Red Pepper » Books

A class act

admin — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 10:00:03 +0000

E P Thompson’s work usually gets a nicely worded (if often guarded) review. After all, he’s part of the original new left, sings the praises of the Levellers as revolutionaries, and is part of the turn to social history and history ‘from below’. He is also often lauded for being part of the move towards ‘cultural’ considerations (cultural studies) with Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. If a review digs a little deeper, it might get to the lack of racial or gender analysis in his work (Struggle for the Breeches by Anna Clark is the most famous repost to E P Thompson’s lack of gender analysis). He is an important author and figure for all of these reasons, but we do him and arguably his most famous book The Making of the English Working Class a disservice if we stop there.
I don’t mean his political life beyond the text as it were, leaving the Communist Party, as a ‘freelance polemicist’ and ‘voice of the peace movement’. I mean that we should follow him down into his books to see what they say, and to make as much out of them as people do of his life. The Making of the English Working Class in particular deserves to be read for a number of reasons.
Published in 1963, it is a historical text that concentrates on English artisan and working class society ‘in its formative years, 1780 to 1832’. In Thompson’s own words he sought ‘to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity’. The book itself is a seminal history from below text, drawing out aspects of the formation of capitalism largely ignored until its publication.
So what makes The Making of the English Working Class so interesting? First, it has a theory of class as a thing that emerged and developed over time. That is, the working class didn’t spring magically out of the processes of enclosure fully formed, but was (and still is) the varied and always contested result of an open process between capital and the not-yet or have-been working class bodies that still populate the world: ‘The working class did not rise like the sun at the appointed time. It was present at its own making.’
But second, if we follow Thompson’s method – his fine grain detail, his patchwork of groups, trends, everyday life and events – what you see is an image of class as a continual process. People are always making and being made into ‘the’ working class. And through that process class – as a concept, as a consciousness – is constantly evolving. It’s worth noting that he was
very much working in parallel on an understanding of the always-antagonistic nature of class as a relationship of resistance and rebellion with the Italian autonomist Marxists, the most famous of whom (for non-Italians) is Antonio Negri. The priority for them, as for Thompson, was the thread of resistance and rebellion that ran through history and formed the basis of capitalist social relations.
Third, and like them, his writing shows class as not one but many. Considered theoretically, the working class is all the same – labour in the abstract. Look a bit more closely, think about your day at work, the commute and the people around you and you’ll see a hodge-podge of peoples, often at odds or even war with each other. Consciousness is the key aspect, emphasised by Thompson against the more economically determinist readings of both Marx and class dynamics:
‘And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs . . . If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not.’
But even here he innovated. Consciousness was not ‘raised’ – people did not need to be made aware of their exploitation or loss to be moved to action. Thompson showed how, in a myriad of ways, people developed their own narratives, ideas, theories and understandings of what was happening and, more importantly, what they wanted to happen. From religion to late night drunken raids on factories, political groups to parliamentary reform – more than ‘culture’, Thompson considers all of life to be both organised and a terrain of struggle and innovation.
Finally, Thompson cautions us not to rush to judgment as though we ourselves were in some position from which to lay out all that has come before us. In motion, riding the rough seas of class conflict, the horizon can surely be our only ultimate guide:
‘Our only criterion of judgment should not be whether or not a man’s [sic] actions are justified in light of subsequent evolution. After all, we are not at the end of social evolution ourselves.’

