Playing God

When I'm not doing university work or party stuff my relaxation time is divided up between blogging, flapjacks, reading, oatmeal and raisin cookies and (occasionally) the classic seven-year old computer game, Civilisation III. For readers unfamiliar with the game, the player begins at the dawn of human history with a single settler. You found a city, build military units, erect an infrastructure, build more settlers, found more cities, and so on. For you to succeed in winning the game the player needs to successfully combine the roles of chancellor, scientist, diplomat, cultural patron, and general to ensure you retain that competitive edge over your rivals.

Assuming almost God-like powers over your civilisation, building an empire over 6,000 years of human history can be completely absorbing. Each victory condition requires different strategies to win, and all the opponents are pursuing their particular take on world domination. You might want to build cultural artefacts and great wonders in peace, but you'd better be prepared for enemy armies snaking over your borders ...

What is interesting about Civilisation III are the things it says about the nature of the nation, its gendered division of labour, the character of history and bourgeois consciousness. Who knew computer games could brim over with all manner of not-so-obvious ideological goodies?

Beginning first with gender, the first point of interest is the graphic representation of population in the game. These come under two broad types: the units and the citizenry. The former are characterised by their mobility and manipulability. There are dozens of different units capable of particular functions and tied to a certain level of technological development. Workers and settlers respectively build infrastructure and found cities, while military units provide the means to defend the home territory or attack the neighbours on land, and later sea and air. The second kind of representation is more or less passive. These are the population of the cities themselves. Here the player directs the citizenry to produce whatever is required, be it units or infrastructure that increases the city’s performance. The population is graphically rendered by a row of faces along the bottom of the city screen indicating whether they’re happy, content, or sad. The player has to ensure that the latter do not outnumber the enthusiastic citizens or the city will fall into civil disorder, ceasing production and tax contributions until the balance has been restored. Finally, the player is provided with five advisers whose responsibility is to oversee the domestic, military, trade, diplomatic, cultural, and scientific aspects of the civilisation. Their function is to provide advice.

What is significant to note is that all units are either male or gender-neutral. The settlers are men with backpacks and the workers go from bare chested loin-clothed slaves to men in dungarees. Up until the discovery of motorised transport all land military units are discernibly male, from Conan the Barbarian look-alikes to extras from Saving Private Ryan. Then they come to be replaced by tanks, mechanised infantry, and modern armour. On the sea and in the air boats and planes represent the military. The only female unit to have appeared in the Civ franchise – the spy – did not survive the cross over from the second to the third game. Women however do have equal graphical representation on the domestic front. The gender split in the cities and on the advisors panel is 50/50. Yet it is the positions occupied by women and men on the latter that is most telling. The domestic advisor, alongside the trade and culture representatives are women. The men on the other hand are responsible for the military, science, and foreign affairs. In terms of the game mechanics, the ‘female aspects’ are concerned with the internal operation of a civilisation whereas the aspects that explicitly attempts to provide a competitive edge over rival nations is the preserve of men. Therefore Civ III sets up a privileged binary in which men perform the active and visible role of exploiting the land, conquering new territories whereas women are effectively privatised and invisible, relegated to the boring tasks of advising the player on the budget or recommending the building of more temples. Yet despite this graphical privileging of men over women, the game engine does not deny the importance of the domestic space. A civilisation with a well-run economy, high cultural rating, and happy populace in all likelihood implies a powerful and technically advanced military. The male/female binary operates at the surface of the game, at the level of graphical representation whereas the actual mechanics itself recognises their dialectical interdependence.

