Though Cowards Flinch

‘Chav’. The word has disputed etymology, and yet everyone knows what it is – or rather, knows that they would prefer not be, themselves, identified as one. ‘Chav’ is that rare beast, denoting a section in society which almost nobody would want to touch with a bargepole, but yet, or so according to Owen Jones, has a well-defined target, at least as far as the mainstream media is concerned, as the newly consumerised working classes – and even in some cases the lower class made good.

Though, rather than being a category worthy of collected denunciation, ‘chav-bashing’ is a concerted campaign against the working class itself. The fact that many working class people would choose not to identify with the term is important in the way it has been used by many middle class people and self-appointed ‘neo-snobs’, such as Jemima Lewis, in the media.

The way in which the word ‘chav’ has been used can be seen within the framework Marxism has used to observe capitalism: as an agenda setting the workers against each other – Thatcher’s preferred means of governance. And yet, ironically, Marx himself would have been none too supportive of the so-called ‘chavs’. The assumption is that a ‘chav’ takes from society without actually giving back to it, and Marx had a word for this himself: the lumpenproletarian. This class, of whom Marx called ‘social scum’ in the Communist Manifesto, were unproductive and likely to be used as fodder for reactionaries.

But Jones has written, not a myth-busting book setting the world right about what is or is not a ‘chav’, but rather a reminder that in recent times, and quite under our noses, the working class have been institutionally demonised wholesale as the very worst, contemptible, subjects society can offer; rowdy, immoral and burdensome.

‘Chav’ is not a catch-all term, but its definition is loose enough so as to allow all to condemn the ‘chav’, thus playing into the hands of Thatcherite politics, key to which is dividing (the working class) and conquering.

As well as saying that this class-hatred (‘neo-snobs’ unto ‘chavs’) stems from the destruction caused by Thatcherite politics, and the age devoted only to a social mobility that sees being working class as a departure, not an ennobled end in itself, Jones is appealing against a rowdy headline-grabbing media, set on a course of snobbery and braggartry, who perceives somebody like Michael Carroll – dubbed the lotto lout – as the sum total of today’s working class.

Indeed, this is what was meant by local Dewsbury Moor community leader Julie Bushby, interviewed by Jones in his book, when she says “Ninety per cent of people here work. We’ve all taken money out of [our] own pockets for this [the search for Shannon Matthews]” (p.17). What she is saying here is Dewsbury Moor is not how the mainstream press paints it; namely as a scum setting with people who care only for themselves and not the communities in which they live.

It’s easy to see how the notion of ‘chav’ fits in neatly with Thatcher’s politics. In the same way that ‘chav-bashing’ is not unique to ‘neo-snobs’ in the mainstream press (the founder of website chavscum.co.uk for example identifies as working class) Thatcher’s policies were not avowedly anti-working class. In fact as Jones points out, for Thatcher class is a “Communist concept”, getting in the way of a society where one is out for oneself. There was one section of the working class Thatcher was happy to side by: the ‘Basildon Man‘. In the 1980s Basildon, a new town, generally speaking working class with a history of sitting Conservative MPs, was seen to epitomise the aspirational working class. In deed, Thatcher wanted to appeal to the “Basildon man” mentality, but in action she was setting about destructive measures which would hit working class families hardest.

In the economy, Thatcher’s 1979 Conservative government quickly “abolished exchange controls, allowing financial companies to make huge profits from currency speculation … at the expense of other parts of the economy, like manufacturing” (p.52). This was a sign that the rich were going to be given allowances, whereas at the lower end of the scale, a “de-industrialization of the economy” would sweep up jobs and opportunities – which many towns to this day have not recovered from.

Thatcher’s plans for society – a concept she was sceptical of – were worse still. Despite her words she did not want to get rid of social class, just stop us from perceiving we belonged to one. On her watch council estates were something to be feared, not somewhere to be proud of, and her callous derision of single Mother families ensured communities were divided (p.67). In an interview Jones conducted with Geoffrey Howe – the longest serving minister in Thatcher’s cabinet, and whose resignation was said to have hastened Thatcher’s own downfall – he was left surprised at how much the living standards of the poorest had become, left only uttering “…at the end of the period they’ve got better off, I think” (p.63).

As Jones rightly puts it: “Thatcher’s assumption of power in 1979 marked the beginning of an all-out assault on the pillars of working class Britain” (p.10). But surely not even she could have foreseen how far this assault would embed itself into future British politics. Jones points out that many New Labour policies were steeped in the kind of middle class triumphalism usually associated with the Tories. Stories about the lazy unemployed became a commonplace, and the era defined a new Labour politician, like James Purnell, who spent more time appeasing Tory attitudes and less time addressing the deep rooted problems that Britain inherited from Thatcherite destruction.

Today, now Labour are in opposition, things are not much better for the traditional party of the working class. While the nation apprehensively awaits Osborne’s deep cuts to the economy, effects of which will hurt the poorest harder, Blairites such as Peter Watt – Labour’s former General Secretary – are calling on the party to accept the Tories’ cuts agenda wholesale. The party historically linked to unions and working people, has become the party of the mainstream. The fire in the belly of the Labour party has been extinguished, leaving the door open for fringe parties to sweep up what has been left –  a gift for far right parties such as the British National Party (BNP).

Jones reflects upon a staggering 1958 gallup poll showing how 71% of britons were opposed to interracial marriage, however it is today, not the fifties, that the BNP is the most successful far right party in the UK to date (pp.222-23). Now that the New Labour party panders to a ruling metropolitan elite community for its votes and support, the BNP have stepped in to raise people’s legitimate concerns (housing, immigration, schools) framing the debate in racial terms. By and large, working class communities reject the appeals of the far right (they got a trumping in the last local elections), but the English Defence League are still making ground, tapping into local  concerns, and Labour is still doing little to counter this. Maurice Glasman, an academic at London Metropolitan University, has raised the debate of how Labour can win back the working classes, with his idea of a ‘blue Labour‘ – which is a start – but clearly there is much thinking left to be had inside the party, in order to reverse years of Tory pandering and working class abandonment.

