Tariq Ali is a tosser
From Tendance Coates, but with my headline (above):
Ali’s Latest Wistful Musings….
Dead Centre; The Year in Shock with Tariq Ali.
Art Forum begins:
THE STUNNING RISE OF NATIONALISM, populism, and fundamentalism has roiled the world. It is tempting to imagine that we are witnessing just another rotation of political modernity’s cycle of progress and backlash. But we can situate the undoing of the demos in democracy’s longue durée while rejecting the false comfort of the idea that what’s happening is not new, that we’ve seen it all before. How did we get here? How did we create the conditions for Trump, for Brexit, for Mosul, for a daily sequence of devastating events, whether shootings or strikes? Is shock, that quintessentially modernist avant-garde strategy of instigating mass perceptual—and therefore political—change, somehow more prevalent than ever, albeit in radically transformed ways? Does shock, in fact, go hand in hand with apathy and desensitization?
Indeed, masses of perpetual longue durées is a must for the quintessentially modernist avant-garde demos.
In this roiled (I have no idea of what this means but it suggests rolling all over the place) piece the Sage of Islington replies with his musings on this rotational cycle.
Choice extracts:
Speaking of Brexit and Trump the veteran pundit, awake from a much needed twenty year doze, admits,
…what strikes me as unexpected is the speed with which this right-wing recrudescence has taken place. Suddenly, in every major European country, you have right-wing groups developing along anti-immigration lines, saying, “We’ve got too many foreigners in our country,” trying to unite voters around populist xenophobia.
On the wars and deaths that have led people fleeing from the conflicts in Iraq and Syriya he is clear where the blame lies.
Not with Assad at any rate….
we confront the fact that the US and its EU allies uprooted these populations in the first place. When you bomb Arab cities and Arab countries, reduce them to penury, destroy their social infrastructures, and effectively create a vacuum in which religious fundamentalists come to the fore, it is not surprising that millions of people want to run away.
Honesty compels him to admit,
We waged a left-wing campaign called Lexit, Left Exit from Europe, which was very small and had limited impact, but our position certainly did chime with the views of a number of people we talked to on the streets, etc., who said that the country was wrecked and that staying in the EU would prevent us from doing anything to fix it.
Brexit was far from the only recent instance in which far Left and Right have found unlikely common ground.
Apparently the real problem is what Ali (and nobody else) calls the “extreme centre”.
I wish I could say that I think the extreme center has been put on notice by the past year’s turmoil and by Trump’s election, that new prospects for the Left and for direct democracy have opened up in the wake of Corbyn’s and Sanders’s campaigns. Unfortunately, I can’t. In the 1960s and ’70s, there was a great deal of optimism. There were few victories, but the defeats weren’t of such a nature that we thought they were going to be permanent or semipermanent. We live in bad times, I feel—the worst through which I’ve ever lived. There was a ray of hope during the height of the Bolívarian experiment in South America, where Chávez’s incredibly moving idea to unite the continent against the empires was very heartening. His death and the dramatic drop in the price of oil have of course brought Venezuela to a dire state. While Ecuador and Bolivia are doing somewhat better, people feel that we are going to be defeated there. And then, with the economic changes that the United States wants in Cuba, one is wondering how long it will be before Cuba becomes a US brothel again. I hope that doesn’t happen. But if it does, I won’t be surprised…
Nothing would surprise Ali…
But thankfully Good News and Merry Cheer is on the way,
Given the state of the world, I’ve been revived somewhat by working on a new book for the centenary of the Russian Revolution next year, The Dilemmas of Lenin. Lenin was a visionary inspired by utopian dreams, a man of practical action and ruthless realism. Rereading him and related works has been a real treat, so much so that my dedication is actually quite optimistic. “For those who will come after: The road to the future can only be unlocked by the past.”
Alan Partridge could not have expressed these thoughts with such a deft touch.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
Let Battle Commence!
