Red Pepper » Mike Marqusee

World’s longest running industrial dispute sets example for us all

admin — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 20:09:00 +0000

Their banner reads:

“Ex-Midrand Council Workers in Dispute Since 1994!
Dismissed for fighting corruption in 1994 and still fighting today!
20 years of Sacrifice! 20 Years of Poverty! 20 Years of Solidarity!”

South Africa’s ex-Midrand Council workers are engaged in what is surely the world’s longest running industrial dispute, a Burston for our times. It started back in 1994, in the midst of the birth pains of South African democracy, when more than 500 workers employed by Midrand Council took industrial action against corrupt employment practices. At that time, local government structures had not yet been subject to democratic ‘transformation’; they were still the creations of the apartheid era. Midrand was run by remnants of the old regime with no interest in reaching a settlement. Under pressure, some strikers returned to work, but the great majority remained in dispute.

In 1996, Midrand Council disappeared into the new local government structures, its responsibilities passed to Johannesburg City Council. There were hopes that the dispute would now be resolved, with the strikers re-integrated into the council workforce, but these came to nothing, thanks to endless buck-passing and bureaucratic inertia (i.e. lack of political will).

The now ex-Midrand workers were left in limbo, on strike against an authority that no longer existed, pressing their demands on an authority that refused to recognise them as employees.

Through all this time, to the present day, the strikers have continued to meet, to agitate and to organise. Many of the original group have passed away (though some of their descendants are active in the campaign). Some have reached pension age (but receive no pension). Others have become too sick and weak to work, and others have moved out of the vicinity, often seeking refuge with family in far-away communities. As a recent statement from the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) says, “Despite these hardships and sometimes with virtually no external support, the Midrand workers have remained resolute and committed to settling their dispute with dignity and with fairness.”

Every Sunday

For 19 years, they have met every Sunday in Ivory Park/Tembisa “in significant numbers, and often in excess of 120, to hear progress in their dispute, and to share whatever meagre resources they have.”

For many years, they did so with no help from outside, relying entirely on their own resources, which were meagre but treated collectively. In 2009, SAMWU assumed a more active role. With the full support of the 283 remaining ex-Midrand strikers, the union resolved to launch a “political intervention” to secure a just resolution.

Negotiations with Johannesburg authorities commenced but were dogged by what SAMWU describes as “delays and roadblocks.” The election of a new mayor in 2012 led to further postponements. A recent public letter from SAMWU notes:

“Two months ago, we learned that a report [on the Midrand dispute] had in fact been submitted to the Mayoral Committee, but we were not allowed to see it, or were able to contribute to it. Indeed we have not even been informed of the outcomes of the Mayoral Committee’s deliberations. In our view this contradicts both the consultation process we had agreed, and national and local government policy of open and transparent government.

“We can only assume that there are forces within the council who are determined to derail the cause of the Midrand workers, and who perhaps for reasons only known to themselves do not want the Midrand case resolved.”

Nonetheless, support for the Midrand workers is growing. Their campaign has been endorsed by COSATU and many of its affiliates. Media interest has also risen in recent months, in South Africa and beyond.

It’s a small scale struggle with a very big resonance. The context includes the debate about the relation of labour unions to the ANC government, the widespread feeling that the post-apartheid regime has failed to deliver on the promises of liberation, and the hot issue of corruption. The ANC’s right-wing opponents exploit the latter for their own ends, but it is nonetheless a reality, a corrosive force running counter to democratic aspirations. Through SAMWU and other unions, public sector workers have shown that they want to tackle corruption and need support from their employers to do so. Obviously there are others with different interests.

In any case, the ex-Midrand workers deserve support and solidarity from trades unionists everywhere, especially public sector trades unionists. Their tenacity is an example to us all.

Contact SAMWU for more information.

