>>> Sob, only two weeks of Battlestar left! What the hell is going to happen?
>>> What to blog about later on? Yesterday's will do in the mean time: http://tinyurl.com/auaevj
>>> @jochristiesmith Reading anything interesting?
>>> At home now but the cupboard was bare. Off out to get some mushrooms. The glamour!
>>> @jonanderson44 - Lorna Morgan eh? She scheduled for a guest post at the 'sunrise?
>>> That coffee was disgusting, but I still drank the lot. Is this the sign of a serious caffeine addict?
>>> My coffee smells like oxtail soup. Not impressed.
>>> Coolio. Another 1,347 words to add to the old PhD done so far today. Time for a stiff coffee and a short break methinks.
>>> Twas nice to have luncheon over the computer catching up on today's blogging. I do wonder how people with jobs manage to blog so frequently.
>>> @catherinebuca - no shammin' here. It's essential for my intellectual development.
>>> @alixmortimer, comforting to know I'm in such exalted company.
>>> Nice cup of tea and a good laugh @ the expense of a certain TU general secretary. Sounds like NorScarf on Sat was interesting too.
>>> Bah, Brother S has disturbed me for a tea after a mere 170 words :(
>>> Right, getting down to work now. Must avoid tweeting for the next hour.
>>> Do I really need something else that will distract me from my PhD?
>>> Viva Longton Help the Aged - 10p a book!
>>> Well, here I am. Twitter. Does that mean I'm now down wid da kidz?
You've got to pity the scholars of the future. Whereas scholars now excavate the archives of historically significant personages, future academics will be raiding rusty Twitter servers and unearthing sketchy thoughts on Elbow gigs. I can already see theory wars being waged over the best tools for the job. Who would win? Content analysis? Post-Heideggerian hermeneutics? Can I achieve Foucault-style academic fame by writing the definitive sociology of tweeting while skipping the gay S&M?
There's plenty of potential with Twitter in plugging material - it's no accident most of the big blogs use it to tweet their offerings and pull in those numbers. And I know, one of my posts got tweeted t'other day and brought the grand total of five people to this here blog. Not a lot, but proof it does work. So time the revolutionary left go where the yoof are (and Stephen Fry. And MC Hammer) and got twittering!
Aside no. 1 Bloggers - it might be tempting as filler but never ever use Twitter updates to make up a blog post. It looks crap and lazy. I've only done it today for illustrative purposes. And general crapness and laziness.
Aside no. 2 - I'll be your twitter friend! I'm anybody's! Follow me here. I will guarantee you a rolling PhD wordcount, observations on Keele coffee, blog plugs and other highlights from my daily itinerary. And because I'm full of tweety love, feel free to plug your twitterly presence in the comments.
It's about time this series of blogs were properly put to bed. If there's one thing I learned from reading History and Class Consciousness, it's that it isn't an easy read. And as I've found during my blogging efforts on each of Lukacs's essays and lectures, it's not a book that can be easily summarised either. But seeing as H&CC was heavily criticised by the 'official' communist movement of the time, and these criticisms were added to by layers of received socialist opinion since, including the self-criticism Lukacs (pictured) undertook in his 1967 preface, is there anything worthwhile left? Can socialists safely give this thick and imposing tome a miss?
Lukacs himself characterises H&CC as a transitional work between his pre-Marxist career and later mature outlook. He deemed it irredeemably stamped by a toxic mix of Hegelian excrescences and ultra-left exaggeration. Seems like the book can be left to gather dust with the blessings of its author. But why?
The first of these self-criticisms concerns H&CC's treatment of ontology - the nature of being. Lukacs demonstrates how his youthful work upholds an understanding of the social and natural worlds that radically opposes the two, which he resolves by collapsing nature into society. He suggests society is the only object of philosophical reflection and that thinking about nature is subordinate because 'nature' is only a category defined by society. It is easy to understand how Lukacs came to this view. Taking Britain as an example, there's precious little of our environment that remains unshaped by human hands. The landscape has been fundamentally remade by hunter-gatherers, peasants, agrarian capitalism, industry, and urbanisation. Our taming of nature appears to be all one way - society has expanded at the natural world's expense, suggestive of the view that society is active, nature is passive, and society can categorise nature according to society's subordination of nature to society's ends. Echoes of this perspective remain alive and well in poststructuralist thinking - its emphasis on the text and there being nothing "outside" of it is merely a contemporary reworking of this perspective.
