Red Pepper » Mike Marqusee

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.

Politics, our missing link

admin — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 10:00:42 +0000

We get the word ‘politics’ from ancient Greece, where polis was used to describe the city‑states that emerged in the sixth century BC. The polis was more than a community or concentration of individuals. It was a self-conscious unit of self‑administration (independent of empires) and from the start was made up of separate, contending social classes.
As Ellen Meiksins Wood explains in her revelatory studies of classical antiquity, Athenian democracy was itself the product of a class struggle and a class compromise, involving aristocrats, on the one hand, and, on the other, artisans and small-holding peasants, who became ‘free citizens’, sharply differentiated from slaves. It was in the context of Athenian democracy that politics emerged as a distinct activity, one concerned with the affairs of the polis, considered as an entity separate from (and superior to) family or clan. Crucially, the polis was contrasted with the more limited and subordinate oikos, household, the private realm of ‘economy’.
Today we’re told that the law of the oikos is dominant, and the polis must yield. Only of course the oikos is no longer the individual household – to which it is deceptively likened – but the imperatives of global capital.
In present-day Greece, we’re witnessing a dramatic clash between polis and oikos – democracy and capital. Here as elsewhere the latter prevails to the extent that it succeeds in making its laws appear implacable, the alternatives mere wishful thinking. Yet the roots of the crisis lie precisely in the non-political autonomy of the economic, in deregulated finance’s detachment from production.
Under neoliberalism, the political realm has been squeezed. Globalisation and privatisation have removed much of the life of the polis from democratic control. Since the fundamental choices have already been made elsewhere, and systemic alternatives are excluded, politics itself becomes depoliticised, a matter of management and expertise, not of ideology or mass constituencies. As the neoliberal consensus was imbibed by the parties of the centre left, politics increasingly became ‘politicking’: the manipulation of images and the clash of personalities.
This evisceration of the political lies at the root of today’s popular anti-politics: the complaint that ‘they’re all the same’ or ‘all in it for themselves’; the desire to get over or somehow circumvent the ‘divisiveness’ of politics; the calls for politicians to ‘work together’. ‘Politics’ is seen as an alien realm of duplicity, opportunism and contrived conflict, not a common concern. Ironically, no one is keener to exploit popular anti‑politics than professional politicians. See the rise and fall of Nick Clegg.
A cloud of cynicism settles over everything, leaving vested interests and real choices invisible. It’s a superficial, easily manipulated scepticism, a problem for the left and a boon for the right.
In the end, this illusory non-political politics is the property of the dominant powers. A good example is the Olympics, where the hoary old apartheid-era slogan ‘Keep politics out of sport’ is once again in favour. Of course, what those who say they want ‘politics out of sport’ really mean is that they want other people’s politics out of sport; they want no politics but their own (that is, corporate and state sponsored messages about competition and identity). This is the paradigm we have to reject, the political ideology that masks itself as non‑political.
We have to be clear that there is no non‑political, non-partisan answer. That politics needs to be ‘divisive’. That the anti-politics of today are impotent. That avoiding choices means handing them to others all too willing to exercise the prerogative.
Left-wing anti-politics
A kind of anti-politics is also widespread on the left. A healthy contempt for mainstream ‘politics’ is combined with a more ambiguous distrust of political organisation in general. We need to be careful that in our rejection of what passes for ‘politics’ we do not inadvertently mirror the de-politicised universe of global capital we want to challenge. In Britain (as elsewhere), politics is our weak spot, the missing mediator without which we can never achieve our goals.
Politics in the sense I’m talking about is the linking of principle with practice, ideas with power, processes with goals, movements with institutions (whereas the simulacrum called ‘politics’ separates all these). Politics means interaction, intervention, agency in relation to the polis – understood (as in ancient Athens) as the arena in which the direction of the commonwealth is set. It means contesting the existing balance of power.
Engaging with the polis (the citizenry, the larger political whole) isn’t about placating the majority but addressing it, honestly and in comprehensible and coherent terms. Politics is always and necessarily partisan. It means making enemies. It therefore carries with it demands for organisation, discipline and sacrifice; it can never be a continuous festival.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking for a politics stripped of desire, imagination, spontaneity. No politics can succeed without to some extent generating its own expressive culture. But that culture, no matter how subversive, cannot substitute for political action. Nor does politics mean abandoning utopia. On the contrary, utopian ideas are vital levers in the contest for political power in the here and now. Politics does, however, mean working out the links between today’s conditions and tomorrow’s utopia, the steps from here to there.
The left has no shortage of policy proposals and alternatives. They’re bubbling up everywhere, not least in the pages of Red Pepper. But politics means coordinating and integrating this welter of ideas, making choices, rejecting some, prioritising others – in other words, creating a programme.
It’s a hard and under-appreciated process, with a negative reputation for dogmatism and sectarian competition. Of course, a programme should be fluid and responsive to changing conditions; ‘the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life’. However, without a programme (forged and fought for collectively), we’ll remain at a hopeless disadvantage. It will always be an uphill climb to make ourselves more convincing, more credible than the prevailing consensus. Sheer negative reaction to the system will not carry us through.
Finally, politics implies the left‑right spectrum (which many greens seek to evade). This spectrum has its origins in revolutionary France, where it accompanied the birth of modern politics, and reflected a division that was not about ethnicity, religion, or region, but about ideas and classes, which is why it became globally recognised. And it is still, I think, unavoidable and necessary (if not always straightforward). When someone claims to have superseded the left-right spectrum, they’re evading the reality of a divided society.
The hardest task
To come now to the hard part. Yes, politics does imply elections and elections imply parties (and programmes). Of course, a party that is merely an electoral machine has actually abandoned politics. But a movement without an electoral intervention is doomed to lose out in the final analysis. Yes, we can hope to influence the mainstream, to push it towards the left, and above all to use our power in the street to change the political context. But being satisfied with that is letting down all those who need more, those who cannot afford to leave the same corporate-sponsored caste in power year after year.
Surely this is one of the lessons of Latin America, where social movements found or created effective political vehicles, won elections, formed governments and achieved real social change, however limited or fragile. To varying degrees, the left parties there have been able to break with neoliberalism, reclaim the polis and politicise the oikos. In contrast, the evolving Arab Spring looks badly hampered by the absence of political formations, leaving the popular movement at the mercies of western imperialism and conservative Islamism.
Back in Britain, the prospects for building a political alternative are so forbidding that most of us have given up talking about it. It’s the hardest task, with the least promise of immediate success, which is why it can’t simply be left to ‘history’ (to someone else). Having said that, I confess I have no road map, no concrete proposals to take us in that direction. First, I suspect, there will have to be a larger number of people agreeing that we do indeed need to redress the political gap and provide the missing link.
www.mikemarqusee.com

A critical perspective on the Olympic enterprise

louise — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 18:52:52 +0000

Photo: 2014lovesocial/Flickr

I enjoyed my afternoon at the Olympics, sitting in my public lottery assigned £50 seat at the ExCel, with a fine view of the men’s boxing. And I enjoyed it not least because I was finally able to watch the sport itself without the surrounding hype and the layers of commentary. For a moment there was only that pleasure which is special to sport: the spontaneity of a story being fashioned in front of your own eyes, once and once only (despite digital repeats), robustly itself and not pretending to be anything else.