Us and them: how the far right feed off the racism of the mainstream

admin — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 21:00:07 +0000

Only a year ago, the London Olympics were being hailed as ‘a defining moment’ in the emergence of a proudly multicultural Britain. That claim was always inflated but it looks decidedly hollow, indeed dangerously self-indulgent, in light of recent developments: the electoral advance of UKIP, the enhanced menace of the English Defence League (EDL) and most of all the attacks on Muslims and mosques in the aftermath of Lee Rigby’s murder at Woolwich.
The far-right resurgence, here and across Europe, poses challenges of many kinds for the left. But whatever else we do, we have to recognise that the far right feeds off and reinforces a more diffuse phenomenon: the racism, national chauvinism and xenophobia that are part and parcel of the mainstream.
The racism of the mainstream isn’t hard to find. Just look at the pages of the Mail or Express (far more efficient deliverers of racist propaganda than the far right) or at entertainments like Homeland or Argo (where in accordance with hoary stereotypes the Muslim enemies of the west are portrayed as unappeasable, brutally irrational and at the same time calculating and duplicitous). Then look at how racism has been shown to infect nearly all our major social institutions – from football to police and prisons to Oxford and Cambridge.
The supposedly ‘unsayable’
Politicians of all three main parties dabble in it. Here the trick is to claim to be saying something ‘unsayable’ but widely thought. Jack Straw on the niqab a few years back was a classic example of the ploy. Now we have Ed Miliband arguing that Labour failed to ‘listen’ to ‘people’ on ‘immigration’ (all three words have to be placed in quotes because none actually means what it’s supposed to mean).
Currently the political centre in this country appears to be taking the line that the far right is voicing some kind of genuine complaint to which the rest of us must listen. Thus the perverse rationale of racism is given legitimacy and the real message of the far right goes uncontested. The scariest thing about UKIP’s election performance was the speed with which it elicited knee-jerk concessions from Cameron and others. Once again we’ve seen that the big danger of the far right is the way they drag the political mainstream in their direction.
Far from being repressed by ‘political correctness’, supposedly unsayable thoughts about race are the common currency of all kinds of polite conversation, including in the media and among the intelligentsia. Nothing the EDL says is any cruder than Martin Amis’s musings on Muslim culpability. And Tony Blair’s malign wooden-headedness was fully on display in his recent declaration that somehow, when all is said and done, ‘Islam’ is indeed to blame.
As for the BBC, the heart of the ‘liberal’ establishment, it has conferred legitimacy on both UKIP and the EDL, but more importantly it acts as one of the great propagators of the us versus them worldview. Its standard treatment of ethnicity, at home or abroad, is one in which a supra-ethnic commentary (western liberal and in fact very ‘English’) confronts everything outside its privileged purview as Other – as all the things that ‘we’ are not: tribal, fanatical, sectarian, beyond reason – and above all not our responsibility. Mainstream commentary, liberal and conservative, is permeated by this habitual optic, which assigns to the Other society’s own dark side (hatred, violence, corruption).
Racism is pliable, elastic, shifting its targets, its grounds of complaint. The line between us and them is drawn and re-drawn. In that process, the ‘them’ is a construction, a phantom, a projection, as is widely recognised. But the same is true of the ‘us’: the us that is the heart of white and western supremacism, an us that is also blithely, routinely invoked across mainstream commentary.
Racism’s global context
Domestic racism has a global context. In the war on terror Muslims (and others) become representatives of the enemy abroad, living in our midst but always suspect. In the dehumanisation of drone killings and the denial of responsibility for death and destruction on an immense scale in Iraq and elsewhere, the double-standard of racist consciousness is unmistakeable, as it is in the easy acceptance as a future Indian prime minister of Narendra Modi, deeply complicit in the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002, and in the casual assumption of prerogatives to ourselves that we deny others, including possession and use of weapons of mass destruction. It’s there in every unexamined use of the pronoun ‘we’ in the discussion of foreign interventions.
Contrary to right-wing myth, Britain’s imperial past goes largely unexamined and unacknowledged, and therefore its assumptions remain active in forming our views of the present. We still live in a world shaped materially and imaginatively by the high imperial epoch, during which a small number of European states dominated the economies and polities of the bulk of humanity. This is not the sort of episode that leaves either party unscarred. White supremacism, racism and xenophobic nationalism are as much a part of our western cultural heritage as what are loosely referred to as Enlightenment values. This is a legacy that has to be systematically unlearned.
The racist response to Lee Rigby’s murder was not automatic or natural. Racism is not a default setting. It’s an ideology, a construction, a hulking psycho-social edifice, one that has to be demolished plank by plank. It’s not a disease that can be cured on a case-by-case basis. The therapy has to be collective – some trauma of confrontation and contestation that alters what people have in mind when they think of ‘we’.
Living under a global capitalism that reproduces all manner of social hierarchies, anti-racist consciousness cannot be a fixed, once-in-a-lifetime conversion; it’s an ongoing struggle, a process that has to be engaged in consciously. There’s no point of rest because the ideology we’re contesting is never at rest.
Whipping boy
An example of that is the way that multiculturalism has been turned into a whipping boy, declared a failure by Merkel, Cameron and an army of pundits. On no basis at all, a variety of unappealing phenomena are blamed on it, from the ‘grooming’ of girls by Asian men to the alleged self-segregation of minorities. In fact, like other racist bugbears, multiculturalism is largely a phantom. The bundle of policies herded under that rubric were concessions made in the past in response to mobilisation in black and Asian communities. There were always objections from the left to the multicultural framework, which conceived of minorities as homogeneous communities with fixed cultural identities.
The right’s campaign is not, however, about the theory but the fact of multiculturalism – that is, the presence of people seen as belonging to alien cultures. Modern European societies are and will continue to be comprised of numerous ‘cultures’ – in fact, of a wealth of sub- and counter-cultures, overlapping and intersecting. To deny or lament this reality is to deny and lament the presence of those seen as belonging to other cultures. In this context demands for integration are demands for adherence to a cultural norm set by the dominant group. It is amazing that some who boast of an Enlightenment heritage see this as anything other than tyrannical.
Under the guise of an attack on the relativism of multiculturalism, what’s going on is a reassertion of the historically pre-eminent form of ethical relativism, the assumed superiority of the western norm. The most strident and powerful form of identity politics in our society remains that of white or western identity: the dominant, majority identity that likes to conceive of itself as a threatened minority, under siege in its own land.
The answer to the real as opposed to imagined shortcomings of multiculturalism is not a reversion to Eurocentrism or mono-culture or the creation of a new, all-embracing cultural synthesis. It lies in the political struggle for equality (not mere representation) and the practise of a solidarity that reaches beyond culture. Olympics-style multiculturalism is of no use. The only antidote to the culture of racism is the cultivation of resistance.

NHS financial squeeze is a contrived crisis

admin — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 11:55:10 +0000

The financial crisis threatening jobs and services at Britain’s biggest NHS hospital trust, Barts in London, is a scandal and a tragedy – because it is entirely contrived.
According to trust executives, among the main causes of the putative £2 million per week shortfall is the ‘non-delivery of planned cost improvement programme schemes.’ In other words, the trust has been unable to implement the spending cuts it had undertaken to make as part of the four year NHS-wide £20 billion ‘efficiency savings’ programme.
It’s not that the trust hasn’t been trying to meet its ‘savings’ targets or that staff have been wanton with resources; it’s that those targets cannot be met without compromising patient care. It’s a paper exercise largely detached from the realities of service provision.
In its report on the Barts crisis, the Guardian notes that ‘Attempts to cut wage costs are failing because vacancies are having to be filled by agency staff.’ What could better illustrate the irrationality of the NHS financial squeeze? Patient needs are non-negotiable; the demand does not fluctuate according to the economic cycle and therefore the supply has to be consistent and continuous. This cannot be done within the ‘business’ model embraced by the Barts bosses. (And the only serious error I’ve suffered in my own treatment at Barts was down to an agency nurse on a night shift who didn’t understand how to use a particular piece of equipment.)
The same point applies to the problem of escalating accident and emergency costs. The hospitals are pushing hard for people not to resort to A&E unless it’s absolutely necessary, but in the end A&E demand is out of the hands of the hospitals that have to meet it. Requiring an arbitrary level of savings from A&E is tantamount to requiring an arbitrary cap on A&E demand, which is not possible, unless you’re simply going to deny treatment to people who need it.
Billions, banks and bailouts
The Guardian article notes that the trust is avoiding mentioning the elephant in the room: the massive £1.1 billion PFI re-building programme – one of the biggest public-private partnerships in Europe – that costs the trust some hundred million pounds a year, 15 per cent of its annual income, in repayments. These, it appears, can never be renegotiated or re-scheduled.
Or not quite. The trust has recently announced that after intensive scrutiny of the books, it has clawed back some £7 million from the PFI consortium – over the 42 year life of the contact. By the end of that period repayments made by the trust on the original £1.1 billion will total £7.1 billion.
Construction giants Skanska and funders Innisfree are the main partners in the PFI consortium. But most of the original £1.1 billion comes from banks, including banks that have been bailed out by the taxpayer, or were in any case advancing the capital because a high rate of return was guaranteed by the taxpayer.
So the public sector releases money at low or no rates of interest to the private sector, which then lends it back at high rates to the public sector. And it’s not just Skanska and Innisfree that reap the rewards. The trust has multi-million contracts outsourcing services to a range of corporations: Health Care Projects (management services), Carillion plc (cleaning, catering and security), Siemens Medical Solutions (medical equipment) and Synergy Healthcare (sterile services). In recent years, Barts senior executives have regularly migrated into the upper echelons of companies doing business with Barts, notably HCP. And this is one reason why they won’t talk about that elephant in the room: not only the mighty, profit-churning PFI beast, but Barts’ increasing colonisation by and integration into a parasitical private sector.
Cause and effect
Muddying the waters is the news that the Barts Trust hospitals are to face inspection as a result of ‘serious patient safety incidents … poor patient confidence and trust in its nurses; long waits for urgent cancer treatment; excessive rates of Caesarean section births; and too many emergency re-admissions.’ Redressing any of these shortcomings will require more, not less, money; and the proposed cuts in staff and departmental spending will surely exacerbate these and other existing problems.
But here’s where the current spate of negative stories about NHS treatment plays a dubious political role. Not because the stories are untrue or insignificant (they are neither), but because they are the effects, not the cause, of the NHS crisis.
My own care at Barts over the last six years has been superb. With a few exceptions, nurses, doctors, technicians and receptionists have been expert, efficient, caring, responsive. But it’s quite obviously a service under enormous and mounting pressures. I regularly attend the weekly haem-oncology clinic, which is always packed with patients. There’s usually a delay of 40 minutes or more between your appointment time and actually seeing a doctor. Patients accept this because when you do see a doctor, you get as much time and attention as is needed. I’ve never felt rushed or cut short; whatever issues I have at that moment are dealt with in full. This can sometimes take as much as an hour of the doctor’s time – which means people behind me in the queue wait longer. And of course the costs to the trust rise. So it’s not inefficiency but efficiency – if the measure is to be safe, effective patient care – that’s making Barts financially ‘unviable’.
Now there will be pressure on staff to process patients more quickly. At the same time, there will be fewer staff to deliver the service.
The trust says it wants to reduce ‘emergency re-admissions’; that will mean staff erring on the side of not re-admitting patients, and thus exercising less caution, less diligence, in ensuring necessary care is provided.
I hope staff at Barts resist this attack on their jobs and on the essential, life-sustaining services they provide. It’s often seemed to me that Barts survives on their good will alone. They’ve already been hammered by a steady fall in real wages and there is a sad fatalism among many, not helped by the patchiness of the union presence across the trust. What’s vital for them to understand is that what’s happening now is not about failings at Barts; it’s a manifestation of the general crisis in the NHS, a crisis brought about by cuts, fragmentation and privatisation, and one that can only be addressed through a mass movement that forces a radical redirection in government policy.
Mike Marqusee is a patient at Barts

