Film review: Sophie Scholl – The Final Days

SBS seem to be on something of a theme lately, screening a number of films about the lives of young women under fascism. I’ve already reviewed two such films in recent months (El Calentito and Las 13 Rosas), so it was with another review in mind that I watched Sophie Scholl – The Final Days on Wednesday night. In the lead role was Julia Jentsch, whose other politically-themed roles include The Edukators, where she played a member of a group of young anti-capitalist activists who break into the houses of rich people, but ‘educate’ them rather than steal from them. This film is based on a true story – that of the eponymous twenty-one year-old Bavarian, a member of an anti-Nazi non-violent resistance group called the White Rose who was executed for treason in 1943 after distributing subversive pamphlets at her university.

At the beginning of what would prove to be an otherwise macabre film, one couldn’t help but be enchanted by the use of old-school methods of political communication. Watching Sophie, her brother Hans, and their friends mimeograph pamphlets to be direct-mailed or dropped at their university in between lectures evoked a yearning for something that is missing from modern politics. Before the thirty-second soundbite and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, any organised group could get its message heard – even under the most infamous dictatorship in human history. It was here, however, that Sophie and Hans would be caught by the authorities, beginning a process which would lead to their deaths.

There were many parallels between Sophie’s experience and that of Verónica Sánchez’s Julia in Las 13 Rosas: the use of underground anti-fascist pamphlets, interrogation scenes with a young female being tormented by a uniformed fascist, the background noise of radio speeches made by the Führer or Caudillo, the camaraderie between women imprisoned for political crimes, the show trials in which they were let down by hapless defence lawyers, and the characters’ naïve hopes that foreign intervention would liberate their country from fascism before their eventual executions. In both films, the lead character’s virtue is imparted via their comparative lack of political engagement – Sophie dodges the detective’s questions by describing herself and her acquaintances as “apolitical”, and is propelled to political action not by ideology but by her faith (Lutheran, if you’re playing along at home); Julia owns about five pieces of socialist literature. This, as well as the fact that the White Rose’s membership probably didn’t run into double digits and its activities didn’t go beyond distributing literature, illustrated well the paranoia of totalitarian regimes, for whom any activity outside their control is seen as a threat.

Besides being a small-time amateur operation, the members of the White Rose were not originally drawn together by politics. This isn’t covered in the film (which, as the title indicates, focuses on the final days of Sophie’s life), but the group was brought together through a shared interest in cultural pursuits and a background in the so-called ‘German youth movement’, a cultural phenomenon similar to Scouting which the Nazis took over and exploited for their own ends. There is an even more intriguing angle, however – Jud Newborn, an author of a book about Sophie Scholl, believes that Hans Scholl was forced out of the official (Nazi-sanctioned) youth movement due to his homosexuality, and that this caused the two siblings to side with the victims of the Nazi state. If true, this reminds us of the obsession which reactionary political movements have of policing the bodies of women, LGBTs, and minorities. (It also provides a link with the storyline of El Calentito, where the transsexual bar owner and her friend don’t need a political science degree to know that franquismo is bad for their health.)

The centrepiece of the film was not the trial but the multiple interrogation scenes in which Sophie is quizzed by Gestapo officer Robert Mohr. Initially, Sophie denies any involvement in the pamphleteering, but confesses forty-five minutes into the film. In explaining her opposition to the Nazi regime, she initially hides behind her belief that the war is unwinnable, an idea formulated based on her brother’s and fiancé’s military experiences (both have seen action at Stalingrad). Then, she reveals her humanism and idealism. She has seen a Jewish schoolteacher beaten, disabled children taken away to be killed (with the assistance of nuns), and dreams of a unified, peaceful Europe. She speaks of her concern that the German people will be reviled throughout history for their actions during the war.

Sophie’s talk of freedom and human rights is scoffed at by Mohr. “Democracy only let me be a tailor,” he yells at her at one point, before rattling off the Weimar Republic’s ills (hyperinflation, political instability, etc.) as his reasons for supporting Nazism. The portrayal of Mohr reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem – someone not particularly demonic, but whose middling life prospects compelled them to seek acceptance in a cause greater than themselves, in which the bureaucratisation of twentieth-century life allowed them to hide behind rules and procedures whilst committing unspeakable evil. Just as the high school dropout and former vacuum cleaner salesman Eichmann could tell himself that he was simply carrying out his tasks as a functionary when he sent Jews to the gas chambers, the tailor-turned-detective Mohr has no qualms about having a twenty-one year-old woman executed because the law wills it. On multiple occasions, he brandishes his pocket copy of the Reich’s criminal code, including when he mocks Sophie’s belief that humans are answerable to a higher power than mere law.

The film ends on an ambiguous note. Sophie is graphically depicted being positioned horizontally in order to fit her neck into the guillotine which would execute her, with her last words being (apparently with some historical licence) “the sun still shines” – last words which reminded me of Galileo’s (“and yet it moves”). One of the pamphlets made by the White Rose is smuggled to Britain, where it is mass-produced and then dropped over German cities by the Royal Air Force. The foreign liberation that Sophie hoped for would come to late to save her, and would produce decades of geopolitical stalemate and the division of Germany. Just like Madrid’s republicans in 1939, the German Resistance’s lack of domestic support condemned it to plead for the help of the international community, which either doesn’t come (as in Spain) or comes at a hefty price (as in Soviet-occupied eastern Germany).

Explaining what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945 is in many ways the ultimate challenge for the political scientist. My own interpretation meshes together the thesis of Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism with a broader understanding of European genocides against non-European peoples, notably illustrated in Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes. Arendt focuses on the transition of statecraft from the ‘government of men’ to the ‘administration of things’, which she traces to the control of Western states by industrial capitalists and to the need of those states to control the societies of their colonies. (George Orwell detailed similar outlines of this phenomenon in his critiques of American Trotskyist-cum-neoconservative thinker James Burnham, who welcomed the New Deal, Stalinism, and Nazism and the managerial class those systems produced.) The mass genocides carried out by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, per Arendt, were made possible by the ability of public functionaries to hide behind bureaucratic procedure and to not think about the human consequences of the orders they were carrying out. As mentioned above, the film’s portrayal of Robert Mohr and Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann exemplify this archetype.

Lindqvist’s book is a sketch of various atrocities committed by European states, corporations, and peoples against their colonial subjects during the late Victorian zenith of imperialism. When I read the book as an undergraduate, the most chilling passage was his description of the genocide of the Herero people of (present-day) Namibia by Wilhelmine Germany in 1897. The final sentence of the passage notes that Adolf Hitler was only eight years old at the time, as if to remind the reader that he didn’t invent the idea of exterminating en masse disfavoured ethnic groups. Everything the Nazis did was copied from someone else – concentration camps were first used by the British during the Boer War, many American states had extensive eugenics programs which inspired the Nazis’ own, and the Führer told his generals to govern occupied Poland as the British had governed India. When Mohr responds to Sophie’s tear-jerking description of the round-up of mentally disabled children to be killed by breathlessly saying “they deserved to die”, he was only expressing an all-too-common view among those in power at the time. (It would take the Holocaust to make eugenics unfashionable, but it still lives on in certain quarters, having arguably made its way into Malthusian rhetoric about ‘overpopulation’.)

