left flank

Zombie social democracy, or the ALP as Australia’s political ‘Walking Dead’

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 20:00:00 +0000

When watching the last few episodes of US cable TV series The Walking Dead, it struck me that the title has a double meaning, that Sheriff Rick and the other survivors of the zombie apocalypse are also among the dead who roam the planet’s surface. They’re still animated to do all the usual human things — eat, sleep, play, laugh, cry, get jealous, fight with each other, screw up — but really only kept going by the residues of the past and not any sense of a goal or a future. The edginess in the best episodes emerges from watching as human pettiness overtakes the survivors time after time, leaving them ever more vulnerable to being eaten alive; destroying each other over very little indeed.

The Australian Labor Party’s rolling crisis, playing itself out in an apocalyptic electoral drubbing in Queensland on Saturday, has many of the same features. The greater the portents of impending doom and destruction, the more the protagonists seize at irrelevancies to explain their situation and inform their actions. The ALP is fast becoming Australia’s political walking dead.

Understanding the apocalypse

The same kind of “going through the motions” that characterises the TV series infected commentary in the lead-up to Saturday: That the LNP lead would narrow, that people would wake up to Campbell Newman/Clive Palmer’s real agenda, that the distribution of votes would save Labor seats, that the settling of the federal leadership stoush would stabilise things, etc, etc. And in the short time since the result the spin to explain this historic defeat has been similarly disorienting: That it was an election purely on state issues, that when Queensland swings it swings hard, that this was simply an “it’s time” election, and that the hated privatisations weren’t the problem, it was how they were “communicated”. Perhaps worst of all is the notion that Queenslanders are mostly reactionary rednecks and deserve what they get.

A much more convincing response has been to point to Labor’s disappointing and often appalling record in government in Queensland over the past 23 years, attacking its traditional supporters among workers, the poor, women and Indigenous people. In this reading Bligh’s surprise privatisations after 2009 are both the catalyst for Labor’s unpopularity and the reason that its union base largely couldn’t be mobilised to support the government any longer.

However, the sheer depth to which Labor’s primary vote has sunk — and not just in Queensland — requires more explanation in terms of the decline of the social relevance of the party’s traditional base in the trade union bureaucracy, and the exhaustion of neoliberal managerialism as an alternative to the traditional Laborist program. This result is worse than what happened in the Great Depression or in the context of an economic crisis blamed on the Whitlam government in 1974. Yet it has happened in the absence of a recession. It’s a pretty unique moment in the last 100 years.

It was helpful, then, that Bob Hawke inadvertently deigned to give us the clearest insight into the ALP’s historic problems when last week he cheerily retold a story about meeting Japanese businesspeople in the 1980s, assuring them that his government had made sure the unions would be tame for them if they wanted to invest in Australia. Back then the union bureaucracy was instrumental in inflicting a major defeat on the confidence of workers to challenge the priorities of capital, through the Accord and its offspring. Today the unions are simply too weak to play that kind of role. In that sense, before today’s zombie social democracy, the Hawke and Keating governments were more vampire-like, sucking the working class dry for big business. All that’s left is the Twilight version of Laborism — pallid and enervated.

All this has profound implications for the federal government. The belief among some that Gillard passing legislation will win over voters is entirely misplaced. At no point was Bligh stopped from getting her agenda through parliament, but that was precisely the problem. Similarly, if it is going to be an effective manager of Australian capitalism, the ALP can hardly allow internal democracy to get in its way. And no one even dares think that the party could reverse its decades long commitment to neoliberalism so as to start to tip the balance against the “1 percent”. You can already see the silliness to which Labor hardheads descend in trying to tap into some kind of class politics with Paul Howes’ attack on mining bosses, in which he pines for “philanthropic” US billionaires like Gates and Soros to take their place. This from a union official and party operative who has distinguished himself through fealty to the bosses.

My not-very-brave prediction: For the Labor Party things will keep getting worse long before they get any better.

The Greens flatline

In this context there are a few words worth saying about the Greens’ showing. It was the party’s worst result of the three state elections since its federal arm entered into an agreement to support Gillard in 2010. The Victorian Greens primary vote at the 2006 state election was 10.0 percent, then 12.6 percent at the federal election, and 11.2 percent at the 2010 state election. The NSW Greens scored 9.0 percent at the 2007 state election, 10.2 percent federally, and 10.3 percent at the 2011 state election. The Queensland Greens, meanwhile, got 8.4 percent at the 2009 state election, then 10.9 percent at the federal election, but slumped to around 7.6 percent on Saturday. For all the confected bluster about the NSW Greens’ support for the BDS and “hard Left” image causing its “disappointing” performance last year — with more than one MP believing that “necessary soul searching” should happen via the media — it is clear that wider dynamics lie behind the pattern of votes.

A key factor for the Greens is that — whatever anti-ALP rhetoric they employ while campaigning — they also provide explicit political support to three right-wing Labor governments (in the ACT, Tasmania, and federally). During the ALP leadership crisis this went as far as Bob Brown taking sides against Rudd because Gillard was more accommodating to backroom dealing. Over the mining tax Brown’s position has essentially been to pass the tax no matter how bad it is, because it’s better than what Abbott would do, a position I understand has caused concern within the party.

Such a strategy is at one level parasitic, sapping Labor’s strength relative to the Greens. But it also limits how much the Greens can win Labor’s disaffected base (and other voters) to an independent set of politics. Those who want a political alternative to the ALP are left having to look elsewhere. For example, while the Greens at times spoke against the privatisations that were emblematic of the ALP’s failure, this was always a peripheral part of their pitch. Indeed, their economics policy carried this charming equivocation:

The Queensland Greens do not believe that governments have all the answers for tackling economic crises and value the hard work, innovation and entrepreneurship which form the foundation of a modern, liberal society with an economy which strikes the right balance between market forces and the public interest.

It is notable that Bob Katter offers a clearer argument against the neoliberal consensus of the major parties than the Queensland Greens do, and early analysis suggests that a large chunk of his party’s vote has come from the ALP and not the mainstream Right parties. That veteran Greens activist and theoretician Drew Hutton seriously considered suing Clive Palmer for defamation over nutty claims that he was part of a CIA plot suggests how little perspective there is inside the Greens about the nature of the crisis.

End or beginning?

Labor has been the main party of the Australian Left, and almost totally dominant in electoral terms, for most of the last 110 years. That’s a reality we have to face honestly, but which we are today seeing unravel as never before. For a few years it appeared that this unraveling could be absorbed by the rapid electoral rise of the Greens. But now the Greens’ problems suggest they have are being caught up in the same political crisis.

Because the Greens have been a pole of attraction to the Left of the ALP, this is likely to have far-reaching but contradictory effects. The election result overall could cause demoralisation, but it is also likely to further break down the restraining role the official Left parties can exert on any re-emergence of social resistance, especially if Australia is hit by more serious economic problems and/or there is a further rise in employer militancy. We can see from Greece how quickly this could accelerate the decomposition of longstanding electoral configurations.

Workers’ struggle, whether narrowly economic or more explicitly political, is an essential precondition of any political alternative being built to the current mess of Left politics. But in many ways that’s a banal argument, repeated endlessly by the radical Left in stock slogans about fightbacks and union revivals, as if such phrases could resurrect a bygone era of struggle. Such an argument misses the centrality of politics, of developing “a concrete analysis of the concrete situation”. And the essential starting point for any such analysis is recognizing the historic scale and specificity of the crisis spreading through official politics like a runaway zombie plague.

Apologies to John Passant for blatant misuse of his term “zombie social democracy”.

Malcolm is not so in the middle

noreply@blogger.com (liz_beths) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 22:00:00 +0000

The sales pitch

Here’s my latest for ABC’s The Drum website, published yesterday.

Australian politics has a strange ‘centre’ at the moment, and the dial seems increasingly to fall at the feet of Malcolm Turnbull.

His presence on shows like Q&A results in both calls for him to reassume the Liberal Party leadership, and the suggestion he is an ALP member in disguise. Analogies are drawn with Don Chipp and he is urged to create a new party of the centre. While some celebrate his staring down of Abbott on climate change, others seem seduced by his status as the likable one inside elite circles.

Yet far from a ‘good sort’ member of the 1 per cent, his celebrated small ‘l’ liberalism is little other than a continuation of the right-wing economic radicalism of the neoliberal era. Turnbull is committed to privatisation of the public sector, radical industrial relations policy, and solving serious social problems (such as climate change) by leaving them to market mechanisms. He has even gone so far as to call building the National Broadband Network ‘the telecommunications version of Cuba‘.

In the lead up to the last federal election, GetUp! chose the seat of Wentworth as one of only two seats in NSW to target leaflet on election day. The seat had Labor for Refugees member and marriage equality supporter Steven Lewis in the red corner, and carbon-price-loving and leather-jacket-clad Turnbull turning it on in the blue. While The Greens received their usual series of big ticks from GetUp!, the leaflet encouraged voters to be prudent as ‘Wentworth Is Different’, they claimed.

I voted in the late afternoon when there were more GetUp! activists than party volunteers at the booth. They were in chorus screaming that Lewis agreed with me on ending marriage discrimination, and that Turnbull was on my team wanting to tackle climate change.

“The candidates want social justice — they’re real liberals.”

“These two disagree with their parties — they say what they really think.”

As the @GetUpWentworth campaign tweeted:

@LewisWentworth supports gay marriage, will cross floor over refugees. @TurnbullMalcolm wants price on carbon. RT this important info!

What were not part of the verbal volleys as I queued, nor discussed in the GetUp! leaflet, were any more fundamental questions about the economy despite the dire global outlook at the time. The leaflet talked about specific policy initiatives — around health, environment, refugees, and jobs and infrastructure — but disconnected from the overall management of the economy and the neoliberal economic orthodoxy of the major parties.

For example GetUp!’s leaflet indicated where the parties stood on an increase in the compulsory rate of superannuation, but said nothing on the catastrophic losses of people’s retirement money in the Global Financial Crisis (as a result of it being gambled on the stock market). It scored the parties on increased funding for Indigenous, preventative and mental health, but said nothing on the growing share of health money going to private health care. Nor did it ask about the repeated failures to bring crucial allied health services (such as psychology, physiotherapy and dental) fully under the Medicare umbrella and change fundamentally the economics of healthcare in this country.

So there I stood, close to the many corners of Kings Cross that house Sydney’s homeless each night, angry about how little the GetUp! leaflet said about the Wentworth community’s haves and have-nots. It was a gloomy bit of icing on an election where Abbott’s record player was stuck on ‘turn back the boats’ and ‘great big new tax‘. An election where Gillard and Swan were trying to sell the story that ‘we’ escaped the GFC, at a time many Australians felt life was getting tougher and the ALP was caving in to the big end of town over the mining tax. An election where The Greens offered little in the way of an alternative outlook on economics, ignoring warnings from members and progressive economists that they had given too much ground to neoliberal ideology.

That said, the 2010 election can also be seen as part of a longer-term trend to dumb down economic discussion and delink questions of equity and economics in Australia. The rise of the use of the term ‘social justice’ has seen the falling away of questions around inequality, to the detriment of both those individual issues and public debate. The media and politicians discuss public policy as if it were simply a series of moral questions, unconnected to wider economic strategy or principles. And the public are allowed to discuss whether something will be funded (or not funded as the case seems more often lately), but any discussion of the wider economic agenda the Government chooses to enact is out of bounds.

Turnbull is not in the wrong party, as some claim, and nor is he politically progressive. Rather, he is an extreme economic rationalist who doesn’t believe in the greater redistribution of social wealth to ensure a more equal, more just, and fairer Australia. I say leave him where he is, in the party full of those who argue the market not the community should determine important social questions.

My favourite press release of Turnbull’s is where he defends the interests of the 1 per cent while condemning the ALP means testing of the private health insurance rebate. Turnbull decried that ‘Residents in the Eastern Suburbs will carry a disproportionate burden of the cuts’. He is no fool, and clearly knows this is because the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney (where he and I both live) is home to a ‘disproportionate burden’ of the wealthy, full stop. He lives amongst those who can most afford private health insurance, and those whose tax returns will indicate they earn above the rebate threshold. The electorate of Wentworth is home to the three wealthiest suburbs in the country (Darling Point, Edgecliff and Point Piper) with a mean taxable income of $186,202.

Turnbull himself slipped off the BRW Rich 200 list in 2011, but in 2010 his estimated net worth was $186 million. Although he slid down 15 places on the list between 2009 and 2010, from 182 to 197, he actually got richer in that time. It is just that other members of the elite club around him were getting richer quicker and leapfrogged him.

So Turnbull is not really in the middle, or a centrist, at all. He is a man who possesses enormous personal wealth, and is a politician who argues for an economic framework that will deliver the further concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.

And even then, while Turnbull is not as socially conservative as some others in the Liberal-National Coalition, he is far from a shining light of progressive ‘social causes’. It still disgusts me that as the local representative for Darlinghurst, the host of the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, he fails to support the call for marriage equality in Australia. Though as Greg Jericho pointed out, ‘giving a “vibe” of being kinda sorta in favour of gay marriage seems to be enough for some’ when it is in fact so very, very little.

Progressive people, including many activists, too rarely see issues of wealth inequality and hierarchies of power as key to social and political debates. For some raising these issues has come to be seen as ‘outdated’ or ‘irrelevant’, part of a past when class mattered. This is perhaps of most concern as we have been living through a period of dramatically increasing inequality in Australia (see also this and this).

Economics is not something separate from politics, or something that is the exclusive domain of experts and technicians. While progressives have been speaking out on crucial social issues (from mandatory detention of refugees to tackling climate change), we have often done so in a way that fails to challenge the dominant economic framework that underpins these problems. We have let the rich and powerful pursue their economic agenda effectively unchallenged. In the process we have failed to put the greatest ethical questions of this decade front and centre — those being the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and power, and the failure of neoliberalism to deliver fair and sustainable outcomes locally or globally. As one Twitter user put it about Turnbull, we should not be ‘swept away by his nice suits & crocodile smile on the idiotbox & forget he’s part of the 1%’.

Call for papers: Historical Materialism Australasia mini-conference 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 05:34:00 +0000

Following on from last year's successful Capital Against Capitalism conference, this year will see the first official Historical Materialism Australasia mini-conference, to be held in Sydney on Saturday 21 July. Below is the call for papers. The website for the conference can be found here.

The website for the Historical Materialism journal and book series can be found here:

Historical Materialism Australasia 2012

Following the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis epitomized the prevailing attitude, summed up more brutally by Margaret Thatcher’s injunction that “There is No Alternative.” Twenty years on from Fukuyama’s assertion, liberal triumphalism has been battered by war, recession and political radicalization on the left and the right. In this context even Fukuyama has conceded that history does indeed have a future.

Karl Marx famously remarked that we make our own history, adding that we do not do so “under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”. Today, history is being re-made on the streets of the Middle East and North Africa, and now also across the Global North. These struggles will shape the world’s future. Yet they take place in conditions marked by protracted economic crisis, continuing wars and imperialist “interventions”, and the rule of the market over all of life. The reoccupation of the world’s streets, squares and commons is matched by the ever-increasing subordination of parliaments to the dictates of the market, witnessed most profoundly in the imposition of technocratic rule in Greece, Italy and elsewhere.

These events have seen Marx return to mainstream debate, but all too often in the form of having his insights cherry picked and reified in an attempt to rescue capitalism from itself. There is a need to go beyond such appropriation, to reestablish a living critique of political economy, to work towards the “determinate negation” of capitalism that Marx spoke of. Such a project requires raising questions about the meaning, the form and the very desirability of democracy in an era of growing technocratic rule. Similarly, as human rights provide a moral cover for wars it becomes necessary to interrogate the language of rights in contemporary political struggles. And, as revolution re-appears on the global stage, if in new forms hardly recognizable to revolutionaries of the past, it is clear that the categories of our political thought and practice must be subjected to renewed thought and debate.

Historical Materialism Australasia is a one-day conference to be held in Central Sydney on Saturday 21 July 2012.

To facilitate this, Historical Materialism welcomes individual paper submissions and panel proposals that seek to contribute to this debate.

Please email paper abstracts of no more than 250 words and panel proposals of no more than 100 words to historicalmaterialism2012@gmail.com by Friday, April 13th.

—Jessica Whyte, Rory Dufficy & Tad Tietze (organising group)

Is the ALP’s condition terminal? A crisis of social democracy

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Celebrating a dubious kind of Labor ‘hero’

My latest piece for ABC’s The Drum was published yesterday. Here is the original text for your reading pleasure. Comments most welcome, and I will try to respond.

A flurry of excitement gripped federal politics in the last fortnight — from Kevin Rudd’s failed challenge for the Labor leadership to the parachuting of Bob Carr into the foreign ministry. Without doubt it represented a brief sharpening of the difficulties faced by the Gillard government. But it also highlighted much bigger and more longstanding problems for the social democratic politics the ALP articulates, troubles that cannot be swept away with facile claims like those that Carr’s foray into Canberra represents an “utterly transformative” moment.

The ALP is in the middle of an unprecedented rut that has much deeper roots than any leadership stoush or lousy decision by a “faceless men”. For anyone not mesmerised by the mood swings of the 24-hour news cycle, the future for Labor looks dark indeed. The party’s conundrum represents a crisis of the Laborist project for which there is no ready solution. Even if the ALP can temporarily rise in the polls, the material conditions for it to recover its former glory simply cannot be recreated.

It is worth examining the dimensions of the ALP’s problems in a little detail to understand the magnitude of what is happening.

(1) The ALP has experienced the erosion and splintering of its historically rusted-on vote. For decades after World War Two Labor was the parliamentary party of the Australian Left, commanding the overwhelming bulk of working class votes. Even in the nine federal elections it lost from 1949 to 1969, its primary vote averaged 45.7 percent, higher than the 43.8 percent it won to take office in 2007 and higher still than the 38 percent it got in 2010 (itself less than the average of the four losses to John Howard). Since the late 1980s the ALP has had to rely ever more on preferences, and now it has lost a large chunk of its electoral Left flank to the Greens. Worse, it crashed to under 26 percent in NSW last year and looks to be heading for a similar humiliation in Queensland, results not seen since the Great Depression.

(2) There has been deep decay of Labor’s party organisation. While accurate historical figures are hard to come by, the ALP’s 2010 party review admitted a massive decline in numbers of members and branches, and in terms of members’ willingness to be active. Party historian Rodney Cavalier has written of 101 branches closing between 1999 and 2009 in NSW alone. At one level the party has gotten around this by using the mass media to get its message out, and by hiring career staffers and apparatchiks to run a shrinking organisation, but its declining social weight has only intensified as its members have disappeared.

(3) The party’s trade union base has withered. The ALP has, from its origins, been the expression of the trade union bureaucracy in parliamentary politics. From 1914 to 1990 union density in Australia didn’t drop below around 40 percent. When Bob Hawke came to power in 1983, some 50 percent of the workforce belonged to unions and the level of industrial action was coming off historic highs in the 1970s. By August 2010 trade union density was just 18 percent. In the year to the end of September 2011 the number of working days lost to industrial disputes per 1000 employees was just over 20, which is less than one-tenth of the rate in 1983 (249 per 1000). Despite unions still being among the largest voluntary organisations in the country, this retreat has also robbed Labor of influence through which to implement its agenda.

(4) The ALP’s factions have ossified and lost political meaning. When factional blocs were mobilised they usually reflected tendencies among leaderships of major unions within the logic of parliamentary politics. Union and membership decline have detached the factions from this social base, leaving them as internal party fiefdoms but not much else. For example, the “Socialist Left” Gillard has ramped up attacks on asylum seekers, intensified the appalling NT intervention and wasted few opportunities in talking up free markets. The political incoherence of the unions’ factional ties can also be seen in the fact that all but one section of one union mobilised its MPs to vote for Gillard over Rudd, arguing that her team is best for the union movement. Yet unions operate under Gillard-constructed industrial laws — often called “Workchoices Lite” — heavily weighted in favour of employers. This became apparent when Qantas exploited the laws to defeat its employees last year with Gillard’s cooperation. It was Rudd’s challenge to factional power networks that upset them, and they were willing to defend a PM leading them to crushing defeat than loosen their grip on the party.

(5) Labor’s political and ideological raison d’être has evaporated. This can be seen in the sudden and very desperate resort to distorted class rhetoric from Wayne Swan, attacking the malign political influence of mining billionaires. This is nothing short of bizarre from someone who supported the ascension of Gillard, whose first moves as PM were massive backdowns over the mining super-profits tax and emissions trading scheme… to those self-same mining billionaires! The ALP’s record over political donations from big business — not to mention its readiness to cave in to the business lobbies (most recently the clubs industry over pokies) — hardly indicates a determination to stamp out corporate influence. That Swan illogically deploys his version of the Occupy movement’s opposition to the richest “1 percent” by claiming that 99 percent of the 1 percent are doing the right thing shows how little this has to do with class and how much it has to do with Labor’s crumbling authority among its own base in the union bureaucracy. This is the same Treasurer who sees getting the Budget back in surplus to keep markets happy as more important than a decent rise in paltry unemployment benefits.

On the morning Bob Carr was inserted into federal politics the Australian Financial Review published an essay of his spelling out the depth of problems facing social democratic parties in Australia and internationally. Anyone looking for insights into the causes of Labor’s problems or possible solutions would have been struck at how Carr comes up empty handed. He concludes that “for the first time in the history of socialism, theory offers no guide,” and suggests the best that Labor leaders can do is “improvise and experiment”. Profound stuff.

