The University of Derby's Centre for Society, Religion and Belief hosted a conference on Muslim Women's Activism earlier today. It saw sessions on Muslim women challenging religious conservatism, extremism, education, and the part played by them in Middle Eastern protest and revolutionary movements. 'Everyday encounters: how Muslim women who chose to wear the niqab engage with their communities', given by Anna Piela of Leeds Trinity University interested me because of what it mentioned in passing: why is the niqab (often wrongly lumped in with the burqa) persistently regarded as an object of unease?
Anyone who's been around the left for a while will recognise the leading explanations for this anxiety. The first is the abiding legacy of orientalism and imperialism on Western cultures: the idea that the peoples of the East, specifically the Middle East to the Far East are culturally, politically, and technologically inferior to the West, and yet pose some kind of existential threat to it. Lump that in with the experience of imperialism as the colonising countries, you're left with a lingering set of racist attitudes and prejudices. True, in Britain overt racism has declined and anti-racism is officially promoted, but those roots have the habit of growing back and taking on new shapes. For example, "liberal" opposition to the niqab and Islam generally assumes women who wear the veil are victims forced to do so, or are unwitting dupes who collude in their oppression. This is because Islam is uniquely reactionary, etc. A variant of the liberal concern for Muslim women helped justify Bush jr's War on Terror, and fed the simplistic and intellectually bunk clash of civilisations thesis.
Orientalist, racist, and bastardised enlightenment ideas allied to geopolitical objectives is but one factor. Another oft-cited explanation is the pervasive quality of the 'male gaze', the taken-for-granted assumption that women's bodies can be sexually evaluated according to various sets of arbitrary but hegemonic criteria (smooth skin, pretty face, even proportions, ample boobs, shapely behind, fuckability), and that we all have a natural right to be able to so scrutinise them. Whole industries are based around the sexist but everyday cultural assumption that women are always on display. The niqab, which hides not just one's facial features but body shape challenges this "right" head on, even if ultimately its theological justifications are usually premised on equally patriarchal ideas. i.e. Only the husband has the right to gaze upon his wife's features. The assumption here is women are property, and need to be hidden away from men in general because they're beasts incapable of controlling themselves. When you have a culture likes ours in which the sexual objectification of women is mundane, you can understand why conservative ideas like these might find traction.
However, while I accept the validity of both these sets of ideas, that racism and sexism has a lot to do with opposition to the niqab, they fall into what you might call 'radical naivete'. This is something that overplays a given set of values, ideas and practices while, simultaneously, rendering a social problem a relatively simple matter to resolve. In this case if we keep steady progress uncovering and draining the reservoirs sustaining racism and sexism generally, the implication is people's attitudes toward niqab wearers will change and become more accepting almost automatically. I want to argue that the problems niqab wearers face, the general antipathy toward it is more complex. It taps into a series of social relations with long histories that combine with but are not reducible to the problematics of gender and ethnicity or, for that matter, questions of power differentials.
Jacques Derrida wrote books about the 'metaphysics of presence', the unstated assumption in Western cultures that the act of truth-telling is something that should be delivered in person, that the truth be enunciated verbally, that only presence can convey authenticity. The job interview, court case testimony, the confession, the lecture, these are instances and workings out of the privileging of presence. Unsurprisingly, bound up with this is an ethics and aesthetics of the face. You don't need to look into someone's eyes to see their soul, its secrets are given away by the sculpting and contorting of foreheads and lips. It is a banal observation, but the emphasis Western cultures place on face-to-face interaction means non-verbal cues - smiles, twitches, dancing eyes, frowns, the configuring of the face into expressions appropriate to the circumstances - are incredibly important to it. Anything that gets in the way of presenting the self via the face is jarring and sits very uneasily with it.
The second point flows from the first. The masking of faces have definite cultural connotations. There's no point stepping around the issue, in Western cultures from at least mediaeval times the obscuring of the face has been associated with villainy, criminality, and death. Think about our history - the masks plague doctors wore during the Black Death, the closed helms of knights sacking peasant villages for not delivering rent, the cloth covering the hangman's face, the depictions of highway men, artist impressions of Jack the Ripper, oxygen masks doled out during the two world wars, balaclava-wearing IRA and loyalist paramilitaries . The hidden face is unsettling and associated with those dark moments we'd rather not recall. Think about their modern iterations in popular culture. Villains from Scooby Doo to Darth Vader, from Michael Myers to Papa Lazarou, their masks and disguises convey upon them an aura of evil. In everyday life, the concealing of the face is associated with crime - typically robbery. See how the press and politics got themselves into a lather about hoodies, the strong association of them with anti-social behaviour and youthful thuggery. In this cultural context, quite apart from other factors, these deeply-held linkages mean the niqab wearer is from the outset is treated as a suspicious figure, as someone with something to hide and potentially up to no good.
