Welcome to the Land of Do-As-You-Please

Well, it took me until Tuesday night to submit 17 amended Course Specification Templates (see last weeks's despairing rant), laboriously typed out because the Quality Control Unit could only send me locked PDF documents. You can probably imagine my joy when I discovered that said locked PDFs were actually so out of date that quite a lot of the work I did turned out to be all for naught. Reader, my stress dreams were replaced that night with delightful visions of certain bureaucrats being roasted to a crisp by a grinning demon.

Thankfully, there have been compensations for the relentless grinding misery of such duties, though sadly cold hard cash is not amongst them: subject leadership does not attract an increment despite it being the exact opposite of what anybody gets into academia for. However, the compensations include spending time with actual students. There are stresses and strains within and between groups of the little darlings: hard-working v. slackers, mature v. young, local v incomers and various others divisions, and the pressure of heading towards the finishing line is showing amongst the final-year ones, but after a couple of weeks of tension during which my tissues box needed replenishing more than once, peace appears to have broken out and my own classes have been a delight. This week I taught Book 9 of Paradise Lost to the second years, who once again amazed and impressed me with their willingness to engage with tough material without the benefit of any secondary-level literary or cultural context. A-level English and History seem to ignore what was once called the English Civil War and its causes and effects almost entirely. That said, this week's class showed me what acute and subtle critics reside in the ranks, aided by a barnstorming lecture from one of my esteemed colleagues. I have to say that despite everything Milton's friends did to Ireland and my residual Catholicism, I fall harder for Paradise Lost's literary qualities and philosophical underpinning's with every passing year.



The other text I taught this year was Moore and Lloyd's V for Vendetta, the graphic novel of a dystopian, fascist Britain which appeared fitfully throughout the 80s and was badly filmed a few years ago, spawning the fashion for Guy Fawkes masks amongst junior demonstrators indifferent to the irony of doing something plastic made by Chinese near-slaves for the profit of Warner Brothers (there's a whole module available on the legal complexities of comic book rights and Moore's ongoing war with Marvel and/or DC at any given time.



It's not a total leap from Milton to Moore: the older text informs V for Vendetta on several levels, from a protagonist's name to Moore's anti-patriarchal politics: where Milton's text mourns the Expulsion while guiltily celebrating the knowledge acquired by original sin, the graphic novel is a militant celebration of intellectual rebellion (and actual violent rebellion too, just like Milton). It's a superb text partly because it's seriously revolutionary: while the woke fanboys have picked up on the text's aesthetics, it's an intelligent argument for anarchy – the ideology, not just chaos. Part of Moore's continuous attempt to knock the hero off his pedestal, V behaves unspeakably cruelly towards his protegée Evey in order, he says, to release her from 'happiness…the most insidious prison'. His view is essentially a mix of Morris, Kropotkin and Gramsci. The book details his disillusionment with the contiguity of Law and Justice, and with the instruments of hegemony: the Church, sit-coms and soaps, the news, political institutions and the 'justice' system. The novel starts with V killing a group of rapist police officers; he then gleefully blows up the Houses of Parliament and the Old Bailey, but the core of the novel is his treatment of Evey, the teenage girl he rescues from the police. Gently rejecting her sexual advances, he breaks her Freudian conditioning, educates her in film, books, music and art (all banned under the new regime), before expelling her then subjecting her to physical and psychological torture until she is 'free' of all illusions about the nature of society. V violently brings down the tyranny, deliberately allowing himself to die in the process, insisting that while violence is necessary to bring about change, the perpetrators should have no place in the post-revolutionary society to come: people like Evey should take their places. It's also a lot of fun: Moore has a rich, dark sense of humour and is astonishingly well-read: you could spend hours tracking down every reference, from Enid Blyton (The Land of Do-As-You-Please comes from The Faraway Tree), Thomas Pynchon to The Road to Morocco, and he even got one of Bauhaus to write a cabaret song for it, incorporating the notation into the text. I've put together clips of all the music and songs reference in the novel: there are also loads of books and plays quoted or referred to).



