Political Philosophy: Part Three

 The third in my continuing series of posts explaining my worldview. The first two posts dealt with the neutralising of an authentically working class public space and popular culture between the Industrial Revolution and the Second World War. This one will examine the history of working class self-organisation in industry.

Part Three: Blackshirts from the Combination Acts to the New Right: the union double standard

In 1792, with successful revolutions having taken place across the Atlantic and across the Channel, the British elite moved to ensure that no such thing would occur on its soil. A Tory politician, John Reeves founded the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. Its mission: inciting mobs to attack radicals, burning effigies of Thomas Paine, and assisting the authorities with prosecutions for sedition, such as those which led to the treason trials of 1794. After successfully keeping the British people under the rule of church and king, it faded away, but the tactic of employing private force to suppress working class revolt emerged again and again.

The Association’s main targets were the network of republican organisations such as the London Corresponding Society, which disseminated radical literature and agitated for political change. Their members were typically skilled artisans, whose trades were in high demand, making them less vulnerable to boycotts aimed at curbing their political activism. In response to this flurry of popular self-organisation, Parliament passed an act in 1793 forcing all such groups to register their constitutions and lists of office-bearers with the government. Four years later, they were banned from administering oaths to new members.

The practice of working class self-organisation (and the paranoid elite reaction thereto) dotted the radical history of nineteenth-century Britain. Schools were established which promoted radical opposition to the regime of the day, only to be forced out of existence by the provision of compulsory state education. The co-operative movement was formed in Rochdale in 1844. Friendly societies popped up everywhere, only to be made into historical relics by the coming of the welfare state. The repression of unions, however, was the most powerful use of the state’s power against the working class. History remembers the Tolpuddle Martyrs, but less so the prolonged struggle for the right to organise of which they formed a part. The British state banned unions, then legalised them but severely restricted their activities; it also replaced customary Saints’ Days with Bank Holidays, of which there were fewer, in order to impose greater discipline on the workforce. As late as 1911, Westminster (in the person of Home Secretary Winston Churchill) was still willing to use military force against striking coal miners in South Wales.

The tactics pioneered by the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers were employed again in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Faced with worker occupations of factories, the country’s classical liberal ruling class began negotiations to hand power in an orderly fashion to the workers’ movement, and the owners of the FIAT motor company offered to turn their factory in Turin into a co-operative. Not all of the country’s elites, however, were as conciliatory, and the ones who weren’t found an ally in Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Far from being some new radical, revolutionary form of right-wing politics indigenous to the twentieth century, as many historians have argued, fascism can be seen as the mid-twentieth century’s version of a tradition of elite-inspired private violence against popular self-organisation which goes back at least to the anti-republican mobs of 1790s Britain.

When the elites can stifle working class self-organisation through peaceful, legal means, however, they will choose to do so. If one examines the provisions of anti-union legislation enacted over the years, one can see many restrictions on behaviour which would be denounced as unconscionable violations of freedom of speech and association if applied to any other type of organisation (especially a corporation). The landmark Taft-Hartley Act, for example, prevents American unions from donating to political campaigns, engaging in secondary boycotts, solidarity strikes, or wildcat strikes, and negotiating ‘closed shops’ with employers. It also requires union leaders to affirm that they are not communists. The Act succeeded insofar as it locked unions into a three-way coalition with the state and business for three decades, but every new generation brings new measures imposed from above to stifle the struggle for freedom and equality.

Observers struggle to account for how the world has changed since the end of the Keynesian Consensus. I put forward here a few suggestions which provide an outline of my explanation of the triumph of the New Right and the malaise of the left:

• The spike in working class activism (France’s May 1968, Italy’s Hot Autumn, Britain’s mid-1970s wave of strikes) led the elites to believe that the Keynesian Consensus was no longer enough to contain the aspirations of workers.
• The economic crises of the early 1970s (the end of the Bretton Woods system, the OPEC-induced oil shock, etc.) allowed for those inspired by Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand to pounce.
• The aim of the world’s elites for the past few decades has been to reduce demand for public goods (transport infrastructure, dams, etc.), so as to allow that part of the world’s wealth which is not paid to workers as wages to accrue to them in the form of accumulated capital.
• Far from being a radical, anti-systemic critique of capitalism, the ‘green’ ideology serves one of the key purposes of the New Right’s agenda. By pointing out (and usually exaggerating) the negative environmental effects of railways, dams, and other forms of infrastructure, greens help to stave off popular clamour for more and better public goods.
• The increasing militarisation of society (SWAT teams, the War on Drugs, CCTV cameras) is a means of dulling the rebellious spirit of the people. 
• The New Right’s Gramscian ideological hegemony manifests itself in the most mundane ways: witness the spontaneous outpouring of grief last year over the death of that modern-day robber baron capitalist, Steve Jobs. Entrepreneurship and innovation in the production of useless consumer goods have become more fashionable to freedom, justice, or equality.

Political Philosophy: Part Two

 The second in my continuing series of posts explaining my worldview. It covers many of the same themes of the first post, and is intended to reinforce the argument of its conclusion, but will focus specifically on the history of sport.

Part Two: The People’s Olympiad, Ultras, and hooligans: the elite capture of sport

In July 1936, just as General Franco’s fascist troops were preparing to launch their coup d’état, Barcelona was getting ready to host the People’s Olympiad. Earlier that year, the ‘official’ Summer Olympic Games had been held in Berlin. The story of those games, of their use as a propaganda tool by the Nazi regime and the symbolic rebuke to their ideology of white supremacy that was Jesse Owens’ four gold medals, has been told many times over. The People’s Olympiad is not well-known, and neither is the culture of self-managed working class sport of which it formed part.

