I’ve chewed up the title of this song to crowbar it under K. It’s likely we’ll want another song entered under T.
It’s important to remember it’s not generally possible to disentangle what was unintentional, what as casual and what was deliberate in The Beatles phenomenon. The Beatles sang girl group songs. Sometimes the lyrics were gender altered, as is here. Sometimes they were not, and you’d have Ringo hollering away about boys. The Beatles sang girl group songs, especially ones with three part harmonies, because they liked them, and you could leave it at if you want to.
The Beatles of course had a profound effect on Western Womanhood, but what about Manhood. In his mini-biography The Summer of Love, George Martin took a few paragraphs to describe the effect of Beatlemania as it hit the United States. He described seeing male office-workers dressed in Beatle Wigs. Grown men pretending to be one of the band: who are you today?
The Beatles were something different, both in appearance and personality. There was an incredible fuss made in the mass media over the length of their hair, bizarre though it may seem now. Hair and headwear continue to be a source of social anxiety, a very closely policed aspect of culture, even today. We just take the rules and norms we are given so much for granted.
This public face was crafted largely by a gay man, Brian Epstein. He took a group of leather and denim clad rockers and put them in matching suits, page boy haircuts and had them bow after every gig. This did not so much tame them as make them enticingly strange and ambiguous1. The legend of The Beatles as family entertainers only arose after other bands came through, specifically the Rolling Stones.
So they were less pioneers than harbingers of something new. Allen Ginsberg described them as evincing a new form of manhood, combining “complete masculinity” with “complete tenderness”. Perhaps that’s not quite right, but something like that.
1. And not just gender/sexual ambiguous. Older people complained they could not tell the different band members apart. Bemused exaggeration, perhaps, but The Beatles contemporaries often described them, especially early on, as being like a “four-headed monster”, a single personality split between four people.
Is a textbook example of just what John Lennon’s genius was. For a great musician he wasn’t actually that great at music. Amongst other things he was a rhythm guitarist with a poor sense of rhythm. His talent, in terms of composition, was being able to capitalise on his lack of fluency leading him to original ideas that would not occur to more proficient musicians. The Times music journalists famously complimented Lennon on his use of Aeolian cadences, John hadn’t a clue what they were.
Working with Paul McCartney and to a lesser extent with George Martin this tendency was harnessed. As time passed Lennon and McCartney depended less each other1, John’s compositions were offered up metrically dishevelled. He began composing on piano to surprise himself. He started working from words rather than an initial musical phrase. Phrases spilled over bars, sections expanded and contracted when needed (e.g. Revolution – “we-e-ell you know”, an extra two beats latched onto a 12-bar blues). What is Happiness is a Warm Gun? Is it a suite? There’s certainly no verse-chorus structure to it. Try counting the beats at various points. It’s utterly mad and yet the song rings true.
I Want to Hold Your Hand
The blockbuster Beatles single, the vertiginous peak of a chain starting with Love Me Do. Much can be made of how early Lennon/McCartney songs were written to generate white-hot hysteria. There is a contrary undertow in several of their early lyrics.
Please, Please Me is of course about John’s passion for oral sex. Despite being palpably more manic, I Want to Hold Your Hand is lyrically chaste. Can’t By Me Love went one step further in having the singer address object of their affection as “my friend”. These are not necessarily disparate elements. There is of course a cool aspect to sexual liberation, specifically casual sex, disengaged passion. This was almost certainly not considered by John and Paul, whose lyrics at the time were place fillers.
Julia
It’s well established that Julia Lennon was her son’s muse. She was a physical embodiment of the concept of anima, Lennon’s personality reflected back in female form, a role later embodied by Yoko Ono. If you accept that theory you can see Julia cropping up time and again in John’s lyrics, as the former lover, possibly dead in Yes It Is, the symbol of bondage and suffering in Girl, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes in Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, possibly the source of rapture in Across the Universe. There are numerous Lennon-penned songs about betrayal and departure. Lennon’s grief mixed with anger at her loss. All his closest relationships were tinged with violence to some degree2.
This is John’s final song to Julia while in The Beatles. Despite being something of an exorcism, judging by the Plastic Ono Band album it clearly failed.