Amongst all the militant, provocative texts I've taught recently, it's the most shocking to many of my students, more so every year. While many of them hail from societies which have had revolutions or civil wars within living memory, most (including me) have had no direct experience of such things, and have never had to address the philosophical justifications for violence – we've educated a generation to assume both that bombing wedding parties from a cubicle somewhere in Oxfordshire doesn't matter (or doesn't happen), and that affluent white societies are the primary victims of violence. Where I differ from most of my students though is that I remember a time when 'terrorism' wasn't a word applied by bureaucrats to any radical impulse (though extreme capitalism and state violence are still exempt), that got int he way of realpolitik, especially those espoused by brown people. I can remember decent English people recognising that there were indeed two (or more!) sides to the Troubles, and Western governments proudly supporting Islamist jihadis in Afghanistan…when convenient. My students are subject to so much silent surveillance, from the CCTV cameras that infest the university campus to the 'Prevent' training all academics undergo to equip them to Spot A Bad'Un And Dob Them In (they phrase it differently but it doesn't take a Foucauldian to spot what they're up to).

V for Vendetta works really well for getting this kind of discussion going because it's accessible without being simplistic or morally evasive. Moore and Lloyd are interested in the role of culture in hegemonic systems, and they care about emotion and the unquantifiable qualities of life: love, joy, autonomy: underneath the cold-eyed espousal of violent methods is a utopian impulse that I've long felt has been lacking on the left in particular. The Labour Party's infamous Controls On Immigration mug sounded the death knell for faith in a confident, altruistic socialism.



Where Morris and a range of other 19th-century socialists believed that The People were capable of cultural, artistic and communal fulfilment (though the Perfectibility of Man is what conservatives say led communism to build gulags), New Labour and its acolytes adopted the classic conservative perspective which held that people were brutes, having rarely actually met any. Conservatives believe in Big Government to restrain our brutish impulses: the true cynicism of New Labour was to go one step further by harnessing those impulses by directing their imagined people's ire at immigrants, the fabled benefits cheats and the like. For Moore, Lloyd and other inheritors of Victorian anarchism, the moral was that all governments, even the well-meaning socialist ones, are based on distrust of the people's empathetic and organisational capabilities. Socialist governments justified their existence by claiming to be the practical expression of the people's determination to distribute goods and services equally, a view I generally adhere to, but the anarchist view holds that governments at best outsource our moral duty to each other and at worst end up arrogating all power and authority to themselves in the name of unjustified self-perpetuation. The difference between anarchism and libertarianism is that anarchists think we're innately good and will care for and respect each other once the initial shock of freedom has worn off and the bonds of surly obedience have been loosed; libertarians reject the idea of mutuality in toto and believe in every man or woman for his or herself.

I don't know. I'm hugely attracted to the principle of humanity's innate goodness, but the daily news suggests that we are selfish brutes: the way we're polluting ourselves and multiple other species to death suggests that we're incapable of behaving responsibly at all even when doom is staring us in the face. Then again, no current form of political organisation has found a way to address it either. I still believe in humanity's general altruism, though perhaps it's only manifested under particular and rare conditions, but I also think that an effective collective decision-making structure with the ability to get things done is necessary, and we may as well call that a government.

Well, this has taken a gloomier turn than I expected when I started mashing the keyboard. Good things have been happening. We hosted a talk by Jessica George on Weird Fiction the other night – she's an expert on Lovecraft and Machen, whose understanding of humanity's cosmic insignificance is, depending on how you look at it, even more depressing than my musings, or paradoxically liberating. It doesn't matter what we do to ourselves and our planet, HPL would feel: the universe is entirely indifferent. Which certainly puts my wrestling with Course Specification Templates in perspective.

I've done 12-hour days at work every day this week, so little time for relaxation - I've been cycling home, eating bad food out of the pan then going straight to bed, so the only leisure has been the Lego Masters final (good creations, bad judges) and a total literary anecdote to the struggle: E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia stories. Inconsequential, lightweight, snide and deliciously witty, they were just what I needed. A real contrast to next week's text: Fight Club.

Recipe for a riot

I don't know, take one measly holiday and the social fabric falls apart. But people of Tottenham, looting ALDI? Have some ambition, for Christ's sake.

Last year, a lot of people expressed their disquiet at the police tactic of 'kettling' student protesters - confining them for long periods, in poor conditions, for no apparent reason - leading to anger and mindless violence. 

What have we done if not 'kettled' our urban poor and ethnic minorities? Insane property prices, low pay, racial discrimination, poor education and political failure have concentrated those denied a stake in society in desolate quarters, kept in place by a racist or (at best) disconnected police force, neglected by the institutions meant to improve their lot. Regardless of your view of what they've done this week, it's not unexpected. 

OK, how do these things happen? Well, there's always a strong dash of opportunism: the element that likes a) free stuff and b) a bit of violence, though they're likely to be at the back of the queue for a truncheon sandwich. Along with the political opportunists and the 'community leaders' who always emerge on these occasions.

