Friday, December 26, 2014

Missouri, goddam posted by Richard Seymour


Since September, I have been recording 'Media Review' segments as part of Tariq Ali's series, The World Today with Tariq Ali, on Telesur English.  The latest is a review of the media's performance on Ferguson.  You might wish to consider some of this while digesting the media's coverage of Antonio Martin or Tamir Rice.

3:26:00 pm | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Working class women take property investors to the cleaners posted by Richard Seymour

This is outstanding. 'Market value' will not prevail in the New Era estate.  A poor people's movement, a movement led by working class women, has beaten the rich, beaten them hands down, taken them to the fucking cleaners.  Or, as the FT wittily put it, 'US private equity beaten by Russell Brand'.

Westbrook Partners, an investment company that has been buying up billions of pounds worth of property in the US and UK, had bought the New Era estate in Hackney with the intention of driving rents up to 'market value' - trebling the cost for the residents.  A two bedroom flat that already costs £800 per month to rent, because London is insane, would cost £2400 per month.  

This is obviously not an isolated instance.  It is part of a wider process that is driving up rents, forcing poor households out of London, and gradually converting the city into a playground for the rich and newly affluent.  This gentrification/ghettoisation is built in to neoliberalism, and the forces favouring it are so much more powerful than those resisting.  So, this win is not a small thing.  And the campaign should be studied and learned from as a case study in poor people's power: you can be certain the speculators will learn from it.

The success, though, does have some limits which should be soberly confronted.  It is a defensive victory that was possible in part because the existence of neoliberal third sector institutions like Dolphin Square, whose very existence as a charitable foundation owes itself to Westminster council properties being flogged to a bunch of investors known as Westbrook Partners. The function of such institutions seems to be as a stopgap - maintaining housing in the private, commercial rented sector while keeping costs at a politically manageable level.  Such stopgaps are not an alternative in the long-term, and they aren't supposed to be.

Part of the problem is that we are stuck in a model of capitalism where people's future incomes are tied directly to stock market values and property values - especially if they have pensions.  That's what is happening with Westbrook Partners.  The money they invest is money that comes from the pensions of American public sector employees, just as the money invested by UK property developers, speculators, traders and so on is often money from British public sector workers pensions.  If you want to have a half-decent retirement, you need the system to boom.  So it isn't just the power of the City of London that keeps things this way - there are strata the population who are better off and more politically mobilised, and who have internalised the social aspirations and priorities of investors as its aspirations and priorities. As much as people may want to imaginatively murder the bankers, there's a strong counter-tendency which is to want the system to boom again, and be prepared to make any sacrifice to the gods of finance, of any number of poor people, so that this can happen.

New Era is what happens when the poor become mobilised. But we need a thousand New Era campaigns, connected and demanding a public housing system, linked to a public utility banking system and a public pensions system. Otherwise these victories, as salient as they are, will be crushed in the long-run.

5:09:00 pm | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Thursday, December 18, 2014

An open letter to Russell Brand posted by Richard Seymour

I am writing an open letter to Russell Brand. It is about his open letter to the person who wrote an open letter to him. It goes as follows:

"Dear so-called Russell Brand - if that is your real name - if you *really* believed that parliamentary democracy is a sham meant to keep all us sheeple from realising the truth about corporate tyranny, you would stand for parliament. The fact that you don't proves that you are nothing but a hypocrite. You bang on and on about inequality. If you *really* cared about inequality, you would invest your multi-millions in tranches of ordinary people's debt packaged in credit default swaps. The fact that you don't proves that you care nothing about ordinary people's debt and are nothing but an elitist. 
What makes it worse is that when people call you out on this, you resort to the most puerile insults. Why don't you go back to being a comedian, you dirty smelly hippy, where at least we'll be laughing at you, not with you. You claim to want to enlighten people, but you promote juvenile conspiracy theories just like all your elitist friends in the liberal, multicultural media who have taken over this country and filled it with immigrants and fixed it so that ordinary joes like me can't make a fortune on the stock market any more. You keep blabbering on and on about housing for the poor. Your mum owns a house, you hypocrite. 
Ultimately, Russell, which is a name that should only ever be given to small yappy dogs, I think this is all just a publicity stunt for you and your ego. That's why you want people like me to be silenced, so that we aren't filling the papers with your name and coupon every fucking day. Well you can't silence me, Brand. Rich bastards like you can't tell me, an ordinary person, what to think. There are loads of rich bastards to tell me what to think, and you're not even in the top ten. 
I was just having a normal day at work, putting anthrax in my mates' work lunch so that I could stamp all over their wheezing bodies on my way to the top - because I believe in MERITOCRACY, you rat-faced fucking vegan homeopathist tea cosy dweller - when you came along for your big 'oooh look at me, I'm cheeky chappy Brand with the wide-angle chin and I hate success' gig. Well I'll tell you what, mate. I'm an ordinary geezer and I for one welcome our alien incubi brain slug overlords. 
So just shut your face now, go away and don't ever darken my tunnel vision ever again.
Yours etc., 
ps: please don't ever go away, I couldn't live a second without you."

Pure linkbait. Send me money.

11:29:00 am | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Murder in Peshawar posted by Richard Seymour

On a scale of Islamist slaughter, this depraved massacre of school children in Peshawar is akin to the massacres carried out by Chechen jihadists about a decade ago.  And, rather like those killings, I think this constitutes a death rattle of the group responsible.  This is a hastily written outline explaining why.

The Pakistani Taliban (TTP) are reactionary and their tactics filthy, but they have in the past been well-rooted enough to recruit thousands for a losing war with the state.  They have enjoyed significant levels of support for their attacks, rising to 20% among Pashtuns. This is in part due to their ability to exert effective political authority over territories - 'law and order' and so on, and in part due to Pashtun ethno-nationalism. But the biggest source of support is Pakistani military attacks and US drone strikes.

The Pakistani military and political elites had been trying in recent years to come to a new alliance with the TTP, claiming that they were really "our brothers" who had been "misled", and so on. This was an organisation which, despite a series of defeats inflicted by the Pakistani military, still had some potential clout.  And it was being lobbied by other Islamist groups such as the ISI-linked Haqqani network to make peace with the Pakistani state - and presumably focus on working with the ISI to conquer Afghanistan again.

In recent years, the TTP lost a great deal of the support it did have due to the brutality of its methods. Suicide attacks on army facilities were one thing. Bombings at mosques, funerals and other public locations were quite another. High profile beheadings also didn't help.

This kind of atrocity, in this context, lacks all strategic logic.  It's the sign of an organisation that has incinerated its popular base and fully embraced the 'takfiri' logic of some other Islamist groups - the attacks on Barelvi Muslims being a case in point.  Its recent expeditions to Syria also suggest that it has shifted from its nationalist focus toward an emphasis on 'global jihad' - and this shift seems to be concurrent with a series of hard military defeats at the hands of the Pakistani army. 

The latest atrocity can only isolate it further and allow it to be broken up relatively quickly.

7:27:00 pm | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Torture works posted by Richard Seymour

A brief guide for the perplexed.

Torture works. The Senate's report on the CIA's use of torture concludes that it is 'ineffective'.  This repeats earlier Congressional criticism of cultural products such as 24, Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty, and so on, often made with the collusion of intelligence agencies.  Hence, the CIA's use of forced anal ingestion of water, stress positions, beatings, hypothermia and other forms of physical and mental torture are understood as a kind of grotesque political error or self-indulgence.

