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January 31, 2017

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The British political situation: One response

There is a fundamental difference between what the leadership of many left groups puts at the centre of its concerns and those that are seen as central by the bulk of the British population and the main political parties. This leads to tactical and resource use errors. Of course the we have own focus which we have to prioritise which is not determined by majority public opinion and politics – but that wider situation, and our analysis of what it means, is central to our ability to intervene successfully around our long term objectives. The leadership of some left group is focused on Corbyn’s Labour Party whereas British politics are focused around Brexit and the Trump presidency. Despite our anti-Brexit focus around the referendum our new focus is resulting in our missing key aspects of the problems facing the movement. In practice anything to do with Corbyn, and the Labour Party as a whole, is being chewed up in both long and short term shifts in global and British politics – whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the forces grouped around him.

What is central to some groups’ strategy is what is referred to as ‘the Corbyn revolution’. They wish to see this revolution capitalised on in order to take the Labour Party to the left. The only way this objective can be supported is to take their organisation’s members and political focus into the LP, and build those forces which are part of the ‘Corbyn movement’ – particularly Momentum. This can be criticised from a number of angles.

First – it fails to understand the degree to which the working class movement has been hollowed out. We are not looking at how to intervene into a vibrant movement. There is no swell of working class consciousness, militancy and resistance. Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party has served to bring to a head the party political aspect of this hollowing out. If Corbyn or the Labour Left are capable of leading anything then that is only a new broad left grouping. An unlikely event as they are mostly thoroughly wedded to the Labour Party. It is also unlikely as they appear to be incapable of organising anything other than an internal conflict amongst some of the usual suspects.

Second – it fails to understand the strength of competing political rivals. Blair is back with his reversing of the ‘historic’ split in British radical politics by his new centre initiative. This is not something for the Blairites in the LP (and probably confirms their defeat) but it could be part of a re-launch of a social liberal centre politics which will have enormous appeal to millions of anti-Tory, anti-Brexit young, multi-cultural working and middle class people. Brown is trying to overcome the split in the union and the economic divide in England with his constitutional convention, now backed by Scottish Labour. This is at least a programme aimed at refocusing the Labour party as a formally social democratic organisation.

Third – Corbyn’s victory has been over interpreted in Labour Party terms. Large numbers of radical people had the unexpected opportunity to vote in a party that they were organisationally and, increasingly, politically alienated from – but maintain an electoral loyalty to (as the only serious alternative). They were not queuing up to be activists in the LP – they were just carrying out a 38-Degrees tactic of electronic lobbying of an unusual (and more costly) kind. A small minority have become active but seem to be disappearing into LP routineism – elections and pointless policy making. Corbyn’s victory’s biggest success has been to bring matters to a head. The problem is that this has happened in totally adverse conditions – and routineism is not going to be a solution. A good lead by Corbyn would be very helpful – but is very difficult given the centrality of Brexit.

Tristram Hunt in his final speech as an MP when stepping down from Stoke Central said two things which we need to understand the significance of. First, Corbyn is out of step with Labour voters and second this separation ‘highlights the deep seated challenges which centre left parties are facing’. The core of his case is 1) that the centre left has lost its way because many working class voters have rejected the ‘politically correct’ (it’s a wonderfully succinct slogan to encapsulate popular alienation from social change and radicalism) inter linked, globalised world that is leaving them behind. 2) it accepts that these problems have been a long time coming. The irony that the coup MPs in the past attacked Corbyn for not arguing the case for the EU well enough, and now attack him for not bending to the key popular issue that won the vote for Brexit, does not seem to trouble them. At least Hunt is right in taking the Labour Party’s problems away from the immediate issue of the leadership of the Labour Party.

Brexit poses the possibility of a major shake-up in British political structure. All five main parties face major challenges which involve reinventing themselves. May is seeking to build a new Tory Party based on patriotic Britain, strong in a free trade world. The Liberal Democrats were cut to pieces by being in coalition with the Tories and are at a weak starting point for rebuilding a social liberal, pro-EU centre. The Labour Party (and most of the unions) has been caught out by being loyal to an EU that has not delivered for many people, and is rightly seen as an agent of liberal globalisation by those same people. UKIP, if it is to continue, needs to accept that its founders’ objectives have been achieved – the recreation of the Tory Party as the party of an independent UK – and shift themselves to primarily taking on the Labour Party. The SNP is now all over the place because the wheels are coming off everything – out of the EU and in the UK seems to be the future.

Whole swathes of the population are looking at new ways of voting and developing new political loyalties. Working class consciousness is weak and confused. This is where we have to start. What values and policies should we be arguing for a radical workers movement to adopt? We are at a point of re-founding of the workers movement. The fundamentally not radical ideology of the Labour movement has come off the rails. It has ceased to be able to defend and improve within capitalism. In many ways the far left and particularly the SWP have provided a left social democratic presence on the streets and the picket lines for 20 years, under the shadow of which actual social democracy has withered away – courtesy of New Labour as much as anything else. Left groups in unions are based on bureaucratic shells and manoeuvre. Committees are empty talking shops.

The left has not been able to make any headway in providing an alternative to liberal globalisation. This has meant people looking elsewhere for pragmatic solutions. We now have to deal with a situation where all the non union progressives are looking for a way to overthrow the referendum result. At the same time a majority of union members have no interest in overthrowing that result – to say nothing of the unorganised working class. The link up of these two groups as Labour Party internal electors is what put Corbyn where he is – and their coming apart will be his undoing.

The consequences of all this are very significant for how we use our very limited resources. All into the Labour Party to defend Corbyn as leader is not the way forward. Our ability to play any role in this internal fight is minimal anyway. If comrades can be members of local LPs that are outward looking then that can be useful. But the fight lies in taking the resistance that made Corbyn’s victory out into the wider working class – this does not require an exclusive base in the Labour Party, though it probably does require some of its base being in existing working class organisations.

Momentum appears to have failed on all counts – both as an internal LP radical group and as broad umbrella of struggle. We have to accept that a big part of the problem is the nature of the English far left – its capacity to reduce anything it touches to a self destructive in-fight is totally demoralising for sane comrades and drives away many who would be interested in what the left has to offer.

