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March 24, 2025

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Careless People

Ian Parker reviews a book that exposes internal workings of Facebook

Sarah Wynn-Williams sure knows how to pitch herself to an audience, and she will hook a sizeable readership with this memoir of her seven years working at a high executive level as “Global Policy Director” at Facebook. Her book Careless People carries the folksy subtitle “A story of where I used to work” and then “Power. Greed. Madness.”

The book, which was initially tagged with another subtitle as “A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” was announced by the publisher six days before it was published earlier this month, on 11 March, to enable some brief airtime for the author. Meta, the company that owns Facebook (and WhatsApp and Instagram, and a number of other social media platforms), moved fast – remember, the phrase “Move fast and break things” was internal motto of the company – and slapped a gag-order on the book, tried to block it completely.

Wynn-Williams, they argued, signed a “non-disparagement agreement” when she was sacked from the company, and this meant she could not do interviews or publicly promote the book. She doesn’t need to. Meta’s reaction to the book drew attention to it, and has succeeded in boosting sales.

Leaning in

Among other things, the book is about power, often linked with sexism, and it was eventually that toxic combination that led to Wynn-Williams being unceremoniously sacked from the company in 2017. She’s had a few years to work on the book, and it is a cleverly-crafted tale of enthusiasm and disillusion. There are some shocking claims.

One claim revolves around the rank hypocrisy of one of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s key co-workers, Sheryl Sandberg, who was, during Wynn-Williams’ tenure, a public face of Facebook, evidently very keen to be that public face (and someone who has since fallen out with Zuckerberg and left the company). Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead was a best-seller, much hyped. You know where this is going.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Sandberg’s attitude to women trying to “lean in” inside Facebook contrasted with arguments in her book. Instead of the woman-friendly message in Lean In, there were “strict rules, selectively enforced and the baseline of ever-present fear.”

When Wynn-Williams has a very difficult pregnancy and is then evidently struggling to cope with a young child, Sandberg tells her to “Hire a nanny,” specifically “Be smart and hire a Filipina nanny.” Why, because “They’re English-speaking, sunny disposition and service oriented.” Wynn-Williams is advised to stop talking about childcare at work; there is a “don’t mention children ethos.” There are also some more salacious stories about Sandberg. Wynn-Williams reports being directly ordered by Sandberg to “come to bed” on a private jet, and was told by fellow-workers that this is not an uncommon occurrence.

At any rate, it did not look as if Sandberg was going to be an “ally” of Wynn-Williams when there were gross instances of sexual harassment in the company. The company response to complaints by women in the company was to develop an “#ally bot,” a “bot that promotes ally behaviours within the company by letting you thank your colleagues for being allies.” This was something that then played well for men in their performance reviews, but not so much for the women they were rewarded for “allying” with.

The covert internal company group “Feminist Fight Club” can do little more than share stories, certainly not bring about change. At one high-level meeting, a woman asks about sexual harassment, and a male manager immediately jumps in to ask when the women will stop going on about “diversity” and start doing some work. We now know how quickly Zuckerberg abandoned DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) policies inside the company as soon as Trump was elected second-time around. It is when Wynn-Williams complains about sexual harassment by one of her other managers – someone angling for a place in the Trump cabinet – that HR turns the investigation around against her, against her own conduct, and then she is fired.

Connections

Wynn-Williams had, in fact, eagerly pitched herself to Facebook, and eventually got hired, working her way into the higher echelons of the company, convinced that Facebook was a force for good, that there was a promise of global “interconnectivity”. She is further galvanised in this belief by the “Arab Spring;” remember the claims that what was happening in Egypt was a “Facebook Revolution?”

She took Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, at his word, and she attempted to put into practice the ethos announced in public policy manifestos, and in the “Little Red Book” given to new employees in which they could read, on the first page, that “Facebook was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.” Careless People book tells the story of how she wanted in and how she fell out with the company. It is riveting reading.

What Wynn-Williams does do so well is show the intimate connection between an internal regime and external policy, how one loops around and reinforces the other. She managed to persuade upper-level management at Facebook that the company was going to be a key player not only in reflecting the world but in making it, and that this influence would need some careful diplomatic work to engage with different regimes. The top bods finally agree, they realise that this is necessary, that “getting past foreign regulators and opening up markets is the most important thing. Suddenly I matter.” Her book describes how Facebook did succeed in influencing political events, with some chilling case examples.

The ethos of the company, she discovered, was not to work for the interconnected good of humankind, but simply to grow; “growth,” not surprisingly, was the mantra of a profit-driven enterprise that was prepared to let individuals and, for that matter, whole communities, go to the wall. The more the company was driven to lie to governments to get access to populations, and so make more profit, so the more it had to tighten up its internal structures, lie to its own employees; internal control mirrored and fed back into external misinformation. This is the basic capital logic of any company wanting to thrive under conditions of competition and exploitation.

In this context, sickeningly, “terrorism” was seen as an opportunity for tightening things up externally and internally, for it meant that governments would be less concerned with transparency, with what happens to user data; after the Bataclan theatre attack in Paris, for instance, Sandberg, who was in a Davos meeting at the time, gleefully emailed the leadership team to say “Terrorism means the conversation on privacy is ‘basically dead’ as policymakers are more concerned about intelligence/security.”

A telling example toward the end of the book which indicates how the internal regime became as corrupt as its public operations is when a woman employee collapses at the Silicon Valley Menlo Park “campus” having an epileptic fit. She is foaming at the mouth, bleeding from her fall, so Wynn-Williams rushes over, and asks a nearby colleague typing at a desk if they are the employee’s manager; they reply yes, but that they are “very busy,” continue typing and suggest contacting HR.

Politics

A turning point in the book comes with the election of Donald Trump in 2017, shortly before Wynn-Williams is fired. There is an account of a plane journey in which Mark Zuckerberg is confronted by some of his close allies in the company who eventually succeed in persuading him that, indeed, Facebook had played a significant role in Trump’s election. Facebook employees had been embedded in the Trump campaign team, and the Trump team spent more than any other candidate at the site, including some detailed profiling and targeting of Facebook users; the bottom line was “we’re making record amounts of money off the Trump campaign.”

Not only that, there was profiling and targeting of Democrat voters, with “dark posts” discrediting Hillary Clinton, that is, “non-public posts that only they would see;” these posts would be “invisible to researchers or anyone else looking at their feed.” The slogan “All Lives Matter,” as a counter to “Black Lives Matter” appears on the Facebook campus graffiti walls after the election, as do posters proclaiming “Trump supporters welcome.”

The political leaning of the senior Facebook management team was toward the Democrats, and Zuckerberg, and others, were clearly initially shocked by the election result, but Zuckerberg’s reaction, when he finally was able to see that Facebook had helped Trump to power, was indicative. Not, how can we mitigate this disaster, but how can we get on the team, bring some of those canny Trump gamers into Facebook. Wynn-Williams describes to Sandberg the women’s protests against Trump, and Sandberg asks what she is wearing. Wynn-Williams starts to describe what the women protesters are wearing, but Sandberg snaps back “No, no, not that. What did Melania wear?”

Some employees, anxious about Facebook hosting hate posts, want to raise the question of the white supremacist terrorist attack in Charlotteville and the rise of the alt-right at Mark’s weekly Q & A session, but this gets pushed out of the way by the apparently more pressing question of “overcrowding on the Facebook campus gym.” The watchwords are order and security, for the company, and for any regime it deals with, China quickly becoming a key instance.

Order

China was then Facebook’s second-largest market, “accounting for an estimated $5 billion of revenue at this time and roughly 10 percent of Facebook’s total revenue.” The trick is that although China blocks Facebook, a significant amount of money flows into Facebook from China; “Facebook’s advertising business in China is growing – even while we’re blocked – because Chinese businesses are buying ads on Facebook.”

Zuckerberg is learning Mandarin, asks Xi Jinping to name his unborn child (Xi refuses), and is so keen to get a photo with Xi to share online that he posts one that shows his own face and back of Xi’s head; a faux pas that causes Chinese anger and complaint.

Alongside the financial deals there is something even worse at play; Facebook being banned means that Chinese citizens who go into Facebook to escape the gaze of the state apparatus will be of even more interest to the authorities, will be precisely the ones to be watched. Facebook then plays into this, making a “key offer” to the regime, which is that it will help China “promote safe and secure social order.” Facebook declares that it “will agree to grant the Chinese government access to Chinese users’ data – including Hongkongese user’s data.” This also means that anyone outside China who is in contact with someone inside the country could have their data stored on a “PoP server.” How this will play out now that Zuckerberg is apparently wanting to show allegiance to Trump remains to be seen.

The plaint that runs through the book is that Facebook management “sucked up to authoritarian regimes like China’s and casually misled the public.” There are detailed examples from Indonesia, the Philippines, where Duterte declares that he is the “Facebook President,” and from Myanmar.