A flame of butterflies

admin — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 10:00:54 +0000

For her latest novel Barbara Kingsolver highlights the transnational, biospheric and personal consequences of climate change through exploring the life of a young, disaffected farmer’s wife in Tennessee. Dellarobia Turner’s life is turned upside down when she witnesses what she believes to be a miracle – an entire valley that seems to be alight in an orange flame. In fact it’s the entire migratory population of North American monarch butterflies.
Dellarobia’s attempt to understand how this has happened brings her into conflict with her family and her community. The patriarchal relationship with her in-laws that she challenges at home is coupled with her struggles against the multiple levels of exploitation of consumerism. Too poor to buy Christmas presents for her children, Dellarobia ‘looked over the bins of tinselly junk and felt despair … There had to be armies of factory workers making this slapdash stuff, underpaid people cranking out things for underpaid people to buy and use up, living their lives mostly to cancel each other out. A worldwide entrapment of bottom feeders.’ Disaffection with an oppressive and monotonous home life is a synecdoche for a more general struggle with the world Dellarobia sees around her.
Kingsolver’s thoughtful crafting of the story questions the motives driving climate change denial in a precarious world. The failure of the US media to provide accurate information in favour of advertising profits and viewer rating is tackled alongside the inaccessibility of academic science for those in the US who are likely to be most affected by climate change – the rural poor and migrants fleeing various catastrophic disasters.
The scandal of market-based responses and the dilemmas of the daily grind of poverty are also weaved into the novel as Dellarobia determinedly fights against logging the mountain – the butterflies’ home – for quick cash: ‘If we log the mountain, then the trees are gone. But the debt isn’t. Does it make sense to turn everything upside down to make one payment?’
The narrative is compelling, yet not always subtle, and the imagery and religious symbolism feel somewhat overdone by the end. But the integrity of Kingsolver’s environmental and political messages makes Flight Behaviour a rich and captivating read.

Athenian nights

admin — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 10:00:53 +0000

Hot off the press – well, if it had been printed – comes this sharply recorded reportage from Athens. It’s only available as an ebook, which is why we can read it sooner after it was written. So if you didn’t feel equipped to head over to Greece but want a flavour of the action fresh from the scene, here’s your opportunity. And if you’ve been following news from the mainstream media, here’s the under‑story you knew you were missing.
Discordia is a witty, fast-paced whip round Athens, summer 2012, wonderfully visualised by Molly Crabapple with striking, dreamy illustrations (as you can see here), and superbly narrated by Laurie Penny with her crisp, incisive delivery. Having taken as inspiration Hunter S Thompson and Ralph Steadman’s 1970s writer-illustrator collaboration, Penny and Crabapple follow the established form with interviews at parties in the dawn hours and insights into their friendship, while at the same time turning it on its head to comment on the reception of their work as women, and the requisite additional ‘swagger’ they find they need to get the job done.
The playing out of the past four years of Greek struggle is told in part through deaths. In 2008, the police murder of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos sparked the initial uprisings. In April this year, 77-year-old Dmitris Christoulas’s suicide tells of the shift from visceral anger to total despair. He shot himself in one of the most central Athens public spaces, Syntagma Square, leaving this note: ‘The government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for with no help from the state . . . I believe that young people with no future will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma Square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.’
The ebook permits an appealing brightness to the images that would be costly in print, and the writing manages to combine all the freshness of blogging with the space for narrative threads that a book allows. From anti-racism demonstrations, to the empty offices of the national left newspaper, to nihilistic parties, Discordia makes connections to the Occupy movement, the Arab uprisings and the English riots of 2011. It warns of the rise of neo-fascism amidst withdrawal of almost any social provision. Smart, sweaty, and humorous, this is a trip to Athens well worth making – and you can get there fast online.
The two illustrations on this page are by Molly Crabapple and are taken from the book.

