The Partisan

Hesitant, Fumbling, Petulant - and Boring: On Personal Attacks on Ed Miliband

2012-02-26T20:08:00.001Z

In thisweek’s Tribune, which, strangely is available in abundance at Charing Cross station but not at Bookmarks, there is an article which Iwrote (not available online, unfortunately) entitled, wonderfully, on thecontents page “Labour being boring”. The argument is that Labour are, in Ralph Miliband’s words from 1960, “hesitant, fumbling, petulant – and boring” becausewe lack any purpose distinct from those given to us by capitalism. The partialhumanisation, which we are offering, of austerity is insufficient.

Theleadership’s embrace of austerity and exclusive focus on policies for the 2015election rather than campaigning together with, in Ralph Miliband’s words, the “dense network of institutions—parties, tradeunions, cooperatives, a labour and socialist press, associations and groups ofevery kind—which constitute a world of labour, and whose purpose is pressure,challenge, struggle and renewal”, makes Balls’ speech on austerity merely apromise of three and a half years of capitulation and irrelevance. Genuine purposesfor Labour, that is purposes distinct from those of the prevailing capitalistconsensus, have always emerged from the “world of labour” rather than from thePLP, which is, in Ralph Miliband’s words, and still, “a pliant instrument oforthodoxy”.

The Tribune article aimed tobe distinct from the ever tedious “Labour must do x, y, z to be elected”,usually expressing, in Ralph Miliband’s words again, “little more than theirauthors’ particular likes and dislikes, projected on to the minds of theelectorate” not least because part of the article’s argument was that Labour’s“ministerialist” obsession, the belief that being in power is enough, is partof the sickness. Indeed, it may be possible that a more confident and assertiveLabour opposition could achieve more, particularly by preventing irreversibledestruction by the government, than a Labour government in 2015 with purposesentirely taken from the austerity consensus.

Despite using his father’swords to criticize the drift of the party under Ed Miliband the article was notintended to be a personal attack. Why Ralph Miliband’s argument from over 50years ago is still relevant is that “the deep organic” sickness Milibanddiagnoses is still part of Labour, it is not too much of a stretch to suggestthat this sickness actually constitutes Labour. Personal attacks on Ed Milibandserve to obscure the depth of the sickness by arguing that Labour’s drift and lackof an direction is an effect of one individual’s lack of charisma- the trivialityof these criticisms serves a quite clear agenda. In some ways the otherright-wing line of attack on Ed Miliband is even more preposterous in arguingthat at a time when government policies are leading to increased costs ofliving, rising unemployment and wage stagnation, Labour are failing because wedo not endorse the policies leading to inflation, unemployment and stagnantwages enthusiastically enough.

At present perhaps thestrongest evidence for the depth of the sickness is that, despite the party’scurrent drift Ed Miliband remains the most promising “credible” (although oneof our tasks must be to challenge the notion of “credibility” behind this)leader. In his leadership campaign by focusing on the need for Labour to regainlost working class voters, Ed Miliband certainly exceeded the other candidates.Ed Miliband has also been able to name “capitalism” as a problem, and herethere is an interesting break with “The Sickness of Labourism”, in which RalphMiliband notes Labour’s hesitance to call the economy “capitalist”. The namingof capitalism, however, exists (and may well remain) on a limited level as theproblem is held to be “irresponsible” or “unregulated” capitalism rather thancapitalism itself. This, at the moment, suggests the solution is regulation toaddress problems which are not inherent to capitalism which risks, as PerryAnderson suggests of regulation, “an increasingly complete severance of expertauthority from the popular will.” Finally, the concept of the “squeezed middle”offers the possibility of building a majority electoral bloc based on demandsgrounded in “felt needs”. The vital realization will come if it is grasped thatthese are needs which can no longer be met within capitalism. Under Blair (andalso at the time “The Sickness of Labourism” was written), with economic growth,being the left-wing of the party of capital offered possibilities of someredistribution of the proceeds of growth from rich to poor, positive effects,albeit positive effects that guaranteed both the position of the rich and thosewho redistributed a little to the poor and public services, were possible;austerity renders even the possibility of a partial humanization of capitalismimpossible.

It is the opening for theleft within Labour that is the significant difference between today and 1960.Acknowledging the depth of our sickness, rejecting both a soft left complacencythat everything will turn out fine in time and the right-wing trivialization ofpolitics that refuses to acknowledge this sickness, is the first step inovercoming the conformism that limits a real movement on working classmobilization, the critique of capitalism or a politics rooted in felt needs.This conformism is precisely the cause of the current drift.

The situation within the PLPis also a little different, in 1960 Ralph Miliband argued, the achievement ofthe left “despite all its defeats, has [been to have] sufficient influence tokeep alive a vision, an impulse and a demand which Labour leaders, for alltheir Conference victories, have always been forced to reckon with [andconsequently] to prevent the Labour leadership from giving way completely toits inclinations; and, given the nature of these inclinations, this issomething of great consequence.” Today, depressingly, Ed Miliband, by instinctat least, is probably to the left of much of the PLP and certainly to the leftof almost all the shadow cabinet. Therefore, much of our task in keeping alivea vision is to challenge the positions of those around Ed Miliband hoping boththat this will enable him to be truer to his instincts and, even moreessentially, that the final break between the Labour leadership and perhaps theparty as a whole and the “world of labour” can be prevented and that we canmaintain sufficient influence that the PLP cannot give over totally to theirinclinations.

Merry Christmas from The Partisan

2011-12-23T13:25:00.000Z

A Christmas Angel from Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

"It began with the fir trees. One morning, on our walk to school, we found them stuck fast to the streetcorners- seals of green that seemed to secure the city like one great Christmas package everywhere we looked. Then one fine day they burst, spilling out toys, nuts, straw and tree ornaments: the Christmas market. With these things, something else came to the fore: poverty. Just as apples and nuts might appear on the Christmas platter with a bit of gold foil next to the marzipan, so the poor people were allowed, with their tinsel and coloured candles, into the better neighbourhoods. The rich would send out their children to buy lambkins from the children of the poor, or to distribute the alms which they themselves were ashamed to put in their hands. Standing on the veranda, meanwhile, was the tree, which my mother had already bought in secret and arranged to be carried up the steps into the house from the service entrance. And more wonderful than all the candlelight could give it was the way the approaching holiday would weave itself more thickly with each passing day into its branches. In the courtyards, the barrel organs began to fill out the intervening time with chorales. But finally the wait was over, and there, once again, was one of those days, of which I here recall the earliest.

In my room I waited until six o'clock deigned to arrive. No festivity later in life knows this hour, which quivers like an arrow in the heart of the day. It was already dark and yet I did not light the lamp, not wanting to lose my view of the windows across the courtyard, through which the first candles could now be seen. Of all the moments in the life of the Christmas tree, this was the most anxious, the one in which it sacrifices needles and branches to the darkness in order to become nothing more than a constellation- nearby, yet unapproachable- in the unlit window of a rear dwelling. And just as such a constellation would now and then grace one of the bare windows opposite while many others remained dark, and while others, sadder still, languished in the gaslight of early evening, it seemed to me that these Christmas windows were harbouring loneliness, old age, privation- all that the poor people kept silent about. Then, once again, I remembered the presents that my parents were busy getting ready. But hardly had I turned away from the window, my heart now heavy as only the imminence of an assured happiness can make it, than I sensed a strange presence in the room. It was nothing but a wind, so that the words which were forming on my lips were like ripples forming on a sluggish sail that suddenly bellies in a freshening breeze: "On the day of his birth / Comes the Christ child again/ Down below to the earth/ In the midst of us men." The angel that had began to form in those words had also vanished with them. I stayed no longer in the empty room. They were calling for me in the room adjacent, where now the tree had entered into its full glory- something which estranged me from it, until the moment when, deprived of its stand, and half buried in the snow or glistening in the rain, it ended the festival where a barrel organ had begun it."

Marks of weakness, marks of woe: "Chav" as Allegory

2011-12-20T16:59:00.000Z

This post follows on from our review of Chavs "The Author as Sympathiser" and will make more sense if that has been read first.

“Everysocial class has its own pathology”, Marcel Proust, The Captive, p.10.

In Chavs there is a double explanatoryfailure which makes, in particular, the analysis of Karen Matthewsexceptionally weak. As we’ve argued, Jones’s lack of theory forces him into anexplanation which is little more than a naturalised and generalised liberalplatitude, excluding, ironically, history and class, when he argues, “leadingpoliticians and journalists had no interest in allowing the Shannon Matthewscase to go down in history as just another example of the capacity of someindividuals for cruelty” (p. 32). The second, related, failure is that Jonesmakes no effort to root the construction of the “chav” as a type in capitalism.Instead of an analysis of the cognitive processes, rooted in capitalism, thatproduce the type, the “chav” is thought merely as the direct expression ofeconomic changes instigated as a matter of choice by Thatcher and choicesmotivated by “mean and usurious self-interest” on the part of ruling elites inorder to maintain their power. Thus, Jones writes, “the demonization of theworking class cannot be understood without looking back on the Thatcheriteexperiment of the 1980s that forged the society we live in today. At its corewas an assault on working class communities, industries, values andinstitutions. No longer was being working class something to be proud of: itwas something to escape from” (p. 40). The continuation, “this vision…was theculmination of a class war, waged on and off, by the Conservatives for over twocenturies” is insufficient to give any historical depth. Abstracting Thatcherand, consequently, the “chav” stereotype from capitalism, further, leads toJones’s politics, worryingly here they mirror the BNP, being constructed largelyaround a vision of a nicer, pre-Thatcherite capitalism coupled with a nostalgiafor the (more male and more white) working class identity this capitalismsustained.

The Physiologies and Capitalism

Physiologiesin which social class, intellectual ability and moral value may be discernedfrom appearance and in which individuals appear as expressions of “types” areintimately related to capitalism and date back at least as far as Hogarth. Aswith Proust, the range of his targets for example in “Marriage a la mode” and“Industry and Idleness”, suggests Hogarth believed “each social class has itsown pathology” and that each social class may be identified by the expressionof that pathology. For the purposes of going beyond the explanatory limitationsof Chavs, though, the most importanttreatment of physiologies and the type is in Balzac. Balzac’s types haveimportant affinities to the construction of the “chav” stereotype. Of “thethought that human beings of a certain type actually become identical with eachother” Adorno writes of Balzac’s need to “reassure himself of immediacy” (p.301). Adorno also discusses, and this is crucial in understanding the “chav”stereotype in the Matthews case, how Balzac, “who is tempted, when he isdescribing Nucingen, to display his eccentricities as characteristic of thespecies of banker as such. This seems implicitly to suggest the idea that thetype is not merely intended to distinguish the individual from the uniform, butto render the masses themselves commensurable with the speculator’s gaze, in sofar as the categories applicable to the masses, organised as they are intotypes, can be regarded almost as if they were so many natural species orvarieties” (p. 302). It is in this movement, situated within capitalism, thatwe need to locate the exaggerations, what Jones describes as the media’s focuson “outlandish individuals” (p. 24), inherent in the creation of the “chav” astype. The alternative is Jones’s comforting (for a prejudiced middle classaudience) banalities like “that’s not to pretend that there aren’t people outthere with deeply problematic lives, including callous individuals who inflictbarbaric abuse on vulnerable children” (p. 24) or “as with most stereotypes,there are grains of truth in the ‘chav’ caricature” (p. 33).

Industry and Idleness, Plate 1; The Fellow 'Prentices at their Looms, essentially the whole story unfolds from the gestures and expressions of the two apprentices and the Proverbs.

The backgroundto the creation the type as a natural species is capitalism itself, mostsignificantly Adorno writes of the secret of Balzac being his “tendency totransfigure capitalist alienation into ‘sense’” (p. 301). The form of thecapitalist alienation that is transfigured is complicated but essential tounderstand if the “chav” stereotype is to be made sense of. Adorno argues that,in 19^th century capitalism, “human beings themselves acquire thestatus of a commodified object of attention, something which the physiologiesthen explicitly present” (p. 300). Building on Adorno’s remark, it is necessaryto address precisely what is at stake in the transformation of human beingsinto “commodified objects of attention”.

The Type and Refetishisation of Relations

Structuring the transformation are three, bourgeois,forms of equality. The first is the bourgeois political form of equality, theequality of the citizen, Benjamin’s reference to the “tenuous egalite that wasvaunted in Louis Philippe’s sobriquet [i.e. “the citizen king”]” in his replyto Adorno is crucial here (p. 310). The point here, however, is that, althoughthe equality of the citizen is tenuous because it is circumscribed it does (anddid) exist. Marx is precise here, “Thepolitical annulment of private property not only fails to abolish privateproperty but even presupposes it. The state abolishes, in its own way,distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declaresthat birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions,when it proclaims, without regard to these distinction, that every member ofthe nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats allelements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state.Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, occupation, to actin their way – i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and toexert the influence of their special nature. Far from abolishing these realdistinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence;it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only inopposition to these elements of its being."

The second bourgeois form ofequality, another emptying out of the human subject of qualities, is thedefetishisation of relations between people, unlike in feudalism, whererelations are structured by (imagined) qualities inherent in people, undercapitalism these relations take the form of relations between empty, subjectsmotivated solely by egotistical calculation, from The Communist Manifesto,“the bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to allfeudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder themotley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has leftremaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, thancallous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religiousfervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icywater of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchangevalue, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has setup that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, forexploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substitutednaked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

The final, defetishisedbourgeois equality is the reduction of all labour to something quantitative andquantifiable through money, “with regard to the foundation of the quantitativedetermination of value, namely the duration of that expenditure or the quantityof that labour, this is quite palpably different from its quality”, or “theequality of the kinds of human labour takes on a physical form in the equalobjectivity of the products of values.” The point of commodity fetishism isthat, standing against this equality, the defetishisation of human relationsand labour, the commodity is fetishised- in commodity fetishism, quality dwellson the side of the commodity. This is the point where the “mysterious characterof the commodity form consists…in the fact that that the commodity reflects thesocial characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of theproducts of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.Hence it also reflects the social relations of the producers to the sum totalof labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apartfrom and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products oflabour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same timesuprasensible or social…the commodity form, and the value-relation of theproducts of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection withthe physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out ofthis. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselveswhich assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of the relation betweenthings.”

Balzac, and the same is truetoday with the “chav” stereotype, goes beyond even this, in the type in whichhuman beings assume the status of commodified objects, the definite relation ofmen themselves assumes the fantastic form of the relation between men as thingsbearing certain socio-natural properties. This begins to give the physiologiestheir hellish aspect, the apparently primitive and overcome fetishised andhierarchical relations between human beings reappear in the form of the mostmodern, on an entirely different and more deeply inescapable level with thehuman being-type as extrapolated from the fetishised and hierarchical relationsbetween commodities. At this point, as well, the type as commodity acquires thebasis for becoming generalized and opens the possibility of a scientific orcritical physiology, in which the transformation of capitalist alienation into sense is made conscious of itself.

Adorno argues that Balzac’sanxiety, ultimately, dwelt in financial speculation and possible crisis, “theage of financial speculation permits the kinds of fluctuations in price whichcan turn the acquisition of these goods in the window either into an intoxicatinggain or into a case of downright deception for the buyer, and it is the samefor those who interpret the physiologies” (p. 301). This is the root of theneed for the reassurance of immediacy, that the “truth” is being told about thevalue of the commodity, either the commodity to be bought or the human ascommodity in the type. To Jones’s broad, and correct implication, that onefunction of the “chav” stereotype is to stabalise threats to the economicsystem, problems which are the consequence of systematic problems withincapitalism are blamed on parasitic elements, it is important to add that thecontext of failed financial speculation, as in Balzac, underpins the anxietywhich creates the need for a taxonomy of the “chav” with certain habitats,plumage, behaviour (particularly sexual behaviour) to make his (or more often)her qualities and status immediately graspable and avoidable. The point shouldbe made that the viciousness of, particularly lower, middle class “chav” hatredand the need to transform working class people into such a natural typepresumably stems from the fear that one may be confused with a working classperson. In a situation of high unemployment in which middle class wagesare squeezed, jobs are temporary and vulnerable and many, previously, middleclass people reliant on welfare the “chav” type goes hand in hand with hatredfor those in benefits (see the British Social Attitudes survey). When more andmore people are out of work and many who are not unemployed will have friendsor family unemployed through no fault of their own, one would expect moresympathy for the unemployed, that this clearly has not happened is partiallydue to the creation of a naturalized type of “welfare scrounger” who the person who believes themselves or their friends unemployed through no fault of their own is distanced from.

Critical Physiologies

If the construction of the type, whether today’s “chav” orthe type in Balzac, is properly rooted in capitalism, its critique can be muchmore revealing than Jones’s imparting of information that shows the limitationsof the stereotype. Furthermore, there are a number of physiologies whichalready contain the moment of critique. In the correspondence, the possibilityof a critical physiology is one of the crucial points of disagreement.Following Benjamin to some extent, we want to argue there are four broad formsof critical physiologies that could provide a starting point to thinkingthrough an alternative to Chavs treatmentof the type.

1. The Physiologies and Laughter: Daumier

Benjamin’s first example of a critical physiology isDaumier’s caricatures. Benjamin writes, “Daumier is constantly stumbling uponthe same thing: in the heads of those politicians, ministers and lawyers heperceives the same – the commonness and mediocrity of the bourgeois class. Andone thing is important here: this hallucination of sameness (one that isshattered by caricature only to be instantly restored: since the furtherremoved a grotesque nose may be from the empirical norm, the more emphaticallythe nose per se will reveal the typical aspect of all human beings with noses),this hallucination is essentially a comic matter in Daumier and Cervantes…Daumier’slaughter is directed at the bourgeoisie; he sees through the ‘equality’ itflaunts…By means of laughter, Cervantes and Daumier both dispel a sameness andequality which they firmly recognise as a historically generated illusion” (p.309). The point here is that “equality” is the problem for Daumier and it isshattered not in dissolving the type or, even worse, acknowledging its truthbut only up to a point, but by exaggerating the type (as with Adorno onpsychoanalysis, with the type “nothing is true except the exaggerations”).

Daumier, Don Quixote Reading

In “The Author as Producer”, Benjamin also makes laughtercentral, writing of Brecht’s epic theatre, he writes, “it aims less at fillingthe public with emotion, even if it is that of revolt, than at making itconsider thoughtfully, from a distance and over a period of time, thesituations in which it lives. We can remark in passing that there is no betterstarting point for thought than laughter. In particular, thought usually has abetter chance when one is shaken by laughter than when one’s mind is shaken andupset. The only extravagance of the epic theatre is its amount of laughter.” Chavs takes precisely the oppositeposition to Brecht on laughter, Jones explicitly sunders laughter fromunderstanding situations. Ultimately, the root of Jones’s maligning of laughteris that in Chavs understanding isheld to be the understanding of someone else’s situation rather than theworking class’s understanding through estrangement of its own situation. Mosttelling here is Jones’s writing on Shameless,he writes “the problem with the series is that it fails to address how thecharacters ended up in that situation, or what impact the destruction ofindustry has had on working-class communities in Manchester…The series gives amiddle class viewer who has had no real contact with people from differentbackgrounds little opportunity to understand the broader context of the issuesraised” (p. 129). (Is it possible to imagine how unbearable TV would be iffulfilled this stipulation?)

Benjamin’s point is also that laughter dissipates feelings,especially empathy, Jones, with his lack of laughter, by contrast is reliant onan ideological solidarity based only on sympathy. Also key here are Brecht’s remarks on Lukacs (Lukacs in the 1930s)and other orthodox Marxist anti-modernist literary criticism that “they are, toput it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes them uncomfortable. Younever know where you are with production; production is the unforeseeable. Younever know what is going to come out. And they themselves do not want toproduce. They want to play the apparatchik and exercise control over otherpeople.” Laughter and production have a crucial affinity in their ability todisturb, and, as argued in the previous post, Jones avoids any attention toproduction and technique in Chavs.

The League ofGentlemen, particularly the job centre scenes, offer an example of howlaughter at types can be critical. Contrasted with, for example Little Britain, its grotesques aresituated within and determined by a recognisably naturalistic setting and,furthermore, mastering the techniques of production, the clichés and expectedformat of the sketch show (grotesque characters, repeated catchphrases andshort sketches resolved in laughter) are mastered and transformed. With itsgrotesques situated within this recognisable setting, The League of Gentlemen also provokes shock and astonishment in therecognition that this is the situation- laughter estranges the situation. It isalso worth noting that the idea of the type, that the situation produces,deterministically certain kinds of people is part of the programme’s correctness and refusal of pleasant resolutionin that when Pauline, the original grotesque is sacked, both her replacementand Ross, the inspector, are revealed to be equally or perhaps more unpleasantthan her. The recognisable situation produces the same, hellish figures, undercapitalist bureaucracy types are mass produced humans. The job centre’storments and humiliations, as with hell’s, are both always new and always thesame.

2. The Physiologies of Hell: Shelley

In a suggestive remark on “Peter Bell the Third” in The Arcades Project Benjamin argues, “theincisive effect of this poem depends, for the most part, on the fact thatShelley’s grasp of allegory makesitself felt. It is this grasp that is missing in Baudelaire. This grasp, whichmakes palpable the distance of the modern poet from allegory, is precisely whatenables allegory to incorporate itself into the most immediate realities. Withwhat directness that can happen is best shown by Shelley’s poem, in whichbailiffs, parliamentarians, stock-jobbers and many other types figure. Theallegory, in its emphatically antique character, gives them all a sure footing,such as, for example, the businessmen in Baudelaire’s “Crepuscule du soir” donot have.- Shelley rules over allegory, whereas Baudelaire is ruled by it” (p.370). Elsewhere, in “On Some Motifs inBaudelaire”, Benjamin suggests that lyric poetry was more or less worn out bythe time of Baudelaire. Baudelaire was able to obtain certain, particularlydestructive and melancholy, effects largely as a consequence of his almostuntimeliness but, the form of lyric poetry remains uncritiqued. In Baudelairethere is no construction and, on Benjamin and Brecht’s terms, no technique. Itis worth noting that, despite the critique of the “chav” stereotype, Chavs abounds in both actual stereotypesand, even more so, in clichéd stock phrases; in Jones’s case the aim merely toinform the middle class public produces the same lack of technique asBaudelaire and thus failure to critique the type in its use as Baudelaire.

Shelley’s rulingover allegory should be identified with “technique”. Even from the first lines,“Hell is a city much like London-/A populous and a smoky city”, everyday life is estranged. This estrangement isintensified by the incorporation of allegory into the most immediate realities.In Shelley’s poem it is mainly the rich who feature as allegorical types, thepoor only exist at the fringes of the allegory, but they are equally dammed: “So good and bad, sane and mad,/The oppressor and theoppressed;/ Those who weep to see what others/ Smile to inflict upon theirbrothers; /Lovers, haters, worst and best;//All are damned—they breathe anair,/Thick, infected, joy-dispelling:/Each pursues what seems most fair,/Mininglike moles, through mind, and there/Scoop palace-caverns vast, where Care/In thronèdstate is ever dwelling.” Hell, as the profusion of real, allegorical types, in“Peter Bell the Third”, is the product of, like capitalism, defetishisedrelations, Shelley’s atheism is critical here, “And this is Hell—and in thissmother/All are damnable and damned;/Each one damning, damns the other/They aredamned by one another,/By none other are they damned./’Tis alie to say, ‘God damns!’/Where was Heaven’s Attorney General/When they firstgave out such flams?/Let there be an end of shams,/They are mines of poisonousmineral.”

Benjamin’sdevelopment of allegory in The Origin of Tragic Drama, offers another means by which the treatment of type in Chavs may be overcome by consideringShelley’s allegorical natural history. Benjamin writes, “in allegory, theobserver is confronted with the facieshippocratica of history as petrified, primordial landscape. Everythingabout history that, from the beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful,unsuccessful, is expressed in a face- or rather in a death’s head. And althoughsuch a thing lacks all ‘symbolic’ freedom of expression, all classicalproportion, all humanity – nevertheless, this is the form in which man’ssubjection to nature is most obvious and it significantly gives rise not onlyto the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also ofthe biographical historicity of the individual. This is at the heart of theallegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history asthe Passion of the world” (p. 166). Allegory as expressing man’s subjection tonature and the history produced by this, exceeds the tedious opposition betweenthe naturalised types of Balzac or the tabloid press and Jones’s world of easycontingency- the type is rooted in certain, identifiable choices and the type’sexistence can be dissolved by contrasting it with correct information.

3. The Physiologies of the Detective Story: Proust, Conan-Doyle, Poe

Giventhe passage of time, the same passage of time that undermined Baudelaire’sgrasp of allegory and, indeed, the passage of time as the eternal transiencethat underpins allegory, Shelley’s types cannot be, immediately, drawn upon toprovide a contrast with Chavs. Thereis, for Benjamin, a modernist version of the types which widens theirpossibility. In the reply to Adorno he writes, Balzac “brings out neither thecomical nor the horrible aspects of the ‘type’. For the novel, I think Kafkawas the first person to combine these two aspects successfully” (p. 310).Proust is the other great modernist writer able to combine these two aspects ofthe type, and this combination required, quite consciously, an awareness of thenecessity of technique and the sickness of the tradition supporting the novel, as Benjamin writes in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire", "Proust's eight-volume work conveys an idea of the efforts it took to restore the figure of the storyteller to the present generation (p. 156). Like Shelley’s poem and The Leagueof Gentlemen, In Search of Lost Timefeatures a profusion of allegorical grotesques all of whom estrange the world,such as Madame Verdurin whose affected laughter is so extravagant that shedislocates her jaw (Swann’s Way, p.226). Benjamin writes, Proust’s “style iscomedy, not humour; his laughter does not toss the world up but flings it down– at the risk that it will be smashed to pieces…The pretensions of the bourgeoisieare shattered by laughter” (“The Image of Proust”, p. 202).

Surprisingly,perhaps, Proust’s attitude towards the kind of reader created by newspapers issuperior to Jones’s, this culminates in Proust’s narrator’s desire to provokereaders into becoming, “the readers of their own selves” (Time Regained, p. 432). In InSearch of Lost Time, Proust’s avidly impatient readers are, as with thereaders of the newspaper raised to the level of co-workers, this happensdespite, or rather because of, Proust’s radical distance from his readers, asBenjamin writes, “the deterioration of experience manifests itself in Proust inthe complete realisation of his ultimate intention. There is nothing moreingenious or loyal than the way in which he nonchalantly and constantly strivesto tell the reader: Redemption is my private show” (“On Some Motifs inBaudelaire”, p. 196).