1. And on George Martin, who began withdrawing from production duties after Sergeant Pepper.
2. For instance it’s reasonable to speculate (while admitting there’s no definitive proof) there was at least a sexual element to John’s relationship with Stuart Sutcliffe and that John felt a degree of guilt over his death from a brain haemorrhage, having had a violent brawl with Sutcliffe years earlier.
Have you ever had somebody walk up to you at work, grinning away manically, and you just think “what do you want from me?” I have been pondering some concurrent phenomena, modern management techniques and systemic infantilsation.
It is a shame, in a way, that there are so many socialists who become teachers or lecturers. Not because the teaching profession shouldn’t be organised or that socialist teachers can’t open minds or make a difference in young people’s lives. Unfortunately the primary product of the education system is not knowledge (if it is tell me all you remember of trigonometry or irregular French verbs – these are just examples). The primary product is habit and deference, and these things are instilled despite the best intentions of the best teachers. That’s why we have an education system.
Why do managers who want to coerce a single individual shut them away in a small room? Why do managers who want to railroad a self-conscious group of workers gather the workers together and present their plans in a faux-democratic manner, called consultation? These are techniques used on people from the age of five.
Hierarchical authority relies on dependence and passivity. It relies on the inner child. Even at the best of times it is very hard to shake your formative education. This is a key aspect in why during revolutions without even realising it people given back what they have won. They cannot imagine a world without managers, bureaucrats, elected politicians, police officers etc, who in normal times they rely on.
It’s is the commonly considered theory that human beings evolved because they were neotenic apes, they preserved juvenile features into maturity. If social management depends infantilisation there is now a worrying trend of preserving social aspects of childhood into adulthood; middle youth, helicopter parenting. They're impressionistic examples, not to cast aspersions on anybody. We are not seeing a moral breakdown so much as describing facts. Here is an article written on the eve of the great crash weighing up the work prospects of Generation Y, who according to this are needy, moralistic, tech-dependent and crave formal structure and personal affirmation. With declining workforce numbers the author advises managers to get with Generation Y’s programme. Of course with mass youth unemployment these days bosses don’t have worry anymore. Young people, especially those on the government’s work programme (3.5% overall ‘success’ rate ), are even more dependent on the graces of the rich and powerful.
Get Back If I get my brain on enough I’ll jam together some trite observations about the Get Back/Let It Be disaster, musical composition, roots music and suchlike, but for now I want make trite observations about The Beatles and Race.
The Beatles were very, very lucky people. They found a manager, possibly the only in Britain, who did not want to ruthlessly exploit them for short term gain. They also found the only producer who could cultivate and discipline their talent with tact and grace (practically everything they in terms of song writing and recording was unselfconsciously original – example, they insisted on calling the middle sections of their songs “middle eights” regardless of whether they had eight bars in them or not, George Martin went with it).
They were a curious and open minded group. When they moved to London at the beginning of their fame they were by chance they found themselves slap bang in most culturally rarefied part of Britain. Everything (and everyone) they encountered was soon radiated out to Western Youth through their records, and be it African-American rock and rollers, Indian sitar players or Nigerian percussionists, it was hail-fellow-well-met.
I think the American Dream had a concurrent meaning for African-Americans and British youth. Chuck Berry was a witty and perceptive lyricist who appealed to the thoughts and feelings of young, white Americans as a way to sell records. It was a life he could only write about from the outside. Though the circumstances were vastly different, the same was true of young Britons like Lennon and McCartney. All four of The Beatles had no truck with racism; they had heroes who were black, they played with black musicians, they refused to play to segregated audiences in America.
There is also another dimension. Whether it was the case or not, the cultural change perceived in the middle of the Twentieth Century was away from rigid and plotted forms to liberated, sprawling forms, e.g. in dance it meant the waltz was superseded by the twist. Rightly or wrongly this was attributed to increasing ethnic minority participation in cultural life. Black culture was seen as young, vital and alive, traditional white culture old, ossified and stale.