But Jones doesn’t leave us hanging on what kind of action should be taken today, in order that the working class feel represented by politicians in parliament. He concludes by touching on just a few things likely to re-integrate the least well-off back into society again. Things like a national programme of social housing, reliant as it would be on “an army of skilled labour”. Today even the Tories are discussing ‘Britain making things again’, and so, opines Jones, “there is ample space to make the case for a new industrial strategy” (p.261). Furthermore, giving workers “genuine control and power in the workplace” is not unique to the Left any longer – the benefits of better workforce engagement has been researched across the board from The Work Foundation to centre right think-tank Respublica.  

Certainly the case for working class empowerment has gained traction again, the battle now is to harangue politicians to ensure they keep their word and start to deliver the changes necessary to reverse the tide of recent class prejudice, started by the Tories and carried on through to the present day via the appeasement of New Labour.

As Jones has cleverly noted in his book, ‘chav’ is the perfect embodiment of how far the class war, waged by the political establishment, and perpetuated by many in the mainstream media, has come. No longer is class prejudice simply fought along the lines of ‘them (the poor) and us (the wealthy)’, but a situation has arisen where their demonisation of the working class has created a ‘them and us’ within those very communities. That this happened alongside the political elites’ efforts to weaken working class institutions (such as trade unions) has frustrated working class strength and pride – laying the ground for the expansion of anti-working class politics. Hopefully this book, which is extremely readable and exceptionally researched, will be the wake-up call needed to combat today’s ‘neo-snob’ class warriors, whose sole aim is the destruction of all that the working class hold dear.

Nearing the tenth year since the world was changed by 9/11, the mastermind behind the attack, Osama bin Laden, is traced to a fortress-like villa in Abbottabad and killed. As the media storm blew over, and initial questions about the legality were put to rest (though some still insist on raising them), there was still the opinions of one person for whom many were waiting – and indeed he has not disappointed.

Though there is nothing in Christopher Hitchens’ extended essay – The Enemy (available as a Kindle download only) – that is particularly new; one or two unorthodox opinions concerning bin Laden needed clarifying, and there is no better than the Hitch to do so.

Notably, the polemic is peppered with understanding this personification of ‘evil’ (a word which Hitchens is happy to qualify) through political terminology. Hitchens is happy to call bin Laden a fascist, for example, explaining his unease with the vulgarised word ‘Islamofascist’ (preferring, instead, the more informed “fascism with an Islamic face”), while later insisting we remember the true conservative core of the former al-Qaeda front man.

There is an urge, so opines Hitch, to refer to bin Laden and his men, as radicals – a juxtaposition which sticks in the throat, particularly on consideration of the medieval tyranny which the wealthy ideologue wanted to wreak upon the world. Unlike any radical, in so far as the word is typically used, bin Laden fought on behalf of a totalitarian world view with an absolutist code of primitive laws. His fantasy world order necessitated the ceasing of personal autonomy, the deification of human control, the fetishisation of a single book, the glorification of violence and the celebration of death. Further still, a sanctioning of the death of whole groups of people, the repression of the sexual instinct and a paranoid anti-Semitism akin to that found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

There is no doubt that what bin Laden did on that terrible New York day in September, was a tragedy like only few others. Quite clearly bin Laden was waging war*. But it mustn’t be forgotten just how much his late life had been marred by errors and grave failure.

Bin Laden was laying down his plans for war at a time when  many “Arab Jihadists” – such as al-Qaeda, Gamaat al-Jihad, Gamaat Islamiyya, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM) – were restructuring their position in Afghanistan, after the defeats they endured in the nineties throughout the Middle East. After preparing attacks on America in 2000, al-Qaeda knew America would have capabilities to destroy the Taliban’s governmental institutions – which were acting as host to Bin Laden’s motley crew. In advance, Mohammed Atef, the third highest ranking member of al-Qaeda, had sought after weapons of mass destruction to protect Afghanistan.

It was bin Laden’s pipe dream that acquiring WMDs would have deterred the US from retaliating, securing the start to a victory for the Saudi and his group. However the acquisition didn’t go to plan. Accepting defeat at this first hurdle, al-Qaeda tried to send a message, through a reporter in Afghanistan trying to make his “media break”, to the US saying they were in possession of WMDs. This, too, proved unsuccessful, the likelihood being that US intelligence simply didn’t believe bin Laden. Instead the American representatives in Afghanistan asked the Taliban to hand over bin Laden for trial, a favour they did not succumb to citing the illegality of handing over a Muslim to non-Muslims under Islamic law.

After experiencing setback after setback – the death of a leader in the Gamaat Islamiyya, Mohammed Khalil al-Hakaima, who fronted the “al-Qaeda in the land of Egypt” project; the collapse of the jihad against the Americans in Iraq – the former leader of the militant Jihadists Libyan Islamic Fighting Group Noman Benotman (now Senior Analyst of Strategic Communications at Quilliam) said that al-Qaeda did not want to establish a caliphate in Afghanistan, and was merely acting as a defense against the occupation – a clear back step on their more global plans.

Though bin Ladenism, as Hitchens puts it, is destined to fail, this doesn’t mean it is not dangerous, particularly in its teachings of young, mainly uneducated men. Its overall goal is to engage in a global war, which it hopes to do with coordination from a central command, possibly in Warziristan (NW Pakistan), branches at a regional level and with help from sympathisers around the world. And though they’ve experienced a major setback with the death of bin Laden, the aim of their project doesn’t look set to cease any time soon.

