Socialism

Your Happening World (1)

Meta, Socialism
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A semi-regular roundup of interesting blogposts and other ephemera.

hundreds of empty ships lay in wait for the coast of Singapore

Owen Hatherley is annoyed by the view of “Nazism essentially as a continuation of German modernism” and the casual slurs against Kraftwerk and other Krautrock bands with an interest in futurism as cryptonazist.

Kpunk’s follow-up.

The ghost fleet of the recession off the coast of Singapore, though it can also been seen closer to home, near Rotterdam. Hundreds of empty ships waiting for better time and higher freight tariffs.

The A-Z of socialism.



Via Louis Proyect comes the 1973 film “Distant Thunder” by Satyajit Ray, about the effects of the 1943 Bengali famine on one village caught in it:

It is the work of a director who has learned the value of narrative economy to such an extent that “Distant Thunder,” which is set against the backdrop of the “manmade” famine that wiped out 5 million people in 1943, has the simplicity of a fable.

Though its field of vision is narrow, more or less confined to the social awakening of a young village Brahmin and his pretty, naive wife, the sweep of the film is so vast that, at the end, you feel as if you’d witnessed the events from a satellite. You’ve somehow been able to see simultaneously the curvature of the earth and the insects on the blades of field grass.

The Bengal famine is one of the dirty little secrets of World War II, as millions of people starved yet part of their harvests were used to feed British soldiers.

Historic left turn in German state elections

Socialism
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While the coverage in the English version of Der Spiegel is all about how badly the CDU did in the state elections held today in Thüringen, Saarland and Sachen, reading the German language shows that the big winner of the election was Die Linke, the post-communist East German communist party.


Election results in Thuringen, Sachsen and Saarland

Die Linke may have looked as just a rebranding campaign by the old East German ruling party, but to everybody’s surprice seems to have genuinely reinvented itself as a proper socialist, populist party and was helped a lot in this by the defection of Oskar Lafontaine from the SPD, the social democrats. That gave it a respectability in the west of Germany it had lacked before when it was still the PDS, the Party of Democratic Socialism. Then it was still seen as a party full of unrepentant Stalinists only popular in the East under those still suffering from ostalgie, the yearning for the old securities of the DDR. Even before the official rebranding of 2007 the party had shown it could appeal to western voters as well, when still in alliance with LaFontaine’s then party, the WASG, during the 2005 elections it at one point was predicted to become the third largest faction in the Bundestag.

But today’s result is much more significant. That the party did well in Thüringen and Sachsen was expected: both are in east Germany. But that it did well in Saarland as well, well enough to be able to form a coalition state government with the SPD and the Greens, is impressive. True, Saarland is where Lafontaine got his start in politics, serving as its minister-president for 13 years from 1985-1998, but coming from nowhere to gaining 11 seats is a sign that German voters are dissatisfied with the traditional parties and looking for more radical solutions. As everywhere else, the economic recession is paid for by the poor to bail out the rich, hence the appeal of a party that’s unashamedly socialist and not afraid to blame the rich, to blame capitalism for its crimes.

How to win people over for socialism

Socialism
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In the Irish Left Review, ejh sums up the state of inter-socialist debate in the British blogosphere:

Welcome the new audience for socialism and always remember what they find of interest. What they find of interest is minutae, because they are interested in political clarification and to that end the smallest details are important. Do not neglect the political ferment inside Skegness SWP, a council byelection in Oxford or what was on the front of Socialist Worker in 1969. This should fascinate a younger audience who missed the discussion the first time around (or the first two hundred). Nothing can do more to encourage new people to join the left than to see far leftists screaming at one another: they will surely understand that we need to achieve political clarification before we can really achieve anything. And political clarification, like tomorrow, never comes.

Via Jamie (where else?)

SWP to left: we need to work together

fascists, Socialism
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In this crisis and with the BNP victorious the left must unite says the SWP:

An open letter to the left from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)

Labour’s vote collapsed to a historic low in last week’s elections as the right made gains. The Tories under David Cameron are now set to win the next general election.

The British National Party (BNP) secured two seats in the European parliament. Never before have fascists achieved such a success in Britain.

The result has sent a shockwave across the labour and anti-fascist movements, and the left.

The meltdown of the Labour vote and the civil war engulfing the party poses a question – where do we go from here?

The fascists pose a threat to working class organisations, black, Asian and other residents of this country – who BNP führer Nick Griffin dubs “alien” – our civil liberties and much else.

History teaches us that fascism can be fought and stopped, but only if we unite to resist it.

The SWP firmly believes that the first priority is to build even greater unity and resistance to the fascists over the coming months and years.

The BNP believes it has created the momentum for it to achieve a breakthrough. We have to break its momentum.

The success of the anti-Nazi festival in Stoke and the numbers of people who joined in anti-fascist campaigning shows the basis is there for a powerful movement against the Nazis.

The Nazis’ success will encourage those within the BNP urging a “return to the streets”.

This would mean marches targeting multiracial areas and increased racist attacks. We need to be ready to mobilise to stop that occurring.

Griffin predicted a “perfect storm” would secure the BNP’s success. The first part of that storm he identified was the impact of the recession.

The BNP’s policies of scapegoating migrants, black and Asian people will divide working people and make it easier to drive through sackings, and attacks on services and pensions.

Unity is not a luxury. It is a necessity. If we do not stand together we will pay the price for a crisis we did not cause.

