And, as the Wayback Machine shows, so used to be Tunesia’s ruling party, until a few days after Ben Ali had fled the country. Will the National Democratic Party be kicked out too when Mubarak fled, or will the Socialist International take its responsibility sooner this time. And which other parties led by dictators are still on the membership list? Look for yourself…
Socialism
The Worldcup as kulturkampf
You can set your clock by it: every time one of the big football tournaments, either the worldcup or the European championships comes around, there will be some normally sensible leftist/socialist having a freakout about the perfidious influence of football on the class struggle [1]. There will be sneers about bread and circuses for masses, earnest arguments about how nationalism, even football nationalism is bad, mokay, and debates in the backpages of the Socialist Review on how competitive sports are inherently incompatible with a true socialist society. It’s all somewhat embarassing, silly and I supect motivated as much from the fact that quite a few diehard lefties were the kind of bookish kid who were always the last to be picked at gym as from sincere conviction. It’s cringeworthy, but it’s as inevitable as the fact that some yankee wingnut is going to write a column about how real men only play American football and soccer is for wimps; it’s just a matter of time before somebody embarasses themselves.
I refuse to get excited about some wealthy misogynist jocks tossing a ball around in the name of patriotism and product endorsement. Mistrust of team sport as a fulcrum of social organisation comes naturally to me. I’m a proud, card-carrying member of the sensitive, wheezy, malco-ordinated phalanx of the population for whom the word “football” still evokes painful memories of organised sadism and unspecified locker-room peril.
[…]
Liberal alarm bells can’t help but start ringing when a bunch of overpaid PE teachers get together to orchestrate a month of corporate-sponsored quasi-xenophobia; however, as soon as World Cup fever rolls around, members of the otherwise uninterested bourgeois left feel obliged to muster at least a sniffle of enthusiasm, sensing that not to do so is somehow elitist.
This is a misplaced notion: football is no longer the people’s sport. Just look at the brutal contempt that the police reserve for fans, or count the number of working-class Britons who can afford to attend home matches, much less the festivities in South Africa. Then there’s the uncomfortable fact that the World Cup is only and always about men.
[…]
There is something suspect about a people’s sport that violently excludes more than half the people, and boozy, borderline misogynist pseudo-nationalism is the last thing Britain needs to help foster a badly-needed sense of community. George Orwell observed in 1941 that “in England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small minorities . . . The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious.”
[…]
Meanwhile, the left still has no coherent response to Britain’s bricolage of troubles. The problem with football as commodified nationalism is that it leaves the left wing entirely undefended.
The tacky, tribalistic, red-and-white bandage of cheesy national sentiment is already stifling the healing power of political expediency, and as the people gear up to root for EnglandTM, the left’s best chance to re-organise and re-energise is deflating like a ruptured football, smashed against a wall by idiot children.
All the usual gripes are dragged in: “more serious things to worry about”; “pseudo-nationalism”; “violently excludes excludes more than half the people”; “overpaid PE teachers”; the obligatory Orwell reference [2] — it’s the Worldcup as Kulturkampf, with football no longer a sport or entertainment, but the embodiment of everything reactionary Penny can think of. It’s no different from what the American culture warriors that Roy Edroso writes about do everyday: project their own political feelings on activities that actually cannot be captured in these terms, as they exclude everything worhtwhile from it. Football in this way becomes just another thing to be scored for political correctness, rather than something to be enjoyed on its own terms.
And of course it’s possible to criticise football and the Worldcup, to like the sport but hate the way it has been captured by capitalism as just one more thing to sell to the masses or promote their worthless unnecessary shit. This is hardly unique to football and is in fact inevitable in a capitalist society: everything is mobilised to serve the interest of capitalists, unless actively resisted. It’s the sporty equivalent of moaning how alternative music has sold out, man. To be able to criticise football you have to engage it, be genuinely interested in it first, not just make lazy remarks about “wealthy misogynist jocks”. Football (and sport in general) is one of the few ways in which working class people can still become rich in a society were the odds are stacked against them. Moreover, if it’s not the workers reaping the benefits of their labour, who does Penny think should? They’re after all the people without whom a football club can’t function; if they don’t get those salaries the money would disappear in the owners’ wallets.
So yeah, Jamie’s right when he says “the first paragraph’s bad enough, but the last paragraph’s just surreal all the way through”. An awful, awful article, ill-thought out, dumb and seemingly written out of spite and a desire to show how much better Laurie Penny is than you for not following the Worldcup.
[1] There will also inevitably be the opposite and equally embarrasing phenomenom, the more prolier-than-thou opinion piece by a middleaged middleclass git in touch with his inner worker haragueing “intellectuals” for not embracing some of the more embarassing aspects of football; for examples see Socialist Unity on the English flag.
[2] And what was it that George Orwell said about free loving, sandal wearing and muesli eating invading the left? Seems to fit somehow…
Time For All Good Socialists To Come To The Aid of the Party
Now that the neoliberal Cleggameron melty waxy thing is in power – whether it’s for 5 years or 5 minutes – a strong principled opposition is required, and we’ll hardly get that from the Labour party as currently constituted.
