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.

State capitalism versus Democracy

State capitalist society cannot have any meaningful democracy. This is because the state directly controls the means of production. Under state capitalism political democracy would be all but the same as economic democracy. With the simplest of movements the division between workers and the means of production (on which capitalism is based) would be erased.

This does not bode well for our times. If China is destined to become the new superpower then every non-revolutionary society is destined to reflect Chinese society in some way. Countries with a one party (or effective one party) state that have extensive power over civil society and nil legal opposition will become the norm.

All of this has been trailed in recent years. If you can say nothing else, the one abiding impression of the New Labour years has been illiberal decline. There are too numerous examples one could give. One thing we would have to add is the closing down of civil liberties did not start on May 1997. Just ask any trade unionist.

Everyone knows the current system is sick. As an aside, when apparently sensible people bandy about nonsense such as free speech for fascists, tactical voting or the PR panacea, it shows how powerful illusions in presently constituted democracy are.

In Britain, parliament has been vital when there has been vital conflict going on outside. So we see parliament came alive in the great years of the English Revolution. The conflicts of the 19th century, over the various free trade and reform acts, came about as the compromise of 1688 was renegotiated under pressure of the French Revolution.

During the 20th century parliamentary struggle was based around the need to absorb the urban workers movement. The interesting thing about the post-war social contract (drawn up at the last height of the organised workers movement) is state capitalism advanced pretty much everywhere.

Many social theorists came to suppose, especially after the period of De-Stalinisation was announced in the east, that the two empires were converging. Planning was slowly but surely overcoming anarchy. We stood on the threshold of plenty. All that was left was to add acceptable social content to each technocratic scheme.

The trouble has always been democracy is essential to generate consent, and technocrats hate democracy. There was no way for the grand dreams of the post war period to connect with the masses. We still live with this failure today. In our cities we have peeling high-rises, sink estates and drab, amenity-free sprawl.

The post war social contract was also based on the marginalisation and forced exclusion of radical politics. At home this usually meant excluding the local CP from public life. Abroad this meant counter-insurgency, massacre and dictatorship. The violence may have been exported. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

So to today: politically speaking, neo-liberalism was about removing all traces of working class influence from government, ending the post war social contract. It was very largely successful. The current ruling class drive to cut public spending is, of course, nothing to do with rescuing the economy, but finishing off the job.

The rise of state capitalism has come with the rise of the multinational corporation. This should logically produce a tension between nationalist and internationalist bourgeois politicians. It does to some extent. Witness the ongoing argument between senior Tories about the merits of the European Union. However, within this example the contradiction seems false, as the same Tories will support close relations with America through NATO and the UN Security Council, the WTO, IMF, World Bank and so on.

The capitalist class has developed international bodies to mediate potential conflicts within their system. Let’s not forget that capital still has a territorial aspect. Multinational companies still have to exist somewhere. From the capitalist point of view there is such a thing as our multinationals and theirs.

This points to something observed at the start of the last century. There is still potential for revolutionary nationalism to upset the imperialist state system. The US government list of rogue states acknowledges this. There is nowhere that really stands out as an alternative to the current state system, except perhaps Venezuela.

In Venezuela there is perhaps a three-way contest going on between the internationalist (i.e. pro-American) bourgeoisie, the nationalist Bolivarian bourgeoisie and the urban and rural working classes. The Bolivarian leaders, headed by Hugo Chavez, are balanced between the first and last of the classes. Though their political base is in the working class, their economic base is in global capitalism. It is an irony that the one coherent example of anti-neo-liberalism has been based on neo-liberal demand for oil.

Given that Venezuelan society has been hotly contested for ten years now, it should be no surprise it also has a flourishing democratic culture.

Your secret fan club

The police love you. They want to know all about you. They want to understand you, grow with you and feel close to you and, in case you commit a crime, they want your details on a handy database.

It's been widely mooted that the police are keeping a secret database of the politically active population. Yet more evidence came in the form of a secret spotter card posted to comedian Mark Thomas:

The card contained the photographs of 24 anti-arms trade protesters, unnamed but lettered A to X. My picture appeared as photo H. You can imagine my reaction at finding I was the subject of a secret police surveillance process … I was delighted. I phoned my agent and told him I was suspect H. He replied: "Next year we'll get you top billing … suspect A."