Enoch Powell’s (rightly) infamous Rivers of Blood speech was a watershed in racism. Before it racism was understood as white supremacy. What Powell sniffed out was a change, thanks to post-colonialism, racist ideology was changing into a defensive white nationalism. If we’re talking culture we must acknowledge that love of black music does not preclude racism toward black people, just ask Eric Clapton.
Get Back, one of The Beatles most successful late-era singles, began as a satire on Enoch Powell. This is what we’re given to believe about the Commonwealth Song. The ironic intent in lyrics about not digging Pakistanis taking jobs was not sufficiently clear, and the lyric was wisely dropped. There were two other occasions where The Beatles possibly let themselves down over this issue.
The first lay buried in archives and bootlegs for thirty years. What’s the New Mary Jane, John Lennon’s anarchic masterpiece that wasn’t, is sung in a ‘comic’ broken English and a mild Indian accent. There is no great malicious intent behind it, though the lyric is a veiled attack on someone in The Beatles immediate circles. It goes to show that prejudice can manifest itself in unexpected ways, even amongst the best of us.
The other, far more blatant, example is the film Help. Their second film was a pleasant enough comic adventure. We get to see the boys in colour this time too. Help is marred by an outstandingly racist parody of an eastern sacrificial cult (portrayed by British actors using unrealistic Indian accents) that drives the main plot. Of course it’s not desperately malicious (though that isn’t a reason not to object) and The Beatles did not write the film, and yes it can probably be put down to ‘the times’, but surely someone the band knew in 1965 could have flagged it up. Who knows?
Anyway, this, I think, is the last version of Get Back they performed at their rooftop concert, i.e. the last thing The Beatles ever performed live:
Can the meaning of The Beatles be summed up in alphabetical order while at the same time making an interesting compilation? The answer is almost. Here goes:
A Day in the Life
Start with a biggie, A Day in the Life is the pinnacle of The Beatles career, according to Ian MacDonald no less. Revolution in the Head practically invented modern rock scholarship, so we should pay obeisance. It came at a point in The Beatles recording career where graft and intuition were in seemingly perfect balance.
Before sound recording recorded music was sheet music. The combination of this and sound amplification expanded the horizon of musical expression; small groups performing together with the possibility collective inspiration, a happening as it was known in the sixties, evanescent moments captured for mass reproduction. The modern musician’s dilemma is between knowing enough to express oneself, whilst not allowing music theory (and standard recording practice) to stifle one’s imagination.
Sequenced at the end of Sgt Pepper, two minutes longer than any Beatles song so far released, with a complex score and involving more musicians than ever before, it appears to be more portentous than it actually is. Each of the verses is literally about something different. Combined with the orchestral production, culminating in the final titanic chord (neither of which was planned when the basic elements of the song were recorded) they seem to hint at a struggle for emancipated perception, to transcend the mundane and violent world. It feels revolutionary, despite some of the lines being humorous babble.
Bungalow Bill, the Continuing Adventures of
I told you it would be difficult. Of course there are other Beatles songs beginning in B, but I want to use them elsewhere. The Continuing Adventures of Bungalow Bill was written at the Maharishi’s camp in Rishikesh by John Lennon. It was recorded late in the sessions for the White Album. Lennon later described it, quite astutely, as a “teenage social-comment song and a bit of a joke”. That it is.
It’s the story of a rich, young American at the camp who took breaks from meditation to go out game hunting. Is that hypocritical? Maybe. The song’s not great, although the chorus is catchy in an irritating way. The White Album itself is like the entire process of record-making laid bare, the rejects and the jokes and the half-formed masterpieces find their place on a double album.
Bungalow Bill is also interesting as it is the first Beatles song released to have a woman’s voice on it.
Can’t Buy Me Love
A slightly obvious choice, but features at a pivotal point in The Beatles’ pivotal film, A Hard Days’ Night.
The film itself is an inspired piece of bluff. Like many other jukebox musicals, Hard Day’s Night is about nothing. It exists to set up the band members as definable, bankable personalities, the sarcastic one, the charming one, the shy one and the down to earth one. Much of their post-touring career was dedicated to busting the image created by this film.
