Thoughts from a Bureaucratic Mind: David Begg and the Austerity Treaty

Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gun to the Head

On April 25^th the Irish Congress of Trade Unions made their final decision on the Austerity Treaty: to sit on the fence. General Secretary David Begg had a few days earlier come out with a cowardly and short-sighted paper on the Treaty. It praises with mild criticism, in a tone of tiredness and detachment, before giving a lazy shrug of the shoulders:

While the treaty is wrong from our economic and social perspective it becomes hard to oppose it unless a satisfactory alternative to the ESM can be advanced.

An extended pondering over Francois Mitterand, Jacques Delors and late-lamented social Europe, which Begg entitles “Context,” seems to have little direct relevance. Begg seems to be trying to tell us that the battle was fought and lost thirty years ago.

The problem now is Delors is gone. Social Europe no longer has champions. The Employment Social Affairs and Inclusion Directorate is marginalised.  Strong German/French inter-governmentalism is in possession.

Alas! History has tied Begg’s hands. Passing the buck to the French Social Democrats of the early eighties rather than taking responsibility himself is Begg’s way of justifying a Treaty which will allow him to pass even more and even bigger bucks in the future. The “context” is as follows: We lost decades ago- resistance is futile. He concludes that

The problem for us is that we are a programme country with the gun of ESM pointed at our heads.

The few words I’ve put in bold from Begg’s comments on RTÉ News on April 25^th throw a little more light on his position:

We’re in an absolutely unique situation, A: Where we have a referendum and B: Where we’re part of a programme with the Troika.

“Where we have a referendum.” If there were to be no practical outcomes to ICTU’s stance on the Treaty, why then they would oppose it. We might propose a definition of “Trade Union bureaucrat” based on these words.

What about this “Employment Social Affairs and Inclusion Directorate,” the marginalisation of which apparently makes all resistance to neo-liberal Europe futile? I never heard of this Directorate until I read Begg’s paper. Shows how much I know, you may say, but you probably didn’t hear of it either. Viewing this directorate as a key element of “Social Europe” stems from the same mind that justifies supporting the Treaty because of

the possibility of the German Social Democrats insisting on a European programme for growth as the price of their support [for the Treaty].

What possible substantial “programme for growth” could co-exist with a Treaty that writes austerity into law? The bureaucrat is a worshipper of charters, programmes, clauses and directorates. Not because they constitute anything material; in Lisbon, a Charter of Fundamental Rights could co-exist with attacks on workers’ rights.

Another example: SIPTU’s demand for a €10 billion investment and job creation package as a condition for supporting the treaty. But the treaty may sign us up to as much as €11.86 billion in cutbacks and new taxes. Bureaucrats negotiate surrenders, but they like to bring home some trinkets from the enemy’s camp to display as spoils of war.

The image of a “gun to the head” of Ireland is a striking one. If there’s a gun to your head, it follows that the one holding the gun is your enemy. That is all that needs to be said in support of a “No” vote, surely. It doesn’t make sense to sign away your liberty to your enemy.

If “our European Partners” have a gun to our head now, imagine if this treaty were passed: automatic punishments for any substantial deviation from extreme austerity; “economic partnership programmes,” meaning a virtual economic-policy dictatorship, in the event of “excessive deficit.” Begg wants to hand them a bazooka in place of their gun. You can see why any good bureaucrat would like this idea: it’s an opportunity to pass the buck higher than ever.

When the buck stops with the European Commission, over whom none of us has any democratic control whatsoever, the likes of Begg will be able to give us history lectures on the “Context” of his irrelevance to his heart’s content.  The times we live in are giving us an insight into the logic of creeping dictatorship, and into the motivations of those who let it happen.

Fighting Back

At a meeting recently I suggested that the “gun to our head” was in fact imaginary. “Getting into existentialism now, are ya?” someone called. Someone else suggested that we just seize power by arming the proletariat with imaginary guns. For saying something off the top of my head without being ready to back it up, I deserved to be laughed at.

All the same, we have to look at what this “gun” constitutes. It is the European Stability Mechanism, a means by which, following our inevitable second bailout, we would be drip-fed money to keep our economy from suddenly collapsing, in exchange for us stripping the country bare all means of creating wealth.

Firstly, the government collaborated in making this the case through the infamous “blackmail clause”; they could remove the gun if they wanted.

More importantly, and more generally, any political actor or commentator who can’t see beyond the next source of short-term funding, who wants “money in the ATMs” at the expense of all else, does not appreciate the scale of this crisis and will be deeply shocked by the course of events in the next few years.

Austerity has, at every juncture, made the crisis worse. The level of debt on the shoulders of the European working class; the parasitical role of financial institutions; the strike of private sector investment; in these conditions, pushed to its conclusion, the strategy of Europe’s ruling class would turn the continent into an economic wasteland.

It’s unlikely they will get that far, however. Austerity is driving people into revolt across Europe and across the world. It will continue to do so because it’s making the crisis worse. Significant Keynesian measures have barely featured because of the neo-liberal consensus and because such policies would be against the immediate interests of those who control capital and the money supply.

In any case, European economies are unravelling, not for want of SIPTU’s token €10 billion, but because they are fundamentally fucked, ruled by a decadent, parasitical capitalist class which is hoarding and gambling rather than investing.

Irish people create €156.4 billion on average every year. If we got every cent of this back in jobs and services, there would be no crisis. Across Europe there’s €2 trillion lying idle in the bank vaults of corporations. We need an international democratic Socialist plan of investment and production to match up potential with need. The market is not going to sort it out for us. We have to do it ourselves, and in increasing numbers, people are joining the fight for such an alternative.

The gun is not imaginary, but it is contingent on many increasingly unstable factors. It is based on institutions which have absolutely no effect once masses of people withdraw their cooperation and move into opposition to Capitalism. Its days are numbered. It’s impossible to say what that number is, but it would be a lot lower if the trade union leadership was doing what it’s paid to do, and fighting for the interests of the working class.

The conditions by which we are being coerced are the conditions of a specific historical moment: the moment in which austerity is being imposed, in which there exists widespread, seething anger; but in which this anger finds limited outlet and in which fighting back is difficult because bureaucratic defeatist rubbish like Begg has not yet been swept aside.

Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996): A Creation Myth

Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins: A Creation Myth

There’s a reason why, at most college societies days, you will see Young Fine Gael giving out free DVDs of Michael Collins. The film is well-paced and visually appealing, and Neeson and others perform well. More importantly, from the YFG point of view, Jordan’s script is a total historical falsification which twists an episode in Irish history into a Hollywood shape. As such it is very enjoyable but ultimately a myth. Another piece might be written about the many details the script deliberately gets wrong- tanks in Croke Park, Broy beaten to death- but it would be a mistake to focus on aspects changed for dramatic or narrative effect. What the film doesn’t show is just as important, not to mention what it changes for political effect. Omission and falsification craft a compelling but mythical “origin story” for the Southern Irish bourgeois state from some of the raw materials left by history.