In one sense the young Lukacs is right - how we define and understand nature is transmitted and conditioned by the historical relationship society has with nature. But we shouldn't confuse the things of logic with the logic of things and conceptually rule nature out. As far as the mature Lukacs was concerned, Marx's materialism was premised on the ontological objectivity of nature. This isn't to reverse the poles of determination, making nature 'active' and society 'passive'. The materialist conception of history points out that society and nature are in a metabolic relationship with one another, which is mediated by labour. In pre-capitalist and pre-industrial societies, the primitive state of the forces of production meant that scarcity was imposed by the forces of nature. With the emergence of capitalism and its constant revolutionising of the productive forces, the metabolic relationship, in a sense, became more equal. Scarcity in modern Britain is not the fault of natural limits but rather the social limits of capitalism itself. This is where the progressive character of capitalism lies - it has developed the productivity of labour to the extent that society is no longer "ruled" by nature. But unfortunately, because of the blind and chaotic characteristics of the system and the way capitalism exploits and pollutes the environment, we are looking at revenge of nature-type scenarios in looming ecological collapse and climate change. Only by establishing global socialism and consciously regulating our metabolic interchange with nature can the worst of the effects be mitigated (see Marx's Ecology).
The mature Lukacs argued that H&CC was blind to this, and therefore blind to a true appreciation of how radically different Marx's materialism was compared with bourgeois philosophy. From this a couple of other errors flowed. The first of these was his theorisation of revolutionary praxis - we saw him repeatedly criticise bourgeois philosophy for its contemplative stance vis the material world, in contrast to the activist stance of Marxism. But because the young Lukacs did not appreciate the role labour occupied in Marxist ontology, his understanding of praxis (the unity of theory and practice) was not based on the actual concrete activity and consciousness of the working class but on a theoretical construct - the idea of imputed class consciousness (see the essay on class consciousness). Here Lukacs argues his younger self philosophically worked out the interests of the proletariat , its place and trajectory in the philosophical process, and the thought-obstacles capitalism constantly throws up to prevent it from realising its socialist fate (false consciousness). For the mature Lukacs this is the mirror image of bourgeois philosophy and is equally as contemplative in spite of the radical verbiage. Implicit is the belief the working class ought to act in a particular way because theory says so, and that they are bound to do so sooner or later - reproducing the mechanistic errors of Second International 'Marxism'.
This is one instance where Lukacs's desire to distance himself from H&CC prevents a considered reflection of this position. It is true that Lenin saw socialism growing from concrete, conscious political action by the mass of our class, action in turn founded on the long challenging work undertaken by the militant class conscious minority within it. But what Lukacs implies in his criticisms is an autonomy of philosophy. Philosophy is, in the words of Louis Althusser, class struggle in (the realm of) theory. It is the abstraction of the experiences of classes and class fractions into contending schools of philosophy and social theory - a point which the younger Lukacs makes often enough about the relationship between Marxism and the proletariat. Therefore the criticisms one can make of poststructuralist attacks on Marxism, which were touched on in this post can partially apply to the mature Lukacs. What the younger Lukacs accomplished was a philosophical sketch of what the working class has done throughout its history. The set of relationships workers enter into in the workplace are antagonistic and this antagonism will find collective expression in some way, even in the absence of class conscious workers and/or Marxist ideas. Imputed consciousness therefore is not an idealist construct, it is a philosophical abstraction of the everyday experiences of our class. Similarly, I may not be a fan of the expression, but the young Lukacs's understanding of false class consciousness is a theoretical rendering and explanation of the ideological barriers capitalism puts in place that have to be overcome by socialist politics. In neither can a trace of essentialism and contemplation be found, provided one stands firmly on the ground of Marxist epistemology.
The second of the mature Lukacs's criticisms concerns his early relationship with Hegel, whose treatment he thought was insufficiently materialist. He says "it is undoubtedly one of the great achievements of History and Class Consciousness to have reinstated the category of totality in the central position it had occupied throughout Marx's works and from which it had been ousted by the 'scientism' of the social democratic opportunists" (1968, p.xx). But the mature Lukacs thought H&CC made use of Hegel in a straight forward and hence a problematic fashion for materialists, and this particularly impacts on his widely influential essays on reification.
