One for Socialist Mothers Everywhere

We had Mothers’ day in the UK over a month ago but every day is a celebration for us socialist mothers, especially when we read a story like this, from Tribune via Aaronovitch Watch:

From This Week’s Tribune Diary:

“Nick ‘neotrot’ Cohen, lately responsible for a lengthy published rant deriding the left for its opposition to the war in Iraq, has been given a dressing down by his mother, for being politically incorrect. Well, it was more than that actually. She gave him a slapping. Mum Maggie was seriously upset at being called a Stalinist in the opening pages of nasty Nick’s book. Not least because, when the Cohen family last gathered together to enjoy a jolly Christmas, cowardly Nick failed to mention the reference, or even the book. Maggie, a lifelong leftie, could not contain her feelings when she next saw her son. Although diminutive to Nick’s beanstalk propsitions, she let him have one round the chops. ‘In all the years they were growing up I never hit the children,’ Maggie recently told friends. ‘Now I have to do it when he is grown up.’

Sometimes children just go Too Bloody Far.

Oh Yeah?

Jonathan Freedland was being ridiculously optimistic in the Guardian this morning:

A new book, Second Chance by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the cold war hawk who served as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, includes a startling phrase. No leftist, Brzezinski detects what he calls a “global political awakening”, a stirring across much of the developing world, among those who are “conscious of social injustice to an unprecedented degree and resentful of its deprivations and lack of personal dignity”. Thanks to television and the internet, the global have-nots can now see all that the haves are enjoying at their expense. The hard-headed Brzezinski sniffs revolution in the air.

[…]

Is it possible that the Blair era of neoliberal certainty is coming to a close, that there are stirrings abroad that call for something else? Might there not be a demand for action, as there was when the last intolerable gap in wealth opened up nearly a century ago – a demand, in short, for a battle against inequality?

Dream on, Freedland. This is what happens when you plan to challenge the neoliberal status quo:

Hamburg – Hundreds of German police searched Wednesday the homes and offices of militants planning to protest against globalization at next month’s G8 summit on the Baltic coast. Federal prosecutors in Karlsruhe said they suspected 18 persons of terrorism. The inquiry is focussed on a series of petrol-bomb attacks over the past year on the offices, homes and cars of German officials in Berlin and Hamburg.

The raids, on 40 premises in northern Germany, were conducted by nearly 900 police.

The 18 had claimed responsibility under a variety of names for their bombings, prosecutors said.

Also under investigation were three persons identified as members of the separate Militant Groups (MG), a terrorist organization which had mounted two anti-G8 attacks, and 25 attacks on property in all since 2001.

Leftists accuse the Group of Eight (G8) nations of oppressing poor countries. They plan to disrupt the G8 summit to be hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the beach resort of Heiligendamm.

Police arrived at dawn at the Rote Flora, a building which functions as a headquarters for the German anarchist movement in the northern German city of Hamburg.

Prosecutors said the raids on the 18-person organization and MG were aimed at collecting documents and other evidence.

Among the targets of nine bomb attacks during 2006 was Thomas Mirow, state secretary of the finance ministry who lives in Hamburg, and there have been more attacks this year. Police have made no arrests so far.

The Rote Flora is the crumbling remnant of a 19th century theatre and was taken over by squatters in 1989.

The leftists now have a lease on the building, which has been at the focus of repeated clashes between rioters and the city-state’s riot police down the years.

Merkel has invited the leaders of the G7 nations and Russia to Heiligendamm, a high-class resort in sparsely populated countryside, to discuss world economic issues next month.

‘Leftist’ by whose definition? I note also that the arrested’ve been accused of terrorism – maybe I’m just dim, but I can’t find any reports on Google of a terrorist petrol bombing campaign carried out recently by leftists in Germany. Maybe someone can enlighten me?

I wonder how long it will take for all these people to be released with no charges against them. Not until conveniently after the G8, I expect.

Merde.

I’m really not feeling well today and not only that, I can’t bear the rejoicing of the UK and US media after their boy Sarko’s win in the French election. The public world is a better place without my presence today, so I’m taking the day off to lie around moaning in between bouts of swearing under my breath and kicking things. I can’t even look at that strutting little Napoleon without wanting to damage something.

Mayday, Mayday

It’s International Workers’ Day today, yay!

Not.

This year’s May Day also coincides with an unfortunate anniversary – 10 glorious years of New Labour. That does tend to take the gloss off things a little.

As for any advance in workers rights – the government’s sanctioning domestic slavery and human trafficking, all of the UK’s public service workers have voted to strike, doctors and nurses are getting militant, the local election results next week cannot be trusted and Britain is one of the most unequal, heavily-surveilled and policed societies in the world. The trade unions are having a May Day rally in Trafalgar Square today but the media’s ignoring it, so it apparently it isn’t happening.

