It is a truth universally acknowledged that the fire of radical politics burns fiercest when fuelled by the polemic of other radicals. Nowhere is this truer than the ruinous, ceaseless battle between transwomen and activists who've come to be known (pejoratively) as trans-exclusionary radical feminists. I'm not going to get too much into that fight. There's little point my mansplaining matters to readers, especially as there's plenty of stuff out there already.
I agree with Caroline Criado-Perez, 'cis' is not a neutral term merely meaning "not-trans". Bound up in trans discourse with something called 'cis-privilege', Caroline is right to ask what this "privilege" means in practice for non-trans women. The privilege of being accepted as a woman means taking all the crap women deal with. She notes that some kind of rarefied gender identity is not core to her personal identity as a feeling, thinking human being, but we live in a society where her body emits signs that constitute her as a woman in the eyes of other women and men, and all that that entails. Likewise, me being 'a man' is not central to my sense of self either. Other things are. Yet the difference between Caroline and I is the fact my wiry, gawky frame has been coded male since birth and I am accepted as a man in all of my daily interactions. The fact gender identity doesn't impinge on my personal identity is a consequence of gender privilege, of being a member of the dominant gender. Caroline's contributions on the debate are especially useful because she places the materiality of the lived, social body at the centre of her approach to the relationship between feminism and transpolitics. It's a reminder that gender is not a free-roaming PoMo signifier that slips and slides all over the place.
Yet it's not transwomen who need reminding about the materiality of gender. As Juliet Jacques notes, transitioning and living as a woman is difficult precisely because of the weight hanging on gender. Harassment, violence, discrimination, the struggle to access medical services, these are the risks undertaken when changing gender. It is a fraught, stressful experience. Committing to the change takes guts.
Ultimately, it's this materiality that is the root of the so-called TERF wars. For radical feminists who have a problem with transwomen, allowing them to access women-only feminist spaces risks the dilution of bringing out cis women's experience of gendered oppression. It might make some women who've suffered at the hands of male violence feel uncomfortable. There is also the notion that transwomen are acting as agents of patriarchal social relations. For example, the hegemonic femininity radical feminism kicks against is an object the ideology of passing works towards. Radical feminism contests it. Transitioning valorises it. Far from contesting gender, transwomen confirm it and thereby strengthen the patriarchy. For transwomen, for a section of feminism to join in with all the avalanche of crap, to have ostensibly progressive people question their right to exist - and worse - is intolerable. Hence the violence of online exchanges, of the prevalence of 'TERF scum' as an insult, and its escalation into encompassing mainstream feminists, like Caroline, and Sarah Ditum, who do ask serious questions about gender.
The TERF wars are not about bloody-mindedness. It is a product of material experience, of how two sets of women live, theorise and politicise gender. The issues, however, are not insurmountable.
Here we go again. In the topsy turvy Tory world of our beloved Department for Work and Pensions secretary, joblessness is not caused by a lack of jobs but instead "cultures of worklessness". To his mind, there are millions living it up on the taxpayer dollar - skivers being kept in e-cigs, iPads and Jeremy Kyle appearances. They do not work because they have no incentive to take a job. It's all bullshit and myth. When a million people queue up every week down the food bank, surely IBS and his chums at the Department would be more concerned about fixing that very real, very pressing, problem.
IBS is a stupid man. Fortunately for him these shortcomings failed to get showcased on Monday thanks to other, more pressing news items - not least a former Tory minister moaning about the lack of a spare room subsidy for MPs. Still, the speech was interesting for what it reveals about the Tories today, as well as the contradictions their inexorable decline are tying them up in. His claims the bedroom tax, tougher sanctions, work capability assessments and the like have responsibility for the "jobs miracle" Nothing to do with cutting up jobs and long-term self-employment depressing the jobless figures (and also wage packets), you understand.
The Tories know their strong suits are benefit-bashing and immigration. They can extend to depths other parties will not reach. In his speech, IBS notes that new arrivals to these shores have taken the lion share of new jobs created while resident Brits like like a Kardashian on the taxpayer dollar. This, for him, is proof enough that social security "creates" unemployment.
What passes for common sense in Conservative circles is that markets are good, and the state is a superbad. The value of a commodity, regardless of what it is, is determined by the market. That is the the millions of different sales and purchases constantly ongoing at any moment. Even front benchers know that a quid for four pints of milk is good, that three quid is steep. Sellers have learned from past transactions the optimum price for maximum sales and maximum profits. Consumers know what they regard as a reasonable price. As this happens spontaneously and reaches a certain equilibrium, sellers and buyers benefit around an optimum level for both. Replace enlightened anarchy with the state's well-meaning meddling and it all goes screwy. Equilibrium is knocked out of balance, things go wrong, businesses go bust, and the economy takes a dive out a 16th storey window.