Lukacs's first charge is how the young Lukacs describes the historical destiny of the proletariat. In Hegel's philosophy history is a process of 'the spirit' becoming conscious of itself as it overcomes alienation. Each form of society corresponds to a particular stage in its development toward the absolute, the point where subject and object become identical and reason reigns for ever more. The young Lukacs reworks this casting class consciousness as the subject and the (unconscious) proletariat as the unconscious object of history. When the two become fused this marks the period of revolution and the building of communist society, the point where history is now the result of conscious activity. The mature Lukacs suggested this was merely metaphysics, of providing a philosophical justification for communism that attempted to "out-Hegel Hegel" and come up with a solution to alienation, a solution Hegel relegated to a liminal space provided by his system.
The second problem is how alienation is conceptualised. In Hegel alienation is synonymous with objectification (in the neutral sense), that is the separation of reality from consciousness. Thus in Hegel's schema, the resolution of subject and object in the absolute means the abolition of alienation and thereby the "destruction" of reality. The young Lukacs didn't hold to this view but the species of alienation he described was similar in form to Hegel's - for example his discussion of the individual facing society as a subject versus a system of objects that are outside and beyond their subjectivity has clear echoes of Hegel. As the mature Lukacs says, "only when the objectified forms in society acquire functions that bring the essence of man into conflict with his existence, only when man's nature is subjugated, deformed and crippled can we speak of an objective societal condition of alienation and, as an inexorable consequence, of all the subjective marks of an internal alienation" (ibid. p.xxiv).
Lukacs goes on to discuss his changing views when Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 was published when he was domiciled in Moscow in the early 30s, but only to put radical distance between himself and the essays on reification. But this is something of an exaggeration. There are moments where Lukacs's early arguments mirror Hegel's, but his examination of the relation between the proletariat and reification seems a pretty accurate reconstruction of Marx sans the Paris Manuscripts, regardless of what the mature Lukacs thought.
Lukacs then goes on to list the positives - the treatment of Marx's work as a whole, H&CC's tendency toward a dialectical and materialist reinterpretation of Marx, and, peculiarly, the mature Lukacs endorsement of What is Orthodox Marxism?. If you recall this is the stress on totality as the defining characteristic of the Marxist method (more here). As John Rees observes in his Algebra of Revolution, this is not the case. What differentiates Marxism from other social theories is not just its relationship to socialist practice but the totality of all the characteristics of materialist dialectics - totality, change and contradiction, premised on a sophisticated materialist ontology.
Understandably the essays on method, class consciousness and reification have drawn the lion share of criticism and comment down the years, but this is not all there is to H&CC. For example, the critique of spontaneism in his second essay on Rosa Luxemburg and the revolutionary party are especially useful restatements of socialist political practice, as long as they're read with a critical anti-voluntarist eye. Legality and Illegality at the same time shows how to and how not to do ideology critique.
What is also interesting about the book was its subsequent fate at the hands of so-called Western Marxism. This trend was primarily a movement in academia, picking up on H&CC's Hegelianism and taking their brand of Marxism in a number of interesting directions. However, what unites the variegated philosophies of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Habermas (with the possible exception of Marcuse) is their aversion to practice, reducing Marxism to a radical species of contemplative thought. The responsibility for this cannot be laid at Lukacs's door - despite the errors and criticisms the appeal of H&CC lies in its being a philosophical call to arms that not only makes the case for militancy in theory, but concrete socialist activism in practice.
I began by noting how a book like H&CC defies easy summary. It can be maddeningly complex and pretty straight forward. Reading the essays in a different order do not seem to bring any extra clarity, but a crash course in Kant and Hegel are definitely useful for the middle essay on reification - I'm still not sure if I entirely understood everything Lukacs had to say on the subject.
In his 1967 preface Lukacs said it was a book of its time and had little bearing on then contemporary debates. Is this still the case more than 40 years later? No. In Britain Marxism has lived something of a twilight existence these last 20 or so years. Its enrichment and development has gone largely unseen as the revolutionary left and a handful of academics and journals have kept it going. Now the neoliberal tide has turned and increasing numbers are looking to Marx and Marxism for answers, H&CC as a statement of the fundamental basics of Marxist philosophy is very likely to attract more activist and scholarly interest. Provided H&CC is regarded as a primer and not the final word on Marxism, it could play an important role in educating the next generation of socialists.
A complete list of History and Class Consciousness postings can be found here.