There is a more fundamental ‘forgetting’ that is located in the way the game plays: a repression of conflict. At first glance this appears an absurd claim to make. One of the chief pleasures of Civ III is amassing an army and sending it over the border to annex a juicy city or territory, repulsing the counter-attacks as you go. The game encourages this style of play; three out of the victory conditions depend on military action. But what the game does is perform a ruse similar to that found in bourgeois philosophies of history: conflict is externalised. Using my most recent game as the English as an example, it began at 4000 BC with a settler, a worker, and a scout. The first act was to establish London, then found more cities and eventually colonising/conquering a good proportion of the world’s surface. In that time the English went from spear-chucking cavemen ruled over by a despot to a vast metropolitan democracy with a stockpile of nuclear weapons. Despite these dramatic changes, the civilisation was as English in 2000 BC as it was in 2000 AD; it remained orange on the territorial map, and the rule of Elizabeth I was uninterrupted. In other words, the game evokes a discourse of the nation and constructs it as an essential continuity. This is reinforced by the way the player has to relate to their chosen civilisation. Civ 3 positions the player as a god-like manager who has to guide their nation through 6000 years of history, therefore the essential continuity is also established at this level, through the act of playing the game.

What does this continuity have to do with conflict? Earlier it was noted how the player must manage the happiness of their city dwellers otherwise the city would fall into disorder, temporarily suspending the contribution it makes to the civilisation. From the standpoint of game management, when it does occur it is usually a small inconvenience. However, when the player wishes to progress to a more efficient kind of government the whole civilisation tends to fall into anarchy. This is the most threatening moment in the game. Being unable to adequately feed the population, raise money, or build anything; it is a potentially life-threatening situation that other civilisations could take advantage of. Though order is eventually restored and the game continues, the moment of anarchy is where Civ III’s discourse starts to unravel. Despite trying to repress internal conflict by programming it as a transient phenomena and not allowing it to alter the distinct identity of the civilisation, it nevertheless erupts out of this moment and begins to destabilise the discourse of national continuity that the Civ III game engine evokes. It suggests that not all interests are identical with that of the nation and that there are always struggles that cannot be assimilated by a frame that reads history through nationalist spectacles. Therefore from this ‘inconvenient’ moment in play, the beginnings of a repressed history of patternless conflict between classes and groups begins to infect the national-continuity metaphysic, threatening the discursive foundations on which Civ III is based.

Then there is the standpoint of management itself, which is the distillation of the individual bourgeois point of view. As we have seen time and again in the various posts to this blog on Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness, reality confronts the bourgeois individual as an unalterable and alien set of laws that can nevertheless be plotted and responded to to satisfy one's egoistic needs and accumulate capital. All the elements - levels of resources, luxuries, entertainers and specialist citizens, production - are so much objects to be managed. There appears to be no qualitative differences between them. The game engine of Civ III confronts the casual gamer in much the same way as any other computer game - one acquires a feel of the game, an understanding of its mechanics and develops strategies that can makes the best of the situation. But control is illusive (unless you dig into the game code) and there is always a possibility your opponents could turn against your carefully-crafted position, you suffer several nuclear meltdowns, or the world slides into runaway global warming.

All that said, it does not mean one cannot enjoy games like Civ - it just means keeping your wits about you and realising the habits of mind so-called God-games engender ...

Structure of Bourgeois Philosophy

'The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought' is the second part of Lukacs' seminal essay, 'Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat'. It is also the section I found most difficult to follow, not being philosophically-inclined nor particularly interested in the work of Immanuel Kant. But it is nevertheless an important part of Lukacs' argument because in it he sketches out what is unique about bourgeois thought vis a vis its predecessors and the proletarian alternative (the latter is the topic of the next History and Class Consciousness post).

As we saw in the previous post, capitalism engenders reified consciousness, of treating the human life world as if it is ruled by objects governed by alien laws apart from and independent of human kind, even though they are the result of human activity in the first place. This for Lukacs is the starting point of bourgeois philosophy. The philosophical inquiries of antiquity and feudalism are radically different because they were not formulated in a reified context. The 'alien power' confronting these thinkers were the forces of nature, over which pre-capitalist societies had little control. Therefore applying these philosophies to more contemporary conditions might be a jolly exercise, but it does not deepen our understanding of the uses to which the ancients put them.

