The French election: Macron or Le Pen

Like most elections these days, the French presidential election have been unpredictable. First, it looked like Sarkozy would make a comeback, then Fillon beat him to it only to be taken out by a corruption scandal. Meanwhile Hollande bowed out of the race, leaving Benoit Hamon and Jean-Luc Melenchon to fight over the left-wing vote. And then, there were two: Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen.

Naturally, people were shocked that the far-right candidate got through. Just as they were shocked that Trump made it past the primaries, got nominated and took the White House. Some people have not been connecting the dots. Of course, this is partly down to distance. No one in France was surprised to see the National Front get past the first round. The truth is that the only certainty of this election was that Le Pen would make it to the second round. Everything else was up for grabs, or so it seemed for a while.

Now we’re told that the French establishment will mobilise a republican front united behind Macron in order to stop Marine Le Pen. This was how the French political class stopped Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002. The Socialist Party and the Republicans put aside their differences to ensure the conservative Jacques Chirac won a handsome victory of 82%. It didn’t amount to much because Chirac was fantastically shit, and the National Front continued to grow towards its current stature.

Today the polls suggest Le Pen will get around 40% of the vote and Macron will come out with 60%. Fifteen years ago, the FN got less than 20% and the Republicans secured over 80%. Although it looks unlikely right now, it may not be too far in the future before we see France elect a fascist head of state. No doubt this will come after another re-run of 2002, where the left and the right gather behind one mediocre centrist in hope of stopping the brownshirts. But for now, the name of that mediocre centrist is Macron.

The politics of a void

Much like Obama in 2008, Macron has been successful by posing as a blank slate for voters to project their hopes and dreams onto. Yet the rise of Macron is a part of the decline of the Socialist Party. It is no insignificant fact that the leading presidential candidate was a member of the PS and a part of the Hollande government until fairly recently. Indeed, Macron was the Minister of Economy, Industry and Digital Affairs under Manuel Valls.

What we will probably end up calling ‘Macronism’ is set to be another variation on Third Way politics. We know what to expect from Macron because we’ve seen it all before with Clinton, Blair and Schroeder. There are some differences of tone, of course. In his most noteworthy rally, Macron just screams at his audience like his nuts are caught on something metallic. By contrast, Blair felt the hand of history on his genitalia and spoke like a fervent preacher.

This time the Third Way comes with an astroturfed ‘movement’ and a candidate styled as an ‘outsider’ despite having all the credentials of an insider. The conditions did not favour a mainstream candidate, so it was necessary for the centre ground to reassert itself outside the mainstream. En Marche! (‘On the Move!’) was launched as a neither-left-nor-right platform with anti-establishment rhetoric. The purpose was always to deepen the neoliberal project of past governments. Except Macron says he will deliver where they all failed.

‘Macronomics’, as we will probably talk about it in the future, consists of tax cuts for the rich and a smaller state bound by an even smaller corset. Austerity is the name of the game, except not for capital. Macron promises to slash the budget by €60 billion and cut 120,000 jobs in the civil service. He wants greater integration within the EU and wants to sign up to CETA – the Euro-Canadian free trade deal. It is a fantasy for Nineties liberals.

Unfortunately for Macron, the Nineties ended a while ago and the situation today is very different. Not only is French society as volatile as ever, the world has seen a populist tide sweep away mainstream governments. There is a crisis of European social democracy, where only the far-right stand to gain until the radical left can rebuild itself and find the strategy it needs. But this also means that the Macron government can be challenged. The game is not over just yet.

The extreme centre is back

At last, the liberal commentariat has found its man: a millionaire stockbroker with an astroturfed mass of support. Mainstream European opinion long ago coalesced around Macron, he is supposedly the guy who can save the centre ground and restore the Franco-German alliance. The hope is that the populist zeitgeist can be vanquished, and the clocks turned back, in just one vote. The illusion is that President Macron will change much for the better.

Without a united front the French left was divided between Hamon and Melenchon, leaving a space open for Macron to reach the second round. Of course, I do think everyone should hold their nose and vote against Le Pen. However, the problem is that a negative vote is not enough in politics. Macron stands for a style of social and economic liberalism that is rapidly going out of date all over the world. And, in the end, the Macron programme will likely leave Le Pen and the FN in a much stronger position.

The good news is that La France Insoumise (France Defiant), the movement formed around Melenchon, might well be the basis for a new left-wing party and an offensive against the centre ground and the far-right. All the French left can do is try to build the alternative their country desperately needs. But, for the time being, you can expect more racism, more violence and an even more precarious existence for the working class. And that’s with the liberals in power.

This article was originally published by Souciant Magazine.

Blair on Putin.

Every now and then Tony Blair pops up out of nowhere and reminds us all he’s still out there on his private jet. It’s almost routine now. This time Blair tells us the West needs to focus on radical Islam. No surprise there. It’s an old message now. We’ve heard it all before. He ranked it alongside the environment in importance. Of course, it should go without saying that the politicians like Blair have never been as interested in combating climate change as they have been in waging wars in West Asia. For years all we’ve heard about has been radical Islamism and the threat it poses to liberal democracies. Yet in Blair’s mind it’s as if the West suddenly stopped focusing on radical Islam.