In Nazi Germany, the twentieth-century disease of bureaucratic managerialism collided with a history of imperialism and genocide wrought by Europeans against subject peoples since Columbus’ landing in the Americas. Like El Calentito and Las 13 Rosas, Julia Jentsch’s portrayal of Sophie Scholl brilliantly depicts the street-level and human-scale consequences of the decisions taken by powerful men in Madrid and Berlin.

Gillard, Rinehart, and the Continuing Legacy of White Australia

Just as I finish my series of posts on ‘Race and the Making of the Australian Working Class’, we get a present-day example of what I was discussing. The federal government has decided to act as a recruitment agency for Big Mining, in particular the empire of Gina Rinehart (whose banana-republican vision of Australia’s future I dissed here), by importing 1700 foreign workers specifically to work in her mines. The decision shouldn’t surprise anyone – the Australian state has shaped the labour market to suit the needs of private employers ever since convicts were hired out.

The debate surrounding the issue has been framed in terms of ‘Australian’ workers being replaced by ‘foreign’ ones. However, as federal MP Kelvin Thomson (ALP – Vic.) pointed out on ABC News24 last week, the foreign workers are being brought in because Rinehart doesn’t wish to employ the indigenous workers who live close to the mines. In addition, the foreign workers are not the downtrodden and oppressed of the Earth, but likely to be educated people from the developed world, China, or India. The reserving of jobs for white people which would otherwise have gone to non-whites is nothing new in our history: just ask Chinese goldminers at Lambing Flat in 1861, Kanakas on the Queensland sugar fields in the 1900s, or Japanese pearlers in Broome in the 1910s.

The use of state power to regulate the supply of labour is essential to an understanding of Australia’s economic history. The battles over the availability of land for settlement, the transportation of convicts, and the immigration of non-whites are all intimately linked with the need of the state and of corporations for a plentiful supply of cheap labour, and with the desire of workers to create a tighter labour market. Indigenous Australians have been particularly targeted by this process ever since the movement of whites to the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes drew them into the pastoral economy. The Aborigines Protection Boards historically acted as recruiters and suppliers of indigenous labour, and the victims of the Stolen Generations were often made to work in missions or in private homes. Indigenous workers were denied the rights accorded to their white counterparts – hence the Stolen Wages phenomenon and the wave of indigenous-led strikes in the Pilbara and Northern Territory in the mid-twentieth century. During the colonial occupation of Papua New Guinea between the First World War and 1975, Australian mining companies were complicit in the use of indentured labour to staff their facilities. Mining giants such as Rio Tinto have a history of union-busting and conspiring to dispossess Aboriginal Australians of their land. The Gillard government’s decision to provide the mining industry with the workforce of its choice continues this ugly tradition.

Hate To Say I Told You So

In my first ever post for this blog, which had earlier appeared on the blog of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, I mocked New York Times pundit and professional centrist Thomas Friedman for his enthusiasm for the Americans Elect project. Americans Elect is one of a recent proliferation of high-profile attempts to elevate a moderate politician (usually in the form of Michael Freakin’ Bloomberg) to the presidency in place of those Democrats and Republicans whose partisanship stands between the chattering classes and the enactment of their neo-Hamiltonian, Something-Must-Be-Done agenda (and of course they ignore that Obama is enacting most of it anyway). Unity08 was the name of last election cycle’s equivalent, and it was destroyed by infighting (between its fanatically pro-Bloomberg wing and its moderately pro-Bloomberg wing) despite the presence of big names from the Carter White House. As I predicted, Americans Elect has gone the same way.

The process used by Americans Elect to nominate a presidential candidate was secretive and designed with a high barrier to qualify for the nomination. No-one did so (former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer came closest, after desperately seeking the AE nomination following the failure of his quixotic tilt at the GOP nomination), leaving its equally secretive backers empty-handed after qualifying for the ballot in twenty-seven states. The predictions of pundits such as Friedman, who suggested that Americans Elect would destroy the two-party duopoly the way Amazon.com destroyed the likes of Borders, have been proven wrong. (And not for the first time: the third-party shtick is one of Friedman’s stocks-in-trade. Last time he even came up with a catchy slogan: ‘Green is the New Red, White and Blue’.) The Big Two parties might be useless and unpopular, but Americans aren’t interested in a candidate who has no support outside the Beltway and Lower Manhattan.

2012 will see the American voter presented with a bumper crop of third-party candidates: former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson for the Libertarians, former Virginia Congressman Virgil Goode for the Constitution Party, and former Mayor of Salt Lake City Rocky Anderson for his self-created Justice Party. (Alas, comedienne Roseanne Barr missed out on the Greens’ nomination, losing to physician Jill Stein.) Friedman can support one of these if he wishes, or he can accept that the chattering classes already have their magical centrist candidate – Barackmitt Willard Hussein Obamney.

Bloggin' Dixie

In a post at the National Review entitled ‘The Party of Civil Rights’, Kevin D. Williamson presents a provocative but deeply flawed revision of American history, which casts the Republican Party as always being the defenders of civil rights for African-Americans and the Democratic Party as always the reverse. There are strong connections, he claims between Frederick Douglass and President Eisenhower, just as there are between the fire-eaters and LBJ.

Every student of American history knows the basic outlines of this story – the South, initially split in its partisan allegiances, began to vote monolithically Democratic in the 1830s or 1840s in response to the links between the rising abolitionist movement and the Whig Party. From there, the party was dominant in Dixie until 1) the rise of a white-collar middle-class in growing and industrialising southern cities, and 2) a backlash against national Democrats’ support for civil rights. Conversely, African-Americans were largely loyal Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans until the New Deal, and became firmly locked into the Democratic column as a result of the civil rights movement. It is difficult to argue against the proposition that the ideological descendants of the Dixiecrats found their way into the GOP, especially when they were the same people.

In order to make his argument, Williamson relies on some odd arguments and spurious claims – Lyndon Johnson’s desire to be seen as a champion of civil rights in the North and an opponent in the South is singled out as if it were abnormal behaviour for a politician. He tells us that General Eisenhower began desegregating the military before President Truman, but Ike had no partisan affiliation until around one year prior to his election, and actually considered taking a spot on the Democratic ticket in 1948. The old saw about Woodrow Wilson segregating the federal government is another half-truth: he completed a process begun under McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft, Republicans all. And the Republican Party’s shifting and calculating positions on race are presented as one linear narrative from Lincoln to the 1957 Civil Rights Act – in fact, its willingness to pander to segregationist sentiment dates from the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction.