If you follow the logic of this argument through to the buying and selling of labour power, to labour markets, you might ask this question. If the majority of jobs being created are taken up by overseas workers, are the bulk of vacancies offered at market rates beneath the price resident Britons are prepared to work for? Anecdotally, yes. This is the more sophisticated reasoning to attacks on social security, even if it so much gloss for their tired punitive populism. Nevertheless, to follow the logic through, social security is distorting the market because dole and other support, like disability, housing, and child benefit, provides workers a means of subsistence outside of employment. Cut this back by tougher criteria and benefit caps, resident workers are forced into a buyer's market. Restricting access to the labour market for overseas workers ticks so many electoral boxes too. IBS's hopes are fewer workers coming here means more Brit-born workers working, and a lower benefit bill.
Labour often mention how the Tories propose to solve Britain's economic woes by a race to the bottom. They deny it, but here it is. IBS has announced it as official policy. Viewed through the prism of Britain's political economy, since Thatcher their approach to economics has been consistently 'vertical'. Rather than government take the strategic lead in investment, technological development, skills, their preference - beneath high falutin neoliberal nah-nah - is make the workers pay to restore profitability. It meant smashing the labour movement, gutting workplace legislation, letting bullying management run riot, and rooting out working class culture. Imagine a business that increases its profitability by paring back on contributions to its staff pension pot, forcing employees to work longer for less, and summarily dismissing anyone who complains. This is what the Tories have done and want to continue to do to Britain in the name of market fundamentalism. Invisible hand or mailed fist?
It won't work, either. It won't get the economy moving. Racing to the bottom won't put money in workers' pockets. But the Tories do not care. It marginally strengthens capital and their class further, they continue to coin it, though in the medium/long-term it will do nothing to arrest British capital's slow decline.
From an interview with Amy Goodman published on the Democracy Now website. This segment of the interview focuses specifically on boycott, divestment and sanctions. There's a brief comment that follows:
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, I wanted to ask you about your recent piece for The Nation on Israel-Palestine and BDS. You were critical of the effectiveness of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. One of the many responses came from Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the Jerusalem Fund and its educational program, the Palestine Center. He wrote, quote, "Chomsky’s criticism of BDS seems to be that it hasn’t changed the power dynamic yet, and thus that it can’t. There is no doubt the road ahead is a long one for BDS, but there is also no doubt the movement is growing ... All other paths toward change, including diplomacy and armed struggle, have so far proved ineffective, and some have imposed significant costs on Palestinian life and livelihood." Could you respond?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, actually, I did respond. You can find it on The Nation website. But in brief, far from being critical of BDS, I was strongly supportive of it. One of the oddities of what’s called the BDS movement is that they can’t — many of the activists just can’t see support as support unless it becomes something like almost worship: repeat the catechism. If you take a look at that article, it very strongly supported these tactics. In fact, I was involved in them and supporting them before the BDS movement even existed. They’re the right tactics.
But it should be second nature to activists—and it usually is—that you have to ask yourself, when you conduct some tactic, when you pursue it, what the effect is going to be on the victims. You don’t pursue a tactic because it makes you feel good. You pursue it because it’s going—you estimate that it’ll help the victims. And you have to make choices. This goes way back. You know, say, back during the Vietnam War, there were debates about whether you should resort to violent tactics, say Weathermen-style tactics. You could understand the motivation—people were desperate—but the Vietnamese were strongly opposed. And many of us, me included, were also opposed, not because the horrors don’t justify some strong action, but because the consequences would be harm to the victims. The tactics would increase support for the violence, which in fact is what happened. Those questions arise all the time.
Unfortunately, the Palestinian solidarity movements have been unusual in their unwillingness to think these things through. That was pointed out recently again by Raja Shehadeh, the leading figure in—lives in Ramallah, a longtime supporter, the founder of Al-Haq, the legal organization, a very significant and powerful figure. He pointed out that the Palestinian leadership has tended to focus on what he called absolutes, absolute justice—this is the absolute justice that we want—and not to pay attention to pragmatic policies. That’s been very obvious for decades. It used to drive people like Eqbal Ahmad, the really committed and knowledgeable militant—used to drive him crazy. They just couldn’t listen to pragmatic questions, which are what matter for success in a popular movement, a nationalist movement. And the ones who understand that can succeed; the ones who don’t understand it can’t. If you talk about—
AMY GOODMAN: What choices do you feel that the BDS movement, that activists should make?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, they’re very simple, very clear. In fact, I discussed them in the article. Those actions that have been directed against the occupation have been quite successful, very successful. Most of them don’t have anything to do with the BDS movement. So take, say, one of the most extreme and most successful is the European Union decision, directive, to block any connection to any institution, governmental or private, that has anything to do with the Occupied Territories. That’s a pretty strong move. That’s the kind of move that was taken with regard to South Africa. Just a couple of months ago, the Presbyterian Church here called for divestment from any multinational corporation that’s involved in any way in the occupation. And there’s been case after case like that. That makes perfect sense.