The People’s Olympiad grew out of a movement calling for a boycott of the Berlin Olympics, which was ultimately unsuccessful in persuading most countries not to send athletes to an event which they knew would be used for fascist propaganda. The Popular Front government elected in Spain in early 1936 organised the games, and attracted six thousand competitors from twenty-two countries, including regional teams representing Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, and Alsace, a team of Jewish athletes, teams from French and Spanish colonies in North Africa, and teams of German and Italian exiles. After the cancellation of the games, some took up arms for the Republican cause in the Civil War. The organisations which sent athletes to Barcelona instead of Berlin in 1936 were those socialist and non-communist sporting bodies affiliated with the Socialist Workers’ Sport International. These groups opposed both the conservative Olympic movement and the Soviet-organised Spartakiads.

Organised sport has its roots in the extension of leisure time to workers – historians often cite the various Factory Acts passed by the British Parliament in the mid-nineteenth century, giving workers Saturdays off, as being key to its development. While most early sporting bodies were funded and managed by elites, working class people played important roles as players and paying spectators. Oppositional politics have played an important role in the development of certain sporting bodies: the best-known example which still exists is the link between Irish nationalism and the Gaelic Athletic Association. Even where sporting bodies were not explicitly organised on political or class lines, their activities were attacked by elites on those grounds. For example, when the Victorian Football League continued playing during the First World War, conservative elements portrayed players as unpatriotic for refusing to enlist in the military. When the league was reduced to four teams in 1916, it was no coincidence that the four in question were from suburbs of Melbourne with large Irish-Australian communities (Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood, and Richmond). And, of course, the strict yet selectively applied rules enforcing amateurism in the Olympic movement (prior to 1980) and in rugby union (prior to 1995) were aimed at preventing working class players from earning a living from sport.

At Italian soccer matches, one can often see banners reading ‘contro il calcio moderno’ (‘against modern football’). The phrase is the slogan of a loose set of ideas among fans, who oppose the commercialisation of soccer and the policing of their activities. The groups of fans which are most vocal in support of these ideas are Ultras, a word often mistranslated by English-language media as ‘hooligan’. The Ultra culture emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of political, cultural, and economic upheaval in Italy, and shares many features of ‘autonomist’ Marxist groups which were common at the time. Some have a distinct political orientation – usually far-left, but with quite a few exceptions. Ultras groups act as autonomous institutions which at times have a hostile, oppositional attitude to club and league authorities. When rivalries get more heated than usual, those authorities are quick to assert their authority, and the organs of elite opinion are quick to denounce the entire Ultras scene – as The Guardian did in 2001 with the headline: ‘Racist. Violent. Corrupt. Welcome to Serie A’.

Although Ultras survive in Italy, as well as in other European and South American countries, the terraces of many other countries have been deprived of an autonomous non-elite fan culture. The policing of the Ultras witnessed in Italy, and the methods and language employed by elites to justify it, finds its parallel in Britain, and in the crackdowns on hooliganism. Using the disruption caused to public order by a minority of apolitical trouble-makers as a pretext, successive governments, most notably that of Margaret Thatcher, have largely succeeded in de-proletarianising the country’s soccer stadiums. In 1989, the government commissioned the Taylor Report, which was charged with proposing solutions to the hooligan problem, which had reached its height in the mid-to-late 1980s. One of its most influential results was the diktat that all professional clubs eradicate terraces from their grounds and establish all-seater stadiums. Just as with the palatial cinemas mentioned in my first post, the need to recoup the cost of construction led to escalating ticket prices. By the year 2000, it was possible for the captain of Manchester United, Roy Keane, to deride his own club’s fans as the “prawn sandwich brigade.” From the perspective of the desirability of autonomous working class institutions, this was a regrettable development.

Today, there is no self-managed sport. Everything is under the control of state-sanctioned national governing bodies, affiliated to IOC-sanctioned international governing bodies. The dependence of sporting bodies on public funding and favourable legislation ensures that it is virtually impossible to operate outside the state sphere. The idea of sport as a venue for political struggle has become alien – the accusation of ‘politicising sport’ has been levelled at those campaigning for sporting boycotts of South Africa during apartheid, and at those who dared question Beijing’s human rights record in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics. The idea that sport and politics don’t mix would be anathema to the organisers and competitors of the People’s Olympiad, or to the Italian workers and students who formed Ultras groups in between strikes and protests.

Just as with the workers’ schools and co-operatives in nineteenth century Britain, the ateneus of fin-de-siècle Barcelona, the Wobblies, and the oppositional culture of early cinema, sport has been subject to the same attacks and attempts at co-option by the elites. This strategy was successful in destroying the independent working class sporting bodies most prominent in the 1920s and 1930s, and the autonomist terrace cultures such as Italy’s Ultras which emerged in the second half of the century.