Suspect? Suspected of what exactly? Nothing, as it turns out:

A spokesman [said] people on the database "should not be worried". "There are lots of reasons why people might be on the database," he said. "Not everyone on there is a criminal and not everyone on there is a domestic extremist but we have got to build up a picture of what is happening. Those people may be able to help us in the future. It's an intelligence database, not an evidence database".

The fact that it's secret should surely be some cause for concern, officer. Perhaps we should apply their typical demand for transparency on our part: if they've nothing to hide they've nothing to fear.

Then again, maybe we're talking a potential narc list. The secret services used to recruit agents during the cold war. Now it seems the police have taken over that job. Matilda Gifford (member of Plane Stupid) knows a little about what they're angling at:

In all, she recorded almost three hours worth of talks with the two men...

The men became explicit about what they wanted from Gifford, what they were prepared to give her in return, and what might become of her if she went to jail. They also claimed they had "thousands" of informers feeding them detailed information about protest groups across the political spectrum.

Maybe that's true, maybe they're blowing off. Either way they have serious money, apparently, that can be paid cash in hand. Although, according to the Associated Press article:

Three national police units responsible for combating domestic extremism are run by the "terrorism and allied matters" committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo). It receives £9m in public funding, from police forces and the Home Office, and employs a staff of 100.

£9 million is piss, when "UK plc can afford more than 20 quid..." Something doesn't add up. The crucial questions though are these:

No police, secret or otherwise, should operate without proper accountability. So how are these three units accountable? Who has access to the databases? How long does information remain in the system? What effect could it have on travel and future employment of those targeted? How closely do these units work with corporate private investigators, and does the flow of information go both ways? Do the police target strikers?

The British state is a hardening fist. Democracy and modern capitalism are coming apart.

Oh but this is goood...

Thoughts after yesterday's demo

Again done better and quicker over on The Tomb. First of all the day was a victory for the nazi Nick Griffin. He got on prime time TV. Despite the overwhelmingly (and rightly) hostile audience, he got to put out his point of view, his unique provocations (such as the perverse and offensive notion that London has been ethnically cleansed of white people). For many people now, fascism is part of the furniture. This is what Griffin wanted.

But will it be pyrric victory? The fantastic demo outside (which on three occasions very nearly got inside) doubtless had the effect of turning the audience and panel firmly against the nazi inside. It must be carried through over the coming days, weeks and months. A useful analogue may be the Olympia rally of 1934.

It was a huge event, intended as a battering ram for the BUF and Oswald Mosely to break through into the political mainstream. Communists and socialists in London were determined to disrupt the event, prevent it from happening. They failed in this respect. But the violence meted out by the Blackshirts on the day had the effect of turning sections public against the BUF.

In much the same way it took hundreds of very harried, aggressive police officers (watch out for U231 if you ever meet him) to protect the nazis yesterday.

Who protects the nazis? You protect the nazis.

Man, they hated that chant.

I cannot add a link to Unite Against Fascism because the site seems to be down (hmm...). None the less, give it your time, money and energy. Join UAF.

Do you remember when dance music was great?

Well it still is. Still Going - Spaghetti Circus:

Actually Existing Capitalism: back in the USSA

A strange kind of funk often descends on people, be they from the left or right of the political spectrum. Many people cling to the equation that state activity = socialism. What seems so obvious can suddenly become bizarre and endlessly confusing. People like Barack Obama, Winston Churchill and Gordon Brown are transfigured into revolutionaries. We end up with not just the workers state but also the degenerated workers state, the deformed workers state and the transitional genocidal workers state.

Its interesting how many historical forms capitalism has had to pass through, how many surrogate regimes it has had to use in order to survive. Capitalism has rarely existed in the form it was supposed to.

There was less of a problem in ancient and feudal civilisations as political and economic power was more or less the same thing. Kings and emperors conquered land and took tribute. Capitalists are people who manage the process of commodity production. At their beginning especially they were actively involved in the production process.

This created a problem we a familiar with today. It is impossible to work and rule. Unlike the working class, which must forcibly redistribute wealth in order to maintain its rule (and in the process undo all class distinctions) the bourgeoisie had the luxury of being able to accumulate wealth. The bourgeoisie created representative systems of its own within the old regime, along an army paid intellectuals, representatives and advocates. It was even able to bring the intellectuals of the old classes over to its cause. An example: the British aristocracy, which was recruited into the vanguard of capitalist development, came to the armed forces and government during the rise of capitalism.

The development of capitalism in Western Europe the 19th century saw wealth accumulated at steeper and faster rates. The need for greater resources, more labour and bigger markets sent capital across the globe. Wherever it set down it transformed the local economy into a commodity economy.

