News from Nowhere

Last Saturday, I went to Stoke-on-Trent's Potteries Museum and Art Gallery for the annual Stephen Hagger Lecture (very sadly I was the youngest there by a good twenty years, and too many of them were from the National Trust wing of Morris fans). This year's lecturer was Fiona MacCarthy, design historian and biographer of Edward Burne-Jones, Eric Gill and William Morris, whose life and influence was her subject for the day. What links these three men and those around them is a commitment to art as a way of life: from the production of goods they evolved a philosophy of community, economics and politics – especially Morris. Stoke is the perfect venue for a lecture on William Morris. The industry which sustained the city was pottery: thousands of highly skilled workers producing globally-renowned items of astonishing beauty, and yet the city is a depressing sump of deprivation and unemployment now, and always was ugly: talk about alienation in action.

Morris, by GF Watts

Morris is perhaps best known as a designer of hugely expensive wallpaper and furniture: the current revival of interest in Victorian Gothic has placed him front and centre. However, he was also an accomplished novelist, typographer, poet, songwriter and revolutionary socialist activist. From his aesthetic interest in the medieval period evolved a conviction that industrial society and production led to degradation of the spirit. From Marx, he learned that alienated work beggared us not only economically but spiritually. He learned every skill from the basics, even making his own dyes for wallpapers and tapestries, and when Morris and Co. was founded, ran the company along egalitarian lines.

Morris seems to have been a force of nature - constantly trying new things, full of energy and also enormous fun: his friend Burne-Jones's cartoons of him are affectionate as well as satirical:

Basically, he was a big fat jolly man who couldn't sit still: his death was ascribed to a doctor as due to 'simply being William Morris and having done the work of most ten men'.

I don't know if Morris's aesthetic appeals to you. I find the wallpaper beautiful but too busy, but the late period 'Arts and Crafts' furniture is really to my taste, and I'd love some of the ceramics designed by his associate William de Morgan.

a de Morgan pot

Morris developed a conviction that beautiful things must be useful things - his followers became the kind of sandalled vegetarian liberals that Orwell hated so much. The contradiction for Morris, of course, is that producing hand-made work ethically cost a fortune, so his customers were only what he called the 'swinish rich'. At least – unlike now – Morris's workers were making a decent living from selling expensive goods to these scum: in our day the shareholders profit while goods are made by slaves in sweatshops.

While I can't afford Morris furniture, glass, wallpaper or ceramics (and in the antiques context their cultural meaning is very different from what he intended), I can read his books and poetry, and I have a cheap facsimile of his astonishing version of Chaucer's work. His novel News From Nowhere is perhaps the most accessible.

News from Nowhere

It's a Utopian fantasy set in a Britain which underwent a socialist revolution in 1952. Classes, law, finance, private property and cities have been abandoned and the people live in agrarian, peaceful, small villages (we tend to part company here: I grew up in the countryside and it's more Cold Comfort Farm than communist paradise). The details are less important than Morris's underlying assumption that human nature is essentially altruistic. Our faults, he says, are those of industrial, capitalist urbanism. It produces competition, hatred, violence, oppression and (not incidentally, aesthetic ugliness).

it is the allowing of machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays. And, again, that leads me to my last claim, which is that the material surroundings of my life should be pleasant, generous, and beautiful; that I know is a large claim, but this I will say about it, that if it cannot be satisfied, if every civilised community cannot provide such surroundings for all its members, I do not want the world to go on

Reforming work will lead to beauty both internal and external, open to all. In this common weal, beauty is a condition of justice, and vice versa: the inhabitants, we're told, could not be happy knowing that fellow citizens are in prison, or trapped in loveless relations: mutuality is the key to social harmony (in contrast to the current Justice Secretary, who is scrapping the Human Rights Act and has banned sending books to prisoners). This was also the basis of his Socialist League

Simply the design of the membership card brings me to the real point of this rambling post. Art and labour brought together. The card is simply beautiful. It proclaims the unity of politics, life and art and above all it is optimistic. Like News From Nowhere, it assumes that the socialist future will transform people's lives for the better. When did we stop believing this? It's still there in Atlee's 1951 Festival of Britain (yes, the Tories took power in 1950 but the Festival was planned under the pioneering 1945-50 Labour government that founded the NHS and did so much more). After that? Not so much. Our supposed leaders are ashamed of the word socialist and whatever they do believe in, it isn't founded in optimism. Nor does it believe in a future which unifies love, life, joy, work, art and politics. Neither Labour nor the multiple far-left splinter groups offer anything positive. We spend our time accepting the ideological boundaries of neoliberalism and finding ways to mitigate the damage it does. I can't imagine the Milibands, Clegg, the SWP leadership or any of the others being able to understand the emotional or spiritual aspects of socialism that are integral to Morris's version.

Stunted by 'politics', they've lost us because they no longer have anything positive to offer beyond technocratic fixes. There's no way of life embodied in modern politics. There is in rightwing politics, but it too consists of joylessness: the Tories and UKIP spend their time saying 'no' to things – foreigners, human rights, the poor, community, altruism. That's OK: beyond Major's lazy fantasy of old maids cycling to communion, capitalist politics has always been about material acquisition. But it's not true of us. The left has forgotten that Marx, for all his talk of materialism, was funny, cultured and engaged with more than just economics - that's why his work is shot through with Shakespeare. Economics was part of his philosophy of life, rather than the other way round. Once the economics was sorted, he thought, our social, spiritual and philosophical ones would be too: happiness was the end, not simply material comfort. Morris knew this, and acted on it.