At the level of political programme we have to address two main problems. One is how to re-link working people to working class organisations. The other is how to link up with those who had the same voting line as us in the referendum who now see the political left-centre as the place where radical social values exist. The labour movement is now permanently divided on Brexit. This is why everybody knows defending the NHS has to move centre stage as we can do that without mentioning the EU. But Brexit is going to be at the centre of electoral and parliamentary politics for years to come and could easily destroy the Labour Party. A consequence of Trump’s victory will be a global fight back by liberalism (with the Liberal democrats and Blair being the British arm). They are not going to give up on their global project and are already counter attacking vigorously. This is just the beginning of a four year struggle which starts with dealing with Le Pen in France. It means that the people leading the fight back against Trump are going to be the social liberals – this will not an easy time for developing the strength of socialist forces. Indeed Coyne’s campaign in Unite is quite compatible with liberal politics, they see unions legitimately in the work place and peripheral to politics – old Democratic Party style.

To play any role with our tiny resources in any of this we cannot become deeply embroiled in the internal events in the Labour Party. We have to focus on other tasks which have longer term objectives. We have to produce propaganda that recognises and analyses the depth of the working class political crisis. We have to put forward proposals for how this crisis could be confronted. We have to reconstruct broad campaigning organisations across the movement.

We have to accept that the most effective way our extremely limited resources can be used is in developing a class struggle analysis and seeking to draw revolutionary Marxists around it and winning new people to Marxism. This can only be done by participating where we can in struggles that are going on and participating, without liquidating ourselves, in any organisation that is campaigning. Our central resources have to up the importance of party building. Tactical flexibility on the ground locally, combined with theoretical and strategic consolidation as the basis for recruitment, will be the only viable option in the coming period.

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Ian Parker

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January 31, 2017

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Unite for Ian Allinson

We should back Ian Allinson for General Secretary of UNITE. Backing Len McCluskey will bring some sour smiles of derision from the bureaucrats around him at pitiful attempts by revolutionaries to draw him to the left, and contempt from a new generation of union activists who are now willing to fight for something different. Deals with the ‘almost left enough for the moment’ union officials are now increasingly completely out of tune with the left politics we should be engaging with. This is all the more important in UNITE now as a union that is drawing in community activists as part of organised labour campaigns. And these deals will fail. We know this, so why on earth fool ourselves as well as those we try to draw into left politics otherwise? McCluskey’s record is not at all as someone who will bravely speak out for Corbyn, but someone who is clearly watching which way the wind blows, and he will jump ship from the Corbyn camp as soon as it is necessary. He has already pushed Corbyn over Trident and restrictions on free movement in Europe, pushed to the right. A vote for him will be a vote for one of Corbyn’s hangmen, doing Corbyn no favours. Ian Allinson, on the other hand, despite his organisation RS21s mistaken stance on Brexit, is way more progressive on that question than McCluskey, and backing him would be way better than siding with the little patriotic Stalinists and bureaucrats who are whispering in Corbyn’s ear. Ian Allinson was one of the most prominent open voices to speak out against the sexual violence scandal in the SWP, and speaks not only for a left agenda but also for a feminist one in union politics. He is a respected activist, and trade union fighter in Fujitsu for many years, and support for him now in Manchester is going to be seen as a test for those on the left. http://www.ian4unite.org/

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Ian Parker

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January 4, 2017

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Mapping, Uncategorized

Socialist Workers Party

Falling Down spins out a desperate narrative of confusion and mania, one man’s response to increasing alienation, an increasingly crazy and violent response that feeds on that alienation to compound the problem rather than finding a way through it. Michael Douglas excels in this film, which was released in 1993, playing Bill Foster, a defence engineer estranged from his wife (who has taken out a restraining order forbidding him contact with both her and their daughter) and cracking. This is a man who wants to be in control but who is losing it. There are two key moments in the film that crack open the fragile ideological carapace of Western patriarchal capitalist culture, revealing something of the hopeless pain for individuals at the heart of it, and showing how these individuals are incited to thrash out at those who should be their allies rather than against the wretched political-economic system that has driven them into this mess.

The first moment is the first crack, the first moment when Foster falls. He is in a long traffic jam on the highway, people are getting agitated, his car air-conditioning breaks down, and Foster loses it, abandons the car and spends much of the rest of the film taking out his anger on those who frustrate him. This is a man who is blocked from getting what he wants, and immediate goals are configured as things he must attain if he is not to be a failure. He is angry, understandably angry, but his energy is channelled in destructive and self-destructive ways rather than in a collective process through which he might learn from those around him who are also oppressed. He acts alone, to solve the problem that he finds himself in, isolated from others, and that increases the problem. Foster trashes a Korean convenience store with a baseball bat after the owner refuses a request for change, and in a fast-food restaurant he shoots up a phone booth after being unable to get access to call his wife. Foster is by now caught up in racist assaults – congratulated by a white supremacist in a military surplus store – and this makes him all the more agitated.

The second moment cracks open this complicity with the violent events of the day, the escalation of a situation Foster was himself trying to escape. Before he is shot dead after pulling a water gun on a policeman, he stands – and at that moment he falls, repeats the process of moral failure, of falling down – and voices his rage and incomprehension that he is actually in some way responsible for the carnage. This is the moment when he bewails the inability of the others to understand what is happening to him, what, ‘I’m the bad guy!’ I help to protect America he tells the policeman, I did everything they told me to, they lied to me. It is surely the most stunning moment in the film, repeating in miniature the incomprehension of the United States as invader and cause of carnage around the world; it is merely protecting itself, its leaders say, amazed that anyone could see otherwise, bewailing this situation by asking, what, ‘I’m the bad guy?’.

SWP

Falling Down stages a symptom of masculinity in crisis in conditions of alienation and the mistaken attempts to seal off the self as a solution to that crisis. It is a failure that is indicative of the lives of many men, and also of many organisations and even ‘opposition’ groups under capitalism, even of groups that aim to overthrow capitalism itself. This is the peculiar and sad symptomatic predicament of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain in recent years, a group mired in complaints about sexual violence, and responding to those complaints with increased confusion, denial and attack on those who raise the question again.

The facts of the case are well-known – accusation of rape against SWP national secretary, investigation committee reporting to annual conference that case is not proven, mass resignations – and the increasing isolation of the SWP is very understandable, oscillating between some shame on the part of some of its members who dared to challenge the party leadership over what happened (with many leaving and setting up shop elsewhere in new groups, like RS21, that treat feminism as a resource rather than an enemy) and defiant claims that what is past is past and that now it is time to move on. In some cases that demand that we move on has itself been accompanied by threats typical of an abuser who has been caught out; shut up, it is time to move on, or else.