For Lukacs, Kant's preface to his Critique of Pure Reason identifies the fundamental distinction of modern philosophy, "it sets itself the following problem: it refuses to accept the world as something that has arisen (or, for example, has been created by God) independently of the knowing subject and prefers to conceive of it instead as its own product" (Lukacs 1968, p.111). In other words it is the philosophical assumption that objects of cognition are not only knowable to the degree to which they are created by the mind, but also that the world is, philosophically speaking, created by the mind. Modern bourgeois thought may try and plot the ebbs of the alien powers capitalism has unleashed, but at the point of its emergence we find, in distorted form, the admission that the bourgeois world is the product of human activity. But this is as far as it can go - the signature of reified philosophy is an inability to consider the connection between what it considers to be the fundamental problems and the material basis of these problems and why they are deemed significant.

The new modern philosophy of rational inquiry developed in conjunction with science and the beginnings of industrialisation in the latter half of the 18th century. As Lukacs puts it, "what is novel about modern rationalism is its increasingly insistent claim that it has discovered the principle which connects up all phenomena which in nature and society are found to confront mankind" (p.113). And that principle is, naturally enough, rationalism; the ability to break processes down into its components and make sense of them. In this way bourgeois rationalism can make systematic sense of the world around it. Its diametric opposite is therefore irrationality, the notion that meaningless can erupt into rational systems at any time and dissolve the whole theoretical edifice. For Lukacs, in Kant's case the danger of irrationality was always an imminent potential in his system. While it is true objects that enter cognition are invested with meaning (and it is these meanings/constructs that concerned Kant), the thing-in-itself, the internal "essence" of an object is ultimately unknowable - the thing-in-itself is an insurmountable barrier to human consciousness. Thus Kant reduces objects to two "complexes", the issue of matter (the content) of the forms through which we understand the world - these we can speak of. The other complex, the 'noumenal', is beyond cognition and should therefore be excluded from scientific investigation.

Lukacs notes it would be a mistake to confuse philosophy with science. Rationalism is about investigating the formal presuppositions of scientific inquiry, but as we have seen, in Kant's hands the irrationality of matter is ruled out. What is ruled in is the phenomenal, that which can be known, thereby an aversion to totality is hardwired into philosophy. What this means for society is "it acquires increasing control over the details of its social existence, subjecting them to its needs. On the other hand, it loses - likewise progressively - the possibility of gaining intellectual control of society as a whole and with that it loses its own qualifications for leadership" (p.121).

What Kant does is sketch out philosophically the dilemma facing the bourgeoisie. In fact he earns Lukacs' praise because he was open enough to acknowledge the limits of bourgeois thought without proposing some dogmatic system to logically complete the problem. Indeed, the philosophy that followed Kant (including Hegel) merely reproduced the same philosophical contradictions, between subjectivity and objectivity, on ever higher and more abstract levels. But the problems remained and were consistently and constantly revisited from then up until now.

This does much violence to Lukacs' discussion of Kant in this section, and the way Hegel responded to these problems. But the main point has been established, of being unable to reconcile subject and object and its permutations - will vs necessity, action vs structure, voluntarism vs fatalism, etc. The bourgeoisie may consistently revolutionise society via the developmental logics of capitalism, but they do this without understanding that same society. That total understanding is only possible from the standpoint of the proletariat.

A complete list of History and Class Consciousness postings can be found here.

Left Blogging and the Left Press

One blog post that caught my eye last week was Dave Osler's piece on blogging and journalism. The argument will be one familiar to most bloggers and politicos. Most daily and Sunday titles are in long term decline, as this corner of the Guardian's site illustrates. This means less ad revenue, less resources available for "proper" journalism, more stories recycled from press agencies or the internet, compounding the decline in the press.

Commenting on a piece by Andrew Sullivan, and tacitly accepting the argument that the explosion of political blogs is partially responsible for the decline in the mainstream press, Dave argues they cannot be substituted for it. Blogs do not have the connections or the resources to plug the gap. For example, the stories "broken" by the likes of Guido and Iain Dale on the right and Liberal Conspiracy on the left are small beer. The story might be different where localised blogs are concerned. Stoke-on-Trent's Pits 'n' Pots carries better political news and gossip than the local rag, for example.