But there’s a cheeky, satiric quality to the film. It is set amongst a typical Beatles touring day, with Paul’s Grandfather as a McGuffin, causing unusual things to happen. Individually and as a group, they run casual rings around everyone they encounter, various figures of establishment, the old man on the train, the pressmen, the doormen, TV producers, Teen culture svengalis, all are perplexed and routed by The Beatles wit and verve. Laving aside the actual backgrounds of some of the members, in the film they represent a rising working class, confident, breezily assuming control and rewriting the rules. As much as this was ever the case we also remember this was before the crisis that mired the second Wilson government, before the bitter struggles of the seventies and eighties.
Against this the Beatles are presented as stuck on a hamster wheel (the old guard are still in charge). They go from a train to a room to a car and a room and a room and a room. They hardly get time to rest. Brian Epstein stipulated that the script must not have a love interest. The film plays on this, I think, by having no female characters with any meaningful dialogue. Women flit past the screen before the lads can so much as talk to them. The film’s sole moment of peril comes when Ringo is incited by Paul’s Grandfather to leave the band for the afternoon, in which time he does more or less nothing.
There is one moment of collective escape. Having caused a ruckus with the TV director by casually wandering on stage to play a song, the band are about to be locked in their dressing room; instead they sneak down a fire escape:
“We’re out” yells Ringo, which is the cue for Can’t Buy Me Love. The Beatles lark about on a playing field for two and a half minutes before another authority figure approaches, the groundskeeper.
“I suppose you realise this is private property?”
The Beatles slope off, though unrepentant:
“Sorry we hurt your field, Mister”.
Drive My Car
This song was the final product of The Beatles brief joke song strategy. As they recorded Rubber Soul they were looking for a way out of their lyrical impasse, running out of variations of love songs. The better songs from the Help sessions, such as Yesterday or Yes It Is, might have been a solution. Both songs touched on mortality and memory. This returned in a big way with In My Life. Before then they had a run of songs that, if they were not exactly funny, had lyrics with a set up and pay off. In Drive My Car the stereotypical roles in sexual banter are reversed by the end, the girl turns out to be sly, deceptive charmer.
Eleanor Rigby
This was a song begun by McCartney but finished by a committee. It is a brilliant song with an exceptional lyric. Not much time needs to be spent on it here, except to say it shows The Beatles were remarkably loveless in 1966. This was their most brutal lyric of the year, a stark description of people wasting their lives in dedication to empty social/religious rituals. It is also an intensely visual lyric, written in the present tense, e.g. “look at him working”. They are like a set of directions, in keeping with Paul’s then current interest in filmmaking.
Flying
We had to go off-piste at some point. There were few Beatle instrumentals issued. They performed plenty in their early career. Later on they recorded dozens of instrumentals, most did not see the light of day. For example, Revolution in the Head describes how in 1967, three days before the band started a formal recording of George Harrison’s It’s All Too Much, they spent an afternoon working on a 16-minute jam, perhaps inspired by Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which was recorded in Abbey Road at the same time as Sgt Pepper. The jam was not that inspired however as they never returned to it1.
It’s common to say that a drug inspired relativism set in at this point. It was certainly about. The cultural embrace of ‘random’2 had a socio-political dimension. It was a rejection of the military-industrial prerogative that saw the whole of post-war society strictly ordered, like a giant barracks, with unearned class privilege and persisting racial and sexual bigotry. Gambling with reality by dropping LSD was the ultimate act of randomisation.
I also think after the tension of completing Sgt Pepper there was the release of the Summer of Love. This is palpable in Flying, which is built on 12-bar blues changes but is a gentle, idyllic sounding tune. It served as an interlude in the Magical Mystery Tour film. Typical of how the film was made, Flying was set to pilfered stock footage, various shots of cloud and Arctic wasteland3, which was given psychedelic tints. None of this came across in the first broadcast, in black-and-white, on Boxing Day 1967.
1. Jam based composition makes much more sense in the digital age. It is must easier to edit and combine digital bytes, as opposed to analogue tape.
2. A side note: musicians may no longer flip through the I Ching at random to find a lyric. There is one remaining prominent cultural figure who uses games and systems as an aide to creation, namely Brian Eno, another product of the former ArtSchool system.