I watched the opening episode of the much hyped three-part series based on David Peace's Red Riding quartet. It is set in the mining area of West Yorkshire and opens in 1974. Andrew Garfield plays an emerging, young reporter (Eddie Danford) who is investigating the disappearances of three young girls over a period of five years. Eddie soon realises that he has entered a web of corruption involving the local police force, council and press. The main villain is a brash, racist, homophobic property developer John Dawson, played by professional Yorkshireman, Sean Bean. Dawson is supported in his dirty deeds by the local bill that seem to have already killed one reporter who got too close to Dawson - as well as given Eddie some savage beatings.
I am afraid that Red Riding didn’t do a lot other than depress me. Yes, it is supposed to depict grim reality but the violence seems over-elaborate and over the top. Gritty reality pieces (Kes, Billy Elliott) need to be believable and this just isn’t. The North is stereotypically depicted as soul-crushingly drab. The sun never shines (although if the series was shot last summer this might have been unavoidable). We get a few shots of bleak-looking moorland on the horizon but the beauty of the Pennines is not portrayed. Bean's character is all too predictable.
So what point is the series trying to make? There is corruption in all walks of life. And? It is unfair and nasty and good people get abused. And?
It is just too bleak for me. Even ‘grim reality’ films can have moments of humour or brief interludes when the better side of human nature shines through. And before anyone tells me I should get my middle-class arse down to a mining area and see what it is really like, I do. I live close to the former North Staffordshire coalfields and regularly walk around the old mining villages. And the views are inspiring!
Of the 'big three' founding fathers of sociology, Max Weber (pictured) was definitely the most miserable. If he thought to preface his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with a few gags then perhaps more of my Thursday students would have persevered with their reading. Does this explain why Slavoj Žižek appears so sexy to so many?
I digress. The purpose of the week's seminar was to bring out the basics of Weber's method and then examine the thesis that protestantism, and Calvinism in particular played a key role in the formation of capitalism. These were my batch of questions for the students:
1) What is Weber's 'Ideal Type' method? Can you think of any examples?
2) What are the main features of a) The Protestant Ethic, and b) The Spirit of Capitalism?
3) For Weber, what differentiated capitalism from preceding modes of production? Why did it develop in Western Europe after the Reformation? Why not in other well developed societies such as China?
4) Do you think there are any problems with Weber's thesis?
5) Despite criticisms do you think Weber's arguments could be useful for understanding contemporary capitalism?
6) What criticisms could Marxists make of Weber's account? Do Marx and Weber offer incompatible views? Whose analysis of capitalism is superior?
Except for committed Weberians and Marxists the subject matter was never going to ignite the passions, and so it proved with this session. But nevertheless Weber's thesis did come in for a bit of a kicking over his value judgements concerning what did and what didn't count as rational action (was it really irrational for Catholic aristocrats to invest in piracy, slavery and wars?); whether you can read off actors' actions from religious prescriptions; and if the documents Weber used to underwrote or undermined his argument. His disjointed "tick box" schema of capitalism's emergence was compared with Marx's emphasis on class struggle to explain the breakdown of West European feudalism.
The next session will be looking at the emergence of nationalism and democratisation - whether the nation is an invention of capitalism or has roots in pre-capitalist times, what social forces have historically driven the struggle for democracy, and the relevance of both today. With a nice cross section of political views in all my classes - from UKIP to anarchism - I hope on this occasion the fur will fly ...
It was my turn to give the lead off at last night's Stoke SP branch meeting. Because of the imminent anti-fascist conference I volunteered to do a primer - and here it is.
The left spends a lot of time condemning the BNP, damning them as fascists and Nazis and frequently mobilising against them. This weekend, for example, the North Staffs Campaign Against Racism and Fascism will be holding a special one day conference on how to beat the BNP. But why? What is it about an organisation that only has 56 councillors, 100 parish councillors and a member of the London Assembly that can rouse the passions like no other political party? In this lead off I'll be looking at three things - what fascism is, the roots of its support in Britain today and how we can go about fighting them.
If we return to the Communist Manifesto, Marx describes the capitalist state as a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. Engels in his Origin of the Family also argued that the state, in the final analysis, is an organised military body that stands in defence of capitalist property relations. But the state is no monolithic leviathan - not only is it struggled over by various factions of the bourgeoisie it has to manage and partially reflect the aspirations of the subject class - the working class. The extent to which the working class exerts an influence over the bourgeois state depends on the level of class struggle. When it is strong the labour movement can extract concessions from it. When the movement is weak the state can be used to strengthen business and the power of the bourgeoisie at our expense. In British post-war history from 1945 to 1979, you could say state economic intervention, the growing welfare state, and the semi-institutionalisation of the trade unions in the field of industrial policy reflected the strength, confidence and expectations of our class. From Thatcher's election in 1979 and the defeats of the 80s these reforms were clawed back. Socialist ideas more or less went underground and the Labour party capitulated to the neoliberal consensus around free markets, privatisation, deregulation and the dismemberment of the welfare state. It remains to be seen if the present economic crisis has conclusively brought this period to a close.
