High intellectualism

If this blog is known for anything (in fact it's known for nothing) then it's lists. Have you ever wondered what to call yourself when engaging in flame war? Well, nothing quite beats Internal Bulletwound or Randy Newman, however, here are a list of names drawn from The Simpsons that you might want to hide behind when you're being a big old meanie about the DDR:

Lenny Leonard
Dewey Largo
Pops Freshenmeyer
Sideshow Raheem
Emily Winthrop
Brandine Spuckler
Jasper Beardley
Johnny Tightlips
Lois Pennycandy
Hank Scorpio
Howard K. Duff VIII
Wendell
Mindy Simmons
Jerry Rude
Cowboy Bob
Serak the Preparer
Toshiro the Apprentice Chef
Chester J. Lampwick
Handsome Pete
Space Coytote
Sherry Bobbins
Laszlo Panaflex
Big Daddy
Trent Steele
Tab Spangler
Lyle Lanley

And so on... until you get bored.

The scum also rises

There are people who are desperately worried about the state of free speech. They seem to be particularly worried about free speech for racists, I might opine that's all they seem to worry about. Meanwhile, on planet earth, free speech does not exist in a vacuum.

If a nazi puts out continual provocations and incitement to racial hatred in a forest and no one is around, does it matter...? The fact is nazis are not lurking in forests but on our TV screens, on radio and on our streets. We have groups such as the BNP and gangs such as the EDL specifically targeting British Muslims for violent approbation. Even if not one member of those groups has ever specifically harmed another human being (and they have), the effect they have is just the same.

For example: the students at City University in London who have been subject to gang attacks. This kind of event exposes racism and fascism for what it it (many times better than all the slots on Newsnight and Question Time). It's just unfortunate that, in giving nazis the chance to make fools of themselves, we are not playing with politics or abstract notions of liberty but people's lives.

The plot thins

Actually there's no plot whatsoever. A clever trevor has dug up another mix of Carnival of Light. They're clever enough to have included excerpts from other alleged versions of the song leaked before. The whole thing gets over cooked when they chuck in a remix of Revolution 9, which was made nearly 18 months later.

Where now for workers' struggle after post strikes suspended?

In particular:

A Royal Mail source quoted in the press today gets it wrong when they say, “The stumbling block to a solution was a small group of union activists in London who seemed to think they were fighting a class war. They were being driven on by the Socialist Workers Party.”

But it is true that the stumbling block was the defiance of the great majority of postal workers and wider solidarity – and the SWP is proud to have played its part in that.

Royal Mail have, of course, been fighting a ruthless class war. Well done to every postie who recognised this and has resisted so far, who has carried the deadweight of their leadership (more concerned with propping up the Labour government), who has put the CWU at the forefront of the fightback against the recession.

The deal agreed shows that if you fight you can win concessions. But if the strikes were kept on and extended the government and Royal Mail management could have been beaten outright. The solves nothing substantial and gives the bosses a chance to recuperate.

This dispute is not over.

Sweet

Lenin Rediscovered... reviewed

I am just coming to the end of Lars T Lih’s book Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done? in context. I am currently reading through his translation of the pamphlet.

My first piece of advice is don’t read it. Not because it isn’t good. This piece of exegesis is over 700 pages long, nearly 4 times the size of the book it is commenting on. It also has a very simple premise, which it repeats over and over again (rather Lenin-like). If you have the time and the patience you would want to read this book, but only if. The best follow-up might be to replace the exegesis with 20-page intro, summarising Lih’s argument.

What Is To Be Done is not a path-breaking document. It is not a sketch of a party of a new type. It is in the best traditions of the Second International.

Connected to this, WITBD is not a pessimistic document. It does not argue for conspiracy versus a mass movement. This should be obvious to any casual reader, let alone someone acquainted with Lenin’s life and works.

Lih puts this down deliberate misuse of polemical passages and some linguistic ambiguities in early translations, largely by Cold War intellectual warriors. For example what was translated as conspiracy did not mean conspiracy but underground organisation, the organised knack of not getting arrested. The word divert, used in a controversial passage, is actually closer to stray away from.

