LENIN'S TOMB

Tihur

2009-11-21T12:49:00.001Z

"Of the more than 6,400 people surveyed, 53.2 said 'Transfer of Palestinians to another Arab country' when asked, 'What's the best solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict?'"

Political correctness

2009-11-20T10:48:00.000Z

Historical Materialism conference

2009-11-19T09:07:00.001Z

The sixth annual Historical Materialism conference takes place next weekend, 27th to 29th November.

Speakers include: Gilbert Achcar * Robert Albritton * Kevin Anderson * Jairus Banaji * Wendy Brown * Alex Callinicos * Vivek Chibber * Hester Eisenstein * Ben Fine * Ferruccio Gambino * Lindsey German * Peter Hallward * John Holloway * Fredric Jameson * Bob Jessop * David McNally * China Mieville * Kim Moody * Leo Panitch * Moishe Postone * Sheila Rowbotham * Julian Stallabrass * Hillel Ticktin * Kees Van Der Pijl * Hilary Wainright

Panels include: APOCALYPSE MARXISM * ART AGAINST CAPITALISM * CLASS AND POLITICS IN THE 'GLOBAL SOUTH' * COGNITIVE MAPPING, TOTALITY AND THE REALIST TURN * COMMODIFYING HEALTH CARE IN THE UK * CUBAN REVOLUTION AND CUBAN SOCIETY * DERIVATIVES * DIMENSIONS OF THE FOOD CRISIS * ECOLOGICAL CRISIS * EMPIRE AND IMPERIALISM * ENERGY, WASTE AND CAPITALISM * FINANCE, THE HOUSING QUESTION AND URBAN POLITICS * GLOBAL LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS * GRAMSCI RELOADED * INTERPRETATIONS OF THE CRISIS * LABOUR BEYOND THE FACTORY * LATIN AMERICAN WORKING CLASSES * LINEAGES OF NEOLIBERALISM * MARXISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE * MIGRATION * PHILOSOPHY AND COMMUNISM IN THE EARLY MARX * POSTNEOLIBERALISM * RACE, NATION AND ORIENTALISM * RED PLANETS: MARXISM AND SCIENCE FICTION * REMEMBERING PETER GOWAN AND CHRIS HARMAN * REVOLUTIONARY THEORY, AUTONOMIST MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY * SLAVERY AND CAPITALISM IN THE US SOUTH * STUDENT MOVEMENTS AND YOUTH REVOLTS * THE CRITIQUE OF RELIGION AND THE CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM * UTOPIAS, DYSTOPIAS AND SOCIALIST BIOPOLITICS.

Book here.

Eco-malthusianism

2009-11-18T21:23:00.003Z

When the system fails people, the bourgeoisie instinctively responds by blaming those people for being inadequate and supernumerary to the system's requirements. During the 1980s, when there was a wave of anger and horror over the famines needlessly blighting parts of the African continent, it was a polemical commonplace to blame overpopulation. Today, a disaster known euphemistically as 'climate change' threatens the lives of millions, particularly the poorest millions. Predictably, there are those for whom the problem is too many people. In May this year, it was reported that a select coterie of billionaires - including Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros - was teaming up to combat overpopulation. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is already committing some of the immense wealth appropriated by Bill through his career in stolen software to tackling the problem. (Don't bother mulling over the quantity of CO2 emissions that were needlessly generated by the excess of production, retail and consumption entailed by Microsoft's practises of planned obsolescence. That's philanthropy for you.)

Now one is increasingly likely to hear from a British think-tank that has been getting in all the newspapers, called the Optimum Population Trust. Some of its leading members are also connected to the racist think-tank Migration Watch, whose bogus statistics are used in immigrant-bashing tabloid eristics. The OPT wants to return population levels in the UK to those pertaining in the Victorian era, before modern hygeine and medicine stopped wiping out the labouring classes. The optimum world population, it says, could be as low as 2.7bn. Its most vociferous champions, including such distinguished individuals as James Lovelock and Sir David Attenborough, assert that the ecological crisis is the flip-side to a population crisis.

In one of its efforts to frighten people into accepting its bizarre conclusions, the OPT says that if population continues to grow at its present rate, then by 2300 it will reach 134 trillion. This is an opportune moment to wheel out the old chestnut about insurmountable horseshit (cited here). It was a commonplace in the 19th Century that if horse-drawn traffic continued to increase at its then current rate, the ordure would eventually pile up several storeys high in New York, London and other major cities. (You can insert your own warmed over horseshit joke here). There are many lessons you can draw from the parable of the horse apples, but one is that just because a trend can be extrapolated from to reach an absurd conclusion doesn't mean that the extrapolation is trustworthy. There may be some important data that is excluded from the extrapolation. As George Monbiot has pointed out, the UN expects the world's population to stabilise at around 10bn by 2200, because the trend is for population growth to stop at a certain limit.

Today, the OPT was once more given television and newspaper spots to comment on a new United Nations report some of whose conclusions seem to abet its crazy eco-malthusianism. It would be ridiculous to blame the UN for the way debates over its reports are framed by the media (unless it courts such a reading). But, for example, C4 News tonight chose to focus on the claim that slower population growth would help slow climate change, citing statistics that claim a difference of a billion people is equal to a difference of 1-2bn tonnes of carbon per year. There followed an insultingly poor 'debate' in which Simon Ross of the OPT squared off against Caroline Boin of the International Policy Network, a corporate lobby group opposed to restrictions on profit-making activities (of course, the nature of neither group represented was explained to the viewer). The OPT is understandably cheered up by this report, with Ross glibly asserting that more people equals more mouths and a greater carbon footprint. The glaring flaw in this argument, which I'm sure immediately occurred to most LT readers, is that population is growing most where carbon emissions are least.

The highest population growth rates are in countries such as Liberia, Niger, Uganda, Eritrea, Afghanistan, etc etc - precisely the countries where carbon dioxide emissions per capita are very low and generally close to zero. Those countries which produce most carbon emissions per capita are a cluster of relatively rich Middle Eastern countries such as Qatar, which don't have especially high population growth rates, and the late capitalist economies of Europe and North America, where politicians tend to argue that there is inadequate population growth to sustain existing social security safety nets.

To quote Monbiot again:

Between 1980 and 2005, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world’s population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world’s population growth happened in places with very low emissions.

What is driving 'climate change' is a particular kind of economic activity, not population growth. Lifestyles are important too. Those sported by the richest tend to exploit and run down our environmental life support systems the hardest. The carbon footprint of a multi-billionaire philanthropist is certain to be dozens of times higher than that of an African labourer. To put it one way, Bill Gates will emit more CO2 jetting to conferences on population growth than a coltan miner in the DRC will in is entire lifespan. So maybe Bill and Melinda shouldn't have any fucking kids. And, by the way, Bill needs that coltan miner, and the genocidal armies who ensure that the ore is delivered to western corporations such as Microsoft, so he shouldn't really get lippy about population growth.

All of the above is perfectly obvious and could be worked out without the aid of a degree in one of the physical sciences. All that is required is a simple inference, based on well-known facts about the distribution of population growth and about the sources of carbon emissions. So, why are we still stuck with these kooky theories? There is obviously an element of ideological legerdemain, particularly when the rich start lecturing the poor on family planning. And corporate PR machines are very adept at muddying waters. But more fundamentally, I fear, it is that the capitalist media is constitutionally incapable of dealing with the issue of environmental disaster seriously, and of grappling with the profound issues raised by it. There is such a blind-spot about any issue that has systemic implications that it can only be approached through such contrived controversies, which are then furiously argued over for five minutes before the advertisements for cheap airlines.

Gaming war

2009-11-17T13:13:00.001Z

This is an MoD demo programme showing soldiers how to handle roadblocks in Iraq:

And this is a video game showing people why they should join the army in the first place (cuz shooting people up is way cool):

Here comes the flood

2009-11-17T10:55:00.004Z

A BBC poll finds that the majority of Britons favour spending cuts. In particular, given a choice between tax hikes and cuts to benefits, 59% favour cuts to benefits. A poll is not holy writ, and respondents do not answer on oath, or in-depth. Posing the question differently - should we tax the rich instead?, etc. - would yield different answers. Nonetheless, such findings indicate that a substantial number of people are amenable to Tory arguments. And that the propaganda war being waged by capital is succeeding.

There is no deficit crisis. There is absolutely no reason to cut public spending, and every reason why it would be a disaster when demand likely to be weak in the coming years. Nonetheless, both major parties are committed to this underlying assumption that public spending must be cut at some point to pay for the bankers' bailouts. Necessarily, therefore, the public debate will continue to play out in a narrow spectrum of when, not whether, spending should be cut. And here, as the figures also show, the Tories are beginning to win the argument that it happen sooner rather than later. This ridiculously poor level of debate is one reason why the Conservatives are capable of not only maintaing a double digit lead over New Labour, but also of grooming their leader as a man of the people.

Some polyannas are citing a slight dip in the unemployment rate to suggest that the crisis may be over. This will undoubtedly be siezed on by Tory hawks to say that recovery is afoot, and we must at last address the fiscal gap. But the ubiquitous experts, whose advice will undoubtedly contribute to investment decisions by firms in the coming years, aren't entirely buying this, pointing to weak fundamentals. They expect years of high unemployment, which means years of weak demand. However, I expect that the Tories are as aware of this as the CBI and the FT are. The commitment to attacking public spending, specifically the welfare state, is simple class war.

The left needs to win this argument at a number of levels. Fundamentally, we have to persuade the organised working class that such cuts are unnecessary and that they can and should defeat any government that attempts to impose them. The recent postal strike could, if successful, have given wider layers of workers the confidence necessary to take on the government. And it would have hit in a timely fashion, a fitting warning shot to the Tories. But the executive unanimously approved a deal that demobilised the workforce in exchange for no significant concession other than that there would be further talks. That is a setback.

More broadly, however, we need to work to establish the most convivial political atmosphere in which resistance can take place. If people are demoralised by the overall political terrain, they are far less likely to risk industrial action. Labour is going to lose enormously, whatever the left does, and that will leave initially quite a strong Tory administration to take up the whip against the unions and anyone else they feel they need to discipline. And, regardless of any other consideration, any left-of-Labour vote would certainly be squeezed in such an election, absent a level of class struggle far more consequential than the current state of affairs. So it is unfortunate that the efforts to develop some sort of left electoral unity continue to stutter and start, so that the most likely scenario in 2010 is that a patchwork of different left groups run candidates under separate names and register little impact nationally.

On top of this, we have to fight a rearguard defence against the far right, with the EDL streetfighters trying to attack mosques, while the BNP parachutes their leader into Barking to try to capitalise on their previous gains in Barking and Dagenham council elections. Margaret Hodge is the last person you would trust to see off the BNP, given that it was her fumbling concessions to fascist propaganda that actually helped the BNP gain 13 seats in 2006. So, a considerable portion of the energies of grassroots activists will be devoted to seeing off that threat. The fact that the EDL continue to be frustrated and outnumbered in their efforts does it make further breakthroughs for the BNP more difficult, given that the latter rely on a contrived atmosphere of racial crisis and conflict to build. But the more votes they get, the more the mainstream media can justify giving them television spots and puff pieces, and the more bourgeois politicians will take it as a cue to move further to the right on issues to do with race and immigration.

I bet you almost wish it was May 2005. The antiwar movement was still a mass movement able to summon 100,000 to the streets at the drop of a hat. There was a youthful left-wing coalition which had grown out of that movement. It had got its first MP elected in a Labour heartland, and he was busy shredding the innards of a couple of Senators, and was celebrated in The Sun for it. Things looked sunny. A whole vista of possibilities opened up before us. Well, tough shit. It's November 2009, baby. And it sucks. And you'll just have to be patient.

