New Labour R.I.P.

Here lied New Labour (1994-2008).

Yesterday it was announced at Crewe and Nantwich General Infirmary that the New Labour Party has been officially pronounced dead.

The cause of death has still yet to be confirmed, and some fear that one Mr. T. Blair and one Mr. G. Brown may be guilty of having rather a lot of blood on their hands, but in any case a long history of addiction to a culture of lying, hypocrisy, arrogance and permanent war together with an extreme dependence on US imperialism and an intensely relaxed attitude to the rich becoming filthy rich certainly took their toll over the years. In the last few days, the New Labour Party machine was in a state of some crazed delirium, ranting and raving in a deeply racist fashion about the hospital ward in Crewe and Nantwich and terrifying many of the other patients.

The funeral will take place sometime from 9-16 June in London. The few remaining friends of the late New Labour Party such as George W. Bush are expected to fly in to attend the ceremony, and a march will be held.

The last even slightly comprehensible dying words of New Labour were recorded as follows:

'The message that we have got is that people are concerned. They are concerned about rising food prices, rising petrol prices. People are concerned rightly about gas and electricity bills, they are concerned about the economy, and I think the message that I have to get to people is this: that we are unequivocal and clear in our direction, that we are going to address and are addressing these problems, we will continue to do so, and my task is to steer the British economy through what have been very difficult times in every country in the world, and that I will continue to do with a direction and clear direction that shows that we will address all of the problems that people are facing. I think people know that the task ahead is to take the British economy through what are very difficult times, difficult times in every country, and I think the message from voters is very clear. It's that people want us to address what are very real challenges, challenges of rising petrol prices when people go to the petrol station, challenges at the supermarket when people see rising food prices, gas and electricity bills that have gone up as a result of oil prices going up, and we will address these problems and the message that I think is absolutely clear and unequivocal is that the direction of the Government is to address all these major concerns that people have, and the task that I have is to steer the British economy through these difficult times. The task I have been entrusted with is to make sure that we can come through the difficult economic times we face, and when I hear what people are saying - and I go round the country a great deal and I understand people's concerns - people are worried after 10 years in which standards of living have been rising, we have a problem because of rising oil prices, with petrol prices, with food prices, with gas and electricity prices. Although it's happening in every country of the world, I understand that the message of the British public is clear and unequivocal. They want us to address these challenges and I believe that I can do so, and that is the task that I have set for myself that we take this economy through difficult times into a future where we have both fairness for all and prosperity for the British people and that is the challenge that I am going to meet for the British people.'

At that point it was unanimously agreed there was nothing else that could be done for the patient, who was clearly not only very sick but in a state of heightened self delusion, and the life support machine was switched off.

In defence of Animal Farm

My good comrade over at 'I.R.' has written an entertaining and typically witty post on the apparent problems confronted by a socialist when teaching George Orwell's fairy tale Animal Farm in school. The crucial passage is as follows:

Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that, despite Orwell's protestations to the contrary, Animal Farm is, at root, a profoundly conservative book. It is impossible to ignore the central message of the story - the one that overwhelms the reader - i.e. that radical social change is bound to end in disaster because the irredeemably selfish, scheming, power-hungry and callous nature of human beings always asserts itself in the end. The pigs - Napoleon and Squealer, particularly, turn nasty for no reason other than the fact that this is, somehow, in their natures. The pigs, of course, are us - or, at least, us given the slightest sniff of power. There is no serious reference to the various concrete material factors that may have constributed to the rapid degeneration and failure of socialism in Russia. Things go wrong in Animal Farm because it is pre-ordained that they go wrong. It is written in the genes. My personal opinion is that Animal Farm is an awful book - it's philosophically and politically simplistic, resting on hand-waving appeals to some odd, half-articulated, semi-metaphysical entity, stuffed to the seams with conservative normative assumptions, called 'human nature', and it's horribly mean to pigs.

