So this weekend saw the sorry spectacle of two separate Respect conferences, each proclaiming to be the One True Respect, one held by the SWP and allies, one by George Galloway and pals.
According to Lenny the SWP-led Respect conference was a great succes and went much better than that of the other bunch, who are splitters and nogoodniks anyway.
While according to Andy, the Galloway-led Respect conference was a great succes and went much better than that of the other bunch, who are splitters and nogoodniks anyway.
I exaggerate, but not much. As with any divorce, both parties have done their best to get their view of events accepted as the truth, though as with most divorces the blame can be parcelled out to both. If you want to examine the whole sordid backstory, peruse the archives at Lenin’s Tomb and Socialist Unity.
It doesn’t really matter who shoved who and who said what. The root cause of the split is simpler than that: a disagreement about the direction Respect should develop in. Should Respect remain a largely electorial coalition, or should it develop into a genuine party? It’s a symptom of the immaturity of the English socialist left that this question could not be answered without an acrinomious split.
After all, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown managed to work together for over a decade despite loathing each other, to the detriment of the country. So why can’t the left do the same to repair the damage? It’s probably too late to undo the split in Respect, but I hope the two succesor organisations will at least be able to work alongside each other.
Peronist President-elect of Argentina Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner‘s election might be said to presage the almost inevitable (she has Murdoch money) anointment of Hillary Clinton to succeed her husband in office, in what seems to be becoming rather a trend amongst a certain class of well-off and well-connected women. Mind you, there’s not a lot of sisterhood on display despite the superficial similarities; Kirchner is not happy to be compared to Clinton:
“Hillary (Rodham Clinton) was able to position herself nationally because her husband was president. She didn’t have a political career beforehand and that isn’t my case,” Fernández de Kirchner said in an interview with CNN en Español, referring to her 30-year career in Argentine politics.
That doesn’t bode well for future US/Argentine relations, does it?
But less flippantly, how did Argentina get to the political point where Peronism is once again in fashion? What happened to the people’s movements born out of the 2001 economic collapse? Bring yourself up to basic speed on the politics of the greater American continent and the contnuing malign influence of US foreign policy with John Pilger’s documentary, The War On Democracy. It’s now up on YouTube in ten parts here: if you have an acccount, load them all into ‘playlist’ and play back to back. Here’s part one to start you off:
Award-winning documentary maker John Pilger suggests that, far from bringing democracy to the world as it claims, the US is doing its best to stifle its progress. Talking exclusively to American government officials, including agents who reveal for the first time on film how the CIA ran its war in Latin America in the 80s, Pilger argues that true popular democracy is more likely to be found among the poorest in Latin America, whose movements are often
ignored in the West.
She may be female but Kirchner is no Michelle Bachelet. I’ll have no truck with the brand of feminsim that says any woman elected is better than none – a woman can govern just as badly and undemocratically as any man and that goes for Hillary Clinton as well as Kirchner. The Democrats and the Peronists both purport to be the champions of the poor, the little guys, the blue-collar and the dispossessed, but both actually work to advance neoliberal economic policy and corporate profit. It’s no coincidence that like the Peronistas both Clintons have adopted the Third Wayas their defining political stance, along with Tony Blair.
Kirchner may have more elected political experience than Clinton but just like Clinton there’s no denying she’s used her husband’s reflected popularity to boost her own quest for presidential power. Both are so firmly wedded to the notion of a corporate state they married it. That’s dedication to a cause, the cause of Evita Peronism.
By the time Nestor Kirchner announced he was stepping down to let his wife run, observers said she had fuller lips, tighter skin and a more lustrous auburn mane, prompting speculation about surgery and hair extensions.
It remains an open question whether this was a personal decision to offset the effects of age, a political strategy to court votes in an aesthetic-obsessed era, or both.
Newspapers gleefully reported that on foreign trips she brought large trunks of clothes and fashion helpers, and changed her outfit up to four times a day. Critics said the makeover was an effort to evoke the magic of Eva Peron, the icon who died in 1952 aged just 33.
Just like Evita, Kirchner’s clothes, shoes, handbags and hair are the stuff of gossip magazines and like Clinton she’s alleged to not be a stranger to Botox. It’s described as vanity but it’s something more insidious. It’s all about the image. masking state corporatism with an attractive, warm and fuzzy media-friendly facade. Don’t look at the policies, look at the hair!