But is it as grim as all that for the bourgeois press? It seems the more highbrow titles are doing all right, thank you very much. The Economist is up 5.6 per cent to 183,539 in UK. The Week and Spectator are circulating at all-time highs (source).

Anyway, what I want to look at is the relationship (or should that be tension?) between left blogs and the left press. Does the plethora of leftist commentary online unduly impact on the fortunes of the likes of The Socialist, Socialist Worker and the Weekly Worker? Beginning with last things first, many have commented on the WW's decline since left blogs have colonised its sect news niche. Why wait every Thursday for the latest SWP-related scoop when it's been on Socialist Unity and dozens of other left blogs for days? Its attempts to generate interest with interminable polemics with the AWL and their erstwhile ultra-leftist bedfellows in the ludicrous Campaign for a Marxist Party has probably driven more of its readers away than anything else. If Peter Manson's last article on John Rees's can-carrying is anything to go by, part of their solution is to go more in-depth and use more inside information.

For The Socialist and Socialist Worker, most of their circulation comes from street sales. In that respect both titles are indifferent to the effects of blogs. But can the same be said of their online presence? Their content is split between activist-generated news and reports on struggles the parties are involved with. But when it comes to articles on bigger issues, the reportage is not qualitatively different from what many bloggers do. Except one kind of commentary is backed up by a party imprimatur and the other isn't. But does it mean people are less likely to swing by, say, the CWI website than a wide array of blogs who offer their own take on the issues of the day? Without the visits figures for the Socialist Party and SWP's websites to hand it's hard to say. I do suspect though that the figures are not as high as they could be.

When I was in the cpgb we used to receive (and I assume comrades still do) a weekly email outlining the most popular articles from the previous issue. Without fail the letters were always a top destination. It remains a strength of the WW that it is always willing to use its post bag as an opportunity to critically engage with its readers and opponents, something that the letters in The Socialist and SW rarely do. Blogging as a general rule invites responses to what is offered, and plays a large part in developing the reputation and profile of a given blogger. As much as SWP-supporting trolls try to derail the comments at Socialist Unity, again generally the debates that take place there are sophisticated, involved and interesting.

I think my organisation and the rest of the left ought to try and learn from this. The AWL and Permanent Revolution allow for comments on their material, so why can't we? Comments received could become the basis for letters. Replies and discussions could build up an audience who are regularly reading our material and might even encourage others to do so as well. So what's there to lose?

The Devil's Whore

For some time, I have been contemplating a blog on the above-named English Civil War drama on Channel 4. Then, when doing some last-minute research, I noticed that Madam Miaow has already produced a very good review of the series, so l will restrict myself to some comments.

I am not normally a fan of costume drama, but I thought The Devil’s Whore was very entertaining. It captured a lot of the violence and uncertainty of the times. The English scenery was impressive, especially as the series was filmed in South Africa! Historically, there seem to be some inaccuracies, but I don’t mind artistic licence. As far as I can gather, the heroine Angelica Fanshawe didn’t exist. Confusingly, at the start of each series, the producers appear to claim otherwise but does it matter? Some viewers have complained that it tears through history at a breakneck speed, and it is therefore hard to follow. This is a fair criticism. Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland was covered in what seemed like about a minute! But, in defence of the producers, I am told that the series was originally scheduled for twelve episodes but had to be cut down to four. The series impressed me because it didn’t come across as modern characters in period dress like so many historical pieces do. It made me want to investigate the period more, and prompted a search on Wikipedia.

I was particularly interested in the sects that appeared at the time. Angelica in turn became involved with the Levellers, the Diggers and the High Attainers (who were derogatorily known as Ranters). The first, whilst not being early socialists, had some egalitarian ambitions. The second seemed to have been commune types. The third seemed the most exciting, and were apparently keen on taking their clothes off and enjoying life for the moment (as are Stoke Socialist Party).

Jim Moody has posted an interesting review of the Devil’s Whore in issue 748 of the CPGB’s Weekly Worker. Also, for a thought-provoking discussion on the three schools of analysis of the English Civil War (Whig, Marxist and revisionist), go to Wikipedia and then to the article by Glen Burgess in the footnotes.