This will not do as a critique.  Torture works.  And it works in the following ways:

i) It procures an evidentiary basis for convictions and supports dominant narratives about a global conspiracy against civilization. A case in point would be Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his remarkable, extravagant confession, extracted under torture.

ii) It supplies a flow of information justifying bureaucratic practices. Of course most of the information is bullshit, and none of it leads to the disruption of major 'plots'.  The Republicans are hugely inconvenienced by the discovery of this fact.  However, bullshit information can be 'actionable intelligence' if it allows the state to perpetuate policies the ruling class supports.  Fielding and monopolising information to produce the discourses of statecraft is exactly what states do. In that sense, bullshit may be exactly what the torturers were looking for.  If Abu Zubaydah did not provide information about real plots, he nonetheless provided information that state agencies could use.

iii) It intimidates and punishes enemies of the state. This does not necessarily break resistance movements. The IRA, for example, understood torture as part of their national struggle, and prepared for it and symbolised it as such. However, it's an open question how much this demoralises potential supporters, as opposed to inciting further resistance. Obama's critique of such methods upon taking the White House was that it merely provided further incitement. But given that he has allowed torture to continue, that is necessarily a provisional judgment about a certain kind of very public, spectacular form of torture.

iv) It identifies social inferiors. This is a sociological commonplace. In ancient Rome, the torture of slaves was justified on the basis that slaves were not rational creatures like citizens. Truth could only be induced from them not through discourse but by tormenting their bodies. In modern states, 'terrorists' and communists and various racial others are those from whom no truthful statement can be elicited except through torture. As such, a de facto caste system is produced in juridical practice wherein a certain special case of people can be rendered, interned, tortured and only released at the pleasure of captors.  Their status as inferiors is inscribed on their bodies, as well as in the technical discourses of the state.

These goals are, of course, only rational within a certain strategic framework, wherein (often racialised) military power is preeminent: war, colonialism, or dictatorship. There is therefore, in principle, a basis for a liberal capitalist opposition to such measures, and to the illiberal, Schmittian discourses justifying them.  But in an empire, effective opposition in the legislature or executive is likely only ever to be partial and contingent.

It is also important to say that the above diagram on the rationality of torture is not the whole story.  These 'secret' functions of torture will form part of the archive of historical experiences that inform any state action.  Yet, to speak of the functions of torture is not to subscribe to a functionalist account of torture.  States are almost always dysfunctional.  A state is not a well-oiled machine, but an ensemble of relations traversed by struggle and subject to competing political pressures.

It would be prudent to assume that the functions of torture would have been understood in some ideological form by most leading state personnel who authorised, legalised and implemented the CIA's 'detention and interrogation' programme. But bureaucrats also operate under a variety of conflicting political pressures, within a particular occupational culture, within institutional constraints, and in a strategic context where the goals are not all straightforward or mutually compatible.  Yes, they wanted to disrupt actual 'plots', catch actual 'terrorists', and so on.  But they also wanted other things, such as wars of conquest, expanded state capacities, larger budgets.  Yes, they have a certain bureaucratic rationality, but they are also subject to official, racist, securitarian ideologies which are often laughably inept.  Dysfunction is built in to what they do.  And of course, there was dissent even within the CIA concerning the use of torture, so these things are always subject to struggle and contestation.

The point of focusing on the rational 'moment' of torture is to point out that it is not pathological from the point of view of imperialist states.  The critique that torture is 'ineffective' implies that the military leaderships, intelligence agencies, local regimes and so on are basically incompetent people who are incapable of learning from centuries of ruling class praxis.  Allow for dysfunction and incompetence: we know that the CIA embodies an immense wealth of monopolised knowledge about how torture works.  We know that it proactively learns and adapts.  Its deployment of methods such as sexual humiliation has been learned in interrogation centres in Israel and Egypt.  Its evolution of methods such as the stress position that leave no clear physical mark, and can thus be classified as 'enhanced interrogation' rather than torture, clearly learns from certain police techniques.  The employment of psychologists who helped to devise new torture techniques for $81 million is indicative of the professional virtuosity of those devising torture programmes.

Allowing for strategic mishaps, blunders, conflicting goals, official antagonism, and so on, the general picture one gets is that the techniques are developed through experience and expertise and the results are such that, even if counterproductive to some ends, nonetheless are both beneficial to other goals, and exactly the sorts of results that the state tends to select in favour of.

From this perspective, it is the critique, not torture, that is ineffectual.

4:38:00 pm | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Thursday, December 04, 2014

A grand jury watched a police officer murder a black person and refused to see a crime posted by Richard Seymour

There is an important lesson here.  

The coroner in the case of Eric Garner ruled that his death was a result of homicide.  That murder, effected with the use of a chokehold banned by the NYPD two decades ago, can be seen by everyone on video.  The barbarous excuses about the officer being frightened for his life can't possibly be applied here.  To put it plainly: a grand jury watched a police officer murder a black person and refused to see a crime.

And we can't just blame the prosecutors for stitching this up.  Because: a Staten Island grand jury watched Daniel Pantaleo choke the life out of Eric Garner and refused to see a crime.  This is not just police racism, it is not just state racism: this is popular racism.  This is about the people who refuse to 'see' a crime, even one that is recorded, if it is committed by a police officer against a black person.  

Obama talks about 'bodycams' as an answer to police misconduct.  Allow me to re-emphasise: a grand jury watched a police officer murder a black person and refused to see a crime.  Against this almighty ideological armoury, a 'bodycam' is about as much use as a lucky heather.

Notably, another Staten Island grand jury decided to indict Ramsey Orta, who filmed the murder, accusing him of being in possession of a firearm.  Orta argues, plausibly, that this is police revenge for his filming the murder.  He might have added that the police stand to gain from criminalising him in an obvious way: the NYPD cop union is already blustering that crooks like Orta stand to benefit from the demonisation of good police, and so on.  What is certain, though, is that the jury which decided to indict saw far less evidence of his alleged crime than everyone saw of Pantaleo's murder of Garner.  

To reiterate: a grand jury watched a police officer murder a black person and refused to see a crime; but they think the guy who made the film is guilty as sin.  This, to further underline the point, is about popular racism.  And it tells us something about the nature of race, and about the nature of the state.  


Racism does not just come top-down, from the state.  Race is nothing but a series of effects of social and political struggles.  These struggles are given a particular materialisation in the institutions of the state, in the forms of political domination, in the ideologies of crime, and in the apparatuses which enforce the ideological category of crime.


The politics of race in the United States are primarily struggled over and settled through the criminal justice system.  And that system depends not only on its articulation with other dominant institutions such as the mass media.  It also depends upon popular participation for its grids of surveillance, its authoritative verdicts, its ideological legitimacy: snitches, witnesses, jury members, 'citizen journalists' and other bottom-feeding internet warriors, neighbourhood watch, pro-cop demonstrators,  tea partiers, conservative activists, and so on.  

The criminalisation of Michael Brown was essential to Darren Wilson walking free.  One would be a holy fool to think that 'criminalisation' here just means fingering Brown as a prime suspect in the theft of cigars from a local store.  Even if Wilson had known of this, it doesn't carry a death penalty, any more than does walking in the middle of the road, which is what Wilson in fact stopped Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson about.  Several layers of criminalisation needed to be added to this to make murder acceptable.

And this was not just the work of Darren Wilson, through his interpretation of the black neighbourhood around Canfield Drive as ‘hostile’, and his fantasy of being grossly out-sized, menaced by a 'bulking up' black youth almost impervious to bullets - a genre of popular television and Hollywood myth-making.  It was not just the work of Ferguson Police Department, in its strategic leaks and dissembling about what had taken place, from the early claims that Brown had broken Wilson's eye socket to the release of autopsy details about Brown smoking pot.  It was not just the work of the mass media, from New York Times's "no angel" piece, in which rapping and growing up in a rough patch is adduced as evidence of sub-angelic status, to the obsessive pursuit in all outlets of "black-on-black crime".