The stakes were constantly raised. In order to stay in the game you needed more and more wealth in order to bid for the market. It is no mystery why surviving capitalists began to pool resources and organise. The typical company went from being private limited to publicly owned.

Perhaps the best illustration of this process can be found in the rewarding final chapters of Rosa Luxemburg’s work The Accumulation of Capital. For brevity I will settle on one factor: transport. Under the heading International Loans, Luxemburg spends some time talking about the Victorian craze for railway building.

It was a risky, sometimes shady, speculative practice often guaranteed by the state. Profit was often little and a long time coming, if it ever came at all. Yet the permanent way was crucial to breaking new frontiers for capitalism. It not only brought commodities to new, faraway places, but also sped up freight and communication, and thus turnover.

The next great leap forward came with the internal combustion engine, leading to the car and aeroplane. Everything the steamer and train could do, the car and aeroplane could do more quickly, cheaply (in terms of running cost), and on a greater scale. But these new developments required a round of new and bigger investment, not to mention planning.

We live with the results of the transport speed up today, nationalised railways, airports, airlines and road networks. Lets not forget the huge subsidies for private firms. Congestion is a major urban issue, wrestled with at city admin level. Air congestion is juggled with everyday by networks of national and international controllers. There is no meaningful free market in transport.

There is a potential new frontier for capitalism in the 21st century. The cold war saw huge military and industrial competition between the American and Russian empires. There was another separate but connected competition as well, called the space race. Incredible amounts of money were thrown at this contest. All of it was directed through national, central, bureaucratic organisations. Again there was no meaningful free market involved.

As the Russian empire fell behind during the 70s and 80s in terms of military and industrial competition, so the heat went out of the space race. With the exception of satellite communication (and even this is heavily reliant on state help) the potential of space remains largely untapped.

The point is, as capitalism has developed it has gone from private to public to state capitalist. The state is now the front man, the organiser and the defender at home (and crucially) abroad. It is the lender of last resort. The state has become the aggregate capitalist, the perfect personification of capital’s will.

Most importantly it is the collective frontiersman. Capital needs a hinterland to expand into, one of Luxemburg’s most clear and timeless observations. The state is the last organisation that can organise the resources and cover the cost of establishing new frontiers.

This means that the conflicts of our age will largely be national conflicts. You cannot have a theory of imperialism without a theory of state capitalism. Have no illusions in Actually Existing Capitalism.

Gordon Brown to get tough...

But not on bankers or corrupt politicians but public sector workers. Public servents are the backbone of our society, not Gordon and his gang of liars, flippers and armchair generals. He's got some chutzpah. He is the weakest, most incompentant PM in a generation... not some hard man, tough guy enforcer.

We can beat him. The posties will be at the cutting edge of any fightback. Here's why you should support their struggle:

1. Defending public services
Royal Mail bosses are determined to run down the postal service, making it slower, more expensive and less reliable.

They hope that if it gets bad enough the public will support another effort to privatise the company.

Many post workers have been in the job all their adult lives. We are committed to delivering a service based on need. The bosses and the government are in this for the short-term, and are only interested in profits.
2. Fighting to keep full time jobs
Royal Mail is slashing thousands of full-time jobs. More than 50,000 posts have been cut since 2002 and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, they want to replace almost all full-time jobs with workers on part-time or temporary contracts.

But part-time work means part-time pay, part-time pensions, part-time sick pay – and part-time rights.
3. A battle for decent pay
Royal Mail boss Adam Crozier is Britain’s highest paid public servant. Since arriving at the company in 2003 he’s pocketed £6 million in pay and bonuses.

Post workers, on the other hand, are among the poorest in Britain. We earn around £100 less a week than the average skilled worker and many of us can only survive on overtime.

Now Royal Mail is telling us we have to accept a pay freeze – and that at least part of our overtime should be compulsory and free.
4. Stopping the union-busters
Our CWU union is the biggest barrier to those who want to cut jobs, services and pay in the post – and that’s why the company and the government are trying to drive us out of the industry.

To get their way they are bullying and intimidating our members, and using managers and non-unionised casual staff in an effort to break our regional strikes.

Bosses everywhere are watching what happens in this dispute. If Royal Mail can drive the union out of the postal service, others will try to do the same.
5. If the postal workers win, every worker wins
Our battle is one of the first in what will be a wider war. All political parties are preparing massive cuts in public spending and if the Tories win the next election, they will be absolutely ruthless.