Celebrations of International Workers Day ring a bit hollow at the moment, especially since if any of those tame union members should wander too close today to the free speech exclusion zone around Parliament in a slogan t-shirt they’ll be arrested.

Workers’ day, my arse; and here’s the perfect comment on the hollowness of today’s celebrations, courtesy of Edmund Schluessel :

Happy Labor Day, comrades!

Here’s The Internationale as a rock anthem, in Chinese.

Comment of The Day: French Framing

Democracy, though sickly and a bit nauseous from repeated blows to civil liberties, is not yet dead in Europe: 85% of the electorate, a tribute to banlieues activism, came out in France yesterday and made a statement – no more wishy washy middle. France seems to want a clear choice between neoliberalism or socialism; ether more of the Blair and Bush-led globalisation agenda, or a President that thinks that ‘liberte, egalite, fraternite’ applies to more than just middle-aged white men with a comfy bank balance.

No prizes for guessing which candidate I prefer; although my preference is irrelevant given that I can’t vote there, nevertheless I think it would be a triumph for all European women should the French elect a female socialist president at the heart of the ‘old’ EU.

But now the election will move into a whole new phase. The stakes get much higher. In comments to Peter Preston’s Guardian article on the election this morning, a French commenter points out the election has wider implications – that it’s not just a left-right battle, but a question of the basic legitimacy of public leftwing ideas:

Being french, I found this article quit interesting, but even more the reactions some people have posted here. Indeed, france does have some things it can be proud of (good health care, excellent rail network, free education – from primary school to university – , and state subventions to sport, art, environmental groups, …), and of course some bad things that go with it (people abusing the health system creating a great debt, a very heavy bureaucracy, many taxs that few people understand). But it is true that this “France in a state of decline” narrative is indeed the corporate media’s ploy to break what was left of, not the socialist party, but the credibility of left wing policies. We hear all the time that Mrs Royal has no program, but that is not true. She has solid a program, many ideas,not all brilliant, but dominantly a pragmatic left wing.

But medias today spend their time telling us that we can be left wing untill we are 30 year’s old, but then, “please, be serious, a globalized society doesn’t have room for such nonsense. Get back to work and stop being childish”. Because problems in our welfare system do exist, we are made to believe that any welfare system is doomed to faliure. Indeed corporations big and small, and individuals do abuse of this system, but it does not mean that this system is a bad one, that it couldn’t be repaired. When your car has a flat wheel (or even two flat wheels), do you just scrap the car ? By ridiculizing the system, corporation and media are just slowly killing the idea that people can be left wing, by promoting a new idealic society of which their corporations would be at the center making the money and dictating their policies. This election isn’t just an election between RIGHT and LEFT, it is an election where the existence and legitimacy of LEFT ideas are at stake.”

Framing affects everything we see in the media. There is little reported in any media that is not intermediated by another person in some way even if it’s only uploading a clip. Someone still chose that clip. They framed the picture you see.

You cannot ever completely exclude the editorial voice, no matter how hard you try. Because worldwide media as currently constituted is corporate and profit making in structure, its larger editorial voice is also corporatist and the information put out is framed to support the making of those profits. To do otherwise would be fiscally irresponsible and negligent towards the shareholders: sensation sells more than fluffy bunnies and hope so that’s the course the media follows.

Thus the narrative of permanent decline that suffuses everything we read and hear – we’re under attack, an amorphous ‘they’ is trying.to take our stuff, we’re being swamped, invaded… unimporant threats are hyped into planetwide scourges while imporant yet dull, worthy, complicated yet important issues are trivialised or go unreported.

The commenter has spotted the biggest frame of all in modern western democratic politics in action. It’s been the ur-narrative of all western politics since the industrial revolution and the concomitant rise of the newspaper barons, advertising and then the PR industry. The philosophy is so all pervasive that it was built in to EU institutions too.

Capitalism is not only the best way, it’s the only way. The Free Market is a pure and ineluctable product of nature, like sunlight or a mother’s love, or butterflies’ wings. Capitalism’s been ordained by God to make all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Anyone who says otherwise is a dangerous lunatic and one of the amorphous ‘they’ trying to take our stuff.

So, put very crudely, goes the story and so goes the editorial direction of the US and European corporate media-at-large.

Now, at least in France, the mainstream media will have to engage publicly with actual socialist politics again. That certainly seems to be what the public want – not just, as in the UK, a non-choice between one bunch of incompetent neoliberals and another but a proper public debate and a real choice between ideological directions for the country.

But the socialists had better be on the ball media-wise and not give their usual ‘our ideas will shine through because they’re right’, naive tv and radio performance. In Spain and the Netherlands socialist parties have shown that it’s perfectly possible to handle the media on your terms and be elected on principled positions. I hope the French socialists are ready for this coming campaign – because it’s not just Sarko v Sego now, it’s Sarkozy and the whole media and cultural establishment’s framing v Segolene.