Counago & Spaves

Men's Over 40s Doubles Champion 2004 at Laytown/Bettystown Tennis Club.

Still got it.

Natalie Portman can do too. Taken from a review of Mike Nichols's movie adaptation of the wonderful Patrick Marber's play Closer in the August 30 issue of Newsweek:

"On the first day of shooting their new film, Natalie Portman gave Julia Roberts a gift. The two women had never met, and because Portman had always admired Roberts, she decided to present her with a delicate silver necklace. On the chain were four letters that spelled out the most profane term for the female anatomy--otherwise known as the C word. "I just thought that was hilarious," Portman says. "But then I was like, 'I hope I don't offend her'." Nope. Compared with what Roberts has to hear, and say, in Closer, it's practically sweet talk. Directed by Mike Nichols......"

If only it had read "Counago."

Managed to walk past Waterstones, Hodges Figgis, and Easons this lunchtime without buying a book. And on payday too. I did however, buy Andrew Collier's book Critical Realism and Ian Steedman's Marx after Sraffa online. My name's John and I'm a shopaholic.

I haven't bored you all with book reviews for weeks, so here's a quick report:

My Life, My Art, by Diego Rivera. Or possibly My Art, My Life, can't remember. Orotund, bombastic, and not at all impressive. Stick to painting and being dead, Diego.

What Is This Thing Called Science?, by Alan Chalmers. Since I used to teach the first five chapters of this book in A Level Philosophy at South Trafford College ten years back, I thought it was about time I read the whole thing. It's a reasonable, and purely introductory, outline of the philosophy of science, and I can understand why Sadie Plant, whose notes I used, only covered the first five chapters; subsequent accounts of the theories of Lakatos, Feyerabend, and Althusser are cursory at best.

The Yogi and the Commissar, by Arthur Koestler. A series of essays written during and just after the war, when Koestler was a credible and non-rabid anticommunist socialist. Very good on the horrors of the Soviet Union. Also relevant: His essay, "On Disbelieving Atrocities."

The Enemy Within: A History of the British Communist Party, by Francis Beckett. A very readable history, and a laugh a minute as party members engage in multiple gyrations as they try to toe the Soviet line. Only Raji Palme Dutt seems to have no qualms about defending Hitler one week then condemning him the next, just because Moscow says so. And when the miners' strike was at its height, the party was more preoccupied with in-fighting between tankies and Eurocommunists than taking on the Coal Board and Thaatchi. What's that old joke about the first item on the agenda being 'the split'?

Currently beside my bed or the loo: The Bumper Book of British Lefties, by Paul Routledge. Brief profiles of all and sundry, including Bernard Ingham (!), Jeremy Hardy, and picket-line crosser Anna Ford. And Gubu Nation, by Damian Corless. Accounts of antics perpetrated in Ireland in an effort to live up to British stereotypes. Great fun.

My train-time reading is currently Naked, by David Sedaris. This man is the greatest living gay American comic essayist resident in France. I adore his work. This collection was bought as a birthday present for me by the gorgeous and wonderful Ms Catherine Leen. A woman of great taste.

Some geeks are running a fantasy blog market, like the stock market only using blogs as businesses. C & S has been cited on the market (and worth fuck all of course). I thought this was a workers' collective.

can be found here. Sign petitions, send letters of protest. Support them.

Whence Marc Cooper derived his reports, can be found here.

A wonderful name for an awful business (allegedly).

Sign the petition if you would. Tara's legacy to archaeology and thus to our knowledge about humanity is still being explored. I don't want a fucking motorway bulldozered through the middle of such a valuable place.

Esteemed antiwar Nation journalist Marc Cooper lays into Naomi Klein and explains his current position on the war.

er . . . drugs, that is.

It's Friday, the sun is shining, and Pinochet is going on trial. Have a wonderful weekend.

From the BBC, the latest in in-flight entertainment.

I, Fatty reviewed in the New York Times.

Of the Department of Government at Manchester University and former editor of the New Left Review writes this on Normblog, concerning the state of the left.

"In the current issue of the New Statesman (intermittent access to non-subscribers) John Pilger has a piece on the upcoming US presidential election. Readers may be interested to note that Pilger, who not long ago was telling us how safe he once felt travelling in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, has evidently felt rather less safe from another quarter. For in this latest piece he speaks in passing of...