Immanence

2009-11-13T18:45:00.005Z

Just a thought. In Zombie Capitalism, Chris Harman points out that the 2,000 largest companies control half of the world's wealth. Harman figures that if a board of directors has about ten people on it, that's 20,000 people (or, by my calculation, 0.0003% of the world's population) who have decisive control over the world's production, output and surplus. There's another way to look at it, of course. The workers of those companies exert decisive leverage over the future of production. They don't constitute a multitude, admittedly, but if they formed communist associations - workers' councils, soviets, whatever - that would surely establish a new hegemonic paradigm of work that could increasingly become the norm. Admittedly, they would then have to wrest control of the means of production from the employers and then eventually take on the state (who seem to get uppity when workers decide to take control of the means of production). But such a process seems altogether more probable than, say, a sphere of cooperative value production gradually eroding the boundaries of capitalist production until the latter withers away. Doesn't it?

American Insurgents

2009-11-12T18:28:00.007Z

Review of Gerald Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and India.

“The Vanguard of Anti-Imperialism...”
Gerald Horne is an historian who has been revealing neglected aspects of African American history for several decades, particularly those relating to class struggle, communism, and what W E B Du Bois referred to as the global ‘colour line’.

In The Deepest South, he disclosed the efforts by Deep South slavers to form a pact with Brazil and build a southern empire that would protect white supremacy. At the same time, he revealed, Lincoln and the northern establishment looked toward schemes that would result in the removal of former slaves from the United States, perhaps to indentured plantations in the British Empire. Again, in The White Pacific, he followed the trail of former slave-owners as they set out across the Pacific, to Australasia and the Pacific Islands, where they engaged in a form of slavery known as ‘blackbirding’. In Cold War in a Hot Zone, he demonstrated the links between African American struggles during the Cold War and militancy in the Caribbean as the British empire was replaced by American dominance. And in Black and Red, he anatomised the African American response to the Cold War, noting that “US Blacks have been among the vanguard of anti-imperialism”.

In this, his penultimate volume, African American anti-imperialism is at the fore again, as Horne assesses the relationship between the Indian struggle for independence from the British empire and the African American struggle against Jim Crow. It is reasonably well known that Martin Luther King was influenced by Gandhi’s doctrine of satyagraha (non-violent resistance), and perhaps less so that Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, Pauli Murray and others also drew on Gandhi’s doctrines. Nehru’s speech at the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement of Third World states paid moving tribute to the struggle of Africans, and particularly of African Americans, whose liberation he pledged India would support. A more recondite affinity drawn out by Horne is the influence of the Ahmadiyya movement of Indian Muslims on African Americans in the early 20th Century – an influence that would later be felt through the Nation of Islam.

Horne traces these connections, from prehistorical origins to the twentieth century, with the overwhelming focus on the decades leading up to Indian independence and the culmination of the civil rights struggle. The shared historical destinies of black America and India arguably began with the American revolution, when some revolutionaries looked to India as a potential anti-colonial ally. Their fate was subsequently bound together through the production of cotton and the circulation of slaves between south Asia, Africa and the United States. Opposing antebellum slavery in the United States, abolitionists in England deplored the country’s manufacture of cloths from slave-produced cotton when it might just as well have been obtained using free labour from the banks of the Indus, at less cost. The Indian rebellion of 1857 carried grave race warnings for the United States. For some, it showed the madness of trying to permanently rule over non-white people. Andrew Carnegie, visiting Lucknow in 1879, fretted that “these bronzed figures which surrounded us by millions” may once again “in some mad moment catch the fever of revolt”. It showed what a “dangerous game” it was for the US to try to conquer neighbouring islands populated by black majorities. Carnegie would go on to become a generous benefactor of the Anti-Imperialist League when it was founded in opposition to the Spanish-American war of 1898. Similarly, the Civil War of 1861-65 which was to end in the abolition of slavery (quite against the original intentions of the North) was closely determined by the availability of cotton from India, not least because it dissuaded English capitalists from throwing their weight behind the Confederacy to defend their cotton access.

Interwoven destiny
African American activists, cognisant of such an interwoven destiny, sympathised with the plight of Asia. Booker T Washington and Jawaharlal Nehru both sympathised with Japan in its 1905 war with Russia, hoping that victory for the former would boost Asian chances of independence from would-be racial oppressors. African American journals considered that a victory for the Tsarist empire would be a “triumph for color prejudice”. The grounds for direct solidarity with Indians were enhanced by the treatment of Indian labourers who migrated to the United States and were treated by racist politicians, including the presidential contender William Jennings Bryan, as a great “peril” to the American way of life.

As a result of this oppression, Indian labourers tend to live among and associate with African Americans. But the first sign of a direct political connection between India and black America was the emergence in 1889 of the Ahmadiyya movement by Mirza Ghulam Ahmed. Early on, the movement despatched a mission to the United States, just as African American Christian missionaries had – with less success – visited the Indian subcontinent to find converts. The movement hinted at a new racial synthesis that was also increasingly emerging in the thoughts of Islamic modernists such as Jamāl-al-dīn al-Afghani: a pan-Islamic alliance that would unite Indian anti-colonialism with Pan-Africanism.

Marcus Garvey had direct links with the Ahmadiyya movement, which would go on to win up to 10,000 African American converts by 1940. Certainly, the critique of Christianity as a primary motive force in racial oppression had a profound influence on Garvey’s movement, though Garvey himself remained a Christian. The movement’s influence was not uncomplicatedly positive, for its leadership forbade revolt against London, and was seen by many in India as a British tool – and there is some evidence for the idea that Britain, as part of its traditional divide-and-rule strategy, promoted the Ahmadiyya movement among Indian Muslims. Nonetheless, Islam gripped the imagination of a minority of African Americans in part because it added to the political struggle a spiritual dimension, a war against Christian ideas, which were seen as the ideas of the slave masters. African Americans who were forming the most exploited layer of the working classes, and experiencing racism not just from their bosses but from white workers as well, were offered the option of a spiritual alliance with an East that, Ahmad said, had never seen the kinds of racial evils that were practised in America because “Islam knows nothing of segregation and discrimination”.

Revolution and anti-colonialism
However, more militant and leftist forms of international solidarity arose through the early decades of the twentieth century. Ideological sympathies were given some expression in, for example, the comradeship between the Indian socialist intellectual L L Rai and W E B Du Bois, himself a member of the National Council of Friends of Freedom for India. And as migration from south Asia to the United States increased in the 1910s, Indian migrants expressed astonishment at the severity of white supremacy as practised in the United States, particularly the treatment of African Americans. Rai himself, comparing India and the United States, considered the forms of oppression in both countries to be remarkably similar, arguing that America was “doubly caste-ridden”.

The combined experience of racial oppression in the United States and British colonialism led to the formation of the California-based movement, Ghadar. It was a revolutionary movement for Indian independence which proclaimed socialism as its ideology and supported military actions against the British, which the latter invariably described as ‘terrorism’. It was influenced in part by the anti-racist leftism of the International Workers of the World, and among its founders was the anarchist Indian intellectual Har Dayal. The organisation was implicated early on in its existence in an alleged Kaiser-funded plot to time an Indian rebellion against British rule with Germany’s campaign in Europe. That such allegations touched on American anxieties about its own developing imperial role was indicated by Secretary of State Robert Lansing’s complaint that German Americans and British Indians intent on stirring revolt in India had arrived in the Philippines, the base of US colonialism in the region.

The Ghadar case aroused sympathy among African American journals, such as the NAACP’s The Crisis and A Philip Randolph’s The Messenger, especially as the suspects were convicted and deported to their fate at the hands of the British authorities. The Messenger also noted, with approval, the refusal of West Indians called on by the British to help quell growing Indian revolt, to raise arms against “the Hindu people in their struggle for freedom”, and referred to Haiti as “America’s India”. India and its emerging generation of Marxist intellectuals exerted a profound influence on African American militants such as Alain Locke. And while Tokyo had once been the lodestar of resistance to white world supremacy, the emergence of an anti-imperialist, socialist Russia came to unite south Asians and African Americans in opposition to racial oppression of all kinds.

The new anti-imperialist pole of opinion was given expression at the 1927 International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism. Nehru, in attendance, was impressed by the presence of both black and white Americans at the congress. The NAACP, surveying the new world situation created by the Russian revolution and the growing anticolonial revolts, exulted that the African American struggle now had two major allies in Russia and India. An African-American publication known as The Crusader, allied with the nascent communist movement, foresaw an “Afro-Asiatic League” which would oversee a coordinated response to imperialism. The forces of white domination could win, the publication argued, when rebellions broke out separately. But with “coordination and simultaneity of revolution”, “not all the might of Europe or the League of Damnations will be able to stop the onslaught for Freedom”. It urged African Americans to show solidarity with the Indians, where it saw soviets developing in opposition to an increasingly desperate imperial power. The same sense of the importance of global solidarity had led to the formation of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, in Chicago in 1920, with Indian delegates in attendance.

It was not just the left that was inspired by the new era of militancy. Garvey’s pan-Africanism drew on the example of Ghadar and its anti-sectarian approach to resisting white domination. “If it is possible for Hindus and Mohammedans to come together in India,” he averred, “it is possible for Negros to come together everywhere”. In general, the Garveyites focused considerably more attention on the fate of the British Empire and its consequences for African Americans, than most others. They also expressed profound admiration for Gandhi whom they, in the greatest compliment they could offer, compared to Garvey himself.

However, it was Du Bois and the NAACP that led the campaign to forge solidarity between African Americans and India. These relations were sometimes strained by the red-baiting of prominent members such as the Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes, who supported Indian independence but was deeply hostile to all communist influence in a way that was not true of the mainstream Indian anti-colonial movement. Nonetheless, the inspiration was reciprocated. Reading Du Bois’ work from London, the Indian activist A K Das wrote to ask why it was not possible to unite “what is called the coloured races”. A R Malik, writing from Punjab, saw Du Bois’ struggle to liberate “the Negroes from the bondage aristocrats and capitalists” as analogous to India’s struggle, declaring that Indians “naturally view the struggle of the Negros with great sympathy”. The NAACP provided information for Indians seeking to rebut myths of their racial inferiority, and Du Bois’ journal, The Crisis, became a sought after source of polemical nourishment in Punjab and elsewhere. Throughout the 1930s, a growing number of African Americans travelled to India to study its difficulties and draw lessons from its intricate race and caste order, and found an audience interested in the struggles of African Americans. And when India was traduced by the American writer Katherine Mayo, in a number of popular books rationalising British colonialism, Indian writers responded by pointing out the barbarism of the American racial order. America, they noted, claimed the right to independence from Britain despite maintaining a gruelling system of oppression – why should India, which did not have this flaw, be denied the same right?

A free and independent nation “of dark people”...
The perspective enjoining the unity of ‘coloured’ peoples faced a particular challenge during World War II. The African American left had largely been critical of Japan in the years prior to 1941, while Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist movement extolled a pro-Tokyo line, noting the implications of Japan’s rise for European control of China and India. Yet, much of the left, including Langston Hughes who had criticised Japan’s policies in China, sympathised with Japan’s unique status as a free and independent nation “of dark people”. Similarly, Indian journals such as The People and The Independent had covered Japan sympathetically, as part of the broader resistance to white world supremacy.

As Horne has previously covered in his Race War!, London and Washington were deeply concerned to counter this sympathy, and particularly the charge that a ‘war for democracy’ was hypocritical when India was not allowed to be free. Powerful voices in both capitals thought the best way to do this was to make some concessions to African Americans and to consider independence for India, but they were ranged against entrenched lobbies. At the very least, though, statesmen had to attenuate the force of any public sermons on behalf of white supremacy. Sensing the possibilities opened up by the war, African American leaders such as Walter White of the NAACP lobbied for Indian independence. White met personally with Lord Halifax to request a commission be set up for the purposes of determining the future of India, a proposal that did not amuse Halifax. He also urged the United States to support independence for India, noting that racial inequality was driving sympathy for Japanese propaganda and would potentially lead to Japan acquiring the Indian subcontinent. White also gave London headaches with his visit to India, and his expressed desire to see Nehru and Gandhi, at a time when Britain was jailing the Indian leadership. Throughout the war, African Americans and Indians pressed their demands in growing coordination. Thousands of African Americans applauded Paul Robeson and Kumar Goshal in the Manhattan Center in 1942 when they demanded a free India as the best condition for defending India against Japan. Goshal went on to write regularly for the Negro Quarterly, a journal for which Ralph Ellison was the managing editor, advising readers in the indissoluble link between the fate of African Americans and Indians, especially as the former defended the latter from Japanese conquest.