‘An hereditary crown! A transmissible throne! What a notion!’

admin — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 12:47:19 +0000

In Rights of Man (1791-92) Paine describes monarchy as like ‘something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to be open and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter.’
For Paine, it was the institution of monarchy, rather than the character of the individual monarch, that was the source of a dysfunctional system. ‘It is wrong to reproach kings with their ferocity, their brutal indifference, the oppressions of the people, and molestations of citizens: it is hereditary succession that makes them what they are: this breeds monsters as a marsh breeds vipers.’ The institution ‘turns the progress of the human faculties upside down. It subjects age to be governed by children, and wisdom by folly.’ As a result of ‘this absurdity, man is perpetually in contradiction with himself; he accepts, for a king, or a chief magistrate, or a legislator, a person whom he would not elect for a constable.’
Crucially, he notes the deleterious effect of monarchic celebration on society as a whole:
‘It is by distortedly exalting some men, that others are distortedly debased, till the whole is out of nature. A vast mass of mankind are degradedly thrown into the back-ground of the human picture, to bring forward, with greater glare, the puppet-show of state and aristocracy.’
Hereditary monarchy treats human beings and whole nations as forms of heritable property, as ‘mere animals without a right or will’: ‘To inherit government is to inherit peoples, as if they were herds. It is the basest, the most shameful fantasy that ever degraded mankind.’
Reading Paine it becomes clear that he experiences monarchy and all that goes with it as a standing affront to his own dignity, intelligence and self-respect. ‘An hereditary crown! A transmissible throne! What a notion! With even a little reflexion, can any one tolerate it?’ This was ‘the most base and humiliating idea that ever degraded the human species.’ ‘It is time that nations should be rational, and not be governed like animals, for the pleasure of their riders.’
In his Letter to Abbe Sieyes, written in mid-1791, Paine explained the all-encompassing and at the same time piquantly personal nature of his rage against monarchy:
‘I am the avowed, open, and intrepid enemy of what is called Monarchy; and I am such by principles which nothing can either alter or corrupt—by my attachment to humanity; by the anxiety which I feel within myself, for the dignity and the honour of the human race; by the disgust which I experience, when I observe men directed by children, and governed by brutes; by the horror which all the evils that Monarchy has spread over the earth excite within my breast; and by those sentiments which make me shudder at the calamities, the exactions, the wars, and the massacres with which Monarchy has crushed mankind: in short, it is against all the hell of monarchy that I have declared war.’

We could have won!