Caught the scum of the Met tweeting this earlier. Note the use of the #freetommyrobinson hashtag. Kind of gives the game away. Unsurprisingly, they've since deleted the tweet. ACAB.
[edit] The offending tweet has now re-appeared in its entirety.
It used to be said that in Britain if something was not specifically prohibited then by definition it was legal, unencumbered and free. If this is still the case today then such a principle is coming under sustained attack. The Defend the Right to Protest campaign has noted in politically charged prosecutions:
[There is] a now-familiar line: the courts can decide what protest should be (or should have been) and prosecute anyone who deviates from that picture – a picture now supposed to be the property of the protestors themselves.
In an earlier court case connected to the one referred to here (part of the fall-out from the Fortnum and Mason occupation) a Judge presiding insisted that UK Uncut protestors were “breathtakingly arrogant” for actively opposing government austerity, in other words UK Uncut is beyond the pale in and of itself. Smaller, but by no means less important, is a trend for councils to start imposing charges on the right to hand out leaflets, under the provision of the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005 (thank you Labour!). This has been opposed in letter by members of the entertainment industry, and quite right too, but much more is at stake than gigs, fetes or comedy nights. Leafleting is a basic democratic activity. This simple Wikipedia entry cites an example of leafleting as a political tool during the American War of Independence. More than likely though leafleting is as old as printing itself. Some councils now charge hundreds of pounds a day for the right to leaflet the citizenry. The good reason is to discourage ‘littering’. The real reasons are to make money and discourage political activity. How much is democracy worth? In some boroughs it’s £350. We must never forget this is a logical corollary of Austerity, a ruling class movement that not only aims to prop up the ailing rate of profit but also to define the terms of our society for a generation or more. If, in times gone by, democracy was its own justification, now it must prove itself before capital accumulation.
Every moral philosophy presupposes a sociology, so said Alasdair MacIntyre. I’ve never read him but there’s no doubt this is true. In order to appraise anything in our society you have to understand what this society is and what point you are appraising it from. Even if you don’t accept the results of Marx’s study of political economy you have to accept he was on the right track.
We are lucky in Britain. Even at this eleventh hour we still have politics and public life constructed around the class point of view. There has been some talk about whether the recent presidential elections signal a return to reality in American public life; this is an example. The American ruling class has successfully prevented public life so far from forming on a class basis. This has not just involved fraud but an awful lot of force. Pre-World War Two class struggle was exceptionally bloody.
No ruling class is ever able to completely insulate itself. Despite the fantasies encouraged by skyscrapers, gated communities and industrial peonage that survives even today, 40 years after the Civil Rights movement, the American ruling class continues to ideologically organise the classes below it. America is a country where the right-wing mobilises, over issues such as tax and land values, against desegregation, reproductive rights, LGBT equality and immigration… and this is before we get into the true conspiracist fringe, and the pro-war rallies, yes, pro-war rallies, rallies for the powerful while they’re still in power, get a brain morans.
So often America has been described as undergoing a French Revolution in reverse, where the sans-culottes restore the ancient regime. The Republicans are like Jacobins in the negative sense, fanatics devoted to hammering reality into the shape of ideology. Remove any objective basis from politics and it will be dominated by lurid fantasies: Obama is a Muslim, general relativity is a liberal plot, gays caused Hurricane Sandy... one could go on. The sense of relief, not just with the presidential election, is understandable. Maybe the tide has turned. But we are dealing with the Democrats, who are perfectly happy not to capitalise on the current liberal shift in America.
We must beware of what the current Tory onslaught releases. We have no end of free-market fanatics, there are oil enriched climate change deniers in the cabinet, anti-abortionists on the benches, an ‘anti-wind farm agenda’ of all things in the Tory party and creationism in Gove’s ‘free’ schools. Part of the ruling class strategy of austerity is the struggle to remove class from the political equation. In this sense Blue Labour is prescient, though it shows the party admitting defeat before the battle has even really been engaged. The Labour party dare not appeal to its base to support the things it was founded to achieve.
We must head all this off before it comes to pass. Class must stay central to public life.