All of this is to be expected from Tony Blair given his record. What stands out is one of the suggestions Blair makes to this end. The former Prime Minister asks that the West put aside their differences with Russia over Ukraine. Of course, by Russia we know that the former statesman means Putin, as all statesmen see governments and countries as one in the same, just as when he refers to ‘the West’ he doesn’t mean the populations of America, Britain, and Europe. Usually ‘the West’ would only refer to North America and North-Western Europe, but since he has defined ‘the West’ in relation to Russia we can include Eastern Europe in this category as well. Like everything about Blair’s world we can only see it in its proper context.

In the ‘War on Terror’ the Russian Federation was a notable member of the coalition forged by the US with countries around the world. Back in 2001 Putin was fighting to put down an insurgency in Chechnya having flattened most of the country since the conflict first started. It was vital to the consolidation of his power in Moscow that the regions remain as Russian provinces. To some it was clear what this meant at the time. As Chomsky said in 2001 “We should look very carefully at this anti-terrorism coalition and who is joining it and why. Russia is happily joining the international coalition because it is delighted to have U.S. support for the horrendous atrocities it is carrying out in its war against Chechnya. It describes that as an anti-terrorist war. In fact it is a murderous terrorist war itself.”[1] Certainly, Blair and Putin understood this then just as they understand it today.

The tussle over Ukraine is a non-issue for Blair in his private jet. He has more pressing issues to concern himself with, such as advising the Nazarbayev regime in Kazakhstan, the al-Sabah family of Kuwait, and King Abdullah II of Jordan. For Blair the personal is political and we should never take him as a neutral agent. He stands as the Middle East Peace Envoy for the Quartet formed by the backing of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and the Russian Federation. Blair works closely alongside John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov. The Quartet was set up in 2002 in the still warm aftermath of the Second Intifada and the Israel’s war with Lebanon. The point of the Quartet has been to back ceasefire arrangements and try to bring about a peace settlement. But it’s long been clear what the arrangement is really about.

In his capacity as peace envoy Blair spends a week out of every month in Jerusalem and maintains warm relations with the Netanyahu government. He was conspicuously absent during Operation Cast Lead and chose to extend his holiday rather than comment on the unfolding bloodbath. Just as Putin has worked to build strong relations between Russia and Israel and continues to hold together the relationship in spite of the Ukrainian crisis. If there were any doubts that the Israeli government would fall in line with its American patrons those doubts were swiftly put to rest last month. On March 27^th Netanyahu abstained from the vote at the UN General Assembly on a resolution on Crimea. No doubt, Netanyahu has the old refusenik voters to consider as his coalition with Avigdor Lieberman bids to hoover up as many of them as possible.

It doesn’t stop there. Israel looks forward to a free-trade deal with Russia. The Israeli government held a moratorium on arms sales to Georgia and turns a blind eye to Putin’s rampaging in the Caucasus; and in return Medvedev cancelled a delivery of missiles to Iran in 2009.[2] In its own aggressive expansionist designs Israel cannot help but find common cause with states which have traditionally sought to expand their boundaries. Of course, this is a relationship not uncomplicated given Russia’s support in weapons of Assad and, by extension, the Hezbollah. The main objective for the Israelis is to prolong negotiations in order to give them more time to expand even further. The Russians have no objection provided they can rely on Israeli and Western support for its operations to thwart the Chechen bid for independence.

Like everything about Middle East policy in the West it all comes down to Israel. So when Ariel Sharon finally died it wasn’t too surprising to see Tony Blair at the funeral service. There the peace envoy spewed forth about how the Bulldozer brought ‘iron determination’ to diplomacy as he had to the camps of Sabra and Shatila.[3] The Israeli government were more than displeased by the last minute change in policy towards Mubarak in the US. Netanyahu wanted total support even after it had become impossible to prevent Mubarak from being removed by his own goons. The reasoning was obvious. Israel does not need a rejuvenated Arab powerhouse on its border with the reins of government in the hands of its populace. Blair and Putin couldn’t agree more. This is what realists mean when they talk about ‘regional stability’.

Not many commentators seem to recall, or perhaps they don’t want to, Blair’s remark that Hosni Mubarak is “a force for good”.[4] As the military were displaced from power and democratic elections were held in Egypt the crusader was clear. He told the readers of the Evening Standard “democracy is not just a way of voting but a way of thinking”.[5] He emphasised the need for proper institutions and pluralism and individual freedoms and a modern economy. When the Muslim Brotherhood were dumped by military putsch last summer Blair reiterated these same words as a justification for the coup. The Arab masses weren’t ready for the democracy and, as always, need a strong leader, in his mind, the kind of man General al-Sisi looks for in his mirror every morning.

If the Quartet is a roadshow for the negotiations then we should know how to frame the importance of Russian support for it. All the states involved in the ‘peace process’ declare solemn support for the two-state settlement, the matters of when, where and how remain conveniently mysterious. As part of the Quartet, only the UN has been a serious forum for international opposition to Israeli aggression and support for a two-state settlement. The UN routinely votes through resolutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict and it votes unanimously in favour of a two-state settlement. The US uses it privilege on the UN Security Council to veto all resolutions and has done consistently for over thirty years now. Meanwhile the EU has been striking in its timidity to the US until recently when the Europeans passed a modicum of sanctions against Israeli settlements. It’s clear that the Russian Federation stands with the US to counterbalance any opposition which might creep out of the UN and the EU.

This article was originally written for Souciant on May 2nd 2014.

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[1] http://www.counterpunch.org/2001/10/04/chatting-with-chomsky/

[2] http://www.cerium.ca/IMG/pdf/Yakov_200.pdf

[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-25710124

[4] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/02/tony-blair-mubarak-courageous-force-for-good-egypt

[5] http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/tony-blair-we-cant-ignore-the-middle-easts-hunger-for-change-7892819.html

Miliband's 'Lesser Evil'.

It is timely given that it was Ralph Miliband who predicted that Labour would always fail the working-class. He couldn’t have been more right. Yet the failures of Ed Miliband will be portrayed as the inevitable disaster of a leftward shift. To understand such a falsehood is to grapple with history. The Labour Party surrendered the ground of opposition long ago. It was set in motion years before Ed Miliband took on the leadership role. The battles waged in the 1960s and 70s internal to the Establishment have had consequences which are still living with. Monetarism filled the cracks of the decaying post-war settlement with James Callaghan stepping in with just the rhetoric the IMF demanded of the British government. That was 1976. By 1979 the choice we faced was between a right-wing Labour government and an even more right-wing Conservative government.

Almost 35 years later and we’re still ensnared by the politics of frugality. The election of 1979 should not be forgotten even if the old hag has finally given up the ghost. The lesser evil offered by Labour in 1979 set the course for the way things have transpired and before we knew it the lesser evil of Tony Blair was on the television. The incessant bleating of John Major’s scandal government couldn’t have made the Third Way more appealing. Blair would make a few gestures to his base – such as minimum wage, devolution, fox-hunting ban etc. – only to institute tuition fees, crackdown on civil liberties and leave the banks to run amok. All the while the Labour government sat back as income inequality steadily grew to its highest point since 1961. As if all of this isn’t bad enough, by 2005 Blair had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq with all the gusto of a child playing with toy soldiers. There ceased to be a lesser evil at all in other words. 

The afterbirth of Blairism first appeared before us as the mound of Brown, only to be left inert and solid by the cold winds of the 2010 election. Since then Ed Miliband has tottered about as Labour leader making as few commitments as humanly possible. The gutter-press went on a pre-emptive offensive against any possible imaginative thoughts in Miliband’s head and dubbed him ‘Red Ed’ for good measure. Yet Miliband soon brought on board Maurice Glasman to engage in ‘Blue Labour’ shenanigans to siphon off the communitarian appeal of ‘Red Tory’. The competition is over a very small slice of votes, while the working-class vote is taken for granted. So he’s had plenty of experimentation with ‘Blue Labour’, ‘predistribution’ and, finally, ‘One Nation Labour’ which was literally plagiarised from the Conservative government of 1868. In spite of this inconvenience, Matthew D’Ancona described Miliband’s speech as ‘divisively left-wing’.

Serious minded people can see that the trilateral consensus has reached an impasse where the only task left is to dress up right-wing policies as cute and cuddly. Brown’s odour remains very much with us. Even though the financial crisis was a product of decades of economic policy around the world the Conservatives have succeeding in shifting the terms of the debate from growth to cuts. The Labour Party works within the same field of assumptions. Appropriately Blair is all for austerity and Ed Miliband has, in effect, signed on for austerity lite (at best). The reddest moment might’ve been last September when Miliband said “We will repeal [the Coalition’s] NHS bill” on the grounds that “it puts the wrong principles back at the heart of the NHS.” That’s not a bad statement, yet the NHS bill isn’t specified (thereby leaving open the possibility of a U-turn). Around that time Labour leader was saying that the next Labour government wouldn’t spend £3 billion to undo the restructuring currently underway. Again, the Health and Social Care Act remained unnamed. Then in June of this year the same walking disappointment reiterated his desire to repeal Cameron’s ‘Health Act’. None of this wordplay inspires confidence.

It seems obvious that the Labour Party is not settled in leadership, let alone in policy where Miliband has insisted that he won’t make promises which he cannot keep (so he makes no clear promises at all). The cowardice is for all to see. Blair and Brown managed to lose the Labour Party around 5 million votes in a period of 13 years. It may be too early for the Labourites to distance themselves from the legacy of New Labour. That would concede ground to the Conservatives who seek to blame everything that they are doing on Brown’s juggernaut-like spending spree. It is significant that the Conservatives failed to achieve a parliamentary majority against this backdrop of mass-disaffection. In fact, the Conservatives could only muster a 3% increase since 2005 and they haven’t seen a majority victory since the glory days of John Major. Perhaps it was a sign of inexorable decline when the carcass of Stephen Milligan was found festooned with electoral cord, bin bag, fruit and stockings.

The state of crisis within the Labour Party may be obvious, but the parallel crisis in the Conservative Party has received little discussion. The plump-lipped Michael Portillo has speculated that the Tories might not see a majority in this decade either. No governing party has ever increased its majority in Parliament since Anthony Eden. In that case it will have been 30 years since the Conservatives held a majority share of the seats in Parliament. No opposition party has achieved a majority swing for a good eight decades. It looks as though Parliament may still be hanging in 2015. Only the well-disciplined bootlicker Liberal Democrats can secure another coalition with one of the real parties. And the psephologists of the Labour-Conservative oscillation know it. In other words, the conditions are there for a left-wing alternative to challenge the centre-ground. We can even build that alternative, or sit and wait for the lesser evil to reappear.

This article was written for and posted at The Third Estate on August 26th 2013.

Bad-Looking Narcissists.

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are." - Gore Vidal

It was quite something to open The Evening Standard on the day that the Queen shook hands with Martin McGuinness and find columns penned by Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Bob Geldof. Blair stands as a living monument to everything wrong with British politics, one of the few pimps to be his own prostitute complete with the moral fibre of an open sewer. And then there is Clinton, a wretched primate standing atop the post-politics of personality and nothing more. Both men are the end products of a process that has hollowed out the discourse in countries where there was barely anything of political substance to desecrate in this way. Thrown into this mix is the white Knight, a mediocre musician, who saved the deserving and left the undeserving to die for our redemption. These spurious progressives know the

Third Way

to rape the developing world. Naturally they write with worry of the Arab’s push towards democracy against the old dictatorships and temper this anxiety with feel-good stories about the steps forward the black African has made.

Don’t forget when Mr Blair praised Mubarak as a ‘force for good’ just before he fell; thoughthe Clintons had always regarded Hosni as family. At least there was never a famine in Egypt, so Sir Bob never had to pose as the redeemer of mankind and toss millions into the mouths of leathery generals swimming in the Nile. And yet Blair has plenty of words to pen, with the blood under his fingernails, when it comes to lecturing ‘barbarians’ on how to run a democracy. He has no time to go into the details of the soft coup that has been carried out to neuter the officials elected to high office. It was seen early on that the outcome of the elections would be a marriage between felools and fanatics. But Blair seems blissfully ignorant. Really the stage is set for democracy in the Middle East, Blair salivates at the possibility of it all falling apart. If it ends up as a military junta “We told you so!” If it ends up as a theocracy, even better!

Of course, Blair has to pat the Arabs on the head for dethroning his friend – a man who held ‘terror suspects’ kidnapped by the CIA in chambers where their children could be tortured – what else would we expect of him? He’s too proud to concede defeat, let alone failure or wrongdoing. The poodle is always in the right, even when he says he’s on the Left. He reminds us “People often say: learn the lesson of Iraq. Actually, I have.” He says so only to draw an analogy between the bombing of Baghdad and the uprising in Cairo. He knows no shame in his capacity for self-love. Now he warns of a religious obstacle in the pathways to new heights of progress for Arabs. Oh he’s aware that Washington is perfectly happy to foster a marriage of convenience between the corrupt military establishment and Islamic conservatives. The idea is to buy-off the Egyptian masses and secure the status quo, namely a tacit alliance with Israel. And Tony Blair is most definitely preoccupied with the affairs of the Jewish State.

Blair wants nothing more than to hold a ‘special place’ in history and make a lot of money in the process. He’s already working to finger Palestinians out of oil found off of the coast of Gaza. It’s clear that Blair was anointed to the Quartet in order to look out for Israeli interests in the Middle East. This was the conclusion drawn by Tory journalist Peter Oborne. As Blair insists that he has visited the region 86 times and has an office in Jerusalem (that he barely uses) he maintains that the only workable solution is “an Israel secure and recognised by the region, and a viable independent State of Palestine.” It’s not common knowledge that the Arab states (with the support of the PLO) accepted the right of Israel to exist within secure and recognised borders. This was part of a platform for a two-state settlement in 1976 with Palestine confined to the occupied territories. The US vetoed the UN resolution and it was wiped from history.

 

Bob Geldof exudes a sense of great achievements when he writes of the “unprecedented effect of connectivity as the largest mobile phone market in the world took off”. A pattern seems to emerge as Bill Clinton has words of praise for mobile phones too.Apparently all over “cell phones are being used for banking, helping refugees find lost relatives, and allowing small producers such as fishermen find the prevailing market prices commodities.” Neither of them mentions the possibility that African countries could well do with major infrastructural investment. The construction of a landline network of phones could potentially create a lot more jobs than what precious little good banking does for Africa. The more it would seem Bob and Bill are just spewing sentimental guff crafted to fill the reader’s head with a soothing warmth. We don’t have to worry about changing the world, just wait for the moment for a feel-good shout. Surely poverty is a gift from the heavens. After all it gives us something to make us feel better about living in a society of moral degenerates.

Never mind what Oscar Wilde said about the beggar you encounter, if you don’t want to be bothered by him then you need a system that can end homelessness. Look on the bright side of the Chinese running the gamut when it comes to ringing Africa dry of any profit that the white man might’ve forgotten to soak up. You can forget about Mugabe and the US bombing of Somalia! Listen to Bob’s statistical bragging and swallow it for the pablum it is. Who wants to know what the great white Knight means when he says that Africa is ‘open for business’? Did you know that out of ten of the fastest growing economies there are six African countries? The International Monetary Fund, that beloved friend of the black man, predicts the African continental economy will grow by 5% in 2012. Perhaps it’s time to drag Geldof down to Golgotha and nail him to the cross. Surely it would raise a package big enough to choke the reptiles who pick at the bones of the famished African.

All the while Geldof barks on about a ‘new Africa’ as he reassures us that we can all prosper from its newfound exuberance. He just barely resists the urge when he notes that the majority of Africa’s people are under 16. Someone should tell Nike where these young  and energetic workers can be found. Perhaps Gap and Primark have already had a go at them, Shell has probably hung a few of them. The truth is Geldof needs black Africa to remain an impoverished basket-case for his career. What else can a musician of his calibre do? Back to the pressing issue, the Chinese creators of ‘jobs’ and ‘wealth’ for Africa. It’s true that Chinese investment leaped from £30 million to £1 billion, with Chinese-African trade leaping from £5 billion in 1998 to £53 billion in 2008. Chinese investment in Zambia is just as suspect as the interest Tiny Rowland showed in the country’s mines decades ago. Overall the influence of China in Africa is a malign one, plenty of dough for the kleptocracy in Zimbabwe and genocide in Sudan. Soon that’ll be the tip of the iceberg.

When Nixon goes to China...

... Lower Your Expectations!

Only Richard Nixon could have gone to China to make peace with Mao, for it was Nixon who was the most staunchly anti-Communist of Republicans and had been embedded in McCarthyism in the 1950s. If the step had been made by a Democrat then they would have been torn apart by the right-wing media. Only Obama can legally enshrine killing American citizens aligned with the "associated forces" of al-Qaeda, even as the conservatives accuse him of being a 'socialist' and the liberals remain silent just to keep the Republicans out of office. This is the lowering of expectations that Alexander Cockburn talks about. The business of conventional politics is rooted in a kind of realism which forecloses any manifested opposition to the ruling-class. We can see this in Britain where the Labour Party signed onto the Thatcherite programme in the 1990s, which amounted to nothing less than an assault on the minimal living standards of working-class people.

The architects of New Labour were well aware that the trade unions would hang on no matter what, a large chunk of Scotland and the North would vote Labour no matter what, so it was only a matter of winning over the Southern middle-class. Under Blair the Party quickly dumped it's commitments to any kind of socialist development, indicatively the common ownership of the workplace by workers was abandoned. It was only because of Labour's history that it could hand over the Bank of England to the private sector and let the markets run amok in the NHS. So it should be no surprise that Ed Miliband has signed onto every pathetic decision of the Conservative Party to trash health-care, education, pensions and benefits in general. The opposition has been foreclosed. Now no one stands on the side of the vulnerable and the exploited in this time of great turmoil. No doubt if Blair was in power he would be pushing through bigger cuts than the Conservative Party could get away with.

So it would seem that the Labour Party is beyond reform, you can thank Tony Blair for that. In another sense then the ground is ripe for the radicals to tap into popular disillusionment, widespread grievances and the people's wrath. We need some major decisions, perhaps the trade unions should break off from the Labour Party and align themselves with the Greens. Of course, the unions won't because they're afraid that would forfeit any influence in Parliament whatsoever. The trite of Ed Miliband is the best they can hope for and clearly the unions have lowered their expectations. There is widespread outrage at what has gone on for the last 30 years. Now we have to think of what is to be undone. It wouldn't take much to reach out to ordinary people, we've seen nearly 1 million march against cuts through the streets of London. The Coalition of Resistance seems to have petered out since Ed Miliband gave a crap speech at the March for the Alternative. The Occupy movement is a good thing in terms of popular energy, but it is insufficient in many respects.

We can't lower our expectations and give in to this crowd. We should remind ourselves that it isn't all gloom and doom. Take a close look at the hubbub around SOPA and PIPA, what do you see? So Wikipedia goes on strike because libertarian Jimmy Wales wants to take a stand for free-speech online. Can't you just make out one of the contradictions of capitalism prevalent today? The more the common is captured as private property, the more its productivity declines and yet the further expansion of the common undermines the relations of property.  Neither the state nor the market has any substantive answers to this matter. Both have demonstrated a remarkable ability to shoot themselves and each other in the foot. Jimmy Wales took a stand for free-speech and undermined property rights in doing so. The state acted to defend the interests of corporations vested in private property, but it will only reduce the productivity of the system if it succeeds. This is just another repeat of when Nixon went to China, except we won't be lowering our expectations this time!


As for the question of what's your alternative? We shouldn't shirk away from central planning even though it was largely a disaster in the 20th Century. There does exist a model for socio-economic planning within the current system and this is reason enough to not dump all talk of planning from radical programmes. In a capitalist system the markets are meant to provide coordination to an intricate network of firms, the only alternative is central planning to coordinate a network of worker self-management. The Left doesn't want to talk seriously about the question of coordination. The corporation is the most advanced, sophisticated and dynamic command and control system in world history. It is a profit-based planning system but the corporate model is not a free-market one, it sends order through supply chains to extract and distribute resources. These techniques of planning can be ripped out of the capitalist system and applied to an egalitarian end.

A Criminal Decade for Afghans.

A toast to Freedom?

We have been in Afghanistan for 10 years now, though the US has interfered in Afghan affairs for closer to 30 years. It is almost common knowledge that the US intervened in the 1980s and backed the Mujahideen to fight the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Actually it was the Carter administration that put together $500 million to set up the Mujahideen in 1978 to counteract the Saur Revolution. The fundamentalist regime of General Zia-ul-Haq was more than welcome to assist the Americans in the bid to prevent Afghanistan from falling under the Iron Curtain. The support for General Zia-ul-Haq went as far as to support the radicalisation of Pakistani society, Jihadist manuals were actually printed at the University of Nebraska before being distributed throughout Pakistan. The consequent sympathy for Islamism in Pakistan combined with bureaucratic incompetence and institutional corruption is what kept Osama bin Laden safe in the country for so long. The horrible war which has now touched Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, for lack of a better word, cannot be understood without this context.

The Poodle's reward.

In the beginning we were told this is the "fight for freedom" and we were told "we will see freedom's victory" in the end. There is little mention of the facts about the people who run Afghanistan now. It is a narco-state where 50% of the economy is "black", which means that the cultivation and trafficking of drugs accounts for half of the Afghan economy. The war lords who cultivate and smuggle drugs out of the country are the same people who slaughtered 50,000 people in a 4 year bid to takeover Kabul in the 1990s. The war lords were won over to "our side" with truckloads of cash and guns. For years now these thugs have gotten away with the mass-rape of women, girls and boys. There is no serious commitment to the reconstruction of the country, instead the Karzai government is allowed to wallow in corruption while the ordinary Afghan goes without universal health-care and education. The Afghan people are only permitted a role of ratifying the position of President Hamid Karzai as the country is occupied and trashed.

The purpose of the invasion was never to overthrow the Taliban, the US had supported the Taliban for years and had provided billions of dollars in support of the regime. Then after 9/11 came the demands from George Bush that the Taliban has to hand over Osama bin Laden to the Americans. The Taliban agreed provided that the US put forward evidence (which is normal procedure for an extradition) and the US then proceeded to bomb Afghanistan without any international authorisation in October 2001. Ironically, the following year Bush and Blair were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. It is worth noting that there were 5 million Afghans on the verge of starvation in the country at the time and, as the bombing commenced, it looked as though the number could rise to 7.5 million. Thankfully the war has not led to starvation on a huge scale, but that does not excuse the immoral nature of the war. Unless we think that it was a sensible idea for Russia to station nuclear missiles in Cuba and point them at the US because it didn't lead to a nuclear war.

The Long Ride to a Free World?

The attacks of September 11th 2001 provided an opportunity for the US to drive a wedge into the Islamist movement, which was actually highly critical of the "new approach" al-Qaeda had taken to attack the far enemy rather than one of the many near enemies. If there had been a serious operation to apprehend the suspects then a wedge could have been driven into the Islamist movement, Osama bin Laden would have been isolated and the threat of terrorism could have been decreased. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the chief strategist of al-Qaeda, wrote then that the aim of the group was to lure the US into an over-reaction in which it would "wage battle against the Muslims." So that the US would be left vulnerable in a horrible drawn-out conflict while the long divided Islamist movement could be brought together against the West. The plan worked out as the US and UK jumped at the opportunity to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. There have since been attacks against cities across Europe, from Sweden to Spain.

It is difficult to ignore the strategic value of Afghanistan and Pakistan in the battle for control of energy resources in the region, which has yet to conclude and we have to bare in mind the superpowers in waiting (e.g. China and India). Logically any pipeline from India would have to pass through Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to reach the nearest sources of oil and gas in Iran or Turkmenistan. The problem is that India could feasibly turn to Iran for oil and gas, but the US wants to isolate Iran and would prefer it if the Indians turned to Turkmenistan. Afghanistan is situated close to major energy producers in Central Asia and the Middle East, it shares a border with Iran and therefore could be used to "contain" it's independent neighbour. The possibility of a Central Asian energy network which would exclude and isolate Iran is quite appealing to the US. To the chagrin of the Americans, Iran has managed to extend its influence in Iraq and Afghanistan in spite of the continued efforts to marginalise Iran in world affairs.

Talking Tough, Talking Bullshit.

Only when some of "our lads" are killed in battle are we allowed to criticise the war. So the deaths of over 40,000 Afghans would be fine so long as no American or British troops died along the way. The assumption is that this is a noble war against terrorism, which has to be fought to secure the West from further terrorist attacks. The line goes "If we don't fight them over there, we will be fighting them over here." The same argument was used by the US government to defend it's war against the Vietnamese, President Johnson stated "We have to stop the Communists over there [Vietnam] or we'll soon be fighting them in California." This is perverse because American and British troops are effectively dying in Afghanistan to raise the threat of terrorism in the US and the UK. As the war has been escalated it has spilled over into Pakistan, so now the possibility of a state with nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamists has increased. Protection of Western civilians and prevention of the spread of terrorism has nothing to do with the Afghan War.

The war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with freedom, democracy or anything as sanitary as self-defence. Not so much as a thought of the Afghan people has ever passed through the minds of the war-pigs and chickenhawks who decided to start this war. We are only allowed to question the war because "our lads" are suffering, which might explain there is little ink and camera film used to cover the slaughter of thousands of Afghan civilians. The vast majority of the people who have been killed in Afghanistan were the victims of the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, not the defenders of Osama bin Laden. We have to concede that the backlash has come from the victims of war, the Taliban now represents a small element of the armed opposition to the occupation. The war itself has made the West hated even more than it was before 9/11 and neither George Bush nor Tony Blair will have to live with the consequences of such hatred. It was Jean-Paul Sartre who said "When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die." Think Bush. Think Blair. Think of Obama and Cameron. Forgive none of these bastards.

Support our Dupes?

Don't Forget Brian Haw!

