This week's All the Hegemony You Can Eat...

Michael Gove has had to abandon his plansto scrap the GCSE, which is fine by me, though many of his other hare-brained schemes still remain; bibles, yachts, performance pay, the downgrading of arts education… it’s a long list. The proposed Baccalaureate was, of course, a return in all but name of the old O Level /CSE system of two-tier education. Gove’s aim, like all the Coalition ministers, is to destroy all egalitarian influence in public life. In this case he means to destroy all remnants of comprehensive education.

The weird thing is he claims inspiration from Jade Goody and Antonio Gramsci in doing it. To be honest I think we’ll skip Goody and talk about Gramsci if that’s all the same to you?

Firstly, regarding Gove on Gramsci we must remember that we dealing with possibly the first Generation X government. Funny though that idea may be at first look at various cabinet figures: Michael Gove, born 1967: David Cameron, born 1966: George Osborne, 1971: Nick Clegg, 1967: Danny Alexander, 1972: Jeremy Hunt, 1966. The one of the points about Generation X is it values cultural omnivorism. We have a somewhat deracinated ruling class (described in a recent George Monbiot article) that is semi-detached from its own tradition. Our rulers are as likely to be culturally influenced by Morrissey and Marr as Edward Gibbon and Winston Churchill. In this sense Gove, a relatively lower-class upstart compared to Cameron or Osborne, is simply one-upping his comrades.

But conservatives sometimes quote Gramsci approvingly, or at least as a worthy adversary. Here’s Melanie Phillips on so called Cultural Marxism. Gramsci is simultaneously the nice Marxist who admitted the working class would never take control of the means of production (a funny thing for the man who edited the paper of the Turin Workers Councils) and the man who said socialists should sneakily capture society’s cultural institutions and use them for subversion. It’s an astonishingly crude version of the Eurocommunist interpretation of the Prison Notebooks, but that’s Melanie Phillips for you.

In the most well-known version of the Prison Notebooks there is a short section on education. Gramsci based his ideas firstly on his own experience as an impoverished student but also on his time as editor of L’Ordine Nuovo, the leading socialist paper in Turin in the 1910s and 20s, education in a much broader sense. 

Gramsci’s attack on the 1923 education act, which promoted a supposedly active and humanistic education over the old style, which was more about rote learning, can be interpreted as a conservative eulogy. What Gramsci was attacking was a mode of education biased toward the ruling class children, those who start with every advantage in life. Humanistic education is ruling class education. It’s what young men and women get at private schools. It's where they learn how to rule. Antonio Gramsci was not against humanistic education, he was for workers power. But the foundation of humanistic education is instructive education, literacy, numeracy, scientific understanding, geography, citizenship and so on. At every stage working class children often get the worst deal from the  education system, they often have the disadvantage of a non-intellectual upbringing, they have to work harder to achieve the same results as their bourgeois classmates.

The question about education is not rote learning versus humanism, exams versus continuing assessment, etc, but to what end are these ideas put. From cutting Bookstart to jacking up university fees and shunting students away from ‘useless’ arts degrees, the current government is trying to deny poorer students the fruits of education. This is Austerity in action; the re-composition of class power in favour of the capitalist class.

The ruling class agenda

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.

The abyss stares back

The link here is to a short, simple piece on the fundamental deception of American political debate. There is such fundamental agreement between the two mainstream parties, public debate narrows down to secondary, often peripheral issues. Because ‘issues’ like teaching evolution in schools, the veracity of climate change or the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate can be argued relentlessly to no practical conclusion, they serve to mobilise various political bases (although the Republicans are always more interested in motivating their core support than the Democrats) and sustain the illusion of urgent debate.

You know it. I know it. It’s seems hardly worth pointing out, except the same grim parade rolls out every four years and no one does anything about it. America is politically null, excepting the Occupy movement, which, rather like council communism without councils, is a moot point if it’s not able to occupy anything. It would take an event so colossal one almost dares not imagine it to open space for a radical alternative. If America means anything it serves as a warning, this is what happens when the labour movement is permanently sidelined.