To my mind Clinton’s at the very least a quasi-Evita Peronist. Trading on reflected glory? Check. Image management? Check. Cult of personality? Third Way-ist? Check. Corporately funded? Check. Hawkish on the military and defence? Soft on neofascism and torture? Check…
If the ascendance of Kirchner and Clinton tells women anything at all, it’s that we can only succeed to high office a] by marrying advantageously b] putting a softer, feminine face on the perpetuation of a political and economic system which keeps other women down and c] pandering to the corporate media’s trivialisation of politics. This is no big step foward for women.
This is how The Times described the Argentinian election – ‘Fatty’ v the new Evita in all-girl fight for Argentina” Murdoch himself may be bankrolling a woman for US president but that says it all about what the global press really thinks of women in presidential politics, doesn’t it?
The election of a woman in Argentina and the potential election of another in the US is not a sudden blossoming of equality, it’s the corporate status quo donning a velvet Prada glove over the hand holding the cattleprod.
Because to get back to my original point, that US and Argentinian politics are beginning to echo one another, the ironic thing about all this is that while the US (as Pilger shows) has been meddling in Argentinian politics for years in the cause of corporate world hegemony it’s rebounded and now both countries’ politics seem to be converging. Both have a politicised military, a greedy plutocracy, entrenched and growing social inequality and a fatal taste for the firm smack of authoritarian government. They’re more alike than they’d admit.
The US now has also a falling currency and an economy that’s could nosedive and has the potential to cause untold social disorder and chaos, just as Argentina did six years ago. What’s Hillary’s plan for that, if any? Will we see disposessed Americans selling their all on the streets like the residents of Buenos Aires had to? Americans north and south may find they have much more in common than they think.
Oh well, never mind. Let’s look on the bright side – at least their potential misery‘ll be misery with a kinder, gentler, less wrinkled face.
Studs Terkel, interviewer extraordinaire, interviewed in today’s Independent:
“I’m known around the block as a writer and broadcaster,” Terkel tells me, “but also as that old guy who talks to himself. I never learnt to drive. Why should I have? The bus was there. So one day I’m on the corner alone, waiting for the 146. I’m talking to myself, finding the audience very appreciative. Then other people arrive; I talk to them too. This one couple ignore me completely. He’s wearing Gucci shoes and carrying The Wall Street Journal. She’s a looker. Neiman Marcus clothes. Vanity Fair under her arm. So I told them, ‘Tomorrow is Labor Day: the holiday to ‘ honour the unions.’ The guy gives me the kind of look Noël Coward might have given a bug on his sleeve. ‘We despise unions.’ I fix him with my glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner, and I ask, ‘How many hours do you work a day?’ He tells me eight. ‘How come you don’t work 18 hours a day, like your great-grandparents?’ He can’t answer that. ‘Because four men got hanged for you.’ I explain that I’m referring to the Haymarket Affair, the union dispute here in Chicago in May 1886. The bus is late. I have him pinned against the mailbox. Then I say, ‘How many days a week do you work?’ He says five.”
[…]
An unflinching socialist from boyhood, his marriage to Ida, a social worker of fiercely philanthropic character, did nothing to temper his idealism. His friendships with Billie Holiday and the black opera singer Paul Robeson, among others, meant that when Senator McCarthy began blacklisting supposed subversives, it was only a matter of time before Terkel’s career was derailed. Studs’ Place was pulled by NBC; his column cancelled by the Chicago Sun Times.
When a network director demanded he take a loyalty oath, it was his mother’s voice that rose up in him. “As a porker takes to mud, so I take to disputatiousness. I’m like an alcoholic when there’s booze around. I suggested, gently and politely, that he fuck off.”
Studs Terkel is a living treasure and I’m glad he’s still with us but it won’t be for that much longer. Where are the Studs Terkels of the future to come from? Answers on a postcard please…
Last Thursday the Shadwell Ward of Tower Hamlets (in London), with a margin of almost a hundred votes over Labour (1512 vs 1415 votes respectively). That’s good news, as it shows that at least in Tower Hamlets Respect is more than just a protest party and can win succesive elections. The by-election was brought on by the resignation of one of the Respect councillors, amidst rumours that this was organised by Labour, whom certainyl seemed to do their best to win this election, to no avail.
