Plus ça Change…? UK General Election Reflections, 2010

It has not been easy to sift through the saturated media coverage of the election and to try to distinguish hyperbole from novelty, opportunism from opportunity and shit from shinola. However, around the edges of the election, a number of issues appear to have become apparent, or perhaps I should say that the blindingly obvious has become forcefully brought home with renewed vigour and in a new context.

Firstly, in the attempts to sugar-coat past Lib Dem policies with so-called ‘progressive’ credentials (whatever that means), the Lib Dem’s economic liberalism is really coming to the fore. Whatever deals are done to abstain on issues such as Europe, the one area where the Lib Dems and the Tories are in accord seems to be the economy, which will have catastrophic effects for public services. The liberalization of the economy in the past generation has meant that Government has virtually no control over anything except public services, and so this area is likely to be disproportionately targeted. The problem is that this is not merely a point that has been grudgingly accepted by the Lib Dems as part of the preconditions for a coalition agreement, but has been warmly welcomed as a key plank of the liberalism that they have always represented. That is not to say that the Lib Dems are the same as the Tories, but their agreement on this particular issue sounds alarm bells for the future of Britain’s public services, and I would be very surprised not to see substantial waves of industrial action over the coming months and years.

This brings me to my second issue: the role of the ‘markets’ in this election. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist or ultra-orthodox Marxist to realize the major influence that so-called ‘market forces’ have on supposedly democratic politics, but any subterfuge or pretense to the contrary seems to have been dropped. If I hear one more reference to the ‘impatience of the markets’, the ‘uncertainty of the markets’ or the ‘need for stability demanded by the markets’, I am going to spit blood. The level of hubris is simply breathtaking, and this is a clear indication of the sheer lack of government control over a deregulated market. Not only is the government utterly impotent to hold banks and market forces to account for this stage of economic crisis, but representatives of the various market forces are explicitly dictating the shape and policies of the government. This is nothing new you might say, but the level of explicitness is rather alarming, as is the complicity of media coverage in promulgating fear of market collapse, which in turn justifies the supposed necessity of public cuts during this stage of economic crisis. I say this stage of crisis because, beyond the media hype, this is merely one part of a process of serial crises that have always afflicted capitalism. This is neither the beginning nor the end of capitalism; it is simply the way it has always worked, if you extend your historical perspective beyond the selective amnesia of this generation.

The details are new, but the predicament is old, and the response to this leads me to my third issue: the results of the far left parties in and out of the TUSC coalition. It won’t be a surprise to hear that results were not all that impressive. Indeed, that is something of an understatement. We could, of course, point to the fact that it took a painfully long time to get the coalition together, that there is still a residual reluctance within parties like the SP and the SWP to work together, and that there are many different views on the role of far left parties within parliamentary politics, but garnering fewer votes than the Christian Party has to sting a little. 12,275 votes! Let us not forget that, despite being utterly decimated in the local and general election (itself a testament to the tremendous and tireless labour of leftist activists across the country and in the key marginal seats), the BNP garnered half a million votes. That threat has not gone away, and the left still has work to do to win the argument in areas of strong BNP support (whether that support is a protest or not). Nonetheless, as I have mentioned before, one of the real tests of the TUSC coalition is not the election results, but whether or not the coalition holds together now. We all know that sectarian divisions on the left are rife, and we all know that there may, on occasion, be perfectly good reasons for that (both historically and in terms of contemporary strategy and theory), but, in the absence of a viable and broad leftist party, a coalition of existing parties is needed more than ever, both inside and outside of parliamentary politics. Parliamentary agitation, industrial action and anti-fascist activities can work in tandem, albeit often in tension, but a coalition of forces should help in the local, national and strategic division of labour. Indeed, it is one of the great ironies of this election that coalition politics is making its mark across the political spectrum. Whose mistakes, whose lessons? Time will tell.

