as something unique. They substitute industrialism, technology or people’s stupidity for the inherent drive of capitalism to expand. If you can’t see the cause, then you can’t see the solution – ergo, there is none, and catastrophe is the inevitable result. None of those things can be changed by collective action: on the contrary, the mass of people are to blame. All we can do is wait for the collapse. The misanthropy close to the surface of every Doomster’s heart quickly turns to racism.

Easy if you're a disenchanted liberal - Un Conte de Noel

Unlike me, Ernest Mandel is able to keep a cool head around these people:

“Philosophers who fall prey to the fetishism of technology and overestimate the ability of late capitalism to achieve the integration of the masses, typically forget the fundamental contradiction between use-value and exchange-value by which capitalism is riven, when they seek to prove the hopelessness of popular resistance...” (507)

This means that, no matter how much use consumers get from mass production, they are still driven to sell their labour power for a wage in order to survive. Due to that contradiction, capitalism is not stable: it must drive down wages and living conditions to maintain profits. Technology, industrialism, and people who watch Survivor are a symptom, not a cause. More importantly, the unthinking consumers who the Doomsters condemn, and the localists chide, contain the seeds of the solution. The workers’ grudging acceptance of capitalism co-exists with a deep hatred of its exploitation and misery. Collective action against capitalism can bring the irrational drives of expansion under rationally planned, democratic control.

La Commune

None of which is to deny that workers’ struggle is at a low ebb. But as the economic crisis deepens, and people begin to resist the imposition of austerity – as they’ve done in Iceland, Greece and France, to name a few examples – they will look for political leadership. British police are predicting a summer of rage from laid-off workers. Localists and Doomsters have nothing to say to them: their abstract, dystopian imaginings live outside the realities of most people. Fearing the sky is falling doesn’t absolve you from finding a way to prevent it, right now.

The End Is Nigh, Part One

2009-02-20T12:28:00.004-05:00

Last weekend the local paper ran a front-page story on the Doomsters: people who believe the peak-oil hypothesis. Since the supply of fossil fuels is finite, that supply will begin to decline soon. Since our entire economy runs on oil, the machinery of industrialism will grind to a halt. We’ll revert to a hunter-gatherer society – a war of all against all lit by wind-up flashlights. The Doomsters are busy stockpiling canned goods, installing compost-toilets and learning to whittle.

This is an extreme version of localism: creating small-scale alternatives to the global capitalist economy: the scale of production becomes a community or a region (the 100 mile diet, for example), rather than the globe. Doomsters reduce that even further: the scale of the economy is yourself.

I have some sympathy for localism. It recognizes the real degradation of people and the environment that capitalism creates. Despite their key error – the believe that people choose whether or not to participate in capitalism – localists are potential allies of the socialist movement. I’m not sure about the Doomsters.

As the lovely Robert Crumb comics show, the Doomsters are motivated by fear. There's a lot to be afraid of, particularly when the bourgeois media presents crises outside of their social, political and economic contexts. The Doomsters try to make those links and deserve kudos for trying. But like Homer Simpson said, the machinery of capitalism is oiled with the blood of its workers i.e. oil is a means to exploit workers, not an end in itself. If the Doomsters saw this, they might not be so condescending towards those workers: the Doomster interviewed calls them “sheeple”. The inference is obvious: he knows the world is coming to an end, and anyone who disagrees with him is blind and stupid.

I’m calling this trope catastrophism: the belief that social collapse is imminent. Previously the reserve of sandwich board-wearing religious lunatics, it’s spread to encompass a significant portion of the counter-culture. Like most unquestioned beliefs, it’s marked by two things: an ignorance of the basic drives of capitalism, and a racist, anti-working class derision for the heathens who don’t get it.

Is the world ending?
Possibly. Peak oil is an attractive thesis because it points out the absolute limits of a carbon-based economy. But focusing on absolute limits – of oil, or even water or air – substitutes a technical problem for a social one. It’s not about how much we have theoretically, but who has the power to decide how those resources get used.

These are not new questions, and there are some antecedents doomsters should consider. Firstly, the idea that we’re pushing the finite limits of planetary resources predates modern environmentalism: it goes back to Malthus, the parson who saw all the poor people drinking & fornicating and kindly suggested they could starve and save the rest of us a lot of trouble. His hatred of the poor forms a black thread running through modern environmentalism, into the deep ecology and primitivist ethos that form the basis of Doomster thought. All share the central premise that people are the problem, not the solution. We have no creative capacities to live rationally and are simply animals fulfilling our basic drives. Like rabbits, we will exceed the carrying capacity of our environment – and then begin to die off.

We're all rabbits...

Secondly, capitalism is such a fundamental contradiction to human life that it will destroy us all. With apologies to the Doomsters, the Marxists got this 150 years ago. Rosa Luxemburg gives credit where it's due:

Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war.

... or sheep

Either we create socialism or the inherent destructive drives embedded within capitalism will create a war of all against all. I don’t think the question was rhetorical: she lived to see the ruling classes of Europe throwing a generation of their workers onto each other’s bayonets. But I do think Luxemburg was a little over-optimistic. Barbarism is not some future state: it exists now, contemporaneous with the relative comfort capitalism grants to a chosen few.

And this is where the Doomsters show their class privilege. They can only posit a horrible future because they’ve enjoyed the benefits of living in a rich, capitalist country. For the majority of humanity, barbarism exists today, something socialists have been pointing out for over a century. The megalopolises of the poor, imperialist wars, climate change-induced droughts – these are happening now. A couple of years ago I saw Time of the Wolf, about an unnamed disaster that hits France, reducing survivors to internal refugees fighting for food and water. The only difference between that scenario, and a dozen stories on the news, was that the survivors were white. I was incensed: when it happens to the world’s majority, it barely merits a glance. When it happens to white people i.e. ‘us’: the horror, the horror. (And I reference that deliberately: Conrad and Coppola’s Kurtz got to see first-hand the barbarism that imperialism created, and didn't handle it very well.)

Primitive accumulation does not refer to face paint - Marlon Brando

Doomsters are animated by this ahistoric sense that the world has gone wrong and, unlike the previous 400 years of slavery, imperialism and colonialism, this time it will affect us. But if you want to see barbarism, go to Gaza, where there’s precious little water or food, and Israeli jets murder with impunity from the skies. Go to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where factions linked to resource capitalists have battled each other for years, killing millions. Try Iraq, Afghanistan or any of the other places ‘our’ troops have been slaughtering civilians and resistance movements. Yet faced with real, existing barbarism, the most the Doomsters can find to worry about is the eventual slackening off of oil supply. I’d argue this is myopic at best, and racist at worst.

Bring on the apocalypse
There’s more to come: the Doomsters welcome the catastrophe. I’ve written before about Barbara Kingsolver’s delight in the future sufferings of others. But shadenfreude runs through the entire localist ouvre, forming the basis for the Doomsters. Bill McKibben, localist economist guru, waits for alternative farming models “for the day when it all hits the proverbial turbine blade.” (232) Carl Carlsson, anarchist DIY enthusiast, looks forward to climate change: “basic industries like agribusiness, oil, chemicals, automobiles, asphalt (and many more), will probably contract suddenly, often into total collapse.” (45) Lyle Estill, bio-diesel entrepreneur, positively glows with anticipation for the coming holocaust: ““Resource depletion, societal collapse, and impending doom may just be the best thing that ever happened to ‘community.’” (214)

Woohoo!

Why do they sound so gosh-darned happy about the suffering that, should their predictions come true, will be visited upon millions of people? Because their models depend on it. As Carlsson enthuses, from the wreckage of basic industry “will emerge local, site-specific, derivative, ecologically sane alternatives under (some kind of new democratic) community design and control, based on the social and technological experiments going on already.” (45) Well, possibly. But only if the forces causing the destruction are confronted and transformed. History provides plenty of examples of collective action by workers and the oppressed to bring production under democratic control. The wave of revolutions after World War One, the Spanish Civil War, the anti-colonial struggles post-World War Two are just some.

How many times can we point to a system collapsing of its own weight, leaving small-scale progressive communities? None. Not because there aren’t well-meaning Doomsters who might deign to share some tinned beans with the survivors clawing at their reinforced steel doors. It’s because capitalism must expand, bringing everything outside inside it. There has never been an example of the captains of industry issuing a press release saying, “Sorry old chaps, we got it wrong. Turns out we were destroying humanity and the ecosphere. Here are the keys to the bank vault – you have a go now.” They will fight to the death to maintain their power, not because they’re bad people but because if they don’t, their competitors will. That’s the nature of capitalist power. As Brecht said,

Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.

But you promised us benefits!

This means that there won’t be a collective collapse. Those counted as rich may lessen, as their beachfront villas submerge under the rising seas. But you can bet that food, water, electricity and flat-screen TVs will continue to delight an ever-shrinking number of capitalists and their hangers-on. They will still attempt to steal the resources of everyone else: the rich will not allow the majority of the world’s population to live in a cooperative, local-gardening, bartering peace. The globalizing dynamic of capitalism will colonize, invade and exhaust to the bitter end, unless it’s confronted and transformed, through the collective struggle of the world’s workers.

Which means that the Doomster plan to drop out and stockpile food is not a solution for most people, who are dependent upon selling their labour to survive. The Doomsters acknowledge this implicitly, through their contempt for everyone else.

Next post: how to hate the sheeple.

Public Information Films, Part Two

2009-02-12T17:33:00.002-05:00

The films get more shrill as the 70s wear on. The government was faced with a difficult mandate: to reinforce voluntary safety behaviour in the absence of stricter laws. The films began cheerily, with cartoon characters and celebrities admonishing adults and children to look before crossing the street, call the National Rescue Service and wear seatbelts. Though would you trust this man with your children?

And here's Doctor Who's John Pertwee, trying to get kids to memorize the clunkiest acronym I've ever heard:

* (Find a) Safe (place to cross)
* (Stand on the) Pavement
* Look (for traffic)
* If (traffic is coming, let it pass)
* (When there is) No (traffic near, walk across the road)
* Keep (looking and listening for traffic as you cross).