The criminalisation of Michael Brown was also the work of a popular racist backlash.  This was evident in the mulch of racist social media memes, and the sewer of right-wing blogs and 'news' sites, asserting that Brown had flashed 'gang signs' (an obsession in the US), that his father was a 'Blood', and that his family was violent.  It was apparent in the pro-cop rallies with Klan members prominently involved, the polling data showing that most whites did not blame Wilson for Brown's death.

All of these criminalising discourses build on a racist 'common sense' regarding what 'everyone knows' about black people, black communities, and black families:  Their families are unstable, often fatherless.  There is a "culture of poverty".  Their communities are filled with crime and violence.  They rap, and throw gang signs.  Cops are courageous just to enter these neighbourhoods, and anyone who doesn't comply with an officer has it coming.  These, and similar ideological understandings, will determine how 'probable cause' is interpreted.  They will determine a juror's sense of the probabilities, their view of the likely dispositions of the cop and the civilian, their sense of what testimony is dependable and what is not, what the best interpretation of physical evidence is.  They will shape the perceptions of witnesses, as to whose behaviour is reasonable, as to who looks menacing, as to what a particular physical gesture might mean, as to what is staggering and what is charging.

The state can blitz a jury with expertise, images, footage, technical detail.  They can overwhelm juries with seemingly 'hard facts'.  But without the racist 'common sense' that fills in the narrative gaps in the police yarn, and makes a spurious sort of sense of these 'hard facts', a prosecution stitch-up would have been hard to achieve.  And in the case of Eric Garner, to reiterate: a grand jury watched a police officer choke a black man to death, and refused to see a crime.

There is an organic relationship between popular racist politics and the legal/police networks that enact racist terror.  The 'filaments of racist ideology' protruding from the material apparatuses of the state have both efferent and afferent conduits.  

Any movement against state racism is at one and the same time a struggle against popular racism.

11:29:00 pm | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Not a band aid, but a running sore posted by Richard Seymour

'When there is a problem in Africa, who are you going to call? Bob Geldof and Bono repeatedly nominate themselves. But why should anyone’s fate be entrusted to the delusional, creepy, self-parodying rock-star messianism of this pair of rich tax dodgers? What do they have to offer?

'The short answer is, they offer us a spectacle. And a spectacle, as Guy Debord argued, is not just a collection of images. It is a social relationship mediated by images. Those who participate in the spectacle get to experience this social relationship in a special way by consuming the images.

'The spectacle of Band Aid — a “charity supergroup” responsible for the 1984 festival Live Aid and its hit single, “Do They Know Its Christmas,” and subsequent events including the 2005 debt campaign Live 8 — is rooted in a colonial relationship to Africa in which, as the political scientist Graham Harrison has shown, “Britishness” is traditionally constructed through campaigns to “save” the continent from blights and disasters. The “feel good” factor derives from the spectacle-positioning of Britain as “doing good” in the world.' - Niamh Hayes and Richard Seymour, 'Philanthropic Poverty', Jacobin, 25/11/14

8:31:00 pm | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Getting away with murder posted by Richard Seymour



Officer Wilson's story is impossible to take seriously.

It is not plausible that, unprovoked, a young man who allegedly robbed a store and had something to hide, would start trouble with a police officer whom he would know to be armed (and of course, Brown was not armed). 

It is not plausible that, unprovoked, he would not just solicit an altercation but aggressively go after the officer, punching him through his window - and even pause mid-way through the beating to hand his stolen merchandise to a friend. 

It is not plausible that when the police officer pointed a gun at Brown, Brown - unarmed - would have said "you're too much of a fucking pussy to shoot me". 

It is not plausible that, after a shot has already gone off, Brown would maintain the assault despite knowing his life was at risk. It is not plausible that, even having been shot and decided to flee, he would suddenly decide to stop running away, but actually turn around and run threateningly back toward the officer with the gun who had just shot him. 

It is not plausible that, after several more shots are fired at him, he would still continue to run toward the officer, requiring several more shots to be fired into him, thus killing him.

To believe all of these things, you would have to believe that Michael Brown was not a normal 18 year old, which he was, but some sort of demonic being.

And indeed, the language used by Wilson invokes that image, of a man crazed with aggression and demonic energy, even after having been shot. It is a childish racial fantasy. 

Only someone who is utterly in the possession of racist ideology could conceive of, much less believe, all of these things. And if you're going to believe that cock and bull story, you may as well believe in the bogey man.

Once you realise that Wilson's story is absurd, and that the argument for self-defence has not been made, it is no longer possible to believe that the jury let the officer off because he defended himself against someone who was attacking him. 

It is at this point that any reasonably observant person should be considering the pattern of racist killing and violence on the part of the US police. 

It is at this point that you should be factoring in the ongoing racial inequities of the criminal justice system, from the beat cops to the prisons. 

It is at this point that the entire architecture of racist exclusions and disadvantage should be brought into the analysis. 

This is systemic, and the systemic name for it is white supremacy. And it matters less precisely what people think they're doing when they reinforce white supremacy than that they do so.

This cop, Darren Wilson, was let off because suppressing terrifying blackness is part of the police's job. It's not about the piffling 'injuries' on officer Wilson's face (a couple of barely visible scuff marks). It's about the potential social and symbolic injury to white supremacy. 
Every interaction with the cops is part of the reproduction of white supremacy, and freighted with the whole moral and political weight of that system, because invested in the authority of the cops - like that of colonial gendarmes - is the authority of white society as such.
Wilson had to kill because of the affront to his state sanctified authority. He had seen these young men walking confidently, relaxed, down the middle of the road, smoking cigarillos. He told them to get the fuck on the sidewalk. They didn't immediately jump to it. They back-talked. They sassed him.  Quite what sassing would entail doesn't matter - just being anything less than quietly quiescent would be enough.
So he decided to get out of his vehicle and fuck them up. Michael Brown, the one singled out by the cop, defended himself, and then tried to run away. 
Imagine a man like that, out there. A big, powerful man. 'No angel', as the New York Times reminded us, citing a list of less-than-angelic propensities such as Brown's fondness for rapping, and his having grown up in a rough patch. 
Imagine him getting away, getting treatment, going to the press, maybe pressing charges, telling all his 'homies' about how he had faced down a cop and lived to tell. No way. He had to be stopped, as a lesson to the rest of them.
The white jurors understood. Even if they thought he had acted overzealously, they felt Wilson's pain. Jesus, they were probably terrified themselves just to think what they would do if they had to confront this guy. Did you see the footage of some guy who might be him in a cigar store? Terrifying. 
Most of those jurors would pull the gun out in a second. And cops, who have to deal with this everyday, who have to show professionalism and restraint - tough job.
Of course they let him off.

8:21:00 pm | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Sunday, November 23, 2014

The colophon of castration posted by Richard Seymour

It is fitting, in its way, that the UKIP symbol is a colophon of castration.  

Recently, a survey of the sex lives of voters found that while Tory voters fantasise about sex with sports stars and little else (because it's all about medals for achievement and being better than everyone else), UKIP voters are generally lethargic and unfulfilled, with the exception of one thing: they go mad for a dildo.  

They are looking for a replacement for the lost phallus: the lost British phallus.

6:09:00 pm | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Saturday, November 22, 2014

The UKIPisation of English politics II posted by Richard Seymour

It's only funny until you realise they're not going to stop.

Let's talk about the 'white working class'.  For more than a decade, a twin discourse about class has been building up.