The US was sometimes capable of responding pragmatically to this situation, as when military top brass noticed that African American soldiers fighting in India demonstrated an ability to relate to Indian civilians that surpassed that of white soldiers, and were thus an asset – despite the generally racist perception of black soldiers as incompetent, lazy, and so on. Nonetheless, with a segregated army and a war in the name of a ‘freedom’ most African Americans did not receive, such understandings were of limited use. The situation of both India and African Americans would have to change if the dominant position of the US was to be secured. According to Horne, whatever the reality of Japanese policy, the perception that it was waging a ‘race war’ against the white world made conditions more favourable for Indian independence and improvements for African Americans.

From race war to Cold War
While the Cold War that followed WWII proved unfavourable for the African American Left, the NAACP emerged the strongest African American organisation in the US. The NAACP has often been belaboured for aligning with Cold War ideology, its leadership arguing that race reform was an integral part of the struggle against communism. Some historians, such as Penny Von Eschen, have argued that the NAACP’s decision shut down possibilities for raising more radical conceptions of social and economic justice that would later come to the fore, and limited the scope for international anticolonial solidarity. Manning Marable argued that the NAACP effectively acted as the “left-wing of McCarthyism” in the early Cold War period.

Horne has been known to share this broad line of argument, and here he acknowledges the limits placed on the NAACP by Cold War ideology, lamenting the decreasing internationalism in the African American movement at just the time that the Indian anti-colonial movement was denouncing apartheid, launching the Bandung Conference to give Africa and Asia a global voice, and founding the Non-Aligned Movement, to escape the restrictive embrace of anticommunism. The anticommunist leadership not only refused to show solidarity with those being put on trial by the state for communist activity, which included many African Americans. Its stance also meant that it had to depart from any idea of an independent foreign policy which would challenge the very global order that Washington was seeking to conserve and reform in its own image. The leadership rarely deigned to express a view that differed from established Washington opinion, and Walter White ended up effectively counselling President Truman on India, steering the NAACP toward a position of trying to influence India in favour of anticommunism. The old internationalism reached a nadir when W E B Du Bois was expelled from the NAACP for attempting to persuade an Indian delegation to the UN to raise the plight of African Americans before the body’s general assembly, a move that would have reflected poorly on Washington’s new stance as a global protector of human rights.

Still, the relationship to India did not vanish overnight. In the year preceding Indian independence, the NAACP was capable of a vigorous campaign on India. Outside the NAACP, African American missionaries to India tried to use their experiences to help overcome the communal divisions that ripped through the subcontinent at a cost of millions of lives as the British opted to ‘divide and quit’. The African American left was profoundly critical of the British division of India, and Congress militants themselves pointed to the evil of racial hierarchy in the US to warn against any attempt to exclude or subordinate Muslims in an independent India. Some worked through YMCAs to develop contacts with Indian militants. Bayard Rustin made contact with local capitalists the better to forge allies among India’s newly independent ruling class.

And there was still a profound awareness of the fact that thousands of Indians lived in the US and suffered racial oppression alongside African Americans. But even here, potential problems arose. A minority of Indian residents of the US chose to argue that their legal rights should be respected on the grounds that they were properly categorised as Aryans, which raised the question of whether anti-racist organisations should campaign for people of South Asian origin to be respect as ‘white’. The major barrier to sustained solidarity, though, was the atmosphere of anticommunism, a political perspective that did not bode well for relations with a country that had pioneered non-alignment, and which had two mass, influential communist parties. The fear of being charged with being communist sympathisers drove many internationally oriented African Americans away from even discussing global affairs. The era of internationalism would return with the next upsurge of the civil rights struggle, but it would come with the breakdown of the liberal Cold War consensus.

The fact that the African American struggle for liberation was compromised in the way that it was by Cold War repression does not mean that it was no longer dependent on global struggles. The very fact that millions of newly free Indians (and Asians of all backgrounds, and Africans) were open to the idea of a systemic alternative to Washington-dominated capitalism was, as Horne’s narrative makes clear, one of the main reasons that the destruction of Jim Crow became a political goal of the liberal wing of US power. America’s global standing became far more important to its long-term advantage than the preservation of its peculiar institution of white supremacy.

In keeping with his long-standing efforts to revive the forgotten international contours of African American history, Horne has done an enormous service in illuminating the anti-imperialism at the heart of black America’s struggle. He has also, in the course of this, brought to light a myriad of class, gender, national and caste issues that intersected with this story. There are times when one would wish for a more critical appraisal of the role of the USSR, whose conduct gave much succour to the anticommunists Horne berates, and whose international stance was often profoundly conservative – its long support for French colonialism in Algeria and Zionism in Palestine, for instance, suggests that it could hardly be depended on as an ally of the victims of white supremacy. At other times in the narrative, it is more evident that African Americans and Indians had a shared destiny, than that substantial political forces among either understood this. And it would have been useful to have an engagement with critics, such as Manfred Berg, who have mounted a defence of the NAACP’s position in the Cold War period. Nevertheless, these are minor criticisms. Horne has written another powerful ‘history from below’, as it were, in which the main agents of liberation are the oppressed themselves. Their stories, and their ideas, are so infrequently told that one can only welcome the fact that such a gifted historian as Horne has chosen to relate them.

The graveyard of the Russian empire

2009-11-11T10:37:00.001Z

On the evening of 27 December 1979, Hafizullah Amin was incapacitated in his presidential palace. He had been poisoned earlier in the day by KGB agents, while 5,000 Russian soldiers who had been arriving at Kabul international airport over the previous three days made their way to the palace. They took over the television stations, the radio stations, and the police force of the Interior Ministry. Russian military advisers had, in a repeat of a tactic used in the invasion of Czechoslavakia, instructed Afghan soldiers loyal to Amin to turn in their live ammunition and use blank rounds in the days before the invasion - it was sold as a 'training' operation.

The communication lines to the palace were cut, so Amin had no way of knowing what was happening. When the horrendous noise of the bombing campaign reverberated through the city, he asked Jahandad, the commander of his presidential guards, what was happening. Jahandad reported that the Soviet Union was invading. Amin did not believe that the USSR would let him down in that fashion, and rebuked his subordinate. Within hours he was dead, and Jahandad's troops were being annihilated by napalm bombs and other incendiary weapons as they attempted to fight off the invaders. (Underscoring the fragility of Amin's support, his officers across the country largely did not resist the Soviet invasion.) The USSR would later claim that they had been 'invited' by the prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan to send troops into the country to defend socialism. As a matter of fact, Amin had pleaded with Russia to send forces to defend his narrow regime, based as it was upon the support of a fractious military cadre (mainly the officer corps rather than the rank and file), a layer of urban intellectuals, and practically no one else. He had not pleaded with them to overthrow his government and impose their preferred client regime.

What did the USSR want with Afghanistan? Even some of their supporters had difficulty working it out. Alexander Cockburn ironically extolled the virtues of the invasion as a civilising mission: "I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it's Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too..." Others insisted that Russia was there to defend the gains of the 'Saur revolution', support womens' rights, build schools for the people, overthrow the khans, etc. There is no doubt that this is what the Afghan communists wanted, and had sought to achieve through the disastrous strategy of military dictatorship.

But the idea that an exploitative and oppressive bureaucratic state like the USSR approached Afghanistan as modernising revolutionaries is tweaking the nose of credulity. The USSR valued a loyal Afghan state, from which it had been able to extract energy on its own imposed price schedules. In 1968, it had constructed a hugely successful gas pipeline from the country, so that only 3% of 2.4bn cubic meters of gas produced in the country by 1985 went to serving Afghan needs - all the rest went to Russia. The USSR also did not want that state to fall to a Muslim uprising, adding to the example of Iran and potentially setting a new example for the largely Muslim populations of the energy rich central Asian Soviet republics. Already in March 1979, inspired by the Iranian revolution, a bloody uprising had taken place in Herat against the Khalki government. Russian 'advisers' were tracked down and killed by the insurgents, before Russian bombers dropped their payloads over the city, crushing the revolt. 25,000 people were killed during that single uprising. During this revolt, a major rift emerged in the administration.

The USSR was concerned that Amin, who belonged to the 'Khalk' (People) faction of the communists, was too radical. In his place, therefore, they installed Babrak Karmal of the moderate 'Parcham' (Flag) faction. They imagined that it would be possible, through a more conservative client-state, to forge a rapprochement with the existing ruling class. Such, after all, had been their strategy in the "people's democracies" - in Romania, they rallied to the King, in Bulgaria they pledged to protect private property, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, they took already nationalised economies and preserved more or less the same personnel running them - so why should they come over all revolutionary in Afghanistan? Just to make the break with any radicalism dramatically clear, Amin's bullet-ridden body was displayed to the selected leadership of the new client regime.

The Russians, eager to scotch rumours that they had overthrown a 'socialist' ally, put it about that Amin had been making deals with the Ikhwanis (Muslim Brothers) and the CIA, and was intent on turning Afghanistan into another Chile. This claim had initially been made by Amin's rival, Taraki, and Soviet diplomats who saw Amin as a rough-hewn 'extreme Pushtu nationalist' among other things, were inclined to believe it. Amin's independent tendencies, his attempts to keep Soviet 'advisers' in their place, and pleading that the USSR revise its gas price schedule (since gas was the state's single biggest source of revenue), surely added to the suspicion. The claim would later feature in the official documentary record of the Brehznev administration recording the reasons for invasion. But it was patently false, and unsupported by any evidence. If anything, it was the USSR that would shortly be applying the methods of Pinochet against the Solidarity movement in Poland.

Of course, the CIA along with ultra-reactionary Wahabbis trained in Pakistan did have their say in Afghanistan. The US had been anxious to overthrow the Amin administration and was also, if Brzezinski is to be believed, desperate to goad the Soviet Union into invading, the better to dissipate increasingly scarce resources in an unwinnable war. From 1978, the US had been training insurgents in Pakistan, and CIA aid was being sent to Afghan insurgents six months before the USSR invaded. The division of labour that emerged was that the CIA would manage the overall project, Special Forces would train managers, and Pakistani ISI would train mujahideen. Money and support was later raised from Saudi Arabia, and logisitical cooperation developed with China. US involvement in stimulating revolt was part of the rationale offered by Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko for having voted in favour of invasion. The realpolitik analysis was the US intended to replace its lost ally in Iran with anti-Soviet bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which could then become the basis for destabilising Russia's Muslim republics. There is some truth in this. It would be utterly foolish and misleading, though, to pretend that the tribal rebellions that had been breaking out could be credited exclusively to American shit-stirring. The truth is that the Amin regime had made itself unpopular by attempting to impose dramatic change from above, without ever attempting to engage the popular majority.

As Jonathan Neale has pointed out, the rebellion against the Soviet occupation began with public protests and strikes, sometimes from those who would have been expected to support the communists. The civil servants, whom the Afghan communists had looked to as a base, went on strike. The students at a girls high school in Kabul, who had led the struggle for womens' rights, now demanded that the men fight the occupiers. In Herat, protesters gathered on the rooftops in imitation of the Iranian revolutionaries, chanting 'God is great'. More importantly, ttens of housands of ordinary Afghans outside of the cities which the Russians successfully controlled, sought out parties and organisations that could supply weapons and organisation. Many were not interested in following the line of an established party, such as the Jamiat or Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb, so what emerged was a number of loose party structures based on coalitions between potentially rivalrous factions, generally pursuing the same right-wing Islamist politics with Saudi money. Given that the left, the secularists and the feminists were overwhelmingly backing the Russian invaders, the growth and appeal of such fronts was a logical - though tragic - development.

In response to this, and to the growing cost of an invasion that was supposed to be a cakewalk, the USSR sought to 'Afghanise' the war. They proposed to gradually transfer military responsibility to a well-trained Afghan army that could hold off the terrorists and defend Russian security interests. It was a complete failure. The Afghan military was well-armed, and well-trained, but it was consistently defeated by the popular resistance. In the Spring of 1988, the USSR began its withdrawal, leaving their beleaguered Afghan allies to their fate.

The war killed half a million people, wounded millions, forced millions more into fleeing as refugees. It cost Russia a total of 60 billion rubles, purely in operational terms. A Stiglitz-style report on its total costs might put the figure much higher, and it certainly kept military investment artificially high when the imperative was to reduce such spending as growth slowed down throughout the 1980s. In combination with a crippling economic crisis, (which shouldn't have affected the 'socialist countries', shurely?), the war was one of the major reasons why the USSR collapsed when it did. The defeat of Russian imperialism created a space for dissidents in the "people's republics". How could an army exhausted from defeat at the hands of Afghan peasants be expected come to the rescue of Stalinist elites in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia etc? And with what? Moscow's rulers were staring into an empty treasury. For the Berlin Wall to fall, the Alpha antiterrorist squad of the KGB had to fall.

But the fact that the resistance had been monopolised by the right also strengthened the landlords, the mullahs, the narco-capitalists, the warlords. The sources of oppression and exploitation that the Afghan communists had sought to defeat were left victorious to fight over the scraps of a wrecked Afghanistan. The communists lost because their understanding of socialism was that it was something that had to be imposed from above - their models were Castro, Nasser, Sukarno, developmentalist states resting on a coalition between the officer corps and the intelligentsia. And if it could be imposed by Amin, it could just as well be imposed by Brehznev. The result is that today, US imperialism can offer a nepotistic coalition of khans, drug-dealers and right-wing ruling class thieves as if it were some kind of progress. And, oh yes, they're building schools and supporting womens' rights, and...

It started with free speech

2009-11-09T21:57:00.002Z

It began with some young fellows expressing themselves freely, delivering themselves of their honestly held views, using their entitlement to free speech, as is their perfect right, this being a democratic society and all that. They said things like "P*ki" and "Get those Muslims". Which is their perfect democratic right, what with free speech and one thing and another. And then, in an apparently unrelated sequence of events, a Muslim student had his head fractured. Then, some nights later, approximately thirty of said young fellows set upon a number of Muslim students with bricks, poles and sticks, stabbing two of them. They also stabbed a bypasser who tried to intervene. And all of this has no connection to anything anyone might have said - about Muslims, about Asians, about 'British values', or indeed about anything else. And it certainly doesn't have anything to do with the promotion of far right racist politics in the mainstream media.

Benediction for the natives

2009-11-09T13:26:00.002Z

Auntie's thumbnail sketch of the Mahometan character:

"Despite their fierce reputation, Afghans are mostly gentle, thoughtful people - deeply courteous, with warm humanity that radiates from luminous eyes.
"They are also tolerant and very patient..."

I am only disappointed to note the absence of that imperishable observation, "and from a nearby minaret, the high-pitched wailing of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer...".

A few points about that 'age of austerity'

2009-11-09T10:19:00.002Z

This is interesting. After ten years in office, during which inequality has consistently risen, New Labour now proposes to do something about it. Higher taxes on the rich are among the measures mooted, but this is unlikely to be accepted by Brown, Mandelson et al. If this sudden concern with income and wealth inequality looks like a desperate attempt to guard Labour's left-flank in anticipation of electoral wipe-out, that is probably because it is. Mind you, there are worse ways to respond to potential electoral annihilation. They could just put Peter Mandelson in charge, and let him lead the party into a mighty progressive coalition with David Cameron and George Osbourne. The flyweight Liberals would then be the, er, 'left' opposition.

The social realities referred to by the equalities minister, Harriet Harman, are certainly compelling. That a fifth of all marketable wealth is owned by a tiny 1% of the population (probably an underestimate, given the amount of wealth that is successfully concealed, offshored, laundered, etc.) is an obscenity. And inequality kills. A report last year found that babies born to poorer families stand a 17% higher chance of dying than those born to richer families. But it isn't just inequality with regard to income and wealth that kills. Inequality in job status and conditions also reduces life expectancy for those not in professional jobs. (See Richard Wilkinson's detailed discussion here). The aggregate effects of inequality, from degraded life conditions to early mortality, amount to a grave abuse of human rights, though it happens to be one that is structural to capitalism. It would be a relief if the Labour Party really felt obliged to mitigate its impact, though it is hard to believe that much will come of it. At the very least, though, the fact that this idea has been raised is symptomatic of the divisions that are increasingly arising within the party in response to meltdown on the economic and psephological fronts.

The wholesale enervation of the New Labour project, after years of ostentatious dynamism, results essentially from the failure of its growth model. I am not dismissing other causes, notably the 'war on terror' and the alignment with unpopular right-wing administrations in America and Europe. But what New Labour promised, what it seemed so certain it could deliver, was a model of growth that would maintain the relatively prosperity of middle class voters, keep capital internationally competitive, and provide enough tax base to keep the working class base loyal with public spending, comparatively high employment, tax benefits and so on. Growth would be maintained through a combination of financial success and an increasingly skilled and educated workforce - the 'knowledge economy', as they used to call it when New Labour's soothsayers were Charles Leadbeater and Anthony Giddens. That emphasis on education would also serve the cause of equality, in a very limited sense, since Brown was committed to reducing 'endowment inequality' by enhancing the ability of the 'socially excluded' to compete effectively in the labour market. The institutional and intellectual underpinnings established by Thatcherism were to be preserved, with flexible labour markets, low business taxes and scaled back welfare systems thoroughly entrenched. Thus, New Labour's victory in 1997 was treated as a success for the New Right, in which the Labour Party played a game of catch-up, finally adopting the electorally successful policies of its Conservative opponents. The task was simply to hitch those policies to the modified ends of social democracy. Whatever the misgivings of Labour's core supporters, this approach consolidated the ideological hegemony of a particularly nasty variant of capitalism. So far, so drearily familiar.

The economic crisis has thrown that ideological hegemony into disarray. In a recent poll, only 11% of people questioned in 27 countries approved of the way that free market capitalism is working. While the majority of people feel that the system can still be saved and made to work with adequate reforms and redistribution of wealth, sizeable minorities say it is totally unworkable and "a different economic system is needed". That minority is 20% in the UK - smaller than many others, but still a massive number of people questioning the basic running of society. That is the basis for a social movement. If that questioning, and the anger that underlies it, is not articulated by the left then it will be appropriated by the far right. Actually, forget 'will' - it is being appropriated by the far right.

If the diagnosis of marxists is correct, moreover, this crisis has not run its course. We are in for a prolonged period of stagnation, with worsening conditions for labour. The crisis has already been successfully used by capital to drive down wages and recoup profits by increasing productivity. Look at the latest statistics from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. They say that in the non-farm sector of the economy during the last quarter of production, productivity rose by 9.5%, with unit labour costs decreasing by 5.2% (and by 7.1% in manufacturing. I expect you'll find the same trends in the UK. So, while things are particularly bad for the swelling numbers of unemployed, those in work are having to labour harder for less. In response to this, none of the main parties can even pretend to have an attractive social vision. They are all committed to ensuring that the working class pays the price of this crisis, with privatization, attacks on public sector unions, and spending cuts across the board. The major differences are in emphasis and pitch. That is why the Tories are, in a throwback to their old 'if it isn't hurting, it isn't working' mantra, pledging an 'age of austerity'.

In this context, the decade-old project of trying to construct a left-wing alternative to Labour becomes all the more urgent, though it acquires new dimensions. Electorally, non-aggression pacts and broad coalitions are the order of the day. But I wonder if it isn't long past time for some sort of anticapitalist alliance, not quite like the NPA but certainly drawing inspiration from it, to be forged.

Chris Harman RIP

2009-11-07T08:57:00.006Z

I am saddened to hear the news that Chris Harman, revolutionary socialist and leading theoretician of the International Socialist tradition, died following a cardiac arrest in Cairo last night. Before his death, he edited the International Socialism journal, and had written an accessible critique of mainstream economic theory, Zombie Capitalism. I personally owe a considerable portion of my Bildung to the man, as it was trawling his back catalogue - Explaining the Crisis, Economics of the Madhouse, etc., plus innumerable articles for International Socialism, (sophisticated polemics against high theorists such as Ernest Mandel and Alec Nove among them) - that enabled me to first get a basic grip of some economic theory. In addition, his historical work, culminating in the magisterial A People's History of the World, provided an invaluable introduction to the topics I would later have to deal with in my degree. Generations of socialists will owe a similar debt, I expect. He is also one of the few such writers to have his work recommended in an album sleeve.

The CWU is wrong to 'postpone' industrial action

2009-11-06T21:40:00.003Z

What lies behind the postal workers' union's decision to call off the strikes that were planned for tomorrow and Monday and begin a 'period of calm'? Well judging from the CWU website and what Dave Ward has to say about the 'interim' agreement it seems like another shoddy deal.

What do Royal Mail get out of the deal? A guarantee of no strikes until after Christmas.

What do postal workers get? A promise from Royal Mail to negotiate changes with the union.

Royal Mail always make promises to negotiate with the union, like they did in the deal they agreed in 2007, and then they ignore them and impose 'executive action'. They lie. By agreeing to postpone industrial action until next year, the union are throwing away all the momentum built up through the sacrifices postal workers have made up to now, especially those involved in local disputes in London and elsewhere, as well as throwing away the best chance of making strike action effective by doing it at the busiest time of the year.

Postponing the strikes without getting most of our demands met would have been bad enough, but with this deal it feels as though the union have thrown away all our efforts for absolutely nothing. If, as seems likely, Royal Mail drag their feet and go back on their demands, it will be much harder, if not impossible, to get postal workers to go out on strike again in January.This deal has the stench of betrayal about it.

The postal workers' Communication Workers' Union (CWU) had decided to announce 'all-out' strike action for today and the next Monday. By all-out they meant all functions out together rather than seperately as they have been. So mail centre staff, MDEC staff (people who key addresses that the sorting machinery cannot read into a computer) and delivery and collection staff (the postie on the street) would all have beeen out on the same days.

This is the action we should be going ahead with. Why?

There are a number of reasons. First there is the tactical issue of when and how to strike. I can see the sense in different functions striking on different days. It may, in theory cause more disruption, which is of course the whole point in order to put more pressure on the management to do a deal. It also keeps the issue in the news for longer. But the trouble is it raises all sorts of difficulties for certain workers. Should lorry drivers deliver mail to delivery offices that are on strike when they are not on strike that day. Similarly should collection staff deliver mail into a striking mail centre when they are not themselves striking. Most staff would refuse to cross a picket line, but would it be legal? All postal workers striking on the same day cuts out all of this confusion. It also cuts out confusion for the public. I have been criticised by members of the public for not being on strike until I have explained that I am not on strike until the next day.

Second, striking for two days would have been an escalation from the previous strikes, even if those strikes were spread over more days. This is important because it is quite clear that Royal Mail are not taking these negotiations seriously. Many postal workers I have spoken to have been concerned for some time that the CWU would do what they did in 2007 and accept a shoddy deal that Royal Mail has no intention of sticking to and we will have to do this all over again in another year or two. Far better to escalate the strike, show Royal Mail we are serious and force them to think again.

Third and most importantly, it is right because the strike action is in a just cause. So what is the dispute all about?