What is at issue here is the longer history and mode of functioning of the SWP, a party that was founded in 1977 out of the International Socialists founded by Tony Cliff in 1962 out of the 1950 Socialist Review Group after their break from the Fourth International (over the question of the nature of the Soviet Union and consequent responses to the Korean War). One of the enduring characteristics of the so-called ‘Cliffite’ tradition which was carried forward into the stereotypically male leadership of the SWP (and also into some of the groups that it spawned in many purges and splits over the years) has been control, and the other is urgency, urgency bordering on mania. SWP leader Alex Callinicos, a new role for Michael Douglas after Tony Cliff, runs the International Socialist Tendency from London. Yes, they are good at organisation and speed of response, but …

Anyone who has been in the SWP or subjected to their antics in the front-organisations they use to recruit members, ranging from the Anti Nazi League (a success) to Stand up to Racism (tinged with hypocrisy after the SWP support for Brexit) – sign a ‘petition’ on one of their stalls concerning any one of a number of current issues and you will find yourself on their recruitment mailing list – will know well that they are control freaks of the worst kind. The organisational rigidity of the party apparatus – prohibition of internal opposition tendencies outside of the short pre-conference discussion period, for example – is also evident in their pre-meeting caucusing and then intervention and elections for positions in front campaign leaderships. Those non-members who are willing to serve as padding to show that the front is ‘open’ quickly discover that they are just treated as useful idiots if they speak out against the prescribed direction of the campaign.

And anyone who has been in and around the SWP at campaign meetings and demonstrations that they don’t directly control will know that, not only does every party member repeat what they have read that week in their newspaper, which is tedious enough, but the solution always amounts to ‘building a massive movement’ against x y or z, and increasing our activity. A situation that is a ‘crisis’ is always, you will hear members claim, turning into a ‘disaster’ (or vice-versa). There is manic optimism in practically every intervention, the idea that if only you do this or that (in line with SWP priorities) you must surely succeed.

The problem with mania is that it expresses a fragile and uncertain grasp on reality, so that when things shift from optimism to pessimism, there is a long way to fall, and the fall-out often has violent consequences for everyone around. The rape-case scandal is still not over, with mass resignations over sexual abuse in the party taking place seven years later, in April 2020. The SWP response to the crisis over sexual violence in their organisation was to shut everyone else out and to try and deal with it themselves – big mistake – and then to blame anyone who pointed to their own complicity in the mess they had created for themselves. That’s what they still say if they are confronted over their mistakes; what, ‘I’m the bad guy?’ They don’t get it, that they are part of the problem, that they repeat and reinforce alienation and patriarchal domination in capitalist society and in so much of the far left.

This is part of the FIIMG Mapping the English Left through Film project.

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Ian Parker

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January 2, 2017

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Mapping, Uncategorized

Spiked

Tomorrowland aimed to surf a wave of ‘positive thinking’ when it was released in 2012, driving forward an upbeat Coke-style ‘teach-the-world-to-sing’ can-do refrain. The illusory victim-blaming sub-text to positive thinking is designed to separate out those who can succeed from the rest, the losers. It was no surprise that it was a Disney production – it is named after one of the rides at Disney’s own theme parks – but neither was it surprising that it lost money at the box-office, mainly because the audience couldn’t work out what was going on. Too dumb, perhaps, all the worse for them. Tomorrowland pretends to be open and inclusive, but it’s actually geared to an exclusive club.

George Clooney stars as the adult Frank, who, as a boy, had visited the 1964 New York World’s Fair and, through a chance encounter with a girl android, Athena, visited ‘Tomorrowland’. This world to come is some kind of high-tech futuristic parallel world, the tomorrow that could be, one that is potentially present around those who touch a magical T-symbol badge, a magical badge destined for ‘special’ individuals to visit and make tomorrow happen. Adult Frank, a demoralised recluse after having been expelled from Tomorrowland by David Nix, an evil-doer who is intent on sabotaging this super shiny version of the future, is mobilised by teenager Casey. She gets her T-badge after repeatedly hacking into the NASA base at Cape Canaveral to try and prevent the decommissioning of the US space programme.

Casey, when reprimanded by her dad for struggling to keep this technological dream alive, throws back at him the story of the good positive wolf and the bad negative wolf. Which is the stronger? The moral is that the stronger of the two is the one you feed, and she matches Frank’s new enthusiasm for the possibility that the technological Tomorrowland will happen – ‘We are the future’, he says – with a desire to feed the right wolf. She’s had enough of being told how bad things are at school – nuclear war, climate change, social breakdown – and voices the key message of the film: ‘I get how bad things are, but how can we fix it?’ Evil David Nix has prevailed up to now because he has persuaded people that they can’t make a difference and that things can’t change for the better. Politics as such is named as part of the problem. Frank and Casey succeed by the end of the film, opening up vistas of progress as T-symbol badges appear around the world for the gifted who will lead us into Tomorrowland.

Tomorrowland tried and failed to key into pragmatic optimistic commonsense, to embed itself in one of the dominant forms of ideology under late capitalism, the idea that technology can triumph, that experts should lead, and that politicians get in the way. This is exactly the ideological worldview that ‘Spiked’ aims at, adapts to and replicates. Spiked is a case study of what happens when a left-wing group is led by a sociologist who has taken his comrades through their own blinding moment of disillusionment to be reborn as libertarians scornful of the old left they successfully separated themselves from.

Spiked, which today carries the tagline ‘Humanity is underrated’ on its website, has its origins long ago as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency (RCT) and then Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), emerging from a 1978 split from the Revolutionary Communist Group, itself a split from International Socialists, which was a previous incarnation of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Even then, RCT/RCP activists were more stylish than the rest of the left, often referred to as the SWP with hair-gel. The group re-launched itself as a magazine ‘Living Marxism’ in 1988, folding up in 2000 after being made bankrupt by a dispute over the existence of Serb concentration camps which they claimed were faked up. By then, ‘LM’ (these initials only by now because the word ‘Marxism’ was becoming rather an embarrassment and the claim that Marxism was still ‘Living’ was rather rubbing in the wrong message) had outflanked the pessimistic diagnoses of the end of the old left project made by the disintegrating Communist Party in its ‘Marxism Today’ series on postmodern ‘New Times’. LM’s ‘Midnight in the Century’, authored by professor of sociology Hungarian Frank Furedi, an unlikely role for George Clooney in a future biopic, argued in 1990 that the crisis was worse than we could have imagined, and that the crisis in the left was irremediable.

The RCT/RCP sent comrades onto graphic design courses, devoted itself to media interventions ready for its reboot as Living Marxism, and eventually disconnected itself from the rest of the left, notoriously siding with the Union of Democratic Mineworkers during the 1984-1985 miners strike, and bit by bit took up a specialist niche position as contrarian anti-left commentators. Siding with the Serbs during the civil war and disintegration of Yugoslavia was one first step, and the next steps included hailing the possibilities of nuclear power and, since its rebirth as Spiked (and a host of front organisations such as the annual Battle of Ideas) pouring scorn on protests against the invasion of Iraq, linking with climate-change deniers and siding with Israel during the attack on Gaza.