So why have we ended up with a political culture which would rather have us fulminating against 'scroungers', immigrants, Europe and each other, or competing over who can inflict most austerity to win votes rather than a labour movement which has a positive vision of how life could be. Last week the government gleefully announced that it would rather let African migrants drown than address the causes of their desperation. Every dead African is a vote reclaimed from UKIP, or so it hopes.

When did we forget that politics could be a vehicle for aspiration and happiness rather than a game of beggar-thy-neighbour? I believe, like Morris, that my fellow citizens are essentially altruistic and well-meaning, that given reform of our industrial, political and social structures this altruism could be liberated to achieve a better society. This is why I teach, and why I teach in an unfashionable ex-polytechnic in an unfashionable town (that and being essentially unemployable otherwise). The lesson of Morris is that all are capable of blossoming under and deserve justice and beauty – it's a socialism of humanity rather than just of economics: this isn't the 'art will civilise the brutish lumpenproletariat' argument of people like Matthew Arnold. It's the idea that intellectual and emotional freedom means nothing if it's reserved for the powerful or the 'swinish rich'. Hence Jeremy Deller's Venice Biennale painting:

It's called 'We Sit Starving Amidst Our Gold' as was inspired by Roman Abramovich mooring his mega-yacht in the middle of Venice, obscuring the views adored by Morris's hero Ruskin, without a thought for others. So here's WM, hurling Eclipse (the world's second largest yacht: two helicopter pads, two swimming pools etc.) out of the way. Morris really does seem to be having a moment.

I'd give up if I wasn't an optimist. I just wish there was a political party I could vote for that feels the same way. Suggestions on a postcard?

Sport: a game of two political halves

Hi everyone. Not much from me for the next couple of days. I'm off to London in an hour, ready for tomorrow's conference: Anti-Communism: Literature, Culture, Propaganda at the Senate House. Having worked on Communist literature and culture for so long, I'm getting interested in the right's cultural activities… something else to add to the list of Putative Papers.

This morning I've been thinking about some research my colleague Mike is doing into the political and historical origins of the Youth Hostel Association in Britain (all contributions gratefully received). He has access to their archives and the various publications the produced, but there's very little on the motivations for the YHA's foundation. So it's a matter of tracing the interests of the founders and any public debate on the subject. One potential impetus is the widespread fear of urban youths becoming a squalid, unfit underclass: WW1's conscription revealed widespread malnutrition, TB, polio and general unhealthiness associated with poverty. Another inspiration may have been the various German cults of Youth and the outdoors, from both the left and the right. Green's Children of the Sun records that Parliament sent a delegation to investigate the Strength Through Joy movement, and came back to pass a Physical Training and Recreation Act, and to found a Festival of Youth. Here's a little footage, with some very interesting commentary:

KING AND QUEEN AT FESTIVAL OF YOUTH

Note that the commentator carefully disassociates these well-drilled youths from the Hitler Youth and other fascist organisations: there's a degree of wishful thinking there. As well as fitness, the formation of organised groups of strapping young people was always going to be political. The Scouts, for example, were explicitly formed to bind young people to God, King (or Queen) and Country, and to produce the next generation's military. Other organisations worried that the urban proletariat were prey to 'cosmopolitan' (i.e. Jewish and/or Communist) subversion and, following the German 'Blood and Soil' ideology, believed that getting them out into the country would reconnect them to the 'real' England, which was held to be the countryside. Physical exercise was better than sitting around, either doing nothing or reading subversive books. The Festival of Youth commentary reminds me of a visit to the Bonn Museum of German History (1946-onwards, rather evasively). One on side, pictures of depressed East German teenagers with information boards explaining that they were 'forced' to join the Pioneers and were little more than slaves. On the other side, photos of cheery West German teens happily marching in Western youth organisation out of patriotic fervour. Truly, the victors write history.

And it's certainly true that all the leftwing people with whom I associate would prefer to read books than play rugby. However, there was a thriving leftwing sporting world. Cycling was always a stronghold of the left, affording cheap transport to pleasant places in the company of like-minded people: the Clarion Clubs formed in Birmingham and Stoke before spreading through the nation (still just about going) merged socialism with cycling.



Hiking was the ultimate leftwing sport: socialists organised the campaign for footpaths and open access, including the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, led by communist Benny Rothman.



Athletics was also a popular working-class sport, particularly the disciplines which required little equipment, such as long-distance running: events were held under the auspices of the British Workers' Sports Federation (largely Communist-inspired) and the British Workers' Sports Association, a centre-left splinter body after the CPGB's authoritarianism got a little too much. The BWSF was a leading light in the Mass Trespass.

As for my sport: very disappointing. Although Karl Marx was an enthusiastic fencer (epée, sadly), so were Mussolini and Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists.

He was a leading member of the British teams, based his shock troops' uniform on the fencing jacket (in black, of course) and used to put on fundraising fencing galas for his Nazi party, with the connivance of other senior fencers and – I suspect – the Amateur Fencing Association. Certainly Charles de Beaumont, after whom the previous national HQ was named, aided Mosley's exhibition matches at the unsavoury Gargoyle Club. Unfortunately, the archives have long since disappeared and there was no newsletter, so tracing the story requires a trawl through the sporting and aristocratic press. One day, perhaps.

Sports' political characteristics tend to divide between team/individual, and be influenced by their social backgrounds. Fencing, mountaineering motor sport and aeroplanes in the 1930s were associated with Fascism: the Übermensch proving his worth as an individual by solo achievement by going higher to look down on us vermin, faster or further (and they were expensive). Rugby League was the preserve of Northern working men. Rugby union split between posh privately-schooled English people and Welsh or Scottish miners looking for a chance to duff up the English without getting arrested. Football tended to be grass-roots and socialist, though many clubs were founded by companies or churches to improve their parishioners' fitness or simply to get them to behave. Tennis was utterly suburban and middle-class: see Sorrow For Thy Sons' damning indictment of social-climbing Herbert who joins the tennis club in his Welsh valley because that's where the (English) managerial class go to escape the grime of the mining village.