There are also—so far, there haven’t been any sanctions, so BDS is a little misleading. It’s BD, really. But there could be sanctions. And there’s an obvious way to proceed. There has been for years, and has plenty of support. In fact, Amnesty International called for it during the Cast Lead operations. That’s an arms embargo. For the U.S. to impose an arms embargo, or even to discuss it, would be a major issue, major contribution. That’s the most important of the possible sanctions.
And there’s a basis for it. U.S. arms to Israel are in violation of U.S. law, direct violation of U.S. law. You look at U.S. foreign assistance law, it bars any military assistance to any one country, unit, whatever, engaged in consistent human rights violations. Well, you know, Israel’s violation of human rights violations is so extreme and consistent that you hardly have to argue about it. That means that U.S. aid to Israel is in—military aid, is in direct violation of U.S. law. And as Pillay pointed out before, the U.S. is a high-contracting party to the Geneva Conventions, so it’s violating its own extremely serious international commitments by not imposing—working to impose the Geneva Conventions. That’s an obligation for the high-contracting parties, like the U.S. And that means to impose—to prevent a violation of international humanitarian law, and certainly not to abet it. So the U.S. is both in violation of its commitments to international humanitarian law and also in violation of U.S. domestic law. And there’s some understanding of that.
I am in two minds about a BDS of Israel. Certainly, turning arms exports to Israel into a live political issue is entirely fruitful. Our government's weak criticisms of Israel's indiscriminate bombing of Gaza while letting armaments flow uninterrupted from Britain's munitions factories means some responsibility falls to them, and will continue to do so should the present three-day truce collapse into a resumption of butchery. This should, I think, be the most fruitful focus of the various Palestinian solidarity campaigns in the West. As we gear up to the general election, the Tories and LibDems are vulnerable on this. An arms embargo is a limited but entirely achievable aim under the present circumstances.
The problem with a boycott campaign more generally is it lacks focus. Rather than a single objective activists are running round establishing what digits on barcodes indicate their origin in Israel, and hunting through the web of company ownership to find what share holders own what, how much, and so on. And the problem is a boycott can run into absurdity too. How much energy was expended on the Tricycle Theatre debacle, for example? And, of course, with Israel and its supporters always happy to denounce its opponents as anti-semitic, how can a boycott campaign be stopped from growing over into a general boycott of non-Israeli Jewish businesses? With anti-semitic incidents on the rise, a broader boycott has to tread very carefully.
Lastly, while Chomsky is relatively positive about the efficacy of boycotts and divestment, I'm not so sure. Yes, a blacking of Israeli goods would certainly damage Israel. To see their economy fall through the floor as a direct consequence of their government's barbarism might prove heartening for some. But just what is a boycott trying to achieve? There's a question with a seemingly obvious answer - to force Israel to negotiate meaningfully with its neighbours, to lift the Gaza blockade, to stop bombing and threatening defenceless Arab populations. Would that be the outcome? I doubt it. The poisonous character of Israeli politics is fed partly by a perceived existential crisis, of a state hemmed in by hostile powers. Of course, it is absurd. 2014 is not 1948, 1967 or 1973. The homemade rockets of Hamas are but a flimsy pretext for Israel to continue using Gaza as a punch bag. However, absolutely crucial for a settlement and lasting peace - be it two states, or some kind of South African-style solution, is a political sea change in Israel itself. Would securing such a change, as remote it seems now, be aided by a boycott, or would it increase the popular sense of siege?
My home village was built on coal. All the local mines had shut before 1984 and open casting was the name of the game. Up until I left home you could see great mountains of slag and earth crouching on the horizon, the engines and buzzers of diggers echoing across the landscape early every morning. There were plenty of current and ex-miners living locally and yet my memory of the time during the Miners' Strike draws a blank. As I was seven at the time, there was only the dimmest of dim awarenesses that something called 'a strike' was happening with the miners. I can remember it as background noise in the nightly news, and getting an occasional mention on Spitting Image (when my parents let me watch it - because I thought the puppets were funny). But of the strike in the village, I don't recall a thing. I can't remember any collections. There were no coal not dole badges. None of my school mates appeared to be affected. This titanic struggle passed my childhood by. Some feat considering we lived a stone's throw from south Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire: the crucible of the strike.