With the creation ofan idle yet attentive and expectant reader raised to the level of co-worker,and not only in this, In Search of LostTime parallels the great detective stories. The crucial difference with thereaders Jones expects for Chavs isthe reader’s attentiveness and role in constituting the text raises them toco-workers. The detective story also introduces another critical possibilitywith the type. Unlike in Balzac, in Poe the type is demystified, Adorno writesto Benjamin, “Poe kept his promise to decipher any secret script he everencountered. One could not properly say the same of Baudelaire or of Balzac,and perhaps this itself might contribute something to your theory about why Poealone composed detective stories” (p. 303). In deciphering human beings astypes, the Sherlock Holmes stories are even clearer in their repetitiveness, tooffer one example, meeting Jabez Wilson at the beginning of “The Red-HeadedLeague”, Holmes is able to deduce “he has at some time done manual labour, thathe takes snuff, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerableamount of writing lately”.

In the SherlockHolmes stories these deductions are always immediately demystified, to thepoint where, in “The Red-Headed League”, Jabez Wilson, having had Holmesexplain the deduction replies, “Well, I never! I thought at first you had donesomething clever, but I see that there was nothing in it after all.” Again thecontrast with Jones is productive, although it may seem strange, the deductionsof the classical detective require no real authority of Holmes’s expertise orprivileged knowledge, hence the disappointment expressed when the working outis revealed, in this way, with the active reader, the deductions have a measureof scientific universality contrasted with the absence of universality wheninformation is imparted. It is a stretch, but only a small one, to link thesedeductions to Badiou’s argument, “Science itself began- with mathematics – withthe radical renunciation of every principle of authority. Scientific statementsare accurately exposed in theirentirety to general criticism, independent of the subject of enunciation, andin accordance with explicit norms that are accessible by right to whomsoevertakes the trouble to grasp them” (Metapolitics,p. 14).

The final,important, point to make about the methods of the classical detective story isthat the procedure of reading the human is derived from the reading of objects.In The Sign of the Four, Watsoninterrogates Holmes, “I have heard you say that it is difficult for a man tohave an object in daily use without leaving the imprint of his individualityupon it that the trained observer might read it”. Watson presents a watch toHolmes who is able to deduce that the owner is Watson’s brother and that “hewas a man of untidy habits- very untidy and careless. He was left with goodprospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty withoccasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally taking to drink, hedied”. The analogy is that it would be equally hard for the world (capitalism)not to leave its imprint on those it has used. In this way Poe and Conan Doyleexpand the interpretation of the commodity as “social hieroglyphic” through, asin Balzac but in a way that demystifies, the human being within capitalismbecomes intelligible but only as an object for scientific contemplation. Readthrough Sohn-Rethel this movement should be clearer, "the formal analysis of the commodity holds the key not only to the critique of political economy, but also to the historical explanation of the abstract conceptual mode of thinking", for Sohn-Rethel, the abstract pure quantities of modern science emerge first in the abstract pure quantities of money and the equivalence of all commodities through price; in Balzac the world ofpure quantity to produce the type is the world of price, of the speculativegaze of the consumer; in Poe and Conan-Doyle, it is the world of science’s purequantities.

4. The Physiologies and Economics: Engels, Elson

The basis ofHolmes’s deduction in “The Red-Headed League” that Jabez Wilson has done manuallabour stems from his being slightly deformed, “your right hand is quite a sizelarger than your left, you have worked with it and the muscles are moredeveloped”. In this deduction, Holmes mirrors some of Engels’s descriptions in The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engelsnoted that in Birmingham,the division of labour is “carried out to the last detail” and the developmentof technology saw the employment of a “great multitude of women and children”.Engels explained the consequences of this on families and particularly as aresult of women’s over-work, which leads to “incapacity as housekeepers,neglect of home and children, indifference, actual dislike of family life, anddemoralization…The children are described as half-starved and ragged, the halfof them are said not to know what it is to have enough to eat, many of them getnothing to eat before the midday meal, or even live the whole day upon apennyworth of bread for a noonday meal – there were actually cases in whichchildren received no food from eight in the morning until seven at night. Theirclothing is very often scarcely sufficient to cover their nakedness, many arebarefoot in winter. Hence they are all small and weak for their age, and rarelydevelop with any degree of vigour. And when we reflect that with theseinsufficient means of reproducing the physical forces, hard and protracted workin close rooms is required of them, we cannot wonder that there are few adultsin Birmingham fit for military service…According to the assertion of arecruiting sergeant, the people of Birmingham are smaller than those anywhereelse, being usually 5 feet 4 to 5 inches tall”, Engels also notes how“unbridled sexual intercourse seems…almost universal, and that at a very youngage.”

Engels’s Holmesianpoint is clear, the lack of growth and physical deformity as a consequence ofworking long hours in confined spaces. This regression functions as theunderside of progressive developments in commodity production, whether capitalism’sdemystification of all human relations, developments of the productive forcesor the expansion in the production of commodities. What is more, Engels goesbeyond the sphere of production (the factory) to include, and make central, thesphere of reproduction (largely, the household). Feminist economists, includingNancy Folbre and Diane Elson, have criticised Marxism for its failure to think therole of households; here, however, Engels is attempting just that.

The features of the Birmingham working classdescribed by Engels (social class discernible from appearance, bad parenting,sexual promiscuity) anticipate the descriptions of “chavs”. The point, however,is that Engels demystifies these, rooting them in capitalism, both capitalismin general and changes in capitalism like the development of the factorysystem. Jones by contrast, accepts the stereotype up to a certain point andthen opposes it through informing his readers of facts and resorting toahistorical explanations, “capacity of individuals for cruelty”. Jones quotesextensively from the media treatment of the Matthews case and its use of thecase to slander whole communities in Britain. What Jones cannotacknowledge is that the media’s prejudices are not just expressions of apolitical choice to marginalise the working class but are also part of the sameknot of social factors which produced the case itself.

The problem with histreatment of the Matthews case (and antisocial behaviour, more generally) isJones’s lack of feminism. This lack of feminism produces both the politicalweaknesses of the two final chapters and a lack of explanatory rigour. In Chavs (unlike The Condition of the Working Class in England) households are excludedfrom the analysis. Diane Elson’s analysis in “The Economic, the Political and the Domestic: Businesses, States and Households in the Organisation of Production” is vital here, Elson discusses how, inneoliberalism, costs and risks are transferred from the state to householdsthrough welfare cuts and demands labour be flexible on capital’s terms. Sheargues, “the domestic sector produces a labour force; and, more than that,plays a foundational role in the production of people who possess not only thecapacity to work but also acquire other more intangible social assets...all ofwhich permit the forming and sustaining of social norms‟ (Elson, p. 197). Elson also notes, crucially forunderstanding why a transfer of costs onto the household is a transfer of costsfrom men to women, that for all the sectors and the circuits between them„modes of operation are built upon the prevailing gender order” and “rules and norms...are predicated upon theassumption that the care and nurture of the labour force on a daily andintergenerational basis is primarily a female task” (p. 197-8).

Elson then explains the disruptiveconsequences of under resourcing the domestic and therefore limiting itsproductiveness, she writes, “it is hard to sustain social norms of ethicalbehaviour in the demoralisation that comes from realising you are no more thana dispensable, interchangeable unit of labour from the point of view of theprivate sector; and from realising that the public sector will do little tomitigate or contest this...Dissonances between the domestic, the political andthe economic have repercussions far beyond the domestic sector, undermining theconditions of supply of a productive willing labour force”(p. 205). This provides the basis for Elson’s critiqueof family intervention programmes (the same sort of critique is possible of thestigmatisation of mothers in working class communities) “there is no suggestionas to why there has been such a deterioration in parenting at this juncture; norecognition of the likely impact on parenting of the extremely long hours ofpaid work undertaken by many of those men and women in Britain who do have paidjobs; nor of the impact of insecurity, unemployment and loss of hope andself-respect as whole communities are crushed by the force of the global market” (Elson, 205-6). Elson here repeats and refinesconsiderably, Engels’s account of demoralisation in Birmingham. What this means is thatanti-social behaviour and even, at an extreme point, the total breakdown ofparenting in the Matthews case is not distinct from the pressures anddemoralisation most mothers suffer, it is, instead, the point where those pressuresbreak out publicly and disruptively.

This line ofanalysis offers one final allegorical possibility when coupled with the media’sobsession with Karen Matthews’s appearance. Jones quotes the Birmingham (ironically) Mail, describing Karen Matthews as “the undisciplined face of

Britain

”and “Karen Matthews, 32 but looking 60, glib hair falling across greasy face,is the product of a society that rewards fecklessness” (p. 18). Elson andBenjamin, read together, would suggest something different is expressed inKaren Matthews’s face, her “marks of weakness, marks of woe”, “everything about history that, from the beginning, has beenuntimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful” or the fact we, all, are “no morethan a dispensable, interchangeable unit of labour”.

The focus on KarenMatthews’s appearance is the final confirmation that types of this sort only existwithin capitalism as hell. Karen Matthews’s, “32 but looking 60” expresses theeternal transience of both nature and fashion and her clothes her inability tokeep up with and master this transience. In TheArcades Project, Benjamin quotes Brecht, writing, “the following remarkmakes it possible to recognise how fashion functions as camouflage for quitespecific interests if the ruling class. “Rulers have a great aversion toviolent changes. They want everything to stay the same- if possible for athousand years. If possible the moon should stand still and the sun move nofurther in its course. Then no one would get hungry any more and want dinner.And when the rulers have fired their shot, the adversary should no longer bepermitted to fire; their own shot should be the last.”” (p. 71-2). The linkbetween the Brecht quote and fashion is precisely fashion’s temporality ofhell, expressed most clearly in Balzac, as with the torments of the job centre,fashion is eternally new but also eternally the same, “the epigraph from Balzacis well suited to unfolding the temporality of hell: to showing how this timedoes not recognize death, and how fashion mocks death; how the acceleration oftraffic and the tempo of news reporting…aims at eliminating all discontinuitiesand sudden ends; and how death as caesura belongs together with all thestraight lines of divine temporality” (p. 66).

The Author as Sympathiser: A Review of "Chavs" by Owen Jones

2011-11-27T18:19:00.001Z

“The best opinions won’t helpif they don’t make anything useful out of the person who holds them.” WalterBenjamin, “The Author as Producer”.

It would bechurlish to deny that many of Jones’s opinions and his desire to disseminatethem widely is refreshing. He is, for example, unambiguous in attacking thepathetically low level of benefits (p. 197) and makes the important argumentthat the quality of and control over work is essential to the understanding ofclass (p. 144). The argument that Conservatives find “class” subversive because“it suggests that a group of people lives by working for others, which raisesquestions of exploitation. It encourages you to define your interests againstthose of others. But, above all, it conjures up the notion of a potentiallyorganised bloc with political and economic power” (p.47) is succinct and,fundamentally, correct. Furthermore, it iswelcome (although this may say more about the state of Labour or thecommentariat) to read an explicitly Labour commentator attacking the beliefthat “the victims of social problems are, in large part responsible for causingthem” (p. 37) and presenting the “chav” as the figure in whom the apparentmoral and cultural indiscipline that causes these problems needs to berectified (p. 194).

However,despite the merits of these opinions, Jones pays a heavy price for the way inwhich he seeks to disseminate them and from his failure to address preciselyfor whom he is writing. As a result of this, Jones’s solidarity with theworking class can only function in a reactionary manner. In “The Author asProducer”, opposing the activist tendency in the New Objectivity (a tendencywhich closely corresponds to Jones’s), Benjamin argued, “however revolutionarythis political tendency may appear, it actually functions in acounter-revolutionary manner as long as the writer expresses his solidaritywith the proletariat ideologically and not as a producer…[it] completelyignores the position of intellectuals in the process of production.” Benjamin’scritique continued, arguing the activist intellectual with his opinions“ideological solidarity”, “takes a position next to the proletariat…but whatsort of position is that? It is that of a benefactor, of an ideologicalpatron.” Benjamin’s essay concluded with an attack on Maublanc’s insistence “Iwrite almost exclusively for a bourgeois public. First because I am forced to…secondlybecause I am of bourgeois origin and of a bourgeois education and come from a bourgeoismilieu, and therefore am naturally inclined to address myself to the class towhich I belong, which I know best and can best understand. But that does notmean that I write to please it or to support it. On the one hand I am convincedthat the proletarian revolution is necessary and desirable, on the other handthat the weaker the opposition of the bourgeoisie, the quicker, easier, moresuccessful and less bloody the revolution will be. . . . Today the proletariatneeds allies who come from the bourgeois camp…I want to be among these allies.”

TakingBrecht and Tretiakov as exemplary, Benjamin offered a way out of the impasse ofthe author’s sympathetic ideological solidarity with the proletariat byinsisting on the centrality of the writer’s position in production (i.e. theproduction of their own works), this introduces the question of “technique”.Drawing on the Brechtian “functional transformation”, Benjamin demanded “do notsimply transmit the apparatus of production without simultaneously changing itto the maximum extent possible in the direction of socialism.” By contrast withBrecht and Tretiakov, Jones is, on Benjamin’s terms, a hack. To describe Jonesas a hack is not to make the easy, probably untrue and definitely irrelevantargument that he is exploiting the working class in an attempt to make money orraise his media profile. This sort of questioning of Jones’s motives basicallycorresponds precisely to the pseudo-Marxist economism which, “does not takeeconomic class formations into account, with all their inherent relations, butis content to assume motives of mean and usurious self-interest” (Gramsci) thatstructures some of Chavs’s weakestsections). Benjamin shows it is possible to be a hack for the most honourableof reasons. Benjamin’s argument on functional transformation continued “thebourgeois apparatus of production and publication can assimilate an astonishingnumber of revolutionary themes, and can even propagate them without placing itsown existence or the existence of the class that possesses them into question.This is certainly true as long as the apparatus is transmitted by hacks, evenif they are revolutionary hacks. I define a hack as a writer who fundamentallyrenounces the effort to fundamentally alienate the apparatus of production fromthe ruling class in favour of socialism.” Jones, making no effort to alienatethe apparatus of production is a hack, but he is a hack for the (left ofLabour) political tendency of which we are a part.

A briefexamination of Jones’s technique should make this and its politicalconsequences clear. What Chavs offersis an extension (in terms of length) and adirect imitation, that is, an uncomplicated transmission, of the apparatus ofliterary production embodied in the middlebrow newspaper feature designed toinform and arouse empathetic feelings in an indolent middle class audienceconsidered as individuals. Jones essentially works to create false vividness.Long, direct quotes are common and are usually, especially when Jones agreeswith those he is quoting, introduced with present tense reporting verbs, in thespace of a single page we encounter: “objects Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee”, “believes Independent journalist Johann Hari”, but “Conservative organs suchas the Daily Mail had used” (p. 24).Whenever a character is introduced, there is extra information, either tocreate vividness, “Rachel Johnson said to me in the same cut-glass accent as herbrother Boris”, (p. 169) or, as with Toynbee and Hari, to vouch for theexpertise of the authority. This technique also reveals Jones’s expectations ofhis readership’s indolent distractedness, for example, “Professor RichardWilkinson, co-author of seminal book TheSpirit Level” (p. 266), “Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’sgroundbreaking study of inequality, TheSpirit Level” (p. 268). A further part of this false vividness emerges inJones’s deliberately untheoretical, unthreatening informal language, “slaggingthem off” (p. 7), “to get a better idea of the Tory approach to socialdivision, I had a chat with senior Tory MP David Davis” (p. 82)

Jones’sattempt at vividness presupposes (and transmits) a whole world of experienceand prejudice shared between Jones and his middle class readers. The bookbegins, “it’s an experience we’ve all had. You’re among a group of friends oracquaintances when suddenly someone says something that shocks you: an aside ora flippant comment made in poor taste…I had one of those moments at a friend’sdinner in a gentrified part of East London onewinter evening. The blackcurrant cheesecake was being carefully sliced”, Jonesthen recounts a crass “chav” joke (p. 1). Essentially, Jones’s entire book is areply to this stupid friend. The presumption of middle class shared experiencestructures the whole book, David Cameron is “not exactly the sort of blokeyou’d bump into in your local pub” (p. 30) and, in a particularly unfortunateuse of cliché, Jones describes Pinochet’s coup as “one of the most brutal inLatin America’s tortured history” (p. 45). To write this (unless, horribly,it’s meant as a pun), a writer is treating language as a set of stock phrases,words exist in certain blocks expressing a natural “truth” which “everyoneknows”. For Jones, there is no need to examine the whole world of middle classcomplacency underpinning these natural “facts”.

The mosttelling example of the world Jones shares with his audience with the mostworrying political implications is in his discussion of the media’s muchgreater concern with Madeleine McCann than Shannon Matthews. Jones seeks toexplain the media’s concern for McCann, summarising, “this sort of tragedy wasnot supposed to happen to folks you might bump into doing the weekly shop atWaitrose” (p. 15). Explicitly, Jones’s target is the middle class dominance ofthe media and its effects but, implicitly, situated within the shared middleclass world, this analysis is also an attempt, by Jones, to help his middleclass readership make sense of their own experience and their own lack ofempathy for Shannon Matthews as opposed to Madeleine McCann.

Jones’sportrayal of himself as, in many ways, identical to his audience, poses him aset of problems and it is in his solution to these problems that the politicalproblems of his technique appear most clearly, meaning that consideration ofJones’s technique is not mere literary pedantry. Benjamin located many of thecrucial changes structuring the figure of the author as producer in “the adventof the newspaper”. Benjamin explained, (oddly quoting himself, but attributingto “a leftist author”), the newspaper’s “content is “material” which refusesany form of organization other than that imposed by the reader’s impatience.This impatience is not only that of the politician who expects a piece of news,or of a speculator who awaits a tip: behind them hovers the impatience ofwhoever feels himself excluded, whoever thinks he has a right to express hisown interests himself. For a long time, the fact that nothing binds the readerto his paper as much as this avid impatience for fresh nourishment every day,has been used by editors, who are always starting new columns open to hisquestions, opinions, protestations. So the indiscriminate assimilation of factsgoes hand in hand with the similar indiscriminate assimilation of readers, whosee themselves instantly raised to the level of co-workers.” Particularly as aresult of his direct transmission of the stylistic techniques of the newspaper,Jones must justify his expertise, he must, ultimately exclude even his middleclass readers from the status of co-workers. The first, and most obvious, wayin which this is achieved is through the book’s predictably linearorganisation: Vivid anecdote or case study, stupid class prejudiced opinion,qualification to show Jones’s balance (more on this below), facts, revelationof the stupidity of prejudice, repeat for seven chapters, scary chapter aboutthe BNP, inspiring and optimistic turn to politics in the conclusion. This,(Benjamin in One-Way Street)“pretentious, universal gesture of the book”, attempts to maintain the author’sauthority to organise information for an indolent audience. This authority isfurther entrenched by the descriptions of each “character” in Chavs, a power Jones asserts to thedegree that, when he likes a quote from Frank Field, describing him as merely“former government minister” (p. 21), when he opposes a quote from Field, he isdescribed as “a right-wing, anti-immigration Labour MP” (p. 223).

Benjamincontinued in analysising the advent of the newspaper and its effects suggestingthe superiority of the early Soviet newspaper (or at least certainconstructivist experiments in it) over the bourgeois press. He argued, “in theSoviet press, the difference between author and public, maintained artificiallyby the bourgeois press, is beginningto disappear. The reader is indeed always ready to become a writer, that is tosay, someone who describes…Labour itself speaks out for writing it out in wordsconstitutes part of the knowledge necessary to becoming an author. Literarycompetence is no longer based on specialized training in academic schools, buton technical and commercial training in trade schools and thus becomes commonproperty.” Jones resists this threat to his authority by relying not on thespecialised training from Oxfordin writing but, instead, on the contacts, popping in for quick chats with ToryMPs, and secret knowledge acquired. The point where this is most clearlycrystallised is where Jones writes, “as soon as they are safely behind closeddoors, away from the cameras, the cuddly PR-speak can abruptly disappear. Iwitnessed the mask slip myself, when in my final year as an undergraduate. Anextremely prominent Tory politician…had come to deliver an off-the-recordspeech to students. So that he could speak candidly…we were sworn to preservehis anonymity. It soon became clear why. As the logs crackled in the fireplaceon a rainy November evening, the Tory grandee made a stunning confession. ‘Whatyou have to realize about the Conservative Party,’ he said as though it was atrivial, throwaway comment, ‘is that it is a coalition of privileged interests.Its main purpose is to defend that privilege. And the way it wins elections isby giving just enough to just enough other people” (p. 39-40). Here we haveJones communicating a secret repressed knowledge with a little extra vividness,the casual tone, the crackling fire, but simultaneously transmitting thestructures that preserve its secrecy- his coyness about maintaining anonymity.

Added toJones’s privileged access to the elite is his own, personal, experience ofworking class life, again allowing him to pass on a hidden world to hisaudience. He interviews one of his former teachers who says, “I remember that alot of those kids, they had no aspiration…But you’d have to be pretty amazing,to come from a working class background like Daniel [one of my formerclassmates] and aspire to something different”, (p. 173) following on fromthis, Jones explains “I was the only boy in my class to go to a sixth-formcollege, let alone a university. Why? Because I was born into a middle-classfamily” (p. 174) These sort of statements about Jones’s own class position,like those of Maublanc, which testify to the author’s neutrality, expertise andgood moral character and which Benjamin opposes, should be contrasted with theactivity of Brecht and Tretiakov and the operative writer who “defines his taskthrough the statements he makes about his activity.” These statements areintended to provoke reflection in the audience, reflection which raises the readerto the status of co-worker in literary production. The further essentialcontrast between Jones and the operative writer, comes in Benjamin’s statement,“Tretiakov distinguishes the operative writer from one who gives information.His mission is not to report but to struggle; he does not play the role ofspectator but actively intervenes.” Jones, by contrast, attempts to remainscrupulously neutral, he prefers it when our opponents agree with him,commenting on the anonymous Tory he writes “here was an analysis that couldhave dropped out of the pages of the SocialistWorker” (p. 40), he is particularly taken with it when Rachel Johnsonagrees with his argument (p. 169-71). In the introduction he argues, explicitlylinking neutrality to the need to inform his readers, “the aim of this book isto expose the demonization of working-class people; but it does not set out todemonize the middle class. We are all prisoners of our class, but it does notmean we have to be the prisoners of our class prejudice. Similarly it does notseek to idolize or glorify the working class. What it proposes is to show someof the reality of the working class majority that has been airbrushed out ofexistence in favour of the ‘chav’ caricature” (p. 11) Jones also insists, for example,that “all of us [i.e. not just the working class] end up paying for aneducational system segregated by class” (p. 180).

Thepolitics of Jones’s attempt at middle class nonthreatening accessibilityparallel those utopian socialists attacked in the Communist Manifesto for whom, “inthe formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for theinterests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only fromthe point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat existfor them. The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as wellas their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to considerthemselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve thecondition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence,they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class;nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once theyunderstand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the bestpossible state of society?” Jones introduces his conclusion “A New ClassPolitics”, with Shelley’s “Rise like Lions after Slumber”, but Jones’sconception of the poor, the working class, the people could not be furtherremoved from Shelley’s. In this way, “Lions after Slumber”, is just anotherstock phrase, expressing little but a world of middle class complacency. Bothin its address and its content, Shelley’s poetry aims not at the peopleas victims, but, in Christopher Hitchens’s excellent phrase“the idea of the risen people.” In Shelley’s “Peter Bell the Third”, there is acrucial and partial exception to this but more on this in “Chavs as Allegory”. Toportray the poor as responsible for their own poverty destroys politicalpossibility; to create a merely ideological solidarity with the working classbased on their status as the most suffering class destroys politicalpossibilities.

Jones’s offering ofinformation to the middle class instead of addressing the working class is underlined by his deeplyinadequate conception of ideology, his lack of any sense of class formationsand mediation between base and superstructure. Of the Karen Matthews case,Jones writes “prominent politicians manipulated the media-driven frenzy to makepolitical points” (p. 29). Running through the book is the manipulative classprejudice of the media and right-wing politicians thought, immediately, as a (or, worse, the) weapon of class warfare.Essentially, the “chav” stereotype is merely the “mean and usurious”creation of elites. To combat this prejudice Jonesseems to think it is sufficient merely to expose the “truth”. Jones poses thequestion, “were [young mothers] anything like the stereotype of the VickyPollard-style teenage mum?” (p. 188) and concludes his “Broken Britain” chapterby arguing “such demonization does not stand up to scrutiny” (p. 220). Jones’slack of any sense of mediation also leads him into, once the prejudice has beenundermined, a platitudinous liberalism, all the Karen Matthews case isis “another example of the capacity of someindividuals for cruelty” (p. 32). Chavs ischaracterized by this limitation, as if we are trapped between a platitude with less than no explanatory powerand an absurd naturalizing of class relations and behaviour. This is a directconsequence of Jones’s inability to think through mediation. Ultimately, whatunderpins Jones’s lack of a theory around ideology or mediation is his basicoptimism about the natural decency of middle class Britain, a set of prejudices, moreor less imposed by an elite with usurious or purely self-interested motives,blocks any possibility of the decent middle classes from helping out theworking class. Thus, Jones argues, “proclaiming people are responsible fortheir situation makes it easier to oppose the social reforms which wouldotherwise be necessary to help them” (p. 220). With this as his basic politicalconception it is not surprising Jones abandons any theoretical formulation for thesake of an easy and nonthreatening appeal to middle-class readers.

The problems posed bythis lack of theory and Jones’s tendency to reproduce almost any white, middleclass prejudice provided it is not about “chavs”, converge towards the end ofthe book, particularly when Jones discusses the Left’s attitude tointernational issues and critiques multiculturalism. Jones sneers, “the problemcomes with the priority given by theleft to international issues…while the BNP are cynically offering hatefulsolutions to many of these bread and butter issues, left-wing activists are morelikely to be manning a stall about Gaza outside a university campus” (p. 257).Jones here is pandering directly to the prejudices of his, not particularlypolitical, blackcurrant cheesecake loving, recently out of university, middleclass friends from the first page of the book. Jones’s claim about the left’sparticular focus on international issues is particularly odd (and onlyintelligible against the background of shared, young middle class experience)given the extensive use he makes of quotes and information from left-wingactivists in working class communities, especially Alan Walter from DefendCouncil Housing (p. 34, 87, 143, 261). There certainly are worthwhilecriticisms that can be made of left internationalist campaigning, the problemis Jones’s politics make them impossible. In fact Jones shares the essentialproblem of a merely ideological solidarity with the most suffering at theexpense of political mobilization. However, if a duty to the most suffering isthe important criteria of politics, the Gazacampaigners are clearly more accurate in the object of their (non)politics thanJones.