'... those of us who marvel at our luck in reaching mature years without having been blown to bits by the warlords of Americanism..'

They may also be surprised to find Pilger leaning towards the view that George Bush might be the 'lesser evil' in the upcoming presidential election:

'The multilateralism or "muscular internationalism" that Kerry offers in contrast to Bush's unilateralism is seen as hopeful by the terminally naive; in truth, it beckons even greater dangers. Having given the American elite its greatest disaster since Vietnam, writes the historian Gabriel Kolko, Bush "is much more likely to continue the destruction of the alliance system that is so crucial to American power. One does not have to believe the worse the better, but we have to consider candidly the foreign policy consequences of a renewal of Bush's mandate . . . As dangerous as it is, Bush's re-election may be a lesser evil." With Nato back in train under President Kerry, and the French and Germans compliant, American ambitions will proceed without the Napoleonic hindrances of the Bush gang.'

So far as the present post is concerned these points are merely by the way and I pass no further comment on them. The thing which interests me here is the overall attitude displayed by John Pilger towards US and, more generally, Western democracy. He it is, remember, who has been happy to express his support - more or less uncritically as far as I'm aware - for those opposing the Coalition forces in Iraq, killing Iraqi and other civilians without scruple, and doing all they can to obstruct the transition to democratically-based civilian rule. 'We cannot afford to be choosy', Pilger told an interviewer, it being imperative to stop the 'Bush gang'; and even now he refers to the insurgents in Iraq as, without reservation or qualification, 'nationalists defending their homeland'. On the other hand, with regard to US democracy, or democracy in the UK and other Western countries, this is the language Pilger speaks:

As in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, Americans are denied a modicum of understanding of what Norman Mailer has called "a pre-fascist climate". The fears of the rest of us are of no consequence......The real debate is neither Bush nor Kerry, but the system they exemplify; it is the decline of true democracy and the rise of the American "national security state" in Britain and other countries claiming to be democracies, in which people are sent to prison and the key thrown away and whose leaders commit capital crimes in faraway places...

In an earlier piece, which I commented on here, Pilger wrote:

The truth is that Clinton was little different from Bush, a crypto-fascist.The hysterical and, frankly, delusionary 'pre-fascist' and 'crypto-fascist' here, as well as the phrase 'claiming to be democracies', coming from someone who avails himself of all the benefits of the fact that these polities are indeed democracies, makes a striking contrast with Pilger's indulgent attitude towards political forces whose democratic credentials are rather dubious, to put it no more strongly than that.

Part 2 > Returning from his hols yesterday, Harry wasted no time in posing a couple of tough questions:

1. Why is it that the organised activist left is dominated by anti-democrats and those who no longer even pay lip-service to international solidarity?

2. Can that situation be changed and how?

I don't claim to have adequate answers to these questions, but here anyway are a few observations on them.

The left - and this goes beyond the 'organized activist left', though it doesn't apply to the entirety of the left, not even to all of the organized activist bit - has not yet truly thrown off the political errors and the moral shortcomings of the past of the left, most acutely concentrated in the calamity and criminality that were Stalinism, but whose roots go back before Stalinism. This circumstance, of not having comprehensively thrown off, or learned from, that past, though it was obviously there before September 11 2001, has been highlighted and aggravated by the events of that day and what has transpired since, as have all the tendencies of which it consists.

The belittling of the strengths and virtues of the political democracies which exist, along with a willingness to recognize as democratic, or at least supportable, political movements that wear it on their face that they are not; a readiness to contemplate political alliances or, short of that, broader alignments of moral solidarity in which common cause is made with movements which do not feel bound by democratic or related standards; a willingness to make apology for, or mutter evasively or remain silent about, means of political struggle which are morally criminal, and to overlook that there are norms of both ethics and law constraining what is permissible even in pursuit of a just cause; the displaying, consequently, of a light-minded disregard for what are now universally applicable human rights requirements, except when they are invoked to criticize Western governments - all of these tendencies indicate that, despite the terrible experiences of the twentieth century, for a significant sector of the left the commitment to democracy is skin-deep; this part of the left has still not assimilated one of the primary lessons of those experiences, that without a foundational and consistent attachment to the norms of democracy and human rights the left is lost.