Anyway, enough of this: I'm off to That London. More anon.

Smilin' Sid has something to say

Morning everybody (well, it's morning here and how I wish it wasn't). You may have noticed that my blogging has declined from last year's high of about four posts a day to one or two. Is he losing his touch, commentators are asking? Perhaps I am. Or perhaps this course of compulsory psychiatric therapy has soothed my inner demons, resulting in less rage to go round. It might, of course, be that I have so much work to do and so little time. Or a combination of all three. But hopefully I'll find an equilibrium of fewer, higher quality posts (note the importance of that comma).

On today's agenda: actually do some research; see some new students; write some lectures; go to another high level meeting as part of my union casework to be told that The Hegemon's senior staff can behave as viciously as they like. Bullying isn't minuted. Anything un-minuted hasn't happened. Therefore bullying doesn't happen. At least, that's the result of the last investigation I instigated. Then my member gets frustrated at the union's impotence and another bit of hope dies. This kind of misery is what gets the Tories up in the morning, but it's no fun for me seeing grown men and women weep.

Anyway, what else is going on? Well, I read a rather wonderful book yesterday, Shogan's The Battle of Blair Mountain. It's the story of the West Virginia miners and their union in the 1919-1921 period. Many of them fought in the First World War and came back demanding union recognition and fair wages. What they got was state corruption, Federal hostility and martial law. Highlights include gun massacres by private detectives, assassinations, 10,000 shots exchanged between miners and mine guard in a single day, the US Army Air Corps bombing miners from the skies, armoured trains raking tent cities with machine gun fire, imprisonment without trial for reading particular newspapers, bribery of judges, the suspension of habeas corpus, treason trials, and in the end, a state civil war.

The miners lost, as did working-class politics and the left in general, making the United States a safe place for vicious exploitation, as it is now. West Virginia is still a mining state, and a poisonous one. The favoured technique is 'mountain top removal', which employs massive amounts of explosives to do exactly that. The environment is fouled by the mining and the coal-burning, but the companies still own the state and its politicians, while the miners have been persuaded that any mitigation is an attack on their jobs: from revolutionaries then are descended reactionaries now.

We tend to forget that the American Dream's individualism isn't eternal: there have been mass movements and class movements throughout that great country's history, from the Farm Labor parties to Chicago's socialists and anarchists - massacred on May Day, the General Motors rebellion, the Jewish socialists of New York, the Socialists and Communists of Minnesota, the Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania and Mother Jones (from Cork!) across the country, Chavez's United Farm Workers, to say nothing of the abolitionist and African-American movements and parties.

Smilin' Sid Hatfield

Here's a key scene from John Sayles's film of the Blair Mountain story, Matewan. The Sheriff is Smilin' Sid Hatfield, who defended the miners from the company goons - he was eventually assassinated on the steps of the courthouse by private detectives who then planted a gun on him and escaped conviction. The United Mine Workers also made a silent movie called Smilin' Sid, which was pretty advanced PR< but the only copy was apparently stolen from the National Archives.



I wouldn't claim that my union work is quite as heroic as these men and women - but it reminds me of what our political enemies would like to see: workers' solidarity smashed, workers' protection abolished, individualism reigning.

Julian Assange: a summary for dimwits

1. Julian Assange is wanted in Sweden for questioning in relation to allegations of sexual assault. He has not been charged. He has not been 'incarcerated' for aeons as Wikileaks keeps saying - most sex crime suspects are banged up on remand, not bailed to a massive mansion in the countryside before diving into the Ecuadorian Embassy.

2. Julian Assange is innocent unless charged and proven guilty. There's nothing progressive about celebrating a man's refusal to assist an inquiry by the police force of a country which is much, much more equitable and liberal than the UK.

3. The UK and US are definitely infuriated by Wikileaks' activities, and no doubt the US would love to spirit him away from Sweden to somewhere like Texas. This doesn't mean he should seek sanctuary in Ecuador - a largely admirable country though ironically lacking a free press - but that he should face the music in Sweden and our progressive comrades in that country should help resist any US extradition proceedings should that come to pass. I don't see anything wrong with asking the Swedes to guarantee Assange won't be extradited to the US. While we're on the subject, I'm rather confused by the British government's hostility to Assange - after all, when General Pinochet came to stay, hands dripping with the blood of thousands, it protected him from extradition to Spain, in one of the most shameful episodes of political history.

4. Confusing Assange with Wikileaks, and assuming that his sexual conduct must automatically be as stainless as his position on big power duplicity, is a distortion of progressive politics which leads to the dead-end of conspiracy theories.

5. The new element - Ecuador's diplomatic rights - is genuinely worrying. If the UK decides that it can violate international law by entering an Embassy in pursuit of Assange, then there are no more rules in this arena: why should the Chinese not retrieve dissidents sheltering in Western embassies, or the authorities of any other repressive country? It doesn't matter whether it's Assange or the most sainted individual: this aspect of the case is really worrying.