In Jones’s use of the BNPto critique the left’s internationalism, “cynically” and “hateful” are welcomebut, ultimately, beside the point. Some of this use of the BNP comes fromJones’s desire to be even-handed, or not to take sides but much more of this,as emerges even more clearly in his discussion of multiculturalism, stems fromhis desire to indulge almost every sort of prejudice, something which leads himto accept much of the BNP’s diagnosis, if not its solutions, to the issuesfacing the working class. In “The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction”, Benjamin wrote of the necessity of “theses about thedevelopmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production…It wouldtherefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon…Theconcepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differfrom the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for thepurposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation ofrevolutionary demands in the politics of art”. Benjamin’s argument draws on thesame recasting, through the importance of production, of the sterile oppositionbetween form and content into the dialectical relationship between techniqueand opinion. It is on the level of technique and the alienation andtransformation of the techniques of production (Brecht, Chaplin, Eisenstein)rather than opinion that the work is made useless for Fascism. Jones isabsolutely incapable of this, the fact that he is strongly anti-Fascist in hisopinions does not prevent Chavs frombeing potentially useful to Fascism. Failingthus to seal his work against Fascism, the use made of the BNP is deeplyproblematic. On multiculturalism, Jones’s argument is that the dominance ofmulticulturalism has led to, on the one hand a loss of a conception of classfrom, particularly left, politics, and on the other hand has seen a“white working class” identity both created, in the sense that with thedisappearance of class and with minority cultures to be celebrated “white”serves as a non celebrated residue, and, therefore, demonized. Thus, Jones writes “although ruling elites have madeit clear that there is nothing of worth in working class culture, we have been(rightly) urged to celebrate the identities of minority groups. What’s more, liberal multiculturalism has understoodinequality purely through the prism of race, disregarding that of class” (p. 225).This leads Jones to tend to argue that the struggle of other groups againstoppression has been part of a colonization of left politics that hasmarginalized the working class, “across the whole of the left – and by that Imean social democracy, democratic socialism and even the remnants ofrevolutionary socialism- there has been a shift away from class politics towardsidentity politics over the last 30 years…Of course, the struggles for theemancipation of women, gays and ethnic minorities are exceptionally importantcauses...But it is an agenda that has happily co-existed with the sidelining ofthe working class in politics” (p. 255).

Jones’s self-presentationas above, class (and, importantly, other social antagonisms), coupled with his ideologicalsolidarity with the working class (but not with women or ethnic minorities)leads him to affirm other structures of domination and exploitation bothbecause of his denial of his privileged position towards these structures andhis sense that these struggles risk blunting working class politics. He makes,for example, the entirely irrelevant argument against all-women shortlists thatthey have “largely ended up promoting middle class women with professionalbackgrounds”, (p. 256) as if the point of AWS was to do something about classrather than promote some women at the expense (absolutely correctly) of somemen.

It is certainly true thatofficial multiculturalism tends to blunt political antagonism, reducingantagonistic politics to the celebration of different identities without anysense of how those identities are constituted by exploitation, domination andexclusion. Official multiculturalism also presents inequalities as beingsoluble within capitalism and class antagonisms, by definition, resist beingresolved within capitalism. It is also correct to argue that the focus on“identity” can, as Jones argues, serve to obscure the multi-ethnic (and that itis much more multi-ethnic than any other class) status of the working class (p.243).

It is, however,absolutely illegitimate both politically and intellectually (the problem withJones’s careless lack of theory) to present multiculturalism as a usurpation ofthe space of left politics by other “equalities” strands. Jones constantly andcarelessly runs together “race” and “culture”, this obscures whatmulticulturalism has meant for conceptualizing anti-racist struggles. The pointshould be made that not all anti-racist or anti-sexist politics are examples ofidentity politics. Insisting on the difference between “race” and “culture”,Francis Mulhern has argued, “the idea of multiculturalism was alwaysquestionable as a line of solution to the crisis that prompted its adoption,that of racism and the struggles against it. Culture is an anodyne representationof race, which is a historically constituted relation of organized inequality,domination and subordination.” Mulhern’s point is that multiculturalism alsoblunts struggles against racism. This point can be developed considering thestatist formation of official multiculturalism. Not only does it claim problemsof inequality can be resolved within capitalism but that they can be resolvedon the level of the national state by policies to promote pluralism anddiversity. This removes one the most significant aspects of the concept of race(or class, or sex), its internationalism. Unlike “culture”, “race” includes theidea that “organized inequality, domination and subordination” has aninternational dimension, it links anti-racist struggles to the internationaldivision of labour in a way that exceeds mere “ideological solidarity.”

Ultimately, Jones failsto live up to his entirely correct and important rupture with much of thecurrent (Blue Labour, for example) ideological class politics, which presentswhite working class as a cultural identity. Indeed, quite often he slips backinto this form of politics, particularly in his conceptualizing ofmulticulturalism. The reasons for Jones’s failure to be the equal of some ofhis opinions can be found in his own conception of his task as a writer, to besympathetic but distanced from the working class in his providing ofinformation to liberate his middle class audience from a particular set ofprejudices about class. This conception leads to Jones writing Chavs in such a way to challenge,intellectually and politically, his audience (and perhaps himself) as little aspossible, in order to offer a broad but entirely middle class accessibility.Jones flatters his audience, who are also himself, with the notion that theliberation of the workers is the task of the middle class.

The Red Book

2011-11-24T16:56:00.001Z

"We should go to the masses and learn from them, synthesise their experience into better, articulated principles and methods, then do propaganda among the masses, and call upon them to put these principles and methods into practice so as to solve their problems and help them achieve liberation and happiness." Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, p. 129

We haven't blogged much recently, one reason was because Tom was writing a chapter on Labour and the South for the Labour Left Red Book. The book is now available to download (for free) should you click here. For some reason Tom's painstakingly complied bibliography is absent from the book, it is, however, at the end of this post.

Coming up on the blog in the next couple of weeks we should have: a review of Chavs by Owen Jones, a spin-off essay on Shelley and the Chav as allegorical type and, perhaps, a review of Owen Hatherley's (fantastic) Pulp book, Uncommon.

Bibliography for "Labour winning in the South"

Balakrishnan,G., 2009. Speculations on the Stationary State. New Left Review, 59, pp. 5-26.

Bradshaw,B., 2010. Why I believe David Miliband should lead Labour. Guardian [online] 30 May. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/30/ben-bradshaw-david-miliband-labour-leader Accessed 27 October 2011.

Denham,J., 2011. No more discomfort- Labour’sSouthern Future. [online] Available at http://www.johndenham.org.uk/john-talks-about-labour-and-the-south Accessed 27October 2011.

Denham,J., 2007. Southern Discomfort Revisted.[online] Available at http://www.fabians.org.uk/events/speeches/john-denham-faces-up-to-labours-southern-discomfort Accessed 27October 2011.

Elson,D., 1998. The Economic, the Political and the Domestic: Businesses, States andHouseholds in the Organisation of Production. New Political Economy, 3(2), pp.189-208.

FawcettSociety, 2010. Fawcett Launches Legal Challenge to the Budget. [online] 1August. Available at http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/index.asp?PageID=1165Accessed 27 October 2011.

Glasman,M. 2010. Labour as Radical Tradition. Soundings,46, pp. 31-41.

GloucesterCity Council, 2010. Election Results byWards Gloucester City Council – Thursday, 6^th May. [online]Available at http://www.gloucesteractive.co.uk/committee/mgElectionElectionAreaResults.aspx?EID=3&RPID=1695237&J=1 Accessed 27October 2011.

Gramsci,A. 1971. Selections from the PrisonNotebooks. Translated from Italian by Q. Hoare and G. Smith. London: Lawrenceand Wishart.

Judt,T. 2009. What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy. New York Review of Books [online] 17December. Available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/dec/17/what-is-living-and-what-is-dead-in-social-democrac/?pagination=false Accessed 27October 2011.

Kumhof,K. and Ranciere, R., 2010. Inequality,Leverage and Crisis. [online] IMF Working Paper. Available at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2010/wp10268.pdfAccessed 27 October 2011.

Marx,K. and Engels, F., 1996. Manifesto of the Communist Party. In: T. Carver, ed. LaterPolitical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-30.

Miliband,E. Ed Miliband. In The Labour Leadership.[ebook] Available at http://www.fabians.org.uk/publications/extracts/labour-leadership-ed-milibandAccessed 27 October 2011.

Miliband,R., 1985. The New Revisionism in Britain. NewLeft Review, I/ 150, pp. 5-26.

Milmo,D., 2011. Unite launches cut price membership for students and the unemployed. Guardian [online] 17 July. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/17/unite-start-reduced-membership Accessed 27October 2011.

Paskini,D., 2010. How Labour can win in the South. donpaskini [blog] 14 October.Available at http://don-paskini.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-labour-can-win-in-south.html Accessed 27October.

Radice,G. and Diamond, P., 2010. SouthernDiscomfort Again. London: Policy Network.

Ranciere,J., 2010. Racism: A Passion from Above. MRZine[online] 23 September. Available at http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/ranciere230910.html Accessed 27October 2011.

Weldon,D., 2011. Wages and Investment- An Outline of an Economic Programme for Labour.Duncan’s Economic Blog [blog] 26 April. Available at http://duncanseconomicblog.wordpress.com/wages-investment-%E2%80%93-an-outline-of-an-economic-programme-for-labour/ Accessed 27October 2011.

Weymouthand Portland Borough Council, 2010. BoroughCouncil Result May 2010. [online] Availableat http://www.dorsetforyou.com/media.jsp?mediaid=161175&filetype=pdf Accessed 27October 2011.

YouGov and Policy Network, 2010. Results. [online]Available at http://www.policy-network.net/uploads/media/154/7135.pdfAccessed 27 October 2011.

Organise Pessimism

2011-10-02T19:01:00.000+01:00

The title of my talk is borrowed from Walter Benjamin's essay "Surrealism: the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" and is, I feel an appropriate slogan for considering the political tasks of today in conjunction with Cable Street. Benjamin's friend, Theodor Adorno, influenced by Benjamin's treatment of time, remarked that, in philosophical interpretation, what is required is to reverse the narcissism that wants to ask what the philosophers can tell us about our lives today and ask, instead, what today's events can tell us about the philosophers. So, rather than the effort made by the less stupid members of the financial elites to read Capital in order to understand the current crisis or adding to the endless profusion of de Bottonesque philosophy self-help books with titles like "How to drop a Dress Size with Habermas" (by boring off those pounds?) or "How Fichte can help cope with Baldness", I want to take as my starting point the question what August's riots can teach us about Benjamin.

My contention is that the riots reveal the link between Benjamin's treatment of pre-Marxist utopian socialism (especially Fourier's) and Surrealism. To make this argument requires us to reject the argument made by many on the left that the rioters should be condemned as hyper-consumerists, lacking entirely in self-restraint. To condemn the rioters in the name of critiquing consumerism repeats what Benjamin attacks in the Surrealism essay as a bourgeois left "moralising dilettantism". This moralising dilettantism is attacked by Benjamin in the name of organising pessimism, against the left liberal's moralising and contemplative faith in "traditional culture" (here Benjamin anticipates his later, famous, argument in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" that "there is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism"). Traditional culture serves, amongst other things, to erect a sharp distinction between the "cultured" and "uncultured", against this Benjamin seeks, arguing this was attempted in Surrealism, to "overthrow the intellectual predominance of the bourgeoisie and to make contact with the proletarian masses." Moralising dilettantism is similarly opposed by Fourier's utopian socialism in the name of a "hedonistic materialism". Benjamin quotes Fourier's critique of capitalism's conjunction of immoral business and idealist moralism and attacks "those exploits of morality calculated to turn us into enemies of our senses and friends of that commercial activity that serves merely to provoke the abuses of sensual pleasure."

Against the moralistic and contemplative attacks on the rioters we need to insist on the distorted utopian features of the riots and, in particular, of the looting. In the wake of the 1965 Watts riots, the Situationist International insisted on the slogan "to each according to their false needs." Looting suggests a situation of non-restrictive material abundance. The promise of rioting repeats the Fourierist promise of the transformation of the restricted and exclusive consumerism of capitalism into the unrestricted and inclusive hedonism of utopia. For Fourier, the productive forces are now sufficient to produce an abundance which allows a utopia in which, in Benjamin's words, "morality has become superfluous". In Fourier the Paris Arcades are transformed into the inclusive dwelling place of the utopian collective. Benjamin praises Fourier for his anti-ascetic, anti-capitalist and anti-Social Democratic liberation of nature. He writes of the utoa in which "four moons would illuminate the earth, sea water would no longer taste salty and beasts of prey would do man's bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labour that far from exploiting nature is capable of delivering her of the creations that lie dormant in her womb as potentials."

In Fourier's utopia lions will deliver the mail

There is a parallel affinity between the riots and Surrealism; as well as the promise of material abundance the riots offer the transformation of the city street. Benjamin writes in the Surrealism essay of how "only revolt completely exposes [the city's] Surrealist face." Again the conjunction of capitalism (or Social Democracy), traditional culture and idealistic moralism seeks to prevent this "profane illumination." We could add a final affinity between the riots, utopian socialism and Surrealism: their explosive spreading.

"The propagation of the phalanstery takes place through an explosion"

There is, however, a limit to a politics derived from the riots, from utopian socialism or from Surrealism. Benjamin notes the Surrealist failure to think through the "constructive, dictatorial side of the revolution." This is also what utopian socialists and rioters lack, the city is temporarily redeemed but this redemption cannot be institutionalised, there is no rupture from the past. In the "Critique of the Gotha Programme", it is only in the higher, post-state, post-political phase of Communism that to "each according to his needs" is achieved. The problem, particularly if the riots are considered together with Cable Street, is that a street-level politics, at least in terms of the possibility of its immediate achievements, is equally (or perhaps even better) suited to the far-right (in the East End attempted in 2011 as well as 1936) than the left. At the origin of this conception is Baudelaire's conception of the "culte de la blague", a politics of shock based on street level intimidation and antisemitic practical jokes featuring grotesque violence, which Benjamin discusses.

Baudelaire's influence on Benjamin was something that long concerned Adorno. In Minima Moralia Adorno critiques Baudelaire's treatment of novelty arguing the new in "its bare contour is a cryptogram for the most unequivocal reaction." Adorno's critique, however, misses how Baudelaire's poetry disavows his politics in its conjunction of writing and loss, what Adorno describes as Baudelaire's mystificatory and "dizzying reversal" is precisely the impossibility of immediate gratification translated into loss and writing. For Benjamin, Baudelaire (and Breton in Nadja) love offers a profane illumination analogous to revolt but following Baudelaire's "A une passante", "a flash of lightning- then darkness. O fleeting beauty whose glance brought me suddenly to life again in a second birth, Shall I never see you again except in eternity", he argues, in "Central Park", "the true delight of the urban poet is love not at first sight but at last sight. It is a farewell forever that coincides in the poem with a moment of enchantment." (my emphasis) It is the stress on loss and its coincidence in the poem with enchantment and eternity that escapes the aggressive immediacy of the politics of the "culte de la blague".

Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" make clear the politics derived from loss and enchantment. Borrowing the experience of time and loss from "A une passante", Benjamin writes "the true picture of the past flits by. The past can only be seized as an image that flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again...every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably." This explosive confrontation between past and present follows on from Benjamin's introduction of the notion of "retroactive force" in the class struggle, of the class struggle's "spiritual achievements", he writes it is "not in the form of the spoils that fall to the victor that they make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humour, cunning and fortitude. They have a retroactive force and will constantly call in question any victory, past and present, of the rulers." To this we should add Marx's similar argument, which also marginalises the immediate results of the class struggle, "from time to time the workers are victorious but only temporarily. The real result of their battles is not some immediate success but a unity amongst workers that gains ever more ground."

Marx and Benjamin suggest an asymmetry between street level organisation of left and right. The right can only win an immediate success through intimidation, our task is to build unity out of resistance to the attempt at intimidation that is able to call the past into question. This is the point where the slogan "organise pessimism" leaves both Social Democracy and the rioters behind, revealing both positions, in their ignoring of the past and of the necessity of a radical break, to be identical. Benjamin's "organise pessimism" is conceived explicitly against optimistic views of progress or views suggesting utopia can be built in current society or the current city without a political break. The temptation of anti-fascism today is sometimes to conceive fascism as an aberration and liberal democracy as an ideal almost without suffering, Benjamin refuses this arguing "the current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical" and linking the politicians of the left's "stubborn faith in progress" to "their servile integration into an uncontrollable apparatus".

Ultimately, Benjamin's objection to Social Democratic progressive politics is its removal of resentment from politics. Zizek has argued that both the French riots of 2005 and the London riots constituted a blind acting out of destructive violence motivated by resentment, nothing could be further from the truth, except in the case of the original response to the execution of Mark Duggan, which crysallised decades of resentment of racist police violence and harassment, the London rioters were overwhelmingly positive, offering nothing else but a joyous affirmation, if anything the London rioters were a fairly egalitarian (no scarcity in looting and the overcoming of racial and postcode divisions) version of Nietzsche's blond beasts. It is resentment that offers the possibility of moving from small-scale victories (the blocking of a fascist march, keeping forests public) to the possibility of redemption. Following Nietzsche's argument as to the early Jews' inability to find satisfaction leading to a sublime hatred able to create ideals, "a truly great politics of revenge", Benjamin viewed resentment as particularly Jewish (it is one of the group of ideas denoted by "theology" in the first thesis). The politics of resentment were betrayed by social democracy, "in Marx the working class appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger...Social Democracy cut the sinews of the working class's greatest strength, its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice which is nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than of liberated grandchildren."

As the Tories seek to dismantle the NHS, we should remember that nobody in British politics was a greater practitioner of a great politics of revenge than Nye Bevan, as with Benjamin, the fact that the "enemy has never ceased to be victorious" compressed all history together, we see this most clearly in the "lower than vermin speech". In this speech, with the NHS founded and a rupture with the past enacted, Bevan turned to past resentments, "no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred of the Tory party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through." This memory, this hatred is what we must reconnect with and organise.

The problem is, to speak as a former Labour parliamentary candidate, is the servility of leading Labour politicians, stemming in part from a stubborn faith in progress and a moralistic unwillingness to make contact with the proletarian masses. This makes living up to the idea the Tories are lower than vermin impossible for Labour at present. A party is, however, necessary to organise and maintain memories of hatred and also to stabalise and generalise struggles. Gramsci argues political passion, street politics without a party has clear limits, "it is not possible to think of an organised an permanent passion. Permanent passion is a condition of orgasm and spasm." A party allows a break from the past. As Benjamin argues, politics is not the locomotive of history but the attempt of the passengers on the train to activate the emergency break.

Letter to Greenwich Councillors on the Proposed Evictions of those involved in Disturbances

2011-08-14T20:49:00.001+01:00

We are writing to express our concern about Chris Roberts’s proposal to seek the eviction of council tenants involved in last week’s disturbances. We hope you will oppose this dangerous and ill-thought out measure.

The eviction of council tenants is a discriminatory measure, unlike the criminal punishments being imposed by the courts, it applies only to those living in council accommodation, not those in privately rented accommodation or home owners, even if they have committed equally serious or worse offences. Greenwich residents who live in council accommodation will be punished twice. Given, as the council’s own Equality Impact Assessment for its Housing Strategy makes clear, Black and Minority Ethnic residents are more likely to live in council accommodation evictions also risk discriminating on the grounds of race.

The eviction will also discriminate against family members who live in the same house who have not committed a crime and are likely to be women and children. In some families, as in the Wandsworth case, family members will be faced with the stark choice of either being forced to throw out a family member (often their own child) or face being evicted altogether if they want to stay together as a family – again, a decision that families in other types of accommodation will not have to make. In other cases the parents of, often very young, children may face eviction. In either case, this incentivises the splitting up of families and causes considerable disruption to the whole family while being rehoused. Children living in temporary accommodation are some of the most deprived, missing out on schooling, on play, and opportunities to develop (Shelter, 2004).

If, like Wandsworth Council, the council deems the family to then have made themselves deliberately homeless and sees no responsibility to rehouse them, the council will not only be undermining their right to a family life but also making destitution a punishment. Both of these things should never be used as a punishment for people, whether innocent or guilty of a crime.

Even if making families destitute and homeless were wise or morally justifiable, we are worried about the impact of evictions on the rights of all council tenants. As with some other recent ideas on housing coming from the council, including the, hopefully now abandoned, plans to impose considerable rent increases and only offer short-term tenancies, it appears that the proposal involves supporting and even extending the coalition’s attacks on the principles that underpin the very idea of council housing. Suggesting, at least for council tenants, that the right to decent housing is not unconditional by evicting those who have committed a crime, is an attack on the rights of all council tenants, including the law-abiding.

We are ashamed to see our, Labour, council alongside Tory Wandsworth at the forefront of this tawdry and destructive populism. We will be submitting a resolution at the next ward meeting to this effect. In the meantime we urge you to oppose Councillor Roberts’s proposal.

Outline for a Book Chapter on Labour and the South: What's Squeezing the Squeezed Middle

2011-07-31T11:53:00.003+01:00

I (Tom) am co-writing a chapter on Labour and the South of England in the GEER little red book. This is a rough outline of my argument and I'd be grateful for comments as, at present, I'm not quite sure how well it holds up.

The intention of the piece is to present a counter-argument to the usual right-wing and opportunistic strategies for Labour to win back Southern seats. It will also suggest that the limitations of, for example, Radice and Diamond’s arguments on Labour in the South, focusing on immediately and uncritically on the “anxieties and aspirations” of Southern swing voters are symptomatic of contradictions and tensions in the Southern economy which our policies need to address.

In the 2010 election 70% of our lost votes were in the South-West, South-East (excluding London) and East of England yet what is usually proposed represents no real break from our 2010 strategy. The point is not, mainly, that we lost swing voters, it is that our traditional supporters did not turn out. In Gloucester and Dorset South, for example, two of the crucial seats we lost, and in which council elections were held on the same day as the General Election, turnout in those wards which elected Labour councillors was between 52 and 58%,

those wards won comfortably by the Tories saw turnouts of between 74 and 80%.

The crucial point of separation between my argument and that of Radice and Diamond or John Denham is in how the “squeezed middle” should be understood. Those on the left urging its abandonment in favour of a greater focus on the poorest and most vulnerable play into the hands of the Tory dismantling of universal welfare in the name of, similarly, targeting help to those who really need it. A potentially radical creation of a political bloc is replaced, whether by Labour progressives or Iain Duncan-Smith with charity. This is particularly important in the South where the high cost of living means that means-tested benefits are withdrawn at a point where people feel, in relative terms, poorer than in the rest of the country. The lack of universal benefits and services, particularly care, whether for children, the elderly or the disabled, impacts disproportionately on women. Women will, similarly, be a disproportionate part of the political bloc needed in the South.

Denham, for example, can only offer a mean-spirited and opportunistic understanding of the squeezed middle whereby those struggling in the South are struggling mainly because of the irresponsible, particularly welfare claimants (mostly women) and immigrants. Radice and Diamond's argument on the necessity of appealing to swing voters' anxieties and aspirations represents a similar tendency. Opposing these positions requires both a more rigorous theoretical understanding if the South and addressing how the Southern society and economy creates a gap between Labour politicians and the public which, even less than in the rest of the country, activists and the Trade Union movement are, at present, unable to bridge. It is this gap which allows the empathetic understanding of anxieties and aspirations to appear as a plausible means of re-engaging with Southern voters. What this direct capitulation to some of the nastier aspects of Southern opinion does not allow is a breaking down of the boundaries between politicians and the masses.

What will help us rework the meaning of the squeezed middle is Ralph Miliband’s argument “recompostion of the working class”, which stresses the proletarianisation of white collar work.

Miliband’s argument that the working class includes those workers, who are particularly numerous in the South, located at subordinate levels of the productive process even if working white collar sectors serves a powerful counterargument to the cultural understanding of class and the Southern opportunists. The identification of the squeezed middle with an increasingly proletarianised culturally middle-class should also suggest a different response from the leadership to strikes. What are workers earning between £15,000 and £30,000 a year, striking against increased pension contributions which amount to little more than a pay cut, at a time of pay freezes and high inflation if they are not the “squeezed middle”? We should also note that the UK’s most sustained industrial militancy is not in the traditional industrial areas of the North of England or Scotland but in Southampton.

The Southern squeezed middle, facing wage squeezes, increasingly temporary contracts and a spiralling cost of living is not being squeezed by irresponsibility at the bottom, nor is it, precisely, being squeezed by irresponsibility at the top. It is being squeezed by capitalism. Analyses by Balakrishnan and Brenner show how since the 1970s the diminished vitality of all advanced economies has seen wages and benefits held down and increased personal, government and firm indebtedness.

With deep structural reasons for the anxieties of the South populist mystifications offered by Diamond and Radice help nobody. However, the same structural reasons explain the problem for Labour in the South and the temptation of Radice and Diamond’s position. Gramsci argues that “the subaltern classes are, by definition, not unified”, the lack of class unification is even more apparent in the South than in the North of England. In the South there is very little collective mediation between a relatively homogenised general working class experience and atomised working patterns. To propose a “left” politics in the South this is precisely what we must address, we must find ways of rooting this politics in the experience of Southern workers and of, in Gramsci’s words again the Party becoming the “elaborators of the new integral and totalitarian [i.e. unified and organising] intelligentsia and the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice...takes place.” The relative homogeneity of Southern experience makes this possible if combined with political action by Labour activists with the Southern public in defence of services and working conditions and the formulation of a politics able to address the socio-economic determinants of Southern anxiety. The alternative is an unprincipled and pandering empathy that continues, ironically, to exclude the mass of Southerners from political power.

Women are People not Incubators: Thoughts on the Politics of Abortion Activism

2011-07-21T20:28:00.002+01:00

The recent activism on abortion (including a meeting to plan activism and a demonstration, both of which we attended) has been encouraging. This post responds to the call within that movement for a unified approach to take campaigning on this forward. In particular, we want to strengthen voices within that movement calling for a proactive approach not just to defend but to extend abortion rights (to Northern Ireland as well as removing the “two doctor rule”). This post also aims to be an intervention, arguing that at certain points theoretical failings and particularly the lack of a rigorous feminism will cause organisational and political problems further down the line.

One point of contention that has already arisen is the debate around whether ‘every abortion is a tragedy’ (seen here in a debate between Dianne Abbot and Laurie Penny). We will take this as our starting point as it crystallises a number of theoretical and, ultimately, political problems. Both Abbot and Penny’s positions tend to abstract abortion from sexuality. By contrast, in her “Privacy v. Equality: Beyond Roe and Wade”, Catharine A. MacKinnon, by insisting on the seemingly obvious, but often neglected, fact that “most women seeking abortions become pregnant while having sexual intercourse with men”, suggests a way beyond this impasse. MacKinnon argues, “the abortion debate has centred on separating control over sexuality from control over reproduction.” In Penny and Abbot’s debate this separation and abstraction is quite clear, the unwanted pregnancy is treated as a given. This obscures how the unwanted pregnancy leading to abortion is a consequence of, in MacKinnon’s words, “intercourse under conditions of inequality”. The only questions posed by them are those regarding an individual woman’s subjective experience of the fact of her unwanted pregnancy. Sex as a (or even the) site of oppression remains unquestioned on both sides. Whilst Penny’s position has the advantage of not making useless concessions to abortion’s opponents and Abbot’s maintains a fidelity to the subjective experience of some women, both positions should be overcome by questioning how the unwanted pregnancy occurred. It is not merely bad luck that heterosexual sex leads to unwanted pregnancies and therefore abortions, the number of abortions should serve to indict heterosexual sex. Instead of abortion as tragedy, MacKinnon quotes Adrienne Rich to show abortion as violence, abortion as situated within violence: “in a society where women entered sexual intercourse willingly, where adequate contraception was a genuine social priority, there would be no “abortion issue”. Abortion is violence...It is and will continue to be the accuser of a more pervasive and prevalent violence, the violence of rapism.”