There is one aspect of the article on which Williamson is (mostly) right: the fact that the GOP had been growing in the South prior to the backlash against civil rights. Williamson throws out examples of pre-WWII Republican victories in southern congressional seats, seemingly without noticing that most of his examples would be in Appalachian districts, where a Whig/Republican political culture had been strong since the Jacksonian era. In 1960, for example, the Party of Lincoln held seven seats in the South: four were in Appalachia (eastern Tennessee [two], southwestern Virginia [one], and western North Carolina [one]) and three in middle-class suburban areas (Dallas [oil], Tampa [tourism and retirees], and northern Virginia [civil servants]). Other areas of Dixie with Republican voting patterns were explainable by factors which pre-dated the New Deal: sugar barons’ need for tariff protection in coastal Louisiana or the abolitionism of the pre-statehood German settlers of central Texas. Moreover, the Republican ascendancy drew its support from multiple sources. Take Georgia as an example: in 1960, Kennedy carried the state while Nixon carried Atlanta; four years later, the rural areas swung heavily to the Republicans and gave the state to Goldwater, while Atlanta voted for the pro-Civil Rights Act LBJ.

To dress up the modern-day GOP as the best friend of black America, Williamson has to perform a conscious mystification of congressional electoral history. He points out that the southern states which elected anti-civil rights Democrats to the Senate continued to do so after the national party began to support civil rights. As anyone who knows anything about American politics knows, the two major parties are the very definitions of ‘big tents’, and congressional seniority was also a reason that some of the old Dixiecrats hung on well into the 1970s and 1980s. Williamson jokes that “[t]hey say things move slower in the South – but not that slow”, as if congressional seniority, presidential voting patterns, and local factors didn’t tell us anything. Similarly, he reminds us that the majority of southern Representatives were Democrats until 1994, omitting that the Democrats had controlled the House since 1958, and that the South’s shift at the presidential and senatorial levels was already complete long before the Newtslide of 1994.

The article’s treatment of Barry Goldwater is also one of its blind spots. The Arizona Senator is described as not being “strongly identified with racial issues one way or the other”. In fact, he helped found the Cactus State’s chapter of the NAACP, a point which Williamson overlooks but which have helped his argument. Other 1960s-era GOP figures more friendly to African-American concerns (Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, John Lindsay) are also ignored, presumably because they aren’t conservative enough. In addition to the rise of a southern middle class, Williamson adds anti-communism and law ‘n’ order to the reasons for the South’s partisan shift, as if either were unrelated to questions of race. Anti-communism was a key feature of opposition to civil rights: reactionaries were always quick to seize upon the Soviet bloc’s condemnation of Jim Crow and upon the communist connections of prominent African-American figures such as Martin Luther King and Paul Robeson. As for law and order, we only need look at the Willie Horton ad to see its potential as a racist dog-whistle.

Littered throughout the article is the usual neoconservative stuff about welfare creating a culture of dependency – apparently a topic on which Williamson has a book forthcoming. To argue, as he does, that over nine-tenths of African-Americans vote for a party which deliberately denies them economic opportunity is little more than an inverse of the ‘false consciousness’/‘voting against their economic interest’ argument put forward by liberals such as Thomas Frank to condemn working-class white conservatives. Surely the best people to consult as to which party is the best defender of African-Americans are African-Americans themselves.

Lastly, there’s something missing from Williamson’s narrative of a GOP committed to civil rights from Reconstruction to the present – the various attempts by the party to court southern segregationist votes throughout that time. Just because these attempts were largely unsuccessful in ending the Democrats’ control of the Solid South doesn’t mean the Republicans were committed to civil rights throughout this time.

The Republican Party didn’t ignore the South between Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Rutherford Hayes appointed a southern Democrat as his Postmaster-General (then the most powerful position in Cabinet because of the patronage its occupant could dispense). Chester Arthur tried to exploit the emerging Greenback/Populist movement to split the South, but its antipathy to Republican economic policies was insurmountable. Although the party tried to legislate for federal enforcement of voting rights during the Harrison Administration, the GOP of the 1880s and 1890s gradually neglected its black and Appalachian southern voters in order to win over a larger share of the non-Appalachian white population there. By the early twentieth century, it was common for different sets of Republican delegates (one ‘lilywhite’ and one ‘black and tan’, i.e. multi-racial) to arrive at national conventions claiming to be the true Republicans of some southern state or other – it was credentials fights over these delegations, rather than care for the welfare of African-Americans that made it necessary for GOP leaders to pay homage to their concerns. (Hence Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation to Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, or the tentative support of Presidents Harding and Coolidge for anti-lynching bills.)

The party consciously courted the votes of white southerners attracted to its economic policies (tariffs, internal improvements) and to its interventionist foreign policy. (Anti-communism was added to the mix after the advent of the New Deal.) All the while, it took its African-American constituents for granted, to the point where they were ready to switch parties. The idea of a merger between the Republicans and the Dixiecrats was always being discussed, and came closest to fruition before the 1952 presidential poll – one wonders how this was at all conceivable if the Republicans hadn’t already made concessions to Jim Crow. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ lock on the South, their need to win African-American votes in big northern cities, and their infiltration by programmatic liberals enabled them to neglect the sentiments of southern whites and become the true Party of Civil Rights.

Jim Crow 2.0

For anyone wanting to understand the relationship between social control, the criminal justice system, and race in the United States, this article on the website of Jacobin magazine (‘The Political Economy of Mass Incarceration’) provides a good overview of how the betrayal of Reconstruction begat the post-1970s culture of mass incarceration of African-Americans and other racial minorities. A couple of important historical lessons from the article:

• Reconstruction was about what would become of the South’s slave population, i.e. whether they would be simply wage labourers for their former owners or something else. The alliance between northern capital and southern planters (symbolised politically by the 1877 deal to hand, in the aftermath of a close and disputed presidential election, the White House to the Republicans in exchange for the Democrats re-establishing their hegemony in the South) condemned them to the former option.
• The post-Civil War southern state governments used the law to deny African-Americans the right to homestead land – a classic tactic for reducing people’s economic opportunities which has roots in the enclosures of medieval England and the Highland Clearances. The ally of the southern oligarchs in denying the freed slaves their proverbial ‘forty acres and a mule’ was…the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency set up ostensibly to advance the interests of said former slaves. (An early example of regulatory capture?)
• The regime of mass incarceration which dates back, like so many negative trends in American life, to the Nixon Administration has a similar purpose. Just as Reconstruction-era freedmen were prevented from engaging in economic activity outside the cotton plantation system, the disproportionate focus on drugs helps to take away a potential source of employment for inner-city African-Americans, forcing them into either the formal economy or into bureaucratic means of social control such as the welfare and prison systems.