Economic odysseys

admin — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 10:00:24 +0000

Scattered Sand delivers an intimate portrait of China’s migrant workers’ shared quest to earn a living. Dozens of interviews shape the narrative in an impressive range of locations and industries across China, and as far as Russia and the UK. They cut across ethnicity as Yi, Uyghur, Tibetan, and native Taiwanese voices weave in unique accounts of persecution.
The book gives context for recent Chinese labour media coverage, including suicides and unrest at Apple supplier Foxconn. While highlighting export-oriented factories in the Pearl River Delta, Hsiao‑Hung Pai also delves into interior China’s brick-making kilns and coal mines, major industries rarely covered by international media, and even drug trafficking and prostitution. She visits labour markets nationwide to show the human faces of unemployment. Jobseekers warn of scams and report mostly failures; the greatest successes are gained through personal connections.
Pai proves the power of connections by visiting the families of migrant workers in Britain she came to know for her first book, Chinese Whispers. Most heartbreaking are her interviews with families of the 23 Chinese migrants killed in the 2004 Morecambe Bay cockling tragedy.
Pai’s own family ties are compelling. Her mother moved to Taiwan during the 1949 communist revolution, leaving family behind in rural Shandong province. She discovers that economically their countryside has also been left behind, and they are mired in the same desperate poverty that motivates many rural people to seek urban jobs.
Coupling contemporary coverage with straightforward political and cultural history, the book analyses major historical events, including the Olympics and global financial crisis. After the Wenchuan earthquake, Pai complements an eyewitness account of a collapsed school encircled by erect commercial buildings with an explanation of the corruption that caused this travesty.
A strong sense of history informs Scattered Sand’s analysis of a wide range of industries, events and communities, and it is particularly useful to situate China’s turbulent history within its breakneck development. Through superb storytelling and historical analysis, Pai succeeds in showing many human faces of Chinese growth.

Lively London

admin — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 10:00:44 +0000

There are two notable strains in literary representations of London. The first, characterised by comic brio and the high style, takes its rhythms from the bustle of the streets and markets, its hyperbolic register from the plausible blather of the stereotypical Londoner. This tradition derives from Dickens, runs through Wells and on into Gerald Kersh, latterly finding expression in Ballard, the Amises, B S Johnson, Iain Sinclair and Will Self.
The second mode is quieter, the scrupulous meanness exemplified by Defoe, Gissing, Patrick Hamilton and Orwell. The dreary compulsion of everyday London life saturates the prose; only the scepticism is exuberant.
London’s Overthrow belongs in the first category. This excellent book is an illustrated survey of London in 2012, consisting of interviews with local people, meditations on place and politics, forays into policy debate, excursions into the capital’s history. The obvious influence is Ian Sinclair, who makes a brief appearance. Miéville has the same hunger for the disregarded minutiae languishing in the shadows of the Grand Projects, the same sympathy for the excluded and off-message.
His style is similarly lively, dense with unexpected metaphors and odes to the quotidian. The text is generously freighted with lyrical bravura passages, affectionate renderings of non-tourist London, including a brilliant evocation of the strange charms of the Horniman Museum. Also included are indignant paragraphs on deaths in police custody, the life expectancy of the poor, the scandal of London’s housing, and the circuses-but-no-bread Olympics. And, of course, the spectre that haunts the book is the misery of economic disaster. In a characteristic phrase: ‘the economy toilets’.
There are sections that don’t convince. The discussion of clothing for female Muslims is one; Miéville’s position that the wearing of the veil is a personal matter is classically liberal and undialectical. And the assertion that ‘we had no food’ before recent migrant cuisine is unhistorical sciolism, untypical and unworthy of the author.
These are minor blemishes. London’s Overthrow is a fitting coda to the double centenary of London’s greatest biographer.