What accounts for the failure to assimilate that elementary lesson? Once again, I don't pretend to offer an overall answer. Impressionistically, however, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that part of the reason is a kind of anti-imperialist reductionism. This is the battle, the enemy, of the left: imperialism, as embodied first and last in the US; and as supposedly embodied today in George W. Bush. Every other question, every principle, becomes subordinate to the need to oppose it and him - to the sacrifice of the credibility, reputation and sometimes moral standing of those so governed."

A point I think I've made before. Universal values are the basis of a consistent socialism: Human rights, democracy, internationalism. Anti-imperialism doesn't cut it. You can oppose imperialism on human rights grounds and on the grounds that imperialism is antithetical to democracy, but it has to be on those universal grounds, not on the grounds of 'national liberation' or anti-Americanism.

From Amnesty International USA. Not funny. Sorry.

Do you think if I gave her enough wool she'd make me one?

Here's an interview with Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie from today's Guardian. He's got a new autobiography out, presumably not rehashing The Christie File, which came out 20-odd years ago. A fine example to us all - a lover of Glenmorangie and would-be Franco assassin.

See Lenin's posting "The Allure of the Modern," here. In fact, he's taking the piss out of Times contributor and Nick Cohen fan Oliver Kamm, whose blog offers up more stuff guaranteed to make our Mr. Hughes foam at the mouth, i.e. a self-styled leftie defending the war.

From today's New York Times.

I just love this sort of thing. Especially, "his blood lust is unbounded." Have a search through the archives of the Communist Forum's Fightback! and see how many other "fascists" you can spot (obviously Leeds United goes without saying).

...but at least I got my picture in the paper so everyone can see what an eejit I am.

An article from the Observer reflecting on ten years of ANC rule in South Africa, offers this gem on the failure to face up to the AIDS crisis:

"Enormous pressure has been put on (Thabo Mbeki) by foreign donors to revise his stand on the issue, and to some extent it seems to have worked in that both he and his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, have promised the country that a 'roll-out' of anti-retroviral drugs is under way. But such assurances have contrasted with minimal action on the ground. In statements smacking of a Marie Antoinette, Tshabalala-Msimang has recommended that HIV and Aids sufferers should try a diet of lemon, ginger, olive oil, garlic, beetroot and African potatoes. Although she recently announced she had changed her mind about the potatoes."

Amusing review from The New York Times, I think, maybe New York magazine


Morrissey Loves Company

The ex-Smiths singer has made a startling comeback by reminding old fans how sad and lonely they used to be.

By Ethan Brown

Rock’s nostalgia business makes crude marketing sense, but there’s something peculiar about pining for Morrissey. To be a Smiths fan, as I was back in high school (when I was tormented for my “faggy” John Fleuvog shoes), was to feel awkward and socially oppressed—why would anyone seek to revive memories of that? Morrissey’s new album, You Are the Quarry, reveals the answer: Emotionally unchanged since the eighties, Morrissey is a link to that uncomfortable past we would do better to forget but, like the singer himself, often revel in.

The Sex Pistols reunion shattered the notion that certain bands might resist nostalgia’s pull, but it’s still disappointing that Morrissey has given in to reminiscing. His strongest solo work was always defiantly unsentimental (“I’m so glad to grow older, to move away from those darker years,” he sang on his first—and best—solo album, Viva Hate).

Somewhere along the way, though, Morrissey decided that he should celebrate his fans’ worst impulses rather than challenge them. That turnaround seemed to come during his string of sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden in the early nineties, which featured boys bum-rushing the stage to envelop a clearly thrilled Morrissey. In the sweaty embrace of his fans, Morrissey changed. Among other things he gave up on the Smiths’ music-industry criticism (most pointed in the mocking cry of “Reissue! Repackage! Repackage!” on “Paint a Vulgar Picture”) and indulged in his own, yes, repackaging. Through the nineties, Morrissey became MorrisseyTM, with endlessly rejiggered compilations of his solo singles like 1995’s World of Morrissey. Other than 1992’s provocative Your Arsenal, his new music suffered, too. Such albums as 1997’s Maladjusted were rote and listless, and fans drifted away.