In the absence of questioning intercourse under conditions of inequality, and how we can mobilise women around this, we are left with debating how we should react to the situation we have. What the impasse over whether abortion is branded a tragedy reveals is that what the movement is left with is recourse to articulating what is seen as almost self-evident – the evidence-based or public health case for abortion, making women ‘objects’ of health based interventions not subjects of politics. This also has the consequence of seeing the task of activism as one of enlightenment or education. Underpinning this is a strange mixture of complacency and cowardice. With, and perhaps no point has been more cited than this, our being part of the “pro-choice majority”, this sort of unthreatening liberalism, aiming to be inclusive, is tempting but, in reality, tends to exclude the vast majority of women. Complacency over our support coupled with a lack of faith in the popularity of explicitly “feminist” messages has also meant that we have felt it unnecessary to address male dominance, Rich’s “the violence of rapism”. For MacKinnon, “arguments for abortion under the rubric of feminism have rested on the right to control one’s own body - gender neutral...Feminists tried to assert that control without risking pursuit of the idea that something more might be at stake than our bodies, something closer to a net of relations in which we are (at present unescapably) gendered.” The speaker from Queer Resistance arguing the current government were attacking bodily autonomy in a general way would be particularly symptomatic of the consequences of a gender neutral argument around bodily autonomy.

What we are currently offering, and this was particularly evident in slogans like “get your rosaries off our ovaries” and the, quite frankly, awful SWP offering “not the church, not the state, women must decide their fate”, is a justification of abortion through a liberal conception of privacy, as MacKinnon writes “an instance of liberalism called feminism...it keeps some men out of the bedrooms of other men”. This is inherently conservative - it removes the private from political criticism and action, MacKinnon again, “when the law of privacy restricts intrusions into intimacy it bars change in control over that intimacy. The existing distribution of power and resources within the private sphere will be precisely what the law of privacy exists to protect.” In doing this we refuse to criticise the sex (and the conditions supporting it) that leads to so many unwanted pregnancies. Even the long tradition of slogans derived from a claim over “Our bodies” is potentially complicit in this, sharing something of the “possessive individualism” diagnosed by C.B.MacPherson: the individual is seen as “essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities...The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is a proprietor of his person and capacities” (our emphasis). A conception that, even at its most radical with the Levellers, “could not entertain the idea of freedom as a concomitant of social living in an unacquisitive society...The Levellers paved the way, unwittingly, for the Locke and the Whig tradition, for their whole doctrine of natural rights as property and natural rights to property.”

One risk of the privacy argument for abortion, particularly at present in the UK, where one of the major threats to access to abortion are not legal restrictions but cuts to health funding, is that an argument that rights to privacy demand rights to abortion can do little about the ability to exercise that right in practice. Part of MacKinnon’s argument is to show that, framed through privacy, Roe v. Wade, “guaranteeing the right to choose abortion” is entirely compatible with Harris v. McRae “in which public funding for abortions was held not to be required.” From the perspective of privacy, “the government may not place obstacles in the way of a woman’s exercise of her freedom of choice, it need not remove those not of its own creation.” Framing our arguments through privacy, through the right to decide without interference from church or state, means missing the importance of struggling for adequate funding of abortions.

MacKinnon notes the relationship between the defence of abortion through an argument around privacy and pornography. At the time of her article Playboy were extensively funding pro-choice campaigns “on a level of priority comparable to that of its opposition to censorship.” Quoting Andrea Dworkin, in men’s support for abortion, “getting laid was at stake”, she argues, “so long as women do not control access to our sexuality, abortion facilitates women’s heterosexual availability ...under conditions of gender inequality, sexual liberation in this sense does not free women; it frees male sexual aggression. The availability of abortion removes the one remaining legitimatized reason women have had for refusing sex besides the headache.” MacKinnon’s central argument here is that our conception of sexuality must be reformulated as not “the repression of drives by civilisation but the oppression of women by men” and that the “struggle for reproductive freedom has never included the right for women to say no to sex.” These arguments suggest an alternative to what we view as the most damaging strategic error we are making which is in how we present and formulate our opposition to Dorries’s plans for girls only abstinence education.

All too often our opposition to Dorries on abortion and on sex education tends to frame the opposition as one between us (pro-sex, pro-bodily autonomy, rational, secular, liberal) and her (anti-sex, anti-bodily autonomy, irrational, religious, conservative). For good reasons, this position is alienating; worse, it is complicit with male domination. We should be far more wary of applauding a male politician like Evan Harris presenting himself as the voice of reason, opposing a manipulative and hysterical woman. This position cannot think beyond the repression of autonomy by religious irrationality (Harris particularly enjoyed a poster calling for “evidence based policy.”) MacKinnon notes “our right to decide has become merged with an overwhelmingly male profession’s right not to have its judgement second-guessed by government”. Now, it seems, we may not be able to rely on the medical profession’s liberalism for much longer, a privacy argument cannot combat this, a right not to perform abortions being an equivalent right to privacy. The personal attacks on Dorries (and to a lesser extent Frank Field) are symptomatic of a deadlock in liberalism. Into an apparently “evidence-based”, dispassionate argument, political passion can only be inserted through personal attacks, external to the argument itself (at the demonstration, when the chants were flagging a “Dorries Out” type chant usually got things going again).

Inserting passion into our argument through personal attacks on a relatively minor political figure is likely to prove counter-productive. These sort of attacks can very quickly seem like bullying, allowing Dorries to present herself as someone in tune with ordinary women’s day to day experience (and the majority of the public support abstinence education, although the New Statesman poll does not appear to have asked about girls only abstinence education, which is what Dorries is proposing). In suggesting every abortion is a tragedy, Diane Abbot is attempting a similar sort of populism. In our focus on Dorries we also overestimate the public as a whole’s knowledge of and interest in the details of Westminster politics.

Conversely, and this is the crucial point, we underestimate, or fear (in the case of some male liberals, for whom getting laid is at stake), the potential radicalism of women’s everyday experience and common sense. This common sense may well be “fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential” but, in supporting abstinence education for girls, it speaks of the women who have felt pressured or coerced into sex, it speaks of how sexual liberation as liberation from conservative repression of drives can also mean the liberation of male sexual aggression. It speaks ultimately of the limitations of an explicitly pro-sex liberal feminism. A development, through its grounding in the "violence of rapism", of the common-sensical consensus currently roughly in favour of abstinence education will build a better foundation for future improvements to sex education and access to abortions, than attacks on an anti-science, anti-bodily autonomy, hysteric Nadine Dorries.

To make this argument does not mean to capitulate to Dorries on abstinence education, not least because Dorries is lying about the current content of sex and relationships education. What it means is that the ways currently being proposed for making an argument in defence of abortion rights are woefully inadequate. Particularly at the Liberal Conspiracy organised meeting, all that was being proposed was a liberal, individualist yet authoritarian means of persuading an ignorant public of the rightness of abortion, reliant on ‘telling the truth’, combating myths by ensuring that there are speakers to oppose Dorries, and appropriately presented stories inserted into the mass media. This tends to present the public as blank slates who, should they fail to acknowledge the obvious scientific or evidence based truth, are ignorant or easily manipulated. Instead of this model, we need to begin in common sense (at least in the content of common sense, of what women already know, if not its form); Gramsci argues, “in the teaching of philosophy which is aimed not at giving the student historical information about the development of past philosophy, but at giving him a cultural formation and helping him to elaborate his own thought critically so as to be able to participate in an ideological and cultural community, it is necessary to take as one’s starting point what the student already knows and his philosophical experience (having first demonstrated to him precisely that he has had such an experience, that he is a “philosopher without knowing it).” Gramsci argues, “at those times in history when a homogenous social group is brought into being, there comes into being also, in opposition to common sense, a homogenous – in other words coherent and systematic – philosophy.” This means that a relationship between women’s everyday experience and a women’s coherent philosophy becomes possible precisely because women’s experience of sexuality is relatively homogenous.

The possibility of what is required (the collective immanent criticism of women’s day to day experiences by women themselves, instead of the top-down, London media centric model being proposed by our liberal allies) is, as MacKinnon argues, essentially precluded by a privacy argument for abortion (which simultaneously prevents arguments about the funding of abortion). She writes “to fail to recognise the meaning of the private in the ideology and reality of women’s subordination by seeking protection behind a right to that privacy is to cut women off from collective verification and state support in the same act.” Instead of attempting to place sympathetic stories about abortion in the Daily Mail we must re-invent a politics of consciousness-raising.

On Shaming Scab MPs: An Update

2011-07-11T20:56:00.001+01:00

Our last post "Shame Scab Labour MPs" has been, in terms of page views, by some way our most popular. That this post seems to have struck a chord with large numbers of Labour members who are horrified by the supine behaviour of the leadership and many of our MPs is reassuring. Before moving back to the normal sort of posts (something quite lengthy against Blue Labour, for a change), there are a few loose ends we wanted to sort out.

Interestingly, unless there is some sort of misunderstanding here, Paul Flynn MP seems to be claiming that there was no picket line outside Parliament on Thursday on the 30th. Here is a link to a photo of a picket line outside Parliament. Through twitter we've attempted to clear this up, but without success so far.

If your MP crossed a picket line on June 30th, we would really encourage you to do something to try to hold them to account: propose a resolution in your local party (our MP doesn't seem to have come in but we will propose a general resolution criticising the leadership and those MPs who did cross picket lines) or write to them. Simon at Latte Labour has written rather a gracious letter to John Cryer and received this, odd, reply. On the subject of Cryer's reply, it should be noted that whilst it is obviously absolutely fine to criticise a Trade Union's tactics, believing those tactics to be "ludicrous", does not justify crossing a picket line. Once the decision has been taken solidarity demands that all workers refrain from disrupting the action. A version of Kant's distinction between the public use of reason (one can criticise taxes in a public forum as much as one wants) and the private use (one must still pay them) surely operates here.

There was some criticism of our argument that crossing a picket line violated an unconditional principle, this, for all its terse precision, was perhaps not particularly interesting, the two posts written by Harry Barnes "Modifying a Picket Line" and "A Reply to 'The Partisan'", by contrast, present strong arguments that some Labour MPs who crossed picket lines may have been justified in doing so as their Parliamentary contribution may have done more good than the harm done in crossing the picket line that need to be addressed.

We have replied to both posts in an attempt to defend why never crossing a picket line is an unconditional principle. Perhaps the most interesting counter argument concerns whether the principle applies to a strike with the aim of furthering, for example, racist interests (perhaps, although the politics of the strike were deeply ambiguous, the Lindsey oil refinery strike could serve as an example here). We would argue that why not crossing a picket line is unconditional is because in the struggle of other workers one's own struggle should be recognised, that the strike is in some aspects on behalf of all workers and contains within a profoundly transformative moment that, again, applies to all workers, "however limited an industrial revolt may be, it contains within it a universal soul...it represents a protest by man against a dehumanised life."

Shame Scab Labour MPs

2011-06-29T18:58:00.001+01:00

With Ed Miliband's urging that Labour MPs cross picket lines it has not been a happy day to be a Labour member. Hopefully (although this is probably rather optimistic) no Labour MPs will do so but, if they do, one advantage of remaining in the Labour Party is that there are means of holding them to account. What we hope for is help to compile a list of Labour MPs who are scabbing (if you see anyone or find out please put them in the comments) and then hopefully for CLPs to pass resolutions against them. It may be a bit feeble but done against enough MPs it would still be worthwhile.

Blue Labour Links and Commentary Part One: Non-Aristotelian Class Relations

2011-06-20T16:31:00.003+01:00

We've decided to break this post into two parts, the first deals mainly with Blue Labour's construction of class antagonism, the second is a bit more recondite and addresses nature and fate in Blue Labour particularly in relation to Glasman's treatment of enclosure. In this part we are rude about the influence of Aristotle's ethics on Glasman; in the second the influence of Aristotle's poetics.

A welcome consequence of Blue Labour's fashionability has been the debates over how and in what sense Labour should be a working class party. This post will mainly be a selection of links with critique around Blue Labour's conception construction of class and, in particular, how a conception of politics links this to nature and tradition, particularly in Maurice Glasman's "Labour as Radical Tradition". Focusing on class, nature and tradition means having to ignore some important contributions to debates around Blue Labour, including excellent posts from Duncan Weldon (except for his suggestive pairing of PJ Harvey and Blue Labour, more on this in our second post) and Paper Tigers. We will also ignore, possibly for the sake of a future post, the interesting uses and abuses of Gramsci in the Blue Labour ebook, The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox.

Whilst we will be and have been critical of Blue Labour, we also believe that it is a mistake to portray Blue Labour as Billy Bragg has done (and indeed some Blairites have) as a reheated neoliberalism or attempt to salvage New Labour. Portraying Blue Labour in this way obscures what is dangerous about it and misses its specific conservative function both within the Labour Party and, more interestingly perhaps, within Glasman's own writings. Our argument will be that in "enclosure", "the commons" and "class", Glasman comes extremely close to grasping and solving certain problems but a particular conservative operation in his thought prevents this.

Non-Aristotelian Class Relations

The essence of what is wrong in the Blue Labour project is clearest in Glasman's argument that what must be recovered in the Labour tradition is it Aristotelian conservatism, that the founders of the Labour movement "did not embrace class war and clung stubbornly to an idea of a common life with their rulers and exploiters". For Glasman Labour Aristotelianism is underpinned by a "notion of the Good Life and the Common Good. This carried into the political life of the nation the importance of politics, of virtue understood as a pursuit of compromise, a middle way between extremes and of the integrity of family life and citizenship."

Glasman's Labour Aristotelianism also involves the belief that political action is both productive of and defensive of the "common life". He argues "political movements which are rooted in the lives and experiences of people bring together new constellations of existing political matter, previously disconnected parts of political life". On one level, this line of argument in which political action brings together what has been separated is more attractive than the other aspects of Glasman's Labour Aristotelianism and more in tune with Marxism. However, the useful dimensions of it are prevented by Glasman's rejection of class antagonism.

In Marxism, political action helps form the workers into a genuine, organised class "from time to time the workers are victorious, but only temporarily. The real result of their battles is not some immediate success but a unity amongst workers that gains ever more ground", or, as Ralph Miliband argues, "Sectionalism, sexism and racism do exist. Yet, it does not come amiss to recall that they have on many occasions been at least partially overcome in struggle; that workers in different occupational locations, male and female, black and white, have sometimes fought in solidarity against a common enemy; even that millions of workers, for all their divisions and divergences, have been linked, even if tenuously, by their common support of parties whose stress was not on sectional and other divisions but on class solidarity and commonness of purpose; and that there is no inherent conflict that must for ever separate worker from worker." In Glasman's belief in the common life shared with the exploiters, by contrast, the common enemy and antagonism which is necessary for political action to truly bring together previously disconnected parts of political life is lacking. When Glasman came to talk to our CLP we suggested that the ability of UK Uncut and the student protests to mobilise large numbers of people was in a large part the consequence of a solidarity emerging from the struggle against a common enemy, in reply Glasman was particularly sneery about the protests suggesting that they had failed, unlike the protests over the forest privatisation.

This is not, however, to argue that in Glasman there is no antagonism or separation underpinning political action; for Glasman what matters is a separation within the working class that allows a section to engage in a cross-class politics. Central to his history of the labour movement is the development of a notion of a one of the grandparents of Labour being the "labour aristocracy", of "skilled workers who had lost their status and small holders who had lost their land. These drew upon customary practice as a means of defying managerial prerogative" in the 1899 London Dock Strike. The importance of a separation within the working class to enable cross-class politics then reappears in Glasman's (metaphorically peculiar- of which more later) account of Labour's "Dad", "we have a Dad of Aristotelian, Common Good and traditional descent...For the Dad, the focus was on the big warning of what would happen if you didn’t have friends, if you didn’t organise, if you didn’t build a movement with others to protect yourself from degradation, drunkenness and irresponsibility. The irresponsible were the people who didn’t pay their subs, didn’t turn up for meetings, crossed picket lines and got pissed on the money they earned."

Working Class Respectability

On the link in Glasman between fashioning an ideology of working class respectability and the argument, Labour must build a conception of the common good "that involves those people who support the EDL within our party. Not dominant in the party, not setting the tone of the party, but just a reconnection with those people", there is an important post from Richard Seymour. Making the argument (and it is profoundly depressing that this argument needs to be made) "Nothing 'Labour' should have anything to do with the EDL", there are strong posts from Carl at Though Cowards Flinch and Don Paskini, who makes the crucial point, "say what you like about Philip Blond...but at least he didn't build his career on the back of the efforts of migrant workers and then turn around and demand this party acknowledge that migrants don't deserve equal status with native British workers."

Alongside his analysis of the notion of working class respectability underpinning Blue Labour, Seymour addresses the function of Glasman's use of class, his attempt "to mobilise the ideologeme of 'the white working class' as a sort of puppet boxer with which to belabour the left in the party." Seymour's argument draws on research into BNP supporters arguing that rather than coming from "the most deprived among whites...The two class fractions most likely to be represented among BNP supporters are 'skilled workers', and the lower middle class. The journalistic accounts are led astray by the 'ecological fallacy' - that is, if BNP voters can be found in a known industrial heartland, then they must be the traditional supporters of Labourism. In fact, Rhodes points out, the BNP support is typically found in the poshest areas of these towns and cities, a fact that has a huge impact on far right politics." In Glasman, these are precisely the heirs of those Aristotelian Labourites concerned with the protection of their status; in Cruddas they are precisely those who object to the state of their neighbours' front gardens.

For the "respectable white working class" what matters is place. Not just place in the sense of locality, as Seymour puts it, "BNP supporters and members tend to articulate their sense of class location indirectly, by reference to locality. Their scale is extremely small, as they tend to focus on this street, that area, etc. They are "rooted" and small town, rather than metropolitan; parochial rather than urbane. So, interviews with fascist voters and activists disclose that struggles over resources and entitlements are refracted through particular geographical references - ie, that street is filled with poor people who behave like animals, and the council throws all the money at them; while this street is respectable and well-maintained but gets nothing. Through such spatial distinctions, they carve out a moral and cultural economy, based on authenticity and respectability" but place in the sense of social position; place as status. Combined, these two senses of place form the kind of conception of community where everyone has their place.

Blue Labour in its localism and communitarianism actively endorses and indeed celebrates this narrowness of perspective, the disruption of settled communities in which everyone's place is clear and secure becomes largely the fault of disruptive elements within those communities including immigrants, who disturb this logic of place. Thus, Seymour argues,

"the language of class also provides a raiment of insurgency to what is actually a continuity exercise, a matey populist facade for an elitist politics. By adding the word 'white', moreover, the 'working class' becomes de-odorised, neutralised, cleansed of menacing cadences of militancy and leftism. It becomes an object of pathos and melancholia, inherently reactionary...This sort of 'working class' is tame, dull, conformist, and deferential, but also vicious, sadistic, and vindictive."

When Maurice Glasman spoke to our CLP the way in which "the white working class" operates conservatively (although, as we have said, against Seymour, Blue Labour's conservatism should not be collapsed into being a Blairite or Labour Right project, however much James Purnell may want it to be). Speaking to the CLP, Glasman was rather coy about directly attacking immigrants. However, he was exceptionally sneery about Black Sections and All Women Shortlists, both of which he treated as attacks on the working class. This, of course, requires a notion of class where class is the only identity, something specifically Aristotelian, where the function of humans is what is absolutely unique to them. In the background of this Aristotelian definition is, of course, the notion that black, woman, gay is a political identity, but white, male, straight is neutral and therefore can inhabit a working class identity. Therefore, for Glasman, to assert being a woman as politically significant is to entirely ignore class, feminism appears for Glasman as much as it does for David Willets as a vehicle for the oppression of working class men by middle class women. Glasman's peculiar decent, working class Aristotelian dad and middle-class Platonic Mum metaphor, in which "The Mum had all the advantages of class - resources, eloquence, confidence and science - and none of the experience of hardship" further reveals these conceptions. Seymour notes the importance of Harriet Harman as a hate figure for much of the Labour Right, "as bye-election loses piled up the Right leaked to the papers that Harriet Harman was responsible, the weasely line being that "we've got a problem with white working class males, and Harriet Harman wants to pass a Bill to help the gays, blacks and women!"

Observing the audience at our CLP, we would argue there are two broad ways in which Glasman's conception of class serves a conservative function with Labour party members. Firstly, it addresses certain resentful members, who are not necessarily working class but resent the efforts that have been made within Labour (and they remain inadequate efforts) to engage women and Black and Minority Ethnic members, whether on the level of party organisation or, more importantly, on the level of basic politeness and consideration. Hence, Glasman, posing as the tribune of the working class arguing, "working-class men can't really speak at Labour party meetings about what causes them grief, concerns about their family, concerns about immigration, love of country, without being falsely stereotyped as sexist, racist, nationalist." The reversal here is clear, those Labour Party members who have, in some cases, spent decades fighting against what was institutionalised homophobia, racism and misogyny in the party are transformed into the excluders of the working class.

As well as giving voice to the resentments of those who feel marginalised by politeness and efforts at inclusion, by posing as authentically working class (there was a particularly odd moment where Glasman discussed the horror of how his wife nearly had to get a job in Morrisons, a disaster which was only averted by Glasman receiving his peerage), Glasman's argument is also directed at the large group of decent, polite, middle class Labour members whose politeness and efforts to include are being treated as oppressive of the working class. What is striking here is the way in which, for Blue Labour thinkers, an argument from within multiculturalism overlaps with a soft fascist argument through stressing the right to express an identity. In the ebook, Jonathan Rutherford argues that within a multiculturalist framework every identity but a white working class identity is encouraged to be expressed, he argues Labour "favours multiculturalism but suspects the popular symbols and iconography of Englishness" (p. 91). Here, the expressive model of multiculturalism, each culture has a right to express itself, overlaps with fascism, "fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses not their right, but instead the chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property." This argument functions both to give confidence to those who resent anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic efforts in Labour but it also plays on middle class guilt to demoralise those who have supported these efforts. Seymour argues, "there's something very important going on when the Labour Right, which worked so hard to end the class war, are anxious to be seen and heard evoking class" and it is in this expressive model of class, rooted in conservative concerns about identity and place that sees the concept mobilised against class antagonism.

Blue Labour's Cold Racism

An article by Jacques Ranciere, "Racism: A Passion from Above" (thanks to Vitoria for the link) helps make clear what is at stake in the attempt by elites to mobilise the fear of an apparently popular racism. Ranciere suggests a different interpretation of recent French racism (expulsion of the Roma, the ban on the veil) from the prevailing left critique. For Ranciere, the left critique of the "opportunism" of racist laws repeats the logic underpinning those very racist laws. What both the state introducing racist legislation and the argument this racist legislation is an opportunistic way of gaining the support of backward white layers of society is the belief that "racism is a popular passion, the frightened and irrational reaction of retrograde layers of the population, who can't adapt to the new mobile and cosmopolitan world." They also share the opposition between an irrational disturbance whether immigrants and the problems and disruptions they cause or the problems and disruptions caused by the popular dislike of immigrants. Thus, Ranciere argues the accusation of opportunism "only reinforces the state's position representing itself as the face of rationality vis-à-vis popular irrationality."

We want to argue Ranciere's argument is crucial for the critique of Blue Labour precisely because it is over immigration that Blue Labour, for all its stress on localism reintroduces the state. Glasman's argument on immigration is not just that the tone we have adopted is out of touch but that policies should have been and should be different, he argues, "Blue Labour does not believe that human beings are commodities and should move unimpeded through the world looking for the highest wages...This leads to an undercutting of wages at the lowest end and strife between migrants and locals. A polity must have control of its borders and of migration." Ranicere notes, "Our states are less and less able to thwart the destructive effects of the free circulation of capital on the communities under their care -- all the less so because they have no desire to do so. They then fall back on what is in their power, the circulation of people. They seize upon the control of this other circulation as their specific object and the national security that these immigrants threaten as their objective -- to say more precisely, the production and management of insecurity. This work is increasingly becoming their purpose and their means of legitimation."

Blue Labour's suspicion of immigration and cosmopolitanism, of those who disturb fixed places and identities, this links to Ranciere's argument about the ideological function of the law, it "provides a subjective figure who is a constant threat to security", but, interestingly in Blue Labour thinking the figure who is a constant threat to security is doubled. In an obvious way, the threat to security is the immigrant but the threat to security, as Glasman speaks to a largely middle class audience is also the figure of the white racist. As well as telling Labour party members that their efforts to combat misogyny and racism in the party have excluded working class members, Glasman's tells us that not only our language on but the last Labour government's welcoming of immigrants (a particularly ridiculous piece of bullshit- the last Labour government were too nice to immigrants?) will lead to popular violence towards immigrants if the state does not intervene- the rationality of state racism opposes the irrationality of popular racism, to which Blue Labour appeals. Ranciere dubs this kind of thinking, "cold racism", he writes, "The state's aim [raison d'Etat] is to maintain this other to whom it entrusts the imaginary determination of what it actually legislates."

The Power of being Chosen: Benjamin, Scholem and Zionism

2011-06-17T22:00:00.000+01:00

Note: This is an early version of an essay published in a radically revised form in the latest Jewish Quarterly with the title "Dreams of Utopia".

From 1923, when his friend Gershom Scholem emigrated to Palestine, Walter Benjamin regularly contemplated joining him. Giving his memoir a peculiar mixture of unforgiving argumentativeness and melancholy poignance, Scholem believed that the failure of Benjamin’s work, his decision not to emigrate and the melancholy that culminated in his suicide were all expressions of the same self-deception. Here, Scholem is certainly correct, which means that Benjamin’s rejection of Palestine can be a means to make legible both certain important aspects of his work, including an often partially concealed critique of Zionism, and the tensions and possibilities of the vulnerably assimilated life of European Jews in the 1920s and 1930s.

Benjamin & Brecht playing chess. Brecht, considering that chess stays the same for too long proposed inventing a new game which three-handed game which they could play with Korsch.