Meanwhile Polly Toynbee ponders the Tory options in the run up to their conference. David Cameron needs a national vote of approximately 42% to take an overall majority in parliament, 6% more than he got at the last election, and support is ebbing away. There are plenty of Tories with a mind to blow up Labour ‘client state’, i.e. its basis in the wider working class. This combined with a set of irresistible populist measures may yet work. And these measures need not cost anything. Imagine if Cameron led the country out of the EU just as it collapsed.

Feeble though our efforts may be even something like the October 20th democan start to head off that kind of future.

The revolution against the revolution

From a document After the Coalition: A Conservative Agenda for Britain, primarily written by Dominic Raaaaaaaaaaaab, Tory MP:

 

"The last 30 years of public debate in Britain has been dominated by leftwing thinking…”

 

It’s all there in black and white. Being exact, “the last 30 years” means since 1982. Since 1982 there have been 15 years of Tory government and two years of Tory-led government. In between there were the Blair/Brown years. New Labour was rightly described as Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement. Mad, isn’t it?

 

This is where the destruction/abandonment of class-based politics gets you. This is anti-logic in action. This is what we have to look forward to if the forward march of the austerity is not turned back.

 

The statement aims to frame the debate even further to the right, useful for a group of right-wing thinkers wanting to hack away at employment law, trade union rights and generally drive working class living standards down to Chinese levels. It is also a mobilising statement.

 

Since universal suffrage the Tories economic base, the high bourgeoisie, has never been big enough to win elections. Its electoral base, the middle class, is shrinking also. As they have nothing to really offer the working class, it is perfectly plausible that the Tory tactics will become more Jacobin-like. They will seek to mobilise people and bind them together on some ideological basis, religion, racism, small-state fanaticism and such like, to achieve right-wing goals. While this isn’t fascism it would be borrowing from fascism. After the coalition expect a British Tea Party to be launched, especially if there is Labour led-government.

 

A revolution against the revolution (the American hard-right uses revolutionary rhetoric all the time) is impossible without an enemy and an order to overcome. It makes perfect sense, from that perspective to say "the last 30 years of public debate in Britain has been dominated by leftwing thinking…” It’s not true, of course, but don’t like little considerations like that get in the way of your argument.

Sport and class and stuff

Social mobility has been declining, most people would admit for some time.

. The interesting thing is, as class divisions have been re-entrenched, our collective ability to recognise class, especially class-for-itself, for what it is has taken a battering. When Nick Clegg is considered a communist, David Cameron says he's middle-class, and Ed Miliband stands for the squeezed middle (whatever that is, perhaps it’s something to do with toothpaste) then you know we’re in trouble.

We’ve talked a lot about how the popular culture industry, especially pop music, is increasingly becoming an upper-class paid vacation, and the worse for it. An interesting article in today’s Graun: though only 7% of the population attend private, fee-paying schools, roughly one quarter of the British Olympic team is drawn from those schools   . Further:

It is the same with many non-Olympic sports. Of the England cricket squad chosen to play this week's Test match, all seven batsmen, including two reared in South Africa, and one of the six bowlers (who do the harder work and are, therefore, traditionally drawn from plebeian backgrounds) were privately educated.

The writer’s reasoning?

Cricket, rugby and most Olympic sports, have been professionalised beyond recognition. All sports now aim to identify talent early, give it intensive practice and coaching, eradicate technical deficiencies, and encourage (not always successfully) the right diet, lifestyle and mental discipline. Sport has become an industry, using scientific techniques to enhance performance. The opportunities for raw, untutored talent are correspondingly fewer. The fee-charging schools, with their lavish facilities and full-time professional coaches (many schools employ former first-class county cricket players), were in pole position to prepare their pupils for the new era.

There is a significant paradox here. As sports became more professional – and no longer the preserve of those who could afford to play for fun – the social base of the top performers was expected to widen.