I look forward to some interesting discussion on The Devil’s Whore.

Bolshevist Blogger Knocked Out By Flu!

Oh the indignity! From Tuesday on your commentator has been laid low by microscopic counter-revolutionaries. Their weapons of sniffles, coughs, sore throats, headaches and fever have sapped the energy of the BC household. This wouldn't be too bad if we hadn't much on, but over the last three days we attended a funeral, had to do our Christmas shopping and, yesterday, were out yet again to inter the ashes. But we didn't get to see it.

I felt slightly better yesterday morning while we were hurtling toward Derby on the train. History and Class Consciousness was out (two new posts on that coming soon), and the flu seemed content to take the back burner. Then, when we got to the station, I had what I can only describe as a funny turn. The symptoms passed, I had something to eat, and just put it down to being hungry. We jumped on to the train over to Nottingham and it wasn't long before I started feeling funny again. I told CBC my vision was darkening and the next thing I knew I was being slapped around the face by the guard! I was pouring with sweat. I was radiating ludicrous amounts of heat. And yes, I felt like absolute crap! (I was out for about a minute - good job it wasn't standing room only!)

The guard and CBC helped me on to the platform where I quickly cooled down and then aided by my mother-in-law and the station's first-aider they shepherded me into the waiting room. It wasn't long before the ambulance turned up and off I was whisked to casualty at Queen's. So what was going to be a very simple and dignified ceremony turned into a five hour drama under hospital lights. I got poked and prodded every which way and had myself a drip fitted (I've never "drank" a litre of water through my arm before!). At the end of it all it turned out the cause of my swoon was ... dehydration. Duh.

The NHS comes in for a lot of stick, but I could not fault my experience of it as a visitor these last few weeks and a (very) short stay patient.

I'm still full of the flu, unfortunately, but I feel well enough now to resume blogging, so watch out!

Towards Effective Green Left Unity

From Neil Cafferky of the Socialist Party's national office:

The following is a statement produced by the SP following correspondence between the Lewisham SP and the Lewisham Green Party after a Green Party candidate was revealed to be on the membership list of the BNP:

ONE of the Green Party candidates who stood in Telegraph Hill ward, south London in the 2006 local elections appears on the list of alleged BNP supporters recently leaked to the media. This ward, in the London borough of Lewisham, is represented by two SP members, Ian Page and Chris Flood, who have been councillors there since 1990 and 2003 respectively.

When the list was published Lewisham SP was asked to comment. Aware that the list, leaked by disgruntled BNP members, did not necessarily imply support for the far-right party, we contacted the individual named, who informed us that he had never been a supporter of the BNP and their racist ideas.

We accepted his assurance but, as there were others on the list who have been Green Party members and who have also been BNP supporters, we also wrote to the Lewisham Greens for their views before we made any public comment.

Darren Johnson, a Lewisham Green councillor and London Assembly member, replied, saying that, “knowing him as I do”, he was convinced that the individual concerned had been “the victim of a malicious prank” and had given “no indication whatsoever that he shared the obnoxious views of the BNP”.

But Darren Johnson also conceded that their ex-candidate, who had no campaigning record in Telegraph Hill, “has had no active involvement in the Green Party for the past two years”, in other words, since the 2006 elections.

This raises a wider question: even if, as it appears, the candidate was not sympathetic to the BNP’s poisonous ideas, why did Lewisham Green Party conclude that he was a better representative of anti-cuts, anti-privatisation and pro-environment policies in Telegraph Hill than the sitting Socialist Party councillors, Ian Page and Chris Flood?

The SP has consistently approached the Green Party to discuss whether we could come to an electoral agreement, at least to not stand candidates against each other where possible. Through the Socialist Green Unity Coalition, for example, we discussed this with the Green Party’s national election officer, who confirmed that such agreements could be made by local parties.

The SP and the Green Party have important differences. The SP believes that fundamental change is necessary to save our environment, which can only be achieved by democratic public ownership of the major companies that dominate the globe.