Hannah Arendt argues that it is impossible to understand Benjamin without grasping the tensions that determined the lives of the intellectual children of the vulnerably assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie. Arendt argues that “the available forms of rebellion were Zionism and Communism... In a remarkable and probably unique manner Benjamin kept both routes open for himself...What strikes one as indecision in the letters, as though he were vacillating between Zionism and Marxism, in truth was probably due to the bitter insight that all solutions...would lead him personally to a false salvation no matter whether that salvation was labelled Jerusalem or Moscow.” Arendt’s argument has the virtue of grounding Benjamin’s choice in the condition of European Jews but, by missing the link between the choices Benjamin made in his life and his thought, obscures and misrepresents the character of Benjamin’s specifically western European Communism. Essentially, Benjamin chose Communism because his particular Communism required a commitment to universality against organic socialist communities whether in Palestine or Russia. For Benjamin universality could only emerge from the melancholy, estranged and marginal position of urban European Jews.

Benjamin considered emigration to Palestine most seriously in 1933, writing to Scholem, “I would be glad and fully prepared to come to Palestine” provided that “I could improve upon my knowledge and abilities there without abandoning what I have already accomplished.” Opposing Benjamin’s question on the possibility of developing his knowledge and capabilities, Scholem, for whom the Zionist project was always a question of the unity of theory and practice, argued that the vital question was rather whether Benjamin could put his knowledge and capabilities to use. Mirroring and supporting Scholem’s insistence on the unity of theory and practice - the demand that Benjamin’s knowledge be put to use - is his insistence of the integration of the individual and the community, by putting his knowledge to use, the intellectual serves the community. Scholem warned, “we find it questionable whether a person could possibly feel well in this country without directly participating in life here...in the long run only those people are able to live here who, despite all the problems and depressions feel completely at one with this land and the cause of Judaism.”

Benjamin in Ibiza, Scholem contrasted the useless solitude of Benjamin's life in Ibiza with an integrated, communal life in Palestine

The power of Benjamin’s defence of his position against Scholem stems from how he does not directly reject this critique of his work or the Zionist diagnosis of the condition of Jews in Europe. What Benjamin does reject is Scholem’s solution that emigration to Palestine would resolve these contradictions, for Benjamin the impossibility of their resolution testifies to the Messiah’s absence. The incompatibility of theology and (Communist) politics does not amount to self-deception but stands in for a whole series of other antagonisms between: theory and practice, the individual and community and nature and history.

The productive contradiction between theology and something external to it also reflects Benjamin’s opposition to Scholem’s belief that the Jewish theological tradition was sufficient either analytically or messianically. The clearest summary of this position actually comes in a letter from Adorno in which he explains his preference for Benjamin’s “anonymous mobilisation of theological experience in the realm of the profane,” but it acquires its full significance in Benjamin and Scholem’s debate on Kafka. Adorno rejects Scholem’s “attempted salvation of theology [which] is strongly linear and romantic...he himself insists on a sort of radioactive decay which drives us on from mysticism...towards enlightenment...He explains the explosions of Jewish mysticism in exclusively theological terms and for that reason violently repudiates the social connections which would otherwise force themselves on one’s attention.”

Beginning in a letter in 1931 and continuing throughout their debates, Scholem went to great lengths to insist upon the exclusively Jewish character of Kafka’s work. Responding to Benjamin’s request for some “hints” on his thought on Kafka, Scholem consistently views Benjamin’s analysis as being limited by his Marxist attempt to weaken theology and “weaken the central Jewish nerve of the work.” These limitations are most clearly evident in Benjamin’s treatment of The Trial as, for Scholem, the exclusion of theology means the Law can only be viewed from its profane side and the Halakah not approached at all.

Benjamin denies that his approach eliminates theology, arguing rather that its theological character is “shrouded”. What Benjamin in fact rejects is not any sort of theology but an interpretation grounded in a symbolic hermeneutic, the “abuse”, whereby “in the work of art the ‘manifestation’ of an ‘idea’ is declared a symbol.” The symbolic hermeneutic of the theological interpretation declares that Kafka’s work is really about how “grace cannot be attained by man at will” and that the Castle is the symbol for the seat of grace.

This rejection of the work of art as a symbol manifesting an idea informs Benjamin’s argument that Kafka’s stories cannot be viewed as parables. He comments, “the word ‘unfolding’ has a double meaning. A bud unfolds into a blossom, but the boat that one teaches children to make by folding paper unfolds into a flat sheet of paper. This second kind of unfolding is really appropriate to the parable; it is the reader’s pleasure to smooth it out so that he has the meaning in the palm of his hand. Kafka’s parables, however, unfold in the first sense, the way a bud turns into a blossom.” It is the first sort of unfolding which means that The Trial “looks as if the novel were nothing but the unfolding of the parable.” Scholem’s interpretation of “Before the Law”, where he reproaches Benjamin for his exclusion of theology, treats it as unfolding in the traditional way of the parable. He argues, “the religious man in the cathedral was a distinguished halakhist, a rabbi, who knows how to transmit - if not the Law itself - at least the traditions circulating around the Law in the form of a parable.”

In Scholem’s analysis of “Before the Law”, even if in a very distant way, there is a reference to doctrine, “the traditions circulating around the law” to sustain the parable’s unfolding as expressing something else. Benjamin, by contrast, points to the ambiguity in Kakfa’s prose pieces, “they are not parables, and yet they do not want to be taken at face value...But do we have the doctrine which Kafka’s parables interpret...It does not exist; all we can say is that here and there we have an allusion to it. Kafka might have said that these are relics transmitting the doctrine.”

Benjamin’s second extensive interpretation of Kafka is a long letter to Scholem, this clarifies their differences over doctrine and tradition and the necessity on an explanatory basis as well as a redemptive one for a point that undermines the self-sufficiency of the Jewish mystical tradition. Benjamin’s argument now is clearer that Kafka’s work is produced by the tension between modernity, the experience of the big city, and mysticism, the experience of tradition. Benjamin’s argument, however, is that the mystical experience of tradition in modernity is the experience of its sickness, that modernity has radically broken tradition as the site of truth, “Kafka’s work presents a sickness of tradition...It is this consistency of truth that has been lost...Kafka’s real genius...was that he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility.” It is then the collapse of the tradition of truth as the experience of modernity which means Kafka’s works can only be relics of theology. Theology’s transmissibility is retained at the expense of any reference to truth. Scholem’s response to this argument is crucial for his understanding of the sufficiency of Jewish messianism as a theory of catastrophe. Scholem agrees with Benjamin on the sickness of tradition but argues that Benjamin’s analysis of modernity is unnecessary, “the antinomy of the aggadic you mention is not specific to the Kakfkaesque Aggada alone; rather it is grounded in the nature of the aggadic itself...I would say such an enfeebling is rooted in the nature of tradition itself.”

In Scholem the nihilistic character of Judaism means that the negative – contradiction – is integrated into the totality of a single, self-sufficient tradition and indeed that the possibility of tradition’s falling sick is to be welcomed. Destruction and contradiction within the tradition are at the basis of Scholem’s anarchistic negative theology and the universality of cultural Zionism. Theology as something esoteric, accessible only to priests and separate from everyday life is destroyed, theological experience becomes exoteric, accessible to all (all are priests). Frankist and Sabbatian mysticism is central for Scholem here, where, as he argues in the case of Sabbati Zevi, the destruction of theology, the transcendence of the Torah is also its fulfilment.

Sabbatai Zevi enthroned

To return to Adorno’s reservations on the salvaging of theology, it is the inner nihilism of Jewish mysticism that drives it beyond itself towards enlightenment, this movement, internal to the tradition is what allows Scholem to reject any social connections. Of Sabbatianism, Scholem writes, “the desire for total liberation that played such a tragic role in the development of Sabbatian nihilism, was by no means a purely self-destructive force; on the contrary...powerful constructive impulses were at work.” The powerful constructive impulses at work here, a properly Hegelian irony of history, were not experienced directly by the Sabbatians, rather, despite its failure, the critical-destructive moment of Sabbatian and Frankist mysticism undermined the rigid hold of rabbinical authority over Judaism and brought the Jewish law into question, helping to open up space for Jewish Enlightenment. In Scholem’s interpretation of Sabbatianism, failure, integrated into the single tradition, becomes success.

Scholem’s linking of destruction and the mystical tradition goes beyond the universality of theology in its transformation of destructive negativity into positive enlightenment, to include the moment of destruction underpinning Zion as the theological symbol uniting origin and the utopian goal of prophetic Zionism. The Origin of German Tragic Drama suggests Benjamin would have found this conception of the theological symbol untenable. Benjamin argues that the theological symbol seeks to merge oppositions in an unbroken whole, the merging of origin and utopian goal, and theology and the profane in Zion, is paradigmatic. The unity of opposites in the theological symbol, which redeems nature, can only be achieved through destruction, for Benjamin “destruction is idealised and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption.”

Benjamin’s opposition to the redemption of nature in the theological symbol goes back as far as his early consciously theological metaphysics of language. In “On Language as Such”, Benjamin writes of the great melancholy in not being “named from the one blessed paradisiacal language names but from the hundred languages of man, in which the name has already withered.” This melancholy, conditioned by the Fall is what the attempt at unmediated symbolic redemption ignores. Benjamin uses the same words to explain nature in allegory, contrasted with the symbolic, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, except he continues “how much more so not to be named but only to be read uncertainly by the allegorist, and to have become highly significant thanks to him.”

16th Century allegorical woodcut, chosen by Baudelaire as a model for the frontispiece of Les Fleurs du Mal

Allegory, unlike the symbol, does not attempt the unmediated redemption of the secret of nature. Contrasted with the redemption of nature in the theological symbol, Benjamin writes in allegory “everything about history that, from the beginning has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful is expressed in a face – or rather in a death’s head.” Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire is where the concerns of the pre-Marxist Origin of German Tragic Drama and the Marxist Arcades Project meet. It is the degradation and transitoriness produced by capitalism which allows allegory to return in Baudelaire. Fashion, rather than war, in the case of Baroque allegory, is the point of transitoriness. It is the commodity form, not Counter-Reformation Christianity, in which nature is degraded, the link between fashion and the commodity form as degrading nature produces the prostitute as the essential allegorical type in Baudelaire. Benjamin writes “the commodity which is the last burning glass of historical semblance celebrates its triumph in the fact that nature itself takes on a commodity character. It is this commodity appearance of nature that is embodied in the whore.” This eroticisation in Baudelaire adds another aspect to allegory and transience which cuts through the symbol or archaic image in Scholem. Of Baudelaire’s A une passante, Benjamin writes “the delight of the urban poet is love – not at first sight, but at last sight. It is a farewell forever which coincides in the poem with a moment of enchantment.” Benjamin’s borrows the melancholy experience of time from A une passante “A flash of lightning – then darkness. O fleeting beauty, whose fleeting beauty brought me suddenly to life again in a second birth, shall I never see you again except in eternity” for the dialectical image in the “Theses on the Concept of History”, “the true picture of the past flits by. The past can only be seized as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again.” The certainty of loss and the image appearing in a particular now of recognisability separates dialectical images from the archaic essences of phenomenology and the theological symbol which have no necessary experience of loss or timeliness.

Frontispiece of Baudelaire's Epaves

The centrality not just of the loss itself but of the experience of that loss links Baudelairean allegory with Kakfa, paralleling Kafka’s brooding over the fragments of his own existence within alienated modernity, “experiments have proved that a man does not recognise his own walk on the screen or his own voice on the phonograph. The situation of the subject in such experiments is Kafka’s situation; this is what directs him to learning where he may encounter fragments of his own existence”.

The affinity of Baudelaire the allegorist and Kafka the brooder opens up the Odradrek from “The Cares of a Family Man” as the key allegorical figure in Benjamin’s work. To begin with Odradrek is nature allegorised, his laughter “sounds like the rustling of fallen leaves”, in “On Language as Such, Benjamin writes “even when there is only a rustling of plants, there is always a lament.” As with mournful nature, Odradrek is linked, in his distortion, to the messianic, “the little man is at home it distorted life, he will disappear with the coming of the Messiah” Against the characterisation of the symbol and tradition in prophetic Zionism in Odradrek there is no original unity to be merged with utopia, “one is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case.” Although, as allegory and distorted nature, “it is the creaturely world of things, the dead or at best the half-living that is the object of allegorical intention”, Odradrek is linked to the messianic. He is, explicitly, not the figure for whom there is hope; allegory proceeds from the fact that the creaturely cannot be redeemed directly. Missing this, and failing to grasp the significance of Odradrek’s half-deadness, “I ask myself to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradrek.” Adorno presents an odd analysis of Odradrek, where he makes “the overcoming of death” as something desirable, rather than something uncanny to the point of hellishness. Benjamin links Odradrek’s lack of death to the Lamb-Kitten for whom “the knife of the butcher would be a release.” The point is, in Benjamin, the creaturely cannot be redeemed directly, as allegory it can never enter into tradition, it cannot transform failure into success in the way in which Scholem thinks Sabbatianism.

The allegorical and the links between nature, Odradrek and the figure of the hunchback acquires in greatest importance in Benjamin’s first thesis on the philosophy of history. The thesis reads “the story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually a little hunchback who was an excellent chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.”

Controlling the puppet is the hunchback theology, the return of the figure of the hunchback, which Benjamin identifies with Odradrek, provides the further link between theology and nature and brings the theses back into the territory and the debates over the Kafka essays. Theology as wizened and having to remain out of sight expresses again, against Scholem, the power of shrouded theology. Its hiddeness and its distortion (Odradrek-the hunchback is “the form things assume in oblivion”), further links theology to the sickness of tradition but also suggests from an Enlightenment, progressive view theology should have died, but, unfulfilled has a strange, half-dead afterlife. In the theses this peculiar power of theology functions as a counterpart and a precursor to Adorno’s argument that, “Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed”. The point for philosophy in Adorno and theology in Benjamin is that neither can be fully integrated into a whole and equally neither can be redeemed or fulfilled directly. Hence the image for Benjamin (and Adorno) is that theology is always a kind of alien body. In this way Adorno and Benjamin display as astonishing fidelity to the origins of philosophy and, implicitly, comment on a break in Marx’s work very different from the idea of a break with humanism. The engagement with Marx is equally significant, what the first thesis signposts is a division of Marx’s work around his position on theology and Jewishness. In the early works, we have, broadly speaking an Enlightenment model, theology is no longer relevant and should be overcome by reducing it to its social basis. This leads to a position which Scholem rightly describes as “repulsive”. In the later Marx the position is reversed, instead of dissolving theology into its simple social basis, the apparently simple social base is now held to contain a theological secret, “a commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” In fact, following the argument on Baudelaire linking the commodity to allegory, a further means of conceptualising the first thesis would be to treat it as a commodity, with an obvious (historically materialist) meaning but on closer examination abounding in theological niceties. Importantly, following the model of allegory rather than symbol, the character of the commodity-image is contradictory, theology and historical materialism, theology and the simple character of the commodity are not merged.

The first thesis (and much of the subsequent text) is further constituted by an engagement with Scholem’s mystical Zionist critique of progress and his remarks on the fate of Zionism. In one of Scholem’s few melancholy letters reporting to Benjamin on the 1931 Zionist congress, Scholem wrote of how “the radical split between my conception of Zionism...a religious-mystical quest for a regeneration of Judaism...and empirical Zionism” had become more and more apparent. He continued, “Our catastrophe started...where community was not developed in its legitimate concealment...By becoming visible our cause was destroyed.” The first thesis could be viewed as a response to this with cultural Zionism standing in for theology, a secret cultural revolution that made possible an authentic victory for Zionism. This argument and the link between foreignness, theory and universality becomes even clearer when Scholem relates the attacks on him and the cultural Zionists “carrying the banner of Ahad Ha’am”, which focused particularly on their rejection of a “reactionary policy towards the Arabs.” In the attempt to maintain a non-racist policy towards the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, the cultural Zionists were attacked as “deracinated intellectuals.” Scholem sorrowfully notes the affinity between these attacks and those from the German far-right, arguing the only achievement of this resolution will be that “every German anti-Semite will be able to justify himself with it very successfully if he wants to demand that the universities be “cleansed” of troublesome theoreticians.”

Scholem’s Zionist cultural revolution also grounds his critique of progress and his admiration for, but rejection of, the Bolshevik Revolution. Benjamin’s theses should be seen as a response involving the preservation and the overcoming of the theological-cultural critique of progress in much the same way the first thesis thinks the relation of theology and Marixsm. The key Scholem text here is his 1918 “On the Bolshevik Revolution”. Scholem argues that there can be no revolution for the Jews, as revolution amounts to the attempt to establish the messianic kingdom without the Torah. The distorted, hidden theological hunchback as the expression of the sickness of tradition and the impossibility of its transmitting truth or even allowing the kind of symbolic destruction that would revitalise the original experience makes the return to the teachings impossible for Benjamin. On the one hand, therefore, Scholem’s critique of progress makes things too easy, symbolic destruction releases the powers of theology, on the other, by repudiating revolutionary politics, Scholem makes his task impossible. The crucial thesis here is the ninth, which begins with a poem from Scholem and introduces the angel of history who should be understood not as Benjamin but as Scholem. Benjamin writes of the angel, “his face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” This, presumably, consciously, mirrors Scholem’s “all that befalls the world is only an expression of this primal and fundamental galut. Such is the state of the world after the breaking of the vessels.”

Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, "This is how one pictures the angel of history".

Communism, for Benjamin, offers the power to raise the dead which is not directed at the future but at the past. The importance of Communism is in the retroactive force exerted by the solidarity built up through action. Even when it fails, “it is not in the form of the spoils that fall to the victor that [refined and spiritual things] make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage humour and fortitude. They have retroactive force and constantly will constantly call into question every victory past and present of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward the sun which is rising in the sky of history.” The point is not the integration of failure into the tradition but the production of a past that, synchronous with the present, can be saved.

With the necessity of political action, Benjamin takes his place in the series of Jewish Messianism which questions the role of humanity in achieving redemption, beginning with the insistence in the Lurianic Kabbalah on man’s role in redemption. Benjamin also retains, but transforms into Marxist terms, the Jewish (rather than Christian) Messianic insistence that universal redemption is accomplished through the actions of a part of humanity, not humanity as a whole. In the theses he argues, “not man, or men but the struggling oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx, it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.” In this interpretation of Marx, distinguished from varieties of progressive historical materialism (Stalinism, revisionist Social Democracy and here empirical Zionism is their counterpart), a short-circuit is enacted between more partiality – the agent of redemption is the working class not humanity as a whole – and a stronger universality – the inclusion not only of present and future generations among the redeemed but the past generations of the downtrodden. Understood as fidelity to a philosophical position emerging out of the sociological status of European Jews this represents Benjamin’s loyalty to Judaism, a loyalty which Zionism, even in the form advocated by Scholem, was incapable.

To clarify this point we need to return to Marx’s “On the Jewish Question.” Marx’s argument is that radical universality emerges out of the ambiguous position of European Jews after political emancipation (assimilation). In Marx’s argument political emancipation amounted merely to the privatisation of religion on the basis of a bourgeois liberal equality, the state no longer considering religion as relevant. However, despite assimilation Jews continued to exist as something separate and excluded from society and in this exclusion bore universality, “a universal and contemporary anti-social element.” The persistence of “the Jewish Question” is evidence of the limitations of political emancipation. The universality embedded in the impossibility of total assimilation (like Odradrek, the Jews should not exist as something separate but they cannot be integrated into the organic community) becomes clear in another Marx text “Critical Notes on the King of Prussia and Social Reform”. Here the excluded part linked to universality are the working class. Marx’s argument is that exclusion operates in a double way, firstly, the working class are excluded politically and socially, secondly, even more significantly, as political emancipation operates by excluding religion, income and class from politics, the revolutionary demands of the excluded make this split and the exclusion of human life legible. “A social revolution possesses a total point of view because...it represents a protest by man against dehumanised life...because the community against whose separation from himself the individual is reacting, is the true community of man, human nature.” For Benjamin, the same is true of European Judaism. The impossibility of the total integration of the Jews under present conditions becomes the point where Jewishness demands an explosive negativity linked to the universal. The explosive power of the excluded and the negative is expressed sharply in the notes for The Arcades Project when Benjamin writes of the power of waste and what cultural history has discarded, what, like allegory cannot enter into tradition. For Benjamin “it is therefore of importance that a new partition be applied to this initially excluded, negative component so that by a displacement of the angle of vision (but not the criteria!), a positive element emerges anew.”

Zionism, in all its forms, started, as Benjamin does, from the inauthenticity and vulnerability of assimilated European Jews but, for Benjamin, its very different response to this diagnosis made Zionism, even the variety advocated by Scholem, a betrayal of what was essential to Judaism. The sharpest criticism of this Zionist tendency comes from Benjamin’s friend Ernst Bloch, which Benjamin praised as the decisive repudiation of theocracy in politics. Bloch rejected Zionism as it amounted to a denial of the Jews’ “power of being chosen” as the agents of redemption and entailed assimilation of Jews, previously a universal, internationalist possibility into the system of balkanised nation states. Even in Scholem’s anarchist rejection of the state, and particularly the state with a reactionary policy towards the Arab residents of Palestine, the attempt to found healthy, organic socialist communities of the previously excluded represented a refusal of the link between Jewish negativity and universality in favour of partiality and fixed identities. Ultimately, neither Benjamin or Scholem saw the victory of their philosophical politics. Scholem’s rich cultural Zionism was marginalised by the empirical Zionism adopting the reactionary policy towards the Arabs that he always feared and creating Israel as a nation state among others. Benjamin killed himself fleeing the Nazis who extinguished the possibilities of European Jewish Communism. However, there remains something to salvage politically from Benjamin’s rejection of Zionism, and that is how the refusal of fixed identities and the easy resolution of contradictions was never an issue of complacent liberal or post-modern tolerant cosmopolitanism but instead always carried a link between marginality and the universal. Of Baudelaire, Benjamin notes “emigration as key to the metropolis”. The modern French philosophy Alain Badiou’s, link of foreignness to universality in the absolute defence of immigrants repeats this, “let foreigners teach us at least to become foreign to ourselves, to project ourselves sufficiently out of ourselves to no longer be captive to this long Western and white history that has come to an end, and from which nothing more can be expected than sterility and war”, and this remains as a political relic of Benjamin’s failure.

Not Really a Post- Vote for Simone

2011-05-24T17:32:00.000+01:00

As may already be apparent, this is not a proper post featuring the kind of rigorous and incisive political critique/ self-indulgent digressions and waffle which you may have come to expect. One of us has been working on an essay on Benjamin's rejection of Zionism for the excellent Jewish Quarterly. With it having been edited down to a manageable length and level of intelligibility, it is very different from the original rambling beast which we might post on the blog shortly.

Also coming up will be a second post on Blue Labour, following this one, which will look at the idea of tradition in Glasman, the relationship between P.J.Harvey and Blue Labour and Glasman's rudeness about UK Uncut and the student protests. We also hope to finish off our posts on multiculturalism, including a critique of Zizek.

Finally, we entered our cat, Simone de Bocadillo (named, of course, after Simone de Beauvoir) into this competition. Her first entry, including a critique of their use of he to refer to all cats was rejected for containing explicit political content. Should she win we will get some sort of diamond valued at £20,000. This might enable us to work a bit less and blog a bit more often, so if you like the blog, please vote for her.

Blue Labour: The Wrong Sort of Melancholy

2011-04-18T18:18:00.002+01:00

Many of us are beginning to realize that old socialists should talk with traditionalist Tories. In the face of the secret alliance of cultural with economic liberalism, we need now to invent a new sort of politics which links egalitarianism to the pursuit of objective values and virtues: a ‘traditionalist socialism’ or a ‘red Toryism’. After all, what counts as radical is not the new, but the good.

John Milbank

The affinities between Blue Labour and Red Toryism are obvious but they cannot work as equivalents, the miserable beasts are yoked together rather differently. Red Toryism, essentially a defence of objective values, modified by egalitarianism, is not identical to Traditionalist Socialism, essentially a defence of egalitarianism, modified by a commitment to objective values. In the case of Red Toryism, the criticism of cultural liberalism is primary; in the case of Traditionalist Socialism, the criticism of economic liberalism is primary. Blue Labour, however, attempts something different to "Traditionalist Socialism", the Socialist aspect names not a commitment to equality but a commitment to a peculiar version of working class politics, in which the white, male, working class are central as an electoral but not a political force.

Consideration of what, precisely, they oppose reveals what a miserably and crudely yoked together creature Blue Labour is. What is the enemy? The secret alliance between cultural and economic liberalism. What really constitutes this secret alliance and the means of opposing it? The opposition then is between traditionalism and modernisation (cultural and economic liberalism, “The Spirit of Manchester?”). How does egalitarianism then operate? There are concrete examples of a left-right coalition resisting modernisation, in Germany, Trade Unions and the Churches defend laws banning shops from opening on Sundays, unease about Labour’s liberalisation of gambling laws. The left aspect, however, is not the defence of an equal society, which has never existed, but an attempt to set limits to capitalist exploitation. In Glasman, the central point of what seems to be a critique of capitalism, is not, in fact, the critique of capitalism but, when he argues, for example against New Labour's "sign[ing] up to a capitalist-progressive form of globalisation, in which working-class people were the biggest enemies of change" merely a sentimental critique of certain destructive-modernising tendencies, often on the level of values, abstracted from capitalism itself. Here we see Blue Labour as an amalgam of feudal and petty-bourgeois socialism, "their chief accusation against the bourgeoisie amounts to this, that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed, which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society...As the parson has gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has clerical socialism with feudal socialism. Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a socialist tinge...In [petty-bourgeois socialism's] positive aims, this form of socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange and with them the old property relations and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of property relations that have been or were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and utopian...when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues."

Cultural and economic liberalism do not move and do not destroy in the same way or, rather, they operate differently as values and in their effects. The opposition between objective (traditional) values and cultural liberalism is a simple one, cultural liberalism directly opposes and undermines traditional values. The same simple opposition cannot be replicated with economic liberalism and egalitarianism. Traditional values have existed, the equal society has not, as a “value” economic liberalism does not, in itself, produce more inequality, it is the released inequality generating forces of capitalism. This is not a question of values but the development and working through of capitalist contradictions.

Ultimately, Blue Labour and Red Toryism totally invert the problem. For them, destruction whether in the sphere of the economic or the sphere of values is a question of values; the destruction of values is always primary; the opposite is, of course, true, the destructiveness of capitalism produces the destruction of traditional values: "It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation."

If social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear. Rather than seeking to restore a language of optimistic progress, we should begin by reacquainting ourselves with the recent past. The first task of radical dissenters today is to remind their audience of the achievements of the twentieth century, along with the likely consequences of our heedless rush to dismantle them. The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve...Social democrats...need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

Tony Judt

"Blue Labour seems very nostalgic to me. This is the idea of Arcadian England, the idea that there was some mythical time when we all loved each other...Well, before the creation of the welfare state, we all died of illnesses early on because all the things that the state provided were not available in those days."