In Myanmar, “Facebook made deals with the local telecoms to preload phones with Facebook, and in many plans, time spent on Facebook wasn’t counted toward your minutes.” So, in Myanmar at that point, the internet was effectively monopolised by Facebook. It was difficult to keep track of the way racist mobs were being whipped up against the Rohingya. This was partly because the country did not use “Unicode,” which meant that there was no immediate translation into other languages, and partly because there was only one Burmese speaker on the Facebook team to monitor things; then there were two Burmese speakers, one of whom was apparently happy to enable a crackdown on peace-groups and allow the racist messaging to carry on. Wynn-Williams is by that point in despair, she says, and concludes that Myanmar would have been better off without Facebook.

Deals

Meta now has over 74,000 employees globally, and an annual revenue of over 164 million dollars. It revels in this data, this success. The penultimate chapter of the book has the unfortunate title “It did not have to be this way,” but as the story unravels in the preceding chapters you do, instead, have the strong feeling that, in fact, yes, it did have to be that way. Given the way that Facebook operated as a business enterprise, it had to protect itself as such, make what Trump calls “deals,” and acknowledge who needs to be humoured, lied to if necessary, and who could be bullied into agreement.

The last chapter reads like a cringy pitch for Wynn-Williams’ next job; she tells us about her good work and interest in AI, and how she would like to make a positive difference in the world. She comes across at times as well-meaning, at times as driven as the other folk at Facebook who drove her out, and at times as deluded as the rest of them. The framing of her trajectory through the company by a shark-attack that nearly killed her, told in an early chapter, and the wasp-attack after she is sacked that also nearly finished her off, told toward the end of the book, is dramatic.

The book is engagingly-written and sometimes funny, well-worth reading, with a lot of excuses for what looks like plenty of bad faith and loads of hindsight. The claim by Meta is that this is all old news, out of date, and maybe they are right, things have changed, they have cleaned up their act. Do you think so?

You need to step back from all this, from her account, to understand how Facebook is meshed into capitalism, concerned with “connection” between people only on its own commodified alienated terms, using people for its own ends. When we use Facebook, we have to bear that in mind, making the connections we want and being beware of the connections that are being made against us. An unspoken lesson of the book is that non-capitalist virtual connection between people has yet to be built; that is one of our tasks as we build connections between the oppressed in the real world.

You can also read this article at Anti-Capitalist Resistance site and comment on it there.

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Ian Parker

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August 12, 2024

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Sport and Cis-Realism

“Sport, sport, masculine sport, Equips a young man for Society, Yes, sport turns out a jolly good sort, It’s an Odd Boy who doesn’t like sport,” are Bonzo Dog lines I could have chanted to myself as I ran away from the ball on dreaded Wednesday afternoon school sports classes. I was made to have a go at boxing but took the gloves off after some little brute bashed me in the face, and I vowed never to do that again.

The nature of sport under capitalism was captured well in the subtitle of an old French comrade’s book, “Sport, a prison of measured time.” Jean-Marie Brohm not only showed us how competitive sport condenses all the worst of a society that divides us from each other while serving it back to us as entertainment, but he also tracked the ever-widening gulf between those who are raised up as sports celebrity professionals and those reduced to the level of occasionally elated spectators, small compensation for immiserated lives. There are chapters in his 1970s book on “The Olympic Games and the Imperial Accumulation of Capital” and a “Draft Appeal for the Setting up an Anti-Olympic Committee.”

Segregation

The segregation of players from audience is a segregation that is more obviously mapped onto class in some sports like tennis, and onto “race” in others; for example, in boxing. Some lucky enough to be able to fork out the fees for membership of a golf club – an environment that encloses green space that sucks up water – might claim that all they experience is gentle rivalry and some banter around the course. Yes, it is possible that a little kick-about in a game of footie can be comradely fun, but the “beautiful game,” turned ugly years ago, not only as part of the spectacle but physically herding us into the pens, different pens.

A worse case is boxing, a particularly stupid and stupefying “sport” that invites one person to knock another senseless in an enclosed space. Here segregation around the ideological but efficiently policed notion of “race” operates to identify and enclose certain categories of people, which historically have included Black and Jewish communities proudly claiming their identities in this arena of inward-directed struggle. This then gives rise, on the one hand, to, sometimes progressive assertion of energy and talent in combat, and on the other, and in wider context, these communities being all-the-more rendered into kinds of animals fighting under the gaze of a more civilised white folk audience baying for blood.

This is a place in which it does seem as if supposedly pure animal-like existence is the only escape from the human world, and as if, paradoxically, some are only human when in the boxing ring. Brute biological images staged for the audience then replace and blot out our creative capacity to act together. As Marx had it: “What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.” Our relationship with nature, including our own human nature, is then viewed in terms of separation, as alienated. Sport under capitalism requires, enacts and reinforces segregation.

Realism

This is all made to seem normal and, in a deeper even more pernicious ideological trope, “natural.” This chicken comes home to roost in the claim that sport as such is a necessary civilized way of channelling natural inborn aggressive energies into harmless contained combat. It then appears in the recent claims in the tabloid press – the very tabloid press that has poured out a stream of anti-immigrant headlines – about fascist mob attacks on asylum-seekers, that the events have nothing to do with politics, but are, as with football hooliganism, testosterone-fuelled mindless rage, masculinity out of control. At play here is the assumption that there is an underlying real biological infrastructure which can be detected and described and must then be appreciated, worked with.

This ideological assumption is at the heart of attempts either to warrant the existing social order – what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism,” in which, in the oft-repeated words of Margaret Thatcher, “there is no alternative” to the way things are now, to the way we are – or to close down alternatives around a no-less toxic version of this way of thinking in sections of the left which can be characterised as “stalinist realism.”

These twin responses, responses to the contradictions of capitalism that are more concerned with telling us what cannot be changed about human nature than with enabling us to do something different, are accompanied in the realm of sport, among other places, by “cis-realism.” The term “cis,” which refers to what is on this side, the one side, is a way of naming those who believe their gender and biological sex are on one and the same side.

As a placard displayed during the recent Manchester Trans Pride procession directed at those who privilege this way of being human put it, “Cis isn’t a slur … but the way you wear it is offensive.” So, it stands in contradistinction to that which runs across, “trans.” What is at issue here is the way that one way of describing reality that sorts humankind into two strictly defined categories that are claimed to be biological absolutes is an ideological form of realism, cis-realism.

Cis-realism

Cis-realism is the not so hidden underbelly of sport, an ideological appeal to motifs of biological difference that drums home a powerful heterosexist message that also intersects with racism. We saw the way this operates to police existing categories of gender in the shameful treatment of the Algerian Olympic welterweight boxer Imane Khelif. Khelif, born a woman, who was accused by those obsessed with a cis-realist understanding of the world of really being a man.

Into these egregious attacks was woven, not surprisingly, a quasi-biological imagery of “race.” The unwarranted speculation, in this case not backed up with any medical evidence, focused first on testosterone, as if that is a hormonal marker of masculinity, and then chromosomes (in the unsubstantiated claim that she may have had the tell-tale “male” “Y” chromosome marker instead of supposed female requisite “XX”).

There were shades here of the demonisation of South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya a decade and a half back. She had been assigned female at birth but then outed as “intersex,” a label that Semenya herself refused, preferring to identify as a woman. Humiliating “sex-testing,” and then the publicising and commentary on what she “really” was made her into one of the quintessential objects of the seemingly unavoidable regime of cis-realism in sport.

In the case of Imane Khelif, not only was Khelif’s biological sex and gender thrown into question, but her apparent leap across the taken-for-granted categories was made visible precisely by her being Black, too Black. In terms of the meanings assigned to her, it was as if her very animality was all the more evidence that her “real” biology disclosed who she (or “he” according to the likes of J K Rowling) really was. Chromosome imagery, one of the staples of a transphobe obsession with biology that runs alongside genital correctness and hormonal level norms, then came into play after Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting was accused, in a grotesque semiotic display of cis-realism, of really being a man; her opponent’s coach stood in the ring at the end of the fight with her fingers crossed, a gesture of abuse signifying the supposedly real femininity of XX.

In each of these cases, no claim was being made by these athletes for “trans” as a lived identity or mode of being that should be respected. Nevertheless, the wielding of “cis” as a normative understanding of gender and sex was used to pathologise these women who were, in the eyes of the cis-realists, not really who they claimed to be. The repetitive mis-gendering of these women cannot be addressed and solved simply by insisting that they “really” are women, for that would precisely be to fall into the cis-realist trap, a trap that then gives licence to those who want to turn on their actual hate-targets, trans people.

Categorisation

This is all, of course, par for the course in sport, for beneath the different weight categories – “welterweight” in the case of boxing, for example – lies the apparent bedrock of biological sex. The cis-realist fantasy is that this will all be sorted out by determining exactly who is a man and who is a woman, a procedure that is patently doomed from the start, and, because it is doomed, those who seem to depart from the assigned categories are themselves doomed to both sexist and racist hate-propaganda.

The presence of testosterone, for instance, is not a knockdown defining characteristic of men, but exists at different levels in different men and at different levels in different women. Those levels in the different sexes overlap, which makes “sex-testing” extremely problematic. Even assignation of sex based on the early examination of genitals is fraught with uncertainty, with some researchers suggesting that some version of “intersex” is the case for more than one in a hundred people; they are then those who will usually have to live uneasily, precariously, with the identity of cis-male or cis-female (that is, unless they claim to live across those categories as trans, in which case they face further abuse and sanctions).