World War Two means different things to different people. For some Allies it an imperialist war, for others a war of liberation. In order to bind the population to the government the two wars had to be lost in each other. Nevertheless at some points the two different interpretations came to clash, the Greeks know all about this. Having liberated themselves from the fascists the British came… and rearmed the fascists.
Different post-war settlements meant various states went part way to meet working class demands and reabsorb the organised working class in the bourgeois hegemonic system in time for the cold war. World War Two became the key reference point it is today.
Of two key arguments the first was “He’s a Hitler”. If an anti-colonial leader wasn’t obviously a communist he was a fascist, and that’s why we must go to war on… sorry, intervene in this particular country. Here’s an example, John Reid on why theIraqwar was asocialist war.
The second argument, more prevalent in the past few years has been “The rules have changed”. In this example Tony Blair wasannouncing to the worldhe was going to eff up any suspicious brown people he wanted to.
This argument has become more significant under the long-term crisis of profitability. The current depression has made it all the more urgent (from the bourgeois point of view) to reorganise the economy and society, to transfer more wealth by various means from bottom to top and prop up the general rate of profit. The current strategy is called Austerity. All checks on executive power, both democratic and bureaucratic must be removed.
This is what David Cameron meant when he saidBritainis at war. Ok, so he meant “an economic form of war”. Yes war, like World War Two, only this time Hitler is planning oversight.
An aside: look how far we’ve come from theGolden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention. Trade equals war. It’s a fundamental weakness in the basis of capitalism. Due to the nature of commodities trade is simultaneously mutual and a form of competition, the source of all conflict. When Cameron talks about bureaucracy what he actually means is oversight:
"Government can still be far too slow at getting stuff done…Consultations, impact assessments, audits, reviews, stakeholder management, securing professional buy-in, complying with EU procurement rules, assessing sector feedback – this is not how we became one of the most powerful, prosperous nations on earth. It's not how you get things done. So I am determined to change this."
Strange as it may seem, according to Cameron this bureaucracy has its roots in democracy.
"There are understandable reasons for that. When you have lobby groups lined up to criticise every action you take; parliamentary select committees ready to jump on every bump in the road; then the rational choice is to be cautious - even over cautious. But for the sake of our country's progress we have got to cut through this".
He's also seeking to pass the parcel in terms of blame for the economic and social catastrophe he has engineered. It's not that we've too much austerity, no, the government would dish out more, if only the bureaucrats would stop pandering to 'lobby groups' and get on with it! This is no argument for bureaucracy, but there are good reason and then there are real reasons, and the real reason Cameron is saying this is he wants to rig society even further in favour of his party and the rich.
It's hard to know what to say about the Israeli onslaught in Gaza that hasn't already been said. This is the fourth such assault the Israeli state has carried out on its neighbours I think in ten years. Lenin's Tomb is of course doing a bang up job. Shabogan Graffiti has some excellent posts on the barbaric propaganda coming out of the BBC. At a surface level it's an utter paradox why the right would hate such a consistent and successful establishment propaganda tool. We forget sometimes that the ruling class (with its competing empires) is not homogeneous. It needs a state in part to make fractions of the class, such as the network of power round News International, knuckle under for the greater bourgeois good. It needs accepted 'neutral' ideological outlets. The BBC is neutral when it comes to intra ruling class conflicts. It is though fiercely partisan when it comes to class on class conflict, state on state conflict. Only six or so weeks ago he Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu was in the United Nations shilling for war on Iran. It seems he'll have to make do with kicking the Palestinians, again. He'll get all the help he could ask from the BBC. This is also a test for the Arab Spring, especially the Egyptians. This is the Egyptian IS statement on the war:
“Today the Zionist enemy is preparing a ground attack on Gaza. But Egyptian gas still flows to Israel, the Rafah border crossing is still closed—and the Camp David agreement remains in force.
“Why are Morsi, his advisers, ministers and organisation waiting? They should put in practice what they always preached before coming to power—cutting all ties with the Zionist enemy, abolishing the Camp David agreement, deploying the Egyptian army in Sinai and permanently reopening the Rafah crossing.”
