INCITEMENT!

From the mid-1990s until last year we apparently lived through a period of prosperity, an economic boom. Apparently the economy was growing, lots of people were getting incredibly rich and average incomes were going up.

But how the hell could anyone tell? For most of us, prosperity meant stagnating real wages, and in the last few years a gentle decline in spending power as inflation accelerated with oil prices. Normal people couldn´t buy houses, couldn´t rent good ones either, they racked up massive debts, their pensions collapsed, they worked harder and longer for the same rewards. Their kids were getting a worse education, their public services were getting cut, packaged, sold-off, then jumping in price. They could see the state of their society deteriorating around them, as whole parts of the country were abandoned to antisocialism.

Meanwhile a small class of super wealthy arseholes systematically enriched themselves. They got the spoils of the ´boom´ and got absurdly, disgustingly rich. And we were told: leave them. Leave them or they´ll leave you. These people are financial heroes, they keep the whole thing from collapsing. If you challenge them, even for a fraction of their enormous wealth, they will give their marvellous bounty to someone else. They will pack up their ball and go home.

Don´t ask them for your wage increases, don´t ask them to pay taxes, don´t demand that their pay packets be within the bounds of basic human decency. For they are the geese that lay the golden egg, and they will take no questions, they will take no interference. Learn to love them, for their are your God.

And we obeyed. We took the paltry pay rises, we let them off their taxes, we stopped our mouths from uttering foul words that might offend the mighty beast.

And now? And now the great God has failed, his world is collapsing around him, and he comes to us to pay the bill. You: on the dole. You: take a pay cut. You: take this cut to health services and that cut to schools. You: slave labour for your dole check. Him: billions of pounds from the Chancellor of the Exchequer so his Empire doesn´t fall flat on its arse.

See, he can´t magic money out of nowhere, he doesn´t create anything. We made all the stuff he´s got, we made it in factories, offices and hospitals. And when it stops working he can only demand that we make it work again. All he does is sit at the top of the pile and accumulate whatever he can.

He had no right to it in the first place, and he´s got no right to it now. If the law says he does, then the law is fucked-up. And if we, the real law of the land, come along and destroy it, fine.

Better yet. While destruction might satisfy our need for revenge, surely taking it back will satisfy more?

arf! obscure foreign policy irony ...

Sadly, I´ve no longer got the archives to my old site, so I can´t point to the stuff I did about how the US and their allies rigged the Afghan constitutional process. Basically they went through this absurd "consultation process" that was run by their proxy administration and then voted on by the self-same provisional government.

This was the original model for governance in Iraq, get some CIA croney (Chalaba, Allawi, whoever), set them up as provisional president, write a constitution that gave the executive all the power, then make sure they´re the only face on TV and radio, and will thus inevitably triumph in the forthcoming elections.

In the first post-constitution elections in Afghanistan, CIA representative Hamid Karzai had 90% of all the media coverage in the entire elections, on both TV and radio, as well as the entire resources of state on his side (compare that to say Hugo Chavez, who apparently suppresses free speech, by shutting one of the dozen media corporations that are all massively hostile to his government and pump out propaganda 24/7).

And now, guess what, they´ve fallen out with Karzai and are trying to shoe-horn in a Prime Minister role with more power (appointed by them apparently!), so they can undermine him! On account of him being a corrupt fucker who deals with all sorts of dodgy Warlord types. Turns out having a democracy and checks and balances is vital after all...

tragedy and empathy

My flatmate has a very blunt way of expressing himself. Particularly after a few drinks. Well, more provocative than anything. As he and his drinking buddies woke me from my painfully disturbed night of sleep (I woke Saturdays, the rest of the world does not...), the talked animatedly. By the time half their number had departed and I´d finished showering and drinking my coffee they´d started a full-blown row that had brought an irate neighbour to the door. "Hombre, te aseguro, si podría callarles, lo haría... yo, yo no salí anoche, me he leventado por el trabajo, que comenza en dos horas. Yo preferiera quedar en mi cama..." Enraged neighbour went away more sympathetic than angry.

I settled down to follow their arguments, and turn the tone a little more comradely. Two friends had been talking of the tragic turn of events in Germany, where a seriously disturbed young man had ended the lives of several former schoolmates before taking his own. My flatmate, as he has expressed on a previous occasion to similar effect, had bluntly announced that he didn´t give a fuck about such things, just as the others didn´t care about the people killed everyday around the world, for reasons no purer than those concocted by this maniac.