The Iraq War and the ‘Pornography of Horror’

After much protracted legal and technical wrangling, WikiLeaks – a website devoted to the leaking of ‘public interest’ video and documents – recently acquired, decoded and released an utterly chilling cockpit video of American soldiers massacring a group of Iraqi civilians with clear selectivity, deliberation and forethought. This video, which combines images with the transcribed commentary of the pilots, affords another lamentable opportunity to reflect on the inherent ambiguities and tensions of releasing and circulating such materials. Their visceral impact and evidential status have to be carefully weighed up against the potential dangers of a retreat into what has been called the ‘pornography of horror’. Needless to say, a ghoulish interest in such material does not equate to political engagement, but neither does a blind unwillingness to engage with the brutal realities of armed conflict in general and the Iraq War in particular.

However, what seems particularly chilling about this video is not the sheer visceral horror of the images or even the simple fact of the massacre (one need not be a conspiracy theorist to accept that this is probably the tip of the iceberg), but rather the details, revealed as much through the transcribed commentary as through the unflinching visuals. Two aspects in particular stand out as especially disturbing. The first is the realization that behind the unthinking bigotry and bravado of the pilots’ interactions, there lies a paranoid fantasia that conjures RPGs out of camera bags and security threats out of collective behaviour. Through such a filter, all strikes are pre-emptive, potential threats are everywhere and lives are extinguished at the touch of a button. What is truly frightening here is not simply the sheer fact of death, but the cold weighing up of life and death in one arbitrary instant of human decision-making. This is the stuff of Philip K. Dick’s nightmares, and it is not a surprise that such an approach is neither surgically accurate – as if often claimed – nor effective in eradicating the immediate threat of insurgency or the future tide of recruitment.

The second striking aspect of the video is how this callous disregard for human life is further enabled by careful physical and psychological training, offensively clinical euphemisms (‘engaging the target’, ‘collateral damage’, etc.) and a heavily technologically mediated style of warfare. This latter point is nothing new in itself, of course; such technological mediation has always been part of warfare in some shape or form. However, since the First World War, it has acquired an energetic dynamism that, to put it bluntly, makes killing easier in both practical and psychological terms. Whatever else American soldiers might be, for the most part they are not psychopaths, and thus an extra layer of de-humanizing, de-individualizing mediation is required in order to kill with such abandon. One can’t help thinking here of Harry Lime’s (Orson Welles’) famous Ferris Wheel speech in The Third Man in which he looks down on the mass of humans below and asks whether or not we would really feel pity or concern if one of those ‘dots’ stopped moving. Warfare on this scale is simply not the same as hand to hand combat. Indeed, in this light, it is interesting to note that WikiLeaks have made an attempt to juxtapose the cold, anonymous distancing of the cockpit view with an added prologue of texts and photos that – in part at least – tries to re-humanize and re-individualize.

It does seem clear though that the cockpit perspective of such videos – which, in a more sanitized form, became a PR staple of the first Gulf War – plays no small part in maintaining such distance, and much has been written about this fact and about the resemblance of these videos to films and video games. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to tell in which direction the lines of resemblance are going, if recent video game production and soldiers’ testimonies are anything to go by. However, one might also point to the way in which the cockpit view uncomfortably positions any viewer of such videos. To what extent does our viewing render us ethically complicit and to what extent does it undermine documented actions? These questions should not be taken lightly or treated as mere pedantry. However much the lines between video games, films and war have become blurred, we should not need to be reminded that this video documents an all too visceral and an all too singular form of human suffering and horror. Without reminding ourselves of this, we run the risk of repeating the de-humanizing distance of the video, albeit for very different reasons. So, by all means, now that this video has been released, let it exert as much evidential pressure as possible to bring culpable parties to account, but let us not forget that each and every death is a singular death, and proceed with all due caution and respect when it comes to circulating and viewing such material.

Haiti, Political-Economy and History

The unfathomable scale of the Haitian earthquake tragedy is a timely reminder of the commonplace observation that so-called ‘natural’ disasters are anything but natural. They are, of course, always mediated and exacerbated by the global reach of vested political and economic interests. In this case, as in most other cases of calamitous, ‘natural’ disasters, generations of national and international marginalisation, neglect, sabotage, mismanagement and corruption led to grinding poverty and the gradual decay of the nation’s meagre infrastructure. Thus, when the earthquake struck, its horrific, ‘natural’ effect was magnified beyond measure by a pre-existing political-economic disaster that rarely pricked the consciousness, much less the conscience, of the European and American media.