But below the surface, all the ingredients are there. At a really basic level, long hot summers produce tense situations that can easily turn violent - New York in the 1970s was a classic set of circumstances.

At the risk of reinforcing my reputation for being a wet liberal (undeserved: I'm a hardline lefty), I will say that institutional contempt and deprivation lead to riots. The specific cause is bad enough - a young man shot dead by the police. But if the police had a reputation for talking before they fired, for treating the poor and brown the same as they treat the rich and white, this riot would never have got off the ground. It's largely not what the police did this time - we don't yet even know what that was - it's what they've done with Menezes and with all the ethnic kids who get stopped whenever they leave their homes.

Add to this the government's withdrawal of youth services in the name of 'austerity': thousands of school kids, often lacking social restraints provided by structured communities, on the streets with nothing to do for 3 months, are likely to find themselves in trouble. To them, government isn't a provider of services: it's simply oppressive bodies such as the police - aggressive and not looking very like their community.

Does this mean I think it's OK to trash the place? No, obviously not - apart from anything else, it's totally unfocussed. Aldi and Carpetright aren't the primary element, unless someone's going to claim that this was an anti-capitalist uprising. I wish it were, but it isn't.

Funnily enough, I've been reading Butterworth's The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents. The problem facing the 19th-century anarchists as they sat in London slums working out the future was the split between 'positive' anarchists, who looked forward to a (possibly violent revolution) and the 'individual' anarchists, who seemed to use the doctrine as an excuse for the worst kinds of terrorist outrages.

To some, outbursts of the most savage violence were natural consequences of the way the underclass were treated - an argument which you might well hear in the coming days. To others, individual murders or bombings became indelibly associated with violence: a great shame given the wonderful premise of anarchism (that without institutional oppression, humanity was capable of altruism, leading to a co-operative paradise).

I'm somewhere in-between. Some of these rioters are the people who'll trash anything, for fun. Some are freelance capitalists, taking their opportunities wherever they can. Some will be politically motivated, though lacking the intellectual skills for concerted, directed action, and despairing at politicians' inability to articulate the needs of a community which has largely been abandoned by the state: just like 19th-Century London

In other respects, the situation is quite different. Malato wrote this of London in The Delights of Exile:

Oh, great metropolis of Albion, your atmosphere is sometimes foggier than reason allows, your ale insipid and your cooking in general quite execrable, but you show respect of for individuality and are welcoming to the émigrés. Be proud of these two qualities and keep them.

Ah well. The beer and food have certainly improved, but we've been conditioned to hate and fear émigrés - leading to the kind of social decay we see this week.

My solution? Not the 'infantile Leftism' Lenin described, which sees immediate violence as the solution to everything. Instead, we need William Morris's formula: 'Agitate. Educate. Organise'.

Here's some John Henry Mackay, cited in Butterworth's book:

Like and enormous black, motionless, giant Kraken, the poverty of London lies there in lurking silence and encircles with its tentacles the life and wealth of the City and of the West End'

and here's Morris himself:

Affluent London was 'so terrified of the misery it has created that at all hazards it must be swept out of sight'. 

This is what we've done: created massive areas of our cities left to rot. In them, the low-paid (the majority of officially poor people are in paid employment) and the unemployed. Next to them, vanity projects, 'iconic' buildings, gated 'communities' (they're not really). It's Ballard's airport landscape writ large: shiny surfaces, anti-crowd architecture, fast transport from investment bank to gated bourgeois ghetto with no smelly, sticky contact with the poor in-between. The bankers don't even see their cleaners: daylight is for the rich, midnight for the poor.

Last year, a lot of people expressed their disquiet at the police tactic of 'kettling' student protesters - confining them for long periods, in poor conditions, for no apparent reason - leading to anger and violence.

One more thing: the EDL smash things up wherever they go, without the kind of coverage this riot is getting. Why? Because the media laps up pictures of angry black folk. It fits with the framing they've acquired from history: they always present black people as naturally violent, inarticulate and so on, whereas white rioters are always 'bad apples'. Like Breivik being insane while Islamic killers are 'ruthless/organised etc.'

Don't feed this prejudice. Don't riot. Demonstrate. If you must use violence (and I'm not advocating it), target your anger. You know how these pictures are used by media and politicians. Don't give them easy targets.

Are you, or have you ever been…?

One very disturbing report today highlights a Metropolitan Police briefing that members of the public should report anyone they think harbours 'anarchist' beliefs.