Here we have a film which includes the 1918-1923 period but which leaves out the fact that there were in these years four spectacular national general strikes. It fails to mention that entire towns, such as Limerick and Waterford, were briefly taken over and run by their Trades Councils as Soviets. This is not to mention the creameries, mills and other workplaces and institutions that were taken over by their workers and run independently, and just as well, without bosses.

A spectacular strike wave characterized the period. The military and the social movements of the time were very closely interconnected, with a strong IRA presence in a particular area escalating and being aided by class action. However, even relatively inactive areas for the IRA, such as Galway, saw very significant workers’ struggles.

You might object that a film specifically on Michael Collins doesn’t have to show these aspects of the national struggle. But the massive class movements in Irish society, north and south, were in fact more effective in the fight against the British Empire than was Collins’ counter-intelligence apparatus, important and all as that was. Also, obviously, the idea that the military and the social aspects of the period can be neatly sealed off from one another is wrong, especially in a revolutionary period.

A crucial aspect of Collins’ legacy, the partition of Ireland, is not dealt with except in a few scattered lines of dialogue on the Treaty. In fact, the Protestants of the North-East of Ireland only come in front of the camera once in the film. A gang of uptight Northern Irish detectives walk into Dublin Castle, walk out and get into a car- which promptly explodes. Is it a coincidence that the only airing Northern Irish Protestants get is in the same scene as a car bomb? These were moreover not a weapon of the Irish Republican Army at this time; they are associated with the Troubles.

This scene stands out as a direct reference to later events. However, the whole film might serve, less directly and not intentionally, as such a reference. According to the internal logic of this film, if the Provisional IRA of the 1970s had been led by someone of Michael-Collins-like calibre, they would certainly have won. If this film is a manual for a successful liberation struggle, what did the Provisional IRA of later years lack? They had car bombs, they had spies and counter-spies and they had teams of ruthless assassins. They had an urban guerrilla movement, a small terrorist minority, next to which the film leaves the heroics of the Flying Columns as a sideshow, at best.

Is there a difference between Neil Jordan’s IRA and that of the 1970s? It is hard to discern in this film. That is not to call Jordan an apologist for the Provisional IRA. “Collins would never be a proponent of contemporary terrorism as practised today,” stresses Jordan in his production notes. Jordan never really defines the differences between the terrorism of Collins and the terrorism of the early nineties. There are, of course, differences in tactics and strategy. However, the most important difference is the fact that Collins’ campaign of terror was backed up by, and sometimes came into conflict with, a mass social movement.

The Dáil, which was part of a developing dual power, a parallel government with courts and local administration in many areas, is in the film relegated to a cellar in which the cabinet is supposed to meet, implied to be somewhere in Dublin’s world-renowned “catacombs.” Meanwhile, the first signs of multiple, never mind dual, power, which reached its highest point with the Limerick Soviet of April 1919, terrified both Dáil Éireann and the British administration.

Many of the film’s falsifications are of a different kind. Is gives the impression that the Civil War happened because De Valera, Boland and Brugha were jealous of Collins. It shows us De Valera hiding in a barn in county Cork, shuddering and whimpering with guilt as he plots Collins’ death. These are examples, as Jordan admits, of his making assumptions which have little basis in fact. The marginalisation of the working class and its movement in favour of a terrorist minority is far less conscious because in this Jordan is aided by prevailing views on the period. A look at any leaving cert history book will tell a similar story to the one Michael Collins tells.

To return to the image of the Protestant detectives and the car bomb: what this scene does is introduce partition, the Troubles and the National Question, and just blow it up. In other words: the script simply can’t deal with the issue. The car-bomb reference to the Troubles draws a connection between the twenties and the seventies and impresses on us an essential, unchanging Northern Ireland. Up go the Protestants in smoke. They are not part of the story of the fight for Irish independence. Collins bears no responsibility for partition- it was inevitable.

On these points, a) the working class and rural labourers’ struggles and b) the problem of the partition, the film is silent. It gets away with this because on them mainstream history is likewise too often silent. Mainstream history is silent because the working class was made silent and Northern Ireland was sealed off.

It would be wrong to tell here the story of the Irish workers’ movement and of the tragic, frustrating inadequacies of the Labour Party throughout the period. This is after all an article about Michael Collins. Just to say: the most important elements of the War of Independence are missing from Michael Collins because they are missing or understated in the history books. In turn, this is the case because the leadership of the labour movement, cowed by De Valera’s slogan “Labour must wait,” submitted to nationalism.

The nationalist character of the movement in the South, allowed by the Labour movement, failed to excite the enormously combative Protestant working class of what thereby became Northern Ireland. The initiative passed to sectarian bigots. In the south Labour passed the initiative to two groups represented by De Valera and Collins, differentiated by “dominion status” and “external association,” two almost interchangeable proposals for the future of Ireland behind which rallied distinct social forces and classes, which remained the case until February 2011.

People today rightly make fun of the divisions between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the modern-day descendants of these forces. Commentators poke fun at 21^st-century Fianna Fáilers criticizing Fine Gaelers for “taking a penny off the pension in 1924.” However, we risk forgetting that the Cumann na nGaedheal government of WT Cosgrave was one of horrific austerity. Between 1923 and 1927 Finance Minister Ernest Blythe cut government expenditure from £42 million to £24 million. The only exception to this general regressiveness was the hydroelectric station that was built on the Shannon- a project which also had its dark side in that it forced many people out of their homes without adequate compensation.

We can see the social attitudes of Cosgrave in a letter of May 1921:

“As you are aware, people reared in workhouses are no great acquisition to human society. As a rule, their highest aim is to live at the expense of ratepayers. As a consequence, it would be a decided gain if they all took it in their heads to emigrate.”

A state headed by the author of these words was the outcome of Collins’ struggle. But a quotation such as this cannot enter into Jordan’s film. Neither can the fact that this state consolidated itself on the basis of brutality toward striking workers- see the postal strike of 1922- and dozens of cold-blooded executions of its opponents. Michael Collins might as well have ended as it began: with the crushing of a failed, desperate rising in Dublin, with executions (though on a far greater scale), with repression and internment.

In Michael Collins, the Socialist leader and writer James Connolly is used for the sake of pathos. We see him wounded and unable to stand; he is tied to a chair and shot by a firing squad. It would be better if the film would listen to what Connolly had to say than to show us once more his martyrdom. We’d understand the War of Independence and Civil War much better if people paid half as much attention to Connolly’s politics as they do to his role in the “great heroic epic of failure” (an excellent line of Jordan’s) that was the 1916 Rising.