Sensible children
But these earnest attempts obviously didn't stick, because the nanny state decided to get darker. It started trying to scare citizens with horrific depictions of road and industrial safety accidents:

In Lonely Water, the Grim Reaper decides death is an appropriate punishment for disobeying water safety regulations:

VOICE: I am the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, ready to trap the unwary, the show-off, the fool, and this is the kind of place you’d expect to find me....

VOICE: The show-offs are easy. But the unwary ones are easier still. This branch is weak, rotten, it’ll never take his weight.

VOICE: Only a fool would ignore this. But there's one born every minute. Under the water there are traps. Old cars, bedsteads, weeds, hidden depths. It's the perfect place for an accident.

BOY: Oi look there’s someone in the water. Get us that big stick to get him out.

VOICE: Sensible children! I have no power over them!

Death appears as the embodiment of the British state itself, bemoaning its lack of power over foolish subjects who continued to demand a greater share of national wealth and, in some cases, to run things themselves.

I think the class struggle provides the subtext why filmmakers tried to foster such a climate of fear. Watching these films - there are over 100 - one gets the distinct impression that there is no safe place. Outside are careless drivers, rampaging teenagers and thieves. Inside are crank phone callers, TV license-thieves and flaming grease-pans. The kitsch amusement value of PIFs never falters, but it's weighted by a sense that society is going wrong, and there's nothing anyone can do to help.

1970s Britain looks like a frightened place - caught in a bind of falling profits and rising worker demands, stagflation was setting in and no one knew what the future held. The nanny state sublimated its fears into the day-to-day: it couldn't tell British workers to sit down and shut up - yet - but it could tell them danger was all around. This culminated in perhaps the most famous PIF, the absolutely chilling Protect and Survive, about how to survive a nuclear holocaust.

Artist Peter Kennard responds

Tellingly, this is left off the official PIF archive site; perhaps no one wants to remember how close the world was to war or, more tellingly, the film appears ridiculously naive in its contention that anyone would survive. Artist Raymond Briggs responded with graphic novel When The Wind Blows, later turned into a film about an elderly couple who attempt to follow Protect & Survive's guidelines. I'd recommend it, if you can handle 90 minutes of two pensioners dying of radiation poisoning.

PIFs continue to be made today, though the tone has softened. Is this simply a cultural shift, or a sign that the government itself no longer feels threatened, like it did in the 1970s? The corporatist compromise fell apart under Thatcher's hammer-blows at the unions, and Labour's own witch-hunt of the left; the discourse of participation stopped being wish-fulfillment, and became the grim sign-post of neoliberal triumph over workers' struggle. These films can be read as historical markers of two things: how seriously the welfare state took welfare, and how strident that state became when subjects refused to cooperate.

You can view Public Information Films here.

Public Information Films, Part One

2009-02-11T19:39:00.013-05:00

The Nanny State is a government that regulates the private lives of its citizens. It's a pejorative term, used by British Tories to castigate the Labour government for laws against things like smoking and speeding. It infers that, if the Left gets power, it will curtail your civil liberties.

The Nanny State label gets selectively applied to a government that, in any case, is indistinguishable from the Tories. The British state curtails the liberties of young people through ASBOs, detains terror suspects for 28 days without charge and shoots the liberties out of Iraqis and Afghani citizens. But the Nanny designation ignores state oppression and focuses on individual behaviour.

The term contains a kernel of truth: once upon a time, the British government did try to tell its subjects what to do. It began making Public Information Films (PIFs) at the end of World War Two on a wide range of topics, from colonial policy to new suburbs. As they reached their heyday in the 1970s, PIFs focused on personal advice and safety.

A still from Fatal Floor

To understand why the British state decided to 'nanny' its citizens, it's important to understand the political context. The state faced pressure from employers to modernize, promote investment and train a higher-skilled workforce. From below, workers', tenants' and community movements demanded control over production, better services and more representative government. As Cynthia Cockburn argues in The Local State,

Since its inception workers have gradually come to recognize that social welfare is part of their wage – the ‘social wage’ – and to press for increased provision…. Second, as technology advances capital requires a more highly specialised and trained workforce…. For capital to increase its productivity it must tend to socialise (that is to turn into a collective activity) the general conditions of capitalist accumulation. (63)

The government's response was corporatism: creating the conditions of capital accumulation, but through balancing the interests of workers and businesses. Buzzwords like consultation, participation and stake-holder were born.

In our era, the terms morphed into excuses for neoliberalism: justifying cutbacks and restructuring by getting workers to take part in them. But in the 70s, the 'cradle-to-grave' welfare state hadn't been dismantled. Government was eager to show it took an active role in the lives of its subjects.

This makes sense for two reasons. Firstly, there's no point modernizing the technical infrastructure of a country - creating faster cars, installing transformer stations, and so on - if your subjects are going to stumble into or in front of them. If capital is going to be more productive, the state must reproduce the next generation of workers. Those workers have to know how to use the home appliances and machine tools they're supplied with.

Secondly, the class struggle was at an impasse. British workers had achieved huge gains in the 1970s, achieving control over workplaces in some actions. There were glimmerings of revolution. The state needed to show that it cared - not simply as a jailguard, but as a guide, mentor and caretaker. As a nanny.

Public Information Films, shown on TV commercial breaks, accomplished both tasks.

Tomorrow: the dark underside of Public Information Films.

Post-strike: blame the social democrats

2009-02-06T13:42:00.003-05:00

The strike we just lost is still bothering me. I've decided to embark on a productive, therapeutic process entitled 'who's to blame'. Today I'll discuss the role played by our local social democrats, the New Democratic Party (NDP).

Or a reasonable facsimile - Lefties

We were on strike for over 80 days, through a particularly cold winter. We faced a constant barrage of negative press. The employer refused to negotiate with us and demanded binding arbitration. (That's for when two parties are stuck in negotiation and need a way out, not when one party refuses to negotiate.) Next the boss tried to make our members choose a bad contract in a forced vote. When that failed, the employer called on its friends in the Liberal government. They, along with their Tory friends, legislated us back to work.

In the final weeks, the NDP appeared out of nowhere. At one snow-bound rally, their members of provincial parliament (MPPs) lined up in their long wool coats to tell us how collective bargaining rights were sacrosanct. At our final rally, our members were attacked by the police while the back-to-work debate was going on. NDP leader Howard Hampton appeared and told us he was calling the premier directly, asking him to tell our employer to get back to the bargaining table. There were huge cheers. It was like we were suddenly getting serious: we'd marched around in the cold for months, but now the powers-that-be were paying attention.

"Have you seen the new white paper on labour relations?"
"Quickly, draft a position for the consultation period!"

In the end it made no difference: our employer told the premier to go away and the legislation passed. The NDP delayed its passage for five days. For that they were pilloried in the press: Jim Coyle, in a particularly nasty column, accused them of "self-indulgent reminiscence and rococo rhetoric" for daring to defend collective bargaining. This stand earned the admiration of our Local members.

I don't like being the cynical voice in the corner. But as MPPs stood on our truck and told us to keep strong, all I could think was, "Where were you before this?" In all the time I walked the line, I never saw a single NDP member. They have riding associations, but a delegation never came to say hello. The employer's security guards may have the unsavoury job of keeping an eye on us, but on one cold day they brought us a big bowl of vegetarian minestrone. With a ladle and cups and spoons. The NDP never even brought us coffee.

"Why is there no fire-barrel lit?"
"The snow put it out!"
- Logan's Run

Nor did the NDP fill the op-ed pages with letters supporting the strike, filibuster until our employer got back to the table, or anything else they could've done from their nice warm offices while we were freezing outside. In the final two weeks, they opposed some legislation. And we're supposed to be grateful that a social democratic party finally does its job.

The new urban voter
The NDP selectively shows solidarity. As the World Socialist Website points out, the NDP voted to send striking Toronto transit workers back to work. They were instrumental in forcing Ottawa transit workers to accept a bad deal, and of course there's the legacy of its time in government, breaking open collective agreements. The NDP does what social democratic parties are supposed to do: soften the blow of capitalist austerity, because 'our' politicians are enacting it.

Oh, no reason... (La Chienne)

Except in our case. Why? The answer seems pretty clear. As a comrade suggested to me some months back, the NDP is busy rebranding itself as the new party of the urban professionals. They've abandoned their traditional working class politics and pursue policies they think 'knowledge workers' want: livable cities, public transit and renewable energy. For example, their new energy economy platform plans to

Expand employment in our communities, build new markets for Canadian suppliers, strengthen sustainability commitments, and encourage Canadian entrepreneurship by adopting a Made-in-Canada procurement policy for the federal government and its agencies.

This is weak-kneed Keynesianism which dodges the issue of who actually controls the economy, and simply provides more business subsidies. With lots of bicycle paths. I think it was Michael Prue who told us at the second-to-last rally, "Two years from now, at the next election, remember it's the NDP that stood by you!"

"Will the NDP support our land reform struggle?"
"Depends if we've got the wifi installed yet..."
- Winstanley

Why don't they stand by traditional working class voters, like transit workers and the public sector in general? Those are the people who vote NDP. For all its restructuring, the NDP wins far more traditional working class ridings in the north of the province and manufacturing towns in the south. It has yet to achieve its urban breakthrough, except for a couple of seats. But thanks to neoliberalism, the NDP are finished with the working class and wedded to the Third Way. As Albo and Evans argue,

As a political instrument, social democratic parties such as the NDP play as much a role in disorganizing the working class as they once did in organizing it (in Canada on the basis of a quite particular and paternalistic labourist ideology).

Blue-collar, low-paid workers are the neglected spouse that allow the NDP to keep pursuing its affair with all things 'knowledge', 'post-Fordist', despite being continually rebuffed. When those knowledge workers go on strike, there's a chance to stand with voters who fit the proper demographic.