admin — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 14:00:25 +0000

The death of Margaret Thatcher and, even more, her reincarnation in the coalition government make this a propitious moment to re-examine the history of the 1980s. With severe cuts being imposed on local government, it’s especially worth revisiting the rate-capping controversy of 1984-85.
The history of the 1980s was never a simple tale of triumphal neoliberalism. The Thatcherite project was resisted every step of the way and at several critical junctures was seriously imperilled. During her first term, until the Falklands war, her government was deeply unpopular. That led to the election, in the early 1980s, of Labour councils with strong left-wing contingents. As unemployment rose, these councils raised spending on services, compensating for cuts in government grants by increasing ‘the rates’ – the long-established local property tax, paid by residents and businesses.
Determined to close this escape valve, the Tories introduced legislation soon after their 1983 victory to ‘cap’ rate rises in what they considered to be profligate councils. From the start, the proposal was controversial, even within the Conservative party, where a significant minority, including Edward Heath, regarded it as an unwarranted centralisation of power. Nonetheless, the government pushed it through parliament and it became law in June 1984.
Second front
The debate about how Labour should respond unfolded against the background of the year-long miners’ strike. For many on the left, this was an opportunity to open a second front against the government. Support for non-compliance was widespread, but there was considerable disagreement over what form it should take. The strategy eventually adopted – in which affected Labour councils would collectively refuse to set a rate – was a lowest common denominator, the one point of action around which most could unite.
It needs to be stressed that the discussion that led to this decision was extensive, involving large numbers at the base of the Labour party. The commitment to non-compliance was the result of a wide-ranging democratic exercise, not the influence of conspiratorial ‘entryists’, and reflected a determination among Labour members to fight the Tories not only during but between elections.
At the Labour Party conference at the end of September 1984, local government attracted more resolutions than any other topic. The official national executive committee statement endorsed non-compliance and called for unity; two resolutions went further, pledging support to councils forced to break the law. The statement and the resolutions were agreed by a show of hands – not at all the result the leadership wanted.
A grassroots campaign
Despite the leadership’s equivocation, the campaign against rate-capping was taken up vigorously at the grassroots. It was inventive, diverse, populist, reaching out to and involving workforces and their unions alongside a wide array of community organisations. In November 1984, 100,000 local government workers took a day’s strike action; 30,000 marched in London. Through festivals, demonstrations, meetings, publications and events involving youth clubs, nurseries, play and pensioners groups, the campaign succeeded in alerting a broad public to the menace of rate capping and its effects on services, jobs and local democracy.
Among the most prominent in the leadership of the campaign and its central strategy of non-compliance were Margaret Hodge of Islington, David Blunkett of Sheffield, and Ken Livingstone of the GLC, along with Derek Hatton from Liverpool and Ted Knight from Lambeth.
From the start, it was clear to all that non-compliance could entail personal penalties for Labour councillors. If the district auditor found that the council had suffered financial loss as a result of their votes, councillors could be ordered to repay the lost money in a ‘surcharge’. If the surcharge amounted to more than £2,000 each, the councillors would also be disqualified from office. On top of that, councillors could be held to be ‘jointly and severally liable’ for the total sum lost to the council – not just their individual share of it.
In February 1985 Neil Kinnock issued his famous edict to the Labour local government conference: ‘Better a dented shield than no shield at all.’ While this was to become (and remains) the prevailing Labour wisdom, it was deeply dismaying to activists. Kinnock had effectively advised the Tories that councils that resisted their diktat would be left isolated. It was a declaration from the top that there would be no labour movement unity.
Nonetheless, at this stage, 26 Labour councils remained determined to defy the government. They planned to synchronise their budget meetings for 7 and 8 March, coinciding with TUC-sponsored ‘Democracy Day’ demonstrations. The government looked vulnerable. Thatcher’s popularity ratings had dipped: 60 per cent now said they were ‘dissatisfied’ with her.
But on 5 March 1985, the miners retuned to work after a year-long struggle. Their defeat became, in the short run, a pretext for giving up the rate-capping struggle, and in the long run, for a general accommodation with Thatcherism. On 7 March, the Times made a prediction: ‘Labour’s left-wing councillors value power more than a place of glory in the Socialist Pantheon . . . They will cling to office and make the shifts required, shifts which in most cases are perfectly manageable.’ The cynicism proved sadly prescient. The first to collapse was the GLC, where Livingstone himself led the climbdown, while John McDonnell led a minority of Labour councillors determined to hold the democratically agreed line.
Defying Thatcherism
Initially nearly all of the other rate-capped councils voted to refuse to set a rate and in doing so enjoyed voluble local support. In April, Islington council published a poll of local residents showing that in the argument over rate-capping, 57 per cent supported the council and only 20 per cent the government.
But as the threats from district auditors became more pressing, one by one the councils abandoned non-compliance. By the middle of June, all but Lambeth and Liverpool had yielded. In September, the district auditors gave notice to 81 councillors (49 from Liverpool, 32 from Lambeth) that the delay in fixing the rates amounted to ‘wilful misconduct’ and that they were therefore required to repay the costs as a personal surcharge. The 81 were also disqualified from office and barred from seeking re-election. A series of judicial appeals failed.
At the end of July 1986, the Lambeth councillors were given 21 months to pay off the ‘surcharges’ at a rate of £5,000 per month between them. Some months later, Liverpool councillors were held liable for an even larger total, £333,000. In the end, these sums were paid off by donations from the labour movement, though not without sacrifices for a number of the councillors concerned.
The councillors paid the price of principle. It was a very un-eighties thing to do. They stood against the current and should be celebrated for that. They kept faith with their electorates and their consciences, even when abandoned by their leaders, vilified in the media and threatened with bankruptcy.
Managerialism replaces politics
The defeat of the campaign against rate-capping was a significant step in the hollowing out of local democracy as well as in Labour’s long-term adaptation to Thatcherism. Those who led the retreat soon shifted their defence. Initially it was posed as a stark choice of lesser evils. But gradually the ‘evil’ became celebrated as a virtue: the ‘reform’ of public services through privatisation and attacks on the workforce. Managerialism replaced politics.
And the pay-off for the ‘dented shield’, which was supposed to be the election of a Labour government, did not materialise in 1987 or 1992, and when it did, finally, in 1997, it did not herald a reinvigoration of local democracy. Instead, the managerial ethos was entrenched via ‘cabinet’ government and executive mayors. The fiscal autonomy enjoyed pre-rate capping was never restored.
Of course, Thatcherism was only the British version of the neoliberal wave of the era. But that global context does not mean its triumph was inevitable. It was resistible. Its hegemony was an end product, established piecemeal, unevenly and painfully. And its triumph required a political struggle.
In that struggle, it was immensely to Thatcher’s advantage that every time she singled out a target for attack, she could be confident that the target would be left high and dry by the Labour and trade union leaderships. Thatcher was never the leader of principle vaunted by the media; she was ruthlessly opportunistic. But it was that very quality that made her adept at calling the bluff of the spineless centre – whether among the ‘wets’ in her own party or the leaders of Labour local government.
Photo: James Taylor. It shows the Hackney Peace Carnival Mural, commissioned by the GLC in 1985.

The People’s Assembly – an absentee contribution

admin — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 17:58:19 +0000

Because of ill health, I won’t be able to attend the People’s Assembly on Saturday. For me that’s frustrating; I was looking forward to hearing people’s ideas for action and experiences in campaigning.

As Owen Jones and others have said, it’s unacceptable that at this stage there is no broad-based anti-austerity campaign. The People’s Assembly is a welcome step in rectifying that weakness.

However, it’s being held at a time when anti-austerity activity is at a lower level than one would expect given the provocations. The pensions dispute, which seemed for a while likely to light the fuse, fizzled out as unions made their separate peaces. Direct action has also ebbed.

In Spain, there’s hardly a city, town or village without prominent anti-cuts posters and graffiti. Hardly a day passes without the media reporting an anti-austerity action of some kind. Of course, austerity is taking a much harsher form in Spain than here, and there is a different political culture, in which regionalism plays a big part. But the sharp contrast with the streets of England (I don’t feel qualified to speak of the situation in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland) also reflects the initiatives taken in Spain by the unions and the left.

How do we make the anti-austerity message present in everyday life, and across the country? At the moment we don’t even have a widely recognised logo or symbol for opposition to cuts (in Spain they use a red circle and bar imposed over a scissors for a clear cut NO CUTS message). Here it’s less a matter of creating that kind of thing out of nothing than finding what’s already out there and generalising it.

Choices for the PA

It’s common ground that the movement against austerity has to be broad-based, inclusive, politically plural. But inevitably it also faces choices and therefore “divisions”.

Of course, we want and need the TUC, the trade union leaderships and the structures of the labour movement “on board”. But we also need and have to ask for more than nominal support. There’s obviously the particular question of industrial action (or its absence). Union leaders are right up to a point when they say they cannot simply issue orders for an all-out strike or whatever; the will has to be present and discernible among the members, not just the activists. But their risk-aversion and inertia is weakening the anti-austerity forces and has to be challenged. This is not to suggest that we scapegoat union leaders for our wider frustrations but we do need to place demands on them. In particular, I’d like to ask: for what battle are they keeping their powder dry? If not now, when?

Recent statements by Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Stephen Twigg have made it clear that Labour will sustain the grip of austerity and depending on the economic situation may intensify it. An anti-austerity strategy or movement that places any faith in an incoming Labour government would be self-defeating. At local level, Labour councils – already corrupted by managerialism – are becoming agents of austerity. The movement can’t avoid challenging them just because they are Labour rather than Tory or Lib-Dem controlled. I hope the PA can somehow articulate a clear demand that councillors of whatever party vote against cuts, evictions, privatisations.

The NHS

The NHS is the most popular and widely used public service. Its dismantling surely ought to be a centrepiece of resistance to austerity. In mixing cuts with “reform” and privatisation, the attack on the NHS illustrates powerfully what austerity really is and who it benefits. Yet we have not yet been able to stage a major national demonstration or action of any kind in defence of the NHS. Where local hospitals are threatened, people turn out in their thousands. Why is it so hard to get proportionate numbers to rally to the NHS as a whole?