We won’t be told – Argentina’s horizontalism

admin — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 10:00:44 +0000

Horizontalism has been the defining feature of the movements that emerged across the world in 2011. Meeting in streets and squares, people sought ways of organising that would allow everyone to participate and break from the exploitative relations that dominate daily life under capitalism. Ten years earlier in Argentina there were similar encounters on a massive scale involving indigenous people, the unemployed, factory workers and the middle class organising together to take control of their lives. These autonomous movements created a way of organising and thinking about revolution that broke with previous practices focusing on the state as a site of change.
These new practices and ideas are being continued today in Argentina and further afield and it is in this context of global unrest that Marina Sitrin’s timely book allows us to learn and reflect on the experiences of the Argentinian movements. Sitrin’s detailed and sensitive analysis explores the different ways in which these movements are creating revolution on a daily basis in themselves and in their communities. They are concerned with developing horizontalism as a process and social relationship, and self-managing projects such as bakeries and schools.
Sitrin illustrates these practices with stories from her observations, including that of a young girl who attended an assembly to raise the issue that her mother was shouting at her too much. Stories such as these, where people feel able to take control of their lives, illustrate vividly the power and beauty of these revolutions. Sitrin combines her analysis with voices of the movement participants, explaining what they are doing and what it means to them.
The movements’ experiments encountered challenges, with their relationship to the state being a particularly interesting one, as well as critiques from outside the movement. Sitrin describes how they dealt with these issues, providing valuable insights for other movements elsewhere. Ultimately it is the movement participants’ reflexiveness and commitment to their processes, along with an openness to changing these processes, that has been key to their continuation and success.
That instinctive feeling – that we will not tolerate being told what to do any longer – is still palpable. The desire to practice horizontalism continues across the world, influenced in part by the experiences of Argentina. Reading Sitrin allows a dialogue between then and now, and here and there, enabling us to learn from each other.

Books in red wrapping paper

louise — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 11:49:31 +0000

Christmas time, not much peace in large parts of the world, precious little goodwill for the 99 per cent either. A time for turbo-driven commercialism to drive up retail’s footfall. Bah Humbug? Or if you prefer, just put the Historical Materialism on one side for the season and embrace the Hopeful Materialism of looking forward to what might be wrapped up and waiting under the tree for 25 December.

A year that continues to be dominated by the fallout from recession and the consequences of austerity means there’s plenty of decent reading matter on the neo-liberal onslaught. Not cheery enough for a seasonal surprise? Then try Meme Wars, by Kalle Lasn of Adbusters. Subtitled ‘The Creative Destruction of Neo-Classical Economics’ this is a coffee table book for revolutionaries, brilliantly illustrated to both entertain and inform. And for a compelling read on the impact domestically of the Coalition’s mishandling of the economy, the powerfully written Dogma and Disarray is perfect for anybody who enjoys Polly Toynbee’s searing assault on all things Cameroon in her Guardian column. With co-author David Walker, Polly expands her arguments and analysis in a handy pocket-book format, a perfect stocking-filler for wannabe social-democrats.

Fellow Guardian columnist Seumas Milne has collected the best of his pieces for the paper and also turned them into a very fine book, The Revenge of History. Purposefully internationalist in range, the writing is intimately connected to a politics shaped by the desire to uproot injustice and propel movements to transform society, an inspirational commentary on a past decade framed by both potential, and betrayal. Those who read the Guardian from the Left will love this one. An attempt to put on paper the various ideas and ideals that might turn the next decade into something more hopeful and less treacherous is the ambitious What We Are Fighting For. Edited by Federico Campagna and Emanuele Campaglio this is a manifesto-style book covering a diverse range of themes written by a variety of politically-committed authors. Upated for the paperback edition, When China Rules the World by Martin Jacques is beautifully written and incredibly challenging for most readers whose politics remain unaffected by the irresistible rise of China as a global power. If half of what Jacques claims for the significance of China to the 21st Century is proved to be correct then a fundamental rethink will be needed. This book provides the basis for such a process, an absolutely essential read.

At the close of 2011 Time magazine chose the ‘protester’ as their composite person of the year cover star. 2012 saw a number of books which sought to capture the meaning and significance of the Occupy! movement that was so central to those twelve months of protest. Amongst the best was Andrew Boyd’s compendium-like Beautiful Trouble which brought together some of the most imaginative elements of a movement influenced by a mix of non-violent direct action and the public drama of situationism. Unashamedly a handbook of do-it-yourself protest. Autonomist ideas have been a key part of many such actions originating outside of the mainstream of leftist, trade union and NGO politics. Occupy Everything edited by Alessio Lunghi and Seth Wheeler very much comes from this autonomist tradition, it is a very effective challenge to left attempts to incorporate the Occupy movement into their own ways of working politically, one for those who embrace creeative tension as a plus, not a minus.