The word spontaneity/spontaneous appears lots of times in the text. Lenin used the word because it was key to a polemic with another Russian Social Democrat. Lih examines Lenin’s opponent and finds his argument to be quite messy.

What is taken to mean spontaneity/spontaneous was given about 6 different shades of meaning by Lenin’s opponent and another 2 by Lenin himself. When Lenin argues about combating spontaneity he is actually arguing to combat chaotic and diffuse movement as an end in itself. Go right to the other end of Lenin’s literary career and you find him arguing with the left in the Communist International about not squandering energy and resources through lack of organisation and discipline. WITBD is part of a consistent argument.

The controversial, supposedly career-defining passages, Lih puts down to Lenin’s polemics with other Social Democrats (WITBD was originally intended as a non-polemical pamphlet). Due to Lenin’s rhetorical inversion of his targets’ language he makes some unfortunate choices.

The section I will concentrate on is the ‘divert’ section. Here Lenin is arguing with a declared Economist, who argues that the working class movement will travel along the path of least resistance, i.e. struggle for immediate material gain, and no amount of effort from ideologues, i.e. orthodox Social Democrats, will be able to divert it/cause it to stray from that path. Lenin on the other hand says effort by Social Democrats can and will have an effect.

Lenin’s pseudonym for Economism is usually translated as Trade Unionism. Lih argues that he meant something closer to trade-union-only-ism. This is the idea that the working class only needs trade or industrial unions, while the political arena should be left open. A common philosophy all over the world, at the start of the Twentieth Century in Russia people who argued this usually meant that the job of overthrowing Tsarism should be left to Liberals or Populists.

It then makes sense when Lenin argues that trade-union-only-ism leads to the “ideological enslavement” of the working class. Without notions of Social Democracy this is where the working class will end up. Social Democracy, of course, did exist and will, therefore, win the working class away from the trade-union-only-ists. An optimistic statement, no?

This is in keeping with the overarching story of the Second International. The international was based on Marxism and The Communist Manifesto. The story told there is of the union of socialism with the working class movement. The French Revolution produced both elements, but in the first half of the 19th century they remained separate. The Manifesto is not just addressed to workers of the world but to socialists of the world. It calls on each group to unite with the other.

The model for this process was the spread of awareness. Marxism is the most advanced social science yet developed. It took two people a tremendous of time and effort to perfect. By necessity they were intellectuals from a bourgeois background.

Think about the amount of intellectual effort that led up to The Manifesto, the critique of Hegel, The Holy Family, The German Ideology, the Theses on Feuerbach, The Paris Manuscripts and The Poverty of Philosophy. After the manifesto you have the giant Critique of Political Economy, best known as Capital. Someone working 12 hours a day on a spinning wheel or lathe could not have written this volume.

It was, however, written from their point of view. Karl Marx saw the working class as a class that struggled collectively. It was striving after socialism in practice. It then should have no trouble in absorbing and embodying it in theory. But how?

The job of socialists would then be to bring this science to advanced and purposive workers who would then propagate its ideas throughout the class. The vanguard concept was embedded in socialism from the beginning. Lenin did not invent it and it was not considered a problem until Lenin was considered a problem.

WITBD represents continuity not a break in socialism.

Further Legend

I was terrified, if I’m honest. Things had been coming to a head, you know? It just seemed like the world was falling apart. Something had to give.

It’s typical; I remember a few weeks beforehand my husband told me a friend of working on the buses was stopped by the police and, literally, yanked off the bus mid route and charged with reckless endangerment. The company had, apparently, been carrying out health checks. A whole bunch of people had been suspended. It just so happened that they were all active union members.

Another of our friends, Guy, was killed. He was a carpenter. He made fine furniture. He was also in some semi-pro bands, covers and that, although he wrote a few songs, which… well I liked them.

My husband and I, we met in sixth form. Guy was there too, so we knew him for a long time. He was almost like a member of the family. We did want him to be a Godfather to Lilly, but said he didn’t believe in all that stuff and, you know, we didn’t mind. That was just him.