6. The whole affair has unmasked a lot of so-called leftists who think the alleged victims' rights are far less important than their hero's worries. If your politics depends on you downgrading sexual assault and vilifying women when it's politically convenient, you need to take a long hard look at yourself. Of course there's a long history of this kind of vicious masculinist Stalinism: Gerry Healy (Workers' Revolutionary Party, bankrolled by the Iraqi and Libyan reactionary regimes) was a serial rapist, violent thug and hypocrite, yet his cult's members rarely wavered from the argument that all criticism was CIA or KGB-inspired propaganda. Healy and his friend Ken Livingstone claimed it was all MI5-inspired. Sound familiar?

7. Socialists don't need heroes. We understand that individuals are flawed, weak and often contradictory. Instead, we believe in the Cloud: the collective wisdom of the intelligent human race. We know that ideas survive individual and generational failure, defeat and death. We believe that a massive never-ending argument, while not always efficient, will guide us towards humane, workable relations between us all. Hero-worship is a dead end, the fantasy of those determined to bring about the apocalypse/class-war/race war or whatever regardless of prevailing conditions.

8. Automatically adopting positions because you don't like those on the 'other' side is what Lenin called 'infantile leftism' (though it applies to the right as well). 'My enemy's enemy is my friend' is a vicious, destructive mantra. What kept billions of people poor and oppressed during the Cold War? The West's deliberate support for any regime - Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Pinochet's Chile, Iraq etc etc - which promised to be anti-Communist. The same goes for the Soviet Union's puppet states - Ethiopia, Angola and Romania. This kind of mindless, obedient politics is the exact opposite of true, humanist communism. It's weird having to point this stuff out because it seems so obvious, but clearly not, given the continued tolerance of Kissinger, George Galloway and most of the Tory Party.

Assange is a diversion. Wikileaks is a noble enterprise, but he is - like us - weak and complicated. By all means resist American/UK efforts to demonise him, but understand that canonising him is simply the mirror of demonisation, and doing so plays their game.

Gorgeous George

A lot of people are celebrating today, because George Galloway was re-elected to Parliament, trouncing Labour (who previously held the seat) and the Tories. Look, they say, it shows that there's an electorate who'll vote for a proper socialist way to the left of Labour.

They're talking utter shit.

I'm a hardline socialist way to the left of Labour. I'm also - thanks to a lifetime of bad choices - an expert on socialist political and cultural history. I know a charlatan when I see one. George Galloway is not a socialist. He's a man steeped in the history and rhetorical devices of socialism. He can preach with the best of them. But he's not a socialist. He's an opportunist who has been elected yet again through the simple method of playing identity politics. His totally legitimate - and often magnificent - opposition to the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has meshed with his propensity to cuddle up to every dictator who opposed the west - despite most of these dictators previously being western puppets. He's manufactured a victory by telling Muslim voters that their religious identity and ethnic origin is the most important thing about them. This isn't progressive: it's racism. He has nothing to say about them as citizens, as proletarians, as Bradfordians.

In George's world, the Tiananmen Massacre never happened.



Here's his embarrassing speech to Saddam Hussein:



I share many of George's opinions. I understand the socialist world which spawned him. But his political strategy is one of divisiveness and conspiracism. He understands that alienated young people - particular those from ethnic minorities who are disproportionately unemployed and harassed by the police and the media - are ready to grasp simplistic solutions and interpretations of their predicaments. He doesn't encourage them to forge alliances: he fosters sectarianism and encourages a siege-politics in which groups are formed for the purposes of capturing the state for private interests. There's no vision here, simply plunder.

Galloway's Respect party was founded as a vehicle for himself alone, in tandem with the Socialist Workers Party (not socialists, not workers), a groupuscule which never stands for election itself, preferring to influence politics behind the scenes: their argument is that parliamentary democracy is a sham, but their own methods are devious and unaccountable.

Galloway is a demagogue: his love of the tanning salon and unspeakable dictators is reminiscent of Tony Blair. They share a conviction that ideology and boring politics is for the little people - Galloway voted in 7% of the divisions last time he was in parliament. While he's making grandiose speeches about Afghanistan or Palestine, who'll be chasing the CSA or the Benefits Agency for his constituents? Because that's what most MPs spend their time working on.

Demagoguery is not socialism. Stalinism was a cult of personality. So was the Workers' Revolutionary Party, led by Gerry Healy, who turned out to be a rapist who used violence to control his tiny sect. So was New Labour ('trust me, guys' is not a political platform). Galloway's part of a tradition which requires total obedience rather than critical support. When Healy was exposed as a rapist, his followers denied, then excused it. When Respect fell apart the first time, the factions splintered in true Monty Python style. Respect is a vehicle, not a party, and its sole purpose is to allow George Galloway and his clique to harness the most reactionary instincts of the oppressed for the purpose of sustaining Galloway's symbolic presence.

There's a view amongst macho politicians on the left - of whom Galloway is an example - that only big groups matter. With George, it's Islamic communities whom he sees as a natural constituency. Labour took their votes for granted, which led to corruption and injustice, as well as fragmented communities. The war ended that, and shifty Tories and splitters moved in.  I use 'Islamic' very deliberately. In the old days, immigrant communities were treated by proper socialists as fellow-workers whose essential interests were the same as other workers: fair treatment at work, equality, good housing, education, health and welfare. Religious identity wasn't a concern: many immigrants, like many natives, had some belief but weren't necessarily observant. Others were, but it was a private activity. Religion wasn't the defining characteristic of immigrant groups, just as it isn't of white native ones. But gradually, that changed, and it brought about a darker vision of the public sphere.

