Big Mistake Hugo

So Hugo Chavez has come out against attacks on Libya's independence, seeing the hand of imperialism in the current uprising. This is not quite the same as giving wholehearted support to Gaddafi and does not go as far as the increasingly erratic, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, but it is disappointing to say the least and goes against the interests that he has fought for over the years, namely those of struggling against economic and political oppression.

Chavez has never been without his flaws. Although he has flirted with elements of Trotskyist thinking at times and has presided over a democratic revolution in his own country, he is not without an authoritarian streak and his closeness to Castro has helped form a politics that gives undue weight to the role of political elites. Realpolitik and the dangerous principle of 'my enemy's enemy is my friend,' has led him towards some poor choices of friend.

To be accurate, Venezuela has said that it repudiates the violence and goes on to say that "Conditions are being created to justify an invasion of Libya, and the central objective of that invasion... is to take away Libya's oil."

It may be true that Western governments are keen to see the removal of an irksome regime and its replacement by a friendly client in the region. The privatisation of Libya's oil wealth will be on the agenda of many and some on the left are disturbed that the rebels are using Libya's old monarchist flag. Too much is being read into the latter, I think and the fundamental point is surely, no socialist can support a regime that oppresses and slaughters its own people in the way that Gadaffi and his thugs have been doing in recent days (and have been doing for more than 40 years).

The international left can have (and largely doesn't) have any truck with a quasi-Stalinist model that places the interests of the state above the people. Socialism is democratic or it is nothing.

Chavez, a man that knows what it is likely to face the undemocratic forces of a state machine, backed by a vicious power elite, should know this more than many. And to his credit he has extended power to working people in Bolivia and instituted programmes that have massively improved living standards and educational achievement. But the short-sighted embrace of a tyrant is a significant blot on a good record. Let's hope Hugo thinks again.

A Very Public Gramsci

Phil at A Very Public Sociologist is running a series of articles on The Prison Notebooks. Part of me is saying 'damn, beat me to it!' but a very useful initiative and much food for thought.

Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm has long been a frustrating figure - often insightful but at the same time a prisoner of his own eurocommunist past, an individual who possesses Gramsci's pessimism of the intellect in spades but often seems to lack the corresponding optimism of the will (other in the most diffuse fashion). Like many eurocommunists he never fully engaged with the nature of Stalinism, yet at the same time his critique of Labour and other social-democratic parties was, to say the very least, unsatisfying. However, as a left historian he has few modern peers and an interview with Hobsbawm is usually worth a read.

ConDem social cleansing

John Cruddas, Labour, Dagenham: "It [the ConDem proposed changes to housing benefit] is an exercise in social and economic cleansing ..... families will be thrown into turmoil, with children having to move school and those in work having to travel long distances to their jobs. It is tantamount to cleansing the poor out of rich areas – a brutal and shocking piece of social engineering."

Ralph Miliband

A good article on Ralph Miliband from last week's Guardian.

Class war steps up a further notch

How can anyone now doubt that this is the most ideological, most vicious government in living memory? So wedded is the Cameron-led Conservative Party to the market and to hammering working people that they are now threatening to end 'council houses for life.'

Today's attack on of social housing can only make life more insecure for those living in council houses. Britain needs more social housing, not less. The government's move only helps its allies in the private rental sector and seems designed to create a more flexible - for which read exploitable - labour force.

Strange feelings of pride....

As an internationalist, national pride is not something that come easily, indeed, I'm not sure that was exactly the feeling when I came across this but hey.....

Rebuilding the left - the debate

Some of the sessions and discussions at Marxism 2009 including Slavoj Zizek, David Harvey and the Alex Callinicos contribution referred to in the Beckett article can be found here.

Lost opportunity or wake up call? The left and the crisis

It seems inevitable that Andy Beckett's feature in yesterday's G2 would receive a lukewarm reception. The comments thread at Socialist Unity illustrates the kind of mixed reception one might expect for a Guardian future on the divided and unfocused nature of today's left. For some, the article was 'vacuous and boring' or saw it as deliberately playing down glimmers of hope such as the performance of the left in Ireland, workplace occupations and community activism. For others, the scale of the defeat endured by the left has been underplayed.