On Lewisham council the Green councillors have not always backed the Socialist councillors’ proposals to resist the pro-market agenda of the establishment parties – New Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. But there is sufficient agreement, we believe, for us to seriously discuss possibilities for electoral agreements.

Unfortunately that has not been the approach of Lewisham’s Greens. Their strategy in the 2006 elections was to stand as widely as possible, regardless of who they were standing against or the record and commitment of their candidates.

The Greens stood three candidates in the three-seat Telegraph Hill ward in 2006, who each polled around 400 votes – well short of winning but far more than the gap between the New Labour candidate elected as the third ward councillor and the third-placed Socialist Party candidate, Jess Leech. Was it really necessary to stand in Telegraph Hill and allow New Labour to slip in? Especially as there were other, New Labour-held wards, in Lewisham where the Greens only stood one candidate?
Darren Johnson hasn’t accepted our offer to discuss what lessons from all this there may be for the future. But the SP plans to stand more widely in Lewisham in the next local elections in 2010 along with, we hope, local trade unionists and representatives of different campaign groups fighting to save council housing, defend education, and keep our NHS safe from privatisation. They too will expect that Lewisham Green Party would co-operate to maximise the electoral challenge to the establishment parties.

----statement ends----

I should emphasise at this point that this is NOT an attack on the Green Party for having an election candidate who has since appeared on the BNP membership list, although it is reasonable to seek clarification from the Greens regarding their knowledge of this person’s politics in response to quires from voters in the area. Nor is the SP trying to dictate to the Green Party who or where they can stand. That is, of course, a decision that must be taken by the members of the Green Party themselves.

What the SP is seeking from the Green Party in Lewisham, and elsewhere in the country, is clarification on their relationship with the rest of the Left on the electoral field. With the new mood of co-operation on the Left following recent setbacks in the quest for a new workers party and with the possibility of a general election in the summer it is vital that the strongest possible challenge is put up to all the establishment parties by socialist, trade unionists, community activists and environmentalists.

Hopefully this can be the beginning of a discussion between socialists and Green Party members on the best way forward to challenging the rule of profit, big business and environmental destruction.

Birthday Blog - Big 2 Today!

Is it two years since I first sat down and wrote my first post for this blog? Yes, it really is! I've already had a celebratory cup of tea with Brother S, and might just treat myself to a flapjack in a bit. To add to the sense of occasion, it's only right and proper I get my stats out.

From December 8th 2007 to December 7th 2008 AVPS has published 230 posts. Of these only 16 passed without any comment, woot! In total 1,758 comments have been left, realising an average of 7.6 per post, which sounds near enough to eight for me! In addition to that, the median number of comments is six. The top five most-commented on (in reverse order) are (joint fifth) Vital Statistics and Solidarity With Harry's Place; SP and SWP Debate the Revolutionary Party (now available to watch online here); Branch Meeting: The Politics of the SWP; the comedy gold that is The Worst Leaflet Ever; and at number one, BNP Members List Leaked (mainly because our friend, The Sentinel, took up unwelcome residence in the comments box). But the most viewed post by a mile remains The Perfect Vagina. This appears to be popular among one handed typists looking to ogle Lisa Rogers sans clothes, or, depressingly, young women with vagina-related hang ups. I hope the latter group will find something in that piece of use. But alas, those engaged in the great internet porn hunt are going to be disappointed. Unless they find the way my font curls my letters a turn on.

From 11th December, 2006 (the day I started using Statcounter) until yesterday there was an average of 143 page loads, 101 unique visitors, and 30 returning visitors. The averages from December 8th last year to yesterday are 218, 157, and 44 respectively (as compared to 67, 45 and 17 for the previous year). So things have come along nicely. There are five posts responsible for the big spikes of interest. The review of Louis Theroux Behind Bars, The Perfect Vagina, the Harry's Place/Jenna Delich row, comment on the BNP membership list farce and, bizarrely, a lot of people wanting to get hold of the worst leaflet ever ... a full six months after it was published here!

Top referrers are consistently Socialist Unity, Dave's Part and the Stokie politics blog, Pits n Pots.