A reader in the article’s comments section suggests that ninety percent of the revenue of the state of Alabama in the early twentieth century came from leasing convict labour to private employers. I’ll have to do some checking to verify this, but it is certainly true that the South has always had a culture of using prison labour. Lacking the religiously-inspired social reformism which drove campaigns for better prison conditions in the North, and lacking a strong union movement to stop the widespread undercutting of free labour by convictism, the region bore many similarities to early post-1788 Australia in its reliance on unfree labour, both as a means of driving down the cost of labour, and as a means of social control. The trend of privatised prisons is not, then, something which has only existed for the last few decades, but the nationalisation of a previously southern phenomenon.

Then, as now, new crimes were invented by those in power to keep disfavoured racial groups in line. The suite of legal restrictions imposed on Jim Crow-era southern blacks included those directly related to economics (such as laws favouring Big Cotton over small farmers), but also included restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms (something I discussed in my post on the Trayvon Martin shooting) and the right to marry a non-black person (until overturned in Loving v. Virginia). In addition, the South was the site of the heaviest applications of eugenics laws (the preponderance of which was one of the few things Adolf Hitler praised America for in Mein Kampf), and programs such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment added to the oppression, as well as demonstrate Washington’s complicity in the region’s racial caste system.

Why, then, does America continue to imprison racial minorities, particularly African-American males, at artificially high rates, despite the lack of a connection between these rates and actual crime or drug use figures? In a 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander blames decisions made regarding drug laws by a Supreme Court packed with Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush appointees. The Court has reinterpreted the Fourth Amendment so as to allow all sorts of searches, which are inevitably undertaken disproportionately against non-whites, and has reduced the Fourteenth’s Equal Protection Clause to covering only overt, explicit racial bias, rather than extending it to protect against gross inequality in the outcome of the application of a law. The system of mass incarceration, she argues, has been embedded in the country’s constitutional fabric the same way the slavery and Jim Crow were – by favourable SCOTUS decisions (Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson) and by bureaucracies (the Freedmen’s Bureau, the various state and federal prison systems) who seek to manage and control freedmen/underclass populations.

Thoughts on Greece

In a famous 1858 speech, future President Abraham Lincoln darkly warned that America could not exist “half slave and half free”. He might have been talking about Europe in 2012, where Germans benefit from high wages, low unemployment, and strong exports, while Greece and Italy are forced to undergo harsh austerity measures imposed on their already fragile economies by unelected technocratic administrations. While Italians wait until next year to choose who will succeed Mario Monti’s non-partisan cabinet, Greeks went to the polls last week. The result was indecisive – the conservative New Democracy finished first and claimed the fifty-seat winner’s bonus (there are three hundred seats in Greece’s parliament), but scored less than twenty percent of the vote. SYRIZA, the equivalent of Australia’s Socialist Alliance or Germany’s Die Linke, came in second. And, of course, the chattering classes have their knickers in a knot about the rise of Golden Dawn, a party which the Lamestream Media invariably describes as ‘neo-Nazi’ yet in the same breath claims it trades on anti-German bigotry. Negotiations to form a cabinet (the most likely combination being New Democracy-PASOK-Democratic Left) have been unsuccessful.

(Side note: one of the most interesting things I learnt about Greek politics during the campaign is the origin of PASOK’s green colour, which differs from the reds and pinks used by other social-democratic parties around Europe. It comes from chariot racing in the Byzantine Empire, when the masses would support the green chariots and the elites the blue ones; this is also why top Greek soccer club Panathinaikos play in a green and white strip.)

One thing has been made clear by all oracles of the technocrat-banker elite: that the austerity measures imposed on Greece are holy writ, and cannot be renegotiated or repudiated, no matter the will of the Greek people. Ongoing protests against austerity have been met with the sort of police repression not usually seen in western Europe (the linked article mentions tear gas, stun grenades, and police brutality). In the negotiations regarding the formation of a government, New Democracy and PASOK have portrayed themselves as the only serious people in the room, and used as leverage their acceptability to Brussels, Frankfurt, and the bond markets. To be sure, none of this is new – economic elites have always had the means to subvert the democratic will of the people – but one can’t help but feel that Angela Merkel and her ilk are much more brazen about it.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell captured the sometimes hopeless nature of political disenchantment when he has his protagonist, Winston Smith, furiously and repeatedly scribble ‘down with big brother’ (in lower case letters, with no punctuation) in his diary. Haunted by a sense that all is not right in his world, but prevented by the totalitarian state from ingesting the knowledge necessary to make an intelligent case against Ingsoc, Winston is reduced to emotional, meaningless, and disorderly ranting. Are sizeable chunks of the European electorate not doing the same? Across the continent, well-meaning people are drawn to far-right and Stalinist parties with unsavoury ideas and histories, to old-school socialists with little chance of exercising power (eg. SYRIZA or the French presidential candidacy of Jean-Luc Mélenchon), or to protest parties who may turn out to be passing fads (eg. the Pirate Parties of Germany and Sweden). There is a movement afoot against the inhuman, anti-democratic managerialism of the neoliberal state. Its problem is that its electorate is disorganised and prone to low turnout and low levels of activism, and that its anti-neoliberal energy is channelled by existing political actors with their own agendas (such as the far-right parties who scapegoat immigrants and minorities, thus letting the economic elites off the hook). No wonder it commands as little respect from the austerity set as Winston’s scribblings did from the rulers of Oceania.

As I write this, three party leaders (Samaras of New Democracy, Tsipras of SYRIZA, and Venizelos of PASOK) have failed to form a viable governing coalition, and the narrative has shifted to the need for a government of national unity. The great fear of the defenders of neoliberalism is that a second election would result in gains for anti-austerity parties, and that SYRIZA could make up the few percentage points needed to snatch the fifty-seat bonus from New Democracy. Their hand-wringing belies two feelings: a contempt for democracy and an admission that their preferred parties (ND and PASOK) are unable to win back the authority that they once commanded. The same is true across the developed world. The last few decades have witnessed drastic declines in political participation (measured in terms of party membership and voter turnout), generating the creation of new supposed threats to civilisation as elites seek to win the attention and the allegiance of ordinary people. And so, instead of positive appeals to the Greek people to be inspired by the visions for their country’s future offered by the two once-dominant parties, they are reduced to playing on fears – fears of Greece incurring the wrath of the EU and the bond markets, fears of the instability caused by a government not being formed, and fears of further electoral gains by Golden Dawn.

This is where Europe’s political scene stands today. An elite lacking confidence in its own authority, hiding behind a technocratic, apolitical mode of governance facing down a public increasingly wary of the self-indulgent scheming of those in power. Yet when faced with serious challenge to their rule, the elites respond with tear gas and Mario Monti-style Vichy regimes. How this ends is anyone’s guess, but no realistic observer can continue to believe that neoliberalism and austerity-ism are any longer compatible with democracy and human rights.

Race and the making of the Australian working class 4

Part Four: Conclusion

To conclude this series of posts, I will propose a theory of how race and class have intersected throughout the post-1788 history of Australia, and how these processes resemble those in other societies, chiefly the United States.

