The soaring confidence of the bourgeoisie

Roger Carr (no relation to Jimmy I presume?) the Head of the CBI has attacked David Cameron for moralising about tax. A little indication as to just how much things are going the ruling class's way. David Cameron has done more for the British bourgeoisie than any recent Prime Minister, drastically redistributing wealth upward and reducing all practical opposition to austerity to nought… but that’s not enough for Roger Carr.

He wants the debate about corporations and taxation to be framed thus.

1)      No morality, it must be all about the rules, or in other words what can’t be got away with. Corporations are allowed to draw on the benefits of universal education and healthcare, refuse collection, roads, subsidised utilities and so on, but you cannot insist they pay for said benefits.

2)      Rules on tax should be fixed internationally. This is impossible but, if it were to come to pass it would put tax regimes beyond any democratic scrutiny. It’s also a derivative of the red herring raised so often about tax and investment. Investment is made more often on the basis of the existence educated and healthy workforce, access to growing markets, easily available utilities, communications and freight, but almost never on rates of taxation.

3)      All changes in tax should be submitted to consultation with corporations. Doesn’t this always happen? Isn’t Carr’s intervention precisely part of a consultation process, where the haute bourgeoisie spells out the terms of co-operation with a democratically elected government (OK, we’l let exactly how this government was formed slide for a second). More importantly though, do you get to negotiate how much tax you’re willing to pay? Of course not.

Attention scum!

Childcare minister Elizabeth Truss reckons too many nurseries are chaotic, with "children running around with no sense of purpose". Honestly, what sense of purpose does a two-year-old need? You heard the minister, attention freeloading toddler scum, grab a broom, get up that chimney and find a sense of purpose!

It occurs though, it is standard neo-liberal statecraft, for both Tory and Labour ministers, to decry public service. That's what executive power seems to mean. Make someone a minster the first thing they do is slag off the people they are responsible for administering and trash the service they provide. Why do they do this?

Part of the reason surely is that public service is provided often by skilled labour, which difficult to quantify and almost impossible to mechanise (the reason why public sector unions, badly organised and soporific, still hold some sway - skilled labour has sectional strength). We are still a long way from a digital doctor or a mechanical teacher.

Outbursts like these are partly technocratic frustration and partly a conscious way of holding down the public sector workforce. No one ever comes into office and says, "hey, you're all doing a great job by and large, keep up the good work" or "you don't get the resources you need and yet you still soldier on, I will fight for you". No. Ministers want these workers run down. In the case of nursery workers it means raising the minimum ratio of staff to children to one in six - a recipe for chaos if ever there was one. They want them run down and demoralised.

A damming indictment of the inefficiency of the IRA

Bozo bites

Boris Johnson wants a potential new Londonairport to be named after Margaret Thatcher. Double whammy! More proof, I think, that Boris Johnson functions as a prophylactic for Tory craziness (remember when he positively associated himself with Rupert Murdoch during the Olympics, when no other politician wanted to be near him). This is ULTRA provocative, yet a twinkle and a smile from Boris Johnson makes such things seem less than harmless. He is hardening people to Tory ideas and hardening people with Tory ideas.

Trashing dead politicians

From the Daily Mail two days after Michael Foot died.Richard Littlejohn (who has fought in precisely no wars either) might have done well to note that Michael Foot was a volunteer in the Auxiliary Units that were intended to be the basis of a Resistance if Britain was invaded by the nazis. Life expectancy for unit members was estimated to be two weeks.

Actually existing news

The Labour Party is abstaining from a bill being rushed through Parliament that will create a retroactive law overturninghundreds of thousands of benefit rebates due to unemployed people wrongly sanctioned. What is more incredible, the fact The Party of Labour refuses to oppose workers exploitation, or the government’s explanation for the bill, that it will “protect the economy”?

Firstly the estimated total pay-out is £130 million, which is of course next to nothing in the grander scheme. It is nothing compared to Trident, nothing compared to Afghanistan, nothing compared to uncollected tax... You could go on. But there’s also a disturbing tendency in public life, which is fast becoming a blood sport, where the weakest in our society are hounded, sometimes to their literal death. These people have been wronged by a government department but because they're unemployed the rules have to be rigged so they always lose out. For shame!

There’s more though. The national economy is being dragged down by suppressed demand, job losses, part-time work, VAT rises, service cuts and closures all add up. Using the unemployed to fill entry level, often minimum wage positions saves a little in the short term, but only for favoured companies. The government is effectively subsidising companies like Poundland. But is depressing wages and knocking the bottom out of the economy. Without effective demand there is no recovery, just a downward spiral. 

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.