Cis-realism is actually where sport under capitalism, at least, unravels itself. This kind of sport typically sorts people into other kinds of sub-divisions where they can run or fight against each other. But why these categories and not others?

Play the game

Some unrealistic suggestions: Why not class, which you might think would be a favourite go-to by some of the transphobe red-wall class essentialists, or length of training (which itself is often a function of class privilege), or a simple personality test to decide who has the will-power (or stubbornness) to fight on and who might decide to call it a day and do something more productive with their lives?

When it comes down to it, if it really is the case that winning and losing is not as important as how you play the game, you could immediately disqualify anyone who is fitter or faster than the others, for clearly they have an unfair advantage at the outset. Despite the attempts of women to break into professional sport, it is an arena of combat that is intrinsically stereotypically masculine; all of the aggressive hierarchical stuff of masculinity under capitalism is condensed and displayed in sport, sport as we know it. Commercialised and professionalised sport has become one of the places where capitalism and heteropatriarchy intersect and reinforce each other.

If you follow the logic of cis-realism you must enforce gender categories based on biological sex and thereby also endorse a survival of the fittest image of humanity that corresponds to capital logic. What we are faced with here is not an immutable biological infrastructure, but an ideological infrastructure laced into capitalism, a cis-realist transphobe one. The alternative is to go “trans,” acknowledge life across assigned categories and open the way to a more fruitful and enjoyable way of living together.

You can read and comment on this post were it was originally published here

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Ian Parker

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February 20, 2024

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Frantz Fanon: Martinican, French, Algerian, African Revolutionary

A new full account of Fanon’s short life and work

Frantz Fanon was once known as the “Lenin of Africa,” an inspiration for liberation movements on the continent and then across the world as anti-colonial struggle took centre stage. More than that, he tried to link personal and political liberation in his clinical work, to understand the psychological depths of racism and forms of resistance, and then shifted his focus to directly work for Algerian independence, expanding his analysis from North Africa to the whole continent. A key focus in his theoretical and practical work was on the role of violence under colonialism and in the process of liberation. This new book, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz, published last month (Bloomsbury, January 2024), provides a detailed and helpfully critical account of this remarkable revolutionary.

Life and impact

Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, capital of the island of Martinique, a French “department” in the Caribbean, a colony, still an integral part of France today. During the Second World War the island was under the “Vichy” regime as part of the collaboration with the Nazis, and Fanon left the island to fight fascism. He was decorated for bravery, and rewarded with a bursary after the war to study medicine and train as a psychiatrist in France.

Adam Shatz traces through the journey from Martinique, from a colonial context in which gradations of “Blackness” were used as a tool of oppression, to France where Fanon encountered direct racism first-hand, something he wrote about. Now, as a “French” radical, he worked within medical psychiatry and questioned it, working with some other radical psychiatrists, including those who sought refuge from fascism in France and Spain. A lesson he took to heart was about the interrelationship between forms of oppression, and the way that colonial power maintained its grip through divide and rule, a lesson voiced in advice by a colleague that “When you hear someone insulting the Jews, pay attention, because they’re talking about you.”

Fanon was then appointed to the psychiatric hospital in Blida, just south of Algiers, and it was here that he began to identify with the Algerian liberation struggle, directly aiding fighters from the FLN, the Front de Libération Nationale, while at the same time trying to introduce alternative forms of clinical treatment. Here he attempted to take forward the “institutional therapy” he had learned during his training in mainland France, a kind of therapy that treated human beings as social beings, always in context, in relation to others. It is here that Fanon becomes a self-identified Algerian revolutionary, and his classic, part autoethnographic study, Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952, tackles the way that racism works its way into the internal lives of the colonised and colonisers. There were signs on the beaches of Algiers and Oran that read “no dogs, no Arabs.” Algerians were seen as less than human, and they were encouraged to internalise that image, seeing themselves as brutes rather than human beings.

Violence

Fanon has now experienced fascist violence and colonial violence, and he is noticing how liberation struggle is also, of necessity, also violent, a counter-violence that not only opposes forces of oppression but also gives rise to healing personal and collective agency. The colonised human being emerges in the course of violent political struggle, from being a mere object to being a revolutionary subject. Violence is, in this way, part of a progressive political process but, as Shatz points out, it is also a symptom of a problem, part of the reproduction of colonial violence that is, in some ways, self-sabotaging. There is, Shatz points out, a tension for Fanon “which he never quite resolved, between his work as a doctor and his obligations as a militant, between his commitment to healing and his belief in violence.”

The argument about violence is made most forcefully by Fanon in a book that was immediately banned in France on publication in 1961, The Wretched of the Earth; in French Les damnés de la terre (which evokes, among other things, lines from The Internationale). There had been massacres in Algeria of hundreds of colonists (events that the French Communist Party was quick to denounce as “Hitlerian”), and then reprisals in which thousands of Algerians died. It was actually the preface by Jean-Paul Sartre that hyped up Fanon’s nuanced and contradictory exploration of violence, and made it seem as if Fanon was advocating all-out violence as a pure cure-all.

Shatz comments on the wording that Fanon used in The Wretched of the Earth: “The English translation of la violence désintoxique as ‘violence is a cleansing force’ is somewhat misleading, suggesting an almost redemptive elimination of impurities, whereas Fanon’s more clinical word choice indicates the overcoming of a state of drunkenness, the stupor induced by colonial subjugation.” For Fanon, it is in violence that the colonized, and this is a direct quote from Fanon himself, find the “key … to decipher social reality.” However you play it, with all the ambiguities, you can see how central violence is to oppression and resistance.

By now Fanon has resigned from the intolerable situation at the hospital and moved to Tunis where he is working for the FLN and develops a reputation as its chief theoretician. As an ambassador for the Algerian liberation struggle, he is in contact with African revolutionaries, and now claims that identity, as African. He writes other important studies, including on the Algerian revolution and on the African revolution, but his life is cut short by leukemia, and he dies in 1961 age 36.

Contested claims

There are some missteps in the book, in the false claim, for example, that Fanon distanced himself from the French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan because Lacan celebrated madness as a kind of freedom. That characterisation of Lacanian psychoanalysis is actually quite wrong, and the Lacanian position on the dreadful “unfreedom” of psychosis is actually very close to Fanon’s own position.

Shatz is very clear about the criminal behaviour of the French Communist Party in relation to the Algerian revolution, and you can see well why Fanon never became a Stalinist; the PCF line was that Algeria was part of France and that the FLN should do a deal. Fanon was never in the Fourth International, FI, but the Algerian liberation movement was a crucial part of the life of the FI in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with the then FI secretary Michel Pablo arrested for gun-running in support of the FLN. Shatz notes that Pablo’s FI operated an arms factory in Morocco (something other leaders of the FI were not so happy about, but which we should now acknowledge as a brave practical achievement).

Pablo wrote about Fanon as a key figure in the anti-colonial struggle; there is much thoughtful reflection by Fanon about the way that a liberation movement that is not explicitly and directly accountable, which does not carry through the socialist tasks of the revolution, risks becoming incorporated into imperialism, with the leadership becoming part of the ruling class of a neocolonial state (as did eventually happen in Algeria). Fanon’s struggle was also ours, and our comrade Daniel Bensaïd has also reflected on his importance for revolutionary strategy.

Fanon now

There is much in this book that resonates with contemporary anti-colonial struggle, including the resistance to genocide in Gaza, and the many ways which colonial institutions attempt to insist only on condemnation of the violence of those who fight back. We are also reminded of the way in which comparisons between the Nazis and other oppressive regimes, comparison that is now treated as a crime in some quarters, was common currency; Shatz notes that “Simone de Beauvoir remarked in her memoirs that French soldiers’ uniforms had the same effect on her that swastikas once did.” Shatz notes that Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabr has said of Fanon that “his prophetic insights remain a source of inspiration to Palestinians,” and the recent book Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practising Resistance in Palestine is thoroughly Fanonian.

This new biography by Adam Shatz is a really interesting, and beautifully written introduction to, and overview of, Fanon’s contribution to revolutionary politics, and there is much discussion of the link between theory and practice. It is not uncritical, pointing out, for instance, that Fanon had nothing to say about the role of Islam in the FLN political struggle, and, as far as the “clinic” aspect is concerned, it does seem as if the shadow of medical psychiatry was still a powerful influence, not to be copied; Fanon was impressed with electroshock as a “violent” treatment, as if that was also in some bizarre way liberating.

Among other things ostensibly “non-political,” but actually also infused with political meaning, we learn that Fanon liked the bebop jazz of Charlie Parker, and we are given a rich political and cultural context for the “lives of Frantz Fanon”; we also learn that he wasn’t always a hard-faced killjoy, he liked dancing when he had a chance, liked nice shirts with cuff-links and sometimes changed his tie twice a day (though he was a bit reproving when Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wanted to take him to a fancy restaurant and talk about the food). There is much to learn from in this book, and an opportunity to return to reassess why Marxist revolutionaries at the time engaged with his work, and need to engage with it now.