Roy Hattersley

The irony of Blue Labour is that, particularly in the version offered by Glassman, is that it is insufficiently conservative. Or, perhaps better, its nostalgia leads it into the murky waters of a conservative-revolutionary critique of the achievements of social democracy. Blue Labour’s critique is sustained myth and the primacy of a moralistic critique and a critique of the state over the critique of capitalism. With 500,000 organised through Trade Unions marching to defend the achievements of 20th century social democracy and many thousands organising in local communities to defend local services, the Movement for Change’s depoliticised community organising, separate from Trade Unions, which, for all their flaws, are the organic institutions of working class organising and representation and Glassman’s attack on the achievements of 1945, Blue Labour situates itself against the mass of people on the side of the destructive powers of capitalism. The Labour leadership telling stories about "the way people have made their home together" is a poor substitute for the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands to defend our collective institutions and rights, whose creation and defence is a genuine collective and democratic achievement that the advocates of Blue Labour all too glibly dismiss as the consequence of "bureaucratic command."

“Poverty disgraces no man.” Well and good. But they disgrace the poor man. They do it and they console him with this little adage. It is one of those things that may once have been true but have long since degenerated. The case is no different with the brutal dictum, “If a man does not work, neither shall he eat.” When there was work that fed a man, there was also poverty that did not disgrace him, if it arose from deformity or other misfortune. But this deprivation, into which millions are born and hundreds of thousands are dragged by impoverishment does indeed bring disgrace...No one may ever make peace with poverty when it falls like a gigantic shadow upon his countrymen and his home. Then he must be alert to every humiliation done to him, and so discipline himself so that his suffering becomes no longer the downhill road to grief but the rising path of revolt. Yet there is no hope of this so long as each blackest, most terrible stroke of fate, daily and indeed hourly discussed by the press, set forth in all its illusory causes and effects, helps no one uncover the dark powers that hold his life in thrall.

Walter Benjamin

[Chartism’s] dominant leitmotiv is to situate the evils of society not in something that is inherent in the economic system, but quite the opposite: in the abuse of power by parasitic and speculative groups which have control over political power – “old corruption,” in Cobbett’s words...It was for this reason that the feature most strongly picked out in the ruling class was its idleness and parasitism.

Ernesto Laclau

Blue Labour has no equal society to be nostalgic for, “the history of all society up to now is the history of class struggle”. Blue Labour’s nostalgia is for a working class identity embedded in communities whose economic conditions have long since been lost. Blue Labour is founded on nostalgia for the white, working class male breadwinner in stable industrial work, only the melancholy product of this identity’s decay remain, a desperate holding onto a white working class masculinity and an identity politics founded on it that excludes the new, recomposed (immigrant workers, women, low-paid office workers in precarious jobs) working class. The working class ceases to be, in Ralph Miliband’s, words “wage-earners located in the subordinate levels of the productive process who, with their dependants, constitute the working class of advanced capitalist countries and comprise the largest part by far of their populations" and becomes culturally defined. Blue Labour reveals the inadequacy of the critique of neoliberalism (Cruddas) and globalisation (Godhart) for Socialists. Blue Labour’s misogyny, as Lisa Ansell writes, “it disenfranchises the mothers for whom welfare benefits are the only remaining bridge for the inequality they face...and those whose unpaid caring work allows the rest of our society to function” and its sympathy for racists, “flag, faith, family”, “Blue Labour [is] sympathetic to culturally conservative views – on issues of place, work and welfare – and hostile to mass immigration” (Godhart) is no accident, it stems from its grounding in its apparently leftist critique of neoliberalism (rather than capitalism) in the name of a white working class identity whose conditions of existence have been destroyed by capitalism. Ansell’s conclusion “Labour is another party willing to ensure that the struggling "decent taxpayers" have someone to blame when they get nowhere. Blue Labour is the only way "New" Labour can continue after a global financial crisis. With it Labour can unite a "working middle class", without addressing any of the party's failures. It casts those left behind adrift, convenient scapegoats for all society’s ills” grasps precisely how Blue Labour will function in setting forth all the illusory causes and effects that interpret the blackest most terrible strokes of fate and thereby obscuring “the dark powers that hold his life in thrall.”

In obscuring the real (systematic) reasons behind poverty and deprivation, Blue Labour makes addressing it impossible. Simultaneously, its populism, its scapegoating makes things too easy, instead of a politics founded on the critique of capitalism, Blue Labour offers an impossible (yet easy) dream of an organic community secured by the removal of speculative and parasitic elements (Red Toryism claims Cobbett as one of its spiritual godfathers). This strange mixture of the impossibility and ease of founding an organic community, a polis which encourages virtue, further underpins Blue Labour’s conservatism when combined with its miscasting of class. Blue Labour’s (profoundly Aristotelian virtue ethics are underpinned by an understanding of class as an identity and a function (ergon). Blue Labour’s class politics is twofold: first, unlike Red Toryism, it aims to appeal to the working class (as it understands it) as a possible electoral bloc, second, it constructs an image of the good polis as one in which the white working class can express their identity grounded in an Aristotelian understanding of function. For Blue Labour class antagonism only exists in the form of middle class liberals showing contempt for working class culture and not allowing it to be lived. Blue Labour’s class based virtue ethics further buttresses its conservatism in the ambiguities of the Good (the good life as the virtuous life, the good life as the happy life, the happy and the virtuous united by expressing one’s purpose). Hence Wilson argues the starting point of Blue Labour is to look for the good life in the way we live now, whilst for many the way we live with now is constituted by wretchedness.

Blue Labour makes peace with poverty by obscuring its causes; the good life today is one that sensitive to our own and other’s sufferings and humiliations attempts to grasp their conditions and begin the rising path of revolt against them.

In order to rightly appreciate the value of strikes and combinations, we must not allow ourselves to be blinded by the apparent insignificance of their economical results, but hold, above all things, in view their moral and political consequences...Without...the constant warfare between masters and men...the working classes of Great Britain would be a heart-broken, a weak-minded, a worn-out, unresisting mass, whose self-emancipation would prove as impossible as that of the slaves of Ancient Greece and Rome.

Karl Marx

Communist goals are nonsensical; this does not diminish the value of Communist action since it is a corrective to its goals.

Walter Benjamin

Missing from both the theorists of Blue Labour and from Ansell’s otherwise penetrating critique is the power of working class political mobilisation and action to change conditions. Glasman, Cruddas and Ansell all overstate Labour’s destructive power in government, whether economic or cultural (Glassman on the destructive effects of the welfare state, Cruddas on a liberal metropolitan elite’s contempt for white working class masculinity, Ansell on Labour’s responsibility for growing inequality), attributing effects which are largely or partially the responsibility of capitalism to government action. What Glasman, Cruddas and Ansell miss is the potential political power of the Labour movement.

Ansell argues, correctly, that “poverty doesn’t generally create an air of solidarity, it fractures communities”, and Blue Labour aims to appeal to workers in this fractured, incoherent state. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx makes the distinction (as the basis for an analysis of how the working class are produced as a political subject) between workers as a fractured, incoherent mass and the working class as an organised subject, it is the most important consequence of struggle that workers are combined into and emerge as a class. This analysis supports Marx’s remarks on Chartism, essentially for Marx the goals of Chartism or Trade Unionism may be insignificant and the movements may fail to achieve them, but, even if they fail, a kind of victory is won in the forming of the working class as a political subject.

Following Benjamin we could argue that Labour’s current goals are close to nonsensical and unworthy of the labour movement. Party policy vacillates between endorsing cuts (particularly cuts to welfare), which the Party should be opposing vigorously, and dishonestly claiming to oppose cuts to valued local services, an opposition which is contradicted by the level of cuts our policy on reducing the deficit requires. However, mass action, whether in local communities or the mass mobilisation of March 26th can serve as a corrective to, and undercut, the leadership’s nonsensical goals. The point is less the direct demands behind the mobilisations but how the mobilisation and organisation creates a political power able to challenge the leadership’s goals. Further, particularly through political action, struggling together in local communities, bonds of solidarity can be formed against Blue Labour’s culturalist identity politics. We can see this in working class communities in Glasgow resisting the deportation of their neighbours, or, in Ralph Miliband's argument, "sectionalism, sexism and racism do exist. Yet, it does not come amiss to recall that they have on many occasions been at least partially overcome in struggle; that workers in different occupational locations, male and female, black and white, have sometimes fought in solidarity against a common enemy; even that millions of workers, for all their divisions and divergences, have been linked, even if tenuously, by their common support of parties whose stress was not on sectional and other divisions but on class solidarity and commonness of purpose; and that there is no inherent conflict that must for ever separate worker from worker."

It is political mobilisation that moves UK Uncut (and moved Chartism) beyond its limited goals and critiques. Considered in themselves, attacks on tax evading companies suggest, as with Laclau on Chartism, a situating of the evils of society in parasitic elements rather than in the economic and political system itself. The antipode here is the Movement for Change’s model of non-political, non-antagonistic community action and Blue Labour’s state-policy level populism. In its politics (from the level of the state policy) Blue Labour appeals to workers in a fractured state without solidarity and organisation, yet the Movement for Change implies cohesive communities, without internal antagonisms, working together. The move that sustains this contradiction is a politics based on removing antagonists (parasitic elements- immigrants, the anti-social non-decent working class, those dependent on welfare, as if low-paid workers claiming tax credits, as if the businesses employing them weren’t welfare dependent) from the community. For UK Uncut the parasites are the powerful; the reverse is the case for Blue Labour. For UK Uncut the people must mobilise against the parasites; for Blue Labour, parasites should be removed by the state. Further, UK Uncut’s populism identifies the abuses of the powerful as the symptom of the corruption of the political and economic system rather than an anomaly which disturbs its efficient functioning. This understanding coupled with their commitment to political mobilisation allows the failure to achieve goals, if indeed UK Uncut fail, to feed back and produce a more rigorous political critique and stronger mobilisation.

The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless it is not in the form of the spoils that fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humour and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call into question every victory past and present of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward the sun which is rising in the sky of history.

Walter Benjamin

The intriguing thing is that there are two real survivals in present-day Britain of the brief rush of Bevanite Socialism that followed the war: one the National Health Service, is considered so sacrosanct that even while dismantling it, Tories or New Labour have had to pay it fulsome tributes. The other is the council blocks that still stand all over Britain’s cities, monolithically making their point about its essential failure...Yet...Modernist urban planning could be seen as one of those moments where the workers – the Labour movement – got ideas above its station, the period where, as per Bevan or Lubetkin, nothing was too good for ordinary people...Modernism well worth rescuing from the dustbin of history...a potential index of ideas, successful or failed, tried, untried or broken on the wheel of the market or the state. Even in their ruined condition they can still offer a sense of possibility which decades of being told that ‘There is No Alternative’ has almost beaten out of us

Owen Hatherley

As a poster on March 26th the meaning of this image was radically transformed

Blue Labour can only offer a complacent and indolent melancholy, a nostalgia for a long destroyed working class pride and cohesiveness and a tolerance for the aggressive acting out of white working class masculine melancholy against women and non-whites. Blue Labour’s melancholy is one that sets itself against building solidarity and affirms the worst aspects of a culture produced by fractured communities and, ultimately, tolerates the economics that produced them in the name of respecting that identity. It is not a question of escaping melancholy but of inventing a different sort of melancholy based not a nostalgia for what was (or an imagined version of it) but a nostalgia for what could have been, for the utopia that didn’t come.

Benjamin’s melancholy is directed at the past that wasn’t fulfilled, which is reactivated by the accidental achievements of the class struggle. Class struggle, that there is antagonism within the economic, an antagonism that disturbs both the economic’s clean functioning and the possibility of grasping it as a totality, means the economic cannot be foreclosed. Gains in organisation, knowledge and bravery through class struggle mean that the past cannot be foreclosed, a retroactive force is exerted, the past is not over. Blue Labour’s melancholy, by contrast, closes off the economic, economics directly and unproblematically determines culture, and the past, the past is no longer open. In the whole range of false choices Blue Labour presents in Cruddas’s claim “the left has repeatedly divided between progressive and traditional; forward and back; future and past; new and old…Indeed, all political parties today can be described as “progressive”, in that they want to depart from tradition”, the past is treated as closed, for progressives to be rejected, for conservatives to be treasured as tradition. Benjamin’s focus is on the openness of the past that, as it never happened, could never enter into tradition.

Making the past real is not a question of repeating what happened or preserving the tradition (the closed past) but making possible the repetition of what should have happened but couldn’t. Hatherley’s juxtaposition of modernist social housing and the NHS is a challenge to repeat, in a Modernist way, by introducing a context in which utopia could become actual, he writes, “what can’t be imagined is a context in which we might have welcomed Modernism, and in fact approached it as part of a specific cultural project.” Significantly, Hatherley’s section “Eldorado for the Working Class” begins with a quote from Benjamin and concludes with an implicit reference to Benjamin’s ninth thesis on the philosophy of history.

With Benjamin’s argument “in remembrance we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological”, this critique of Blue Labour and Red Toryism’s melancholy becomes something internal to theology, (the theological roots of Red Toryism, in particular, are explicit).

This demands a sharp distinction between two versions of “raising the dead”, the title of Cruddas’s recent New Statesman essay and central to Benjamin’s ninth thesis, “the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, make whole what has been smashed.” Cruddas refers to, following Chesterton, the necessity of Labour redemocratising its own dead “to conserve what it fought for”. The problem with Cruddas here is rooted in his perception that the struggles of past generations of working people were successful, hence we fight to conserve what Labour fought for, and conservative, which “resists relentless commodification, values the land, believes in family life, takes pride in the country and its traditions: a conservative socialism.” In Cruddas the dead are not raised, the traditions they created must be protected, in Benjamin the raising of the dead requires a gap in tradition, "in order for a part of the past to be touched by the present instant there must be no continuity between them". In Benjamin our weak messianic power refers to the past but is as opposed to tradition as it is to progress, its object is the explosive coming together of the past’s failure and the present.

Fascism attempts to organise the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses not their right, but instead the chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.

Walter Benjamin

It isn’t a matter of struggling for the people, on behalf of the people, at a distance from the people; it’s a matter of struggling with and in the midst of the people...When I was elected president it wasn’t the election of a politician, or a conventional political party; it was an expression of the mobilisation of the people as a whole. For the first time, the national palace became a place not just for professional politicians but for the people. Welcoming people from the poorest sections of Haitian society within the centre of traditional power – this was a profoundly transformative gesture.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide

It would be an exaggeration to describe Blue Labour as fascistic. Nevertheless, there are important affinities: Godhart’s affirmation of working class racism, its intellectual roots, with Red Toryism, in Catholic Fascism (the influence of Chesterton), the conservative-revolutionary style of its critique, the attempt to find a “Third Way” against (Milbank again) liberal individualism and statist collectivism and its revolt against the legacy of the secular Enlightenment. The point that needs further analysis here is the link between its expressive model of class (replacing the working class’s right to change property relations), its model of community organising (replacing the working class’s right to take political power) and its response to what it imagines as working class anxieties about immigration.

The French collaborator Robert Brasillach proposed a model of reasonable anti-Semitism. For Brasillach, “We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; and the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz … We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organise any pogroms. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti-semitism is to organise a reasonable anti-semitism.”. The important thing to note here is not just the endorsement of anti-Semitism but the movement from (unreasonable) working class anti-Semitism as unpredictable, socially destructive and outside the law, to reasonable anti-Semitism, predictable, socially conservative and organised by elites and the state. This adds a further dimension to fascism’s (and analogously, particularly with Cruddas’s analysis of the need to restore “Englishness” as a response to the unreasonable racism of the EDL, Blue Labour’s) expressive model of class. The expression is that of a demand as a threat to social stability which the state is to meet but in such a way that society is not disturbed. The state acts on behalf of working class expression but because it is able to do that there is no need for working class political power.

Blue Labour’s total exclusion of the working class from politics is clearly evident in Glasman’s critique of New Labour. For Glasman, New Labour never particularly liked working class people, Blue Labour by contrast is able to empathise with them. Empathy, however, does not solve the essential problem, whether the elite empathises with working class people, or whether it doesn’t, it is affirmed as an elite which is not working people- hence empathy is required to bridge the gap between the elite and working people.

The distance between Aristide (another theologian) and Blue Labour, despite what could be thought significant similarities, is clearest when the question of the importance of controlling state power and its relation to social and community movements outside the state is addressed. Within the thinkers of Blue Labour there seem to be differences over how important it is for Labour to win elections. Godhart suggests that by reconnecting with working class values Labour will win election, Ansell criticises Blue Labour as being a cynical, but likely to be successful, election winning strategy. Cruddas, on the other hand, argues that Labour became too obsessed with winning elections and needs to reconnect, although the implication of his argument is that this is the way to win elections again. For Glasman, community activism provides a means of Labour improving people’s lives without holding state power.

There is no doubt that Glasman is correct to argue that Labour cannot merely wait until the next general election whilst people's lives are destroyed, not doing anything to resist or even to hasten the coalition's demise. But, sharing some of the important presumptions of this position, Glasman cannot offer a useful critique. There remains, in Glasman, a sharp distinction between politics, which is limited to the state, and, with Glasman's critique of the welfare state, further circumscribed and reduced to administration, and (depoliticised) community action, which aims to solve the problems caused by government (in Glasman's analysis the problem, quite explicitly is what government does, not capitalism). This split is also reflected in the necessity of empathy for the working class in Glasman, empathy is necessary from politicians, because there is no critique in Glasman of a politics that, on a structural level, excludes working class people and no analysis of working class political mobilisation, which by involving the working class directly in politics removes any question of empathy. Lacking an understanding of the political in the economic as the point where antagonisms exist in communities, Glasman and the Movement for Change can only imagine a variety of socialism in which they "care chiefly for the working class, as being the most suffering class...socialists of this kind consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured...They therefore violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class."

It is the link between the failure to think class antagonism and the need for a working class taking of state power that is cut through by Aristide (another theologian). For Aristide the taking of state power was both essential and insufficient. For Glasman community action makes bringing the traditionally excluded into the centres of power irrelevant. The functioning of the state can continue more or less as usual. As with Glasman, for Aristide action outside the confines of the state is indispensable, but for Aristide it is always political struggle, everywhere is a site of politics, is a site of antagonism between the people and its enemies. This action and understanding links the state and communities, both are political sites. It also means, however, that taking state power is insufficient, and, probably, not even the most important task. Firstly, the exercise of state power is always sustained by a politically mobilised people. Secondly, exercising the right to change property relations requires action across society, bypassing the traditional party-state representative network.

Politics without Identity: Part Two What we talk about when we talk about Culture

2011-03-22T19:25:00.001Z

This is the second part of our now four part response to David Cameron's multiculturalism speech. Part One "Politics without Identity: Part One Multiculturalist Tact and the Decline of Class Politics" is here, we will publish parts three and four shortly.

Social Relations between Men themselves assume the fantastic form of Relations between Cultures

Badiou's chapter long development of his eighth and most important point against Sarkozy, "there is only one world" shows precisely what is wrong with Cameron's invoking of liberal values as a condition of belonging in Britain. In Badiou, "there is only world" opposes Sarkozy's demand that "those from elsewhere must integrate into our world" and those who do not love France and its values should leave, Badiou writes "if you place conditions on the African worker belonging to the same world as you, you have already destroyed and abandoned this principle." (p. 61-2)

In his speech, pandering to the resentments of the white racist, Cameron attempted the argument that multiculturalism operates a double standard, "when a white person holds objectionable views – racism, for example – we rightly condemn them. But when equally unacceptable views or practices have come from someone who isn't white, we've been too cautious, frankly even fearful, to stand up to them." Superficially, this seems a reasonable argument, racism must be opposed. The problem is that, like Sarkozy, Cameron makes adherence to liberal values a condition of belonging only for his Muslim racist, nobody questions the right of the white racist to belong and continue living in Britain as a result of his racism. Conditions are only placed on one of the racist's belonging.

Against Cameron and Sarkozy, Badiou shows how insistence that "there is only world" and refusing any conditions on belonging can underpin confronting all versions of racism, he writes "the unity of the world is one of living and acting beings, here and now. And I must absolutely insist on this test of unity: these people who are here, different from me in terms of language, clothes, religion and food exist in the same world, exist just as I myself do. Since they exist like me, I can converse with them, and then, as with anyone else, we can agree and disagree about things. But on the absolute precondition that they exist exactly as I do - in other words, in the same world." (p. 61)

We need to be, as Badiou is, quite precise about the unity of the world and the function of fidelity to the statement. It is to serve as a counter-movement to the dominant unity of capitalist globalisation, thus for Badiou, "we reverse the dominant idea of the unity of the world in terms of objects, signs and elections, an idea that leads to persecution and war." (p. 61) In the opposition between these two unities, the dominant capitalist and the Communist we should pose the question why and how the unified world of capital entails exclusion and why "culture" becomes the means of exclusion. Badiou writes, "the price of the supposed unified world of Capital is this brutal and violent division of human existence into two regions separated by walls, police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. Why has what the politicians and the servile press of the Western countries call the 'problem of integration'...become in all these countries the fundamental datum of state policy? Because all the foreigners who arrive, live and work here are proof that the thesis of a democratic unity of the world realized by the market and the 'international community' is a complete sham...The most widespread conviction, and that which government policies constantly seek to reinforce, is that these people come from a different world...Money is the same everywhere...and the dollars and euros that these foreigners from another world have are happily accepted by everyone. But as for these people themselves, because of their origin and their mode of existence we are reportedly told they are not part of our world. The state authorities and their blind followers will keep tabs on them, ban them for staying, mercilessly criticise their customs, their way of dressing, their family or religious practices." (p. 57-8)

It is productive to read Badiou's analysis of the relation between the unity of global capital and its exclusions based on culture together with Marx on commodity fetishism in Capital. This reading also suggests a Marxist means of filling in an important gap in "On the Jewish Question". In Marx under capitalism (contrasted with feudalism) relations between men are abstractly equal (all are equal as citizens, all are equal as egoistic economic actors) and defetishised, furthermore, commodities express an abstract equality of human labour as "the duration of that quantity of labour, this is quite palpably different from its quality." In Badiou, there is the equality of money, again, as an abstract quantity. In both Badiou and Marx, inequality is then displaced onto a fetish; in Marx it is relations between commodities, in Badiou it is relations between cultures. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek defends "commodity fetishism" against its Althusserian criticique, that it is based "on a naive, ideological, epistemologically unfounded opposition between persons (human subjects) and things." For Zizek, Marx's power lies in the use he makes of this opposition so that, in commodity fetishism, "it is as if all their [i.e. human subjects under capitalism] beliefs, superstitions and metaphyiscal mystifications, supposedly surmounted by the rational, utilitarian personality, are embodied in the social relations between things. They no loger believe but the things believe for them." (p. 31) The implications of this argument can also be applied, interestingly, to Marx's "Jewish Question". Much of Marx's text is based on the critique of political emancipation, which is "the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic individual, and on the other to the citizen, the moral person." What Marx did not anticipate, however, is, following religious emancipation, a move analagous to commodity fetishism, the defetishised relations between free people, either as members of civil society or citizens, becoming fetishised as relations between cultures. Today, definite relations between men assume the form not only of relations between commodities but also of cultures. Whilst liberal capitalism presumes an equality of people as citizens or consumers, it produces an inequality from the perspective of culture; following Badiou, culture believes for us.

We want to use this analysis to explore what is excluded from culture in two recent debates around multiculturalism: responses to Searchlight's recent report on identity and the way in which allegations of tolerance of Muslim abuse of women have been mobilised against multiculturalism both in Cameron's speech and remarks by Jack Straw over "grooming" of white girls by Muslim men. We want to argue that, trapped by viewing human relations as relations between cultures, both the advocates and critics of multiculturalism are unable to offer a convincing position. These debates are structured by culture being "customary difference", as Mulhern writes "the promotion of culture as a defining social relation has tended to obscure the articulations of ethnic and class formations, which differ crucially from one part of the multicultural landscape to another...what counts as culture is what distinguishes us from others...The kind of difference that counts is custom: confirmed, received difference...Customary difference is most strongly confirmed in the plane of religion, whether as doctrine, as worship, as spiritual observance or as sanctioned behaviour. The culminating effect of this discursive logic, where the contingencies of inheritance and situation favour it, is to strengthen traditionalism, the systematic advocacy of customary relations and practices, and to confirm its beneficiaries as natural leaders of populations invariably called communities."

Multicultural Tolerance as Class Hatred

As we saw, with the decline of class politics on the left, it is not only those like Cameron, Sarkozy and Merkel, who believe in the indispensibility of a leitkultur in which every state is based on a dominant cultural space which members of other cultures must respect, for whom relations between people assume the form of relations between cultures, this is also true of those who defend multiculturalism. The consequences of this loss of an emancipatory conception of class and any critique of capitalism are strikingly evident in one of Ralph Miliband's disappointing son's analysis of Searchlight's recent research into attitudes towards race and identity. Discussing Searchlight's taxonomy, David writes, "On the left are "confident multiculturals" and "mainstream liberals", comprising 24% of the population. On the far right sit "latent hostiles" and "active enmity" (totalling 23%), who share antagonistic attitudes to others and differ only in the degree of their antipathy and tolerance of extremism. The centre of British politics are the "identity ambivalents" and "cultural integrationists"." In Miliband's analysis, the distinction between left and right loses any reference to economics and redistribution and becomes merely a question of confidence and cultural attitudes. What is even more striking is that the traditional relationship between class and politics is almost entirely reversed. In Searchlight's report the "left" groups are "predominately professionals" in the case of "confident multiculturalists" and, in the case of "mainstream liberals", "for the most part educated to degree level. The "right" groups, by contrast, are either, in the case of "latent hostiles", "likely to be older, not university-educated, and more than likely working class", or, in the case of "active enmity", "the unskilled and the unemployed".

The way in which Miliband's restriction of political positions to cultural openness leads to a reversal of the traditional wealthy=right/poor=left political polarity should suggest Zizek's argument in Defense of Lost Causes that "to merely oppose populist anti-immigrant racism with multiculturalist openness, obliterating its displaced class content- benevolent as it wants to be, the simple insistence on tolerance is the most perfidious form of anti-proletarian class struggle." (p. 267) Our response to this, however, cannot (we must remain loyal to "there is only one world") be as Zizek has, recently, seemed to argue to affirm simply the truth of populist racism against liberal multiculturalism, as well as violating "there is only one world", this move fails to work through how class content is displaced- more on Zizek's more recent failures in the final part.