As a lover and student of sport for many decades, I don’t need to be reminded how compelling sport can be. But I’ve also learned what sport is not and that over-stating or mis-stating its importance does it no favours. As one, the media are demanding, cajoling, whipping us into appropriate displays of Olympic enthusiasm, particularly in relation to British competitors and especially British victories. Breathless BBC commentators reiterate the same round of superlatives – ‘unbelievable,’ ‘incredible,’ ‘amazing,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘unbelievable’ – telling us again and again how unique, how special, how extraordinary these Olympics are. It feels like they’re the ones on performance enhancing drugs, not the usually sober, poised and realistic competitors. The boosterism is relentless.

We’re all being enjoined to get out and back Team GB, regardless of the particular event or the particular competitors, as if there were no other elements in the spectacle. No matter what the context, no matter how minor or major the sport or what role it actually plays in our lives and imaginations, and entirely disregarding the merits of the opposition, we must reproduce the same emotion, the same enthusiasm. As a fan, I’m always sad to see sports reduced to a hollow chamber for a one-dimensional national chauvinism. The human phenomenon we call sport is far more interesting than that.

Sadly, at the ExCel, after the refreshment of the boxing came the utterly formulaic torpor of a video package in which celebrities and former Olympians waxed banal on the ‘atmosphere’ that makes the Olympics special and the ‘unforgettable’ moment we’re part of. Sorry, but generally I prefer to decide for myself – or let time decide – if something I’ve witnessed is unforgettable. Olympic competitions, like other sports competitions, as any sports fan knows, are not an uninterrupted succession of climatic highs. The boring and the (relatively) mediocre play a necessary role. Commentators rush to squeeze the events and results into preferred narratives and to draw an apposite moral lesson. Even Cameron seems to think it’s his job to tell us what we should learn from (successful) Olympic performances. These lessons are invariably platitudes which tell us little about either sport or the outside world. It’s as if there’s a fear of letting us draw our own meanings, exercise our own powers of interpretation.

So let me exercise mine. The Olympic podium is a symbolic package: individual excellence at the service of the nation-state under the overlordship of multi-national capital. Which is why the supreme Olympic gesture remains the Tommie Smith / John Carlos ‘black power’ salute of 1968 – two medal winners overturning the symbolism, refusing to let their individual excellence serve the forces that degraded them and their people.

The government, LOCOG and much of the media, having failed to allay public discontent over the expenditure and the legacy, have resorted to a Victorian claim for the morale boosting effects of elite sport, as a source of inspiration and emulation, which will ‘save’ children from poverty or crime. The big Olympic message is that individuals can overcome their environment or disadvantages through determination and self-will. This is entirely in keeping with the neo-liberal ethic, the cult of individual success in a competitive market.

This reading of sport ignores two fundamental realities. First, the critical role of collective support for each of the performers, not one of whom could have developed their skills to Olympic levels without the immense infrastructure of social support which makes it possible to realise individual talent. And secondly, the fact that elite sports performers are by definition exceptions. For the great majority, including many with athletic abilities, environment is not transcendable, no matter how ‘determined’ they are. The neo-liberal message will be re-echoed in the coming Paralympics, where individual triumph over circumstances will be feted – even as the government subjects the disabled to punitive discipline, denying them the support needed for independence. The paradox is that at the core of this micro-managed spectacle, this superstructure of manipulative messages, of corporate and national branding, is a phenomenon whose essence is its unpredictability, its uncontrollability, its sublime indifference to all extraneous narratives.

Sport, even encased in the Olympic armour, retains an autonomy; each competition operates under impersonal self-contained laws. Unlike art, or the opening ceremony, sport cannot be orchestrated. Indeed, that’s a condition of its legitimacy. It does not unfold according to a pre-conceived scenario, or illustrate a pre-conceived ‘lesson’. Once the gun is fired or the clock starts, competitors are subject only to the egalitarian law of the level playing field, something otherwise conspicuously absent in our world. This is why we celebrate a Jesse Owens, an Abebe Bikila, a Cathy Freeman – because they used the level playing field to overturn (for a moment) historical hierarchies. This unpredictable, uncontrollable, objective core of competitive sport, the source of its drama, is at odds with today’s Olympic package, which is increasingly an exercise in micro-management – from physical security to intellectual and cultural property to the formation of subjective interpretations.

It’s worth remembering that the Olympic league tables ranking nations by their medal tallies have no official status and are not formally recognised by the IOC. They are a media invention that rose to prominence during the Cold War, when the comparative medal haul acquired political significance for both sides. Nonetheless, this unofficial league table has become, in effect, a determinant of state policy, in the UK as elsewhere. Funding is dished out in accordance with medal targets. So to justify the expenditure on sport, Team GB must reach its London 2012 targets. But investment in sport – as even billionaire football club owners learn – is never secure or straightforward. It is always subject to sport’s inherent unpredictability (especially in a one-off event like the Olympics, where a single error can nullify years of preparation), to countless contingencies, not least the great unknown of the opposition. These days our boxers, swimmers, gymnasts etc. are every bit as state subsidised as the Cubans and East Germans of old, who were reviled for their spurious amateurism.

Today, the advanced capitalist societies rally under the standard of elite ultra-professionalism, a state and corporate sponsored professionalism presented as the epitome of individualistic dedication, single-mindedness, self-will. Egocentric qualities from which, somehow, it’s asserted, the community automatically benefits. There is a case for state support of elite sports performers, but in relation to the overall objectives of ’sport for all’, i.e. public health, it’s as dubious a strategy as trickle-down economics. The Olympic hype has helped me understand an observation made by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek. Under the old regime, he says, the command was ‘Thou shalt not’ whereas under the new it’s ‘Thou shalt’ – a ceaseless injunction to enjoy, consume, spend, celebrate, cheer, smile. Or as Olympic sponsor Nike says, ‘Just do it’. All of which is in its own way as oppressive and self-distorting as the old prohibitions.