This drift to the right has enabled and been fuelled by a concern with social diagnoses from outside the Marxist tradition – set reading at the still-functioning internal organisation meetings are typically classical sociological texts set by Frank – and this has also made conversation with ‘policy-makers’ easier. To engage in sociological babble about the ‘elite’ chimes better with policy wonks than old talk about social class. Hapless sellers of Living Marxism during the late 1990s were already finding it difficult to justify their presence outside left events, claiming that they wanted nothing more than to promote ‘debate’, and now this ‘debate’ apparatus is in full bloom, ranging from the Battle of Ideas to the ‘Debating Matters’ events in schools and prisons. For some obsessive critics they are everywhere, with their tentacles through the media, and they love this exaggerated importance given to them, feed off it.

The rationale for the turn to ‘debate’ is precisely to side-step traditional ‘politics’, especially left politics, and to draw libertarian politicians and intellectuals ranging from Nigel Farage to Roger Scruton away from politics as such into ‘debate’, to enable a new generation of gifted leaders to emerge who will lead us into Tomorrowland. Spiked has spawned a new generation of younger activists who are well-suited to the new ideological climate, sons and daughters of old LMers are leading campaigns to trigger Brexit Article 50, for example. This then led the group to do a deal with Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, a lash-up which gave them access to EU and then British parliamentary seats, after which they were quickly out-flanked by the Tories who moved to deliver everything Farage had promised.

This strategy means cheering on the destruction of the welfare state – the ‘Nanny State’ that tells us not to smoke and how to think, and opposing censorship of all kinds as being the work of the thought police in the media and on the campuses. Frank inveighs against ‘dumbing down’ of education and against victim culture – a mantra that neatly links Spiked to the concerns of the new right – and his followers search out all manner of ways in which we are told how vulnerable we are rather than how inventive we could be. The twist is hat this involves a turn to the right, to a concern with order rather than change; Frank Furedi’s 2020 book on ‘borders’ includes praise for national boundaries, for the Orbán regime in Hungary, and for biological boundaries between the sexes, a favourite transphobe motif of late.

There is some truth in their warnings about ‘victim culture’, of course, but for all of the complaints about the ‘liberal elite’ telling us how to behave and think, this is a message for the elite: forget the gloomy predictions made by the old left, the question for Spiked is how can we can fix things. The possible technological future is within our grasp, if only we would change our negative mind-set and dedicate ourselves to making it happen. Don’t buy it. To be frank, this boils down to nothing more than thinking positively about ‘debate’, subscribing to Spiked, and hoping that being awarded a T-symbol badge will enable you to touch tomorrow now.

This is part of the FIIMG Mapping the English Left through Film project.

Posted by

Ian Parker

Posted on

November 21, 2016

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International, Uncategorized

Trump: Ten brief notes

This is a perfect storm and perfect scene for the repetition of mistakes on the left as we scrabble around for good news to salvage from disaster. Here are ten points which sift through some of the reactions from the left, some of them quite ridiculous, and try to orient us to a better understanding of what has happened. Trigger warning: contradictions ahead.

Trump is a cultural phenomenon. The culture that breeds it includes The Apprentice, the US TV show that Trump starred in from 2004. This glorification of ‘business success’ incites the audience to admire a wealthy bully who stands as an exemplar of what it is to have made it as an individual in US America, and what that requires in terms of competition and humiliation. Trump channels a greedy desire for victory over others and vicarious participation in a corrupt cynical politics that is predicated on making money. Trump needed pots of money to stand and win in this election, but, more than that, he needed a cultural assumption that the accumulation of money is a good as such.
His victory reinforces existing institutional arrangements. The intervention of FBI Director James B Comey in the crucial final days of the vote indicates that the central power structures of the United States have been fermenting and crystallising for some time around a neo-conservative agenda. The claim that Trump’s power base lies in the redneck and poor and unemployed communities distracts attention from where the real danger lies. This is something that Clinton could not counter, because she herself was part of that same power structure which relies on and admires a central elite core with wealth backed by the threat of violence. The election of Trump represents a shift inside the apparatus, not so much a revolt against it.
There is an invisible majority that is not for Trump. The popular vote for Clinton was over a million votes more than what Trump got. The electoral apparatus – funnelling of the vote in the primaries through the two major parties and then the count of the final vote through the colleges – guarantees a disenfranchisement of the poorest communities. This is a version of the ‘first past the post system’ in which key power brokers are able to facilitate a cascade effect which then overrides the popular vote. Trump has a mandate of about a quarter of the US American electorate, that is, an electorate which already excludes millions more people.
There was a significant vote against Clinton and the State. Clinton did not deserve the popular vote that she got, and the distribution of the vote as it was – with about fifty percent of the electorate not voting – show that it was not so much that Trump won, but that Clinton lost this election. There was an astonishingly lower proportion of the vote among the Black and Latino communities, much lower than Obama got in the last election, and much much lower that Obama got the first time round. Some of those who voted for Trump must also be included in the revulsion against Clinton, though this was mistakenly directed at the ‘emails’ rather than her collusion in the coup in Honduras, for example. This means taking care not to demonise all those who voted for Trump.
There was an alternative to two-party rule. There were a number of alternatives which included, if we disregard the libertarian right which was able to attract some of the protest votes, the Green Party which, with Jill Stein as candidate, was able to garner over a million votes, that is over double what the Greens got last time round, and, of course, there was Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders could have beaten Trump, and Sanders standing aside and handing over some of his votes and all of his energy to Clinton was a disastrous mistake. Trump would not have been loyal to the Republicans if he had failed to win their nomination, and Sanders should not have been loyal to the Democrats.
Trump is worse than Clinton. But there is a huge debate over what exactly this banal statement actually means; whether it means that Trump is a Le Pen figure, a fascist, which might mean that the appropriate slogan should have been one borrowed from France ‘Votez l’escroc, pas facho’ (vote for the swindler, not the fascist). No, that kind of approach was part of the corralling of the anti-capitalist (and anti-racist and progressive ecological vote) into the Clinton campaign, and it actually demobilised people. The momentum of the Sanders campaign needed to be kept going throughout as an alternative, to show that resistance was possible, and to build a movement against Trump and what he represents.
Trump is not a fascist. He is a populist, which is not to say that fascism itself does not play the populist game. He is a businessmen well used to starting with an extreme opening gambit and then negotiating down to realistic goals. In the first days he, quite typically for a neoliberal pragmatist, back-peddled on his opposition to ‘Obama-care’, on the building of the wall (it could be a fence in parts, he said, which it already is), on the number of migrants he planned to expel, and denied that he planned to register Muslims. But this is not reason to breathe a sigh of relief, for the destruction of health provision and racist measures will be implemented, but more ‘efficiently’, with the blessing of the Republicans. This will also include some bitter disappointments for trans activists who did support him. He reassured his allies in NATO that he would defend them. This is business, big business, though not exactly ‘business as usual’.
This is a victory for racists. It is not business as usual because it is dripping poison into political debate, which is evident in the appointment of Breitbart chief Steve Bannon, a virulent antisemite and champion of white nationalism as a policy advisor. The appointment is symbolic, and the license for hate that Trump is willing to give to those who have been loyal to him during the campaign entails a particularly vicious form of symbolic violence. This is the symbolic violence of those who are determined to shift the debate onto their terrain so that objections to racism and sexism are to be viewed as ‘political correctness’. Racism is part of the equation which runs alongside sexism – the attack on abortion rights being one indication of this – and contempt for environmental concerns. Trump is not fascist, but he opens the way to fascism.
Trump is now a Republican politician, with all that entails for foreign policy. The Democrats have historically been less protectionist than Republican administrations, and more interventionist. The two aspects go hand in hand, and this is what is behind the threat by Trump to make the NATO allies pay. Arms industry shares soared the day after the election, and this is because Trump is more than happy to tie support for dictatorships abroad with arms sales. It is when they pay, when it suits US-American big business interests, and when they put the money up front, that the new administration will back them up, against whatever enemies they choose, external or internal.
This election is disaster not only inside the United States, but also globally. It signals a shift of foreign policy which, while admittedly less interventionist directly, will be willing to reinforce the power of dictators willing to do business with the US. That includes Putin, with applause in the Duma at the results, and, of course, Assad, for whom this is a green light to continue with his deadly assault on the left opposition to his regime, and it includes Saudi Arabia who will be the linchpins of a ‘Sunni triangle’ alliance with the murderous regimes of Egypt and Turkey, and China, whose praise for Trump has been muted as yet, but whose regime will also benefit. Antisemitism at home goes hand in hand with Christian Zionist support for Israel.

