Further confirmation that the supposed gap between the great mass of lawfully protesting DecentOrdinaryFolk and the StudentRadicals of UK Uncut is not as great as certain career opportunists might want us to think, here’s a letter of support for UK Uncut signed by various union and NGO bigwigs:
UK Uncut have played a significant part in changing the terms of debate around economic policy in the UK and have been praised by politicians and the media for doing so.
Indeed UK Uncut played a key role in ensuring that more people were at the march on Saturday than otherwise would have been. At all times they acted in a way which complemented and supported the TUC march.
However, in taking the type of peaceful action which UK Uncut routinely undertake on Saturday, targeting Fortnum and Mason on this occasion, they were treated in a political and deceptive manner by the police which sends an ominous message about the right to protest.
It would appear activists were misled by the police about not being arrested when asked to leave the Fortnum and Mason building, after which they were held for a significant length of time, their clothing was confiscated and they have been denied the right to protest in the near future.
This situation has now been seized on by the media and politicians to further threaten the right to protest. UK Uncut activists have been blamed for damage they did not cause and this story has become a substitute for discussion of the real issues raised by UK Uncut and the TUC march in general.
You could set your alarm by it, it’s so predicable: that moment in every large scale protest movement where the opportunists start to concern troll their more radical allies, usually echoing rightwing propaganda when doing so. With the 2001-2003 protests against the War on Afghanistan and the War on Iraq, it was ANSWER, a smallish antiwar organisation that had taken the lead in organising protests when most liberals were still wringing their hands on whether or not they could trust Bush to run their war, that suddenly was the bogeyman when more respectable organisations and people finally jointed the antiwar movement. It supposedly had ties to groups that supposedly had ties to groups that supposedly had ties to terrorists and there were some *gasp* communists amongst its members and of course the people attacking ANSWER were not McCarthyites, but surely we should not let such a controversial group lead our antiwar protests, think of what it would look like to Middle America… The result was a divided and weakened American antiwar movement that found it that much harder to oppose these wars, but at least various centrists and liberals had shown how serious they were.
In the fight against the ConDem cuts we’ve now reached the point where both the Labour Party and the TUC are on board and helping to organise mass demonstrations like the March 26 demos in London, which had some 500,000 people marching, as well as saw more radical groups repeating the same tactics that had been used in earlier protests, including the early student protest: attacking and occupying shops owned by tax cheats and other symbols of the economic order that had fucked up Britain and made the cuts “necessary”.
With Labour and the TUC now directly in the picture, it was therefore inevitable that the professional pearl clutchers would start to doubledown on condemning these “childish vandals” and Oxbridge student activists (an old favourite) and accusing them of trying to hijack the movement, contrasting them to the thousands of real working people trying to have a decent, peaceful, lawful protest and who disapproved mightely of these antics. None did so more pompously than Anthony Painter, who ended his sermon like this:
The group’s retail outlet of protest choice is TopShop. Instant gratification consumerism has a mirror image in instant gratification politics. The dopamine rush of credit card financed prêt-a-porter fashion finds its corollary in the jejune fantasies of the retail activist chic. Meanwhile, those who are really hit hard continue to suffer.
I hope the TUC continues marching. I hope it gives voice to the voiceless in every village, town, and city in the land. UK Uncut owes a lot of apologies. Without trading Martin Luther King quotes – a glib game as we have seen – better instead to respect and understand his legacy. We can overcome. But only if we are wise. A small minority were not only unwise on Saturday. They were downright dumb.
(Oddly enough this appeal to end senseless violence and concentrate on lawful ways of protest does nothing so much as make me want to punch his smug, fat face in — childish, I know.)
Thing is, as anybody not gripped by tabloid hysteria knows, this supposed divide between ordinary folk decently protesting and evil anarchists just does not exist. Take the eighties squatters riots in Amsterdam for example, huge violent affairs in which the city centre was the battlefield between hardcore anarchists and riot police, whole streets ripped up to throw at the police etc etc, yet support for the squatters movement was never greater. That’s because quite a few ordinary, non-political people could actually see for themselves that the squatters had a point, that it was a scandal that private landlords let buildings rot away when so many people could not find housing at all.
The same goes for UKUncut and its occupation of Fortnum: for all the tabloid hysteria, plenty of people have no problem seeing the same rich bastard that caused the crisis that might cost them their own jobs suffer a bit. You can’t split the uncut protestors into two groups of supposed vandals ruining it for everybody and decent, hardworking ordinary people just wanting to have a meaningful protest. Criticising a particular kind of protest is of course legitimate, but demonising them and the people who undertook them will only serve your opponents cause. What somebody like Painter does is helping to divide the anticuts movement, which doesn’t help anybody but the ConDems. If you worry more about policing what those on your side are doing than what you can do to put the pressure on the real enemy, you are the enemy.
The working class, the colonized, the oppressed, the alienated and the poor don’t need theories conjured up in academic discussions, in the coffee houses which line the well paved streets of upper class neighborhoods. They don’t need special vocabularies and essays on superstructure, intersectionality and sociocultural meta-meta critique.
If there’s any socialist cliche that needs abandoning it’s the supposed contradiction between the educated ivory tower intellectual and the oppressed working classes. It’s the leftwing version of the “salt of the earth, white working class man telling it like it is”: only evoked to push through the writer’s own prejudices. Crow wants to have his cake and eat it too, by both putting himself above the “The working class, the colonized, the oppressed, the alienated and the poor” and telling us that he knows what they want.
This sort of rhetorical trick presupposes both that intellectuals cannot be part of the working classes and that the working classes cannot do theory, cannot be intellectuals themselves. This sort of distinction might have made some sense in the nineteenth century, but in today’s world most of us “intellectuals” are just as much wage slaves as your average factory workers are.