'Two souls' of the working class
On the one hand, there is this melancholic representation of a forgotten, disenfranchised 'white working class'.  There were documentaries, articles, tea towel memoirs, focus groups, policy documents.  This 'white working class' was never discussed in terms of what made it (part of) a class, but always in terms of its supposed cultural tics.  I still remember, with cringing embarrassment, the spectacle of Matthew Taylor - then the head of the IPPR - patronising some skinheaded East End codger about pie n mash, and jellied eels, in the context of a documentary about multiculturalism.  This is the working class we have supposedly lost, gone with the empire, and all those manufacturing jobs: an industrious, clean, virtuous, jolly, culturally vibrant working class.  It is important to stress just how much this is a mythical mobilisation of affect.  Historically, in certain contexts, it has been possible to speak of a 'white working class' in a meaningful sense, as something that was historically and politically produced through practices like segregation.  There is no equivalent experience in the UK today.

On the other hand, there is the vicious, punitive demonisation of a section of the working class whom both the Thatcherites and Third Way politicos referred to as 'the underclass' or, in politically correct New Labour terminology, the 'socially excluded'.  Later, the idea was popularised through the meme of chavs.  These were people identified by their failure to integrate into societal norms, their 'dependency culture', their crass consumption patterns, their mobbishness, their unfamiliar speech patterns, and their moral degeneracy.  They represented the decay of 'British values'.  This was linked to racial anxiety in obvious ways, which became explicit during and after the England riots: "the whites have become black".  Even today's rioters aren't like rioters in the good old days.

This discourse began to develop only a few years after Tony Blair had declared the class war over.  It very visibly wasn't over.  However, this was because the symptoms of class were visible rather than because there was a well-organised labour movement putting class on the agenda.  And the symptoms of class life under neoliberalism did not have to be explained in a leftist idiom.

Three changes in class life
The entrenchment of neoliberalism in everyday life, with the destruction of collective organisation and the removal of social protections and provision, ensured that more and more of ordinary experience was characterised by vicious competition.   The more that competition was accepted and valorised, the more hierarchy was worshipped, and those lower down the chain treated simultaneously as potential competitors, losers who should be spat upon, and dangerous elements who needed to be controlled.  Thus, the resentments deriving from class injuries could be effectively canalised into competition and aggression toward others of the same class.

Also important was the growing stratification of the working class based on working patterns, education and lifestyle.  It had never been the case that factory workers made up the majority of the working class.  However, their experiences were sufficiently like those of other workers, that they were able to 'stand in' for the class, figuratively.  Their degree of organisation commanded respect, as did the cultural salience they had achieved in post-war Britain.  There is no such easy metonym for the working class today.  It is far easier to speak of the class in terms of cultural cliches: the estuary accent, poor education, social conservatism and traditionalism.  Skinheads, white vans, England flags, and sports tops, became synecdoches for class.  And two small businessmen, Tommy Robinson and now Daniel Ware, were able to 'stand in' for the 'white working class'.

Finally, just as important was the transformation of social democracy and its adaptation to Thatcherism.  If capitalism creates its own gravediggers, you could argue, so does the working class.  When New Labour took office, it was not sufficient for them to administer neoliberal capitalism and police its breakdowns.  They had to discipline their own working class base, and react to breakdowns as challenges to their project of transforming Labour into New Labour.  These sporadic strikes, protests, civil disobedience and occasional political defections were manifestations of backward-looking tendencies within the working class which had held back Labour's necessary modernisation.  This resort to non-market solutions was linked to the cultural pathologies producing 'social exclusion' and trapping people in poverty.   Hence, the variety of authoritarian panaceas, from the demand that British Asians 'integrate', to Asbos, to Blair's proposal to monitor potential problem children from before birth - all intended to adjust working class people to life in neoliberal Britain.

Racecraft and neoliberal dysfunction
Race, as became evident after the northern riots and the Cantle report into them, is a convenient ready-made strategy for policing the dysfunctions arising from neoliberal politics.  These riots - like almost all riots - were not about one simple issue.  Hundreds of young people became spontaneously embroiled in open combat with the police, as well as gangs of fascist bovver boys, over a range of issues.  The immediate issue was fascist provocation and police brutality.  The longer-range issues were local government under-funding, de facto segregation in local housing and service provision, and the tendency for racist local police forces to criminalise Asian youths.

The almost instinctive, learned response of the British media, the government and the Labour leadership both in Westminster and in local councils, was to boil all this down to 'race riots'.  Long before an official report was produced, local politicians and police chiefs, as well as Labour MPs, were describing a failure of multiculturalism.  It was a lack of integration, the failure of locals to internalise British values, self-segregation, and so on, which had made local whites resentful, kept the communities divided and fostered distrust of the police.

Such claims only made sense as a malevolent twist a particularly toothless kind of liberal multicultural discourse according to which racism is not about hierarchies and oppression, but rather about different groups needing to tolerate one another, get along, respect one another's right to narrate, and so on.  The malevolent twist took the form of an insidious white nationalism in which British Asians were assumed to be essentially outsiders rather than citizens, and troublemaking outsiders at that.  Thus, the problem was that British Asians had failed to tolerate whites, to respect their diversity, and to acknowledge their right to narrate.  This was when New Labour and its allied intelligentsia adopted in fully the neo-Powellite idiom that was to become its disgrace note on questions of race, nationality and immigration.  The 'war on terror' merely accelerated the trend, and ushered in the spectacle of the melancholic 'white working class', marginalised and forgotten, undermined by a new multicultural 'underclass' filled with 'feral youths' and brooding would-be terrorists.

The fertile terrain of reaction
At the early stages, this class discourse was simply one element in a complex set of racial representations that centred on culture, and particularly on Islam as the folk devil menacing British values.  It helped create fertile territory for the far right.  The BNP was the first beneficiary, increasing its votes between 2000 and 2009 by over 1000%.  Often its successes derived from effectively manipulating the language already popularised by New Labour.  For example, when the government made it a priority to 'crack down' on asylum seekers, with a range of measures from voucher schemes to detention camps, the BNP leader Nick Griffin expressed his gratitude: "The asylum seeker issue has been great for us.  It legitimates us."  And: "If Blunkett deports one asylum seeker, we can deport all of them".  Likewise, it was Gordon Brown who legitimised the "British jobs for British workers" slogan by uttering it as Prime Minister to a Labour conference.

However, it seems likely that it was the credit crunch and ensuing recession that decisively shifted the focus of racist politics.  Islam was replaced by immigration as the most salient enemy.  Were it not for the economy still being rather parlous, polls suggest that immigration would have been the number one issue in the 2010 election.  This was when the discourse of the 'white working class' began to assume the prominence that it has today.  And just as the BNP began to collapse - the new post-crunch climate imposing challenges that the schismatic organisation failed to handle with aplomb - the EDL had arrived with its strategy of street violence.  Partly, this very spectacle was linked to a media strategy in which Tommy Robinson, evidently hamming up his educational handicap, moved in on the cultural space marked 'abandoned white working class'.  And when the EDL fell apart, it was not long before Britain First had half a million 'likes' on Facebook and was doing its bomber jacket and cloth cap routine.

Now UKIP is using the BNP's strategy in hollowed out Labour 'heartlands', talking up racialised local issues - to be precise, issues which local Labour elites have often assiduously racialised - and strongly suggesting that Labour has stopped caring about white working class people because it's too busy being politically correct and sucking up to immigrants and the EU.  And if UKIP were to fall apart, which seems incredibly unlikely, a new organisation would spring up in its place.

This is the meaning of 'fertile ground': however organisationally fractious the far right are, however much they are projecting influence insanely above their social weight, they are able to do so because the terrain has been produced over a long period.  What is more, because of the prolonged social and political crisis unleashed by the credit crunch, they have the initiative.  The dominant parties are locked in their own dynamics of stalemate and decline.  Any semblance of representative democracy is paralysed by the Westminster consensus on all essential matters.  The unions are too busy conserving whatever remains of the union premium to take the lead on anything.  And the left is shattered.  So what we get instead of a broad popular mobilisation is a kind of ersatz resistance led by a dissident tributary of the Tories; instead of class struggle, this bitterly melancholic politics of whiteness and class authenticity.