This all means that it is a grotesque mistake to see his election as a ‘chance of a lifetime’, as some on the left saw Brexit, or as an ‘opportunity’ for change in which the working class that supposedly supported Trump will supposedly abandon him when he does not deliver. No, this is, rather, as Trump himself declared, ‘Brexit, plus plus plus’, and is of a piece with a shift to the right globally, one which will encourage and strengthen the right in every single country. Yes, we do hope for opportunities in the midst of this new contradictory reality, but these will have to be built from the base up, inside the US and internationally.

These notes were prepared for Left Unity Manchester, and amended following a very useful discussion at a meeting, thanks to all those who participated, agreed, disagreed, and sharpened some of these points.

Posted by

Ian Parker

Posted on

November 4, 2016

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Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left

Here is the further reading, with web-links from Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left.

These further readings, with web-link suggestions to complement them, do not map one-to-one onto the keywords in this book. And some of these readings illustrate some problems with these debates rather than neat ways to resolve them. What is most important now in these texts is to explore further how the different ideas link with each other, and so many of these references span the different debates around each of the keywords.

Achcar, G. (2006) The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers; London: Saqi. This detailed analysis of the so-called ‘war on terror’ shows how Western intervention constituted the Islamic fundamentalist organisations as both enemy and partner of imperialism to destroy the left. An interview with Gilbert Achcar about the themes in the book after the Paris massacre is here: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/9/gilbert_achcar_on_the_clash_of

Ahmed, S. (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. This book includes the classic essay ‘Feminist Killjoys’ by Sara Ahmed, a motif taken up by many other feminists as a critique of all the various forms of enjoyment that buttress power and violence against women. See also Ahmed’s essay ‘Walls of Whiteness’ here: https://mediadiversified.org/2014/04/22/walls-of-whiteness/

Anievas, A. and Nisancioglu, K. (2015) How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press. This study shows how capitalism is grounded in territorial control which intimately links the fate of the ‘West’ with, in Walter Rodney’s term, the ‘underdevelopment’ of the rest of the world. An interview with the authors about Eurocentrism is here: https://viewpointmag.com/2015/12/01/towards-a-radical-critique-of-eurocentrism-an-interview-with-alexander-anievas-and-kerem-nisancioglu/

Arruzza, C. (2013) Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism. London: Resistance Books. This book provides a detailed overview of the range of different debates at the intersection of Marxism and feminism, including the impact of Black feminism and queer theory. The ideas in the book are explored further by Cinzia Arruzza here: http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article3718

Bourne, J. (1987) ‘Homelands of the mind: Jewish feminism and identity politics’, Race and Class 29 (1): 1-24. Jenny Bourne’s article was a controversial intervention into identity politics that got a bad reception from some anti-Zionist Jewish feminists in the UK. The questions of identity and the way it is addressed as something ‘intersectional’ is explored in a different context in Sharon Smith’s 2013 ‘Black feminism and intersectionality’ here: http://isreview.org/issue/91/black-feminism-and-intersectionality

Burstow, B. (2015) Psychiatry and the Business of Madness: An Ethical and Epistemological Accounting, London: Palgrave Macmillan. This book is produced from years of radical feminist political activity in and alongside the psychiatry and disability movements, drawing on the voices of the oppressed to explore how the psychiatric apparatus appears from the standpoint of those subject to it. The arguments are linked with contemporary political struggle in Asylum: Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry which can be accessed here: http://www.asylumonline.net/

Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge. This is one of the classic grounding texts for what became known as ‘queer theory’ and, more importantly, of ‘queer politics’ in ‘third-wave’ feminism that was expressed in HIV/AIDS activist movements like ACT UP. The argument in the book is explored further here in relation to Islam and secularism in a 2009 text Is Critique Secular? by Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood here: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/84q9c6ft

Chen, K. (2010) Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. This book provides a ‘standpoint’ argument of a quite different type, grounding the political resistance to imperialism in Asia on the terrain of intersecting histories of China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The global context is also addressed in relation to Western feminism and imperialism here: https://www.opendemocracy.net/deepa-kumar/imperialist-feminism-and-liberalism

Combahee River Collective (1977) ‘History is a Weapon’ This document was written as one of the founding texts of Black feminism, making a strong standpoint argument for autonomous collective organisation. The text is available here: http://historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/combrivercoll.html

