Though Cowards Flinch

Labour Left (formerly GEER) have tonight published their opening salvo in the fight for the Labour party heart – amid other recent policy books by Progress in the form of the Purple Book and of course Blue Labour.

The book, composed of chapters by MPs, party activists, bloggers, writers and the four combined (including this very author), covers a wide range of subjects from ethical socialism, the history of and how it can return today; the public services, cuts and the part played by the private sector; education; ethical consumerism; philosophy; sustainability and identity.

It proves to be a fascinating read, and at over 200 pages, insightful and complete.

Download the book here - because Labour needs new ideas.

The first thing to say about this book is that there is never a wrong time to publish critical, in depth material about one of the most – if not themost – electorally successful far right parties in the UK. On the day of writing this review, the Daily Mirror ran with a splash about the presence of a man – Chris Hopgood – who describes himself as the leader of the British arm of the Ku Klux Klan. The article goes on to quote Hopgood giving complimentary praise to Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, and its success on being “elected by the people of England” [sic]. It is episodes like this where one can console themselves that for every time the party tries to present itself as mainstream something reminds us of the truth (for which we should be grateful).

(Read on)

Reading Paul Richards, author and editor of Tony Blair In His Own Words, in The Purple Book, one gets the sense that what he appreciates of the Labour Party before 1945 is the efforts to achieve power, not power itself. After this date it was all welfare and statism, but before there was community spirit, and a goal on which to unite on.

This is very reminiscent of the Freudian view of the drive. For Jacques Lacan, a Freudian psychoanalyst, “aim is the way taken. The end has a different term in English, goal.”

On the subject of capital, Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and Lacanian thinker, reminds us of Lacan’s view of the difference between aim and drive: “One should bear in mind here Lacan’s well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive: while the goal is the object around which drive circulates, its (true) aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such.”

When we get down to it, we learn that the goal is never really achievable, the enjoyment stems in aiming to reach the goal. In the same sense, Paul Richards and his return of the repressed (which actually sums up the The Purple Book perfectly – from neoliberal Blairism to the realisation that everything they know is wrong) is only interested in the aim of welfare – from a time when working men’s clubs were a place to listen to music as well as a place that held collections for their customers’ operations in lieu of a national health service – and not the goal.

Unlike the goal of the drive, welfare is possible, and one that is predicated upon the civil and human rights delivered by a welfare state that does not, inherently, interfere with big communities.

What differentiates Purple from Blue is that Maurice Glasman disliked the managerialism that replaced the communitarian “aim” – while the latter is comfortable with private enterprise, he is no enemy of welfare, but has distrust of the lack of individual empowerment that came with it, emulating the corporatism of large enterprises.

The Purple Bookers bred managerialism anew – which is why their new found communitarianism is the return of the repressed.

The Purple Book has about 7 original ideas, most of which are bland and, well, hardly new. Paul Richards has what Lacan called “narcissisme de la chose perdu” (a romantic image/conception of time gone past) as do most of the writers in the book – which is no bad thing in itself - but the romanticism seems to forget the incredible achievements made by the party post-45 in a way that Glasman certainly doesn’t simply forget. Further, it forgets why it was necessary to club together before the victory of the welfare state – and this kind of neglect is certainly not something anyone should wish to incorporate into their political objectives.

For my review of The Purple Book see here.

After the “historic” victory in Scotland for the Scottish National Party (SNP), it was inevitable that the question of Scottish nationalism would re-emerge. Little attention has so far been given to analysing attitudes of nationalist sentiment, making Political Discourse and National Identity in Scotland both timely and necessary, addressing both “elite” and “non-elite” perceptions.

(Read on)

Being the opposition, the Labour Party during their conference had at least the opportunity to discuss ideas that will fundamentally change the direction of their politics, and hopefully all politics, for some time to come – a privilege not able to be enjoyed, to the same extent, by the Tories this week as they go to conference with this message ‘let’s stick out our dodgy economic policies out’.

During a conversation over the week with a friend, the notion of an ideas deficit came up – that is to say, though some ideas are being discussed as part of the realisation that the politics of New Labour must be put to rest, few people are stepping up to deliver those new ideas – Maurice Glasman being the exception here.