It is difficult to overstate the impact the Miners' Strike has had on British political and social history. Everything about politics you know now has been heavily conditioned by the outcome of that battle. Had the strike turned out differently, had the Tory plan to close the pits been seen off there would have been no neoliberalism, no New Labour, no mass privatisations, no unbalanced economy, no race to the bottom. And no more Thatcher. The death of the so-called iron lady would have invited comparisons with Ted Heath, the Tory PM humbled by the miners. You might have had the likes of John Redwood and Norman Tebbit fondly recalling their days in the Downing Street bunker, and of them pouring over table-sized mock ups of how a free market Britain might look, an awful vision strangled at birth by the mass pickets of the miners.
In his excellent book, Look Back In Anger, my friend Harry Paterson calls the Miners' Strike an "industrial Stalingrad" because of the ferocity of the fight, the resources it sucked in, and the history-defining stakes it raised. There is no more apt an analogy.
Harry's book concentrates on telling the story of the strike in Nottinghamshire where, throughout the year-long struggle, the majority of colliers crossed picket lines and carried on working. This takes in a brief overview of miners' organisations upto the eve of the strike. Interestingly, what was to happen later had local precedence. 'Spencerism', so-named after the Broxtowe Labour MP George Alfred Spencer conspired to and successfully led a Notts breakaway from the Miners' Federation during the 1926 General Strike. In short, the Area had previous. Yet that does not explain why thousands of miners carried on working while their comrades nearly everywhere else were solid in heeding the strike call.
Harry's account of the unfolding battle in Nottinghamshire is socialist history writing at its best. The violence meted out by the police, the frame ups, intimidation, the home invasions of striking miners, Harry is as sparing of the police as they were of miners and their supporters 30 years ago. The press and politicians at the time praised the courage of working miners on the Notts coalfield. It's very easy to be brave when you have the full might of the government at your back. Quite another to stand up to that. Harry captures the solidarity and empowerment of the workers who took this on. Quite rightly the essential work of Women Against Pit Closures is afforded its central place. And the realisation of doom creeps in as the strike wears on into the winter, with opportunities for negotiated settlements and solidarity action disappearing. The final nail was the settling of a parallel dispute between the pit deputies' union NACODS and the Coal Board (the presence of a deputy in the pit was a legal requirement for a mine to continue operating).
As the book works through the strike, the breakaway of the Notts-based Union of Democratic Mineworkers, the subsequent collapse of the industry, and the disgusting decision of Labour awarding the UDM a monopoly on handling compensation claims arising from Vibration White Finger, Harry takes the scalpel to a few myths. First, 'there should have been a national ballot'. The book explains the NUM was not a unitary organisation but a federation in which each of its Areas had a large degree of autonomy. Each of the Areas came out after South Yorkshire according to local ballots that were fully constitutional. The dispute was latter ratified as national by a special delegates conference of the NUM's areas, and the motion for a national ballot was voted down. Not that a ballot ratifying strike action would have made a difference to the Nottinghamshire majority anyway. Nevertheless, what this clearly shows - and Harry is able to document throughout - is how a ballot was not in the gift of Arthur Scargill to grant. The 30 years of calumny shovelled his way is exactly that. While, of course, the leadership handled negotiations, the strike was very much run, driven and led by the rank-and-file. To make it a matter of NUM leadership, as Tories and Trots in their own way did at the time and have continued to do so since betrays a basic ignorance of the struggle.
The miners could have won the strike had the TUC delivered secondary action promised, had NACODS rejected a deal, had - perhaps - the leadership produced a slightly different negotiating strategy. But it was the Nottinghamshire majority, the scabs, Margaret's men, the blacklegs who could not see beyond the end of their nose that killed the strike. Notts area contained the most productive and modern of Britain's pits. They saved the government's bacon. Without Thatcher's fifth column breaking the miners and with it, Britain's labour movement, the government's task would have been far harder, if not impossible. That is where responsibility for the failure of the Miners' Strike, the smashing of an industry, the destruction of hundreds of communities, lies. These people are responsible for the dog-eat-dog society we have now. Not with NUM. And certainly not Scargill. They betrayed all our futures.
For a relatively short volume, Harry has produced the definitive overview. In his hands, the period, the class struggle comes alive. If you're in the labour movement, new to politics, new to socialism, Look Back In Anger is indispensable.