Davis, A. (1981) Women, Race and Class. London: Women’s Press. Angela Davis, once a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America, and campaigner against the ‘Prison-Industrial Complex’, works at the intersection of different forms of exploitation and oppression in this book; Chapter 13 of her book, on ‘Women, Race and Class: The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective’, is available here: http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/davis-angela/housework.htm

Debord, G. (1967) Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. Guy Debord, the leader and master of the ‘Situationists’, provides a polemical analysis drawing on Hegel and Marx of the way that radical action is ‘recuperated’. There is an illustrated guide of his argument here: http://hyperallergic.com/313435/an-illustrated-guide-to-guy-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle/

Ebert, T. (2009) The Task of Cultural Critique. Champaign, IL: Illinois University Press. Teresa Ebert takes on a number of different cultural theorists, including Slavoj Žižek, from a feminist and Marxist standpoint; her 1995 essay ‘(Untimely) Critiques for a Red Feminism’ is available here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/ebert.htm

Fanon, F. (1967) The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fanon’s book, which was published in France with an incendiary introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre and promptly banned, is a classic of anti-colonial and post-colonial writing. It is work that needs to be taken forward with feminist critique, with one attempt here: http://postcolonialist.com/culture/reading-mis-reading-frantz-fanon/

Federici, S. (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia Silvia Federici writes in the Italian autonomist tradition that takes that Marxist politics in a more explicitly feminist direction than, for example, Antonio Negri. There is an interview with her here: http://endofcapitalism.com/2013/05/29/a-feminist-critique-of-marx-by-silvia-federici/

Firestone, S. (2015) The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. London: Verso. Shulamith Firestone was one of the inspirations for a ‘radical feminist’ strand of ‘second-wave’ feminism; the first chapter of her book ‘The Dialectic of Sex’, which was originally published in 1970, is available here: http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/firestone-shulamith/dialectic-sex.htm

Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? London: Zero Books. Mark Fisher’s book addresses the way that neo-liberal capitalism today presents itself as normal and natural; it is an analysis that can be situated in relation to ‘new materialist’ feminist theory articulated by Karen Barad which precisely aims to show how what is normal and natural is constituted as such; she outlines this argument here: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.3/–new-materialism-interviews-cartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext

Foucault, M. (1981) The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction. Harmondsworth: Pelican. First published in 1976, Michel Foucault’s ‘History of Sexuality’ was intended to be the first volume of a six-volume study that could eventually, perhaps, have addressed feminism. There have been claims that Foucault himself named neoliberalism and then became rather fond of it, a claim rehearsed here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/foucault-interview/

Fraser, N. (2013) Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. London: Verso. Nancy Fraser is quite clear that she is still a feminist, despite the attempts to misrepresent her as arguing that feminism as such has failed because it has been recuperated under neoliberalism, and she makes her feminist commitment clear in her 2014 article ‘How feminism became capitalism’s handmaiden – and how to reclaim it’ available here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal

Freeman, J. (1970) ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm Jo Freeman specifically addressed contexts in which some ‘consciousness-raising’ groups claimed to have dispensed with power, and her arguments are complemented and critiqued in Cathy Levine’s response ‘The tyranny of tyranny’ which is available here: http://libcom.org/library/tyranny-of-tyranny-cathy-levine

Greenstein, A. (2015) Inclusive Radical Pedagogy: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Education, Disability and Liberation. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Anat Greenstein links the development of critique and practice around what is called in the United States ‘normalcy’ with questions of education and liberation; further attempts to link disability activism with feminism have been made here: http://disabilityintersections.com/2014/03/why-feminist-disability-studies/

Guerin, D. (1973) Fascism and Big Business. New York: Monad Press. Daniel Guerin’s analysis of the rise of fascism, first published in 1939, focuses on the way that, despite the claims to be anti-corporate, fascism arises as a strategy of last resort for the bourgeoisie to destroy capitalism; an extract from Guerin’s book is available here: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/guerin/1938/10/fascism.htm

Haraway, D. J. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. London and New York: Routledge. This important book by Donna Haraway locates feminism clearly in relation to the exploitation and animals and the destruction of nature; Haraway’s ‘cyborg manifesto’, which takes the analysis in the direction of the relationship between women and technology, is available here: https://www.stumptuous.com/comps/cyborg.html

Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, a key figure in the Italian autonomist tradition, provide an analysis of capitalism as intrinsically global, and the book, which was followed by Multitude in 2004 and Commonwealth in 2009, became important in the ‘Occupy’ movement. As well as taking distance from Marxist analyses of imperialism, it also had little to say about feminism, which is reasserted here in the argument for Wages for Housework by Selma James: http://www.globalwomenstrike.net/content/selma-james-and-wages-housework-campaign

Henley, N. (1979) Body Politics: Power, Sex, and Nonverbal Communication. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Nancy Henley shows how women are expected to take up less space than men, both in big public spaces and in more intimate settings, and to have a different relation to time; it is an analysis that provides some context for the changes in production analysed in Alex Williams and Nick Srinicek’s 2013 ‘Accelerationist manifesto’, available here: http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/

Hochschild, A. R. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. The US American feminist sociologist Arlie Hochschild shows how women’s stereotypical capacities for ‘care’ become instrumentalised under capitalism with the rise of ‘feminisation’ of industry in the service sector, which is something Silvia Federici addresses in her 2010 article ‘Wages against Housework’ available here: https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/silvia-federici-wages-against-housework/

Kelly, J. (1992) ‘Postmodernism and feminism’, International Marxist Review, 14, pp. 39-55. Jane Kelly’s feminist critique of postmodernism homes in on the ‘theories of difference’ that run through a range of different ‘postmodernist’ approaches to language; the article, which was written before many feminists reworked these theories for themselves, is available here: http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article2737

Klein, N. (2008) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Naomi Klein has combined scholarly analysis with socialist, feminist and environmental activism in a number of books, including in this one on the way that capitalism requires the systematic destruction of human resources in order to rebuild itself and stimulate profit; raw materials for the book are available here: http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

Knight, C. (2016) Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chris Knight shows how the deep split between Chomsky’s academic work on linguistics and his political commitment actually has dire consequences for both aspects; an earlier journal article version of the argument in Knight’s book is available here: http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/decoding-chomsky/

Kollontai, A. (1977) Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai. New York: Norton Alexandra Kollontai, one of the most radical of the ‘first-wave’ feminists, was one of the Bolshevik leaders who put energy into the abolition of the family and the reconfiguration of personal relationships in the Soviet Union; an essay reclaiming Kollontai for contemporary Marxist feminism by Teresa Ebert is available here: https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/1724