2012 marked two important World War Two 70th Anniversaries, the battles of Stalingrad and El Alamein. In recent months David Cameron has announced plans in 2014 to mark the centenary of the commencement of World War One. Too often this ‘anniversaryism’ is entirely divorced from the politics and causes of the conflict. In the case of the Second World War, anti-fascism, as marked by Philosophy football’s range of Stalingrad T-shirts. A masterful account of the Eastern Front campaign waged against the Nazis is provided by the definitive biography of the most important of all the Red Army’s Generals, Marshal Zhukov. Stalin’s General by Geoffrey Roberts combines the finest in military history writing with a hugely readable account of the political intrigues that would affect Stalin’s control over the resistance and reversal of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. A deconstruction of much of the mythology of WW2, ranging from Indonesia and Vietnam to Yugoslavia and Greece, is provided by Donny Gluckstein’s splendidly dissenting A People’s History of the Second World War. Almost every theatre of this most global of conflicts is covered with examples chosen to illustrate how anti-fascism was too often used as a mask to enforce empire and prevent resistance movements becoming a focus for turning liberation from occupation into movements for independence and revolution.

For a progressive politics to mean anything and extend well beyond the tiny audience it currently involves in any meaningful way requires an agenda unrestricted by the narrow parliamentary definition. Yet many who profess a preference for the extra-parliamentary can likewise fail to see much beyond this boundary too. In contrast to such narrowness three of the most interesting books of this year are Martin Kelner’s Sit Down and Cheer and Steven Poole’s You Aren’t What You Eat and from Russ Bestley and Alex Ogg The Art of Punk . None are written in an obviously political fashion yet they engage with subjects vital to any project to change society for the better. The summer of 2012 was absolutely dominated by sport, consumed by most of us via the TV. Kelner’s book is a fascinating history of sport on TV. The Christmas best-sellers? Cookery books, Poole’s book is a superbly written critique of our modern obsession with what he rather neatly dubs ‘gastroculture’. Bestley and Ogg have complied a vividly visual collection of a never-to-be-forgotten era when music was angry and anti-establishment, musical or otherwise.

Fiction is something else some might find surprising cropping up in such an avowedly political reading round up. Yet as a form it is vital to both understanding society and framing a vision to change it. With his novel Heartland author Anthony Cartwright established himself as a hugely gifted author. Cartwright’s latest, How I Killed Margaret Thatcher has a title to guarantee his addition to the kind of people the Daily Mail make it its business to warn us against.

The plot imaginatively weaves the make-believe with the very real consequences of the deindustrialisation and mass unemployment that was Thatcher’s doing. For a writer of best-selling crime fiction Christopher Brookmyre has a strangely low profile in the mainstream press. Here is a writer who effortlessly combines his Scottishness, politics, and an ever-rising death count, usually in the most bloodied of circumstances, to create a thrilling read. His latest, When The Devil Drives has rather disappointingly junked some of the darkly bleak humour of his previous titles, a lack however more than compensated for by the strong plot and even stronger characters that populate the book.