The path to what’s coming starts from the beginning what went before
Counterfart’s café closes: ha-ha-ha
This may have happened some time ago, but I’ve only just heard: ha-ha-ha:
This failed:
… but we hear they are opening this:
H/t: comrade Coatesy
Fight antisemitism – though it doesn’t exist
I have just received a leaflet from the Birmingham branch of Socialist Resistance, advertising a meeting entitled ‘Fight antisemitism – Fight Zionism’. The speaker is Roland Rance, and one side of the leaflet carries a statement supposedly (*) from him:
********************************************************************************************************
Roland Rance, a socialist Jew and anti-Zionist writes:
The current controversy over alleged anti-Semitism in the Labour Party comes from a convergence of several different forces: apologists for Israeli, always keen to denounce supporters of Palestinian rights; the Labour right, looking for any stick with which to beat Corbyn and the left; and the Tories and their press supporters, desperate to prevent a Corbynled Labour victory. It is no coincidence that this issue burst into public during an election campaign marked by outright racism and Islamophobia.
These attacks are rooted in a continuing campaign to change the meaning of the term anti-Semitism, to include anti-Zionism, or even opposition to Israeli policies and practices. We must be clear on this: anti-Semitism, like all forms of racism, has no place on the left, or in society as a whole. Zionism is itself a racist ideology, and anti-Zionism is a legitimate political position. We should also bear in mind that an increasing number of Jews oppose Zionism and very many Zionists (probably the majority) are actually not Jewish, but fundamentalist Christians.
The targets of the current attacks (some of whom are themselves Jews) are not antisemites. Some of them may have been guilty of clumsy phrasing or thoughtless responses; but they are not anti-Jewish racists. Most of the attacks are based on comments on social media, some dating back years; it is evident that there has been a systematic trawl through people’s previous activities.
We must resist this. We call for free speech on Israel, and an end to the witch-hunt. We oppose racism, whether directed at Jews, at Muslims, or at any other community. And we stand firmly alongside the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation and justice.
**********************************************************************************************************
The leaflet also carries this cartoon by the, err, “controversial” cartoonist Carlos Latuff:
So there we have it: according to Socialist Resistance, antisemitism “has no place on the left” and, indeed, as proof of that statement, it simply does not exist on the left! All allegations of antisemitism come from “apologists for Israeli … the Labour right … and the Tories”.
None of the individuals recently accused of antisemitism are guilty, and anti-Zionism cannot ever be antisemitic. As a result of these false allegations, free speech itself is now at stake!
In other words, “nothing to see here, comrades, move on!”
* in fairness to Roland Rance, I note that the wording of the leaflet seems to be loosely based upon a much longer and more nuanced article by him on the Socialist Resistance website, that does very reluctantly admit that in one or two isolated and extreme cases antisemites have “infiltrated” the left and the pro-Palestinian movement. It’s a politically weak and evasive article, but nowhere near as bad as the appalling drivel put out under his name, by his comrades in Birmingham.
Pierre Rousett on the Charlie Hebdo killings, Islamism and related matters
The author is a leading member of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, an organisation that has not always been clear-cut in its analysis of Islamism, so this article is of great significance. It first appeared in International Viewpoint:
After the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher Jewish supermarket: thinking through the new and rethinking the old
By Pierre Rousset
We should start with a worrying observation.
Heads of state understood the importance of the events of January. Representatives of “democracies” and dictatorships alike, they came to Paris and locked arms together to show solidarity “at the highest levels”. A spectacular gesture if ever there was one!
On the other hand, a significant segment of the radical Left thought it was just business as usual. To be sure, some organizations published declarations of solidarity (and deserve genuine thanks for this) as well as articles grappling with the significance of the events. But many others felt it was enough to score debating points, correct as they may have been (against cross-party national unity, for example); or had as their first concern the need to distance themselves from the victims (declaring “Je ne suis pas Charlie” [“I am not Charlie”] in flagrant disregard for the message intended by those saying “Je suis Charlie” [“I am Charlie”]); or, far worse, felt the urgent task was to assassinate morally those who had just been assassinated physically.
Soon after the events, I co-wrote an article with François Sabado in which we specifically sought to understand what was so unique about the event and its implications in relation to our tasks. [1] No doubt, much more needs to be said on that score, but I’d like the text that follows (and which deals in large measure with the state of radical-Left opinion) to be read in conjunction with the previous one to avoid pointless repetition.