Right-wing sectarianism

Sectarianism is bemoaned on the left. Too many socialist parties not enough socialists. Everyone's sectarian, except me. You get the picture?

It's interesting, actually, but there is a proliferation of groups on the right as well, much less commented on. The breakdown of the Tories popular base is well documented. The decline of Toryism is covered, for now, by the convergence of the mainstream parties. The Lib Dems support the current government and the Labour party doesn't really oppose it. The general logjam in our society stems from the fact all significant civil society groups are, in some way, tied up with the mainstream parties.

The breakdown is also occurring on the right. There is the UKIP which currently has around 10% support in opinion polls. It will take many hard Tory votes but unless something very odd happens it won't win any seats at the next general election however. There is the NF, the BNP and the British Freedom party on the fascist right, the BFP is a splinter from the BNP, which in was a split from the NF. In street fighting of course the Infidels have are a split from the EDL. From the sublime to the ridiculous, former Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie has suggested forming a Southern Party to represent, well, people like him living in and around London.

The continual breakdown of political formations possibly lends credence to the idea of petty caesarism as the dominant force in modern politics. 

Happy New Year, you scum...

Love, your Government and Overlords.

What you reading for?

201 libraries across Britain closed this year. The modern institution of the public library started with the 1850 Public Libraries Act. Similar to the act establishing the NHS, the libraries act took a patchwork of services and made them into a common feature of public life, free at the point of use. Generations of self-education have gone on in libraries up and down the land.

But this is nothing to the current local government minister, Eric Pickles. According to him concern over library closures is restricted to luvvies (clearly no one reads books in Brentwood and Ongar, at least no one who votes Tory).

This attitude is common across the mainstream political parties. The leader of Brent Council, a Labour borough, told residents of Kensnal Rise they had nothing to be concerned about with their local library because “people buy their books at Tesco” these days (so does Tesco have a reference section now?). Brent Council then sent in the goons overnight to strip the library, not only of the books but all the paintings, murals and even the plaque dedicated to Mark Twain (the Mark Twain) who took part in the opening ceremony in 1900.

£20 for a hardback book is nothing to the likes of the political class, it’s an awful lot lot a working family. Lets not forget libraries are internet hubs, free at the point of access. Remember, Austerity is about making life meaner, harder and narrower for working class people, it is also about driving them from public life. 

Merry Christmas, you scum.

I found out yesterday apparently most of the proceeds from the ongoing public sector pay freeze (and pension contribution rise) have gone toward the £5 billion capital investment announced today. Public sector workers, doesn’t that make you feel better all that money going to good causes, like Michael Gove Novelty Schools ™ ? You’d have only spent it on things like food, clothing, rent and whatnot.

Surely now this year can be written off as the worst, most calamitous year in working class memory, living memory. A year of Olympics, Royals and no strikes, no big ones anyway. There was the Olympic bus strike, on balance a success, but after that things kept on rolling the ruling class’s way. Unite the resistance: what resistance? There has been a vital question posed of the public sector unions, to be or not to be, to fight austerity at the point it’s being applied, to fight and to lead the wider population in that struggle, or not. They chose not to fight. We need a drastic re-evaluation of British trade unionism (let alone what the fuck the alleged Party of Labour thinks it’s up to).

The latest statement from Gideon Osborne is yet another flip-off to the poor. There are further benefit cuts (the biggest benefit payout being working tax credit – in the end a subsidy for low wages and underemployment). We already have seen a 23% rise in homelessness , concentrated among the young. April will certainly be the cruellest month, when universal credit and the room tax kick in. On the other hand he has cut corporation tax (the optional tax, judging by Starbucks, Amazon and so on) by 1% and cancelled a planned 3% rise in fuel duty, so that’s Nigel from the golf club sorted. The rest of you can fuck off.

Merry Christmas, you scum.

Thoughts for the Brain - bespoke reality

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.

Of course you realise this means war?

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 the Iraq war was a socialist war.

The second argument, more prevalent in the past few years has been “The rules have changed”. In this example Tony Blair was announcing to the world he 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 said Britain is 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 the Golden 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.

Michael Gove - child snatcher

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 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 Tory party - it's like a lottery that rewards stupidity...

It must be a slow week for the Daily Mail. There's clearly not enough immigrants-gets-free-porsche stories to go round, so they printed this:

Britain’s biggest trade union has set up a new wing – which can only be joined by the unemployed. Tory MPs said it was ‘scandalous’ that Unite, led by the hard-Left former docker Len McCluskey, was trying to exploit benefit claimants for political and financial purposes.

Outrageous! It's for Poundland and Tesco to exploit unemployed people! 