Opposing both liberal multiculturalism and populist racism requires something like the emancipatory Hegelianism Zizek offers in The Parallax View in his analysis of American culture wars. Zizek writes, "we should reject the very terms of the culture war. Although, of course, where the positive content of most the issues debated is concerned a radical leftist should support the liberal stance (for abortion, against racism and homophobia, and so on), we should never forget that it is the populist fundamentalist, not the liberal, who is, in the long run our ally. In all therir anger, they are not radical enough." (p. 364) In Zizek's analysis, there are two points where the working class populist is in the long run or ally at the expense of the middle class liberal. The first, as suggested against the Searchlight report, is solidarity with the poor against the rich, the second, more importantly, is that while multicultural liberalism aims to difuse antagonisms, right-wing populism maintains the link between politics and social antagonism, Zizek argues "it is populist fundamentalism that retains the logic of antagonism, while the liberal left follows the logic of recognition of differences of 'defusing' antagonisms into coexisting differences: in their very form, the conservative-populist grass roots campaigns took over the old Leftist radical stance of the popular mobilization and struggle against upper class exploitation" and "the point of subtraction is to reduce the overral complex structure to its 'antagonistic' minimal difference. So what the series race-gender-class obfuscates is the different logic of the political space in the case of class: while the antiracist and antisexist struggles are guided by a striving for the full recognition of the other, the class struggle aims at overcoming and subduing even anihilating the other...[it] aims at the anihilation of the other's sociopolitical role and function...it is logical to say that antiracism wants all races to be allowed freely to assert and further their cultural, political and economic strivings, it is obviously meaningless to say that the aim of proletarian class struggle is to allow the bourgeoisie fully to assert its identity and strivings." (p. 362)

Zizek is clearly correct to distinguish the struggle with an antagonist in class politics and the horizontal logic of recognition. However, both the EDL itself and Labour responses to it, from David Miliband and Jon Cruddas, have tended towards a logic whereby the aim of politics is to allow the working class (at least the working class as they characterise it) fully to assert its identity and strivings. This position is, of course, supplemented by believing in the necessity of the bourgeoisie fully to assert its identity and strivings. Cruddas has offered the most comprehensive and detailed development of this position and we have discussed the limitations of this position in the past, we argued, "the static nature of class for Cruddas became obvious in the way in which he discussed the good society. Cruddas argued that his notion of the good society was derived from the Aristotelian polis. Cruddas’s neo-Aristotelian model seems to entail that tconstruction of culture, which may be transmitted by women, or at least women are to blame for failures in its transmission, but only men live in culture, women have no access to it.he cohesive polis offers a place for each citizen to virtuously live out their function as a member of a particular class. To put it another way, Cruddas’s model seems to be little more than a refinement of multiculturalism in which a “white working class” English identity, which has been marginalised by a liberal, cosmopolitan Labour elite, is afforded the same respect as other identities." What we want to focus on in this post because alongside the culturalisation of politics and the absence of a critique of capitalism, it is the essential point shared by both the advocates of multiculturalism and the advocates of leitkultur, is the way in which culture is constructed by the exclusion of women, although (for example with Frank Field and Iain Duncan-Smith) women may be to blame if the transmission of culture breaks down.

Culture: Men are alienated, Women as "Easy Meat" or frigid

Cruddas's treatment of the EDL and Cameron's treatment of Islamic fundamentalism are sheped by indentical treatments of culture. Of the context of the emergence of the EDL, Cruddas argues "men have lost traditions of skilled work that were a source of pride...many young men have lost the traditional rites of passage to adulthood". He also describes the EDL's politics as "born out dispossession but anchored in a English male working class culture; of dress and sport." Similarly, Cameron's analysis of Islamic fundamentalism focuses on violent young men, whose violence is explained simultanously by the undermining of the ways in which culture is transmitted but also anchored in culture, for Cameron, the terrorist threat "comes overwhelmingly from young men who follow a completely perverse and warped interpretation of Islam" and " in the U.K. some young men find it hard to identify with the traditional Islam practised at home by their parents whose customs can seem staid when transplanted to modern Western countries. But they also find it hard to identify with Britain too, because we have allowed the weakening of our collective identity." Cruddas and Cameron's exclusive focus on men's alienation from culture, whilst also rooting their violence in culture stems entirely from how culture is constructed when it becomes the way in which relations between people are experienced.

The exclusion of women from culture becomes clearest when Cameron discusses the treatment of women by British Muslims. Women are only mentioned once in Cameron's speech, he says, "some organisations that seek to present themselves as a gateway to the Muslim community are showered with public money despite doing little to combat extremism...let's properly judge these organisations: do they believe in universal human rights – including for women and people of other faiths?" The obvious, and entriely true response, to this is that Cameron should consider the beam in his own eye before pointing out the speck in the Muslim Council of Great Britain's.

Beyond Cameron's hypocrisy on women's rights even more is revealed, particularly his presumption women are not part of culture, merely objects of it. Cameron's demand is merely that groups believe in rights for women, suggesting the issue is how women are treated by men. This becomes even clearer in the juxtaposition of women and people of other faiths. People of other faiths are clearly not part of Muslim culture, with the exception of Sabbati Zevi it is hard to imagine a Muslim Jew, this is obviously not the case with Muslim women. Ultimately, Cameron does not aim to challenge the prevailing multiculturalist contract between the state and already powerful men who claim to represent their communities and culture, the contract between men remains merely with a new stipulation. This amounts to very little improvement on Rahila Gupta's characterisation of a multiculturalism in which "the state more or less enters into an informal contract with the more powerful leaders in the minority community - disempowering women and trading women's autonomy for community autonomy." In fact, what we have in Cameron's speech is an attack on "community autonomy" without anything being offered for women's autonomy.

Possibly the most telling, and certainly the most disgusting, example of bracketing out the general oppression of women and resorting to cultural explanations was in Jack Straw's remarks that Pakistani men view white girls as "easy meat" for sexual abuse. This remark was condemned, quite rightly, by the LRC, but almost entirely for the racist rather than the misogynistic content of the comments, closer attention to entirety of Straw's remarks should establish the way in which his (very typical) conception of culture interlinks sexism and racism.

As with Cameron's comments on Muslim terrorists and, albeit to a lesser degree, Cruddas's analysis of the EDL, Straw's remarks move, in an entirely unmediated way, between a kind of condescending sympathy, almost absolving the alienated young men in question of responsibility for their acts and an extremely aggressive condemnation. What produces this movement is blaming the actions on culture, and, most unpleasantly, in Straw's case on the culturally determined behaviour of women. Essentially, in Straw's analysis, insofar as the perpetrators are men they are sympathised with, insofar as they are Pakistani they are attacked. For Straw, the origin of the crime lies, first, in the intersection of the (cross-cultural) bodies of young men "they're fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that" (it's worth noting that the men convicted were 28 and 27, not 16 and 15) and Muslim sexual repression, or more specifically the chastity of Pakistani girls, Straw continues, "but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically." This then leads them to target white girls, whose lack of chastity makes them "easy meat."

The implication of Straw's argument is, of course, a radicalisation of the fairly typical double bind for women, they are responsible for sexual abuse if they want to have sex; they are responsible for sexual abuse if they don't want to. Young Pakistani men, on the other hand, are passive victims of their bodies and culture. It is not just Straw who argued this, for the trial judge described Abid Saddique as "a sexual predator with a voracious sexual appetite that you gratified as frequently as possible in a variety of ways."

The exclusive focus on culture linked to "voracious desire" entirely distorts the case. Lost is not only a Marxist sense of the mediated economic relation to the crimes but the simple, immediate economic imperative, the rape was not merely (or even at all) a question of desire but part of systematic exploitation of the girls, including a significant economic benefit for their abusers. The rapes were part of a grooming process that led to the girls being passed onto older men. Straw entirely ignores this, instead presenting it as a question of the impossibility of male desire due to the repressiveness of Muslim culture (but it is men who experience the effects of repression). In fact, following a truly culturalist version of Mill's harm principle, for Straw the problem only emerges when Muslim men step outside and harm women not belonging to their own culture.

The response to Straw's remarks from the LRC and from Keith Vaz, who said "I disagree with Jack Straw ... I don't think you can stereotype an entire community. What you can do is look at the facts of these national cases, give it to an agency, make a proper investigation and see how we can deal with these networks of people who are involved in this horrendous crime" was both true but inadequate in that by focusing on the racist aspects of what Straw said and arguing that the abuse was not related to any specific community or culture, they obscured the misogynistic dimension of Straw's remarks and how it sustains the racist aspect. Ultimately, culture by its ver nature excludes women. This founds culture, so whilst it is correct to argue that the abuse was not a consequence of Muslim or Pakistani culture, it was a consequence of culture in its cross-cultural foundations.

Politics without Identity: Part One Multiculturalist Tact and the Decline of Class Politics

2011-02-26T13:01:00.003Z

This will be the first part of a now four part essay in response to Cameron's speech on multiculturalism. The three other parts: "What we talk about when we talk about culture", "Melancholy, Conviviality and Narrative" and "Emancipatory Politics beyond Culture" will be up over the next few days.

Deptford High Street, London's best high street

Against the liberalism of muscular liberalism

Cameron's recent speech against multiculturalism was striking because he managed to get almost everything wrong. This claim is not meant as a mere polemical device, instead a critique of Cameron's total failure should offer us, on the left, a means of engaging with the achievements and limitations of multiculturalism and to question its hegemony on the left. Francis Mulhern's argument that, in the struggle against racism, "some kind of multiculturalism is the horizon of all progressive thought and practice" is key.

Alongside its rudeness and provocative timing, the root of the various ways in which Cameron's speech was wrong was how it managed to attack many of the achievements of British multiculturalism (as contrasted, for example, with the ways in which France has tried to come to terms with a multiracial society) in critiquing "passive tolerance", whilst remaining within a framework which, whilst it was not exactly multiculturalist, shares its deeper conceptual problems. To put it another way, referring back to Mulhern, Cameron's rejection of multiculturalism in favour of "muscular liberalism" rejects the necessity of the struggle against racism, but retains a liberal or even progressive form. The task of the left is precisely the opposite, to maintain that the struggle against racism, unfortunately, is still indispensable but that its articulation within a liberal or progressive framework should be rejected in favour of a politics of emancipation.

Cameron: Courtesy to those with power, Rudeness to those without

Reasonably enough, given that even Nick Griffin thought its timing was "provocative", most commentators have focused on the British context of Cameron's speech a the expense of analysing the European context. One exception is Diane Abbott, who described Cameron's speech as "a courtesy to Merkel." Before looking at the speech as an intervention in European, particularly German, debates, which we will do in the second part of this piece, it is worth looking at the meaning of Cameron's courtesy and the place of politeness within multiculturalism.

Back in July we wrote an extensive post analysing the politics of Cameron's politeness, which was largely in response to an article by Martin Kettle, describing Cameron as, amongst other things, "a man of grace". In Kettle's article it is largely other politicians, whether foreign leaders (Cameron's courtesy to Merkel is a continuation of this), coalition partners or even opposition MPs, who Cameron has treated courteously. In the multiculturalism speech the price of this elite politeness to Merkel was that it required considerable rudeness towards people in Britain with rather less power. It is telling Cameron's politeness tends to slip when dealing with Britons from ethnic minority backgrounds. Paul Mason described the same student protesters that Cameron had insulted as "a feral mob" as coming from the "British banlieue", The Guardian noted that here Cameron's language was "uncharacteristically frank."

Cameron's courtesy, extending to his Parliamentary opponents, serves to close down debate, it deantagonises (i.e. depoliticises) politics. Cameron's patrician courtesy, allied to Labour's feeble attempts to appear "reasonable" and "credible" excludes anger and genuine opposition from debates between MPs, hence Labour's lack of support for Sadiq Khan's (truth-telling) rudeness in claiming Cameron was "writing propaganda for the EDL." Even more importantly running alongside the deantagonisation of Parliament is the way in which the move between Cameron's courtesy and rudeness aims to limit politics to an already depoliticised Parliamentary politics.

Cameron's polite reasonableness aims to suggest that he has considered every possible option and interest and moved beyond them to act in the national interest. Therefore, those (Sadiq Khan, the student protesters...) who are angry are expressing an immature and private interest. This characterisation of opposition as immature underpins Cameron's rudeness towards those demanding inclusion. His rudeness emerges at the point when the whole (the reasonable national interest) is (challenged by demands for inclusion that reveal it to be) false. A similar movement between politeness and rudeness underpins Cameron's attacks on multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism as "Social Conviviality".

Multiculturalism as "social conviviality" (Paul Gilroy) or part of the "new civility" (Tom Paulin) is characterised by a very different tact from Cameron's movement from politeness to rudeness. To a large extent "multiculturalism" denotes a series of difficult negotiations between people adapting to radical change in that the social norms, determined by a largely hierarchical, monoracial society, have been undermined by mass immigration. Mulhern, therefore, argues "the irreducible positive value of multiculturalism is that it has embodied, in British public life, an unprecedented attempt to acknowledge and embrace the historical fact of a multiracial society." However, whilst the importance of these tactful negotiations must be acknowledged, we should also be aware of the limitations of a sometimes "passive tolerance", albeit deserving a rather different critique from Cameron's. As Zizek argues, "multicultural tolerance and respect of differences share with those who oppose immigration the need to keep others at a proper distance. "The others are OK, I respect them," the liberals say, "but they must not intrude too much on my own space. The moment they do, they harass me – I fully support affirmative action, but I am in no way ready to listen to loud rap music."

However, this tact also tends to obscure dominance (and ignore exploitation), for Mulhern, "to speak blandly of a plurality of cultures in coexistence is to obscure the historical dominance of one of them, that of Anglo-Britain, and an array of continuing social effects that are not mainly 'cultural'." By referring back to Marx's "On the Jewish Question", it should become clear that a certain measure of tact constitutes the modern state, it is at this point we should challenge the hegemony of multiculturalism on the left. As Marx argues on Jewish emancipation, emancipation as the state's political neutrality between religions, merely entails their privatisation, "the state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinction, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, occupation, to act in their way – i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of their special nature." Cameron's tactlessness is, therefore, in some ways pre-modern, by contrast, in critiquing multiculturalism, we need to repoliticise what multiculturalism depoliticises which is that which the tactfulness of the modern state excludes from politics.

The Decline of Class Politics

In order to situate our critique of multiculturalism it is necessary to explore the history of how it came to dominate the left's thinking about immigration and race and in so doing excluded other political possibilities. The clearest way to do this is by looking at Ralph Miliband's "The New Revisionism in Britain." The dominance of multiculturalism on the left is part and a consequence of the new revisionism's repudiation of class politics, which denotes, in Miliband's words "the insistence on the ‘primacy’ of organized labour in the challenge to capitalist power and the task of creating a radically different social order." The new revisionism rejected class politics's insistence on the primacy of organised labour for lacking pluralism, being hierarchical and, given the, apparent, disappearance of the working class in advanced capitalist countries lacking the possibility of universality. The first part of the move away from class politics towards multiculturalism was the argument that "new social movements, based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, ecological concerns and the struggle for peace present at least as great and as radical a challenge [as class politics]."

The second move towards multiculturalism is a consequence of the fracturing and opening up of a range of struggles entailed in the rejection of the primacy of class politics. The rejection of organised labour's challenge to capitalist power leads to the challenge to capitalist power becoming first untenable and then unimaginable, capitalism asserts its dominance by becoming unmentioned. In class politics, "class" names the antagonism cannot be resolved within capitalism. A capitalism without discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality is possible; a capitalism without class antagonism is not. The abandonment of class politics entails the abandonment of the possibility of a total critique of capitalism in its essential aspect. It also involves abandoning the hope of a political bloc able to take state power.

In many ways Miliband's argument mirrors Terry Eagleton's attack on the politics of postmodernism. Eagleton writes, "it is as though almost every other form of oppressive system - state, media, patriarchy, racism, neo-colonialism - can be readily debated, but not the one which so often sets the long term agenda for all these matters, or is at the very least implicated with them to their roots." He also argues that the postmodern emphasis on pluralism and its critique of hierarchy hobbles any possibility of radical politics as, "radical politics is necessarily hierarchical in outlook, needing some way of calculating the most effective distribution of its limited energies over a range of issues. It assumes...that some struggles are central to a particular form of life and some are not."

What the new revisionism and the impossibility of founding a radical politics on a plurality of identity or issue based social movements leads to, ultimately, is the loss of the desire to create a radically different social order, this desire becomes limited to the demand that identities are respected within the existing order. Not only does the new revisionism undermine the possibility of an effective, broad-based radical politics, it is often inadequate even to deal with questions of sexism or racism. Ralph Miliband notes that fidelity to class politics does not mean denying that racism and sexism exist but that the task is to think their shaping by class, but "this is not to fall into the ‘class reductionism’ with which the new revisionism so easily charges Marxists. It is rather an instance of what might be called ‘class relationism’, or the insistence that class is a critical, decisive factor in ‘social being’." By exploring the similarities between Miliband's argument and Marx's critique of the political emancipation of Jews, the point can be made more clearly; multiculturalism, by emphasising the necessity of respect for cultural identity can only frame racism (or sexism) as immediately experienced disrespect or intolerance for that identity, it can only appear as violence or harassment. Disrespect for identity is the business of the multiculturalist state; Mulhern's "array of continuing social effects that are not mainly 'cultural'" that result from the dominance of Anglo-Britain.

The obvious temptation, therefore, is to oppose the bad, subjective, identity politics of the new revisionism with the good politics of the past based on objective class position. However, this simplistic opposition is untenable. The new revisionism's critique was both wrong and necessary. What the new revisionism's critique actually reveals is that really existing class politics was an identity politics before identity politics. The class politics critiqued by the new revisionism was an identity politics founded upon an archaic (given the recomposition of the working class) and exclusionary white, male, unionised, industrial working class identity. What both really existing class politics and the new revisionism shared was the grounding of politics in cultural identity.

Ralph Miliband offers an implicit critique of class politics as identity politics in his discussion of the "recomposition of the working class". Miliband argues "it is perfectly true that the working class has experienced in recent years an accelerated process of recomposition, with a decline of the traditional industrial sectors and a considerable further growth of the white-collar, distribution, service and technical sectors." A politics founded on the old working class identity would necessarily exclude these workers. Miliband's critique, however, risks the opposite problem to class politics as identity politics; the subjective and organised (that is political) essentials of class are lost.

Going back to The Communist Manifesto reveals the risks of Miliband's recomposition argument. In Marx, to be part of the working class, it is not sufficient to be (what Miliband describes being working class as) a "wage earner located in the subordinate levels of the productive process." What Miliband risks losing is the organised aspect of the primacy of organised labour. Marx argues that, first, "workers form a mass dispersed throughout the whole country and disunited through competition." At this point, Marx is clear, these workers do not constitute a class and is arguable that Miliband's recomposed working class, dispersed and disorganised do not either. It is only later that the dispersed mass come to constitute a class, "confrontations between individual workers and individual bourgeois increasingly take on the character of confrontations between two classes...From time to time the workers are victorious, but only temporarily. The real result of their battles is not some immediate success but a unity amongst workers that gains ever more ground. This organisation of proletarians into a class, and hence into a political party, is disrupted time and time again by competition among the workers themselves."

The Working Class must be reinvented against Multiculturalism

This leaves rather a small (but profitable) space for attempting to reinvent class politics without identity but with a subjective, organised political dimension. Class struggle is what makes economic determinism untenable; economic development creates political possibilities but it does not determine them. Class struggle as the political moment in the economic ("every class struggle...is a political struggle") stops the closure of the economic. As well as being opposed to economic determinism a reinvented class politics reveals the affinities between economic determinism and identity politics- neither treat class as the outcome of a struggle, both require consciousness of identity to be derived from an objective position. Marx shows us that class is not objective, class consciousness does not mean the adequate subjective grasping of an already existing objective position in the world. There is no objective (pre-political, pre-subjective) class position.

Political invention and action must then move on the level of creating a working class. This requires, perhaps more than anything else, resisting any culturalisation of politics, whether it is a multiculturalist version or the racist-populist white working class male identity politics of the EDL, which reduces the working class again to an incoherent mass. At present Alain Badiou represents the most valuable effort to attempt to reinvent the figure of the worker and link it to universality in a way which suggests the possibility of overcoming multiculturalism whilst maintaining its achievements. In The Meaning of Sarkozy, Badiou introduces eight points against Sarkozy, beginning with "assume all workers labouring here belong here and must be treated on a basis of equality and respected accordingly - indeed honoured - especially workers of foreign origin." Badiou notes, further, that this aims at "re-establishing the signifier 'worker' in the speech and action of politics...the organisation of workers of foreign origin occupies a strategic position."

Polarised Demands from Desire to Drive and What Now?

2011-01-16T18:57:00.000Z

Polarised Demands

An analogy with the distinction in Lacan between desire and drive suggests both how this movement from a simple, moderate demand to more radical action and understanding operates and reveals what, perhaps, may be the greatest danger for the student movement. As we have said, at the date demonstration, the emergence of what mattered from the demonstration (solidarity between and collective action by what had been rather disparate groups) required a different goal (leaving the demonstration, getting close to the Palace of Westminster) being blocked.

At most protests an opinion is expressed, a demand is made, this demand is met or, more often, is not, the protestors go home and continue with their lives. The Lacanian parallel is with desire, the object is desired, and satisfaction comes form the achievement of desire. In the anti-Iraq war protests, the refusal by the government of the desire of the protestors did not reveal anything significant about social and political organisation or the state on a structural level (it certainly suggested a moral bankruptcy on the part of the Labour leadership but, by its very nature, moral bankruptcy entails a free choice not something structurally determined). With drive, what is crucial is how it is constituted by being blocked. As with drive, the experience of solidarity constituted by the desire to leave being blocked or the grasping of structures in the blocking of moderate demands, transforms failure into triumph. “The object of drive is not related to the Thing as the filler of its void: drive is literally a countermovement to desire, it does not strive towards impossible fullness and, being forced to renounce it, get stuck onto a partial object as its remainder – drive is quite literally the very drive to break the All of continuity in which we are embedded, to introduce a radical imbalance into it.” (p. 63) Zizek explains this more clearly (and rather more crudely) through “the well-known joke about a fool having intercourse for the first time, the girl has to tell him exactly what to do: ‘See this hole between my legs? Put it in here. Now push it deep. Now pull it out. Push it in, pull it out, push it in, pull it out…”Now wait a minute,” the fool interrupts her, “make up your mind! In or out?” What the fool misses is precisely the structure of a drive which gets its satisfaction from the indecision itself, from the repeated oscillation.” (p. 64)

The student protests being sustained, their not going home and continuing with their lives even when their demands have not been met, will be a consequence of the difference between desire and drive. However, whilst being the basis of the movement being sustained, it is also the basis of a considerable risk. The risk, which is compounded by the necessity of the student movement bypassing the Labour Party, the traditional means of institutionalising egalitarian demands, is that the repeated oscillation, the repetition of failure becomes its own satisfaction. Something similar seems to be the basis of Bruno Boostels’s critique of Zizek’s Lacanian Communism, which Zizek goes on to discuss following his obscene but instructive joke, “by giving priority to the Act as a negative gesture of radical (self-relating) negativity…I devalue in advance any positive project of imposing a new Order, fidelity to any positive cause.” (p. 64) The tragic paradox may be that given the impossibility of the student movement’s egalitarian demands being translated into Parliamentary terms by the Labour Party, the only means by which the movement can be sustained is the guarantee of its irrelevance.

This is also the danger of Laurie Penny’s appeal to the immediacy of the protests’ creativity against the claim that their demands become institutionalised at the level of the state through a connection to the Labour Party, she argues, “Labour is making a fundamental error, however, in assuming that these young protesters want or need anybody to "be our voice". Parliamentary politics has sold the young out,..The young people of Britain do not need leaders, and the new wave of activists has no interest in the ideological bureaucracy of the old left”. Penny’s argument includes a reference to the influence of Situationism on the protests.

It should also be remembered that there is nothing essentially “left” about combining creativity and humour with protest and bypassing its reference to its institutionalisation through the link between party and state. One of the most successful manifestations of this sort of political action was the anti-Semitic intimidations of what Benjamin describes as the culte de la blaque in late 19th and early 20th century France. The culte de la blaque explicitly rejected the politics of the mass party aiming to take power at the level of the state, for the French far right the Republic (the institutions of democratic government) was a slut. Benjamin locates the origins of the culte de la blaque in Baudelaire’s taking over of the conspiratorial mode of politics from Babeuf and, particularly, Blanqui. This mode of politics, at first revolutionary, requires small, tight groups of conspirators committed to acts of direct action to shock the bourgeoisie out of its complacency. The point is not to tarnish Penny’s position by association but, instead, to argue that a conception of political action that rejects the organisation of a mass party and aim of institutionalising demands on the level of the state and prizes direct action which links the shocking to the achievement of immediate goals may be more successful as a form of intimidation rather than a means of creating something radically new (except on the level of the shocking originality of the protest).

What Now?

In an earlier post, comparing the current student protests to 1968 in Britain and France, we should have been even clearer that, unlike in the confrontation between cultural conservatives and student radicals in ’68, there is now no measure in common between the student protestors and their opponents, and, in the same way, no relation between the protestors and the state. In 1968, the common measure was, however, not through a relation to the state, but in locating the struggle over a shared understanding of its location: the politics of culture. Instead, in Britain today there is violence on the streets from protesters and, more significantly, since they are rather better armed, from the police and a new violence in the language used by the government about protesters. This is a sign that the common measure between street and government . Instead of rational government arguments we have, demands for submission often based on the notion that the protesters have failed to understand the rationality of the government, and naked violence.

The student protests and UK Uncut have entirely bypassed the traditional left, and here there are parallels with ‘68. This bypassing of the NUS, the official student leadership, and the Labour Party, leads to the essential pair of questions about the protests, which remain, still, or perhaps better, again, within the ambiguity over the (non-)relation of political and social revolution in Marx’s “King of Prussia”, in which the social revolution requires the political act (an action from the standpoint of the state) which is “the overthrow of the existing ruling power and the dissolution of the of the order…But as soon as its organising function begins and its goal, its soul emerges, socialism throws its political mask aside.”

1. How far is Labour’s response (Ed Miliband’s attack on disorderly and violent protestors, his criticism of Len McLusky’s intervention, which drew inspiration from the “magnificent student protestors”), which seems to be trying to block any extra-Parliamentary resistance to cuts, down to the personal feebleness and servility of the leadership and, most, of the PLP or how far is it something essential? In Alain Badiou’s words, is the left merely “the set of parliamentary political personnel that proclaim they are the only ones equipped to bear the consequences of a singular political movement”? This leads Badiou to the conclusion that the “recurrent theme of betrayal” on the left: the proletarian movement, the egalitarian upsurge, betrayed by servile politicians, the failure for there to be “continuity between a political mass movement and its statist bottom line” is not an aberration but the function of politicians of the left. Therefore, for Badiou the Paris Commune’s declaration, “the proletarians of Paris, amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs” does not form part of the history of the left but a break from it. (194-8)

2. Given the student protestors’, essential given Labour’s feebleness, bypassing of the traditional statist left, is the task of the protestors and the wider anti-cuts movement, especially those Unions who remain (for how long?) affiliated to Labour, to force concessions from government, to force the Labour leadership into a more radical position or even to bring down the coalition, benefiting, presumably, Labour? If this essentially statist logic is impossible, and without a less servile Labour party, it will be, how can the demands of the student and anti-cuts movement be met and, more essentially, how can the egalitarian upsurge be institutionalised? Without this institutionalisation does the anti-cuts and student movements become another chapter in our history of noble failure, or at worst, like ’68 a nostalgically treated “explosion of creativity”, or, at best, part of essential political organisation and unity that will be useful at some point in the future?