His contention that the propertied classes of Ireland “have a thousand economic strings in the shape of investments binding them to English capitalism,” and that therefore “only the Irish workers remain as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland,” is a prophecy. The working class and poor peasants, despite making up the ranks of the IRA and engaging in the mass struggles which achieved independence, failed to put any stamp on the state which emerged after independence. The small, weak Irish class of property and landowners led the “independent” state and… well, here we are.

That is why Jordan opposes the Provisional IRA and supports Michael Collins, without defining the distinction between the two. That is why partition is portrayed as inevitable. That is why the working class never enters any scene despite its spectacular role in the real-life events. That is why Michael Collins, the creation myth of the Irish bourgeois state, is a strange and incomplete story.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1910/lih/foreword.htm

http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/estudiosirlandeses/merivirta07.pdf

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/hadden/1995/natq/index.html

The Destruction of the Occupy Dame Street camp

Got up at 8, heard the Occupy Dame Street camp had been taken down at 3 that morning. I got down there as quick as I could. First thing I noticed coming up through Temple Bar was that the plaza was saturated with water. Maybe they’d washed it clean after clearing the dense undergrowth of tents and huts.

Coming up closer I could see nothing in the plaza- no tents, no pallets, no banners, just 3 high-vis uniforms standing by the path. The wooden boards that wrapped around the trees were patched with brighter spaces. For months there had been stickers, posters, placards and pages taped to these boards, a riot of slogans and ideas. All that was left was a faint discolouration.

Then I saw over by the railings a small group of maybe ten people. Faces resurfacing from my memory of before Christmas when, in that enthusiastic few weeks before it started haemorraging momentum, the protest had drawn me down to Dame Street plaza every day.

A journalist was ducking around with a camera and talking to two girls. They talked of bulldozers. Two army cars with guns. Posessions in the tents just destroyed. The journalist asked were there photographs of last night. Some online, apparently, but not much. Phones had been deliberately broken.

The protestors had taped up a small notice on the railings saying “Occupy Dame Street, ride on.” A guard noticed, came over and , with two grabs of his gloved hands, ripped it down. We closed in a called on him to stop, but it was pathetic, the unifrom could do what it wanted. How easily the Guard could have pretended  not to notice the little white square of paper. One last gesture of contempt at the broken protest: a tiny taped-on page is ripped from two railings by a half-smiling, silent Guard. Pages taped to railings? Not on, kids.

One last gesture of anger from the broken protest: two men start chanting “We all live in a fascist regime,” but it doesn’t catch.

A note of positivity: “Wait til six o’clock tonight,” says a girl. “We’ll show them then.” There’s gonna be a protest. I suggest maybe tomorrow at six, so there’s more time to build for it. Then a man in a camouflage jacket says: “We’ll have another one at six tomorrow so.” It takes me back four or five months. The Occupy attitude, provoking equal parts admiration and frustration.

“I couldn’t be here the last two days, cos of work,” says one man angrily to a woman who’s giving out to him. She wanders toward the benches talking about “Faces we haven’t seen for a long time comin back here now there’s a bit of drama.”

Don’t know if she was having a go at me or at others. Whatever. I hadn’t been there in months, like most of the early crowd. I was busy with more effective, important forms of resistance. 20,000 people have attended Household Tax meetings in every county in the state and non-payment is still over 90%. A “no” vote on the Austerity Treaty will shake the world under the feet of the billionaires of Europe. I’m building these campaigns, building my party, educating myself and politicizing other people. I have nothing to apologize for.

The Guards removed the camp for the most pitiful reason: they didn’t want it to spoil the St Patrick’s Day parade. This eleventh-rate former-colonial basket case of a bourgeois state! They’ll stamp out protest if there’s a risk the tourists and the (now semi-mythical) investors may see it. I remember seeing a poor bored Guard walking doggedly from lamp-post to signpost to lamp-post last April before the Queen of England’s visit, studiously tearing off all the anarchist stickers with his hands.

Remember also that the London protestors were turfed out only a few days ago. If ours is the last capital city left with a camp full of crusties in the middle of it, then in the eyes of our ultra-sensitive politicians we might be in danger of turning into that most terrible of things: “The laughing stock of Europe.”

But if this had happened in October or November it would be a different story. Occupy was only successfully evicted because it had in the meantime alienated itself from broad support. The state let ODS’ own weaknesses wear it down to the bone, then smashed the brittle remains.

What were these weaknesses?

If nothing is going on except camping and there’s no strategy except hoping that more people come along, well, people will always have better things to be doing with their time and energy and money.

With no elected leadership, there arose a de facto leadership composed of whoever had the least time on their hands and could spend most time down at the camp.

Consensus-based decision-making ensured endless debates with little activity to show for it.

There was sometimes a virulent, nazi attitude towards political parties- as if we’d all just fallen from the sky and were mindless machines bent on “proselytising” and hijacking.

Sometimes there were promising signs: huge demonstrations early on in the movement, a mighty echo from Wall Street resounding down from College Green. Like every protest movement without a strategy or achievable goals, however, this lost momentum.

Then there were reports of people moving to occupy NAMA buildings. It only really happened once, to my knowledge, down in Cork; they were isolated, turfed out and brought to court.

The Occupy movement had huge public support. I remember all the beeps of the horns as cars passed. I remember the crowds that would gather at 1 and 6. Its four demands were brilliant. But the movement, although it was lodged in plain sight of the world, was sealed off by its own assumptions.  The self-sacrifice of many people who did give up other aspects of their lives to camp out on Dame Street was never going to be more than the choice of a minority, when the movement had no promises to make.

This idea of trying to build a new society in the plazas and squares had absolutely nothing going for it. It was an implicit admission that you couldn’t change society, that you had to quarantine yourself from it like it was contagious. As if by your lifestyle, you could attain a kind of holy transcendence.

The vast, vast majority of people are too concerned with work and family to “rise above” Capitalism. Humanity can’t cut itself off from the social system that puts food on the table and keeps the hospitals and schools running, any more than the slave can make his chains disappear just by wishing it.

However, the majority in society can be mobilized to defend our living standards in a direct way. The rich have stopped investing in society on a scale that is historic; our governments are looting our services and pay to make up the gambling debts of these same billionaires. We are on a trajectory toward leaving society as bare and sodden as Dame Street plaza is now.

People won’t accept it, though, not without a fight. Six months ago, if anyone told me that there would not be mass movements of a historic scale over the next few years, I would have laughed in their faces. Today it’s no longer a prediction, it’s a reality. The Household Tax campign, only two and a half months in, is spectacular, and it’s only the start.