Outrage ensued as the others castigated him for his callous, uncaring attitude toward the unfortunate dead. As I attempted to cool the temperate I took his side, by way of clarifying his arguments in the reasonable terms of the barrack room lawyer - "we´re not asking for anything unreasonable, sir". When I took his argument up the more reasonable it seemed to me. It´s easy to feel and express sympathy for the victims of arbitrary violence: to declare "we are all Marta" or to put up a poster of Madaleine McCann. After all, what do you actually have to do other than feel it. Marta´s killer is in prison, the police are/were searching for Maddie, however intense your empathy, there was nothing to be done.

My other friend was telling me, "we all know how terrible things are in Africa (sic), but this is different". Maybe it was the cultural proximity, the deliberate nature of the atrocity, but it was definitely different. For me the difference, and the reason why we don´t feel so profoundly for the horrors of everyday life, is the way in which we are responsible. Sometimes regular people carry acts of extreme brutality. No-one need condemn them, they are so obviously horrific that no one could. The authorities are dealing with them, they agree that these are contemptible actions. With the effects of poverty or tyranny, society, at least the power structures of our society are responsible. They will not be punished, things will not change, they will not be pursued, caught, made to pay.

There´s something to do about all that endemic stuff, something to take responsibility for. The thinks that challenge us, weigh more heavily than the things that we can feel strongly about, but that call for us to do nothing. The way society kills people is neglected even when close to home, even if it´s pensioners dying out of the lack of heating in the Winter, or for lack of aircon in the Summer. If the killing of the elderly through neglect had the same emotional impact as Marta´s murder, we´d have been storming parliament long ago.

This functionless empathy (Diana Syndrome you might call it) is a calling card to others in a destructive callous world. We all want to know that we aren´t entirely emotionless, that the tragedies of others still exercise. Safely expressed, without the need to do anything. Demonstrating against terrorism the same. We shall not be bowed by your bombs, as we support the powers that be in dealing with your tiny threat.

It´s understandable, but ultimately worthless, even self-indulgent. Which is why to some of us, the hollowness of it makes us angry.

this crisis is annoying, huh?

You wait 30 years for a crisis of capitalism, and when it comes you´re still not satisfied. I mean first off, for the most part, certainly the British Left, spent the last couple of decades intently staring at it´s own navel, fighting with each other, worrying about solidarity with villagers in South East Kurdistan, and generally doing anything except building a strong and lasting alternative to the political mainstream.

So, here we are in the midst of a big economic and political crisis and who benefits? The fucking Tories, the arseholes who actually designed the absurd economic system that left the UK so vulnerable. Now they´re getting to turn round and say, ooh, it´s Labour´s poor economic management you see. Of course, it´s no coincidence that the countries hardest hit are the one´s, like ours, that built in the highest degree of dependence on the finance, construction and retail sectors of the economy, and, not to go all shouty: THAT WAS EVERYONE´S IDEA, THE ENTIRE FUCKING POLITICAL CLASS, YOU DON´T GET TO DISOWN IT BECAUSE YOU AREN´T IN POWER.

Furthermore, it´s not badly managed, it´s not being taken advantage of by greedy businessmen (now, convenient hate figures, previously heroic wealth creators), the thing is functioning exactly how it was designed to. If you design a system in a certain way, and claim credit for it when it works, when everything goes wrong, you don´t get to just wash your hands of it.

Outside of the Tories, guess what, just like we warned when everyone was mincing around waving their lollipops about the war, the force that is probably going to explode over the next couple of truly depressing years will be ... fascism. Already the warnings are flooding in about the BNP getting to send off their little shaven-headed white power comrades to the European parliament. More than one anyway. Well, why? Why is it that form of extremism that´s getting play and not some variety of Leftism, or even, maybe, why not both. Because, the BNP have actually been on the streets doing ordinary everyday politics and, come the crisis that´s going to give them a base from which explode. The various groups of our side have spent the years complacently talking about a downturn as some kind of explanation for decline or stagnation, will now pay the price for neglecting the hard yards.

Aside from that, the protests that we´ve had over the past few months; the strikes, the demos, the throwing stuff at union reps. I mean. Nobody likes to say I told you so, but fuck me. Casualisation, agency work, subcontracting, privatisation. We said it made workers more vulnerable, we said it made them easy to fire, that in the end it was going to turn back the clock to Victorian labour relations, where we all go back to being in employment day by day at the employer´s discretion. We said the unions were fucking gash and wouldn´t, couldn´t do anything about this. And, lo, it came to be. Half the workers at Cowley were agency. How the fuck didn´t that get fought before the crisis? Why wait until employers don´t give a shit whether you strike or not? Why organise, why protest, when everything´s so bad that management don´t even care what you do? Why didn´t we do this shit when we actually had the leverage of being in boomtimes?