A proudly quirky choice for ‘journal of the year’, but my favourite is the annual edition of Twentieth Century Communism, which for 2012 took as its theme ‘communism and youth’. Splendidly mixing the historical and the international this is in every sense of the words a labour of love, yet each edition never disappoints with its faultless rediscovery of one variant on a radical past. Publishing-wise Communism seems to be making a bit of a twenty-first century comeback too. The icon-shattering publishing house, Zero books, added Colin Cremin’s iCommunism to its increasingly impressive list of titles. This is a book that updates Frankfurt School style radicalism for the web 2.0 generation. Breathlessly modernist and radical at the same time, the perfect combination. Jodi Dean’s The Communist Horizon is part of the publisher Verso’s interesting project to reinvent the entire idea of Communism. The academic references are considerable and may put off some readers, yet the purpose is faultless, a wonderful polemic full of both anger and imagination. But the best of this bunch is Kate Hudson’s The New European Left . An academic publisher will narrow and reduce this book’s readership yet it deserves to be widely read. In a year when Syriza in Greece offered a vision of what an Outside Left party boasting both broad appeal and electoral success might look like this book provides a well-written analysis of the successes and failures of similar projects across Europe. The Left in Britain remains largely parochial in its interests, Kate Hudson outlines the urgent need to connect our politics to these developments on the other side of the Channel. Of course in Greece the neo-fascist Golden Dawn are on the rise and across Europe a populist right is growing too. The point is that this has been challenged by a resurgent Outside Left too, posing a popular alternative while in Britain the growth of UKiP isn’t matched by such a formation to Labour’s Left of any substance at all. Kate Hudson’s book lifts the spirits by shifting the focus to Europe to understand what a successful development of this sort looks like. Ken Keable’s London Recruits is a true life left adventure story rooted in an era when perhaps foes, and friends, were easier to identify and oppose. The book tells the story of white Comunists and socialists recruited to go to South Africa to work undercover for the ANC against the Apartheid regime. Heroic stuff and a tale well worth re-telling.

It seems unnecessary to single out a ‘Book of the Year’ amongst the riches already listed. But the passing away of Eric Hobsbawm in this year coincided with the publication in paperback of perhaps his most important selection of essays, How To Change the World. A truly public intellectual, scholarly yet absolutely committed to maximising the political impact of his writings, a broad appeal few other historians could boast, and an unapologetic Marxist, anti-capitalist and communist to the end. Philosophy Football celebrated his work in 2012 with the reintroduction of our Hobsbawm T-shirt with the brlliant quote ‘The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.’ This book is a handbook for those in future years might seek to equip themselves with the ideas and ideals of Marxism and Communism Hobsbawm not only cherished but helped develop. A stunning collection.

With this lot the temptation to abandon all thoughts of boycotting Christmas as a bourgeois deviation will have to be put on hold until Boxing Day, after all isn’t that bloke heading for the chimneys dressed in red?