In short, cultural anxiety toward the niqab is more than just sexism and racism. It taps into basic structures of feeling that are core to Western cultures. Does that excuse the antipathy and harassment niqab-wearing women face? No. It does, however, mean that tackling the issue is more complex than anti-racist and feminist explanations suggest.
It's hard to imagine, but it has been five years since Michael Jackson, the self-styled King of Pop, died. While a real tragedy for his family, close friends, and the millions who revered him Jackson's passing was a seminal moment in celebrity culture. It, along with the demise of Jade Goody and the shock deaths of Princess Diana and Peaches Geldof said a great deal about the state of celebrity culture.
For those not old enough to know what Michael Jackson was like before the abuse allegations, his celebrity person was in a league of his own. Growing up in the 1980s, there were only two other two pop megastars that could touch him in the fame stakes: Madonna and Prince. Despite both of them being sexually beguiling figures, it was the comparatively sexless Jackson who commanded the column inches. A household name from the age of six, his star shot into the stratosphere off the back of groundbreaking records that helped define modern pop music. Thriller remains the best-selling album ever. His celebrity was something else, it was a cult of the personality.
Jackson's celebrity reached its apogee in the weird vanity film, 1988's Moonwalker. Watching this tale of 20s criminals, stolen children, and - yes - Jackson's transformation into a car, spaceship and a robot now is an exercise in masochism. Even then, its 93 minutes of hubris was considered a little OTT. Jackson, however, could get away with it. The film positioned him alternately as the champion of kids, as the coolest of the cool, and someone - or something - a world apart from us mere mortals. As if to underline that, you could play him in the video game adaptation - what other celebrity was then rendered in pixellated form?
As celebrity built up Jackson, it was undergoing a mutation. The Gods among us were placed on pedestals by the media, but the money increasingly lay in knocking it away. This was qualitatively different from the gossip and muck-raking of the past. The new capriciousness articulated two contradictory but united moments of celebrity: of destroying its deifying aura, of using the media lens to cut celebrities down to size by revealing their all too human foibles; but paradoxically making celebrity more obtainable and more seductive, as a path to an easy life that trades the pressures of the mundane for an effortless existence in the spotlight.
Michael Jackson's celebrity epitomises this shift. At the unassailable heights of his 80s career, tabloid stories circulated about his erratic behaviour: Neverland, the oxygen chamber, the childlike behaviour, surgery, a shrine to Elizabeth Taylor, Bubbles - all stories parodied by Jackson himself in his 1987 single Leave Me Alone. But as long as he churned out the megahits Jackson was able to incorporate the eccentricities into his aura, which served to mark him a star apart.
Shortly after the release of 1991's Dangerous, the almost crippling blow came from the first set of child abuse allegations. Jackson never really recovered, partly because of the wall-to-wall coverage, partly because he never refuted them - preferring instead to settle out of court. Yet the circus continued. 1995's HIStory performed creditably, and the media feeding frenzy surrounding Jackson was matched only by the growing hubris of his celebrity, a hubris that saw him mocked by Jarvis Cocker for his Christ-like performance of Earth Song at the 1996 Brit Awards. His two year marriage to Lisa Marie Presley (widely seen as a cynical move to boost his "straight" credentials) was followed by a short-lived relationship to Deborah Rowe, the bizarre appearance of three seemingly-caucasian children, and the exposures by Martin Bashir and Louis Theroux showed him up as a grotesque absurdity. Latterly the second round of child abuse allegations finally and fatally compromised Jackson's aura for all but the most devoted die hard fans.
Yet the death of Michael Jackson the man is but a phase in the evolution of his celebrity. Five years ago, comparisons were made with the late and very much lamented Elvis Presley, and Jackson's celebrity has had a half-life not dissimilar to the disembodied state his ex-father in law has led these last 37 years. His celebrity will continue as it has done - it will fascinate, it will dazzle, it will appall.
Friends, hangers on, journalists, biographers, and opportunist bloggers will profitably mine Michael Jackson for many years to come. But peel away the artifice and grotesqueries there lies a real tragedy behind the fame. His death was a personal trauma for his family and young children, and marked an end to a deeply alienated life.
Belated second sketchy contribution on intersectionality. I recommend looking at Identity Politics and Intersectionality first.
1. Intersectional thinking, informed in general by some kind of identity politics/new social movement theory accepts, in the abstract, that gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, etc. are constituted by and through social relations. These relations are also relationships characterised at greater and lesser degrees by domination, discrimination, subordination, oppression, inequality, and silencing.
2. While acknowledging it in theory, the relational character of oppression tends to recognition in the breach than in the observance. Intersectionality is too often identified with the breakdown of attempts to think through the ways multiple oppressions work together, when its promise lies in overcoming their compartmentalisation. Intersectionality is not about an inverted hierarchy of oppression, scoring points for having it worse than others, or privilege checking as a precondition of solidarity.