It is similar to the contradictory fact that as university places expanded, the fee system and the compartmentalisation of subjects (turning universities into sausage factories of knowledge) led to fewer education opportunities and less social mobility. This is the seeming paradox of meritocracy. The word and the concept behind it was invented by the Labour philosopher Michael Young , who used the word in a pejorative sense. Merit in a class society is a retrospective judgment. Opportunities to succeed in a career or vocation etc tend to fall to those best placed to receive them. Money, class, power, however you want to put it, is capable of opening or closing doors to you. David Cameron described himself as “sharp-elbowed middle-class”, suggesting he had to struggle to get to where he is today, which is a gross insult to those who actually struggle in life. The idea that bankers should receive bonuses because they deserve them, while teachers, nurses and dustbin men should tighten their belts is offensive to many, but this is where so-called meritocracy gets you, the idea that financial reward is the same as just desert. Put in athletic terms, in the context of our society: You and I were born on the starting blocks, while David Cameron was born in the home straight. 

Sport, like all other aspects of culture, needs to be rescued from the bourgeoisie. 

David Cameron says tanker drivers have no justification for striking

Yes, well, the corrupt pig would say that. Tanker drivers can't hold the country to ransom, only 'premier league' Tory party donors can do that. What justification does the drivers union claim? Let's do what no national newspaper or TV or radio outlet seems to want to do and find out. First of all:

Members of Unite working for five major fuel distribution firms delivering fuel for household names, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, BP, Shell and Esso backed a call for strike action by an average of 69 per cent. Turnouts across the five companies averaged 77.7 per cent.

Unite urged the employers to meet their responsibilities and talk meaningfully about establishing reasonable minimum standards that secure the stability of this vital national industry. Attempts by the union to progress a forum have been thwarted by employers’ unrelenting attacks on drivers’ terms and conditions.

The results for the seven companies involved in the ballot are:

Turners 94.4 per cent in favour on a turnout of 81.8 per cent.
Norbert Dentressangle 74.8 per cent in favour on a turnout of 71.3 per cent.
Wincanton 68.4 per cent in favour on a turnout of 71.9 per cent.
BP 60.2 per cent in favour on a turnout of 85.8 per cent.
Hoyer 59.7 per cent in favour on a turnout of 79.7 per cent.

In DHL drivers narrowly voted against strike action (44.6 per cent), but voted in favour of action short of a strike (53 per cent). Members in Suckling voted against strike action (85 per cent) and action short of strike (76 per cent).

Over 61.1 per cent of those voting across the seven companies voted for strike action.

I mean, come on, just because you vote, freely and fairly for something doesn't mean you're entitled to get it; give us £250k, THEN we'll see what we can do. But why have they voted like this?

Tanker drivers work in an increasingly fragmented and pressurised industry where corners are being cut on safety and training in a bid to squeeze profits and win contracts. Drivers face growing job insecurity as a result of the contract ‘merry-go-round’ and a ‘beat the clock’ culture has flourished with drivers forced to meet ever shorter delivery deadlines.

Final salary pension schemes have been swapped for inferior money purchase schemes, and some workers are now on their sixth pension in as many years, with 10 to 15 years left to go in the industry.

Saftey, wages, pensions, piffle! What's important is that striking is bad, and the tanker drivers shouldn't do it because it would be back to the bad old days of the winter of discontent, when even tanker drivers refused to bury the dead, oh woe! If the tanker drivers do go on strike we've got to all pull together, do our bit for UKPLC (4 years without a stock market crash) and panic hoard petrol, sorry, stock up on petrol and store it in our garages... Hang on a minute, isn't that a bit dangerous?

Monsta, Monsta!

David Cameron has pledged to fight the Health and Safety Monster (see here in the picture tidying up downtown Tokyo).

You can understand why Cameron would want to fight such a dangerous beast. Britain it seems is one of the safest places in the EU to work, at least in terms of fatalities (171 deaths last year)... curiously that’s more people dying in work each year than soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

But, look at it from another angle; let’s not forget the 1.2 million people a year who have to endure workplace related illnesses, or the 200,000 approx annual reported workplace injuries. Something's amiss. There are clearly too many people getting through the working day unscathed!

With antimonies like these...!