War is politics by other, violent means. Proving the axiom right now is the arc of slaughter carving a great bloody crescent out of the Middle East. Start from the Mediterranean coast and move gradually in. The racist hysteria in Israel has found an outlet in the carefree pounding of the Gaza Strip. Civilians? Children? Collateral, Guv. Blame Hamas. Scan eastwards and we find Assad's regime just about clinging on. This secular but brutal monarchy has defended itself by any and all means at its disposal, be it torture, massacre and, arguably, chemical weapons. As despicable Israel's actions are, Assad's crimes in the Syrian civil war are far, far worse. Further east still there are the mediaevalists of ISIS, or the 'Islamic State' as they style themselves. With a little bit of help from Qatari and Saudi friends, its several thousand misfits and thugs have carved out a petty caliphate the size of Ireland. Except it's not that petty if you're on the receiving end of it. Many a fundamentalist has raised the cry "death to the infidels!" Only IS has a morality deficit large enough to operationalise it.
As we know, their lightning fast advance after the rout of the Iraqi army has put hundreds of thousands of people at risk. If you're a Christian, a Shia Muslim, a Yazidi, or lead a secular existence then your life is in danger. If you live in Northern Iraq or North East Syria, you live in a land that could bear witness to another round of genocide and religiously-motivated murder.
Unfortunately, from the comfort of Britain some care to dismiss the clear and present threat ISIS poses the people of Syria and Iraq. While the account of the USA's historic shenanigans is spot on, the official Stop the War article on Obama's decision to start bombing ISIS positions is a complacent, tedious piece. It's complacent because it sets up the persecution and massacre of the Yazidi as a lesser evil to the extension of US interests that a bombing campaign would entail. And it's tedious as the hand of Israel and the US is seen everywhere behind the rise of ISIS. For example, the US "allowed" ISIS to run riot to frighten the Iraqi government off closer ties with Tehran. That worked out well.
Does the US have a base among the Kurdish proto-state centred on Erbil? Are they arming and using them to try and keep Baghdad out of Iran's camp? Undoubtedly. After the Iraqi army melted away, are the Kurds working as the State Department's proxy fighters against ISIS? Absolutely. It doesn't matter that the US are bombing ISIS positions and airlifting supplies to stranded Yazidi to shore up the position of their regional clients. Faced with life under an American puppet or a short, dark future under genocidal zealots, I would have thought the "progressive choice" be obvious.
This isn't to say there aren't some extremely serious questions demanding answers. Why is it Qatar and Saudi Arabia, whose perverse, fundamentalist autocracy is every bit a staunch an ally of the US as Israel, have been funnelling cash to ISIS without so much as a murmur from Uncle Sam? We in the EU aren't sitting pretty either. How much oil have we been buying from ISIS?
Last month writing about Iraq, I argued that the historic debt the UK and US owes the Iraqi people for smashing up their country and embroiling it in violence that has claimed the lives of almost 200,000 people rules out military action. After all, it ended so well in Afghanistan and Libya, to name two other unhappy countries. That was before the present crisis.
Very occasionally, good reasons and real reasons coincide. This is one of them. ISIS are a barrier to American plans for Iraq. They also pose an extinction threat to anyone falling into their clutches who does not meet their standards of religious hygiene. They need to be stopped. They need to be destroyed. And, at present, there is only one way of doing that.
I'm not ashamed to admit it. Better Off Alone is a damn fine tune from 1999, a song that soundtracked my summer in a sweltering factory.
2013. Labour had a crap summer. As MPs departed for sunnier climes a great gaping political hole opened up. Into its maw poured all kinds of grumbles and whinges, with advice tacked on. "Ed needs to do this. We need some policy. We're not cutting through." Since then Labour's policy maypole has got firmly planted, and the shadow cabinet are spending the silly season dancing around it, tying yet more ideas and initiatives to the mast. Under the heading of 'The Choice', Labour are using the news vacuum to get its message across. Good.
Conversely, Dave's summer woes are piling up. First, there is Gaza. With appalling suffering filling our screens, with Israel's spin being called out as utter bullshit in the court of public opinion, our Prime Minister has been nowhere. There's been a couple of platitudes about Palestinian victims, but these are always qualified by unambiguous support for Israel. That all his office could do was cry foul and accuse the opposition of "playing politics" when Labour condemned the slaughter. Prattling on as if some sort of gentleman's agreement was in effect merely underlined how out of touch the PM is. Once more on a foreign policy issue, Dave has been found wanting. Once more on an issue demanding leadership, Ed Miliband has pre-empted him.
It could all about to get worse for Dave too. The Tory pack's reporting of Sayeeda Warsi's resignation yesterday has been ungraceful by their own shoddy standards. Having seen hard Tory Zionists like Louise Mensch roundly condemn Israel's massacre, I have no doubt Warsi's feeling on this is genuine. Her opposition is in tune with reservations in the wider party too. Andrew Mitchell has come out for an arms embargo on Israel. Hugo Swire is reportedly very unhappy too. Even Boris Johnson, for once, did not mince his words. Dave needs a restive parliamentary party like a splitting headache.