3. The compartmentalisation of oppressed social locations is neither a matter of faulty theory or misinterpretation, but an effect of how the social relations constituting these positions work. It is an outcome, condensed theoretically, of experience. One cannot help but notice, for example, that the UK's new, post-Twitter generation of prominent feminist voices tend to be white, alumnus of top universities, reside in London and have solidly middle class backgrounds. The problem of which "we" these feminists speak of and for finds itself replayed 30 years after bell hooks diagnosed the problem in the seminal Ain't I A Woman?. But it's more than a question of who gets more CIF slots and retweets. It's a symptom of an underlying political economy of oppression, of being disadvantaged in some circumstances and benefiting from advantage in others. It is the latter that tends to generate axes of tension, making axes of solidarity based on shared characteristics difficult.
4. There are theoretically possible routes out of the impasse. The first of these is intersubjectivity. Sloppy, pathologised forms of identity politics valorises the unique qualities of one's subject position. No straight white man can hope to understand what it's like being a gay black guy. An impassable gulf separates able-bodied from disabled feminists. This, of course, is utter nonsense that fetishises oppression instead of challenging it. We are thinking, feeling, empathising creatures. Human beings are not cold appendages of interests, arrived at schematically. Social divisions do not prevent the more privileged and advantageous from sympathising, solidarising and allying with the oppressed - the history of each and every radical social movement tells us that. Likewise the reverse is true - our capacity for empathy is tugged on to shore up support for the arrangements ruling over us. The millions who grieved for Princess Diana. The millions who identify with celebrities. On and on it goes.
5. Intersubjectivity is a necessary condition for overcoming the pathologisation of identity politics, but is not sufficient. Taken in isolation it has its own dangers. In short, it can amount to an over-theorised notion of simply being nice and respectful or, as Bill and Ted might put it, being excellent to each other. In so doing it reduces sexism, racism etc. to matters of ignorance or individual nastiness. Questions of power are not relevant, they are pushed out of the picture.
6. The other is to give up on coordinated intersectional politics entirely. Just stick to ploughing your own identity furrow and let others get on with theirs. Laissez faire will sort things out, one hopes. Or dust off a master category and subsume everything to that by treating other differences as secondary. In both cases, this is a recipe for less efficacy and more pathology.
7. Perhaps understandably, intersectional thinking has tended to overlook class. Like gender, like ethnicity, like sexuality, like disability, class is a dynamic social relationship systematically reproduced across capitalist societies that is absolutely essential to its reproduction.
8. Too much received sociological commentary reduces class to status or, worse, occupational category. While important and vital to social critique and intersectional politics, an understanding of class as a relation, as a process takes us into capitalism's guts. And what we find there is a simple, banal truth that intersectional politics has forgotten. The overwhelming majority of people have to work for a living.
9. Basic Marxism. In advanced capitalist societies, there are those who own significant quantities of capital and those who do not. The people that do, whether by direct employment or through various intermediaries invest their capital to make a profit, from which they derive an income. The source of profits derives from the labour of others. Capital, collectively, employs a propertyless mass of people (the proletariat) to produce commodities. It doesn't matter whether they're material or "immaterial", the point is the full value of what is produced is not returned to the producer. They have signed up for X quantity of hours in return for a wage or salary. The value realised by the sale of commodities accrues to the employer. Hence this difference - surplus value - is abstract and hidden, and yet can be discerned from the social behaviour of employers and employees. They act as if surplus value is as tangible and real as the sturdy wooden desk my computer rests on.
10. This is where the notion of material interest comes into play. Capital in general is a blind social process. To perpetuate itself (and the owners who depend on it for income) it has to constantly seek new ways of generating greater and greater profits. Seeking markets is one element of this - after all, if no one buys your goods you won't make your money back, let alone see any profit. Where individual capitals exert direct control is in the production process, where it faces the irresistible impetus to drive costs down. Typically this has been via an intensification of the labour process, where the application of technology makes employees more productive - at the cost of little or no extra wages, or by lengthening the working day or reining in pay and benefits. From this standpoint workers are reduced to inputs, to figures winking on a monitor. They are a resource to be managed, or an inconvenience to whittle away. It's not so much a case of Marxism and socialism reducing human beings to proletarians, it's a matter of theory describing a real, concrete process.
11. From the standpoint of capital then, workers are only a means to an end. People are employed to make money. Capital buys labour power for a set number of hours, and that's it. As long as management's right to manage is sacrosanct in its workplaces, it mostly doesn't care what its workers do in their own time. Likewise, despite the best efforts of the media, education, and institutional dictates, we sell our labour power because we have to, not because we want to. And in this relationship, working people too have definite sets of interests. These aren't the result of a thought experiment; struggling around and asserting these interests have had concrete impacts on each and every capitalist society. There's the obvious - capital has an interest in depressing wages, labour has an interest in raising them; capital has an interest in lengthening the working day, labour has an interest in stopping this encroachment on free time. Capital wants its workers subordinated completely to the needs of the business, labour wants the business to fit round their lives. Capital wants to treat its employees like cogs, labour demands to be treated like human beings. This is the stuff of class struggle.