Regretfully, I have to take issue with the assessment of Animal Farm as 'an awful book'. In terms of literature, as a novel, it is incredibly readable and has carefully, well drawn memorable characters, while politically it stands as a devastatingly powerful satire on Stalinism, and totalitarian rule in general. Personally, looking back, when I read it at school as a young anti-capitalist - and I was not taught by a noticeably left wing English teacher - I like to think it helped in some way shift me from my early sympathies for the former USSR and former Eastern bloc - towards Trotskyism. This is not to say there are not weaknesses, relating to the isolation and disillusion with the possibilities for revolutionary change of Orwell himself at the time of writing. As I pointed out on this blog back in August 2005, (crudely paraphrasing an article by John Molyneux on Animal Farm from an old issue of International Socialism):

For a Marxist, Orwell's depiction of the rise and fall of the Russian Revolution in 'Animal Farm' is rather problematic due, in part, to his apparent conflation of Lenin and Stalin into one character - Napoleon - or rather the absence of a 'Lenin' character altogether. This implies Leninism led to Stalinism in a crude and ahistorical manner. Orwell's failure to acknowledge the devastating impact of the Russian Civil War is also relevant here, to say nothing of his pessimism about the possibilities of working class resistance under Stalinism. However, 'Animal Farm' is a novel - if you want to know more about the Russian Revolution read Trotsky himself as well as Tony Cliff's 'State Capitalism in Russia'.

Indeed, it is redeemable as a book if only for a conversation I overheard a few years ago on a crowded bus through town. Two young women students were quite loudly discussing Animal Farm which they were obviously studying for something or another, and while neither of them had any particularly deep understanding of the Russian Revolution, one of them did correctly note that 'Snowball' was meant to be 'Leon Trotsky.' At that moment, it dawned on me that if it was not for the teaching of Animal Farm in school, in all likelihood almost all schoolkids in Britain would emerge without ever having even heard of one of the most important revolutionary Marxists of the twentieth century. Indeed, in what other possible context would the name Leon Trotsky just come up in an everyday conversation? For that reason alone, socialists today surely stand indebted to George Orwell and to Animal Farm.

PS. Quite irrelevant really, but there was a quite interesting article about Orwell and hypocrisy in politics in the Guardian over the weekend. As Orwell was quoted as saying (from a defence of PG Wodehouse), 'All kinds of petty rats are hunted down, while almost without exception the big rats escape.' When I read that quote, I instinctively found myself thinking of the pro-war 'left', which claims to stand in Orwell's tradition of radical journalism but is purely concerned with hunting down petty rats while letting big rats like Bush and Blair escape their crimes.

On civilisation and culture

Terry Eagleton has a long and thought provoking article on civilisation and culture in today's Guardian.

The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart. Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced. In this sense, culture has become part of the problem rather than the solution, as it was for Matthew Arnold and FR Leavis. In traditional forms of political conflict, working people have proved most inspired when what was at stake was not just a living wage but (like the mining communities) the defence of a way of life. The political demand our rulers find hardest to beat is one that is cultural and material.

Ever since the early 19th century, culture or civilisation has been the opposite of barbarism. Behind this opposition lay a kind of narrative: first you had barbarism, then civilisation was dredged out of its murky depths. Radical thinkers, by contrast, have always seen barbarism and civilisation as synchronous. This is what the German Marxist Walter Benjamin had in mind when he declared that "every document of civilisation is at the same time a record of barbarism". For every cathedral, a pit of bones; for every work of art, the mass labour that granted the artist the resources to create it. Civilisation needs to be wrested from nature by violence, but the violence lives on in the coercion used to protect civilisation - a coercion known among other things as the political state.

These days the conflict between civilisation and barbarism has taken an ominous turn. We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational. It is no surprise, then, to find that we have civilisation whereas they have culture. Culture is the new barbarism. The contrast between west and east is being mapped on a new axis.

The problem is that civilisation needs culture even if it feels superior to it. Its own political authority will not operate unless it can bed itself down in a specific way of life. Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it.

Eagleton's points certainly cast light on the activities of Margaret Hodge, Britain's Culture Secretary, who is busy trying to get everyone to submit to the power of New Labour's Corporate State though the cultural medium of 'Britishness'. As Hodge puts it,

'I know that across the political spectrum there are powerful advocates for the creation of a renewed and re-invigorated sense of Britishness.

No - the people who want a 'renewed and re-invigorated sense of Britishness' do not come from 'across the political spectrum' - they come from the Right wing of British politics - the Tories, the BNP, the Lib Dems and of course New Labour.