Recapitulating a failed strategy

In reality, Carr simply retreads the strategy that has dominated Labor politics since the early 1980s, the pro-business market liberalism of the Hawke and Keating years. It’s the same “reform” mantra repeatedly dredged up by commentators across the spectrum, who decry the fact that the sacrifices demanded of Australian workers to restore the health of the corporate sector are no longer being openly pursued by the political class. Yet if one wants to look at Labor’s secular decline, then it most closely matches this heroic period of “reform”.

This should not come as a surprise. Through the Accord and its successors, Hawke and Keating delivered a historic victory to big business at the expense of the ALP’s traditional working class supporters: An across-the-board cut in real wages in the late 1980s (something Thatcher never achieved in the UK), painful restructuring sped up by the “recession we had to have”, and the weakening and fragmentation of union organisation through waves of enterprise bargaining and productivity trade-offs. Industrial relations academic David Peetz has identified the main causes of union decline as changes to industrial laws, increased market competition leading to more aggressive employer tactics, rising inequality, and labour market changes caused by economic restructuring — all processes driven by ALP policies and continued by the conservatives. If the key purpose of the ALP’s union base in this period was to deliver on the demands of Australian business, it also had the effect of undermining the unions’ ability to keep carrying out that function.

It was this combination of factors that underpinned Labor’s crushing 1996 defeat and 11 years in the wilderness. Labor then also moved to the Right on a series of social issues, buying the myth that it had to surrender to conservatives’ use of nationalism and social conservatism to win back the “Howard Battlers”. Perhaps nobody should’ve been surprised given the party’s historic support for White Australia and countless Australian military adventures. Nevertheless, Labor’s acquiescence to Howard on asylum seekers and the War on Terror hit hard among a section of its core supporters, who switched to the Greens in disgust. Finally, the party embraced the ideological trappings of “neoliberalism”, with its reduction of politics to a kind of technocratic managerialism. ALP leaders’ ideas are now so far from the party’s historic program that its MPs lambast Tony Abbott for not being pro-market/pro-business enough over climate change or paid parental leave.

If the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, then Labor’s crisis is unlikely to be solved by repeating what has brought it to this sorry point. Those who imagine that people like Carr represent a way forward should recall that his mix of economic rationalism, racially-charged law and order policies, and use of “overpopulation” arguments to evade scrutiny of crumbling infrastructure ended with him resigning as NSW Premier before the voters could get to him. They should also remember his subsequent consultancy to the super-rich at Macquarie Bank and his activities as a political lobbyist for business.

Such piecemeal hollowing out of official politics can continue for some time while the Australian economy avoids the worst of the global crisis. Similar processes were also at play in social democratic parties around the world before the GFC. But where centre-Left parties have driven austerity they have seen their support collapse even more spectacularly — perhaps nowhere more so than Greece where the recently ruling PASOK party is languishing at around 8 percent in the polls and radical Left parties are together garnering support of around 42 percent. Committed to the aggressively pro-business, Thatcherite agenda adopted by most mainstream parties after the recessions of the 1970s, modern social democracy no longer has either the social weight or political program to navigate its way out of a worsening global social crisis. Even when social democratic politicians play at Left rhetoric they sound unconvincing and have no strategy to deliver on their bluster, even if not all are as ham-fisted as Wayne Swan.

A European social democrat in the early twentieth century once said that the job of social democracy was to be the doctor who saved capitalism when the system was sick. The modern ALP has spent so long playing such a role that its own condition is starting to look suspiciously incurable.

On Finkelstein, the BDS, one-state solutions & the problem with Gandhi’s strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:47:00 +0000

Palestinians cross over the Syrian-Israeli border, May 2011

I’ve had a chance to look at Norman Finkelstein’s recent controversial statements about Left strategy over the question of the BDS. Finkelstein, a brilliant critic of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, has for some time been highly critical of the international BDS campaign, in particular because he believes it implicitly calls for the end of Israel (a “one-state solution” in the parlance).

Over at Lenin’s Tomb, Richard Seymour has rebutted the general outline of Finkelstein’s arguments, but I thought I’d repost some comments I’d made in a Facebook exchange last month about the connections between this position and an insufficiently critical approach to Gandhi’s strategic thinking. Never one to do things by halves, Finkelstein powered his way through dozens of volumes of Gandhi’s collected works to summarise the Indian independence leader’s oeuvre, and delivered a lecture about it in 2008, the text of which can be found here. Apparently he has replayed these arguments in his latest book, This Time They Went Too Far, and it was Max Ajl’s response to this that piqued my interest in the Gandhi connection, which I’d heard Finkelstein speak about in broad-brush strokes previously. I’ve written on the fetishisation of “non-violence” (and Gandhi) previously at Left Flank, here.

My response to the 2008 speech on Gandhi was as follows:

What is the social content of Finkelstein’s argument about Gandhi on movement strategy? Actually, he obscures it by avoiding serious discussion of the context and social forces (from above & from below) involved in either conflict, or — more properly — he reduces them to a bourgeois nationalist configuration with great reliance on the brilliant strategy and doggedness of non-violent leaders and cadre. Gandhi’s arguments carry a deep strain of liberal moralism in them, which Finkelstein seems uncomfortable with but has no alternative to.

Therefore he can argue that, whatever faults there were in Gandhi’s position, it lay at the centre of the success of the Indian movement. This collapses the myriad of social forces that did not use Gandhi’s tactics as part of the massive struggles that won decolonisation. There is very little discussion of how Gandhi’s ideas played out in practice because the historical record shows that Gandhi’s strategic views represented only one part of the actual movement. The final result, too, was limited to a national solution and a terrible partition (which of course Gandhi didn’t want but had no viable strategy to stop).

Secondly, the historical context and nature of the Palestinian struggle today is radically different. Finkelstein makes little effort to draw convincing analogies. However, like Gandhi he puts the class struggle second (or lower) down the priority list because he envisions it in what can only be called a pretty straightforward question of national rights. This cuts his argument off from questions of class struggle across the region (not to mention the West).

Therefore, worst of all, his is almost entirely an argument about influencing international ruling class opinion. He doesn’t seriously consider either the limits of this amorphous “public opinion” he talks about in pressuring governments, and neither does he provide a serious explanation of how that could change in building international solidarity movements. This becomes most repellent in his complete lack of discussion of the possibility of renewed Arab movements from below reshaping the balance of forces in a way that doesn’t simply rely on “public opinion”. In this he shadows the mistake made by many one-state advocates, of seeing the issue as an Israel-Palestine conflict that must find some resolution in that isolated binary. Perhaps even in 2008 it seemed that the idea that the road to Palestinian liberation ran through the main street of Cairo and not Jerusalem was nowhere close, but that didn’t stop people like Tony Cliff or the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists arguing for it — based on a careful analysis of the constellation of forces.

I can totally agree that revolutionaries must start by mobilising around things people already believe. That’s a simple materialist proposition. But the extension of a materialist analysis is to look at the limits and potentialities of where one starts. I think the rapidly changing situation in the MENA region indicates that Finkelstein’s call for a non-violent strategy linked to a position held verbally by most of the international ruling class actually limits itself to demands that leave Palestinians stuck in the same two-state merry go round that the “international community” endorses but never acts on. His argument strengthens a “consensus” that has been used to repeatedly derail the struggle. Simply put, the question cannot be justly solved in bourgeois nationalist terms.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that non-violent tactics have no place in this struggle, or any other, but here they (wittingly or not) reveal the political (rather than simply strategic) weaknesses of Finkelstein’s position.

The importance of this is to say that not all movement strategies lead to the same result. The means by which movements decide to try to defeat oppression can radically constrain (or open up) the ends that can be achieved. Finkelstein’s take on Gandhian strategy limits the struggle to a narrow national outcome that seeks to avoid seriously disrupting hegemonic systems of control in the Middle East (ones in which a Zionist Israeli state is a central prop). I think it is simply untenable to assert that the non-violent mobilisation of four million Palestinians alone would be enough to defeat the most powerful military power in the region. Rather, the key to justice for Palestinians requires looking beyond this to the wider Arab working class, who can take on not just Israel but the matrix of Arab ruling elites that also buttresses the existing order.

Ironically, Finkelstein has ramped up the shrillness of his criticisms of the BDS just as the current situation in the region has become one where mass resistance and ruling class instability have rapidly spread across borders, threatening the break-up of the entire system of control that has dominated for more than 40 years. Last May’s border protests, which Time called “the Arab Spring model for confronting Israel”, were just one manifestation of this. In such a situation, to tailor demands to win over the powerful actors who have maintained these regimes of domination is not just abstractly problematic, but today trails behind the potential being opened up by ordinary Arab people themselves.

Is this what democracy looks like? The NSW Greens & the campaign against the BDS

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:36:00 +0000

The latest issue of The Monthly and my response in The Drum on Monday (here, reposted at Left Flank here) have stirred public interest in the sharpened political debates about the future of the Greens. On Thursday, The Australian ran a curiously subdued feature on the party by Christian Kerr that also pulled a lengthy quote the Drum essay.

One area that deserves more analysis is the blow-up over the NSW Greens’ now-rescinded support for a Boycotts, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. With the kind permission of the author and Graham Young’s Online Opinion site, we are reprinting Hamish Ford’s 28 April 2011 exploration of the BDS controversy just after the Marrickville Greens councillors split, thereby overturning Council policy. Hamish was then a Greens member and is a lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle.

GUEST POST BY HAMISH FORD

Last Tuesday evening’s Marrickville Council vote, after a three hour debate, to rescind its support for the international BDS campaign (originally enacted with a Greens-initiated 10-2 majority vote in December) marks a significant moment for both politics and democracy within NSW and Australia.

In addition to revealing the powerful efficacy of unprecedented, escalating pressure by the major political parties and much of the media, the BDS saga and its outcome could also be a real fork-in-the-road moment for the Greens, in particular its currently privileged role as primary political representative of Australia’s left-wing voters.

Unprecedented pressure and feverish denigration

Perhaps the most surprising critical commentary aimed at the Greens has been from state Upper House Greens MLC Cate Faehrmann. In a Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece she essentially adds ‘internal’ credibility to copious hostile media and political voices outside the party who insist it performed poorly at the election, highlighting the controversial BDS policy as a key problem. The assumptions and explicit aims driving Faehrmann’s arguments are, I believe, deeply misguided.

The BDS issue was always going to be controversial in a country where most media and politicians maintain a more draconian default pro-Israel line than operates even within Israel itself. (See for example the quality Tel Aviv daily Haaretz‘s discussion of Israel becoming an Apartheid state due to racist, colonial policies and openly discriminatory citizenship laws.) Seldom mentioned in all the hysterical scare-mongering over the issue is that the BDS campaign has not only majority Palestinian support but also that of prominent international figures, particularly African National Congress veterans (including globally adored Nobel Laureates Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela) who have long argued that not only is life for Palestinians comparable to the situation of black South Africans at the peak of Apartheid but often actually worse. These are uncomfortable truths for those who criticize the original Marrickville decision on the precious and myopic grounds that it has ‘soured relationships’ in the neighbourhood, and who protest with full-tilt colonial arrogance that BDS is not in the best interests of peace but also even of the Palestinians themselves. (As usual, the clearly apparent views on the matter held by the actual subjects of such hand-on-heart concern are of no import whatsoever.)

What right do the Liberal Party, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian, both liberal and conservative Jewish opinion and lobby groups, federal ALP backbenchers and former Labor councillors have to so denigrate Marrickville Council and the Greens as personified in the figure of Fiona Byrne, Marrickville mayor and Greens candidate for the state seat? The only people she is directly accountable to on properly democratic grounds are party members (who rightfully expect her to carry out official, rigorously-developed policy), Greens voters (who are owed the same, via special representative contract) and, since becoming Mayor, the ratepayers of Marrickville municipality. On all counts, Byrne did not err. It was increasingly asserted by political and media critics prior to the vote to rescind the BDS provisions that local constituents clearly ‘rejected’ Byrne’s candidacy and the Greens per se by not electing her to the state seat. This ridiculous claim, which seriously fudges the final vote’s incredibly close margin (a mere 676 votes), is at the heart of the deceptive narrative that says the Greens performed poorly at the election.

Bruised by the deceitful ‘failure’ narrative

The Greens’ vote in Marrickville — for many years already representing the highest in the country at state and federal levels — went up even more at the 2011 NSW election: by 3.3 percent on primary votes and double that after distribution of preferences. This is an impressive result by any reasonable measure, not just for a minor party but one that has been up against grindingly relentless political, media, and lobby-group smears. That Byrne came so close to taking the seat off a popular and purportedly left wing sitting member and deputy NSW Premier (Carmel Tebbutt) is remarkable.

Rather then defend the principled positions articulated by Byrne and other party colleagues who faced such vicious treatment over many months, Faehrmann prefers to throw yet more damaging kerosene on an already enormous fire, giving it an added ‘horse’s mouth’ legitimacy. But more than this, she comes across as extremely naïve in not seeming to acknowledge that prominent criticism and intense — in this case, clearly overwhelming — pressure from obviously self-interested and ideologically opposed voices is not a good reason for a party to abandon its stated principles.

The ‘failure’ narrative is at best naïve, in the case of Faehrmann, or otherwise willfully deceitful. I can’t recall any high profile state Greens party figures — Byrne, Jamie Parker (the new member for Balmain), Senator-elect Lee Rhiannon, or prominent MLCs John Kaye and David Shoebridge — ever saying the election would result in a ‘Greenslide’. Commonly painted as virtual Trotskyites in the media, these figures have all been in the Greens for long enough to know that any such confidence is not only suicidal but also unrealistic. Any even small improvement in the primary vote for a party whose progressive policies will automatically be marginalised by mainstream politics and most media as ‘extreme’ — entirely irrespective of whether they actually are — will always be tough going. Faehrmann seems to show no understanding of this.

At the NSW election a clear majority of vaguely centre-left-leaning voters decided to ‘man the barricades’ and support the oldest Labor party in the world at its darkest hour. In this light, the overall Greens result was anything but poor with swings of 1.3 percent in the Legislative Assembly and 2 percent in the Legislative Council. This amounts to roughly a 20 percent increase on the party’s 2007 state election result, and more than double the swing. Far from a failure, then.

Prescient principles — shaky execution

The NSW Greens’ error was not in adopting the now demonised BDS policy, which in fact properly expresses the party’s long-held support for Palestinian self-determination, international law, and human rights, no matter how ‘well received’ such a stance might be at the time. Rather, by not sufficiently getting out and properly owning such an inevitably controversial position, the NSW party scored an ‘own goal’ by making itself easy prey for ravenous media to declare them as Bob Brown’s ‘radical’ baggage (while he is okay by comparison). On this score Faehrmann’s critique is likely correct when she writes that Byrne did not get enough broader party support, especially from prominent figures supportive of the BDS policy.

Rather than a mere ‘media release’ upon the state party adopting the BDS policy, a good start would have been a big press conference announcing and explaining it, with BDS spokespeople in attendance to answer specific questions about the global campaign. (Jewish voices within and beyond the Greens also could have actively highlighted that such aims and strategy are not ‘anti-Semitic’.) In addition, the participation of any internationally respected figures who support BDS and who were in the neighborhood, such as ANC veterans, could have provided genuine moral support and historical gravitas.

A ton of bricks was always going to come down on any prominent political party supporting a global campaign that seeks to raise awareness of Israel’s ongoing abuses of human rights and active blocking of basic services in the Occupied Territories resulting from the illegal taking of land acquired by war following the Jewish state’s creation after the 1947 UN partitioning of Palestine. Not even entering into the contested historical minefield (including the question of to what extent UN General Assembly Resolution 181 actually validates Israel per se, seriously questioned here), by sticking to the reality of ongoing abuse the BDS campaign is less ‘extreme’ than directly responding to the very abuses and violations of international law resulting in a record number of UN resolutions.

Hanging tough, and not ‘extreme’

To buckle under the media and political pressure long at boiling point as a result of the BDS saga would not be at all surprising. While Byrne has been impressive in weathering the storm and Rhiannon has probably been wise to keep quiet for now, the new Marrickville Council vote (where only Byrne and one other Green stuck to their original position), Faehrmann’s intervention, following statements by former Greens MLC Ian Cohen, indicate there is a serious case of the wobbles in some sections of the party. Understandable though it might be, however, there are worrying ramifications if the Greens are to allow their enemies’ coordinated attacks to be so efficacious.

In fact, history and common sense suggest that the precedent for success does not lie with such capitulation. Leading up to past elections, media-framed scandals around the Greens were on issues like the ‘harm minimization‘ drugs policy and the party’s traditional anti-war position, where the party hung tough in the face of daily attacks its vote not only held ground but actually increased. The Faehrmann line of argument seems entirely unaware of the fact that, while it may be unpleasant, there is actually no threat to the Greens vote when conservative media comes down on the party hard. Quite the opposite.

This time with BDS the even hotter issue that supposedly proves the Greens are beyond-the-pale radicals, was that in addition to the usual right-wing voices, ‘Left’ faction Labor MPs such as Anthony Albanese — despite likely often sharing the general sentiments motivating the Greens’ gutsy position behind closed doors — went feral (writing opinion pieces in The Australian no less, which on this issue is suddenly Labor’s best friend). Notwithstanding their professed ‘moral’ outrage, such figures have for some time now been clearly desperate to discredit the electoral threat to inner-city seats that Labor proprietarily claims to ‘own’.

The BDS beat-up scandal has served a broader narrative in which the party is deemed ‘extreme’ from all corners. The result is often petulant but carefully focused attacks on individuals — first Byrne and Parker, then increasingly Rhiannon as the shadowy alleged leader of the party’s ‘radical’ faction. Trying to dismiss the Greens by using the oldest trick in the book (actually the same one the Liberals used for decades to bag the ALP), last Friday AWU leader Paul Howes quipped with a pretentious smirk: “I think that most of the Greens’ policies are based on Lee Rhiannon’s interpretations of [Marx’s] Das Kapital.” A cursory perusal of the NSW party’s policies by anyone not suffering the feverish effects of childish exaggeration and desire for base political hyperbole, however, will find there is nothing ‘Marxist’ about them.

The right-wing union leader has obviously been reading The Australian, where the Greens’ NSW Senator-to-be is daily portrayed as a dangerous Communist threatening the very fabric of the national polity, before she has even started her term in the Senate. Rhiannon is commonly presented as a threat to democracy rather than her election being evidence of its proper representative health. On her way to Canberra due to a strong Greens Senate vote in NSW in 2010, she also enjoys overwhelming party support after decisively winning (ahead of Faerhmann, who had both Bob Brown’s and much of the media’s ongoing support as the more ‘moderate’ option) a scrupulous preselection voting process to become lead Upper House candidate. That this longstanding Greens politician may on occasion articulate positions at odds with that of the elite media and political hegemony — but entirely in keeping with NSW party policy — demonstrates a healthy democracy in this country through the presence of a party unafraid to stand up for its principles irrespective of potential controversy and widespread abuse.

Anti-democratic demagoguery vs. local representation

Beyond demonising Rhiannon and ignoring her party and electoral credentials, the extraordinary assault on the Greens as a result of the BDS saga has revealed a broader and very disturbingly selective attitude on behalf of powerful media and political voices when it comes to democratic principles much bally-hood by those very same voices in justifying military interventions elsewhere in the world. If you think a party in Australia has the right to advocate its rigorously developed policy agenda (in the case of the Greens, by way of democratic and transparent internal party processes without equal), then upon attracting sufficient votes to have its say and where possible enact said policies at the local, state, or federal levels of this country’s representative democracy, it seems that many prominent figures don’t agree.

The most astonishing attack on fundamental democratic principles in this sordid story was when the NSW Premier, Barry O’Farrell, threatened to ‘sack’ Marrickville Council if it did not rescind the BDS motion. (Former Liberal Party staffer David Miles even suggested on the Drum’s ABCNews24 incarnation that the Council be sacked irrespective of the imminent vote.) Meanwhile, Kevin Rudd issued his own condemnation of local democracy. Let’s be clear. These major party big wigs openly seek to squash the democratic rights of residents who voted for a Greens-majority Council because the great mainstream political and media power elite have deemed one of this elected body’s actions (born of overwhelming 10-2 support) as ‘unacceptable’.

Meanwhile, misleading news reports (and some Drum opinion pieces) relayed inaccurate claims that the BDS policy would have cost local ratepayers millions of dollars. Far less frequently reported was the Council’s general manager saying any such estimates are ‘speculative’, and — more importantly — that the Greens repeatedly made clear the BDS process was never intended to be retrospective (therefore already purchased cars, computers etc. would not have to be gotten rid of).

Even more revealing and selective, perhaps, is the endlessly repeated mantra from Rudd on down that local councils have no business entering into ‘foreign policy debates’. Yet the now approved-of sanctions campaign against Apartheid South Africa first started at a grassroots and local politics level, the proponents of which were routinely vilified until finally the issue became mainstream. There was also the case in the 1980s and 90s of many Sydney council areas being declared ‘nuclear free zones’. In both instances, action at the local level concerning ‘international’ issues was not only entirely legitimate as the most obvious first port of call for grass-roots democratic expression, but it also clearly ‘works’.