Before conference I had the impression Glasman was given the cold shoulder, but on a few occasions I was reminded that many people in the party still hold him in some esteem. The problem, thus, is not the ideas of Glasman that are contentious (though in my opinion they are still vague enough for many different, perhaps contradictory, constituencies to appeal to them), but his delivery – notable of which was his talk of incorporating the EDL into ideological discussions. 

Creating ideas anew can make politics exciting, and this certainly is lacking today – but perhaps this is not the deficit we should worry about. The real task for us today is to unpack and fully realise ideas of old, the ones that have stood the test of time, that have been widely disseminated but little demonstrated. If this is the case, more should be done by policymakers to unpack the practical kernel of ethical socialism, the subject of much exciting debate in Labour circles today. 

However not much beyond names and epithets are discussed in relation to ethical socialism, though the enthusiasm is there. Which is why I was impressed to read through a new report by Stephen Beer, the senior fund manager with the central finance board of the Methodist Church, on The Credibility Deficit, written for the Fabian Society. In the report, there is not only discussion of ideas central to what we might call ethical socialism (I should point out also that Mr Beer does political communications for the Christian Socialist Movement) but also presents them in such a way as to show their practical policy implications. For example, discussions around dishonest and unethical banking policies, key to the New Labour legacy, need to be overturned (which should go without saying) but the difference in liberal and socialistic measures is the former aims to situate a society where no vested interest is giving primacy in the political system, whereas the latter will legislate to ensure this is so, and is therefore not principally opposed to reining in laissez faire policies in order to see the good society flourish. 

As Beer puts it in the key messages: “values must not be crowded out by markets … [revisiting, revaluating and applying these values] will require Labour to take some tough decisions”. 

Other policy ideas such as investment focused stimuluses and muscular financial reform are also a welcome intervention into where the debate goes from here.

There are problems from the outset. Like the campaigns of Stella Creasy, they detail very opportunistic, and encouraging, reform, but there seems to be no enthusiasm for radical change of the system. I had the fortune of seeing Beer and Creasy share the same platform while at conference, and while their messages resonate with local challenges, it stays safe at times working only to rework the current economic system from within it, and not putting forward challenging longer term aims such as an end to the debt society – a predicate to capitalism (Beer, on the evening I saw him speak, pretty much said debt is a societal good – a notion I find contradicts the good of society).

From the conversations I’ve had over the last week, ideas is again the name of the game, and many people are playing (the forthcoming Red Book by the Labour Left group, in which I have a chapter, is another case in point). It’s now time to translate those conversations into economic policy. The Credibility Deficit is a good beginning to the translation, and I hope it is listened to by the right people to carry it forward.

The pop philosopher Slavoj Zizek, around the time of the 2009 elections in Iran, asserted that the Revolutionary Guard was not some working class militia but like a mega-corporation. Too, Zizek’s refusal to talk up the reformer candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi earned him much criticism from Ahmadinejad’s critics – but his criticism was mostly misunderstood. In Mousavi was not a radical who would solve the socio-economic problems Ahmadinejad presided over, but someone who would restore status quo, praised by the legions of mostly Middle Class supporters who took to the streets in what became known as the Velvet Revolution.

What Iran needed, rather, was somebody to tackle the social inequality prevalent in society. The worry that Mousavi was too Westernised was misjudged too – to the confusion of many, Iran is already rather Westernised, perhaps more so than the West would like to admit. President Ahmadinejad has before qualified the term “full liberal democracy” to Iran despite calls the 2009 election was rigged (though as was the case with Bush in 2004, suspicions of election rigging is not limited to non-democratic countries), while Saeed Rahnema, Professor of Political science at York University in Toronto, has pointed out that Iran has a ruling elite who are said to be “market-oriented capitalists”.

Further still Heydari Kord-Zanganeh, head of the state-run Privatisation Organisation Gholam Reza, delightedly announced in 2009 that “We have privatised $63-billion worth of government assets since 2005,” noting the goal of ridding billions more assets. What passes as Western has already been captured in today’s Iran.

In his wonderful book The Ayatollah’s Democracy: An Iranian Challenge, Hooman Majd – Iranian by stock, now living and working in New York – chronicles other measures Ahmadinejad has taken, cynically speaking, to give the appearance Iran is a free and open society, deserving of its independence and dismissal of foreign interference. On October 29, 2009, the Supreme Leader addressed an audience of students at Sharif University, Tehran. During an opportunity for the audience to speak a student, one Mahmoud Vahidnia, launched into a tirade, subsequently receiving press attention and even making it on to the Supreme Leader’s own website. Such openness has caused many to assume he was planted, to show illusions of free speech at a time when Iran was conscious the world’s eyes were upon them.