You can read and comment on this article where it was first published here

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Ian Parker

Posted on

December 15, 2022

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Postcard from Mauritius

Ian Parker travelling east in the Indian Ocean

Mauritius is an African country, but Hinduism is the most widely-followed religion, one of the legacies of enforced travel to the island as indentured labour – debt bondage with promise of release after the cost of travel has been paid back, usually a scam. The arrival of indentured labourers is commemorated each year on 2 November. Creole, Kreol Morisien, is most widely spoken, but signs at the airport on arrival are in English, French, Hindi and Chinese.

Arab traders knew of it and then the Portuguese and then the Dutch had their fingers all over the island before the French moved in. The Brits ran Mauritius as a plantation economy from 1810, when it took it from the French, until independence in 1968.

Mauritius is often touted as a successful capitalist economy after independence (and a counterweight to the horror stories sold to Réunion about what would happen to them if they broke from France). It is about the same size as that island to the west, actually a bit smaller with a larger population, despite what taxi drivers tell you. They insist, indignantly, that their island is much larger than Réunion.

Unemployment now runs at about 8%. A B&B host complained that Réunionese on unemployment benefit (with unemployment over there at over 40%) come to cheaper Mauritius on the 45-minute flight east to holiday here.

Race

Among many of the dominant Hindu population, a strong work ethic, tuned-in now to contemporary neoliberalism, is seen as the way out of poverty, and so racial divisions function to divide and rule, and also to often marginalise Afro-Mauritians. They are part of the ‘General Population’, which is one of the four official categories used to balance representation in parliament, the Assembly; the three specific designated groups are Hindu, Muslim and Sino-Mauritians.

Gandhi stopped in Mauritius in 1901 on his way to South Africa, and he sent an envoy back to represent Indo-Mauritians in court still battling over their indentured status. Our Hindu host in one place said her family had been here for five generations, lured here by the British with the promise of gold, but she was glad she was here; she was not Indian, she said, but Mauritian. It was then clear, as she spoke about her neighbours, that lines of heritage among different Indo-Mauritian groups, Marathi, Telugu and so on, was keenly felt.

Discussions at dinner among host and visitors included trading of stereotypes followed by a caution; that it is fine to say such things in private, but if you post anything negative about another group on social media you will be visited by the police. During a minor robbery here in the centre of the countryside one night – three youth were caught by a German tourist running off with some electrical equipment – the B&B host, Hindu, asked if the miscreants were African (they were not).

Some Afro-Mauritians turn to Rastafarianism. Dope was criminalised here though there is still widespread use, with a crackdown in 1999 leading to mass arrests and then the death in custody of a well-known local musician Kaya. Kaya, Joseph Reginald Topize, had been one of the founders of Seggae, a blend of Reggae and Sega music. One of his concerts was followed by arrests and imprisonment, and claims by police that he had suffered concussion after banging his head against jail bars during withdrawal from drugs. There were riots, including against exclusion and pathologisation of Afro youth.

We were told that there are no Jews in Mauritius, but there is a Jewish cemetery in Saint Martin. The British diverted a ship carrying refugees from Nazi Germany during the Second World War to Mauritius and Jews were then contained here, dying here or leaving as soon as they good after the war.

Sugar

There were no indigenous people here on the island prior to colonisation. Slaves were transported from Madagascar, and then augmented by import of more slaves and then indentured labour from the Indian subcontinent. Sugar-cane was developed as the main crop. Chinese labourers were also brought across, the descendants of which are now part of the ‘Sino-Mauritian’ community.

40% of the land is agricultural, with 90% of that still taken up with sugar cane plantations, but that is much less than the old colonial days, and the government is keen to move into finance in which India is a key player. Mauritius the main provider of Foreign Direct Investment, FDI, to India through the so-called ‘Mauritius Route’. India is second largest FDI provider to Mauritus, after the US (then it is the UK, Cayman Islands and Hong Kong). Most of this investment now goes into tourism. Most real estate investment, including hotel complexes, comes from France, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

The decline of the sugar industry and the interplay of different racial stereotypes, including of Chinese as shopkeepers and docile manual labourers, is evoked well in the 2014 film Lonbraz Kann. The title of the film is in Kreol Morisien. You can get an idea of how Kreol transforms the language of the colonialists to find a voice for the people if you say the title of the film and then the title in French, “A l’ombre de la canne” (or, in English, “In the Shadow of the Sugar Cane”).

Gender

There is an active local feminist movement, and also a backlash here from men who throw the phrase ‘cultural Marxism’ around (and the unspeakably reactionary British Home Secretary Suella Braverman, known for repeating this far-right phrase, is daughter of a Mauritian mother who herself was a Tory councillor and parliamentary candidate in north London). So, resistance and reaction of different kinds abounds here, ideological confusion and internalised oppression. Feminism is present in politics and culture, with some writings by feminists initially banned.

Ananda Devi’s 2014 Eve Out of Her Ruins is a case in point, and it captures something of this context for women, and the way their lives operate at the intersection with other forms of oppression. The book published originally in French, and then made into a film before it was translated into English, is set in a deprived part of the capital, Port Louis. The fictional name of the suburb is Troumaron, which will serve for Kreol and French speakers to convey that it is a shithole.

In the course of the story the four teenage characters encounter sexism, racism and poverty. There are passing references to French Johnny Hallyday, to conflicts between Hindu and Muslim youth, and to the scapegoating of Afro youth by the police. The core of the story, however, is the plight of Eve and her relationship with her lover Savita and sexual exploitation by a school-teacher. Desperation and power drive the young women, and the young men are torn between violence and solidarity.

Class

The second largest political party in the National Assembly is the Mauritian Militant Movement, MMM, which is now an affiliate the (Second) Socialist International. There is a Hindu-dominated ‘Labour Party’, also a Socialist International affiliate, and a local party representing Rodrigues island, and fighting for autonomy. The largest party is the misnamed Militant Socialist Movement, a split from the MMM, and governing in an electoral alliance with the Rodrigues Island representatives and the Muvman Liberator, another MMM split-off following a spat about MMM support for a Labour Party Prime Minister.

There is also a far-left local party, Lalit, which split from the Mauritian Militant Movement in 1981, and which defines itself as feminist as well as environmentalist and internationalist. Lalit, “struggle” in Kreol Morisien, campaigns against the presence of British and US military forces on Diego Garcia, land which is historically part of Mauritius. Ecology is also a key issue here, with the fate of the dodo, native to the island, seen as emblematic. Other species are set to go the same way.

Bats with a wing span of up to 31 inches, Flying Foxes, are endemic, but with deforestation driven from rural areas into the cities. They can be seen swooping down at dusk to eat lychees and mangos in gardens. Viewed as a pest by many people, they have been wiped out in Réunion, and are now under threat here. Macaque monkeys, introduced by the Dutch, roam wild in some parts of the island, and are then harvested and contained and exported; Mauritius is the biggest exporter of monkeys for research, the rate now is over 10,000 a year.

Lalit has not bad positions on most international questions, and activists have worked in the past with Fourth International comrades in nearby La Réunion (and I saw a copy of a Kreol translation of a book by Ernest Mandel published in Port Louis). There is also a smaller ecosocialist breakaway group called Rezistans ek Alternativ that has been in active contact with the Fourth International in the last few years. A former government minister from the MMM told me that they were still in friendly contact with Lalit and Rezistans ek Alternativ. This is a small place, about 1.3 million people in total, and in radical politics circles people know each other well.

Current Rezitans ek Alternativ mobilisations have been around the case of Bruneau Laurette, arrested for drug-dealing. There have been protests and a strong police presence against demonstrators outside the court in Moka, just south of Port Louis. This is a test case for civil liberties connected with environmental concerns, but difficult. Laurette emerged as a problematic populist leader following the Wakashio oil spill off the south coast in July 2020. He raised questions about failure to clean up after the tanker burst open on a coral reef, and about corruption. There were significant demonstrations with an ecosocialist dynamic.

Capital accumulation in Mauritius is no longer directly colonial, but the ruling class is busy investing the fruits of the labour of others overseas, with the finance sector operating effectively as a site of money-laundering. The future of an opposition movement is intimately linked to what is happening in the region, and internationally. Much of the left is caught in electoral politics, but there are repeated attempts to break out of that, and as activists do so they are linking different forms of resistance to envisage a real alternative to the form capitalism has taken here.

This is a corrected version of an article that appeared on the Anti-Capitalist Resistance site

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Postcard from La Reunion

The flag on sale in the local Chinese-run multi-mart is for La Réunion, with the number 974 displayed in the red triangle. There should be a point in the number, for this island is a French département, sending representatives to the mainland from around 900,000 inhabitants, and it is at the bottom of the list with the other overseas territories. It is not even marked with a full number; it is just the number 97.4.

Colonialism

There is a history of struggle here, against colonialism and the forms of sexism that link racism with capital accumulation, and also a vibrant radical history. Activists who built anti-apartheid movements against the South African regime, a regime that the local politicians were willing to back, are still around, some standing for the far-left in the recent elections. Support for the left is difficult to harness, however, either to elections or to popular struggle. Many local votes for Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round then went to Marine Le Pen in the run-off with Emmanuel Macron.