The post workers’ strike is about drawing a line in the sand and telling any future government that we will not accept the smashing of our services.

If we are beaten, bosses everywhere will say: if we can take on the CWU and win, we can break you too. We must not allow them to do that.

Charlie Brooker gets it spot on

The sound of a nail being hit on the head - almost as pleasant as the sound of a homophobe being hit on the head.

BBC to vet the Question Time audience

Presumably all in the name of balance. This is the BBC that refuses to show appeals for aid to Gaza but gives a platform to 'Mark and Joey'... in the name of balance. This is the BBC that maintains an unofficial blackout of LMHR and StWC events but gives Nick Griffin airtime to vent on all sorts of subjects.

The BBC was never truly a voice of the people, never truly representative of the licence paying public. This is a body that reputedly always has a member of MI5 on its board after all. But something has clearly turned rotten in this corporation. BBC commissioners have become arrogant collaborators. It's time we started making an issue of this.

No plugs for Nazi Nick, 22nd October.

Just stuff

Michael Moore is a Christian. More precisely he is a Catholic. But this is not news, he said as much before. It’s only a surprise to Sean Hannity.

There are a few things worth bringing up. In America there is a proliferation of churches and temples. People usually understand the word secular to mean irreligious or even anti-religious. In this sense there is a clear contradiction between the secular state and the society dominated by religion.

This actually brings out the strict meaning of secular. On one level the American revolution was a continuation of the English revolution a century earlier. At that time religion was not just about personal faith and social ritual, it was also a form of popular philosophy. The promise of religious freedom bound the masses to the leaders of the revolution. Unlike in numerous European countries, the American state would guarantee freedom of worship by deliberately staying out of religious matters.

In modern America the perception of Protestantism and Catholicism is reversed. Catholicism is not associated with conservatism, bigotry and fascism, as in Europe, but with immigrants and the working class. The protestant suburbanites and small townsfolk live in general fear of the big city and it’s teeming catholic masses.

It is a big leap to go from there to supposing the Catholic Church in America is remotely radical or even progressive. The fact that Michael Moore claims Christian inspiration for his politics shows how a person’s outlook is often based on aspects of wildly different systems. Michael Moore’s worldview is a combination of popular priest and politicised union organiser.

Post ballot to be announced soon

It's likely, very likely that there will be a yes vote for national action. This is, or will be good news. Auntie is aghast. Even the union leaders seem a bit concerned.

Dave Ward, deputy general secretary of the CWU, argued that modernisation should be about improving services rather than cutting them.

"Postal workers are striking to defend future services as well as for jobs and modern conditions," he said.

"Modernisation is crucial to the future success of Royal Mail, but the implementation of change must be agreed and it must bring with it modern pay and conditions."

If that wasn't clear enough, check out Billy Hayes statement:

"We don't want to see strike action, we want to see a negotiated settlement".

This strike should go ahead. The regional strikes have been very well supported by the members. A victory for the postal workers would not only strike a blow for union rights (Royal Mail management have tried to effectively derecognise the union twice, in 2003 and 2007, and been forced to back off), it will also send a message that cuts in jobs and services can be resisted. The working class does not have to pay for the folly and greed of bankers and politicians.

Posties work hard. They have faced jobs losses despite the fact that volume is going up thanks to the growth in things like internet shopping. The government and the managers have tried to run the service down (remember when first class guaranteed delivery before 10am?) in order to sell it off. The only thing stopping them has been the postal workers and their excellent guerrilla warfare.

This is a big confrontation. The posties need your support and solidarity. The strike must not (and does not have to) be called off or scaled down.

Let's talk about 1989

Let's talk about 1989 and not mention the Stone Roses once. Hooray!

1989 is crucial because it is the only commonly agreed year of revolution in living memory. If the student-worker uprising in China during the summer wasn't spectacular enough by the end of the year mass movements were toppling governments across Eastern Europe, crowned by the fall of the Berlin wall on November the 9th (71st anniversary of the revolution which toppled the Kaiser and finally ended World War One).

1989 happened because the global economic crisis, the first under neoliberalism, combined with the ratcheting pressure of the second cold war, took down the weaker empire. The Russian empire, which only 20-30 years before, looked so imposing, ground to a halt.

