Shiraz Socialist

Taken more in sadness than in anger. From Richard “Lenny” Seymour:

….

Realistically, Qutb’s ideal state would probably not have differed that much from Nasser’s, except for added religious trappings.

In the meantime, I fear that Hamas are currently the only serious resistance movement in Palestine, for all their shortcomings.

….

All this in an effort to put down those straw men so perfect for today’s support-anyone-who’s-against-the-USA “left”, Alan Johnson and Slavoj Žižek? For goodness’ sake - is he really the best the SWP’s got on its “don’t have to do a paper sale” academic wing these days?

Martin Bright, in the latest edition of the New Statesman, discusses “how the left and Israel fell out of love“. It’s not a particularly profound or insightful piece, but it’s worth noting because it’s a rare example of a liberal/left publication admitting that there might - just might - be such a thing as anti-semitism on the “left”:

“The internet has flushed out a whole subculture of left-wing hostility to Israel that should make even Marqusee (Mike Marqusee - an anti Zionist who makes much of the fact that he’s Jewish - JD) uncomfortable. This has a regular and willing outlet on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website and the New Statesman also suffers from it whenever we publish articles on Israel. Postings on our blog casually link Zionism to fascism or South African Apartheid. The language is so unpleasant that it is difficult not to draw the conclusion that many of the comments are driven by anti-semitism.”

And sure enough: visit the New Statesman’s website and you’ll see some choice examples of just what Bright is on about. You can, of course, comment there yourselves, but you have to register.

Another example of what he’s on about appears on the page following Bright’s article: a full-page ad from these people, who appear to deny Israel’s right to exist, and who seek to introduce a “long-overdue phrase into the English language:

“nakba denial: the act of denying, including legal and moral responsibility for, the on-going, systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine that was waged in order to create the State of Israel.”

A classic example of people whose primary motivation appears not to be solidarity with the Palestinians, but visceral hatred of Israel. No doubt they consider themselves “left wing” and would furiously deny being anti-semitic (as opposed to being “anti Zionist”).

Today’s grovelling apology by the West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service - not to mention the “six figure” libel damages, is of course most welcome. It will also, hopefully, bring an end once and for all to the cops’ efforts to act as TV censors.

Channel 4 and the producers of Undercover Mosque , the Dispatches programme referred to Ofcom by the cops, have been vindicated. The cops started out investigating the race hatred, incitement to violence and bigotry being preached in various “mainstream” mosques, including the Green Lane Mosque in Small Heath, Birmingham. For some reason that has never been fully explained, they then turned their attention to the producers of the programme, accusing them of selective editing and distortion. The programme makers were accused of undermining community relations. The CPS reviewing lawyer Bethan David claimed that “in this case we have been dealing with a heavily edited television programme, apparently taking out of context aspects of speeches which in their totality could never provide a realistic prospect of any convictions.”  Seizing on this, the preachers and their apologists made much of how they had, supposedly, been taken “out of context”; to which, one can only echo the words today, of David Henshaw, the boss of the company that made the programme: “No one has explained what (is) the correct context for arguing that women are ‘born deficient’, that homosexuals should be thrown off mountains and that 10-year-old girls should be hit if they refuse to wear the hijab.”

Judge for yourself, if you’ve a strong stomach:

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
 
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
 
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin

I find this poem exhilarating, but parts of it are difficult.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;

First point – that “something almost being said,” is an awkward, even ugly line, clotted with consonants.  “Being” is a hard word to stress comfortably.  By the scansion it should break into two syllables – be-ing – but that makes you exaggerate the “be” bit, which isn’t natural English, and Larkin always tried to make his lines sound like natural speech.  Or was this deliberate, for the sense of this line, that what is “almost being said” is inexpressible – something that will not be turned easily into words?

The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

That is the puzzle presented by the verses, why this greenness which is normally experienced as a delight, should be a kind of grief.  The next stanza suggests and then refutes one answer:-

Is it because they’re born again,
And we grow old?  No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

It then implies another answer.  The sight of Spring can be a kind of grief, in that it is a bank statement showing that the credit sum of our years on this earth is being drawn on and we are getting closer to being permanently bankrupt.  Both we and the trees are growing old.  Grief is not us feeling the difference between us and the trees, but our similarities, except that the trees have “their yearly trick” of looking rejuvenated.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.