Others felt such a move to be too sophisticated of the Iranian propaganda department, instead – and so much like the US – it has its own way to curb dissent in a way which doesn’t tend to upset the masses. While radicalism is no longer actively prohibited in America (gone are the days of McCarthyism) the American mainstream press acts like what Majd calls the “genteel and more subtler … version of Iran’s Guardian Council” (p.123).

Majd notes that the Iranian people are almost instinctively conspiratorial – something he implies throughout was absent in his own journalistic accounts of the run up to election 2009. He scoffed at notions that he was being followed, along with his friend Mohammed Khatami, son of reformist leader of the same name – while they were lunching together in the Yazd province, and laughed off opinions of Ahmadinejad’s “resurgent authoritarianism”. But today he takes these views a little more seriously, particularly as so many people were imprisoned for “treason” after flocking to the streets.

When the author discussed his book last year at the LSE he was introduced as someone who “travels back and forth quite freely to Iran” to which he quickly replied “so far,” before explaining he hasn’t been back since the election so he hasn’t had a chance to test whether he’s able to travel as freely as he used to. Given that in the book he describes Ahmadinejad as a “sitcom” (p.41) and “educated but unsophisticated” (p.163) his caution may be well-advised.

Unsurprisingly Majd’s book centres around the events leading up to the disputed election, and how encouraging, it was to see young people display such overt interest in national political matters. But clearly he is addressing an audience largely ignorant of Iranian culture (indeed he admits as much, referring to some American audiences who have just assumed Iran is a rogue dictatorship). His recalling Ahmadinejad’s more authoritarian features, for example, must not be an indictment on the nature of Iranian people. It is too simple to say the President is a fascist and the people beneath him sheep. A great example of this comes from Majd’s visit to the Yousefabd synagogue in Iran, then to the Dr Sapir Hospital to visit Dr Siamak Moreh-Sedegh, President of Tehran Jewish Committee. Despite government sponsorship of anti-Semitic conferences and Ahmadinejad’s own holocaust denial, Dr Moreh-Sedegh told Majd “anti-semitism can only thrive if there are roots. And there simply are no roots in Iran … we’re not in the least bit afraid of anti-Semitism in Iran”. (p.237).

The current regime in Iran may harbour unpardonable features, but the Iranian people are largely resistant to this and it says a lot about a nation, and the limits its government has in being able to control and dominate them.

Ahmadinejad may use rhetoric about the Islamic Republic to his advantage, but the Iranian revolution is the people’s and they know it. For this reason the rise of the green movement perhaps shouldn’t surprise us; what was a surprise was how the government reacted – this in turn marks a shift back to the days where leaders told Iranians what to do; the Ayatollah’s democracy. But if history is any judge this cannot last. Majd’s book serves not only to show the tragedy of Ahmadinejad, but to inform his audience that it’s not in the Iranian DNA (at least since the revolution) to be told “what is true”, or “what is forbidden”, and to warn the sitting government to do this at its peril.

This is a cross posted entry by James Bloodworth

In 1947 George Orwell wrote that ‘every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly and indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.’

Today, many right across the political spectrum like to pick and choose from Orwell according to taste, stressing either the democratic, socialist or anti-totalitarian aspect of his work at the expense of the multitude – the resulting ‘legacy’ depending very much upon the political persuasion of those doing the accounting.

Christopher Hitchens, the one-time darling of the left, has in recent years uncomfortably skirted this same political dividing-line. He has at once attracted the scorn of his former comrades for his alleged shuffle to the right, while in the process gathering a substantial number of followers whose admiration rests almost entirely upon the premise of him having ‘come to his senses’.

On the surface, the nature of Hitchens’s politics depends, in a similar fashion to Orwell’s, almost entirely upon whom one is talking to.

His latest effort, Arguably, is a collection of essays spanning the past decade on politics, literature and religion. The prose (which is unsurprisingly of an extremely high standard, even if at times Hitchens employs rather too much Look-at-me vocabulary) comes with an added element of tragedy due by the fact that Hitchens was diagnosed with terminal cancer before he wrote a substantial proportion of it. This may, in fact, be Hitchens’s very last book.