Ah yes, Boris. Finally he's done with the dithering and announced he's looking for a seat. Dave's put on a brave face that fools no one. Yes, Johnson wouldn't be looking for a way back in if he thought the Tories were more likely than not to get back in next year. That much is clear. But what the punditry are missing is how destabilising this could prove to be in the meantime. First, to have the second most senior Tory in the land and, arguably, the party's best-known asset declaring the 2015 match over before the first service can only dampen the mood of Tory activists. Some business-types might hold back the cash thinking it's a lost cause, and others will sit on their hands because they prefer Johnson to lead a "proper" Tory party back to power in 2020.
An additional problem is the Parliamentary Conservative Party or, rather, the behaviour of his lieutenants. Johnson wants the top job. But so do George Osborne and Theresa May. As intellectually deficient the Tories collectively are, they have low cunning in spades. Neither Camp May nor Camp Gidders are going to take a Johnson comeback lying down. In fact, in a rare Machiavellian move Dave's recent reshuffle was about securing the succession for Osborne. As Johnson spoke to the press this morning, text messages and emails winged back and forth inside the respective camps. Grids will be put into place as plans are drawn up. The Tories then will be fighting a two front war - an unconventional general election campaign most of them think they're going to lose, and an internal leadership struggle. With the latter break out into the open before next May? It's difficult to see how it won't.
If going into a difficult election with a dysfunctional party wasn't enough to spoil Dave's summer, there's more. Last night Alistair Darling, on the whole, did a good job debating Alex Salmond. Instead of losing, like - again - the punditry erroneously predicted, Darling arguably won. Yes, the First Minister had him on the ropes a couple of times. But on two key issues - uncertainty over currency, uncertainty over pensions - Salmond retreated into 'it'll be alright on the night' platitudes. And don't even mention the aliens. While for the sake of the union it is a good thing Darling is leading Better Together than Flashman Dave, it looks bad that the Tories are having to rely on Labour leadership to save the status quo. Far more damaging, however, is what the debate augers for the election campaign. Salmond is no push over and is one of the most formidable politicians in the UK. Yet armed with facts and figures Darling was able to effectively oppose substance to style, to slay rhetoric with uncomfortable truths. And, it appears, ordinary people quite liked it. Pleasingly, after obviously following my advice, Ed Miliband's speech on Ed Miliband signals a welcome abandonment of stunts and embraces his wonky, political strengths. This is what 'The Choice' strategy is all about: doubling down on the issues and leaving the airbrushing to Dave. And Dave's back room helpers, the Crosbys, the Messinas, the Murdoch cronies and the like know he hasn't a Tory on Merseyside's chance of going toe-to-toe on this terrain. TV debates? Dave will do all he can to duck them.
If you look at Tory messaging this last year, they think their hope lies in hopelessness, of ramming home relentlessly hate, fear, scapegoating and the tough action needed to crack down on them. Unions, benefits, Europe, immigrants, this is the shit ingot the Tories wish to transmute into electoral gold. Yet when asked what are the most important issues facing voters and their families, respondents on this YouGov poll consistently rank immigration as a low priority issue with welfare and Europe. 'Economy' is edging downwards while housing and, crucially, health are moving in ways Dave would not want them to. And as Labour are determined to personalise the coming election by asking people whether they feel better off now than they did five years ago, it's difficult to see how the Tories can counter this without redoubling their negative efforts.
As Dave holidays in Portugal, he must know the writing is on the wall, that the next nine months are going to be excruciating and agonising as his authority bleeds away and the problems pile up. It couldn't be happening to a nicer guy.
In order to really know an object, one must grasp and investigate all sides of the object, all its relations and 'mediations' ... Second, dialectical logic requires that the object be taken in its development, in its 'self-movement' ... in its transformation. Third, the whole of human praxis must enter into the 'definition' of the object, as well as the critique of its truth, since as a practical determination the object is bound together with what is necessary to man. Fourth, the dialectical logic teaches that 'there is no abstract truth'; truth is always concrete.
Cit Douglas Kellner (1984), Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism, p.52.
A century on and the establishment are still soft-soaping it. So no Dave, no. Britain didn't declare war against Germany for the sake of poor little Belgium, the rights of small nations or for the defence of neutrality. Those then groaning under the weight of our empire might have had a thing or two to say about these matters after all. These were the good reasons. The real reasons, which did not make war an inevitability, was acting to prevent French and Belgian channel ports from becoming German naval bases, and putting the Wilhelmine upstart back into its box. Cold, hard interests carried the day in the lead up to the declaration. Humanitarian concern was so much flim-flammery.