The 'white van' working class
So here we are.  The Labour leader is so utterly petrified of alienating this quasi-mythical figure, 'white van man', lest it turns out that he speaks for the whole 'white working class', that he fires a shadow cabinet member for even obliquely possibly offending them.

The government are so desperate to get in on this game that they have Michael Gove telling us that prejudice toward 'white van man' is as abhorrent as prejudice to an ethnic minority.  And Ed Miliband, absurdly, is probably kicking himself not to have thought of that line.

This is the UKIPisation of English politics.  It has been a long time in the making.

Labels: , , , , ,

1:39:00 am | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Friday, November 21, 2014

#Respectthevan posted by Richard Seymour

Do you see this?  This is a white van.  Not a purple van.  Not a green van.  Not a vermilion van.  Not a van with little blue and pink dots on a yellow background van.  It's a white van.  And you will respect this van.  Do you understand?  Do I make myself clear?  RESPECT THE VAN.



I saw a van once and only felt ennui.  But that's because it was grey.  Another van, this one time, gave me a funny feeling 'down there'.  That's because it was a carmine colour.  Then this one time, there was like a cordovan van with French raspberry stripes, and that made me snigger like a teenager that's just been shown a word that looks like 'cock'.  White vans, which are by no means the vehicle of choice of racists and predators, are not to be giggled at.  They are not funny.  I certainly do not have that view of these vans.  RESPECT THE VAN.

There was another van that made me feel immensely sad.  That's because it was a Royal Mail van, and it had just been sold off to a private competitor which had sellotaped a bit of paper with the word 'Direct2U' crudely scratched on in green biro over the venerable logo.  It's a different world we live in today.  Not like the one we had yesterday, which was perpendicular.  But the white van is not a solemn van.  It is a respectable van.  RESPECT THE VAN.

The only van that I have ever thoroughly disrespected was Van Rompuy, because he is a Brussels bureaucrat who goes round feeling up fruit to see if it complies with his crazy rules.  He probably hates all others vans who are not him, because he is probably like a strict dean of an American university who is uptight and repressed and growls "Cooooreeeeey" whenever something bad happens.  I hate him.  But you know what, Van Rompuy?  Your intolerant eurocrat ways are not welcome here.  RESPECT THE VAN.

A lot of ethnic minorities might not like it.  The politically correct might not like it.  The socially conscience stricken liberals might scream "waaah" every time one of them offends their delicate senses with its gentle hum and little toot of carbon monoxide.  But this van is a British institution, like the Queen and war and declining living standards and letting child rapists do whatever they want as long as they're in the cabinet.  RESPECT THE VAN.

7:32:00 pm | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Miliband's weakness posted by Richard Seymour

In his conference speech, Ed Miliband blamed his recent calamity on external forces, while Andy Burnham identified ‘vested interests’ opposed to his leadership.  The right-wing press had a good laugh about this, since such claims manifestly ignored all the evidence of discontent in the PLP and even the shadow cabinet.

Part of the problem is that he cannot acknowledge the nature of the divisions within the Labour Party.  His entire strategy of leadership is based on triangulating between Blairites, the old Labour Right, and the moderate centre-left while simultaneously - and this is impossible - rebuilding the social basis of Labourism, and regaining the 5m working class votes lost by New Labour.  And he’s trying to do all this within the constraints of a broadly accepted austerity agenda, and on the basis of a strident ‘Britishness’ in Scotland, which undercuts him repeatedly.  The SNP are trolling Miliband expertly along these two axes.

In this context, the simultaneous weakening of the British economy and the secular decline of the British state isn’t just bad for Cameron - it weakens Miliband’s own position.  On top of this, his precarious balancing act repeatedly collapses into incoherence - over the extent of austerity, how much Labour will ‘reverse course’ and so on.

The Blairites are much more coherent and single-minded.  They have been willing to take on not just rival leadership factions, but their own members, the unions, the wider Labour electorate, repeatedly.  They have done so with some success in the past.  They don’t mind losing working class voters if a viable cross-class electoral coalition can be built around the ideology of aspiration and on the basis of a mainstream pro-business agenda.  And to reconcile Labour and its base to that project - the only one they think of as plausible - is the purpose of their existence: a strategy which Gramsci once referred to as ’transformism’.

This is why they find Miliband so intolerable.  Recently, there have been columns and editorials in The Guardian, the New Statesman and the Telegraph by various Labour figures fantasising that he is a Bennite, or thinks like a Marxist who doesn’t get ‘aspiration’.  I can only understand this a coded way of saying that he is not totally committed to the Blairite project.

It is not about ‘vested interests’.  These ‘external forces’ are entirely internal to the Labour Party today.  That is what Miliband can’t say.

12:20:00 am | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Monday, November 10, 2014

It's not even original. posted by Richard Seymour

I've been watching people pussyfoot around this issue.  I can barely believe what I'm reading.

If I may summarise.  There is a writer and actress in the US called Lena Dunham.  She recently published her memoirs.  Among the things she describes in her memoirs is, as a seven year old girl, looking at her one year old sister's vagina.  And then, presumably a bit older, wanking in bed next to her sister, and bribing her with sweets for kisses.  I know, right?  Pretty normal childhood.

Dunham jokingly refers to mimicking the techniques of a 'sexual predator', but obviously no one is going to read this and think that a little girl could be a sexual predator.  Right?

No one, that is, apart from the perverts, creeps, patriarchs and lunatics of the American Right.  And, somehow inevitably, a bunch of feminists too.  The National Review kicked off a controversy by claiming that Dunham had confessed to paedophilia and child sexual abuse.  Soon enough, there were some well-meaning progressive activists who worried that Dunham, if not actually a predator, had disclosed something 'problematic', 'inappropriate' and so on.  They were 'weirded out'.  It was, like, omg, creepy.  Which makes me wonder if these guys have read any Samuel Delany.

Now, Dunham is a white woman.  If the paradigm of 'privilege' is useful, then she certainly has racial and class privilege.  And as a cultural producer, she is accused of perpetuating white supremacy in her output.  Many feminists have had a problem with Dunham's particular way of representing women.  In Girls - which is otherwise not a total piece of crap - black women rarely feature, and are either caricatured or hostile when they do.

So, a number of articles and tweets and statuses - dozens, scores, hundreds of them - began to make a connection between Dunham's privilege and its manifestations in her work, and this latest controversy.  They argued that, as a beneficiary of racial privilege, Dunham had 'got away with' something.  They were not entirely sure what she had got away with.  Some openly claimed she was a sexual abuser.  For others, it was more that her behaviour was 'inappropriate'.  Or, that she shouldn't have published her memory of this.  One way or another, talking about white privilege would make the absurd accusation of child molestation - or being inappropriate, or gross, or omg creepy, or something - coherent and progressive.

Even many of those who wanted to arrest the tidal wave of bullshit felt the need to hedge a little bit.   Roxane Gay, for example, makes a substantively correct argument about the controversy, but even she confesses to finding something 'disturbing' in what Dunham wrote - even while making the absolutely correct point that what she describes is well within the normal range of stuff kids do.  I think Roxane Gay is fibbing a little bit.  I don't think she finds normal behaviour - or the description of normal behaviour - disturbing at all.

The Right's accusations are absurd.  Children are not paedophiles, categorically, by definition.  The power relationship between an older and younger sister is in no way identical to the power relationship between an adult abuser and a child victim.  And, although this is not strictly germane since Dunham's childhood behaviour is not problematic, children are also not responsible for their behaviour in the same way that adults are.  The accusation is just. downright. absurd.