 I can see why the trees are unresting – broadleaved trees are busy, their leaves changing from buds to withered in a few months – but how are they castles?  Because they are large and strong?  And how can castles “thresh”?  And is there a play on words from “grain” in the second stanza to “thresh” in the third?  The idea of threshing seems fine – that they are mounding up their leaves to “fullgrown thickness” as you would pile up heaps of grain after threshing.  And the idea of busyness and the unresting movement is fine too.  But the castles are a puzzle.

The last two lines though have complete clarity.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

The thing that was “almost being said” in the first verse becomes what “they seem to say”, the joy of spring and its sense of new beginnings. This poem has the Larkin uncertainty, that you cannot make great positive declarations, that everything must be qualified, the “almost-instinct, almost true”.  But after the climb of stumbling hesitancy he finally reaches the summit and can shout out loud and joyful “afresh, afresh, afresh”.

In a turn-over of poll predications, it would seem that Serbians have voted down the extreme right-wing Radical Party which had been expected to narrowly win the general election in that country. Instead they have opted (by a relatively healthy margin) to elect the Democratic Party (DS) of President Boris Tadic. Guess they didn’t realise they were supposed to be “sound anti-imperialist heroes” after all, so they didn’t elect the far right. Sorry. I’m sure there’ll be tears in many an “anti-imperialist” home tonight.

His wife was recruited by the NHS to do hard, low-paid work in our health service. While giving birth, she was unlawfully killed by the very hospital she worked in. Her husband, who hoped to make a life with his family in Britain, is now to be deported. What a FUCKING DISGRACE!

Good to see Unison taking up the case: Unison activists should congratulate Prentice for his statement and build a union campaign. The rest of us should lobby our MP’s, write to the Home Office, do whatever we can. We’ll keep you informed of any campaign or activity that emerges.

Wanna blast Jacqui Smith (cool name: uncool chick!) for her, like, totally fascist decision to do something uncool about shit and weed, man? No use hanging with these uncool squares at “Shiraz”, droning on about Israel and the Labour Party and other uncool shit, man!

Mosey on over to Dave’s, like, totally cool , unsquare place for where the real vibe’s like, happening, man!

“Yes, the impulse to side with the Palestinians, the demand for justice for them, the criticism and denunciation of Israel for its treatment of them in the Occupied Territories - all that is consonant with the basic stuff of the left. All that is not only ‘justified’ but necessary for any decent socialist.

“The conclusion from it? The only conclusion consonant with the authentic left is to seek justice for both sides; to propose mutual recognition of both peoples’ rights. The only possible programme for doing that now is two states - an independent Palestine side-by-side with Israel.

“The objective anti-semitism of the ‘absolute anti-Zionist’ left is defined by its rejection of accomodation, its opposition to two states, and its self-identification with the chauvinist Arab or Islamic proposal to destroy Israel and, at the very least, deprive the Israeli Jewish nation of self-determination.” (Sean Matgamna: ”‘Left’ anti-semitism is no myth“). 

As the 60th anniversary of the proclaimation of the state of Israel approaches, the professional Israel-haters, “anti-Zionist” fanatics, and conspiracy theorists are lining up to denounce the state as uniquely illegitimate (on a par, they claim with apartheid South Africa, if not Nazi Germany!), and Zionism as an especially racist ideology (unlike other forms of nationalism, which contain no racist or preferential elements, of course).

I was going to entitle this piece “Congratulations Israel”, as a sort of “up yours” to the anti-Israel fanatics and ignoramouses that inhabit the left, liberal-left, right and loony-far-right, and who are all too often indistinguishable from each other in their “anti Zionism”… whilst I accept that not all anti Zionists are anti semites, it is undoubtably the case that, these days, all anti semites are anti Zionists.