When identity politics and war became enmeshed, some very dubious decisions were made. Well-meaning politicians, concerned by the plight of immigrant and minority communities, handed representational power to religious leaders and business groups which fostered an identity rooted in religious practice. Pretty soon, everyone believed that 'Muslim' = strictly observant, then 'fundamentalist'. The idea that Muslims could be religious slackers who shared our interests in social justice, or the minimum wage or nuclear disarmament, disappeared. We treated Muslims as religious zealots and many young Muslims embraced it as the only stable identity available. Dubious 'community leaders' encouraged this - leading to the burning of The Islamic Verses, to segregation and to people like George Galloway and David Cameron fuelling mutual suspicion and reductive concepts of identity.

It's like assuming that Ian Paisley's fascist apocalyptic cult and a Catholic priest's child-abusing habits define Christianity in Northern Ireland, and then treating them as legitimate representatives of those communities. (Which is what's happened).

What's lost is the continuum of Islam (and other religions) as a practice, from Wahhabi to Sufism, from essential to cultural, from observant to casual. Galloway's identification with Islam has led him to encourage and applaud some disgusting bigots. Misogynists, homophobes, anti-semites (for the record: Israel is a vicious state guilty of multiple war crimes - but not because it's a Jewish state): they all appear next to Galloway as 'true' representatives of an oppressed faith. Eventually, these things become self-fulfilling prophecies, and we're left living in ghettos of mutual hatred. But George will be on Question Time, and that's what matters.

True socialists know that socialism isn't' embodied in one person. My political hero, Lewis Jones, refused to join a standing ovation for Stalin - in Moscow at the height of the Purges - because he didn't believe in the Great Man theory of politics. Harry Pollitt and Dennis Skinner are socialists: they're boring, hard-working people who believe that the force of their arguments will prevail, not the deployment of fake tan and fine phrases.

This country needs a socialist party - yesterday's Question Time, in which a Labour shadow cabinet minister joined the anti-union lynch-mob without even considering whether the tanker-drivers' strike (over health and safety) might be justified. George Galloway is not the future of socialism. He speaks well, he's sometimes right, and it's fun hearing him humiliate Tories and pathetic New Labour stooges, but George isn't The Great Liberator: he's a fame addict.

Socialism and Sex

I thought that would get your attention.

It's a chapter-heading in a book given to my by a colleague: Revolutionary Socialism by Arnold Lunn, published by the Right Book Club. The RBC was a counter-operation to the Left Book Club. It was far less successful, partly because being on the right is just plain evil, and because the texts chosen weren't much good - mostly memoirs by ex-socialists explaining how they were converted. I collect them when I see them, but I'm far more interested in LBC books - if you see them (orange paperbacks, pink hardbacks) get them for me and I'll pay you back.

Lunn himself was quite interesting - obviously very bright, but he devoted his life to mountaineering, skiing and being rightwing: such sports were commonly associated with fascism in the interwar period. His father founded the famous but now disappeared Lunn-Poly holiday company. Like many English rich conservatives, he converted to Catholicism, despite his father being a Methodist preacher.

Part of his objection to socialism is its materialism: he couldn't stand the idea that we are determined by physical processes (chemistry etc.)

So anyway, what did he think about socialism and sex? It's only a short (11 pages) unillustrated chapter. Apparently, the socialist's "creed leads inevitably to promiscuity". I must confess that this has not hitherto been my experience. Rather the opposite. For real promiscuity, I suggest that Lunn should consider the case of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, who had more sexual partners than voters.

Lunn does admit that the Communist Manifesto looks to the liberation of women and that Lenin was 'ascetic' and opposed to promiscuity. He does, however, claim that 'revolutionary movements have a disastrous effect' on moral standards. Really? Ask the Iranians. More to the point, the 'free love' lot were a tiny minority. The British Communist Party was famously conservative and moralistic - their efforts kept 'licentious' American comics out of Britain in the 1950s, and they lost out to the hippy-influenced New Left because they didn't like rock, long hair, marijuana and sex.

To Lunn, though, revolution and 'immorality' go together because weak-minded people would rather blame repressive society for their sexual incontinence than accept responsibility, while revolutionaries will encourage anybody who rebels.

Then he takes a rather illogical turn. After claiming that communists are promiscuous, and accepting that their leaders reject promiscuity, he claims that people become socialists because they're 'sex-frustrated' or feminists, ready to throw away their honour, give their own surnames to their children before being exploited by the revolutionaries. Added to this, he claims that France's socialist leader, M. Blum, is a promoter of incest. Rather confusingly, he then condemns the Spanish socialists for declaring that 'arousing the sexual feelings of another… amounted to a gross and palpable interference'.

In the end, Lunn's objection to socialist sex is that it implies atheism. Easy marriage and easy divorce stem from a rejection of the eternal rules imposed on us by God, whereas a Christian believes that 'eternal happiness' in heaven 'must not be jeopardized to escape from the discomfort of an unhappy marriage'. So suck up the misery and think of the angels!

Women, of course, are both more important and less noteworthy than men. Or more clearly: women don't matter, but female virginity does: 'when women enjoy the same sex liberties as men, the ancient doctrine of virginity topples down like a heap of snow struck by  rock. There is nothing to hold it together. Chastity… is no longer a badge of honour or glory'.

Men, of course, are exempt. Carry on shagging, chaps!

Thankfully, concludes Mr. Lunn - quoting Joad - these rampant atheists will get what's coming to them: 'they are very unhappy, and the suicide rate is abnormally high'.

So that's all right then.

Socialist Heroes No. 1: The US Military

I mean it. The US armed forces are the world's greatest and most powerful examples of socialism in action.

I realised this when I sat in front of the TV watching Tea Party lunatics calling for small government and an end to government spending, while expressing a desire for more soldiers, bigger guns, and more wars.