The unique character of the event
I’ll be referring in particular to an interview with Gilbert Achcar, with which I agree on many points of analysis, but which also contains a number of surprising blind spots. The first of these has to do with the unique character of the event. Gilbert seeks to trivialize the whole affair. “The reaction [to the attacks] has been what anybody would expect. […] These were quite similar reactions from appalled and frightened societies [the USA after 911 and France now] — and, of course, the crimes were appalling indeed. In both cases, the ruling class took advantage of the shock […] There is nothing much original about all this. Instead, what is rather original is the way the discussion evolved later on.” [2]
Gilbert is quite right to point out [elsewhere in the same interview] that it is extremely exaggerated to place the Charlie Hebdo attack and the September 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers on the same footing. And yet millions of people spontaneously took to the streets following the French events, unlike what happened following previous no less atrocious attacks, such as the murder of children in front of a Jewish school in Toulouse.
Scottish history dissolved into fantasy
Above: Bambury talking nationalist shite
The following appeared in The Scotsman:
Book review: A People’s History of Scotland by Chris Bambury (Verso £12.99)
Reviewed by Roger Hutchinson
IF YOU think Scotland has always been left-wing, wake up to the complexities of the past.
A significant element of the Left will vote Yes in September because it believes that, without the hindrance of English Tory votes, a socialist republic will be established in an independent Scotland.
Chris Bambery’s book supports that view. He is a veteran of virtually every Trotskyist body in the UK, from the International Marxist Group to the Socialist Workers Party and now the small splinter International Socialist Group. The word “international” is something of a puzzle, as the Scottish International Socialist Group is nationalist. The “Scottish Workers’ Republic,” he writes, is “a dream we hold in our hearts and minds.”
Do not, then, approach this book expecting to read more of the pussy-footing academic social history which Scotland already has in abundance. Bambery sets out to prove that all of Scotland’s past has led us, with Marxist inevitability, to the day when the red flag will flutter over Holyrood.
A full people’s history must begin with our most distant ancestors. Bambery skips through the post-Ice Age settlers of 11,000 years ago but, the Neolithics not being strong on Gramsci, moves quickly on to the Middle Ages. Although we are promised “a corrective to the usual history of kings and queens, victorious battles and bloody defeats,” when it meets the agenda, as in the Scottish wars of independence, the civil war and the Jacobite risings, this book positively bubbles with kings and queens and gory battles.
Twenty-three pages into his book, Bambery recommends the Holywood movie Braveheart as giving “a good account of [William] Wallace’s life.” That statement should disillusion even the sympathetic reader. The day we defer to Mel Gibson’s version of our past is the day Scottish history dissolves into fantasy.
It is a shame, because there is much of interest here. There is a predictable account of the events leading up to the Treaty of Union in 1707, which was not of course a democratic decision as democracy didn’t exist then. But the plausible analysis that Scottish negotiators – who were representing a bankrupt country – drove a hard bargain through the treaty and that Scotland consequently benefited more from the Union than did England, merits not so much as a nod.
The Enlightenment and the Jacobite risings pose a problem to left-wing nationalists. Bambery flunks the first and passes the second. The Enlightenment flourished in Scotland immediately after the Union. It may have done so anyway – David Hume and Adam Smith would still have been born and educated in an independent Scotland. It is nonetheless difficult to ignore the possibility that the Lowland Enlightenment was kick-started by a fresh and invigorating free association with like minds from the rest of Britain.
No more, if he is writing a people’s history, can a responsible historian avoid the unsavoury connection between the Enlightenment and what Chris Bambery calls “the darkest chapter in Scottish history”, the Highland Clearances. The clearances were a straightforward response from Scottish landowners to Lowland Enlightenment theories of improvement and scorn for tribal responsibilities.
The bulk of this book deals with labour unrest since the 19th century. The growth of trade unionism and the discovery of a political voice in the industrial proletariat is powerful and stirring material. In telling the stories of the ordinary footsoldiers in the Radical War of 1820, of the cotton spinners’ strike of 1837 and of the miners’ struggles from 1840 to 1984, in describing the lives of such as Mary Brooksbank and James Connolly, Bambery offers a Scottish version of EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.