Hitchens’ sobering conclusion, quite in distinction to the reaction displayed on TV screens after news emerged of bin Laden’s death (which, however, Hitch admits to having “welcomed without reserve”), is that “[t]he war against superstition and the totalitarian mentality is an endless war” [and that] Temporary victories can be registered against this, but not permanent ones”.

Osama bin Laden died a failure, reduced to watching re-runs of himself delivering propaganda speeches exploiting young, angry men into thinking that fighting the jihad was the solution to all life’s ills. But it is a fool who thinks the efforts of a crafty (albeit damaged), multicellular entity as al-Qaeda have been suppressed yet.

* Much of the information from here on has been sought from this amazing collection of essays by Camille Tawil called The Other Face of Al-Qaeda (pdf file).

Around this time every year in Dresden, groups of neo-nazis come out in remembrance of the allied bombing in the city that took place 13-15 February 1945. They come out to capitalise on the bitter taste left in the mouths of those thinking about what atrocities bomber commands had wreaked upon the city, filled as it was with factories, oil plants and many civilians.

Though sure enough, year on year, groups of anti-fascists congregate in a symbolic pledge against what the nazis call the “bombing holocaust”. This year 17,000 people arrived to make sure the nazis can’t hi-jack this issues as their own.

Between the 13^th and 14^th of February, 66 years ago, the British RAF took part in the exercise; three attacks during a 14-hour period dropping a total of 2,978 tonnes of bombs. The US would then go on to drop a further 771 tonnes. On the 15^th the US 1st Bombardment Division dropped bombs, missing the centre of Dresden due to cloud, instead hitting nearby southeastern suburbs.

In the words of Erich Kästner:

Yes, Dresden was a wonderful city. You may take my word for it. And you have to take my word for it, because none of you, however rich your father may be, can go there to see if I am right. For the city of Dresden is no more. It has vanished, except for a few fragments. In one single night and with a single movement of its hand the Second World War wiped it off the map. It had taken centuries to create its incomparable beauty. A few hours sufficed to spirit it off the face of the earth.

Many wonder whether it was necessary. After all hadn’t the ends justified the means? And surely Britain was fighting for its existence; for some it was total war, any lawyers in the room are to button their trap or risk looking unpatriotic. George Bell raised his voice in the House of Lords, pouring scorn on what he called “mass killing of civilians” – and though he shaped the debate thereafter, he could not bring back the dead, the innocent.

Of course some wonder whether the perpetrators of the attacks can really be blamed, after all hindsight is a privilege not enjoyed by the chaps in the air. And anyway, were it not uttered in the good book, Romans 3:8, to do evil that good may result? Some have put it on good authority that it was no use to the war effort in its totality after all; “It has been hypothesised” one philosopher has written, “that if allied bombing had been relentlessly focused on fuel and transport in Nazi-controlled Europe, the war would have been shorter by two years.”

*

The words, on reflection, “war crime” are used unflinchingly to describe the attacks. In the theory of Just War, it is contested whether the actions meet the criteria for proportionality – where any good that results outweighs bad. Easily by the standards of today, it would fail on violation of the following, article 3 in the statutes of the Hague:

• Wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity

• Attack, or bombardment, by whatever means, of undefended towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings

But back in the day, four years before the Geneva Convention of 1949 and their additional protocols, no such legal yardstick, excluding personal morality, was used. And personal morality seldom received much of a look in.

Were the commanders informing chaps in the air ensuring the lesser of two evils? Was it worth overriding the campaign back at home by Vera Brittain and the like over the morality of carpet bombing? Was it worth doing something that was of little military value anyway? No. Was it a war crime by any reasonable measure, from Rome to Geneva? Yes.

Was the area bombing of Dresden justified? No it was not.

I got a message for you Dr Michael O’Malley – author of The Wisdom of Bees - why don’t you learn the difference between homology and analogy before you start saying we can learn from the bees, since they run a de-centralised, productive existence. Can we learn from ants too, what about the blue whale or the back of a panda’s thumb? It doesn’t take for Darwin to tell you that we humans have lived in an artificially selected world for so long that we can learn nothing, Nothing!, from bees, so why don’t you just come out and say it: you hate pollen don’t you, because you can’t have sex with it, it’s just pretend, it’s mere pseudocopulation. That’s all.

When thinking on the topic of obscenity and censorship the first thing that enters my mind is a scene from The Simpsons where a school trip goes awry, the bus on which the children are travelling falls into a thunderous sea, dragging Otto the bus driver to his wet end, and landing the young to an isolated island off the coast of nowhere. Bart, ensuring his dominance among peers, puts everybody’s mind to rest: “We’re gonna live like kings! Damn, hell, ass kings!”

Authority and rules often make the compulsion to break them all the more delicious, in the absence of adults on the island, so Bart feels the urge to shout the forbidden. By no means should we rid ourselves of rules, even if this were possible, but in being realistic about the nature of rules, and the nature of people, rules are very often there to be broken.

This point is made all the more relevant on consideration of two things: November 2 2010 was the 50^th anniversary of the acquittal of Penguin Books in the Lady Chatterley trial, and November 3 2010 was the day YouTube began taking down al-Qaeda videos after the British Government contacted the White House complaining about the material.

So worried I am about repercussions I've concealed my face

There are of course great differences between the two; the former is a piece of great literature. From the beginning of the trial in 1960 the book was made to be considered through the eyes of a hypothetical 14-year-old girl, the moral puzzle put to the jury was whether they would want young girls to read such filth, since it was pornographic, and more to the point, made a mockery of courtship.

Whether any girl of 14 desired to read it was beyond the point, this was the set standard of person for whom impression ought to be guarded. The clincher towards the end of the trial had been where the defendant called on the jury to ask themselves whether they would allow their children to read the book, remembering for a moment that they would consider their young to be of good education and stock, and thus not impressionable in the same way other young were – of other families, perhaps of a lower order. Was this what it had boiled down to? Was the anxiety of the book an issue of class?