It is perhaps not a surprise then that, in their rush to document the terrible human stories of the disaster, this political-economic context often looms as the iceberg beneath the news media’s surface, and this serves to obscure not only the complex entanglements of the present but also the triumphs and defeats of Haiti’s colonial and post-colonial past.

Forged in the fire of a globalised Enlightenment, what became an independent Haiti in 1804 owes much to the revolutionary zeal of former slave and political leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, who played a pivotal role in the early history of the Haitian revolution (1791-1804). Most memorably recounted in C.L.R. James’ masterpiece of Marxist history, The Black Jacobins, Toussaint’s example sent terrifying shock waves through the region and through the corridors of European power. Determined to halt the revolution from spreading like a wild fire through the plantations of the Caribbean and beyond, interested parties resolved to quash Haiti’s nascent national imaginings. And when Europe’s colonial grip on the Caribbean began to loosen and America rose to international ascendancy, it took only a small nudge to ensure that Haitian poverty and exploitation could become virtually self-sustaining.

There is no doubt that what is required now is immediate humanitarian action, donation and aid. However, over the longer term, let us remember that those nations clambering to offer aid today are the same nations responsible for what amounts to a willful obsfucation of politics, economics and history and a naturalisation of poverty.

Haiti Emergency Relief Fund Appeal
Peter Hallward @ Guardian Online
Andy Newman @ Socialist Unity

‘Hard Cases Make Bad Law’: Bio-power and Airport Security

Readers will no doubt be familiar with the phrase ‘hard cases make bad law’, my interpretation being that extreme individual cases should not lead to a reactionary process of law-making that is inappropriate, disproportionate, ineffective or subject to the short-term whims of electioneering politicians, rather than the long-term interests of those who will inherit such law. As many commentators have observed, law exists in a state of perpetual and unresolved tension between its universal remit and its individual application, and although individual cases often set interpretive precedents which become absorbed within the body of common law, such law also has to be written and interpreted with a view to its universal remit in order that it be appropriate, proportionate and effective as a juridical legacy. These tensions have always been intrinsic to the judicial process and cannot be resolved. Otherwise there would be no need for lawyers, judges, juries and courtrooms. Law would simply weigh, calculate and sentence like a machine, and however hopelessly imperfect and ideologically unsound the process of law might be, most are happy that this is not the case.

‘Hard cases make bad law’ then. In recent years, we have seen many abuses of this principle, abuses which threaten the juridical assumption of innocence until proven guilty, and which subject the general population to a kind of criminalization without any of the (albeit meagre) protections afforded to those subject to due legal process. Examples might include the recent decision in the UK to force every adult with any regular dealings with children (e.g. a parent coaching a football team or a writer doing a library reading for children) to complete an expensive, drawn out and overtly criminalizing CRB check (Criminal Records Bureau). Until proven otherwise, everyone is assumed to be guilty under this ruling. This is clearly a reactionary political response to a very small set of extreme cases, and it is designed to pander to the lowest political common denominator (e.g. the extreme voices that often call for internment or capital punishment as the solution to crime). Whether or not such a move may safeguard some children is not the issue here. The question to ask is whether such a move is appropriate and proportionate. Without such considerations of appropriateness and proportionality, every one of our hard-fought civil liberties is up for grabs.

Risk is an integral and unavoidable part of social life, and although we may want to protect against some of its more extreme effects, it is simply not worth attempting to eradicate it at all cost, because, it we are not careful, the ‘solution’ may well be worse than the problem. A spate of domestic violence, for example, is not sufficient reason to put a state-monitored camera in every home, however many such cameras proliferate outside the home, and however effective such a move might be. This is simply not a price worth paying, no matter what reactionary, tabloid polls might indicate. A spate of street crime is not sufficient reason to intern large proportions of the population without trial or due process. The solution to murder is not capital punishment, and on we go. Thoughtfulness, carefulness, a view to the past and the future and a level head are what is required, and not the reactionary excesses of a fearful minority or an opportunistic political class.

However, one of the areas where the abuse of the legal principle that ‘hard cases make bad law’ is at its most extreme and dangerous is the carte blanche that has been offered to contemporary governments by this generation of terrorism legislation. ‘Plus ça change (plus c’est la même chose)‘, one might say, and one might cite as contemporary examples the extraordinary abuses at Abu Ghraib prison or Guantanamo Bay, but what I want to focus on here is precisely the ordinary abuses which are passing without sufficient or sufficiently critical comment in the mainstream media. More particularly, I want to focus on the intersection of terrorism legislation and airport security, an intersection where the human body itself becomes a locus of power.