But armies are paid for by taxpayers. The government takes your money and spends almost 5% of GDP and 44% of US Government tax income ($663.8 billion) on war. Massive standing armies, a huge navy, enormous Marine Corps, gigantic air force, the National Guard, covert operations, missile silos, satellites, research and development, propaganda, accommodation, vehicles, educational programs: the list is endless, and it costs a lot of money.

Brilliant.

Eh? Surely that's not a very Vole thing to say. But I do. The US is a military state. It spends almost half the tax it collects on the military. This is genius. The government knows that Americans hate taxes and distrust governments. They also know that the more you hate taxes and governments, the more likely you are to like guns and massive military force. So someone sat down and thought about how to support the US economy while keeping these loons happy, and hit on the idea of a mighty military.

Think of it like this: if you manufacture enough enemies, you can usually be at war with a couple of no-mark sandpits at any one time, while keeping a massive enemy in reserve - once the USSR, now China. Your voters therefore demand that you hugely outgun and outspend them.

This leads to massive recruitment, taking young men and women off the dole queue caused by your decline as a manufacturing economy. They serve their country, learn to be docile and obedient citizens and view the armed services as the epitome of American-ness, and they get an excellent education paid for by the state after they leave. So you're fiddling the employment market and contributing to the education system. You also employ a lot of people to teach and train these recruits while in service. Then there's the housing for your forces, and the military bases. You scatter these throughout the country until every small town has a military outpost. That keeps them patriotic and ensures that they (and their local politicians) will never object to the military expenditure because it's keeping their town alive.

You also invest massively in university and industrial research and development, providing more jobs and tying everyone into a state-regulated economy without ever mentioning the dread word 'socialism'. But that's what it is. Shhh. Don't mention it to the Americans.

Why Am I A Socialist?

"I won't get out of bed for less than $10k" per day

                                                                  gets people in and out of bed for £10k per year

The Day of Waiting Around

I seem to have spent a lot of time waiting in the cold today. All, of course, in a good cause.

Neal, Mark, Pritpal and I joined many likeminded middle-class liberals to spend several hours in a Dudley carpark. It was our bit to combat the fascist scourge.

Less flippantly, there's a nasty little groups called the English Defence League which combines football and fascism. They're a front for the British National Party and claim to be anti-Islamic rather than racist (as though that's OK), and every demonstration they hold turns into a rampage on their part - such as in Bolton and Stoke recently (they're all from, and like to wreck, already depressed towns).

Today was Dudley's turn: in the midst of almost total social and economic breakdown, caused by capitalism (a massive out of town mall destroyed what used to be a thriving market town), they massed to protest against a mosque. Predictably, some of them turned to attacking the rozzers, their own stewards (!) and breaking things - several arrests.



In case you wonder about the intellectual capacities of these types, check out the comments on the Youtube video. Here's a sample:

better to get rid asasp !we are losing our english traits ! churches instead of mosque ? its england not fucking india ! dont like it ? fuck off back 

Meanwhile, a large proportion of the 3000 police were employed rounding up and filming a bunch of liberals confined to a car park a long way from the fascists. I particularly despise the myriads of police cameramen, the Forward Intelligence Teams, who illegally film everyone and put us all on a database, rather than gather evidence of actual crimes. More pictures here.

I only saw them search Asians

Multiculturalism in action

If the skills required to fight reaction are sectarian bickering and newspaper selling (a ritual activity at such gatherings), then we're highly trained. Rather than actually doing anything, the myriad groupuscules on the British left would rather argue over arcane ideological points. I think they actually enjoy the arguments and fear the responsibility of power.

I could have bought:
Socialist Worker (SWP: not socialists, not workers, can't party)
Socialist Review
Socialist Outlook
Socialist Appeal (their seller wasn't very appealing - denied being a party but didn't explain who was funding a newspaper)
The Socialist
The Militant
and a range of other papers, one for every two demonstrators. Meanwhile, some ineffective speeches were made and drums were banged. Actually, I found it all very appealingly nostalgic - I used to go on lots of these and loved the familiar slogans, the papers, the whistles, the camaraderie. This one was rather nice: some lads dressed up like the old Black Bloc and occasionally made a half-hearted attempt to rush the police lines, but nothing happened.

Still, they also serve who stand and wait, eh? It was important to turn up and remind each other (nobody from the public or the EDL could see us) that the streets aren't the preserve of the fascists. Delightfully, I found myself on the train with these charming fellows, all sloping back to their holes in Stoke - the closest I got all day.

A flying picket

Wiggum waddles into action

I had a brainwave actually. All these fascists seem to hail from absolute dumps, including my hometown of Stoke. They think that everyone of non-British origin should be sent 'home' (despite the utter impossibility of finding anyone who's 'pure British' - it would mean sending all the Anglo-Saxons back to Germany and the Scots back to Ireland).

Josiah Wedgwood, who founded Stoke's ceramics industry. He often sports a beer bottle, and sometimes a Stoke City shirt.

So. Let's give them somewhere nobody else wants, like Dudley. Fence it off. Give them the seeds of any plant that can be proven 'indigenous'. The same with cattle. Remove any tool, machine and object of foreign origin. According to their racial theories, their community will become a Utopia.

Return in, say, 5 years to check the results. My guess is that it won't be an earthly paradise.

Working class hero

My friend Paul's dad died a few weeks ago. His obituary is in the Guardian and it's one of an exemplary leftist life (despite his membership of the SWP).

All hail Frank Henderson. If only we could all emulate him.

A very boring post which might save the world

Simple: read this article by Tony Judt. It's quite long because complicated ideas require lengthy exploration. It's a slowly dying man's attempt to relegitimise the state as a force for good in the face of decades of individualism and selfishness.