The sexual politics behind the accusation are reactionary, authoritarian and patriarchal.  They would encourage parents to pathologise manifestations of child sexual curiosity, and to treat their kids as abusers - if not heathen sinners, or possessed by Satan.

The invocation of privilege politics in this context is an unfortunate attempt to obscure the presence of patriarchal ideology in sections of the feminist movement.

Seriously.

12:35:00 pm | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Monday, November 03, 2014

Whitewashing sexism. posted by Richard Seymour

The feminist organisation Hollaback collaborated with a marketing agency recently to make a viral video.  It showed a woman walking through New York streets over a period of ten hours and being repeatedly harassed and in one case actually stalked for five minutes.  She does not interact with anyone, respond to anyone, even look at anyone.  Nothing she does could possibly be construed except by a sexist as an invitation to holler at her.  Even though the women is being secretly filmed and thus has some potential protection, at times she looks genuinely frightened.  And that doesn't seem to discourage anyone.  So, the behaviour ranges from rude and creepy to downright sinister - and it's real, and it has to be stopped.

Within a short while, some people started to notice the racial valences of the video.  The actress was white, whereas almost all the harassment came from black or Latino men.  Asked about this, the marketing agency stated that they had edited out harassment from white men because it was "said in passing, or off-camera".  But it has also been argued that there was a certain amount of social editing in the making of the clip, inasmuch as most of the shots appear to be from certain areas of New York like Harlem.  These editorial decisions are not neutral.  The semiotics of such a highly compressed message are incredibly important.

Hollaback are a liberal feminist organisation with anti-racist politics.  In an article they produced for Huffington Post earlier this year, two leaders of the organisation cited their own research to demonstrate that sexist harassment is not particular to working class or black men.  They decried the dangerous myths about black male sexuality which, they suggest, go back to Birth of a Nation and the Scottsboro Boys.  So they are not unaware of the issues now being raised by their critics.  To the extent that they authorised the editorial decisions made by the Rob Bliss marketing agency, therefore, they made an ideologically informed choice to racialise this issue - knowing how problematic this is.

The film-makers would be aware, as all advertisers are, of the affect aroused by racial coding.  They would know that blackness attracts more hostility, more hate, and more agitation in audiences - particularly white audiences with money and clout.  Class coding works in a similar way, with poor, 'low class' people more likely to excite contempt, and thus interest.  If the film had been edited to show purely white middle class male harassment, the libidinal economy would have been very different and it is less likely that the video would have gone viral.  It also seems likely that the decision to racialise the issue added a certain resonance to Hollaback's campaign for a more forceful policing response to harassment.

It is not of interest whether Hollaback 'intended' any of these effects.  Their liberalism may be so 'colour-blind' that they didn't even notice what the marketing agency had done with the video.  The effects are what matter, and these are not difficult to decipher.

The problem with this approach, however, is not just that it panders to white middle class racism in order to highlight a real problem.  It is that, precisely because in doing so, it works to the advantage of white sexists.  Take this guy, Steve Santiagi, one of these fuck-wit 'dating experts' and guides to masculine 'empowerment'.  You know the type: if you're a damaged or shy or awkward or gullible male, he will offer you the option of 'manning up' and reclaiming the jouissance which women have stolen.  He argues on CNN that the video merely proved that this type of catcalling was the reserve of 'low class' men of a particular 'culture', and used this to defend the majority of decent, classy, upstanding white, middle class sexists who merely want to compliment pretty women, etc.

There is a pattern here.  The colour-coding of sexism always works to the advantage of sexists. When people like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher attack feminists, they usually claim that feminists focus too much on small, negligible examples of sexism in civilised Western societies and should turn their attention to the barbarians in the East.  In so doing, of course, they 'whitewash' the majority of sexist harassment and violence.  And I think the video does the same.

11:47:00 am | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Friday, October 17, 2014

Do you condemn ISIS? posted by Richard Seymour

Look.  If pressed, and if it will help anyone sleep better at night, I will condemn ISIS in the boldest and most strident terms.  But I will do so with some weariness.

It has been a neo-McCarthyite mainstay of British politics for the last decade or so to demand condemnations of this or that from those who are in any way critical of war, of the state of Israel, or even of Islamophobic racism.  You well know the type of question: "but do you condemn these atrocities?", "do you condemn Hamas terrorism?", "do you condemn the suicide bombings?", and so on.

The point of the question is to insinuate that there is a question.  It is to imply that there is some whiff of sympathy on your part for, let's say, beheading charity workers, or enslaving and raping women.  And there is no good way to respond.  If you answer "yes, of course", the next demand will not be far off.  "Ah, then do you condemn those who would not condemn...?  Do you also condemn x?  How about y?"  You give the green light to derail the conversation, you show that the game works.  If you don't give that answer, then of course you have condemned yourself.  If you give a nuanced answer, you have prevaricated horribly when real people are dying this very second.  If you say "fuck off, I'm not answering your weaselly little question", then clearly they've touched a nerve - bit jumpy are we?  Something to hide?  And of course, even if you do offer condemnation, it might not be condemnatory enough.  Or it might just be ignored, your words misquoted or invented for you.  The aim of the game is to attach a stigma to you, not to have an honest discussion.

You see the point.  Now look at this.  The story related here, by a student tabloid which sees fit to retweet Tommy Robinson on this very subject, is untrue.  It is not the case that the NUS 'refused to condemn ISIS'.  It is a lie.  Nonetheless, this untrue story, which has its origins in a post written by Daniel Cooper of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty (AWL), has been picked up by the press both in the UK and internationally.  The result has been torrents of execration poured on the NUS Black Students' Campaign.

The actual story is a little bit less enthralling, and requires a lot more subtlety in parsing.  Roughly one month ago at a NUS National Executive Committee meeting, Cooper proposed a motion in solidarity with the Kurds, and condemning ISIS.  Frankly, knowing the AWL, I think this statement could have been a hell of a lot worse.  This is an organisation which cheerfully promotes and defends racist ideas about Muslims.  I quote from its guru, Sean Matgamna:

"Like desert tribes of primitive Muslim simplicity and purity enviously eyeing a rich and decadent walled city and sharpening their knives […] so, now, much of the Islamic world looks with envy, covetousness, religious self-righteousness and active hostility on the rich, decadent, infidel-ridden, sexually sinful advanced capitalist societies."

In contrast with such high Victorian meanderings, and in light of the heavy intimations from the same author that the AWL would support an Israeli nuclear strike if necessary, Cooper's motion seems prime facie quite reasonable to me.  Support the Kurds, condemn ISIS: what could be bad?  On the other hand, the response of the NUS Black Students' Campaign was not unreasonable either.  They didn't disagree with supporting the Kurds.  They didn't disagree with denouncing ISIS.  But they did want parts of it altered.  In a speech, the NUS Black Students Officer queried some of the formulations, suggesting that they could potentially feed into Islamophobia.

The major sticking point for the Campaign was that it called for students to 'boycott' any individual found to be supplying ISIS with weapons or training or funding.  The objection here was not that it would be politically incorrect to deprive a struggling Muslim group of the weapons it needs to blah blah blah.  The objection was that this phrasing would give the false impression that this was actually a major tendency among students - specifically Muslim students - and could feed into political pressure for added surveillance of this group, which of course takes place in quite destructive ways.

Even if you estimate this risk to be low, it's a relatively simple thing to resolve.  Assuming that Cooper and the others who drafted the motion didn't intend such a construction, and that they weren't merely seeking controversy in order to depict themselves as the victims of a soft-on-totalitarianism left, the motion could just be moderately re-worded.  It would just be a case of either amending the motion or taking it away and writing it again, so that any possible problematic implication was removed.  Since amendments to the motion were not permitted, the Campaign promised to go back and write a new motion both expressing solidarity with the Kurdish struggle and denouncing ISIS.  Before the motion could be submitted to the next NEC meeting, however, Cooper's article appeared in which he complained that the NUS didn't want to condemn ISIS because of 'identity politics'.  It was after this article appeared, roughly a month after the meeting, that the press picked up the issue.