For activists hoping to change the world, occupying a square is a good tactic- it’s a constant protest, a permanent invasion of the public consciousness. But alone, it’s not enough. We need to orientate towards mass movements, providing the organisation, the infrastructure and the financial support wherever needed. We meed to go to millions of doorsteps and hundreds of community centres, and tie thousands of posters to poles.

We also need to provide the politics. We need to help mobilize the working class in its own defence in a general way. This is the class that can bring society to a halt by witholding its labour, just as the rich are currently witholding their capital. Then when we’re organized and politicized, we can go on the offensive.

My worry is that the slowing-down and liquidation of Occupy Dame Street will demoralize people who are looking toward creating a more equal and rational world. But it is beyond possible doubt that in my lifetime there will be moments in which the seizure of power and wealth by the working class, and the democratic, equal reorganisation of society, will be possible. The only variable is what foundation the politicized, revolutionary layers of society are willing and able to build between now and then. That’s us, and that’s our job now.

Review: Conquered City by Victor Serge

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Trans. Richard Greeman

New York Review of Books

2011, 1932

Victor Serge was a Bolshevik leader in Russia during the darkest days of the Civil War and the Terror. In his novel Conquered City he left us a record of a terrible, formative year in the life of St. Petersburg. The city’s most terrible months were still a decade away when he wrote his novel in 1930-31 and dispatched it to France, chapter by chapter, for publication. Nonetheless Serge brings us on a tour of hell itself in his description of the year 1919-20.

Serge shows us a packed and stinking train station with a shanty town in the lobby; a squalid prison seen through the eyes of a wrongly-accused man; frontline troops without boots; workers whose shipment of bread has been once more hijacked, whose patience is wearing thin. He shows us executions and murders, and looters being shot without a second thought.

There would be plenty of material in Serge’s work for any of the capitalist triumphalist writers of the last twenty years to shout about. Service, if he was bothered to open a book by those he writes about, would love Conquered City. Serge, however, was a revolutionary, and this work is not a reactionary horror show but a clear-eyed, level-headed debate about the Revolution and the Terror. It is a decisive justification of both because, unlike Service, Read and the rest of them, Serge presents the threat of the White armies in an accurate- and terrifying- light. Nor does he ignore the “Greens” or try to romanticize them- a contrast to the Kronstadt-mania of his later years.

The Russian Civil War was a fight to the death. It was unimaginably cruel and bitter. In passages like the one I quote below, Serge takes it on head-first and retrieves irony, humour and a bizarre sense of life-going-on amid the horror.

(If you like, imagine it happening in the NAMA’d buildings of Dublin’s quays, many years from now)

The noisy clatter of typewriters filled rooms designed for princely comfort; a coarse conqueror, Comrade Rhyzik, was sleeping in his boots [...]

Every once in a while the bored sentry sitting, elbows propped on a dirty table, at the door to the cellar stairs would get up, reluctantly shoulder the strap of his rifle, and go to open the padlock of his prison. 

“All right!” he would say, not unkindly. “Financiers to the crapper, three at a time!” 

 Though it is mired in the everyday horror of the Civil War, Conquered City maintains an attitude of hope. This hope is all the more stirring because Serge doesn’t flinch from showing us just how bad things got during the civil war, or to what horrific lengths the revolutionaries went to defeat the Whites and the Allies. He’s not trying to lie to us but to show us exactly what happened and explore why. For the most part he is utterly convincing; however, I have my reservations about a scene where a professor wrongly condemned to death philosphically sides with his Bolshevik persecutors.

The translator, Richard Greeman, tells us in the introduction that the hope expressed by some characters is just irony. Serge was writing from the dog-house of those revolutionaries who still dared to oppose Stalin, and the novel foreshadows the growth of the dictatorship. On relating the story of a skirmish in a copse, Serge goes through the many different versions of events that are current: “..according the the fourth [version], invented ten years later, the copse didn’t exist and nothing of the kind had ever happened.”

I would disagree with Greeman, however. The depths Serge goes to in his description of the horror of the time, and the lengths to which he goes  to provide some hope that the future will be better (at one point two characters debate this point for about nine pages), signal to me that he is writing about 1930-31 as well as about 1919-20. If the revolution can overcome the Whites, the famine, the blockade and twenty-one foreign armies, it can overcome Stalinism. Serge, a dedicated Oppositionist, would hardly have peddled writings that would undermine his own lifelong struggle.

Tragically, the worst of Stalinism was yet to come as Serge wrote Conquered City. He wrote it in distress but also in hope, however, and Greeman is wrong to assume that because Serge tells the truth, he must be a jaded cynic. Conquered City is the work of a revolutionary and this fact is visible in every line. Following an ensemble cast of diverse characters around the city between 1919 and 1920, it is a meditation on the Red Terror and the Civil War that explores every dark crevice, pulls no punches and tells no lies.

Sinn Féin’s boycott betrayal

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Plenty of Sinn Féin members are calling for non-payment of the household charge while the leadership discourages it, pretending that a mass boycott is a “personal” matter. Even as they condemn the charge and condemn austerity, they summon up the image of the non-payer being left high and dry by a hapless campaign and an apathetic public. There are two causes for their adoption of this position.

The first is their institutional memory of the Rent and Rates Strike in the 1970s, which was a failure. Alongside this is the memory of the Bin Tax campaign, a more recent and relevant defeat. The Rent and Rates Strike was doomed to failure from the start due to the fact that it was not an economic protest of the working class, but a political strike necessarily based only in the Catholic community. A part of the failure of the Bin Tax campaign, meanwhile, may be left at the feet of Sinn Féin themselves for the similarly double-mouthed stance they adopted at that time. Moreover, the emphasis on blockades as a tactic and the fine economic weather are features of that campaign which will be absent from the struggle in the New Year.

The second reason is far more substantial, and for it the above reason is often deployed as a cover. Sinn Féin as an organisation is hostile to mass participation in politics. Aonghus O’ Snodaigh speaks of the “irresponsibility” of calling for non-payment and talk about people being “left in the lurch, facing fines and imprisonment”. There is a genuine risk of that happening to people. However, if Sinn Féin were to support the campaign- to dedicate and organize their public reps, staff, resources and activists- the chances of any non-payer suffering would wither away to nothing. The Sinn Féiners are the ones leaving people in the lurch.

With something like the Household Charge, as with the Poll Tax and the Water Charges, half-measures are worse than nothing. 10% non-payment just means 10% of the people being victimized.  When Sinn Féin hang back and talk about people broken by fines, they make what is to some extent a self-fulfilling prophecy- in not admitting for a moment that it has every chance of success while “personally” refusing to pay, the aim and the outcome is individual martyrdom, not victory. Martyrdom won’t save anyone a cent, and it won’t defeat austerity.