I’ve been an Olympic follower since the Tokyo games of 1964 but I perfectly understand that many people do not share my interest, and there is no civic requirement for them to do so. It’s not only non-sports fans who resent the way these Games are being imposed on our attention at every turn, or the exaggeration of the significance of particular results. The Olympic boosterism treats competitive sport as something it is not and never should be – mandatory. To be itself, sport needs to be a freedom exercised, an option not an obligation. The injunction to ‘stop moaning’ or ‘whingeing’, projected across the media, should be roundly rejected, not least by genuine sports fans.

The issues raised in and around the Olympics are not trivial: security in the context of the war on terror and the erosion of civil liberties; outsourcing and casual labour; the global ethics of giant corporations; the colonisation of the commons through the super-enforcement of intellectual property rights; the subordination of local needs to the imperatives of global capital. These are not peripheral questions that can or should be wished away – and the success or failure of British competitors, or even of ‘London 2012’ as a one-off event, will have no bearing on any of them. Sport does offer a kind of escape, an alternative, exterior focus (like Shakespeare, a Twilight movie, or a game show). But it is not a vacation from critical thought. I find no difficulty thoroughly enjoying the best of the competition without compromising for a moment a necessarily critical perspective on what the Olympic enterprise has become.

Olympics: The Games turned upside down

admin — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 18:34:48 +0000

In a world where the words ‘iconic’ and ‘icon’ have been so cheapened by overuse, it’s salutary to recall their original meaning. In religious use, an icon is a representation that is more than a representation, an image that contains a power beyond itself. It’s not merely familiar or typical (or self‑referential). It’s not a triumph of image over reality; it’s a deeper connection between image and reality, in which the former draws power from the latter.
That’s what makes the image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium at the 1968 Mexico Olympics that rare thing, a genuine icon. But its iconic power can only be reactivated, and the image saved from the banality of contemporary ‘iconography’, if we delve into the moment and its meaning, its background and its aftermath.
This is what makes The John Carlos Story (Haymarket Books) such a wonderful gift. Carlos’s intelligence, humour, ruefulness and righteous wrath make him a commanding observer and narrator. He’s sensitively aided by the cutting-edge socialist sports writer Dave Zirin, whose columns and books fearlessly explore race and class, money-power and media‑hypocrisy. Together, they’ve turned a sports autobiography into a powerful social testament.
From boycott to podium
Carlos explains how, in early 1968, he joined a handful of other elite African‑American athletes in the newly formed Olympic Project for Human Rights. The idea was to mount an African-American boycott of the upcoming Olympics in order to dramatise the continuing oppression of black Americans. Four demands were agreed: the hiring of black coaches (a crucial issue for the athletes, whose daily lives were managed by older white men imbued with racist assumptions); the restoration to Muhammad Ali of the heavyweight title stripped from him because of his refusal to take part in the war in Vietnam; the exclusion of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympic movement; and the removal of the head of the IOC, Avery Brundage – a long time white supremacist, going back to the days when he helped Hitler secure the 1936 Olympics.
Despite valiant efforts, the OPHR activists were unable to persuade many of their fellow competitors to sign up for a boycott; for most of them the Games represented a once in a lifetime opportunity. In the end, the OPHR activists decided they too would take part, and as a result of that decision Carlos, Smith and their allies found themselves in a position to turn the Games upside down.
In the 200 metres final, Smith won the gold in world record time, with the Australian Peter Norman in second, fractionally ahead of Carlos. With Norman’s support (he’s wearing the OPHR badge on the medal podium), Smith and Carlos staged their protest before a global audience. As the US national anthem played and the US flag fluttered overhead, the two African‑American champions raised clenched fists and bowed their heads.
As Carlos explains, the accompanying symbolism was hastily improvised: black gloves for black unity and strength, bead necklaces to remember the lynch mobs, black socks and no shoes for black poverty. But the message was unmistakeable – and profoundly provocative.
These were African-Americans who would not allow their success to be used to bolster America’s image, to imply that black people in America enjoyed freedom and equality. They repudiated this image as a sham, a cover-up, a false unity, and at the same time they posed against it a different solidarity, a higher unity. In so doing they dramatically subverted the core symbolism of the Olympic podium, where individual excellence is harnessed to national identity. It was a globe-spanning message in a globe‑spanning language.
The context of ’68
As Carlos makes clear, the context was everything. It was 1968, and the wave of protest and repression had rolled through America and Europe and into Mexico City on the eve of the Olympics, when the military fired on protesting students, killing hundreds. In making their stand, Smith and Carlos brought the spirit of ’68 to the centre of the Olympic arena, breaching the citadel of sport, so often hailed as a haven from politics. They were able to do that because of their own relationship to the swelling currents of global activism. They knew that when they stood, they would not stand alone.
In narratives of the 1960s it is common to find the latter part of the decade, with its sometimes extreme and violent rhetoric, contrasted unfavourably with the earlier, more innocent and high-minded years. Many historians lament in particular the passing of the integrationist, nonviolent phase of the civil rights movement and its displacement by the militant black power phase.
They forget that this shift occurred because of the frustrations and failures of the earlier phase, out of which arose the need for a deeper, more systematic analysis as well as more effective forms of action. They also neglect the achievement of black power in releasing the self-reliant cultural energies of black performers – among them Smith and Carlos. Their protest was a flower of that movement and moment: a black nationalism with an internationalist vision, in which African-Americans were seen as members of a global community of the oppressed.
Unfinished business
Smith and Carlos were expelled from the Olympic village and returned home to find themselves vilified. They were denounced as ‘black storm troopers’ who had disrespected their country and, most heinous of all, had shown a shocking ingratitude for all America had done for them. For years Smith and Carlos were treated as pariahs by the athletics establishment. There were no sponsorships, no coaching or media jobs for these world record beaters. To feed his family Carlos took jobs as a gardener, in a grocery store and an aluminium factory, and a stint in American football.
As the political movement that had inspired his action disintegrated, Carlos and his family were isolated. His marriage broke down. In 1977, after years of financial distress and mounting depression, his wife, the childhood sweetheart who stood by him every step of the way in 1968, took her own life.
After much struggle, Carlos found a rewarding life as a school guidance counsellor, though it’s only in the last decade that he and Smith have received the recognition they’re due. Carlos makes clear that the demons still haunt him, that there’s still unfinished business. Not least political business.
In his story, the narrative arc of trial and redemption so familiar from sports autobiographies and Hollywood biopics is invested with depth and realism – because it’s linked to a wider social struggle. The bravery was real and so was the suffering that followed. It is this history, feeding into and flowing out from the famous image, that makes the Smith/Carlos moment so deeply resonant and so enduringly relevant.
Colonised by capital
Since Carlos’s day, the Olympics, like so many other parts of the commons, have been colonised by global capital. At London 2012, the podium will serve as a symbol of the holy triad: individual competitive excellence, national identity and corporate overlordship.
As Carlos notes, the removal of the indigent from public view by the host city has become as much part of the Olympic ritual as the torch relay. Along with that has come the establishment of Olympic zones as licensed private dictatorships, in which rights to free expression and assembly are suppressed for the duration. An aggressive assertion of intellectual property rights, ruthlessly enforcing the corporate sponsors’ exclusive claims to the Olympic entity, will be matched by an unprecedented security clampdown, ensuring neither local residents nor protesters against corporate sponsors are able to disrupt the flow.
Like global capital, the Olympics have been cast as a juggernaut, an irresistible force with laws of its own to which we must all submit. In deference to that higher command, we’re told to swallow the exorbitant expense, the dubious ‘legacy’, the loss of rights, the trickle-up economics. We’re told to ignore the aching contrast between public austerity and Olympic extravagance. Despite the attempted lock down, the contradictions in the whole enterprise loom large, and one way or another, they’re bound to surface.