Who needs, um... ontology? And that's as far as I got with Historical Materialism. But seriously, a note on the contradictions of class baiting: In order to get their buddy Clarkson off the hook rightwing commentators have had to insist it was all said in jest (c'mon, any fool knows Clarkson does want to see us all shot, he just doesn't think it's practical right now). The trouble is the strike wasn't in jest, hence the 'joke' fell flat. Days ago the right was screaming blue murder about the cost to the economy, now they have to about face and dismiss the strikers as having non-jobs.

Similarly Cameron has claimed Wednesday's strike was a damp squib and, 24 hours later, obviously big.

Which is it, we're left wondering? For rightwingers it's both and everything.

Why do the rich keep getting richer?

It might have something to do with union membership.

Arise, ye starvlings... and save the music industry

From all the fucking hippies clogging up London with wax jackets and vintage bikes. Here's why:

Yet there is something profoundly odd about the hyperbolic championing of Florence Welch. At a time when a climate of burgeoning radicalism should be reorienting our culture so that hitherto suppressed voices from the margins might be heard, why is the Great British Hope of 2011 a fashion-obsessed, privately educated young woman from a family of privileged metropolitan movers and shakers? In fact, shouldn't the red carpet treatment afforded to Welch make us question the extent to which we are all complicit in a top-heavy system that no longer has any qualms about poshness and ostentatious consumer decadence?

The huge popularity of FATM's hermetic, Bloomsbury-meets-Björk aesthetic is symptomatic of a society that has become almost irretrievably divided without knowing it. Though it often makes the right noises and appears sympathetic to reform, liberal, middle-class Britain has abandoned counterculture and true radicalism for an unfortunate lingering obsession with escapist lifestyle fantasy. While inequalities have mushroomed in the UK in recent years, the British bourgeoisie has increasingly indulged in a way of life that seeks to cover over its affluence with vague gestures at radical chic, pastoral myth, and down-at-heel "folksiness".

Please elaborate:

The most aloof, entitled middle-class since the Edwardian period has become inured to its position at the top of an emphatically inegalitarian social hierarchy. Meanwhile, deprived of its vocabulary and identity, the real "folk" or working class has increasingly receded from view over the past couple of decades, as several commentators this year have noted. And the pervasive notion that There Is No Alternative has been compounded by the fact that the alternative, proletarian, bottom-up traditions of the past (independent music, folk culture, communitarian politics) have been casually appropriated by a liberal-conservative elite that blithely attaches itself to faux-populist causes such as "big society", nu-folk music, Blue Labour, and Green Toryism. FATM's catwalk pastiche of Kate Bush's wayward, subversive English eccentricity is merely the latest in this series of top-down co-options of "grassroots" marginality.

The answer:

So what is the alternative? Perhaps the point is that we politicians, journalists, academics, and indie musicians are part of the problem rather than the solution, and are likely to carry on being so until substantial reform of the political system allows the genuinely marginalised, alternative sectors of the world a chance to shine.

The author probably isn't suggesting workers power, but something like the above solution should be applied much more broadly, to all of our society.

Did America win the War on Terror?

Worth thinking about for the moment but, being a bunch of ignorant yobs, we need someone to do our thinking for us. Here's some words from a book:

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.

Well, we're not quite on the brink of starvation but remember, the war was, and still is being, fought at home as well as abroad. Think about the various anti-terrorism laws, the foundation of organisations such as Homeland Security in America, or the Anti-Extremism Unit here in Britain, now well funded and tenacious bureaucracies, difficult to remove. Think about the concurrent ideological push, Islamophobia in particular, but the rise of bitter, fearful right-wing politics in general, the fact that each fraction of the right, mainstream, populist and fascist, feeds off each other.

The war was as much about shifting the balance further in favour of the US-based ruling class at home as well as abroad. Did America and it's allies win the War on Terror? When we say America we mean the ruling class, in particular it's neo-liberal fraction. When we say war we have to ackowledge it is still going on. At home at least they are winning. We are not talking here about "the potential for a fightback" or them being "weak but nasty", but actual results. The global anti-austerity movement, vibrant though it is, has not broken through anywhere. We don't need Greek-style resistance, we need better than Greek-style resistance.

We can do something about that, you know?