In this case, there can’t be much doubt that a big part of the problem is the absence of leadership and initiative. Neither health workers nor patients have been given much opportunity to participate in any kind of common defence of the NHS. It’s also true and a significant problem that union implantation among health workers is patchy. In my frequent hospital visits I see the fatalism of NHS workers and I can understand it. It’s the upshot of accumulated disappointments. Labour preceded the Tories in undermining the NHS. In the last few years, the value of their pay has declined, for some by 15% or more. But they have been given no lead, no focus, no strategy. This applies also to the other side of the NHS equation, the patients / users who have no voice and no effective vehicle for participation. The patient advocacy charities – each disease has at least one – are resolutely apolitical and in many cases far too close to Big Pharma. Nonetheless, one thing that does unite, for example, many millions of cancer sufferers in this country is they will be negatively effected by a weakened, fragmented NHS.

I don’t know how we address these issues which is why I would have liked to hear what others have to say in the NHS discussion at the PA. It offers a rare chance to discuss NHS defence strategy as a whole (beyond the local). However, I’m sure there won’t be time enough to do more than touch on many questions. So perhaps in addition to follow-up local people’s assemblies there could be follow-up sectional People’s Assemblies on the NHS (or benefits or jobs, etc.) convened on a regional or national basis.

The development of the PA

As for the role of the PA itself: I hope it’s not seen as a “brain centre” or HQ or regulating body in relation to the movement. Its role is to facilitate and fertilise. The local assemblies that are expected to follow will have (at least) two hard tasks: one, to draw in previously inactive people in significant numbers, and two, to formulate and implement plans for collective action, which may include civil disobedience.

It may be that the anti-austerity feeling in England is just waiting for a spark to ignite it. Some act of resistance that galvanises the latent sense of intolerable injustice.

Open, transparent and participatory discussions and decision-making should become built-in, customary, in the functioning of the PA at all levels. Most will agree with that but it will only become a reality if participants insist on it.

The question of the relation of “platform” to “floor” at the PA is already being debated. With the very large number of speakers to be accommodated it may prove unsatisfactory for many who want to make a contribution. It’s understandable that in trying to build a broad and diverse coalition, to represent its parts and its various fronts of struggle, organisers end up with unwieldy platforms and awkward choices in the allocation of time. The balance isn’t easy to strike. But the mistake to avoid is erring on the side of “platform” (tipping the balance away from the floor). It has a history. Assembling a platform is not the same as assembling a movement or giving it real representation.

I hope one thing we’ll all acknowledge this weekend is that we’re in for a very long and difficult struggle. Persistence is a virtue we’ll have to cultivate.

Brushing history against the grain

admin — Fri, 31 May 2013 20:41:23 +0000

The city of Luxor in southern Egypt made the headlines in Britain at the end of February, when 19 tourists were killed in a hot air balloon accident. That tragedy will compound the woes of Egypt’s tourist industry, once a major source of employment and foreign currency, now languishing as foreign visitors are driven away by (misconceived and exaggerated) fears of instability and violence.
Luxor, the site of ancient Thebes, the principal capital of the Egyptian New Kingdom (1550–1050 BC), is studded with colossal carved temples and richly decorated tombs. But the most revealing and moving of its many ruins may be the least spectacular. Known as Deir el Medinah, these are the low-lying remains of the workers’ village, home to the artisans who built the tombs and temples. Their small, sturdy domestic units are laid out on a grid pattern. Here lived stonemasons, tomb painters, carpenters, rope makers, porters. Scattered among the excavated foundations are mini-pyramids and entrances to underground burial vaults, small in scale but decorated with as much care, as much wealth of colour and detail, as the royal tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings. These workers had their own visions of an afterlife, a better life. And they had a sense of their own value.
This is the site of history’s first recorded strike. The workers were paid in grain, from which they made bread and beer, the staples of the Nile Valley diet. In about 1200 BC, the state treasury, drained by Rameses III’s imperial wars, failed to meet its commitments. The workers downed tools and staged a sit-in at the construction site of the pharaoh’s mortuary temple. Perhaps surprisingly, they won the dispute. Their leverage was their masters’ fear of dying without the proper funerary arrangements, entering the afterlife under-equipped. The Egyptian cult of the dead, for once, benefited the living.
Approaches to the past
What are we to make of this episode from remote antiquity? Walter Benjamin, in his prophetic final essay, Theses on the Philosophy of History, written in 1940, distinguished between two opposing approaches to the past: ‘historicism’ and ‘historical materialism’. For the former time is linear, uniform, cumulative. ‘Its method is additive: it offers a mass of facts, in order to fill up a homogenous and empty time.’ In contrast, the historical materialist ‘records the constellation in which his own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one.’ The job of the historical materialist is not to reproduce but ‘to explode the continuum of history’.
Benjamin asks: ‘With whom does the writer of historicism actually empathise?’ ‘The answer,’ he insists, ‘is irrefutably with the victor.’ History becomes a ‘triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage.’
In contrast, for the historical materialist, ‘the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of civilisation which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.’
There’s no better illustration of that ringing dictum than the art of ancient Egypt, the product of a brutally stratified society governed by a religion of state power, personified in a god-man ruler. Yet long after the system that oppressed them crumbled, the work of the artisans of Deir el Medinah remains vital, colourful, rhythmic and refined; it excels at grand effects but also in delicate naturalistic detail. Whether in the vast vaults of the Valley of the Kings or in the humble tombs of Deir el Medinah itself, the afterlife is depicted as a better version of this life, furnished in abundance with the good things of this one: food, drink, flowers, birds, song, dance, family. Ancient Egyptian art remains alien, at times weird. But it’s also recognisably human; it leaps across chasms to forge a connection.
On the left we see ourselves as makers of the future fully engaged with the present. We look ahead, not behind, and we resent the charge that we are ‘wed to outmoded doctrines’ and in particular that we have failed to adapt to the changes of the past 30 years. But we should not be ashamed of being ‘conservative’ in defending rights won in previous generations or communities threatened by ‘development’.
Capitalism’s disregard for the future, its bias in favour of the short-term, is notoriously reckless. But it is equally reckless in its disregard for the past, unless that past can be packaged for consumption or the transmission of propaganda. In either case, the past is not allowed to stand independently, to speak with a voice of its own – and to demand from us some accountability.
Brushing against the grain
Benjamin says our task is ‘to brush history against the grain’. An example of this in our own moment is the 23‑year campaign for justice for those killed at Hillsborough. Though justice itself has yet to be done, much of the truth has now been established. This was achieved only because the families and their supporters defied the massed chorus telling them their quest was futile, emotion-driven or vindictive. Their sense of duty to the dead was not diverted by appeals to pragmatism and the virtues of adjustment, of ‘living in the present’. As a result, they succeeded in recovering a suppressed history which, in turn, becomes an active element in our present and future.
In Spain, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory aims to document the fate of Franco’s victims and to excavate and identify their bodies, including the tens of thousands dumped in mass graves. To do this, the association has had to defy the ‘pact of oblivion’ that smoothed the transition to democracy by shielding members of the old regime from accountability. In this case, a sense of obligation to the dead, to those who were on the losing side, was not a ‘backward-looking’ indulgence: it was a social necessity. We can’t decipher the present without examining its foundations in the battles of the past, acknowledging losses as well as gains.
The Palestinian insistence on recognition of the Nakba – characterised by pro-Israel commentators as a vain desire to recoup a lost battle – is in fact a necessary engagement with the realities of the present: the ongoing impact of the Nakba in the policies of dispossession and ethnic cleansing. At the same time, it’s a steadfast insistence on a future of self-determination.
Despite their brief victory, the workers of Deir el Medinah never escaped their state of impoverished servitude. They were on the ‘losing side’ in the march of history. Nonetheless, in their art and in their action, they remind us, in Benjamin’s words, that the ‘fine and spiritual . . . are present in the class struggle as something other than mere booty, which falls to the victor. They are present as confidence, as courage, as humour, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle, and they reach far back into the mists of time. They will, ever and anon, call every victory which has ever been won by the rulers into question.’
The illustration above is Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, 1920, which Benjamin used to illustrate his point about the nature of history.