In recent years, the intersection of terrorism legislation and airport security has virtually been defined by individual cases dictating general law, each case being the thin end of an ever thickening wedge. An attempt is made to bring down a plane with a shoe bomb and we are all forced to remove and scan our shoes at the security gate. Another attempt is made to bring down a plane with liquid explosives and we are prohibited from bringing liquids onto the plane. So far, one might consider this a minor but justifiable nuisance. However, although the line between minor nuisance and major abuse is difficult to draw, one place it can be drawn is at the body. This is not the body as an impermeable and sacrosanct house of a fixed human subjectivity, but rather the body as a socially and culturally constructed, mediated and permeable locus of a power that cannot be contained by individual authority or state control.

The French philosopher and social historian, Michel Foucault, has written extensively on such an intersection of body and power in the nineteenth century, but there is a further intersection worth noting here insofar as it forms an important historical precedent to today’s airport security measures. This intersection involves the use of what were new recording technologies (especially photography) to record bio-metrical information (the shape of the head and body, an analysis of the features of the face, the collection of fingerprints, etc.) in three key, overlapping domains: (a) colonial racism, where superficial bodily differences were used to justify a supposedly fixed racial hierarchy of physical and psychological aptitudes and character traits, (b) the profiling (i.e. fixing) and incarceration of mentally ill patients and (c) the profiling and incarceration of criminals.

This forms a crucial part of the historical precedent to today’s airport security measures, and although one cannot simply reduce general technologies to specific histories and say that they are one and the same for all time, the intersection of body and power remains. To say that general technologies and specific histories cannot be fused is most definitely not to say that such technologies are somehow neutral and ahistorical. Thus when the US administration starts collecting and storing the fingerprints of every foreign visitor to the country and citing terrorism legislation and passenger safety as its justification, the history of criminal profiling remains an integral part of that process. Far from a simple precaution, an absolutely vital legal precedent of innocence and due process is being turned on its head. We are not only all being profiled as criminals but, without any formal charge, we are also being denied access to due legal process. This is the ordinary dimension to the extraordinary abuses at Guantanamo Bay, and we accept it at out peril because it is only the beginning.

The attempted transatlantic, Christmas day bombing has, without any general consultation or debate with the general public, ushered in a rushed, reactionary consensus to install extensive full body scanners at airports across the globe, scanners which can scan beneath our clothes. This is taking the entirely disingenuous maxim that ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’ to its most preposterous degree. This trend seems to be part of a long-standing public/private inversion. Whatever was ‘public’ (e.g. industry, healthcare, education, etc.) has been made private, and whatever was ‘private’ (e.g. the domestic sphere, one’s own body and thoughts, etc.) have been made public through constant encroachments on our civil liberties and a deluded, intrusive and confessional popular culture. What is the next stage in airport security? Naked travelling? Cavity searches as standard? Microchip passports under the skin? Human barcodes? Lie detector tests? Psychological profiling of all passengers? A full CT scan to see what you are hiding under your skin or in your body? How far do we have to go before we start to deal with root causes (e.g. post-WWII neo-imperial foreign policy) rather than peripheral symptoms?

I hope that I am exaggerating in the above list, but even as it stands now, one need not be an avid reader of Philip K. Dick, George Orwell or Franz Kafka to find this direction both frightening and sinister. A choice between travelling under these conditions and not travelling is no choice at all, and as this is but one strand of a far more extensive erosion of civil liberties, we need to sift through and tackle each on its own terms at it emerges. This is a time for careful thought, decisive action and bold defiance.

Politics Abhors a Vacuum: Left Unity Since the European Election

Political periodising is a dangerous affair, one of the more egregious examples being the journalistic obsession with the supposed paradigm shift that occurred on the morning of September 11, 2001. However, with all such reservations in mind, one event that could reasonably be considered a turning point for recent left unity projects was the notorious election of two BNP MEPs at the European Elections in June 2009. When the dust settled and the dropped jaws turned to raised fists, a period of reflection set in with a view to exploring what options there might be for a left unity project or alliance to contest the next general election.