Any notion that they are being “responsible” by sabotaging this campaign must be dismissed. Sinn Féin’s position is a betrayal. Their support was not expected or hoped for, and nor is it necessary. The campaign still has every chance of success. At this point, before it has even begun, the campaign is miles ahead of where the anti-water charges campaign was at an equivalent stage. We have a huge campaign and have had massive meetings. We have a rake of TDs. We have huge support. This betrayal will have deeper consequences for Sinn Féin than it will for the Household Charge.

There were people left high and dry by badly-organized or defeated campaigns in the past. But if working-class communities standing up and defeating the state machine was an easy and painless process, then it would happen far more often. Sinn Féin, like everyone, know that sticking your head above the parapet invites enemy fire. It’s common sense. But the fallout from a defeat seems to be in the front of their minds, which suggests that they think the campaign will fail.

This is the curious point, because if defeat is inevitable in the communities (which it definitely isn’t!) then it’s hard to see why Sinn Féin are bothering to oppose the charge. Can we imagine for a moment that they think they might defeat it in the Dáil? Perhaps they have a plan to mobilize enormous demonstrations against the charge as an alternative to non-payment. Both of these scenarios are equally ridiculous and without foundation.

The answer to this political riddle must be that Sinn Féin are, in this instance as in others, performing the rituals of resistance, while failing actually to resist. This is the behaviour of a party that has a more realistic perspective than the Labour Party, even if it is equally cynical. If the Labour Party is displaying bovine idiocy, Sinn Féin can be credited with brute cunning. As an organisation, their political manoeuvres signify not the intention of defeating austerity, but the intention of harvesting votes by ineffectually opposing austerity- and only in ways that are “responsible”.

Those who call for non-payment, on the other hand, mostly see TDs only as an auxiliary to politics in the streets and in communities. In Sinn Féin’s implicit position of electoralism, by contrast, it is easy to see a future trajectory: steady growth, junior coalition partner status, utter sellout, then back, not quite to Square One, but to Two or Three, never to advance beyond Five. So Sinn Féin would oppose austerity just so that one day they might impose it- that theirs would be a policy of austerity is certain, considering their role as instruments of the Tories in Northern Ireland. This trajectory, however, would apply to “ordinary” times, assuming a return to prosperity and stability.

That would be a very big assumption. It will be increasingly necessary in coming years for communities to organize against cutbacks. There will be no radical-electoralist constituency for Sinn Féin to appeal to- no body of voters willing to let a TD say to them that civil disobedience is “irresponsible” at a time when it is a dreadful necessity. This shunning of the Household Charge campaign will be their first step on the road to irrelevance. Maybe after a few further steps they will begin to consider sweeping policy changes- for better or for worse- as a way of saving themselves.

Opposing Nick Griffin

Image by infomatique via Flickr

On Tuesday 11^th October members of Trinity College’s Philosophical Society left a Trinity lecture hall with a silent, traumatized air. In a crowded and emotional public meeting the Phil had been subjected to a harsh berating for inviting Nick Griffin, leader of the racist British National Party, to speak at a debate on immigration.

Socialists and anti-racists on and off campus, staff unions, the Graduate Students’ Union and many student societies formed a broad campaign and, by Friday, had succeeded in getting the invitation withdrawn. There would have been a huge demonstration on the night of the debate and many were willing to block Griffin from speaking if necessary. Thirty anti-fascist activists illustrated this fact to the Phil by occupying their debating chamber on Thursday night.

In the course of the campaign, however, we came up against those who thought that the best way to stop Griffin was to defeat his ideas in a debate. Some claimed that Griffin represents a constituency that should not be ignored.

We responded that the outcome of the proposed debate and the speeches made would have been insignificant. A notorious racist with a neo-Nazi past would have spoken from a respected platform in Ireland; this would have been an inspiration and an organisational focus point for the far-right in this country. Debates like this are a big help to political racists, who usually have serious trouble gaining such publicity. In their desire for controversy, however, student societies quite often remove this obstacle by giving them a platform.

The Phil did ask a Socialist Party member to speak against Griffin at the debate, but he refused the offer. Only as a last resort would he share a platform with individuals like Griffin. We were confident that we should and would get the debate cancelled and we were up-front about that.

Though presented as a “moderate” and “respectable” anti-immigration party, the BNP has a long list of members, former members and even election candidates who have been convicted of racist abuse and assault, arson, terrorism and, in several cases, the sexual abuse of children. There are dozens of examples in the last decade alone. The party’s attitudes toward violence and links to violent groups are disturbing.

We want an open and free debate on migration- not one which assumes that such twisted individuals as Griffin have a valuable contribution to make. When there are no jobs and devastating cutbacks, a significant minority of people will say “we need to look after our own first,” and parties like the BNP, if sufficiently organized, will pick up votes and recruits. In the absence of such a party, anti-immigrant sentiment is unlikely to find an organized channel. This is of crucial importance because a political party provides finance, unity, organisation, publications, and positive reinforcement of ideas that might otherwise never take root.

We demand equal working conditions and fighting trade union representation for all to ensure there is no exploitation of migrants or undercutting of the hard-won rights of Irish workers. We demand a state that can provide homes, welfare and public services for everyone, not one that relies mostly on “the market” to do so, guaranteeing scarcity and therefore conflict.

Whenever we raise the issue of “no platform for fascists,” pundits come out with the same tired old quip: “who are the real fascists here?” Unlike them we have a very specific definition of fascism. Nick Griffin has been an active political racist for most of his life. He is closely linked to extreme violence and has denied the holocaust. Therefore we use the term “fascist” quite correctly.

Nor are we “stifling debate.” Genuine Socialist activists discuss migration with huge numbers of people when we knock on doors and hold street stalls and public meetings, but rational debate is not a weapon worth deploying against a fascist. In a dark alley with a migrant, the weapons of Nick Griffin’s friends are not subtle sociological arguments but the boot, the fist and the pipe-bomb. In inviting Nick Griffin to a debate, the Phil were bringing a knife to a gunfight, and expecting others- particularly migrants from Asia and Africa- to take the bullet.

Thankfully, the far right now understand that any attempt by them to organize in Ireland will be met with uncompromising resistance. However, the most important anti-fascist activity by far remains the struggle against capitalism. When we live in a fair and equal society in which workers democratically run the economy, racism would be eliminated along with the need for mass migration. We must emphasize the need for solidarity between peoples of all races as a weapon against the domination of the world by banks and corporations.

 

 

 

 

On Alan Moore

Image via Wikipedia

“Be warned, though,” said the man behind the counter. “It contains a lot of fish-rape.”