The second lesson from the European elections is that we need a united fightback to save jobs and services.

If Cameron is elected he will attempt to drive through policies of austerity at the expense of the vast majority of the British people.

But the Tories’ vote fell last week and they are nervous about pushing through attacks.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne told business leaders, “After three months in power we will be the most unpopular government since the war.”

We need to prepare for battle.

But there is a third and vital issue facing the left and the wider working class. The crisis that has engulfed Westminster benefited the BNP.

The revelations of corruption, which cabinet members were involved in, were too much for many Labour voters, who could not bring themselves to vote for the party.

One answer to the problem is to say that we should swallow everything New Labour has done and back it to keep David Cameron, and the BNP, out.

Yet it would take a miracle for Gordon Brown to be elected back into Downing Street.

The danger is that by simply clinging on we would be pulled down with the wreckage of New Labour.

Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the PCS civil service workers’ union, has asked how, come the general election, can we ask working people to cast a ballot for ministers like Pat McFadden.

McFadden is pushing through the privatisation of the post office.

Serwotka proposes that trade unions should stand candidates.

Those who campaigned against the BNP in the elections know that when they said to people, “Don’t vote Nazi” they were often then asked who people should vote for.

The fact that there is no single, united left alternative to Labour means there was no clear answer available.

The European election results demonstrate that the left of Labour vote was small, fragmented and dispersed.

The Greens did not make significant gains either. The mass of Labour voters simply did not vote. We cannot afford a repeat of that.

The SWP is all too aware of the differences and difficulties involved in constructing such an alternative.

We do not believe we have all the answers or a perfect prescription for a left wing alternative.

But we do believe we have to urgently start a debate and begin planning to come together to offer such an alternative at the next election, with the awareness that Gordon Brown might not survive his full term.

One simple step would be to convene a conference of all those committed to presenting candidates representing working class interests at the next election.

The SWP is prepared to help initiate such a gathering and to commit its forces to such a project.

We look forward to your response.

But with the examples of the Respect party and Socialist Alliance fresh in their memory, will the rest of the socialist left trust the SWP not sabotage any new regrouping again? Deservedly or not the party does have a reputation of using coalitions only for their own ends, ending them when they no longer seem to gain from them or they might lose control of it. The party needs to show that they’re serious about this open letter before anybody else will want to work with them on anything but a case by case basis.

In defence of Andy Newman

Socialism, UK politics
Published on 1 Comment on In defence of Andy Newman

I’ve noticed before that Andy Newman’s heart was in the right place, but that his political instincts every now and again are awful, which must be why he has been trying to defend the indefensible, viz 6,000 pound cleaning bill Gordon Brown paid his brother, by imagining some “alternative realities that the Tory press could have been be outraged about”.

It didn’t go down well.

People who normally couldn’t agree on the colour of the sky were for one glorious moment united in their desire to tell Andy how wrong he was. One hundred and twentyfive comments later and none of them went “hang on, I think he might have a point”… When so many people of so many different political backgrounds say you’re wrong, even those with the firmest of opinions might start to wonder whether their critics might have a point.

But not Andy.

A followup post explained his reasoning more clearly: “there are some genuinely scandalous aspects to how the expenses system has been milked; but there is also a large part of media driven moral panic. Is anyone really that surprised that the most powerful political figure in Britain gets his house cleaned at public expense? Paying a cleaner is hardly “having your snout in the trough”. Spare me the moral outrage.” We should “make no mistake, people who are being whipped up to see all politicians as on the make will be cynical that any political change is possible, and retreat away from political engagement.”

And suddenly I understood why Andy is trying to defend the indefensible and why Dave Osler is warning about “the danger of depolitisation”. It’s fear. Fear of populism. As John Emerson has argued in an American context, there’s a deep and innate mistrust on the left of the political instincts of the people when left to their own devices, a feeling that anything other than appealing to them through well reasoned appeals to the intellect is dangerous. In America this is ingrained through collective memories of the Ku Klux Klan, Nixon voting hardhats and the like while in a British context populism is largely associated with Daily Mail campaigns against paedos, asylum seekers and benefit cheats as well as the BNP seduction of the “white working class”.

Which is why whenever a political issue suddenly inflames large sections of “the public” the first instinct of a lot of socialists is not to use it and encourage it, but to dampen it down. We’ve seen it with the mass protests against the War on Iraq which had a lot of the liberal left worrying about whether our leaders would be swayed by the uninformed mob. We’ve seen it with the Respect experiment and the handwringing about whether decent socialists should have anything to do with “communal policies”, we’ve seen it with the endless debates about whether the strike at the Lindsey oil refinery was a “racist strike”.

Too many socialists, like Dave and Andy, equate populist anger with rightwing anger and therefore are uncomfortable with it. Which is why they want to dampen rather than strengthen this anger. You would expect socialists, who after all strive to completely destroy the current capitalist system and replace it with our own, to be pleased when the apathy of too many voters, alienated from a “political system that grants workable majorities to governments actively endorsed by just one in five of the people they govern” as Dave has it, finally turns to anger even if that anger is not quite ideologically sound. But instead we get the demeaning spectacle of Andy Newman an dDave Osler actually trying to defend this corruption. All because they fear the very people they supposedly fight for.

We socialists have a choice when confronted with justified public anger like this. We can either engage it, like our predecessors did or dismiss it because it doesn’t fit our ideological prejudices. If we chose the latter we’ll never again be more than a boutique movement.