Let us be clear, we only have the 2007 Pay and Modernisation Agreement because the postal workers went on strike then. Before that Royal Mail were making changes sometimes with local agreement but usually without any agreement. The 2007 Agreement was supposed to be a framework for introducing change in four phases. In each phase there was supposed to be further negotiation with the CWU. Again, this has happened in places but increasingly it was done through 'executive action'. This is where Royal Mail impose changes regardless of the union's position. It is Royal Mail's equivalent of industrial action. This predates the local strike action in London and other places. My unit (office) was not in local dispute at all and yet we were served with executive action at the start of the year because we did not accept their plans for the year. So it is Royal Mail that have broken the Agreement, contrary to what I have heard in the media, and it is Royal Mail that, at the risk of sounding childish, started it.

So what are Royal Mail's plans? There is much talk of modernisation. This does not mean, again as I have heard in the media, that postal workers are opposing the introduction of new 'walksort' machines that will speed up the sorting process, even though this may result in the loss of jobs. Royal Mail is using this as an excuse to casualise an increasingly part-time workforce, on less pay and with less good conditions and job security. They call it 'flexibility'. In the past year around ten full-time postal workers (40 hours a week) have left my office. They have all been replaced with workers on part-time contracts (22.5 hours a week). None of these workers can do the Inward Primary Sorting (IPS), or sorting the office's mail into each round or 'walk', which still needs to be done, nor do they sort their own round. The full-timers that are left must do the IPS, sort and tie up their own round and sort and tie up the round for at least one of the part-timers. So while the part-time workers do not get enough work to be able to earn enough to support themselves and their families, the full-timers are made to do more and more work for no extra money. And of course management tries to set the two groups of workers against each other so they are not standing up to them together. Meanwhile both groups are frequently going over their hours but are bullied and harrassed by management to both do the work AND not claim for overtime.

They call this process 'taking hours out of the office'. On at least two occasions we have been told that hours have to be taken out of the office but that once it has been done, we will not be expected to have any more hours taken out. And each time they came back to us again demanding more hours. Last time it was 176 hours. Even the manager said it couldn't be done. So he was moved to another office and a different manager was brought in who did think it could be done. And it was. From January 2010 they want another 144 hours. This is typically done by 'collapsing' a walk. This is where a walk is divided up into small chunks and a bit is added to each of the other walks, thus depriving a postie of his or her walk and making everyone else do more work for no extra pay. This was initially introduced for the quiet period during the summer and was known as 'summer savings'. But now we are expected to do it throughout the year only now it is called Phase 3 savings.

These are just some of the issues around modernisation, there are many more (for example, Royal Mail want us to deliver MORE junk mail and no longer be paid extra for doing so). Royal Mail's 'reason' for making these changes that are trotted out at the end of every news report is that mail volumes are falling due competition from other mail services since deregulation was introduced and increasing use of the internet. But is this actually the case? Postal worker Roy Mayall (possibly not his real name) has written a brilliant article explaining how Royal Mail have been fiddling the figures to make it appear that mail volumes are down when our experience and back aches tell a different story.

So the dispute is about working practices or modernisation but it is also about pay, pensions and privatisation. Although pay is not a big issue in this dispute it is galling that Royal Mail managers are getting between £2000 and £9000 bonuses, depending on their seniority, while we are getting a pay freeze. In order to get these bonuses managers have to ram through these changes in their office(s).

The pensions issue is not actually part of our dispute with Royal Mail but it is connected with it. The Government, as sole shareholder of Royal Mail is supposed to pay the employer contribution of postal worker's pensions. We have been paying in our contributions but the government decided not to, taking a 'pension holiday' for over ten years! Now, not surprisingly, the pension fund is in deficit and the government is using this as an excuse to (part) privatise Royal Mail. They say the 'business' is in crisis and so they need to raise money from the private sector and to make it more profitable. But the two things are not connected. That is money the government owe us and they should pay it immediately. Pensions are not a bonus, they are deferred wages and not to pay it would effectively be fraud. Without the pensions deficit that the government should by rights make up the Royal Mail is actually in pretty good shape. Last year Royal Mail made £321 million profit.

So what this dispute is really all about is Royal Mail, backed up by the government, running down a much-loved service so they can try to get the public to accept privatisation. The Tories have already said if they are elected they will fully privatise Royal Mail. This will undoubtedly be disastrous as has been demonstrated by all the other utilities that have been sold off. We need to win this dispute to prevent privatisation and defend this public service.

As the leaked Royal Mail document shows it is also about smashing the CWU. The government wants ordinary working people to pay for the financial crisis. Therefore it needs to smash union power in order to get working people to accept a lower standard of living and so the rich can carry on making huge profits. By taking on a big, militant union and winning it will make it harder for other groups of workers to fight back.

Postal workers are leading the fightback against the government. If we win, every other group of workers will be strengthened in their fight. Please support us.

left turn

Fort Hood

2009-11-06T07:56:00.003Z

Guest post by redbedhead:

BY NOW EVERYBODY ON THE PLANET KNOWS about the killing of 12 people and wounding of 31 others at Fort Hood in Texas. There's no doubt that this is a tragedy for the families and friends of the slain. But from a tragedy like this there will inevitably issue forth a second tragedy - the racist, anti-Muslim hysteria that will follow because the man - Major Nidal Malik Hasan - was from a Palestinian background. And that hysteria - already in evidence in online newspaper comments boxes - will obscure the real issues and the real reasons for this tragedy. Hiding from the truth will only ensure more tragedies like this in the future. So, let's go through some of the truths.

1) The sheer racism involved in immediately speculating on the religion of the shooter. Back in May, an Army Sgt. stationed in Iraq and suffering from PTSD shot and killed five of his fellow soldiers. That man's name - John Russell - was Anglo Saxon. Nobody speculated on the role of his religion in the killing. In this instance, as an article in the New York Times makes clear, Hasan, who joined the military out of patriotism, faced harassment for being Muslim and wanted out, even pursuing a failed legal route to early discharge. As a psychiatrist, he had counseled many returning vets who suffered PTSD. The combination of these two things apparently made him "mortified" at the prospect of being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan.

2) This racism also provides a cover for the fact that men and women trained to kill and who experience the brutality of enforcing occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, suffer from mental breakdowns, suicides and commit murders at far higher rates than the general population. A 2007 CBS News investigation into military suicides found:

"Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have served during the war on terror... had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians the same age. (The suicide rate for non-veterans is 8.3 per 100,000, while the rate for veterans was found to be between 22.9 and 31.9 per 100,000.)"

And according to an article in the Washington Post, based in part upon an investigation by the Colorado Springs Newspaper, the rate of homicides amongst veterans from the Fourth Infantry Division's Fourth Brigade were 114 times higher than the rate amongst the general population in Colorado Springs, where they are stationed stateside.

"During their deployment, some soldiers killed civilians at random -- in some cases at point-blank range -- used banned stun guns on captives, pushed people off bridges, loaded weapons with illegal hollow-point bullets, abused drugs and occasionally mutilated the bodies of Iraqis, according to accounts the Gazette attributed to soldiers who said they witnessed the events."

Another study by the New York Times found that at least 120 people had been killed by returning vets. However, the Times itself assumes that this is a conservative number since it was reached only by looking at newspaper reports and it only includes active-duty soldiers and new veterans. The CBS survey used government statistics.

3) The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents and the destruction of infrastructure and social networks that will take generations to repair. The media and government are utter, utter hypocrites to condemn these murders while taking no note - or reporting as simply normal operation procedure - the families slaughtered wholesale by US drones that fire missiles at wedding and funeral parties, into Pakistani villages. In Afghanistan alone there have been an estimated 8,400 - 28,000 direct and indirect civilian deaths caused by ISAF and US forces.

4) Mass murder has become as American as apple pie with dozens killed in spree murders this year alone. What is it about American society that brings about such a large number of these types of violent acts? The roots have to be found in the fact that America is the world's biggest, most violent empire, whose means of domination and largest single budget outlay goes towards the
military. This year alone the military will take up to $700 billion directly with more indirectly through military aid to countries such as Israel and Colombia. This is a country jacked on violence. America, as the wealthiest nation on earth, also had the third highest levels of inequality and poverty in a study by the OECD released in 2008. The only two countries above the US were Turkey and Mexico. The combination of poverty and glorified violence, in the shadow of historically unprecedented levels of wealth creation is key to understanding the prevalence of violence in America.

There is a danger that in the days following the Fort Hood shootings, the right and the media will whip up terrible racism. Arguing wherever possible the real reasons for this terrible act will be an important part of the ideological struggle to maintain the momentum of opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We mustn't allow the truth to drown in a sea of racist filth.

Alex Callinicos v Martin Wolf

2009-11-05T08:40:00.001Z

Citizen's arrest for Israeli ambassador in Nottingham University today

2009-11-03T18:04:00.001Z

You might recall that Nottingham University students were among those who occupied in support of Gaza in January. In response to a visit by the Israeli ambassador, they have issued the following press release:

A planned visit to the University of Nottingham campus today by the Israeli Ambassador to the UK, Ron Prosor, has caused widespread dismay and consternation within the university community, notably among the Palestinian and Islamic student body.

The visit, during which the ambassador is due to deliver a lecture entitled “Israel’s Search For Peace” is due to take part at 6pm on Wednesday 4^th November in the Great Hall of the Trent Building, on the University’s Main Campus.

The visit is set to be the focus of a massive demonstration by student protestors who are objecting to the University authorities’ apparent insensitivity and lack of judgment by inviting Mr Prosor less than 8 months after Israel’s internationally-condemned attack on the Gazan population in December 2008-January 2009. This attack left more than a thousand civilians dead and inflicted a huge human and material toll on the Gazan population.

The decision by the University authorities to invite Mr Prosor is even more surprising considering the campus was the stage of a substantial protest movement back in February. This protest was widely reported and involved the occupation of a lecture theatre by hundreds of students. The students were protesting against what many considered to be the tacit complicity of the University authorities in Israeli war crimes.

The occupation protest culminated in a large demonstration outside the Vice Chancellor’s office, under the banner of “Books Not Bombs”. Nottingham South MP Alan Simpson, who spoke at the protest, urged the University to stop dealing with arms manufacturers and to help supply educational materials and financial aids to Gaza’s students.

Many of those who took part in the protest action earlier this year have expressed their disappointment at what many deem to be a highly provocative decision by the University authorities. They feel that this seriously goes against promises that were made, in the wake of the student occupation, by senior management to seek better relations with the Palestinian and Islamic student body.

The protest being organised on Wednesday 4^th November is aimed at raising awareness about Israeli war crimes as highlighted in the recent UN “Goldstone” report of October 2009. Some of the protestors have been seeking legal advice regarding the possibility of affecting a citizen’s arrest on the Ambassador were he to enter the campus.

Many student and human rights campaigners have urged the University to rescind the invitation and have vouched to use all peaceful and legal avenues available to them to ensure the lecture does not take place.

PRESS CONTACT: 07786316571 – EMAIL: NottinghamForGaza@gmail.com

A ruined tea party, and a brewing inferno.

2009-11-02T15:57:00.000Z

Yes, you could talk about the fact that Afghanistan's 'election drama' (a phrase that has seemed oxymoronic in the UK of late) is becoming more farcical by the day. The US-groomed former Talib and ally of Northern Alliance warlords is, apparently, a massive fraud. His rival, a US-supporting warlord named Abdullah Abdullah, is withdrawing from the electoral spectacle on precisely those grounds. And the UN is sending its supremo in to have a bit of a nosy, and tell the natives to buck up their act and at least pretend that the freem-n-moxy that was graciously conferred on them by the US is more than a paper-thin oligarchy. Yes, as I say, you could talk about that.