In the first post in this series, I referred to the book How the Irish Became White, by former Harvard academic Noel Ignatiev. To sum up the book’s arguments, Irish Catholic migrants to the U.S. in the early decades of the nineteenth century often intermingled (socially, economically, and politically) with blacks, but over the years, in order to improve their social standing, the Irish began to separate themselves from blacks and to use their white skin to gain entry into the political community of Jacksonian America, in which the benefits of citizenship were conferred on white males. They achieved this by excluding blacks from professions, by destroying black homes and churches in riots, and by siding politically with the Southern slaveocracy. Ignatiev argues that the Irish had the advantage of white skin, which allowed them the possibility of entering the dominant culture which was denied to African-Americans, but that the benefits of whiteness were not automatically afforded them, and that the actions described were their means of winning a place in the ‘white’ race.

Ignatiev is not simply telling the story of Irish-Americans, but of all migrant groups. His thesis could easily be applied to Australia, a country founded as a penal settlement in which Anglo-Saxons, Irish, Africans, and Aboriginals mixed relatively without incident, and were presided over by an elite which thought of the continent as an outpost of British civilisation. Over the course of the nineteenth century, and most intensively on the goldfields of Victoria and New South Wales during the 1850s and 1860s, ‘white’ Australians (a term broad enough to include Maoris, African-Americans, and sometimes Aboriginals) marginalised Chinese migrants, and in doing so forged a broader white/European identity based on the exclusion of those ethnic groups deemed to be unfair competitors (chiefly the Chinese, but also Japanese, Kanakas, and others).

At every stage of this process, Irish-Australians were prominent – Peter Lalor led the Eureka Rebellion, Irish miners were present at Bendigo and Lambing Flat, the Kelly Gang emerged in response to the Victorian constitutional crisis of the 1870s, Irish-Australians were the backbone of the early ALP and ACTU, and Arthur Calwell was the last major party leader to defend the White Australia Policy. Like their co-ethnics in the United States, they overcame the discrimination aimed at them by the Anglo elites by helping to articulate whiteness as the key determinant in their new homeland’s national identity – except that here, the people whom the Irish worked hard to exclude were Chinese, not African-Americans. (And indeed, they fought alongside African-Americans at Eureka.)

However, in their rush to become ‘white’, different European-descended ethnic groups had to shed their own cultural baggage and adopt a pan-European identity. In both countries, the early Anglo-centric definition of national identity slowly gave way to a white/European one as migrant groups from all over Europe were incorporated into the majority by their acceptance of the bargain between capital and (white) labour. To see how this operated in Australia, it is instructive to examine the history of Broken Hill, once a hotbed of labourism, socialism, communism, Wobblyism, et alia. In 1916, the city’s union hierarchy debated the merits of teaching Esperanto to union members, as the proliferation of ethnicities made communication difficult. At the time, Broken Hill boasted left-wing organisations comprising a host of different nationalities. In the 1998 federal election, a significant share of its white working class voted for One Nation, whose support for English-only language policies in education and immigration were a long way from the cosmopolitanism which drove the Esperanto movement. The explanation for this curious phenomenon is simple: like Ignatiev’s Irish-Americans, Broken Hill’s diverse European migrant communities became white.

In 1913, Vladimir Lenin expressed his surprise that despite ALP control of both houses of federal Parliament, the Australian working class was not in any great hurry to overthrow capitalism. Perhaps it was because of his own success in building a multi-ethnic socialist movement that he missed the key ingredient in the bargain between labour and capital in Australia: white supremacy. Ignatiev has argued that white supremacy in America has historically served to lessen the negative impact of capitalism on the white working class, and has thus functioned as the equivalent of social democracy. As the United States has never developed a welfare state as comprehensive as those of many European countries, white supremacy served to fill the gap. This analysis is somewhat applicable to Australia, with the exception that we did develop such a welfare state. But, as I showed in the previous post with the discussion of how the original (1912-1978) ‘baby bonus’ was only available to white mothers, Australia’s welfare state often served as simply another institution reproducing racial inequality.

If Australia was (and to a large extent still is) a social democracy for white people, it was its non-white inhabitants who bore the brunt of economic inequality. The Chinese Protectors appointed by Victorian authorities in the 1850s to police racial antagonism on the goldfields acceded to white demands that the Chinese be kept away from productive areas. When they moved from the goldfields to the cities, the exclusion of Chinese from unions made them easy prey for employers wanting cheap labour. In order to quell discontent among the white working class, the country’s elites would happily deport Chinese, Japanese, and Kanaka workers. If Big Pastoralism needed cheap labour in the sparsely-populated north of Australia, the Aborigines Protection Boards would provide it by forcing Aboriginal workers to work for much worse pay and conditions than whites. (Decades later, some are still fighting for the ‘stolen wages’ which white employers failed to pay them.) And in Papua New Guinea, Australia got to play the role of colonial power, with all the exploitation of native labour that implied. All this parallels the experience of the United States, where a relatively comfortable white working class won its privileges by the exclusion from unions and from secure, well-paying jobs of African-American, Mexican-American, Asian-American, and Native American labour, and by opposition to Chinese and Japanese immigration similar to that seen in Australia.

Race and the making of the Australian working class 3

Part Three: White Australia and White Labour

When the first federal Parliament assembled in Melbourne in 1901, it was faced with a dilemma: how to ban the immigration of people of colour without actually writing such terribly un-PC language into the text of a law. The problem arose because of the concerns of the British government that such language would offend the non-white subjects of its empire, as well as jeopardise its newly-forged foreign policy ties with Japan. The Barton government found a solution – a fifty-word dictation test which could be used to exclude any applicant that immigration authorities didn’t want. One of the most interesting features of the test was that it didn’t necessarily have to be conducted in English, but in ‘any European language’. This feature was partly a device to allow an undesirable English-speaking migrant to be thwarted by being given a dictation test in another language, but it also reflected the continuing move from an Anglo-Saxon to a white/European national identity.

(I won’t cover it in detail here, but the story of Egon Kisch’s attempted entry into Australia in 1936 demonstrates the hilarity that ensued when the arbitrary nature of the dictation test was exposed.)

Long after the end of convict transportation, unfree labour persisted in pockets of Australia, notably the sugar industry in Queensland, where Melanesian workers (‘Kanakas’) were often tricked into boarding ships bound for the cane fields. The replacement of these workers with whites, and their eventual deportation, became one of the causes which defined the Australian labour movement in its early decades. After the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act, the white working class began to further flex its muscle, demanding the use of ‘white labour’ in the cane fields. The result was the Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1902, and the eventual repatriation of all Kanakas by 1906. (Some of their descendants still live in Australia, however, which explains the ‘South Sea Islander’ category which puzzles people filling out their census forms.) A similar fate awaited the Japanese pearlers in Broome, who were swept up in the push for ‘white labour’ in 1913.