One effect of the New Labour years has been to hollow out notions of progress and social good. Almost every MP in Parliament calls themselves, and everything they do 'progressive'. Michael Gove has given another example of this. He wants children at risk of neglect to be taken into care more quickly. The way he describes this however is rescuing children from "a life of soiled nappies, scummy baths, chaos and hunger, hopelessness and despair".
He's taking a good idea, that children should not suffer, and turning it inside out. If there's any key cause of hopelessness and despair in Britain it's the Tory government and it's strategy of Austerity, driving down working class living standards to pay for bankers in need. Chaos and hunger are frequently the products of poverty, rather than neglect, but there's nothing to be done about poverty as far as the Tories are concerned.
The message is clear, lose your job and you're a step closer to losing your family. It's another stick to beat working people with.
The Tories are aiming to destroy the basis for working class intervention in public life and they are aiming to do it in one term. They must be fought. Anyone who tries to delay or divert struggle is objectively on the government's side. This cannot be emphasised enough.
Two more examples 1) Michael Gove plans to cut 1,000 jobs from the Department of Education. He wants to reform Britain's education system yet he is cutting back on the people supposed to be delivering his reforms. He does not want reform, he wants chaos in comprehensive education. 2) Cuts in government grants to local councils are being targeted at poorer, i.e. Labour voting boroughs. Such grants make up 50% of a council's budget - 25% is formed by business rates, also distributed by central government, the remainder (not including day to day revenues) comes from council tax, which has been capped. Local government is now a fairly hollow democratic formality, no GLC or People's Republic or South Yorkshire will give Cameron and co any trouble. To fight any part of the Tory agenda is to preserve some kind of future for ourselves, and we can fight ALL of it, but man have we got to turn things round quickly. There can be no waiting for Labour.
Historical Haemorrhoid Sufferers Alexander the Great T.S. Eliot Viv Richards Marylin Monroe Percy Bysshe Shelley Socrates Nero Napoleon Gerard Manley Hopkins Martin Luther
Historical Druggies (and their drugs) Admiral Nelson - opium Lord Liverpool - ether Tsar Nicholas the 2nd - hallucinogens, cocaine and opium Winston Churchill - barbiturates Anthony Eden - amphetamines Richard Nixon - amphetamines Leonid Brezhnev - sleeping pills
Historical Phobics (and their phobias) Nicolae Ceausescu - bacillophobia, fear of germs Sigmund Freud - siderodromophobia, fear of trains Samuel Johnson - lyssophobia, fear of insanity Maximillian Robespierre - haemophobia, fear of blood Robert Schumann - metallophobia, fear of metal
A fascinating piece on the Runner’s High, how exercise can become literally addictive:
Eight-and-a-half hours into the 100km (62m) Norfolk Coastal ultramarathon, he pain in my legs and badly battered feet was almost overwhelming. I desperately wanted to give in to the urge to curl up in a ball at the side of the trail and shut my eyes.
Sixty-two miles is not particularly far in the ultrarunning world – and the bleak, beautiful and flat Norfolk coastline may not be as hard on the legs as the Alps or Hard Rock 100 – but it was further than I had ever run before. The race pounded me almost into submission before I broke through and was lifted on a wave of euphoria unlike anything I've ever experienced…
Using the 'dark side' had felt cathartic – as if I was performing some kind of alchemy in transforming messed-up emotional crap into endurance running gold (I wish). But as I crunched over the final shingle stretch of Kelling beach and headed up the hill towards the finish, I conjured up an image of my six-year-old running alongside me – laughing and joking as we often do on our Sunday morning jogs around the local park.
It was presumed that this common feeling of elation was produced by endorphins, naturally produced opiates released during prolonged exertion or pronounced stress. Current research is looking at the possible effect of what are called endocannabinoids. It’s all very fascinating, but what’s the angle? Well, nature is the most astonishing chemical and engineering workshop. The HIV virus evolved in West Africa, immunity will have developed there also. This is just an example.
Is it possible to copyright a gene? Well pharmaceutical companies certainly think so. In a world dominated by commodity economy what’s to stop them enclosing this precious commons?