Now, with New Wave nostalgia peaking, the fans are back and Morrissey is, too: He sold out nearly a week of shows at the Apollo Theater. Amazon cheerily noted that “based on customer purchases, [You Are the Quarry] is the No. 1 Early Adopter Product in Alternative Rock.” Where the Morrissey of old would have howled at this cant, it aptly describes the new Morrissey.

Quarry doesn’t have great songs, just not-so-clever quips like “And don’t you wonder / Why in Estonia they say / Hey you, big fat pig” (“America Is Not the World”). Mostly, he offers weak expressions of his love-this-loser ethos, as in “This world is full / So full of crashing bores / And I must be one / Because no one ever turns to me to say / ‘Take me in your arms’ ” (“The World Is Full of Crashing Bores”).

Emotional stasis has always been central to Morrissey’s persona—he famously told an interviewer, “I don’t want anything to interfere with this state of dissatisfaction”—and Morrissey’s peers like the Cure face the same sort of expectations from their fans. But the Cure’s Robert Smith has held onto his romantic worldview while transforming his band into expansive, almost psychedelic rockers. Morrissey doesn’t try half as hard, content to play his own caricature, alt-rock’s Woody Allen. On his great 1992 single “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful,” Morrissey winked at how his sudden fame was received by admirers. But it isn’t success that makes Morrissey hateful; it’s his turning of adolescent inadequacies into a crass road show.

Is a journal that comes out of the Brighton and Hove Unemployed Workers Centre. Here are three articles that provide some history on Marxist and non-Marxist approaches to theories of Capital's decline and decadence. The first article discusses the immediate post-Marxist developments, the second discusses post-WW2 ideas, including Castoriadis and (god forbid!) criticisms thereof, the Situationists, and the Italian autonomists, and the third article discusses the ideas advanced by the journal Radical Chains. Who'd want to read this stuff unless they have a particularly traumatic train journey home, I hear you ask? Well, me, I guess. Maybe Bill. Any takers?

An interesting article by anarchist writer Murray Bookchin in the journal Democracy and Nature on the regressive turn toward national liberation movements taken by the left in the 1960s and 70s.

When you can spend the morning reading Spiked!? That's mostly what I've been doing, anyway. And I have to say most of the articles I've read are uncontroversial, common-sensical, and maybe mildly contrarian. Nothing spectacularly rabid, just a bit sort of 'grumpy old men-ish.' Maybe that's me, too.

In the Ireland section there are links to articles by Damian Byrne, who used to be the associate editor of Social Sciences Asbtracts here in the office and a colminist for the Cork Examiner, now just the Examiner, until he took a job editing the Dail's equivalent of Hansard. His articles in the Examiner were always of a similar bent: taking a contrarian view to the prevailing consensus, so it's no surprise he's been adopted. The other lads in Social Sciences tell me they were always too scared to open their mouths in the coffee room for fear that their opinions would form the basis of one of Damian's articles in subsequent weeks.

You're right, Bill, that most of the positions resemble anarchist views, but to me they look more like old-fashioned liberal views about free speech, civil liberties, etc, but also liberatrian views, especially Ben-Ami's economic articles on risk-averse capitalism. Still, as I say, nothing controversial.

Thanks for the excellent link on Haiti, by the way. That's precisely the sort of research that's needed in order to make an accurate assessment of the consequences of a war/coup/invasion etc. We already have some idea about the treatment of workers in Saddam's Iraq. We need now the research on Iraqi workers'/socialists/unions' views on his removal.

From the New York Times magazine, June 20th

From Seventeen magazine:


"I use a girl for sex, then move on to the next one. All players do that--especially in summer, 'cause that's when girls start wearing less clothes."

Jerel, 15, new market, alabama

I didn't get back to you on Panama and you haven't had a chance to respond to my comment on the Franco-Prussian War, but none of these invasions undermine the Marxist argument for the expansion of the American empire, nor the point that it's possible to support some invasions and not others. Of course, capitalism is dynamic, and I recognize that there is an underside, a dialectic, as you want to call it. Surely that was Marx's point: the underside would provide the momentum for transforming dynamic capitalism into something else while taking advantage of the productive, integrated world capitalism had created. But it requires that that integration has taken place.