I was asking the man behind the counter in Subcity in Galway about Alan Moore’s soon-to-be-released stories set in the world of HP Lovecraft’s weird stories.

“Fish-rape!” I exclaimed. Though in hindsight, it was to be expected. When the copyright for Lovecraft’s horror stories expired and Alan Moore got his hands on them, the resulting graphic novels would inevitably involve fish-rape. Lovecraft’s stories would not acknowledge the existence of sex, let alone rape, but would often involve grotesque fish-people. Moore’s stories, meanwhile, always seem to have a rape scene.

Sitting in the Jervis Street library some time later, taking a cavalier approach to a pressing deadline and flicking through a really fun Moore comic entitled Smax, I saw yet another female character being brutally raped. It set me thinking over all the Alan Moore graphic novels I’ve ever read, and I realized that every one of them included a scene where a woman is raped or else very nearly raped. This includes Watchmen, V for Vendetta, the three League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books and the shorter comic Century: 1910, From Hell, and the Lovecraftian Yuggoth Cultures.

There’s a new edition of Century¸ set in 1968, which I was looking forward to for a while. I saw it in the shops recently, had a flick through it, and though no sexual assaults caught my eye, I realized I’d had enough of Alan Moore. That isn’t to say that reading him wasn’t worth it.

V for Vendetta remains my favourite of his works: it oozes a grimy 1980s British atmosphere, and with David Lloyd’s shadowy, ashen illustrations, it makes me think of the greatest mini-series never made by the BBC. The flamboyant V himself seems all the more extraordinary against this grim and down-to-earth backdrop. The film should have been directed not by the Wachowski siblings (The Matrix) but by Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Let the Right One In).

Watchmen is quite rightly taught on some English courses in my college now. Some found the long “writey bits” between the chapters to be a bit of a bore but I loved the sense of looking at artefacts from the world of the comic (even Hollis Mason’s bizarrely short memoirs).

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, like Gaiman’s Sandman and Morrison’s The Invisibles, appeals to readers because of the web of references it spins. These kinds of comics are best read by English undergraduates. The League perhaps came to over-rely on this trick, however, making it a hit-and-miss affair as time went on. Whole speech-bubbles, whole panels, whole pages, began to turn into inside jokes cracked between Moore and some imaginary person out there who’s read every single thing he has.

It is Moore’s use of rape, however, that smacks most strongly of self-indulgence. As he’s at the top of his business and all it takes is his name on the cover to sell his work, he can treat his female characters however he likes.

Sometimes Moore uses rape for the sake of pastiche. In Smax and Watchmen, what could be more incongruous with the fantasy worlds, respectively, of Tolkien and of superhero comics, than the idea of sexual assault?

V for Vendetta contains the least explicit and most stereotypical scene of threatened rape: V crashes in, Hollywood-style, before the secret-policemen even touch our heroine, kills them and spirits her to safety.  Here Moore is no more at fault than is any artist who is too lazy to think of a better way to bring hero and heroine together. Evie’s extended torture later on in the comic presents a more complex picture. There’s nothing sexual in this sequence: it’s a narrative, however harrowing, of resistance, through which Evie rises above victimhood.

In the League comics, rape seems more sinister. In the first, an attempted rape is presented in a cartoonish way, but again as a way of bringing the hero to the rescue of the heroine. Later the invisible man, again very cartoonishly, infiltrates a girl’s school and goes on a raping spree every night. This sub-plot is played entirely for laughs. Later rapes take a different tone, reading as attempted condemnations of patriarchy and misogyny.

The Invisible Man rapes Mina Murray, and in revenge Dr. Hyde rapes the Invisible Man to death. A girl working in a London boarding-house is gang-raped by its customers; this spurs her to wreak a bloody and very explicit revenge. James Bond tries to rape the unlucky Miss Murray after luring her to Orwell’s Ministry of Love. He underestimates his victim, who, as in previous examples, exacts a vicious revenge.

In each of these cases Moore seems on a facile level to be trying to challenge views of rape and misogynistic attitudes. Perhaps this feminist pose would be convincing if Moore didn’t “explore” rape with such obsessive regularity paired with such lack of any real message beyond “rape is ugly” (though the message “James Bond was a rapist”, reminiscent of MDC’s song “John Wayne was a Nazi”, is intriguing). In each case, moreover, rape is used as a plot device to justify some extremely gory revenge scene.

So, with resounding echoes of the worse aspects of Tarantino, the reader and the writer indulge in a good rape scene; pat each other on the back for disapproving of rape; and go on to indulge in a revenge scene which has been very comfortingly justified. As with many action movies that try to assume an “edgy” tone, the author adopts a fake “hardened” view of the world. Pretending to a grim, hardcore realism, the author loses himself in brutal fantasies. Utter infantile macho self-indulgence so often and so easily poses as “progressive” and “subversive”. So did Italian fascism in its early years.

As noted before, sex and women are timidly absent from Lovecraft’s tales. What disturbs me about Moore’s Lovecraftian rape scenes, however, is not some kind of fanboy nerdiness about “remaining true to the original” by leaving out sex, but rather the sheer self-indulgence that is evident. Moore is visibly having great fun using Lovecraft’s material and ideas, and amid all this fun he throws in some more pointless rape scenes- for what object, if not for fun? To carry his ill-defined rape-related crusade even into his Ctulhu pastiches?

I believe that in time comics/graphic novels will receive the same critical acknowledgement and attention as written novels do today. I hope that when a future generation studies Moore- and it definitely should- the writer’s evidently disgraceful attitudes toward women and clear obsession with rape should be to the fore.

In many ways Moore is a fitting successor to Lovecraft. Moore’s obsession and Lovecraft’s utter silence when it comes to sex point to vast seams of mental disturbance for critics to dig into into. Moreover, Moore, like Lovecraft, straddles literature and pulp fiction. When comics are studied in universities, students should read Moore and understand immediately why the graphic novel was looked down upon in our time as a laddish, adolescent hobby. In the midst of real brilliance are patches of utter self-indulgence and the gross artistic abuse of women. It is all the more offensive that it tries to pretend to be anything else.

Lovecraft’s talent and imagination shine through his horribly racist attitudes (usually) and attain a certain independence from the author that edifies him and helps us to understand him. I am in a trough with Moore at the moment, but I predict that sometime in the future I will open V or Watchmen again and, just like with Lovecraft, hope that it can shine through.

Why did the credit binge happen?

I’ve skim-read yet another article in the Times which tries to explain the objective shiteness of Ireland by blaming it on a mash of vague “cultural” factors- how we see the state, how we engage as citizens, how we should be more like Scandinavia. The memorable bit of the article (which is available here: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0820/1224302759014.html) is when he says if we had had a Norwegian finance minister for the past twenty years we wouldn’t be in this mess. I heard another guy on the radio this morning bemoaning the fact that we’re “on our knees”, considering we were one of the world’s most competitive countries just a few years ago.

This is what passes for commentary right now. No suspicion on the part of that second guy that there might be an intimate connection between our “competitiveness” and our failure. Being “competitive” in the capitalist market means being on your knees.

The other guy, the Scandinavian-ministers-guy, looks at our credit binge and says the Scandinavians would never have done this. That’s the same attitude which breeds articles full of lazy, spend-happy, feckless Mediterraneans and disciplined, austere Germans. At its worst it breeds the Myers brand of African, a black haze of angry incompetent irrationality.

A more sensible analysis shows us that after the Irish Gombeen class accidentally recovered from the crisis of the 1980s, the credit binge was the only option. How else to achieve prosperity in Ireland than to fake it? When world capitalism became fundamentally unprofitable in the 1970s and ’80s, this was the route taken by most of the advanced capitalist countries. The Age of Credit (c.1989-2008) was the historical blink-of-the-eye in which the weak, tiny Irish Capitalist class found conditions in which it could thrive. Never before had it provided full employment or such huge tax revenue. As a historically weak class of gombeens and chancers, not quite capitalists, the Irish ruling class naturally found its niche in an age when con artistry was seen as viable economic policy.

That age has passed. Debt mountains; rows upon rows of dead, empty houses- dramatic contributions from an apparently unpromising class. It’s all we could ever hope to get from them, even if there had been a Norwegian on Merrion Row. It’s all we ever will get from them; talk of export-led growth and our “enterprizing spirit” should be disregarded out of hand. If only this failed class had the grace to bow out now.

[ps: a short post from politics.ie on the word "gombeen"- I think I pass the test for precise usage of the term... http://www.politics.ie/forum/culture-community/166759-why-do-posters-misuse-word-gombeen.html]

England Erupts

Four people who were alive a few days ago are now dead, nearly 2000 people have been arrested, thousands of businesses have been effected and over a hundred homes have been burnt out. I think most of us are glad the riots in England are over. Now, however, we have to listen to the ridiculous comments being made by the media and political establishment about the riots and their causes.

The usual right-wing imbecility

Cameron made a speech recently in which he said that Britain’s “security fightback must be matched by a social fightback.” A social fightback- sounds good. If he means more jobs, more resources for education and youth centres, democratic control over policing, etc. But of course he doesn’t mean that. His diagnosis for his “sick society” is that Britain has been going through a “slow-motion moral collapse.”

Poverty, deprivation and alienation are not issues- it’s simply a moral issue. All socio-economic factors are angrily written off as “excuses”. If there’s no socio-economic causes there conveniently need be no socio-economic response. If it’s a moral issue then all that’s required is a moral response- ie a speech by the Prime Minister and a media campaign demonizing people who need social welfare to survive.

Cameron only half-heartedly followed his implications to their conclusion: “Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices had no consequences. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibility. Communities without control.”

Other have been more definite. Historian David Starkey came to the conclusion that the problem was that “the chavs have become black. The whites have become black.” Dreda Say Mitchell writing in the Guardian points out that Starkey fails to draw the connection between speaking in a Jamaican accent and burning down a corner shop.

Lord Tebbit, and over here in Ireland Kevin Myers and David Quinn, have smacked the bush Cameron seems to be beating around. The problem, apparently, is the fact that we live in a society in which single mothers are supported by the state rather than being left to starve. These commentators put undue prominence on the father-figure issue as if it is the single overriding factor: these kids, they don’t have a man around to tell them what to do. Myers, for one, believes that social welfare for single mothers is part of a feminist conspiracy to make the male redundant. Of course it’s significant that a huge number of Tottenham youths have no fathers. But this is simply one symptom of a much wider and deeper issue than can be written off as a seeping “culture” of irresponsibility.

Not only do they neurotically focus on fatherhood to the exclusion of most else but they actually believe that a significant proportion of single mothers have had babies only so that they can claim social welfare. Let’s pause and contemplate how ridiculous this is: as if anyone would go through pregnancy and childbirth (alone) simply to live the next twenty years on peanuts.

Insistence that the rioting has nothing to do with cuts or poverty is another hallmark of the media and political response- rehashing isolated examples like “I heard on the radio them interviewing a rioter and he had a posh accent” or “some of them were students”. The people coming before the courts are, the vast majority of them, young, male and unemployed.

It’s not a revolution either

Some left-wing groups have glamorized and celebrated the riots. One in particular put up posters in affected areas saying “from riot to revolution”.  Fundamentally, this analysis demands a lot of doublethink because people’s day-to-day experience of the riots doesn’t tally at all with the idea that it’s a progressive uprising. If it weren’t for the severe cruelty of many episodes during the riots, for the widespread destruction of people’s property and life it caused, and for the fear felt by so many, the right could not possibly have made the ideological offensive outlined above.

The riots have set the workers’ movement back. The state now has a greater repressive apparatus at its disposal (water cannon, plastic bullets) and a greater license to use it than before. The EDL and similar groups have taken the opportunity to play at vigilantes and increase their prestige. The political points voiced by many protestors have been undermined by the attacks on ordinary people that have taken place, and these polticial points were scattered and inchoate to begin with.

However, an article I read that tried to prove the riots had a Greek, Spanish, even Egyptian character was far more convincing that the platitudes of the right. There was no shortage of quotes from onlookers and participants alike to support this analysis. This is because the riots were a mixed bag. We need to understand in a way that few commentators have really acknowledged that “the rioters” weren’t a united group subscribing to any political programme. There were many different elements.

Mixed character

There were obviously opportunistic thugs, thieves, gangsters and psychopaths. There were people just letting rip after years of frustration on the dole or Minimum Wage or close. There were political protesters who have tried and failed to get attention in other ways. There were gang mambers or people associated with gangs just following the herd. There were people just looking for daily necessities or the luxury goods that capitalism spends hundreds of billions shoving in our face every year.

These groups are of course fluid- one could be many or all of the above. We need to think about broken window syndrome as well: someone else smashed the window in Currys and now everyone’s taking a widescreen TV- I really want one- the damage is done already anyway, I might as well- I’m high on adrenaline anyway- here we go.

We need to think about the mentality of years spent in communities that are overlooked and under-resourced by the state, about cameras and thugs instead of community policing. We need to think about areas already depressed, tense and badly-policed in which stops-and-searches are frequent, and over 20 times more likely if you’re black. Places where hanging around on the street corner is seen as a crime, but there’s nothing else to do and nowhere else to hang out.