Brian Haw died in his sleep at the age of 62 after a struggle with cancer. In the last 10 years he has become a fixture of Parliament Square in a perpetual state of protest which defied the people responsible for the deaths of over 1 million Iraqis in war, who were eager to break him with the changes to law which David Blunkett likened to a "sledgehammer". Months ago Boris Johnson won a court order to evict Brian Haw, supposedly in preparation for the Royal Wedding, just as Boris had stamped out Democracy Village back in 2010. It was just when Haw was being treated for cancer in Germany that the Mayor, in collusion with David Cameron and Theresa May, decided to make his move and Haw immediately appealed the order in spite of his deteriorating condition. In fact, it was just as the Con-Dem Coalition came to power in May 2010 that Brian Haw was arrested for perhaps the last time at 8:30am.

Over the years there were consistent attempts by the Establishment to bring his 24 hour protest to a halt. He was repeatedly arrested and taken to court by the British government, which supposedly stands for enshrined notions of bourgeois freedom. Every time Haw won so much more cunning methods were used to force him out of Parliament Square. Protest outside Parliament, without permission, was banned in 2005 and only Brian Haw was exempt because his demonstration began years before the law was passed. Oh the absurd intricacies of legal wrangling! There were efforts to evict him by force and when that didn't work the government restricted the demonstration to 1 metre by 3 metres. The most recent efforts have limited the protest to the pavement and now it looks like the protest will be kicked off of the pavement and would no doubt disappear as a result.

It is important to remember that Haw began his protest outside of Parliament in 2001, first of all against the fresh round of sanctions imposed on Iraq by Western governments and then against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Brian Haw was the son of one of the soldiers who liberated the concentration camp of Belsen. As an evangelical Christian he was deeply concerned with the suffering of oppressed peoples around the world, he had visited Northern Ireland during the Troubles and Cambodia's Killing Fields. Sadly, it would appear that Tony Blair has the last laugh in this instance and that might be a testament to the nonsense that is Karmic retribution. It is at least a testament to the moral fibre of how society that Tony Blair has gotten away with the outright war crime in which he indulged so enthusiastically. Over 1 million people have been slaughtered in Iraq, along with millions left deformed and dispossessed in the economic reforms imposed without the consent of the Iraqi people.

Iraq had been first subjected to sanctions by the United Nations soon after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 and the US struck back at the disobedient client state. In the 1990s the sanctions led to the deaths of over half a million children and possibly more people than the number of people who were killed in the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Before the sanctions Iraq was a developed country, rich with oil and dependent on imported food. In 1996 the UN Security Council permitted Iraq to sell oil in order to secure food and other essentials for it's people. The control of the capital accumulated from the sale of Iraqi oil was under the Security Council, which was in turn dominated by the US. The special sanctions committee responsible for what is allowed to flow into Iraq in exchange for oil consistently opposed the rejuvenation of vital services such as power and water.

The country was permitted to restore it's oil industry as supplies of food and contracts for equipment were withheld in New York. The worth of the equipment exceeded $1.5 billion and included the equipment needed to diagnose and treat cancer, as well as X-Ray machines, the tools necessary to put out fires and even toilet soap. The stated purpose of these sanctions was to "pacify" Iraq by forcing it's government to stop building weapons of mass-destruction. In one instance, Britain blocked vaccines for yellow fever and diphtheria from being exported to Iraq on the grounds that the vaccines might be used in weapons of mass-destruction. The country was basically held to ransom, of which the Iraqi people suffered the real consequences and Saddam Hussein held onto power in the meantime. Though the Ba'ath regime was left crippled, it only clinged to power because of the impact of the sanctions on the Iraqi people and looks likely that Saddam would have been deposed in the Arab Spring.

Red Ed, Blue Labour and other Bollocks.

Better Red than Ed.

The current leader of the Labour Party was elected on the basis of his centrist credentials, which contrasted with the Blairism of the preceding 16 years, which were welcomed by the labour movement who were imperative in his victory. The way that Ed Miliband was elected over his brother was not a victory for socialism or even social democracy, but it did signal the end of New Labour. If David Miliband was elected it would have furthered the right-ward shift of the Labour Party which began steadily in the 1980s. The transformation of the Party was taken to its fullest expression under Tony Blair in it's civil authoritarianism, interventionism and all-out market liberalism. In simpler terms, Blairism introduced killing Iraqis for oil to the Labour Party along with kidnapping "terror suspects" and sending them to be boiled alive in Uzbekistan at the pleasure of a regime no better than the Taliban. All the while New Labour only raised the bar on what Thatcher pulled off in the 80s.

The Labour Party is not active in the opening up a space into which the working-class can enter as a political agent for radical change, though the Party looks to pose as providing a means for the working-class to pursue reform of the system. This is more accurate of the Labour Party that was led by Clement Attlee, which achieved important reforms in the 1940s. But it is not true of New Labour and it definitely isn't true of Labour under Ed Miliband. There was a time when the Labour Party consisted of socialists, social democrats and Christian leftists. The particular form of hegemony which was New Labour might be understood as compromised of a neoliberal strand, with a subordinate strand of social democracy which is systematically transformed into neoliberalism. The objective being that the privatisation of public services can be defended as in line with the history of the Labour Party. The Right turn the process of transformation on it's head, neoliberalism becomes social democracy or even socialism, in order to label the leader "Red Ed".