AVPS's second year has been very kind. When I last checked it is linked to by 157 blogs and websites, of whom 128 are active (defined as updated within the last 45 days). Aside from getting a posting gig at Socialist Unity (and I do plan to return posting soon, Andy!), AVPS has variously had material plugged on the Carnival of Socialism, Stumbling and Mumbling, the Britblog Roundup, and Liberal Conspiracy. And this humble vehicle made #17 and #57 in the self-styled King of Blogging's top 100 left blogs and top 100 political blogs. That's not bad for a shameless provincial without metropolitan, media, and Oxbridge connections ;)

The best thing about the blog's second year is not that it's grown into a slightly bigger fish, but rather the pond has got somewhat larger. For instance, if you were to cast your eyes over to the blog roll you will see (under 'The Marxists') the CWI stable has expanded to 11 blogs (if you include this one). And those are the ones I know of. There could be more out there! And despite some blogs falling into inactivity, the number of comrades - mainly independent socialists and Marxists - trying their hands at blogging has increased, giving us a right bright and breezy collective of leftwingers commanding ever greater numbers of readers.

Where now for A Very Public Sociologist? Well, nowhere really! The third year of the blog will offer the same eclectic mix of the sociological, the political, and yes, occasionally the musical too. Cheers to all the regular readers for sticking with my slightly schizophrenic ramblings.

Workers' Power, Manx Style

If you were to open a copy of this week's Socialist, you will find this seldom-noted gem of British labour movement history, courtesy of Christian Daugherty.

On 3 July this year it was the 90th anniversary of the little-known Manx general strike, the Isle of Man's first and only general strike. Its immediate cause was the withdrawal of the subsidy to the flour industry, resulting in rising bread prices. This sparked unprecedented mass strike action across the island, bringing it to a complete standstill for the next two days and under effective control of the strike committee. The strike was only called off after it had forced the government to continue the subsidy.

The Manx government and the Lieutenant of the Isle of Man, Lord Raglan, were very unpopular because of their resistance to reform. Manx workers and poor farmers were angered that the government had repeatedly postponed the introduction of direct taxation of wealth (this was seen as more fair than indirect taxation), old age pensions, national insurance and workmen's compensation. All of which had already been introduced in the rest of Britain.

As early during the war as 1916, there was a demonstration against the government at the Tynwald day ceremony.

Lord Raglan was met with shouts of 'resign'. When the Manx parliament, the House of Keys was mentioned, there were shouts of 'dissolve'. Demonstrators carried signs saying 'no food taxes', 'direct taxation' and calling for old age pensions. Speakers were met with boos and jeers and at one point someone threw a clump of mud and grass which hit Lord Raglan in the face.

On 20 April 1918 the Laxey miners went on strike for better wages, but were ordered back to work by the minister of munitions pending a decision on their case. Manx workers were then further angered by the raising of indirect taxation in April, the raising of the military age to 51 in May and the announcement of a government surplus of over £40,000 in June.

The final straw came with the removal of the nine-penny loaf. At which point the workers vowed to remain on strike until it was restored.

On the evening of Wednesday 3 July 1918 trade union leaders on the island called a general strike. They formed a strike committee composed of trade unionists that sat continuously for the next two days, at the strike headquarters in Salisbury Hall. The strike committee was in effect a soviet and an embryonic form of workers' power on the Isle of Man.

The practical power of the strike committee is demonstrated by the fact that during the strike only one boat sailed to the island from Liverpool. This was with permission of the strike committee and on condition that upon arrival its crew should also stop work and join the strike for its duration. No boats left the island.

On Thursday morning the government was shocked when mail and passenger boats didn't arrive and the cargo workers refused to load the ships. Amongst the sailors, firemen and cargo workers there was full union membership and 100% support for the strike.

The railway management had high hopes of using non-union labour to run services and early on Thursday morning there were some trains to Douglas, but only one from Douglas to the south of the island.

Its passengers brought news of the strike in Douglas, resulting in a crowd gathering at the station and holding a spontaneous demonstration in support of the strike. The crowd then persuaded the non-union train drivers and the train guards to join the strike.