There are still some undecided voters there - Big Man Japan

The NDP stood up for our local - at the last minute, in the most minimal way possible. I guess I should be grateful. But I'm not going to be ecstatic simply because they made a few gestures. My lower back is still aching from all those days on the concrete.

Therapy for dummies

2009-02-01T18:10:00.003-05:00

I was going to blog about the end of the strike, but I'm still too upset. So this is a piece I wrote in 2006 and never published.

Psychoanalysis is an exciting science. Probing the pysche, dredging up memories, finding patterns in experiences, thoughts and emotions where none existed before. Academics devote reams of paper to it: Freud, Lacan, Deleuze & Guattari have conferences and journals dedicated to their work. Psychoanalysis can be one of life's great endeavours: patients devote years to it, going two or even three times a week to a doctor who will help them reveal their inner lives.

But psychoanalysis is exclusive in more than just its depth and time required. It costs a lot of money. A good psychoanalyst charges hundreds of dollars an hour. Which is why psychoanalysis is the science of healing rich people. Poor people get self-help. It's why magazines, books, and courses for poor people are so popular. They're produced in mass quantities, and promise instant results. The self-help industry brings in over $6 billion a year in the U.S. alone.

If you open up Cosmopolitan, you won't find articles on competing models of the Self or ego-development courses. You will find, however, tips on how to change your behaviour: satisfy your man in bed, lose those extra pounds, get more out of your career. The difference is clear: psychoanalysis is about changing what's inside you in a deep, fundamental way. Self-help is about making cosmetic changes. It's no accident make-up ads appear next to "snag a hunk" quizzes: both operate on the surface.

The dogma of self-help is a particular type of treatment: cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Its premise is that when someone has a problem, you don't treat the feelings underlying it. You treat the behaviour instead. You 'reprogram' the brain's neural pathways onto more productive routes, so that when a person faces adversity, they stop their negative thoughts and think positive ones instead.

There's an impressive body of literature on CBT: it gets results. It takes around six weeks of therapy at most, until the patient learns new behaviours. It works - but on what level does it work? If it's so successful, why aren't psychoanalysts out of business? After all, five year treatment programs are incredibly inefficient.

The answer is that CBT is cheap therapy for the working class. It doesn't go deep: it fixes up the symptoms. It's not about getting you to re-evaluate your life, but to cope with the life you have better. It's reformist: it assumes, like the old adage, that there are some things you can change, and some things you can't. In the latter category is: everything but yourself.

Unlike psychoanalysis, which in its best moments, understands the individual as shaped by capitalist exploitation (see Erich Fromm, for example), CBT not only skips the environment of the patient, it says that environment doesn't matter. It's individualist from the beginning, and not in a way that gets people to question their circumstances. It's all about acceptance.

If you don't like your job, there must be something wrong with you

In that way, it mirrors the life conditions of working people. We're atomized, set against each other, forced to compete to survive. CBT naturalizes that competition, because anything that goes wrong is your own fault for not thinking properly, for not responding correctly to trauma. Its answer is classic liberalism: you're empowered. You do have the ability to change - not what's around you, but how you view what's around you. As Darian Leader argues (and I swear I wrote this article before I read his!),

The market has triumphed here, as our inner worlds become a space for buying and selling. We pay experts such as life coaches to teach us how to change in the desired way. Aspects of ourselves, such as shyness or confidence, become commodities that we can pay to lose or amplify. Depression or anxiety are seen as isolated problems that can be locally targeted without calling into question the rest of one's existence

This is why CBT's success rates are so high. Working people want to survive. Having their attitudes as solely products of their own heads gives an illusory sense of control. The problems aren't fundamental - because there's no need to talk about where they came from. They can be mastered by thought games: lists on mirrors, snapping rubber bands on your wrist, etc. Everything is fine, once you adjust yourself.

For many, the adjustment takes a little help

I want to stress that mental illness is not a false ideology. Working people do have mental health problems, because living in this system does your head in. It's simply impossible to exist without facing the contradictions. There's the difficult choices families make to survive and the pressure they face when a family member can't cope. Or you don't get enough to eat while someone else can pay $5 for a coffee. And that's under normal circumstances. Al-Jazeera reports that, among the after-effects of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, half of all Gazans suffer from mental illness.

Under these conditions, CBT provides the proper ideological framework for capitalism. CBT captures the sense that something's wrong - a sense that comes out in depression, alcoholism, and very occasionally social unrest - and blunts it. That energy has to be turned to fixing your behaviour, not the environment past and present.

Violence is often a means of coping

And best of all, CBT is cost-effective. Treatment is something that used to take huge investments of time, emotional energy and money. Now it can be mastered in a weekend. This is the perfect therapy for neoliberalism: it's the mental equivalent of lean production and speed-up. Leader says:

In today's outcome-obsessed society, people must become countable, quantifiable, transparent. And this leads to a grotesque new misunderstanding of psychotherapy. Therapy is now conceived as a set of techniques that can be applied to a human being. This makes sense if we see it as a business transaction with a buyer, a seller and a product. But it totally ignores the most basic fact: that therapy is not like a plaster that can be applied to a wound, but is a property of a human relationship.

There are therapists who are beginning to recognize they're acting as apologists for the ruling class. From Prilleltensky & Prilleltensky, Beyond Resilience:

Treatment was designed, implemented and evaluated by a host of professionals, with the disabled individual having little input regarding the process. What could not be cured had to be rehabilitated, and what could not be rehabilitated had to be accepted. Psychological theories focused on the need to adjust to one's misfortune and make the best out of a tragic and limited life.

It's hard to transcend your limitations - Fitzcarraldo

What's tragic are the limits imposed on people's lives. Yes, there are millions of examples of people treating each other brutally - so many, in fact, that we can't see it as a problem of individuals (which is what 'human nature' arguments boil down to - individual choice.) If Marx is right, and we're creative at the core of our beings, then stunting that creativity - through war, unemployment or bad jobs - is going to damage us:

Wellness and liberation exist in a dialectical relationship. Without liberation many oppressed people cannot experience wellness, and without wellness there is no superordinate goal for liberation.

"Doctor, are you trying to make me personally responsible for alienation and social dislocation?"

Wellness must be begin personally: our inner lives are rich and our histories are unique. But coming to terms with our feelings - the goal of any individual therapy - is only the first step. Wellness must become social. I'd suggest Marx's 11th Thesis can be applied creatively: "The therapists have only interpreted your world; the point, however, is to change it."

Book Review - The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Frederich Engels

2009-01-21T14:45:00.002-05:00

I admit this isn't a book I ever thought I'd read. It sat on the shelf along with its other Soviet-era 'Progress Publishing' bookmates, for the time when I retired and got around to reading anthropology, religion, linguistics, theories of the novel and all those other things I'll do when the class struggle is over.

"How's that anthropology coming?"
"I've decided to pack it in and start trainspotting instead!"

But honestly, it was worth it: The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State is actually a very interesting book. Part journalism, part academic treatise, and part polemic, Origins is a brilliant example of what Marxist studies is best at: synthesis. In a short, readable, 175 pages, Engels brings ancient, legal and political history to bear on indigenous societies, the status of women and the origins of democracy. They're all huge topics, and Engels turns them into a seamless birth-story of capitalism.

Materialist history
Engels wants to figure out how human society progresses through three stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization. Like Marx, he's researching changes in the mode of production, from pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer societies (savagery), to cultivating plants and animals (barbarism), to a complex division of labour and commodity production (civilization). But he's not demonstrating these changes; rather, Engels focuses on the social forms associated with them, in particular family relations. He wants to show how communal societies evolved from a matrilinear, or 'mother right' to a patriarchal, 'father right'. Membership in a clan was originally based on who your mother was. Since individuals mating for life didn't exist, no one really knew - or cared - who the father was. Men left their tribe, or gente, and joined their wives'.

All this meant that the family and marriage - as we know it today - didn't exist. Without private property to be protected, individual unions made no sense. Different systems of polygamy (one man, many wives) and polyandry (one woman, many husbands) existed in different societies, according to how the gente was organized. Engels draws on the work of anthropologist Lewis Morgan, who lived with indigenous societies in North America and showed the impact of mother right. These societies were egalitarian: women had equal rights to men in every political decision and could kick men out of their gente if they chose.

From patriarchal class society and bad marriages (First Day of Freedom)

Society only began to adopt restricted unions as it developed privately-controlled surplus wealth. Mother-right passed to father-right, because men worked in the fields and controlled the agricultural surplus. Group marriage passed into monogamy, as men gained more power over women and other men and needed to guarantee male heirs. Sex itself lost its character as a freely-enjoyed activity and became another form of labour, as women lost all access to the means of production. Prostitution is not the world's oldest profession: it began with class society.

Engels goes into incredible depth, surveying the literature on not only indigenous societies, but ancient Greece & Rome, Celtic and Germanic societies. I got lost trying to follow the intricate threads between uncles and nephews, fathers and sons, etc. But his overall point is clear: relations between the sexes used to be egalitarian. Class society destroyed them and created women's bondage. Most importantly, this wasn't just a byproduct of class society: it was the inevitable result, part and parcel of its development. The family could only arise when women had been subjugated and turned into property.

This is why Marxists say women's oppression can only be destroyed by ending capitalism: the two share the same root. Socialism isn't about 'workers', narrowly defined: it's about destroying the private property system that turns women into slaves, or as Engels puts it: "The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman." (74)

You can apparently enslave copies too (A Perfect Fake)

It's very hard to summarize Origins, since Engels is doing a summary himself. But Engels is tracing the origins of things we take for granted, the most cherished institutions of the bourgeoisie: the family, marriage, the law, democracy. By showing them to be tools for managing private property, Engels is showing how they're temporary, and they can be changed.