Gillard bites Rudd

I suppose I should write something about the vote of the federal ALP caucus to keep Julia Gillard as prime minister. I’ll say a few things:

• Julia Gillard is a joke. She’s a Blairite Third-Wayer who came to power thanks to the factional hacks leaking polling to Andrew Bolt. (Anyone who deals with Andrew Bolt is not a progressive in good standing.) She is a cynical, vision-free intellectual lightweight who has never published anything comparable to Rudd’s Monthly essays. Her anti-refugee policies and rhetoric are a disgrace to this country, and there is no ideological space between her and Ayatollah Abbotteini on any issue.
• Kevin Rudd is a joke. He’s another Blairite Third-Wayer who suddenly discovered populism last week when he needed it to overcome his lack of support in the party-room, but had no problem in inviting 1000 academics and celebrities to Canberra to dictate his corporate-friendly policy agenda. He presided over the government which inflicted Conroy’s internet filter and Roxon’s puritanical tax on premixed drinks. He exploits progressives’ genuine fear of an Abbott government to try and make himself the leader of some sort of anti-Abbott Front Populaire, yet it’s not clear what policy differences he has with the Ayatollah. His only redeeming feature is his intellectual nature, but he has done nothing to roll back the ‘Brutopia’ described in his famous 2007 Monthly essay.
• The ALP is a joke. It’s a collection of Blairite Third-Wayers, factional hacks, nanny-state tyrants (Conroy, Roxon…), and Samuel Gompers wannabes (Combet, Shorten…) It is no more than an instrument by which the elites rope progressives into providing bipartisan support for their neoliberal/green/nanny-state agenda.
• The Westminster System is a joke. Political parties are not private organisations, and should be forced to open up leadership positions to American-style primaries as a condition of being registered with the Electoral Commission. A prime minister, once sworn in, should only be removable by a German-style constructive vote of no confidence. Mark Arbib and Paul Howes dictating the choice of the nation’s head of government to a 102-member electoral college is not democracy. 
• This country is a joke. We are governed by a decadent, useless political class which has been deliberately barren of ideas for decades. Neo-liberals have destroyed our egalitarian spirit and our nation-building ethos. Greenies have ensured that we haven’t built a dam since 1985. Prohibitionist puritans want to raise the drinking age to twenty-one. Our economy is a Stalinist, centrally-planned behemoth controlled from above by the Big Two supermarkets, the Big Three television networks, the Big Four banks, and the Big Fat Sandgroper Mining Barons. MBAs in suits produce nothing of value and then whinge that taxation levels are stifling their creativity. Any expression of oppositional culture is stamped out by the tabloids and the current affairs shows. Our problems are much deeper than the question of who leads the ALP.

The Brooks Fallacy

 This is another post examining how those on the political right see the world. In a recent New York Times column entitled ‘The Materialist Fallacy’, David Brooks, who describes his conservatism as ‘Hamiltonian’ and regularly criticises free-market fundamentalism, discusses the decline of social capital in the United States.

He begins with the idea that social cohesion since 1962 is not what it was between 1912 and 1962. So far so good, although his puritanical obsession with marriage rates and out-of-wedlock births is rather grating. He then discusses three explanations for this decline offered in recent decades: a liberal one (focused on the lack of working class jobs), a libertarian one (which blames the evils of ‘Big Government’), and a neo-conservative one (which sees the decline in “traditional bourgeois norms” as the culprit). After a digression into some recent research findings about social cohesion, Brooks proceeds to provide an apologia for the social norms-centred, ‘neo-conservative’ explanation.

According to Brooks, the ‘liberal’ view, which blames the decline in working class jobs for the decline in social capital, is “a crude materialism that has little to do with reality.” In other words, the same charge of ‘materialism’ that has always been levelled by the right at anyone who dares question the reasons for economic inequality. He also overlooks the myriad ways in which conservatives destroyed social capital among working class people, for example, by stifling the ability of unions to organise with the Taft-Hartley Act, or by enacting economic policies designed to favour the financial sector and inherited wealth over the manufacturing sector.

It is in his fifth from last paragraph that we get the ‘Mitt Romney moment’. “I don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost,” Brooks writes, “it still doesn’t make sense to drop out of high school.” That’s the modern Republican Party: “not concerned about the very poor” and “don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost.” It takes a particularly ideologically blinkered person to compare 1962 with 2012 while hand-waving away the end of the Keynesian Consensus and the rise of neo-liberalism, while at the same time explaining the economic dislocation caused by those events as the result of some rejection of Judeo-Christian values and ‘bourgeois norms’.

There is something odd about the assertion that modern society suffers from a lack of ‘bourgeois norms’: surely the world today is as dominated by the values of the middle classes than ever before. In addition to left-wing political parties and trade unions, there were once cultural institutions run by the working class itself – schools, co-operatives, libraries, labour exchanges, sports clubs, cinemas, and more. In the nineteenth century, socialists in the north of England operated schools which openly proclaimed their desire to turn young minds against society’s rulers. In the 1920s and 1930s, socialist sports federations held multi-sport gatherings which were larger than the Olympic Games. Before the First World War, Americans could go to a socialist-run cinema and watch a socialist propaganda film. There are no longer any equivalent institutions which can serve as incubators for any set of oppositional values. The aspirational and individualist ‘bourgeois norms’ are shared by virtually all – even 50 Cent entitled his first album Get Rich or Die Tryin’.

Brooks’ penultimate paragraph is the scariest. He discusses how to “rebuild orderly communities”:

“This requires bourgeois paternalism: Building organizations and structures that induce people to behave responsibly rather than irresponsibly and, yes, sometimes using government to do so.”

In other words, Brooks’ ‘Hamiltonian’ conservatism isn’t above using the state as a blunt instrument to force white, middle-class, aspirational, corporate, Judeo-Christian values down our throats.

Political Philosophy: Part One

 This is intended to be the first of a series of posts outlining my political philosophy. There isn’t one single, linear narrative, but rather a series of snippets of nineteenth and twentieth century history, which, taken together, will give the reader some idea of how I see the world and how I think it could be improved.