This is how he explains his status:

"Today I'm regarded outside New York University as a Looney Tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I'm … a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist … I'm on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable."

If you added a little more hard left authoritarianism, you'd reach my politics. Judt's a classic liberal: he believes in a balance between personal liberty and a state which works for the greater good under the direction of an enlightened electorate. Me? I've met Tories. They can't be rehabilitated. They belong in camps.

Still, in an ideal world, Tony Judt for President. Meanwhile, buy his book.

We have lost touch with the old questions that have defined politics since the Greeks: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society? A better world? The US and UK today are more unequal – in incomes, wealth, health, education, life chances – than at any time since 1914. Is this desirable? Is it prudent? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. Until we have learned – or re-learned – how to pose them, we shall go on as before.

And John Rawls' classic A Theory of Justice.

Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the 19th century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person", writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." 

Feckless proletarian scum: Orinoco

I've been watching The Wombles (for professional reasons, obviously). I once thought that the Wombles were lovely eco-minded creatures cleaning up after wasteful humans so that we learn the error of our ways. I now realise that they're nothing but furry indoctrination, designed to condition unsuspecting children in preparation for a life of slavery.

Hegemony in action

Orinoco is the central Womble character: he's feckless, greedy and lazy - lovable, but his proletarian antics are always punished, as we will be if we don't work hard. His boss is Great Uncle Bulgaria, a demanding autocrat constantly demanding copies of The Times (traditional paper of the élite) who almost always foils Orinoco's reasonable requirement for adequate food and rest. The boy needs a union!

The downtrodden proletariat

The heartless bourgeois exploiter of free labour

The books are great, the animations are heartwarming - that's how capitalism works, kids. Gramsci would recognise the evil genius that is The Wombles. I prefer these Wombles.

Stalinism in action

Comrade Arthur Scargill is speaking at The Lighthouse on Thursday, as part of his Socialist Labour Party election campaign.

I'm going along, though I certainly don't support the SLP. I'm deeply dubious about Scargill too. On the plus side, he took on Margaret Thatcher in the last campaign of organised working-class resistance this country has seen. In the negative column, he made major tactical and strategic errors which contributed to his defeat, and he became a ranting demagogue. His party isn't socialist or communist in the progressive terms I attach to those names - it's Stalinist: centralist, still obsessed with an outmoded focus solely on industrial production despite the absence of industry, and unconcerned with issues such as the environment, feminism and civil liberties.

If I wanted a political party like this, I'd vote Tory. Boom, boom. Jesting aside though, there are plenty of more convincing leftwing parties (the CP, the CPGB, Workers' Alliance etc.) if you don't want to use your vote combating the Tories, which is my focus in this election and this constituency. Better purgatory now and heaven tomorrow than descending into hell today.

Still, Scargill's a fascinating character and a great speaker, and the last representative of what might have been, now Foot's dead.

Boring mandatory politics post of the week

Brilliant piece by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman on how the soi-disant left has carried out the dearest wishes of the right (hat-tip to Slugger O'Toole on this one). This is the bit he picks out,  something I've been moaning about for ages.

In recent years to be on the ‘left’ has come to signal an intention to be more thorough than the ‘right’ in carrying out the agenda of the right, and better at protecting such undertakings from the backlash inevitably caused by their dire social consequences. It was Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ that laid institutional foundations under Margaret Thatcher’s inchoate ideas about there being no such thing as society, ‘only individuals and families’. It was the French Socialist Party that did most work on the dismantling of the French social state. And in East-Central Europe it is the ‘post-communist’ parties, renamed as ‘social democrats’ (wary as they are of being accused of lingering devotion to their communist past), that are the most enthusiastic and vociferous advocates – and most consistent practitioners – of unlimited freedom for the rich and the leaving of the poor to their own care.

A new addition

Welcome, all of you, The Stilletoed Socialist. She's soft left (which is almost as good as hard left) and really hates the Daily Mail. A gap in my life is filled.

Move along, it's another politics and environment post

Being a rcalcitrant anarcho-syndicalist with Trotskyist leanings, I'm a huge fan of Ken MacLeod, the Scottish Trotskyist-ish science fiction author. He's a brilliant writer and stunningly intelligent.

However, I'm also very, very scared about what we've done to this planet and consequently what we're doing to its poor, mostly black inhabitants, none of whom have done anything to bring the eco-apocalypse down on our heads.

The problem is that the hard left has always seen industrialism as the solution to dragging the proletariat out of its suffering. Being green, to them, equates to being a smug, selfish and hypocritical bourgeois git. And you know, they're right - there are lots of Tory landowners taking long-haul flights to paradise islands, or weekend breaks, while telling the rest of us to recycle.

BUT - it's the poor who'll suffer first. Anyway, back to Ken MacLeod - here's his solution, expressed in his admiration for a techno-fix approach proposed by a learned professor. It's very appealing, and is also a fantasy of the climate change-denying right. The problem, of course, is that it's never this simple, consumption just is damaging, and the benefits won't extend to the poor.

For me, a highlight of a very engaging and informative weekend was a talk by Prof Colin McInnes, DSc FRAes FInstP FRSE FREng, titled 'Random Thoughts of a Techno-Utopist Running Dog'. The usual conception of sustainability, Prof McInnes argued, was a dangerous idea. Technological stagnation only means slower resource depletion. We need continuous technological progress to make new resources available. The idea that we should use less energy is outrageously inhumane and regressive. Most of humanity gets its energy from burning wood and dung. We need a vast increase in energy production. That means nuclear power, including new kinds of nuclear plant such as the Thorium Energy Amplifier. Nuclear waste is just inadequately burned nuclear fuel. We need to find ways of burning it all. Most reycling schemes are feel-good rather than do-good, condemning us to pre-industrial, manual rooting about in rubbish. We need plasma torches and mass spectrometers to really recover all the useful stuff in our waste. 'Humanity is the singularity. We are self-replicating smart matter.' To campaign against cheap flights to Prague while jetting across the world for eco-holidays in the Galapagos is naked class warfare. With synthetic genomics we can have carbon-neutral aviation even cheaper than today's travel.