Perhaps the most telling and rightfully-obvious point, however, when it comes to the put-down criticism that genuine democracy at the local council level is overridden by the core business of garbage collection, is the fact that Marrickville Council has had sanctions against Burma in place for 13 years yet has received little or no public censure for this. It wasn’t until attention was finally turned to Israel that everything changed.

Boldness and survival: the opposite of easy

The NSW Greens and Marrickville Council are due some respect for first having the guts to adopt a targeted policy that at least in Australia (more than in many other countries) was always going to not only lose some votes but inflame even further the daily bashing by sections of the media and the Liberal and Labor parties. It is certainly not easy to be a minor progressive political party entering the main game of Australian politics once the full gamut of opposition forces has been made violently clear.

The kind of argument offered by Faehrmann — that the Greens need to change course towards less controversial and ‘divisive’ policy waters — is deeply flawed. In fact, I believe it points to the opposite of what she presumably intends: her own party’s destruction. If the Greens head Right, they might pick up a few more middle-ground votes but will definitely lose far more of a finite progressive base. On electoral grounds the result would be reduced overall support. But more substantively, when it comes to the richness of Australian democracy, for Greens members and voters — the people it is supposed to represent — the party’s very existence would become essentially pointless. One of its biggest advantages would be lost. Both friend and foe alike tend to agree that the Greens unambiguously stand for a clear set of convictions or ‘values’ —whatever you might think of them — in an era where the major parties, particularly Labor, are regarded as mainly offering competing brands of managerialism, with founding ideological raison d’être now at best a dim (and usually disavowed) ghostly presence.

Far from retreating into a more allegedly ‘acceptable’ policy framework as demanded by an ideologically narrow political and media discourse, the gutsy Greens at the 2011 NSW state election needed to be a bit more bold overall in arguing for one of the party’s apparently more contentious positions. Rather than dangerous radicals who need to ‘get real’ and give in to forces that will never give them the tick no matter how much they offer to compromise, the Greens on this occasion looked more like an idealistic yet serious and pragmatic party who didn’t quite follow through enough with the full courage of its notable convictions.

The Greens at the crossroads: ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ matter more than you’d think

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:15:00 +0000

‘Factional rifts, personal animosities and turf wars’

My latest article on ABC’s The Drum, looking at the politics and ideology behind the growing tensions in the Australian Greens, and why these debates matter.

In the last decade there has been a dramatic reconfiguration on the Left of Australian politics. The ALP’s support has dropped to levels not witnessed since the dark years of the Great Depression. Labor has also experienced an excruciating crisis of identity in full public view. In the meantime, the Australian Greens have grown from strength to strength, culminating in winning the balance of power in a hung Parliament in 2010. The party is currently enjoying its peak — so far — of popularity and influence, and this has led The Monthly to commission a lengthy feature by Sally Neighbour, focusing almost exclusively on tensions between Bob Brown and his supporters in NSW on the one hand, and the rest of the NSW Greens on the other.

“Divided We Fall” is a disappointment, a thinly disguised intervention on the side of the Brown camp. It is hard to miss the partisan slant when half as much space is given to the arguments of those who defend what she calls the “recalcitrance of the NSW branch” as to the party leader and his allies. While not engaging in the kind of demonisation of the party’s “watermelon” Left that The Australian does so well (its confected “Lee Rhiannon met with KGB spies” scandal just the latest such attack), the essay sides firmly with the “pragmatists”, the misnamed “new guard”, and others wanting the party to move Right.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising given The Monthly editor Ben Naparstek’s views of NSW Greens position on the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians:

I think that it's outrageous that Bob Brown hasn't taken a stronger stance against Lee Rhiannon for calling for a boycott. Bob Brown, you know, if he's serious about leading a genuinely progressive party, should not allow those kinds of extremist elements to fester within it. And the fact that, you know, Bob Brown might not be the leader in five years and that, heaven help us, Lee Rhiannon could be, is I think a very terrifying thought.

Neighbour also continues the depressing journalistic trend to describe “factional rifts, personal animosities and turf wars” without analysing the deeper structural and political dynamics behind them. In particular, the Greens’ success is simply taken for granted, left unexplained. This allows Neighbour to treat the internal debates in a decontextualised void where electoral saleability and parliamentary manoeuvres are all that matter.

Problems of growth

As I argued in an Overland Journal essay in 2010, the rise of the Greens cannot be understood apart from the crisis of social democratic politics, as Labor-style parties abandoned their traditional supporters by shifting rightward and embracing neoliberalism. As a result, the ALP has become increasingly difficult to differentiate from its conservative opponents. But the last decade also saw the emergence of new social movements opposing corporate globalisation, racist refugee policies, the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and climate change.

The Greens took positions clearly to the Left of the ALP on each of these issues. In every case the Greens started out by being in the minority, at times a very unpopular one, but were able to win support and change the terms of the national debate. Yet when Neighbour writes of the Greens that “most issues they champion [are] now firmly mainstream” she elides all this, implying that the Greens’ success has come from appealing to some imaginary middle ground.

Further, the Greens have made these electoral gains while having the kind of decentralised grassroots structures — and very high levels of accountability to the members of both policy and MP behaviour — that Brown claims are holding them back. Behind Brown’s seemingly innocuous desire to “centralise” and “professionalise” is a philosophy that MPs should be given almost unlimited scope to reshape policy and drive strategy, with the membership’s role largely reduced to passive grunt work like raising money and handing out how-to-vote cards. Just such a disempowerment of the ALP’s membership has been identified as a key factor in that party’s crisis.

One of the reasons Brown has been able to win support for his strategy is that the Greens’ success has led a new layer of activists to join — some formerly from other parties — who are more interested in parliament than social movements (although this has been uneven). Views have also been shaped by the decline of mass protest activity since the election of the Rudd government in late 2007, thus limiting the attractiveness of extra-parliamentary tactics and lending more weight to the activities of elected representatives.

Neighbour accepts as given the idea that when parties gain influence they must adapt to the logic of the parliamentary bubble. Yet this is at a time when trust in politicians is at all time lows. Brown is fond of saying, contradicting the Australian Democrats’ old strategy, that he wants the Greens to “replace the bastards”. Yet there is every sign that the corridors of power are doing more to shape the Greens than the Greens are doing to shape official politics, so that may end up simply “joining the bastards”. Federally, the Greens have seen their role as using their newfound influence "responsibly", even if that has meant softening criticism of the government.

NSW Upper House MP (and Brown ally) Jeremy Buckingham is more honest about the politics behind the recent conflicts in the NSW party when he tells Neighbour, “We want to get outcomes, not just be this force that drags politics to the left.” Such counterposition of ideology and outcomes is, however, unsustainable. For example, Buckingham’s “hard Left” Upper House colleague John Kaye was a major public face of the campaign against power privatisation in 2009, helped stop construction of the destructive Tillegra Dam, and won a ban on endosulphans. He and fellow “Rhiannon camp” MP David Shoebridge brought public attention to Barry O’Farrell’s anti-union laws with their record filibuster speeches.

Buckingham and fellow MLC Cate Faehrmann have also taken internal debates into a mainstream media eager to give them space to prosecute a case against the party’s Left. When they’ve failed to win support for their positions among party activists, or sometimes — as with Faehrmann over the BDS — when they’ve not even started a discussion inside the party, they have acted as if the members who got them elected barely mattered. They didn’t run for preselection on a platform of reforming MPs’ relationship with the party. Neither stood up and opposed the BDS policy until the major parties and the media started to campaign against it. And outspoken Buckingham staffer Max Phillips, who initially voted for a BDS on Marrickville Council, claims the issue was “tearing the party apart” when in fact he was spearheading the campaign to drop the policy under pressure from Bob Brown and a right-wing media assault. Little wonder that this group has faced anger from wide layers of party members and community activists, a fact that Neighbour obscures by implying they are battling a bureaucratic machine.

Some Greens MPs’ obsession with media respectability has also led them to avoid controversial issues like the plague. Senator Christine Milne hit a low water mark recently when she attacked the Australia Day Tent Embassy protest, repeating the claim that protesters were “violent” when no evidence had emerged of such behaviour (and still hasn’t). She also missed the irony of claiming that “violence is unacceptable and violence is never going to advance the cause in Australia” while praising the Tent Embassy’s historic achievements, which were driven by militant “black power” politics and featured pitched battles with police.

Narrowing the space for progressive politics

Not wanting to “drag politics to the Left” may seem harmless, but what it really means is further limiting left-wing political representation because the major parties have been working hard to move this country to the Right for decades. If the Greens abdicate this role, they will be further narrowing the space for independent progressive politics.

There is good reason to believe that Buckingham is actually one of those keen on moving the Greens to the Right. It is one thing to oppose a policy like the BDS within overall support for justice for the Palestinians, quite another to join the parliamentary friends of Israel. In The Monthly Buckingham says he opposes “classic old-left ideology about notions of class struggle and a more centralised control of economies” and has tweeted in favour of “free enterprise” as a solution to environmental problems, in sync with Bob Brown’s pro-market views. Brown’s allies have in recent years sought to water down Australian Greens policies that call for limits on government funding of rich private schools, and the federal Greens MPs have campaigned for big cuts to company tax for small business (and voted for an across-the-board corporate tax cut) when party policy explicitly calls for company tax to be raised.

Buckingham reveals how much parliament has, for him, become an end in itself when he argues, “We have to acknowledge we are in the tent, we are at the table. We’ve got to mature and stop hectoring people.” It is notable that Buckingham

(along with Faehrmann and Jan Barham) took the elitist monarchist title “The Honourable” when he became an MP, in contrast to NSW Greens tradition.

So why does all this matter? Simply put, the Greens have been the focus for widespread hopes that a new progressive politics could emerge in opposition to the neoliberal consensus between the major parties. Yet the eagerness by some to adapt to and work with the same power structures that have alienated voters and turned them to supporting the Greens now threatens to undermine this achievement. In the end debates within the Greens are only important insofar as they lead the party to be part of implementing the progressive social change it claims to stand for, or standing in the way of such change.

The ALP’s rightward shift created a crisis of representation on the Left of Australian politics, with that party’s hard heads arguing that left-wing voters had nowhere else to go. The Greens proved them wrong but now, even if on a smaller scale, this new party of the Left risks recapitulating that mistake. That has significant implications for the future of the Australian Left. Unfortunately Sally Neighbour’s essay has failed to clarify what is really at stake.

With ‘friends’ like Western governments, the Arab Spring doesn’t need enemies

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:00:00 +0000

Protesters in Tahrir unfurl the flag of the Syrian rebellion

This article first appeared on the ABC Drum website yesterday.

One of the abiding images of the Arab Spring has been an aerial view of Tahrir Square in Cairo, brimming with thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of protesters. This image has returned most spectacularly on the first anniversary of the 25 January uprising, with Tahrir not just full but overflowing onto dozens of streets, boulevards and bridges, the biggest mobilisation yet. It is in such displays that the term “people power” takes on real meaning, when the great mass of humanity takes an active role in making history.

The Arab Spring has not just been a set of domestic struggles for freedom, it has also profoundly reshaped regional and global geopolitics. The pictures from Tahrir bring to mind the formulation employed by the New York Times, at the moment of the great demonstrations against the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, that protesters had become the second superpower of world politics.

If the wave of uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is about “the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of their own destiny”, it has also provoked a reaction from those whose interests had been served by systems of control and repression in the region. In this, the governments of Western liberal democracies have played a particularly insidious role in encouraging, funding and arming the most brutal regimes on the expectation that they could provide “stability” and “security” for Western interests, especially interests linked to the geopolitics of oil.

Despite this, much mainstream commentary has been dominated by a naïve belief that Western governments will now “do the right thing” and support the Arab Awakening. In addition, a series of figures on the Left, like Lebanese Marxist Gilbert Achcar, long-time critic of US foreign policy Juan Cole, and my On Utøya collaborator Guy Rundle, argued that the Left had a duty to support NATO intervention in Libya (or in Achcar’s case at least not oppose it). In this they ran a left-wing version of the argument that Gaddafi was about unleash a massacre and that calls for NATO involvement should be uncritically supported as an act of solidarity with the revolution. Even the usually anti-war Australian Greens were almost as belligerent in their calls for military action in Libya as Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd.

I want to argue that for all those inspired by Arab Spring, the last people we should look to help those movements are our home grown leaders who have spent so long supporting tyrannical regimes “over there”. No matter what cuddly phrases about “democracy” and “freedom” they insert in their speeches, when they increase their meddling in the Middle East it is inevitably to limit, restrain and repress the legitimate aspirations of the region’s ordinary people.

The Arab uprisings have destabilised a region in which Western powers had nurtured relations with a host of “friendly dictators”. In response to these setbacks, they have rushed to recalibrate strategies and tactics to try to regain the advantage, to reimpose networks of control. This, and not their woolly liberal democratic language, is the consistent thread that runs through their actions since February 2011.

To reassert their power “our” governments have turned to a number of strategies with varying degrees of success, five of which I explore here.

(1) Undermine or coopt opposition movements

When Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Rudd initially refused to come out in clear support of Egyptian protesters’ demands, in particular defending Hosni Mubarak’s continued rule, it was not simply a matter of being caught on the hop but because they had for so long relied on the dictator. As Tony Blair opined at the time, to them Mubarak had “been immensely courageous and a force for good”. Clinton made the relationship crystal clear in 2009 when she said, “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.” Vice-President Joe Biden even had the temerity to claim — even as teargas canisters made in the USA were being used against Egyptian protesters — that Mubarak was “not a dictator” and shouldn’t step down.

Such a strategy soon became untenable as Mubarak looked certain to go, but Western leaders and their mouthpieces in the media have continued to send thinly veiled messages that opposition movements represent a threat to stability and the development of Western-style market liberalism. Thus, after February we were plied with the line that continued military rule was still needed in Egypt because of the Islamist “threat”. Then, when elections produced landslide wins for Islamist parties, and anti-military protests grew larger and bolder, the focus shifted onto various liberal forces and even dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood as potential stabilisers against more radical elements, especially once Islamist leaders showed their willingness to continue neoliberal policies favoured by Western interests.

(2) Green light repression

For all the talk of how the United States was supporting movements for change by intervening in Libya, in nearby Bahrain where it bases part of the Fifth Fleet it was doing quite the opposite. Obama gave Saudi Arabia the green light to invade Bahrain to help the latter regime crush the pro-democracy movement. Senior US sources later revealed this had been in exchange for the Saudis engineering Arab League support for a “no-fly zone” in Libya. Bahrain remains a firm Western ally, with US arms sales continuing despite “concerns” about the regime’s actions. The US also more tacitly backed the Yemeni regime as it carried out repression, and then continued to work with dictator Saleh to stall democratisation.

(3) Talk “reform” while defending dictatorships

Western governments have ramped up verbal encouragement of “reform” and “moves to democratisation” in the region. Yet except for Libya, and now perhaps Syria, that has meant refusing to call for regimes to go until no other result is possible. The case of Saudi Arabia is most egregious — an incredibly repressive monarchy based on untold oil riches but denying the most basic of democratic rights to its native population, let alone the temporary workers it super-exploits. Despite the emergence of protests against the Saudi regime, the main Western intervention in its affairs in the last year has been British PM David Cameron’s recent trip to sell it more arms (as does the United States), some of which are used to quell internal unrest and assist in military operations against civilian populations in other states. Cameron waxed lyrical about the dictatorship during his trip:

Saudi Arabia is our largest trading partner in the Middle East... but it also has unique influence in the region and in the Islamic world. … People who think we shouldn't be friends with — or our prime minister shouldn't be visiting — a country that is such an important ally and such an important force in the world would be advocating a head-in-the-sand policy, and that is not in our national interest.

Indeed this is part of a general strategy to bolster the strength of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which is made up of six oil-rich dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, UAE and Qatar) and which has become the hub of oil-centred capitalist development across the region. It is the GCC’s ties to the West and weight within the Arab League that has helped Western leaders to get the League to fall into line, especially as allies like Egypt become less reliable. There are also more direct economic advantages that rich nations are trying to secure. In Tunisia, Egypt and Libya — but also other countries across the region — organisations like the IMF, World Bank and European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (which drove neoliberal shock therapy in Eastern Europe) are demanding harsher market reforms in exchange for loans, aid and investment.

Obama, Sarkozy & Cameron — hijacking the struggle for liberation

(4) Hijack rebellions

As mentioned above, the Arab League was vital to providing a fig leaf of legitimacy to the NATO intervention in Libya. Despite its rapprochement with the West in the 2000s, the Gaddafi regime’s crisis provided an opportunity for Western military action not afforded by other Arab Spring events. Gaddafi could still be portrayed as a recent enemy of Western interests — a “mad dog” who supported terrorism — at the same time as a relatively immature and weak revolutionary movement could be convinced to accept Western help when it couldn’t immediately defeat the dictator. Utilising the rhetoric of “humanitarian intervention” and “responsibility to protect”, NATO ignored the letter of UN Resolution 1973 in order to drive regime change.

As historian and former International Crisis Group director Hugh Roberts pointed out in his detailed account of the machinations behind the war, NATO powers repeatedly refused Gaddafi’s offers for immediate ceasefire by imposing impossible conditions on him. This not only made war inevitable, it also prolonged the conflict so that perhaps 30,000 were killed and another 50,000 injured in order to avert an allegedly impending massacre that Gaddafi had no serious chance of carrying out. For all the admonitions from the White House that Arab protesters must remain non-violent and show restraint, the bloody mess in Libya and the celebration of Gaddafi’s death simply revealed how selective the West is about when violence and chaos are acceptable — that is, when they fit within its own strategic plans. NATO involvement also tipped the balance of forces within the revolution towards former Gaddafi stalwarts and other reactionaries. The new ruling clique has shown its eagerness to woo Western big business but has fallen foul of its erstwhile supporters because of its lack of transparency, moves to limit democratic rights, and its ties to Gaddafi’s old regime, not to mention its continuing torture of prisoners.

The Syrian democracy movement, meanwhile, has been incredibly tenacious despite horrific repression by Bashar Al-Assad’s security forces, which has left an estimated 5,500 people dead. But there are signs that its inability to topple the dictator are leading some factions — in particular the Syrian National Council — to seek foreign intervention. The SNC clearly intends to woo the West with promises of a quick regime change while keeping the murderous state machine intact. As one of its spokepeople argues, “We want to distinguish between the regime and the state in Syria. There will not be chaos like in Libya. We still have powerful military institutions that we want to preserve.”

(5) Ramp up the threat of war

Meanwhile Israel has championed the cause of military strikes against Al-Assad’s allies in Tehran, allegedly to wipe out a nascent Iranian nuclear weapons program. It has become apparent that Israeli forces are murdering Iranian nuclear scientists in what should properly be called acts of terrorism. In a quaint bit of double-speak, the Israeli Defence Minister said that military strikes on Iran were “very far off” but wouldn’t say whether this meant weeks or months!

Yet there is nothing quite like the threat of a full-blown military crisis to help reassert control in the region. The US has stepped up diplomatic and military manoeuvres against Iran, despite Israeli and Western intelligence assessments indicating the country is nowhere near even starting a nuclear weapons program. Most commentators seem oblivious to the irony that the campaign to stop such a program is being run by a series of countries armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons: The US, Israel, the UK and France among them. Further, Asia Times reports:

[T]he US has now dropped its demand that countries such as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates agree not to enrich uranium as part of their growing nuclear relations with the US. Simultaneously, the US and Europe continue to insist that Iran should divest itself of this right, thus giving a new edge to double standards.

Behind talk of helping protesters in Syria and stopping an “irrational” regime in Tehran, the real reason for this bellicosity is that the West and its Israeli and GCC allies see Iran as standing in the way of their strategic dominance over the whole region. It is the same logic that means Obama’s words about decreasing US involvement in Afghanistan mask an open-ended and escalating war.

What sort of solidarity?

To understand the actions of Western powers in response to the Arab revolutions it is necessary to penetrate beneath the rhetoric of politicians and mainstream pundits. A better indication comes from the recently released Pentagon rethinking of US power, which sees as an aim the creation of an unfettered right to act against any strategic incursion by rivals. Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense singles out China and Iran, and ominously recalls Bush-era notions of “full spectrum dominance” when it argues that the “United States must maintain its ability to project power in areas in which our access and freedom to operate are challenged”.

After a year of revolts two complex processes are unwinding in competition with each other. On the one hand, in several countries opposition movements have either won tremendous gains or held their ground in the face of brutal repression that has been covertly or openly supported by “our” governments. This process is most highly developed in Egypt where demands for political freedom have been radicalised by the intransigence of the military regime, and have also started to connect with socioeconomic demands made by an increasingly organised and militant independent workers’ movement. The latter development has been in large part driven by worsening economic conditions, for which the military rulers have no solution.

On the other hand, local rulers and their backers in Western power structures have regained some of the advantage through a mixture of carrot and stick, with the emphasis firmly on the latter. Part of that approach has been the promulgation of the idea that the West is part of the solution, when in fact their actions have been to head off more fundamental social and political change. The instability has led to a stepping up of repression in several countries and growing talk of further military adventures.

In these circumstance calls by progressives here for further Western intervention are disastrous for the building of real solidarity. As Libya demonstrated, such intervention will only come on terms set by rich nations seeking to shore up their interests. One mistake that some on the Left have made is to assume that because US power has been weakened by the Arab revolts, it is more easily used to advance worthwhile ends. This not only vastly overstates US weakness, it creates the impression that the second superpower on the streets of the Arab world cannot rely on its own power to drive social change; that it needs to mortgage its fortunes to powerful patrons whose designs are anything but beneficent.