There are moments when the state can assume a degree of autonomy from the ruling class and the aspirations of the workers. This happens when class struggle reaches an equilibrium. Marx analysed this phenomena in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and termed it 'Bonapartism' after emperor Napoleon III, who seized power in France in 1851. The state and the person of Napoleon III appeared to stand above and apart from society - not least because he appeared to speak for all groups and classes. Press freedoms were curtailed, parliament emasculated and elections emptied of any democratic content but the state remained premised on the defence of capitalist property relations. Thus the rule of the bourgeoisie was preserved.
Fascism is a species of Bonapartism. Typically fascist parties and movements comprise 'lumpen' elements of the working class, declassed middle class people fallen on hard times and small business people. They always dress themselves up in the national flag and claim to be the true uncorrupted voice of their country, and are as such opposed to immigrants, the labour movement and anything else that threatens the integrity of the nation as they see it. Their politics are often crude and incoherent, but that doesn't stop the ruling class from backing them if they feel threatened by a strong working class. Italy, Germany and Spain are, if you like, the classic cases of where the fascist movement was levered into power by the ruling class off the back of intense class struggles. Fascism was their battering ram to smash the labour movements. This preserved capitalism but the price the bourgeoisie paid was political expropriation and the ruin of their countries - so it is not an option our rulers will lightly take.
Britain is a million miles away from this situation. The bourgeoisie might be worried about the economic crisis, but none of them think they're about to be swept away by socialist revolution. Hence the BNP are a comparatively tiny organisation, especially if we compare it to its brethren on the continent. But like the fascist movements of the past they fish from the same sociological pool. Equally none of them have any kind of record of standing up for workers of any colour. And the areas of Stoke they draw support from tend to be all-white, depressed, and with high rates of unemployment and welfare dependency. The 'white working class' in media-speak is synonymous with the most backward, alienated and isolated sections of our class.
This comprises their electoral bedrock in Stoke, but it is not one they can take for granted. It is mostly passive and tends to be a mile wide but only an inch deep. Their activist numbers in Stoke can’t be that much more than ours, despite having a paper membership many times our own. And this support is hardly what you would call a solid vote. Having spoken to many BNP voters over the years, especially when we were canvassing in the Abbey, the majority I spoke to could not be described as hardcore racists. I've lost count of the conversations I've had with BNP voters who previously supported Labour all their lives. Among them is a sense of grievance, abandonment and disillusionment with mainstream politics. This isn't surprising when New Labour and their carbon copies in yellow and blue have done everything to show their contempt for working class people and their aspirations. Make no bones about it, the mainstream parties are responsible for the increasing support of the BNP, not anyone else.
But seeing as the BNP are so small, why should we bother about them? First they propagate ideas that are not only repulsive to most people but also divide our class. The power of the working class depends on its strength as a unified collective - the BNP's nationalist and racist poison cuts against this and makes the tasks of socialists that much more difficult. Second is their political function - if they get a whiff of power in this country we'd better watch out. As Pastor Niemoller observed in his celebrated verse, "first they came for the communists ...". Even now they attack socialists and trade unionists if they think they can get away with it. Assaults on activists are not uncommon. Socialists have received bureaucratic harassment in some authorities where the BNP have an influence. And even local Labour party candidates have had their property vandalised for standing up against the BNP. Thirdly wherever they build a base, racist attacks and racist "incidents" follow. In Welling in the early 90s where the BNP were then headquartered there was a spike in racist assaults, culminating in the infamous murder of Stephen Lawrence. BNP activists might not be directly involved in this violence but they help create a situation that encourages racist activity.