The novel itself is a commentary on language, class and sex. Lawrence himself, in the preface to the book Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, reminds his audience of the real point: “I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly and cleanly.”

As Geoffrey Robertson QC pointed out in his article on the book and its trial: “Judges in 1960 regarded themselves, rather more than they do today, as the custodians of moral virtue. In performing this egregious function, they came to blur the distinction between literature and life.” Those judges who felt the novel explored sex in a manner rather dirty, with what had been described as “purple passages”, simply felt they could set the terms of what sex ought to be, to put a monopoly on what acceptable sex is for adults, in the confines of their bedrooms or indeed their minds.

Suspicion that the Judges were consumed by a snobbish view of sexual expression would not be unfair. A scene in the twelfth chapter of Lawrence’s book describes sex and language in a way obviously unfamiliar to many conducting the trial:

‘What is cunt?’ she said.

‘An’ doesn’t ter know. Cunt! It’s thee down theer; an’ what I get when I’m i’side thee, and what tha gets when I’m i’side thee; it’s a’ as it is, all on’t.”

“All on’t,’” she teased. “Cunt! It’s like fuck then.”

“Nay nay! Fuck’s only what you do. Animals fuck. But cunt’s a lot more than that. It’s thee, dost see: an’ tha’rt a lot besides an animal, aren’t ter? – even ter fuck? Cunt! Eh, that’s the beauty o’ thee, lass!”

The jury’s verdict of not guilty on November 2 1960 was unanimous, and Penguin had even managed to get copies on sale by the late afternoon in Leicester Square. It was considered a pivotal stage in the free written word, but the debate on freedom of speech and print was something to emerge time and again, notably in the eighties and nineties with Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and what has been called the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in 2005.

The decision by YouTube to remove videos by al-Qaeda will be set in the context of the debate on freedom of speech versus protection of the impressionable. Though one often wonders whether the latter is a misinformed position to take, similar in its way to the use of the hypothetical 14-year-old girl in the Penguin Books trial, only this time we have the hypothetical Muslim internet user. By banning those videos we will only make them more sordid and sought after; indeed pirated copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover sold for up to fifty dollars in the late twenties and early thirties after it had been banned in the United States, and sales of it sky-rocketed after the trial had ended.

This does not mean we tolerate things we find morally displeasing, but we need to learn the lessons of old; there is no rule book explaining what appeals to impressionable people any more than there is to explain why people like Abba, and in any case, banning something hardly ever nips its impression in the bud, and can often have the adverse effect.

I’m reading Paul Richards ‘Labour’s Revival: A Moderniser’s Manifesto’’, as background for my own book writing exploits. 

I’ll reserve judgement on the whole tome for another time, but this amused me……

Paul explains why he didn’t manage to win a very winnable seat in 1997, but came close:

It would be nice to think they were voting for me but of course they weren’t.  Individual candidates make only a marginal difference in elections, unless they’ve done something bad (p. xxiv).

Perhaps Paul did something bad, because he’s clear on why some Labour candidates held their seats in 2010 against the odds:

The clear lesson from the campaigns that where local candidates were supported by active community-based campaigns, built on years of incumbency, with local issues to the fore, they stood a much better chance of winning (p.48).

 ps. I much prefer Don Paskini’s analysis of how to win elections.

pps.  I also know a thing or two about winning elections through local efforts.  Candidates do count.

Days like these

I’m not up to blogging about the Comprehensive Spending Review today. I’m not sure I’ve anything useful to add to what others are saying about it, and about its perpetrators.

To be honest, I’m just a little bit numb still.

So instead, I’ll do that political influences meme passed on to me and the TCF team by Phil at A Very Public Sociologist and Bob from Brockley.

The earliest and still strongest political influence on me is not a politician, or a political philosopher, but a writer, Franz Kafka. Here’s why he’s important to me, and why I think his work matters to the Left in general

Kafka as pscyhcoanalyst

There are about as many ‘interpretations’ of Kafka’s work as numbers of doors I’ve knocked on and asked people if they wouldn’t mind voting Labour this time around.  And that’s well more than 10.  

There are some I don’t buy – it’s all just a straight condemnation of early 20^thcentury bureaucracy because he had to work hard in a dull office, for example, This does nothing to explain Amerika (otherwise called The Stoker or The Lost One etc. in English as well but I’ll stick with the title in still the most common translation, and the one I’ve got to hand)? 

And at least until recently, I wasn’t convinced by wholly ‘pyschoanalytic’ explanations, though it was fairly obvious that Kafka had a grasp of Freudian concepts of the ego/id.

The more I read though, the more I’m convinced by Kafka-as-Freudian.  Certainly, the text is littered with what we might now call Freudian slips, where the unconscious (or ‘id’) peeps through the surface of the page. 

This is facilitated by his regular use of the literary device of ‘erlebte Rede (‘experienced speech’) or indirect free speech, which collapses first and third person narrative; and indeed I note in my internet wanderings to here that Kafka was studious in the way he edited his work  to create this effect. 

The notion that central to Kafka’s work is the tension between the ego and the id (in modern society), and that alienation, despair and death comes from the suppression of the id at the expense of the ego, is straightforward enough to sustain.  We can just look at the way Kafka’s characters die for that evidence. K (The Trial) dies ‘as though the shame were meant to outlive him’ because he never accepts his guilt – he never accepts that he is guilty of the suppression of his unconscious desires.

Gregor (Metamorphosis), on the other hand, dies happy (and his family goes out into the light for the first time in months) because he becomes accepting of the animal he is.  When does Gregor being to move towards a happy death? When his sister plays the violin – music transcends – and when he starts to accept that he is an animal (his id) rather than struggle against it.  

