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.

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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.

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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).

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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!