R. I. P Chris Harman

The Future of Capitalism

A debate at King’s College London, between Alex Callinicos (SWP) and Martin Wolf (Financial Times)

Lost In London

Well, it had to happen sooner or later.  Eh I don’t care, I got home in the end and the exercise will havedone me good.  And it is wonderful to be living here!  Anyway, without further ado, here’s the song

(and by the way, big respect for the dude who got L M H R tattooed accross his knuckles in response to the BNP turning up to his band’s gigs)

Volver, an’ that

With canny timing, just before the release of his new film Broken Embraces, Pedro Almodovar’s Volver was on FilmFour t’other night. It tells the story of a crisis in the main character Raimunda’s life which disturbs the memory of traumas she thought she’d buried long ago – memories which become physically embodied in the form of her mother, seemingly returned from the dead. I saw another of his films a few years ago, Bad Education, in which men who’d been abused as children try to rewrite their past and, with it, themselves. From what I’ve heard, Broken Embraces moves away from the whole child-abuse thing, but takes the idea of manipulating the past in an attempt to outmanoeuvre bad memories and develops it further.

This obsession isn’t peculiar to Almodovar. The process which Raimunda and her family have to go through in Volver reflects what is happening on a larger scale across Spain. The dictatorship of General Franco only came to an end in the 1970s, still very much within the lifetimes of many people and the lifetimes of many more people’s parents. The transition to democracy was managed by the King and the conservative establishment after Franco’s death, and there was a great deal of continuity from the old regime to the new one (indeed Spain’s last Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, the warmongering bastard and close ally of Bush and Blair, was once a member of Franco’s own party).

Accordingly, there was never much in the way of Truth and Reconciliation; on the contrary, an unspoken pact of forgetting bound people never to speak of what had passed. Not unlike the aftermath of many a family trauma, all references to the fascist regime were locked away in a dark cupboard which – at least until very recently, as a generation that never knew fascism began to reach maturity – everyone sort of knew never to open.

This is a confusing and oppressive way to live. A line in Volver reveals Raimunda’s village, isolated and built on secrets, to have the highest rate of insanity in the world, or something, and that’s not exactly surprising. Our lives are shaped by the experiences we’ve lived through just as our societies are products of their histories and if that-thing-we-don’t-talk-about was really such a big deal then its legacy will be more or less everywhere. Avoiding it will require constant, unacknowledged vigilance. Pretty stressful stuff.

This kind of stress is one of the themes of China Miéville’s new novel, The City and the City, although I think it might tell us more about Northern Ireland than Spain. As surreal as you’d expect from Miéville, the book is set in two cities which occupy the same physical location. Their separation is the product of tremendous mental discipline from the inhabitants of both, with presence in one city dependent upon an ability to “unsee” what is happening in the other. This unseeing is, in turn, enforced by a terror of the mysterious authority known only as “Breach”. Like Breach, the main role of Franco’s secret police was to scare people out of seeing what they weren’t supposed to see – and the terror they inspired continued to do so long after they had gone.

The classic example of social control through suppression of history usually comes from revisionism in Stalinist Russia and its satellites, of which George Orwell provided the best-known literary examination. “In times of usual deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” “Who controls the present controls the past, and who controls the past controls the future.” Stuff like that. That Stalin and Franco had to go to such extraordinary lengths to bury the past is no coincidence, as we’ll soon see, but the suppression of history is routinely achieved with much less effort in the “free world” of market capitalist democracies.

I say “suppression”, but of course it’s not that. Historical knowledge isn’t just available, it’s actively taught in schools and propagated on TV and in the media. It’s quite a strange and convoluted form of history, though. I remember my GCSE in Social and Economic History, which basically told the story of the Industrial Revolution in Britain mainly through tedious lists of inventions. Even this was a great leap forward from all I’d been taught before, in which the point of view of ordinary people was completely off the agenda.