Ed and David are the sons of Ralph Miliband, a committed Marxist intellectual of the New Left, who argued that there are tendencies within the Labour Party that will always betray the working-class and we now know just how right he was. Ralph Miliband stood for a kind of socialism predicated on self-emancipation, without a dictatorship or a one-party state. For the Murdoch press, Ed Miliband is 'red' because he demonstrates some social democratic sympathies when he called for Britain to adopt a "capitalism that works for the people". Even though "Red Ed" still endorses 'Blue Labour', which is not so much a movement as a small collection of intellectuals calling for the Labour Party to address the concerns of a more conservative working-class than it has done in the past. Maurice Glasman has argued that 'Blue Labour' is in line with the role of the Labour Party in British history, the way it has represented working-people and has asserted the role of the ordinary person in society.

The Conservative Socialist.

Maurice Glasman thinks that the Labour Party can defeat the Con-Dem Coalition if it follows the 'Blue Labour' line of becoming more conservative and heavily critical of financial capitalism at the same time. Apparently, Gordon Brown was not 'conservative' enough to secure a Labour victory in 2010. Even though Brown is supposedly an avid reader of Gertrude Himmelfarb, the neoconservative cheerleader of the Bush administration, who thinks that the West has been in a state of moral disorder since the 1960s when traditional values were torn apart by a frenzied youth. In office Gordon Brown was a market liberal and never differed from the orthodoxy established by Thatcher. Then there is Tony Blair, who has been described by Douglas Murray as the "ideal" neoconservative and has also been praised by Richard Perle. This is down to Blair's superb interventionist credentials. Glasman would no doubt argue that 'Blue Labour' was never fully tried under Blair or Brown.

The game Glasman is playing might be called comfortable reaction, it is a game played by the Right in general and also has parallels on the Left. Glasman can criticise Blair and Brown on the grounds that 'Blue Labour' was lost, the Party became ensnared in finance capitalism and ultimately abandoned patriotism. At the same time the values of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity were lost. For Glasman the Labour Party essentially became a liberal party which acted along utilitarian lines under Blair and Brown. Note the absence of any reference to civic authoritarianism and liberal interventionism. Though there is an inkling of truth in Glasman's thesis, the Common Good was lost or more accurately never advocated by Blair. Solidarity was traded in, along with liberty and equality, for an atomised interpretation of society which could easily be reduced to a spiritual and economic wasteland. Further problems emerge when Glasman advocates a "conservative socialism".

The dreaded s-word is only used to "domesticate" the concept, to reassure us that we have moved on and the ideal can now be discarded except in tame variants - e.g. aspirational socialism. The links between Glasman and Labour are at once tribal and parasitic, 'Blue Labour' is window-dressing to put it bluntly. The same can be said of the relationship between the Conservatives and Phillip Blond. Since the end of the Cold War we find that politics are increasingly about management, but there is a need for 'big ideas' in order to effectively manage society. The Establishment has grasped at the most malleable ideas around, there is room in 'Red Toryism' for cuts and room in 'Blue Labour' for race-based populism. The rift between Labour and the unions has been growing for decades, 73% of trade unionists voted for Labour in 1964; in 1974 it was 55% and in 1983 it had slumped to just 39%. Since then Labour has drifted further right-wards and Peter Mandelson has acted to stamp out the influence of unions even more.

Expect Failure.

Incidentally Gordon Brown is currently looking to become the head of the IMF, to the chagrin of David Cameron, it is hardly a leftist position of power in the world. Though Brown has called for financial reform at an international level, which is what is needed to bring the banks back into the realm of 'sanity'. A tempting hypothesis is that the Crash has made room for a tamed liberalism based on Keynesian theories to enter the world stage once more. From here we could be led to conclude that Brown could lead the IMF apparatchiks to challenge their own ideas. Though it could just be that Brown is looking to outshine Blair on the world stage, the war of ego between them have now moved onto the world stage. The fact that the politicians only dug up Keynes in order to save the economy from imminent collapse only to recreate the unsustainable boom of the preceding decade. Brown's pitch might be a capitalism with better management, but in effect it is only to defend the system as it is.


The joke about 'Blue Labour' is that the Party has not been left-wing for almost 30 years. Labour accomplished the most when Clement Attlee was in power from 1945 to 1951, even in defeat the Party went down with the votes of 48.8% of the electorate - the largest proportion ever won by a single party - and only lost because of the First-Past-the-Post system. Old Labour enjoyed such success as it had succeeded in establishing the National Health Service along with a system to provide benefits, care for the elderly and sick. Under Labour the Bank of England, coal, gas and electricity were nationalised. What Labour began in 1945 would last until around 1975 when the social democratic epoch began to be challenged. In those 30 years there was high economic growth, low unemployment and incomes increased alongside productivity. The workers' share of the GDP peaked in the 1970s and has been in decline since the rise of Thatcherism.

It looks like the country faces the usual predicament that there are no viable alternatives to takeover from the incumbents and the result could be a Conservative government in 2015. The Liberals are taking all of the flak for selling out, which is fair enough. But the effect has been to strengthen the position of the Conservatives. The only way Labour will be able to lead a charge against on the Coalition will be if the Party returns to it's left-wing roots. There is no hope of a more 'moderate' Blairism bouncing back. The Labour Party has to shake-off the tenets of Blair, whether it be torture, wars for oil, spending cuts for the poor and tax-cuts for the rich. Only the labour movement can salvage the Labour Party from the abyss and lead a successful campaign against the Coalition. That is the only way Labour can mobilise working-people again. In the meantime, we should bare in mind what Ralph Miliband taught us about Labour - expect failure and we will never be disappointed again.