This is not to say that anyone should feel the slightest sympathy for dictators like Gaddafi and Al-Assad. Nor should the presence of pro-Western elements in opposition movements lead to doubts about the genuineness of popular struggles when the regimes happen to also be in Western crosshairs.

Surely the best support we can give people fighting tyrannies is the promise that we will act here to try to stop our rulers from twisting events to their own advantage. The diabolical problem of Middle East politics has never been a shortage of Western intervention — Western governments have been constantly interfering for well over a century. But that intervention has always been primarily in their interests, and never on the side of genuine freedom and justice. That’s the kind of intervention we should be demanding ends, once and for all, so that Arab people can decide their own destinie

From Global Justice to Occupy Everywhere

noreply@blogger.com (liz_beths) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:40:00 +0000

Overland Journal has produced a special online edition, discussing the Occupy movement. Elizabeth has an article on the antecedents to Occupy in the Global Justice Movement and the Zapatista uprising.

Invasion Day

noreply@blogger.com (liz_beths) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:06:00 +0000

A number of myths have shaped Australia’s national identity in profound ways. The possibility of a vast inland sea saw many early settlers search the interior of the country unfruitfully, often meeting an untimely death. The kernel of this myth was a 1798 report to the Colonial Office by First Fleet botanist Joseph Banks:

It is impossible to conceive that such a large body of land, as large as all Europe, does not produce vast rivers, capable of being navigated into the heart of the interior, or, if properly investigated, that such a country, situate in a most fruitful climate, that should not produce some native raw material, of importance to a manufacturing country as England is.

Subsequent searches lasted until the mid 1800s, and informed the modern myth of a nation of noble explorers attempting to cross the Blue Mountains. Yet as Banks makes clear, it was the economic benefit of new materials for an emergent industrial Britain that was primary in his thoughts.

The myth of terra nullius is the weightiest of all the myths. Australia was not a vacant land, but a homeland of others requiring invasion and conquest. This lie continues today despite the 1992 High Court judgement that an unbroken line of ‘ownership’, which predated 1788, has been proven.

Australia, we are still told, ‘was born peacefully, without revolution or civil war’ (Australian War Memorial website). Yet as the course of Australia’s economic development shows, the subjugation of the indigenous population was a necessary pre-requisite to the introduction of widespread wool production and farming.

Today is a day to recall the profound and deleterious impact of invasion on the many Aboriginal communities that were here first. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.

For the love of women's liberation

noreply@blogger.com (liz_beths) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:04:00 +0000

Here is a link to my article on feminism, published yesterday at the ABC's The Drum website.

Chris Berg’s libertarian dreaming. Or, when ‘liberty’ for the few means tyranny for the many

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:28:00 +0000

General Augusto Pinochet — champion of liberty

Do you remember 1989? That was the year that a series of East European Communist regimes fell in the context of a wave of popular protest. It was a tremendously inspiring time, a real indication that ordinary people could be the subjects, rather than objects, of history.

But the collapse of Communism also presaged a new era of capitalist triumphalism, perhaps infamously summarised in Francis Fukuyama’s assertion that we were witnessing “the end of history” — the victory of liberal democratic capitalism as the highest possible achievement of human social organisation. The rapid shift of the Eastern bloc to various kinds of democratic political systems combined with harsh neoliberal restructuring (or, as it was called at the time, “shock therapy”) seemed to provide material evidence that the outcome of struggles against tyranny and dictatorship could only end in market democracy at best. Even countries like China, despite officially going under the name “socialist” have rapidly moved towards marketcapitalism.

Yet something strange has been happening lately, exemplified by Chris Berg’s latest op-ed — on North Korea — in the Fairfax papers on Sunday: The capitalist triumphalists have become very concerned that people, especially those on the Left, might think there is something good about Communism. You know, that thing that died in 1989-91. Berg writes, in opposition to what he sees as a trend to downplaying the North Korean regime’s crimes, that, “The romanticisation of communism survives.” He argues:

Sure, no 20th-century dictatorship has been without its defenders. Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Castro’s Cuba, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam: they've all been praised by Western socialists looking for a model of the good society.

Recently he wrote what may be considered a companion piece to the North Korea article, a barely coherent account of the “socialist calculation debate” for The Drum, which also concluded with a denunciation of Stalinism.

Berg is from a right-wing libertarian think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs. His libertarian “anti-statism” even leads him to some positions with which the Left can agree (free movement of people across borders, opposition to censorship, etc).

Distracting from capitalism’s horrors

So if capitalism won, why is Berg worried about the “romanticisation of communism”? It is not because there has been a sudden upsurge of pro North Korean sentiment in the wider community. We have not seen thousands weeping on the streets over the death of Kim Jong-Il. Neither has there been a revival of Stalinist organising on the radical Left. The Occupy movement, for example, has been mercifully free of nostalgia for the Communist bloc. Yes, there have been a few fringe Western Stalinist tendencies trying to defend the North Korean dictatorship, but they have hardly managed to gain mass appeal for their views (see here for an excellent takedown from the US)*.

The real problem, that one that Berg and like-minded ideologues scuttle to avoid at every turn, is that most of the richest capitalist countries have fallen into the system’s biggest crisis since the Great Depression. More than three years on from the GFC, there is not only no sign of a resolution, the Eurozone appears to be on the brink of a deep recession and possible break-up. Many millions of people have lost their jobs and poverty has skyrocketed, including in the country that has been the centre of the free market project, the United States. Inequality has grown worse And, despite the bleatings of defenders of capitalism that ordinary people were “living beyond their means” thanks to bloated welfare states, the main reason for the sudden emergence of sovereign debt crises has been a combination of government bailouts of private companies (most notoriously banks) and decreased taxation receipts because of private sector recession.

What Berg and co are really warning is that, no matter how bad the crisis is, even the thought of collective alternatives would be much, much worse. This is the “tyranny” he is really railing against, not some imaginary threat of popular pressure for the introduction of Stalinist dictatorship. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, who confidently asserted that “there is no alternative” to the neoliberal revolution she led, Berg more defensively implies that there is an alternative but we dare not go down that road or we’ll all end up enslaved.

There are many things to say about right-wing pro-market libertarians denouncing “tyranny”. But the one I want to focus on here is their notion of tyranny as a phenomenon tied up with states that stands opposed to the free flow of market exchange that provides true liberty. As liz_beths has previously pointed out at Left Flank, the “freedom” implied by capitalism is one that rests on property rights that conveniently ignore the deep injustices that underlie apparently fair exchange in the marketplace. The secret birthplace of inequality under capitalism doesn’t lie in unequal exchange but in the extraction of unpaid labour from workers at the point of production; what Marx called “exploitation”.

State and capital

But the issue I want to concentrate on is the relationship between markets and states. For Berg, the greatest problem with states is that they stand in the way of relatively unfettered individual rights, here seen through the lens of private individuals being able to engage unhindered in exchange of commodities. Libertarians seem to fall into two camps about such individual rights; either they believe that such exchange relations represent the fulfilment of humanity’s essential nature or, like Hayek, they see them as the highest possible form of society even if they believe they are not natural and so must be won or imposed.

Such views utterly mystify how markets — the matrices of social relationships in which such generalised exchange relations are possible — are created, recreated and enforced. As Canadian historian Henry Heller powerfully argues in his recent book, The Birth of Capitalism, the “spontaneous” development of capitalist social relations within the pre-capitalist feudal mode of production could only proceed so far without finding itself butting up against the entrenched, state-directed structures of feudalism (or its late “absolutist” variation). It took bourgeois revolutions in countries like Holland, England and France to take state power and restructure society to maximise the potential for capitalist development based on exploitation of workers and competitive accumulation. Whereas under feudalism and earlier class societies exchange was relatively peripheral to economic activity (agricultural production was mainly for peasant subsistence and the tribute demanded by the feudal lords and/or the state machine), under capitalism few things are made without the explicit aim of being exchanged in the marketplace. So, for example, car workers have to buy cars with wages rather than simply take them home from the factory where they built them. Those who do the work are alienated from the right to directly benefit from the fruits of their labour.

Enforcement of capitalist relations is not only not “spontaneous”, it has also rarely been benign. Marx famously described (Capital Volume One, Part VIII) the brutal period of “primitive accumulation” of capital in England as involving the forcible, state-driven expulsion of people from the land on which they lived and subsisted, thus providing not just newly acquired land for private capitalist use but a workforce free from means of production with which to subsist and therefore dependent on employment to survive. This is the nuts and bolts of how a capitalist labour market is created, by coercing the majority of people to lose their means of subsistence and have their productive capacities subordinated to the needs of capital. Such a process has been repeated in China in recent decades through a state policy of immiserating the rural workforce to help “encourage” them to enter horrific sweatshop conditions in the booming industrial zones.

The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie

Direct state violence is not just a thing of the distant past, either. It has happened repeatedly in order to enforce the individual rights of those who control capital — the type of property that matters most in cementing wealth, power and influence. Milton Friedman took the line that Pinochet’s bloody coup against the Allende government in Chile in 1973, and subsequent repressive rule, did wonders for economic freedom in that country. This is how he endorsed it in 2000:

It was important on the political side, not so much on the economic side. Here was the first case in which you had a movement toward communism that was replaced by a movement toward free markets. See, the really extraordinary thing about the Chilean case was that a military government followed the opposite of military policies. The military is distinguished from the ordinary economy by the fact that it’s a top-down organization. The general tells the colonel, the colonel tells the captain, and so on down, whereas a market is a bottom-up organization. The customer goes into the store and tells the retailer what he wants; the retailer sends it back up the line to the manufacturer and so on. So the basic organizational principles in the military are almost the opposite of the basic organizational principles of a free market and a free society. And the really remarkable thing about Chile is that the military adopted the free-market arrangements instead of the military arrangements.

It is true that Friedman did on occasion criticise Pinochet’s regime, but it is hard to see his argument as being anything other than a justification of centralised political tyranny in the service of “decentralised” market liberty.

Austrian market libertarian Friedrich von Hayek was even clearer about the need for state coercion to create his preferred kind of liberty:

Well, I would say that, as long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression — and this is valid for South America — is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government. And during this transition it may be necessary to maintain certain dictatorial powers, not as something permanent, but as a temporary arrangement.

Then there’s Egypt, which Berg discussed after the uprising that overthrew Mubarak last year. While criticising Mubarak’s restriction of political freedoms, he praised the regime for its neoliberal restructuring efforts, which by his account created economic opportunities that then led to increasing aspirations for democracy. Yet Berg’s economic case was paper-thin, resting on a drop in unemployment from 2003 to 2011 while ignoring the overall rise in unemployment since 1990 when neoliberal reforms really got under way, as well as the spiralling inflation, growing inequality, poverty and extreme concentration of wealth at the top of society that developed under Mubarak. In the same article he points to even greater “economic freedoms” in Bahrain, where a democracy movement was soon to be brutally crushed by thestate with the help of Saudi Arabia and with the tacit approval of the United States. Strangely I have been unable to find Berg’s critique of this particular form of market-supporting tyranny. But he was quick to warn that the Arab Spring must stick to the “liberal” path or risk squandering economic opportunities.

Similarly, he has little to say about the plethora of dictatorships in Africa that have studiously pursued neoliberal policies under the eye of the World Bank and IMF only to deliver economic stagnation and greater suffering for their people (while enriching a tiny elite).

Berg — like most right-wing libertarians — implies that the state is some kind of parasitic or obstructive force in relation to the pure world of market relations he fantasises about. Yet capitalist markets have always required extra-economic coercion to work, precisely because they systematically benefit a tiny minority — capitalists. If there were no states then individual capitalists would need to rely on other (private) forms of repressive machinery to maintain their advantageous social position, wealth and power — their right to exploit and accumulate capital. But nation states provide a number of advantages to the capitalist class, not least of which is their apparent autonomy from class relations. The state appears to stand for the “general interest” of society when in fact it operates in the interests of the dominant class in that society. And therefore it is essential to creating and perpetuating the social relations from which that class gains its riches and power.

It is little wonder that Berg’s employers are funded by rapacious capitalists — like those in the mining industry — who have shown little compunction in running to the state for subsidies or to squash mild increases in taxation. We should not be fooled that these companies’ support for ideologues who decry state interference in their rights are really about a general opposition to the meddling of governments in private activities. Rather, they are big fans of state action, just as long as it is on their behalf.

The secret core of the libertarian argument is that debates over the scope and nature of state action are always predicated on there being a coercive state apparatus systematically operating for that very capitalist “liberty” more appropriately called the “freedom to exploit the many by the very few”. By any means necessary.

* This is not the place to discuss the nature of the Stalinist countries as bureaucratic state capitalisms in detail. For those who are interested, the application of this view to North Korean state capitalism is well covered by South Korean Marxists here, here and here. For an analysis of the implications of Kim Il-Sung’s death from the same perspective see this.

NOTE: This post has been edited to omit a brief reference to Berg’s theoretical influences, which it appears I may have misremembered from a Twitter exchange last July. My apologies for that oversight.

New revolutionary rehearsals. Part two: From democratic to social revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:18:00 +0000

Bolivia's water wars

SPECIAL GUEST POST BY COLIN BARKER

In the last post we published the first half of Colin Barker’s new introduction to the South Korean edition of Revolutionary Rehearsals, looking at the trend towards ‘velvet revolutions’ or ‘negotiated transitions’ in the neoliberal era. In the second half he looks at how the contradictions of the neoliberal era have not only spawned new resistance but opened up the possibility of fundamental social transformation.

The past 24 years have thus provided many more materials on ‘revolutionary rehearsals’. And the coming years will surely provide many more. The world is still reeling from the largest global crisis since the Second World War, whose after-shocks are being felt in both the heartlands and the peripheries of world imperialism. Everywhere, national and trans-national governmental institutions are demanding that working people must pay for the banking crisis with cuts in real wages, welfare services and pensions — while those responsible for the crisis are walking away with larger salaries and bonuses. Transnational bodies like the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, which lock national governments into their neo-liberal policy embrace, do not even pretend to be responsive to popular movements and demands.

There is thus every reason to suppose that mass popular movements will again — and in much less than the next quarter-century! — pose directly the possibility of a socialist transformation of society. Possibility is not, however, inevitability. Reflection on previous experience suggests some of the conditions of success.

What marks the beginnings of a revolutionary era is the entry of large masses of the oppressed and exploited into active engagement with political life. The opening of mass struggles ‘from below’ signals the breakdown of political ‘normality’, a condition nicely described by American historian, Lawrence Goodwyn as one where 'A relatively small number of citizens possessing high sanction move about in an authoritative manner and a much larger number of people without such sanction move about more softly.' [1] Normality is commonly preserved by a mixture of fear and disbelief in the possibility of significant change. Its breakdown is marked by a release of popular energy and imagination.

The question is then, what form does this take? How are popular aspirations formulated and expressed? Is the old distinction between ‘political’ and ‘economic’ demands maintained, or do they begin to dissolve — as famously analyzed in Rosa Luxemburg’s account of mass strikes? [2] Capitalism’s supporters always hope to maintain this separation: recently the Financial Times, the leading British capitalist newspaper, summarized its concerns about the ongoing revolutionary situation in Egypt by saying, ‘The economy itself must be depoliticized’. [3] That ‘depoliticization’ of economic life was what the capitalist class loved about the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. Socialists take the opposing view, asking whether popular practical hopes are invested only in a change of government, or also encompass demands to do with, for example, wages and prices, working conditions, democracy in trade unions, and managerial power in workplaces. Is economic as well as political corruption challenged from below? Are there processes of ‘saneamento’ (the Portuguese term from 1974), of ‘cleaning out’ those whose power depended on their connections with the old regime? The expansion of struggles focused on ‘economic’ questions is a vital part of every popular upsurge with the potential to change the very bases of social life.

What’s involved is not just a matter of weakening and undermining old patterns, but of beginning to create and spread new kinds of relationships and institutions, in all areas of social life. What kind of new regime is possible? If no new regime is more democratic than the movement that creates it, we need to ask whether those engaged in revolutionary upsurge are building new kinds of democratic organizations, not just in the obviously ‘political’ sphere but in neighbourhoods and workplaces, in the organization of ‘public order’ and justice, and in the institutions of the popular movement themselves, in unions and parties, in people’s assemblies and workers’ and peasants’ councils. Is the general demand for democracy and mass participation in every sphere of social life emerging, and being theorized and broadcast across the insurgent movement?

A mass movement from below can generate the conditions for this to occur, as nothing else can. For in such a movement, popular learning and development speed up enormously, once the old barriers of fatalism and fear begin to dissolve and those who ‘moved about more softly’ start to feel their accumulating strength — and to mock and pull down the formerly powerful. The idea that the whole of society can indeed be remade on new foundations takes on a suddenly realistic hue. Issues that once were the debating topics of tiny minorities can become practical questions for millions: what kind of economy do we actually want, are working people capable of running society themselves?

It is in relation to just such matters that we can measure the deepening of popular revolutions. A merely ‘political’ revolution that overthrows an old government can be accomplished by a determined minority. One estimate is that around twenty per cent of the population of Egypt was actively involved in the overthrow of Mubarak — a brilliant popular achievement, but still by a minority. A socialist revolutionary process, however, will necessarily involve a far larger proportion, for it must reach far deeper into all the forms and aspects of everyday life. To the degree that working people do begin to manage their own productive and organized life activities under their own steam, developing democratic means of decision-making, to that degree also their confidence in their own cooperative powers can develop. Their own individual and social transformative growth becomes both a means and an end. The importance of such ‘cultural’ and ‘psychological’ development can hardly be over-estimated.

Successive approximations

Revolutionary movements make it possible to set aside old assumptions and prejudices, whether about religious, ethnic and national antagonisms, or gender superiority and difference. However, there is nothing automatic about such advances: they have to be fought for openly, and the proponents of old divisive ways pushed back in favour of new, enlarged ideas of solidarity. Popular movements do not only contest power with the old rulers, they involve deep and contentious debate about their own forms, their own procedures, their own meaning and purpose. They develop, for good or for ill, through processes of mass learning, by debating, testing and absorbing the lessons of different engagements with the old forces and forms of authority, through defeats and advances, dramatic turning points and reversals. Leon Trotsky described this experimental method of discovery and learning as one involving ‘successive approximations’ by mass movements, a method involving great leaps of understanding and imagination as well as collapses of mutual trust and fierce internal arguments.

To the extent that, in their development of new forms of organization, and their challenges to old forms of authority, movements burrow away at the institutional and cultural supports of capitalist power, a revolutionary period is marked by a peculiar form of contested government, sometimes termed ‘dual power’ or ‘multiple sovereignty’. The former ruling classes, and their very principles of power, are severely weakened, but they have not yet been decisively replaced. The rising power of the movement of working people has not yet gained full power and confidence in itself. It is a situation of huge instability, but also one, in Trotsky’s phrase, of great political ‘flabbiness’. The question of the moment becomes ever more stark: will the popular mass movement march forward to take power for itself, through its own new democratic institutions, or will sections of the old ruling class exploit its uncertainties, divert its energies, and find ways to demobilize the movement and recover its old power in some new form?

In this volume’s chapters on Chile and Poland, that ruling class recovery took form as military dictatorship, a particularly brutal form of capitalist rule. Barely less brutal was the Islamist dictatorship in Iran, erected on the defeat of left and secularist forces in the 1979 revolution. But the chapter on Portugal shows that ruling classes have other possibilities, not least a recourse to the politics of social democracy. In place of the direct contest of mass movements with capital and the state, let’s have an election! In just this way, the five years of revolutionary contestation in Bolivia from the great victory of the Cochabamba ‘water wars’ of 2000 ended with the election of the left government of Evo Morales in 2005. Popular energies were displaced onto the electoral path. In one sense, the Morales election registered a huge victory for the people of Bolivia — but also a failure to resolve the crisis of Bolivian society. The capitalist class’s property and power remained intact, poverty for the mass of Bolivians continued. [4]

In conditions of ‘dual power’, the role of revolutionary Marxist parties takes on its maximum significance. Such conditions produce opportunities, not only for socialist advance, but also for reformist politicians to seek to ride to office on the wave of popular discontent and mobilization. For their project to succeed, it is vital that the popular movement de-mobilize its forces and lower its aspirations, to focus instead on the parliamentary arena. In such circumstances, revolutionary socialists’ active involvement in the movement becomes vital, for they can develop an alternative pole of argument and agitation, stressing the need to maintain and further develop the movement’s independent activity and organizations — for it is in these, and not in parliament, that the possibility of a real social transformation resides.

In a world locked in crisis, where the flames of revolt are once more rising, these matters will again be posed as practical questions. The re-publication of this volume seems timely.

The English language version of Revolutionary Rehearsals is currently in print via Haymarket Books here. The South Korean version is at the publisher’s website here. The original was published by Bookmarks in the UK. A website of Colin’s writing can be found here.