That conservative assessment you linked of the RCP/LM was very good and summed up my feelings about them, too, insofar as there's nothing in any way Marxist about LM, Spiked, IoI etc. They seem to have realized the game is up for Marxism as a science too. There's just the moral case remaining.

Incidentally, it isn't any more valid to draw comparisons between fascists and environmentalists for their shared irrationalism than it is to draw comparisons between Muslim homophobes and Anarchists for their shared oppsition to the war. It was an indefensible use of the term 'fascist.' Not all arguments used by environemntalists are anti-rational, any more than arguments used by the RCP are rational. Based on false premises, perhaps, but then you might as well call Lysenko a fascist

Here's something we can both have a laugh at. Alex Callinicos exposing the myths about Marxism in order to save it and leaving nothing behind except a moral argument for the necessity of overthrowing capitalism. Well, maybe, that's all there is. It'll do for me.

Brigands of the world, after the earth has failed their all-devastating hands,
they probe even the sea; if their enemy be wealthy, they are greedy; if he be
poor, they are ambitious; neither the East nor the West has glutted them. [. .
.] They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire,
and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace (Agricola, 30)

Spotted in Harper's magazine:

From an official North Korean news report of an April 22 train explosion believed to have killed at least 161 people and injured 1,300.

"The Korean people's spirit of guarding the leader with their very lives was fully displayed when there was an unexpected explosion at Ryongchon Railway Station in Ryongchon County, North Pyongan Province, on April 22.

Upon hearing the sound of the heavy explosion on their way home for lunch, Choe Yong-il and Jon Tong-sik, workers at the County Procurement Shop, ran back to the shop. They were buried under the collapsing building and died a heroic death when they were trying to come out with portraits of President Kim Il-sung and leader Kim Jong-il.

When the building of Ryongchon Primary School was destroyed by the violent blast and the classroom on the third floor caught fire, teacher Han Un-suk, thirty-two, also died after bringing portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il to a place of safety and saving seven pupils.

Teacher Han Jong-suk, fifty-six, also breathed her last with portraits in her bosom.

Principal of the school Choe Pyong-ryop and his son rushed to the accident scene and evacuated materials concerning the revolutionary ideas and immortal exploits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il from the school, wrapped in fire.

Such a noble deed was also done by head of the county nursery Pak Sun-mi and seven nurses including Jang Yon-hui and Ri Pongsuk, and principal of Ryongchon Middle School, Kang Yong-su. Many people of the county evacuated portraits before searching for their family members or saving their household goods."

Thanks for keeping this going, Bill. I didn't think you'd rise to the bait.

Lenin may not have intended to actively support the imperialist warmongers of Germany, but whatever his intentions, objectively, his actions benefited them. However, my point was that he understood that it's possible to strategically take advantage of an imperial war to further a progressive goal. Marx and Engels understood this, too. During the Franco-Prussian War, they supported Bismarck and the Prussian side, but only insofar as it served the revolutionary cause. Their argument was that German unification advanced the cause of communism by accelerating the socialization of production, as well as creating a unified working class using one language. When the war became an imperialist venture and the army advanced into France, they saw that there was no advantage to be gained for the socialist movement and switched sides, denouncing Bismarck's policies.

My point, and I do have one, is that it's arguable that there are NO progressive forces participating in this war and that it is therefore of NO strategic interest to socialists and not in their interests to side with anyone. This is the position communists tried to adopt at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, i.e. that the Nazis and the western imperialists should be left to fight it out and that defence of the Soviet Union was the main priority for socialists everywhere.

However, a Marxist case CAN be made, extrapolating from the example of the Franco-Prussian War, for support of the Americans as the only progressive force in this war, at least from a socialist point of view. I call this the Hitchens defence, because he (Christopher, not Peter, though it's difficult to tell which is which these days) has been defending American capitalism for its dynamism, its capacity to break down superstitions, its humanization of natural forces, its liberatory power for women, and so on, in recent interviews; Thus, advancing U.S. globalization serves to accelerate the socialization of production by bringing more and more people into its sphere of influence and its remit. Had it not been for the perversion of Marxist theories by the New Left and their anti-imperialist support of Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot etc. in the 60s and 70s, there might have been others who at least would have had Hitchens's consistency if not his penchant for the bottle.