Kovel, J. (2007) The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (2^nd Revised edn). London: Zed Books. Joel Kovel’s argument for ‘ecosocialism’ is grounded in a detailed description of the way that capitalism in a variety of different contexts must devote itself to the destruction of nature; the question which is touched on in the book, and which needs more work, is how ecosocialism connects with ecofeminism, a question addressed here: http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article2407

Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe were, with Stuart Hall in Britain, driving forces in theory of what was known at the time as ‘Eurocommunism’, and they both now provide resources for new social movements like Podemos. They link ideas from linguistics and Lacan’s psychoanalysis with the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose prison writings are available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/prison_notebooks/

Leon A. (1950) The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation. New York: Pathfinder Press. Abram Leon was a Trotskyist murdered by the Nazis, and his book was published posthumously on the prompting of the Belgian economist and secretary of the Fourth International Ernest Mandel; one of Mandel’s own texts on ‘the Jewish question’ is available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1946/07/jews.htm

Lorde, A. (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. This book by US American Black socialist lesbian feminist Audre Lorde includes the 1977 essay ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’ which is also available online here: https://shrinkingphallus.wordpress.com/the-transformation-of-silence-into-language-and-action-by-audre-lorde/

Löwy, M. (2010) Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia. Dallas TX: University of Texas. Michel Löwy’s book provides a passionate description and defence of the variety of different challenges to orthodox Marxism from within the surrealist movement. It takes forward the arguments made by Trotsky in a document signed by André Breton and Diego Rivera in their 1938 ‘Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art’ which is here: https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/works/rivera/manifesto.htm

Millett, K. (1977) Sexual Politics. London: Virago. Kate Millet was one of the key figures in ‘second-wave’ feminism, arguing in this book for a radical feminist critique of dominant cultural resources which buttress patriarchy, which she defines as the domination of women by men and of younger men by older men; the second chapter of Millett’s book is available here: https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/millett-kate/theory.htm

Mitchell, J. (1974) Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. This classic text re-examined the hostility of some feminists to psychoanalysis, and argued that the shift from biology to language in the work of Jacques Lacan opened the way to thinking about transformation of society instead of adaptation to it, a line explored in this online volume edited by Carol Owens: https://discourseunit.com/annual-review/7-2009/

Mojab, S. (ed.) (2015) Marxism and Feminism. London: Zed Books. This edited book includes chapters on intersectionality and standpoint and on other key issues that span the different keywords in this present book; a short introduction to connections between Marxism and feminism and a list of more resources is available here: http://www.feministezine.com/feminist/philosophy/Introduction-to-Marxist-Feminism.html

Nayak, S. (2014) Race, Gender and the Activism of Black Feminist Theory: Working with Audre Lorde. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. This study is devoted to the work of Audre Lorde and to the connection between her theoretical writings and contemporary Black feminist political practice: Audre Lorde’s 1980 text ‘Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’ is available here: www.clc.wvu.edu/r/download/29781

Puar, J. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, CA.: Duke University Press. Jasbir Puar shows how gay culture becomes harnessed to capitalist state practices and to imperialism as a segregated niche category of identity that then functions ideologically; the ideas are explored in the specific context of Islamophobia and Zionism here: http://www.nopinkwashing.org.uk/background-reading

Raymond, J. (1980) The Transsexual Empire. London: The Women’s Press. Janice Raymond’s book gives a clear and polemical account of the radical feminist objection to ‘trans’, the way that gender binaries risk being reinforced as particular bodies transition from one gender to the other; some problems in Raymond’s account are outlined in Jacqueline Rose’s 2016 essay ‘Who do you think you are?’ here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n09/jacqueline-rose/who-do-you-think-you-are

Reed, E. (1975) Women’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family. New York: Pathfinder Press. This book takes forward Engels anthropological claims in his classic 1884 text ‘Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’. The specific consequences for an analysis of women’s oppression are spelled out in Evelyn Reed’s 1970 article ‘Women : Caste, Class or Oppressed Sex’ available here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/reed-evelyn/1970/caste-class-sex.htm

Rowbotham, S., Segal, L. and Wainwright, H. (2013) Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (3^rd Edn). Pontypool, Wales: Merlin. The first edition of ‘Beyond the Fragments’ was published as a pamphlet in 1979, bringing together feminist activists from three different far-left groups in Britain; reflections by Johanna Brenner on this third edition, published during a time of crisis in the British left over questions of sexual violence, are available here: http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article4162

Said, E. (2003) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Harmondsworth: Penguin. First published in 1978, Edward Said’s book on ‘orientalism’ took up work by Michel Foucault and focused on the production and functions of representations of the exoticised and feared ‘other’; Said opened the way to further analysis of orientalism and feminisation, explored here: http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article27016

Spender, D. (1980) Man Made Language, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dale Spender shows how the English language is skewed against women to render them as less than human, and this provides a feminist context to the argument Jean-François Lyotard made about ‘language games’ as defining interaction in his 1979 book ‘The Postmodern Condition’; the introduction to the English translation of Lyotard’s book by Fredric Jameson links postmodernism with Mandel’s diagnosis of ‘late capitalism’, and is available here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm

Spivak, G. C. (1990) The Post-Colonial Critic. London and New York: Routledge. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak translated and introduced writings of Jacques Derrida into English, reframing ‘deconstruction’ as something compatible with Marxism and feminism; her argument about a tactical use of identity categories in the notion of ‘strategic essentialism’ is explored here: http://www.dawn.com/news/1152482

Tiqqun (2012) Preliminary Materials for a theory of the Young-Girl. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). The Tiqqun collective provide a diagnosis of the way feminised imagery functions ideologically, but also tend to repeat this imagery in their own critique, as is made clear in this critical appraisal and review of their work: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/rp177-shes-just-not-that-into-you

Trotsky, L. D. (1938) The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/ This document, written as a founding text for the Fourth International, is usually known as the ‘Transitional Programme’, and the updating of ‘transitional demands’ for the present day has often been debated, as in this example linking it with ecological questions: http://www.socialist.net/a-transitional-programme-for-the-environment.htm

Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. This is an academic book for researchers that brings them out of their comfort zone and insists that any radical research worth the name must be rooted in the experiences and forms of knowledge of the oppressed. The ideas are worked through in the open-access online journal Disability and the Global South which can be accessed here: https://dgsjournal.org/

Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2010) The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. Harmondsworth: Penguin. This book, with the argument that gross inequalities lead to greater unhappiness, has been influential on new generations of community and environmental activists, and the link with ‘gender equality’ has also been taken up by feminists like Carol Gilligan: http://www.port-magazine.com/commentary/the-world-after-men-carol-gilligan/

Williams, R. (1976) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana. Raymond Williams aimed to provide an overview of the keywords that have come to make up contemporary progressive culture, but although Williams himself was a ‘cultural Marxist’, he rather overlooked feminism and other new social movements; the analysis needs to also address a range of other links to radical critique, as it is here: https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/40460

If that isn’t enough, or too much, and you want some basic reading on what Marxism is, then look at the seven books that are listed here

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Ian Parker

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September 5, 2016

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Uncategorized

Globalisation: Linguistics and Imperialism

This keyword was one of fifty explored and put to work over the past two years. The notes on the keywords are revised and collected together in a new book ‘Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left’ which will be published in 2017 with a concluding essay placing them in historical context. The book includes a detailed reading list with web-links so you can more easily follow the links online, a list which is available here.