It is almost a parallel history for, as Bambery says, there was solidarity between workers north and south of the Tweed. The oppressive forces facing cotton weavers in Glasgow were identical to those confronting their equivalents in Lancashire. Coalminers in Fife and Durham had shared conditions, shared aspirations and in some cases the same employers. None of them had much in common with the land wars of the Highland Gaels.
Bambery argues that the desire for separation was a natural reaction to Thatcherism. This isn’t an original thesis, but it carries some water. Scotland’s Tories might not have disappeared, but most of them no longer vote Conservative.
He acknowledges, however vaguely, that his thesis has a counterpoint. It is that in 1979 Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of a Scotland which had, just 20 years earlier, been a Conservative country.
In three consecutive general elections between 1951 and 1959 most of the north of England and Wales and much of London was vainly attempting to re-elect the Labour government which had. a few years earlier, delivered the welfare state and the NHS.
In the same three elections Scots, in unison with the Home Counties of England, gave more votes to the Tories than to any other party and ensured the premierships of Churchill, Eden and Macmillan – and the continuing presence of Margaret Thatcher as a young MP in the governing party.
Presumably because it throws a nasty curve ball at his theory of Scotland as an intrinsically left-wing society on a millennial march to a workers’ republic, Bambery summarises the Scottish politics of this decade as “incredible”. That is not good enough. Other historians accustomed to exploring and analysing such patterns might wonder, who cannot credit it, and why?
History falls neatly into nobody’s political agenda. Nor, most of the time, does the future.
H/t: Dale Street (who comments: “‘A People’s History of Scotland’ appears to be on a par with a book Bambury once wrote about Ireland, which was so badly written and edited that it was impossible to distinguish the factual inaccuracies from the typing mistakes.”)
SWP “rape” dispute on Youtube
The SWP crisis, caused by their leadership’s dreadful mishandling of rape allegations against “Comrade Delta,” has now reached Youtube, thanks to a dissident young comrade (who is, it has to be said, a terrible singer):
Meanwhile, here is The Leadership’s response to the allegations and criticism…
Mastermind: British Trotskyism to 1949
Dave Osler got seven. I got nine. Test your knowledge in this jolly quiz:
‘New Left Project’ on Syria
Critical friend of ‘Shiraz’, Roger, writes:
“IMO this article deserves a shout out and link to – even if (or, perhaps, especially because) it’s from a site that can say ‘people one would have expected to know better, such as Tariq Ali, George Galloway and John Rees‘ without any apparent irony, and does fawning interviews with the likes of Richard (Lenin’s Tomb) Seymour”:
Syria: Neither Riyadh nor Tehran but Popular Revolution
Is any of this true? The situation in Syria is both extremely violent and extremely complicated and difficult for even those within the country to grasp, let alone those outside of it. Nonetheless, information is available if one is ready to consult people within Syria or those who have reported from there recently—a step rarely taken by those proposing the anti-anti-Assad argument. Let us take the claims in turn…
Read the full article here.
Vote Livingstone: tax-dodger, hypocrite and scumbag
“You know that I have long held the opinion that a Labour Left which accepts you as any sort of leader, or even as a member, is a Left that lacks purpose, standards, memory, self-definition and proper self-respect” – Sean Matgamna, Open Letter to Ken Livingstone, 2010.
The net finally seems to be closing on Ken Livingstone. For decades, this strutting shyster and shameless charlatan has somehow ‘got away with it’ in the eyes of much of the ‘left’ (from the liberal-left Guardianistas to the ‘far- left’ of the Socialist Action and Socialist Worker variety).
Some of us, like Sean Matgamna of the AWL, rumbled Livingstone early on and had no hesitation in denouncing him for what he was (and remains): a posturing, fake-left gobshite willing to grovel to the powerful and, indeed, anyone, no matter how reactionary, who might do his career some good.
But, astonishingly, most of the ‘left’ and much of the trade union movement has continued to be taken in by (the future) Lord Redken of Gobshite. Their chummy approach is summed up by the fact that they feel themselves to be on first name terms with him – he’s always “Ken” to these idiots.
