For no raisin

While we try to block the triumph of meat-headed provincial fascism in Britain you never know we might not win and may have to flee for our lives. Here are some names you could use for your fake passport, you never know, they might work:

Dr Jordan Edilstein
Professor Baxter
Krispy Kreme McDonalds
Kevin Bacon
Horse Renoir
Predator
Chilly
Cousin Phil
Parker Peters
Laura Vanderbooben
Luke Fondleberg
Scotch Bingington
Sholanda Dykes
Mr Mustachos
Warren Beanstalk
Ricky Spanish

Silly kippers

OK, OK, OK, there has been the frankly wonderful mobbing of Nigel Falange in Edinburgh. Comrades, I think we’ve found the model for dealing with UKIP public appearances. 

But better than that, it now turns out a major UKIP donor, a Greek shipping tycoon called Demetri Marchessini, once made a coffee table book called Women in Trousers. The main contention of the book was that Women in Trousers were behaving in a ‘hostile’ manner by deliberately making themselves unattractive to men.

So far so crass (proof, if you needed more, that there's no such thing as single-issue bigotry - UKIP is a crank magnet): but the punch line is this. In the book Marchessini (who also once called Jennifer Lopez a “Mexican tart” – Lopez is Puerto Rican) wrote: “I adore women and want to see them looking beautiful. Everyone has the obligation to look as attractive as possible”. 

This is Demitri Marchessini. Silly Kippers don't know when to stop, do they?

Also, why is UKIP accepting donations from foreigners? I'm just asking.

Social democracy unravelling

For many years we took it for granted that the public was to the left of the government, not any more. Since the beginning of the depression the British Social Attitudes survey has shown a clear right-ward shift in public opinion. According to this piece it has been driven by Labour supporters. 

According to the survey there has been a particular breakdown in social solidarity. In 2011 47% of Labour supporters agree with the statement “if benefits were not as generous people would learn to stand on their own feet”, up from 11% in 1987. Thirty-one percent of Labour supporters now think welfare recipients are “undeserving”. Twenty-seven percent of supporters think poverty is primarily about social injustice, down 14% from 1986, while 22% think it’s a matter of individual weakness, up 9%.

There is no one else to blame except the last Labour government. This is the end result of twenty plus years of triangulation, of the Labour party pointedly neglecting its base, but also trying to square the circle of achieving social democratic results through neo-liberal means.

The most concerning statistic is the one about the source of poverty. It means not only have people shifted to the right but they have lost the ability to rationally calculate their material interests. A majority of people support action to relieve child poverty yet a majority of children in poverty live in households that have work and poverty is supposed to be a personal failing. How does that make sense? 

Unemployment  figures have been well over two million for several years now. This is not a problem of strivers versus skivers (the recession was not caused by 2.5 million people suddenly deciding they couldn't be bothered). Long term unemployment (and underemployment) is a problem for everybody, the entire working class. It creates insecurity, helps suppress wages and overall effective demand.

The way out is not more sado-monetarism but ample jobs at a living wage. The recession is precisely not the responsibility of the unemployed but the capitalist class.

This breakdown in class consciousness is why it’s not kicking off everywhere. Social struggles in Britain now start from an even weaker basis than existed pre-2007. It will take years to turn political questions such as the above around, after all it took the Labour Party leadership nearly thirty years to convince the Labour voters they were more right wing than they realised.

On a much smaller level, I think this is why Left Unity is right to try to stop the 57 Varieties of Socialism from overwhelming the party before it’s even properly constituted. British politics has an excess of revolutionary socialist groups. They have sheltered for years under a giant social democracy. That social democracy is no more. If sectarianism could be indulged before it can be no longer.

Interesting...

Some old news, but with bearing on the modern political scene. This is a photo that shows Nigel Farage in 1997 with Mark Deavin, a BNP 'researcher', and Tony Lecomber, a far-right thug with two convictions, one of possessing explosives, the other of stabbing a Jewish school teacher. Farage says he met Deavin once but denies meeting Lecomber and says the photo could be doctored.

If you know someone who supports UKIP

Phil space

A fascinating discovery: the residual water on the Moon came from the Earth. This means when the Earth suffered the likely collision that produced the Moon it already had oceans and a hard crust, and that the water which made it to the Moon survived the collision (quite a feat). Water is a volatile substance. It had to be imported from the outer solar system, where it could exist in a stable form. The water that eventually reached Earth is essentially the same as the water currently buried in carbonaceous asteroids in the asteroid belt, the water came from the asteroid belt, not comets. This means we probably have to thank Jupiter for life on Earth.

In other news, as I tap this out, there's an annular eclipse approaching over Australia; watch it here.