Eurocentric?
Modern readers will be shocked - and rightly so - at Engels' use of terms like "savages" and "barbarians", which are completely unacceptable today. What did Engels mean by those words? Was he really putting white men at the top and everyone else underneath? Was his acknowledgement of colonial suffering just sympathy for people he viewed as naturally inferior and thus doomed?

I'd argue this isn't true. Engels draws a strict line between historical event and moral progress. The terms he uses are indefensible, but they're not meant as value judgments. Engels sees social development as contradictory: this is the dialectic at the heart of Marxism. Listen to his description of the Iroquois:

the kind of men and women that produced by such a society is indicated by the admiration felt by all white men who came into contact with uncorrupted Indians, admiration of the personal dignity, straightforwardness, strength of character and bravery of these barbarians [sic].

History, not His Story - Public Enemy

Speaking of the Zulus, he writes,

This is what mankind and human society were like before class divisions arose. And if we compare their condition with that of the overwhelming majority of civilized people today, we will find an enormous gulf between the present-day proletarian and small peasant and the ancient free member of a gens.

I'm not using scare-quotes because I'd suggest that Engels, unlike his 19th century peers, isn't being Eurocentric. Engels is drawing a world-historical example. He uses European examples, and he's quick to point out where the gens exists to the present day (e.g. in Ireland.) He's saying world development proceeds in different ways, in different places. But his first premise is that capitalism - the system that began in, and was forcibly exported by, Europe - is degrading, humanly corrosive and needs to be destroyed, utterly.

(Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India)

This is the only position from which an understanding of colonized peoples based on solidarity, not paternalism, can start from. It's why Teiowi:Sonte Alfred Deer of the Haudenosaunee People writes (New Socialist magazine #58 - pdf):

The Haudenosaunee are a participatory constitutional democracy based upon socialist principles.

Both Karl Marx and Frederic Engels were fascinated by the political and economic organization of the Haudenosaunee. In fact, Marx wrote extensive notes on his study of Lewis H. Morgan’s treatment of the Haudenosaunee in Ancient Society (1877) and League of the Iroquois (1852), interested particularly in the Haudenosaunee’s democratic organization in relation to its economic structure.

After Marx, Engels wrote Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), which directly examined the political organization of the Haudenosaunee. In this sense, it can be suggested that the Haudenosaunee pioneered modern socialism, and that our society was in fact the original Socialist Paradise.

Capitalism has a lot to answer for (Doctor Who: The Next Doctor)

Engels is not romanticizing non-capitalist* societies. He says the division of labour developed in the face of

the almost complete domination of man by external nature, alien, opposed, incomprehensible to him... the tribe, the gens and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a superior power, instituted by nature, to which the individual remained absolutely subject in feeling, thought and deed.

Marxists think the development of the means of production - social wealth - is a qualified good thing. It allows generalized prosperity for all; it certainly allows the computer and internet connection I'm writing this on. But this doesn't answer the more important question: what kind of development? What matters is the form, not the content. What Eurocentric anthropologists called 'savagery' were often societies organized around ecologically complex, steady-state subsistence societies. Capitalism, on the other hand, as a form of social development, is wholly reactionary. And Engels is absolutely clear what he condemns:

The lowest interests - base greed, brutal sensuality, sordid avarice, selfish plunder of common possessions - usher in the new, civilized society, class society; the most outrageous means - theft, rape, deceit and treachery - undermine and topple the old, classless, gentile society. And the new society, during all the 2500 years of its existence, has never been anything but the development of the small minority at the expense of the exploited and oppressed great majority; and it is so today more than ever before. (98)

I challenge anyone to read racism, colonialism or even apologetic Eurocentrism into that. Engels is clear that his moral - and more importantly, political - sensibilities lie with non-capitalist peoples.

(
La Commune)

Finally, there are parts that read like a saucy Victorian novel, particularly where he describes the development of sex in class society: "the young female captives become the objects of the sensual lust of the victors" (62), "beautiful young slaves who belong to the man with all they have" (63), "serious unnatural vices" and "the perversions of boylove" (65) - ooooh Mr. Engels, I feel all flushed, I must loosen the clasps on my bodice...

*I use the term 'non-capitalist' rather than 'pre-capitalist' to avoid the connotation of a value judgment. There are no non-capitalist societies today: indigenous nations join the ranks of those subject to imperial power in the underdeveloped world. And as Murray Bookchin points out, this process goes back centuries.

On strike: day 61

2009-01-07T21:16:00.004-05:00

Today I arrived at the picket line in the afternoon, expecting lunch, but there was a single slice of pizza left. I had resisted eating pizza over the holidays, knowing it would be standard picket line lunch once we resumed the strike. I needn't have bothered: warm, fresh pizza is actually quite tasty. This cold, hard slab of dough cracked in a few places, unwillingly, until I grew fearful for my temporary crowns and pitched the rest of it in the fire barrel. Anyhow, the pizza slice had accomplished its purpose: to remove my appetite.

The rest of the day continued wet and slushy. The line was smallish, 15 people at its height. We endured our penance, marked by the daily 2:30pm arrival of a young man in a silver Volkswagen Golf who told us to get a job and then sped off, and the rare pleasure of a yellow school bus driven by a prune-faced, white haired bus driver woman. In the past she's told us, "I bet you're all NDP voters!" - which as a Marxist I take as the height of insult, presumably how it was meant. Today she made the sign of a cross, and told us we need to stay on strike till April, when our jobs are finished and we can be replaced.

The line dwindled to eight by 4:15pm, until a few hardy souls felt the onset of frostbite and left. Five of us hung on for another half hour and I took up car-talking duty: explaining to the waiting cars that they're going to be held up for a couple of minutes, because we're on strike against the employer and this is our workplace.

This was just enough time for me to be admonished by one driver for holding him up, and yelled at by a couple of young women in a jeep. The man couldn't understand why he should wait, since he has "nothing to do with the strike": I explained that the road he wanted to take cut through my workplace and therefore he was involved: had he just remained quiet he would've gotten through faster.

The young women, in their nice red Suzuki jeep, were in the way of an exiting truck. When I asked them to shift to the side, the driver took a stand and declared, "I've been through three times today, and I'm not moving again!" I could see she really felt she was making her annoyance clear, though risking her paint job is an odd way to do it.

"We live here! Why are you doing this? We don't picket your house!" her well-manicured blonde companion moaned.

"This is my workplace," I told her.

"This is where I live!" she yelled.

"You're stealing our education!" the driver added.

The point that neither would be here unless they were getting an education - which we provide for sub-poverty line wages and no job security - was apparently lost on them. Pragmatically, the six minutes out of their day that their three picket-line crossings cost them was more important.

Yesterday it was a woman in a black Jaguar telling me that she couldn't be held up, because she was a senior, seniors' hours in the pool went from 11am-12pm, and after noon "the rowdies come". I resisted the temptation to tell her to leave the house earlier; "You have no right to be here!" she opined, and I had to walk away with her in mid-yell. The best story I've heard is the SUV-mom who came to our line and said she was on her way to the pool with her kids, and she couldn't be stopped "because there are future Olympians in the back." And she wasn't trying to be funny.

As I sloughed off the day's insults listening to Bad Brains on the way home, it struck me that the Dead Kennedys were right: Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death. Mention global warming or the invasion of Gaza, and people throw up their hands and say they're powerless - which, to be fair, many of them (including me) are. Make them wait for two minutes, and they explode. I'd be tempted to say it's alienation: the lack of control over big things in one's life leads to hanging on to small things very, very tightly. Except that these people have lots of control. They have expensive cars and good hair. They're used to getting things their way, and anything that gets... er, in the way of that very important way is an affront.

The socialist in me knows this isn't true, but it sure feels that way sometimes

We also got plenty of sympathetic talk from drivers, and one young Afro-Caribbean delivery driver waved and wished us good luck. If you're near your local picket line, do come out and wish the strikers well. It means a lot.

Drawing conclusions
There was an excellent post a couple weeks ago on the Socialist Unity blog about negotiating: you can read it here. It seems the author has had some hard experience navigating the lines between political principle and working class consciousness:

for the vast majority of trade union members, including most activists, what they want from their union is collective strength to redress the in-built power advantage that the employer has, and they want representation, and expertise...

if you are going to take action it needs to be over something as clearly and narrowly defined as possible, and bring to bear the maximum pressure on management that you can. I learned this the hard way... I always used to argue that we should widen the list of demands while we were already out...
I never managed to convince a single soul that I was right in this approach, which should have told me something. I was an excitable lad, and wiser heads knew that clear cut small victories were the way to build confidence and organisation.

Sage advice. Our strike goals weren't clearly and narrowly defined at the beginning, and the membership couldn't unite around it. The longer the strike goes, the worse this dynamic gets. Today for the first time I heard we couldn't hold two of our key lines because there weren't enough picketers - this in a strike where only a quarter of the membership has participated at all.

But sometimes we have to

It got me thinking that, while we've had plenty of strategies to win, we now need a strategy in case we lose. I still hope for a good deal, and I'll be on the lines till the cold, bitter, windswept end. I don't mean to sound defeatist (and indeed, claiming that talking about a loss is 'defeatist' is part of the problem.) But if we don't unite, the employer can wait us out, or offer us small change and force our wavering members to accept. If this happens - and I think it's likely - then I see it going one of two ways:

a) Mutual recrimination. The 'radicals' blame the 'reactionaries' and vice versa (heavy, heavy air quotes around those terms.) Leftist strategy being associated with a discredited leadership, we either get a truly right-wing union leadership, or we fall apart and go into trusteeship. Unlike Woolworths, there won't be any deep discounted sales to make that bittersweet.

b) a political balance-sheet. Cooler heads prevail and suggest a sober account-taking of what we did right and what we did wrong. There's a re-assertion of democratic process. We take pride in the weeks we stuck together and emerge in a new spirit of togetherness.

I'm a happy trade unionist!

I don't know how b) would happen, but it bears thinking about. Like any relationship, getting closure that allows you to move on is important, and this strike has been an incredibly intense affair.