Even when he sank as low as anyone who claims to be a socialist can sink, and called for scabbing, the Livingstone ‘brand’ has remained strangely unsullied. Until now.
It turns out that this champion of the poor and oppressed, this scourge of the ruling class, is nothing but a dirty, hypocritical, two-faced tax-dodger. Most of us first heard about this last Sunday from Nick Cohen’s column in the Observer. Cohen, an honest left-wing journalist has been one of the very few writers in the mainstream liberal-left media, to have consistently attacked Livingstone in recent years, and for the right reasons. But Cohen’s understandable hatred of the man has led him to an unfortunate political conclusion with regard to the forthcoming London elections: “I will vote for Labour assembly members, then Green, Lib Dem or something equally silly for mayor, and offer no second preference. If Johnson wins by one vote, I’ll say that was Labour’s fault for putting forward Livingstone, not mine. We own the politicians. They don’t own us.”
The AWL, which has been denouncing Livingstone for even longer than Cohen, still calls for a Labour vote in the mayoral, as well as GLA, elections;
Vote Livingstone… very critically
By Andrew Smith
Ken Livingstone has aligned himself with the Occupy movement and attacked the tax-avoiding rich. Now, however, it seems he is one of them himself.
There has been a minor scandal in the media because Livingstone and his wife set up a company to channel money from his media appearances and speeches — allowing them to avoid the 50% income tax rate and pay 20% corporation tax instead.
It’s right that there should be a scandal. It’s a shame it’s so far mostly limited to the press, and limited to the issue of tax-dodging. The real issue here is that Livingstone is a very rich man trying to get richer — not the kind of individual who can seriously represent working-class London.
Nor is it “just” a matter of personal wealth. It’s his policies. In 2008, when Labour chancellor Alistair Darling proposed a trivial tax on foreign financiers, and was backed by the Tories, Livingstone opposed the move. While as London Mayor he never offended the City, or property-developers, he did go out of his way to attack the unions on London Underground.
Livingstone’s record and his policies on a whole range of issues — not just basic “class struggle” ones, but his links to reactionary semi-Islamist forces — rule out the idea that he is a serious left-winger, let alone a socialist. This is abundantly obvious, if you don’t close your eyes to it. Go on Livingstone’s campaign website, for instance, and you immediately confronted with a special page featuring an image of policeman’s helmet and a pledge to increase police numbers.
Unfortunately a huge swathe of the left is closing their eyes. Livingstone’s union backing is — so far — completely uncritical, while the SWP seems to have only published one sentence on the election: “We will be backing Labour’s Ken Livingstone for London mayor” (of course, the SWP sees Livingstone’s Islamist links as a virtue).
We should still work for a Labour victory — despite Livingstone.
However inadequate from a working-class socialist point of view, Livingstone’s policies are different from Johnson’s. He says he will cut fares and reinstate EMAs for London college students. He has backed a campaign to defend and extend council housing. He opposes more cuts than Johnson does, anyway, and has even supported some strikes.
These differences reflect the underlying reality that Livingstone is the candidate of the labour movement. The fact that the labour movement does not have the political will to impose a better candidate — a candidate who is not a friend of the City and who has not openly encouraged RMT members to scab on their strikes — or even to put more pressure on Livingstone is a reflection of our weakness. We seek to address that.
Meanwhile, Boris Johnson is openly and unreservedly a servant of the ruling class, committed to class warfare against the working class and the labour movement. He opened his campaign with an Evening Standard interview pledging to bring in driverless trains and smash the Tube unions.
A victory for Labour in the mayor and GLA elections will be a blow, however limited, against the Tory government. We should not trust Livingstone an inch, and organise to exert the maximum pressure on him. But we should do that while working for a Labour election victory.
*******************************************************************************************************************
NB: Even one of Livingstone’s closest media allies is now being mildly critical…but his no.1 cheer-leaders on the ‘far-left’ remain diplomatically silent. The tragedy is that a whole generation of socialists have been encouraged to have illusions in Livingstone, and many are now left very disillusioned indeed.
Shiraz Socialist 