Part One: Manchester, Barcelona, the Wobblies, and Hollywood: the rise and fall of working class cultural institutions

The journey begins in my ancestral home city, Manchester. In 1840, followers of the pioneering socialist Robert Owen were accused by local grandees of practicing a “hideous form of infidelity.” Their crime? Establishing a school, the Hall of Sciences, which gave working class people access to education at a time when there was no secular school system. Their efforts were part of an autodidactic trend in Britain – the education of workers was a cause promoted by the Owenites and the Chartists, and had its roots in the discussion groups formed by republicans around the turn of the century, when the writings of Thomas Paine were the all the rage, and when the spirit of the American and French Revolutions threatened to cross the Atlantic and the Channel. The political, commercial, and clerical elite were threatened. “If they are to have knowledge,” said the then-Secretary of Education, “surely it is the part of a wise and virtuous government to do all in its power to secure them useful knowledge and to guard them against pernicious opinions.” Within three decades, Westminster had made education compulsory, forcing children into church-run schools and out of the network of workers’ schools.

In the nineteenth century, Barcelona was one of the most industrialised cities in Europe, but the loss of overseas markets for its products which followed Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American War hurt its economy. Unlike in some other places, where socialism and communism were popular, Barcelona became a hotbed of anarcho-syndicalism and of the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT), the world’s best-known anarchist union movement (thanks largely to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia). In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the CNT was the dominant political force in Barcelona’s working class districts, or barris (the Catalan equivalent of the Spanish barrios), which played host to a culture of independent working class institutions. The book Class, Culture, and Conflict in Barcelona 1898-1937 by Chris Ealham (downloadable in PDF form here) documents this masterfully, but two examples will suffice here. By 1914, the city had seventy-five ateneus, social clubs for workers which offered leisure, cultural, shopping, and library facilities. In addition, just as in Britain, working class schools were established, often with help from the CNT, and which prided themselves on offering an alternative to the Catholic Church-run education system.

The response to all this self-governance by the lower orders sent the city’s elites into a panic. Ealham’s book describes the rise of gents d’ordre (‘men of order’), elites who demonised the inhabitants of the barris as disorderly, criminal, disease-ridden, racially degenerate, and threatening to Catalonia’s culture (Barcelona’s working class was, and is, disproportionately composed of migrants, most famously Andalucians). Their ideas, and the moral panics they flamed, gave the state the ideological cover it needed to violently repress strikes and other forms of resistance, as well as to terrorise migrant groups (the Catalan regional government was deporting migrants to other regions of Spain well into the Second Republic). Naturally, the culture of CNT locals and ateneus suffered under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, before being completely destroyed by the Fascist victory in the Civil War.

The Industrial Workers of the World supposedly got their nickname, ‘the Wobblies’, from a mispronunciation of their name by a migrant worker who said something like ‘I wobble-you wobble-you’. Unlike the business-friendly craft unions affiliated to the American Federation of Labor, which often segregated African-American workers and campaigned against Asian immigration, the IWW provided a welcoming home for people of all sorts of national origins. It practiced (or, rather, practices – it still exists) industrial unionism, that is, the organisation of all workers in a workplace into a single union local, as opposed to craft unionism, which divided them by skill and occupation. Its ideology was a form of syndicalism, which entailed management of the economy by the workers themselves through their unions, and because of this, Wobblies took steps to prepare for that eventuality. Their union halls typically contained books which provided the technical knowledge needed to run factories, in addition to literature on non-work related topics. Observers noted that IWW halls were full of discussion of culture and ideas, and new members were invited to chair meetings – something which was aimed at developing leadership and confidence.

As with the CNT, the elites used the state as a means of suppressing Wobbly activity, and were cheered on by the American Federation of Labor. The IWW’s opposition to the First World War gave the elites the ammunition they needed, and no tactic seemed to be considered out of bounds. IWW leaders were imprisoned on trumped-up charges, and members were massacred and lynched. The post-war Red Scare led to another wave of repression, and the IWW entered the 1920s as a shadow of its former self. Once again, an independent working class organisation was destroyed by the state.

At the same time that the IWW was leading strikes and opposing the war, Americans were developing a new national passion: film. The development of cinemas in the early twentieth century gave people a new way to spend their money and leisure time, and the patronage of many cinemas had a decidedly working class bent. In Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America, Steven Ross points out that the majority of pre-First World War movie-goers were workers. A substantial proportion were also women, children, and migrants, and the rise of cinema culture made it possible for those groups to mould public space in America’s cities to better suit their interests.

The movie-going culture quickly found itself under attack from the self-proclaimed guardians of public morality. Their target was sometimes the sexual content of films, but more often they were disturbed by the political atmosphere of the cinema – films often challenged traditional authority, and cinemas were used by various progressive political groups to spread their message. Ross produces a telling quote from a group of civic leaders in Cincinnati calling themselves the ‘Juvenile Protection Association’: “healthy recreation in individual and community life”, they pontificated, meant that the film industry “must submit to social control.” The result of the attacks on the industry was that cinemas began to be built in ‘better’ neighbourhoods and aimed at a more middle-class audience; the increasing cost of admission that needed to be charged to pay for all the new amenities in cinemas also made it more difficult for working class people to go to the movies regularly. In the name of public order and traditional morals, another venue of working class self-governance was turned into a depoliticised, consumerist form of mass entertainment.

I will conclude this part with an observation: although the middle of the twentieth century saw social democratic parties come to power, who built welfare states and made working class people more materially better off than at any point in history, I can’t shake this feeling that the working class had more power to control its own destiny and to manage its own institutions beforehand.

French update

Since my last post about the French presidential election, to be held on 22 April and 6 May, a few candidates have dropped out, but there has been little overall movement in the polling.