K (The Trial) goes the opposite way – creating rational argument to seek to win out over what must remain irrational because it is of the subconscious. Why does the officer in the penal colony willingly choose death through what to the explorer seems like (pre-modern) savagery, and yet still not get  ‘redemption’ on his face as he dies? Well to be honest it’s years since I read it so I’ve forgotten how I used to think of that one.  Anyway, it’s bound to be because he refuses to ‘de-rationalise’ experience, just trust me on that one. 

And of course The Castle ends with death in defeat, but reconcilation with defeat by what-is-irrational. But that is not all there is to Kafka, not by a country doctor’s mile. 

While Kafka’s work is ‘timeless’ in the way set out – a message about needing to be true to yourself – such a relatively straightfoward interpretation risks leaving out from it a load of the words he actually wrote, especially about women. 

To deal with this we need to set his work back into its  historic context of a new modernity/bureacuracy which was, for Kafka, JUST THEN heightening that level of alienation,  through the rise of an early capitalist consumerist society. 

Ultimately, Kafka does not just, I suggest, question how people’s minds work within a social context, but also how ‘real’ that social context is in the first place. 

In this respect he presages (indeed is still ahead of) much of postmodern philosophical thought, and is the reason he is relevant to the Left and even to the modern Labour party. Indeed I would argue that he is more relevant in the early 21^st century than when leading thinkers in the left – notably Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin –  sought to claim him as one of our own some fifty years ago. 

A useful starting for that interpretative journey, from an interpretation of Kafka as writer that just ‘messes with your head’ to one of Kafka as sooneone who has profoundly important things to say to us about a  century later is (I am recently persuaded) Jacques Lacan’s Marxian re-interpretation of Freud, who (as we have seen) may have been at least an indirect influence on Kafka. 

Now Lacanian psychoanalysis is notoriously difficult to understand – indeed there are those who suggest that Lacan wrote impenetrably because he was, in the end, talking pure bollocks, whether or not in a knowingly ironic manner. 

I don’t side with this argument (at least until I actually try to read his stuff properly), but I am happy to acknowledge that his primary texts are simply too hard for me and my small-size brain to handle, and I need to turn to intermediaries to get what he’s on about. 

Fortunately, when there’s Slajov Zizek around to write a ‘How to Read’ book on Jacques Lacan, you’re in pretty safe hands, especially as it’s free on the internet as well.

So, what happens if you take a Lacanian-as-understood-by-Zizek approach to the text of The Trial, for example?

What happens is that, suddenly, the apparent irrationality of the Law  starts to reflect the inherent irrationality of the ‘desiring agency’ of Lacanian psychoanalysis.  That is to say, the law is all-that-is-desire, and in Lacanian terms the Marxian dialectic of structure and agency, the essential incompatibility of which creates the alienation of the individual, is collapsed into a permanence of alienation, because ‘the law’ controls both K’s desire and that which is desired. 

This ties into later elaborations in Lacan, in which he expands upon the Marxist concept of surplus value to include what he terms ‘jouissance’ (or enjoyment). Similar to the notion of surplus value, Lacan holds that any social enjoyment we get through work, leisure, consumption, sex etc.  comes a at cost, and is mediated through some bureaucratic agency, and intensified through the subject’s own compulsion to enjoy. This enjoyment can never be fully realised because it is mediated through these agencies,  which ‘skim’ off ever greater surpluses, leaving only enough enjoyment to engender further (obsessive) compulsions, to further consume and enjoy.   

And so it in The Trial. It’s as if the Law operates both as the site/structure of obscene enjoyment (the magistrates’ books are full of porn, the couple have sex at the back of the examination room), and as the agency compelling K to enjoy while also forcing its prohibitions (the student working for the court carries off the washer woman whom K was trying to seduce).  

The relationship of women to K and to the Law is central to the key concept of this book. The Law is a wholly unknowable entity, from which things emerge/disappear but no answers can be given.  K receives no answer from the Law as it has none to give him.

What, then, does desire (the Law?) want? It wants K to keep on desiring, which is why the Law in the book permits an unlimited postponement maintaining desire until death, and even beyond as the shame of (unfulifilled) desire goes with K to the grave.  In short, Kafka expresses, in poetic form, a post-Marxist analysis of what it is to be alienated’, which only rears its head in philosophy some 50 years later.  And he’s easier to understand. 

(In passing, I think there’s a parallel here with Milan  Kundera’s ‘treatment’ of women in the Unbearable Lightness of Being, where  the skimming of the surplus value related to sexual enjoyment actually declines as the main protagonist Tomáš strives towards some form of revolutionary consciousness).

But this is not where it stops – if Kafka were simply a very early Freudian-Lacanian psychoanlayst, it would be impressive, and Kakfa’s work would still be captivating,  but hardly something for the Left to hold on to now, as an important influence (and consoltation) for the hard times that are a-coming. 

Kafka as leftie

For me, the pinnacle of Kafka’s intellectual outpouring is NOT the Trial, though it may be the most perfect work in terms of how it entwines form and meaning (though I’d argue that Metamorphosis and The Castle are both up there).  

For me, the pinnacle is the last (unfinished) novel, Amerika. 

Amerika is the oft overlooked third big novel, ‘the lighthearted one’ which doesn’t really fit with the other two.  What Amerika is, though, is a step forward in Kafka’s ‘postmodern’ vision, and one which takes us beyond Lacan to the at once harder edged, but ultimately more liberating social theory of Baudrillard (at least in his last work, The Intelligence of Evil: The Lucidity Pact). 

Baudrillard is of course most famous (and mostly pilloried) for his concept of a late capitalist society which has become a totalising ‘virtual reality’ (‘The Gulf war did not take place’), a world in which consumer overload means there is no longer even any potential for the kind of ’alienation’ that the left has hitherto set out as an inevitablity of the surplus value-based system of capitalism. This is because the concept of alienation in itself proposes some form of residual reality, however unattainable, or in Marxist terms, however far from the consciousness of the proletariat..   