The NUS Black Students Campaign responded with this statement.  The statement has become a hostage to fortune, inasmuch as it was susceptible to selective quotation.  This is the sentence and a half which appears as the lead quote in all the press:

"We recognise that condemnation of ISIS appears to have become a justification for war and blatant Islamophobia.
"This rhetoric exacerbates the issue at hand and in essence is a further attack on those we aim to defend."

It is usually misleadingly attributed to the NUS Black Students Officer's speech, and of course there is a reason why the quote starts mid-way through a sentence.  It is to erase any trace of the part of the statement which says:

"We stand in complete solidarity with the Kurdish people against the recent attacks by ISIS and join many others in condemnation of their brutal actions."

Now, I do not think this statement at all well-phrased.  It is quite a reasonable argument that the condemnation of ISIS, which takes place almost every day in the papers and on the television news and in political speeches, has become a ritual which has been linked to justifications for war and Islamophobia.  In fact, given the Sun's recent shit-stirring front page, we know for a fact that the connection is there.  (Do I really have to say this?)  But to make this argument in this political and ideological context, one has to be extraordinarily precise in one's phrasing - and this point isn't precisely put in the statement.  That is why it can be misrepresented as saying that the denunciation of ISIS is Islamophobic, despite its clear denunciation of ISIS.

The NUS Black Students Officer, Malia Bouattia, has been subject to volleys of vicious and sometimes violently misogynistic Twitter abuse as a result of it.  All of those 'lionhearts', 'crusaders' and 'defenders' calling her a "fuckwitted cunt" or wishing rape on her, would most likely find their withers decidedly unwrung if they realised that they had caused a young woman and her family to entertain serious and valid worries about their safety.  Because, after all, ISIS aren't the only nutters out there.  But they are just the rabid dogs, as it were, responding to the dog whistle.  Those who sounded the dog-whistle, in order to have their own 21st Century version of the 'Baa Baa White Sheep', are as much to blame.  I condemn them.

12:02:00 am | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

The UKIPisation of Cameron posted by Richard Seymour

This would once have been an outre joke in The Thick of It:



7:25:00 pm | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Friday, October 10, 2014

The UKIPisation of English politics posted by Richard Seymour

I'll tell you what I think.  I think this country is going to the dogs.  I think it's being flooded, over-run, taken over.  By thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of right-wing racist scum.  

You can't even hear proper English spoken on a train any more.  It's all "faaackin immigrants" this and "faaaackin immigrants" that.  And they're not happy behind the privet-hedges any more.  They're not comfortable in their cosy little ruts, their weekends of beer, barbecues and bigotry.  They suddenly think they can run the country.  

I wish I could say that this was the UKIPisation of politics.  The answer then would be simple: send them back.  Send them back to their provinces, their suburbs, their village Wetherspoon's, their urban overspill conurbations, their motorway service stations famed for dogging.  But it's much, much worse than that.

You see, Nigel Farage said in his conference speech that UKIP was parking its tanks on Labour's lawn.  He said that the party is not about left vs right, but about right vs wrong.  

This morning, with the bye-election results in the bag and a very strong showing in Heywood and Middleton, he says that UKIP is now the only national party, the only party that extends its reach into all classes and across the left-right divide.  This is UKIP's populist gambit, in part tactical, and in part strategic.  The tactical element is the need to reassure Tory voters tempted by UKIP that they won't just let Labour in.  The strategic element is that in order to seriously transform the Conservative Party, UKIP needs to assemble a force much larger than that comprising disaffected Tories and the fragments of the hard right.

How much of this is Farage blowing it out of his fudgehole, and how much is UKIP really a threat to Labour?  The answer is that Labour are threatened, but perhaps not in the way that many Labour-supporting pundits think.  If you listen to Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin, you would think that UKIP is actually becoming the party of the disenfranchised, old Labour voting working class.  This can't be discounted entirely.  Plainly, UKIP has mobilised thousands of older, whiter working class voters.  And at least some of these voters are people who would once have voted Labour.  This is how Labour's majority was cut dramatically in Heywood and Middleton.  Even taking into account the reduced turnout, Labour seems to have picked up disenchanted Liberal voters and lost some of its own base to UKIP.  While there is a significant national swing to Labour, in this instance it was negligible due to the impact of UKIP, who cohered a range of disaffected voters.  Undoubtedly, their core in Heywood and Middleton is working class Tories, but it seems unlikely that they would have come second without scooping up a few thousand ex-Labour voters.  Of course UKIP doesn't transcend left and right.  Of course its bedrock is the Thatcherite petty bourgeoisie.  But its support has always crossed class lines, and now it's crossing party lines to an extent as well.

However, I am wary of any tendency to overplay this, in part because of that wing of the Labour intelligentsia that essentially wants Labour to remodel itself according to the Blue Labour motto, 'faith, flag and family'.  They who can think of nothing smarter than for the party of organised labour to tail a party whose colophon is a currency symbol.  So let's be clear that any inroads UKIP makes into Labour territory are still very limited.   Polling had shown before the bye-elections that six times more former Tory voters than former Labour voters backed UKIP.  The only MPs to defect to UKIP thus far are Tory MPs. The major funder to defect to UKIP is a Tory funder.  The former deputy mayor defecting to UKIP is a Tory.  And with Allan Craig from the Christian Alliance joining, the evidence is that UKIP is also mopping up the other fragments of the extra-Tory Right.  Insofar as UKIP parks its tanks in Labour seats, its biggest windfall is of former Tory voters.  I suspect that, for all its racist dog-whistling about the child rape scandal, it is far too conventionally Tory to threaten Labour in the same way and to the same degree that it threatens the Conservatives.

Still, with those proportions guarded, the other danger is that it is underplayed in order to spare Miliband's Bean-like face.  Liz MacInnes tried to say, after her victory, that the result was a ringing endorsement for Ed Miliband's leadership.  This is laughable and, unfortunately for her, plenty of UKIP people were on hand to give the comment the jeer it deserved.  Nor can we take consolation in the idea that this was just a protest vote by voters who feel excluded from the mainstream.  Of course, there is an element of truth in this.  UKIP's campaign posters tapped into this: "How many more times are they going to let you down?", and "Labour doesn't care" were big themes.  As with all protest votes, however, there is a political and ideological content, and in this case it signified a further shift to the right in English politics.  

Helen Pidd reports for the Guardian that in Heywood and Middleton the single most prominent issue raised in the campaign was immigration.  Immigration has come to stand for everything that is going wrong in people's lives.  With the standard of living dropping for the longest period since the Depression, with wages stagnating, public services being cut, the poorest at each other's throats over the measliest of welfare crumbs, and no one - not the Left, certainly not Labour - able to articulate a viable opposition, UKIP are the ones canalising popular resentment.  It's all the immigrants that Labour let in.  You can't even hear an English voice on a train any more.  You can't even live in a big city now, it's full of them.  They work for pennies and shit in doorways.  Labour's strategy was to ignore this as far as possible, and focus on the NHS - one of very few areas on which Labour has put clear distance between itself and the coalition.