What can we do about them? This is the question NorSCARF will be asking at Saturday's conference. NorSCARF was set up in the late 70s to counter the growing menace of the then National Front and has since been the favoured labour movement vehicle for anti-racist and anti-fascist activity in the Potteries. At present it brings together a broad range of activists from all kinds of political backgrounds, including the Labour party. This fact, which is NorSCARF's greatest strength, is also its chief weakness. In order to maintain this unity there is a tendency toward lowest common denominator politics. This keeps everyone on board, but at the price of not really hitting the BNP where it hurts. To give you an example of a NorSCARF-endorsed leaflet I helped deliver round Longton a couple of years ago, it concentrated on three matters:
1) The candidate's holocaust denial.
2) The BNP's hate-mongering over plans for Stoke's only purpose-built mosque.
3) The candidate not paying his council tax.
I wrote at the time "Given everyone in Longton is well aware of Batkin's far right lunacy (not least because his ward has been plastered with Unite Against Fascism and Searchlight material in the past) and his support remains undiminished, just highlighting his and the BNP's racism and Islamophobia just won't cut it. And as for not paying his council tax, given its relentless rise to pay for council mismanagement, is a failure to pay likely to count against him?"
People have turned to the BNP because Labour has consistently kicked them in the teeth. They are the nuclear option when it comes to protest votes. If you want to beat the BNP you have to address the conditions they feed off, but that's impossible without understanding the causes and providing a political alternative. Obviously in an organisation with Labour backing that's a problem - this was why A was shouted down at the last NorSCARF conference.
This isn't to say NorSCARF is of absolutely no use. It has done useful work making sure the BNP are dogged with racist baggage wherever they go. It's good at mobilising non-BNP voters who may otherwise stay at home. But neither tackle the underlying issues, and there is no prospect of NorSCARF of evolving into something that will.
What does this mean for our anti-fascist work? Our party has a semi-detached relationship with NorSCARF because we are not afraid of calling a spade a spade. For us fighting fascism is inseparable from arguing for socialist politics. If the BNP are growing in the absence of a working class political alternative, it follows we must work to build that alternative on the streets, in the workplace and at the ballot box. Last summer, for example, witnessed some Herculean efforts at delivering our series of anti-fascist leaflets as the BNP sought to capitalise on the killing of one of their activists. In all some 15,000 were posted through Stoke's letter boxes.
What we need to think about then is how we can work with NorSCARF and crucially draw in that layer who've come to similar conclusions as us toward our party? Should we seek to build a loose faction of like-minded activists? Forget about NorSCARF altogether? How should we relate to LMHR, who are planning a massive free gig at the end of May? And what about the RMT’s left electoral initiative?
The following discussion talked through our experiences of dealing with BNP supporters and the casual racism we often meet on stalls. One comrade joked about his activity on the banking crisis. When he started he thought that at last this would be an issue no one could possibly blame immigrants for. In the first conversation he had he explained how it was funny money could be found for that but not post offices, hospitals, etc. "Yeah ... " said the woman, "and immigrants".
Another mentioned a discussion he had on Saturday with a couple who had similar sentiments. Replying to the 'send 'em home' argument on jobs and housing, he replied that if we did that then we'd still have the same problems, and especially so if the millions of Britons who worked overseas were forced to come home. He also pointed out it wasn't Poles or asylum seekers who'd been closing the pot banks, the steel or the mines. That seemed to have a big impact on the couple, demonstrating how racist and xenophobic attitudes in most cases are very shallow.
The discussion moved on to the nitty-gritty of strategy, which I'll keep mum about.
But all in all I thought the session went well. There were new members and new people to Stoke there, and I hope the talk and discussion served as a good introduction to the local political and anti-fascist scene.
Some good news for a change. I look forward to seeing these big name building firms getting soaked by black listed workers for their disgusting employment practices. From the BBC:
Company sold workers' secret data
The information watchdog has shut down a company which it says sold workers' confidential data, including union activities, to building firms.
A raid on The Consulting Association in Droitwich, Worcs, revealed a serious breach of the Data Protection Act, the Information Commissioner's Office said.
The ICO said a secret system was run for over 15 years enabling employers to unlawfully vet job applicants.
Action is being considered against more than 40 firms who used the service.
Past and present customers included Taylor Woodrow, Laing O'Rourke and Balfour Beatty, the ICO added.
The Consulting Association's owner would also be prosecuted, it said.
"He should have been notified, registered with our office and he wasn't and that's a criminal offence and that's a clear prosecution," said deputy information commissioner David Smith.