There are strong institutional connections to France and attempts to resist that. During the May 1968 events, travel from the mainland was temporarily stopped altogether, but many of the images of what was happening in Europe were of the inexplicable chaos there. It was and still is localised action that counts, action that addresses immediate exploitation and oppression.

Recent protests Fifty years later, in 2018, gilet jaunes protests were massive in La Réunion, bringing the island to a standstill. The movement was quickly bought off, with leaders of the movement being given jobs and housing. The movement is still alive and well, though those involved no longer refer to themselves as gilets jaunes.

Ears

When we arrive at the ‘Qj des zazalé’ old gilets jaunes encampment in Le Tampon in the ‘sud sauvage’, the wild south of the island, accompanied by a long-standing militant and local candidate in the recent elections, we are met with friendly banter that marks us as ‘zoreilles’, old whites from La France.

Why ‘zoreilles’? Possibly from ‘les oreilles’, and that may be because you have to be careful what to say in front of the whites, or it may be because the whites arriving from mainland France had red ears from the sun and stood out to the locals, or it may be that they cupped their ears while getting the incomprehensible locals to repeat what they were saying.

At the same time, whites are still very much in command, and class politics is refracted through racial domination and anti-racism. Those who travel from mainland France, the zoreilles, are given additional salaries, with the ‘correction’ adding a sizeable amount as well as tax concessions which enable them to buy houses, sometimes two or three extra houses, which can then be leased to the locals. This is settler colonialism in practice.

The ‘Qj des zazalé’ camp (General Headquarters of the Azaleas camp) was attacked by the police two weeks ago and has had to be rebuilt after the cyclone. Land nearby in a ravine that was used to grow food has been seized by the authorities. They are under pressure, but a small group keeps the place going, which includes a garden area, “guest quarters”—that is, a small hut—and a café. There are open meetings every Monday to which everyone in the local community is welcome.

These are the remains of the gilets jaunes, and the radicals involved have taken on a new autonomous movement form. Many of the old activists, those who were not bought off, got caught up in anti-vaxx conspiracy stuff during the pandemic, and there are still posters on the walls in nearby Saint Joseph for a mobilisation against the authorities wishing to impose on their right to refuse vaccination passports. The poster carries two flags, those of France and of La Réunion, a sign that this movement is now run by the far right.

Here, as on the mainland, the left has had to be careful around this because these documents pose a real threat to civil liberties. During the pandemic, there were a lot of conspiracy theories, and people didn’t know if deaths were caused by COVID or by dengue, which was a real threat.

Kids

If ‘zoreilles’ are the privileged, and the term used as an insult, if sometimes affectionately so, the ‘kafs’ are those most subject to exploitation and oppression, with ‘kaf’ a racist term that is also designed to infantilise those who are black. A child might also be referred to as a ‘kaf’.

There are local organisations that reclaim the term, one of which, ‘Association Rasine Kaf’, was set up with the help of local comrades building a section of the Fourth International in the 1970s. Comrades then hoped for the island to be another Cuba, allying with Mauritius and Madagascar. Today, anti-racist activists tend to move away from Marxism and only talk about slavery and the fight against colonialism.

There is a focus in these movements on racism and on the interiorisation of colonialism, the way that it becomes embedded in everyday relationships, and that is also a necessary response to the way that French colonialism has operated here. Slavery may have been formally abolished in 1848, but it took many years for it to be effectively put an end to.

Some local cultural practices of ‘maloya’ music, for example, were prohibited until 1981 with the election of François Mitterand. A maloya event was broken up by the police on the day of the election and took place successfully two weeks later.

Internal colonisation proceeds alongside obvious state control from Europe. There is a mural on a wall in Saint Joseph’s for Raphael Babet, for example. Babet was a deputy from La Réunion to the mainland from 1946 to 1957. One of Babet’s big ideas was to found a white-governed enclave town in the middle of nearby Madagascar, also a French colony at the time. The town was founded and named ‘Sakay’, later ‘Babetville’, with La Réunion as a local staging post for the colonial administration. “Colonialism” replicates itself inside each of the colonial possessions.

Power

The local press systematically misrepresents what is happening on the ground. The right-wing daily newspaper Le Journal d’île de La Réunion carries a scare story today over the front page and the first two inside pages about the dangers of prostitution. The centre-left Le Quotidien de la Réunion et de L’Océan Indien fills these three pages of its issue with photos and reports of the run-up to the 11 November celebrations of the end of the war, the First World War.

The local communist party was not a branch of the French Communist Party, PCF, but was Réunionaise and was a mass party that fought for independence (against the PCF) and so the shift to the right during the 1970s, formalised in 1981 with election of Mitterand (when it concluded that independence was unnecessary because it could fight inside the system) was all the more dramatic (and it finally lost all electoral influence in 2012). One result was a lingering hostility among the social movements towards political parties, a suspicion that was present in the gilets jaunes protests. Leftists were welcome, but as individuals, not as representatives of organisations.

Before Macron abolished the wealth tax, the disparity between rich and poor was more visible, with the highest proportion of high taxpayers to those living below the poverty line – now running at 40% – of any other French département. Réunion also scores the highest in whisky consumption. The island imports pretty much everything and exports very little, except some sugar cane. Lifting the wealth tax was a win-win for the super-rich here, whether they are white or not. They kept their privilege, and it was hidden from the official figures. Power is sometimes very obvious here, but the material conditions that make power possible are often hidden. As a concept, poverty is used to put current struggles in context and connect different progressive moments. Everywhere is a function of class position, and the left has a hard struggle ahead to reorganise.

This is a corrected version of an article that appeared on the ACR site

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Booker Prize Books 2022

Ian Parker has some reading recommendations from the Booker Prize for your holidays

The Booker Prize process has seen some rocky times since it began in 1969, ranging from controversies over the composition of the panel to hissy-fits by authors imagining they should have won it. The scope of the entrants has expanded over the years, and that, along with a greater sensitivity to various dimensions of oppression, has given rise to some interesting long and short lists. This year’s crop gives us some good interesting work, books that raise political questions from different contexts in an interesting way.

The prize is now supposed to be ‘international’ in scope, though still listing only books published in the English language. This year we have five books from the United States, two of which explicitly tackle racism, and one of which tries to take a long view of the history of racism in the US. There are two books from Ireland, one of which is concerned with colonisation. There are two books from further afield, one from Sri Lanka and one from Zimbabwe. There is a continental European book written by a US author, and there are three home-grown English books. So, some openings, and some restrictions.

The short list

This is my order of preference from the short list, and I’ll try to give you an idea what you are letting yourself in for without unnecessary plot spoilers, and I’ll try to be clear about what I liked and didn’t like. These may be idiosyncratic choices by the panel, of course, and you may well like the look of some of the books I was less keen on, but here goes.

Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Sevens Moons of Maali Almeida is a real book; long, well-structured, a compelling ghost-perspective on a time of many deaths in Sri Lanka. I’m not into supernatural stuff, but this works, having been written and rewritten for different audiences, now with some explanation of what the different local and international players are in Sri Lanka. It is by turns horrific and funny. At times it seems to be too balanced, throwing a plague on all parties, but it has its soul in the right place, raising questions about the role of a gay photo-journalist in times of war, and what hopes for redemption there might be for those who collude and those who resist.

Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker is a disconcerting and downright weird tale of someone, we don’t know their age or who they live with, though they seem young, or when it is set, or where they live – though we guess it is somewhere up north of England. Garner is an old hand at mystic stuff written for young adults, and I’ve avoided his work up to now. At some point characters bleed out from a comic the main character is reading, and there is a chase through mirrors out of this world and back into it again. It is cryptic but intriguing, and I really liked it, thinking about it a lot afterwards and wondering about what it was supposed to mean.

NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory is set in Zimbabwe, a surreal satire on the Mugabe regime that is configured as a cast of animals, with dogs, the ‘defenders’ as the shock troops of the state. The word ‘tholukuthi’ appears again and again scattered into the text as if at random. I found that very irritating. It means something like ‘and so we see’ or ‘you find that’, and the phrase has become a trademark of the book. The corrupt viciousness of Mugabe is captured well, and no opportunity for scorn at him or his successors is lost. We have a window into the history of anti-colonial struggle that eventually, and unsatisfyingly, in my opinion, tries to end more hopefully than Orwell’s Animal Farm, a book it deliberately alludes to more than once.

Percival Everett’s The Trees conjures up the world of benighted white hillbillies in the US, and they are made to seem all the more backward and ridiculous viewed from the perspective of some black cops brought in to solve some bizarre murders. The plot builds and the deaths accumulate. I liked this a lot, but puzzled over where it was going. This is about slavery and its aftermath, about society haunted by its past, and the failure to acknowledge and resolve racist trauma. And then, perhaps this was inevitable, there is no resolution at all. Unkindly, perhaps, I felt that the author had a great idea, and started writing and then didn’t know how to click things into place.

Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William is based in the US, musing on the nature of character and relationships, and eventually successfully draws us into the little lives it describes. It is also often annoying, too-cutely written from the perspective of someone who is barely aware of what they are tangled in, written so well that one suspects that the writer herself is as naïve as the first-person viewpoint character they inhabit. None of the characters are really likeable, and there is a quasi-reflexive aspect to the book that is also annoying, but finally it works out, with threads surprisingly tied together.

Claire Keegan’s Small Things like These is very slight, a novella. It’s not bad, but it’s too brief, set in Ireland in the aftermath of the Magdalen laundries scandal, with an afterword about the thousands of young pregnant unmarried women confined and exploited by nuns. The writing is fluid and – like her Foster which was made into a film as The Quiet Girl – it homes in on family life, in this case contrasting that with what is going on behind the convent walls. It sets the scene well, but does not pull together, leaving us rather hanging, wondering about what all this might mean for the characters and for the society that allowed this to happen.

The long list

Some of these lower down in the top thirteen are very good, and I would bump some of them up into the short list, while some of them are so-so. For the moment, let’s just take these seven that did not make it into the short list. Again, roughly in order of preference, here they are.

Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho patches together in a really neat way the queer lives of a network of women – mainly literary types and mostly very rich – who disturb given categories of gender and sexuality from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. Many of them idealise ancient Greece, and ‘Sappho’ here is a potent signifier, exciting and inspiring them to live way beyond what they are told they should be. This is fiction and history, beautifully written and exhaustively researched, with a detailed account after the end of the book telling us what was adapted from what.

Maddie Mortimer’s Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a weirdly-formatted book, and that’s something that disrupts the text – words are compressed, split, and wound round each other, and images complement the narrative. This makes it difficult to read on an e-book, and I converted it into simple text to read. The typographical image work is actually unnecessary, and that makes it feel overworked. But this debut novel is a surprisingly engaging moving story of a family ravaged in different ways by cancer told in fragments; the family fragments and we watch them fall apart.

Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study is, at times, very funny, crafted as a kind of elaborate spoof of the life of a radical psychiatrist – it’s clearly based on R D Laing, with that character appearing at other points to give some Zelig-style real-feel to the book. It rattles along through the voice of a relative of a patient out to outwit the shrink and revealing something weird about herself in the process. At some farcical moments I pictured it as a song-spattered Dennis Potter TV series. There is nicely-observed stuff about people pretending to be clients of therapy, as well as ‘untherapists’ critical of their own institution, and unwittingly getting drawn into what they think they are setting themselves against. It’s a good long joke.

Leila Mottley’s Nightcrawling is a painful journey with a young black woman in Oakland. This debut novel just about escapes cynical charges that this is poverty-porn, and it hits some predictable buttons around the contradictions of sex-work and the intersection of racism and sexism among the exploited and oppressed. It feels at moments like different kinds of sexual lifestyle are pasted in, playing to an audience. There is good stuff here clearly schooled from creative writing class, with lows and highs, moments of desperation and then heart-warming bonding, and some legal tension and police violence. Written from the heart, but formulaic.

Audrey Magee’s The Colony is set on a remote Irish island 1970s, and the intrusion of an English painter – symbolic violence – is interleaved with a sequence of sectarian killings in the North. There are some clunky explanatory facts about language and colonisation inserted through the research writing of a French visitor who, for his own complicated reasons, wants to save the language. Despite some nicely observed scenes, the real menace and violence seems always to be located on the side of the Irish, and so some kind of journalistic ‘balance’ ends up betraying whatever positive critical points that are being made.

Hernan Diaz’s Trust is structured around the conceit of ‘perspective’, with four different books in this book giving different viewpoints on the economic success of a US businessman centring on the 1929 Wall Street Crash, from which he benefits. There are more red herrings than solutions, and what is revealed in the fourth book – and that, and this is a heavy clue, is about the Wife – is not the most interesting answer to the most pressing questions that are raised and forgotten as we go through the thing. The book displaces attention from who labours to create wealth to who is creative enough to calculate and invest wisely.

Karen Joy Fowler’s Booth is a rather tiresomely padded-out family story about the life and crimes of the guy who killed Abraham Lincoln in a theatre. It is a mythic narrative of interest, maybe, to US-Americans, and I remember seeing images of John Wilkes Booth pop up in DC comics stories and puzzling as a kid then about what was going on. It is too long and, infuriatingly, much of the life and family is fabricated. You won’t learn much, except that the good guy in the story, Lincoln, was himself a dodgy character who hedged his bets on whether or not to actually end slavery, so I didn’t care so much when he meets his maker at Booth’s hands.

The top three

The books are pitched in very different ways to different readers, and perhaps it is stupid to rank them. Different styles make for real difficulty in imposing criteria. I have two criteria here that clash against each other. There needs to be a political sensitivity that makes me feel that I’m immersing myself in something of the real world and getting a different, progressive, vantage point on it; there should be critique. And there needs to be an enjoyable flow so that I feel that I am finding a way out of this world, stepping out into a quite different landscape, of the world and characters; there should be escape.

So, bearing that in mind, if I had to choose, I would select the following as the top three from these thirteen listed books. First place to Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (which beautifully and horrifically combines escape with critique), so I agree with the final Booker panel verdict. Then, second, Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho (for progressive historical critique in absorbing vignettes). Then, third, Maddie Mortimer’s Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (for taking us into some surreal places to examine our mortality). In different ways, these works of ‘fiction’ are also, as all good fiction should be, windows back on the real world.

This article appeared first on the ACR site

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September 30, 2022

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Edenfield: Mental health in crisis

Ian Parker reports on what has been revealed in the modern-day asylums

A protest bringing together around fifty people at very short notice took place outside Manchester Central Library on Thursday 29 September. This was following an undercover BBC investigation that revealed abuse inside the Edenfield Centre in north Manchester. This was widely reported in the local press and nationally. The undercover reporter was employed as a healthcare support worker, and covertly filmed patients being restrained, sworn at, humiliated and placed in seclusion.

Protest

There were banners from Unison and from the Manchester Users Network, from which Alan Hartman and Paul Reed spoke at the protest. The Tory MP Christian Wakeford (who jumped ship to join Labour after being elected) whose constituency includes Edenfield, also spoke, calling for a public inquiry.

The Manchester Central Library protest was organised by CHARM (Communities for Holistic Accessible Rights-based Mental health). CHARM was set up precisely to combat the attempts to condense mental health care in Manchester in a massive new facility in the north of the city. Park House Hospital in Crumpsall will not only imprison patients in a new unit which is cut off from the local community, but ‘treat’ patients from across Manchester.

With the push to outsourcing and competitive tendering that was ramped up by a Labour government, that also means that Park House will be competing to offer its services to other parts of the country. And so, patients will be wrenched away from their own communities and families, who will have, in many cases, to travel long distances to visit them.

Speakers from CHARM included Paul Baker, a long-standing activist in radical mental health politics, and Anandi Ramamurthy, an activist whose daughter is in one of the north Manchester institutions. There were workers from mental health services in Manchester who were wary about speaking at the protest, but were there in solidarity. They spoke privately to members of the crowd about receiving emails from Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust to employees after the story broke. Emails first referred to ‘alleged abuse’ – and this is after the video evidence was shared widely on social media – and then employees were told to refer any press inquiries to managers.

Privatisation

This is the disaster of privatisation and containment in large central units that destroys the best hopes of community care in mental health. It is part of the package of top-down unaccountable health care that leads to the kind of abuses that have occurred at Edenfield. The BBC undercover investigation shows a little of what is going on, but there needs to be a response that puts the blame not only on hard-pressed staff who are inducted into a regime of abuse that takes short-cuts, but on the kind of neoliberal austerity capitalism that sets the managerial rules that lead to this abuse. The short-cuts are made for financial reasons, and cuts to services are now at the heart of capitalism.

This is a protest that raises broader issues about the nature of this wretched economic system that makes us sick and then punishes us further when we have broken under the strain. Actively supporting the CHARM protest, and present at the Central Library were supporters of Asylum Magazine for radical mental health, a collective of activists inside and outside the mental health system that have exposed such abuses over many years. Supporters of the Red Clinic also participated before their own public meeting later that evening. This is a struggle for mental health that must, of necessity, also be anti-capitalist.

You can read and comment on this article here

Edenfield: Mental Health in Crisis

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Communists in the Clinic

Ian Parker reports on the progress of the Red Clinic and the role of communism for its workers and supporters

We all know well the toll that capitalism takes on our lives, and the physical and mental strain that exploitation and oppression involves. Distress intensifies in times of austerity, with isolation of people from each other giving new actual and virtual twists on alienation at work, and for those excluded from the workplace. Capitalism is bad for your mental health.

Whether or not everything would be hunky-dory when we have overthrown capitalism is a moot point, and anyway we cannot wait, so what should communists involved in the field of mental health do now, and how should they think about their role and aims? One answer has just been given by Dorotea Pospihalj of the Red Clinic, an avowedly internationalist collective of therapists committed to providing accessible treatment who define themselves as communist.