Find more recent book reviews for Christmas present ideas in our books section

No better model

admin — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:00:42 +0000

This morning, in the most important newspaper in Africa, Johannesburg’s Business Day, I come across this remark in the publisher’s weekly column: ‘The thing is that Americans, in a way none of the rest of us fully appreciate, are driven by an unshakeable conviction that if they work together they can do almost anything better than anyone else. That sort of conviction only occurs in democracies and the more pure the democracy, the stronger the consensus in society.’
Fortunately I can quickly turn to an antidote sitting on my desk, a vast tome that took more than a decade to construct, but that bullshit-detects such romanticism by revealing – better than anything else now available – Washington’s combined, uneven and fatally contradictory processes of imperialist expansion, catastrophic financialisation, excessively liberalised trade, intensifying class struggle and crisis mismanagement.
In The Making of Global Capitalism, Canadian political economists Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin provide a masterful century-long history of US corporate activity and state economic strategy. Insofar as capitalist states are where class interests are codified, their spicy reading of dry officialdom’s milquetoast narratives is absolutely vital to our knowledge about power.
Having worked with Panitch and Gindin during 2003-04, I can testify that their on-ground practices and building of a formidable community of radical scholars at York University’s political science department and in the Toronto left are exemplary, as is the Socialist Register project, which is properly catholic in treating the most crucial debates.
Grappling with the past five years of world turmoil, Panitch and Gindin were probably shaken by the recent period, for it was my experience that the very word ‘crisis’ was previously frowned upon in their Empire seminar, so convinced were they that mechanisms of accumulation and class domination were firmly in place. Financial markets did, then, appear smooth and seductive, especially to workers who shouldered unprecedented debt burdens along with widespread belief in ever-rising real estate prices. But this in turn created both a collaborative labour aristocracy steadily losing privileges, and the repo man’s knock at the door of the sub-prime house. As Panitch and Gindin explain, this was a divisive and atomising process in the US, compared say to earlier collective-action episodes such as Mexico’s 1995 ‘El Barzon’ debt rebellion or early 1990s South African ‘bond boycotts’.
It is here that Panitch and Gindin add so much to our understanding of too-clever elite displacement of persistent crisis, in my view. Still, though, they would describe the mid-1980s-2000s as an era of growth in which crisis tendencies of prior decades – born of a ‘profit-squeeze’ (i.e. worker militancy) – were actually resolved. But given those steadily rising debt ratios from the early 1980s, which can only partly be explained by technological advances in financial engineering , I still don’t buy it. My sense is that, like David Harvey’s argument in Enigma of Capital and Limits to Capital, global capitalism relied upon the spatial fix (globalisation), temporal fix (financialisation, stretching out payment times), and ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (imperialism) as crisis management techniques: i.e. shifting, stalling and stealing instead of the restructuring required to restart accumulation properly.
Yet thanks to Panitch and Gindin, we know much more about how this was arranged. Writing in their Washington-centric world (so unlike Hardt and Negri’s Empire), there are two corollaries that I hope are further debated. First is their tenacious denial of ‘the collapse of investment due to general overaccumulation’, which is disputed in other recent books by John Bellamy Foster, David McNally and Alex Callinicos. We could unpack whether vast software investments during the late 1990s splurge were real or bogus from the standpoint of surplus value extraction. And then, regarding profit rates, we might strip out rentier profits earned by most of the west’s biggest ‘productive’ firms and conclude with a different interpretation of genuine corporate health, contrary to the tycoons’ botoxed, steroided appearance, disguising their muscle-bound paralysis.
Second, we need to consider the lack of inter-imperialist rivalry in this story, at a time when world–1 per cent fragmentation foils globo-governance initiatives such as renewing the World Trade Organisation Doha round, legitimising the Bretton Woods Institutions, refashioning the currently anarchic world financial ‘architecture’, subduing Latin America’s pink tide, or making the UN security council work better for imperialism.
Most valuable, though, are the ways these Canadians set out anti-capitalist principles and critiques of reformism, and defend socialist aspirations. In perhaps no other site in the English-speaking academic world are such committed, principled and generous leaders so warmly received by colleagues and students, and more importantly, by workers and communities in struggle. This means taking with utmost seriousness both their analysis and strategy, for even if they do not always jump the gap perfectly, no one I know has a better working model.

The M word

admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 14:00:39 +0000

Alison Bechdel’s cartoon strip, now a collected works, Dykes To Watch Out For, established her as a cult hero. It went on to win the cartoonist international acclaim for her laugh-out-loud, mesmerising soap-opera comic following the lives, loves and political struggles of an endearing team of North American lesbians. Begun in a pre-L Word era, it set out in uncharted territory, imagining that: ‘By drawing the everyday lives of women like me, I hoped to make lesbians more visible . . . if only people could see us, how could they help but love us?!’
Are You My Mother? explores theories of the ‘mother-daughter’ gulf by considering the writer’s own childhood. Bechdel brings in theory on the effects of the initial stages of the mother-child relationship, ultimately reaching an understanding that embraces her own experience. The book follows Fun Home as a second memoir that seeks to understand Bechdel’s family and thereby herself.
Bechdel examines the work of Virginia Woolf and the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to shed theoretical and narrative light on care and dependence. She provides the reader with a handy map of her life in girlfriends and therapists – invaluable reference points – as she draws together a web of dreams and experience to make careful conclusions about how she understands her mother and their ways of relating to each other.
The book left me refreshed by the journey Bechdel takes the reader on through her life and others. She mixes sharp humour and an enamouring reflective process to create cartoons that convey nuanced relationships, all in a concise and stunningly beautiful monochrome and blood-red graphic novel.
Not for the faint-hearted, Are You My Mother? is a long, cross-continent road trip in soul-searching. But it isn’t navel-gazing: each page contains a funny, delightful detail in character observation, and as a whole, perhaps more so than Bechdel’s other ‘cult faves’, this work has the potential to resonate with a wider audience.