Beyond church and state

admin — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:36:17 +0000

When a high court judge ruled against Bideford Town Council’s inclusion of prayers in its formal agenda, Tory communities secretary Eric Pickles acted quickly, fast-tracking a parliamentary order ‘effectively reversing’ the court’s decision. By doing so, he crowed, ‘we are striking a blow for localism over central interference, for freedom to worship over intolerant secularism, for parliamentary sovereignty over judicial activism, and for long-standing British liberties over modern-day political correctness.’
Pickles’ binary system is a crass muddle, but his political, Tea Party-style agenda is clear. Privatisation, cuts, the nullification of local democracy are to be camouflaged by an appeal to a cultural ‘majority‘ allegedly threatened by an amalgam of Big Government and liberal political correctness.
Really, the issue of prayers at council meetings ought to be straightforward. State-sponsored prayer, however ecumenical, is a powerful public endorsement of a specific religious belief – not only about the existence of a supreme being but also about the nature of our relationship to it (supplicant). As a result, it excludes all of those who do not subscribe to that specific belief, or imposes a silent hypocrisy as a condition of inclusion. It creates a second-class citizenship.
In his Rights of Man, Thomas Paine derided the coupling of church and state as producing ‘a sort of mule-animal, capable only of destroying, and not of breeding up’. As Paine noted, the state-church tie-up is not just an intrusion of religion into affairs of state but also an intrusion of the state into affairs of the spirit. Prayer at council meetings is an invasion of privacy, a colonisation by the state of our inner life. As such, it might seem to go against the grain of Pickles’ vision of a privatised, minimal local state – but in fact, as so often, neoliberal economics and cultural reaction work in tandem.
Secularist self-criticism
If secularists are to respond to this strategy, they must engage in some serious self-criticism (which in any case is where the secular spirit ought always to begin). ‘Religion’ and ‘secularism’ are not mutually exclusive categories but are too often treated as such by people on both sides of this much‑hyped, ill-defined divide. Similarly, the misleading association of secularism with the ‘west’ (with imperialism or capitalism) is shared by both fundamentalists and prominent liberal secularists.
At a formal level, secularism demands the ‘separation of church and state‘, the protection of minorities, the elimination of religious discrimination or favouritism, and so on. But in addition to this negative, restraining function, secularism posits a shared realm, a distinctively public realm, in which arguments are addressed to common interests and principles, though of course they may also be informed by religious motives.
The deeper crisis facing secularism is that under neoliberalism this shared realm has been eviscerated. Capitalism tends to dissociate the economic from the political, making daily life and labour subject to an abstract economic law; that tendency has become extreme under neoliberalism. On all sides, the truly public domain has been whittled away. Politics, and along with it much of our social existence, is reduced to a question of management. The secular, shared realm is confined to a narrow space, leaving little room for questions about aims and alternatives, and offering few spaces for solidarity and collectivity, which of course opens a gap for ‘religion’.
The power of the politics of religious identity is a feature of the globalised neoliberal order, not merely atavism. The desire to belong, however horrific its manifestations can be, is not in itself reactionary; it’s a rational response to a precarious world and drives democratic mass movements as much as authoritarian sects. In this sense, the answer to the politics of religious identity is not to catalogue the ‘absurdities’ of religion but to create a secular order worth belonging to.
The arguments over religion and secularism are interlaced with the many confusions surrounding ‘multiculturalism’. It’s not unusual to find ‘Christian’ and ‘secular’ antagonists united in rejecting what they see as the moral relativism of multiculturalism, or in hostility towards Islam. It suits both ‘sides’ to conceive of secularism as somehow ‘without culture’, which is a bit like saying someone speaks without an accent. This highly selective vision of the west as a bastion of the ‘secular’ and therefore the ‘universal’ has been evoked in support of the west’s wars in the Middle East and discrimination against Muslims in Europe.
The last thing an honest, effective secularism should do is blindly defend modern (western) culture or its particular property-based notions of freedom. In some ways this culture, deeply linked as it is to global capital, is even more intrusive and pervasive than the old ‘religious’ cultures, especially when it claims to be nothing more than life itself, the human condition: competition and imitation, consumption and production. A secularism that takes that culture for granted will be unable to fulfil its promise: to create an effectively shared human realm.
Wary of generalising
The sheer variety of religious experience and expression should make people wary about generalising. Undeniably, religion has a long, brutal history as a mask for privilege and exploitation. But it also has a history as a vehicle for freedom and equality – because it posits a power and legitimacy greater than the state or wealth or weapons. Inscribed in the history of many religions is their own emergence out of a conflict with power, in defiance of an oppressive orthodoxy: Guru Nanak, Buddha, Muhammed, the Hebrew prophets, Jesus. In just about all religious traditions, repressive, hierarchical strands are found alongside emancipatory, egalitarian strands, often tangled together. Sects may originate in one impulse only to turn into embodiments of the other. How else could it be? In the end religion unfolds in the material world, under the pressures of economics and politics, and is always shaped by that.
But contradictions abound also on the secular side. The Enlightenment is often dragged into the discussion with little regard for its actual historical content, its internal divisions and limitations. What Adorno called the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ produced not only social and scientific advances but also weapons of mass destruction, ‘racial science’, genocide, environmental degradation and the creation of a new ‘secular’ cult object, the nation-state, responsible for as much intolerance and bloodshed as any of the great religions.
After all, is the belief in god a more serious or dangerous ‘absurdity’ than the widely held secular beliefs that imperial power is beneficent, that ‘growth’ can be unlimited in a finite environment, that the deficit is caused by too much public spending? Is religious faith a greater obtuseness than the blithe acceptance of the laws of capital as ‘natural’? Is it worse, or even more irrational, to derive comfort from thoughts of an afterlife than to derive it from compulsively hoarding or displaying inordinate wealth? The former is a social problem if it prevents people from taking action in this life. But the latter is socially irredeemable.
There’s a world of difference between the atheism of a Bakunin – ‘as long as we have a master in heaven we will be slaves on earth’ – and the New Atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens et al. One seeks to empower people, the other to set limits on them. Thou shalt not doubt the wisdom, coherence and finality of the existing secular (western) order. What virtue is there in an atheism that is entirely conventional, merely assumed as part of the ‘common sense’ of the age? This is received opinion, as little an expression of independent thought as the religious doctrines of the past. It is a highly un-dialectical materialism.
Within a secularism liberated from the restraints of global capital, we need an atheism responsive to the gaps and incoherences in human experience, to feelings of awe and reverence rooted in the here and now. We need an atheism that enhances the search for meaning – not an atomistic, abstractly ‘universal’ consciousness, but a consciousness as fluid as reality, finding the universal in its true home, the particular.
www.mikemarqusee.com