Australia was not the only country in which white workers were asserting their racial identity in order to remove competition from non-white workers. In 1922, striking Afrikaner miners revolted in South Africa, established workers’ councils, which they poignantly named using the Russian word soviet, and demanded the sacking of their black colleagues. The government responded by bombing them from the air, but by the end of the 1940s, South Africa’s elites had been won over to the idea of permanently splitting the working class. Similarly, striking white workers in Alabama in 1914 hired the Ku Klux Klan to attack black workers. The threat of bi-racial working class solidarity represented by the activities of the Industrial Workers of the World (or ‘Wobblies’) was met in all three countries by state repression, usually with the Wobblies’ opposition to the First World War as a pretext. By methods such as this, the elites of all three countries punished workers who acted in a colour-blind way, while rewarding workers who accepted white supremacy with a welfare state and protections for white labour against non-white competition.

In 1912, the federal Labor government passed a bill providing for the country’s first ‘baby bonus’, a bounty of five pounds to be paid to the mother of every live white child, and – controversially for a society still steeped in Victorian morality – to be paid whether or not the child was born in wedlock. Against protest from religious authorities over the latter provision, the imperative of populating Australia with whites won out, and gave white Australians access to a government program which was denied to indigenous Australians, Asians, Africans, Maoris, and Pacific Islanders. (The bonus was paid to the natives of Papua New Guinea under Australian control, but was given to the father rather than to the mother.) It is noteworthy that the bonus was abolished in 1978, just as the White Australia Policy had been dismantled and non-white immigrants were entering the country in large numbers – rather than be expanded to non-whites, and unable to continue benefiting whites only, it was simply done away with.

As part of the early twentieth-century process of nation-building, Australia was confronted with the question of what to do with its most underdeveloped and least white-populated region, that part of South Australia lying above the twenty-sixth parallel of latitude south. In 1911, in the face of proposals that the unproductive landmass be returned to British control, it was ceded to the federal government to become the Northern Territory. While some wanted to leave it in the hands of its original inhabitants, such as this 1920s proposal for an indigenous state, the Northern Territory came to be dominated by Big Pastoralism and by Vestey’s, a British meat-packing corporation. The growth of pastoralism reduced Aboriginals’ access to water and land, forcing many into the white economy (a situation repeated many times the world over when capitalism has forced those living in a pre-industrial society to become working class, cf. the enclosures in medieval England or the Highland Clearances). Canberra, through the Aborigines Protection Boards, provided corporations such as Vestey’s with a steady supply of cheap, vulnerable indigenous labour. In the 1960s, the Vestey’s site at Wave Hill would become the scene of one of the first major Aboriginal strikes.

It should also be remembered that the Australian state’s treatment of Aboriginal workers was repeated when the country took control of Papua New Guinea, where white Australian settlers lived off the labour of indentured native workers. The policies and practices of the colonial administration shaped a low-wage and vulnerable native working class, and middle-class Australian settlers were able to employ multiple domestic servants, something which would have been out of their financial reach back home (but which is characteristic of racial hierarchies everywhere – black domestic servants were commonly employed by whites in pre-1994 South Africa and pre-1980 Rhodesia, and South Asian, Filipino, and African ones are commonly employed today by whites and wealthy Arabs in the Gulf).

Race and the making of the Australian working class 2

Part Two: Gold, Sugar, and Federation

Among the participants in the Eureka Rebellion, John Joseph is perhaps the most intriguing. An African-American originally from New York, he moved from California’s gold rush to Victoria’s in time to take up arms in support of the rights of miners. The Ballarat goldfields on which he worked were a welcoming home to all nationalities – British, Irish, Italians, Maoris, African-Americans…all except the Chinese. As a result of his involvement, Joseph was the first of the thirteen men charged with treason to be tried, as it was believed that his skin colour would increase the chances of a guilty verdict. The colonial authorities miscalculated, however, and Joseph was found not guilty.

The reason that the authorities made their assumption was because they knew that the miners were disturbed by the presence of non-whites on the goldfields. Earlier in 1854, anti-Chinese protests had taken place in Bendigo, and even before Eureka, the colonial authorities (headed by Governor Hotham) had begun to propose anti-Chinese legislation in order to quell the simmering discontent which threatened their oligarchic control of the colony. The parallels with the post-Bacon’s Rebellion actions of Virginia’s elites are obvious – faced with the threat of rebellion from below, Victoria’s elites sought to pre-empt it by driving a wedge between the (mostly) white majority of miners and the ethnic group which they most distrusted. Eureka was not just the birth of Australian democracy, but also one of the milestones in the shaping of a white Australian working class.

Beginning in 1855 in Victoria and 1858 in New South Wales, legislation was passed to specifically shape the lives of Chinese migrants. In 1855, Victoria established Chinese Protectors, who helped to move Chinese miners away from whites – usually to places where whites had already taken most of the gold. This system, in name as well as in practice, paralleled the Aborigines Protection Boards which were a feature of the dispossession of indigenous Australians in every state and territory. Over the next few years, both colonies levied taxes on the entry and residence of Chinese (Victoria’s entry tax was once hilariously flouted by a group of Chinese miners who disembarked at Robe in South Australia and walked across the border) and the experience was repeated by Queensland when Chinese descended on its goldfields in the 1870s and 1880s. As part of a second wave of anti-Chinese resentment in the 1880s, Victoria and South Australia barred Chinese from voting – a measure which stands in stark contrast to the lack of legal barriers to Aboriginal suffrage in both places, and to South Australia’s pioneering of female suffrage.

In Jacksonian America, sections of the Irish-American working class used strikes, boycotts, and violence to displace African-Americans from trades and occupations which they had performed for decades, and to exclude non-white labour from those callings (the history of which is the subject of How the Irish Became White). Australia had its equivalents, and the first outbreak of violence against non-whites occurred at Lambing Flat, near Young in New South Wales, where white miners rallied to the symbols of earlier miner rebellion (such as the Eureka Flag) and forced Chinese miners off their goldfields on the pretence that the Chinese were a source of unfair competition. The creation of a legal distinction between Chinese and non-Chinese had succeeded in stopping revolts against the colonial authorities, but served to encourage whites to further marginalise the Chinese. By 1888, the anti-Chinese agitation had moved beyond the goldfields, and had fuelled a nationwide push for legislation to stop Chinese immigration.

The labour press of the period, particularly the Bulletin magazine, treated these efforts, which culminated in the various Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1888, as the successor to the struggle against convict transportation, a fight which was within living memory for many of its readers. Given that the convicts whose entry into Australia was opposed in the 1840s and 1850s were mostly white and British, it is clear that something is different between the two periods – namely, that at some point a white working class identity had formed. The ethnic groups which had struggled together at Ballarat, Bendigo, and Lambing Flat had forged an identity which was more inclusive than the original, Anglo-centric model of Australianness, but which specifically excluded the Chinese (along with other Asian groups, and sometimes indigenous Australians).