Malevich in Politics: The EMA Protesters and the Countryside Alliance

2011-01-14T12:20:00.001Z

Malevich, Black Square

For Zizek, unfortunately, the banlieue protests in their violent negativity and their abandonment of both specific political or utopian demands reducing politics to a mere demand for inclusion represented the end of ’68 in France. Anticipating, in some ways, UK Uncut’s protests, Zizek suggests that the ideal form of this kind of protest is the flashmob, as a pure, unreadable appearing and assertion that the group belongs here (an extension of "Whose Streets? Our Streets!). Zizek describes this reduction of politics to a minimal difference, between included and excluded, leading to unreadable violent explosions as "Malevich in Politics", following "Black Square's" analogous reduction in painting. What is significant in Britain’s student protests, in contrast to the banlieue protests is that the experience of exclusion is determined by concrete decisions from the government and that the demand for inclusion is made in the form of opposing the decisions. As we argued in our last post, the blocking of these demands transforms it into a more radical demand for inclusion.

With the EMA being abolished and 80% cuts to university funding, the disproportionate bearing of cuts by the poor, the non-white, women and Londoners whilst Philip Green is allowed to continue to avoid paying taxes reveals who counts in Britain, who is included and who is excluded. This antagonism between the included and excluded goes far beyond the demand that we all, including students, submit to the discipline of the market, it establishes that submission to the market entails an odd movement between generality (“we’re all in this together”) and exclusion (rejecting a “system which has a place for us all”). It is this which gives a radical edge to what are incredibly moderate demands: the rich should pay taxes too, spending that broadens opportunity and, according to IFS, pays for itself to be retained, universities should not be subject to vastly disproportionate cuts. Although the axis of exclusion/inclusion is not merely age based, Nick Cohen, describing the university and EMA cuts as “an act of political extremism; a raw display of the power of the old over the young”, is able to grasp how exclusion functions and how the protests attacked it. Hence Cohen argues, a cut that led to £4,000 fees, for example, whilst breaking the Liberal Democrat promise and being in excess of the departmental average, certainly would not have led to this anger. Essentially, the antagonism between included and excluded, means that even very moderate that would be easy to meet, will not be met. This is forcing critique to move on a different level.

Central to Zizek’s analysis of the banlieue protests is the structuralist concept of “phatic communication”. Phatic communication does not aim at communicating any message or demand, it merely aims to establish if the channel of communication is working. Sarkozy’s response to the protests revealed, beyond any doubt, that it was not. The concept of phatic communication is also central to understanding the importance for the protesters of getting as close to the Houses of Parliament as possible, “to make our voices heard” and what (initially) being prevented from doing so revealed. The failure of phatic communication reveals the limits of political emancipation.

Strangely, in the sense of exclusion and with it the total breakdown of communication between a defined social group and government and protest becoming a case of (blocked) phatic communication, the closest recent parallel with the student protests, especially with the EMA protesters, is with the Countryside Alliance. The Countryside Alliance and the EMA protesters, made a specific and limited demand that something apparently essential to their way of life (foxhunting, the EMA) be maintained. The near certainty that Parliament would remove what was essential to a way of life was held to be the consequence of the exclusion of the social group from politics. The analogy between the EMA protesters and the Countryside Alliance can be further clarified by contrast with the anti-Iraq war protests. The slogan “Not in my Name”, which, rather than being a demand to be included, was an intervention in a debate in which the protesters were already participants, which, symbolically, but only symbolically, withdrew the protesters from the included when the war went ahead. The EMA protesters and the Countryside Alliance, by their presence outside Parliament, demand to be included in a debate from which they have been excluded and, therefore, totally transform the debate by their inclusion.

There are, of course, crucial differences between the Countryside Alliance and the EMA protesters, these do not, though, precisely, stem from the Countryside Alliance being comprised largely of social elites defending something repellent. For the Countryside Alliance, their exclusion was cultural, a liberal, metropolitan elite did not understand rural life. Since the Countryside Alliance’s exclusion was cultural, not, as with the EMA protesters, a question of a struggle over resources, the challenge its demand for inclusion presented was of a different and more superficial level. Its demand did not also take place in a context in which the government’s ideological universalism is only possible through a set of exclusions. Therefore, the Countryside Alliance’s demand for inclusion could never become a demand for social emancipation in the same way as the student movement’s demands are- it is absurd in a number of ways to imagine the Countryside Alliance mobilising Marx’s analysis of how “the bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the town.”

To grasp what is unique and inspiring about the student protests the contrast with the Iraq war protesters and the affinites but also the differences between the student protesters and the banlieue protesters is crucial. In Living in the End Times, Zizek uses the psychoanalytic distinction between acting out and the passage à l'acte to contrast the Iraq War protestors and the banlieue riots (p. 326-7). "Acting Out" corresponds to the Iraq war as "a spectacle addressing a figure of the big Other, which leaves the big Other undisturbed in its place...the massive demonstrations against the US attack on Iraq were exemplary of a strange symbiotic relationship, parasitism even, between power and the anti-war protesters. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters had saved their beautiful souls...while those in power could calmly accept it...the whole case was rather a supreme case of fully co-opted acting out." For Zizek our predicament is that the only alternative appears as violent outbursts devoid of meaning like the banlieue protests. Britain's student protests, perhaps, by the movement from a liberal to radically egalitarian demand for inclusion which having the demand expressed in concrete and limited demands offers a means beyond the illegibility of the banlieue protests. It certainly moves beyond the Iraq war protesters. Combined with other groups of protesters demanding inclusion in the same way, we could be seeing the possibility of " a symbolic intervention capable of undermining the big Other (the hegemonic social link), of re-arranging its co-ordinates."

Demands for Inclusion: from Political to Social Emancipation, from Liberalism to Communism

2011-01-12T14:17:00.000Z

In philosophical discussions of the 2005 banliueue protests a crucial movement from a liberal to a communist conception of inclusion can be observed. The impossibility of demands for inclusion being met within a statist-liberal frame (demands for inclusion are demands for citizenship) forces them beyond liberalism to something more radical. In a discussion with the liberal anti-communist Bernard Henri-Levy, Zizek points out the similarity of Henri-Levy’s interpretation of the protests as a demand for inclusion with the communist Alain Badiou’s interpretation (the discussion of the banlieue protests begins at around 16 minutes). In fact, as with the moderate demands of the British protestors, the impossibility of the demand for inclusion being met within a liberal framework forces a more radical interpretation.

The impossibility of meeting demands for inclusion within capitalist democracy is why the mainstream left have, in general, failed to benefit politically from the crisis. The mainstream left still suggests that capitalism can afford all its humane elements (culture, wide access to education, a comprehensive welfare state), reconcile all its contradictions (between efficiency and social justice) and, above all, include everyone. For the right, by contrast, capitalist democracy (with the democratic aspect constrained when the emergency demands it) is no longer utopian, it is merely (following Churchill) the least bad option: capitalism cannot include everyone, it can no longer afford its humane aspects, its contradictions cannot be resolved they must be tolerated because there is no alternative. Ironically, therefore, the right have been far more acute critics of capitalism than most of the centre-left.

To explore the limitations of the liberal understanding of inclusion, we should go back to the “early” Marx’s critiques of political emancipation and the political understanding of revolution in “On the Jewish Question” and “Critical Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian’”. Marx wrote these texts in response to essays by Bruno Bauer and Arnold Ruge, both of whose positions are analogous to liberal positions today.

For Henri-Levy the demand for inclusion is a demand for citizenship. In “On the Jewish Question”, Marx notes how limiting the emancipation of Jews to their recognition as citizens (political emancipation) merely privatises religiosity. Building on this analysis Marx begins to develop the critique of political emancipation which comes to fruition in “The King of Prussia…” In “On the Jewish Question”, Marx then argues, “The political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it. The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinction, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, occupation, to act in their way – i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of their special nature. Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only in opposition to these elements of its being.” In a situation in which, formally, Jews are emancipated this also leads to demands for Jewish equality in civil society (i.e. not from the perspective of the state), hence Bauer argues (and is ridiculed for this by Marx), “The Jew, for example, would have ceased to be a Jew if he did not allow himself to be prevented by his laws from fulfilling his duty to the state and his fellow citizens, that is, for example, if on the Sabbath he attended the Chamber of Deputies and took part in the official proceedings. Every religious privilege, and therefore also the monopoly of a privileged church, would have been abolished altogether, and if some or many persons, or even the overwhelming majority, still believed themselves bound to fulfil religious duties, this fulfilment ought to be left to them as a purely private matter.” In the notion that students, particularly recipients of the EMA, are demanding special privileges in refusing to submit to the equality of “we’re all in this together”, Bauer’s argument is repeated.

The revolutionary implications of the critique of political emancipation emerge fully in the opposition in “The King of Prussia…” between political understanding and the political revolution, of which Robespierre names the limit, and social revolution. Both the political and social revolution begin in the experience of exclusion but in political understanding, operating on the level the state, the limit is revolutionary action on the level of the state and exclusion is merely exclusion from the having the rights of the citizen. In political understanding evils are inessential to social organisation and therefore soluble on the level of the state. Marx then notes the limitations of this understanding as “the political soul of revolution consists in the tendency of the classes with no political power to put an end to their isolation from the state and from power. Its point of view is that of the state, of an abstract totality which exists only through its separation from real life and which is unthinkable in the absence of an organized antithesis between the universal idea and the individual existence of man. In accordance with the limited and contradictory nature of the political soul a revolution inspired by it organizes a dominant group within society at the cost of society.” As with “The Jewish Question”, political emancipation (i.e. liberalism) involves the ending of exclusion from the state through the state treating social antagonisms as irrelevant (and therefore preserving them).

What is opposed to the limitations of the political revolution is the social revolution, based on the whole that is excluded from political life, on social antagonisms, which the state cannot end because even when it deems them irrelevant it is constituted by their existence. Marx writes of how the “social revolution possesses a total point of view because – even if it is confined to only one factory district – it represents a protest by man against a dehumanized life, because it proceeds from the point of view of the particular, real individual, because the community against whose separation from himself the individual is reacting, is the true community of man, human nature.” It seems that there are at least two sets of exclusions which are attacked by the social revolution. The first are exclusions based on class antagonisms and are based on the exclusion of most humans from the true community of man, the worker is excluded from control over work: s/he produces surplus value to which s/he is not entitled and the purposes of her/his work are determined from outside. The second set of exclusions stem from the separation of the state from real life (hence the limits of political emancipation- the state is neutral towards antagonisms in “real life”). These exclusions are exclusions within each human, aspects of human life are excluded from the human community.

To return to the student protests, the student demand for inclusion based on particular demands (the retention of the EMA, not raising tuition fees, Philip Green should pay his taxes) reveals the exclusions which allow the abstract totality of the state and of “we’re all in this together.” This is how we should interpret Marx’s “particular, real individual” as the assertion of particular demands which cut through the abstract totality asserting a universality which is constituted by the particular. This new opposition between Real and Abstract Totality is an essential break from the repulsive aspects of “On the Jewish Question”, rooted in the reduction of the abstract of Jewish theology to the real of “haggling”. Therefore, the demands of the student movement and UK Uncut become not demands for special privileges but a protest against dehumanised life, the protest against dehumanised life cannot but begin in particular, real demands which cut through the abstract totality which is constituted by dehumanised life.

Introducing Marx’s essay, Lucio Colletti succinctly summarises the text’s ambiguous politics, he notes that given Marx’s critique of political revolution, it is essential “to avoid substituting political action, which is action from the standpoint of the state for social revolution…[but] Socialism certainly requires political activity. But as soon as its ‘goal, its soul emerges, socialism throws its political mask aside.” Marx’s refusal to limit revolutionary action to the action from the standpoint of the state also suggests the superiority of the utterly uncreative slogans and posters at the student protests (for example Clegg=Bellend, a crude drawing of Clegg being sodomised by Cameron) over ‘68’s outbursts of creativity (“under the paving stones the beach”). In The Meaning of Sarkozy, Alain Badiou defends his right to insult Sarkozy as part of his refusal of capitalo-parliamentarianism (i.e. an exceptionally limited form of political understanding on Marx’s terms). For Badiou, “It is characteristic of politics that there are enemies, even if capitalo-parliamentarianism presses its domination to the point of trying to make us forget this. And why the hell, if there are real enemies, shouldn’t I be allowed to insult them?” (Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy p. 6). The crudeness of the protestors’ slogans and their pure negativity cuts through the coalition’s consensus politics, which is only consensus on the level of the state. The slogans of ’68 by contrast are merely a repetition of utopian systems like Voyage en Incarie, Clegg=Bellend, explodes the limitations of political understanding and suggests Marx’s “ruthless criticism of the existing order”, which he opposes to Cabet’s humanistic and dogmatic understandings. The point, again, is that the protest against dehumanised life does not necessarily need a positive programme, it certainly does not require as Neal Lawson would have it, that we define what it is to be human, it begins in particular and modest demands which cannot be met. Cabet and Lawson’s humanism is a humanism of abstract totality.

The Economic State of Emergency: The People as Disruptive Pupils

2011-01-11T12:28:00.005Z

The problem for the coalition is disruption. In order to get the country back on its feet, we must all work together, trust the government and not make unreasonable demands that spoil things for the hard-working majority who understand their place. The demand from the protestors to be included or for a particular benefit disrupts the lives of the hard-working majority; essentially the protestors do not know their place. The model, quite clearly, is of the government as wise, and, if necessary, (“water cannon may be used”, “protests may be banned” if young people don’t behave themselves) a strict teacher managing a class with a few unruly pupils.

Alongside its revelatory stupidity (Proust and Benjamin both note the disclosive importance of stupid people and phenomena, lacking reflection or genius they express general or historical rules, ideology, habits or attitudes with particular distinctiveness), Katharine Birbalsingh, the Tory’s favourite teacher’s, thoughts are useful in clarifying this attitude. She argues that “EMA should be scrapped, not to save money but to save our kids”. The problem for Birbalsingh is that the EMA leads to classrooms being packed with “goons” who, “if they do show up, they’re only doing it because they know they’ll miss out on their EMA if they don’t. So they disrupt, cause misery for the ones who want to learn, and at the end of the week collect their cheque for a week of work done well.” The EMA is also part of a culture of “prizes for all” which rids the poor “of the motivation and aspiration that is required for success in life.” In a few brief paragraphs, this makes clear what structures the coalition’s political and educational agenda.

A demand to be included by those who traditionally haven’t been so is a demand for special privileges. It is unreasonable for those who might need more attention to ask for it from teachers because it will prevent teachers from “really pushing the bright and the best to get to decent universities to do courses that will make a difference to their lives.”
In order for poor children to be successful, they must submit to the discipline of competition, which means many will fail and be excluded. In order for the country to be successful, we must compete with other countries by submitting to the discipline of market competition.
The country is in crisis because of a crisis of authority caused by family breakdown and a lack of, particularly, paternal discipline, “I ran into the father of a boy I used to teach yesterday. He has three children, all with different mothers… Dad shakes his head laughing about how badly behaved his boy was at school. His mum was always worried about him, you know”. Lacking firm discipline, the poor expect a consumer lifestyle to which their place does not entitle them “But the reality is that many of these children own wide-screen televisions, trainers that cost over £100 and several fashionable mobile phones” (and the country has been brought to its knees by government borrowing grounded in this expectation we should have decent public services).
Ultimately, the crisis of authority is caused by a, possibly, well-meaning liberal elite who undermined discipline and morality in the poor by generous welfare handouts (including the EMA), lacking a strong moral control over families and the belief that everyone could be included, “it didn’t matter that his son misbehaved at school and hardly learnt a thing. He goes on to explain how now the same thing is happening with his second son, but he’s not worried. Why should he be? The system has a place for us all.”

Criticism of welfare and more generally payments like the EMA to the poor create the crucial link between the last Labour government, a weak, profligate liberal elite, and a grasping and disruptive underclass engaged in anti-social behaviour, rampant consumerism and indiscriminate breeding. The “economic state of emergency” this has caused is what justifies the suspension of normal democratic functioning to allow the firm, correctional hand of government to restore discipline (fiscal discipline, moral discipline, discipline in the classroom…)

We can see this suspension of normal democratic functioning in the Liberal Democrats’ abandoning of election promises on tuition fees due to the crisis making the promises no longer affordable. Obviously, Nick Clegg is not the first politician to abandon an election promise but there are striking elements to his abandonment. The first is the speed at which the promise was abandoned, the economic situation is not sufficiently different from when the promise was made to be able to justify it by changing circumstances. The second, even more important, is Clegg’s pride in having abandoned the promise. Students are “living in dreamland”, Clegg, by contrast, is mature enough to recognise that the crisis demands tough action and man enough to take it. No attempt, although perhaps none would be possible, has been made to argue that the promise hadn’t been broken.

The emergency suspension of democracy (keeping election promises, allowing protests) suggesting that democracy itself, at least a democracy in which some people are too immature to accept servility to the demands of the market, prevents the tough choices being made that have to made if the country is to be put back on its feet, is not unique to the UK. Zizek notes this discussing the 2008 bailouts, “the panic was so absolute that a transnational and non-partisan unity was immediately established…But what the much-praised bi-partisan approach effectively meant was that even democratic procedures were de facto suspended: there was no time to engage in proper debate, and those who opposed the plan in the US Congress were quickly made to fall into line…we were in a state of emergency and things simply had to be done fast” (p. 80). To this we could add Papandreou’s abandonment of electoral promises to secure the Euro bailout, the impatience over the possibility of the nation’s elected politicians debating in

Ireland

over the emergency budget and the panic at the possibility of an election before the budget could be passed. But, in

Ireland

, of course, the politicians were sensible enough to draw back from the brink of consulting the people.

This technocratic populist “new politics”, more than anything else, entails a reduction in the sphere of politics. This is most evident in the invoking of economic necessity which not only justifies the abandonment of manifesto promises but also dubs those who demand that election promises are met as naïve and immature. Consensus is built on the presumed interests of the hard-working majority, this appeal to the hard-working majority allows for considerable pluralism on the level of government and parliamentary politics, hence a coalition government is its most appropriate form. Simultaneously, as we’ve argued elsewhere, this modesty, Cameron’s “it’s silly to think other parties don’t have good ideas”, excludes and delegitimises any acknowledgement of an antagonistic dimension of politics. The double reduction of politics exists most clearly in the “Big Society”, obviously, the sphere of state action is reduced, but, less obviously, at the same time politics is reduced to the level of the state, extra-parliamentary action: demonstrations, strikes, organising around particular interests are rejected. The protestors by contrast, defend the scope of the state’s powers in welfare and education, whilst refusing to limit politics to the state.

“If I start Crying, do you think they’ll let me out?” or “Protestors who remained peaceful were allowed to leave”

2011-01-10T12:45:00.001Z

The relegation of political protest from an essential part of a democracy to an outburst of anti-social behaviour explains the strangest aspects of the government’s response: Theresa May’s claim that all those who remained peaceful were allowed to leave the Parliament Square cordon. At first, this should seem merely like a lie told by somebody with power who suspects that those who are the victims of the lie lack the power to correct it. However, analysed through the link that “anti-social behaviour” creates between youth and place, something even more troubling appears, the notion that merely to be present in Parliament Square protests was to be engaged in disruptive, anti-social behaviour. May was certainly stretching the meanings of violent and not peaceful, but, on her own terms, was not, exactly, lying. For May, “peaceful” does not refer a person’s actions but an ethical status and way of being in a particular place.

We arrived in Trafalgar Square at about 2.30 (we had to finish off our banner and return a judge’s wig to a fancy dress shop in New Cross). We then, having assembled our banner, were forced to take an extremely circuitous route to Parliament Square. The effect of this, even on more punctual marchers, was that in Parliament Square there was the most dispersed crowd we have seen at any demonstration, at this stage lacking in any collective purpose with people milling around pointlessly,. We had just missed the brief collective destruction of the crash barriers which were preventing protestors getting close to Parliament. The police enacted dispersal of the group (not even a collective at this point) and the boredom this produced led to some of the, very sporadic, oafish and basically individualistic violence (at the early stages of the protest- this was indeed violence by a “small minority” and it can be explained by the usual sociological clichés, bored, frustrated youths with nothing better to do….).

After milling about for a while, our “felt constructivist” banner meeting with bewilderment and some admiration and leading to a stilted conversation about Rodchenko and Popova, we decided to leave. Ironically, a collective purpose only began to emerge as demonstrators tried to leave and were prevented from doing so by the police or told to leave through other exits (which were not open). We spent about half an hour wedged against one line of police. At this stage, whilst irritated, both police and protestors were fairly good humoured, although even then, we overhead “if I cry a lot, do you think they’ll let me out”, from a girl who must have been in her mid-teens. We should remember at this point, Theresa May’s claim that nobody peaceful was prevented from leaving. Those at the front of the group were sort of working with the police to prevent anybody being pushed into a massive crack running down Whitehall. Eventually, we got through one line of police (we’re not quite sure if they let us through or just couldn’t hold back the crowd any more).

This left us in an odd and troubling no-mans land between two police lines. We walked up Whitehall for a couple of minutes until we were met by a line of police in riot gear running towards us brandishing truncheons and forcing us back. The charge from the police in riot gear was followed by one from police on horseback. A small group of protestors, whose youth made them rather more agile than us, escaped over a fence, they were pursued by police who beat some of them with truncheons. But far be it for us to call Theresa May a liar.

At this point some protestors attempted to build a barricade out of some of the steel cages, which due to poverty of materials and the Haussmannesque width of Whitehall offered very little defence against police charges. The odd object was thrown to try to prevent the horseback charges. Unlike the earlier oafish violence, this violence was entirely in self-defence and was part of the collective purpose of the crowd. Eventually, we found our way out down a side street.

There are two theoretically significant aspects to our experience of the demonstration, firstly the way in which the government have identified “violence” with “disruption” therefore extending the meaning of “violence” which justifies police repression from violence against people to violence against property to possible violence against property to, ultimately, being present at a demonstration. Secondly, perhaps even more significantly, is the way in which a collective purpose at the demonstration only emerged through police blocking of the reasonable and minor demands of protestors either to leave the kettle, to get close to Parliament. We should treat the demand to get close to Parliament, to have one’s voice heard, as literally as possible. On this violence as a collective purpose, we must resist the temptation to justify it by explaining it. The vital distinction is between the oafish, individualistic violence at the beginning of the demonstration, which we may want to explain away as the consequence of boredom, police tactics. This also reveals the other figure who Cameron opposes to the feral mob, the first is the polite, middle-class, liberal protestor expressing their opinion, the second is the feral individual: the hoodie who should be understood (hugged) or disciplined. The violence that emerged in self-defence or when legitimate purposes were blocked is something different, it approaches being an authentic act (one that breaks with the chain of causation and redefines the possible), the point where an impolite collective negativity emerges which comes into contact with the universal.

Cameron's "Racaille" Moment

2011-01-09T16:33:00.001Z

Some commentators have suggested an analogy, in the composition of the protestors with the French banlieue protestors of 2005, most notably Paul Mason who noted the preponderance of “banlieue-style youth from Croydon, Peckham, the council estates of Islington”. However, the parallels between David Cameron’s description of the protestors as a “feral mob” and Sarkozy’s description of protestors as racaille and the relation between the government response and the age, race and class of the protestors in

Britain

and

France

seem not to have been drawn. The Guardian described Cameron’s language as “uncharacteristically frank” but instead of treating it as an outburst that reveals the hidden racist beneath a pleasant patrician manner or, even worse, ignoring it, we need to trace analyse the situation which provoked and how, precisely, it is “uncharacteristic.”

The contrast is between the language of a calm, political inclusion, bringing parties together to deal with a national emergency, “we’re all in this together” or “The progressive half of progressive conservatism represents the ends we are fighting for, our vision of the good society and the good life. This vision is not exclusive to the Conservative Party, or any other party. I’ve always thought it’s silly to deny the truth- that in politics most of us are fighting for the same things.” Cameron’s consensual language presumes inclusiveness on the level of the state, based on an appeal to the nation as a whole to deal with a national emergency. His “uncharacteristically frank” language emerges at the point where a certain group make a demand for inclusion that bypasses the state (and, importantly the established left channels, the NUS and the Labour Party) and, by making this demand aims to shatter the complacent “we’re all in this together.” What we also see in the coalition’s rhetoric about the protestors, suggesting the protestors are making self-indulgent demands, living in dreamland, whilst the concrete demands the protestors are making are extremely moderate, is the idea that capitalism can no longer afford its old humane aspects: a humanist culture, wide access to higher education as part of social mobility, a decent welfare system, rights to protest and democratic accountability and choice and that to demand them is unforgivably disruptive. Tough language against the protestors is justified because their demands (either for inclusion on a level beyond the political or their specific political demands) are made within an economic state of emergency, imposed, according to the government, in everyone’s interest.

With “feral mob”, we are a long way from the traditional language used to characterise protests and explain their violence. We are, instead, in the realm of violent disorder and, particularly, anti-social, behaviour. This, obviously, links up to Theresa May’s odd claim that many of the protestors were members of “street gangs.”

The traditional liberal response to violence in a protest has been to blame it on a small, thuggish minority. This enables any police action to be supported, but also defends the right to peaceful protest. This position may often only defend the right to protest on a formal level, it may often be hypocritical but, at least, in its hypocritical tribute to the right to protest, it acknowledges that right. Cameron, explicitly rejected the traditional liberal hypocrisy, arguing that, "I don't think we can go on saying a small minority were there. There were quite a lot of people who were hellbent on violence and destroying property."

There is quite clearly an analogy between this and the move from crime to anti-social behaviour, the traditional response seperates violence at the protest from the peaceful protest and protestors, the link between protesting and anti-social behviour treats “violence” from a “feral mob” as inseperable from the protest. . It is important to remember how the concept of anti-social behaviour diverges from that of crime, with crime an action is punished; with an ASBO it is not an action but an individual’s way of being, particularly when linked to a place. In crime, the doer is, to an extent, separated from the deed, in anti-social behaviour it is the doer who is subject to disciplinary measures.

Even more significantly Cameron and May establish the link, bypassing parliamentary and democratic channels, between overblown and populist rhetoric and technical-administrative decisions from the police over tactics (and even the possibility of banning protests). In this way police violence and police undermining of the right to protest avoids Parliamentary scrutiny.