Free associations

This recent thought-through answer in the online paper For a Communist Clinic is conceptualised using specific theoretical resources; it is psychoanalytic, which not all radical mental health practice is nor should be, and Dorotea’s paper is aligned with the work of the old Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou. For Badiou, the ‘communist hypothesis’ is about an always open possibility that we enact through a range of events that will include the domains of politics, of course, and science, art and love, the last of which frames much clinical work whether it is psychoanalytic or not.

This does not mean that communists in the clinic attempt to indoctrinate, nor even subtly suggest that their patients become communists, but there are aspects of the ‘free association’ that is possible in the clinic that chimes with the kind of ‘free association’ that we struggle for in the field of political economy. As Dorotea Pospihalj points out, there are psychoanalysts of the right as well as of the left, and she draws on her own experiences of political activism in Slovenia – she is based in Ljubljana – to show how some bizarre political choices can be made by therapists who think they are ‘radical’.

There is a sometimes jokey recent webcast with Dorotea, who stood as a candidate for the ecosocialist Left party in recent elections in Slovenia, available on the Psy-Fi Psychology and Theory show, and another Psy-Fi episode is about similar initiatives in Brazil with Christian Dunker and myself; we can see here how important an internationalist perspective and organisation is to the Red Clinic, and to anything that pretends to be ‘communist’ in clinical work. We not only learn from each other’s quite different experiences as we talk and act in solidarity with each other, but we are able to break out of the national peculiarities and limits of our own national traditions. We need to break out of those limits in our therapeutic work and in our conceptualisation of what it is we are doing.

The politics of truth

What underscores communism in the clinic in conditions of capitalism – and who can say whether this kind of clinic will actually be necessary under communism – is a politics of truth combined with theoretical reflection. This argument, again drawing on the work of Alain Badiou, is something that is actually familiar to revolutionaries outside the clinic; we bring our analytic understanding of the nature of capitalism to bear on our politics and we know that we must speak the truth to power. We are beset by lies in this society, and our political activity is grounded in truth; speaking truth to others and speaking truth to ourselves about what we are doing.

The Red Clinic is one of the sites for taking this work forward, but not the only site. Meetings about the Red Clinic have grappled with the role of particular models of therapy and our relation with treatment that is already available on the National Health Service. The NHS is a valuable resource, and anticipates in its form – free medical support at point of treatment for all – what we would hope for under communism. It is not for nothing that rabid right-wingers hate the NHS and want to privatise it, destroy it.

While we fight to defend the NHS we also mobilise to extend what is good about those services, increase participation of service users and make the treatment something that is empowering rather than demobilising, something that embeds support in social networks instead of increasing the isolation of people who are simply doled out antidepressants because that is cheaper and quicker. Here we need to link with other radical initiatives like the Free Psychotherapy Network and the recently formed campaign for universal access to counselling and psychotherapy.

Local and global

These initiatives need to be local as well as international. In Manchester, for example, the CHARM network that was set up to challenge attempts to concentrate mental health care in a large hospital in north Manchester has also been extending its links with activists and users of services to address questions of racism. The Red Clinic has been devoting energies to the struggle against racism and apartheid, with its practitioners supporting a group of clinicians in Palestine, and hosted an online discussion of work on ‘Mental Health in Palestine: Resisting Settler Colonial Partition’.

Communism is an opening to another world beyond capitalism, something that needs to be built now, and we know well from radical mental health initiatives around the world, whether that is in England and Wales or work in indigenous communities in Amazonia, that working class self-activity needs to be intimately linked with struggles against racism and sexism and other forms of oppression. The work in Brazil reflects on the process of listening as the core of progressive work, not immediately obviously communist, nor necessarily psychoanalytic, but congruent with what it is to be a communist in political activity.

For a communist clinic

There is a long history of radical therapy that has known, in its heart, that the capitalist system must be overthrown before the crisis in mental health services can really be resolved. The reflections on communism in the clinic pick up the threads of those debates. Meantime, we need to defend what services we have and build better ones, the kind of services that are democratic and open, and that facilitate the kind of free association that enables people to fight for communism.

You can read this article and comment on it here

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Ian Parker

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June 20, 2022

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Dystopian Science Fiction: Bodies of Ideology

Ian Parker enjoyed Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem trilogy and wonders why.

Liu Cixin, a darling of the Chinese state whose books are heavily promoted and very popular, may be surprised to hear that his ‘Three Body-Problem’ trilogy, which is named after the first book but which is formally correctly known by the very indicative title ‘Remembrance of Earth’s Past’, is going to be turned into a Netflix series.

This is not going to be easy because Liu Cixin writes in the genre of ‘hard sci-fi’, that is, the kind of science fiction writing that is not so much concerned with soft social and moral problems that the Star Trek franchise tinkered with but with technological mind-blowing stuff that makes the human species look very small, very insignificant. There is, nonetheless, plenty of social and political stuff woven into the trilogy, and some potent ideological motifs at work, the kind of stuff that makes this work chime with the agenda of the state.

First thing to notice about the ‘remembrance of the past’ claim is that the first book in the trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, does not dig very far into the past at all; mainly dwelling on the brutal treatment of near relatives of key characters during the Cultural Revolution, something that is very obviously portrayed as a bad thing. An astrophysicist is beaten to death during a ‘struggle session’. Brutal and manipulative the Cultural Revolution may have been, but that, for Liu Cixin, is not the main problem with it because, as he makes clear in the next two books, a measure of brutality – and the number of deaths as we go through the trilogy is truly mind-boggling – is necessary, even valuable for technological and social advance.

Order

The main problem with the Cultural Revolution as seen in the first book is that it is chaotic and random, and here a first lesson of dystopian science fiction of this kind is spelt out in gruesome detail; order is bad but inevitable, but disorder is worst, and you need to report any instances of it to the authorities.

In fact, the ‘three-body problem’ is precisely itself about disorder, about the instability of a ‘three-body’ star system in which three solar-bodies are orbiting each other and producing extremes of heat and cold. The question that needs to be faced by humanity is how they should respond when, on a very long but ineluctable time-scale, ships seem to be coming on invasion-course from that unstable star system towards our own, towards earth. By earth here, read China, and China and Chinese protagonists are at centre stage through the three books. This rebalances, in a progressive way, the usual assumption in Sci-Fi writing that the Western world is the technological advanced centre of our planet and representatives from other cultures should merely come onto the stage as bit parts (think Chekov and Sulu).

Suspicion

The second book in the series, The Dark Forest, deepens the China-centric focus on earthly progress when under threat, with a repetitive meditation on what the consequences might be of sending a message out from this planet to other possible civilizations. The premise of the ‘dark forest’ hypothesis is that the universe, like a forest, is an irredeemably hostile place. While it is tempting to imagine that other forms of life in far-away star systems are necessarily more technologically-advanced and so more socially-advanced, and so likely to be pleased to hear from us because they look forward to visiting us and making friends with us (the Posadist position, for example), it is actually more likely that other civilizations are more brutal and will be intent on colonising us.

The lesson of the ‘dark forest’ is that you should definitely not signal your presence in the world to others, but instead keep yourself hidden; hidden and silent is the safest option. This message is replicated at different levels of the trilogy, ranging from keeping quiet during periods of social turmoil like the Cultural Revolution, to keeping quiet about what technological progress you are making in relation to the West, possibly hostile countries outside China (an historically understandable take on things), to contact with aliens. Assume they are out to destroy you, and attack first.

The trilogy unfolds through the second and third book over literally millions of years, a span of time that also marks it as ‘hard sci-fi’, and it is here that the dystopian aspect is drummed home. Reading the trilogy is like being drawn into a nightmarish march forwards that is inevitable and bloody, marching to the beat of a drum that you do not control, and harnessing yourself, adapting to technological change that, you realise somewhere along the way, will never promise utopia, will never perhaps even promise a better life.

Obedience

Hard sci-fi here is also hard life, a hardening of our stance towards others – suspect them, and be all the more suspicious the more different they are – and hardening relations of self-control, and ordered social relationships, along with adherence to authority. There is, for example, a lull in the narrative in the middle of the trilogy where there are signs that things are going soft, that things are going wrong, that the human race has lost its edge, is not on a winning streak against the alien forces. The key sign of this is a breakdown in gender relations, specifically that women become more masculine and men become effeminate, a moral-political message that will play well with the Chinese state now, and not so well with the LGBTQI+ communities who are seeing each and every space to contact each other shut down.

Nature

But, and here is the good news from Liu Cixin, the healthy natural balance between male and female reasserts in book three, Death’s End, and the onward march to the future is restored. This is not a matter of choice, and personal choice is also something treated with a great deal of suspicion in the trilogy – even almost as bad as alien invasion – but of necessity, and so we have a quasi-Confucian concern with respect for your elders and betters combined with awesome technological expertise, the triumph of technological reason over everything else. If the encounter with the universe will show us anything, the trilogy seems to be saying, it will show us what our deepest nature is as obedient well-behaved and grateful servants to a higher purpose.

Whether Netflix will balance this all out with a liberal-individualist concern with dialogue and a pretence that decisions are taken for the good of all, or whether it’ll glory in the unending subjection of human beings to a machine-like future, bewitched as they are glued to a screen that replicates in their leisure time the lives they lead while working, remains to be seen.