We'll leave aside that fact that anarchists haven't committed any notable crimes since 1910, and that was dubious: the Siege of Sidney Street featured some politically connected men - the most notorious of whom may never have existed - but they were essentially burglars.

In fact, it strikes me that most of the political and terrorist crimes committed in the history of humanity have been in the name of organised ideologies of left or right. Despite the evasions of Melanie Phillips, Fox News and Co., the Norwegian massacre was committed by a man with an internally consistent rightwing ideology nurtured by their hysteria.

Anarchism - the concept that humanity is naturally co-operative, and therefore does not need states and governments (there are left and right versions) - might be simplistic and idealistic, but it's rarely violent. All the anarchists I've met have resorted to the method of plying me with nasty cider and bad weed, in corners of student parties. Rarely have I felt the social structure to be under threat.

It's also not illegal. Nor is fascism, communism, or extreme religious world-views. That is - or rather was - the point of freedom. You can think what you want. It's when you impose that position on others using coercive methods that you become a criminal. Obviously there are real-world limits on this: the UK is currently bombing Libya's government for being oppressive while selling weapons to Saudi Arabia to help it behave oppressively, but that's an argument for another day.

The basic idea is this: you can't legislate for thought, though you can educate. But now the police have decided that anarchists are a threat and should be investigated simply for their thoughts. Who's next? We know that environmentalists are already spied on. Socialists? Liberals? Meanwhile, Breivik and his British allies - who view violence as a cleansing, healthy thing per se - carry on bombing.

I know who I think is more fundamentally threatening to democracy: a police force, lacking responsible oversight, which arbitrarily sets limits on political thought. Perhaps that's what comes of dining too often with the News of the World.

Ironically, the sight of the cops singling out anarchists for thought-crime neatly demonstrates one anarchism's central tenets: that states always become oppressive, whatever their intentions. I don't entirely agree: only capitalist and pseudo-communist states inevitably degenerate in this way, but the Metropolitan Police are doing their best to make it certain.

DDOS, LOIC and other nerdy things in perspective

I'm absolutely loving the Anonymous collective's attacks on Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, PayPal and various other corporations who've decided that censorship is a matter of commercial wisdom.

The old definition of a state is a body which reserves to itself the right to use force against its citizens or other states/their citizens. To some extent, this still applies online: every major country, from the UK to China employs an army of hackers: China recently downloaded all global e-mails, Israel infected Iran's science computers, Russia attacked Lithuania and the Chinese have access to basically all of the US's critical infrastructure.

However, the danger of training masses of computer programmers is that hackers tend to be contrary libertarian weirdos. Some will do whatever they're paid to, but quite a lot of these bedroom warriors will develop skills and apply them if they think there's a challenge in it - like Gary McKinnon, autistic sysadmin. Put a hacker in front of a big bad corporation or government and they'll have a go.

So - and as you may know, I read a lot of 'hard' SF, where the notion of flowing around states and corporations rather than allowing them to dictate the shape and direction of the online world - each hacker is now in possession of the tools formerly reserved to the state. A Distributed Denial of Service (automated mass hits on a website to block access to legitimate users) using a tool like LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon - the name tells you all you need to know about these kids: they play a lot of computer games) is essentially a weapon available to a global, untraceable collective. Sure, my institution blocks DDOS software like LOIC, but most users are at home, limited only by bandwidth. Download LOIC here to get involved in Operation Payback.

A part of me worries that these guys are selfish libertarians with no regard for democracy, but an alternative reading is that they're anarchist-syndicalists of the kind portrayed in Ken MacLeod's Scottish Trotskyist-libertarian science fiction. Their principles are those of Jefferson which I quoted yesterday: freedom of information leads to free societies, and organisations which block, reserve or squat on information are the lumbering dinosaurs which need to be brought down.

There's a good deal of idealism and fantasy in the anarchist-egalitarian world of hacking and futurism, partly because these people are only now developing an ideological base, but I'm all for it. It has the potential to bring to life a non-capitalist, non-statist democracy of the kind envisioned by Lenin and Trotsky before the Russians became wedded to the state-communism model.

Where things are getting interesting is the overflow of DDOS-style activism into the offline world. What is the fluid, random, 'flash-mob' style closedowns of Vodafone, TopShop and other outlets organised by UK Uncut to protest against tax evasion if it isn't a distributed denial of Service? Loose, leaderless groups coalesce with minimal organisation for a specific event before melting away again. No structure for the cops to infiltrate, no long-term planning, no hierarchy: just a shared set of ideals and limited set of objectives.