François Hollande (Socialist) continues to lead, with 28-34% in the first round and 56-60% in the second in all polls conducted so far this month. He has made a few waves in the international media by attacking bankers and Greek austerity measures, but is still seen as a lot more moderate and presidential than the incumbent. Nicolas Sarkozy (Union for a Popular Movement) has 24-26% of the first round vote in February’s polls, but still hasn’t beaten Hollande in a head-to-head second round poll since November 2009 (!) He has unveiled his platform, the centrepiece of which is a series of liberal economic reforms to be enacted by referendum – something which only makes him seem more ‘Bonapartist’, and which would be very embarrassing for him if he lost said referenda.

Marine Le Pen (National Front) is still third, but claims to be having difficulty securing the 500 signatures of elected officials needed to get on the ballot. She polls between 15 and 20 percent, but her absence would allow Sarkozy to challenge Hollande for the first-round lead (although not doing anything to his second-round deficit). Behind her are the centrist François Bayrou (Democratic Movement, 12-14%), the left-of-the-Socialist-Party Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Left Front, 7-8%), Eva Joly (The Greens, 2-4%), and our old friend Dominique de Villepin (United Republic, 1-2%). The most exciting news concerning any of these candidates was that de Villepin’s campaign headquarters were burgled, something which is a little suspicious given that we know that Sarkozy’s people may have had some involvement in Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest.

At the bottom of current polls, unable to rise above one percent, are the Trotskyist Nathalie Arthaud (Workers’ Struggle), the altermondialist Philippe Poutou (New Anticapitalist Party), the centrist environmentalist Corinne Lepage (CAP21), the slightly right-of-centre Hervé Morin (New Centre Party, and who may be on the verge of withdrawing), the Bob Katteresque Frédéric Nihous (Hunting, Fishing, Nature, and Traditions; yes, that is the party’s name!), and the eurosceptic Gaullist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (Arise the Republic). This group of candidates are going nowhere, may not even be on the ballot, and are only good for their amusement value. Morin, who hails from Normandy, provided it recently when he talked about seeing the Allied forces land in 1944, something which would have been rather difficult given that he was born in 1961.

Two other candidates mentioned in my last post have withdrawn: Jean-Pierre Chevènement (Republican and Citizens’ Movement) and Christine Boutin (Christian Democratic Party), both of whom were struggling to even hit one percent. Chevènement is one of the most interesting French politicos in terms of ideology: he is Keynesian, eurosceptic, anti-American, opposed to regional autonomy, and staunchly secular despite establishing the French Council of the Muslim Faith while a minister. His tiny party (he is one of its two MPs) is dependent on the Socialists, so he will almost certainly endorse Hollande. Boutin extracted a price for her endorsement of Sarkozy: a negative comment from him about same-sex marriage (she is its foremost opponent in French politics, and is most remembered for crying in Parliament when civil unions were legalised). Some polls are also testing a candidate named Jacques Cheminade, who ran in 1995 as the candidate of the Solidarity and Progress Party, a LaRouchite outfit, and who assures everyone that he already has the 500 signatures.

If anyone is interested, French Wikipedia has a page dedicated to polling for the election, and new polls are released every few days. The link is here; and note that the pollster CSA has the worst reputation (I’ve seen it referred to as the ‘French Zogby’). Their main page about the election is here, and has pictures of all the candidates (including one of Marine Le Pen playing chess!)

Rinehart's poem

Western Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart has composed a poem and had it engraved on a boulder somewhere outside Perth. It’s a paean to rent-seeking capitalism that made me want to throw up. I reproduce it here for the purpose of amusement, as well as to shed some light on how Australia’s elites think:

The globe is sadly groaning with debt, poverty and strife
And billions now are pleading to enjoy are better life
Their hope lies with resources buried deep within the earth
And the enterprise and capital which give each project worth
Is our future threatened with massive debts run up by political hacks
Who dig themselves out by unleashing rampant tax
The end result is sending Australian investment, growth and jobs offshore
This type of direction is harmful to our core
Some envious unthinking people have been conned
To think properity is created by waving a magic wand
Through such unfortunate ignorance, too much abuse is hurled
Against miners, workers and related industries who strive to build the world
Develop North Australia, embrace multiculturalism and welcome short term foreign workers to our shores
To benefit from the export of our minerals and ores
The world’s poor need our resources: do not leave them to their fate
Our nation needs special economic zones and wiser government, before it is too late.

The poem’s content demonstrates the thinking of modern-day conservatives, and specifically the class of rent-seekers who make up WA’s mining elite. The idea that “hope lies with resources buried deep within the earth” is an implicit swipe at any efforts to establish a more secure manufacturing base in Australia, and would have the petro-tyrants of Riyadh, Tehran, and Caracas nodding in agreement. The line after that, extolling the virtues of “enterprise and capital” is pure Ayn Rand.

Following on, she tells us of jobs forced offshore and investments not made because of “political hacks” and “rampant tax”. No doubt she has been taking lessons from Republicans across the Pacific, as this matches their ‘job creators’ rhetoric. Then, we get more amusement from her assurances that prosperity is not “created by waving a magic wand”. Apparently she is too stupid to see the irony of this, as extractive industries are all about this – it’s things such as industrial policy which are hard work. (In the early United States, for example, Jefferson’s export-driven ‘yeoman farmer’ vision was more magic wand-like than Hamilton’s economic policies.)

The poem ends with accusations of prejudice against miners, workers, and foreigners on the part of those who don’t unfailingly support her industry. The idea that the corporate elite is more in touch with the working class than its critics is plain old right-wing culture war resentment, straight out of the Sarah Palin playbook. One of the most revealing lines, however, is her call to “welcome short term foreign workers to our shores”. This is where we see the conservative mind at work. Short-term, so that they are more vulnerable; permanent migrants might unionise and secure pay rises. The final line, calling for “special economic zones” reveals her intention, and that of Australia’s corporate elite: to turn this continent into one massive low-wage, non-unionised, undemocratic, unequal hellhole like Dubai or the Jim Crow South.