And bollocks to the boom, when was that? It´s not like we´ve all been living it up the last 15 years. Getting by, throwing a quarter of society on sink estates to rot in longterm unemployment and near destitution, other people watching their real wages slowly deteriorate, their pensions disappear, their rights eroded, their housing become prohibitively expensive, the cost of living steadily rising. Now what? Kicking millions out of work, probably millions more taking cuts or freezes. Everything still seems to cost as much, even though we´ve got less money. More jobless, more homeless, more cuts to the support system, more with less.

The question is: how angry are we, really?

union reps schmunion schmeps

If you know my views on the world in much depth, you´ll know that first and foremost I think it´s in the little things, in the details that you can change the world. There´s as much value in persuading a colleague of a neighbour to stand up for their rights (collective and individual) as there is in convincing someone that they want to join whatever pseudo-revolutionary sects is taking up your Saturday afternoons these days.

So I bother myself with the little things. I try to convince people they should join trade unions and be active in them, that this or that thing about their working conditions is unjust, that they should try to change the things they object to in their everyday lives. I´m always trying to get people along to meetings, to take an interest in their collective problems. Firstly, because it´s a better way to live life than to just accept everything authority does to you passively - the only way we ever improve things. Secondly, because it´s through realising that we have collective interests, fighting for them and winning them that people change their disposition toward life and the world (rather than recruitment, which is just getting people to put a label on something that they already feel or know).

In truth, sometimes it´s harder to make people care about the trivia than to convince them of the most extreme ideas. Especially TEFL teachers. For the most part they´ve taken the job to see a bit of the world, and they have an interest in the arcane and philosophical. They´ve probably flirted with some obscure spirituality at some point (probably whilst travelling), and they´re up for debates about metaphysical crap. They certainly aren´t usually hanging around long enough to worry too much about having to tolerate things they don´t like at work. So you can usually get people into a discussion about who would deliver the mail in a post-revolutionary society, but you can´t interest them in whether or not it´s reasonable for management to pay their travel time to Villaverde.

This I expected, I was prepared to do my bit banging my head against that particular brick wall. I was not, however, expecting such a graphic illustration of Spain´s specific industrial relations problem; the "Comite de Empresa". In Spain, if a business is a certain size, you all elect a number of workplace delegates to a Works Committee, who negotiates terms and conditions with management on your behalf. Elections are held every five years or so, and in between times the delegates just stay in the role. Of course, anywhere with our kind of turnover five years is a really long time, and instead of our stipulated three, we actually have one and a half, as one rep left and another switched to part-time.

The other element is that the delegate has to be affiliated to one or other recognised trade union to stand in elections, and ours is officially a representative of the communist-influenced Comisiones Obreras (CC.OO). This person does not have the same idea of what workplace organisation that I do. A lovely person, but our ideas on what representing people involves could not be more different.

For instance, my first thought is give people some reasonable ideas around which they can use as a starting point to discuss and organise. Nothing too extreme, just baby steps you understand, things to change that even management might see the point of. The first thing I got in reply was "well I know how management will see that, and what they´ll say". Now for me, the point is not to be a sort of buffer zone between workers and management, but to represent our interests and demands as strongly as you can to the people in charge. We want something, we should try our damnedest to get it.

After we´d gone through the whole, "things that might be nice to have", I moved on to some basic organising. Here we were at a meeting, during the working day, in the workplace, and there were a grand-total of three people, including the rep, in attendance. There were a few things that I had by way of objection. First off, no-one had been consulted about when might be a good time to have a meeting, secondly no-one had been encouraged to attend, nevermind the "drag them in kicking and screaming if you have to approach" that marks out really enthusiastic organisers. Secondly the invite had come via management. It´s a small thing, but I think it´s an important principle that workers´reps should communicate with the rest of the workers through our own channels. It just looks bad when it comes through management, like it´s not really our own organisation, but just a sort of wanky staff consultation, where we suggest things and then they do whatever the hell they like. "But we don´t have people´s emails" says our rep, well why not get them? "I´ll stick a notice on the board, but I´ve done it before and no-one signs up, and anyway they aren´t interested".