This is the dilemma for the Labour leadership.  Every ingrained instinct tells them to nod along to the anti-immigrant beat, to acknowledge the 'real concerns' behind this racism, to try to deck it in a progressive pallium.  They want to protest that, after Scotland, they are the real party of Britain.  They want to say that they are the party that put asylum seekers in detention centres and ratcheted up the 'integration' agenda.  They want to say that they were beating up on immigrants before Nigel Farage was a   They want to say that they understood the concerns of ordinary people and will take very tough decisions, very tough decisions indeed, to prevent abuses and protect working people.  Indeed, they've more or less said all this before and will say it again.  But they also know that this can't be their pitch to core Labour voters.  And if they'd tried it in Heywood and Middleton they would have been laughed at.  After all, UKIPers would simply have pointed out that it was under a Labour administration that waves of migrant labourers from eastern Europe were admitted to the UK, and added that the party obviously has no intention of withdrawing from the EU.  

And somehow this is connected ideologically to the credit crunch.  Labour's bungling.  Labour's economic mismanagement.  Labour's mass immigration and overspending.  And Labour certainly can't challenge anti-immigration rhetoric in response to this, or make a positive case for migration, any more than they can persuasively state how they would do things differently in the economy.  To do that, they'd have to be prepared to fight a long, difficult battle and reconcile themselves to press unpopularity and even major losses in the short term.  It's just not in their political DNA; institutionalised defeat, self-loathing, the assumption that Thatcher was right about all big questions, is.  So they had to run a bland, single issue campaign to barely scrape back in.

Now with growing calls from Labour's Right for Alan Johnson to challenge Miliband, the pressure will be on to start flooding the papers with 'tough' announcements, immigrant-baiting, and flag-waving.  Whereas the swami of Blue Labour wanted the party to be a home for sad old street-fighting losers in the EDL, the goal now will be to channel the provincials of the east coast, the suburban white flight families, concerned cabbies, elderly racists, and so on.  Ed Miliband will meet "Brian, a self-employed plumber from Clacton who told me a heartbreaking story.  'What abaaaht all these immigrants,' he asked as I gripped his shoulder and crooned sympathetically.  'There's fackin faaasands of the cahnts.  When they're not dahn the dowl office, they're undercutting me.  I'm tryna raise a fambly.'"  Later on, to Miliband's complete surprise, Brian from Clacton will turn out to be a real person, a Tory voter, and a cause celebre akin to Joe the Plumber.  He will end up on a platform next to 'White Dee' endorsing Iain Duncan Smith's plans to cut benefits for street urchins, drunken tearaways and Romanians.  Meanwhile his son will be arrested for calling a celebrity crime-fighter a 'cock' on Twitter and locked up for five years.  Labour will decry the breakdown in British values and call for the Tories to distance themselves from deadbeat dad Brian, while the same celebrity will end up standing for 'Common Sense Labour' or 'Tough on Latvians Labour' or 'Hovis Labour, just like your mam used to make' in Burnley, parroting whatever moronic patriotic spiel they've been given by the Ollie Readers of Brewer's Green.  One Nation Labour, decidedly not under a groove.

Nor is it just that Labour will be pulled to the right alongside the Tories.  I have argued that Farage's strategic prize is the leadership of the Tory party.  He wants the Cameronites out, the Thatcherite Eurosceptics in.  It's a middle class putsch.  But he doesn't want this as an end in itself.  So, you might argue that what he actually wants, his real objective, is to get Britain out of the EU.  Yes, but he doesn't want that as an end in itself either.  It is about the UK's growth strategy, its labour standards, its regulatory framework, its currency and its financial markets, its human rights laws, criminal justice, and so on.  It is about reorienting business away from Europe and toward a more hyper-Atlanticist, 'free market' strategy.  It is about liberating small investors, venture capitalists, lone 'entrepreneurs' and small-to-medium sized firms from onerous labour laws and Brussels regulations.  It is about reorganising the state so that it is more 'libertarian' in matters of property rights, and more disciplinarian in matters of obedience to authority.  The challenge to the 'metropolitan elite', the 'political class' - whatever you wish to call it - is ultimately an attempt to recompose the power bloc.  

So this is UKIPisation.  We may be far from this objective, but most of the dynamic forces in English politics currently tend in its direction.

One last thing.  Nigel Farage's strategy is in some respects similar to that of Nick Griffin when he was leading the BNP.  Griffin would soften the rhetoric prior to elections and then, bouyed by victory, come out with something like calling for immigrants' boats to be sunk in order to harden support.  Before the election, Farage was going out of his way to play down the role of the far right in his party, to say that he didn't want BNP votes, and generally represent himself as a spokesperson for the silent majority of closet racists.  

Now he has taken the opportunity afforded by this victory to say that migrants with HIV shouldn't be allowed in the UK, thus rehearsing an imagined connection between immigration, disease and sexuality, a theme that is as old as scientific racism.   It is unlikely that this was a fuck up; more probably, it was a deliberate, punctual gesture.  Because the fact that the leadership of UKIP is always having to explain away the latest bonkers statement or seig heil photo from a leading UKIPer, the party sees as an oppressive result of 'politically correct' tyranny.  This isn't just bombast, they really do see the boundaries of what other people would call civility, decency, humanity, as a dictatorship of metropolitan values.  They see 'political correctness' as a domesticating, timidifying set of controls.  They blame this consensus for the Cameronites, for the betrayals of the political class, and they chafe under such limits.  One of the things that Farage is doing is trying to open up a space in which all the stuff that you're not allowed to say about gays or the disabled is more permissible.  

This is another aspect of UKIPisation: small, cumulative acts of decivilization, the barbarisation of discourse, and the revival of habits of speech and mind that had been pushed to the margins of society.  It can't be long, on past form, before a Labour backbencher vocalises the same worries about HIV interlopers, and the Sun mounts one of its crusades.

10:55:00 pm | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Pilger calls for a deal with Assad posted by Richard Seymour

John Pilger is hardly alone in saying this:

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west – Syria, Iran, Hezbollah.  The obstacle is Turkey, an “ally” and a member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to channel support to the Syrian “rebels”, including those now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.
A truce – however difficult to achieve – is the only way out of this imperial maze; otherwise, the beheadings will continue. That genuine negotiations with Syria should be seen as “morally questionable” (the Guardian) suggests that the assumptions of moral superiority among those who supported the war criminal Blair remain not only absurd, but dangerous.

In saying it, he merely echoes a range of figures from Peter Hain to Patrick Cockburn and George Galloway.  Nor is he saying this for the first time.  Yet there's a curious logic to the proposal which is odd for anyone professing to be of the radical, anti-imperialist left.

Of course he is correct that the dominant imperialist states are perfectly placed, morally and politically, to negotiate with Assad.  The idea that such talks would taint their diplomats is laughable.  But, however much he wishes it was, this isn't a dispute between the imperialist states and Assad.  The 'truce' he seeks is between those whom he refers to as "'rebels'", with scare quotes, and the regime which he refers to as "Syria", without scare quotes; yet the deal he wants to see negotiated is between imperialist states and "Syria".  And why?  So that Assad can remain in power in order that 'the West' can team up with him to defeat ISIS.

It is only because Pilger et al tend to reduce the Syrian opposition to the machinations of the CIA, MI6 and so on, that the incongruity does not strike them.  Because otherwise, how could one so willingly give the impression that the first duty of the anti-imperialist left is to suggest ways that the imperialist states can defeat a bunch of sectarian jihadis, by throwing their weight behind negotiations to protect and conserve the Assad regime?


8:39:00 pm | Permalink | Comments thread | | Print | Digg | del.icio.us | reddit | StumbleUpon | diigo it | Share| Flattr this

Search via Google

Info

corbyn_9781784785314-max_221-32100507bd25b752de8c389f93cd0bb4

Against Austerity cover

Subscription options

Flattr this

Recent Comments

Powered by Disqus

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Lenin's Tomb
Email:

Lenosphere

Archives

Dossiers

Organic Intellectuals

Prisoner of Starvation

Antiwar

Socialism