[1] Lawrence Goodwyn, Breaking the Barrier. The Rise of Solidarity in Poland, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p xxi

[2] Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, The Political Party and the Trade Union, London: Bookmarks, 1986

[3] ‘The economics of the Arab spring’, Financial Times, 24 April 2011

[4] Jeffery Webber has chronicled the Bolivian experience in a three-part article in Historical Materialism (vol 16.2-4, 2008) and in his book From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation, and the Politics of Evo Morales (Chicago: Haymarket, 2011)

New revolutionary rehearsals. Part one: The limits of neoliberal ‘democratisation’

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 01:57:00 +0000

Vaclav Havel — face of the ‘velvet revolutions’

SPECIAL GUEST POST BY COLIN BARKER

For those of us drawn to Marxist politics in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collection of essays edited by Colin Barker called Revolutionary Rehearsals was a brilliant riposte to ideas that history had ended with the victory of liberal capitalism and that “there is no alternative”. Here was a book that showed the possibilities and limitations of a series of revolutionary moments in the period from May 68 in France to the crushing of the Solidarność movement in Poland in 1981. In May last year Colin wrote a new introduction to the South Korean edition, bringing the book’s arguments up the present. We are reproducing it here in two parts with his permission.

The English language version of Revolutionary Rehearsals is currently in print via Haymarket Books here. The South Korean version should be for sale here when it is released. The original was published in the UK by Bookmarks. A website of Colin’s writing can be found here.

PART TWO CAN BE READ HERE.

It is almost a quarter of a century since Revolutionary Rehearsals was first published in 1987. The book focused on a number of important cases, over the previous twenty years, in which a very particular possibility seemed to open up: namely, that mass workers’ movements might challenge for state power. The exploration of that possibility guided the selection of chapters.

The period since 1987 has been, in one sense, extraordinary in the sheer number of revolutions that have occurred. If one thing seems certain, it is that revolution is alive and well across the globe, and is indeed a very ‘normal’ part of the political process in the modern capitalist world.

There has been a whole series of vitally important and dramatic transformations in political regimes. A wave of ‘democratization’ has swept away a variety of political dictatorships. If the wave perhaps began in Greece, Portugal and Spain in the 1970s, in the 1980s it brought down dictatorships across Latin America, in the Philippines and South Korea, followed by the ‘communist’ (actually state-capitalist) regimes of Eastern Europe. The 1990s witnessed the end of the Apartheid regime of South Africa and the fall of Suharto’s dictatorship in Indonesia, along with moves towards democracy in numbers of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a trend that continued into the new millennium. At the time of writing, in the spring of 2011, a new wave of revolutionary struggles is challenging many autocratic regimes across North Africa and the Middle East.

There is a paradox, however, On the one hand, ‘liberal democracy’ has extended its sway across the world, and its expansion has been aided by extensive popular protests, including strike waves and mass demonstrations, on a previously unimagined scale. Yet, at the same time, social inequality has been growing in rich and poor countries alike, as ‘neo-liberalism’ has strengthened its grip on national and international economic policy-making. Neo-liberalism is a policy whose intentions and effects are to shift the balance of power and wealth away from working people and towards the capitalist class. Indeed, the past few decades have seen the rich massively increasing their share of income and wealth, and not only in good times.

When the capitalist banking system ran into crisis, the major capitalist states raised trillions of dollars to save the banks — and went on to insist that the bill for the subsequent deficits must be paid by working people, and that public services should continue to be privatized, i.e. converted into new sources of profit for the capitalist class.

All of this is now widely understood across large parts of the working classes of the world. But it has taken time and bitter experience for that to be learned, and the learning has shaped the form of revolutions.

After the Polish military smashed the workers’ movement, Solidarity, in December 1981, the continuing underground opposition to the regime shifted its ideological ground. In the autumn of 1981, Solidarity’s first Congress had called for a ‘self-governing republic’ that would extend democracy into the workplace and the economy. But now, after their defeat, the movement’s leaders and advisers began to look to ‘the market’ as the solution to the ills of their economy and society. Illusions in western capitalism spread. Instead of looking to the organized power of working people to re-make society, they came to identify freedom with the free market. But they were not the only ones to be so convinced: the increasing paralysis of the state-capitalist economy also persuaded wide layers among the Polish ruling class that there was no alternative to the market and private property. The fruits of this parallel development were harvested in the spring of 1989, when Solidarity’s leaders sat down at a ‘Round Table’ with representatives of the regime and came to an agreement for a ‘negotiated transition’ in Poland: to parliamentary democracy, and the re-installation of private capitalism. [1] As in neighbouring Hungary, the transition from one regime to another was accomplished with little by way of strikes and demonstrations. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe — notably in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania — it took popular uprisings and mass demonstrations to dislodge the old regimes. Large numbers of workers participated, but there was little sign of the development of new popular institutions from below, and only sporadic challenges to managerial power in workplaces. After 1989, the privatization of profitable resources proceeded apace, and unemployment and inequality grew.

In South Africa, mass strikes and township protests finally compelled the Apartheid regime to the negotiating table. The outcome was the profoundly popular election of an ANC government in 1994. However, within two years, the ANC leadership followed advice from the IMF and the World Bank, abandoning its previous economic policies in favour of a neo-liberal strategy. Working people lost out in a big way. South Africa remains near the top of the list of the world’s most unequal societies, with the Black share of national income actually falling. Although the level of everyday popular protest in post-Apartheid South Africa is also among the world’s highest, successive ANC governments have worked to contain and deflect popular resistance.

‘Velvet revolutions’

Thus the years following the first appearance of our book did not prove favourable to the perspectives we discussed. Rather, revolutionary challenges were contained and deflected by what some political commentators called ‘negotiated transitions’ — or what Czechoslovak wits called ‘velvet revolutions’ — a form perhaps first seen in Spain in 1976, but then followed in Latin America, Eastern Europe and South Africa.

These kinds of political transformation seem to have some preconditions. On the ruling-class side, sections of the ‘old regime’ must see the writing on the wall, and be prepared to abandon their previous power-monopoly. More important, on the side of the opposition, ‘moderate’ leaders must be found who will work to contain the activity of their own supporters within ‘safe limits’ and to guarantee the safety, and often the continued wealth and security, of at least most of the old regime’s cadres. In this way, the ‘risks’ of popular revolution may be reduced, and openings can be created for at least the more far-seeing of the old regime to achieve satisfactory ‘safe landings’ when regime change occurs. The machinery by which ‘negotiated transitions’ are achieved may include ‘Pacts’, ‘Round Tables’, ‘Amnesties’, ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commissions’ and the like. The crimes of former murderers, torturers and thieves may be forgiven. A ‘negotiated transition’ requires both a ‘reforming’ wing within the ruling class and a dominant ‘reformist wing’ within the opposition. The reformist opposition leaders must work to contain popular demands and organizations, by a mixture of cooptation and demagogy, and by excluding dissenting voices. There is also a more general condition: politics and economics must be treated as separate and distinct spheres, so that contradictions between political equality in the ballot box and rapidly widening economic inequalities are not too obvious. Such an ideological separation underlay the East European ‘dream of the market’, that everyone would be free — and equal.

The ongoing march of neo-liberalism, however, has reduced its ideological appeals. Its social and economic effects have become more prominently apparent, as political and economic power have become more concentrated and more closely interwoven. Across continents, there has been a widespread growth of popular suspicion and hostility towards the privatization of public services and of ‘the commons’, towards the granting of private property rights to wealthy corporations at the expense of the poor, towards the increasing dependence of the poor on food and fuel whose prices are governed by commodity speculators. Increasingly neo-liberalism smells, not of ‘freedom’ but of the corruption of public offices by the lure of wealth. Major environmental, economic and social crises have offered speculators and those with privileged access to decision-makers new opportunities — to profit at the direct expense of their shattered neighbours’ lives.

Many of neo-liberalism’s advances rested on major working-class defeats. Too often, commentators have read these defeats as meaning the end of the working class as a focus of resistance. What they missed was that defeats were, as in past history, often the occasion for new beginnings, and for the re-making of workers’ movements. Older industries and occupations might crumble, but new sectors were being driven into the proletariat, and bringing impulses to revived insurgency. ‘White-collar’ workers have come to play a far more central role in popular resistance, from Mexican teachers in Oaxaca to militant Egyptian tax-workers in Cairo. The gap has continued to narrow between workers and students, who played an unexpectedly prominent role in the May 1968 movement in France, now that ‘higher education’ has become a mass industry run on bureaucratic and capitalist lines. Millions of former peasants have been driven into the hugely expanded cities of the ‘Third World’, where they have developed new capacities for organization and struggle. Some movement transformations have been dramatic and rapid: the core of Bolivia’s labour movement, the organized miners, suffered appalling defeats in the mid-1980s, yet a decade and a half later a recomposed popular movement proved able to achieve an astonishing victory against water privatization in Cochabamba, initiating a five-year period of revolutionary upheaval.

Thus, if it took a while for the realities of neo-liberalism to din themselves into the brains of those subjected to its processes, by the end of the old millennium the evidence of that popular recognition was widespread. The period when popular revolution could be smoothly substituted by ‘negotiated transitions’ as a mechanism of political change was ending. Issues of ‘economic justice’, interweaving economic and political struggles, were again becoming more prominent in insurgent agendas. The poetic cries of the rebellion of Chiapas in 1994, which coincided with the official beginning of the North American Free Trade Agreement (a key development in neo-liberalism’s programme), would be picked up and amplified by a host of different voices and movements over the subsequent period. In the very last month of the 20^th century, an international demonstration at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle provided slogans that resonated with movements over the next decade and more: ‘Our world is not for sale’ and ‘Another world is possible’.

The idea of freedom was no longer attached to the concept of the market. On the contrary, a new generation now identified the market as a principal cause of injustice and exploitation. The crises and injustices associated with the real workings of capitalist world economy provoked major waves of popular insurgency as the 21^st century began. Uprisings in Ecuador in 2000 and in Argentina in 2001, both of them associated with economic crisis, brought down their governments. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, the new century began with a successful mass movement against the privatization of water. In 2002, in Venezuela, a right-wing coup backed by big business was defeated by a huge popular movement that restored Hugo Chavez to the Presidency to which he had been elected four years earlier. In 2003, in Bolivia, popular uprisings drove out successive Presidents who failed to respond to their demands. In 2006, a mass movement overthrew the government of Nepal. These struggles were increasingly interwoven with mass strike movements and popular insurgencies that focused directly on economic and social demands. So, too, it has been with the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011.

[1] There were tragic paradoxes. The first Minister of Labour in the new government was Jacek Kuron, co-author with Karol Modzelewski of the 1964 Open Letter to the Party. In 1964 Kuron had called openly for a workers’ revolution; in 1990 he was giving fireside chats on television to explain the necessity of rising unemployment….

In part two: From democratic to social revolution

12 months

noreply@blogger.com (liz_beths) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 03:42:00 +0000

Happy New Year to all our readers. Thank you for you thoughts and comments on Left Flank, in what was a year of revolutions and a return to politics from below in many corners of the world.

Of course we're not all politics here, just mostly, so here are other parts of our last 12 months in photos taken by us both.

January, Sydney Festival

February, Woolloomooloo

March

April, Rome

May

June, coffee (necessary).

July

August, Surry Hills library

September, Williamstown wetlands

October, Occupy Sydney

November, Mitte - Berlin

December, Katoomba

Interface Journal: New issue on 'Feminism, women's movements and women in movement'

noreply@blogger.com (liz_beths) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 05:59:00 +0000

Photo of Cairo street art by Hossam el-Hamalawy.

A new issue of the journal Interface was released last week, announcement below.

Volume 3/2 (November 2011): Feminism, women's movements and women in movement
Issue editors: Sara Motta, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Catherine Eschle, Laurence Cox

Volume three, issue two of Interface, a peer-reviewed e-journal produced and refereed by social movement practitioners and engaged movement researchers, is now out, on the special theme "Feminism, women's movements and women in movement". Interface is open-access (free), global and multilingual. Our overall aim is to "learn from each other's struggles": to develop a dialogue between practitioners and researchers, but also between different social movements, intellectual traditions and national or regional contexts.

This issue of Interface includes 27 pieces in English and Spanish, by authors writing from / about Australia, Canada, Denmark, Guatemala, India, Ireland, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Spain, the UK and the US.

Articles include:

Sara Motta, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Catherine Eschle and Laurence Cox, Feminism, women's movements and women in movement

Theme-related articles:

Janet Conway, Feminist knowledges on the anti-globalization terrain: transnational feminisms at the World Social Forum
Lyndi Hewitt, Framing across differences, building solidarities: lessons from women's rights activism in transnational spaces
Eurig Scandrett, Suroopa Mukherjee and the Bhopal Research Team, "We are flames not flowers": a gendered reading of the social movement for justice in Bhopal
Akwugo Emejulu, Can "the people" be feminists? Analysing the fate of feminist justice claims in populist grassroots movements in the United States
Finn Mackay, A movement of their own: voices of young feminist activists in the London Feminist Network
Melody L Hoffmann, Bike Babes in Boyland: women cyclists' pedagogical strategies in urban bicycle culture
Nina Nissen, Challenging perspectives: women, complementary and alternative medicine, and social change

Special section: feminist strategies for change:

Sisters of Resistance, Why we need a feminist movement now
Nina Nijsten, Some things we need for a feminist revolution
Rosario González Arias, Viejas tensiones, nuevos desafíos y futuros territorios feministas
Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, Independence vs interdependence
Roberta Villalón, Feminist activist research and strategies from within the battered immigrants' movement
Elena Jeffreys, Audry Autonomy, Jane Green, Christian Vega (Scarlet Alliance Australian Sex Workers Association), Listen to sex workers: support decriminalisation and anti-discrimination protections
Jean Bridgeman, Wise women in community: building on everyday radical feminism for social change
Jennifer Verson, Performing unseen identities: a feminist strategy for radical communication
Jed Picksley, Jamie Heckert and Sara Motta, Feminist love, feminist rage; or, Learning to listen
Anarchist Feminists Nottingham, Statement on intimate partner violence within activist communities

Other articles:

Kenneth Good, The capacities of the people versus a predominant, militarist, ethno-nationalist elite: democratisation in South Africa c. 1973 - 97
Michael Neocosmos, Transition, human rights and violence: rethinking a liberal political relationship in the African neo-colony
Roy Krøvel, Alternative journalism and the relationship between guerrillas and indigenous peoples in Latin America
Tomás Mac Sheoin, Greenpeace: a (partly) annotated bibliography of English-language publications
Anna Feigenbaum with Kheya Bag, Ken Barlow, Jakob Horstmann, David Shulman and Kika Sroka-Miller, "Everything we do is niche": a roundtable on contemporary progressive publishing

This issue’s reviews include the following titles:

Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport, Digitally enabled social change: activism in the Internet age
SV Ojas, Madhuresh Kumar, MJ Vijayan and Joe Athialy, Plural narratives from Narmada Valley
Eurig Scandrett et al, Bhopal survivors speak: emergent voices from a people's movement
Hilary Wainwright, Reclaim the state: experiments in popular democracy

A call for papers for volume 4 issue 2 of Interface is now open, on the theme of "The global emancipation of labour: new movements and struggles around work, workers and precarity" (submissions deadline May 1 2012). We can review and publish articles in Afrikaans, Arabic, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Maltese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Zulu.

The next issue of Interface (May 2012) will be on "The season of revolutions: the Arab Spring", with a special section on the new wave of European mobilizations.

Interface is always open to new collaborators. More details can be found on our website.

When freedom is a dirty word

noreply@blogger.com (liz_beths) — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 08:24:00 +0000

Whatever criticism one may have of the Occupy Everywhere movement, its central idea that ‘We Are the 99%’ speaks to the many people who sense a deep injustice in the current socio-economic system. People do not feel they have it ‘better than ever’, even in Australia, and many point to the diminished freedom they feel — economically and politically — as a key source of their grievances. The movement has been raising concerns about both the economic situation of the majority compared to the very wealthy in society, but also about the decreasing ‘buy-in’ they have to mainstream politics. Despite the promise of freedom in the neoliberal era people feel more and more curtailed and personally diminished.

This article looks to assess what lies behind the term ‘freedom’ when it is deployed by the neoliberal ideologues. When the concept is raised in Australian political circles, it leads many to think almost exclusively of economic libertarians and hard Right think tanks who enjoy an almost hegemonic usage of the term at the moment. Traditionally it was the Left, and not the Right, that was concerned with free will and justice, at the forefront of the fights against exploitation and subjugation. Politics for the Left was supposed to represent a festival of the oppressed.

Such a project of the progressive side has been sidelined in recent decades, replaced by Francis Fukuyama’s famous phrase that we are at ‘the end of history’. He argued that the old ideologies were dead and capitalist ‘liberal democracy’ was the final stage of socio-cultural evolution. In response, I would argue, The Left has failed to adequately mount a case for its project in more recent times, and even as protests break out across the developed and developing worlds many are at sea and without a critique of contemporary capitalism. While Occupy Everywhere is a movement for these times, it is one that (as Žižek warns) cannot afford to fall in love with itself.

The neoliberal false promise

Under the names economic rationalism and neoliberalism, many of the key policy prescriptions of neoclassical economics have been implemented. Free trade, abolishing investment barriers, privatisation, corporatisation, decreasing the social wage, decreasing the welfare net and contracting out — these are the public policy initiatives embodied by the neoliberal project. While such initiatives are touted as necessary, and necessarily good, they are little more than dogma for many politicians and members of the media. TINA is the name Margaret Thatcher gave to it: ‘There Is No Alternative’. Even for many economists, the reliability and social benefit of economic rationalism is accepted at face value.

Proponents of neoclassical-neoliberal economics across the political spectrum have argued the state needs to cede ground to the market in order to have an internationally competitive economy. It was argued by its proponents from the late 1970s onwards that three important things would result from this policy shift: (1) That minimal involvement in the market would avoid economic crisis (such as the one in the 1970s) as there is no natural tendency to crisis in capitalism; (2) That it would raise global living standards; and (3) that as government removed itself from the economic field there would be liberty as the market (made up of the choices of individuals) would reign unhindered.

On the first promise it is clear the neoclassical-neoliberal policies did not just fail to avoid such a predicament, but that this era was the harbinger of the deepest crisis since the Great Depression. While politicians crow about Australia escaping the economic recessions elsewhere, the fact the global economy is yet to emerge from its widespread collapse, and things look increasingly shaky in China, should give anyone pause for concern. The current crisis was preceded by neoliberalism’s failure to restore global growth rates to pre-1970s levels, even if some countries (like Australia) have maintained relatively higher rates of accumulation.

GDP growth per capita: No recovery with neoliberalism

On the second promise, there has been growing distance between the richest percentile and poorest percentile globally and within almost all countries in the neoliberal era. Not only has the wealth gap grown, millions remain in poverty in both the majority and developed worlds.

In relation to the third promise, that neoliberalism would bestow an economic system based on freedom and liberty, the current era has in fact seen the very denial of that freedom. Contemporary capitalism is not simply a system captured by unsavoury greedy individuals (as some critics argue) but one that operates at its core in the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

Individuals versus societies

Since the end of the Keynesian consensus and the post-WWII boom, neoliberals have forcefully and successfully argued that a particular conception of human freedom, found in various guises in neoclassical economic theory, must be the methodological focus of the modern economic project. Their project has been one based in notions of rational, utility maximising individual agents and the minimal intervention of the state in the economy. The neoclassical tradition sees freedom as inexorably linked to ‘the individual’, rather than a wider social or class project.

Methodological individualism sits at the heart of neoclassical and neoliberal economics, and has its origins in the work of classical liberal theorists such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Ludwig von Mises (an Austrian economist, philosopher, and classical liberal) makes this connection clear saying methodological individualism is the ‘principle…involv[ing] the recognition that all actions are performed by individuals’ and ‘a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual members’ actions’. Put another way, social explanations are in the end reduced to individual-level reasons. This is the theoretical underpinning of neoclassical economics. From here, we can understand why neoclassical theorists are primarily concerned with the impact of individuals and their choices on the economy. It is not that individualism denies the existence or influence of institutions or organisations, but that these are the creation of the actions of an individual or sum of individuals and can be altered by them.

The emphasis is therefore on mathematical models and equations, which predict the marginal behaviours of individuals as a way to understand the overall functioning of the economy. Heterodox and Marxist theorists, however, see such models to be of limited use and their emphasis falls on social situations and historical circumstances. For them, often adherents of methodological holism, it is a different approach ‘that holds that meaningful social science knowledge is best or more appropriately derived through the study of group organisations, forces, processes and/or problems’ (Warren J Samuels). For heterodox theorists, conceptualising the economy begins with the whole — in Marx’s idiom, the world exists as a ‘differentiated unity’ rather than a collection of distinct and disconnected observable facts. They argue that for those who do not begin with ‘totality’, there is a potential trap of reifying individual actions (seeing them for something in and of themselves and not connected to a wider economic, social or cultural phenomena). It is not that this approach fails to recognise a two-way relationship between individuals and society, but that without a methodological holism you can only see individual actions for their isolated meaning and not for their more inherent nature as part of a social whole.

It is with this nexus in mind that we can best appreciate some of the central tenets of the neoclassical theory, which focuses on the actions of individuals within markets. The economy is understood as consisting of markets that naturally arise through what Adam Smith says is a ‘certain propensity in human nature…to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’. Wealth is not extracted by one class from another, but rather ‘the distribution of income to society is controlled by a natural law, and that this law, if it worked without friction, would give to every agent of production the amount of wealth which that agent creates’ (John Bates Clarke). The market, which is connected directly to the agency of individual subjects, therefore distributes goods and wealth in a manner that is natural, just and efficient. The price mechanism will guide the market towards an equilibrium point where the market ‘clears’, because ‘if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place until both believe they will benefit from it’ (Friedman and Friedman). Utility maximisation by individuals (who have finite income), and the necessity of a firm’s efficiency (given it must ensure profit), leads to goods having a price (and only one price) at which a market clears.