Thinking beyond boundaries

admin — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 15:13:21 +0000

When C L R James’ Beyond a Boundary was first published 50 years ago, the sociology of sport and the politics of popular culture had no place in the academy or on the left. The book had to create its own subject, define a new field of intervention. James aimed to establish cricket as worthy of serious study and to expose the failure to study it as an unacceptable omission. As he says at the start of the book, he could no longer credit an account of Victorian society that found no room for W G Grace. Like that other seminal work of 1963, E P Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, James’ book aimed to rescue the culture created by the lower orders from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’.
James was 62 when Beyond a Boundary was published. Behind him were decades of political struggle, taking in the West Indies, Britain, 15 cricketless years in the USA and a brief spell in newly independent Ghana. His publications already covered a wide range – history, philosophy, literature, politics – through which could be charted his developing anti-Stalinist Marxism, as well as the vast expense of intellectual energy in years of factional struggle in the Trotskyist movement.
In 1958 James returned to Trinidad after an absence of a quarter of a century. Independence was around the corner but exactly what shape it would take was uncertain. As editor of the independence movement’s newspaper and a key advisor to its leader, Eric Williams, James championed the newly-formed West Indies Federation and opposed the US base at Chaguaramas. When Williams opted for a pro-western policy, James found himself frozen out.
‘I had placed myself at his disposal, adapted myself to his needs,’ he observed ruefully. ‘He does not appreciate what that means.’ By the time Trinidad was granted independence in 1962, the West Indies Federation had collapsed and James had been forced into exile.
An optimistic portrayal
It was in the wake of this disappointment that James sat down to write his long-gestated book on cricket, which is very much an optimistic portrayal of West Indies’ destiny. He begins by asking ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ – adapting Kipling’s double-edged imperial lament, ‘What do they know of England who only England know?’
Declaring that the ‘answer involves ideas as well as facts’, he sets off on a great intellectual journey, passing through Victorian England, ancient Greece, industrial Lancashire (one of my favourite episodes, an affectionate portrait of a working class culture), the Trinidad of his youth and a Caribbean on the brink of independence. In doing so he urges us to ask not only ‘how men live’ but also, crucially, ‘what they live by’. That is, he calls attention to the superstructure of ideas, values and identities, and their embodiment in the praxis of daily life, including sports.
As innovative in form as it is in content, Beyond a Boundary is uncategorisable, a blend of memoir, history, theory, journalism, political manifesto. For all its diversity, it has what many of today’s hybrid texts lack: a commanding intelligence and a distinctive voice, dry, purposeful, thrillingly and theatrically didactic. The book is all of a piece and would be diminished by the loss of any of its component parts.
James’ over-arching concern is the development of West Indian cricket. He traces its relation to the hierarchies of colonialism and colour and the unique role it played in a stratified society. Recalling his early experiences of the game, he remarks: ‘Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it.’
Revolt into modernity
Leftists are often taken aback by James’ reverence for the English public school ethic. But what he saw in this ethic, as embodied in cricket, was something that fitted the needs of an emergent West Indian society, a self-discipline that was part of the struggle for freedom and equality. In his view West Indians were not only victims of imperialism but agents able to seize the tools of the oppressor and use them for self-assertion and self‑development.
That’s the lens through which he understands cricket. In its story he sees West Indians adopting and adapting the culture and technology of their masters, making it their own, turning its disciplines to their own purposes. As a Marxist, he viewed the revolt against colonialism not as a revolt against modernity or western culture, but as a revolt into a modernity of self-determination, a new relation to a wider world. So even at his most conservative, James is always revolutionary.
James argues that the ‘representative’ quality that dramatists struggle to infuse into their individual characters comes effortlessly to cricket: in the confrontation between bowler and batter, where the two are simultaneously individuals testing their individual strengths and embodiments of a larger group, the team, whose destiny is shaped by their actions. What James relished in cricket was this dialectic of individual and collective, moment and process, the technical and the spontaneous. His belief in the significance of exceptional individuals, figures created by history to make history, permeates Beyond a Boundary, not least in its finely-tuned portraits of George Headley and Learie Constantine, cricketers who became representative through their mould-breaking individuality.
As James notes, history blessed him with the perfect ending for his story. In 1961, he led the successful campaign to have Frank Worrell appointed captain of the West Indies, the first black man to hold the prestigious post. Here James’ love of cricket and his anti-colonial politics meshed. (Only James could depict Worrell as both the heir of Thomas Arnold and the equal of Trotsky as a powerful personality.) Worrell’s much‑praised leadership of the West Indies tour of Australia later that year provides Beyond a Boundary with its triumphant conclusion, in which James describes how West Indies ‘clearing their way with bat and ball … made a public entry into the comity of nations’.
As it turned out, Worrell’s team were merely forerunners of the great era of West Indies cricket supremacy, from the mid-1970s to early 1980s. In the team fashioned by Clive Lloyd, the team of Richards, Holding, Roberts et al, James’ prophetic view of West Indies’ cricket was fulfilled. Like Bob Marley, the cricketers projected a West Indian identity on to a world stage, briefly making these politically and economically marginal islands a centre of global culture.
Long decline
What would James have made of the long decline that has followed? Surely, he’d note in the fall of West Indies cricket the absence of the very factors that made for its rise: the anti-colonial movement and the ideals of third world solidarity. Later cricketers, emerging from a West Indian society battered by neoliberalism, could not match the ambition, creativity and commitment of a generation determined to liberate themselves from the colonial and racist order into which they had been born.
James asked not only how cricketers played, but what they played for. His programme for the future entailed a ‘return of the cricketer to the community’. For James, what mattered in popular culture was its democratic content.
This is why I suspect he’d find much of today’s popular culture studies alien, particularly the tendency to treat the field as a continuum of texts, a self-referential symbolic order. For him the central task of the enterprise was the process of political and aesthetic discrimination, the honing of a method of evaluation. He might ask: ‘What do they know of popular culture who only popular culture know?’
Reading the book for the umpteenth time, it struck me that in his desire to do justice to cricket James overstates its claims. Perhaps he took cricket too seriously, and in doing so fell prey to what cricket historian Derek Birley called ‘the aesthetic fallacy’.
Cricket, James declared, ‘is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.’ Yes, but it is also fundamentally a different type of spectacle, with a particular appeal. In sport, the aesthetic is an incidental by-product – not the purpose of the exercise, which is to win the competition. However well-rehearsed, cricket remains at root unpredictable; the result (and therefore the meaning) cannot be pre-determined.
I owe a huge personal debt to James, for many reasons. What now seems to me most important in his legacy is the example he set, more than any of his theories. It’s the virtue summed up in the title of his masterwork: thinking and living beyond boundaries, whether they’re the boundaries between cricket and the wider world, the boundaries that separate discourses and disciplines, or the boundaries of race, class and empire.
www.mikemarqusee.com