Although the ban on Chinese immigration was a working class cause, there were no representatives of the working class in the colonial parliaments which passed it – the Australian Labo(u)r Party was not founded until 1891. It was the colonies’ elites – both liberal and conservative – who rushed to meet the demands of white workers for anti-Chinese legislation. This shouldn’t be surprising when we consider the role of American industrial capital in scuttling Reconstruction or the role of South Africa’s (largely Anglo-Saxon) elites in setting up apartheid in order to protect the Afrikaner working class from Black competition. It suits the interest of the economic elites to keep the working class divided, and the social problems, whether real or perceived, in communities of colour provide opportunities for social conservatives to stir up moral panics (something Chinese-Australians experienced with regards to opium usage and accusations of trafficking white girls as sex slaves).

Just like their American counterparts, Australian workers used union membership as a means of excluding non-whites from the fruits of their struggles. The 1903 by-laws of the Australian Workers’ Union excluded “Chinese, Japanese, Kanakas, Afghans, or coloured aliens other than Maoris, American Negroes, and children of mixed parentage born in Australia.” Notably, Aboriginals were generally not excluded, and indeed some unions offered them membership at discount rates – the colour bar was primarily aimed at Chinese and Kanakas. (Note also the specific derogations for Maoris and African-Americans, two groups whose members fought alongside whites at Eureka.) The examples of non-racial Australian workers’ organisations were exceptions which proved the rule – most noteworthy among them were the Industrial Workers of the World and the Communist Party of Australia (which in the early 1930s proposed to abolish the Aborigines Protection Boards and establish independent Aboriginal republics in the Northern Territory and northern Western Australia).

Australia’s nineteenth century finished on a high note, as the six colonies secured formal independence from Britain and federated as the Commonwealth of Australia. For the incipient nation’s political leaders, the 1890s were spent in a series of constitutional conventions, in which the issue of race reared its head. At the time, the pro-Southern interpretation of the meaning of Reconstruction in American history was dominant (a view known as the Dunning School and centred on Columbia University), and it was no surprise that Australia’s founding fathers, when fixated on racial questions, looked across the Pacific with horror. While they allowed the states the responsibility of legislating for indigenous affairs, the federal government was tasked with policing other non-white groups, and the new nation quickly set about avoiding a repetition of what it saw as the United States’ ‘Negro problem’.

Film review: Las 13 Rosas

For the second time in two months, SBS has screened a politically-charged Spanish film starring the lovely Andalucian actress Verónica Sánchez. I reviewed the first such feature, El Calentito, here. Its setting was the 1981 attempted coup by old-guard franquistas and its effect on the blooming Madrid counter-culture of the early 1980s, as seen through the eyes of Sánchez’s character Sara, a nineteen year-old escapee from a conservative Catholic family who finds freedom in punk rock. Last night, Las 13 Rosas took us to the beginning of Franco’s rule, and portrayed the final days of the lives of thirteen women condemned to death for their anti-fascism.

The film begins with two members of the group addressing an impromptu public gathering. They try to exhort their audience to resist the fascist takeover, but by this stage it is too late – Franco’s troops are already marching on Madrid and the republicans are left with the naïve hope that the oncoming war in Europe will lead to Spain’s liberation from franquismo by its neighbours. (Of course, it didn’t – the Spanish, like the captive nations of eastern Europe, were left to their fate by the new world order forged at Yalta, and Franco became the West’s anti-communist ‘our son of a bitch’ until his death in 1975.) As the fascists take control of Madrid (and the red-yellow-burgundy tricolour of the Second Republic is replaced everywhere by the red-yellow-red ensign of reactionary/bourgeois Spain), they settle scores with their enemies, and one by one the women are discovered, arrested, imprisoned, and subjected to show trials. The film ends with their execution by firing squad (all based on real events), and with their final letters to their loved ones.

Sánchez plays the role of Julia, a nineteen year-old streetcar conductor who has dabbled in socialist activism but is not so ideological that she can’t date a nationalist soldier. She is arrested after distributing anti-Franco pamphlets and subjected to a rather nasty interrogation, which includes being forced to undress, being punched and kicked, and having her nipples burned with cigarettes. Imprisoned, along with the others, in an overcrowded and unsanitary jail, her natural rebellious streak manifests itself in many ways. She affirms her atheism when asked upon entering custody to state her religion, assists with the writing of a song mocking the jail’s squalor, lets live rats loose during mass, and refuses to deliver the straight-arm fascist salute when required. Even in the face of the firing squad which would execute her, she remains defiant, abusing and questioning the manhood of the fascist soldiers. Just like her role as Sara in El Calentito, she portrays a headstrong young woman not heavily invested in the political conflict around her, but who nevertheless poses a threat to the powers-that-be by her determination to enjoy the fruits of women’s liberation: Julia’s status as a working woman is as provocative to the reactionaries of 1939 as Sara’s music and sexuality would be in 1981.

The film is valuable not only for the human interest angle, but also for its insights into the politics of the era. The arrival of nationalist troops in Madrid is accompanied by a round-up of republican activists, and the film features real footage of an address to the nation by General Franco, calling on Spaniards to assist the authorities with hunting down suspects. Despite the broad range of ideological currents which supported the Second Republic (and despite the fact that they didn’t all get along with each other, cf. the battles between communists and anarchists during the Civil War), they are all subsumed by the franquistas’ anti-communism. Thus, streetcars have “red conductors”, prison vans are labelled “RED PRISONERS”, and the womens’ pamphleteering is described by the state prosecutor as “basically Communism and Freemasonry.” (Franco also had a weird thing about Freemasons.) Religion plays its role as well – everyone arrested seems to instinctively reach for their Catholicism as a means of protesting their innocence. Spanish flags are everywhere and xenophobia fuses into anti-communism: Franco’s speech refers to those who hide republicans as “bad Spaniards, that is to say, non-Spaniards.”

Las 13 Rosas paints a picture of the political conditions that accompany reactionary regimes. General Franco’s broadcast spoke of the need for totalitarianism (he actually used that word) to bring order and stability to Spain. But in order to pacify vibrant socialist, communist, radical-republican, and anarchist movements, his men entered homes without warrants, arrested suspects without any evidence of wrongdoing, physically and sexually abused detainees, and executed them without trial (except when they were given trials as fraudulent as any witnessed in Moscow during that era). And for what? To ensure a compliant and vulnerable supply of workers for foreign and domestic capital, and a steady stream of believers to fill the country’s Catholic congregations. The film demonstrates, better than any work of political science could, the truth of Corey Robin’s thesis in The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, that political conservatism turns nasty (and behaves rather un-conservatively) when faced with emanicipatory movements from hitherto marginalised groups. The Catholic/conservative/nationalist section of Spain initially reconciled itself to the end of the monarchy, and the political right formed government for a two-year period in the middle of the Second Republic, leaving many key social reforms untouched. But when faced with a Popular Front government with a strong mandate, union militancy, and talk of gender equality, it turned to the man whose party had won 0.07% of the votes at the 1936 general election, but who could provide the muscle to oust the republican regime.