Broader horizons

admin — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:00:27 +0000

The past year has been hailed in the media as one of ‘protest’ in the abstract, but it’s been more challenging and concrete than that. In defiance of received political wisdom, mass action in the streets returned with undeniable impact. Contests over space and the public domain became vehicles for the assertion of radical alternatives, which thereby forced their way into a discussion long restricted to a narrow consensus.
In Europe and North America, this democratic insurgency sought to free democracy itself from the straitjacket imposed by neoliberalism, which has deepened the historic tendency of capitalism to confine ‘politics’ to the non-economic realm. Raising the banner of the 99 per cent, the Occupy movement (with associated developments) broke through 30 years of neoliberal ideological hegemony to make the system itself – and the interests that drive it – the subject of debate.
As a result, perceptions of the possible have been redefined. Horizons broadened. We do not have to be slaves of the financial sector, sacrificial victims to appease angry fiscal gods. Whatever else, this systemic challenge means the struggles of the coming years will be fought out on different terrain.
An unapologetic ‘No’
Against the claim that the Occupiers have failed to raise specific demands is the fact that the Occupy milieu has generated demands aplenty: on tax justice, financial institutions, environmental sustainability and so on. These need to be and are being detailed and enriched and disseminated. But the starting point must remain a giant, wholehearted, unapologetic ‘No’ to neoliberalism (at the least).
Here it would be a pity if people in and around the movement became muddled (for example, by notions of ‘dialogue’ with bankers). We have to adhere to (and develop) our initial and epochal ‘No’, our rejection of the prevailing economic system and its dismal politics.
It is this prevailing system that is the great Negation – of solidarity, interdependence, responsibility for the environment, of a vast realm of human possibility and countless human lives. The nihilism of our times lies in the subjection of our entire society and culture to the narrow imperatives of capital accumulation. That’s why we need a ‘negation of the negation to redeem the contraries’, as Blake, anticipating Marx, called for 200 years ago. Yet even as we make this deeply considered ‘No’ our starting point, we must remember that what will decide outcomes will be the action or inaction of the much larger numbers of people who do not (yet) share this starting point.
As for the much-discussed question of ‘process’, the adoption of a horizontal, consensual model, given negative experiences with other models, laid the necessary basis for mutual trust. Of course this model was not created spontaneously. It’s been gestating for years, developing through campaigns and struggles. It’s driven by an admirably anti-hierarchical spirit, along with a deep, understandable but not unproblematic suspicion of ‘representation’ of any kind.
Previous experiences with non-hierarchical models suggest they carry perils of their own. The movement can become preoccupied with its own processes, identity and purity. In the absence of representative structures, it’s easy for individuals or coteries to make themselves spokespersons – and for the media to pick and choose whom it will give a platform to. What’s more, if people experience the process, however open and inclusive, as unproductive, without results in the real world, they’ll become disillusioned. In the end democracy is not only about how we make decisions but also our capacity to implement those decisions.
None of which is to suggest that the experiments in democracy should be curtailed. On the contrary, they must be continued and expanded. But they must be outward looking, they must aim to intervene, to mobilise, and not be content with sustaining a separate space. The new-old methods will have to be adapted to changing priorities and diverse constituencies. The link between the activist core and the much wider periphery will have to be strengthened.
The challenges are immense. In Britain, public service cuts will combine with recession to push millions into poverty and chronic insecurity. The breadth and scale of the attacks makes it hard to keep pace, no less to consolidate and unify. Plus there’ll be the mighty distractions of the royal jubilee and the Olympics, which will be used to promote national unity and pride.
Convergence
One of the encouraging developments of last year was the convergence of the labour movement with the extra-institutional insurgency associated with Occupy (including, in this country, the UK Uncut campaigns). This was seen most dramatically in the US, with the interventions of construction and transport workers in support of Occupy Wall Street and in Oakland, where dockworkers and allies battled police. But here too we’ve seen Unite, PCS and other unions seeking a relationship with the new forces and forms of resistance.
From its side, the Occupy movement or whatever follows on from it also needs to reach out – to make the relationship between labour and capital, and therefore the labour movement, central to its analysis and strategy. If the movement understands this, it can play a critical role in creating the conditions (shifts in the climate of debate, in popular awareness) in which workers can take action with greater confidence.
Despite changes in the workplace, in technologies and the global labour market (overwhelmingly to labour’s disadvantage), the relationship between labour and capital remains central to capital accumulation and at its heart exploitive. It is also a relationship, a division, an experience more widespread today than ever, as market imperatives have been imposed in the developing world and extended within the developed world. (In one sense, it’s being on the subject side of this exploitive relationship that defines the 99 per cent.)
Organised labour is rooted in collectivity, which is the source of its power and identity, and in this respect trade unions, however politically tame, have long offered at least the seed of an alternative to capitalist individualism. For all their failings, they remain the most democratic and accountable institutions in our society – certainly in comparison with the corporations, the media, parliament, universities, charities or regulatory bodies. The shared if highly fragmented world of work, which shapes the daily lives of billions, where value is generated and appropriated, where society is reproduced – this has to be a key arena of contest for any movement aiming for radical social change (or ecological sustainability).
It is because of their basis in this shared world of work that unions in Europe have taken up the fight against austerity that has been largely repudiated by their erstwhile social democratic allies. Here in Britain, the Labour Party, forged by the unions a hundred years ago, is now too wedded to neoliberalism and too divorced from any mass base to offer real resistance. Long‑term developments – the attrition of members’ power, the conquest of the party by a professional cadre chained to the logic of ‘presentation’ – have left it incapable of imagining or articulating an alternative. Similar developments have been seen across Europe as ‘post-modern’ inducements created ‘post-social democratic’ parties. In the end, the retreat of the mainstream left contributed as much as the collapse of Communism to the erosion of belief in alternatives.
Gaping hole
This has left a gaping hole, which the forces embodied in the Occupy movement cannot hope to fill, though they can forge a way forward. At some point, if we are to defeat austerity, we need to bring down the government. But then what? It may well turn out that we shake the tree, Labour politicians gather the fruit, and our world remains under neoliberal management.
In Latin America social movements were able to find or create political vehicles, and through them acquire the power to make the break from neoliberalism, which in turn made possible the remarkable reduction in poverty seen in the region over the last decade. We need a Latin American moment in Europe – a regime and a population willing to defy the demands of global capital.
In the meantime, our agenda in Britain over the coming year must be escalation: an increase in the tempo, scale, variety and overall public presence of resistance. We have to raise the social and political costs of austerity for the ruling elite. If we can see off even one of the major attacks we will be immensely strengthened. Those with a systemic critique need to find ways to bring radical ideas and the energies they unleash into immediate struggles – and fight to win.