Make no mistake: this is the anti-Hamiltonian, anti-Keynesian, anti-manufacturing, anti-democratic, and anti-union vision which the Ayn Rand cultists who run this country, and every other, are hell-bent on imposing upon us. We must stop them before it is too late.

Romney, Secularism, and the Presidency

 Of the forty-three Presidents of the United States, only two have held any sort of religious office: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both deists, were vestrymen in the Anglican/Episcopal church, prior to the Revolution when it was the established church in Virginia, and a vestryman was as much as civil and a religious office. (Jefferson would go on to author the legislation which disestablished it.) Americans may be on the verge of breaking their two-century-old streak of electing laypeople to the White House, however, as the former Stake President of the Boston Stake (the equivalent of a bishop, with jurisdiction over the eastern half of Massachusetts) wraps up the Republican nomination.

Whenever Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is discussed, the focus is always on his religion itself and not the position he held within the LDS Church hierarchy. During his 2008 and 2012 campaigns for the Republican nomination, we have heard endless comparisons between evangelical Protestants’ alleged intolerance of Mormons today and the bigotry faced by John F. Kennedy. There is one crucial difference that is overlooked in all of this: Kennedy wasn’t the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston. He was a layman, and indeed had a strong record of voting against measures supported by his church’s hierarchy (such as federal funding for parochial schools, and nominating pro-choice justices to the Supreme Court). If Romney is elected in November, he will be the first President to have held any religious office after the adoption of the First Amendment, and the President who has held the most senior office within any church. The comparisons with Kennedy are convenient for him, as they are meant to imply that any discussion of his religion is tantamount to the sort of bigotry and misrepresentation that Kennedy was subjected to in 1960.

Secularism in the United States has an interesting and misunderstood history. The state-level declarations of religious freedom expounded in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, such as Jefferson’s in Virginia, inspired the ‘no religious test’ provision in Article Six of the Constitution and the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom and prohibition of a federal established church. The last states to disestablish their official churches did so in the 1830s, and Americans elected Presidents of various flavours of Protestantism without much commentary on their religious beliefs. After the Second World War and the dispersal of inner-city ethnic populations to the suburbs, the tolerance accorded to minority Protestant sects was extended to Catholics and Jews, something which made it possible for John F. Kennedy to do what Al Smith couldn’t do in 1928 – be elected President as a Catholic, and which makes it possible for record numbers of Catholics and Jews to hold high federal office today without comment. Slowly, religious tolerance has extended beyond the Judeo-Christian realm – there are two Muslims and one Buddhist in Congress, and George W. Bush visited a mosque only six days after 9/11.

Americans’ religious tolerance, however, has two negative counterparts. One is the intolerance accorded to atheists. On various statistical measures of tolerance, atheists rank below most categories of religious believers – the most striking example, since we’re discussing the presidential nomination, is that fewer Americans would vote for an atheist candidate for the White House than a Muslim, only a decade after 9/11. The second dark side to religious tolerance in the United States is that because criticising other peoples’ religions, and therefore their religions’ hierarchies, is off limits, American politics lacks the tradition of anti-clericalism which is still relevant in parts of Europe – most notably in France, the middle third of Italy, and European Turkey. The regular interference in public affairs by the likes of Falwell, Robertson, Graham, and Sharpton would be met with derision in Britain or Australia, and hostility in France, but is tolerated by Americans as a normal part of political discourse.

Thus, we have a situation in the United States today where Mitt Romney can immunise himself attacks on his religion by referring to a secular tradition which was largely the work of Thomas Jefferson, while overlooking Jefferson’s thoughts on clerical interference in politics. “History, I believe,” the Third President wrote in 1813, “furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.” One wonders what Jefferson would have thought of such a senior religious figure being nominated by a major party for the presidency.

In recent decades, the Enlightenment-influenced secularism of the Founding Fathers has come under attack from religious conservatives. After organised Protestant chauvinism made its last stand in the underground anti-Kennedy pamphleteering campaign in 1960, moderate Protestants made their peace with liberalism while their conservative counterparts joined forces with Catholics to oppose legalised abortion. Together, this unholy alliance has redefined the role of religion in public life. In America today, there are federally-funded ‘faith-based initiatives’, the words ‘under god’ in the Pledge of Allegiance have been given the Supreme Court’s sanction, and it is unthinkable that any President would be inaugurated the way John Quincy Adams was in 1825 – swearing the oath of office on a book of law and omitting the now-customary ‘so help me god’. After striking blow after blow against Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’, the theocrats squeal that they are being persecuted whenever their delicate ears hear ‘happy holidays’ instead of ‘merry Christmas’. So much for the Squire of Monticello’s prediction that everyone alive in the 1820s would die a Unitarian.

It is for these reasons that it is scary to hear Romney peppering his speeches with phrases such as “saving the soul of America”, a formulation he has used after a few recent primary and caucus victories. Someone who was once the most powerful Mormon cleric in New England, and whose shameless pandering to the theocrats of the Evangelical-Catholic axis knows no limits, is not someone who can be trusted with the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – especially given his unsavoury record in dealing with the issues of abortion, adoption, and women’s rights within the LDS Church. Talking about saving America’s soul is not the rhetoric of a ‘Massachusetts moderate’ running on his record as a CEO – it is the rhetoric of a reactionary cleric embarking on a jihad against what remains of the spirit of 1776 and 1789.

