In 2012, seeing their salaries slashed by over half, the Association of Greek Archaeologists launched an international appeal against massive government cuts and to stop the targeted, professional looting of archaeological sites and museums. Here in the UK, Neil emailed the Greece Solidarity Campaign (GSC) saying he really ‘ought to do something.’ In his self-effacing way, Neil explained that he had ‘quite a high profile’ in archaeology, knew Greece well, and had just had a book out on the Ancient Greek Olympics. He sent a list of ideas for what the campaign could do but stated that he did not ‘do Facebook’ so I would have to connect him with the Greek archaeologists some other way.

Neil’s intervention was remarkable – he quickly had an event called Archaeologists Against Austerity: Solidarity with Greece arranged at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology, plus further events at Bristol University and in Newcastle which allowed archaeologists Despina Koutsoumba and Fotis Georgiadis to come to the UK, speak at these events and make headlines in Greece.

Neil’s good friends in archaeology supported the tour, some of the establishment boycotted the events as they were unhappy at the politics. The best bit was holding a protest inside the British Museum, with Despina and Neil holding up a banner saying Can’t Pay Won’t Pay – Solidarity With Greece, and demanding the return of the Parthenon Marbles.

Here is Neil at his best explaining the living breathing significance of these stolen revolutionary treasures:

“History is sanitized. The role of the people in making their own history, the idea that it’s people organising themselves to bring about revolutionary change is not something that our rulers want us to celebrate and talk about. So what happens is that the objects are ripped out of their original contexts and treated like art objects which you approach in a hushed awe in an environment like this.”

This ‘People’s History’ approach was reflected in a recent letter Neil published in support of the ‘ritual killing’ of the Colston statue by Black Lives Matter protesters, a cause which for Neil represented huge power and hope. Neil was deeply committed towards making the world a better place. He once wrote to me:

‘BTW I became a revolutionary on the Grunwick picket-line in 1977. A group of Asian women sacked for joining a trade union by a sweatshop boss, and hundreds of police mobilised to smash a way through the mass picket to get busloads of scabs into the factory. That was when this innocent grammar-school boy from Tunbridge Wells began to grow up!’

Neil was also heavily involved in organising a South Africa disinvestment campaign on his campus in the late 70s, and then worked for two years in the head office of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. He was also instrumental in creating the No Glory In War commemorative WWI campaign with Stop The War Coalition and Jan Woolf. You can read more about his political work here.

Anyone who met Neil knew he was whip smart with an extraordinary intellect and capacity for writing brilliant books including the extraordinary A Radical History Of The World. I was suitably intimidated when I wrote to Neil in his role as series editor at Pluto Press to ask him to take a look at a book idea I’d had. He was immediately warm, kind and encouraging: “If this is your first such venture and you are unsure about all this book publishing stuff, very happy to talk on the phone.”

Neil gave me the courage to write Stitched Up – The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion and to do it to the best of my ability. He was an intellectual safety net who I could explore Marxist theory with and who expected me to be smart and inquisitive, to read extensively and push ideas forward. In the acknowledgements I wrote: ‘To Neil Faulkner for polishing this book from a rough diamond to something I wanted everyone to read. For patience, guidance, and letting me phone you at all hours to discuss topics from Chanel to use-value.’ (Last time I phoned him to discuss something random and fashion related was to get his thoughts for this article on Klarna and debt schemes. Once again, his answers to my questions made everything click into place.) When the book launched, I was so proud to share a platform with Neil, he was warm with the audience and also very funny – though sadly he did not wear one of his definitive waistcoats to the event.

I saw Neil’s ability to inspire confidence in people extend through the work of the Brick Lane Debates a political group whose aim was to mix politics with culture and attract wide audiences to discuss and act on crucial topics of the day. The group was mostly in their twenties and thirties and we punched well above our weight and ahead of the times – holding large symposia in East London – Changing The Climate, We Should All Be Feminists, and I Can’t Breathe. Neil provided energy and intellectual vigour to the creation of this work.

Last night, having learned of Neil’s passing, I sat in candle light with a friend who I met through Brick Lane Debates and we talked about Neil. About his brilliant public speaking, his compassion and insight into a truly remarkable range of subjects. My friends talked about a formative event called Capitalism 101 which we ran at Housmans Bookshop – Neil would talk about capitalism and how it intersected with an issue in society, helping people to join the dots before everyone split into discussion groups. My friend remembered in great detail the Capitalism 101 on workplace mental health (long before it was de rigour to talk about mindfulness) where people felt comfortable enough to talk about the extreme levels of anxiety and stress they were being subjected to at work and how Neil prompted people to understand that this was not something we should accept as an individual problem but how we should see it as part of capitalism which must be pushed back on and dismantled.

We then got to talking about the This Changes Everything conference at Friends Meeting House – it was based on Naomi Klein’s book of the same name and over video link she told the packed audience it was the most exciting thing to ever happen in her life as a writer. It was an urgent call to action on climate change, pre-dating XR. It is one of my biggest regrets that the Left still has not managed to build an anti-capitalist movement on the climate. Neil was instrumental to creating This Changes Everything and as anyone who has had the pleasure of working with him on a political project will know he brought bucket loads of organisational energy and ideas, giving the project a serious political backbone. In a world where much of the organised Left has traditionally dismissed climate change as ‘not a priority’ or even more stupidly ‘a middle class problem,’ Neil understood it as THE defining global issue of capitalism and for that directional leadership I will always be truly grateful.

Having spoken to people and scrolled through Twitter to see people publicly mourning Neil’s loss, one word comes up time and again: Mentor. Looking up the dictionary definition of mentor brought me to tears once again – ‘someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person.’ Neil’s heart was so big, his patience so endless, his capacity for both learning and imparting knowledge so wide, and his revolutionary spirit so strong. What gives me comfort is to look around at the people he mentored and see them doing remarkable things – whether with Anti-Capitalist Resistance which he co-founded, the climate movement, social justice campaigns, Momentum, trade unions, and of course archaeology. People leading in their field, keeping revolutionary flames burning, fighting for justice, and being better kinder people. Neil’s impact lives on far beyond his tragic, untimely and utterly unfair death at just 64. In grief I believe all we can do is make his work live on through our actions.

I will never stop missing Neil. I am crushed by the certainty that I will never know another like him. His intellect and insight were one thing, but equal irreplaceable is the joyful, funny, brave human being who always signed his emails to us with these words –

Love Neil.

It has become a truism that we live in the most dangerous phase of imperialism. Rosa Luxemburg’s assessment that the future we face is either that of ‘socialism or barbarism’ no longer fully expresses the depth of the interlocking crises facing humanity. As the Hungarian Marxist Istvan Meszaros wrote in 2003: ‘if I had to modify Rosa’s words it would be ‘barbarism if we are lucky. …the extermination of humanity is the ultimate concomitant of capital’s destructive course of development.’

The world situation has deteriorated even since Meszaros wrote those words: America’s longest ever military engagement continues in Afghanistan; the Middle East is further destabilised through US invasion and war in Iraq which cost the lives of 100,000s; the dismemberment of Libya; the wholesale destruction of Syria, and the creation of millions of refugees. The climate crisis is severe and worsening and is even at this point doing irreversible damage to the planet. This year we have extensive wild fires in the US, the melting of the permafrost in Alaska and Siberia which is accelerating climate change, the decline in sea ice in the Arctic and from where frozen methane deposits have started to be released, the Greenland ice sheet has melted beyond the point of no return and much of the Amazon rainforest has been transformed into savannah.

On top of these crises we can add continued economic stagnation and decay, particularly in the capitalist West, and the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic which will deepen global economic problems. The radical socialist and revolutionary left is generally in retreat having largely been eclipsed by the emergence and rise of reactionary and far-right forces although there are exceptions to this rule such as the recent MAS victory in Bolivia. The most acute symptom of the present conjuncture in international relations is the emerging cold war between an economically declining US empire, struggling to deal with the pandemic, and a rising China. Our understanding and engagement with this new cold war will be crucial not only for the future of humanity but for the political future of the radical socialist left internationally.

Richard Smith’s new book China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse has been hailed by Michael Löwy as brilliant and strikingly original, saying, ‘This is an important book! It is the first Marxist attempt to describe, explain and critically analyse the Chinese model of (hyper) development, and its disastrous ecological consequences – for the Chinese people as well as for the whole planet.’

Smith’s central thesis is that the model of Chinese economic development – which he understands as a fusion of capitalism and bureaucratic-collectivism – is the main driver of the environmental destruction of the planet. He says ‘the marriage of capitalism and Stalinist-Maoist bureaucratic-collectivism has created a diabolically ruinous hybrid economic system that is ravaging China’s environment, destroying the health of its people, driving the country to ecological collapse, and threatening the whole planet.’

Smith considers this ‘diabolical’ system far more destructive than what he calls ‘normal capitalism’, however those seeking a Marxist explanation for the system’s origins, development and future prospects may be disappointed. There is no class analysis of Chinese society or of the Chinese state. In his concern to expose the destructive nature of the Chinese economic and political system, he fuses his narrative with many of the cold war tropes which dominate neo-liberal thought about Chinese society.

When the US under Nixon and Kissinger opened up relations with China in the 1970s it seemed inconceivable that China could ever threaten US economic power. At that time the Chinese economy was one twentieth the size of the US economy and hundreds of millions of its people lived in abject poverty. The West assumed that as China modernised it would undergo political transformation into a form of bourgeois democracy and that the essential pre-requisite for such a transformation would be the privatisation of Chinese state-owned industries accompanied by the free flow of capital transfers and a political system along US lines. The failure to follow that path would relegate China to a relative economic backwater unable to escape the so-called middle-income trap. As the supply of cheap labour from the countryside dried up it would find itself powerless to advance economically and to enter the high-value added markets of more developed economies. These assumptions have proved to be incorrect.

Central to this is the idea that the Chinese economy would also be unable to innovate successfully and advance technologically unless it adopted the Western political model. In his book Smith accepts this view arguing that China has been unable to produce any counterparts to the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk because intellectual property rights – themselves a deeply flawed concept – are not guaranteed in China. He asks ‘What rational capitalist would risk investing millions today when all their Intellectual Property could be stolen tomorrow?’ And he goes on to say, ‘Chinese billionaire capitalists like Alibaba’s Jack Ma or Huawei’s Ren Zhengfei are big and rich only because their companies are cosseted, state-funded, state-protected monopolies not because they’re great innovators’. Smith’s argument is that because of the structure of China’s economic and political system the country is forced to steal IP from the technologically innovative West. But again this has proved not to be the case.

In reality China has transformed into a global technology leader and the US is targeting the most successful Chinese companies. The Trump administration is exploring restrictions on Jack Ma’s Ant Group over concerns that its digital payments platform would come to dominate the US market. It has expressed similar concerns over ByteDance’s TikTok company to which tens of millions of young people in the States have signed up. Huawei Technologies has been in Trump’s sights for a long time now because it is way ahead in 5G technology.

Smith’s argument ignores the fact that for much of its history China was more advanced than the West in science and technology. There is a considerable debate as to how and why the industrial revolution took place in Britain in the late 18^th century but there is general agreement that the West drew on previous developments in Chinese science and technology. The concept of intellectual property rights does not derive from a socialist world view. Socialists understand developments in science and technology to be part of the common treasury of humanity. As the biologist and sinologist Joseph Needham wrote, ‘Modern science is composed of contributions from the peoples of the Old World, and each contribution has flowed continuously into it, whether from Greek and Roman antiquity, or from the Arabic world or from the cultures of China and of India.’ Moreover, billionaires from either the US or from China whose wealth has soared during the pandemic derive their riches not from technological innovation but as a result of the nature of the global economic system.

The assumption that China would never rival the United States while the Communist Party remained in power underpinned US policy towards China from the late 1970s onwards. That belief began to unravel following the 2007/8 financial crisis when the Chinese economy played the key role in stabilising the global economy. Its direct control over production and the banking system enabled it, by 2014, to overtake the US economy in purchasing power parity, becoming the second largest economy in the world. The Chinese economic system is qualitatively different from that of the US, as Marxist economist Michael Roberts points out, ‘the capitalist mode of production does not dominate in China’. A 2012 World Bank report on China explained, the successful economic growth in China is based on bureaucratic state planning and government control of investment. Smith while accepting that state planning is central to China’s economic rise, argues that state control is a negative factor and argues that it leads to unrestrained growth. It is the size and nature of that growth which poses the greatest risk to humanity, and which is the primary driving forces in the world behind climate collapse, eco-suicide and the Sixth Extinction.

Smith presents US President Donald Trump as a far-sighted and tactically astute leader. Thus, he says,‘Trump is the first, and so far the only, Western leader to have publicly called out the Party’s criminal operations for what they are’.Trump believes that China has only prospered because it has stolen technology and intellectual property from Western companies. Smith goes on, ‘Trump’s first round of tariffs blind-sided the Party leadership’. He says ‘some [Chinese citizens] are whispering that ‘only Trump can save China’, and quotes the Lehman Brothers economist Zhu Ning, ‘the trade war is a good thing. It gives us hope when we are hopeless’. Smith notes that Trump has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement – which was the result of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference but he believes that Trump’s ability to damage the environment and climate is limited whereas China’s is unconstrained. In reality Trump has not been that constrained, he has scrapped climate regulations in the US, rolled back clean water rules and loosened pollution standards while encouraging new fossil fuel development.

It’s a one-sided world-view which sees China as ‘bullying and threatening the US’ and ‘seizing the South China Sea’, but which mentions neither Obama’s Pivot to Asia nor the huge US military build up in the South China Sea and which has no analysis of the struggle for hegemony between a US in decline and a China on the rise. The new cold war between China and the US is a product of this. Both wings of the US ruling class are determined to halt China’s rise through a hybrid strategy of political, ideological, technological and financial interventions and through stepping up military pressure.

The style of the book often rests on overheated journalese and the inflamed rhetoric obscures the valuable points Smith makes about environmental pollution and climate change. The book fails to analyse or explain its central conclusions. For example, Smith writes in his concluding chapter ‘The Next Chinese Revolution’ that ‘one way or another the Chinese Communist Party is headed for the dustbin of history’. He says ‘many in China yearn for a transition to a capitalist democracy like in Taiwan or the US. Who wouldn’t?’. Smith  places his hopes for the region on a united front for democracy led by Taiwan and Hong Kong, where he says residents enjoy the freedoms of ‘western capitalist democracies’. However it is unclear how Smith sees this transition to democracy taking place much beyond him saying ‘the East German Stalinists never saw it coming either’.

Smith, I think, overestimates the antipathy to the Chinese Communist Party among the general population. The Party continues to enjoy a reservoir of legitimacy which in part derives from its revolutionary history and in part from the economic advances within contemporary Chinese society.

Prior to 1949 China was overwhelmingly a feudal society with huge levels of poverty, a semi-colony subject to brutal imperialist exploitation. The revolution of 1949 ended more than a century of political humiliation for China at the hands of Japan and the West. Following China’s defeat in the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 50s, the major European powers compelled it to grant them favourable tariffs, trade concessions and territory, including Hong Kong. China was further weakened by military defeat by Japan in 1895. Lenin wrote, ‘The European governments have already started to partition China. They are not doing it openly, but stealthily like thieves. They have begun to rob China as they would a corpse.’