That's by the by: As I was saying, it may be that there is no progressive advantage in the victory of either side. So far in this war, the only clear winners I can see are Iran, who managed to use their influence to persuade their third greatest enemy to get rid of their first greatest enemy (assuming that Israel is their second greatest enemy). They must be wetting themselves in Tehran. I've resisted identifying with Nick Cohen's argument all along - I only inserted his article as an act of provocation, as you know - but my concern is this: 20 years ago, when the U.S. was supporting Saddam, the Left was quite rightly protesting this support and denouncing Saddam as a fascist. Yes they were. And they were pointing out that he was killing Kurds and torturing trade unionists. At that point, they seemed to be showing solidarity with the progressive forces in Iraq. But now it seems that Saddam's victims were just a convenient stick with which to beat the Americans. The Left didn't really care about them at all; their main concern was to berate the USA. And it's that universal anti-Americanism that has persisted and which has typified the Left since the 1960s. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that anti-Americanism is the sine qua non of most Leftist organizations in Europe, if not everywhere. As a result, when Saddam was ousted, rather than rejoice and argue that, objectively, progressive forces could benefit from the new situation that had arisen in Iraq as a by-product of a war between two forces they despised, the Left decided they had to adopt whatever position was diametrically opposed to America's. It lacks nuance, it lacks vision, and it lacks socialism.

So is Saddam a fascist? Well, I couldn't agree more that how we use the term is of major importance, hence my jibe about the RCP/LM accusation that environmentalists were 'fascists.' Other 'fascists' according to the anti-imperialist Left at the moment, and used without irony or concern for the meaning of the term, include the Israeli Defence Forces and Jewish settlers (okay that was Paul Durcan who wrote that. Is he a Marxist?)

My definition of a fascist organization or country would be one that was typified by totalitarian policing and surveillance, extreme nationalism, militarism as a central cultural ethos, a hierarchical command structure, a lack of democratic accountability, glorification of a great leader, and probably some sort of mysticism associated with blood and soil, forefathers' sacrifices and so on, that typically justifies xenophobia. One thing that I would say fascism is definitively NOT is a puppet of the ruling classes in times of crisis. This is not only an outdated Trotskyite tenet, it was never true when he first enunciated it. Hitler was no friend of the ruling classes; they thought at first they could control him, then later they decided they could deal with him and preferred him to the communists, though not to the social democrats, and finally they ended up acquiescing to him. The second world war, let's be candid without being trite, if we can, can't exactly have been what the German bourgeoisie had hoped for. Unless you only count arms manufacturers. They didn't control him; otherwise they'd have got rid of him. Similarly, there was no bourgeoisie pulling the strings in Ba'athist Iraq. That was because Saddam ran a totalitarian society. Everyone was under suspicion.

But Marxists can't call Saddam a fascist because it undermines one of their most basic principles, namely, that the economic substructure of a society determines its superstructure, including the nature of the state. If fascism is only a tool of the bourgeoisie in times of crisis, it follows, there must have been a secret bourgeois cabal determining Saddam's policies, able to curtail and control him if needs be. If there wasn't one, and indeed there wasn't, then the argument must conclude that he can't have been a fascist. Had he been a fascist, yet not controlled by a bourgeoisie, the Trotskyite theory of fascism and the Marxist theory of economic determination would be undermined.

But he was, and they are.

Unless, of course, you want to argue that the bourgeoisie is an international class now, and that the United States represents in macro that bourgeoisie, turning to Saddam in a time of crisis to fight Iran. It's stretching Marxist theory a bit, but at least it would be consistent.

Except then, that would make Saddam, gulp, a fascist.