The SWP’s call for a left alternative (posted on 9 June 2009) has been a particularly illuminating example in this regard for the extensive and often heated debate it has generated, and for the entrenched divisions on the hard-left which it has made plain. The most recurrent accusations appear to be that calls for left unity might be a ruse for larger groups to usurp or absorb smaller ones, or that narrow party interests might be prioritised over real unity (see the Socialist Party’s response as an example). In claim and counter claim, analysts and activists have been pouring over the relative merits and demerits of the ill-fated RESPECT coalition, the Socialist Alliance and the No2EU campaign, for example, but almost all discussants agree that a left alternative is more necessary than ever. In the absence of such an alternative, there is a serious risk that the far-right will exploit the vacuum created by the collapse of the Labour vote.

Such an alternative would need to be a genuinely representative alliance, of course, and there are real questions to be asked about how larger and smaller groups are to be positioned in relation to each other, but this need not mean a denial of past or present grievances, nor a denial of other strands of action, such as anti-fascism and industrial action, nor a betrayal of revolutionary politics. Such concerns are perhaps understandable, but this should not be allowed to stifle debate, nor should the tone of that debate be allowed to descend into the kind of bitterness, vitriol and empty rhetoric that alienates those newly drawn to left politics by their rage against the failures of the mainstream parties. The differences on the left are surely not insurmountable, nor is it beyond interested parties to convene a national conference to discuss disagreements, common ground and rules of engagement in an open and collegial manner.

The recent RMT ‘Crisis in Working Class Representation’ conference (a relation to the No2EU campaign) is an interesting and welcome beginning, and there has been some coalition forming around it with the Socialist Party, the Alliance for Green Socialism, the Communist Party of Britain and a number of trade unions. It is not clear as yet where this will lead, but as the clock ticks towards a general election, is the alternative to a left alternative really worth considering?

A Very Public Sociologist on SWP Open Letter
RMT Crisis in Working Class Representation
Socialist Party on SWP Open Letter
Socialist Party on a new Electoral Coalition
Socialist Unity on RMT Conference
Socialist Unity on SWP Open Letter
Socialist Worker Online on Left Unity
Socialist Worker Online on RMT Conference

Mandelson Calls for Universities to be More Closely Aligned with Business

One might be forgiven for thinking that Peter Mandelson had reached the bottom of the political barrel many moons ago, but today (3/11/09) he abused his unelected position once again in order to launch an out and out assault on the British university system. Mandelson’s statement to the House of Lords affords another lamentable opportunity to examine how politicians, managers and businesses are being allowed to use the economic crisis to push through and justify neoliberal policies devised well before the crisis began. We have seen this happen across the public sector in recent months, and here we see this logic deployed against the university in a last gasp attempt to claw back some ground for the ill fated New Labour project.

Anyone working in the British university system over the last 15 years or so will be painfully aware of the incremental changes ushered in by successive Tory and Labour governments in the name of ‘modernising’ the University, a neoliberal euphemism favoured by managers and policy makers. A barrage of rhetorical methods have been devised to encourage fee-paying students to regard themselves as individual consumers of an educational ‘product’ sold by the university administration for profit and provided by university staff for wages. University staff have in turn been subject to management driven workload increases and a host of repressive forms of surveillance and control of their teaching and research using models derived from private business practice (e.g. the institutional audit). Success is increasingly measured by one’s ability to be seen to be publishing, competing for research funding and devising means of subjecting education to the whims of the market, and one’s ability not to be seen making the cuts in teaching and research quality silently accepted as necessary. It is more important to be seen to be working than it is to be actually doing the work, a product of the target-driven, top-down management style of university managers and New Labour alike. This is just as well, as being seen to be working involves producing such a complicated and time-consuming administrative paper trail that one has little time left to actually do what this paper trail claims one is doing (and this will be familiar to anyone working in the NHS, the police service, or any other public institution). An increasingly bloated stratum of middle and upper management (also familiar to anyone working in the public sector) maintains its power by generating an impenetrable and constantly changing lexicon of new management jargon and acronyms (‘excellence’, RAE, TQA, AHRC…). Such a lexicon is all but entirely meaningless and appears to be devised purely for the performance of power rather than its logical execution. As such, it is all but impossible to decipher, let alone master.