But I decided not to use that provocative masthead for one reason, and one reason only: the Palestinians. The Sean Matgamna quote at the top of this piece sums up my feelings: the Palestinians are the main victims of the present impasse in the Middle East and our first instinct must be solidarity with them. But, as Matgamna eloquently argues, solidarity with the Palestinians does not require us to endorse Arab / Islamist anti-semitism: unfortunately, much of the so-called “left” does exactly that. Not just the likes of the SWP, Socialist Resistance and ‘Respect’: who cares about those ignorant clowns? No, important sections of the “mainstream” labour movement left, including both wings of ‘Unite’, the leadership of Unison and the Campaign Group of Labour MP’s, habitually go along with the idea that Zionism is a form of racism and that Israel is uniquely evil - even when they formally support “two states”. Sean’s polemic was written in response to a piece in the Graun (6 March 2006) by a “mainstream” commentator and former advisor to Robin Cook, David Clark. And I know from my own first-hand experience, that trivial anti-Jewish racism (in the form of jokes and asides) is considered acceptable on the mainstream labour movement left, in a way that no other form of racism would be.

Johnathan Freedland has some sensible things to say about all this in today’s Graun. 

The Israeli so-called “new historians”, plus the poisonous Lenni Brenner, and the academic / professional ‘victim’, Ilan Pappe, have given a great deal of intellectual succour to the “absolute anti-Zionists” over the years.

Here’s a pretty effective demolition of at least one of the “new historians” (albeit one who’s since transformed into a rather right wing Zionist). And more detail from the same writer, here.

Finally, to deal with Ilan Pappe, an Israeli academic whose Walter Mittyish misrepresentations of his own situation and role in Israel are so outrageous as to be either outright lies, or the products of a deranged mind. Similarly his misrepresentations of Israeli and Middle Eastern history. For instance, this strange man wrote in the Morning Star of April 25 2008:

“The zionist community in Palestine was powerful enough to carry out the ethnic cleansing and to fend off the later limited military attempt by some Arab governments to try to stop the operations in May 1948.”

I will return to Pappe’s allegation (not entirely untrue) of “ethnic cleansing” later; but for now, I want to concentrate on his description of a “limited military attempt by some Arab governments”…

What this charlatan is referring to is the attempt, immediately Israel was declared, by the regular armies of Syria, Transjordan, Iraq and Egypt, to wipe out the new state. The generally pro-Palestinian historian Peter Mansfield acknowledges in his authoritative book “A History of the Middle East” (Penguin, 1992),

“If Zionist resistance (to the Arab attack -JD) had collapsed there is little doubt that even King Abdullah (the most conciliatory of the Arab leaders in 1948 -JD) would have been obliged to continue until the state of Israel had been strangled at birth.”

So, yes: the foundation of Israel was, indeed, al-Nakba for the Palestinians. And there were massacres like the killing of 250 inhabitants of the village of Deir Yasin by Irgunists on 10 May 1948. But the main cause of the Nakba  was the rejection by the Arab ruling classes of the UN’s partition proposals, and then those same rulers’ military attack on Israel. None of this excuses Israel’s subsequent treatment of the Palestinians: but it does expose the one-sided misrepresentation of Middle Eastern history that is all to common on the so-called “left”. And it also explains why recognition of Israel’s right to exist within pre-1967 borders is an essential prerequisite for a just peace and a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Whilst we at Shiraz have always been a proudly disparate bunch, it is doublessly clear that there are several friends of this blog whose politics would loosely be definable as “Labour Left”. You may well have read their sites before, as well as this one - and if you haven’t then you should.

Indeed, until very recently I myself would broadly have fallen into that category. I was never totally comfortable with attempts by sections of the left to pull away from the Labour Party, which I had been brought up since childhood to see as “my” party, and which latterly I had come to see as a vehicle via which the Labour Movement could exercise its influence in the party political field: Lenin’s classic formulation of the “bourgeois workers’ party” could not describe it better. In spite of a brief spell as a member of the Socialist Alliance, I quickly rejoined Labour and argued tooth and nail with comrades that things hadn’t changed so very much.

It is now self-evident that I was wrong. The sheer scale and weight of the evidence of the past few years demonstrates that the Labour Party is not now, nor feasibly ever could be again, a vehicle for working class participation in politics. Not only do I refer to the nauseating and shameful policies of the past decade, from University tuition fees to the war on Iraq. I do not merely seek to address the unbelievable corruption in “our” government, from the dodgy dossier to cash for honours at Westminster, to “our” Ken’s lavishing of telephone-number salaries on the coterie of Socialist Action members in his administration. That is all important, but I do not merely refer to those things. I also refer to the fact that there is clearly no way to improve things within the Labour Party.

Even back in the days of Callaghan, Wilson, Jack Jones and Frank Chapple, or even going back previously to Gaitskell’s time, Labour leaderships and governments would routinely ignore the decisions taken by “democratic” party conferences. The membership would become outraged, but nothing much would happen. The brief, failed flare-up during the Benn era was an exception to this rule. What I think the shrinking remnants of the Labour Left have to accept, is that such a rising will never and could never happen again. With the “Bournemouth Deal”, the unions surrendered even the right to pretend to influence decisions made over party policy. Further, their leaderships (with notable exceptions) still seem happy enough to be used as cash cows within the party structures, whilst even left-controlled Executives conduct such struggles as they can manage outside of that arena. And anyone who believes that the CLPs are anything other than the driving force of the party’s right, is deluding him/herself beyond belief.

Further, the complete bankruptcy of the party in the eyes of the public is demonstrated by Thursday’s electoral melt-down. This was capped off by a man who struggles to tie his shoelaces beating “our” Ken Livingstone to the London mayoralty. This in spite of a Labour campaign in London which at times was so hysterical as to give the impression that we were witnessing an election between the SPD and the Nazis in 1933, not a fight between a tired and tarnished mayor and an upper class fop in 2008. A lot has been made of the fact that Livingstone’s vote in London was better than Labour’s nationally. Not only is that a false comparison (had he been running for Sheriff of Surrey, one imagines he would have had a total kicking rather than losing narrowly), but it also fosters delusions on the left. Some people almost seem to be under the impression that Livingstone got as good a vote as he did because of his left-wing political stances. Now, whilst it is undoubtedly true that Livingstone’s stance on the Iraq war did him no harm, it is simply untrue that Britain’s richest city is a giant reservoir of left-wing voters. The fact that the left tends to be a closed circle not only politically but in terms of people’s whole lives (it is dominated by relatively secure, unionised and middle-class public sector workers), we don’t see quite the same picture of what a broad spectrum of the public thinks, as those people actually do. The reality is that it’s highly unlikely Livingstone would have gained those extra votes (with which he still lost the election) on the back of being marginally to Brown’s left. Indeed an endorsement from the RMT or other active London unions would almost certainly have lost him more votes than he would have gained. It is sadly the case that the unions - and I remain a proud trade unionist - cannot always carry their own membership’s votes by endorsing a candidate, let alone those of the wider public.

Why then do people stay in the Labour Party? The usual answer from LP members (including my friends Stroppy, Dave and MarshaJane) is something along the lines of “what else is there to do”? Well, that is not an adequate answer, comrades. You need to come up with a reason to be in what is very much New Labour’s party, a party with a shattered “left” that is impotent and, in many cases, not that left wing, and a party which has no moral authority at all to lay claim upon the loyalties of ordinary working people in this country. I and others who remain outside (my own LP membership expired last year and I have not renewed it) need not explain ourselves - the evidence is there for all to see.

Indeed, the best I have seen thus far in terms of strategies offered by online Labour leftists is “J4L 08″, AKA a repeat of John McDonnell’s 2007 attempt to launch a challenge to Gordon Brown. Even the aforementioned MarshaJane Thompson, who worked on McDonnell’s first campaign, appears in her post on the subject to concede that not only would McDonnell not win but also that his candidacy would rely on the endorsement of right-wingers even to get on the ballot paper. A flop in the making therefore, even if McDonnell should “succeed” in losing to Brown on a cross party vote rather than “failing” even to get to that stage.

There is, it seems to me, no alternative to the slow and patient work of building a working class political movement outside of the Labour Party. Such a stance may even entail endorsing a vote for certain Labour candidates at times, or candidates from other parties such as the Socialist Party or the Greens. I’m prepared to cherry pick in that sense. What I’m no longer prepared to do is pretend that the right-wing husk which is today’s Labour Party in any sense represents me or my interests. Time to wake up and smell the coffee, comrades.

On May 1968’s fortieth anniversary Shiraz Socialist publishes exclusive extracts from legendary Marxist Perry Anderson’s forthcoming memoirs, Apodic Aporiae (necessary doubts). Unlike many Anderson has never reneged on his class origins. He remains today as committed to the left as he ever was. With a rare personal voice Anderson sheds light on the key moments of 68, at home and abroad. These passages describe the unfolding of the événements. An English translation will soon be available. Andrew C

Extracts:

“Clachtoll Broch. The 1st of May, 1968. I knew something was afoot. That morning I hailed the Gillie, “Tha latha math ann an diugh.” “Aye, young Master, it is a-raining in the field.” A glint came into his eye. “The beaters say we dinna see the best of it yet.” Prescient words! Surely the best was to come.

Lunch. Tariq had just arrived. His palanquin was still outside. ‘Gorge Rouge’ Blackburn, had come, post-haste, from his London Red-Base. Tom Nairn was there, fresh from his triumphs in Tossing the Caber at the Sutherland Games. In the kitchen, the ‘chicks’ (unreconstructed were we, alas), Germaine Greer, Juliet Mitchell and Hilary Wainwright were preparing some amuse-gueules, and roast Osprey. As Homer might have described us, ές ‘Нλΰόίου πεδίου.

The wireless crackled. As hôte I deftly tuned to Radio Luxembourg. Our comrade ‘Danny’ was on the microphone. “Nous, on a demandé, la semaine dernière, qu’on puisse visiter les nanas dans leurs chambres. On nous a dit non! C’est la répression bourgeoise. Faut faire la révolution!” Outraged I forgave the failure, after the clause, ‘last week we asked’, to employ the subjonctif imparfait. The right to visit female students in their rooms denied? Truly an act of repressive intolerance. Had the doomed and inert capitalists bared their teeth at last? Danny would show them his own molars.”

……..

“We took to Boat-train to Calais. Paris was ablaze. At the Gare du Nord a charming poulbout from Montmartre disrobed us of our bourgeois wallets. Inside les Deux Magots Sartre and Castor were ebullient. Radical discontinuity ruled. Wordsworth described well the atmosphere of a similar Revolution. As the lesser known line goes, ‘When Reason seemed most to assert her rights..’ While I mused, Guy Debord popped in, “It’s ze societie of the Spectacle, hein?” He shoved a paving stone under my chin, “On the beach, the stones to throw.” He paused, and spoke to a companion, Ian Bone, “Où sont nos pintes?” Althusser rose from a nearby table, “Only through theoretical practice will the class struggle be won.” As the rock reached his head he seized his sword-cane and poked Debord in the eye.

I was seized by doubt. Would there have to be a Niederwerfungsstrategie? What would be the calibration of means and ends? That evening from the occupied Sorbonne, I addressed an attentive audience of thousands. “Solidarity! A coherent and militant student movement has not yet emerged in England. But it may now be only a matter of time before it does. Hornsey Art School is in our hands as I speak. The LSE will soon fall. The Oxford Union is a Soviet under the joint leadership of Comrade Tariq and Comradette Benazir Bhutto. Hasta la Victoria, siempre! ” Deafening applause followed.”

……..

“Looking back, forty years on, what have we learnt? Perhaps it’s the origins of the present crisis. Try the protasis, what if… It is revealing, the supine remains supreme. . For the if stands as fungible property, in a world where radical opposition has drained into new channels. A revolution in the revolution. Oneself? A Watchtower, Nairn, a Flag, the Saltire, Blackburn, a Pension Fund, Tariq, a Leading Liberal Democrat supporter, the ‘chicks’? Perhaps the deepest revolution of them all: soon to publish a joint soc-fem Cookery Guide, ‘Alternative Appetites’. The future? States dissolved. National democracy reborn. Alterglobalisation. There are no certainties here; so far, all that is possible are proposals and conjectures. Jottings more than theses, they stand to be altered or crossed out. The old Mole grubs on….”