The information commissioner will need to look into this further to see whether these practices are more widespread and take the appropriate action. "The construction companies that were his customers, we have to investigate and find out just what their involvement is. "But what we're looking to do there is issue enforcement proceedings against those that were involved and that'll put them essentially on notice that if they get involved in this illegal trade again, then they will face prosecution."
Business Secretary Lord Mandelson said he was "sorry the practices have taken place" and welcomed the intervention of the information commissioner.
"He will need to look into this further to see whether these practices are more widespread and take the appropriate action, as he's already done in this case," the minister added.
'Trouble stirrer'
Not only was the database held without the workers' consent, but the existence of it was repeatedly denied.
Following the raid on 23 February, investigators discovered that The Consulting Association's database contained the details of some 3,213 workers, the ICO said.
Data included information concerning personal relationships, trade union activity and employment history, it added.
Comments included "lazy and a trouble stirrer", "Ex shop steward. Definite problems. No Go" and "Communist Party".
Employers paid £3,000 as an annual fee, and £2.20 for individual details, the ICO said.
Invoices to construction firms for up to £7,500 were also seized during the raid.
The ICO said it had served an Enforcement Notice ordering The Consulting Association's owner to stop using the system, and expected the company to cease trading by the end of the week.
It added that the owner had failed to notify the ICO as a data controller.
Mr Smith said: "Trading people's personal details in this way is unlawful and we are determined to stamp out this type of activity."
Alan Ritchie, general secretary of building workers union UCATT, said: "Take one of the issues that we have in the construction industry: we have just under two people killed every week through bad health and safety practices and if a whistleblower then raises these issues, then obviously he has found his name on this list.
"He has never had the chance to challenge it.
"He has never been able to turn around and say, 'You are classing me as lazy. How can that be?'"
The prospect of the RMT launching a nation-wide European election bid from the left is certainly an exciting one, and has already generated some discussion and speculation. The report below from Pete McLaren is of last weekend's CNWP steering committee meeting that went out on the Indie SA discussion list. Needless to say the process is far from finished, so readers and comrades ought to keep that in mind.
I want you to be the amongst first to hear some potentially quite exciting information.
It was announced at the CNWP Steering Committee on Sunday that the RMT are putting up the money to stand TU/left "lists" in every Euro constituency. Their main reason is to ensure left opposition to the BNP. They invited the Socialist Party, Communist Party and a handful of left Trade unionists to a meeting last weekend to announce this. They presented a list of their 10 key demands, which concentrate on rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, opposing racism and fascism, opposing privatisation, opposing EU militarism, restoring democracy to EU states (whatever that means), defending manufacturing and keeping Britain out of the eurozone. I know the SP have asked for an 11th point on internationalism, partly to counteract the largely anti EU stance of the RMT.
The RMT are calling this a platform for the election, not the start of a new party, and that whatever regional organisations are put in place, that will all end the day after the Euro Elections. However, the initiative is independent and trade union based, and we could keep the momentum going after June 4th even if the RMT will not not do so.
The SP have asked for the group organising this initiative to be broadened, and this was backed by the CNWP today, along with general support for the project as an independent TU challenge. As I understand it, the RMT organising group has already agreed to support Rallies or Public Meetings in every region. The RMT are discussing media publicity.
I suspect that this will be a left anti EU TU programme, and I suspect there will be a lack of democracy about how candidates are selected and the manifesto agreed - but I could be wrong. The registered party name is "No2EU-Yes2Democracy", which I think could send out the wrong message - the very word "socialism" should have been included, for a start. The politics behind this was described today as 'Trade Unions against the EU constitution' , with some left politics against privatisation added.
CNWP Steering Committee members, whilst welcoming the initiative, were critical of its probable programme and its concentration on the EU, and the lack of democracy so far.
There is even an idea at present that anyone elected under this banner would not take up their seats - this is already being challenged within the group around the RMT.
This is an evolving process, and hopefully there will be changes, with some democracy and accountability, and a more progressive programme. But, in any case, I do think the initiative offers real possibilities. There will be a momentum created in every region, with the left working together and structures may well appear on a regional basis. These do not have to disappear after the elections just because the RMT leadership wants them to. The initiative could become a step towards a new left party. The Rallies could be used to push that whole process forward.
As long as the politics are within the 80/90% we can all agree upon, I think this could open up real opportunities. I may be wrong. I had no idea this was coming, although those at the the LULC will remember that Rob Griffiths did say that the CPB was discussing with others the possibility of standing a TU/left list in two constituencies. I guess this is what he was referring to. It has now multiplied!