The French Revolution, if it happened at all, was best understood through the eyes of Marie Antoinette – and not the tens of thousands of ordinary Parisians who risked everything to confront a regime that kept them in starvation, establish democracy and abolish slavery. But it’s in the 20th Century that we really lose the plot. In the space of a few short generations, the memory of the uprisings of the 1920s has been almost completely edited out of existence. People know about the Jarrow march, maybe, but the general strike that nearly toppled the government? The mass mutinies that stopped Churchill carrying WWI into revolutionary Russia when everyone had had quite enough of dying for no reason? Nothing.

As we get closer to the present it gets worse and worse. Labour Party member John O’Farrell’s popular book An Utterly Impartial History of Britain arbitrarily decides to stop history at 1945. The struggle for women’s liberation, the economic collapse and subsequent fightback of the 1970s, the miners’ strike, the rise of the National Front and its long defeat by mass antifascist activity, the collapse of Social Democracy, the war on Iraq and our opposition to it – O’Farrell wants you to know your history, but not that history. Not the history that made the world as we know it and certainly not the history that people like you have helped to shape.

History, in other words, hasn’t been suppressed, as such. It has been atomised. It has been cut off from the people who make it (or rather, they have been cut off from it). This is, of course, a product of ruling class propaganda and indoctrination, but not that much. When Marx wrote that the ruling ideas of society are the ideas of the ruling class, he didn’t think it was because all capitalists are as skilful manipulators as Derren Brown. He meant that the kind of society we live in, and the way it is run, informs the context in which we form our ideas, to the extent that the ideas of those at the top just seem like common sense.

For example, under capitalism, we are made to compete with each other for wages, conditions and artificially scarce resources, and so many people’s experience makes it easier for them to believe the capitalist telling them that deep down everyone is a ruthless bastard than the socialist telling them that we can all unite in the struggle. What’s more we organise society through the exchange of commodities between individuals: you can buy something from wherever its on offer, or you can sell it to whoever’s asking, but you’re pretty much totally cut off from the big picture of how it gets produced and distributed and consumed. This too has implications for our understanding of the world.

We can see this very clearly in economics. The “neoclassical” model and its predecessors, which between them have dominated mainstream economics since the 19th century (give or take some necessary flirtations with stuff that actually make sense) take the isolated individual as their starting point, and have this individual buy and sell things to no-one in particular. They love using the example of Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on a desert island. Now there are aspects of our lives under capitalism which undermine such an understanding – in particular in the workplace, where most of us do spend most of our time and energy, and where we are blatantly anything but consumerist hermits – and others which reinforce it.

Insofar as we do think of ourselves in Robinson Crusoe mode, we cut ourselves off from each other and thus from our power to act collectively. This act of “unseeing” our shared interests and shared power is, of course, something that all socialists seek to undermine. As revolutionary socialists, though, we have to go further. We have to remember that if history happens anywhere, it isn’t on Robinson Crusoe’s island. The commodity fetish, the atomisation of capitalist society, doesn’t just cut us off from each other, it cuts us off from the big picture of historical change – and in doing so, from the possibility of changing history.

This is why Lenin, if it was Lenin (I am writing this offline so I’m not able to check), said that a revolutionary party needs to be the memory of the working class. We need to stop “unseeing” our past if we are to play any role in our future. This is why the bit at the end of the Marxism festival when everyone sings the Internationale is so electrifying. It doesn’t just link us up with the other people in the room: it links us up with the workers of the Russian Revolution and the partisans defending the Warsaw Ghetto.

Franco came to power in a fascist counterrevolution. When his uprising began, it was a response to mass general strikes and demonstrations, to election landslides by socialists, communists and anarchists, by collectivisation programmes of land and industry, to a society in which, as George Orwell put it, the workers were in the saddle. It wasn’t enough merely to defeat this revolution: there would always be many many more workers than there were fascist boot boys. That’s why the act of forgetting, of unseeing, of disowning history became so important the idea of taking the saddle loomed large in the minds of the workers and, for Franco, Hitler, Pinochet and fascists everywhere, that possibility needed to be wiped out of their consciousness with as much violence as necessary. (Stalinism too, it hardly needs to be said, has its origins in a counterrevolution to purge the legacy of 1917 once and for all.)