This is da bomb!

Good morning (or evening or afternoon for my far-flung readers). How are you all today? Here the sun's breaking through the clouds, a Test match is being played 19 miles away (weather permitting), and I've received a pile of CDs in the post (I have a new card, but no PIN, so can only shop online for now).

What has Postman Pat brought me today? John Adams' Doctor Atomic Symphony and three CDs of Vaughan Williams: 'Sancta Civitas' and 'Dona nobis pacem' (VW was a cheerful agnostic or atheist and liberal to left - 'Sancta Civitas' is an interesting exploration of the fate of the soul while 'Dona Nobis Pacem' is a warning against war), Folksong Arrangements and Choral Folksong Arrangements (which also has some Holst). Normally my tastes are a little more modernist, but I've a soft spot for VW, and he's on the classical wing of the peace and socialism movement - folk songs were (like the 1960s) a way to demonstrated solidarity and to reconnect with culture unadulterated by bourgeois atomisation - though not always successfully. The Adams is a symphonic version of his latest opera, which follows Robert Oppenheimer as he builds the first nuclear weapon - I can't afford the actual opera recording yet, but it'll come.

Meanwhile, Steve Reich, when's Double Sextet being released? It won prizes ages ago and it still isn't commercially available. Boo!

Euro-pudding or mean Little England

Amidst all this disgust about political sleaze, there's an election going on, for the European parliament. I'm a hardline socialist, but unlike most on the proper left, I'm in favour of a United States of Europe - as long as it's a United Socialist States of Europe.

Despite its structural weaknesses, corruption, inefficiency and inevitable political fudging, the EU is currently a better state to be a part of than Britain. In some ways, the EU is a capitalist plot, as my comrades on the left say - but Britain under the Tories and New Labour is a capitalist concentration camp, in which de-unionised workers labour for longer hours, lower pay, less protection and fewer rights than our European cousins. So I'm happy to trade a little bit of British state power for egalitarianism and a better deal for the worker.

Will Hutton, a centrist whom I respect greatly, says that only a shock will remind us of how brilliant EU membership is:

Along with the BNP, the opinion polls suggest that more than 50% of the vote will go to anti-EU parties. I'm not sure the British know the consequence of their vote, but a dynamic is in train that will lead to our exit from the EU.

As a pro-European, I don't want this to happen, but I've begun to wonder whether it wouldn't be better for Europe. Only living outside the EU as the sceptics want - creating a politically diminished Britain fit for hedge funds, tax-avoiders and asset-strippers - is likely to convince the British majority that the option is a disaster.

Meanwhile, the Europeans can deepen the EU, along the way empowering the European Parliament. When a Tory government leads an impoverished, embittered Britain back into the EU in 25 years' time, reality will have imposed political maturity.

His point is that Europeans are beginning to question the benefit of being the targets of constant, bitter carping from Britain - yes, the UK is a net donor to the EU, but its diplomatic and political efforts are so selfish (and sometimes so slavishly pro-American), its financial policies so wholly devoted to beggar-thy-neighbour quick-buck capitalism, that the continental Europeans are starting to wonder whether an amicabledivorce might be better for them too.

Sorry about the margins and italics - this bloody interface won't let me put them back and it's driving me crazy.

Yet another birthday

I'm off now. To sunny Stafford for Dan's partner's 40th. Then my Germanic chum (like that, Deer Friend) Felix is coming for the weekend to drink while I mark essays. What are you lot doing for the bank holiday? Wish I was going walking…

Oh yes - to drown out the New Labour screaming, I just received Tristram Hunt's new biography of Engels, and a new edition of Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England (short answer - less than idyllic). Plus ça change…

Some dreadful political puns

I haven't moaned about politicians for a few days. Why is Hazel Blears still employed, even though non-Ministers have been suspended from the Party for doing the same thing? Perhaps because he'd have to sack several other ministers too, and perhaps because she's vindictive enough to devote the rest of her career to undermining the Labour Party.

Have you noticed that the more rightwing the MPs are, the more corrupt they are? Rob Marris (though by my standards he's quite rightwing): innocent. Paul Flynn: innocent. Dennis Skinner: innocent. Hazel Blears, Geoff Hoon, Tories who charged us for 'duck islands' and moat cleaning: GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY.

There's a simple ideological reason for this. Being rightwing means privileging individualism. The appeal of the Tories and of New Labour is this: do whatever you can to get ahead, and we'll reward you. Everybody else is a loser. So naturally, corner-cutting and fraud is admirable under this system.

Socialism said: there's plenty to go round, so if we work together and look after each other, all our lives will improve.

So socialists don't steal from the citizens and capitalists do.

Pun time. The full details of MPs expenses aren't out yet. Did Bill Cash in? What did Ken Purchase? Did David Borrow? Did Liam Fox his constituents? Is Joan Humble? Were Greg Hands in the till? Does Sir Michael Lord it over us? Is Paddy Tipping a racist sport? When it came to negotiating with the fees office, did Jon Trickett? If so, did Derek Twigg? Was there a Steve Webb of deceit? Finally, was Tony Wright? Feel free to add more…