Independencia para el Norte!

 

Some good news from the Old Country, at last. The increasing pace of Scottish and Welsh devolution has got people thinking about self-government for the North of England, and a think tank has been established to pursue a devolved legislature, either for the North or for each of its three regions. According to the Guardian, the Hannah Mitchell Foundation (named for the legendary Mancunian socialist and suffragette) was launched in Huddersfield two weeks ago, and is linked to a number of northern Labour politicians, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott.

In recent decades, the domination of the British economy by the financial services sector in the City has led to what was once the world’s greatest empire becoming a banana republic. The belligerent attitudes of successive governments towards European integration are the most obvious manifestation of this – Westminster and Whitehall will throw any other sector of the economy, and any other part of the country, under the bus in order to protect the status of the Square Mile. And of course, the links between the City’s money and the think tanks and lobby groups which facilitated the rise of Thatcherism are well-documented. The North, which was the economic engine of the British Empire at its height, suffers from de-industrialisation, urban blight, and racial conflict, while its economy has become so dependent on public spending that over half of the North-East’s GDP comes in the form of handouts from Westminster and Brussels.

As Simon Jenkins pointed out in his book Big Bang Localism: A rescue plan for British democracy, far from being a harbinger of freedom, the Thatcher government destroyed local self-government in the name of cutting costs. The most well-known example of this was its running battles with the metropolitan county councils, most notably in Ken Livingston’s Greater London and in Merseyside (run by the Labour ‘loony left’), which were abolished in 1986. But more importantly, and largely occurring under the radar, were the changes in the powers of local councils around Britain. More and more, the central government gave itself the power to limit the actions of councils to spend and to deliver services, by limiting rate-raising and transferring councils’ powers to unelected government agencies. The British people were no longer trusted to vote out a profligate or badly-performing council. The Jacobin attitude of Westminster was summed up by Thatcher’s Chancellor, Nigel Lawson (father of TV chef Nigella), who said that “so long as public services exist, Treasury control is essential. The alternative is no financial discipline at all.” The Thatcher government’s anti-localist stance has been continued, with only minor and symbolic reversals, under Major, Blair, Brown, and Cameron.

While all this was going on, other parts of Europe came to enjoy increased autonomy. The incoming Socialist government in France in 1981 ditched that country’s Jacobin, centralising traditions and granted sweeping powers to elected regional councils. Spain’s post-Franco transition to democracy led to Catalonia and the Basque Country having two of the most devolved regional governments on the continent. (The latter keeps all the tax revenue raised in its jurisdiction, a privilege also accorded to Sicily.) And, of course, Belgium’s transfer of powers to its regions has been remarkable. Centralisation of power increasingly appears to be a disease which only afflicts the Anglo-Saxon world – witness the Reagan Administration’s bullying of Vermont over its legal drinking age, or the Australian High Court’s ridiculously broad interpretation of the corporations power in the 2006 Workchoices case. Westminster’s denial of autonomy to the English regions and denial of pan-metropolitan government to provincial centres is out of step with its European neighbours, and leaves the North without the tools to rebuild its economy and move out of the shadow of the City.

While Scotland will likely end this decade with either independence or the power to legislate for virtually everything except foreign affairs and defence, and Wales follows a few steps behind Scotland, the North has little control over its own affairs. In 2004, voters rejected a plan for an elected legislature in the North-East, one of the nine artificial regions into which most public matters are now organised in England. The prospect of Scottish and Welsh independence leaving northerners at the whim of a Conservative-dominated Westminster, however, may lead to a re-think, which the founders of the Hannah Mitchell Foundation are hoping for. But why stop at devolution? Why should northerners allow English patriotism to keep them under the domination of the financiers in the City? Why not an independent northern republic, proudly taking its place at the European Council table alongside its Celtic and Nordic neighbours?

White Panthers...or perhaps Old Lords

Two items in recent days, one concerning each of the two front-runners for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, have prompted me to pose an intriguing and provocative question about the modern GOP. That question: is the Republican Party a mau-mauing, post-1968, New Left identity politics movement for old suburban white people?

We’ve all heard Moneybags Mitt say: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich; they’re doing just fine.” This is interesting in light of the cultural populism that the GOP has perfected over the years. Conservatives like to pose as the champions of the ordinary American against the ‘elites’, yet denounce ‘elite’ liberals as perpetrating ‘class warfare’ when they dare talk about raising taxes. Moneybags Mitt appears to be trying to thread both needles here; but is there something more sinister about this quote? What is the conservative audience supposed to think when they hear ‘very poor’ and ‘very rich’?

In the case of the ‘very poor’, that one is simple: blacks, Hispanics, et cetera. It has been noted before that Tea Party supporters tend to stick to their free-market principles when government programs which tend to benefit minorities are discussed, but when programs which benefit older, white people are supposedly under threat, the response is ‘get your filthy government hands off my Medicare’. As for the ‘very rich’, it is rather curious that Moneybags Mitt refers to them as ‘they’, as his own status a member of the overclass is surely uncontested. To understand what he means, we must first examine a few quotes from his challenger.

This blog post by Ben Adler on the website of The Nation has noted that Newt Gingrich has attacked, in recent times, “elites” who “ride the subway” as well as people “who live in high-rise apartment buildings” and “ride the metro.” The context for the latter quote was a ‘Rally for Homeownership’ prior to the South Carolina Primary. That Gingrich would attend such an event made me laugh – lobbying for Fannie and Freddie, anyone? Seriously, though, what Gingrich seems to be doing is pandering to suburban white folks by telling them that they’re somehow better than the elites in the big cities. But not just any big city – the references to subways and newspaper headquarters indicate that Newt is probably thinking of New York or Washington when he peddles this sort of nonsense. In addition to the anti-urban angle, the denunciation of public transport users fits in with the Republicans’ attitudes to the environment and to the large outlays of public spending required to build such things as subways and metros. There is also a parallel with a quote often attributed to Margaret Thatcher, about any man who rides a bus to work after the age of thirty being a failure.