Streets of the imagination

admin — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:38:21 +0000

Events over the summer brought to mind William Blake’s uncompromisingly angry poem ‘London’, written in the early 1790s under the impact of revolution in France and repression at home. The poet wanders ‘through the charter’d streets/near where the charter’d Thames does flow’, where he encounters signs of widespread distress. He hears the sound of ‘the mind-forg’d manacles’, the fears and prejudices that keep people in thrall to an unjust social system. Above all, he sees the exploitation of youth: chimney sweeps, soldiers, prostitutes – victims of state, church and commerce, Blake’s tyrannical trinity.
Blake called London’s streets ‘charter’d’ because so much of the city’s economic life was subject to ‘charters’ granting exclusive privileges to private corporations. In 1791, they had been denounced by Thomas Paine as ‘aristocratical monopolies’ because of which ‘an Englishman is not free of his own country; every one of those places presents a barrier in his way, and tells him he is not a freeman – that he has no rights.’
In ‘London’ Blake confronts what we would call today a privatised London (even the river), whose ultimate ghastly manifestation is prostitution. ‘But most through midnite streets I hear/The youthful harlot’s curse’ – the contractual commodification of desire, which serves, ironically, to spread sexually transmitted disease. Marriage and prostitution are daringly linked as the twin sides of a pervasive social hypocrisy. The poem ends with the chilling, terrifically compressed image of ‘the marriage hearse’, society’s primary institution damned as deadly.
All this from a walk around London, at that time the world’s largest and fastest-growing city. Nowhere else was there such a convergence of wealth and poverty; nowhere else was the market so ruthlessly dominant.
Lifelong Londoner
Blake was a lifelong Londoner. Along with Shakespeare, an adoptive Londoner, he is the least well travelled of all major English poets – venturing no further than the Thames estuary and the Sussex coast. As a journeyman engraver, he was one of many London artisans drawn to radical ideas in religion and politics, and from whose ranks the London Corresponding Society, Britain’s first plebeian political organisation, was formed in 1792.
Blake grew up in the London of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ and always avowed himself ‘a Liberty Boy’. Like most London artisans he supported the American revolution. And when London exploded in five days of riots, the most extensive in the city’s history, in June 1780, he was there – at the front of the crowd, whether by accident or design.
The ‘Gordon Riots’ began in anti-Catholic demonstrations whipped up by the maverick MP George Gordon. In their initial phase, Catholic places of worship and businesses (mostly foreign merchants) were attacked, though no Catholics were killed. Soon the crowd, having mastered the streets, changed tack and targets, turning its ire on the Bank of England, the homes of judges (ransacking the mansion of the Lord Chief Justice), and above all the jails. They broke open crimping houses (where impressed sailors were confined), debtors’ hostels, and one after another all the city’s prisons, culminating in Newgate – the biggest and most notorious of them all, London’s Bastille. Hundreds of prisoners were released and the building was burnt to the ground.
According to Blake’s first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, writing in the 1860s, Blake was minding his own business at his home in Soho when ‘Suddenly he encountered the advancing wave of triumphant blackguardism, and was forced (for from such a great surging mob there is no disentanglement) to go along in the very front rank and witness the storm and burning of the fortress-like prison.’ To which a London magistrate in 2011 would mutter ‘a likely story!’ before imposing a maximum sentence.
Which cause?
It took 10,000 troops to suppress the riots. Between three and four hundred rioters were killed; 450 were arrested; 25 hanged. How ‘political’ were these events? Who were the rioters and what did they seek?
In The London Hanged, Peter Linebaugh identifies diverse participants: apprentices, journeymen artisans, domestic servants, tripe-sellers, coffee house waiters, laundresses, seamstresses, as well as a number of African-Americans, ex-slaves who made up 6 to 7 per cent of London’s population. When Thomas Haycock, a waiter, was asked by a judge why he had rioted, he replied simply: ‘The cause.’ Which cause? Haycock explained: ‘There should not be a prison standing on the morrow in London.’
Blake was 23, had just completed his apprenticeship and commenced what would prove to be a deeply frustrating freelance career. In every respect he fitted the profile of the rioter and if he later recast his participation as involuntary, there is no doubt of the event’s impact on him. That year he first conceived the image later titled ‘Glad Day’ or ‘Albion Rose’ – in which a classically proportioned male youth springs majestically from the earth, embodying the exaltation and energy of liberation. Some time later he gave it the caption:
Albion rose from where he labour’d at the mill with slaves
Giving himself for the Nations he danc’d the dance of Eternal Death.
Blake was to live through decades of war and reaction. His hopes for public recognition and an escape from penury were repeatedly dashed. But he pursued his lonely prophetic vocation and continued to produce stunningly original poems and images. He spent his last years in a two room flat in an insalubrious tenement adjacent to where the Savoy Hotel now stands. The one redeeming feature was the small window that afforded a view of the ever-busy Thames.
To the end Blake remained responsive to London’s confused, generous, mean-minded, moody, all-powerful and impotent crowd, and to the hypocrisies of its rulers. ‘I behold London,’ he exclaimed, ‘a Human awful wonder of God!’ In his final masterpiece, ‘Jerusalem’, completed in 1820, Blake spoke of London’s unwilling warriors, the sailors in the crimping houses:
We were carried away in thousands from London; & in tens
Of thousands from Westminster & Marybone in ships closd up:
Chaind hand & foot, compelld to fight under the iron whips
Of our captains; fearing our officers more than the enemy.
City of the mind
For Blake, London is a psyche, a city of the mind. ‘My Streets are my Ideas of Imagination,’ he has it declare, ‘My Houses are Thoughts; my Inhabitants, Affections.’ It is both microcosm (of human civilisation) and macrocosm (containing many worlds). It exists everywhere and nowhere, always and never, like ‘Lambeth’s Vale/Where Jerusalem’s foundations began; where they were laid in ruins.’
In the rhythmic litanies of London place-names found in Blake’s later works, the poet traces the course of his giant visionary forms: from ‘Highgate’s heights & Hampstead’s, to Poplar Hackney & Bow:/To Islington & Paddington & the Brook of Albions River/We builded Jerusalem . . .’
Out of familiar workaday London, Blake conjures a sanctified geography, treating the modern city and its neighbourhoods the way the bible treats ancient Palestine. He sees it as a decisive battleground in the epic spiritual-political struggle through which ‘intellectual war’ must overcome ‘corporeal war’. Here Los, the poet-prophet-blacksmith, labours at his forge. ‘On the banks of the Thames, Los builded Golgonooza’ – a multifaceted, jewel-like city of applied imagination, Blake’s capital of artisans. ‘In fears he builded it, in rage & in fury. It is the Spiritual Fourfold London: continually building & continually decaying desolate!’
Finally, Blake sees liberated London as a meeting-place for all that is human: ‘In the Exchanges of London every Nation walk’d/And London walk’d in every Nation, mutual in love & harmony.’
This is a defiantly republican London. A London without kings or priests or financiers or their ‘hirelings’, the publicists and apologists whom Blake reviled. A London of free labourers, in which individual and collective creativity flourish together, a city thriving off the dialectic of the one and the many.