Or you could talk about the regional apocalypse that is developing within the bloody embrace of NATO and Obama-style multilateralism. I wish it were redundant to spend too much time talking about the terrorising of the Afghan population by the occupiers, but it plainly isn't. Johann Hari sometimes does a good job of drawing attention to the humanitarian consequences of the war. Here, he notes that according to Lt Col Kilcullen, in recent aerial attacks the US has killed 98 civilians for every two 'insurgents' killed. If that ratio holds for the air war as a rule, then consider that the US is currently boasting of having killed up to 25,000 insurgents. 25k is 2% of 1.25m. Lacking a Lancet-style cluster survey, one can only make an educated guess as to whether such a figure is approximately realistic. There was one cluster survey carried out for the first nine months of the invasion and occupation, which estimated that 10,000 civilians had been killed, the majority from air attacks. A similar survey today would be reporting the effects of a far more intense aerial campaign, in a war lasting for eight years now. Who can say that the soaring use of cluster bombs, daisy cutters, 'smart' missiles aimed at wedding parties, drone-based ordnance, and the usual deposits of unexploded ordnance, will have harvested a negligible number of bodies? I just venture that, were this to be properly investigated, levels of mortality way well exceed those in Iraq.

Further, nowhere is the point sufficiently taken that these consequences are an intended, deliberate, and considered outcome of the aggression. It is not just that as the US transfers the risks of its operations to the civilian population through high-octane aerial attacks, it necessarily leads to a perhaps undesired but accepted level of civilian slaughter. It is that the distinction between civilian and combatant is being eroded as rapidly as it was in Vietnam. The Afghan population has simply become, in the context of a guerilla war, part of the enemy. NATO planners know full well that the insurgency couldn't sustain a heavy presence in 80% of the territory, and effectively take over the Nuristan province, without the backing of a socially significant layer of the population. I would infer that the intention of constant attacks on civilian population centres is to terrorise the population - perhaps with the hope that whatever measly and corrupt civilian programmes are being promulgated can 'win hearts and minds' at some point in the increasingly distant future.

The second point is that we are witnessing anew the way in which imperialism and nationalism can intersect to bloodily reconstruct the geography and political economy of whole regions. Such is the history of the Indian subcontinent during and after colonial rule. There was little in the history of Muslims and Hindus in India to give rise to any apprehension of the schism that would arise in the 1930s, never mind the calamity that would unfold with partition in 1947 - 90 years after an uprising uniting Muslims and Hindus had delivered India's first body blow to the British behemoth. The story of India's division is an extraordinarily rapid one, in which the divide and rule policies of the British - some of whose deadly fruits were borne again this year in Sri Lanka - interacted with the independence struggle that took off in the 1920s following the Russian revolution and the 1919 Amritsar massacre. In Uttar Pradesh, a highly mixed region notable for its role in the 1857 uprising, the British authorities had already used such tactics by, eg, acceding to demands that Hindi be the official language of the region. As Indian struggles wrung forms of electoral representation from the British, the colonial power insisted that voters identify themselves on a communal basis. One major example of such divide-and-rule was the attempted partition of Bengal in 1905, then a mixed state in the east of India. That was succesfully resisted, but the basic policy of attempting to foment divisions based on confession remained.

This became important in the independence struggle as upper and middle class Indian Muslims whose position had been established through the colonial state sought to be included in any future settlement. The Muslim League, founded in 1906, was initially loyal to the British crown, and sought to promote these interests, and had supported the partition of Bengal on the basis that it was good for Indian Muslims. The British patronised the League for this reason. Until the 1937 elections, however, the majority of Indian Muslims had sought representation in a future independent polity through the Indian National Congress. The turn to other forms of political expression, some class-based and others confessional, resulted from Congress refusing to work in coalition with the Muslim League in government, which aroused fears that it would be a de facto communal power. (In truth, the Congress had allowed a certain blurring of the edges between secular nationalism and Hindu communalism by permitting joint membership of Congress and Hindu Mahasabha until the early 1930s. Much of its leadership was reactionary and sectarian, and the inspirations for avowedly secular Indian nationalism often included dubious Hindu communalist figures such as the writer Bankim Chattopadhyay.) By 1940, the Muslim League was campaigning for a Muslim state to be named Pakistan, including Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan, the North West Frontier Province and Bengal. Jinnah, who was no sectarian and had attempted to broker unity with the Congress, had concluded that Muslims and Hindus were two nations.

It turns out that there were more than two potential nations in there. India was first divided at the cost of 1 million lives. Then, as the Pakistani state came under the domination of the military in 1957, it escalated its practises of discrimination and oppression against the more populous eastern 'half' of the country, and thus sparking an independence struggle which it unsuccessfully attempted to suppress with near genocidal violence. It might have succeeded had it not provoked Indian intervention. But Pakistan was divided at a cost up to 3m civilian lives. Kashmir has remained a running sore and an object of military rivalry between India and Pakistan. Whatever happens to Kashmir, it has cost up to thousands of lives every year. And today, the authority of the Pakistani state over substantial swathes of its territory is in question - not because of fundamentalism, but because the state is unable to meet the needs of the population, and is instead devoting resources and firepower to fighting its own front in the 'war on terror'. Obama's $7.5bn aid package is supposed to help overcome this, but the conditions that come with this commit the Pakistani state to a prolonged, expensive and destabilising war (admittedly with the assistance of Xe, née Blackwater). It also infringes further on the polite fiction of Pakistani sovereignty by demanding more and larger US permanent military bases in the country. The military is divided over this strategy, and - despite much bravado - is unable to control south Waziristan or the Swat valley. It is taking sustained blows in major cities such as Rawalpindi, Lahore, and Islamabad. Some of the attacks reportedly aren't even coming from Talibs, but are mutinies from within. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas, created by the British to contain Pashtun revolt, are now a faultline in the 'war on terror'. The North-West Frontier Province, originally annexed from the Emirate of Afghanistan, may as well now be an autonomous region of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's viability as a national state is also now in question. The US has attempted to control the country using largely Uzbek warlords, with a handpicked, carefully groomed and scented Pashtun leader. Whoever 'won' the Afghan election wouldn't be able to claim much legitimate authority outside of Kabul. Lacking much of a fiscal base, it is almost entirely dependent on US and donor funding, aid projects, World Bank programmes etc. Even if the Taliban and its associates were decisively defeated, it is hard to see this fractious bunch of mercenaries emerging into a coherent national ruling class, since their brand of highly profitable narco-capitalism comes with military competition and territorial struggle built in. The insurgency (not yet convinced by the insights of satyagraha for some reason), has marginally better chances. It has more national cohesion than the warlord factions do, but is inherently self-limiting by its rootedness in one dominant ethnic group and its reactionary ideology. Of course, the Taliban have proven to be capable of reinventing themselves, but that still doesn't mean they have a remotely plausible social vision. At best, they would be capable of forming an authoritarian nationalist coalition with some defecting warlord groups. It is hard to see a coherent national movement emerging here. If anything, the trend is toward a combination of regionalism and localism.

NATO imperialism is thus intersecting with national and regional politics in such a way now as to accelerate the centrifugal trends already in evidence. The legacy of British 'nation-building' in southern Asia has at times commanded applause and admiration from some of the intelligentsia, but it is a legacy that we are constantly living with no less than with the current reality of US empire. In both the long and the short view, the 'divide and quit' settlement has actually been catastrophic. Its problems may have been resolved more amicably and less bloodily if not for constant outside subventions, the pressures of the Cold War, the coopting of the Pakistani military, the creation of a layer of reactionary Wahabbis to fight Afghan communists and then the USSR etc. That the one force capable of subverting the barbaric heritage of colonial nation-building, international socialism, meets the present challenge in an historically weak state, only adds to the presentiment of grave danger.

Actually Existing Capitalism: back in the USSA

2009-11-02T12:12:00.009Z

A strange kind of funk often descends on people, be they from the left or right of the political spectrum. Many people hold to the equation that state activity = socialism. What seems so obvious can suddenly become bizarre and endlessly confusing. People like Barack Obama, Winston Churchill and Gordon Brown are transfigured into revolutionaries. We end up with not just the workers state but also the degenerated workers state, the deformed workers state and the transitional genocidal workers state.

Its interesting how many historical forms capitalism has had to pass through, how many surrogate regimes it has had to use in order to survive. Capitalism has rarely existed in the form it was supposed to.

There was less of a problem in ancient and feudal civilisations as political and economic power was more or less the same thing. Kings and emperors conquered land and took tribute. Capitalists are people who manage the process of commodity production. At their beginning especially they were actively involved in the production process.

This created a problem we are familiar with today. It is impossible to work and rule. Unlike the working class, which must forcibly redistribute wealth in order to maintain its rule (and in the process undo all class distinctions) the bourgeoisie had the luxury of being able to accumulate wealth within the Ancien Regime.

The bourgeoisie created representative systems of its own within the old regime, along with an army of paid intellectuals, representatives and advocates. It was even able to bring the intellectuals of the old classes over to its cause. An example: during the rise of capitalism the British aristocracy was recruited into the vanguard of capitalist development, in particular to the armed forces and government.

The development of capitalism in Western Europe the 19th century saw wealth accumulated at steeper and faster rates. The need for greater resources, more labour and bigger markets sent capital across the globe. Wherever it set down it transformed the local economy into a commodity economy.

The stakes were constantly raised. In order to stay in the game you needed more and more wealth in order to bid for the market. It is no mystery why surviving capitalists began to pool resources and organise. The typical company went from being private limited to publicly owned.

Perhaps the best illustration of this process can be found in the rewarding final chapters of Rosa Luxemburg’s work The Accumulation of Capital. For simplicity I will settle on one factor: transport. Under the heading International Loans, Luxemburg spent some time talking about the Victorian craze for railway building.

It was a risky, sometimes shady, practice often guaranteed by the state (example the Transcontinental Railroad in the USA, financed by 30-year government bonds). Profit was often little and a long time coming, if it ever came at all. Yet the permanent way was crucial to breaking new frontiers for capitalism. It not only brought commodities to new, faraway places, but also sped up freight and communication, and thus turnover.

The next great leap forward came with the internal combustion engine, leading to the car and aeroplane. Everything the steamer and train could do, the car and aeroplane could do more quickly, cheaply (in terms of running cost), and on a greater scale. But these new developments required a round of new and bigger investment, not to mention planning.

We live with the results of this speed up today, state founded railway networks (examples: Candian, Japanese and New Zealand National Railways), airports and airlines with large state involvement (name a few: Finnair, Air India, Alitalia, Olympic Air). Let's not forget the huge subsidies for private firms (such as the US government's Air Transportation and Safety and System Stabilisation Act, which guaranteed the US air industry $5 billion to cover losses resulting from the 9/11 attacks). Congestion is a major urban issue, wrestled with at city admin level (Transport for London or Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens). Air congestion is juggled with everyday by networks of national and international controllers. There is no meaningful free market in transport.

There is a potential new frontier for capitalism in the 21st century. The cold war saw heated military and industrial competition between the American and Russian empires. There was another separate but connected competition, the space race. Incredible amounts of money were thrown at this contest. All of it was directed through national, central, bureaucratic organisations. Again there was no meaningful free market involved.

As the Russian empire fell behind during the 70s and 80s in terms of military and industrial competition, so the heat went out of the space race. With the exception of satellite communication (and even this is heavily reliant on state help) the potential of space remains largely untapped.

The point is, as capitalism has developed it has gone from private to public to state capitalist. The state is now the front man, the organiser and the defender at home (and crucially) abroad. It is the lender of last resort. The state has become the aggregate capitalist, the perfect personification of capital’s will.

Most importantly it is the collective frontiersman. Capital needs a hinterland to expand into, one of Luxemburg’s most clear and lasting observations. The state is the last organisation that can collect the resources and cover the cost of establishing new frontiers.

This means that the conflicts of our age will largely be national conflicts. You cannot have a theory of imperialism without a theory of state capitalism. Have no illusions in Actually Existing Capitalism.