While the article maintains a relatively sympathetic tone, Beckett, as a writer in the mainstream press, is writing from the outside. Beckett, like many of his broadsheet colleagues, tends to highlight the more fashionable contributors to the debate on left strategy - Naomi Klein, Hardt and Negri, Wilkinson and Pickett - and some of his sources, most notably Geoff Mulgan, formerly of Demos, are good bets if you want to see left-wing hackles rise.

But despite its faults it is a worthwhile read, and highlights some important issues (and points of contention) that the Left will have to deal with if it is to escape its current impasse. It may indeed be true that Beckett is making points that are to many on the left, axiomatic. It may also be the case that there are more reasons for hope than he suggests. Whilst the centre left did badly across Europe, new forces like the NPA in France give hope for the future.

It is hard to resist the conclusion, however, that as despite the collapse in the financial system and the exposing of capitalism's weaknesses, there is little sign that large sections of society see this as a sign of fundamental systemic failure. The left has failed to communicate an effective negative critique or a postitive alternative vision.

This does not mean that the left has been ineffective in mobilising around specific campaigns - against the war, fighting the fascists and so on. But it would be foolish to downplay the danger that on a wider level, there is an ideological vacuum which should be ours which is being targeted by conservatives, nationalists and worst still, the fascists of the BNP.

Hillary Wainwright says in the feature: "The crisis of the financial markets has become a crisis of public spending - it's incredible." She is right.

If Beckett's piece has a serious failing it is the tendency to caricature the positions of many in the debate. Alex Callinicos's arguments are positioned as councils of pessimism, for example.

A realistic assessment of the state of play has to be the point of departure for any new strategy. Neal Lawson, highlights, the way in which the left alternative has been weakened by the failure to fill the gap left by the collapse of communism and the implosion of post-war social democracy.

These two events should have been an opportunity for the transformational left - an opportunity to leave behind the crimes of Stalinism (and the increasingly sterile debates over its nature) and the dead-ends of reformism. Instead, we watched as many of the values and fundamental ideas of socialism began to be eroded. As the Stalinist and reformist tides went out, other ideas were caught in the ideological undertow.

The left needs to rebuild an alternative vision and an alternative world view. This does not have to be homegenous and monolithic. Indeed, the reverse is true. We need a vibrant, intellectual and cultural space which shares key values - empowerment, democracy, equality, diversity - and recognises that different perspectives can be applied to agreed ends.

Can we do this at a time when the industrial base of the movement is fractured and still on the defensive? There is much sense in such concerns but we cannot afford not to focus at the same time, on the political. A left movement that once more provides a critique of capitalism and begins to voice an alternative is a vital rallying point. Ideological purity and consistency is surely not the solution. There are many who feel that left unity is chimerical and risks wasting effort and resource better deployed elsewhere. Surely the opposite is the case?

Initiatives like the SWP's open letter (ignored, unsurprisingly, by the Beckett article), the Socialist Party-initiated Campaign for a New Workers Party and the People's Charter are perhaps starting points.

To make them work the left has to learn new habits and ways of working. No one says that we can agree on everything or that there will not be sharp debates but we have to build a plural, consensual left and leave behind the sectarian impulse to always dominate and control. If we can't we will be doomed to see recent left history repeat itself again and again, not as farce but as tragedy upon tragedy.

Wired celebrates socialist shock

Wired tacks more towards Ayn Rand than socialist figures from US history but this story marks a break with the normal libertarian conservative schtick.

And this is a surprise?

So the caring, sharing Tories are a thing of the past. That presumes that there was any substance in the Conservative claims that they would match Labour spending (such as it is) or that 'one nation Conservatism' was back in vogue) . Did anyone ever believe such nonsense? Ex-PR man David Cameron knows how to spin a story and whilst Labour's ratings may have been in free fall the Tories knew that the bulk of the UK electorate would not wear a return to the Party's default mode of service-cutting and attacks on working people. A crisis and division within the Tories own ranks has sent Cameron and co scuttling for their political comfort zone and towards an appeal to their real base: big business and sections of the upper middle class. There is one area, of course, where government could start saving - the £3.3 billion per annum spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What are the odds on that being high up the list?

The passing of a great American

Studs Terkell, one of the great radical voices of post-war America has died. The story here.