Actually it’s not that new. Enabling people and communities to form positive personal and common identities across the traditional boundaries of class or faith has always been central to progressive thought.

Has it? Why then did the Labour Party when it was set up call itself 'the Labour Party' rather than 'the British Party' if it wanted to form an identity 'across the traditional boundaries of class'?

But we know that simply talking about the concept of values that may embody Britishness on its own, means nothing to the good burghers of Barking. Those values need to be lived out in ways that mean something for real people in real places.'

And how are the philistines in New Labour going to make 'Britishness' real to the good burghers of Barking? Ah yes, set up Armed Forces Day - a really original idea.

Still, there are some dissidents - . Quoted on the BBC website was one Albert Beale, of the pacifist Peace Pledge Union, who said he disagreed with the concept of an Armed Forces Day. "The idea that we celebrate the fact that people go around killing one another is just an anathema to me," he said. Welcome to 'culture' and 'civilisation' under capitalism, Albert.

Thought for the day

Twentieth Century Communism

There is a new 'journal of international history' coming out soon called Twentieth Century Communism. It has a blog here, which isn't very 'twentieth century' but looks as though it will be useful for historians of Communism none the less.

Marxism 2008

The full timetable for Marxism 2008, which is in London from 3-7 July, is now online here. For those who have never sampled Marxism, the festival remains of course a veritable cornucopia of historical materialism served up by the British SWP in a form unrivalled on the British left, with a range of top speakers such as David Hilliard, Tariq Ali and Tony Benn accompanied by an impressive and generous garnishing of culture...

Unforgiving Years

Unforgiving Years, described by one reviewer as 'probably [Victor] Serge's best novel', is now in English for the first time. Surely an indispensable read for any revolutionary socialist...and it seems perhaps also fans of The Wickerman film...

La Commune (Paris 1871)

For those interested in films about workers' revolution, in London on
Sunday 18 May, from 12-8pm, there will be a screening of the epic La Commune (Paris 1871) (2000) dir. Peter Watkins, 345min with breaks.

Grand Theft Auto IV: A Marxist Analysis

Well not quite - I'm sure someone could do one but it ain't going to be me I'm afraid. My housemate has it, but I have only played it for about 20 minutes and all I accomplished was getting arrested for driving over a policeman's foot or something. If anyone wants to write a Marxist analysis of GTA4, I'll publish it, or if anyone knows of anyone that has written one, I'll link to it, but in the absence of one, I'll link to a defence of the game by Charlie Brooker. As Brooker notes,

'[T]here's a wealth of incredible detail and some surprising moments of satire. For example, Liberty City has its own TV networks, which you can sit down and watch if the mood takes you. One channel, Weazel, is a thinly-veiled parody of Fox that features shows such as Republican Space Rangers (a fascistic cartoon in which dimwitted right-wing hicks roam the galaxy exterminating peaceful life forms)'....

Personally, I can't really comment on such matters I'm afraid as I am currently still at 'the learning to drive the car stage'...

John Pilger on the privatisation of the British postal service

'The whole wilful destruction is a new Labour classic and shows why, in a nutshell, even the ever faithful have turned on them. Having already closed 6,000 post offices since it came to power in 1997, more than any other government, it issues press releases saying it wants to "help the Post Office modernise, restore profitability...invest in new products and look at innovative ways to deliver services". We know what this means. It was left to a member of the Scottish Parliament, Fergus Ewing, to say it: "Senior management are preparing the ground for a huge sell-off of the postal service."...While new Labour is happy to subsidise [greedy Royal Mail boss] Crozier's fortune, a failed bank [Northern Rock], colonial bloodbaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and a culpably useless Trident nuclear weapon system costing up to £20bn, it refuses to subsidise a true public service that costs, in relative terms, peanuts.'

Full article here

1968: "The world is on fire - just follow the light"

In 1968, Jean Paul Sartre declared that "The world is on fire" - and so I thought I would just put up extracts from the memories of activists around at the time from a special edition of Socialist Review which give a sense of 'May 1968'.

'[T]he student movement, with their own demands, led the struggle. During the night of 10 May the barricades went up, with some workers joining them. The battle between the demonstrators and the police lasted for four hours. There was massive repression and the next morning the CGT called a one-day general strike for 13 May to protest at police violence. So on 13 May workers protested across France. This one-day strike was very strong in Paris and in the other big cities.