I posted this after Labour’s disastrous results in the 2008 local elections and I think my suggestion – that socialists take over Labour from the ground up – still holds true.
Go Cry Emo Party
May 3rd, 2008Is there any way for Labour to regain any shred of credibility as a working class party, after the complete and utter fuckup they’ve made of things? Because if not, Labour is a dead party.
Well, possibly. First, if socialists rejoin the party en masse and use their heft to stack constituency and regional committees – a return to entryism, but in the open. Then if they get rid of Brown and an entire discredited generation of leadership, elect a new, visibly English (as opposed to Scots) and working class populist leader,
My money is still on Alan Johnson as leader. Johnson’s man-in-the-street qualities will serve Labour better in the media, a foil to the plummy Establishment Etonians who seem destined to have power (as so much else) dropped in their laps as an unearned benefit of the electorate’s reflexive disgust with the current government. The Tories have little in the way of actual policies – they are as frozen in the headlights of current world conditions as are all the other parties, and that they’ve done so well so far has been because of a mixture of expert media management and New Labour’s own exhausted disarray.
Politics in the next two years, if economic forecasts are accurate, is likely to become ever more class-based as those that have seek to hang on to what they’ve got and the less well-off, taxed beyond endurance, become more and more angry at the rich and those who enable them.
If the Labour party is to survive the left will have to rejoin the party en masse and force a generational putsch of Blairite/ Brownites. Co-opt the party to rescue the brand, in marketing terms; what other left organisation has the same brand presence? Why try to launch an alternative to Labour when the party is ripe for the plucking? There is a crying need for a party that’ll fight class war and which has an actual working class person leading it, rather than the closeted public schoolboys, incompetent Scots party droids, failed suburban solicitors and legacy Labour pubescents we’ve been subjected to so far.
But Emo Labour hasn’t got the gumption for root and branch reform to judge from the lame reaction by Brown and other Labour types on the news this morning. The only chance that Labour just might survive as an electoral force is if the real left get off their self-involved arses and take over a party that’s weak and ripe for the plucking, purge the Blairites and Brownites and force MPs to push through electoral reform pronto.
Hey, it could happen. I’m not holding my breath though. When push comes to shove most leftists would much rather wring their hands and talk theory on blogs than actually get out and do anything. But if Labour is about to be unelectable for yet another generation, the least the actual left can do is try and make it an opposition to reckon with.
Alan Johnson is saying he will not stand as party leader and that his money’s on David Milliband. Don’t lose me a fiver, Alan – and more to the point, if you enable Pitt the very much younger to lead the party, it’s absolutely positively no longer a party of the left and deserves to stay in the political wilderness for ever.
First Muslim women elected to British parliament
London : Shabana Mahmood and Yasmin Qureshi have become the first Muslim women to be elected to the British parliament after successfully defending Labour seats.
Mahmood successfully increased the majority of former International Development Secretary Clare Short, who has retired from parliament, from under 7,000 votes to more than 10,000 in Birmingham Ladywood in central England.
The Oxford University-educated barrister saw off challenges from two other Muslim candidate, Ayoub Khan representing the Liberal Democrats and Nusrat Ghani, who was standing for the Tories.
I see some things never change.
The announcement of her success came as Qureshi, who is also a lawyer, won by a reduced majority of more than 8,600 in the Bolton South East constituency in north-west England.
Not another bloody lawyer – like they didn’t cause enough damage already.
Respect Party leader Salma Yaqoob is seen as having an outside chance of capturing Birmingham Hall Green, which has boundary changes with the adjacent Sparkbrook and Small Heath, where she came second at the last elections with 27.5% of the vote.
Salma Yaqoob didn’t win but came second:
Despite being written off by the media I came second, polling over 12,000 votes. It is a fantastic achievement and testimony to a desire for a political alternative to the parties of bombing and big business. It is clear that many people’s fear of a Tory government boosted the Labour vote, puncturing the Lib Dem bubble but also squeezing my vote as well.
Not a win, but a good result nonetheless. And if any proposed LibDem/A.N.Other coalition falls apart, she can stand again.
Smarter than the average Trot
From Darren, who writes:
Do you know your Heaton Lee from your Ralph Lee? Ted Grant’s real name? The first bullshit myth Gerry Healy spun about himself? CLR James’s batting average for the Old Fractionians Second XI? The name of the De Leonist organisation in Scotland which turned towards Trotskyism in the thirties? Who debated for the Bolshevik Leninists’ against the SPGB’s Adolph Kohn at the AEU Hall in Doughty Street in London in 1936?
Well, the answers to all of the above questions will not be found in the following clip from Mastermind, but what does follow is Paul Moorhouse answering questions on his specialist subject,”British Trotskyism Until 1949′. (What’s the odds that all the questions were cribbed from Bornstein and Richardson’s two-volume history of British Trotskyism?)
Moorhouse also explained why he was a Trotskyite: