Category: Politics

The Dale Farm affair

by Matthijs Krul

An old scrapyard near Basildon, Essex, is not normally a site that would draw international attention and be at the center of a major social and political controversy crossing traditional lines of interest. But when Basildon council decided to request and enforce an eviction order against a Traveller community living on the site known as Dale Farm, it became the focus of activists and political bodies from comrade Vanessa Redgrave CBE to the United Nations. The Traveller community of Dale Farm, some 90 families strong, owns the land legally but occupies half of it without a planning permit for building. Basildon Council points out that the site is officially on a greenbelt site, and therefore no planning permission can be granted despite appeals by the Travellers present there. The greenbelt, after all, was created as a purposely ‘undeveloped’ and non-urban space to preserve open land around the heavily urbanized southeast of England, in particular London and the ring of commuter towns around it. Furthermore, the council claims it is already hosting more Traveller sites than any other nearby borough (although it does not define this) and therefore feels it is being unfairly portrayed as hostile to vulnerable people. What to do?

It is not the specifics of the case that make it interesting as a political question. After all, the law is clearly on the side of Basildon Council, while at the same time humanity seems on the side of the Travellers. After all, even a government inspector noted that there is a distinct lack of Traveller sites in the general area and significant overpopulation. There are no particular indications that the Traveller presence causes problems in other ways, the children attend local schools, and so forth. What makes the case interesting is the ramifications it has in terms of a conflict between political interests that have in the last decades been increasingly allied: left-wing political sentiments and environmentalist ones. After all, any socialist worth their salt is naturally inclined to defend a vulnerable, often exploited people on the margins of society against the authority of a borough council in Essex trying to prevent them from living in the homes they maintain on unused land. But on the other hand, many on the left would in general also be inclined to support the notion of the green belt, and the necessity for preserving open landscape to preserve the ecosystem, for walking and cycling and other forms of enjoyment of open space, and to restrain the limitless hunger of some city councils for covering all England in asphalt for the benefit of dreary ‘new town’ shopping malls. That makes this an unusually direct case of the interest of the human against the interest of the natural.

It will be no secret that the present author thinks the green-red coalition, to put it in contemporary terms, that has formed in the last 40 years or so is an important step forward for a more comprehensive and scientific political understanding of how to achieve a socialist society. But this test case, so to speak, demonstrates the limits to the potential this alliance has. A shortage of housing, especially when it redounds to the discomfort of the poorest and most marginalized groups in the country, is a very serious issue for any socialist. The United Kingdom has suffered from a dramatic underinvestment in public housing construction since the days of the Thatcher government, and the slow deflation of the housing price bubble will do nothing to allay these issues for those not ranked as middle class. One may like or dislike the semi-nomadic lifestyle of the Travellers; certainly, from the point of view of the full development of the individual there serious problems with the isolated and patriarchal nature of some of the culture of this group. But that is not germane to the current case, as there is no indication of any hostility towards the society of Basildon generally on the part of the Travellers, merely a desire to live as they have done for a considerable amount of time. The site itself is indeed in unmistakably green land, but is also a former scrapyard, which implies that even the pretense of unsullied nature would be hard to maintain for Basildon council or the town’s visitors – while of course every critical environmentalist is aware of the relative and invented nature of any ‘open nature’ in any case. This, in turn, raises the question of priorities, and more particularly, the question of for whose benefit a country is planned.

Local planning laws are, as any planning is, a formalization of the recognition of the need for all societies to control the interaction between its members and to create out of the chaos of social relations a particular structure of life as an emergent property, one with a definite political form and purpose. As soon as humans have historically entered into relations with others in a fixed place for an indefinite period of time, such planning is the prerequisite of all human control over our own lives. But at the same time, they are also always a restriction of individual freedom. In this sense, all planning is the victory of the abstract freedom of the social individual, the species-being, over the physical freedom of the individual creature. This can be justified if and only if its actual reality is to enhance, rather than diminish, the mutual recognition of humans in which their full development as individuals depends on the full development of each of the other individuals, the only authentic form of society. This is as true for environmental planning as for any other.

For reasons scientific and aesthetic, taking the human interaction with nature – our metabolism as Marx called it – into account is of prime importance in making political decisions. The days of pretending pollution would not kill the poor, that uneducated people do not care about having green spaces, or that adverse ecological impacts can be limited to any small region are clearly over. Whether we like it or not, we must face the consequences of the global system capitalism has created, and the interrelationship of all the natural elements with each other and with our own production – the crisis of nonrenewable resources being the clearest example of this. But general ecological principles can only be justified insofar as they serve human goals, insofar as they enable a better life in every respect: better production, greater aesthetic enjoyment, more freedom to roam, better health, and a better comprehension of the world we live in and its physical properties. But they cannot be a hindrance or a let, a hard limit to the needs of humans for their own sake. Getting the line right between these requires a very careful understanding of the intricate and contradictory nature of the web of our interactions with our environment, the way it shapes us and the way we shape it – perhaps truly a case where the use of the term ‘dialectics’ would be appropriate. In the case of Dale Farm, the preservation of the green belt on this particular site by means of public planning fails that test.

London Burning: One Week After the Riots

by Matthijs Krul

Why all of a sudden this unrest
and confusion. (How solemn the faces have become).
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?

Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
and said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.
– Konstantinos Kavafis, “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1904), tr. Edmond Keeley

If there was ever any doubt as to the meaning and significance of the concept of political consciousness, that should now be laid to rest. One week after the (seeming) end of the worst riots the United Kingdom – and particularly London – has seen since the Second World War, politicians, police, and the public are still trying to understand the causes and motives behind the events. After the death of Mark Duggan, a suspected gangster from Tottenham, by a police bullet the city erupted in a multiple day spree of looting, aggression and arson which saw everything from estate agents’ offices to the Victorian-era carpet store ‘House of Reeves’ go up in flames. The outburst of violence, mainly centered in neighbourhoods with a proportionally large black population but by no means exclusively perpetrated by black citizens, then spread quickly to middle-class areas as well as other cities of the country, with Birmingham and Manchester seeing some of the most severe violence. The police and government were caught entirely by surprise. Cameron and Johnson had to return from their respective holidays in a hurry while the Metropolitan Police had to call in assistance from as far as Wales and Cumbria to restore ‘law and order’. The government’s response was nonetheless clear: it put a total of 16.000 policemen onto the streets of London and with most stores closing early or altogether, the riots ended as suddenly as they had started, leaving politicians and analysts from left to right rudderless in their wake.

In order to appear serious and in control, the predictable response of the Coalition government has been to use the heavy hand of the law on everyone even vaguely associated with the looting and the riots. In scenes almost reminiscent of Victorian or even 18th century British ‘justice’, one man has been sentenced to six months imprisonment for stealing 3.50 worth of mineral water, whereas two hot-headed gentlemen have been given a full four years for inciting to rioting in a message on Facebook. The government has furthermore called for extending the powers of the police to implement curfews within London, not excluding minors, and various borough councils are seeking to make homeless the families of convicted rioters with the full backing of the cabinet. Of course, this harsh and collective form of punishment will do nothing but add to the grievances that already exist among many of the poor and minority groups in the country, not least in the capital. For there are many of these and they are real, and the fact they have not been taken seriously for three decades is the true cause of these riots, however they may have been experienced subjectively. Much has already been written by commentators less on the side of law, Bentham and private property about the enormous and rising inequality in the United Kingdom, which not only puts the country to shame even in comparison with the mediocre nonentities ruling many continental nations, but also encourages the formation of gangs and the disaffection from society generally experienced by many young people today. When nobody is looking out for you and there is no hope and no prospect, how is anyone expected to give a damn about ‘law-abiding citizens’ and their property? Why would any of the young black people, suffering 50% unemployment between the ages of 16 and 25, have any warm feelings towards the managers of electronics chain stores or even small shopkeepers in their own neighbourhoods?

It will not do to pretend that the formation of gangs, who were in any case only marginally involved in the riots (with 3/4ths of identified rioters having had no gang connection whatsoever), is some sort of natural growth. After all, mould only grows there where the structure is allowed to rot, and that is exactly what has happened in this case. With the parliamentary chatterers, ever more difficult to tell apart in policy or rhetoric, stealing tens of thousands out of the public purse with barely any repercussions, with the most savage cuts to public services and support for the poor while hundreds of billions are awarded to private banks to reward them for their failure even by the standards of capitalism itself, and with widespread corruption among the country’s premier police force and the country’s greedy vultures of the tabloid press alike, it is obvious even to the least politically aware that there is something fundamentally rotten in the state of Britain. But so far, this has only caused the confidence of the British public in its government and institutions to be lower than at perhaps any point in history.

What is missing is a politically conscious response, an awareness of these circumstances as being more than incidental cases of corruption, but being immediately part and parcel of the reshaping of society by the ideology of neoliberalism (even in its ‘Big Society’ form) interacting with the incentives of the capitalist system generally. Tony Blair has played the role of Deng Xiaoping, and in his unprecedented three terms in office told his precious middle classes ‘to get rich is glorious’; and with the country already in the stranglehold of the City financiers, those who were clever or unscrupulous enough to stock-job, bribe, or flatter their way upwards have done so, taking no prisoners on their way. This has left the country with inequality not seen since the days of Disraeli, an economic depression that is soon to enter its fourth year, and now the poorest areas burning while Russian and Arab oligarchs use the low value of sterling to ‘invest’ in properties in Kensington and Knightsbridge. But while there is a general sense of corruption and something being amiss even among normally such establishment papers as the Daily Telegraph, neither the commentators (with the occasional exception of the Guardian‘s remaining ‘left’) nor the rioters themselves seemed much interested in connecting cause and effect.

The latter in particular is to be regretted. Although in these matters I should speak for myself, I think all socialists here have experienced the events with ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, the destruction of some local stores, petty thievery, and the burning of independent carpet shops hardly constitutes a serious case of class warfare, and we should not forget that to give the government a full licence to further restrict and repress the few liberties yet unaffected by almost 20 years of ‘new politics’ is a serious matter. The part of the working class still fortunate enough to have a job to go to does not approve of the destruction of their homes and neighbourhoods, and little is achieved by burning a vehicle or two (if it did anything, Sarkozy would not still be in office). One can’t blame anyone but the government for its singularly repressive, unimaginative, and revealing response to the events, but we can recognize that provoking the public more generally into hatred of overt signs of resistance is not in our favour. With the student demonstrations as well as the TUC one, there was the general sympathy of much of the population, and the targeting of more explicitly political sites – such as tax evading stores and bailed-out banks – is a different case. The latter also happened in the recent riots, but the mainstay of the action consisted of the looting of televisions and brand-name sneakers, and this does not constitute socialist or any politics by anyone’s measure.

Yet this is not a condemnation as such, and that is the other side of the equation. Frustration has been building up among many of the poor and neglected people, and there are ever more of those. Frustration with the searching powers of the Metropolitan police, which have been so overwhelmingly aimed at black youth that they constitute a case of racial harrassment on their own. Frustration with the lack of jobs, not just among blacks, but increasingly among all sections of the working class. Frustration with the housing problem, with decaying council blocks increasingly being next door to shiny new developments for a gentrifying middle class commuting to the finance jobs where the salary for interns is often significantly more than the median wage and which these people will never have. And with successive governments not having built any serious amount of public housing since Thatcher ended councils’ obligation to do so, this is worsening year by year. Frustration with the blatant corruption, ineptness, and venality of a ruling class which wastes the public money on duck ponds and wars in Afghanistan while cutting poor people’s subsidies for education and forcing disabled people into work they are unable to perform. Frustration with the government’s attempts to sell off the country’s most socialist and most popular institution, the National Health Service, under the pretext of ‘efficiency gains’ when the abysmal state of the country’s privatized railways show the folly of such ideas daily even to middle class commuters. Frustration with the class warfare from the top, in short, whether it’s abolishing social programs for ‘disadvantaged’ youth or lowering the tax rate for people making several times the median wage when the country is supposedly out of money.

What is truly to be regretted, therefore, is not the property damage as such. While this serves no particular purpose, and the opportunistic intervention of gangs (often themselves composed of people who are bored and desperate at once) has made the events deadly where they did not need to be, this is just the symptom. The real issue is not that the riots were wrong, but that they were the wrong riots: because the people involved, insofar as they were not just opportunistic in the first place, had no political consciousness and no awareness of what social structures and changes they are part of, the only target for their frustration were obvious icons in the local area: the local stores reminding them every day of the restrictive effect of poverty, the chain stores selling goods they could never afford to buy legally on a 65 pound per week ‘benefit’ check, estate agents displaying proudly the highest rents in Europe as a result of a mercenary and totally unregulated private rental market, and so forth. Moreover, one should not underestimate the importance of people utterly impotent to affect anything in their lives having some semblance of power for once – the adrenalin rush alone makes it tempting. But the poorest of the local petty bourgeoisie is not the cause of the despair and your average Sikh off-licence manager is no better off than anyone with a job in Tottenham or Salford. Neither will Carphone Warehouse or Foxton’s suffer much from the damage – the costs go to their insurer, who will pass it on to the likes of Swiss Re, giants of finance capital in gleaming offices in Zürich that no gang member from Croydon will even have heard of.

In fact, this spontaneous outbursting of rebellion is much like those of medieval peasants, of poor Victorian artisans or even the much-maligned Communards, and no more deserves condemnation by socialists per se than those did. We now recognize in those the signs of class struggle, regardless of the flaws of some of their strategies and the subjective notions of the participants. The fact the government is responding not too much unlike the government did at Peterloo, be it less deadly, is telling in this regard. But what had been an opportunity for showing the strength of a frustrated, neglected, and depressed populace in taking seriously the real looting – the looting of the wealth they have created by those who already have most of it – turned into an affair more reminiscent of the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, in which the poor black population vented its anger onto random Korean shopowners and achieved nothing but further repression and emptying of their neighbourhoods for their efforts. That the House of Reeves burned instead of Canary Wharf’s chrome monoliths is the real tragedy of these times. For socialists, this shows how much work we have to do to rebuild a conscious movement.

Israel, the CPGB, and the National Question

by Matthijs Krul

In their statement on the Arab Spring and the general situation in the greater Middle East, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) makes some common but fundamental mistakes in dealing with Israel and the national question. By the national question we mean the spectrum of political issues dealing with national liberation and resistance movements, the self-determination of peoples, and questions of separatism, irredentism, and the counter-nationalism of states attempting to prevent these. Dealing correctly with the national question has often been the Achilles’ heel of Marxist movements, as the evolving and sometimes confused statements by Marx & Engels on the topic have been of little help, and later ‘authorities’ have disagreed so virulently on the subject. Moreover, nationalism takes many forms and guises and this has added to the inability of many Marxists to conceive of the issue properly. Yet there is no doubt that it is a question of real significance. Although some movements and parties have attempted to deal with it by simply setting the question aside, hoping it would go away, it is clear from the history of the last century that nationalist movements have been immensely powerful in determining both the success and failure of socialist politics. From the failure of internationalism at the outbreak of the First World War to the successes of socialist anti-colonial movements in harnessing nationalist ideas, there is no evading the importance of the issue. Using the CPGB’s statement as an example, we can elucidate some of the relevant considerations and show why the CPGB’s position on the Israel/Palestine conflict is the wrong one, although well-intentioned. Continue reading “Israel, the CPGB, and the National Question” →

The Libyan intervention and the Bay of Pigs: A Parallel

by Matthijs Krul

There is still much ado among socialists and left-wingers of various stripes as to the question of support for the Libyan rebels, and more particularly, what to make of the US/British/French/NATO intervention in that country. Now that the Americans, deeply fearing being enmeshed in a third hopeless and unwinnable enterprise, have quickly withdrawn, the onus is on the British and French to finish the job and drive out Ghadaffi without making it too obvious their aim is to drive out Ghadaffi: surely a task worthy of a second Suez. Since the respective leaders of the UK and France are about as intelligent and capable as their counterparts during the Suez ‘crisis’ were, this should come as no surprise. In practice, perhaps following instinct, virtually no left-wing parties and organizations whatever have actually come out in support of the foreign intervention against Ghadaffi. This seems to be entirely independent of the reported fact that some elements in the Revolutionary Council in Libya, an outfit of great political variety and opacity, had actively requested such intervention. However, among the general population there is less clarity. Although it seems that generally the majority opposes further war in Libya, probably due to war exhaustion, there is a general feeling in most responses as well as in the wider media of sympathy with any Western-led enterprise to at the very least punish the evil man Ghadaffi for his attacks on the rebels. The only prominent counterpart to this has been the consistent campaigning by MRZine and Counterpunch against the rebels themselves; they seem to have either bought “Colonel” Ghadaffi’s appeals to his Arab Jamahiriyan brand of sham socialism, or they have simply translated their habitual anti-imperialism into a position of ‘say the opposite of what your enemy says’. Neither seem to be very wise from any point of view.

That said, it does behoove us to address more fully the important question of a case like this, where there is rebellion against a disliked government, with a seeming progressive element in it, although it is unclear to what extent. At the same time, there is a potential imperialist element to the rebellion itself, because of the support from outside. This is a question of both political theory, in terms of what we take imperialism and anti-imperialism to be, as well as strategy, in that we need to decide to what extent we consider outside help by opposing forces to be acceptable to achieve generally desirable aims. To understand this, I believe it is useful to go back to an older discussion, now long forgotten: a discussion between Max Schachtman, a leader of an American socialist group originally committed to opposing both the US and the USSR in the Cold War but generally veering towards supporting the former, and Hal Draper, who had split off from the former’s group over exactly this issue, and insisted on considering each equally undesirable from the long-term point of view of socialism. The time here is the 1960s, and while one can debate the correctness of the assessment against the USSR and its allies, it may be clear that neither country involved really represented socialism as we think of it, or made any real moves towards getting there. It is in this context that the debate must be understood. The debate was about the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which at the time appeared as an uprising within Cuba itself of anti-Castro forces; it was clear to all that those forces had the support of the US, but this being the second day of the invasion, it was not yet generally known that the whole thing was set up by the US to begin with, at least not to Schachtman. For our purposes this is not the interesting part, nor is the question of whether Castro following the Soviet line was really as bad a development as it is made out to be here, since there is no equivalent situation to that in Libya today. What is interesting to us is assuming that we think of Castro as a dictator, generally undesirable but flashing ‘progressive’ credentials (like Ghadaffi), and of the rebels as they were seen initially: a motley bunch with a left and a right, the politics being entirely undetermined as yet, claiming to fight the tyrant for a free politics in Cuba of whatever kind (similar to the rebels in Libya today). Continue reading “The Libyan intervention and the Bay of Pigs: A Parallel” →

Is the end near for the Assad tyranny?

by Matthijs Krul

While the eyes of the world public have been on the internationalized conflagration in Libya, and we now have to bemoan the loss of Bahrain as a site of revolution after its bloody suppression with the connivance of Saudi-Arabia and the United States, events have been developing in a revolutionary fashion in Syria. This country is a longstanding opponent of American influence in the Middle East but also itself notorious for its meddling in the affairs of its neighbour Lebanon. The Assad clique, representing the Alevite minority in a strongly Sunni majority country, have professed themselves as most Arab dictators in such a position as forces for nationalism and progress as against the reactionary powers of sectarian politics and liberal openness to American power. With the Arab world divided in many ways between these three pathways, the Assad-Nasser-Saddam Hussein path of nationalism and state-building may appear to be the most progressive. At the least, one could be inclined to see in it a way towards the ‘developmental state’ that could lift the economic and social levels of the peoples concerned to a point where they would actually have the consciousness and ability to resist their domestic tyrants without the help of clergy or American bombers. But of course in practice they have proven as opportunistic, as stubborn and as tyrannical as their colleagues of the clerical or the Westernizing kind, and their appeals to ‘Arab socialism’ as a different way forward have long ago been revealed to be so much hollow talk. In Syria as much as in all such countries the order of the day is corruption, repression, and hypocrisy. The frequent adventures abroad and the talk of defending larger interests, whether of their so-called ‘socialism’ or the Palestinian case are but masks for the massive enrichment of a small elite at home while the people are held mute and ignorant, leaving them with little more than religious fervor to give them a sense of dignity and an ideological source for resistance. And the Assad clique has repressed even that with characteristic bloody-mindedness, virtually levelling the city of Hama when a religious rebellion against the regime of Assad sr. broke out in 1982. This suppression was done with such force that almost everyone in the city who had not fled was killed en masse, reminding one of the ‘liberating fervor’ of the Crusaders. The primary organizer was none other than Rifaat al-Assad, the brother of the current President and his main competitor for this position, sidelined since. Continue reading “Is the end near for the Assad tyranny?” →