The nightmare ticket

I often find myself agreeing within Lenin (Richard not Vladimir) and this piece on the nightmare ticket of McCain and Palin is no exception. Far more rarely (if ever) do I agree (even partially) with Martin Kettle. Kettle is right, however, to argue that the US media is completely overplaying the Palin factor and have lost their judgement and sense of proportion. Kettle was talking about the US media but much the same could be said regarding the UK's commentariat. Putting a candidate up in front of a stage managed crowd is one thing, winning over the wider public is another. It certainly is the case that in the calculus of the 'culture wars' Palin may consolidate the conservative base but even that is far less homogeneous that commentators like Jonathan Friedland like to suggest. Palin's personal story is likely to play quite differently around the country and the it remains to be seen how the artificial synthesis that is the Republican programme will stand up when tested against the priorities of the US public. Today's New York times contained an interesting graphic depicting the rhetoric deployed by the two candidates. Now one can make far too much of all this, particularly as Obama's policies and promise have been similarly overstated. For the Left both have to be seen as tribunes of big business and US imperialism. However, it is significant that where the Democrats lead on the economy, business is the most important term in the Republican lexicon, similarly jobs loom large for the Democrats, taxes and God for the Republicans. As much as McCain wishes to portray himself as the maverick, the reality is that he has tacked right to please the conservatives in his party and that places him in much the same mould as his predecessors.

Despite having read David Harvey's book I wasn't aware of this. Thanks to Socialist Unity for this particular discovery.

The flip side....

..... of hegemony.

Good grief....

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I mean really, Hazel effin Blears as Communities Secretary. Almost as laughable as Blair as Middle East peace envoy.

Postscript: If only it had stopped with Hazel Blears. The true extent of Gordon Brown's contempt for traditional Labour values and its grassroots membership became clear with the appointment of thuggish, union-hating, public-school oaf, Digby Jones as minister in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. If anything torpedoes the illusion that Brown marks a significant break with Blairism then surely it is this appointment.

Pitiful

Why should this surprise me? Why should anything that this George Romero, New Labour zombie government does surprise me? After all, it is 12 years since Clause IV was abolished ending any illusions anyone might have had that Labour was a socialist party. But a nominally Labour party, introducing a budget that hits the poorest and rewards the middle classes? Anytime you feel yourself wavering ever so slightly and consider giving this warmongering, racist, ever so slightly, Dulux blush of pink 'Labour Party' the benefit of the doubt then remember what the darling of the Labour left - deluded idiots that most of them are - did in this his final budget. Gordon, you are scum.

Milton we hardly knew ya.....

Well actually we did. Somehow the world seems a little brighter....

Universities and Union reject campus spying

Both the Universities and the University and College Union have moved with commendable speed to reject any proposals for monitoring of students' political or religious activities. Hopefully, this one will be squashed before it can gather momentum.

UCU joint general secretary, Paul Mackney, said: 'UCU has expressed its concern to the Minister that our members may be sucked into an anti-Muslim McCarthyism which has serious consequences for civil liberties by blurring the boundaries of what is illegal and what is possibly undesirable. UCU members have a pivotal role in building trust - these proposals, if implemented, would make it all but impossible.

'There is a danger of demonising Muslims, for example by the statements of five ministers in the last couple of weeks, when actually Muslims have made enormous strides in getting more of their young people to universities and colleges.

'The government's premise is wrong: radicalisation is not the result of Islamist segregation, but government policy, especially in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq. Even so, radicalisation is not the same as violent extremism or terrorism.'

The senator would have been proud...

Somewhere, in the deepest recesses of the underworld, in a dark chamber, just down the corridor from Lavrenti Beria and General Franco, Senator Joe McCarthy must be sensing a certain warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that somewhere, back in the world of the living his ideals and methods are being continued, not just in his homeland but also in the good ol' United Kingdom.

The idea of a surveillance society has seen a bad press in recent years. Spying on your parents, on your children, your colleagues and your students had slipped into disrepute. Is there no such thing as moral fibre anymore?

Well, it seems that in the Department of Education there is and with the news that 'Asian-looking' students should be monitored for signs of extremism and terrorist involvement that stiffening of resolve and patriotic vigilence is to be instilled in that notoriously wish-washy lot, university lecturers.

Oh yes, there'll be tiresome arguments about the breakdown of trust between teacher and student and universities may become a little fractious but hey, that's the price of freedom. Isn't it?