Back to the shop floor

admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 12:00:39 +0000

In the wake of the largest number of killings during a strike in South Africa since the white miners’ strike of 1922, when 153 workers died, it is appropriate that we reflect on the classics of the workers’ movement. Strikes bring sharply to the fore the contradictions within capitalism and often lead to the reconfiguration of class forces.
The 1922 strike led to the 1924 Pact government that laid the basis for an alliance between white workers and Afrikaner nationalism. Two decades later, in 1946, another miners’ strike, which led to the death of nine workers, resulted in the creation of an alliance between black labour and African nationalism. It was, however, the 1973 strikes in Durban that were to lay the foundations for the emergence of a powerful workers’ movement in South Africa.
The 1973 strikes were not led by trade unions; in large part they were the spontaneous collective actions of black workers responding to apartheid’s cheap labour system. As young left intellectuals at the time, we searched for ways we could give this surge of worker militancy a sustained strategic and organisational focus. Influenced by the powerful shop steward movement in Britain, we followed closely its development and the books that emerged from it.
The one that caught our imagination and influenced our teaching and political practice was Huw Beynon’s Working for Ford. I received a copy in 1974 and reviewed it in the South African Labour Bulletin, the journal we had set up to record, analyse and conceptualise this new social movement. Industrial relations at the time in South Africa was dominated by the paternalistic idea that there was a basic harmony of interest between management and labour. Working for Ford made clear that the workers’ struggle ‘can only be remedied by a fundamental change in the entire basis of production. The political transformation of society . . .’ The edition in which the review was published (June 1974) was subsequently banned under the Publications Act for promoting ‘worker unrest’, mainly because of an article highly critical of the treatment of workers at British Leyland in Durban.
There were three ways in which Working for Ford influenced the way we saw shop stewards. The first was the concept of working-class factory consciousness that Beynon saw manifest in the shop stewards at Halewood. ‘A factory consciousness,’ Beynon wrote, ‘understands class relations in terms of their direct manifestation in conflict between the bosses and the workers within the factory. It is rooted in the workplace, where struggles are fought over the control of the job and the rights of managers and workers.’ This led to a concentration in the early years on building support on the shop floor by winning visible concessions from management over unfair dismissals in particular.
Second, if the stage for this conflict is the factory floor, its organisational manifestation is not the trade union bureaucrats but the shop stewards committee. Hence factory class consciousness finds its historical antecedents in syndicalism – developed in Britain in the shop steward movement that occurred during and after the first world war. At the core of these emerging unions in Durban was the notion of direct democracy, of accountability of worker leaders to the rank-and-file, report-backs and mandates.
Third, and for me this was the most important question raised by Working for Ford, how does one explain why some workers define their interests in collective terms and become shop stewards and others in ‘individualistic’ terms and become supervisors?
Beynon rejected an explanation of activism in terms of different types of personalities. ‘An adequate account of shop-floor activism and leadership,’ he argued, ‘needs to go beyond the personalities of the people involved and consider the ideology of the activists and the organisation within which they are active.’ Beynon located the roots of activism in the values of shop stewards and the structural contradictions of capitalism most starkly manifested on the factory floor.
Working for Ford was written 40 years ago and a lot has happened to the British shop steward movement since then. In South Africa these early unions went on to establish links with working class communities and were to play a central role, as the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), in the struggle for democracy. Labour was not seen as a commodity but rather as creative human activity. I remember also discussing Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliot’s The Lucas Plan: a new trade unionism in the making? with shop stewards and considering how production could be made socially useful.
But for the South African labour movement the Marikana massacre on 16 August, when 34 striking workers were killed may yet prove the kind of turning point that 1922, 1946 and 1973 turned out to be. For the workers’ movement what is clear from Marikana is that worker leaders need to go back to the shop floor, listen to the workers’ voices and rebuild the kind of shop floor movement that is so effectively analysed in Working for Ford.