Doom, glorious doom

Capitalism will leave a legacy to socialism. It’s likely then that if workers power comes to pass it will be an emergency regime. Here’s is another thing to consider, a report by the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, discussing likely future health emergencies resulting from climate change. If Britain becomes warmer and wetter it will become more prone to previously tropical diseases.

They are already heading our way. Dengue was detected in France in 2010. Malaria was reported in Greece in 2011. The West Nile Virus first emerged in New York in 1999 and is now found across the United States.

If and when these diseases do infiltrate our society it will be a question of what cost we, or more precisely the people in power, are willing to pay, greater overheads maintaining public health, or the running cost of continual human suffering. Given the debased state of our ruling class I suspect they’d prefer a debilitated and desperate working class to a mild redistribution of wealth for a conscientious and functioning society. 

Reply in the affirmative to the efficacious use of technical language

Some thoughts thoughts for the brain on this. 

A metaphor is a means by which a perhaps complicated idea or set of ideas is compacted down into a single phrase or even word. Take the phrase “all the world is a stage”[1] from Jacques soliloquy in As You Like It. The world is not a stage, but people do act out their lives, as it were, in roles thrust upon them. Karl Marx, a Shakespeare aficionado, put it differently: men make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. If metaphor is a way of transporting meaning all language is in a sense a metaphor.

Jargon[2] is a form of specific metaphor that applies to defined groups. Jargon is a way for members of such groups to communicate with speed and ease. The danger is quite obvious. Jargon can be esoteric. Esoteric language is exclusive[3].

There are two problems with trying to simplify or clarify language. First of all it makes communication more difficult. If you wanted to discuss, say, watermelons, conversation would grind to a halt if instead of saying watermelon you had to describe it[4]. The second problem is it skirts some very reactionary ideas.

One of which is language superiority. No one has ever said “my language is backward, inexpressive and difficult to learn”. English is the closest thing there is to a global lingua franca, not because it’s an innately superior language, but because it has been spread by the British and American empires. The other reactionary danger is it can serve to drive out refined thought from public life. Socialism is about helping raise the great mass of people up intellectually.

An example: in the early 40s George Orwell was a supporter of Basic English[5]. Most people don’t notice the shift between his celebrated essay, Politics and the English Language, a plea for simple English, and 1984, with its concept of Newspeak. Truncating language, removing all ambiguity, nuance and idiom, was shown as a means of control. Nothing as dramatic has occurred in history so far[6]. Nonetheless attempts to police language have always been reactionary, attempt to transcend it have so far foundered.

There is no clear solution for us, except to say language is a site of struggle. We must be critical at all times. Rather than ask is this jargon we should be asking does this word work? If we are discussing the implications of democratic centralism then we really ought to use the term, instead of inventing a one or a pleasant metaphor, which actually serves to confuse matters. Tom’s argument is actually an esoteric one. Unless you were present at the first national meeting of the IS or received a substantially accurate account of said meeting you are not part of the initiated. You don’t really have a means by which to judge the argument.

We should also be quite rigorous. We have all heard people make clumsy statements. We’ve all probably made clumsy statements. I once heard someone say “we need to be in touch with concrete people on the ground”, which made me think of SWP members swooping about the sky. Has anyone really said anything as lumpen as “comrades will launch a disciplined intervention into the campaign with our propaganda in order to recruit”?

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[1] Happily plundered from the top of the Wikipedia article describing metaphors, follow it, if you like, with “and all men and women merely players”.

[2] Which I didn’t know until now derives from the Old French for birdsong.

[3] That said, there is no universal language, all metaphors are to some degree exclusive. You either understand them or you don’t

[4] Could you please pass me the pass me the large, round fruit with green, waxy skin, pink flesh and black seeds? How much is this large, round fruit with green, waxy skin, pink flesh and black seeds? Does the large, round fruit with green, waxy skin, pink flesh and black seeds taste alright to you?

[5] An English-based language devised by the linguist CK Ogden, consisting of 850 ‘essential’ words, to be used as a lingua franca and an aid to teaching English as a second language.

[6] Although it occurs something drastic might have happened to Korean after six decades of isolation in the North.

Actually existing songs

Actually existing songs available as sheet music in the British Library:

Ball Tossing
Both Old Men or Young
Fair Cloris in a Pigsty Lay
Fixed in His Everlasting Seat
Galloping Dick
A Handy Little Thing to Have About You
I'll Place it in the Hands of My Solicitor
I'm a Very Potent Queen
I Smote Him on the Boko with My Whangee
A Lap Full of Nuts
A Large Cold Bottle and a Small Hot Bird
Miniwanka
Open Thy Lattice Darling
Say Mama, If He Pops Shall I Send Him to You?
They've All Got Sticky Backs
You Do Keep Popping In and Out