I'm not going to step into the breach. After this strike is over I'm going to have a long, hot shower, sit down with a cup of cocoa laced with Chartreuse and watch The Tripods.

Slaughter in Gaza

2009-01-06T21:08:00.005-05:00

I haven't written about the Israeli invasion of Gaza, but not because I haven't been following it. I've been to two demonstrations and followed the daily news updates when I can. But there's only so much I can take. Nothing makes me feel more powerless than the news that the Israelis are at it again: bombing, shelling and shooting their captives. Today it was 40 murdered at a school sheltering refugees. It will be something else tomorrow.

Other people have spoken coherently about Israel's agenda. Chris McGeal writes in the Guardian on how the invasion - and the media strategy - have been planned for months. Al-Jazeera reports the farce of portraying two equal sides, when in reality, as Avi Shlaim writes, the Israeli Goliath is crushing the Palestinian David. Bashir Abu-Manneh, writing for the Socialist Project, situates the invasion as the latest bloody salvo in a long campaign, stretching back to the establishment of the Israeli colonial project in 1948. I won't try to duplicate their words. I'd simply add that I blogged about Israeli hypocrisy on Hamas three years ago (links in the sidebar), and I think the analysis holds. Hamas has to answer for all their actions; Israel and the occupation slip from view.

The barbarity of the state of Israel's racist, murderous existence rarely shocks me. But the bloody ferocity of the Israeli Defence Force is a reminder that 'our' interests in the Levant do not come cheaply.

Or the present, for that matter - from Matzpen, about Israeli anti-Zionists

Slogans don't count for much in times like these, but for what it's worth: occupation is a crime; free, free Palestine.

The Family Wisdom of Localism, Part II

2009-01-03T13:23:00.001-05:00

One of my earliest memories is of seeing Star Wars IV in the theatres. I distinctly remember being awed by Luke's family dinner, where they sat around the table drinking blue juice. (This was in 1978, before I knew about Raspberry Kool-Aid.) If the future could hold such novelties as unnaturally-coloured juice, I thought, it was a grand thing indeed.

Localism abhors most technology, lumping it in with size as an evil of industrialism. It's true that when industrialism and technology are used for profit, human health and the environment become externalities - things no one pays for - and the planet suffers.

But localism doesn't understand how capitalism is a system of social relations, open to change. So its response to the 'scale-up' of modern capitalism is not revolution, but a scale-back. The answer is technology 'appropriate' to small, rural communities: "back to the land is an option with a permanent, quiet appeal", says Kingsolver, speaking in glowing terms of the Amish. There are two major problems with de-scaling.

More city folks making fun of the quiet charm of rural life - The Mighty Boosh

Size has already happened
Firstly, they completely miss the historical conquest of agriculture by capitalism. As Marx pointed out, capitalist social relations destroy the unity of agriculture and handicrafts, constantly penetrating “into enclaves of simple commodity production and production in pure use-values which had survived from pre-capitalist society.” (Mandel, 378) Marx predicted industrial technology would be applied to agriculture early on. This is due to downward pressure on profit rates.

As industry mechanizes, the proportion of machines to humans used in production rises (known as the organic composition of capital.) Machines are cheaper than humans. But this cuts into profits, a) because buying machinery forces capitalists to purchase even more machinery and b) fewer workers receive a wage and can't buy what's produced. Capitalists look for new opportunities to temporarily raise profits, applying technology to agriculture and raising productivity (before cutting back employment and wages, and the cycle begins again.)

"I will first lower, then raise your production costs!"

Ernest Mandel argues that prior to World War 2, “ground-rent [money paid to landlords] ladelled off a substantial part of the capital needed for such mechanization.” But government-supported industry developed machinery and chemicals for agriculture. Thus “the age of late capitalism… has been characterized by an even greater increase of labour productivity in agriculture than in industry.”

The idea that agriculture can be de-capitalized on a mass scale poses real, concrete problems the localists never address. Who would take away the machines? How would people be fed without a mass exodus back to the land? Decapitalization does happen 'naturally': through capital's inherent tendency to destroy itself through war and economic crisis, as David Harvey argues. It's fascinating that Kingsolver indulges in the schadenfreude that I pointed out last week: giving up machines is historically done through laying people off or bombing them. It's nothing to look forward to (unless you're a secret Malthusian and think people are the problem, which I'd argue is at the root of modern environmentalism - more on that later.)

Capitalist crisis gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling

People like cool stuff
This leaves persuasion as the only other way to get back to the land (presumably forced de-urbanization - Pol Pot's Cambodia - isn't an option.) So how will the localists convince billions of people to give up their urban privileges? Through the force of their argument? Which brings me to my second problem with scaling back: the localists display a spectacular lack of imagination. The forces of production developed under capitalism could unleash massive positive development, if only they were organized rationally - a fact Marx never forgot, even in the midst of his harshest denunciations. As he writes in the Manifesto, on petty-bourgeois socialism,

In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.

Capitalism also makes things people enjoy

For every Hummer burning through the ecosphere, there's a mass transit system. For every coal-fired plant, there's a solar panel. As I've argued before, technology developed for capital will not help people. But human creative potential is something capitalism colonizes, not invents. We have the potential to create a technological utopia.

In defence of high-tech
I use the word 'utopia' deliberately, to take it back from the hippies. I'd like to go on record that I hate gardening. I have bad childhood memories of fruit-picking under the hot sun, my back aching and flies buzzing around me. I have nothing but respect for the migrant workers forced to make their living this way. I think it's inhuman, and I look forward to the day when it will stop, either because agriculture is completely mechanized, or because all our food comes from a matter replicator. Laboratories can already synthesize complex flavours without the need for actual foodstuffs. Why not synthesize textures and nutrients as well? And free us up for more important things, like Wii bowling?

If anyone has a spare Wii, I accept donations

OK, OK, you don't have to come with me to my brave new world. There will still be fresh food after the revolution, hopefully a lot more of it. But freeing the human body from natural constraints is a dream stretching back thousands of years. For localism, the answer to size and technology is community. Yet many things create community. Gardening is one; video games are another, and which hobby produces line-ups at midnight sales? People yearn to experience different virtual worlds. The technotopia impulse doesn't have to be the exclusive domain of the Right, carving out small (local!) havens of high-tech while the mass of humanity suffers.

Left-wing culture has always embodied the dream of unleashed human creative potential. Marx alludes to it in the Manifesto, where rational, democratic planning ushers in communism, the beginning of true human history. The space fantasy of 1970s African-American funk music, and some of today's speculative fiction, are further examples of the wedding of hope for a human utopia with new tools to achieve it. Like human liberation in general, Marxism has taken this dream and grounded its utopian impulses in materialism: the real movement of humanity to free itself from capitalism. I'd suggest the continuing popularity of sci-fi shows there's a huge cross-section of people who still maintain a utopic impulse, however alienated and distorted, which localism completely ignores.

Freed of the need to sell our labour power, the future could be one big game

Who are the localists?

"that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of 'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat." (George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier)

Assuming gardening is the best choice for community, rather than one time-consuming, back-breaking choice among many, is not about reconnecting with our animal spirits. I'd argue it's a piece of middle class habitus: for those professionals suitably distanced from subsistence living, they can get their hands dirty with no fear of having to make it subsistence living. Not coincidentally, they've never considered what stopping the big, non-local corporations might involve, beyond well-meaning entrepreneurship.

Unless you feel guilty about shopping

There is a gaping hole in localist theory where collective action against capital should be. I have yet to read anything about the union movement - much less the socialist movement - in localist literature (except as a source of investment funds!) The impact of this is no less pathetic for being so obvious. As Ernest Mandel writes:

When thinkers sincerely and profoundly hostile to capitalism proclaim the impotence of the proletariat [or, for our purposes, never even consider its agency] in the imperialist countries to challenge the existing social order, their own tragic misjudgement makes them unwitting cogs in the vast ideological machine constructed by the ruling class to achieve the vital objective of convincing the working class that it is helpless to change society. (Late Capitalism, 506)

The reason for localist despair is complex. I know the localists aren't the enemy. They're just well-meaning liberals confronted with a problem so vast in scope they can't see a way out. They're responding according to the habitus of their class position: thrift, hard work and charity. If you're well-off, your labour counts for something. That professorship is hard work, but people listen to you on the radio. The small business you run (not a convenience store of course - maybe a yoga studio) puts you in touch with other enabled liberals, gives you a membership in a small business association and opens a politician's door. Through your own hard work, you matter.

If only the workers were more motivated, they'd make something of themselves

Why couldn't the world work this way? Why couldn't everyone shop locally, spend more on good food, live ethically? Franz Jakubowski writes of the middle classes,

their role in economic life is restricted to the sphere of circulation (small businessmen, etc.); or else they are not direct participants in the economic process (liberal professions). They only come into contact with the basic phenomenon of capitalism, the commodity, when it is in circulation; or... [when they produce] goods for their own individual needs.... Of course, the middle classes are in a position to see the symptoms of capitalism, but they cannot see the cause of those symptoms. Consequently, the economic and social changes which they strive for relate to the symptoms alone, and the changes, if achieved, remain within the framework of capitalism.

I'm not interested in the remaining within the framework of capitalism. I look forward to the power of technology put into the collective hands of the working class. The dynamics Marx identified - centralization and concentration of capital - have increased dramatically in the past 150 years, and all the ethical alternative schemes to capitalism haven't impeded its growth an iota.

The one thing that has restricted capital is mass resistance: fighting, not ignoring or circumventing, the power of big business. Threatening to destroy it works much better than trying to out-shop it, drop out or just wringing your hands. Strikes, demonstrations, occupations and riots are local actions I can support. Localists identify the alienation and degradation that capitalism creates. But to stop capitalism, we must organize a revolutionary movement that wrests capital, local and international, from rulers' to workers' control.

