Category Archives: Mapping

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February 3, 2017

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History, Mapping

Alliance for Workers’ Liberty

A Canterbury Tale, a Powell and Pressburger classic from 1944, stars Eric Portman as Thomas Colpeper, a magistrate and gentleman farmer who gives improving cultural lectures to the community, but who is then revealed to be the ‘glue man’. This is the glue man who has been pouring sticky stuff into the hair of girls too friendly with the American GIs stationed in the fictitious little town of Chillingbourne near Canterbury in Kent. Colpeper’s rationale for doing this, he says when he is uncovered, is that this will frighten the girls away from fraternising with the outsiders and so glue together the community.

In this film Colpeper is, in some sense, the obscene underside of the law, the smear on the community necessary to hold the good moral law in place. In spite of itself, the film reveals something of the dirty often secret violence that holds a clean wholesome community in place, a united community that in this film is configured as a very English ethnic community. It is Bob, an American army sergeant who gets off the train to Canterbury at Chillingbourne by mistake, who links up with Land Girl Alison (played by Sheila Sim) to track down the glue man after she is attacked on the first night.

A Canterbury Tale has become a cult favourite among a small group of devotees who visit Canterbury every year and declaim from the script, visiting Canterbury Cathedral at the end of their visit. They are then able to re-enact the final scene in the Cathedral where the British Army Sergeant Peter (played by Dennis Price) plays the organ after deciding not to report Colpeper to the police. Bob has discovered that letters have indeed arrived to his sweetheart, and Alison has discovered that her boyfriend has not been killed in the war as she feared. Just Chaucer’s pilgrims travelled to Canterbury, Colpeper says, ‘to receive blessing, or to do penance’, so Colpeper and his English community are blessed after having been glued together; the implication being that these desperate measures of deception were necessary after all, and the good that came from them will bear fruit.

AWL

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) popped into the headlines in 2016 as the mainstream press tried to track down evil Trotskyists who were infiltrating the Labour Party, but their supposed crime of supporting Jeremy Corbyn and taking the Labour Party further to the left is nothing to some of the strange alliances they have made since they were formed. In fact, while they were busy circulating petitions against a ‘witchhunt’ in 2016, they were keen to reassure their hosts that they are very loyal to the party, taking the opportunity to draw a contrast between their own fealty to the party apparatus and the dastardly operations of nasty ‘entrists’ who are not really concerned with unity at all. The AWL appear to operate as poachers turned gamekeepers, but things are more complicated than that; they are, at one moment, poachers who are willing to pretend to be with the gamekeepers, and, at the next, gamekeepers for the unity of a community who will do a little poaching on the side to glue things together.

The mastermind behind the AWL’s twists and turns as they burrow into organisations and then emerge triumphant with a handful of new members out the other side is Sean Matgamna who founded Workers’ Fight in 1967 after a brief faction fight inside the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), then British Section of the Fourth International, forerunners of the Militant Tendency and today’s Socialist Party (SP). He then took the group into Tony Cliff’s International Socialists (IS), forerunners of today’s Socialist Workers Party, after IS made a unity call in 1968 and invited different organisations on the revolutionary left to come together under one umbrella (theirs). The story that went the rounds is that IS had their eyes on the International Marxist Group, a fairly important organisation at the time which counted Tariq Ali as a prominent member, but instead of Tariq Ali they got Sean Matgamna. IS paid dearly for their mistake, and Matgamna’s Trotskyist Tendency was duly expelled from Cliff’s group in 1971, and buoyed up with new members scooped out during the adventure.

Unity was now the name of the game for Matgamna, but unity with a twist, which was that each and every other Trotskyist group that made the mistake of responding to the siren calls of his group in good faith got badly bruised. Unity, it seems, could only be brought about by a healthy dose of internal strife. It set a pattern for a peculiar ‘inoculation’ model of entrism in which Matgamna’s comrades join as very loyal members of the organisation they have targeted but then ally with part of the apparatus to attack enemies and so emerge as the winners at the end of the process. Workers Power made the mistake of fusing with Workers’ Fight to form the International Communist League (ICL) in 1975, for example, but things ended badly in less than a year. Matgamna shut down the ICL and its paper Workers Action in 1978 and launched Socialist Organiser, which styled itself as ‘the paper of the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory’. Now inside the Labour Party, they managed to persuade Alan Thornett’s Workers Socialist League (formed after the expulsion of Thornett and other comrades from the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1974) to agree to merge with them in 1981 and close down their own paper Socialist Press. It was another bad mistake, and the joint organisation lasted less than a year.

One of the crunch points in the faction fight that spat out the Thornett group again was the 1982 Falklands War and a response by Matgamna to the conflict which has been part of a pattern of adaptation to ethnic unity and notions of ‘community’ before the war and since. Before the Falklands War, Matgamna had already argued inside IS and after his expulsion, and against the anti-imperialist and Irish republication position of most of the British revolutionary left, that the Protestants of Ulster should be seen as a beleaguered community under threat with the right to self-determination. It was an argument that was in tune with some of his old comrades in the RSL back in the mid-sixties (and there are traces of that in the Militant and SP positions on Ireland). True to form, Matgamna argued that the Malvinas were not Argentina’s, but that the plucky Falklands Islanders did, just as Margaret Thatcher always claimed, have the right to self-determination.

The split with the Thornett group left Matgamna in charge to go on to found Alliance for Workers’ Liberty in 1992 after Socialist Organiser had been banned by the Labour Party two years earlier, and the AWL has been proving itself loyal to its host organisation ever since, and loyal to the different nationalist and ethnically-defined communities it has allied with. This is as well as having its newspaper operate as an outlet for Matgamna’s poetry, improving cultural material that is clearly an embarrassment for the poor AWL members who have to sell the thing. Would that Eric Portman were alive today to play the part.

The adaptation to ethnic unity and community identity took another turn when the AWL followed through the logic of Matgamna’s 1986 declaration that a ‘two-state’ solution was the only way forward for Israel, and for the defence of Israel. The AWL went on to forge a strong working relationship with Zionists in the Union of Jewish Students (more fool them, don’t they know it will end in tears), leading Matgamna’s bunch to argue that Israel is not an apartheid state, a position very convenient for its loyal membership of the historically pro-Zionist Labour Party. This is a position that has drawn the accusation that the AWL are ‘revolutionary imperialists’. This particular alliance with Zionism also, rather predictably, led the AWL to publish Islamophobic trash, glue in the hair; an alliance, for unity and community, against outsiders. The AWL line, a weird perversion of the internationalist tradition they were born from, seems to be that community identity is an underlying good, and that a measure of deception and dirty work for the enemy will eventually result in something blessed for all.

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

 

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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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January 2, 2017

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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.

S

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.