The Socialist Alliance will get regular updates from the SP and CNWP on further developments, so I will keep you informed.
Interesting times, maybe!
In Unity
Pete
Photo by Marc Vallée
I've always thought conservatives are a bunch of wankers. Here's the proof.
Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers
Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.
A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.
"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.
However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.
More here.
Future dystopias of overcrowded hive cities and post-apocalyptic wastelands could accurately anticipate the world to come, according to the latest issue of the New Scientist. Its feature, How to survive the coming century makes very grim reading indeed. Forget the climate change deniers, the real debates are around how bad it's going to get and what we can do about it.
In this article, the appropriately-named Gaia Vince reports that the IPCC predicts a global increase in temperature somewhere between 2°C and 6.4°C this century. As Peter Cox puts it, "climatologists tend to fall into two camps: there are the cautious ones who say we need to cut emissions and won't even think about high global temperatures; and there are the ones who tell us to run for the hills because we're all doomed. I prefer a middle ground. We have to accept that changes are inevitable and start to adapt now." So what would a mid-range increase - say 4°C entail?
Well, the world would look something like this - a planet where rain forests and productive agricultural land is choked out by advancing desert, coastal regions disappear beneath the waves, glaciers and ice caps shrink and vanish, and perhaps most destructively, the growth of two uninhabitable dry belts in presently densely populated regions.
The flip side of increased warming is that cold regions to the north and the south will become temperate and capable of sustaining large human populations. But how large depends on a number of things. First is the speed and depth of the changes to come - James Lovelock thinks "the number remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less." Others are more hopeful, but this depends on the second key factor: social change. While governments around the world promote anaemic green washing, or prominent environmental celebrities like Al Gore blame a lack of political will for the paucity of radical action, Vince argues that dealing with the crisis means to "rethink our society not along geopolitical lines but in terms of resource distribution".
Winding the clock forward 90 years and working with a projected global population of nine billion, Vince is sure these numbers can be accommodated if everyone receives 20 square metres of space (this would, according to my very dodgy maths, require 4.5 million square kilometres - about half the size of Canada), which in turn demands packed high rise cities towards the poles to free as much land as possible for agriculture. Food production would have to be more seasonal and move away from thirsty crops. The remaining land will be too precious for large scale cattle grazing, so say goodbye to your beef burgers. And the oceans would likely suffer a massive crash of fish and other sea life thanks to increasing acidification. Biodiversity would plummet with many species eking out an existence in zoos or gene banks.
But this will also be a world of huge engineering projects. The uninhabited and uninhabitable wastes of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australia might become home to a global belt of solar cell arrays. This in combination with nuclear, wind, wave, and geothermal power could supply the energy-hungry cities of the north and south.
Vince's thought experiment is in many ways the best possible outcome. She herself admits the massive stores of carbon and methane locked up in the world's forests, tundra, and ocean floors will either have or be in the process of escaping into the atmosphere. The temperature would not remain a static 4°C above present levels - they would climb further. Plus the world she describes is premised on global-scale planning. What character this planning would be is left open. But the scale required of juggling mass population transfers, building new metropolitan centres, constructing energy gathering facilities and so on can only be possible in a social system where at the most the market plays a marginal role. Whether this society is bureaucratic/technocratic and ruled by the descendants of today's bourgeoisie, or socialist, depends on how the class struggle plays out in the intervening years. If socialism inherits this battered planet then we are best placed to cope with the damage. If not the chaos and social dislocation of Vince's scenario would be without parallel in history. Mass migration, starvation, wars ... it almost doesn't bear thinking about.
It's a good job this is only speculative but it is speculation solidly based on contemporary climate science. Our species will survive, but whether it will be in the billions or the millions depends on the class battles of the next few decades. The stakes could be that high, comrades.
It's annoying. Plenty of stuff going on in the world is begging to be commented on. There's a couple of posts bubbling under about "theoretical issues". But can I write? Nope.
It's strange. Sometimes the crap can't flow out of my fingers fast enough, even if there's nothing going on. I don't know. How do you overcome that sense of ennui that settles upon you when you get into your blogging interface? Do you just write any old crap? Do you procrastinate? (A bit of a problem if blogging is your preferred means of procrastination). Does a blog about blogger's block jump start your engine? Can Twitter and Facebook unplug your creative juices - when they're not giving you cancer?
It would be interesting to hear what strategies other comrades employ to keep the block at bay.