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Ian Parker

Posted on

August 22, 2016

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History, Uncategorized

Trotsky: What was that?

Like most human beings, Leon Davidovich Bronstein was born and he died. He was born in 1879 in Ukraine, became active in left politics in Russia as a student and was imprisoned in 1905 for participating in protests and a failed uprising against the brutal Tsarist regime. It was a regime that was still feudal, barely developing capitalist economic relations that many Marxists at the time saw as being the necessary prerequisite for a transition to socialism. Leon, our hero, escaped from internal exile, taking the name of his jailor in Odessa to avoid capture, and that name is the one we know today as Trotsky.
One of the lessons of 1905 for Trotsky was that in place of a static ‘stage’ view of historical change, the globalisation of the world economy that had already been picking up pace at the time Marx was writing led to the possibility that protest could grow over from anti-feudal to anti-capitalist revolutionary politics. A ‘permanent revolution’ would therefore be one that was intrinsically internationalist, linking different kinds of struggles against exploitation and oppression. Actually, in practice, Trotsky himself as an individual was a little behind his own analysis. There was a gap. He had to shift rapidly during the 1917 October Revolution across Russia to join the Bolsheviks, something his enemies held against him afterwards. He then became one of the leaders of the Soviet Union, and of the Red Army which was combating invasion by fourteen capitalist countries keen to prevent this revolution from growing over into a genuinely ‘permanent’ and international one.
This is where another gap opens up between Trotsky as leader, now an inspiring strong personality able to lead the regime and its troops, and the revolutionary process itself. His role in the suppression of the rebellion by sailors in the fortress at Kronstadt near St Petersburg, then renamed Petrograd, made him complicit in the formation of the very bureaucracy he analysed so well. But personal failings do not invalidate the diagnosis he gave and his brave attempt to reassert what was most progressive and democratic about the revolution against Stalin’s ban on rival parties, internal factions and then on any dissent. Trotsky’s book ‘The Revolution Betrayed’ was the fruit of his own direct participation and reflection on the mistakes that had been made, and recognition that this crushing and distortion of the revolution was a function of its isolation. There could be no ‘socialism in one country’ as Stalin claimed while he massively increased his own power and that of the apparatus.
The Stalinist bureaucracy in the 1930s was determined to root out its internal enemies, and Trotsky was portrayed as the root of all evil, with claims that he was working with the fascists alongside a grotesque revival of Russian antisemitism used to target him and his followers. It is true, he was a revolutionary Jew who saw autonomous collective self-organisation of the oppressed as an energising force for authentic internationalism. He warned against the trap of closed nationalist politics, and against the disastrous mistake of Zionism which would itself settle Israel on the land of others. He worked as a journalist before the revolution – they are not all bad – and after that he became the conscience of the revolution, a reminder of what it should have been. That meant connecting political-economic protest with cultural rebellion, including on the position of women as an index of how progressive or reactionary a regime is. Trotsky’s activities and writings on culture span engagement with psychoanalysis – meeting with Wilhelm Reich in exile in Norway, for example – and surrealism, writing a manifesto for revolutionary art while in Mexico toward the end of his life, a manifesto that was published under the names of André Breton and Diego Rivera.
That broad contradictory open and inclusive practice of revolutionary politics is what characterises the best of Trotsky, and it provides the background for two further key innovations. We can link the two. The first was the recognition that there was a marginalisation of revolutionary groups with the rise of fascism and Stalinism and then of the Cold War, and a domination of left politics by large reformist social democratic parties or, in some places, by communist parties tied to the Soviet Union. In these new conditions, Trotsky argued for what has been called ‘entrism’; not the secretive manipulation of the larger party apparatus, but direct membership and participation in the mass movement organisations. This is one way of drawing those who thought voting would change the world into action themselves, to themselves become those who would change things.
The second innovation was voiced in the founding document of a new international organisation in 1938 the Fourth International, a document known as the ‘transitional programme’. For Trotsky, ‘transitional demands’ like a sliding scale of wages or for opening the books of the corporations were eminently reasonable and democratic calls that capitalism could not and would not agree to. It was ‘transitional’ because it brought those in struggle up against the limits of the regime, and it then became transitional in practice, growing over from a series of demands into a linked political challenge to capitalism itself. Again, what was crucial for Trotsky was that it would be through the collective self-activity of people themselves rather than through diktats by their leaders that any revolutionary change worth the name would happen. In this, Trotsky is close to the revolutionary democratic politics of Rosa Luxemburg who was killed in 1919 in Berlin on the orders of the social democrats after an uprising that would have broken the isolation of the Russian revolution.
All this is anathema to big dictators and those who want to be like them. Trotsky was murdered by an agent of Stalin in Mexico, the only country that would give him a visa, in 1940. His son had already been murdered in Paris. The agent plunged an ice-pick into Trotsky’s head. Those who use the term ‘Trotskyite’ as a term of abuse sometimes joke about ice-picks, and they focus on the personality of Trotsky himself, avoiding the theory and practice he helped to build. Those of us who call ourselves ‘Trotskyists’ admire his life struggle and try to learn from that, drawing a balance sheet which puts that life in context, and aiming to build a different context in which such a hardening of character and brutality of politics will no longer exist. He didn’t drink much, and by all accounts lunchtimes in exile before he died were not a bundle of laughs. There are no pictures of Trotsky with cats, something which makes him less immediately internet-friendly, but if you twist a Trotskyist’s arm they will sometimes admit that they did once name their cat ‘Rosa’ or ‘Leon’.
You can also read this article where it was first published and comment on it here.

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Ian Parker

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August 15, 2016

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Keywords, Uncategorized

Refusal: Of Sex Work

This keyword was one of fifty explored and put to work on this site. The notes on the keywords are revised and collected together in Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left, which includes a concluding essay placing them in historical context. The book includes a detailed reading list with web-links so you can more easily follow the links online, a list which is available here.

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Ian Parker

Posted on

August 8, 2016

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Keywords, Uncategorized