This is what Swazi democracy looks like

James O'Nions — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 22:16:10 +0000

The second Global Week of Action in Swaziland, organised by the Swaziland Democracy Campaign, which concludes this Friday (9 September), has already scored remarkable successes, amid terrible sacrifices. The week marks a new highpoint in the ongoing confrontation between an absolute monarchy that for decades has plundered the country and an increasingly emboldened democracy movement.

Events kicked off on 5 September with a mass demonstration through the heart of the capital city, Mbabane. One of the COSATU delegates who joined the protest reported: ‘The streets of Mbabane have been occupied by a range of different people, including workers, students, the legal profession, community and church activists, and all marching in unison and toyi-toying for freedom. They are united in one purpose, to challenge the continuing rule of Africa’s last absolute monarchy. There is an almost carnival atmosphere in the air!’

The next day the protest moved to the country’s largest city and economic hub, Manzini, where thousands surged through the streets. In a town of 75,000, this was equivalent to hundreds of thousands in a major European city. What’s more, these demonstrators were defying intimidation and a very real threat to their physical security, amidst conditions where the daily struggle for survival can be daunting.

Up until now, the police had stood back, a marked contrast with their behaviour at the last protests in April, dispersed with batons, tear gas and water cannon. The police were aware that they were being monitored by a variety of international observers and that the recently agreed, desperation-born South African bail-out was still vulnerable.

However, as the action spread on Wednesday (7 September) to other regions of the country, notably the small towns of Siteki in the east and Nhlangano in the south, the Swazi regime deployed the riot squads, firing rubber bullets and teargas. The regime is railing against an alleged ‘invasion by non Swazis’ – referring in particular to the 40 plus COSATU activists who crossed the border to join the protests. A number of COSATU representatives have been picked up by the armed forces and deported. It’s also reported, as I write, that senior Swazi trade union leaders and leaders of the main (banned) opposition party, PUDEMO, have been beaten up. In Manzini, police battled with young people.

However the week ends, the regime will have been the loser. The gains of the democracy movement in the streets may be fragile but they will have an intangible ripple effect.

In the run up to the week of action, Swaziland was wrestling with economic crisis. Years of maladministration, waste, corruption and gross inequality came to a head as a result of the global recession. A huge deficit opened, the government was unable to pay its bills and has only been saved from open bankruptcy by the loan of $370 million from South Africa. Public sector wages are being slashed or withheld, and the meagre provision for poverty relief has dried up. As a result of cuts in allowances, the country’s 6000 university students are boycotting classes.

The South African government seemingly had little reason to do Mswati any favours. The Swazi monarchy collaborated with the apartheid regime and harassed ANC activists on its soil. Nonetheless, the Zuma government’s concern for the established economic order overcame any historical resentment. COSATU, among others who wanted democratisation as a condition of a bail out, strongly disapproved. During the week of action, protests against the blank cheque bailout were held outside the South African parliament and branches of the South African Reserve Bank in cities across the country.

Mswati is known to have a personal fortune of more than $200million – while 70 per cent of his subjects live on less than a dollar a day. More than 40 per cent of the workforce are unemployed. The country suffers the world’s highest HIV infection rates and lowest life expectancy at birth (32 years).

However, Swaziland is also Africa’s third-biggest sugar producer and as such has become Coca-Cola’s southern African base. Mswati is a major partner in the business and is an honoured guest on his annual pilgrimages to Coke’s global HQ in Atlanta, Georgia. Mswati’s despotism is built on the sponsorship of multi-national corporations. Whether it’s telecommunications, media, mining, agriculture, or soft drinks, the royal family gets a piece of the action.

Mswati presides over the world’s longest running state of emergency, going back to 1973 when political parties were banned. Since then, the royal elite has ruled through the ‘tinkundla’ system – a top-down machine of patronage and corruption which they dignify as an authentic expression of Swazi ‘culture’. The king enjoys untrammelled executive and legislative power. Along with the vote, freedom of speech, assembly and association are suppressed, while the royal family treats the nation’s resources as private assets, accumulating vast fortunes without any kind of public scrutiny.

Long-simmering but disparate dissent acquired a new focus and channel with the launch of the Swaziland Democracy Campaign in February 2010. The Swazi trade unions provided the backbone and direction of the growing movement, working cooperatively and creatively with religious and community groups and civil society activists. Their Swazi unions’ joint work in this campaign has in turn led to the merger and unification of the country’s various labour federations, which can only add weight to the democracy movement.

SDC activists also highlight the vital contribution made by COSATU, across the border in South Africa. Unusually in the realm of trade union internationalism, they’ve matched words with deeds, putting material and political resources, and bodies on the ground, at the service of the SDC. The last few days have seen the regime challenged by a palpably united front of public sector workers, church members, lawyers, students and the unemployed. For the first time, there was significant mobilisation in rural regions, a hard-earned breakthrough for the democracy movement, and one that has elicited a violent reaction from the regime.