Dare to fail, dare to win

admin — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 10:00:19 +0000

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the global anti-war protest of 15 February 2003, people are bound to ask what it actually achieved. Certainly it failed to stop the war, a failure for which Iraqis paid and are paying an exorbitant price. So was it a waste of time, an exercise in futility? There are answers to these questions, but to be persuasive they cannot be glib.
Let me flash back to 15 November 1969, Washington DC and the Moratorium for Peace in Vietnam. This was probably the single biggest anti-war demonstration of the era, estimated at half a million by some and twice that by others. I’d come down from the New York suburbs the day before, on a bus chartered by local activists, and spent the night on the floor of a Quaker meeting house. The next day I wandered among the vast, mostly youthful crowd, listening to the speeches, and feeling despondent and confused.
I was 16 but already a veteran of three years of anti-war protest, during which time I’d seen the movement mushroom. In the spring of 1966, I’d accompanied my parents to my first Washington DC protest, which was considered a great success because it attracted a crowd of 10,000. Now there were perhaps a hundred times that number and it felt to me like failure.
Pete Seeger, then age 50 but already a Methuselah of struggle, led chorus after chorus of the recently-released ‘Give Peace a Chance’. I was churlish about this because I thought we were or should be saying a lot more than ‘give peace a chance’. So I joined a splinter march chanting ‘Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win’ and got tear gassed outside the Justice Department.
None of this was very satisfying and on the long drive home I felt depressed. What was the point of it all? For years we’d been protesting in ever increasing numbers, with ever increasing militancy – and yet they kept escalating the war. What difference had all our earnest activity made? What difference would the Moratorium protest make? What difference would anything make? My commonplace teenage malaise had become intertwined with a precocious experience of political frustration.
My scepticism about the demonstration’s effect seemed warranted when five months later, at the end of April 1970, the US extended the war into Cambodia. In the protests that followed six students, four at Kent State in Ohio and two at Jackson State in Mississippi, were shot dead. The upshot was the biggest student strike in US history: more than four million students walking out of classes in universities, colleges and high schools across the country. Yet still the war did not end.
Two and a half more years would pass before the peace treaty was signed in Paris in January 1973. By this time there were millions upon millions dead, disabled, bereaved, traumatised. Nonetheless, the movement against the Vietnam war is widely considered the most ‘successful’ anti‑war movement of modern times, against which more recent movements have measured their ‘failure’.
Retrospective vindication
Many years later, I learned that the Moratorium demonstration was, in fact, hugely effective. In July 1969, Nixon and Kissinger had delivered an ultimatum to the Vietnamese: if they did not accept US terms for a ceasefire by 1 November, ‘we will be compelled – with great reluctance – to take measures of the greatest consequences’. The US government was threatening, and indeed actively planning, a nuclear strike against North Vietnam. In his memoirs, Nixon admitted that the key factor in the decision not to proceed with the nuclear option was that ‘after all the protests and the Moratorium, American public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war’. What would have been the world’s second nuclear war was averted by our action, though we couldn’t have known it at the time.
So it turns out that marching on that day was anything but an exercise in futility. In fact, it’s hard to think of a day better spent in the course of a lifetime. My teenage despondency was utterly misplaced.
But this kind of retrospective vindication is rare in the extreme. Most days spent in protest will not be rewarded with such a tangible achievement. The point is that we don’t know and we can’t know which protest, leaflet, meeting, occupation, activity will ‘make a difference’. We are always the underdog, we are always contending against power, and therefore the likelihood is that we will fail. But no success can be achieved unless we risk that failure. Otherwise when possibilities for success arise they pass by unrealised.
Beyond ‘success’ and ‘failure’
I fear we slip too easily into a capitalist paradigm of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. Here the investment is of value only to the extent it yields measurable gains. If it doesn’t it’s a failure, dead capital. So we look for evidence that our efforts have had an impact, made a difference. Every success is catalogued on the credit side, while the much greater number of failures is left untabulated. Sometimes in doing this we start to sound a little desperate, clinging to straws. I wonder if this is the best way to persuade people to invest themselves in a cause. After all, there will always be activities offering more reliable and more tangible rewards.
In evaluating our political efforts, we have to jettison neoliberalism’s stark demarcation between success and failure, which erases everything in between and, even worse, denies any combination of the two. In the politics of social justice, unmixed success and unmitigated failure are rare. Every successful revolution or major reform has had unintended consequences, created new problems, fallen short of its goals. In politics, failures contain the seeds of successes, just as successes conceal the roots of failure.
Capitalists like to invoke a ‘risk/reward ratio’ to justify their profits. Sadly, people on the left sometimes emulate their narrow logic. They promise activists a return on their investment, a guarantee: history is on our side.
But for us, there can be no stable ratio between risk and reward. Our risk has to be taken in defiance of the odds, recognising the likelihood that there will be no reward. At the same time, we take the risk only because of the nature of the reward we seek: a precious step towards a just society. We are not at all indifferent to the outcome. We aim and need to succeed because the consequences of failure are real and widely felt.
Investing in a cause
So we make the investment. We put our time and energy and skills at the disposal of a cause. This is a greater investment than the capitalist knows – and one that makes us vulnerable in a way the capitalist never is.
We’re taught to despise and fear failure but to engage in the politics of social change we have to be brave enough to fail. Science advances through failure; every successful experiment is made possible only by a host of failed ones. In human evolution, failure – incapacities, shortcomings – led to compensation and innovation.
There are worse things than failure. You can learn more from a failure than from a success – if you recognise it as such. But if the only lesson you draw from failure is never to risk failure again, you’ve learned nothing at all.
Needless risks should always be avoided. We don’t have resources to squander. But the elimination of risk is impossible if you’re contending with power. Without risks all that can be done is to reproduce existing social relations. There is no truth, no beauty without risk, because these things can only be secured in the teeth of resistance, against institutions and habits of thought. To succeed in any way that matters, you have to take your place in the republic of the uncertain, where you risk yourself, not your stake in other people’s labour. It’s the action taken in the full knowledge of the possibility of failure, and its consequences, that acquires leverage.