We started the occupation of our factory at Renault Billancourt on 16 May. We held meetings every day where workers could vote on the continuation of the strike. Workers at Renault had a long history of great struggles and that's why it was so important to have these meetings.

I was 25 years old at that time, and we were occupying the factory every day and night. This movement was exhilarating for us young people.'

Michel Certano, carworker, France


By 1968 it seemed the war had been going on my whole life. When the US was defeated in 1975 I felt I had won. All my friends and I felt like we were actually fighting the war alongside the Vietnamese.

Sheryll Yanowitz, Berkeley

1968 showed that the cracks in state capitalist power were widening, and that revolutionary struggle was back on the agenda, big time. That was where my future lay.

Eddie Provost, docker, London

For me 1968 was about the birth of the civil rights movement. Originally a campaign for basic demands, it stands out as a significant moment in the narrative of Irish history. The black civil rights movement and Martin Luther King earlier in the 1960s had excited the imagination of people here. The influence of the student movement and reports of militancy from around Europe were also in the mix - Northern Ireland is not an isolated place.

Eamonn McCann, Derry

'My officials came to me and said, "There'll be a demonstration [against the Vietnam War] in London and they might try to take control of this department." I said, "I've been trying to get control of it for several years!"'

Tony Benn, British Cabinet Minister

The New Statesman also has some pieces by Eric Hobsbawm and Noam Chomsky but both of those figures were quite mature and set in their ways by the time 1968 came around. Chris Harman, a review of whose book on 1968 by John Molyneux is online here was rather younger in 1968 and provides a better analysis of the radical change in consciousness that took place:

'[Things] began to change with the May events in France. People suddenly saw the possibility of revolutionary change much nearer home and one which came from below, involving the mass of people. The media concentrated on the student battles with the police in the Latin Quarter of Paris. But by the third week of May the spectacle of the working class holding to ransom the government of a major capitalist country had an impact on those fighting back against the system everywhere.

Great revolts cause a fantastic widening of people's horizons. Those who would have laughed at the idea of revolution in 1966 - or at least deemed it impossible - were taking it seriously in the summer of 1968. When Britain had its biggest Vietnam demonstration, in October 1968, the most popular slogan alongside "Victory to the NLF" (the Vietnamese liberation movement) was "We will fight, we will win, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin"; the most popular placard was of a clenched fist with a spanner and the words "Workers' Control".'

All hail the Great Benefactor!

The One Party can still go on to win a historic fourteenth year in Government despite their drubbing on Unanimity Day, Justice Secretary JS-1968 declared yesterday.

JS-1968, an Inner Guardian, appeared to initially suggest that the people had wanted to "punish" the Great Benefactor himself - before hurriedly correcting himself to say "punish us" - The One Party as a whole - for the scrapping of the 10p tax rate.

"They wanted to punish him - or punish us in respect of the 10p," he told The One State Gazette. "Those it has affected, it has affected adversely and those people are understandably very upset about why it is that a Government that has cared and continues to care very much about lower-paid people should be doing this."

JS-1968 warned that the Government must make "fewer mistakes", but at the same time he stressed that it should not allow itself to be blown off course by the will of the people.

"What we have to do is actually maintain the strategy that we have followed because it is a strategy that has produced much more effective management as a whole over the last 11 years," he said.

While he insisted that The One Party would emerge triumphant at the next Unanimity Day, he appeared to indicate that the Great Benefactor would now cancel next years Unanimity Day as a result of the apparent ingratitude of the people this time around. The people would not be allowed to show such ingratitude on Unanimity Day in 2010. "I am very clear that the situation in two years time will be different from where we are today," he said.

Other Inner Guardians also rallied to the Great Benefactor's defence. Chairman of The One Party, TL-1956 said, "There isn't, outside of those who have their own personal malice towards the Great Benefactor or indeed the odd ones with personality defects, a challenge against the Great Benefactor."

[Apologies to Yevgeny Zamyatin]

Happy Birthday to Karl Marx

On this day 190 years ago, Karl Marx was born. In this short article, Alex Callinicos looks at why his ideas still matter.