He had taken to looking after his old Mum. She was getting on and starting to not, not cope with life, if you get me? Times were already quite tough. She was living in an old terrace off Colombia Road. She had already been burgled once, when the bastards came back for more. They took her pearls and her wedding ring, beat her up and left her with a black eye and broken ribs.

So Guy, bless, him, he sold up his business moved in next door. That was about, ooh, a year before it all started. We only found out much later that he was struggling to make ends meet. He was getting a carer’s allowance, although he was giving most of it away to his Mum.

She was living on her husband’s private pension. He’d died about five years prior, when times were good. Five years later most of that pension had dwindled. There was almost nothing left.

By the time Guy was killed the gas had already been disconnected, they were behind on their mortgage (can you believe it, poor woman still owed money on her home) and there were final reminders on all the other bills. It seemed Guy was going out of his mind when he shot a bailiff with the black market pistol he had bought as self-defence.

He might have survived if he had called the police, come clean on the spot. Instead he barricaded him and his mother in the house. Their fate was sealed. When the police eventually broke in they shot him and narrowly missed her, although she died in hospital later that night.

We know this because there was records found in an old police station nearly a year later. At the time though we got very little out of the police. They were busy. They had to deal with cases like this every day. All they said, by way of explanation was that he shot at a police officer, wounding him in the left thigh, leaving him crippled. Guy was guilty of attempted murder of an officer and so, as far as they were concerned, he got what was coming to him.

I mention this because, toward the end, this stuff was commonplace. We’ve come so far and been through so much since… It seems like another lifetime. Yet I remember being so afraid. If what happened to Guy could… if it could happen to Guy it could happen to anyone. It felt like we were going mad, driven out of our minds.

------------------------------------

We’d sort of heard about the riots on the first night. It was an observation, then a rumour. There was an awful lot of noise and lights coming from the north. Loads of police vans were spotted heading in the same direction. I remember counting at least three police helicopters zipping across the sky at top speed.

Lilly was away from home. Her school had been shut down after a few of the staff and kids fell ill, although she didn’t seem to be coming down with anything. So we sent her off to stay with her Nana in Wales, although she dragged her feet every step of the way. That was hard… Then my husband was suspended from work after he tested positive, which was even harder.

He was taken into Homerton Hospital for observation. I remember going to visit and having to step into a sterile suit and mask. Once he started showing symptoms I was prevented from seeing him, which was… I know that it was nothing to do with the staff there… They were struggling to cope as it is. He was allowed a call home once a night. I used to wait up until about 9.30. The phone would ring every night on the dot, until that is the riots broke out.

I was sitting at home. I’d been working that day down the charity shop. I’d been a tiring day. There’d been some officers in that afternoon making routine checks, asked standard questions. It must have been a slow day as they were there for half-an-hour.

I was watching TV, waiting for my call, when I saw a news item about disturbances in a London suburb. It turned out it was Haringey, although it turned out you had to guess. I recognised some of the shots, stand-offs on Tottenham High Road, looting in Wood Green shopping centre.

I saw something strange in the broadcast. Despite the outrage of the reporter, the commentary, I saw this clip of police with riot shields, batons and dogs charging a group of youngsters, teenagers. They retreated a little and the police eventually stopped. Then, ripping through the crowd came a flying wedge. Kids, totally fearless, armed with bats, snooker cues and iron bars giving as good as they got.

The police line fell back, and back, and back. It was then that I noticed myself nodding and smiling.

Future Legend

Yo, yo, yo motherlickers. Those of you with memories (one or the other of this blog's two readers) will remember an unfurling piece of fictional nonsense about the endoftheworldasweknowit (and it felt fine). I've rewritten and rejigged it and given it a name, and am now typing up some mock first hand accounts (ala Studs Terkel) from some of the survivors. Here's the first:

I was there. I saw it happen. I knew it would, eventually… everybody thought so.

I used to be a computer programmer, one of the safest jobs imaginable. I’d been working at a City Firm for several years. It was part of the Canary Wharf complex, one of those real paper shuffling, magic tricks with money companies.

I started there as a temp. I remember, a couple of weeks after I started my Wife and I were invited to a barbecue with friends (she was my fiancée back then). I was asked about my new job, where it was, what I was doing and so on.