Matthew Yglesias nails it on Slate. “It’s telling” he writes, “how swiftly any kind of commitment to free market economics melts away in the face of the identity politics concerns of prosperous older white suburbanites.” Policy-free denunciations of the Other in order to make members of the in-group feel special? Sounds like identity politics to me.

Romney and Gingrich are aiming their messages at a demographic which is responsive to denunciations of the ‘very poor’ (due to their blackness and Hispanicness) and of the ‘very rich’ (because they see themselves as downtrodden by ‘liberal elites’ on the East Coast). That same demographic is willing to denounce government spending, while also holding its hand out for assistance with mortgages and cheaper Canadian prescription drugs. The idea of the GOP as an identity politics movement for ‘older white suburbanites’ is a good framework with which to study modern American political discourse, and would help observers to get beyond the Big Government vs. Small Government dichotomy, which is unhelpful as it overlooks conservatives’ heresies on corporate welfare, farm subsidies, mortgages, and social spending for retirees (and conversely, the green-induced reaction against Keynesian public works projects on the left). Instead, we should view conservatism as the vehicle by which old white suburban people assert their dominion over the young, multi-racial, subway-riding populations of the cities.

Ron Paul, the Civil War, and the War on Terror

  

In the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, Ron Paul’s anti-war stance has won him a lot of support from people who might otherwise consider themselves left-wing / liberal / progressive / whatever. This has happened despite Paul’s radical free-market ideology, his ‘leave it to the states’ position on social issues, and some embarrassing past positions on race. It’s disturbing, and in my view reflects a misguided rejection of the Wilsonian foreign policy tradition, and of executive power itself, by sections of the American left.

In the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who covers a lot of African-American history, has a three-part series of posts highlighting Paul’s objectionable views about the Civil War, and debunking them using contemporary sources as well as more recent historical works. While reading them, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between Paul’s rhetoric about the Civil War, and that of the opponents of the War on Terror. When Paul labels Lincoln the aggressor, when in fact all the steps taken to escalate the conflict were taken by the South, he sounds exactly like those who denounce everything done by the United States in the Islamic world as aggression while excusing everything done by terrorists. When the neo-confederates damn the Lincoln Administration for a few suspensions of habeas corpus here and there or for preventing the Maryland legislature from voting to secede, they sound exactly like those who use extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay to denounce an endeavour grounded in true Wilsonian principles.

The second of Coates’ posts discusses the economics of slavery, with reference to Paul’s support for compensated emancipation along the lines of the British Empire’s abolition of slavery in 1840. (I love how Coates ties it into modern political discourse by referring to it as a “bailout”.) He reiterates the huge barrier to emancipation overlooked by apologists for the Confederacy: the cost. The total value of all slaves held captive on American soil had risen from $300 million around the time of the Revolution to $3 billion on the eve of the Civil War. It seems that Paul would have preferred that the Union leave future generations of Americans with a massive debt than to see white people die for black peoples’ freedom. If one believes slavery to be wrong, one must support its abolition whatever the cost. The whole thing is eerily reminiscent of the 1930s pacifist catchphrase “why die for Danzig?” and of Cindy Sheehan’s contention that her son “killed for lies and for a PNAC neocon agenda to benefit Israel.”

In the third post, Coates talks about Paul’s contention that slavery could have been ended without recourse to ‘violence’, noting that if keeping human beings enslaved isn’t ‘violent’, the word doesn’t have much meaning. In addition, the regular use of military force to put down slave rebellions surely constitutes violence. On this point, Paul again echoes the arguments of the Moorite-Chomskyite left. The latter bemoan the use of ‘violence’ by the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, conveniently ignoring that those societies were dictatorships characterised by abominable human rights records. The rulers of Orwellian tyrannies are violent towards the citizens’ liberties every second of their existence. It makes no sense to attack the United States for putting an end to the supposed peace and tranquillity of life under the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Gaddafi (and perhaps, in the near future, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad).

The thread which connects neo-confederate thought to the modern anti-war crowd is their shared rejection of Wilsonianism. In his classic study of American foreign policy, Special Providence, Walter Russell Mead defined Wilsonianism as one of the United States’ four constituent foreign policy traditions. It is characterised by the pursuit of universal human rights standards and international law, and while not necessarily supportive of actions which harm America’s standing in the world, it doesn’t put as much stock in defending the ‘national interest’ as other foreign policy creeds. The Wilsonian impulse to put American power at the service of the advance of liberal democracy predates Woodrow Wilson himself, and has guided the United States’ pursuit of the Civil War and both World Wars, and its key role in reconstructing a framework of international co-operation after each of the two world wars.

When free-market fanboiz like Ron Paul attack Wilsonianism, they do so because they see it as an extension of the interventionist economic policies they abhor at home. Right-wing isolationist literature is full of references to Wilsonian ‘do-gooders’ – the same slur used domestically by the right to denounce attempts by the left to use the state to alleviate suffering and injustice. This is why Ron Paul retroactively opposes the Union’s prosecution of the Civil War – just as the right of the elites to their ‘private property’ precludes the amelioration of the condition of the poor and working class today, it precluded the liberation of the slaves then.