Jack Crow very much has a point that reifying dead, white Marxists is counterproductive when it comes to understanding why the Egyptian revolution is happening now, that even Marx himself can be wrong or outdated and that his works at best hands us a tool to help understand the world, not a prefabricated solution. A pity he falls into the same outdated cliches himself at the end of his post.
As Roy Edrose has shown time and again, to analyse and judge any artwork soley on its political merits is a fool’s game, as he dissects yet another hapless rightwing culture warrior failing to understand why the latest Hollywood blockbuster is not best viewed as a potential liberal propaganda vehicle. You find such naive appraisals of art on the left as well, but its heyday has long passed and most leftist culture critics are more subtle than that, able to both see the political dimension in art and still appreciate it on artistic merits as well.
People call them far-right wing, and you can see where this impression comes from. With the extreme costumes and pyrotechnics, their concerts do have moments that look like some kind of post-modern Nuremberg rally. Till Lindemann’s bunker-busting voice sounds menacing and his long trilled r’s are reminiscent of Hitler.
So one critic called their work “music to invade Poland to”, and the New York Times thought Lindemann exuded such macho aggression that “it seemed he could have reached into the crowd, snatched up a fan, and bitten off his head”. Rammstein once got a lot of flak for featuring Leni Riefenstahl propaganda clips, and neo-Nazis have used their material – without permission. But they responded to accusations of being right wing or neo-Nazi with a 2001 number called Links (Left) 2,3,4 which declared:
Sie wollen mein Herz am rechten Fleck
Doch seh ich dann nach unten weg
Da schlägt es links.
Links!
They want my heartbeat on the right
But whenever I look down
It’s beating on the left.
Left!
Does that settle the question? No it doesn’t, as we’ll see. Neither can you settle it by reading all their lyrics. Firstly the English translations are seriously unreliable (I’ve done my own). But secondly, that’s nobody’s fault, because even German speakers will wrestle with the deliberate ambiguity of just about everything these guys write.
A glimmering of understanding in that last paragraph, but unfortunately O’Lincoln spents the rest of the article just doing that which he himself just said is pointless: analysing Rammstein’s lyrics to see if any clues to their political orientation can be found there. He concludes:
To be on the left means a responsibility to make a clear statement on the issues you raise. This Rammstein often fail to do.
Which is about the worst kind of pronouncement you can make about art, to call for an end to all ambiguity and to want rigidly defined areas of doubt.
Propaganda needs clear, simple statements. Art doesn’t. What Rammstein is doing with their music is much more complex by that and any attempt to find an explicit political message in it, whether fascist or socialist, is doomed to failure, as that’s not what they are interested in. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t anything interesting to be found in looking at Rammstein in a political context, but it does mean more than just a cursory scan of their song texts and actually analysing them, contextualising them and engaging with them. Not just showing that the lyrics in Wollt Ihr Das Bett in Flammen Sehen are misogynistic, not just explaining how they are, but why they are, how the song fits in with the rest of their work.
But that’s much harder than what Tom O’Lincoln did.
Just put a post up at Prog Gold, where I try to explain what I think is now happening in Tunesia in that great blogging tradition of instant expertise on subjects learnt about in five minutes of cribbing from smarter people. You may want to go over there and see if I make any sense.
Or you could read Lenny’s last, threeposts and get his, much more self assured, analysis of the situation,as he’s actually quite good at this sort of thing. Mind, there’s a thin line between what Lenny does and the sort of communique put up on the websites of every obscure Trotskyite three man band revolutionary tendency, explaining Tunesia in their own, slightly warped Marxist theory and why only their interpretation of what $INSERT_DEAD_SOCIALIST said about The Revolution can provide a full understanding of the revolt in Tunesia and why this is the True Start of the WorldWide Revolution, or just a Intra-Capitalist Struggle, though not why they never paid attention to the country before.
Because for the most part of course none of us in the English language, political/socialist blogosphere did, but we do now do our level best to become instant experts on it. Just as we did with Honduras last year, or Georgia before that. Nothing wrong with that, but there is a tendency to fit such happenings in whichever schema we’re pushing on our blogs, especially on the more hardcore socialist blogs, without much regards for what’s happening on the ground.
On the whole Terry Eagleton’s opinion piece on football is quite sensible, sketching out how the beautiful game functions in our capitalist societies. It stumbles at the end though, as he slips in the necessity of abolishing it if we want to be “serious about political change”:
If the Cameron government is bad news for those seeking radical change, the World Cup is even worse. It reminds us of what is still likely to hold back such change long after the coalition is dead. If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football. No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. And in the tussle between them, football is several light years ahead.
[...]
With football, by contrast, there can be outbreaks of angry populism, as supporters revolt against the corporate fat cats who muscle in on their clubs; but for the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.
Football serves as a safety valve, as something that gives meaning and a common purpose to the lives of countless people in a society where so many other communal ties have been deliberately broken. In that sense Eagleton is correct to see it as something that helps prop up capitalism, a modern variant of Rome’s panem et circenses. But he’s wrong to therefore assuime that football needs to disappear before a revolution is possible. That’s just confusing a symptom for the disease. In our hypercapitalist world anything and everything is co-opted and used by capitalism for its own ends. It’s therefore easy to, as Eagleton does here, confuse the trees for the forest. The problem isn’t that football has been co-opted, but that there is a capitalist system to do so.
Which doesn’t mean that we should just accept capitalism’s influence on football (or other sports), but that if we want to fight this influence, we have to do so because of the love for the game itself, not out of some abstract desire for a world revolution. Because that trick never works.