It is possible to conceive of the Trial, and The Castle, as just such ‘realities’, from which only knowledge in death can release us (and I’m sure David Bowie had been reading Kafka rather than early Baudrillard when he penned Quicksand on Hunky Dory). 

But Amerika provides the resolution to the philosophical impasse, just as The Lucidity Pact does so about a century later.  Essentially, the setting of Amerika IS a virtual reality.  It is no longer the near but never totalising (consciousness-excluding)  universes of The Trial or The Castle, where desire is unfulfilled and the end must be death and/or shame, depending on the level of guilt acceptance; instead it is a complete world,  where things seem as they are because what is written of them is based on photographic representations and travel guides  – the early 20^th century equivalent of the television travel programme, in which you enjoy a virtual holiday without having to leave your armchair). But, as with Baudrillard’s Lucidity Pact, there is a liberation even within the acknoweldgment that there is no escape. 

It is no coincidence that Rossmann, the central character, joins a theatre – the epitome of artificial representation – and that this seems to be the key to his ultimate happiness (albeit in an unfinished novel).

Moreover, it is no coincidence that, at the end of the novel, he chooses to take a technical position (notably returning to a childhood daydream) instead of an acting position in the theatre.  He is at once accommodating himself to the fact that the theatre is the best place for him, and taking satisfaction that he is able to see it at one (small) step’s remove.    Importantly for the process of reclaiming Kafka for the Left, it is through engagement and solidarity with his fellow workers (how different to K, who seeks to dominate) – workers who are a disparate bunch but who get on fine, despite different language backgrounds  – that Rossmann nears contentment.   

The way Kafka set out this contentment brings us full circle to Metamorphosis, as the final (unfinished) passage has the train with the theatre on board moving out into the vastness of the nature of America, similar to, but on a vaster scale, than the walk in the springtime that Gregor’s family take after his death in Metamorphosis.. Here, it seems, is a poetic resolution of how to live (even in the literal sense) with the fact that all is unreal, unknowable and alienating. 

Which is precisely what Baudrillard is up to in the Lucidity Pact: 

At bottom…..we are faced with an alternative: either we suppose a real that is entirely permeable to history (to meaning, to the idea, to interpretation, to decision) and we ideologize or, by contrast, we suppose a real that is ultimately impenetrable and irreducible and in that case we poetize. (p. 63). 

(I am indebted to Toodle Noodle, commenting at Dave’s Part, for this insight on this.)  

Baudrillard, then, seeks out – as an explicitly political project – a (poeticised?) ‘otherness’ of thinking, as a means to create a strained but workable compromise-with-virtuality by which we might live. 

Kafka, it seems to me, goes one stage further in his explicitly political ending to Amerika – it is is through communication and solidarity with other human beings that we actually manage to accommodate ourselves to this ‘otherness’. And here, strange though it may seem, I think both Kakfa and Baudrillard meet Jurgen Habermas and his chunky Theory of Communcative Action coming the other way. 

Habermas gets there by a completely different route – rejecting from the off what he considered to be the innate conservatism of poststructuralist/modernist relativity (especially and a tidgy bt unfairly, Foucault), in favour of an appeal to ‘ideal speech’ as the foundation for a new call to universal and interpersonal values.   

But in the end, it seems to me, there’s an agreement that, while the ‘soul searching’ of the past fifty years of postmodernist philosophical development may have been necessary and worthwhile, that it’s also been regressive in terms of commitment to action, and that it’s time to move on with a renewed commitment to a clarity of (political) communication – whether that be as a result of some filthy pact with devilish virtuality, or because  the values of the enlightenment has been rekindled. 

And what, ultimately, is communication in the context of universal values? 

It’s solidarity. 

The main difference between the poltical philosophy journeys of Baudrillard/Habermas and Kafka? 

Well Kafka travelled the road in a few short tuberculous-ridden years in the early 20^th century, and used a lot less words to get there.  And for that reason alone, Kafka is worth reclaiming by the Left for what he is – not the Czech ‘enigma’, or the troubled genius, but a genius political philosopher a hundred years ahead of his time.  As I’ve noted, there have been plenty of  attempts to claim Kafka as one of our own (Adorno, Arendt), and more recently Michael Lowy has sought to identify Kafka’s ‘libertarian socialist’  leanings.  

Recently as well, Sinead Kennedy had a pretty good stab, albeit in a brief article, at it, analysing from ‘the hard left’ how he’d been given a pretty rough ride by Stalin and his not-very-good-at-philosophy-or-art mates, but how he makes a lot of sense to the left. 

I contend that Kafka makes more than a lot of sense. 

I contend that he should be regarded as a leading intellectual light of the Left, a key weapon in the intellectual armoury of the Left as it seeks to combat the thirty-year philosophical hegemony of the New Right. 

He should be ‘required reading’ for the Left. 

This is the first of a three part series in which I explore the current nature of Labour party membership, the limitations set upon it by the party’s hierarchy, and what Labour party members can do to overcome those limitations, thereby helping to develop a democratic party which counters the conventional wisdom of the inevitable decline of mass membership parties, by redefining what it is to be a party member.

When it’s done, it will form the bones for the first half of the concluding chapter of ‘The Fifth Tradition’.

Part 1: The Paul Richards’ view: consult and control

 In this month’s Progress magazine Paul Richards tells whingeing Labour party members to behave:

I am always infuriated when people say the National Policy Forum (NPF) has taken power away from members. There was never a golden age of members’ democracy in the Labour party……………

We’ve done a great deal to empower party members in the choosing of our leaders, our candidates, our reps on the NEC and NPF, and our voice at conference. If you seek a golden age for members’ democracy in the party, this is as good as it has ever been.

Now, forgive me for sounding a bit ungrateful towards Mr Richards (who I note is important enough to use the ‘royal we’ of party insiders), but I don’t think telling the grassroots of the Labour party that this is the best we’re going to get, and that we’d better get used to lumping it, is a great offer. 