Now maybe this is where my troublemaking comes in. I´m of the opinion that it´s good for me and good for them if everyone shows an interest in union matters - this stuff is important for everyone. So you can´t just say we´ll leave them to show interest if they want and leave it at that. You actively push people into giving a shit, and hope that over time the interest will develop into something you don´t have to work so hard to prompt. Don´t stick a sign on the wall and hope people sign up, but go round with a clip board and say "can you put your email on the staff reps list?" If they´re really disinterested and have a great reason to say so, then they´ll say no, otherwise they will and should go along with it.

The point is not to be the passive recipient of whatever individual grievances may spontaneously develop but to be building a strong collective group where people stand up for each other and show one another solidarity. You´re not there to absorb problems, you´re their to make a collective.

Which is the problem with the Comite de Empresas system. It makes you reliant on a rep, rather than on your collective strength. Over time this tends to put the rep in the situation where they sit not among their group (their "electorate") but between them and the bosses. We don´t work together, we don´t make demands, we just make a system that we hope will makes things run smoother.

A history of Spain in stickers (part 2 The Left)

One of the funny things about Spanish Stalinism (and there are very few funny things about Spanish Stalinism) is how dramatically its experiences affected the rest of its European sister parties. The legacy of its time in government during the Civil War was that the party ended up full of middle-class lefties, who wanted a Republic of order, stability and well, whisper it, capitalism. These people were also the core of the party´s elite in exile, and when they came back they behaved in the same way. Despite brief flirtations with guerrilla expeditions after World War 2 (Tito´s exploits evidently got them over-excited), they generally stuck to pretty moderate stuff when opposing the Generalisimo, even to the extent that their present trade union the CC.OO derives loosely from their infiltration of the old Franquista state-sponsored trade unions. It´s not surprising they invented Stalinism-lite aka Euro-Communism (a sort of social democratic cheerleading squad for third world revolutionaries), which then spread around Western Europe. These days they´re light on street presence, but are the largest component of third biggest party in national elections (Izqueirda Unida). You can still find their wee ones (the Unión de Juventudes Comunistas de España) running around putting up stickers like this one about the Battle of Berlin. Of course when you´re a minority of the government, nothing attracts the otherwise disillusioned kiddies like your "glorious" antifascist past and some nice red flags.

Also unsurprising, that they spawned some "return to real coke" communists (err... anti-revisionists maybe?), who go around being all early 30s sectarian. Welcome to the Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España (PCPE) and their especially charming youth section the CJC (Colectivos de Jóvenes Comunistas). They´re loving their hammer and sickles too, but not in the Reichstag planting way, but in declaring whole neighbourhoods their territory. This was in Lavapies, the city centre´s most mixed and most proley barrio. It reads Antifascist Workers Neighbourhood. Bolshier and much less mainstream than the PCE/IU, the PCPE was founded back in the 1980s, when everyone registered that the PCE weren´t going to take over, and some people got nostalgic for the idea that Marxist-Leninism might actually mean challenging capitalism. They´ve a few thousand members apparently, but never poll anywhere near six figures nationally. The kiddies website is full of affection for all sorts of noxious third-world dictatorships and other such third worldist crap that gets Rage Against the Machine fans excited.

As a interesting sideline they also seem to fish quite effectively in the pool marked ´antisocial punky squatters who are confused about what they want´, through various ´independentist youth groups´. The fact that Spain is more or less four or five different countries shoe-horned together by historical coincidence, means that some kids get terribly excited by the idea of liberating their socialist homeland. Like these funny Jaleo!!! kids (and yes, the exclamation marks are in the name). Who were busily plastering Cordoba with these smart looking posters for a free and socialist Andalucía. You see the same thing in other cities, youngsters who live in squats and want to break off pieces of Spain (almost every CSO - Occupied Social Centre in Bilbao has a flag of the Basque homeland on it...), and aren´t really sure whether they´re Anarchists, National Liberationists, Guevarists or some unworldly mix of all of the above.

Finally, there´s my lot, who probably on balance who got more material stuck to walls than anyone else in the city. I don´t know if there´s more of us, or just that we love stickers (anarchists looove stickers), but they´re everywhere. It´s a reassuring feeling to know that one of yours has already been past here recently. This one says (I think ... wasn´t sure about the expression, any Spanish speakers want to explain that one?), "Working week of 65 hours? We will see the faces!!", part of the campaign against a proposed sixty five hour working week. The CNT in Madrid these days is a couple of thousand ish I think, they´ve a nice office in Plaza Tirso de Molina (you can´t miss it there´s a big banner on the 2nd floor), which I presume was paid for or given in recompense for, all the stuff that the Francoists took off them. The CNT is apparently in a period of moderate growth after dropping first from the Civil War high of 2-3 million, to the post-Franco opening of maybe as much as 500,000, to a modern union of 10,000 members with a lot more people influenced by it. The split from the 1980s is a bit more moderate and has about six times that ...