Very well then I contradict myself. My abiding fear that wimpy, liberal America would be too enervated to stave off a Zomney Apocalypse proved unfounded. The turn out was enough and Obama won, which is about the best ‘realistic’ result we could have hoped for. There is still no significant party to the left of the Democrats, save for the Green Party, and I don’t know how they’ve done (or how much to the left of the Dems they actually are). One of these would really change the picture, and that's actual realism.
But what does the result mean? Politically it’s business as usual, albeit mildly more polite, erudite and consensual. Then again it was always going to be. If we’re talking about demographics, look at this, the results of the 2000 election.This was the last hurrah for Nixon’s Southern Strategy. It was a political strategy that sought to undo civil rights movement gains and cement Republican hegemony. Inner cities were left to decay, while suburbs were allowed to flourish. The working class, especially in the northern industrial cities, was subject to socio-economic torture.
Net migration since the 1970s within the United States has been north east to south west (people go where the jobs are, it makes sense - an example, here's a detailed map of 2008 movements based on IRS figures). The Democratic base is on the move while the Republican base is shuffling off the mortal coil. Hence Bill O’Reilly’s anxious observation, that the white establishment is now a minority. Why such anxiety, Bill, do minorities have a hard time of it in the Land of the Free?
We’re not done though. A determined social democratic party that understood its base (leaving aside how many of these things have ever actually existed) would have tailored their tactics to these facts, delivering reforms that strengthen their base, in other words actively overturning the effects Southern Strategy, re-segregation, deindustrialisation and urban decay. The Democrats are not that party and they never will be. From Gary Younge's piece in today's Graun:
The people who delivered him a second term on Tuesday night – the young, black and brown – are those who were least likely to have benefited from his first. His greatest cheer for the night was when he reprised a version of the speech that made him famous when he introduced John Kerry at the Democratic convention in 2004.
"I believe we can keep the promise of our founders," he said. "The idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try."
That is what people voted for. The trouble is that while Obama has the eloquence to articulate those aspirations he has, for the most part, not had the courage to fight for them or the strategic ability to deliver them.
Socialists participate in bourgeois elections, even if sometimes only obliquely, through a call to vote for a particular candidate or another party, in order to advance the socialist cause. This is how we weigh anything up: does it get us closer or put us further away from our actual goal.
This is not a debate about principles but tactics. The only principle anyone can break is abandoning the ultimate goal of revolution from below and settling for electing more or less left wing people to existing positions in society.
Will Obama being returned to office result in an uptick in working class confidence and activity? Liberals and left-wingers will certainly feel better if Obama defeats Romney, but we have no right to expect Obama to organise his supporters to build a mass social democratic movement of any kind.
Will the calls of left-wing groups inside America, let alone outside it, make much of a difference to the outcome? It’s doubtful.
What is there then to do? Socialists must look for the vanguard of the working class, try to win it and organise it. The vanguard in America is the group of people, wherever they happen to be, who look beyond the Democrats without looking beyond the Democratic base.
If no left-wing group stands to gain out of a call for an Obama vote (a strictly different thing from an Obama win) then there is no point in doing so. This is all the more the case with socialists outside America. I remember being told in 2008 we had to ‘relate’ to the Obama victory. I thought, why? Who are we supposed to be impressing?
My predictions for the election tomorrow: 1) there will be a voting controversy and 2) Romney will win, his base is more energised and more likely to vote, also the extent of racism means Obama’s polling is generally over reported (people say they’re going to vote for him but they’re not).
Brace yourself. This is another dimming in the decade of darkness, 3,000 days of night. Obama or Romney, whoever is president, there is a struggle to be had.
No, but life goes on and so does this blog. Say what you like (you can't btw - it's a figure of speech) but Through the Scary Door has outlasted:
Shoot Johann Hari Dead Men Left Heckles Cakes 64 Slices of American Cheese The Prophet Rage History Needs a Push City Centre Socialist Workers Tottenham SWP Theft is Good (but it depends who you're stealing from) The Sharp Side...
Par En Bas...
Fear of a Red Planet...
And many other sites runs people who could string a sentence or two together. We definitely hope Red Bed Head, Monuments Are for Pigeons and Proletarian Tide keep the flow coming. What does the future hold? I think we can safely say the bigger picture's going to get worse before it ever gets better. Lots of Tory outrage posts I guess.