Hitchens’s reputation as controversialist par excellence was cemented in recent years with his repudiation of the left and his articulate opposition to monotheism. Importantly, were Hitchens alone in rejecting the conventional left/liberal, post-9/11 politics, his bravado and bluster would likely be much less potent. (Hitchens’s politics were never about posture alone; but one should not underestimate the importance of showmanship to the Hitchens brand). As it happened, there were others on the left who also viewed the attempt on the back of 9/11 to conflate John Ashcroft with Osama Bin Laden as crass moral equivalence; or as Orwell put it 70 years before: ‘the argument that half a loaf is no different from no bread at all’.

The problem with the notion that Hitchens, after 9/11, simply did the obligatory shuffle to the right, or as David Horowitz puts it (underwhelmingly, considering his own political trajectory), had ‘second thoughts’, is that a substantial proportion of the left really did climb into bed with reaction during this period, and continue to do so whenever a group points AK47s in the direction of the United States and its allies.

This was not confined to the debased remnants of Stalinism, either. The editorial of the liberal-left New Statesman of 17 September, 2001, written by then-editor Peter Wilby, appeared to blame Americans themselves for the 9/11 attacks – for ‘preferring George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader’. A few weeks later, the Oxford Academic Mary Beard wrote approvingly in the London Review of Books about the ‘feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming’.

Arguably, however, also shows Hitchens at his dogmatic worst; and at times he resembles Isaac Deutscher’s description of the ex-Communist who, having recanted on his previous belief system, is ‘haunted by a vague sense that he has betrayed either his former ideals or the ideals of bourgeois society,’ and who ‘tries to suppress his sense of guilt and uncertainty, or to camouflage it by a show of extraordinary certitude and frank aggressiveness’. In Hitchens’s essays on Iraq, as Jonathan Freedland points out: ‘The absence of evidence (of WMD) is deemed not to be evidence of absence but, on the contrary, evidence of the presence of WMDs in the immediate past.’

While it may be simplistic to simply write Hitchens off as a ‘Neo Con’, he has very little to say on traditional left-wing domestic concerns, such as economic or social policy; and it seems increasingly clear, if only by omission, that interventionism is not the only ‘consensus’ that Hitchens now uncritically accepts.

In a 2008 interview with Prospect, Hitchens, a man who lives in extremely comfortable surroundings in Washington, showed a thinly-veiled contempt for those whose lives are made bearable by the British benefits system, dismissing the welfare state as ‘little more than Christian charity’. In a recent article for Slate in the aftermath of the UK riots, Hitchens also appeared to take the establishment line that the unrest was ‘sheer criminality’ (as one Tweeter put it at the time – ‘yes, we know it is sheer criminality; the question is why are our youngsters sheer criminals?’). While much of the British left is right now busy mobilising against the greatest cut in living standards in a generation, in the same article Hitchens glibly put ‘the cuts’ in brackets and ridiculed the term as an ‘all-purpose expression… used for all-purpose purposes’.

Writing Hitchens off as a Neo-Con or a free-market zealot is a rather pointless exercise; it is, however, necessary to acknowledge that he no longer notices or much cares for the struggles of the working class. If it is not part of the dramatic fight against totalitarianism (which I have no wish to downplay), then it does not seem to appear on Hitchens’s radar.

Orwell, in a reply (dated 15 November, 1943) to an invitation from the Duchess of Atholl to speak for the right-wing British League for European Freedom, stated that he didn’t agree with their objectives. Acknowledging that what they said was ‘more truthful than the lying propaganda found in most of the press’, he added that he could ‘not associate himself with an essentially Conservative body’, that claimed to ‘defend democracy in Europe’ but had ‘nothing to say about British imperialism’. His closing paragraph stated: ‘I belong to the left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country.’

Hitchens, like many British journalists of his generation, has spent much of his career in the shadow of Orwell. He has also spent perhaps a small proportion of it waiting for his very own Orwell moment – a moment when he could take on his own side in the way Orwell took on sections of the left over its appeasement of Stalinism. Despite the bluster and fear-mongering (not-to-mention the genuinely repulsive politics of the Jihadi movement), Islamism is not Nazism or Stalinism; and Hitchens, however good his prose may be, is no Orwell. In defending the gains of liberal democracy against its totalitarian enemies, Orwell never dumped his own politics.

I have a post up on the LSE blog reviewing Eli Pariser’s recent book The Filter Bubble.