12. The majority of women are dependent on a wage. The majority of men are dependent on a wage. The majority of white people are dependent on a wage. The majority of the global non-white majority are dependent on a wage. Straight people, gay people, bi-people, trans people, the majority of all these are dependent on a wage. Able or disabled; oppressed nationality, oppressor nationality, the one thing they have in common, the experience cutting through the sections and intersections is the experience of the capitalist workplace. Of their subordination to the demands and dictates of capital. You can see why, historically, class has been privileged by labour movements, social democratic parties, and communist parties. So, are we back to the beginning? Is class the lynchpin?
13. Yes. And no. Capital is constituted by struggle. When we sell our labour power, we get caught up in it. There is no escape. But this does not mean everything is "reducible" to class, at least not class narrowly defined in traditional terms. As wage labourers, as proletarians, there is a political economy to how we, as a variegated collection of human beings, reproduce ourselves as such. We reproduce our physical bodies through eating, resting and, yes, actually reproducing; and we reproduce ourselves as social beings in the many varied social contexts that mark our lives as gendered, raced, sexualised people. The former is a physical necessity, the latter is, theoretically, the realm of freedom. It is the space in which we can realise ourselves. We give up chunks of our lives not just to survive, but so we have the resources that allow us to follow our inclinations.
14. The political economy of wage labour, however, is not an idyllic place. The realm of freedom is, too much, a realm of privatised freedom, of seeking comfort in one's peccadilloes before heading back out to the daily grind. The realm of freedom is also potential freedom. Because, for too many people, it's the opposite. Reproducing oneself socially and culturally (and physically) is not a free-floating matter. It is under certain conditions, under the weight of history and convention, and through patterns of certain social institutions. This is the place of the family, the traditional bastion of gender roles, compulsory heterosexuality, and the rule of the father. It is the place of community, of what constitutes an insider and who is coded an outsider. It's the space of the environment, of whether you live in a nice place or a run down estate suffering the effects of crime and pollution. It's the dimension of social and cultural capital, of the networks and status you command - or don't.
15. This is the home, the wellspring of the oppressions addressed by identity politics and intersectionality. As vulgar class politics have treated human beings as wage earners who need to get over their divisions - a critique of the political economy of capital while forgetting/ignoring the political economy of wage labour, you might argue that intersectionality is an attempt to theorise and reconcile the divisions within the political economy of the latter while bracketing the political economy of capital. This is why both have floundered. The former emphasises the simple at the expense of the complex. The latter, the complex at the expense of the simple. The bulk of the proletariat is intersectional. The bulk of the intersectional is proletarian.
16. The separation of the two political economies is an analytical separation. While at work, you might spend your time thinking about the weekend. At the weekend, you might find yourself thinking about work. The values, ideas, prejudices that have taken root outside of the workplace can be and often are carried into the workplace. Capital too has proven adept at using these social divisions - gender, race, sexuality, religion, nationality and status - to help atomise workforces in its ceaseless hunger for more surplus value, more profit. Solidarity is harder to deliver across colour bars and sectarian division.
17. This is where intersectional and class politics, erm, intersect. Exploiting divisions among workers can reinforce divisions among workers. Throwing millions of women out of work after the first and second world wars for the returning men reinforced patriarchy, made them economically dependent on their husbands, and strengthened a strict gendered division of labour in work. Proletarian men benefited - they had their jobs, and, culturally speaking, they were entitled to keep a woman along the lines of the bourgeois home, with its male head and wife/mother. Capital obviously benefited. And women lost out. Privileging either, in this instance, skews the analysis and therefore the political response. Hence, while the two political economies are analytically separate, the struggles in each are tangled up with one another.
18. For those who doubt the salience of class politics, the fact labour movements are growing in the developing world, and have knocked about the advanced capitalist nations just shy of two centuries suggests that doubting is somewhat overstated. Their basic, most basic function, is to bring working people together to face their employers as a disciplined collective. It's far more difficult for capital to pursue its relentless race to the bottom in an organised workplace. Yet in postmodern/identity, and intersectional thinking, labour movements are generally neglected as agents of change. Partly, perhaps, they present as dull and plodding whereas new social movements and their antecedents are fresh, but also because labour movements were occasionally the villains of the piece. Colour bars, gender bars, excluding oppressed nationalities, labour movements at various times and in various places have not only enforced them, but initiated them. This is because then, as now, labour movements are movements of working people as you find them.
19. Yet labour movements have come a long way. They're not perfect. The legacy of gendered and racialised divisions of labour still mark certain sectors of it. Yet, in general terms, they have moved from being a brake on the intersectionality of the working class to facilitating it. What other movement is committed to attacking sexism, racism, homo and transphobia? What other movement throws together people from different faiths and none, actively seeks to recruit resident and immigrant workers, and addresses issues from the workplace to environment, health, economics and quality of life and actively works toward their progressive resolution? There is no other such movement. Except for the labour movement.
20. The solution to intersectionality's quandary, of the theoretical glue that can hold it together, is a fundamentally open socialist politics grounded in the mass, intersectional labour movement that already exists. Class politics, so theorised, also has to reflect the actual intersecting, nuanced practice of the labour movement as it is now. Basically, what's on the table is a merger that's long been established. It's time theory caught up with practice. Struggles around gender, ethnicity and sexuality, and class struggles are part and parcel of the same. Every permutation of identity, the working class is it. And if you look at the other end, when you ask "who benefits?" from intersecting oppression and class exploitation, time after time it's the same group of people - the 1%, the bourgeoisie, the establishment, the power elite, the ruling class.
21. The labour movement is a class movement. It is an intersectional movement. As such it represents a persistent threat to the rule of capital, and, in embryo, speaks of the possibility of a future beyond capitalism. It is a movement articulating the universal interests of the overwhelming majority of people. Get stuck in.
By any common sense measure, a large protest ambling through London should be big news. The Graun covered it. Twitter was all over it. And yet, the many thousands who turned out on the People's Assembly March Against Austerity got nary a mention on BBC News bulletins. All it merited was a postage stamp of an article on the website. And to think, more or less simultaneously, the rolling news channel was gurning over the annual summer solstice hippy fest at Stonehenge. We say cutback, they say, erm, "Look at the sun rising behind the Heelstone!" So yes, some people are pretty peed off. When the BBC eagerly cover Nigel Farage opening a toilet door and ignore the largest demonstration to have taken place in London this year, a lot of the marchers and their supporters are crying foul. Quite rightly too.
Yet, is it a simple case of rightwing BBC bias again? Content analysis shows its current affairs coverage dresses to the right. My own number crunching of Question Time found there was a bias toward rightwing guests. In this instance, is the BBC's reportage, or lack, underscoring a straightforward Tory bias? Well, it does speak of pronounced lean to, but the reasons aren't as simple as one might suppose. We're going to have to grub around in the political economy of BBC news production once more.
There is the BBC's cognitive bias. If there is an establishment, you don't get much more establishment than Auntie. And being an institution who, along with government, parliament, the monarchy, the police, the armed forces, is a pillar of official society means it finds certain things worthy of coverage, and other items not. It's an unstated rule, a disembodied set of preferences and attitudes journalists imbibe from the moment the employment contract is signed. The news reports on a) what the establishment finds interesting, and b) what it thinks the people will find interesting. Which is pretty similar to what the establishment finds interesting. Official events get the wall-to-wall treatment. Politics, understood in narrow, Westminster terms - the BBC is there. When it comes to events that disrupt the smooth running of official Britain, it gets covered. The coverage, however, is skewed. Consider reports on tube strikes. Compare the attention given to the reasons for and against the strike with the reporting of the disruption. The viewpoint is never about the issues at stake. All that counts is whether one can get to work on time. This framing occurs because the BBC thinks people don't like strikes, but also they are extra-parliamentary political actions. They exist entirely outside its very strict constitutionalist frames of reference. That also means demonstrations, unless they are super-large, violent, or feature Al-Mahajiroun types, don't get a look-in. They're not "proper" politics.
Parked not a million miles away is simple newsworthiness. Yes, the BBC should be about balanced reporting and cover a broad spectrum of stories. It is suppose to inform the nation, after all. Yet it fails to do so. Compare it with its competitors. Channel 4 News, France 24, Al-Jazeera, Russia Today, CCTV, whatever one thinks of their output the tendency is to cover a wider range of stories that, for whatever reason, the BBC chooses not to cover. It's quite regular top find, say, an uncontrolled outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, or the plight of Iraqi and Syrian refugees in Jordan featured on one of the other news stations while the BBC keeps schtum. They're simply not newsworthy enough. And you can say the same about the People's March. Austerity has been damaging. The human cost is appalling, and the economic damage depressed the economy a couple of years longer than "necessary". Despite this, the anti-austerity movement has not had the kinds of impact the anti-war movement, and the anti-poll tax movement before it did. Polling shows backing for cuts, explicitly anti-austerity parties polled poorly in May. Sad to say, austerity has not become a political hot potato. Because it hasn't made itself felt through conventional, Westminster-centric politics, and in the absence of a groundswell of opinion, the movement challenging the cuts isn't on the BBC's radar. Small wonder they ignored Saturday's mobilisation.
Finally, while these are important the BBC has to always play a canny political game. Its interests are clearly served by the status quo. It gets its annual bung through the television tax, and so enjoys the kinds of resources other channels can but aspire. It does not want to surrender to commercial pressures. It does not want the licence fee to be scrapped. And so, ever since 2003's Gilligan/Kelly/dodgy dossier affair, the BBC have shown a bend toward the government, whoever is in power. They know perceived anti-government reporting might call unfavourable reforms down upon its head. Hence why you have the BBC's love-in with UKIP, the establishment's anti-establishment party. They do not represent an existential threat as such, and are often portrayed as menacing the three main parties equally, though, of course, we know that's not true. It also touches distinctly second order issues - Europe, immigration, anti-politics animus. Anti-austerity, like the anti-war movement, however offers a challenge to a central plank of government policy. As Iraq is the pivot on which Blair's governments will forever be judged, the Coalition have invested their political capital heavily in a demented cuts programme in the belief it will get the wheels of Britain turning again. The Tories call this a long-term economic plan. With a BBC looking out for its institutional interests while a rabid pack of Friedmanite wolves, there is just no way they would give an anti-austerity protest proportionate coverage.
That's what it comes back to, the web of institutions, interests, and habits of mind the BBC are a constitutive part of. Getting a feature is not the be all and end all of protesting. Anti-austerity campaigns have been carrying on regardless since the Tories' first round of cuts. There's no reason to believe that's going to change. However, the only way the BBC will report the anti-austerity message is by making it, if you pardon the ugly word, unignorable. And come the TUC-backed march against austerity in the Autumn, we have every chance of making that happen.
This edited collection by Evan Smith and Matthew Worley is launched tonight in London. More details here. The discussion, 'Revolutionary force or pressure group? The role of the British far left in British politics since 1956' certainly sounds very interesting. I wish I could have been there.
Below is the list of contents, which is a veritable smorgasbord of left trainspotterly goodness. The bloke who wrote chapter four sounds familiar too.
AGAINST THE GRAIN: THE BRITISH FAR LEFT FROM 1956 (Manchester University Press, 2014)
Evan Smith & Matthew Worley (eds)
Introduction: the far left in Britain from 1956
Evan Smith and Matthew Worley
Part I Movements
1 Engaging with Trotsky: the influence of Trotskyism in Britain
John Callaghan
2 The New Left: beyond Stalinism and social democracy?
Paul Blackledge
3 Narratives of radical lives: the roots of 1960s activism and the making of the British left
Celia Hughes
4 Marching separately, seldom together: the political history of two principal trends in British Trotskyism, 1945–2009
Phil Burton-Cartledge
5 Opposition in slow motion: the CPGB’s ‘anti-revisionists’ in the 1960s and 1970s
Lawrence Parker
6 Dissent from dissent: the ‘Smith/Party’ Group in the 1970s CPGB
Andrew Pearmain
7 British anarchism in the era of Thatcherism
Rich Cross
Part II Issues
8 Jam tomorrow? Socialist women and Women’s Liberation, 1968–82: an oral history approach
Sue Bruley
9 Something new under the sun: the revolutionary left and gay politics
Graham Willett
10 ‘Vicarious pleasure’? The British far left and the third world, 1956–79
Ian Birchall
11 Anti-racism and the socialist left, 1968–79
Satnam Virdee
12 Red Action – left-wing pariah: Some observations regarding ideological apostasy and the discourse of proletarian resistance
Mark Hayes
13 Anti-fascism in Britain, 1997–2012
David Renton
The Solid disco has been too, too commercial of late. It's even had guitars on. Enough of this nonsense, let's get back to brass tacks. Tonight's dancefloor is reverberating with the sound of this:
That there Michael Fabricant. He's a bit of a card. What with his silly wig and self-deprecating humour, he's the sort of MP tailor-made for social media. Good old Fabbers. At least, so I thought.
Oh dear. The mask has slipped. The bants, the joshing, it's crumbled away leaving something behind suggestive of a deeply unpleasant personality.
I'm not going to spend any more time on Fabricant, especially when Dan Hodges has done a good job. Instead, I'd like to turn my attention to the clots who would defend him.
Who should we find at the head of the pack? Surprising no one, it's the idiot Delingpole. Now chief pinhead at Breitbart London, James has completed his long hike from rock to crock journalism - as his short piece covering for Fabricant shows. Here, his argument amounts to "it's wrong to punch Yamin Alibhai-Brown, but nothing at all wrong with wanting to punch her." Profound.
As it happens, I will concede that Twitter is home to bands of people who do jump on comments made by politicians and celebs. But no way are hard right fools like Fabricant victims in this regard, it comes with the territory. The powerful and the privileged have long had the power to determine how people with certain shared characteristics are represented officially and in the media, against their will. Twitter and social media are taking pickaxes to the hierarchy. Symbolic violence - look it up, Jimbo - is getting a rougher and rougher ride. You can't expect to say how you'd like to punch an Asian woman in the throat and get away without being challenged any more.
And they hate it. For Delingpole and co, free speech is being able to speak their limited, lazy minds without any comeback. It's part and parcel of their so-called libertarianism, a fancy-sounding word that lends their anguish and brittle selfishness philosophical cover. If Fabricant and Delingpole want to make violent statements, here I agree with them, they are completely free to do so. But it's pathetic even by schoolyard standards to cry about "PC conspiracies" and bigoted leftyism when people answer back and force our right-whinging heroes to justify their words.
They're coming home, they're coming home, they're coming, England's coming home.
What a shambles. Let's remember a happier time.
Fashion has boldly gone where no style has explored before. If 2014 will be remembered for anything lighthearted, it will be the side-saddle swimming trunks. Late to the comment party as per, this product - as modelled by self-styled 'Gay Kardashians', Bobby Norris and Harry Derbidge from TOWIE - manages the tricky task of undermining and reinforcing traditional notions of masculinity. That, and it has got people talking. Just how do they stay up?
Capital has fully colonised women's bodies. Potions 'n' lotions, make up, hair removal, and so on, every conceivable facet of the female body has a mass market clustered around it. For men, on the other hand, its invasion by market forces is less pervasive, its commodification not as thorough. This isn't to say the commercialised male body beautiful does not exist. Creams, razors, smellies, hair loss treatments, these are hardly recent innovations. Ideal-typical masculinity is marketed, exploited. It plays football, wears the fashions, commits acts of hyperviolence, and fucks its way through porn flicks. The commodification, however, proceeds differently. Too often, women's bodies are marketed/positioned as passive objects, as foils for men's desires and egos, as - for want of a better phrase - service providers. Mother, whore, sidekick, or saint, the tropes are different but there is an identity of content, an undergirding theme. Not so with men. The man is the agent, not the object of desire. As with anything and everything social, this hegemonic conceit is challengeable and is challenged. The het gendering of desirable bodies carries on regardless, hence why make up, dedicated razors for legs, chests and pubes are, for men, at best niche products. When was the last time you saw something marketed as a 'masculine hygiene product'?
Gay men's bodies problematise this persistent dichotomy. It's interesting. The hegemonic gay body has shifted from the so macho, moustachioed hunk of the Village People/Freddie Mercury archetype to the camp, coiffured, on trend fashionista of, well, TOWIE. That hasn't been the only switch. The gay body of yesteryear was a manly body pump-primed for sex. Recall the AIDS panic of 30 years ago, and the homophobic elision between licentious promiscuity and disease stirred up by sundry bigots. Now, it's almost as if sex has been written out. When Boy George quipped he preferred a cup of tea to a bonk, he unwittingly was a harbinger of the sexless gay guy to come. Of course, gay men have sex and always will. But the gay body for the popular (straight) audience has been desexualised or, to be more accurate, rendered bodies without desire. Mediatised gay bodies don't speak of sex, they speak of campery, frippery and immaculate self-presentation. Less queen, more Queen Mother. Less agent. More object.
The bodies of Bobby and Harry have been positioned by the celebrity press as passive objects - there is little qualitative difference with the copious swimwear shoots of women's bodies crowding the sidebar of shame. And the photos invite us to ogle them, with a special stress on "the package". The side-saddle trunks reveal almost as much as they conceal. Is that a stray pube? Could that be the outline of his johnson? Bobby and Harry have therefore made a contribution to aesthetics of the pubis, a concern that's usually the preserve of women. Their "intervention" has crossed a gendered boundary: the media simply do not look at men in this way. With their smart tatts, designer shades, eyebrows to die for and skimpy underwear, Bobby and Harry have subverted the gendering of taste.
While our TOWIE friends in collaboration with the media have invented a new way of seeing the male body, thereby undermining its agency vis a vis the passive, feminine other; they're strengthening its traditional positioning too. Bobby and Harry clearly look after themselves. No hint of flab, and there is tone and muscle definition. It speaks of self-discipline and working out. As gender-troubling the side-saddle trunks are, what kind of body could carry it off? A gay body, definitely. But not one with double D moobs and a beer baby. To queer masculinity as effectively as Bobby and Harry, you have to take a manly body - one that a great many "conventional" straight blokes wouldn't mind having - and stick it in a fancy jock strap.
There we have it, a disturbance of gender norms that got millions talking. Bobby and Harry are unlikely gender queer heroes. Yet, at the moment of the transgression, as the fabric clings to their loins it reconfirms the hegemonic masculine hard body. It undermines and reasserts. Problematising the body depends on the body. The body depends on problematising the body.
Who knew the side-saddle swimming trunks would expose this much?
The high foreheads down at the Bank of England are stumped, confuzzled. Employment is up, output is up, economic growth is up but productivity is stubbornly stalled. In fact, it remains well below the pre-crisis peak. Such a scenario in economics is what Jack the Ripper is to murder mystery. There's a definite culprit, but none of the received models are capable of pinning down the guilty party. Is it the statistical measures? Is it the weather? Naturally, the Bank are right to be concerned - the less productive the UK economy, the more pronounced its relative decline would be vis a vis its competitors, even if - as now - the economy is growing absolutely as per the GDP figures.
According to the BBC's statistics bod the Bank measures productivity takes "the amount of goods and services produced in the economy and divide it by the number of hours worked." So, what's going on? Here are some suspects I'd stick in the line up.