It's not new of course: UK Uncut are drawing on the traditions of Captain Swing, the Luddites, the Rebecca Rioters and the Chartists - but faster.

Hackers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose except your social lives!

Brown paper parcels tied up with string…

Happy Bastille Day - how I love sharing a birthday with a purge of the idle rich.

I went straight to work from my parents today, and was greeted by two wondrous things. The first was a massive pile of parcels: seemingly all the books I've ordered recently have come in the same delivery. OK, it looks like I've bought myself a load of birthday presents, but I'm still childishly excited by opening parcels and smelling new paper.

One of the books was To Hell With Culture: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century Literature edited by H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight, the latter of whom was one of my PhD external examiners. Funny that to buy the book at its cheapest (£25 second hand), it had to go from Wales to India and then be sent to me… Coincidentally, Knight wrote the definitive 'biography' of Robin Hood, and another of the books which arrived today was Adam Thorpe's revisionist Hodd. The others were the massive pile of OUP sale books (on medieval literature, modernism and the Victorians), Kiberd's new book on Joyce's Ulysses, and most wonderfully, the fourth volume of the Moomins strip cartoons. Just as a physical object, Drawn and Quarterly (PDF sample on that page) have produced a thing of beauty.

The other weird and wondrous thing this morning was receiving an email from Hilary Wright. It took me a few minutes to work out that this was my sister, returned from honeymoon and starting a new life with a new name. Regardless of your views on marriage and surnames, it felt like a significant moment even to those around her: I have a sister but after 26 years, her new position in the world and new relationship to us all are aurally and visibly announced.

Stand not upon the order of your going

Damn. Just ordered another book, for £21: Klaus and Knight's 'To Hell with Culture': Anarchism in Twentieth Century British Literature: Anarchism and Twentieth-century British Literature. Stephen Knight was one of my PhD external examiners, and I'm a sucker for 'politics in literature' books. It's been an expensive day though…

Quick break now for coffee then a piece on Cromwell's internal political pressure which I'm particularly looking forward to.

It's Malcolm Wanklyn (buy this book or this one). He's got a very small audience which is desperately disappointing, as he's started with a fantastic review of his experience of deconstruction as it affected historiography, especially seventeenth-century history. The focus is the many Oliver Cromwell's: left hero, left villain, inspiration to Hitler and Mussolini, fundamentalist or freedom fighter, hammer of Scotland and Ireland etc. etc. Malcolm's concentrating on the military career and the various ways in which it can be seen. Malcolm sees OC as taken up by radical politicians (the Fiery Spirits) who saw him as God's General who would win the war and persuade the undecided that Cromwell was the tool of Godliness.

It turns out that Cromwell used these people to achieve power, and tamed their radicalism for his own ends. This draws on an existing debate about whether or not Cromwell was radical or not - he certainly crushed the leftists such as the Levellers and Diggers. He was certainly a tolerationist in the early years - he didn't agree with the Scottish Presbyterians that any minority Protestants and Catholics should be crushed.

Despite his later military successes, Cromwell's early martial victories were a mixture of being in the right place at the right time, down to other peoples' successes, and a good degree of spin as the Fiery Spirits sought their 'god's general' - trying Waller, the Earl of Manchester and the Earl of Essex first.

I should mention what a great speaker Malcolm is: enthusiastic, total command of his subject, rarely needs notes, dynamic delivery.

Final session is on Manorial Rights of Wreck - didn't catch by whom. Apparently, some lord of the manor has turned up a 12th century right to ownership anything out to sea as far as a barrel of Hambrough/Humber (no, me neither) can be seen floating on a clear day by a man on horseback from a clifftop (supposedly 3 miles!) - conflicting with all sorts of other laws. The speaker's a law lecturer who is a diver. He's found loads of excellent stuff, but before he could give it to a museum via the crown, the lord of the manor claimed ownership. The git. Anyway, it's raised a host of quite interesting legal questions.

Quick guide for you scavengers:

stuff above water - Wreck. Belongs to the owner or the lord of the manor if no owner turns up.

Below high water - belongs to the Lord High Admiralty since time immemorial, which legally means 1189. Common law jurisdiction follows the tide as it comes and goes.

A derelict is an abandoned vessel floating or sunk below low water - and belongs to the Admiralty in British waters. The Tubantia was a hot case - a Dutch ship sunk and believed to be carrying gold. Turned out it had a cargo of Edam!

Update - a Hambrough/humber barrel = corruption of Hamburg Barrel - a 45 gallon drum used by the Hanseatic League. Phew.