Because these changes have been dispersed through political, economic and cultural practices, it has often been difficult to pin them down to a specific source, to penetrate their arcane logics and to challenge their effects. This gives such neoliberalism a kind of pernicious strength. In a university context, this strength is also compounded by the extent to which it can be applied to any educational content. Thus, the teaching of business administration and the teaching of Marxism can both be subject to the same market forces, emboldening the former and weakening the latter’s political-economic force, whilst appearing as a marker of tolerance towards educational diversity. However, what makes Mandelson’s statement even more contemptible than the usual assault on the university is that it marks a move towards subjecting the university to market forces in terms of both its working practices and its educational content. According to such a logic, the university should not only mirror the logic of private enterprise, but should directly provide private enterprise with a ‘skilled’, bespoke work force, and in true neoliberal style this is all done in the name of challenging the ‘elitism’ of the university system. Policy makers have said all of this before, of course, but to do so in the context of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression gives his statement extra resonance, and without forcefully confronting such a logic at all levels of the university and beyond, and at political, economic and cultural registers, the walls of resistance are vulnerable.

UCU Article on Mandelson
UCU Campaign Against the Commodification of Research

Welcome to the Left Unity Blog

The Left Unity Blog is an exploration of the cultural and political breadth of the contemporary left in Britain and beyond. It is not affiliated with, nor does it seek to selectively endorse, any particular position, party or organisation, but it is nonetheless open to whatever contributions are forthcoming.

The blog is not blind to, nor does it seek to efface, the considerable factional and sectarian divisions within and between such groups. Rather, it seeks to explore the contested and common ground in a vigorous but intellectually open and collegial manner. In the face of a rising far right across Europe and an increasingly neoliberal centre, such alliances, however strategic, are more necessary than ever, and the possibilities to gain ground for a united left are considerable.

The blog makes no claim to be comprehensive or systematic, nor is it intended to offer a clear plan of action or a scholarly collection of essays. It offers a more modest selection of cultural and political reflections on the contemporary left in Britain and beyond. Comments, ideas, resources, events and news are very welcome, but please offer them in the open spirit of the blog.

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TUSC Launch

Coverage of the UAF Rally Against the EDL in Bolton

Launch of The Really Open University@Leeds (March 2, 5.30pm)

Leeds University Industrial Action Suspended

Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition

This is an extremely interesting development for those of us interested in left unity alternatives, however modest. The success of this coalition will invariably depend on the depth and breadth of support from existing socialist organizations and the trade unions, but the mood so far is moderately collegial (in relative terms!).

It is perhaps difficult to avoid the conclusion that TUSC’s electoral gains will be minimal and symbolic, and that the prospects for after the election remain doubtful at best (see the AVPS response), but I still think that this is a coalition worth supporting, not least because of the range of parties involved. Let’s just hope that the usual politics of sectarianism does not squander yet another opportunity for dialogue and cross party platforms. I, for one, will be looking beyond the elections to see whether this coalition turns into any meaningful forms of engagement, but watch this space…

Higher Education on the Line at Leeds University

Things are hotting up at Leeds University after a huge vote in favour of strike action or action short of a strike by Leeds UCU members. This promises to be a vitally important test case for the rest of the country, and the struggle here will resonate across the UK’s universities. Success or failure could well be replicated elsewhere.

Fortunately, Leeds UCU are taking the fight to the Vice Chancellor and remaining resolute, and this has been accompanied by extensive support from non UCU members and, crucially, from students. Indeed, a Leeds University Against Cuts group and a Defend Jobs at Leeds, Defend Education group have been set up to lobby, agitate and work in tandem with UCU members. Both groups have been extremely active and deserve considerable credit for their energy and incisive action. This is crucially important as part of the struggle is essentially a PR battle for control of media representation to dispel the types of myth making used to exploit genuine student anxieties about the future of education and the future of their degrees. Developments are coming thick and fast, but Leeds UCU have an excellent blog to keep everyone updated. Watch this space.

German ‘Fleshmob’ Strips Off To Protest Against Full Body Scanners

Well, this is one way to do it…