The question is why was this senseless and utterly unnecessary slaughter allowed to happen? Recall the extraordinary Basel Congress of the Second International in 1912. It passed a manifesto declaring the following:
If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.
In case war should break out anyway it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.
Fine words. Stirring words. This was not the rhetoric of some cranky sect gathered in Switzerland's version of Conway Hall either. The Second International was a mass movement. Its sections ranged from important working class parties to organisations numbering millions of members, affiliates and supporters. The German Social Democrats were the jewel in the crown, and its formal commitment to Marxism provided the International its shared intellectual reference point. Yet with the outbreak of war, Lenin reportedly fell off his chair and condemned his copy of Vorwärts (the SPD's paper) a forgery for reporting that the party's deputies had unanimously voted for war credits in the Reichstag. How did the mighty movement committed to turning imperialist war into class war fall apart? Why did sections of the Second International, with a few exceptions - most notably the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), rally to their national colours?
The contemporary revolutionary opposition lay responsibility for international socialism's betrayal at the feet of its leaders, and the argument has changed little in the intervening century. Rather than doing the right, revolutionary thing, the official Marxists of Germany, Austria and France, and the Labourists of Britain took the opportunist road, of treading the path of least resistance. Yet this was not a failure of nerve. Long before 1914 Rosa Luxemburg was regularly polemicising against the revisionism and opportunism of the SPD line. Her argument was that for a clique within international Social Democracy, their position as party and union bureaucrats invested them in the small gain here, the compromise there. They had become mediators of the relation between capital and labour. When push came to shove they jumped into the nationalist camp of war to maintain their privileged position, and were happy to deliver the factory and battlefield fodder to imperial interests. Lenin had made a not too dissimilar analysis of trade unionism and the class struggle in his maligned and misunderstood What is to be Done?. When he returned to his senses he took Luxemburg's basic position and argued the collapse of the International was thanks to a 'labour aristocracy' encompassing party and union bureaucracies, but taking in all kinds of layers of relatively privileged workers. While also dependent on selling their labour power for a wage, their higher living standards were brought by the "super profits" extracted from the colonies. As beneficiaries from colonialism, they had an immediate interest in maintaining empires and therefore acted as bourgeois contaminants in the workers' movement. As they had extended their sway through those movements, so social democratic and labour parties succumbed to reformism and, latterly, chauvinism and war fever.
This tale, with little modification, still passes for an explanation in Trotskyist and Stalinist circles. It is, however, obviously false. Not only was no evidence forthcoming proving the transfer of "super profits", but it also neglected to mention that Germany's "empire" was economically negligible, and Austro-Hungary had no colonies at all. Their wealth stemmed not from imperial plunder but international markets in economic competition with the other great powers. The second problem is an implied elitism, of assuming that where the leaders go the masses shall meekly follow. Had your Eberts, your Scheidemanns, your Hendersons, et al rallied workers to the class war banner then the July crisis would have grown over into a crisis of capitalism.
While the argument is a non-starter, it does avoid having to ask awkward questions about the political capacity of Europe's working class at that time. In Britain, the first six months of 1914, there were over 40 million strike days - only the strikes of 1921 and 1926 saw greater numbers taking industrial action. That July, St Petersburg was paralysed by 135,000 workers taking strike action and calling for the monarchy's abolition. Workers were conscious of their interests and were quite prepared to stand up for them in the workplace and against the authorities. How to explain the about face, of militancy evaporating and millions flocking to sign up? To answer the question is to put a huge question mark over the viability of revolutionary socialist politics. While Luxemburg and Lenin were right that the upper echelons of the labour movement had become integrated into their respective national capitalisms, so had the majority of workers themselves. Far from plain sailing, nevertheless Britain was a representative democracy of sorts and had improved the lot of working people through piecemeal grind here, strike action there. Ditto for imperial Germany and republican France. The parties and organisations of workers had wrested significant concessions from bosses and governments. Allied to rising living standards, pragmatism appeared to work. This was the early phase of the attempted institutionalisation of class conflict, and it seemed to be working. The majority of workers had a stake in the bourgeois state, in their nation. Conversely, despite double-digit growth, Tsarism in Russia and its struggle to maintain the autocracy actively stymied the rise of its growing working class. By denying it a stake in their system, Russian proletarians were more combative, more open to revolutionary ideas, more likely to resist the call to war - and even then they were not totally immune.
As organised labour movements found their feet and successfully prosecuted their interests it's small wonder the increasing sense of advance, of security, of solidarity contributed to nationalism's mass appeal. Hence when declarations of war were met with outbreaks of class peace, it was the case the leaders were following the workers, not the other way round. The Socialist International was not able to prevent the war because the working class enthusiastically went along with it. It wasn't just the lamps that went out across Europe one hundred years ago. The hope European capitalism could be brought down by revolutionary socialism was snuffed out too.
