“a thoroughly bourgeois fashion”

Socialism
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John Quiggin wrote something stupid on the internet six years ago:

At a deeper level, the appeal of revolution has a substantial residue of aristocratic sentiment. In the course of the last 200 years, and even allowing for the defeats of the past 20 years or so, the achievements of the Left have been impressive, starting with universal suffrage and secret ballots, going on the creation of the welfare state, continuing with progress towards equality without regard to race, gender and sexuality, preserving the environment from the disastrous impact of industrialism and so on. Yet most of this progress has been achieved in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion, through long agitation, boring committee reports and so on. Gains that are ground out in this way are not noble enough for an aristocratic sensibility: far better to fail gloriously.

Which is so not right it’s not even wrong. Fortunately, John Quiggin recognises that and in his current post linking back to this called it “unjustifiably snarky”. It remains however a good example of the whiggish view of history,where ideas like universal suffrage sort of hang in the air until it’s their time to be implemented and progress is inevitable and achieved by reasonable men without emotional attachment working within the legitamite democratic channels of government. It ignores all the revolutionary unpleasantness that made it possible and necessary for those “boring committee reports” to be written and deliberately minimises or removes from view entirely the contributions of those people not “thoroughly bourgeois”.

Every leftwing advance has been achieved against the resolute opposition of the bourgeois, who’d immediately took the credit for it once it had become the status quo, rewriting history to make it inevitable. That’s what Quiggin did here.

the Greek revolution will not be televised

Crisis? What Crisis?, Europe, Life under Capitalism
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Paul Mason is in Athens, doing some great reporting on the Greek crisis:

And I will repeat the point about hostility to the media: it’s not a problem for me and my colleagues to be hounded off demos as “representatives of big capital”, “Zionists”, “scum and police informers” etc. But to get this reaction from almost every demographic – from balaclava kids to pensioners – should be a warning sign to the policymaking elite. The “mainstream” – whether it’s the media, politicians or business people – is beginning to seem illegitimate to large numbers of people.

As one old bloke put it to me, when I said: “Don’t you want us to report what’s happening to you?” – “No.”

He was quite calm and rational as he waved his hand in my face: “It’s too late for that.”

Jamie wonders if /when the counter revolution comes. The Colonels’ dictatorship was not that long ago after all.

The Waiting Room: Iraqi refugees in Syria

Comics, War on Iraq
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first page of the Waiting Room by Sarah Glidden

Sarah Glidden is a Jewish-American cartoonist whose breakthrough comic How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less was published by Vertigo last year. Working with the Common Language Project she has written and drawn the above comic explaining the situation the two million Iraqi refugees in Syria find themselves in. Not just a good primer on the plight of Iraqi refugees in Syria, it’s also a great example of how to do journalism through comics. Even at their most banal comics draw you in like no other medium can do and a good cartoonist like Glidden can hold your attention even through the dry recital of background information because the pictures complement and add to the text you cannot achieve through photos.

Waiting Room is published at Cartoon Movement, a website dedicated to political cartoons and comics journalism.

Labour’s strategy: don’t oppose

New Labour, UK elections, UK politics
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Lenny riffs on Dan Hind’s observations on the need to break the ConDem coalition before the next election, and Labour’s role in this:

I would guess he rightly judges Labour’s position, which is that the last thing they want at this point is political power. The Blairites are convinced that they would have to implement the same cuts as the Tories are doing, (ex-chairman Peter Watts has even bizarrely claimed that opposing cuts is hurting Labour), and that it would be much easier to allow them to get on with it. The Labour soft left doesn’t yet have a coherent alternative, or at least not one they’re able to articulate or willing to fight for. Neither side really wants to re-open an old civil war, though the Right are better placed to wage it if it comes. So, they are sitting it out, passively awaiting the Tory meltdown and their dream ticket in 2015. Their strategy would involve striking the correct poses in the face of catastrophe, while nonetheless doing little to prevent it. (Dan does not say, but we should note, that this has significant consequences for the conduct of the labour movement’s resistance to austerity. If the trade union leadership subordinates its actions to the objective of getting ‘their’ party in government, then that most certainly entails an attempt to keep the lid on militancy).

If that sounds familiar it’s because it’s the exact same strategy as the Democratic Party followed during the Bush era. Over the years I’ve explained that the failure of the Democrats to meaningfully oppose Bush was a feature, not a bug. The party leadership knew that sooner or later the voters would return to them as the only real alternative, once they were sick to death of Republican mismanagement. At the same time the leadership wasn’t too unhappy with what Bush and co were doing anyway, even if their base was. And once the disgust with the Republicans was large enough and the Democrats did have a charismatic presidential candidate their strategy was validated – they got their cake and ate it too. And in the meantime they dissipated a lot of the grassroots militancy that sprung up in the wake of the War on Iraq and the like.

Whether or not Labour is consciously following the same strategy, or is just too divided at the moment to meaningfully oppose the coalition doesn’t really matter. The fact of the matter is that Labour too has shown itself not to be trusted when in power, to no longer be a meaningful leftwing party, if perhaps still slightly better than the LibDems are now. Bringing them back into government won’t solve anything, unless Labour is returned to its roots as a true socialist party.

Because I’m a sucker for a nice sentimental gesture

Music, Video
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When one fan yelled out she learned to play guitar to this song, Paul Simon invited her to play on stage and she did and she was good. A lovely gesture that paid off for everybody, something nice to get you into the weekend.