Royal Mail's scabbing depots

2009-10-29T08:28:00.002Z

Never mind the non-revelations in The Guardian's 'undercover' shock-horror expose of casual workers listening to music under their hoodies, and so on. Yes, Britain's number one liberal newspaper, scourge of corrupt MPs and multinationals, sent their reporter into a scab sorting office and he found out precisely fuck all. Socialist Worker, by contrast, accompanied a score of activists down to a Dartford sorting office, which Royal Mail says is being used to clear up early Christmas mail. They hoked through the bins, and established that Royal Mail is using the place as a sorting office for regular mail from all over the world. The casual workers are being employed at the minimum wage of £5.80 an hour on the basis that they are covering the Christmas surplus, whereas in fact they are being used as scabs. This, as SW also reports, is breaking the law. The temp agencies supplying these workers, Reed, Manpower and others, are not allowed to supply temporary workers for that purpose.

The news reports a breakdown in talks last night, saying that both sides blame one another for the fall-out (oh, they do? quelle reportage!). In assessing these claims, bear in mind that the CWU did make a serious offer aimed at establishing a period of calm yesterday, and that Royal Mail management is committed to the one-sided imposition of its preferred settlement. And bear in mind that Royal Mail management are circumventing the law in order to keep the mail moving, and thus break the strike rather than negotiate. And finally bear in mind that the TUC's role in this is not to support the strikers, but to operate as an independent facilitator of negotiations. The CWU leadership doesn't have a problem with this, though some posties do. But the point is that the major forces of the organised labour movement are pushing for a negotiated settlement, including the CWU leadership itself. The workforce has signalled through acceptance of previous deals, which shed tens of thousands of jobs, that it is willing to negotiate even to its disadvantage. The only intransigent force here is management. That's the bottom line.

Crisis and recovery: myths about China

2009-10-27T09:17:00.006Z

Guest post by redbedhead

ARE WE IN A RECOVERY? Well, there’s certainly lots of talk of “green shoots” and the head of the IMF said on Saturday that “just now we see the beginning of the end of the crisis, predicting that the world will return to growth this year and by next year global growth will be around 3 percent. Is it true? Any talk of global recovery needs to start by looking at two key places – China and the USA. The two countries are locked together in an unwilling but interdependent dance from which neither can escape. The USA is China’s largest trading partner with 21 percent of China’s exports going to the US and almost eight percent of its imports coming from there. In the US, China is now the USA’s number 1 trading partner, representing up to 19 percent of total trade vs Canada’s 14.5 percent. Until last year Canada was the biggest trading partner.

This is significant for a few reasons. First, because exports are still key to China’s growth, with its balance of payments surplus accounting for 10 percent of China’s GDP. In real terms that means that China sells $300 billion per year more than it buys on the world market. It is a key component of China’s growth rates, which have hovered around the 10 percent mark. Having such a high balance of payments surplus has meant that China can invest heavily in growing its economy. It’s rate of investment is a whopping 43 percent of GDP, compared to about 16.5 percent in the United States and 23.1 percent in the EU. But it’s also meant that China can buy up American debt – it holds close to $800 billion in US debt – in a process of debt cycling that helped fund the 2003-2007 boom. It was as though the US borrowed money from China to pay for stuff that it was buying from China. And China lent money to the US that it had made by selling the US goods from its factories. Right wing historian Niall Ferguson labeled this cycle “Chimerica”. What was really happening, of course, was that by continuing to buy up US government securities they simultaneously kept US interest rates low – thus helping to fund the consumer debt boom – and also kept the US dollar high, making Chinese exports cheap.

It was a virtuous cycle until the bubble got too big. It is now in the process of becoming a negatively reinforcing cycle: the collapse in US imports is driving down China’s trade surplus, and the massive quantity of US debt is driving down the US dollar, which is making it less attractive as a reserve currency and threatens to push up US interest rates. The Chinese have stated on a number of occasions that they are concerned by US debt levels, levels that they were happy with in the past when it meant the sales of Chinese goods. In March, Premier Wen Jiabao made some very bald statements at the end of the closing of China’s legislative session:

“We have made a huge amount of loans to the United States. Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I'm a little bit worried... I would like to call on the United States to honor its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets.”

But the Chinese can do little more than express concern. They know that ending the present round of massive stimulus spending in either country would be a disaster, since it is all that is propping up the anemic growth in the US and accounts for perhaps half of the growth in China. At a joint two-day conference between China and the US in July, China made the ritual noises about getting the deficit under control but then re-emphasized that now is not the time to stop deficit spending to stimulate the economy. As Peterson Institute economist, Ted Truman, put it:

“They don't want the U.S. economy to collapse because they are highly dependent on the U.S. economy in terms of economic activity and ... because they have a lot of their financial eggs in this basket.”

The result of the present crisis and the interdependent negative effect it has had on China and the US is leading to a number of processes. China is desperately trying to avoid a slowdown in growth. Anything below about 8 percent will cause a rise in unemployment and, it is feared, a growth in unrest – already in good supply. But with China pumping cash both directly through state investment and indirectly through a rapid expansion of lending – at 34 percent, or four times the rate of GDP growth – there is a serious danger of both an asset bubble and massive over capacity as plant comes online with insufficient global markets to absorb the increase in supply. With US retail sales stagnant and GDP in the European Union expected to shrink this year by four percent, the only hope for China beyond government stimulus that is expected to end after 2010 is to develop domestic consumption.

Recent statistics, for instance showing a 16.5 percent growth in retail sales and a whopping 34 percent growth in auto sales, seem to suggest that this is happening. However, these stats are largely for foreign consumption and for the central state paymasters of regional bureaucrats. In other words they are, at best, manipulated and are often outright fabrications. But even where there has been a growth in domestic demand, much of it either includes increased government expenditure or one-off incentives as part of the government stimulus package. The real problem is that rather than rising, household consumption in China is falling – from 47 percent in 2000 to around 30 percent today, a massive decline. What this suggests is that in the medium term shifting China’s economic priorities to develop domestic demand looks like an unlikely proposition for a number of reasons laid out in an article by Michael Pettis in Nouriel Roubini’s Global Economic Monitor. As he notes there are a number of structural and policy limitations to the growth of Chinese consumption:

“• An undervalued currency, which reduces real household wages by raising the cost of imports while subsidizing producers in the tradable goods sector.

“• Excessively low interest rates, which force households, who are mostly depositors, to subsidize the borrowing costs of borrowers, who are mostly manufacturers and include very few households, service industry companies or other net consumers.

“• A large spread between the deposit rate and the lending rate, which forces households to pay for the recapitalization of banks suffering from non-performing loans made to large manufacturers and state-owned enterprises.

“• Sluggish wage growth, perhaps caused in part by restrictions on the ability of workers to organize, which directly subsidizes employers at the cost of households.

“• Unraveling social safety nets and weak environmental restrictions, which effectively allow corporations to pass on the social cost to workers and households.

“• Other direct manufacturing subsidies, including controlled land and energy prices, which are also indirectly paid for by households

“By transferring wealth from households to boost the profitability of producers, China’s ability to grow consumption in line with growth in the nation’s GDP was severely hampered.”

While Pettis hits the producerist nail on the head, he fails to mention the contradictions that prevent the Chinese state from truly shifting towards a consumerist model. As I discussed above, the Chinese state is deadly terrified of a rise in unemployment and believe that an eight percent growth rate is necessary to absorb migration from the countryside to the cities. Shifting economic priorities towards developing domestic consumption necessarily means reducing the very high rate of investment and providing an increase in wages, social services, etc. For instance it was reported at the end of October that investment accounted for nearly 88 percent of GDP growth. Cutting back investment and redirecting that money to consumption would, at least in the short term, lead to a substantial increase in unemployment. However, the export-led model has its own drawbacks, not least of which is that the Chinese economy is vulnerable to drops in external demand. And the Chinese state can’t provide any direct stimulus to counteract such a pullback. The result of that vulnerability has been made clear in the present recession.

“Between January and September, China's exports fell by 21.3 percent compared with the same period in 2008. The country's total trade with the European Union dropped 19.4 percent while trade with the US and Japan declined 15.8 percent and 20 percent respectively, according to the General Administration of Customs.”

There is also great pressure from the Americans – and others - for China to increase domestic consumption because the USA can’t continue forever to be the repository for Chinese exports. The American ruling class is increasingly nervous about Chinese control of the US debt, which implies a vulnerability to Chinese pressure of US policy. That means that there must be reversal in US indebtedness – and thus an increase in exports and saving. Barbara Hackman Franklin, Bush Sr.’s former Director of Commerce, summarized the viewpoint recently, stating that:

"The US must increase savings and be less consumption-led and that China must become more consumption oriented and less dependent on exports”

But, if anything, China is doing the opposite. Its policy of pegging the Yuan to the US dollar means that as the dollar has declined to more normal pre-crisis levels, China’s currency has also declined. This is, in effect, a devaluation that hinders the US, desperate to overcome its trade deficits, from doing so. As Paul Krugman noted in the New York Times on October 23:

“By pursuing a weak-currency policy, China is siphoning some of… [the already deeply depressed] demand away from other nations, which is hurting growth almost everywhere.”

Yet, in the face of this policy the US administration is, if anything, becoming more conservative in confronting China on its currency. Back in January during hearings on his nomination as Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner accused China of currency manipulation – a very big accusation that would have meant (if it was sustained after his confirmation) that the US would have to take action against China including, possibly, sanctions. But by October 15 the Treasury Dept under Geithner was singing a different tune in its report to Congress, saying that, while China’s currency was undervalued, it was not being manipulated. Krugman’s response was, “they’re kidding, right?”

But the Obama Administration is not kidding and for very good reasons. If China were to start selling it’s US dollar reserves in a big way it would lead to a much more dramatic decline in the dollar. That would put serious
upward pressure on interest rates as the US government found it more difficult to raise funds in bond markets. While a lower dollar would make US exports more attractive, the combination of higher interests rates and higher import costs – particularly energy – would choke off the feeble recovery and likely lead to stagflation. It would also prick the asset-bubble that is the New York stock market, awash in bailout cash, further depressing the economy. So, expect explicit discussion of currency manipulation to remain taboo. And while the Chinese aren’t happy about all their dollar holdings being worth less every day as the US dollar slides, they aren’t unhappy about their currency devaluing along with it, making their exports cheaper. However, doing nothing – which seems to be the better part of both countries’ present strategy – has a price. For China, it means a continuing decline in the buying power of the Chinese consumer as the cost of imports rise from everywhere but the US. This will make China further dependent upon exports to keep the economy growing, which will also make it vulnerable to factors beyond its borders and thus beyond its control. And as it buys less and sells more it not only has the effect of slowing growth elsewhere, thus undermining its market, it raises the possibility of protectionism. In its trade with the European Union, China had a trade surplus of €170 billion in 2008. The US, by contrast, had a trade deficit of €80 billion. It will be more politically palatable for recession-bound Europe to accept a decline in trade surplus than to see its deficit with China increase. One wonders if America’s weak dollar strategy isn’t, in part, to get Europe to put pressure on China to revalue its currency.

By looking at come of the contradictions faced by the Chinese economy, it begins to look less unassailable than the media is prone to represent it. And it is less the case that China is obstinately refusing to revalue the renminbi than that China has grown itself into a corner, so to speak. With asset-prices rising and the risk of a housing bubble on one side, along with a major crisis of overproduction looming on the other, China must navigate between the rocks of multiple economic dangers and the charybdis of urban and rural revolt that could destabilize the carefully built edifice of Chinese capitalism. It's not hyperbolic to say that the future of the world will be dramatically affected by whatever happens there.

OutRage!ous Censorship of "Gay Imperialism"

2009-10-24T14:55:00.007+01:00

The reader of Lenin's Tomb has long been familiar with the problem of Islamophobia in general and its unfortunate manifestations on the (broadly defined) Left in particular in the age of the "war on terror." The reader is also well acquainted with queer variants of it, such as attempts at gay-washing of Israel. Left-wing criticisms of these phenomena, especially by queers of color themselves, are indispensable to our struggle to displace the hegemony of liberal imperialism.