In return for £26 a year in ‘subs’,  the jobless members of Unite Community receive perks including discount designer glasses, advice on ‘claiming the right benefits’ and a  pre-paid debit card offering cashback in high street stores.

Exploited, to the tune of 50 pence a week... and they're going to tell the unemployed what their rights are? For shame! Also, why the scare quotes around subs? Sub is short for subscription fee. Don't they have those at the Daily Heil? Perhaps direct debits are an underhand form of communism? I don't know. But here's where it gets really silly:

Last night Tory deputy chairman Sarah Newton said: ‘It is scandalous that Labour’s largest donor, Unite – which backed Ed Miliband for the leadership – is looking to politically mobilise the unemployed and plug its falling membership subs.  

‘The public expects trade unions to protect the rights of their members in the workplace – not try to fill gaps in their funding off the back of the unemployed. Is  Ed Miliband really comfortable taking money from a union that  is acting in such a cynical way?

Cynical? Well, of course, Tories are experts on British trade union history, and are only to happy to respect the terms of collective bargaining. It's a shame then that somebody who knows so much about trade unionism and only has it's best interests at heart (you shouldn't be filling any gaps in funding off the backs of h the unemployed, oh no) could have forgotten about The National Unemployed Workers Movement of the 1920s and 30s. What was Sarah Newton MP thinking, eh?

So it begins...

It’s the Week of Evil, or Tory Party Conference. And there’s perhaps none more evil than Gideon Osborne. The heir to an Anglo-Irish Baronetcy, whose only day job was folding towels in Selfridges, Osborne described a proposed mansion tax as the politics of envy. We wouldn’t want that when we incite people in work against against sick or unemployed people who, in Gideon’s imagination, are busy growing mushrooms. 

His big plan to save civilisation from endless, relentless doom is a scheme whereby workers swap employment rights for company shares. This is the future, folks. Unless we do something we will have the golden opportunity to give up our workplace protections in return for giving a portion of our wages back to the company to play with. Do you see the problem there? I hope you do because, let’s be realistic, given the 2.5 million unemployed, how many bosses are going to present this option as a fait accompli, take it or leave it?

Osborne has also warned parents on benefits against having more children. In his kind of future some children will be left behind. Does that include people tax credits, the biggest benefit claiming category there is, in which case that also means parents in low paid work? He displays a cavalier understanding of where babies come from. If there is now such a thing as surplus humanity (too many babies!) then what can we expect, workhouses, mass sterilisation, or just children starving to death? 

Words cannot express how truly repellent this man is.

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.

Plebgate...

The current headline sensation is the Fucking Plebs story. The interesting thing about the fallout from Andrew Mitchell’s outburst, apart from the fact that the Tories look down on everyone, even the people they pay handsomely to do their dirty work, is the fact that a senior MP got away with swearing at a police officer.

Despite the debatableprovisions of the 1986 Public Order Act, generally speaking it doesn’t take much for an ordinary person to be arrested, for example the Oxford University student taken to court for “remarks likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress”. He asked a mounted officer if he realised his horse was gay.

There is one other thing to mention about swearing. It is intimately connected with class society. Here’s Leon Trotsky on the matter(weighted toward post-revolutionary Russia, but with some general applicability).

Broadly speaking there are four categories of swearing, filth, sex/sexuality, race and blasphemy, translated into social terms they are contempt, oppression and bigotry. The fact that we might feel the need to swear, often without realising what we are doing, indicates how despite our best efforts we still take aspects of the prevailing ideology on board. This also shows the other point about ideology that needs hamming home, the prevailing ideology is such that we do not recognise it for what it is, at least not until we come into conflict with it.

Swearing is something that will wither away with a classless society. We can do our best in the meantime to be aware of its origins and significance to counter its more pernicious effects, racism, sexism and so on.

Talk bollocks... TO THE EXTREME!

That's how to relate to to the kids. There are too many stories of Tory ministers/MPs/supporters talking offensive rubbish almost to count, but this is a gem. Damian Collins, another of the class of 2010, reckoned (on Channel 4 no less) that:

1. Seeking further education shows a lack of motivation.
2. "A businessman" he knows (unattributed quote passed off as sociological analysis) said they would rather have a 16 year old train as an unpaid apprentice for three years so they can start... at minimum wage. You've got to have a dream...
3. If it's difficult paying for transport to get to job interviews, well, you know what to do, busk!

Now, has Damian Collins considered that maybe someone struggling with bus or train fares is going to struggle to scrape together the shrapnel to afford an instrument? Has he? Has he really? Perhaps he wants them to beatbox or sing four-part harmonies? Do the kids of today where to find out about busking by-laws? Are they motivated enough?

He couldn't just be talking utter fucking bollocks, could he?