Books again

The final two, putting this slow-burning feature out of its misery...

4 Harry Cleaver - Reading Capital Politically

I´m one of those people who always takes a mountain of books with him every time I travel anywhere, a sub-conscious acknowledgment of how lazy I am whenever nobody expects me to work for a living (a friend recently described my trip to visit them as me having ´experienced the internet of Australia´). One time I was in Vienna, staying with a friend (as a man of limited means, but cosmopolitan acquaintances this is how I take holidays ...), and he was flicking through my books. This man, being one of the most educated men that I know, idly passed comment on each volume, until he came to this diminutive little book.

"Is there another way of reading Capital other than politically?" He asked me, and I mumbled something unintelligent about reading it philosophically, economically, sociologically etc etc. But I didn´t get across Cleaver´s actual meaning of the title which he expresses as follows:

I intend to return to what I believe was Marx's original purpose: he wrote Capital to put a weapon in the hands of workers.

Simply that the purpose of it (and I think every political book) should be to accumulate knowledge for the social war that we´re in the middle of. A simple, powerful sentiment, which Cleaver illustrates by applying aspects of the book to the world he lived, with its contemporary struggles and the world we actually lived in.

It´s much more effective than trying to shoe-horn the world into the prescription of political activists who have long since being dragged off the stage, icepick lodged in cranium. There´s the perceptive application of the theory to the changing face of capitalism in the last 40-50 years, and the effective explanation of how capitalism is forced to transform itself in the face of what we (the working class) do to it (if nothing else I think it inspired the best contemporary book on this topic Beverley Silver´s Forces of Labor). More than that, it´s one of the best practical guides to the bearded one´s work that you´re likely to find. It´s also small enough to fit in your pocket or to read online if you have the time.

5 Jose Peirats - Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution

There´s a possibility that you will see the title of this section and sigh, as another anarchist flags up the profound effect of the Spanish Civil War on his political outlook. Fear not, I´m going to take a slightly controversial line. Obsessing about the Spanish Civil War can be damaging to your political health. In fact, dwelling on that past is possibly the most debilitating aspect of most anarchist groups.

Once you get bogged down on what things worked in the past, how they were organised in the past and what that means for our ideology, you´re finished. You´re a glorified historical recreation society busily trying to promote nostalgia for a revolution that happened over seventy years ago. Yes, if you´re anything like me you´ve a fondness for crying at the end of Land and Freedom, and if you lived in Spain you´ll be trying to convince your friends they want to go and see La Mujer del Anarquista at the weekend.

But modern life is not the same as semi-rural, church-dominated 1930s Spain, we aren´t re-creating the struggles of way back when, we´re existing in a modern world. In every era workers came up with innovative ways of defending themselves under capitalism and even pushing those societies toward revolution. What they came up with suited where and when they lived. Later on new generations invented new structures and organisations that suited what they wanted and how they might set about getting it. But soviets and factory councils weren´t the same as syndicates and collectives, nor were they the same as what developed in any of the revolutionary moments after that. Every time we invent something new, be it in the Hungarian Revolution or May ´68. It doesn´t come off the pamphlet in some anarchist or communist pocket, it comes out of everyday life and experience.

So what did I get out of Jose Peirats´ shorter book (there´s a 3 volume one too!)? Peirats was a member of the CNT all of his life, a historian and educator too. His book isn´t a whitewash, nor is it a hagiography of martyrs. It´s an explanation and a criticism of how he sees that the revolution went wrong. He was a convinced anarchist all his life and he was honest enough to criticise the conduct of his own organisation. It was great when I read this to understand why we don´t make examples out of history, we learn lessons and think about what happens and what´s happening now. We try not to wallow in nostalgia and assess honestly the shortcomings of our own history.

Most of all we understand that everything in history is compromised, not just by the dominant classes but by ourselves and the fact the reality is dirty and is far from Utopian. As I explained to a friend recently, I´m not a Utopian, I´m someone who wants things to better and thinks he has some insight into why they are how they are. I shouldn´t have to judge myself against the criteria of any imaginary world but on the quality and utility of my ideas in real life and in contrast to the ideals of others.