One such queer-of-color criticism of "gay imperialism," a collection of essays titled Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality, however, is being censored in Britain, apparently by Peter Tatchell of OutRage!, who evidently felt his sensationalist brand of activism and rhetoric ought to be above critical scrutiny and got the publisher of the book to take the book out of circulation. For more information about this OutRage!ous censorship, see:

Johanna Rothe, "Out of Place, Out of Print: On the Censorship of the First Queerness/Raciality Collection in Britain" (MRZine, 15 October 2009)

Aren Aizura, "Racism and the Censorship of 'Gay Imperialism'" (MRZine, 23 October 2009).

Umut Erel and Christian Klesse, "Out of Place: Silencing Voices on Queerness/Raciality" (MRZine, 24 October 2009)

How can leftists beat this censorship? In addition to the actions recommended by Aren Aizura, I suggest a couple more, in the short term:

Hold public forums to discuss the censorship of queer-of-color criticism of "gay imperialism."

Open up your journals, classrooms, and so on (if you work in publishing, education, and related industries) to discussion of this problem.

In the long term, though, we need to work on creating a Queer Left, informed of Marxist Feminism, capable of discussing such questions as religion and sexuality in proper historical materialist fashion (i.e., supplying missing materialist foundations to Foucauldian critique of the dominant discourse on sexuality).

Springboard for Griffin

2009-10-23T10:34:00.005+01:00

I can't be the only who is already sick to death of all the news and commentary about Nazi Nick's appearance on Question Time. So, I'll keep this short and bittersweet. A number of antifascist commentators have expressed mild but pleasant surprise at the way in which old psyclops floundered on Question Time. Sarah Ditum and Sunny Hundal are among them. I wish, briefly, to demur. Griffin certainly was all over the place at points. He was challenged to an extent on his real record and beliefs, and members of the audience landed some decent blows (while the duce sat there chuckling away as if it was all a bit of a larf, and he was in on the joke). However, two things: 1) As many people expected, the overwhelming tenor of the discussion was appallingly racist, with Jack Straw, Chris Huhne and Baroness Warsi competing to sound tougher than one another on immigration. That automatically legitimises the empirical claims made by the fascists. The 'debate' is then a narrow one about who most adequately deals with the purported problem. Warsi made the claim that many BNP voters aren't really racist, merely having legitimate concerns, and therefore the mainstream parties have to 'listen' to them. That is based on a falsehood - the BNP's voters are overwhelmingly racist, far more so than the population at large. But accepting this logic means accepting a discussion on the terms of the far right, which has benefited them wherever the tactic has been tried (eg Essex, following Margaret Hodge's disgraceful pandering to BNP rhetoric). 2) Just because antifascists watching this thought Griffin came across as a sleazy dishonest windbag doesn't mean that everyone thought the same. Polls show that 40% of British people think that white people are the most discriminated against group in society, and a plurality think that Muslims are the most privileged. That was Griffin's audience, and he didn't have to win over every one of them to make this a successful evening. He needed to reach those racists who are deeply suspicious of the mainstream politicians, don't think Straw et al are serious about cracking down on Muslims and immigrants, and who suspect that the BBC is biased to the left. And those people may well have reacted quite positively to Griffin's claims, and may be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the whole 'Nazi' thing. I wouldn't roll out the barrels just yet, that's all I'm saying.

Update: the BBC brings us news of the fruits of its labours. A Yougov poll says that 22% of British voters would "seriously consider" voting for the BNP, while more than half thought Griffin had "a point" in standing up for the interests of "indigenous white British people" (a phrase the BBC chooses to repeat without scare quotes).

Protest outside BBC

2009-10-22T22:12:00.009+01:00

Well, that was an interesting evening. It seems that BBC headquarters across the country had protests and occupations - in Plymouth, Glasgow, and some other cities that I don't remember. A number of protesters managed to scale the gates to the BBC headquarters in White City (one placard read: "It's not THAT kind of White City, Nick") before the main protest actually began, thus panicking the police briefly. I believe the actual filming of the Question Time programme was delayed by a couple of hours because of the protest, and that a number of antifascists did get into the studio. (In fact, I see from the clips being shown on the BBC that the studio audience detested Griffin, as they should have done, and were far more effective at challenging Griffin than any of the creepy politicians they had on the show - especially the pathetic Jack Straw). And I also hear that Jonathan Ross was inconvenienced in some way.

By the time I arrived, the protest had swelled to several thousand people congregated on the road outside Wood Lane tube station. It was quite noisy and rebellious, and there was an inordinate number of young people there. I hear there was some rumours of violence outside the gates or something. I didn't see any violence on the part of protesters whatsoever, but the police did pepper spray a couple of kids, a few people were assaulted by coppers not wearing their numbers on their shoulders, one guy was throttled and another fellow did get his head cracked open by a truncheon. Aside from the usual police brutality, it was a straightforwardly militant, multiracial protest in the mainstream antifascist tradition. The audience passed through security gates behind plexiglass where they could see us outside protesting, and were clearly rather excited and intrigued by the whole thing. When filming ended, the protesters then marched to where Griffin's car was supposed to be exiting, and blockaded it for a while, before a number of ominous looking police vans turned up and despatched a platoon of riot cops. There were some fascists around, and a number of few Nazis wandered over from the nearby pub to taunt the protest before being chased away.

Here are some pictures of the protest as I arrived:

Here, someone symbolically burns the 'television licence':

The protest stayed on for a while, until well after filming had ended, at least ensuring that Nazi Nick had a late drive home after what one can only hope will have proved an abortive publicity opportunity.

Mainstreaming fascism

2009-10-22T09:18:00.005+01:00

Today, the BBC will film its Question Time episode with Nick Griffin [pdf] on the panel. Protests will be gathering outside the studio at Wood lane from 5pm, and there is already reportedly a picket building up there. I don't know how big the protest will be, but I will say this: I spent some at a stall outside Holborn station yesterday, which was petitioning against the BBC's decision. The response was extraordinary: it was one of the few times that I have seen people queue up to sign petitions. The BBC directors have been musing over various possibilities in response to this. They've got the studio audience locked down, it seems: antifascists have been meticulously vetted from the audience, while BNP members and supporters will be in attendance. Yet, they're still not completely certain of their position, so they have reportedly been considering whether it is possible to move the event forward and film the show without an audience. If that's true, why bother with the panel and chair? Just put Griffin under a spotlight and give him 45 minutes to deliver his message to the kids. It has been pointed out that the arguments over Griffin's appearance are analogous to those that erupted over Le Pen's television appearance in 1984, after which support for the Front national doubled. Now Jim Wolfreys has explained in more detail the similarities between the tactics of the BNP and FN. These involve precisely the strategy of normalisation, distancing themselves from the explicit symbols, regalia and language of the traditional far right, and tapping into more socially accepted forms of right-wing politics, such as anti-immigrant racism.

We have to take note of such tactics, and make sure as many people understand them as possible. As Michael Rosen argued in a typically sharp contribution at last night's UAF meeting, fascist strategies of dissimulation are as much what they are 'about' as Holocaust denial, white supremacy and the building of a fascist terror state. Rosen pointed out that Griffin's particular use of language cannily exploits a weakness of liberalism, namely its failure to properly unpack and interrogate the concepts that it relies on. So when Griffin appeals to 'freedom', 'democracy', 'identity' and so on, he knows that this is a mystifying language that won't be challenged by the BBC or any guests they have invited. "Freedom for whom, to do what?" is a question that won't be asked tonight. Similarly, Griffin understands something about the nature of the BBC's 'impartiality'. If Griffin lies about his position, or pretends that his organisation has nothing to do with the violent EDL (which protested recently on behalf of the BNP's right to be on Question Time), he knows that he is unlikely to be challenged, since the BBC has an established practise of largely taking politicians at their word. We are used to Downing Street correspondents telling us what the PM thinks or feels, as if it was a matter of established fact, when all that has happened is that they have received a briefing from a spin doctor telling them what the PM allegedly thinks or feels. Deference is the general tone of the BBC's political coverage. And we know from past BBC encounters with the BNP that even if they lie about widely understood matters-of-fact, they won't be confronted. Griffin understands this, and knows that he will have considerable leeway to play with received opinion. Finally, Griffin understands that what is acceptable in political language depends to a great extent on the precedent set by others. When he calls for the EU to sink boats containing refugees - basically calling for the mass murder of a civilian population - he is playing on anti-immigrant sentiments and ideas already introduced into popular language by the right-wing mass media, and by the government.

We also have to understand something about the other player involved: the BBC. Its director-general, Mark Thompson, doesn't understand what is wrong with having the BNP on Question Time. He says it would be censorship not to have the BNP on Question Time. This is a man personally responsible for refusing to broadcast the DEC appeal over Gaza, a decision he presumably does not consider to be censorship. Yet the rationale he presents is at variance with the facts and with BBC doctrine. First of all, he says that the level of BNP support demonstrated in the Euro elections is sufficient to mandate an appearance by the fascists on Question Time. This is disingenuous, since we know that the BBC have been angling to arrange an appearance on the show by the BNP for a couple of years now, well before the recent election results. Secondly, it isn't true that the only consideration here, even in the BBC's own terms, is the demonstrated electoral support of a particular party. The BBC is owned by the public - all license fee payers are 'subscribers'. For that reason, despite its paternalism and instinctive sympathy for power, it has to at least answer to the public in some way. It has developed a set of discourses and practises that interpret its public service remit - the two key ones being 'trust' and 'compliance'. Those presenting and producing programmes have to get clearance from 'compliance' - a producer, an editor, an executive - who will approve or decline potentially troublesome incidents in a programme. Rosen pointed out that one example of 'compliance' at work was exhibited in a recent programme about King George VI. Because old George had a stutter, he was depicted as having a stutter. It had to go to compliance who advised that there was 'too much stutter' in evidence. So, there is no such thing as 'free speech' in the BBC: editorial controls are vast and intricate, and in this case deferred completely to any possible concerns of George's daughter, the current tinpot monarch, and her disgusting and illiterate family. As regards 'trust', the BBC requires that viewers - subscribers, co-owners in a sense - trust whatever appears on the BBC, and everyone who works for the BBC has to commit to upholding that trust. Trifling controversies, such as the Ross-Brand affair, constituted a breakdown in compliance and a breach of trust. So, the idea that hosting a fascist politician, with an explicit commitment to purging Britain of all of its non-white citizens, is in any sense uncontroversial by the standards of the BBC itself, is utterly false. What the BBC are doing is breaking with their own conventions to promote a fascist party before millions of people.

The third party we have to understand is New Labour. Gary Younge reminds us that when we see that fascist spouting off on national television to an audience of millions, those principally responsible for disseminating the racist ideology about Muslims that the BNP so ably exploits are the New Labour hierarchy. Jack Straw, who is to appear on the show with Griffin and promises to be really rather stern with him, is a cardinal offender. It was he who didn't want to talk to a constituent who was wearing a niqab, though he evidently feels up to chatting politics with a Nazi who is committed to driving every last non-white person out of Britain. It was he who, as Jerry Dammers of The Specials pointed out at the UAF meeting, insisted that Asians should speak English in their own homes. Dammers asked: "If Straw moved overseas to a country where English wasn't the first language, would he stop speaking English to his family? Of course he wouldn't. What racism!" And Straw is a man whom we are supposed to look to as a champion of antifascism in this debate. Indeed, a whole number of dubious opponents of fascism are emerging these days. And while one is happy for the BNP to be attacked by anyone and everyone, sometimes the stench of hypocrisy accompanying such attacks mitigates their force. A particularly poignant example are those army generals who want to murder Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, but don't want their good name to be besmirched by association with the far right. Aside form the questionable anti-racist credentials, army generals have a pretty poor record, historically on antifascism. All of this reinforces the point that one can't rely on the great and the good facing down fascism on our behalf. The tradition of antifascism that has been effective in the past has been that involving the grassroots authorising themselves and taking action independently to stop the fascists, regardless of how much the media demonised them, and regardless of how much the bourgeois politicians pleaded for such matters to be left in their hands.