But what did the company do? I realised then that I didn’t really know. It wasn’t apparent and I’d never stopped to ask. It turned out the company was a financial agency. It specialised in converting debt into financial packages and selling them on to investment firms. Companies, actual productive companies got to spread their risk while the investment firms were able to diversify their portfolios. It all worked so long as everybody paid up what they owed.

Except, of course we know now, it was a game of pass the parcel… or really it was musical chairs. My job was quite safe. Everyone in the office used quite high-tech packages, the latest computer equipment, but no one knew how they worked. I did and so I was always in demand. But the company eventually went broke.

It was just before the stock market crashed. No one, none of us, the regular drones had any idea what was going on until a few weeks before. It turned out the company itself was running on finance. Usually the Directors were hardly ever seen round the building. They started coming in more and more, making long and sometimes fraught sounding calls from their office. There was a parent company in New York, and a sister company in Frankfurt. By the end both were on the phone almost daily.

The Directors had been borrowing money from investors to cover running costs, including our wages. Debts mounted while the credit rating began to sink. The life support was turned off and the company simply died, like that. I still haven’t been paid my final month’s wages.

So I was one of the first to be laid off in the great wave of unemployment. I didn’t deserve it. I know that. But I can’t help feeling in some way I did. I didn’t dedicate myself to anything particularly useful. At least, I couldn’t say the people I worked for added anything to society.

There were a few nice people at work, pleasant folk, but I hated the general atmosphere there. The way senior staff would talk about people, about life in general was terrible. Sexist, racist, homophobic brutes, everybody who wasn’t them didn’t have an excuse, they were just useless scum.

Lots of people went along with it, laughed at their bosses’ jokes. I just kept my head down and tried not to stand out. I remembered, on my first day signing on, how the managers and directors used to talk about dole scroungers, filth to be washed away. I thought of myself as a liberal guy and used to cuss them, internally.

But, waiting to see my advisor, I sat and looked around and was surprised to see how young and normal looking a lot of the claimants were. They looked like interns, office juniors, smart young people who used to come to London for work, who passed through the office all the time. Even I used to look down on the unemployed.

I did work again after being laid off. I managed to find a few months temping here and there, as well as some cash-in-hand work, delivering papers. It was nothing like the good old days though. I had to make frequent trips to the jobcentre.

In the beginning it was fairly normal. As the illness set in life seemed to change. The government changed the rules so, you used to come in once a fortnight to get your book stamped, now you had to come in every week. There weren’t any new staff laid on or centres opened. Queues began to form.

Then it got round that dole offices were breeding grounds. Facemasks came in, then the random searches. I remember more than once people being whisked off the streets or getting yanked out of the dole queue. The police soon had regular checkpoints up and around town.

After about a month and a bit the agencies and gang masters started coming down to the dole offices, bold as brass, and started picking people out the queues and offering day work on great rates. I knew a few people who went with them, some actually got work, a lot simply got mugged or had their wages lifted.

Despite this there were a lot of desperate people. The gang masters arriving would always cause chaos and bad noise. The police did nothing. I remember getting very confused and upset by this. The first time I saw this I tried to remonstrate with a nearby officer, plead for him to intervene. He told me to go away then threatened to have me arrested.

The gang masters were usually well dressed. Sometimes if a guy or a group of guys happened to walk past and looked like a recruiter groups would head off after him, begging and, if he was on his own, threatening.

The other type of person you’d get was the rich kids, students, city folk and the like. There was a lot of anger and fear put about then. The papers were full of stories about the great unwashed, scroungers and mobs, Typhoid Mary’s draining the system. I heard about groups of kids in masks who’d come down to dole queues, GP offices and second hand stores anywhere where they’d likely find poor, sick people, and start throwing their weight around. I only saw it happen once. That was the time it kicked off.

A group of what looked like students (one of them I remember had a UCL rugby top on) came down to the queue. It was a Wednesday. I was due to sign. They didn’t have facemasks on, the kids, which was illegal by that point. Officially you had to wear them outdoors, in public spaces at all times. Generally though you wore it round you neck until you saw a police officer and then it was up quick.