Image: Crowds celebrate in Trafalgar Square after Britain declares war on Germany.
It's not news that the fifth generation of consoles left a legacy of some truly ugly games. Something like the first iteration of Tomb Raider on the PlayStation or Sega Saturn looks rank by today's standards. Back then it was very well-received and appreciated as a technical achievement, but no one ever thought the game was pretty. Such is the lot of the three dimensional games that appeared on said systems and its contemporary, the Nintendo 64. They were to 3D what the old Atari 2600 was to two dimensional gaming. Great to play, grim to look at.
Granted there were a few that looked alright, and as per the laws of video game life as the consoles aged programmers got a better grip with the hardware and wringed bravura performances out of the circuitry. One such game happens to be my recent obsession: Ridge Racer Type 4. Released on these shores in September '99, by this time I had lost interest in video games even though, like nearly everyone else, we had a PlayStation too. So approaching a retro game without any familiarity or nostalgia is, I suppose, like normal gamers buying new, modern titles.
The original Ridge Racer was a coin-op conversion and launch title for the PlayStation and, as such, looks a bit ropey even by the system's standards. As Namco's cutting edge arcade game, and like every good launch title, it showed up not only what it could do better vis a vis its geriatric predecessors but also its potential. It was a reason-to-buy along with a killer clutch of early software that, sadly for Sega, its Saturn rival did not match. As such Ridge Racer established itself in the PlayStation canon, even if (whisper it) the game wasn't all that playability-wise. Two generally well thought-of sequels followed before Type 4 arrived on the scene.
I've already alluded to it, so I'll say it explicitly. For a PlayStation racing game, Type 4 is as gorgeous as it gets. Blockiness is reduced to a minimum, the so-called 'PlayStation shimmer' isn't that distracting, the cars and environments are well drawn. The colour scheme is especially praise-worthy. When you're bombing around the tracks the brilliant blues or downbeat hues of dusky digital skies is enough to make you think it's summer outside. We all know tunes can be summery, but games? The lighting effects on the cars and roads for night time driving give the game a stylish edge that retro gamers appreciate in Japanese-made titles. Seeing the fireworks explode as you race the final track on new year's eve '99 is indicative of the craft approach Japanese designers are known for. The soundtrack too is excellent. As a mix of drum and bass, ambient techno and proto-trance it conveys a hyper modern, if not futurist feel on proceedings.
As per its arcade roots, Type 4 is not a simulation. The accent is on playability, of flouting the laws of physics as you glide around corners at speeds in excess of 190kph. The responsiveness of the cars vary, but everything works as it should. And the artificial intelligence isn't bad either. I swear there have been too many times when computer-controlled opponents have blocked me from overtaking them, and by far the worst offender is your team mate!
Type 4 was after Sony's own Gran Turismo changed the terms of video game racing. It could not offer the depth of that title's career mode, and so replied in other ways. This, if you like, is the 'sociology bit'. At £40 a pop and with no trophies or achievements to shout about, responsible game designers had long been keen to maximise value for money, or last-ability. Secret levels or ratcheting up the game hours was one strategy, the other - common to racing games - was the pursuit of ephemeral experiences. Type 4 typifies this. The game comes with 'just' eight tracks and two single-player game modes, the 'Racing Roots Grand Prix 1999' and a race against the clock. There are also four racing teams with four car manufacturers (corresponding to difficulty levels). Racing each possible combination and qualifying for races in all the different qualifying positions unlocks cars for the time attack mode. There are 320 in total. Life's definitely too short. Yet there will be hundreds of thousands of gamers out there who spent countless hours either side of the millennium unlocking most or all of them. Yet think about the substance of the experience - the racing of slightly different designs around the same eight circuits with, in most cases, very slight variations in handling, speed and acceleration between them.
This hunt for ephemeral experience is integral to the ethics of gaming before the internet. Born of necessity, of the vast majority of console gamers not being able to buy a new game every week, mastery comes from playing something to death, of knowing absolutely every secret, every stratagem and sharpening up transferable gaming skills. Being able to kill Type 4, for instance, puts the player in a good position to display their skills if they have a gaming sesh on other racing games around a mate's house or, back then, in an arcade. From the publisher's point of view, building in such content was more than just good practice. Drawing the player into the hunt for ephemera primed the market for future titles in the franchise. The gamer knows that future iterations will carry over many of the features and game play they found so compelling. In Type 4's case, there have been eight titles for a variety of formats since.
As a retro experience, there are few PlayStation racers that have stood up as well as this. Give it a spin.