It’s especially not a great offer when, in the very same article, we’re given  two examples of when the party hierarchy deliberately set about ensuring that the leadership didn’t have to come into contact, or accede to any of the requests of the great NPF unwashed:

The first NPF took place in 1993 at the Ark in Hammersmith. It was a curious affair. The shadow cabinet where there in force. My job was to ‘mind’ various shadow cabinet ministers including Margaret Beckett (the deputy leader) and Tony Blair…..

Ministers at the NPF in Warwick, and the Number 10 political office, were given a simple order: no pasaran.

It becomes even less attractive an offer when Richards admits, in passing, that:

The NPF remains an alien structure to most of the party membership, and apart from one or two assiduous NPF reps, members do not know who represents them at it.

And after this series of admissions, including the crucial one that the party’s leadership deliberately makes plans to ignore the NPF, what is Richards’ conclusion?  

Yes, Richards concludes that everything’s just fine really, and that the whole thing just needs ‘modernizing’ a bit:

The review must look at the ways in which the NPF seeks views and gathers ideas. There is a range of tools which can be used in modern policymaking, from citizens’ juries and panels, to online consultation and polling, none of which the NPF does currently.

Crystallised here, it seems to me, is the key problem facing those who want to reform the Labour party (and I don’t mean this in the Paul Richards’s sense of ‘reform’).

When Richards talks of how the NPF might improve its processes to ‘seek views and gather ideas’, he reveals the limits of the current Labour party’s ambitions, even post-New Labour. 

‘Newer Labour’, as long as its processes and policies continue to be dominated by ‘thinkers’ like Paul Richards, will not be interested in devolving real decision making to members; they are content to refine their top-down consultation structures in a way which may make more members feel involved, but which does not fundamentally change the power structures, which does not fundamentally democratize the party.  

As Richards says in his piece, the policy review to be conducted by Liam Byrne may well be ‘open-ended’, but it is an entirely separate review from the ‘process review into the NPF’s workings being conducted by Peter Hain, and there is no evidence that there will be any join in the middle.

The new processes for consultation that Richards envisages, and which Hain is tasked with developing, will actually be designed to close down and control choice for party members, by setting the parameters of what is up for discussion, while at the same time dragging them into time-consuming bureaucracies, in just the same way as the rolling NPF policy document process has done to date.  

And if, by any chance, anything different in terms of final policy choice does manage to emerge from the grassroots, then absolutely nothing has changed to stop the leadership just ignoring it anyway.

In many ways, the Labour party as it currently operates is an exemplar of the quiet, effective abuse of power set out by Steven Lukes in his seminal work, in which the abusers may often genuinely believe themselves to be on the side of the abused.

It’s our job, on the Labour left, to highlight this (often, as I will suggest in part 2,well-meaning) oppression, and to liberate our oppressors in so doing.

As Paulo Freire said, though he didn’t mention Paul Richards by name:

As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressor’s power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression (Paulo Freire, 1972, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p.32 of Penguin Edition). 

Forthcoming, in part 2: Reflecting on the conceptual limitations of the Watt-Painter debate about party membership: who gets to say what members are for?

And in part 3: Redefining party membership: from foot soldier to policy maker

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a proper book for a while, provisionally called ‘The Fifth Tradition of Labour’. 

I’ve never tried to write a book but, heh, there’s no point looking back in a few years and wondering what might have been, and the words flow quite well.  So why not?

As many of the bits of the book started out life as blogposts, I thought I’d copy in a bit of the main pitch here. 

The book proposal and some drafting is done, and its ready to send off to literary agents and the like.  There’s even an exciting and well-known person writing some bits with me, but whose identity must remain secret for the moment – not because s/he said so, but in order to maintain an air of mystery about the whole thing and thereby entice agents.

So if you’re a publisher or an agent who wants to get her/his hands on what will almost certainly the most talked-about book of 2011 (in my house), please feel free to contact me to discuss terms, or whatever it is you do at the start of the publishing process.

Here’s some of what I’m saying in my submission blurb.

The Fifth Tradition of Labour

The book is ambitious. 

It does nothing less than advocate the conscious development of a new ‘tradition’ within the Labour movement. 

It seeks to move beyond the old antagonisms betweenthose on the Labour left who believe in the parliamentary road to socialism, and regard themselves as ‘realists’, and the revolutionary left who believe that successive generations of Labour politicians have betrayed the working class, and that liberal and parliamentary democracy is incompatible with socialism. 

It sets this out in the context of an analysis of four different Labour traditions that emerged within the twentieth century, and seeks to show how much of the later disjuncuture within the labour movement arises from misunderstandings about what the state is, and how this relates to economic power structures. 

Epistemologically speaking, I seek to ‘decentre’ accounts (and folk memories) of political activism to show how the different traditions emerged and were then interpreted and re-interpreted according to the beliefs political actors and commentators brought to them.

While this is the theoretical framework for the book, it is not a book on political theory, and no specific chapter on theory is planned. 

Most of the planned chapters, the bones of some of which some I have already set out in at Though Cowards Flinch and The Bickerstaffe Record, get down to the real nitty-gritty of current operational codes and practice within the labour movement (and the non-aligned left), and show how these can and should be changed for the betterment of the labour movement overall.   The ‘decentring’ of the account will be woven into this exploration of the historical development of the four traditions.

This engagement with real practice – warts and all – is, I contend, what gives the proposed book its ‘Unique Selling Point’, grounded as it is in my own experiences of grassroots labour activism (and successful electoral campaigning to date), and a good understanding of how the (macro) political economy relates to the currently dominant economic narrative of the right played out national,  local and individual levels.