Having built a military-industrial complex on the sweat and oppression of millions of working people the Eastern Bloc economy had built up colossal overcapacity (evidenced by the huge economic and social crash once Eastern Europe was opened up to direct market competition), which it struggled to unload on the world market, especially after the neoliberal turn. This combined with the problem that the economy was state owned.

An exploitative society with national ownership of the means of production cannot have meaningful democracy. There was precious little means of generating consent. The state was at constant war with the people. An example: by the end of the DDR an estimated 1 in 10 of the population was in the pay of the Stasi.

This was not a problem at the start of the empire, during the stage of primitive accumulation. As the state owned economy developed and expanded westward it became more and more difficult to extract profit through squeezing the population. But reform tended to encourage rebellion. Witness the events of 56 and 68. Any social conflict expressed was liable to immediately become a challenge to the state system.

The legacy of the 89 revolutions was used by the western ruling classes as further evidence, piled on top of the neo-liberal assault and the breaking of many unions in many countries, of the decline and death of socialism. The likely readers of this post will know that the above argument is a state capitalist argument. Put simply what was passed by many (including the western ruling classes) as Actually Existing Socialism was actually a system of exploitation of wage labour. Fundamentally speaking both east and west were the same.

The idea that Russia represented socialism must be challenged. This argument will be overcome as a new and purposive working class movement with hegemonic sway is built.

Connected with this argument is the line put that this was a good revolution, at last! It was a nice, peaceful, bloodless event (except in China and Romania, but there's always exceptions). The level of direct control by the state over civil society was a paramount concern. There could be no legal organised politics, no free press, no mass meetings, no open public discussion.

What people wanted was freedom and democracy (not necessarily burgers and Baywatch). But these are ambiguous terms. The only people to fill them with any meaning were people organised before the upheaval, the 'radicals' within the local CP or collections of dissidents. They filled the goals of the revolution with neo-liberal content, which they saw as a solution to the problems of the stalinist system, the opposite of the old world.

What became known as 'revolution' after 89 was a nebulous formula where people appear on the streets, something happens in government and a 'revolution' takes place. It has been repeated several times since, in places like Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan where governments have been replaced. Others have tried and failed. For example Tibet, Lebanon and Zimbabwe.

The missing x factor in these last two cases was outside intervention. The most reliable intervention usually came from the United States. We now have imperial gameplay through 'revolution'.

The series of mass movements and uprisings in Latin America have gone some way toward filling the void at the heart of revolution. These revolutions have been driven by ideas of autonomy, popular power and civil rights, ideas that add social content to political demands.

Diary of a post worker

Read it here, up the posties:

What a pathetic, spineless bunch our managers are.

At a weekly information session at Teesside mail centre last week they made clear they want a no vote in the national strike ballot, which was no surprise.

One of them read out a

pre-written spiel about how the strike is nothing to do with anyone outside of London.

Apparently, if we go for national action it will only be to protect outdated practices in London, where Royal Mail says terms and conditions date back to the Dark Ages.

What utter nonsense.

This strike is about preventing the company steamrollering our union and them wanting to turn us into casualised and part-time robots.

And we’ve had enough experience of this locally to know the truth.

We walked out unofficially two weeks ago after being provoked by hordes of managers from the outside who’d come to lay down the law after we’d taken a day of official strike action.

The processing staff, who did two or three hours work before joining their colleagues on deliveries outside the building, had a whole day’s pay taken from them.

When asked at the information session whether Middlesbrough will see another 192 managers drafted in from all over the country – including six from Belfast – to break this week’s strike, the manager’s reply was less than informative.

“Not all of them were managers,” was the best he could come up with.

It is obvious that the company is gearing up for a show of strength.

The same company that takes pay from the struggling postman and woman is more than happy to pay out thousands in hotel fees, overtime, travelling and subsistence to those who will break a strike.

What a way to run a once-proud public service.

This strike isn’t going to be about a north/south divide – it’s about forcing Royal Mail to treat us like human beings.

G20 Update

Are you lost? Perhaps you're a tourist looking for a landmark? Perhaps you're a pregnant woman denied access to a toilet? Do these people look like police officers to you?

Well, they look like police officers to the CPS. Speaking of hyped up vindictive scum, Sergeant Delroy Smellie (stand firm, comrades, hold it in!) will be prosecuted for his alleged assault of Nicola Fisher (alleged is just a polite term, he's as guilty as a puppy sitting next to a pile of poo). That said he's hardly likely to go to jail. Expect testimony from senior officers about the terrible, terrible burden he and his comrades faced that day, awful responisibility you just wouldn't understand.