This explains why neoclassical theorists argue the economy manages itself without extensive intervention, by way of setting prices and the self-interest of economic actors. Yet, as Michael Krätke notes:

Free-market liberalism is based on a ‘theoretical error’, on the belief that ‘economic activity belongs to civil society and the State must not intervene to regulate it’. In liberal thought, a methodological and analytical differentiation, between ‘politics’ and ‘economics’, is reified and raised to a political norm. In order to avoid this conclusion, it is necessary to understand that the free market and the liberal market-economy is ‘a “regulation” of a statal nature, introduced and maintained by means of law and compulsion’.

Thus, as David Harvey argues, capitalism does not in fact deliver freedom but its debasement through the establishment of capitalist relations of production:

This neoliberal debasement of the concept of freedom ‘into a mere advocacy of free enterprise’ can only mean, as Karl Polanyi points out, ‘the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property’.

This alludes to Marx’s analysis of the commodity form in Capital, where he observed (with bitter irony) that a ‘double freedom’ was the necessary condition for labour-power to become commodified in order that profits could be extracted: A person is required to be free to sell their labour-power (in that they are no longer bonded to another as under feudalism), but they must also be free from the ability to subsist (lacking control of the means of production). In this way, Marx analyses the rise of capitalism as a political act requiring coercion, and not something that spontaneously arose through the unfolding of market logic.

Freedom beyond the market

In neoclassical theory there is also integration of the economic and political — of a type — through the weight given to individual choices as a direct expression of a free society. While some argue the neoclassical project is an attempt to demonstrate scientifically and mathematically the ‘laws’ of markets, it is instead distinctly political with an embedded contradiction between the universal claim of personal and economic freedom and the exploitation of the majority in the interests of a minority.

Nowhere are the political implications of the focus on individuals in the neoliberal era clearer than in the increased discipline of the labour force in the neoliberal period. Naomi Klein’s book No Logo (2000) reflects on the paradox of promotion of consumer ‘choice’ at the same time as those commodities are produced in sweatshops, where freedom is in short supply for the workers involved. Terry Eagleton suggests that the contemporary individual is shaped by such contradictions:

Capitalism needs a human being who has never existed, one who is prudently restrained in the office and wildly anarchic in the shopping mall.

This scenario mirrors, at the level of ideology, Marx’s argument in Capital that ‘in the society where the capitalist mode of production prevails, anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in the manufacturing division of labour mutually condition other’. Neoclassical theory articulates an ideal of freedom through atomised exchange, based in individual self-interest, while dashing that ideal against the cold, hard rocks of collective exploitation where: ‘the silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker’. Neoclassical economics thus maintains a lacuna around the fact that capitalist production is irreducibly social and collective but also organised as ‘many capitals’ which — because of the operation of the law of value — must each deny individual freedom to their workers.

In contemporary debates this remains clear in the assumption that there should be freedom for capital from state intervention or collective workers’ organisation. Yet ‘labour market deregulation’ actually means greater state intervention to regulate labour, which became obvious in the debate over WorkChoices legislation. The legislation saw the intensification of orthodox neoclassical principles in the arena of industrial relations, sold on the basis of its necessity for international competitiveness and economic strength. Yet the ‘logic suggests that the government’s purposes in redesigning the industrial relations legislation can be interpreted as an ideologically driven attempt to force down wages, remove workers’ conditions and emasculate the power of trade unions’ (Hartman and Darab). One example of the ideological nature of the policy was its intervention into the labour market in higher education to mandate and ‘encourage’ change through potential benefits and losses to income, as well as to limit (as it did for all workers) dismissal protection, ‘no disadvantage’ tests for new enterprise agreements and the choice to take industrial action.

Because of the inequalities of power between capitalists and their workers, increasing freedom for the latter can only come from greater collective rights in the workplace. Neoclassical economists and their neoliberal counterparts in public policy making remain wedded to the idea that the denial of collective rights is the precondition of individual freedom — but limited to a freedom to act in self-interested ways in the marketplace.

Marx counterposes to this the idea of a struggle for the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, whereby the (majority) working class collectively imposes a radically different type of freedom, but one based in eliminating the atomism implicit in capitalist social relations, thereby freeing individual creativity and potential through an irreducibly holistic social act. He thus sees collective working class struggles to subvert the power of market relations as creating the ground for the emergence of real individual freedoms for the vast majority.

Freedom, or the denial of it, is more than a sociological, philosophical or juridical concern — it is a subject of and for political economy. The debasement of freedom in neoclassical theory and contemporary neoliberal ideology is embedded within the capitalist mode of production. By looking at processes arising in class relations rather than individual choice, we can point the way to a broader and deeper conception of human freedom — a conception more satisfactory than the neoclassical economics’ focus on freedom to engage in atomised market exchanges, which necessarily favour the few. This doesn’t just describe the limits on freedom created by class society but points to a collective alternative: a movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. Something raised by Marx and Engels many years ago but echoed in the new emerging Occupy Everywhere movement. It seems important though for progressive voices to move beyond the idea of ‘We are the 99%’ and to talk of how we came to this point: the point where freedom is debased because of capitalism. It is time for alternatives.

Breivik update: Politics, terrorism and psychiatry

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 06:45:00 +0000

Candle-lit vigil in Oslo, soon after the 22 July massacre

Since my last piece for The Drum, the IPA’s Chris Berg has produced an attack on our book, On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe. We haven’t formally responded, but many of the comments below his article deal with his frankly desperate and unconvincing attempt to exonerate the Islamophobic and anti-multicultural Right from creating the context in which far Right violence is more likely.

In the meantime I was asked to write a short piece about the Breivik diagnosis for weekly medical industry paper Psychiatry Update. I’m reposting here as it includes newly available detail about the psychiatric report, and because Psychiatry Update is only available to registered healthcare practitioners (you can follow its tweet stream here: @PsychUpdate).

Diagnosing Breivik with psychosis is medically questionable and acts to separate the terrorist's actions from their underlying political causes, writes guest blogger Dr Tad Tietze.

Psychiatric diagnosis has been the subject of public debate after two court-appointed psychiatrists found that confessed Norwegian right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik – who murdered 77 people on 22 July – suffers from “Paranoid Schizophrenia”, and is therefore criminally insane and unfit to stand trial.

The finding sits uncomfortably with copious publicly-available information about Breivik’s actions and stated motivations, in particular his 1500-page Manifesto 2083 and his connections with a growing European far Right.

While obviously one can’t rule out psychosis, there is a jarring lack of diagnostic precision and cultural contextualisation evident in those sections of the report that are publicly available that serve to make its findings highly questionable.

Examples include the use of “bizarre delusions” to describe Breivik’s appalling but completely possible plans for national purification, the characterisation of common words from the far Right and online gaming communities as “neologisms”, and descriptions of his understandable fears of being monitored by police as “paranoid delusions”. Multiple references to “grandiose delusions” naïvely ignore the grandiose character of far Right ideology.

Most embarrassingly it rates his functional GAF score at 23, properly defined as “inability to function in almost all areas (e.g., stays in bed all day; no job, home, or friends)”. This, in someone who singlehandedly executed a complex terrorist plot!

The case also suggests limits to court and psychiatric processes in dealing with political crimes. After 22 July, the media in Norway rapidly shifted the focus from Breivik’s politics to errors in policing and examination of his personal and psychological history. Such depoliticisation mirrored what hard Right thinkers were doing to distance themselves from a massacre inspired by their ideas.

The two psychiatrists have, intentionally or not, followed suit. They concede they have no experience with “ideological terrorism” or the far Right. It also seems they didn’t integrate into their assessment Breivik’s (sickening but coherent) Manifesto, nor widely-available conservative and Islamophobic literature he drew on.

The reason for all this is probably very prosaic – with our professional focus on individual psychopathology, psychiatrists sometimes medicalise social and political phenomena that fall outside our own belief systems. In this case it may provide a perverse legitimacy to ideologues whose calls to “civilisational war” inspired Breivik.

Even in the unlikely event Breivik was truly “insane”, his actions cannot simply be divorced from the years he spent in far Right subcultures that constantly talk about doing what he actually did. If removed from this context, such a diagnosis puts fascist ideology in a straitjacket, and thereby allows its political significance – and any serious political response to it – to be evaded.

The Breivik diagnosis: Fascist ideology wrapped in a straitjacket, political implications denied

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 22:58:00 +0000

Comments now closed on this article at The Drum, so reposting here for your commenting pleasure!

Two court-appointed psychiatrists have found confessed Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik legally insane and unfit to stand trial. The full text of their 243 page report is yet to be released, but if public statements are representative of its contents, there is good reason to suspect their assessment may tell us more about the socially embedded nature of psychiatric diagnosis and the prevailing political climate in Norway than any claim it was the result of some kind of cold, hard, value-free science.

Because Breivik placed so much information about his activities and belief system on the internet, and because so much is publicly known about his crimes and their preparation, as well as his political connections, any assessment of Breivik’s mental state has to be placed in the context of these facts in order to make sense of his actions. Yet the details released so far is that they suggest the psychiatrists have either mistaken his fascist ideology for a mental illness on the basis that they cannot comprehend how someone could come to such extreme views, or — less likely — they have decided his political beliefs are irrelevant to his crimes by focusing on some other (as yet unrevealed) aspect of his psyche.

Depoliticisation complete?

For Aslak Sira Myhre, writing in The Guardian, the transformation of Breivik’s “political madness” — one defying usual notions of mental illness and shared by large numbers of extremists around the world — into a “personal madness” follows the pattern established by the Norwegian media since 22 July, increasingly focused on Breivik’s lifestyle, childhood, and psyche. Such a focus serves to distract from the fact that Breivik’s hatreds — of Muslims and Leftists — don’t come from an illness but from a well-established political milieu.

It was a such a process of attempts to depoliticise the significance of a mass political assassination by reducing it to the deranged actions of a “lone wolf” — which prompted Elizabeth Humphrys, Guy Rundle and myself to bring together authors from Europe and Australia to produce a political response. The result was an e-book, On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe, published in late October. We were in part driven by a desire to rescue the dead and survivors of the massacre from being reduced to victims of a meaningless act when all evidence pointed to a clear social and political context for the atrocity.

One of the key depoliticisation strategies employed by commentators was the definition of Breivik as disturbed. Hard Right bloggers like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, both active in the US “counter Jihad” movement, sought to evade the close similarities between their views and Breivik’s by suggesting that he was insane precisely because he had acted on their warnings of civilisational war. But even mainstream commentators like Peter Hartcher wanted to draw an improbable psychological dividing line between the rise of far Right parties in Europe and the actions of the Norwegian mass killer, as if mental illness could so selectively turn one of many supporters of a violent nationalist ideology into someone actually willing to act on their beliefs.

Within days mainstream commentary around the world, as in Norway, was dominated by presumptions that Breivik was insane. A good example is a recent report in the German Der Spiegel, which claimed that during interrogations Breivik “revealed all but [his] motive”. While unable to find a coherent psychological clue in his childhood for such an appalling act, the article is full of Breivik’s explicit ultra-nationalist motivations. Truly a case of not seeing the wood for the trees.

And a new Melbourne play has been subjected to lurid attacks on Channel 10 and in the Herald-Sun because it dares to suggest the killings were rationally planned, ideologically motivated and inspired by mainstream conservative figures like John Howard and Peter Costello (both praised by Breivik).

Those keen to erase connections between far Right politics and the 22 July massacre will be relieved by the psychiatrists’ conclusions. Overheated Islamophobic rhetoric will be able to continue without the spectre that it might actually have a predictable effect in the real world. The rise of “respectable” racism — of dog-whistle politics designed to distract from the failures of politicians to deliver improvements in the lives of ordinary citizens — will be able to continue without the stain of bloodshed. For more extreme elements it will free them of association with an unspeakable crime (one they may have a lot of sympathy for) and allow them to continue to prepare for the very struggles that Breivik took to a logical endpoint. This will give them breathing space as once again we can rest assured that the “real” terrorist threat is that of radical Islamism.

Convincing evidence yet to emerge

What, then, of the psychiatric report? As it is not yet in the public domain it may well turn out to describe classic signs of psychotic illness in Breivik. Yet it is curious that in such a high-profile case, where initial expert opinions suggested that psychosis was highly unlikely, the only details released by prosecutors Bejer Engh and Svein Holden are more suggestive of an incomprehension of fascist ideology on the part of the doctors than anything like clear confirmation of mental illness.

For example, in coming to a diagnosis of “Paranoid Schizophrenia” the psychiatrists apparently state that Breivik displayed many kinds of “bizarre delusions”, a technical term that usually refers to false beliefs based completely outside of normal experience (e.g. magical powers, alien invasions, etc.). Yet to date they have only spoken publicly of manifestly non-bizarre beliefs that ape common tropes among more extreme sections of neo-fascist subcultures:

“They especially describe what they call Breivik's delusions where he sees himself as chosen to decide who shall live and who shall die, and that he is chosen to save what he calls his people,” said Holden.

“Breivik has stated that he committed the murders, or executions as he calls them, because of his love for his people.”

Such ultra-patriotic ideas, along with Breivik’s inflated views of his own ability to become a future ruler of Norway through radicalising an anti-Islamic, anti-Marxist “Knights Templar” resistance movement, may be extreme yet they fit with the kind of grandiosity exhibited by current and past fascist ideologues. The leading contemporary biographer of Hitler, Ian Kershaw, has suggested that the Nazi leader probably had what would today be called Narcissistic Personality Disorder. But he points out that this fails to explain how Hitler built a mass movement that took state power, launched wars and implemented the industrially organised slaughter of millions. In 1928 the Nazi vote was under 3 percent and Hitler was considered a nutty fringe annoyance, yet by 1933 he had been invited into power by a Weimar political class in crisis.

Similarly, the notion that Breivik lives in his “own delusional universe where all his thoughts and acts are guided by his delusions” only implies illness if one is first convinced that his ideas don’t represent a variant of far Right ideology, even if a particularly extreme one. It is a recognised problem in psychiatric diagnosis that, because it is mostly unable to rely on physical signs or laboratory investigations for confirmatory evidence, even when a person’s ideas may be incomprehensible to a doctor they can still fit with minority belief systems shared by people with non-mainstream but nevertheless non-insane ideas. Such ambiguities have on occasion seen psychiatry serve repressive social policies, such as with the forcible treatment of dissidents in Stalinist Russia as “schizophrenic”.

Similarly, no evidence has been released that Breivik suffers from characteristic hallucinations and thought disorganisation usually present in Paranoid Schizophrenia. His Manifesto 2083 displays an overall political and strategic coherence even with its optimistic projection of a timeline of civilisational war and national purification, again unlike the typically illogical writings of psychotic individuals. And while patients with Paranoid Schizophrenia usually believe they are being persecuted individually, Breivik makes clear his is a belief about social threats.

Finally, despite recent statements that Breivik “acted alone”, it is clear that his links with the European far Right went well beyond the odd internet chat. His connections with the English Defence League are well known. He travelled to London to meet EDL activists as recently as March 2010, when his elaborate terror plot was already well under way. EDL leader Tommy Robinson later warned that current UK policies would lead to an eruption of English Breiviks. Breivik claims he is just one of several like-minded “cells” in Europe, but has refused to release details of his accomplices unless authorities bow to a series of ultimatums. None of these are behaviours typical of people suffering from psychotic illnesses, who usually remain isolative and poorly organised.

One also has to wonder how useful were 36 hours of psychiatric examination of a neo-fascist outside the context of his usual political milieu, and how much the necessity of secretive preparation for a major terrorist attack would have led him to appear more socially disconnected than usual.

Repoliticising mass murder

Many in Norway are already questioning the psychiatrists’ opinion. As Erling Johannes Husabø, Professor in Criminal Law at the University of Bergen, commented, “It must have been a special type of psychosis they concluded upon considering Breivik was able to act as methodically as he did. An insanity decision is usually used for people who have more of a disturbed perception of reality …” Others are preparing legal challenges, and the report still has to be reviewed by the country’s forensic commission.

But, apart from the possibility that some new revelation will emerge from the full report, why would psychiatrists reach such a decision apparently on the basis of quite unconvincing evidence? Some have suggested various subterranean motivations. Perhaps an insanity finding will ensure there are legal means to keep Breivik detained for life in a country where the maximum criminal penalty is 21 years jail? This seems unlikely, as Norway also has provisions for dangerous criminals to be kept detained past that time. Maybe it will deny Breivik credibility? Yet this mistakes the audience he is targeting: His plan is to cohere the far Right and not to win over the broader population. Potential admirers will dismiss assertions of madness when his ideas match their own. Or perhaps the diagnosis is intended to deny him a platform? But it seems unlikely that psychiatric detention will leave him with substantially fewer rights to speak out than a normal trial. Finally, some may see this as a move to ease the suffering of the survivors, but already many are upset at the findings.

The reality is almost certainly more prosaic, related to the way that social and political problems have become increasingly psychologised and medicalised in modern society. It is telling that Breivik’s defence lawyer, a member of Norway’s Labour Party, argued that “the whole case” indicated his client’s insanity despite admitting that Breivik remained calm, was capable of executing an elaborate plot over many years, and that he thought he would be killed because of his actions — all features indicating considerable grounding in reality, even if wrapped in extreme ideas.

Similarly, the details of the psychiatric analysis released to date suggest incomprehension at how the far Right thinks and operates. It is true that such ideas can seem unreal to most people, but they are also based in well-worn subcultural discourses animated by hatred for all those undermining an idealised national unity. Brevik’s Manifesto includes long sections surveying various manifestations of right-wing ideology in order to pick out those he thinks are most suited to progressing the radical nationalist cause. His approach is of a piece with the general character of fascism as a “scavenger ideology”, reducing the value of various slogans and beliefs to their utility in building a movement to wage war and take state power in the future. As Anindya Bhattacharyya argues in On Utøya, it is for this reason that fascist ideology is “wildly contradictory and unstable, held together in the last instance by mysticism rather than rationality.”

Even today’s neo-Nazi thugs, like the German cell recently revealed to have carried out a series of murders of immigrants over the last decade, require various belief systems to sustain their actions. As one who broke with them has explained there was both ideological indoctrination and a grandiose sense of purpose involved in their violent activities.

There is a further issue, rooted in the social role played by the psychiatric profession. As psychotherapist and author Gary Greenberg wrote of the diagnosis of Paranoid Schizophrenia given to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber — once again on the basis of very thin evidence — the problem was that once mental health professionals got involved politics and morality became subordinated to notions of mental illness: “Not because my colleagues and I are scoundrels … but because the mental health industry will reduce the political to the personal every time. It is our business to do so.” (In the Kingdom of the Unabomber, p. 46) It’s not that psychiatrists intentionally find mental disorder where there is none, but that they are always looking to the possibility of providing a treatment for an illness as a humane and rational option. They will thus have a natural bias towards diagnosing in order to treat; that is, to do something rather than nothing.

Such a trend has probably been exacerbated in an era where politics itself has been downgraded in favour of the notion of people as self-interested individual actors in a free market. The very idea of ideology has become unfashionable and so a Breivik becomes harder to comprehend, and therefore is more easily packaged as being mentally ill.

Even if Breivik did show signs that he had slipped into a state that could sensibly be considered “psychotic”, his actions cannot be divorced from the social context and political networks from which he emerged. His ideology, strategic pronouncements and motivations cannot be reduced to the ravings of a lunatic when they simply reflect a variation on widely held views within the far Right. It is a far Right that has gained increasing prominence as mainstream politicians step up rhetoric against multiculturalism or Muslim immigration. If removed from these very real contexts, the notion that Anders Breivik is “insane” can only serve to put an ideology in a straitjacket, and thereby allow its political significance to be evaded and ignored.

Thanks to Jorge Sotiros for inspiration. More information about On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe is available here.

Rewind: Depoliticising Utoya — Anders Breivik as ‘madman’

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 05:50:00 +0000

It was not entirely unexpected that two prosecution-appointed psychiatrists would find Norwegian fascist mass murderer Anders Breivik insane and unfit to stand trial, diagnosing him with Paranoid Schizophrenia. The diagnosis — so far only backed by a few, unconvincing details from their as-yet unreleased report — runs counter to the voluminous information, available in the public domain, about Breivik and his belief system, including his notorious Manifesto 2083.

I am writing an initial response for ABC’s The Drum, which will probably be online tomorrow. In the meantime, here is an essay abridged from the e-book On Utoya: Anders Breivik, right terror, racism and Europe, which originally appeared on The Drum last month. The e-book was edited by Elizabeth Humphrys, Guy Rundle and myself, published in late October, and is available for download from Amazon here.

Three months ago, when far-Right activist Anders Breivik killed more than 70 people in Norway, the world was treated to a bizarre series of turnabouts and reversals as the media struggled to interpret and frame the events.

Famously, before Breivik’s identity was known, numerous right-wing commentators leapt to the conclusion that it was a violent Islamist attack. For almost exactly 10 years, the response to such events conformed to a well-trodden path — of making a hard political case against Islamism, and usually Islam more generally. Even when the actions of terrorists were classified as ‘mad’ or understandable only with reference to the twisted individual psychologies of the perpetrators, this mental disturbance was the result of hate-filled, anti-Enlightenment doctrines learned in Madrassas, where contempt for Western values and rabid fundamentalist explications of the Koran whipped them into a frenzied, murderous state.