Never mind. It wouldn't be the first feature of Marxist theory to be disproved by reality. Castoriadis, for one, Bill, identified a whole bunch of Marxist tenets that were either unprovable in theory (labour theory of value, for instance) or demonstrably wrong in fact (necessity of the business cycle, progress toward revolution in advanced capitalist states). Most people still managing to call themselves Marxists seem to belong to the 'yes, but' school. And very few of them had either the experience of Castoriadis (fought in the Greek resistance, joined the Communist Party, left the Communist Party to join the Trotskyites, left the Trotskyites to form a non-Marxist revolutionary socialist organization), nor his intellectual prowess as an economist, nor indeed his willingness to own up and say "I was wrong, we were wrong, and socialism is going to disappear up its own arse if we don't put things right soon." Well, I styled myself a Marxist once upon a time and can't even bring myself to dare to compare my credentials with Castoriadis because I don't have them, but I'm prepared at least to say "I was wrong," and I've never met another Marxist yet who's been prepared to say that.

I suspect, by the way, that Castoriadis would be appalled at the thought of inspiring a mass movement. He was already part of one - socialism - and one of the features of his autonomist socialism, like that of Kropotkin (and, incidentally, why I was so favourably inclined toward the Surowiecki book and Steven Johnson's book on Emergence) is the view that mass movements don't require leaders. Crowds can inspire themselves, railways can be run by the workers themselves, organization can emerge from apparently chaotic and unrelated interests (god, a free-market argument if ever I heard one). Only grudge-addled, hierarchy-loving provincial schoolteachers imagine that the masses are incapable of identifying their own interests, that they need technocrats, better-educated individuals with access to the absolute truth, to show them where their true interest lie. And of course, say these new ubermenschen and women, it isn't their fault that, by pure accident, yet also by the necessity of history, it is they who have been especially equipped, thanks to their social location, to fulfill that role . . . whether the masses like it or not.

Aah, the joys of polemics. Have we progressed anywhere dialectically do you think?

I don’t think you’ll find that Lenin ever actively gave his support to imperialist warmongers, or enlisted them on the side of trade-unionism; the rest of the history is arguable, too.

The ex-RCP probably don’t have much animosity towards Cohen; they ignore him disdainfully. My own repugnance is, as I said, over the dishonesty of his journalism (those two articles being among the examples I referred too: some anecdotes, some out-of-context quotes) as in the Harrington story where the technique is to say that Harrington agreed with something someone said, thus suggesting that the RCP advocated the destruction of the Jews or whatever. It’s also over the way ‘leftists’ like him immediately cuddle up to the ruling classes when major issues are involved.

The concern for accurate definitions of fascism isn’t just a quibble. Either you use words – any words – so generally that they are useless (and ideologically loaded, so that historical change becomes concealed, for instance) or you have a nominalism that rejects any kind of generalised thinking – which, again, serves to stop people seeing underlying causes of things. ‘Fascism’ has acquired a significance beyond Mussolini’s rule; there were common factors at work both in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Those factors have little to do with Islam or Ba’athism (whatever the source of the latter’s organizational model, which I’m sceptical about anyway).

Civil liberties are under attack in an unprecedented, almost – dare I say it? – fascist-like way. And, yes, it is rather worrying – and ironic - that among the few people who dare to defend free speech is a neo-Nazi,* albeit he has his own dubious reasons for doing so and – unlike the RCP – would be very resistant to granting those rights to, say, asylum seekers. But what does this say about the contemporary ‘left’, who condone this process?

In fact, many right-wing libertarians share the RCP’s (as it was) concerns with increasing state control (as do, for example, anarchists); however, they don’t tend to support their attacks on immigration controls or Western imperialism or a number of other issues. To imply a shared, fascistic world-view from that one common value is illegitimate, and the same mode of argument as this little gem:

Your a Socialist ,so it is easy to understand,all the Socialist ideologies are closely related.There is little difference between Socialism,Stalin's Communism Mussoini's Fascisti,Mao's Communism,Hitlers National Socialist(NazI)Party,Baathism,and Kim Il Jongs Communism [. . .] Republicsans are hardly Socialists and Nazi is an acronym for Natinoal Socialist party. [Michael] Moore certainly os a Socialist,national or otherwise Nazi seems fitting.