Alain Badiou Number and Numbers (1993) Translated in English 2008 (Robin Mackay)

Alain Badiou’s work has often been described as incorporating set theory, or more precisely Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZFC: the standard in set theory). His utilisation of the theory in question aims to identify whether there is a withstanding relationship of Being to history, nature, the state and God. His mathematical pursuits, as we shall see, lead him to criticise the existence of the standard Greek theory of The One, which is philosophically unpalatable for Badiou since for him there cannot be any one overarching set (keeping in line with ZFC). Based on this criticism of The One, Badiou is led to discover that by these logical postulations we cannot conceive of a grand cosmos, a Whole Nature, or a Being of God, providing we base our hypotheses of these figures on the Universe’s physical laws.

As has been previously mentioned, some of these concepts were dealt with in Badiou’s Being and Event but Badiou decided to dedicate a whole book on the constellation of Numbers. Badiou begins his work by providing historical context of thought regarding Number, starting from Platonism and the theory of forms, detailing the Greek representation of Number as bracketed within the notion of the “World of Ideas” and the separate world of numerical existence. He deals with Frege’s ‘logicism’ and his description of Number as a “trait of the concept” and neither transcendental nor empirical. He also swiftly engages with theories by Peano (and the Peano Arithmetic; logical postulates which are based on mathematical inductions) Dedekind (which focuses on real numbers – encompassing rational numbers like 5 or -5 and irrational numbers such as √2 , infamously known as Pythagoras’ constant, the first number known to be irrational, that is where a number cannot be expressed by two integers) and Cantor (the heroic initiator of the modern theory of the infinite) to provide Badiou with a framework in which to direct his criticism and assert his own mathematical principles.

For Badiou, the theory of Number, in consideration of the criticism of the theories he provides as a framework, must not omit three reflections; firstly that considerations of order, that is either ordinal numbers or the order type of a well-ordered set, must arise from the intrinsic, or ontological, definition of Number. In other words, Number is not simply a concept in operation (his obvious blow to Frege) but rather it is an actually existing entity “which can be thought in a structural and immanent fashion.” (101) Number is, as such, not constructed, but, its very being makes possible all of the constructions in which we engage (as mentioned before, Number plays a part in every part of our life).

The second consideration for Badiou is that it is ordinal Numbers that ground Number’s material basis, “its natural ontological horizon.” Real Numbers themselves, Badiou reinforces, are non-natural deductions from this natural material (102). This is Badiou’s attempt to ground the mathematical object (the abstract object that includes numbers, permutations – mapping of elements of sets to other elements of sets -, partitions – exclusive parts, blocks or cells to a set -, matrices – an abstract element that corresponds to other elements in a large abstract system -, sets, functions, and relations) to its ontological referent, a topic highly contested by many mathematicians. And lastly, the third consideration is that traditional numbers are specific cases of the unified concept of Number, but do not exhaust it. There remains, for Badiou, a great immensity of Numbers that mathematicians have not thought of yet, again toeing the ZFC line.

With consideration to the numericality that Badiou is distancing himself from, Badiou is able to maintain that: ‘Number is neither a trait of the concept, nor an operational fiction; neither an empirical given, nor a constitutive or transcendental category; neither a syntax, nor a language game, not even an abstraction from our idea of order.” (211) As such, Badiou asserts that Number takes the form of a type of Being. Criticism, from John Kadvany for example, has picked up on the fact that Badiou produces many reasons why Number is not merely spectral, but less on why Number has a legitimate ontological status. Indeed there is some truth to this, and it is a concern when Badiou, instead of unpacking his mathematical ontology further, eagerly turns to the economy using his numericality to deal blows to the capitalist system (surely the most speculative of numericality, as Slavoj Žižek has asserted, it is often thought that behind the numbers and the logic of capital circulation there are evil geniuses, when in fact this couldn’t be more untrue, “the fate of whole strata of the population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the ‘solipsistic’ speculative dance of capital). It was surprising here that Badiou didn’t make good use of another of his intellectual mentor’s Jacques Lacan, whose integer-like theory of the gendered subject was that it is either Whole or partial, or in other words, that the material grounding for a negative integer is based on the existent penis and the penis as an absent referent, respectively. In this sense Number does not rest on the Idea or the immediate or the abstract, but rather it is mediated by our sexed position, that it is an observation that is appropriately woven into the fabric of our beings, that Number is as necessary an object for our Being as sexual difference. Perhaps in this light Badiou’s staunch criticism of Constructivist mathematicians (who assert the necessity to find a mathematical object to prove it exists) would punch a little more weight.

On this premise, however, Badiou does hit the mark with a political appropriation of Numbers on the effects of capital numericality. For Badiou, the “dance” of capital breaks down the thinking of number, an inhabitant of our Being. The question is, does capital itself fragment the legitimacy of value (in reference to the point Badiou makes when saying “Number … it is claimed, underlies everything of value” (213)) – by manipulating value itself – or does it infiltrate other areas of social life in order to disturb our thinking of Number, say for example with the invention and marketability of the calculator, or the simplification of mathematics education? Certainly the point here, for Badiou, is that in terms of capitalism, value just doesn’t add up (Badiou, incidentally, not invoking Marx here, perhaps a further suspicion that he is, as Bruno Bosteels imagines in his book The Speculative Left, a Communist without being a Marxist), and that, perhaps, capitalism has not properly theorised the relationship between labour and value. But also more than this, capital as a degree of power has closed itself off, has become an exclusive domain, and problematises, as a consequence, the domain of Numbers in general. Perhaps it is the hegemony of capital that is stopping mathematicians from thinking in terms of the “innumerable immensity of Numbers we have not yet thought or used”? (102)

Badiou’s book should really be seen as a refutation of the hitherto history of mathematical theory, and its relation to the current political climate. But as it is, it should be seen as the groundwork to a wider mathematical ontology, which is no criticism, since if this is to be a grand mathematical theory, it’s going to have to unpack all hitherto mathematical theory, a large piece of work.

For a longer version of this see here