The kids went up and down the queue. They said were looking for two people to clean their house. One of them, the leader it seemed, had a wedge of cash that he waived about. He went up to a few people in the queue, usually Black or Asian, and started recruiting them by putting fivers in their pocket.

No one wanted to take up the offer, it seemed. There was a bit of pushing and some staring down between people, tension but no violence. There was a bit of cursing and swearing from the kids before they gave up and started to walk off.

Someone then broke from the line. I turned to see three lads, they looked to be Somali to me, running off after the students. The students weren’t interested though, pushed them away and kept on walking. A few more people followed after them. Pretty soon the students were surrounded with people begging, they couldn’t escape. I turned away for a moment but then heard what sounded like one of the students yell, “f-off you f-ing p-s”, something like that.

Then there was a scream. I looked up. One of the Somali lads had fallen to the floor, clutching his chest. The students were off, heading down the road at top speed. It was clear the poor boy had been stabbed. Pretty much the whole queue ran over to help. Some chased off after the students.

About twenty seconds later half a dozen police cars and one van pulled up, officers started pouring out and arresting the crowd.

That’s how it started.

Authenticity

I casually searched my online name there other day and found, to my surprise, that I had accidentally spawned a polemic. I commented elsewhere that the secret connection between Grunge and Britpop was the pursuit of authenticity. My polemicist took umbrage with this in particular relation to Blur. They did not like Blur. Blur were inauthentic.

It says something about the 90s and their legacy that authenticity is regarded as unambiguously positive. Why does a work of art (however high or low) have to be authentic? There is no objective reason. We don’t expect feature films to be documentaries. We don’t expect historical novelists to have experienced what they write about first hand. You get the idea.

The desire for something real is, however, objective. The key quality of 90s pop culture was authenticity, or at least perceived authenticity. In the 90s you had to keep it real and play it straight. Drama was estimated by how true to life it was (or felt). Millionaire rappers talked about the ghettoes and gang warfare, while rock singers cried over their loneliness and angst. They did this because it was real.

In terms of music there was a clear reaction against high 80s values, primarily multi-tracking and synthesised sounds; the very things that are currently making a comeback. In America this was expressed as a general enthusiasm for low fidelity sound. British music makers swapped sampling and funky shuffle beats for strings, brass and big guitar reverb (the change from concentration on the groove to shifting harmonies did wonders for indie bands’ song writing, not to mention singing).

What defined 80s music was production. It is a simple step of logic to go from production, to product to commodity. Britpop and Grunge emerged at a time of shifting cultural values. Grunge artists were overwhelmingly liberal, while the British music scene was massively anti-Tory.

Whether they venerated underground punk bands or listened to high 60s pop, musicians were trying to connect with a past vitality that stood in sharp contrast to early 90s numbness. This numbness was not just musical, but cultural and social.

But classic pop/rock was not vital because baby boomers were an unusually brilliant generation. The great music of the 60s and 70s was particularly brilliant because it was made in an atmosphere of upheaval and questioning. It was the time in late capitalism where people, especially young people in the west felt inspired, empowered and optimistic about the future.

Having sampled some early Britpop albums I started turning on to The Beatles and through them saw the sixties appear “sun-flooded” across the chasm of time. It doesn’t matter so much whether the people who lived through the 60s felt like it was a golden age, growing up in the 90s amid the anti-climax of the cold war it certainly did.

Pursuing an ideal gives people energy. In another arena, this is what turns working class politics from the struggle to survive into socialism. Culture does not follow the same rules as social movements. Utopianism is ultimately harmful to the socialist movement. In terms of culture it matters not a jot. The illusion is objective if the artist is able to bring it to life. If, in pursuing musical authenticity by using past methods of making music to renovate modern culture, musicians fail to make completely expressive, non-alienated art then… never mind. Great music was made in the 90s. If we want to free culture we have to destroy the commodity system in its entirety.

Music alone cannot change the world. We knew this already.

One sure fire way to stop fascism and racism.

You need more immigration. See here, graphic evidence that concentrated prejudice and large ethnic minorities rarely overlap.