The family wisdom of localism, Part I

2008-12-25T16:28:00.004-05:00

I'm busy wading through my third book on localism, this time Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It hews to the same pattern as the other two: professional worker comes to understand that the global economy is bad, gives up her comfy lifestyle and pursues a local business - in this case farming - instead.

Wayne, how come we don't shop at Whole Foods?

All the books adopt a folsky tone, reminiscent of Stuart Maclean (raconteur of dull, 'middle Canada' tales, for the small-town, pie-baking, antique-shopping masses that only exist in the misty, nostalgic minds of CBC programmers - but I digress.) Localist books are filled with references to the joys of country living and family foibles, how wonderful it is to know your neighbours, earnest about the problems facing family farms - and even a little shame-faced at being so earnest. But like a kindly mother, they're not going to lecture you. Instead they chide you, gently, that if you changed your habits, the world would be a better place. Here's Kingsolver on home-made cheese and her mother-in-law:

She made ricotta routinely, to the end of her life.

Laura was her name, ultimate known as Nonnie, and I suppose she'd have loved to see us on a summer Saturday making mozzarella together: daughter, grandson, great-granddaughters, and me, all of us laughing, stretching the golden rope [of cheese] as far as we could pull it. Three more generations answering hunger with the oldest art we know, and carrying on.

Stupid capitalism, interfering with my idealization of feudalism

Somewhere between the bucolic pastures and nostalgia for pre-capitalist commodity production, the localists make a leap between cause and effect.

They're dimly aware of capitalism. They mention the very real problems that agribusiness create: monoculture production that destroys topsoils, GM seed production that takes seed-stock out of the hands of farmers and into those of the corporations, abandonment of seed varieties. But they put all this down to size. "The larger the corporation, the more distant its motives are apt to be from the original spirit of organic farming", Kingsolver writes, as if small corporations had impeccable motives. Farming "keeps people independent from domineering central powers." (150) Her folksiness veers towards Sarah Palin as she indulges in a little shadenfreude, anticipating the sufferings of millions: "when centralization collapses on itself, as it inevitably does, back we go to the family farm." (178)

When we become peasants after the collapse, we'll be able to spend more time outdoors

Waiting for the collapse is less than neighbourly, and it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding about capitalism. Capitalism is a social relation, not a set of things. Size matters, but it's not as important as what capitalism creates: a global market, which forces commodity prices down to the absolute minimum. This is market compulsion. Capitalists - of any size - who sell for more will be undersold by others. They get bigger because it's cheaper: economies of scale cost less. It's not a choice. To quote the Communist Manifesto,

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

There is no 'outside' to capitalism, no safe spaces where well-meaning entrepreneurs can work hard and be rewarded. You can't cajole, entreat or nag your way out of the compulsion to produce for the gloval market. It destroys everything, including Grandma Nonnie's cheese-making, before it:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Unless, of course, you're a localist.

Blast! It's the damned global market that makes us drink!

Localists tell story after story of frustrated local business people, trying to work ethically but being undersold by the power of large corporations. Caught by the very system they don't understand, they can only think like the petty-bourgeois they are. They don't want to smash the state, take over the corporations or build a workers' movement to resist capitalism. Instead they do what well-informed petty-bourgeois socialists have always done: appeal to people's reason, and beg them to shop differently.

It's like tracking down a murderer, and once you've found him, counselling all his potential victims to give him a wide berth. Agribusiness destroys the earth and our health, so isn't it cheaper, the localists argue, to spend a few dollars more on organic, local food? Kingsolver goes out of her way to argue a local-food lifestyle isn't expensive or elitist. But the whole point of externalities, like pollution, is that they're external: not borne by consumers. That's the anarchy of the market: capitalists plan according to the bottom line, not social need.

See what proper planning could build?

To change that, you have to attack the problem at its source: the power of capitalist enterprise - and its political arm, the state - to determine production priorities. When workers have to sell their labour power to survive, spending less matters right now. This is the logic of existing in a system where long-term survival is left up to individuals. Acting according to your own, narrow interests is, in a partial but real way, rational. We can blame stupid consumers all we like, but they won't change their priorities until we create a society that doesn't leave individuals to survive according to the whims of the market. The market, not consumers, dictates what gets made and how.

Tomorrow: when the petty-bourgeois try to change the world.

Best online game ever

2008-12-16T23:33:00.000-05:00

In honour of international hero Muntazer al-Zaidi, everyone should play Sock And Awe.

On strike: day 32

2008-12-07T13:54:00.001-05:00

I’ve been on strike for over a month. This is not such an easy thing in sub-zero temperatures. My military surplus parka may be fashionable, but my shapeless goose-down coat is warmer. My 18 hole Doctor Marten boots are beautiful and intimidating in an art-punk way, but too heavy for the slow back-and-forth of picket-line walking, leading to sore calves. My kaffiyeh is fashionable but too thin… you get the idea. My vision of winter as an aesthetic choice only works when I don’t have to spend too much time outdoors. Reluctantly, I’m learning to layer: T-shirt, turtleneck, wool sweater, vest, leather motorcycle jacket, down coat. And even those things don’t stop the shivers after a few hours.

Politically, it’s a much harder adjustment. I know this is a strike against the neoliberal university. I know the administration is using all that government funding, and all those tuition dollars, to build a medical school, promote its MBA programme and shaft the Arts Faculty (the largest one, which subsidizes all the other programs.) I know that if we settle for a bad deal, then public services everywhere will be forced to make do with less – not just in the university sector. If we win a good deal, we set a firm precedent: public sector workers won’t let the government offload the financial crisis onto the public.

But most of the university workers on strike are scared, first and foremost, for their jobs and their degrees. They’re emotionally and physically exhausted, and a large part of that is from not seeing an end to the strike. It’s incredibly stressful. You can’t do any planning. Christmas vacation? Gifts for the family? Graduate and look for work? It’s all on hold.

I’m a leftist in the union. The language of neoliberalism and union militancy speaks to me. But it doesn’t to most people in the union. They don’t identify with class struggle, and they don’t see themselves as part of social movements. In many cases, they don’t see themselves as poor or as workers. They’re out on the line because they want a better deal. When they hear about neoliberalism, it makes them think there are radicals and extremists in charge of the union, dragging them into a strike with no end.

Let me give an example. At a union meeting, a member gave a presentation on mobilizing the local. It was the basics of Marxist political economy: we sell our labour power for a wage, this happens in the context of cutbacks, the only way to stop them is to be as mobilized as possible. The response was audible: people groaned. They were frustrated: they’d been on the line for weeks, and instead of a strategy to finish the strike, they were getting ‘idealism’. Hearing this, another member responded, “You might forget about neoliberalism, but neoliberalism won’t forget about you.” More groans. Faced with the hard reality of striking, the political conclusions began to sound flimsy.

I don’t think most people oppose an analysis of neoliberalism. They simply see it as irrelevant. There are no examples of popular struggle winning demands in the public consciousness, still less changing the political context. Neoliberalism exists – so what? Our strike can’t change that. No one wants to mortgage their future – and in many cases, their actual mortgage – for a political point, when all around us the economy is crumbling. When I’ve tried to argue carefully for the importance of a political understanding of the strike, I’ve been told it’s “unrealistic”, that we’re not going to get everything we’re asking for.

Insisting on making this a political movement strikes me as ultra-leftism. As socialists and unionists, we are absolutely correct in our analysis of the causes and consequences of strikes. However, we can’t impose that understanding just because the objective conditions warrant it. A union is a mass-membership group based on shared working conditions, not a political party.

There are two things I think would help our strike. One, speak the language of the majority. If the rhetoric around neoliberalism is turning people off, then let’s stop using it. It doesn’t build people’s confidence to stay out on strike. And two, think strategically about what our union is capable of. The ‘subjective’ fact of how people perceive the strike gets translated into an objective fact: who shows up to picket. If union members feel the strike is being misled, they won’t show up, and they’ll vote for the first deal the employer forces on us. Being militant in a way that doesn’t connect with people’s sense of what’s possible, can actually weaken the strike.

One of the things that makes me a socialist is the belief that people’s ideas can change very quickly, when they come together to struggle collectively against capital. I still look forward to those quick transitions. But they’re complex, mediated by a host of factors and they don’t arise out of nowhere. It’s our job as radicals to prepare the ground for those transformations: meet people half-way, so when they begin to shift, they’ll want to talk to us.

For example: let’s say the employer offers us a bad deal. As a radical, I’d think, “We got a 4% raise when if we’d held out just a little longer, we could’ve gotten 6%.” But if most union members think it’s a good deal, then their confidence is boosted, and it makes us stronger for the next fight (which, in my local, may be only two years away.) Of course we try to push the limits of what’s possible, in our rhetoric and actions. But we start from the actual limits, not from where we wish those limits were. Our starting point is the current consciousness of union members.

And at this point, I’m more concerned about union morale than I am about winning all our demands. Because it’s becoming increasingly obvious the employer wants to break us. They’re refusing to budge on issues that wouldn’t even cost them any money. If we can come out of this struggle with a union local still intact, I’ll consider it a victory. But the longer the strike lasts, the less I’m certain of that happening.

Our line has a picket line barbeque on Fridays. The warm veggie burgers are great, because there’s nothing worse than cold pizza when the air is already freezing. We also finally have a fire barrel, which is great for warming the hands. But I come home smelling like campfire, and toxic campfire at that – I don’t know what they put in the wooden pallets we’re breaking up and burning, but it’s not cedar chips and lavender oil.

Revolutionary Misfits, Episode 4

2008-11-18T22:41:00.000-05:00

What it's like on strike

2008-11-13T16:59:00.000-05:00

Cold and ache-inducing. But more on that later.

I’m on strike for the first time in my life. I’ve walked other picket lines in solidarity, wrote letters to the editor supporting strikes and, of course, based my political philosophy on the working class coming to power. But I’ve never actually been on strike until now. After a few days on the picket line, it's reinforced a number of ideas for me.