At noon a crowd mainly consisting of women and children marched to the Douglas train station to prevent any more trains running. Having arrived they persuaded the signal operator and the clerical staff to join the strike and no more trains ran during the strike.

There were also a few electric trams from Ramsey to Douglas early on Thursday morning, run by non-union workers and management. The union workforce protested in Ramsey and a meeting in Douglas, called by the strike committee, ended with a half mile procession to the electric tram station. There were no further tram journeys for the remainder of the strike.

After this, the strike remained solid throughout the island for the rest of Thursday and Friday, resulting in the cancelling of the Tynwald day ceremony on Friday. At 3pm on Friday the government announced they would continue the flour subsidy. Having achieved their aim the strike was called off and the workers returned to work triumphant after the two most tumultuous days in the history of the Manx labour movement.

The Manx working class still remained very radicalised after the strike ended. On Armistice Day, trade unionist and general strike leader Hall Caine made a speech. He said of the war that: "Liberty has nearly been wrecked during the last four years. We have seen it as we see a ship sometimes outside - beset with tumultuous seas, with the black cormorants of autocracy screeching and squirming above it. "

The Manx ruling class took fright at the general strike and the show of strength by the Manx working class. It came only seven months after the October revolution in Russia had brought the Russian working class to power. This show of strength frightened them into making concessions.

Firstly the government agreed to continue the flour subsidy. Through continued pressure, within two years of the strike most of the July 1916 demonstrators' demands had been won.

On 27 July 1918 the income tax bill was signed by the Tynwald. On 17 December Lord Raglan, Lieutenant of the Isle of Man resigned after sixteen years. This was followed by the passing of the adult suffrage bill in February 1919 and the workmen's compensation bill in March 1919. The old age pension and national health insurance bill was passed in May 1920.

As the current economic crisis in the financial sector hits the island, the lessons of the general strike will become increasingly important for Manx workers.

The Isle of Man's economy is even more dependent on the financial/service sector than the UK. In 2000 it was estimated to be about 86% of GDP. As the crisis bites, Manx workers will face the biggest attack on jobs, pay and public services for a generation. This is after more than 20 years of economic growth have resulted in a certain stabilisation of living standards.

The general strike has important lessons for UK workers today, who have already faced more than a generation of attacks on their living standards. As the economic crisis grinds on we will face intensified attacks.

The Manx general strike shows that workers, through united strike action, can completely paralyse the power of a government. They can force the ruling class into a retreat and win progressive reforms benefitting all workers.

This would not have been possible without the trade unions having strong membership and the active participation by the workers. A determined, trusted and elected trade union leadership was also essential.

Unfortunately there was no Bolshevik-type party to take the political leadership and push the movement forward towards socialism.

Serious reforms cannot be gained by persuading the capitalists that aspects of their society are unjust. They can only be gained by directly opposing capitalism, with the power of the organised labour movement.

Back

Very sorry for not blogging lately. Unfortunately, CBC's aunt passed away last Friday after a battle with a long illness. As with all things of this nature, the experience hasn't been a particularly pleasant one, especially as we were close. I'm sure readers will understand why I haven't blogged and why I put the comments under moderation.

But life goes on, and the AVPS conveyor belt will be delivering a series of posts on this and that over the next few days. I've also had a look at the blog roll for the first time in yonks, and was disappointed to see so many left blogs fall by the wayside. Will two have sprung up for every inactive blog? Has leftyblogland acquired hydra-like properties yet? If it has do let me know and the blog roll will be modified to reflect that.

Brief(ish) Hiatus

Apologies to AVPS readers for not being on the ball of late. I've got some family stuff going on at the moment, which is more pressing than churning out the latest blog post. That said, hopefully something will flow out of my finger tips later this week should the opportunity present itself. But don't hold your breath! In the meantime either give AVPS a wide berth or amuse yourselves debating fascist-friend-of-the-blog, the 'Sentinel', on this here thread, at least until normal service has been resumed.