Then it became clear that Breivik was Norwegian, white, and had perpetrated the atrocity as a way of “waking” Europe from its sleepwalk into thorough Islamisation by “cultural Marxists”. There was a brief moment when Anders Breivik could be understood as a product of the rise of the Islamophobic Right in Europe. Yet almost as quickly the optic shifted to one of Breivik as a lone madman, because a deranged, self-obsessed and isolated individual was, of course, the only kind of person capable of such cruel and barbaric acts. Unless he had been an Islamist, that is. The media line was bolstered when Breivik’s lawyer declared that to have acted the way he had the killer must be insane, and told reporters he had demanded that Breivik undergo psychological testing. Explaining his reasoning, the social democratic lawyer said that the terrorist had “a view on reality that is very, very difficult to explain”.

Much of this shift in emphasis was the product of the same right-wing commentators who’d been eager to cry “jihad” the moment the events had hit the news wires. Yet they would not have been able to succeed in turning the discussion if there was not a great deal of general confusion about the whole notion of madness, and a cultural tendency to use it as a grab bag to explain any form of extreme or violent behaviour — particularly in an era when political movements and violence other than Islamism have become close to invisible. Discussion of Breivik and his crimes demonstrated how confused the public sphere was about the nature of politics, sanity and evil — and the uses to which such confusion could be put.

Thus pundits and commentators from a wide range of political viewpoints came to bury Breivik’s act in the realm of psychopathology, to see only the monstrous form and deny rationality (however unpalatable) to its content. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hartcher, sought to dismiss conflation of “the incident with the rise of far-right parties in Europe”.

Andrew Bolt, after initially blaming the attack on Islamists, then protested at alleged “gloating attempts to blame the horrific murder of 93 Norwegians [on] any interest group or cause that murderer Anders Behring Breivik touched,” including his Christianity. Instead he blamed Breivik’s relationship with his father.

Nor was it merely journalists and pundits who rushed in to declare Breivik’s psychopathology. With the victims’ bodies still being recovered, self-proclaimed psychological experts were analysing the killer’s motivations with barely a shred of substantiation to work from.

Lumping Breivik in with previous “spree” killers, Cambridge University psychologist and researcher Kevin Dutton told readers of his blog at Psychology Today that Utoya:

Wasn’t really about ideology or religion at all. That’s just the window dressing. It was all about him. Breivic [sic]. And his deep-seated feelings of inadequacy in relation to the opposite sex.

Others drew on the controversial argument put by Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint that extreme racism was a form of psychosis known as Delusional Disorder. Forensic psychologist Dr Michael Nuccitelli preferred Narcissistic Personality Disorder because he “planned and premeditated his expected infamy” — a tenuous link to a complex and frequently disputed diagnosis. Even London Mayor Boris Johnson weighed in, calling Breivik “patently mad” and predicting that “we can expect exhaustive psychoanalysis of this dreary and supercilious 32-year-old sicko”, even as he performed such.

The evidence for it was practically non-existent, but already the psychological-psychiatric narrative was taking shape. This was especially so because the Norwegian mass killings created a serious problem for the Right in both its mainstream and less acceptable forms. Here was a situation where its more or less open incitements to civilisational clashes were being turned into deeds in a cold, clinical, premeditated manner by an enthusiastic supporter. Desperate to hang on to their ideological positions, to be able to draw an improbable dividing line between ideas and actions, they resorted to a psychological rather than political argument.

The fact that Breivik praised and quoted verbatim the work of leading figures of the conservative Right in the United States led many of them to develop an “insanity defence” of their own. Pamela Geller, whose blog Atlas Shrugs is mentioned in the Manifesto, and which has been a focal point of opposition to the proposed Islamic centre in lower Manhattan, quickly denied culpability: “This guy was nuts … He co-opted the work, he stole the narrative, to substantiate his insane, violent plans”.

Author Robert Spencer, creator of Jihad Watch and co-founder of the group Stop The Islamization [sic] of America, repudiated any responsibility for Breivik’s actions in part by arguing, “This kind of thing is going to happen. You can’t account for psychopaths, and so I’m not going to be deterred.”

And the UK Daily Mail’s notorious Melanie Phillips was incandescent that anyone would associate the massacre with “decent people who are boiling with rage at being disenfranchised by an entire political class”. Breivik was simply “ in the grip of a psychosis”.

Psychosis, narcissism and the murderous mind

The notion that Breivik’s actions “did not bear examination” was a use, and usually a far-from-consistent one, of the two ideas of mental disturbance most frequently employed in the law — psychosis and personality disorder. Thus some people suffering psychosis can make the defence that they were so disconnected from reality that even though they understand the act is wrong and hurtful they believe other factors make it unavoidable (e.g. a mother with a psychotic depression drowns her children because she believes they are suffering because of her inability to parent them, and that the only way to relieve their torment is by going to heaven).

The discovery that Breivik’s Manifesto 2083 was easily downloadable from the internet shifted the focus away from the crudest generalisations, chiefly because of the document’s generally coherent structure and arguments. Much of it was lifted directly from right-wing websites and articles, many of them well known. Unlike Jared Lee Loughner, who shot an Arizona Democratic congresswoman in January 2011 while obsessed with government conspiracies as part of a psychotic illness, Breivik’s “madness” could not be parcelled off in the same way. Simply put, serious psychosis makes the kind of compiling and editing that Breivik did very difficult in the absence of effective treatment.

This brings us to the second kind of mental disorder that can be invoked to explain aberrant acts of violence: The category of “personality disorders”. These are a historically much more recent psychiatric construct, rising to prominence with the 1980 third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), widely recognised as the “bible” of modern psychiatric diagnosis. Yet, as the DSM’s authors are at pains to point out, there is no coherent theoretical framework behind these diagnostic categories, based as they are on clusters of maladaptive and socially unacceptable behaviours (rather than causative mechanisms). Research into these diagnoses has been plagued with questions over the arbitrary criteria that determine whether certain personality styles and problems of living get to be called “disorders”, as well as evidence that there is massive overlap between the categories that robs them of specificity.

Diagnoses like Narcissistic, Antisocial, Paranoid and Schizoid Personality Disorder also bear the marks of their social construction. One person’s successful, driven, confident political leader is another’s misanthropic, self-obsessed, destructive narcissist. One only needs think of how Australian political journalists lauded Kevin Rudd’s ruthless and single-minded capture of the Parliamentary Labor Party for his own agenda, but then retailed stories about his unsuitable personality when his prime ministership started to come under pressure politically. Yet no serious commentator would suggest that Rudd’s trajectory can only be understood in total separation from the Labor Party’s. Such an idea comes mainly from apologists for the party who want to lay the blame for the failure of its collective project on a wayward individual.

Significantly, personality disorders do not represent a complete break from reality. They do not normally represent a defence in the sense of “not guilty, mentally ill”. They are not, in our society, considered to excuse people of their culpability in criminal acts. Moreover, people who meet the criteria for such disorders hold widely divergent social and political views: From the banal mainstream to the extremes of Left and Right. There is no straight line from personality disorder to violent political mass murderer, any more than there is from personality disorder to ruthless entrepreneur.

But, of course, when an apparently singular and unthinkable horror occurs, that won’t stop attempts to reduce it to such categories, however crudely. The psychologisation of Breivik’s atrocities serves a function in settling fears, in isolating “extremists” as “lone gunmen” divorced from wider political developments, to paint a picture of a healthy political current whose only internal threats are aberrations. In this way it is a clear case of depoliticisation.

But it is also the reinstatement and intensification of the Right’s preferred political strategy for keeping the nation united by identifying the causes of social polarisation and instability in external threats; threats to nation, to culture, to resources, to cohesion. In such a configuration a mass political assassination can occur, yet within days the old threats from outside are re-emphasised because our internal problems are mere aberrations and outliers, of no greater meaning. Even if they shy from accepting Breivik’s most extreme conclusions, by calling him insane they seek to continue the same project by other means. It demonstrates above all that we need to get away from notions that any event which strikes us as brutal, sadistic or inexplicable should be dismissed as “mad” — and above all that we have to go beyond individual psychology if we are to understand the events that have most impact on us.

The Greens & Palestine: confronting inconvenient truths of the party’s right of return policy

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 15:52:00 +0000

Guest post by TONY HARRIS — cross-posted from his blog, Watermelon.

In March last year, 35 prominent Jewish Australians signed a petition renouncing their automatic right of return to Israel, labelling such a right a “racist privilege” while Palestinians, ethnically cleansed from Israel in 1948, are denied their rights of return under international law.

This goes to the heart of the problem of finding a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Palestinians are the largest refugee group in the world, and constitute the most protracted and long-term refugee problem — around seven million of the 11 million Palestinians are refugees, five million living in refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, under the supervision of the UN agency set up in 1951 specifically to deal with this population: the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).

The Australian Greens pride themselves on determined and principled defence of the rights of refugees. Greens politicians and activists can rightly take credit for focusing attention on the inconvenient truths of the rights of asylum seekers under international law, and in the process, helping to shift Australian public opinion over the appalling abuse of rights under current Federal Government asylum seeker policies. The Greens’ national website gives prominence to the fact that asylum seekers are not illegal, citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Palestinian refugees, who in May marched on the border with Israel during the annual Nakba commemoration, were not illegal either. Yet 14 paid for this right with their lives, shot by Israeli troops, in an extreme version of a Tony Abbott, “turn back the boats” exercise.

The right of return is the other side of the coin of seeking asylum. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights expresses this in a single sentence: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and return to his country”. This is reinforced under the International Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Alongside this is the even more explicit Palestinian “right of return” under United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 of 1948, which was accepted by the new Israeli state as a condition of its entry into the UN. This resolution states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss or damage to property.”

The Australian Greens position

There is an emerging strategy by the Greens’ national parliamentary leadership, following on from the national furore over support in the Greens for the BDS campaign against Israel, to try and present a “small target” over the Israel-Palestine conflict. This has involved a limited “cherry-picking” from Greens national policy, focusing solely on the question of the “two-state solution” and by extension, support for the Palestinian Authority’s UN bid for recognition of a Palestinian state. But the Greens also have a policy on the “right of return” and the national leadership is bound to assert it. It calls for: “a just and practical negotiated settlement of the claims of the Palestinian refugees that provides compensation for those who are unable to return to their country of origin, Israel or Palestine”.

The insertion of the term “practical negotiated settlement”, is an example of the usual caveat that finds its way into a political party platform but does not absolve the Australian Greens from interpreting this provision in line with international law. As has been pointed out above, this is less equivocal. Any “negotiated practical” outcomes cannot bargain away the right of return, and the alternative of compensation has to be offered as an option. In terms of who is defined as a refugee under international law, a guide is provided by the UNRWA definition: persons living in Palestine from the 1 June 1946 to 15 may 1948 together with “descendants of fathers fulfilling this definition”.

In this context there also needs to be a refutation of any notion of “trade-off” between Palestinian refugees and those Jews who moved to Israel from the Middle East and North Africa after 1948. While of these Jews were drawn to the new Israeli state, and others encouraged to do so by Zionist activists, there is no doubt that many were forced to flee from Arab states in the aftermath of the foundation of the state of Israel. The forced transfer of populations, whether Palestinians or Middle Eastern Jews, would today rightly be described as crimes against humanity under the Fourth Geneva Convention. One crime cannot be traded against another and the right of return of Palestinians is not diminished by the unwillingness or inability of Israeli Mizrahis to return to their countries of origin. Their right to do this, and be offered the option of compensation, is valid in its own right. It needs to be put onto the Arab states, especially in the context of the human-rights based Arab revolution, that they have responsibilities in this regard no less than Israeli responsibilities towards Palestinian refugees. Similarly, the willingness or otherwise of Arab states to grant proper settlement and citizenship rights to post-1948 Palestinian asylum seekers does not negate the Palestinian right of return.

In confronting this issue, then, the Australian Greens would be well advised to take up Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign reminder that it was “the economy, stupid”. For the Australian Greens approach to the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict “it’s the right of return, stupid”. This has consequences for the other part of the Greens’ Israel-Palestine policy: the two-state solution.

The right of return and the two-state solution

A right of return by Palestinians confined to just the 22 percent of historic Palestine, with nothing more than a token right of return to Israel, will not be acceptable to them or comply substantially with international law. This means that Israel will potentially have to absorb a considerable Palestinian population, substantially altering its demographics. On the other side of the fence any Palestinian state is likely to contain a sizeable number of Israeli Jews. The need to resolve the illegality, and land-grabbing, of the West Bank Jewish settlements aside, there are likely to be a considerable number of Israeli Jews remaining, perhaps being offered Palestinian citizenship. Indeed there is a strong argument that the settlements have effectively killed off a two-state solution, guaranteeing a bi-national state as the only effective resolution to the conflict.

Further, a Palestinian state on 22 percent of Palestine will not be economically viable and combined with a degree of Israeli dependence on the Palestinians, as a labour source, is likely to see the two states economically integrated. This of course would bring to the fore cross-border class tensions between a dominant Israeli, and subordinate Palestinian, capitalism on the one hand and potentially common class interests of Palestinian and Israeli workers and economically marginalised on the other.

All this begs the question why not just cut to the chase and have a bi-national state (which this writer supports), which is increasingly likely to end up as the default position. Nonetheless, a two-state solution may give a much sought-after national identity to both Israeli and Palestinian peoples in resolving the conflict, but will inevitably encompass a bi-ethnic, cross-border, political, economic and social reality.

The Greens’ political problem

Many in the Australian Greens have been focusing on the search for a “static”, electorally acceptable policy, which will keep the pro-Israel foreign policy and political establishments off their backs, and keep at bay their bête noire and staunchest critic, Federal MP Michael “Yankee Doodle” Danby (as Wikileaks reveals, he has communicated regularly with the US Embassy). The unfolding of the Arab revolution and the associated Palestinian resistance will at best render this strategy irrelevant. A good example of this was the debate over the BDS in the Senate in July where the Greens’ sole response, assertion of a two-state solution, ignored the then unfolding drama of the blocking of the Gaza peace flotilla. In this context the Greens need to engage with the unfolding dynamics on the ground.

The right of return as a core Palestinian demand has been restored with the recent developments within the Palestinian resistance, which lay emphasis on a human rights-based approach (see extensive discussion of these developments by various commentators on Al Jazeera, at The Electronic Intifada, and elsewhere). This is typified by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which has shifted focus from the final geopolitical outcome of the Israel-Palestine conflict to the immediate reality of Israel’s violation of international law and human rights norms as regards the occupation, the right of return, and discrimination against Arab-Israelis. This is in the context of a shift in the nature of Palestinian resistance from armed struggle to wider civil resistance, with non-violent actions such as the BDS and protests against the separation wall. These civil resistance techniques are not new to Palestinians; this kind of action has been brutally suppressed down the years under both Israeli and British colonial administrations. But they are being re-energised through the rights-based resistance and the wider Arab revolution, as well as through growing international support in such activities as the BDS and Gaza peace flotillas.

This rights-based civil resistance represents a “bottom up” approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, emphasising that Israel has here-and-now obligations under international law, which do not wait upon a final political settlement. This is an alternative to the bankrupt “top down” approach taken by the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in recent years, under pressure from the Western powers, which has been exposed by the publication of the Palestine Papers. It is also an alternative to the static and authoritarian policies of Hamas in Gaza and come from frustration at the inability of Hamas and Fatah to resolve differences and give democratic and accountable political leadership to the Palestinian resistance. The Fatah-led bid at the UN for the recognition of a Palestinian state (problematic though it is for many Palestinians) is in large measure a response to this groundswell and to the wider Arab revolution to which it is linked. There is also great potential for links to growing Israeli opposition to the policies of the right-wing Netanyahu government, through the universalities of a rights-based agenda, notwithstanding difficulties in such areas as debates over the BDS and issues like the Palestinian right of return.

The political outcome of the Israel-Palestine conflict will need to involve two peoples sharing the one land. And there is also a wider historical symmetry between the Jewish and Arabic peoples as the common victims of Western imperialism and racism, an important narrative that is largely absent from the debate. There is a lay-line of human suffering that runs through the death camps of the Holocaust and the demolished Arab villages of the Nakba; a timeline of Western imperialism and racism that extends from World War One, and its aftermath in both Europe and the Middle East, to the West’s backing of the “solution” of the Israeli colonial project. But since 1948 it has been the Palestinian people who have been expected to pay the price of this imperialism and racism. Palestinians, including refugees, have shown their determination not to pay this price.

Many in the Australian Greens have become frustrated with this situation, and the perceived excessive dominance of the issue in recent party debate. But it is history that has placed the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the Middle East generally, at the centre of world politics. The Greens must decide whether to be relevant in this issue, and engage dynamically with the Palestinians in their struggle, the wider Arab revolution of which it is part, and with the developing opposition within Israel. This struggle will intensify in the medium term as Israel, the US and their allies reject the UN Palestinian bid. Following through with support of the bid and its rejection will confront the Greens with the need to engage further with these dynamics on the ground. This would inevitably bring the Greens into further conflict with the pro-Israeli stance of Australia’s foreign policy establishment. The Greens must avoid the temptation to adopt a static, small-target approach for reasons of electoral safety, and follow through, showing the same determination as in the asylum seeker debate, and confronting the inconvenient truths of the conflict, such as the Palestinian right of return.

End times for democracy? How the 1% staged a coup & why worse is yet to come

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 23:06:00 +0000

'Don't forget who runs your economy now.'

For the 1 percent who rule society, democracy seems more than ever a hindrance to ensuring that the most calamitous economic crisis since the 1930s is paid for by the 99 percent below them. The most obvious expression of this is the installation of unelected technocrats as prime minister in Greece and Italy, in order to keep the countries’ governments firmly on the path of ever-deeper austerity programs designed to keep those ubiquitous “markets” happy.

It is here that we can see Lenin’s statement that “politics is a concentrated expression of economics” playing itself out concretely as a crisis of production and debt has mutated into a crisis of the political class, the state, and national sovereignty.

Democracy: Going, going, gone?

Behind all the platitudes being mouthed about the potential for economic mandarins to seriously address these interlocked emergencies, there remains the stubborn fact that in each country the problem was a political elite unable to maintain a social consensus for the brutality being inflicted to keep the Eurozone together. In neither country was there an election and nor in each case did the leader even lose a vote of confidence on the floor of Parliament. Indeed, in Greece George Papandreou won such a vote only to immediately step down in favour of a “government of national unity” headed by a little-known neoliberal bureaucrat.

The only legitimacy accessed by Papademos and Monti has been a negative one, based in the deep unpopularity and lack of authority of all sections of the political class across Europe. It is a situation where the factions of the Greek far Left together hold better poll results than either of the two main parties, and where Berlusconi was so deeply discredited that his premiership may have collapsed even without the pressure coming from Berlin, Paris and bond holders.

Left Flank has argued before that 2011 has been a year of global resistance from below on a scale not seen since 1968, but one key feature of any such conjuncture will be manoeuvres by ruling elites to head off and break rebellion through a mixture of coercion and consent.

The imposition of technocratic rule is just one of the mechanisms available in a period of sharp crisis, and it is neither new nor a sign that the ruling class can necessarily impose its will. As Marx argued in 1853 in relation to a period of “technical” rule in Britain, “The best thing perhaps that can be said in favour of the Coalition [technical] Ministry is that it represents impotency in [political] power at a moment of transition.” However, the experience of Weimar Germany suggests that such subversion of liberal democracy can also lead to the imposition of ever more authoritarian forms of government, ever further from the niceties of popular consent. We are not there yet, and it would be wrong to overplay rumours that the Greek generals are thinking of staging a military coup, for which there is little evidence at present. It’s not that such moves may not be attempted if things get worse, but to raise excessive fears about their prospect can easily feed an argument that the Left should accede to a very real technocratic coup so as to try to dodge authoritarianism down the track.

These events have occurred concurrently with new attacks on the Occupy movement across the United States, where it has emerged that Mayors involved in the coordinated crackdown colluded not just with each other but the US Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

Conservative forces have also played their hand in relation to the Arab Spring. Western Powers gained new legitimacy thanks to the NATO intervention in Libya, with sections of the Syrian democracy movement looking to a similar deal with the devil. Yet while direct Western intervention looks less likely, the key players in the region — brought together in the Gulf Cooperation Council, throwing its weight around via influence within the Arab League — are seeking to divert movements from below and to drive a wedge against a key opponent, Iran. Nobody should shed a tear if Bashar al-Assad falls, but to see foreign meddling in his downfall as innocent of such dynamics would be naïve.

Imperialism is not just something that happens in the developing world. You can see it in the imposition of ECB/IMF rule on Greece and Italy and in other machinations at the top of the Eurozone hierarchy. Angela Merkel told her CDU party’s conference that the monetary union needed new rules to impose even tougher fiscal discipline on member states, under the banner of “closer integration”. And Finland’s Europe Minister has called for the six Triple-A rated economies in the Eurozone to be given extra powers to dictate what happens in the 11 non-core economies and new entrants, over the heads of locally elected governments.

{Source: FT.com}

The far Right on a new terrain

The current crisis is so serious that such manoeuvres may well come to nothing. There is a real prospect of Greece (and/or some other country) defaulting on its debt and exiting the Euro. If the existing elite structures cannot provide a clear path out of the crisis, there are darker forces hoping to win support for more authoritarian solutions. For example, Dutch hard Right populist Geert Wilders has started to publicly talk about taking his country out of the Euro, and French presidential candidate Marine LePen — of the fascist National Front — has been gaining mainstream traction through her party’s objection to the single currency. In Greece the far Right LAOS party has joined the government of national unity.