Respect was set up to build an alternative to the Labour Party, one that embodies the social democratic ideals Labour has left behind in its quest for power. It’s nowhere near a true socialist, let alone revolutionary party, but then it’s not meant to be. In the current political climate it’s a great leap forward to even have a proper social democrat party again. Politics have moved to the right and the old social democrat parties have moved with it; having a proper alternative therefore is a must, one that doesn’t scare away people, yet doesn’t abandon its own ideals either.
Here in the Netherlands we’ve seen the same process at work. For most of a century the PvdA and its predecessor, the SDAP, were the main social democratic party, while there was a variety of more leftwing, socialist and communist parties operating in their shadow. In the Eighties however the PvdA was largely sidelined from government, while the smaller parties lost votes and membership, which ultimately led them to fuse into GroenLinks, less doctrinate, less socialist and more of a challenge to the PvdA, or so the hope was.
In reality, what happened was that as the PvdA moved towards the right in the eighties and nineties, GroenLinks moved along with them, until there was little difference between them apart from a vague sense of smugness… In the process hardcore social democrat –let alone socialist– values had been thrown overboard.
Enter the SP, or Socialistische Partij. Founded in 1970 as a Maoist party, the SP had never managed to get even one seat in parliament, until 1994. Since then the party’s share of the vote steadily increased election on election, until today when they’re the third biggest party, with 25 seats.
How did they do that? By starting small, in local neighbourhouds and unions, by relentlessly campaigning, not for some distant socialist utopia, but on practical issues of direct importance: “sewer socialism” at its best. Through their evolution the SP shed a lot of baggage, became less socialist perhaps, but the end result is that there’s still a party in Dutch politics that talks about realising a socialist world and it’s a party that cannot be ignored.
That should be the future of Respect. It did well in the 2005 general elections, getting Galloway elected and they hope to get him elected again, but for the moment they should concentrate on building up their strength locally, around issues that directly influences the lives of the people they hope to be their voters.
[By Martin Wisse, X-posted from Wis[s]e Words, pic added by me]
By all reports Paris Hilton is a despicable human being: shallow, vain, racist, spiteful and crude. Rich from the day she was born, she never has had to lift a finger to get what she wanted, she never had to work on anything she didn’t want to and she never had to struggle for the kind of opportunities most of us would be lucky to get only once in our lifes. She’s the walking proof that those who have can only get more. Yet what has she ever done to deserve the hatred unleashed on her, especially after she got sentenced to fortyfive days in jail for driving without a license? Compared to other members of her class she’s practically a saint. She hasn’t bought up perfectly sound companies and gutted them for a profit, destroying thousands of jobs in the process, she hasn’t started any wars or profited from them, she wasn’t responsible for Enron or Worldcom, had nothing to do with Katrina or any of the thousands of disasters normal members of her class leave in their wake.
Which is why she, According to David Walsh at the World Socialist Web Site, makes for such a good scapegoat. Because she may be rich, but she isn’t powerful; an outsider not connected to the real powers in the land, the people running the US government and the US businesses. As Walsh puts it:
To help retard the development of a rational opposition to the current political and social state of affairs, the media cultivates an artificial hostility toward much easier targets. A seething but politically confused population is fed victims, sacrificial lambs, so to speak, while the real criminals go about their business.
The aim, conscious or otherwise, is to make sorting out what is actually taking place in the country more difficult by encouraging a facile and undemanding (and perhaps temporarily cathartic) outrage against a Paris Hilton or some other such figure. The population is intended to feel, falsely, that its cause has been served and blows have been delivered against the rich and powerful, when all that’s happened is a young woman guilty of a misdemeanor has gone to jail for a month or more.
By offering Paris Hilton as a figure to hate, attention is deferred from the systemic failures of capitalism unto the moral failings of an individual. If we believe that the problem with Paris Hitlon and others like her having personal fortunes the size of a small country’s annual budget while thousands of others have to sleep under bridges and eat out of garbage cans is not that a system which allows such gross inequalities is wrong and immoral, but only that some people cannot handle wealth well, then we will accept that others with great wealth but the tact not to flaunt it so much, do deserve their wealth and we accept that the system as it exists is right and proper.