And so, opening up to the truth about Franco leads the way to opening up about what came before. Let’s go back to where we started, with contemporary Spanish cinema. Before Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom in the mid 1990s – a wonderful film, by the way, and one that was available to view online at Google video last time I checked – the subject of the Civil War and the revolution was more or less completely out of bounds; now there is a surge of interest, and a bumper crop of films on the subject (There’s an article in Socialist Review a few months back on this, but like I said I can’t get the links).

But even if there had never been a Spanish Revolution to rediscover in the past, the act of breaking the pact of forgetting massively improves the chances of making one happen in the future. We’ve all seen the effect that mass meetings and demonstrations can have on people, raising the possibility of taking collective action after a lifetime of atomisation. Similarly, it’s hard to really think about shaping history until you stop being terrified of even looking at it. The skeletons in the cupboard count among the many enemies whose power we will have to smash. It’s very exciting to see this happening in Spain – and, looking at how hard the place has been hit by the crisis, not a moment too soon.

Unky Barack’s seasonal greetings

Barack Obama, I gather, has sent out a nice happy Ramadan message to the Muslims of the world. I can’t be bothered finding a link but it’s all over my facebook so I trust you’ll locate it with a quick Google. Well, it is a nice gesture: a refreshing change from his predecessor, and a middle finger at the racists who’ve done so well out of the War on Terror.

One thing sort of spoils it though:

The death toll from a suspected US air raid in Pakistan has risen after nine more bodies were pulled from the rubble, officials have said.

Three Pakistani intelligence officers said on Saturday that 21 people had been killed in the attack in the village of Dande Darpa Khel in North Waziristan a day earlier.

A local tribal elder said six children were among the dead.

…

Friday’s raid was the third in three weeks by what are believed to be CIA-operated pilotless aircraft.

I’d also like to convey my Ramadan greetings to my Muslim friends and comrades, but alas I don’t have a flying deathbot to deliver them.

Would you like the best years of your life with that?

 

From The Economist (via BoingBoing), a chart showing “how long it takes a worker on the average net wage to earn the price of a Big Mac in 73 cities.”

Not only truth, but supreme beauty

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to apologize for the prosecution of Alan Turing that led to his untimely death.

MATHEMATICIAN, LOGICIAN, WARTIME CODEBREAKER, VICTIM OF PREJUDICE - "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere like that of sculpture."

Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code and told us how to tell whether a machine could think.

He was also gay. He was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated as a ‘cure’, and took his own life, aged 41.

The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing for his treatment and recognize that his work created much of the world we live in and saved us from Nazi Germany. And an apology would recognize the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended this man’s life and career.

More Book Reviews: The Devil and the Taliban

It hasn’t been the greatest of weeks, spent mostly discovering the true meaning of the phrase “writer’s block” with only the cat and an unwritten essay for company.  But, as befits such a week, I’ve got a fair amount of reading done, getting through both The Devil in Amber by Mark Gatiss  and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.  If you’ve been kept awake at night by speculation of what I think about both or either of these books, then tonight is your lucky night for – in furtherance of the noble aim of procrastination – I fully intend to review them both.

Like Spinning Plates

They’ve also just brought out a new song dedicated tothe memory Harry Patch, the man who never wanted to go to war – and who now finds warmongering generals trying to hide behind his memory.  But when I listened to Like Spinning Plates just now I was more reminded of Ed Miliband, whose inane adventures you can follow on Twitter while the Vestas workers are forced out of work in the background.

The Fountain at the Centre of the World

Insomnia again.  Boo.  It’s not like I don’t have stuff I need to have slept well for.  Anyway.  When I started this blog, I told myself I’d regularly review all the books and films that crossed my path.  That ship has long sailed right out of view, but there’s no reason I can’t do it sporadically.  So here goes, with Rob Newman’s novel The Fountain at the Centre of the World, which I just finished for the second time.  Here goes…