In the end, Las 13 Rosas succeeded in depicting the inhumanity of the execution of a group of innocent young women without coming across as didactic or preachy. Its message is essentially feminist – just as the young women are exercising their newly-won freedoms to work and to vote, their lives are cut short by the actions of men, who betray their activities to the authorities and then administer brutal (in)justice. But it is also pro-youth: the older generations are quickest to greet the victorious fascist troops with straight-arm salutes and are most apprehensive about the younger characters taking control of their own lives. I can’t resist comparing it to El Calentito in the sense that it reminds the viewer of the ramifications that court intrigues have on everyday, street-level life: the coming of fascism means not only an end to republican activism, but also forces an ex-communist musician to pawn his instrument in order to raise the funds to flee the country. The ‘thirteen roses’, however, were denied the new birth of freedom experienced at the end of El Calentito, and their country would have to wait until 1975 for the happy ending.

Stonewall Obama

Forty percent of homeless youth in New York are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered. Recently, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the darling of the centrist/bipartisan NYT-reading Washington cocktail set, cut funding for homeless shelters to the tune of seven million dollars. A few days later, President Obama announced his long-awaited Damascene conversion to support for same-sex marriage. Bloomberg joined the rest of the Obama fanboiz in patting the President on the back for caving into pressure from rich liberal campaign donors coming around to the progressive side of the issue.

I agree with everything in this article in Jacobin magazine (which, BTW, is a great read) attacking the pro-marriage lobby. The focus on winning the right to marriage has a certain Booker T. Washingtonesque quality to it, that is, it is based on the idea that LGBT people should conform to the norms of white/straight/bourgeois/Protestant society in order to be accepted. It is also often accompanied by the homophobic idea that LGBT people need the stability of marriage lest they fall into more promiscuous lifestyles – an argument that Andrew Sullivan, among others, is particularly fond of. The same-sex marriage crowd opt for mainstream respectability over serious social change, and then brazenly appropriate the symbols of earlier, more hardcore, LGBT struggles, as Bloomberg did when he connected Obama’s change of heart to Stonewall. As the article notes, “Stonewall was not a wedding, it was a riot.”

The motivations of Obama, Bloomberg, and other elite liberals can be glimpsed by reading the arguments advanced by the City of San Francisco during the California Supreme Court’s deliberations over the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot initiative which banned same-sex marriage in the state. The political rulers of the city of Harvey Milk and of the White Night Riots had the opportunity to present the case for same-sex marriage through the language of rights and equality. Instead, they chose the language of managerial neo-liberalism, focusing on how much tourist revenue San Francisco would lose if gay couples were to wed in other cities where same-sex marriage was legal. Big city mayors like Bloomberg are naturally more concerned about attracting wealthy, white, middle-class gay couples than about the welfare of the homeless LGBT youth whose funding he slashed.

International Vote Like A Pirate Day

After their breakthrough success in the 2009 European elections, where they won two seats in Sweden’s delegation to the Parliament in Strasbourg, the world was awakened to the existence of the Pirate Party movement. In 2011, Germany’s Pirates capitalised on disaffection among Green, Free Democrat, and Left Party voters to win fifteen seats in Berlin’s state legislature. The Pirates have proved that those results were not one-off flukes, and have in the last six weeks won seats in two more state legislatures: four in Saarland and six in Schleswig-Holstein. Tonight, the country’s largest state, North Rhine-Westphalia, goes to the polls, and the Pirates are consistently polling above the five-percent threshold needed to win seats there.

Germany’s political system is fairly easy to understand. There are two main parties: the centre-right Christian Democrats (including their Bavarian arm, the Christian Social Union) and the centre-left Social Democrats, and three smaller ones: the (classical liberal) Free Democrats, the Greens, and the Left Party (a merger of East Germany’s former ruling party with some leftist groups in the west). The position of the Pirate Party, both on the left-right spectrum and in relation to the existing parties, is not yet fully clear. Commentators have difficulty placing the party on the left-right axis because their basic raison d’être confounds peoples’ identification of the left with economic interventionism and of the right with free markets. A party which attacks monopolistic corporations would appear to be left-wing, yet the Pirates also defend free enterprise. But as we shall see, the Pirates are an echo of how the German left might otherwise have developed.

The Pirates’ voter base indicates their status as a party of the left. In Berlin last year, their voters were disproportionately young, unemployed or blue-collar, and switched to the Pirates from the SPD, the Greens, the Left Party, or from not voting in the previous election. Geographically, their support was highest in working-class suburbs in West Berlin (such as the SPD-voting Spandau) or in East Berlin (such as the Left Party-voting Marzahn-Hellersdorf), and in proletarian bohemian strongholds in the city centre (such as the Green/Left Party Kreuzberg). The classical liberal/centrist FDP, who suffered a huge drop in support, mostly leaked votes to the CDU and the Greens, not to the Pirates – their base (mostly middle-class Protestants: they’re referred to as ‘the party of doctors and dentists’) aren’t the sort of people who instinctively oppose the recording industry’s War On File-Sharing. In short, the Pirates’ support is found among young, anti-system Germans who believe that the SPD and the Greens sold out to the establishment long ago, and that the Left Party is too dominated by septuagenarian ex-Stasi types to provide a dynamic alternative to the Big Four parties.

The idea that being left-wing automatically means favouring large, soulless, impersonal bureaucracies over the dynamism of the free market is a) not true of everyone on the left and b) never was true prior to the early twentieth century. The German experience is instructive in this regard. In 1891, the Social Democratic Party published its Erfurt Program, summarising its policy goals. It was produced against the backdrop of the creation of a rudimentary welfare state by Bismarck’s conservative government, which the SPD labelled ‘state socialism’ (and they meant that term to be derogatory). Its demands included biennial parliaments, the right to keep and bear arms, and an elective judiciary, in addition to a few basic calls for economic regulation, such as a forty-hour week, the abolition of child labour, and free health care. These were too much, however, for Friedreich Engels, whose critique of the program asked whether the regulation of such things as “the bar…medical services…pharmaceutics, dentistry, midwifery, nursing, etc.” was “compatible with the rejection of all state socialism.”

What happened, then, to the left-libertarian spirit of the fin-de-siècle SPD? It died when the party jettisoned its anti-war and anti-imperialist stance in the face of the patriotic mobilisation which accompanied the First World War. It embraced the statist ideas of British Fabian intellectuals, and like so many left-wing parties around the world, came to view the wartime regulation of the economy as a model for building socialism in peacetime. When the Keynesian Consensus collapsed, it followed the rest of the global establishment left in diverting its authoritarian instincts towards the nanny state and green Malthusianism. The 5-10% of left-wing Germans who now reject the SPD-Green bloc are doing exactly the same thing that SPD voters did a century ago: supporting left-libertarianism against Bismarckian state socialism. It isn’t too difficult to make the case that if Marx and Engels were alive today, they would be among them.

So to the good folk of Nordrhein-Westfalen: vote Pirate!