Meanwhile, Germany has been partly distracted from the Eurozone crisis by revelations that a Nazi terrorist group operated for a decade under the nose of state security agencies, while carrying out a series of brutal anti-immigrant murders. And Norwegian fascist Anders Breivik has appeared in open court and been granted media access while he awaits his trial. Despite at times ludicrous media attempts to situate his act of mass murder in crude psychological terms, he continues to state he is a “resistance fighter” against Islam’s destruction of Europe via the encouragement of multiculturalism by the “cultural Marxists” of the centre-Left.

It was issues like these that Guy Rundle and I discussed with Phillip Adams on ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live the other night (the interview can be podcasted here), in line with the argument developed in our e-book, On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe (available here). One key point I raised was the fact that in extreme socioeconomic crises, when large sections of the middle class are — in Trotsky’s term — driven to despair by the destruction of their aspirations and livelihoods, fascist ideas can gain a mass hearing and apparently isolated individuals like Breivik can act as a beacon to growing networks of extremists as they prosecute the argument that only an extreme nationalist solution will resolve the crisis.

The point is not to see the accession of the far Right to power as imminent (it is not) but to understand that it is not inevitable that liberal democracy can reassert control in a situation where the social basis for it has been so dramatically undermined. There is no guarantee that existing political classes and state elites can restore stability in such a precarious situation, and certainly not without resort to extreme measures that open the way for more sinister actors to play a role.

Resistance and politics

The coming period raises decisive questions not just about the ability of ordinary people to resist the effects of the crisis but about what sort of politics are needed to give them the best chance of pointing a way out. Any such approach must start from a position of refusal to surrender to “the dictatorship of the markets”, to stand with every social struggle against the austerity measures being demanded and to argue that the 99 percent have the right to reject any practical culpability for the crisis.

Already there have been mass anti-government protests in Greece, on the anniversary of the 1973 student uprising against military rule, as well as in Italy, against a “bankers’ government”. Occupy London has to date defied an eviction notice and even expanded the protest into a nearby empty building owned by financial giant UBS. Any thought that the SCAF had strangled the key movement of the Arab Spring was also upset as one of the biggest protests since February filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square and other Egyptian cities. This doesn’t come out of nowhere, as workers’ strikes have spread and grown dramatically in recent months, underlining the growing social dynamic to the revolution.

But beyond this there is no formula for how this plays out politically. Lenin also famously said that Marxists should engage in “concrete analysis of the concrete situation”, and that “politics must take precedence over economics”. The Left is very weak internationally despite the re-energising influence of the last 12 months. For example, notwithstanding the brilliant Indignados movement in Spain, the Left remains relatively marginal when it comes to the forthcoming elections, in which the conservative pro-austerity PP is expected to win a massive majority. In part this reflects the way that electoral politics tend to lag social movement activity, but it is also a legacy of the fragmentation of opposition to austerity, with the trade unions having surrendered to PSOE’s attacks and the 15M movement (understandably but mistakenly) reacting to this with an outright rejection of political parties and unions, thereby partly abandoning the field to existing political actors.

Yet Greece shows that something different is possible. Not only has the radical Left grown in influence, the argument of a section of that Left for debt default, exit from the single currency and a radical program of nationalisation, capital controls and other progressive measures has been widely discussed. In this way, there has been a serious Left response to the most unavoidable concrete fact of the crisis: The fragile position of the key European neoliberal project of the last two decades — monetary union. It is around this axis that all other questions pivot as ruling classes around the Eurozone scramble to save the project, at the cost of social devastation.

As Costas Lapavitsas and his team at SOAS have cogently argued in their latest report on the Eurozone crisis (and as Lapavitsas argued in a major debate at the Historical Materialism conference in London last week), such an action program would not be a solution in and of itself, but could act as a bridge to rebuilding a confident and politically-focused struggle for socialism based inside the working class. The idea remains controversial, particularly because for some on the Left it is mistakenly seen as caving in to nationalism, but it targets the glaring weak point of European capitalism and its austerity-focused politicians and technocrats.

This is exactly the kind of revitalised, concrete, strategic Left politics that needs to be fused with mass resistance already emerging in response to the current crisis. Otherwise we risk being dragged ever closer to the social hell our rulers seem to have no clear alternative to demanding of us. This is the challenge we face.

A Left Flank dispatch from Europe: The ‘descent into chaos’ begins

noreply@blogger.com (Dr_Tad) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:56:00 +0000

If the last week’s bizarre political contortions in Greece — first a referendum, then not, then a government of national unity, now more uncertainty — were not enough, the spread of contagion to Italy threatens even greater turmoil. As we arrived in London we were greeted by the Financial Times informing us that Silvio Berlusconi had (finally) agreed to resign as PM, but apparently in part so he could maintain a hope of running for the top job yet again in early elections.

The relief among European financial elites that once again they had imposed political change over the heads of any kind of sovereign democratic decision-making by the people of individual European nations (let’s recall that both Greece and now Italy have accepted IMF and European Central Bank mandarins to “monitor” and oversee their domestic finances), rapidly crumbled and the Evening Standard headline by late afternoon laid bare the seriousness of the situation. As one Facebook friend said, it’s Eurapocalypse Now.

Perhaps in Australia, where we’ve weathered the worst of the global crisis, the faltering authority of our political class can appear (only appear) to be a function of contingent, extra-economic factors, but in Europe there is no mistaking that it is a crisis of political economy, as top UBS economist George Magnus was at pains to point out in August, invoking a famous quote from Karl Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within this framework of which they have operated hitherto

For pretty much the best account of how the global economic crisis, the post-2007 unravelling of the debt-driven era of financialised capitalism that we’ve lived through (and which in Australia has been held in stasis thanks to a mixture of stimulus and resources export markets in China) as it applies to Europe, you can do no better than read the three reports by the SOAS London based Research on Money and Finance group released over the last couple of years. The third has just come out and they are downloadable here.

To briefly sum up, the problems in the Eurozone are primarily caused by the way that the construction of a new international reserve currency to compete with the US dollar has exacerbated inequalities between “core” and “peripheral” Eurozone nations. This has seen the German ruling class’ cuts to its workers’ real wages give it a massive competitive advantage over poorer capitalisms such as Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal (and now even Italy). That process led to Germany effectively becoming the chief creditor to the increasingly indebted periphery, and when the GFC broke these disparities came to a head, especially as private debts rapidly became sovereign debt through massive taxpayer-funded bailouts of the banks and financial system.

Thus, claims that the ordinary people of Greece and other peripheral countries have been “living beyond their means” are pure elite ideology, designed to get ordinary people to accept endless austerity in order to save a monetary project that has always been about shoring up the interests of European capital and not European workers. The current crisis also exposes how the most powerful European capitalisms (Germany and France in particular) have gained the most from the arrangement, leaving the peripheral nations trapped in an impossible debt spiral. But peripheral ruling elites feel ever more tied to the Euro the worse things get, fearing that being outside the tent will leave them more exposed to both their competitiveness problem and the anger of their own populations. At the same time, the post-2007 crisis now threatens to disrupt and possibly destroy that hierarchy, as Greece approaches default and possible Eurozone exit.

The great thing about the RMF reports, and especially the latest one, is that they are not primarily concerned about the fortunes of Greek capitalism in such a situation, but how the pressing social questions created by the crisis can be addressed. And so they should, as a recent report in the leading international medical journal The Lancet ha shown that the crisis has been a disaster for the health of ordinary Greeks, concluding, “It reminds us that, in an effort to finance debts, ordinary people are paying the ultimate price: losing access to care and preventive services, facing higher risks of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases, and in the worst cases losing their lives.” Another report in the same journal has shown a sharp rise in suicidality.

Costas Lapavitsas and his RMF co-authors argue that default and exit from the Eurozone is the best option for ordinary Greeks, but for it to truly address issues of social justice there would have to be immediate nationalisation of banks and a shift in power from capital to organised labour. They spell out the beginnings of a serious transitional program: A response to the crisis from below around which ordinary people can be mobilised.

In the UK things are not quite as dire, but within hours of arriving we caught part of a 10,000-strong student protest against Con-Dem attacks on the education system. This is the first major student mobilisation of the new academic year and follows the wave of radical protests and occupations of late 2010. Since then there have also been mass union protests (including strikes) against the government’s harsh austerity program and 30 November is set to be the largest national work stoppage since the General Strike of 1926. It will involve significant strikes by health workers against cuts and privatisations within the NHS. Occupy London continues at two sites near the heart of the City of London.

The ideological ferment is considerable. A talk by Canadian political scientist David McNally — on the topic of his new book, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism — packed out a lecture room at Kings College last night. David’s arrival in the UK seems to have coincided with the gathering of clouds over the Eurozone. As someone once wrote, “It was a dark and stormy night…”

Left Flank in London

noreply@blogger.com (liz_beths) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:49:00 +0000

Tad and Elizabeth are both presenting conference papers at this year’s Historical Materialism conference, held in Central London later this week. UK readers can register for the conference here.

This is the abstract for Tad’s paper Beyond critical psychiatry: Towards a materialist account of mental illness:

After decades of dominance, biological psychiatry faces a crisis of legitimacy and the emergence of new critical perspectives within and outside the profession. Some have even questioned basic philosophical assumptions of psychiatric research and practice. This growing critique is particularly evident in debates over the diagnosis of depression, a condition whose prevalence and treatment has risen dramatically in the neoliberal era, and whose validity is increasingly under challenge. Yet, despite at times offering radical insights, such critiques fail to provide a thoroughgoing rethinking of the mainstream psychiatric project. A Marxist approach, drawing especially on the work of Valentin Voloshinov and Peter Sedgwick, must start by integrating four key insights to move beyond the limits of critical psychiatry’s current scope: (1) The critique of medical individualism as the basic organising principle of clinical practice, (2) the conceptualisation of emotion and cognition as emerging at the boundary between the (biological) subject and society, (3) the nature of health and illness, “mental” and “physical”, as social constructions, and (4) the indissoluble link between identification of illness and the social practice of treatment. The integration of these concepts within a materialist account of the rise of depression locates it in a dynamic, contested space at the intersection of powerful corporate and state interests, the reductive biological horizons of capitalist medicine, and the growing social distress produced by three decades of neoliberalisation — as well as growing subaltern opposition to their effects. Such an account can act as a framework for further investigations into mental health and illness in the context of projects for social transformation, as well as contributing to alternative heuristics in psychiatric research.

This is the abstract for Elizabeth’s paper Understood in their ‘originality and uniqueness’: Locating Gramsci’s organic intellectuals in the Australian Global Justice movement:

Antonio Gramsci articulated the category of ‘organic intellectuals’ to describe individuals whose role is ‘as constructor, organiser, “permanent persuader”,’ providing leadership within hegemonic projects to forge a ‘popular collective will’. Gramsci linked this construct to that of ‘The Modern Prince’, a strategic centre (or party) within subaltern hegemonic movements, bringing together organic intellectuals within a common project. While these general conceptions have been much discussed, they have less commonly been utilised in the concrete study of modern social movements. The emergence of the Global Justice Movement (GJM) in the late 1990s seems to provide a fertile context in which to examine the relevance of Gramsci’s theoretical approach, especially as the movement possessed clear anti-systemic characteristics and rapidly drew together diverse social forces around common concerns and aims (both within and across national boundaries). In the weeks after the Seattle protests of late 1999 it led Stephen Gill to proclaim the emergence of a ‘Post-Modern Prince’ which sought ‘to develop a global and universal politics of radical (re)construction’. Contra Gill, Matthew D Stephen pointed to the limitations of the GJM’s model of ‘unity in diversity’ vis-à-vis Gramsci’s problematic, noting especially Gill’s silence on the role of organic intellectuals in cohering the movement’s direction. Drawing on analysis of interviews with leading activists from the Australian GJM, this paper demonstrates the utility of Gramsci’s categories. It highlights the crystallisation of a layer of movement ‘networkers’ — akin to organic intellectuals — from within the various sectors of the movement but whose orientation was to build a wider movement transcending those sectoral divisions. It also points to the limitations of their development when the GJM fell into decline, their inability to collectively respond to the challenges faced by the movement, and ultimately the inability of the movement to produce a self-conscious ‘Modern Prince’ to take it forward. It confirms Stephen’s assessment of Gill’s premature celebration of the GJM, but also — following Gramsci — suggests the potential for a deeper development of anti-systemic movements through a conscious focus on uniting movement networkers as a central aim of building an effective strategic centre.

Australia’s #occupy protests: When ‘politics’ is no longer just a game played by elites

noreply@blogger.com (liz_beths) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:35:00 +0000

Occupy Sydney: photo by Kate Ausburn

This week ABC’s The Drum published an article by Tad on the Occupy Movement and the demand from many that it list its 'demands'. Below is the article in full. Tad was also interviewed on ABC Brisbane about this question.

It's been remarkable to see the sheer number of public lectures and admonishments - delivered by assorted politicians, pundits, bloggers and Tweeters - that Australia's #occupy activists have had to endure since they started their protests on October 15.
Indeed, there is a glaring contradiction in the fact that so much attention has been paid to a movement by detractors who also claim it is irrelevant to local conditions and therefore has no chance of attracting wider recognition.

You'd think the protesters had launched an armed insurrection to overthrow modern civilisation from the hysterical tone of some conservative critics, who have also lavished praise on aggressive police operations to evict camps in Melbourne and Sydney. Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, for example, justified the crackdown not just with invective against protesters ("a self-righteous, narcissistic, self-indulgent rabble" and "a hard core of serial and professional protesters, hell-bent on trouble") but also (twice in one article) made the bizarrely inflated claim that the protesters were holding the entire city "to ransom".

Others soon joined the fray, spraying ridicule and anger at those daring to find systemic problems of inequality and lack of democracy in our society. Gerard Henderson complained that the protests were merely a reflection of left-wing "narcissism", not noting the irony of devoting an entire SMH op-ed to draw attention to this fact. Perhaps most disturbingly, the Daily Telegraph's Tim Blair went as far as advocating water cannon, torture techniques and even Wicker Man style witch-burning to deal with protesters in an apparently "satirical" attack on the movement. Even many, like Treasurer Wayne Swan, who acknowledged that the movement was pointing to real social problems, felt the need to criticise it for descending into "violence" (here defined as doing something other than disbanding your protest the moment the authorities tell you to).

Yet relatively small and not especially militant protests captured much attention. The key to understanding why is, as I have argued elsewhere, in the fact that:

The protesters occupying public space may still only have the passive support of large sections of the Australian population, but they have done something very important - given a voice and shape, however inchoate, to a new culture of resistance and rebellion. By doing so they have also exposed a crisis of authority from which our rulers are no longer immune.
To grasp why this is, it is important to dispense with one of the most erroneous claims made against the movement, retailed by its conservative haters as well as some progressive voices keen to point out its deficiencies. Put simply, these critics claim that the movement lacks politics, by which they mean easily defined demands or policy prescriptions.

Why demanding demands is a road to nowhere

At first sight, the #occupy movement has been frustratingly short of what is these days commonly understood as a political program, instead mostly producing consensus statements about what is wrong without articulating a clear agenda for what should be done about it. Yet, rather than being an immediate liability, this actually reflects a strength in the current circumstances, and in fact points to how the movement's politics are actually more significant than the bread and circuses we get from Canberra and the commentariat.

Firstly, this is a brand new movement, united by the belief that there are deep systemic issues that lie behind rising poverty and inequality, and that social and political institutions have been subordinated to corporate interests, thereby rendering them unrepresentative of the vast majority. This is the politics summed up in the slogan, "we are the 99 per cent". It is therefore inane to argue that it must also immediately have a simple, digestible set of policies to deal with problems on such a scale. The very open nature of the protests, their invitation for people to join working groups and assemblies to debate alternatives, is a statement about the need for a genuine democracy. By stipulating that the movement have a ready-made program, critics also reflect their view of "democracy" as work done by minorities in opaque back rooms, with a complete lack of public involvement.

Secondly, there is often an exhortation that the movement should repackage its anti-systemic critique into piecemeal reform proposals that can easily be inserted into the machinations of mainstream parties. This was the kind of line taken by some progressive critics of the protests. Yet such an approach would automatically defeat the purpose of the movement, which has been to call attention to the fact that more radical change is needed. Such a line of argument reflects the way that politics, government and economics have been reduced to a kind of "technocratic managerialism" in the neoliberal era, where markets must be allowed to operate on their own steam and policy is about making small, (allegedly) ideology-free tweaks to get better outcomes.

As Slavoj Zizek warns, the protests should be wary of false friends who argue that the movement should come out and support progressive agendas being run from above, as Bill Clinton has in both praising the protests and saying they should get behind the Obama jobs plan. Zizek argues:

What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of concrete pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum - a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, as it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly new.
Thirdly, the protests are not a break with politics-in-general, but with a specific kind of politics: That of the official political system. Such a phenomenon can be seen most clearly in the Spanish indignados movement, where fury with political parties and trade unions led to a ban on all organised and visible involvement by such organisations in the occupations. But in all cases around the world there is a clear sense that really existing structures of liberal democracy have failed; that popular sovereignty has no expression through the "usual channels". In Spain the slogans "Real Democracy Now!" and "No-one represents us!" captured this sentiment adroitly. Thus, a refusal to "come to the party" and play the game like the politicians do is a powerful rejection of official politics, which at the same time opens the space for a politics from below, where ordinary people debate and decide their own futures rather than leaving it in the hands of a political class that serves the rich and powerful.

Finally, the movement's anti-systemic critique, however embryonic, is tied up with the notion that an alternative is both necessary and possible. Thus, accusations of utopianism are really beside the point because in this context they really mean demanding that alternatives must not be entertained. Liberal shadow minister Christopher Pyne got closer to this than many of those hostile to #occupy when he argued on ABC's Q&A that opposing capitalism was wrong because the only possible alternative was 20th Century Communism - i.e. Stalinism. But, as Zizek points out:

The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons - the commons of nature, of knowledge - which are threatened by the [capitalist] system.
In the context of a deep and mutating crisis of the global economy that has robbed even the ruling elites of confidence that they can repair the situation in their own interests, the refusal of demands and the positing of alternatives have been able to demand the attention of millions of people. The absurdity of the critics who "demand demands" is that they have been forced to recognise and respond to the movement so hysterically, thereby disproving their own contention that it is irrelevant until it plays the games they prefer. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more relevant movement in Australian society than this one - right here, right now.

Where the real challenges lie

There is, however, an important sense in which a strategic debate over demands will be inevitable within the movement as it develops - but one that must build on the movement's fundamental social critique rather than negate it (as mainstream critics would prefer). It is essential, then, to read the recent debate and subsequent comments on Overland Journal's blog, where activists thoughtfully discuss exactly these problems from an insider perspective. While I completely disagree with Mike Stuchbery's view that the movement should orient on giving itself the "best possible shot at winning some concessions from government and corporations", reducing it to an NGO-like pressure group, he also raises something that supporters of the movement have often not addressed - the role of demands in mobilising active supporters.

This is especially vital because for the movement to grow in strength it needs to draw in much wider layers of the 99 per cent. The evictions in Melbourne and Sydney, and now the scenes of police terror in Oakland, show that, unless the movement gets bigger and better rooted, governments will try to break it through the use of force against small groups of protesters. One reason the Wall Street camp has been so successful is that has rapidly managed to inspire and draw in significant sections of organised labour. It is here that the question of "demands" takes on a new meaning - in terms of finding ways to articulate the movement's anti-systemic critique with the concrete situation ordinary people - the 99 per cent - find themselves in.

Even in Manhattan this has been an underdeveloped feature of the movement, as was explored in a fascinating debate on Left strategy and #OWS held two weeks ago. The formation of a Demands Working Group has attracted controversy within the movement but reflects an attempt to address these strategic needs.

UK writer and activist Anindya Bhattacharyya (recently arrested while reporting on the Wall Street protests) has argued that effective demands:

Should be addressed diagonally, ie to both the ruling elite and the popular movement simultaneously, or more precisely, they should formally pose a demand addressed to the elite, but actually raise a slogan that engages and resonates with the movement - mobilising it and thereby subjectivating it from within.
Reversing the old Situationist concept that one should "be realistic and demand the impossible", Bhattacharyya calls for slogans that are technically feasible but considered completely unrealistic within official political discourse. Rather than simply accept what "concessions" elites are prepared to give, this kind of "demand forces its own possibility and reconfigures the frame of what is considered 'realistic'."

There is no formula for such demands - they come from the concrete situations in which people find themselves. But one could imagine the Australian #occupy movement demanding, for example, a complete end to mandatory detention of asylum seekers, or a big rise in taxes on corporations and the rich, or guaranteed paid employment for all adult citizens, or the replacement of the failed superannuation system with properly funded government pensions, or massive government investment in renewable energy and public transport - shutting down carbon-emitting industries as these come on line.

Yes, these are "demands", and ones the #occupy movement may choose to consider in order to spread its reach and strengthen itself. But while they are all within the realm of what's "possible" and "necessary", they are certainly not what critics will see as being politically "realistic". The importance of such demands is that they start with the idea that we cannot trust the 1 per cent to be nicer to us if we simply ask. Rather, such demands - and the movement itself - start by declaring that the 99 per cent must take matters into their own hands.