Despite harassment, detention and torture, SDC activists, bolstered by international trade union support, have mounted ever more ambitious actions, climaxing in this week’s events. They know the struggle ahead will be demanding, but they remain confident that the movement has taken a huge stride forward.

For supporters abroad, the priority is to isolate the Mswati regime, using all available forums and pressure points. One of the goals of the week of action is to raise global awareness – and across Africa it has succeeded in doing that. The lack of coverage in the mainstream media here in Britain by no means reflects the significance of developments in Swaziland, a small country with a big revolution-in-the-making.

For more background on the democracy struggle in Swaziland see Mike Marqusee’s previous article for Red Pepper

The bedrock of autonomy

admin — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 23:34:31 +0000

Now entering my fifth year of living with multiple myeloma, a haematological cancer, I reflect back on a roller-coaster ride of symptoms, treatments and side effects. Whatever else this experience has brought, it’s been an education. But what exactly have I learned? To begin with, that any glib answer to the question misses the core of the experience – the sometimes murky dialectic of being ill, which is a social as well as physical condition.
For me, the experience has led to a heightened awareness of our intricate dependence on others, as well as our deep-seated need for independence.
Sitting with my IV drip, I like to think about all the human labour and ingenuity that come together in this medical moment. The inventory is endless.
The first circle of dependence is immediate and sometimes intimate. Partners, friends, doctors, nurses, cleaners, porters. I’m also dependent on a vast network of people I never see: pathologists, pharmacists, IT engineers, equipment repairers and supplies managers. Everyone who has anything to do with maintaining the supply of medications or the functioning of equipment or getting me to and from hospital. Everyone who makes sure the lights are on and the building safe. The whole intricate ballet that is a functioning hospital. One misstep, one breach in the rhythm, one failure to be at the appointed spot at the appointed time, and the whole breaks down, with potentially dire consequences.
Beyond that, I’m dependent on a long history of scientific development to which individuals and institutions in many countries have contributed. From the British chemist Bence Jones identifying the protein associated with multiple myeloma in the 1840s to the pathologist and one-time film star Justine Wanger developing the IV drip in the 1930s. From the Irish physician Francis Rynd, who invented the hollow needle in the mid-19th century, to Don Thomas of the University of Washington who pioneered bone marrow transplants in the 1980s. From the first experiments with chemotherapy (a by-product of chemical warfare) in the 1940s, through the protracted struggle to master the art of toxicity (a dialectic of creation and destruction if there ever was one), to the discovery of proteasome inhibitors in the 1990s and the subsequent creation of new ‘targeted therapies’, like the one I’m currently receiving.
Without innumerable essential advances in immunology, pathology, biochemistry, chemical engineering, statistics and metallurgy, to name but a few, I wouldn’t be where I am now – in fact, I wouldn’t be at all.
The story of scientific advance is also, of course, a story of errors, false hopes, cynical exploitation and misappropriated resources. We’ve come a long way from the 2nd century AD when Galen, doyen of Roman medicine, declared that cancer was caused by melancholia; or from the treatment – rhubarb and orange peel – given to the first patients diagnosed with myeloma in the 1840s. Even as recently as the 1950s myeloma patients were given a standard urethane therapy that was later shown to be completely ineffective.
The drip flowing into my vein is drawn from a river with innumerable tributaries. It is an entirely rational, intelligible process, but no less miraculous for that.
Not just hard science
And it’s not just a story of hard science. Alongside that, and necessary to it, is the whole history of the hospital (which for many generations was primarily a place you went to die, not to be cured), of the discipline of nursing, and of a host of social developments that made it possible to convert raw science into practical care.
I’m acutely conscious of how dependent I am on those who built and sustained the NHS, including, pre-eminently, generations of labour movement activists and socialists. And as I sit with my IV drip I’m mindful of those in government and business who would smash the delicate mechanism of the hospital and shatter the network of dependence that sustains me. (Among other things, the disassembling of the NHS runs counter to the thrust of advanced thinking on patient-centred care, which stresses a multi-disciplinary and integrated approach.)
I’m being kept alive by the contributions of so many currents of human labour, thought, struggle, desire, imagination. By the whole Enlightenment tradition but not only that: by other, older traditions of care, solidarity, mutuality, of respect for human life and compassion for human suffering. The harnessing of science, technology and advanced forms of organisation and information to compassionate ends is by no means automatic. It leans on and is only made possible by the conflict-riddled history of ethical and political development.
Beautiful as it is, this network of dependence is also frightening. Restrictions in capacity and mobility are hugely frustrating and relying on others to supplement them is not a straightforward business – for patient or carer. As a cancer patient I often feel I’m engaged in a never-ending battle for autonomy. I fight it out in relation to institutions (including hospitals), experts (who claim to know more about my situation than I do), medications (an endless struggle to find an elusive balance), means of mobility, forms of diet. Not to mention the vital effort to live a life beyond illness, to hold on to that kernel of freedom that makes you who you are.
Struggle for autonomy
Paradoxically the struggle for autonomy is one you can’t win on your own. You need allies, and part of being a carer is being an ally, a comrade, not a nursemaid or controller. Independence is the stuff of life. It’s motion, energy, free will, the capacity for self-development. But you can achieve it only through dependence on others, individuals and institutions, past and present. That’s a truth driven home to the cancer patient, but applicable to all of us. As is the realisation that the most rewarding use of the independence thus secured is in the service of a creative and compassionate engagement with others, building higher dependencies – new networks of mutuality.
Illness is anything but an ideology-free zone. Certainly not for the government, which aims to divide sufferers into acute cases deserving of support and less acute ones that must be forced out into the labour market, where our only function will be to undercut wages and job security. This is one among many reasons why resistance to the attacks on benefits for people with disabilities and long-term illnesses ought to be a central plank of the anti‑cuts movement.
The crisis facing the disabled and the ill is an extreme form of the crisis facing all those dependent on the public sector in whatever manner (the majority of the populace). We don’t want charity – the form of dependence that makes independence impossible – but rights and the resources to exercise those rights. Speaking for myself, taking part in anti-cuts activity is some of the best therapy available: an unashamed acknowledgment of social dependence and at the same time a declaration of political-spiritual independence.
Being ill makes salient some critical features of the underlying human condition, not least the dialectic of dependence and independence. Even in the most despairing moments, the utmost dependency, the politics of illness turns out (for me) to be a politics of struggle and hope, the harbinger of a solidarity flowering out of our common but always idiosyncratic weaknesses. n
Contending for the Living is Mike Marqusee’s regular column for Red Pepper. www.mikemarqusee.com