The working class can only resist capital by withdrawing its labour. Since I work at a university, not only do classes stop, but contractors and on-campus services like private schools, colleges and health clubs are disrupted. Future ‘consumers’ – students – start questioning their brand loyalty and switch schools. Other institutions look on with fear, lest we’re successful and their own workers can demand more. What kind of public services we want becomes an issue.

Going on strike builds social relationships. ‘Socialists-from-below’ have always emphasized that through a strike, workers learn to cooperate in new ways. I’m not part of the strike leadership or even the union cadre. But even just walking the line for a few days, I’ve met new people and reconnected with others. I’ve had fascinating conversations with them all – often about the strike, but also about their research and the world at large. Strikes make us social.

Granted, my picket line is a little smaller than this

Being on strike has also revived the socialist whipping boy: consciousness is contradictory. I was expecting angry students who feel they’re being ripped off, since they’re not going to class. There are some of those. It’s unfortunate: undergraduates already feel like cogs in a machine, and forcing the people who do 50% of the teaching to live below the poverty line isn’t going to help. If we get a good settlement, we’re happy and secure, and we teach better. But I understand why, if you’re paying close to $6000 a year for tuition, you feel like you’re buying a degree, rather than participating in a collective learning process, in which the workers who teach you deserve a decent standard of living.

However, I wasn’t expecting fellow grad students, walking the line with me, to believe that we’re not workers. According to some of them, our massive debt & below-poverty-line wages are a sacrifice for future jobs. I call it the ‘guild mentality’: just like an apprentice at a medieval guild, you think you’re getting training for future earnings.

But in capitalism, the wage relation doesn’t stop just because you go back to school. The university saves a lot of cash by making grad students do most of the teaching work. This lets the university focus on public-private partnerships, prestige projects and building fancy new facilities for ‘marketable’ degrees like business and medicine.

If you believe education should be a personal sacrifice, that lets the university provide its services on the cheap, cut out full-time tenured jobs and take the pressure off the government to fund education. Which, in turn, reinforces the idea that education is a privilege, rather than a right.

For those who question public spending priorities, I’ve got two words: $700 billion. That’s a portion of what the U.S. government can cough up for banks who got burned trying to rip off poor people. The bail-out is coordinated across different national banks, which Canada contributed to. Imagine spreading that kind of cash around for international public services.

Encountering these attitudes, admittedly, has flummoxed me. It’s not that the socialist argument is wrong, or even that it changes significantly: the capital-labour relation, and everything that stems from it, has been in place for a couple hundred years. But the way it expresses itself changes constantly. Nationalism, patriotism, moral sacrifice – there are a thousand ways to say, “Please exploit me!” Normally, my crimson-tinted glasses filter those out, but being on a picket line forces me to confront them.

Umm... have you read Capital Volume One?

My formative years in a far left group made me think the job of socialists is to march up to right-wingers and “make the arguments” till they see the error of their ways. But it’s far more complicated than that. Firstly I have to understand where they’re coming from; secondly, I have to see how their arguments reflect reality, however distorted; and thirdly, I don’t expect to convince everyone, or all at once.

Being a socialist is counter-intuitive: you have to see things as they might be, not just as they are. Relationships of power aren’t right in front of your eyes; rows of frustrated, inconvenient people waiting to cross your picket line are. Faced with that, I’ve sounded less like Trotsky battling the Centre & Right Oppositions on the Bolshevik Central Committee, and more like Alan Partridge trying to run a talk show.

Think about your job security, brothers & sisters!

Finally, my image of picket lines as places of dramatic confrontations has had to change. Yes, there are idiots who have tried to provoke picketers. By and large, however, walking a line is tedium.

That doesn’t translate well into a story, so I understand why all the Ken Loach movies I watch focus on the exciting bits of class struggle. But there’s nothing exciting about your calf muscles aching after 4 hours of walking up and down a little piece of asphalt.

But at least give them some ibuprofen

Then there’s the cold – even a 10 degree November day can turn your extremities to ice if you don’t layer with wool, goose feather and long underwear. I drink hot liquid to keep warm – but most of the hot liquid available is coffee or tea, so I end up jittery from all the caffeine. For all the people who call strikers ‘lazy’, believe me, I’d rather be at work: sitting in a warm office is way more comfortable and less tiring. When the revolution comes, I’m going to request a mid-May start.

Mp3 blog: Rock The Dock

2008-10-31T22:00:00.001-04:00

File-hosting has come a long way since I started this blog. So I thought I'd try sharing one of my favourite albums:

Britpop stars support the working class in this very listenable compilation.

Background
At the end of the 90s, Britpop had reached its zenith and would soon decline. The sheen had worn off, and drink, drugs, fame and the vacuity of lad culture had taken their toll. As went Britpop, so went New Labour: 'Cool Britannia' was soon exposed as more window-dressing for the same old exploitation and greed.

It's the same old song

Beneath the hype, the working class continued to fight the erosion of its living standards and the profit regime imposed by neoliberalism. This crystallised in the fight of the Liverpool Dockers, who went out on strike after fellow union members were sacked for refusing low-paid overtime. They remained on solidarity picket for three years, sacrificing their jobs and security for the principle of international solidarity.

The response at home and abroad was immense, but not sufficient. The company set the workers up to break the union and introduce low-cost labour at the docks. Government indifference and criminal neglect by their own union leadership hung the dockers out to dry. The strike may have failed to defend the workers' interests. But it showed that, beneath the rhetoric of 'management priorities' and the law, the same question remains: which side are you on?

Open up, it's the pigs - paramilitary police attempt to intimidate the dockers

The Music
Britpop was always a marketing designation first. The cheeky chappie personae of its leading lights fit with the postmodern ethos of the times: the kids don't care about the issues any more and just want to have fun. Damon Albarn could adopt a mockney accent, Noel Gallagher could give two fingers to the camera, and rock rebellion was reborn, stripped of any content.

But Rock the Dock shows Britpop had a heart. It was put together by Gallagher's record label; Gallagher himself had become disillusioned over his trip to No. 10 Downing and wanted to make amends. Perhaps the breadth of this compilation shows how common this sentiment was: many of the leading lights of Britpop contribute tracks. This is no stodgy exercise in agitprop: contrary to the conceits of most music journos, politics and music make a great mix.

A yobbo with heart - Gallagher at a Dockers' benefit in 1998

Oasis kick it off with a live version of Don't Look Back In Anger - an odd choice, given the strike had been lost by the time the compilation was released, but at least he name-drops the dockers from the stage. Beth Orton is here with Best Bit, proving she never received the acclaim she deserved. Billy Bragg (of course), Ocean Colour Scene, Primal Scream - bands that were huge in their own right are here, standing with the workers.

Equally pleasurable are the lesser lights assembled here, which gave me a first listen to Britpop's second tier. Cast, Rumbletrain, Lovers and Gene add jangly, morose songs about working class life. Smaller's track Aimless is one of the best here, an angry two minute hymn to alienation. Even The Chemical Brothers shine with Setting Sons, a driving highlight and the only electronica track on the disc.

Women of the Waterfront

The only weak point is Doxx Band's The Line, apparently assembled from the dockers themselves. The song itself is lovely and sincere, particularly the little rap in the middle (how many times do you hear Northerners rap?) But it degenerates into fuzzy guitar noodling that could be better left out. Chumbawamba channel English folk harmony through anarcho-syndicalism with One By One, a blistering attack on the dockers' union leadership. But they open with a quote from a docker's wife, in obvious distress about her poverty, who keeps repeating "You don't know" how bad it is. The moralism grates a little: obviously we do know, at least a little, otherwise we wouldn't be listening. Finally, there's one obvious oversight: where is Cocaine Socialism by Pulp? Bar none, the song sums up best the rank hypocrisy of New Labour and Britpop's co-option.

In Never Cross A Picket Line, Billy Bragg asks, "Where is the might of the labour movement?" The labour movement didn't come together to defend the dockers. But Rock the Dock shows it could have, and garnered mass support for doing so. Britpop found its soul as the labour movement was losing its own, a fact both honourable and tragic.

Download Rock The Dock here.

Is Obama a socialist?

2008-10-20T22:04:00.011-04:00

Emphatically, definitively, no.

Over the past few days, I've been flattered that the Republican Party ticket has paid so much attention to my little corner of the world. According to John McCain, Barack Obama's plan to tax those earning over $250,000 a year is "spreading the wealth around" and "redistributing wealth", which makes him a "socialist". Meanwhile, Sarah Palin has been playing up Obama's links with Bill Ayers, former member of the Weathermen, leftist terrorists of the 70s who blew up a few things, including themselves. Accuracy In Media, the right-wing media watch group, finds some convoluted links to the Democratic Socialists of America - the Chicago DSA branch endorsed Obama in 1996, and he in turn called Saul Mendelson, one-time member of the Young Socialist League, a champion of the democratic left.

"My name's Ilyich, and I want to welcome you to this year's Democratic National Convention!"

Two of the most powerful people in the world think socialism is a threat. I'm flattered, really. But I have to reassure some right-wing Republicans (and disappoint some left-wing Democrats.) Obama is not a socialist. Nothing he or his party stands for, and nothing in his platform, is remotely socialist. And I say this as someone who would welcome a socialist revolution. You can relax - we're not taking remedial barricade-building in night school yet.

A blank slate?
What does Obama stand for? We can't ask him. In his autobiography The Audacity Of Hope he writes, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." This is convenient, because Obama has leftist credentials. He was a community organizer in Chicago. 10 years ago he attended a dinner hosted by Palestinian intellectual Edward Said and spoke critically of U.S. foreign policy in the Israeli state. As late as 2004, he told a Palestinian rights activist, "Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front."