The second revolution: 1792

admin — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 12:00:18 +0000

Left to right: Thomas Paine, Thomas Hardy, Theroigne de Mericourt, Mary Wollstonecraft
France 1792 was the year of ‘the second revolution’. On 10 August, the king was overthrown, bringing to an end three years of uneasy ‘constitutional monarchy’. For months the legislative assembly had been locked in conflict with Louis XVI, while at the same time fighting a war against invading Austrians and Prussians. The Parisian masses resolved that conflict by direct action, invading the Tuileries palace and arresting the king. In response, the assembly called a general election – the first election in Europe conducted under universal adult male suffrage. Eighty years would pass before the exercise was repeated.
The elections, held in the first two weeks of September, were festive, proudly democratic occasions marked by wide‑ranging debates, and the results were a resounding confirmation of the action of the Paris masses. The 750 deputies elected to the ‘convention’ were overwhelmingly committed to the formation of a new republic, though they would soon fall out violently over its direction.
The events of 10 August had ushered in not only a new republic but a new power: the plebeian Parisians, who would come to be known as sans-culottes. Organised in the sections (neighbourhood committees) and commune of Paris, in the coming year they would mobilise repeatedly to force their ‘popular programme’ on an often reluctant convention. That programme included not only stiff measures against ‘counter-revolutionaries’ but also price controls and action against hoarders and speculators. If this was a ‘bourgeois revolution’, someone forgot to tell the sans-culottes.
Revolutionary best-seller
The revolutionary impulse overflowed established categories and surged through ancient barriers. In the British isles, the best-seller was Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, which thanks to its plain but vibrant style and cheap price reached hundreds of thousands, including artisans and labourers.
In Part I, published in early 1791, Paine defended the French Revolution and debunked what passed for the British constitution. ‘The portion of liberty enjoyed in England,’ he observed, ‘is just enough to enslave a country more productively than by despotism.’
In Part II, published in February 1792, Paine amplified his republican arguments. Insisting that ‘only partial advantages can flow from partial reforms,’ he warned: ‘Change of ministers amounts to nothing. One goes out, another comes in, and still the same measures, vices, and extravagance are pursued. It signifies not who is minister. The defect lies in the system.’
Most remarkably, in Part II Paine pushed the democratic revolution into the economic realm. He identified the central contradiction of European progress: ‘A great portion of mankind, in what are called civilised countries, are in a state of poverty and wretchedness, far below the condition of an [American] Indian.’ He went on to propose, in some detail, what would later be known as a welfare state: payments to the elderly, the disabled and parents of young children, universal primary education and public works to provide gainful employment. All this ‘not as a matter of grace and favour, but of right’. And all to be funded by a new system of steeply progressive taxation and cuts in military spending. The search for democracy had led Paine to social democracy.
That there was a ready audience for Paine’s ideas was shown by the rapid growth of the London Corresponding Society, along with similar bodies in Sheffield, Manchester and elsewhere. Dedicated to parliamentary reform and universal male suffrage, the corresponding societies were Britain’s first plebeian political associations, charging dues of only a penny a week. The LCS founding secretary, the shoemaker Thomas Hardy, explained that its members represented ‘a class of men who deserve better treatment than they generally meet with from those who are fed, and clothed, and enriched by their labour, industry or ingenuity’.
Paine and the corresponding societies created a new radical democratic pole in British politics, squarely opposed to and by Pitt’s Tory government. Caught between the two, the liberal Whigs vacillated. Fox and a small band stood out against the attacks on civil liberties and the drift to war with France, but were gradually isolated. Within a year the Whig leaders, driven by their fear of revolution, had joined Pitt’s ministry – not the last time Liberals would respond to a crisis by lining up with Tory reaction.
Global rebellion
Paris was the epicentre, but the repercussions were global. The revolutionary contagion spread to Ireland, where the United Irishmen had been formed a year earlier, and to Scotland, where, in December 1792, the Edinburgh Friends of the People organised a ‘general convention’ for parliamentary reform attended by 160 delegates from 35 Scottish towns and villages.
In the Caribbean, the hugely profitable French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was convulsed by a slave revolt of unprecedented dimensions. On 19 August, the man who was to become its greatest general issued an appeal: ‘Brothers and friends, I am Toussaint L’Ouverture, my name is perhaps known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want liberty and equality to reign in Saint-Domingue. I work to bring them into existence. Unite yourselves to us brothers, and fight with us …’ For the first time, the ideas of the European Enlightenment were turned against European power.
Rights of women
Under the extraordinary conditions of 1792, the question of the ‘rights of man’ also became, briefly, a question of the ‘rights of women’. On 6 March, Pauline Leon, a 23-year-old Parisian chocolate-maker, read a petition to the legislative assembly demanding the formation of a women’s national guard. The petition was signed by 319 Parisian women, including cooks, seamstresses, market-sellers, and wives and daughters of shoemakers, butchers, lawyers and doctors.
On 26 March, the 30-year-old Theroigne de Mericourt, a figure romanticised and demonised by historians and novelists, in a speech to one of the Paris sections, took the call for a woman’s right to bear arms into broader territory. ‘Compare what we are with what we should be in the social order . . . Break our chains. It is finally time that women emerge from their shameful nullity, where the ignorance, pride and injustice of men have kept them enslaved for such a long time.’
Across the channel, Mary Wollstonecraft was completing her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Cautiously as Wollstonecraft proceeded, focusing mainly on women’s rights to education and barely hinting at political equality, her work was greeted with horror by the polite classes and consigned to oblivion for the best part of a century.
She shared that fate with many of the revolutionary agents of 1792, which was also a year of reaction. The royal proclamation of May, aimed at Paine and the corresponding societies, marked the beginning of a decade of repression (‘Pitt’s Terror’ in popular legend) as severe as anything in British history. The upshot was the silencing of radical dissent and the crushing of popular aspirations, in the course of which a modern elite-driven British nationalism was fashioned, a development whose consequences are still very much with us.
Paine himself barely escaped arrest when in September he crossed the channel to take his seat as an elected deputy in the convention. The world’s first international revolutionary addressed a challenge to his fellow representatives: ‘In seeing Royalty abolished and the Republic established, all France has resounded with unanimous plaudits. Yet some who clap their hands do not sufficiently understand the condition they are leaving or that which they are assuming . . . it is little to throw down an idol; it is the pedestal that above all must be broken down.’
Imprisonment and defeat
Within little more than a year, Paine would be imprisoned by the revolution he celebrated. On his release after 11 months, he returned to the convention to restate his commitment to that revolution, and to warn the deputies, unsuccessfully, against limiting the franchise by a property qualification.
In the short-term, the democratic radicals of 1792 suffered defeat, isolation, imprisonment or death. Women’s political clubs were banned in November 1793 and nearly all the women militants fell victim to the purges of 1793-95. Toussaint died in a French prison. Leaders of the LCS and the Edinburgh convention were jailed and some transported to Botany Bay. In 1798, the United Irishmen were crushed, at a cost of 30,000 Irish lives.
It would take another 120 years for Ireland to achieve partial freedom and women to win the vote. The anti-colonial struggle, launched in Haiti, remains incomplete. The social democracy envisioned by Paine only came into existence after 1945, and its vestiges are now being stripped away. So were all these struggles ‘premature’, doomed to failure, a waste of passion and effort? Readers can make up their own minds about that.