Read it by following this link:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2011/07/10/book-review-the-filter-bubble-what-the-internet-is-hiding-from-you/

Man writes amazing words. Man wins prize for writing amazing words. We later find out that man’s words are stolen from another man’s book. You may think I’m referring to Johann Hari, but in actual fact this is an account of George Orwell.

It is widely recognised that the plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four (man lives in totalitarian society, has instincts towards rebellion, is encouraged by female companion to write down thoughts of rebellion, system finds the man and woman, brainwashes man into believing he loves the system he lives in) is identical to Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, originally published in English in 1924.

Orwell reviewed the book for Tribune Magazine in 1946 and he acknowledged the part We had to play in the creation of 1984 in a letter to George Woodcock (1967), in which he stated that he had “only been able to obtain a copy of the book in French and was looking for an English translation.”

The Orwell Prize organisers, who are investigating whether or not to withdraw Hari’s prize for journalism in 2008, are aware that Orwell borrowed the idea for his novel from a book he understood to be circulating slowly in England.

In their print of Orwell’s We review they link to an article by Paul Owen discussing whether it matters that Orwell “pinched the plot” (to which Owen answers not really). No call, as far as I’m aware, has been made by The Orwell Prize for the Partisan Review to withdraw their prize for Orwell, which was the total of £357.

Hari’s crime is not so different. I can believe he nicked an excerpt from a book to clarify a quote during an interview – I think it’s wrong, but I can believe it – and he has since apologised. I really don’t think The Orwell Prize should withdraw his award for this matter, not least because it is part of the furniture for writing. We only have to look at Orwell himself to realise.

On a different subject entirely, a great journalist once said: “we can choose our identity, but sometimes it also chooses us”. There’s a third way here: sometimes our identities are chosen for us!

In those early days, just when most households started to have dial-up internet, Microsoft and Apple marketed the so-called “intelligent” services, a helpful thing which made web-based decisions for you, gauging information you fed it to work out what you probably wanted from your web experience.

These products went down like a sack of potatoes in the Suez! PC World decided that “Microsoft Bob” was the 7th worst technological product of all time, and nobody heard from them again. But, so says Eli Pariser in his new book The Filter Bubble, despite our aversion to an external intelligence telling us what we should watch or browse online, big internet names are doing this for us anyway, only this time without our knowing.

Google, with information gleaned from our previous searches and online cookies, inundates us with advertising on web pages which hosts its adverts. Only recently I was looking on gumtree for a flat in London – now every time I visit some of my favourite websites, a little box in the corner will reveal to me cheap rooms in the areas where I was searching. It might have been helpful then – though perhaps slightly intrusive, and a little disconcerting – but it’s not helpful anymore, now I have found a flat in London, those pop-ups won’t pop off!

Facebook is up to tricks as well. Ever wonder how your page decides what to consider “Top News”? According to Pariser, it is based on Facebook trying to work out what you’re most likely to click on. Again, this may seem helpful, but Facebook is trying to work out your preferences for you, without you (Mark Zuckerberg should liaise with Andrew Lansley on empty soundbite remedies: no decision about me without me!). The upshot of this is if, like me, you’re on the Left politically, Facebook may have interpreted me as someone who only likes to see the statuses and news feeds of other Leftists, whereas in fact I want to see opinions from across the political spectrum.

As Pariser points out: “The internet may know who we are, but we don’t know who it thinks we are or how it’s using that information.” (p.218)

Recently in the US, a federal class action demanded that AOL stop tracking people’s web browsing and selling the information to third-party advertisers. This sort of stuff need not be said. Companies on the outside world bend over backwards to reassure customers that their information will not be sold to third parties, yet this is a common occurrence online, as Pariser is keen to point out.

But yet we are only too happy to put information of ourselves out there, and allow ourselves to become pickings for companies trying to feed us product. The Facebook Social Graph and Google Plus will soon be privy to individuals’ maps, detailing what our likes and interests are, what we do on the internet, and given the relaxed attitude the law has towards big online companies and our personal information, who knows what can happen – certainly Pariser is not happy about what may come.

His main point is that the internet was designed for the free movement of mass information. But some online companies are putting this ethos at jeopardy. They want to refine, and define, your online personality, and then sell you stuff you don’t want after they’ve pigeonholed you and decided what you see when you browse. Gosh, when do we have to have this conversation on democratising the bloody internet again?