There's something you don't see every day - Barack Obama & Edward Said

Things calm down
Last June, Obama gave a strongly pro-Israel speech at an American Israel Public Affairs Committee dinner, including declaring Jerusalem indivisible and cementing the Israeli occupation. He's since backed away from this position, but it's a good illustration of the 'blank screen'. Liberals - and some conspiratorial rightists - can point to his leftist gestures, while ignoring the obvious: they're 10 years old. As Ali Abunimah writes, "His decisive trajectory reinforces a lesson that politically weak constituencies have learned many times: access to people with power alone does not translate into influence over policy." As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama is under the influence of big money. And that means that right-wing, anti-socialist politics fill the screen.

Right-wing money
These are Obama's top funders, (from Paul Street writing in Znet):

Obama's top 20 contributors include Goldman Sachs (#1 at $692,000), Citigroup (#3 at $449,000), JP Morgan Chase (#4 at $405,000), Lehman Bros. (#10 at $371,000), and Morgan Stanley (#16 at $319,000). Note that Goldman Sachs has given three times the amount to Obama it has contributed to McCain and that Citigroup's Obama giving more than doubles its investment in McCain. Obama's #16 contributor - the investment bank Morgan Stanley - gave Obama $20,000 more than McCain got from his top contributor (the investment banker and brokerage house Merrill Lynch).

Still.

Those names should sound familiar. They're responsible for the credit crisis: a vast transfer of money from the working class to the ruling class. Stealing from the poor, to give to the rich, is the opposite of socialism. McCain accuses Obama of confiscating wealth in order to spread it around: "After all, before government can redistribute wealth, it has to confiscate wealth from those who earned it." But no one who's wealthy earned it - they simply found a way to steal the labour of someone else. If Obama was truly a socialist, he wouldn't just be taxing incomes over $250,000. He'd be expropriating the banks and corporations and sharing their wealth.

Right-wing politics
The cash Obama accepts has the final say on his policies, like it does for all ruthless pragmatists. Obama has tacked far to the right since coming to national attention. He's supported:

the $700 billion bail-out
death penalty for child rapists
limits on abortions, continued funding for religious development organizations
allowing telecom companies continued undercover survelliance
unilateral bombing of Pakistan
continued, and intensified occupation of Afghanistan. This despite his apparent acknowledge that it's a war against civilians
a "phased withdrawal" in Iraq, despite there being popular support for the U.S. army to leave now, in both the U.S. and Iraq.

Can I add that the Democratic Party is a party of imperialism? One example: Lyndon Johnson grew the U.S. troop commitment in Vietnam from 16,000 to 537,000. There are many others.

Don't worry, it's well-protected.

Socialists for Obama?
Obama is an imperialist, and an economic and social conservative. Yet liberals still support him (and, tragically, Bill Fletcher Jr, my favourite African-American Marxist.) Why?

The first, and most obvious argument, is that he's a black man running for President in a deeply racist country. The symbolic value of his victory would be significant.

But let's be clear: it would still just be symbolic. Blacks, Latinos and Asians would not suddenly get jobs paying equal to whites or stop being targeted by the police. Immigrants would still face a vicious, racist backlash. The prison-industrial complex wouldn't be torn down. The descendants of slaves wouldn't get reparations. Moreover, Obama's candidacy cuts both ways. He claims to be post-racist: this is very convenient for those in power who say America is a land of opportunity, rather than a state founded on - and thriving off of - racism. The fact that most blacks support Obama - like they support the Democrats - may be a desperate hope for dignity. But it's only desperate because the civil rights movement that won desegregation has collapsed. As Linda Burnham, writing for the Black Radical Congress argues, "The complete collapse of the political into the electoral ill serves a community that has been so ill served by mainstream politics." Over 40 years on, Malcolm X is prophetic:

The second argument is that McCain would be worse. 'Lesser evilism' is a tacit acknowledgement that the Right won the argument. Democrats have agreed that deficits, corporate tax and unions are bad; and that imperialism, cuts to public services and wage stagnation are good. You don't fight a greater evil by adopting its agenda. You fight it by opposing it, something the Democrats and Obama have utterly failed to do. I'd suggest that's because they're right-wing themselves.

(Besides, if you want to vote for a progressive African-American candidate, there's Cynthia McKinney. Note to Republicans: socialists support her.)

The socialist alternative
So don't worry - Obama has nothing to do with socialism. Sorry you were startled, Republicans: I know socialist ideas are powerful. God knows what would happen if the poor and oppressed ever got hold of them. Actually - people are still willing to vote for someone you label a socialist, maybe that says something? Maybe it's about time we found someone for the rich to really be afraid of?

Don't you know I'm local?

2008-10-19T16:16:00.000-04:00

I'm writing my thesis on localism: the idea that the best kind of economy is a local one. Localism is hugely popular right now - witness the social movement that's sprung up around the 100 mile diet, for example. If we restrict our consumption to what's grown or made nearby, localism says we can

avoid the carbon footprint of food transportation.
return to small-scale artisanship, ending the exploitation of large numbers of workers on farms and in factories
feel the environmental impact of our consumption decisions first-hand, rather than on a farm hundreds of miles away
grow our own food, getting back in touch with nature and the rhythm of the seasons

Yes, it's a Cypress Hill reference

The horrible effects of industrialization that localists see are real. The environment is being degraded quickly; poor people are already suffering from global warming. Localism also taps into our alienation: since we live in a society where the highest goal is profit, the cheapest goods, produced in the largest quantities, are what people get to consume. Fast food, fruits and vegetables are stripped of their nutrients.

There's something admirably democratic in localism. We're used to hearing how globalization makes democratic control over our economies irrelevant: if we object to what industries do, they'll leave, taking their capital and jobs with them. According to localism, that no longer matters. We cut them out of the economy by creating our own economy, for our own needs.

What about the workers?
However, this is impossible under capitalism. The localists never mention this, because they're not socialists. Firstly, they have a nostalgia for pre-capitalist forms of society, as if prior to the industrial revolution, we all lived in rural idylls. Secondly, localists truly believe they have the power to single-handedly change a mode of production from within, without any of the boring, tedious middle steps like expropriating the wealth from the capitalists, overthrowing the capitalist state, or - most importantly - building a mass movement of the working class to do both.

If you want to stop the ecological crisis, you have to identify who's causing it. Corporations create large-scale damage; government legislates it. How can individuals, creating local change, impact a problem that works at the national and global level?

When the practicality of large-scale change comes up, the localists usually say their detractors are being pessimistic, in thrall to the power of capital. And this is largely true, because the critics have come exclusively from the Right. But what localists fail to recognize is that, whether you like capitalism or not, you can't ignore it. Capitalism centralizes and concentrates power, with precious little regard for the people being centralized and concentrated.

But this is the fault of capitalism, not industrialism

Capitalism's innovation is the global market, which has existed for 150 years. The market compels costs to sink to the lowest necessary to produce something. And economies of scale are cheaper. Any attempt to correct this, through the actions of individual consumers or gardeners, can only be partial. Small economies cost a lot - ethical ones even more. The only people who can choose to buy more expensive, local goods are the wealthy.

Ethical consumers
Localism relies on informed consumers, one of the markers of being middle class: those who have free time, education and, most importantly, healthy and well-paid jobs. They can worry about what they eat, not where dinner will come from. For the working class, the acute danger from toxins in the workplace, or injuries in the workplace, are far more pressing than the chronic dangers from our food. This is most obvious from the obesity crisis: no amount of tut-tutting from the chattering classes stops the workers from eating those unhealthy, great-tasting fatty foods. When you're working 2 jobs, or living in a tent city, who cares? The vast majority of us don't have the cash for local food - equally importantly, we don't have the time or energy to garden. Most people are too busy working. And why should they be forced to spend their free time gardening?

The obesity scare is anti-working class

The fetish of the small businessperson is also middle class - or, to be Marxist about it, petty bourgeois. The entire localist literature lionizes ethical entrepreneurs. It's true, small business-owners can fill niche markets for ethical consumers - but this only reinforces localism's class bias. The idea that a movement can grow, business by business, to outperform vast capitalist enterprises, is pure fantasy. The market disciplines localist businesses whether they like it or not. To mass distribute healthy food, the localists would have to cut costs to compete with the agribusinesses, and this would force them to adopt the practices they decry.

It's still neoliberalism
The context of localism, which rarely gets mentioned, is neoliberalism. Post-USSR, the far left has fragmented, and except for a few brief moments 1999-2001, there's been no pole of attraction for anti-capitalism. Absent mass working class movements, the intermediate classes have stepped in to fill the void. The petty bourgeois, and the well-off strata of the professional classes, have enough spare income to consume ethically. Their position in the division of labour still subjects them to alienation, but it doesn't create mass social organization. Fair Trade, localism and ethical consumption are the result.

Capitalism is increasingly unfeasible

I honestly don't care if someone wants to pay $5 for a cabbage. But the insiduous part of localism is how it pushes out socialist alternatives. The localists are busy being 'realistic', getting on with changing society for themselves and their customers. The slow, patient work of organizing mass movements is simply irrelevant to them. There's an underlying streak of misanthropy, too: many localists see mass consumption as the root of all evils. Who consumes? The 'mass' i.e. the workers. So unions defending their members' standard of living becomes part of the problem. Since the organized left has been so disorganized, the ideas of another class take over.

Now more than ever
The sense of dislocation localists feel is a symptom: the cause is the market, which forces us to sell our labour power, alienating us from our work. The challenge is to take the real alienation that localism identifies, and re-orient it towards building a working class, anti-capitalist movement.

There is a way to organize the economy to meet social needs, including healthy food for all and a sense of job satisfaction. It's called socialism, and it requires destroying the market. To do that, workers have to take over the firms that exploit them, and replace the political rule of the capitalist class with their own, direct democratic rule. Only then could we reorganize the economy to be environmentally sustainable, and reorganize work so we control the fruits of our labour.

And make sure everyone has access to cool things

The problem is not industrialism vs. smallness, but profit vs. need. 150 years after Marx wrote, capital still expropriates labour power. Do we quibble about the shape that takes, or do we end it once and for all?