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June 20, 2022

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Redeeming Marcuse

Ian Parker reviews the new edition of Herbert Marcuse’s Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia: Five Lectures published by Repeater Books.

There aren’t many really revolutionary philosophers who want to change the world, not as deeply and radically as Herbert Marcuse, and for this alone he is worth reading and thinking with, even when it gets a bit heavy.

Marcuse was one of the key first generation figures in the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’, taken on by the new Institute for Social Research before the Nazis took power, but having to flee Europe and playing a leading role in intelligence gathering as part of anti-fascist activity when based in the United States, later taking up academic posts there. This is trajectory that took him from being a doctoral student in Germany before the war with Martin Heidegger – a philosopher who romanticised the past and threw his lot in with the Nazis when they took power – to being an influential teacher of Angela Davis and, for his pains, Marcuse was denied permanent university appointments.

These five essays are gathered from different times, from the mid 1950s to the late 1960s, which was when Marcuse was able to more immediately connect again with revolutionary movements as an inspirational figure in the ‘New Left’, something he was credited with naming as something qualitatively different from old-style rather morally-conservative left-talking men in suits. That, then, and here is also something to bear in mind when we read mealy-mouthed ‘critiques’ of Marcuse for being an infantile ‘Utiopian’ communist, enabled him to connect with his own early revolutionary history; he had been a member of a soldiers council during the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919. He never forgave the Social Democratic Party that sent in their paramilitary groups to quell that rebellion, during which Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered (and these groups, the ‘Freikorps’, then became shock troops in the rising Nazi movement). Social democrat inclined ‘social theorists’ then respond to that suspicion with the spiteful insinuation that Marcuse is ‘ultra left’.

When things are so bleak, when it seems as if all possibility of resistance has been crushed or, worse, absorbed and its energy turned against anyone who rebels, when everyone seems to be recruited into being an agent of their own oppression, what is to be done? Marcuse provides an analysis of the depth of the problem which never succumbs to pessimism, which always looks for any ‘crack’, any opening; for Marcuse, we live in a cultural-political-economic system that betrays the hopes of the past, covers it over, attempts to blot out attempts to change society, but we can retrieve those positive revolutionary hopes and bring them alive again.

Of a time

There is a paradox in Marcuse’s writing, something that is very clear in these five essays, and which is a source of strength and weakness (if we think dialectically about this, which we must, which is what he encourages us to do). On the one hand, these essays are of their time, and marked by it, the last two essays given as lectures in Berlin in 1967, quite short interventions which are followed by lengthy thoughtful dialogue with students and activists who challenge him and make him clarify what he is saying. It is not only the audience that frames what is going on in these essays, and in the earlier ones in the book, but the political context in which Marcuse found himself by the end of the 1960s. This is a time of rising protest against the US war in Indo-China, and solidarity with the Viet Cong is a priority. Marcuse knows this, and he sees the vanguard of that solidarity movement, and the basis for more wide-ranging revolutionary change in the student movement, a student movement that is connected with ‘third world’ revolutions.

So, one of the consequences of his assessment, which is based on that particular balance of forces in the United States, and which the Berlin students question him about, is that Marcuse does not see the working class as a revolutionary agent as such. In fact this also leads him to think that the working class in the first world capitalist countries have been neutralised, bought off; alienation has become part of the name of the game for everyday life, and here we have some of the grimmest diagnoses that Marcuse became known for in critical social theory circles. The conceptual basis for this diagnosis is spelt out in the earlier essays on technological progress and on the way that what drives us as human beings is turned against us, becoming a force of repression.

It is there we find startling, and still useful notions; that we are subject now to a peculiar kind of ‘reality principle’ in which we must produce and perform, and this ‘performance principle’ that drives and pulls us into becoming little masters of others and of ourselves, locked into ourselves, brings with it an alluring and toxic illusion of freedom. In place of historical collective struggles for freedom – those that Marcuse wants to remind us still exist as latent possibilities – there is false freedom in which we think we are releasing and expressing something genuine but find ourselves simply still ‘performing’, enjoying as we have been told we should. This is, Marcuse argues, ‘controlled liberalization’ that is still repressive. It looks and feels like we are releasing something that has been channelled, ‘sublimated’ into this ‘vicious circle of progress’ of commodity culture, but it is repressive, it is what Marcuse calls ‘repressive desublimation’.

We just need to think of the way that every counter-revolution involves not only brute violence – the kind of thing Marcuse experienced in Berlin in 1919 during the quelling of the Spartacists – but emotional numbing and the ingraining of disappointment so we come to believe change is not possible and we repeat that pessimistic message to anyone who is trying to change the world. After the French Revolution, then, there was ‘Thermidor’, the period of reaction in which the revolutionaries were crushed, and a repressive regime was sedimented, and that then becomes the model for Trotsky’s analysis of the reaction inside the Soviet Union against the Russian Revolution; the revolution betrayed is, he points out, ‘Thermidor’. And what Marcuse adds to this is an analysis of the way that failures and repression involve what he refers to as ‘psychic Thermidor’, the drumming into each individual , into the inside of each individual that they better make do with what little power they are given in this wretched repressive society.

Looking to the past

While these essays are of a time, the one side of the paradox in the book, they are also quite romantic; that is, Marcuse, rather like his old supervisor Heidegger, looks to the past as a source of hope. The risk he is willing to take is to look to the archaic biological heritage of the human being, and this is where Freud and psychoanalysis are woven into the story. The editors of the essays point out that the term that was, in Marcuse’s time, translated as ‘instinct’ should be translated as ‘drive’, and the drive is something that is more malleable, more historical. But even so, when Marcuse writes about Freud, he takes on good coin the description of what he refers to as ‘two basic drives’, of life and death. Yes, it may be true that we are driven to destroy ourselves as well as create new possible forms of relationship and society – there is something of life and something of death in what we do – but Marcuse traces this opposition to underlying forces that Freud had reified, turned into underlying interminable forces.

The third essay, for example is on the ‘obsolescence’ of Freud, but the sting in the tail, and this is where Marcuse attempts to redeem something from the pre-history of capitalism, is that while psychoanalysis seems to be speaking of things in the past that are ‘obsolescent’, actually those things are still buried, still possible, still able to be brought alive again. So, it is not the ability to labour and the working class that is agent of change, a force that is created by capitalism itself as its own gravedigger (which would be the Marxist line) but the re-finding of ‘erotic energy’; what we should celebrate, if Marcuse is right, is not work but ‘pleasure’.

There is something in this, something that Marcuse touches on in his comments about the role of ‘demonstrations’ in resistance against society, and of the way we might find ways of working with ‘humanitarian progress’ instead of ‘technological progress’; for Marcuse, ‘demonstrations’ are sites in which we demonstrate not only against what is wrong but enact an alternative. We ‘demonstrate’ that another society is possible, live it, perhaps experience it for a moment, show that there is an alternative; to declare that ‘civilization arises from pleasure’, however, risks replacing a Marxist account of the role of labour in our lives as human collective beings with a too-simplistic and reductionist Freudian account.

Redemptive reading

I suggest you read the essays in reverse order. Start with the essays 4 and 5 from 1967; they are clearer, not bogged down with Freudian jargon, and have the questions and discussion included. Then track back to essay 3, the 1963 essay which does give the clearest account in the book of what is radical about psychoanalysis. Essays 1 and 2 from 1956 are more difficult, and if you can get through those you should be better placed to make sense of the frankly too-dense ‘introduction’ to the essays which does, even so, usefully remind us that Marcuse historicises the unconscious rather than seeing its operations as eternal and universal, and spells out the stakes of Marcuse’s analysis of ‘alienated labour’ for an account of the importance of production and not merely consumption.

It was Marcuse who gave us the really useful phrase ‘second nature’ to describe how what we experience of ourselves is not given directly by our biology but always mediated, always historical. That is too much for some hard-line psychoanalysts who won’t give up on the idea that what they are describing is real bedrock unchanging biological human nature. There are moments, as I’ve noted already, where Marcuse breaks from key tenets of Marxism, but actually his claim that we should find a way of finding revolutionary change ‘within’ labour rather than ‘beyond’ labour is quite compatible with Marxism. Surely we do want to build a world in which labour is enjoyable, pleasurable, rather than being a drudge.

A first footnote to the introduction of this book is a quote from Theodor Adorno, one of the most well-known of the Frankfurt School philosophers; that the only philosophy that can be practised in the face of despair is from ‘the standpoint of redemption’. This is indeed what Marcuse did, and as close to actual political practice as he could, making use of his position as theorist to link with and energise new social movements in order to redeem the hopes of the past, to find cracks in what seemed like total control of society in the service of capital accumulation, to write for the resistance.

This was published first here on the ACR site

This is also part of the FIIMG project to put psychopolitics on the agenda for liberation movements

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Fourth International in Manchester Group

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Dystopian Science Fiction: Bodies of Ideology

Redeeming Marcuse

There aren’t many really revolutionary philosophers who want to change the world, not as deeply and radically as Herbert Marcuse, and for this alone he is worth reading and thinking with, even when it gets a bit heavy.