This is from one of Cohen’s fellow crusaders for liberty at:
http://www.wickedgood.info/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=50023;guest=462633

Or the argument might go: Most British Muslims were against the war. But many Muslims are homophobic. Therefore, they are fascists and can be bombed. And because the SWP, some trade-unionists, some of the brighter anarchists, some Christians, etc. were against the war, sharing that one principle makes them fascists too. The Greens (the party, that is) opposed the war – fascists! As did the BNP, funnily enough. So they are all deserving targets of the humanitarian bombs of courageous socialist George Bush and his fellow uber-shop-stewards, Bush, Berlusconi etc. in the glorious battle to defend international trade-unionism. Venceremos! Rejoice!

Meanwhile, in the Great War against Fascism, Tony Blair has not forgotten the home front. The purity of his crusade drives him to seek out the fascists here in Britain. Fascist graffiti writers, fascist drunks, bad parenting fascists, homeless fascists and fascist smokers, spraying their poisonous gases into the lungs of babies just as they did at Auschwitz are to be served with ASBOs, put on a register, and invited to re-education seminars in order to purge our society of their fascist filth. Scientists are working to identify the fascist gene so that fascists can be caught at birth and interned alongside those Islamic fascist ‘asylum seekers’ that are infiltrating our shores in droves.

Maybe not a great idea, but then I think you'll find that Lenin had no such scruples, taking advantage of a war instigated by imperialists to hijack the revolution that was taking place in Russia. And what's more, he enlisted the help of the German High Command to supply the sealed train to carry him back there.

Mind you, maybe those dirty German imperialists knew he was going to slaughter all the trade unionists when he got there, so there'd be none of them left when the Germans marched into Moscow.

Huzzah! Someone else has figured out how to post blogs. About time too. Does anyone care to respond to Bill's post? There's lots of things to comment on. I particularly liked his insistence that the Ba'athists aren't fascists in the strict sense of the term. Well, no, not if by strict you mean they ruled Italy during the 1930s and 40s. I meant in the sense that the Ba'athist party's structure was based on that of the Nazi Party when it was first established. But, of course, Bill is right that the accusation of being a 'fascist' is one that we mustn't apply too liberally, like say, the way the RCP labelled environmentalists fascist for opposing genetic technology and animal testing.

This despite the fact that the RCP itself espouses some phenomenally impressive right-wing views. I read recently a glowing report of a Living Marxism conference from Patrick Harrington, who found much in common with the RCP's political incorrectness.

Of course, the RCP aren't really Nazis. No, they're liberatrian capitalists. Or rather, they're not really, they're only pretending to be: Their support of capitalism's dynamism must stem from faith in the immiseration thesis; that the more powerful capitalism gets, the more oppressed the workers will be, and the more chance there will be of revolution. THAT'S obviosuly why their views accidentally coincide with fascists like Harrington who want increased misery for the masses.

As for RCP animus against Nick Cohen, I wonder if that's anything to do with this article, or maybe this one. I used to say scratch a liberal and fascist bleeds. Now I'd say scratch a Marxist and a libertarian opportunist bleeds.

Those mid-morning snacks will never be the same again.

Or not, as the case may be. Spotted in Aftenposten

This is old news now, but I only just noticed it. Ed Rooney as kiddy fiddler. Ewwww.

An abstract for an article in Parenting magazine:

A number of soft personal baby carriers are reviewed: The Red Envelope Baby Sling ($45), the JJ Cole Premaxx New Edition ($60), the Evenflo Snugli by Nicole Miller ($60), the Baby Bjorn Baby Carrier Active ($125), and the Infantino Go Go Rider ($25).

From an article by Ken Linnau and F. A. Mann in the April 2003 issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology.

"A thirty-five-year-old man presented with severe abdominal pain and distension but normal vital signs. An abdominal radiograph showed multiple rounded objects, some in the shape of a head with a pointed nose. The patient stated that he had ingested multiple heads of a popular children's toy doll over the course of several days. He declared that swallowing dolls' heads was his habit for anal autoerotic gratification. Certain dolls are icons of American popular culture. For example, an Internet search for "Barbie doll" renders more than 200,000 hits, and Barbie remains an integral part of many toy collections of millions of children all over the globe. Familiarity with the radiographic appearance of this famous American doll may help to differentiate the foreign bodies in the bowel of our patient from packages of illicit drugs ingested by body packers. This case illustrates how icons of popular culture affect all aspects of life and can present emergently to the radiologist, who should keep in mind that the human imagination may not follow clinical algorithms."