As we are told time and again, there are more people in employment in Britain than ever before. The rate might not be at record levels but the absolute number of workers is. The most recent employment figures have 30.5 million in work. What bearing does this have on productivity figures? The more hours worked in a given economy, the more the productivity figures will be depressed. For example, in May 2008 the number of people in employment were 29.5m, an in-work rate of 74.9%. The ONS productivity measure by worker saw output fall from 103.4 to 98.3 in Q1 2009, before recovering in fits and starts to 100.5 at the end of last year - with about a million more in work. So then, do the absolute numbers have a depressing effect? If economic growth was flatlining, or numbers employed were increasing at a rate faster than GDP figures, then yes, it would appear so. Even though GDP is again on the rise, it is still below pre-crisis. Hence the productivity puzzle could be partly explained by the disparity. Then again, the ONS measure for productivity by output per hour started off with 103.1, and falling by Q4 2013 to 99.1. This outcome is too strong to be a mere effect of more workers in work. Rather, there are more employees producing less.
This is where we're going to have to get more sociological. In Feb-Apr this year, 1.633m workers, or 6.4% of the whole workforce, were on temporary contracts. While the proportion of those in temporary work because they cannot find permanent positions are falling, nevertheless this is an all-time high. There are also now 4.533m self-employed workers too, 1.175m workers with second jobs, and 8.175m part-time workers. All three of these are records as well. Without overstating the case, this points to a significant proportion of the workforce for whom precarity is their lot. The majority of these are likely to be in receipt of modest incomes, and more prone to insecurity anxiety. Furthermore, especially in the context of a period of crisis and stagnation, there remains understandable, overhanging fears for one's job. It saps workplace morale. Having had the displeasure of working under the threat of redundancy, I know. As workers are human beings and not machine inputs, anxiety + fatalism + precarity = lower productivity. If, on the other hand, a large proportion of Britain's workplaces paid at least the living wage, offered job security and more job autonomy, and various fringe benefits it's not unreasonable to assume higher morale would lead to higher productivity. You treat workers like cogs, then they'll occasionally seize up like cogs.
The socio-cultural climate pervading work will have an effect you can't measure easily on a spreadsheet. But a diffuse structure of feeling is not all that's going on. There is the employer side of the equation to consider. All employers, whether public, private, or part of the amorphous third sector engage people for what they do. In other words, they purchase their workers' labour power for certain quantities of time. Where business is concerned, it's in order to make profits. If you hold to Marx's approach to surplus value, which I do, an employer buys labour power because it generates value over and above the value of that labour power. i.e. Employing a factory hand for £7.50/hour sees them, over that period of time, produce commodities worth £77.50. This value is nominal, however. It is not realised until those goods are sold. Out of the surplus value - the difference between the labour power value and the value yielded - the employer meets their other obligations - rents, interest on loans, other obligations and liabilities, etc. Whatever is left after tax is profit which can be invested in more productive technologies for the firm, or consumed by the proprietor/shareholders.
Here, an employer will only reinvest over and above what the firm needs to stay afloat if a new opportunity for profit is perceived. Investing in new machinery and doubling output is only worthwhile if an employer believes the demand exists for their goods and services. And here is British capitalism's problem. Employers in general are on an investment strike because the opportunities for realising surplus value are perceived to be limited. Wages are outstripped by prices. There is a frightening level of individual, private debt. Whatever combination of government comes to power next year will carry on with austerity, thereby choking demand in the economy. And a huge amount of uncertainty hangs over Britain's relationship with the world's largest single market. Rather than invest in plant that gluts one's markets, it makes sense to hire additional workers for the time being, especially while wages are depressed.
That's only one part of the explanation. Another addition is the growing army of the self-employed, many of whom will have started businesses from redundancy payouts. What is the character of the new wave of businesses that have been set up since the crisis? How many are actually working for companies who get round workplace law by ensuring their "employees" are officially designated as self-employed? What kind of things are being produced, and how "productive" (in the sense of value creation) are these businesses? How many are basically hidden unemployed?
Lastly, there is the overall balance of the economy to consider. As everyone knows, Britain is lopsided and practically everyone in politics is committed to its rebalancing away from the public to the private, and finance to the "real economy". The problem is that manufacturing, the engine room of value creation and innovation, is much reduced compared with Britain's immediate competitors. Service industries, however, occupies a larger proportion of the economy. Setting aside the dynamic and money-spinning innovations pouring out of digital and creative industries, what comprises 'services'? Retail, hospitality, eating, legal, public services, media, property, etc. As tertiary industries geared around the production of a service, the opportunities for investing in productivity-boosting innovations might be somewhat limited. There are only so many ways to sell a coat, cook a meal, rent out a room, provide professional advice, etc. Investment has a tendency to be ancillary to the delivery of the core business activity, such as new IT/POS technologies and does not impact on productivity as such. Therefore when a greater proportion of an economy is dependent on industry of this character, it's unsurprising that productivity tends to lag behind the 'expected' level of development.
It's worth remembering economics is a social, not a natural science. If the Bank's team - horror of horrors - got back to the discipline's roots and contemplated looking at the situation sociologically, they might get somewhere solving the productivity problem.