Think about areas with few jobs and only low-paid ones at that, where mugging and drug-dealing are commonplace.  Growing up there, you join a  gang. You harden up. You get tough or die. When violence between gangs and individuals defines life, getting together and bringing that violence on a mass scale to the high street is not such a radical or shocking step. It’s actually logical enough.

Imagine the difficulty of bettering yourself in such an environment, of escaping. Then imagine if the government triples tuition fees, cuts grants and makes it impossible for any working-class person to attend college on their own resources. Imagine your youth centres are being closed down as only one part of £41 million worth of cuts in the area. Imagine the government tells you this is only the beginning, and the only other political force, meanwhile, is the Labour party which is urging the same cuts only not so fast.

Hundreds of people have died in the custody of the London Metropolitan Police in the last few decades. No police officer has ever even faced trial with relation to this. Every few years, some innocent person is shot dead. Imprisonment rates soared in the 90s and 00s, for no apparent reason as crime rates had been dropping.

The spark

In recent months thousands marched against police brutality in these same neighbourhoods. There was little media coverage.

Several hundred marched on Tottenham police station on the day it all kicked off because no police officer had yet spoken to Mark Duggan’s parents. The demonstrators waited for hours and no police official came to address them. Finally something happened: the police beat up a 16-year-old girl. The rest is history.

World crisis

It’s not a coincidence that this happppened within a year of uprisings all across North Africa and the Middle East and serious protest movements all along the Mediterranean. Within Britain, the year has seen huge student campaigns, an enormous demonstration on March 26th, a strike of 3/4 of a million workers and many other smaller movements.

The riots, of course, have been very different from these. But clearly they should be viewed as part of the same narrative. Internationally, capitalism is in crisis. The credit bubbles of the last 20-30 years have proved unable to overcome its innate contradictions. Western Capitalism can’t afford the welfare state which alone has made capitalism bearable in the last few years. It can’t produce goods with sufficient profit unless that production is taking place in a dictatorship. Huge numbers of people have moved against these dictatorships in recent months and discontent in China is growing, with incalculable implications for Capitalism.

Political Crisis 

Cameron bewailed people “acting as if [their] choices had no consequences.”

Let’s reflect that those rioting are in their twenties and their thirties. They are the supposedly “post-industrial” generation. They are Thatcher’s offspring. They are the population of the scrap-heap of the services-based economy, the detritus of the Age of Credit.

Tories: you don’t destroy millions of manufacturing jobs without very serious consequences. You don’t try to smash the trade union movement without very serious consequences.

Labour: you don’t move irretrievably to the right and preside over an increasing marginalization and demonization of the working class without serious consequences.

The British working class, largely speaking, works in low-paid, mindless, odd-hours, insecure, non-unionized, non-socialized jobs. Huge numbers barely subsist on the dole. Ten million live in council housing. They are demonized as “Chavs”, as an “underclass”, and the social problems that have seeped in inevitably due to their socio-economic position have been pointed at the prove their utter essential depravity.

That large elements of this socio-economic class should return the favour and prove just as hostile should be no surprise. That they should do so in a violent, angry, apparently unpolitical way should be no surprise.

All the Tories’ plans amount to digging this hole ten times deeper, all the while removing the safety net of welfare. The Labour party proposes to dig the same hole, not as quickly, not as deeply, but just as surely.

War on gangs 

Cameron in the same speech quoted above declared a “war on gangs and gang culture.”

The best way to undermine organized crime is simply to provide for people economically and socially. We are a social species and we will form groups the better to achieve things together and distribute the spoils of our victories among us. This is the function the state is supposed to serve for its citizens.

Instead it serves as a manager of the affairs of the rich, with the excuse that “private enterprise” and “the profit incentive” are the surest creators of wealth in society despite all the evidence to the contrary. All the while harvesting our tax money, they bail out the rich when they fail. When things go wrong, they send in men in uniform to beat the problem away.

Society is coming under a huge attack from the rich and the traditional institutions of struggle, bought out, are being totally complacent. The situation is crying out for a fighting trade union movement and a dedicated mass socialist party for the working class, to provide policies and ideas that relate to daily life. Only Socialism, with its message of democratic workers’ control over the economy, over wealth, production and organization in society, can address the urgent problems that have led to these riots. The existence of the rich and the super-rich is of course unconscionable, but of far greater importance is their control over the economy.

When the class anger that spilled over into riots is channeled into a peaceful but far more effective campaign- of general strikes, of mass civil disobedience, of occupations, nationalizations and democratic grass-roots organisation of a new society- then we can start controlling the economy and planning on industiral, local, regional, national and international levels. The only alternative is to continue allowing the economy- the sum of all decisions made by the richest and greediest people- determining almost every factor of our lives.

Some see any attempt at socio-economic analysis of the riots as an “excuse” for “mindless criminality”; apparently, I’m letting people off the hook for their actions. The question of individual responsibility, however, must be hugely limited when we don’t control the economy, while the economy determines whether we eat or starve, whether we work or don’t work, whether we live or just exist, whether we survive or die. Of course there’s good and bad, there’s degrees of choice for individuals- there’s some wriggle room, in other words. There are “degrees of choice”; some have 360; some, like myself, a middle-class Irish student, have a fair few. Those who wind up rioting are for the most part those with fuck all economic wriggle room and “degrees of choice” not worth a curse.

David Quinn on the Riots in England

[A letter I had printed in the Indo on August 15th 2011. Sudden proliferation of letters to the Indo may be noticeable on this page. I'm working in a cafe where we get the Indo every day. Previous to working in this cafe, I'd never read the Indo with much regularity and so had no idea of the depths their columnists can sink to. I do now and keep getting angry and feeling like writing in.]

Monday August 15 2011

DAVID Quinn (Irish Independent August 12) — ‘Left has laid the groundwork for riots in Ireland’ — thinks it “doubtful whether the (English) rioters are even aware” of government cutbacks.

I think young people in Haringey in London know that eight out of their 13 youth clubs are to be shut down, especially seeing as so many of them have been involved in peaceful — and ignored — campaigns to save these clubs.

The rioters must be very well aware of the recent increases in college fees and cuts to grants that have destroyed any prospect of a decent future for millions.

It’s a reasonable guess that these rioters know a lot more about cutbacks than Mr Quinn.

As to Mr Quinn’s knowledge of modern history and politics, apparently “the Left” has destroyed “traditional values”, creating a mindless, riotous “underclass” — he seems not to have noticed the trampling of the working class that has taken place since the 1980s, or the de-industrialisation that has reduced swathes of Britain to an economic wasteland.

There would seem to be a remarkable correlation between the areas “the Right” has left destitute and the areas “the Left” has been most successful in its sinister plot against the family.