In the revolutionary uprisings of 1925-7, the Communist International dominated by Stalin insisted that the Communist Party, formed in 1921, subordinate itself politically to Chiang Kai-shek and the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang movement. In 1927 Chiang Kai-shek slaughtered tens of thousands of Communist Party-led workers in Shanghai, Canton and other cities. For the next decade the Kuomintang sought to completely destroy the CCP. Mao Zedong argued that in order to survive, the Communist Party would need to adapt its Marxism to the concrete conditions in China at the time, saying, ‘if a Chinese Marxist talks of Marxism apart from its Chinese peculiarities, this Marxism is merely an empty abstraction.’ Unlike the conditions in which the Bolshevik party operated in Russia in 1917, the CCP was forced out of the cities and eventually, operating in a very different Chinese context, built popular and socially progressive bases in the countryside while adopting the tactics of guerilla warfare.

Mao Zedong at Yan’an

In 1937 the Japanese invaded and occupied China. Japan was eventually defeated in a war that lasted until 1945 and which cost the lives of between 12 and 15 million Chinese. The civil war then resumed with the Communist Party finally defeating the Kuomintang in 1949 when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was proclaimed. The deep roots of the CCP in Chinese society are located in this history. The party united the country in a war of national liberation thus ending colonial exploitation in China and it also destroyed the landlord class and freed the peasantry through an agrarian revolution. The land was redistributed and marriage reform was introduced which undermined the patriarchal basis of Chinese society. Women were given equal shares of confiscated land and access to divorce. As the US journalist Jack Belden write at the time, ‘in the women of China the communists possessed, almost ready made, one of the greatest masses of disinherited human beings the world has ever seen. And because they found the key to the heart of these women, they also found one of the keys to victory.’

One of the other keys to victory was winning over the urban proletariat. The majority of big factories lay under the control of colonial countries in concession ports and cities. Winning power in the cities was linked with the national liberation struggle. The Communist Party defeated both the nationalists and the colonialist forces in the cities. In the areas where the Kuomintang had been in power the CCP revived the labour unions, doubled wages and improved working conditions while dealing with collaborators and instituting popular elections.

After the revolution the PRC turned to the Soviet Union as its closest ally and economic partner. During the 1950s, China received extensive support in its industrialisation process with expertise, equipment and the building of factories. By the late 1950s political relations had deteriorated as Mao developed his outspoken critique of Soviet policies, including that of ‘peaceful coexistence’, and by 1961 the CCP had declared that the Soviet Union had become a ‘revisionist’ power. With the withdrawal of Soviet economic support, Mao had turned increasingly to Chinese-reliant programmes, such as the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, to develop the economy; he also introduced political initiatives like the Hundred Flowers movement of the 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, designed to open up debate and counter developing bureaucratisation. Such initiatives, while designed to address real problems through the mobilisation of the people, often led to catastrophic and terrible outcomes; they were unable to provide the basis for the scale of production needed to lift China out of poverty.

In 1978 the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping opened China to limited foreign investment and a developing relationship with the global market; within a generation China has emerged as a great economic power and creating the most powerful working class on the planet.

Smith’s book is strongest in detailing the terrible environmental toll that China’s economic rise has taken on the country but weakest in its explanatory power. He fails to take account of China as a developing country. So he states that China became the ‘toxic waste dump of the world’ without understanding that this is the common fate of developing countries to be the dumping ground for waste from the industrialised West. China has now banned the import of toxic waste but many other Asian and African countries are forced to continue to accept such shipments. He ascribes blame to China for what is actually the result of economic relationships in a grossly unequal world.

Marxist analysis is lacking in his consideration of the CCP and its leadership. He draws his colourful inspiration from Western popular culture, from the Godfather films and the television series Game of Thrones. Xi Jinping is presented as a sociopathic Don Corleone figure constantly seeking ways of wiping out his competitors. ‘ Xi is trying hard but he can’t lock the whole population up in psychiatric hospitals and concentration camps’.

Smith’s analysis of the Chinese political system in his chapter ‘Guanxi and the Game of Thrones’ is primarily based on the work and writings of the neo-liberal economist Minxin Pei who is referred to throughout. Pei sees the party as a gangster type operation saying, ‘if your patrons do not protect you you’re toast…’ This understanding seems to have impressed Smith who has developed an entirely cynical view of the importance of Guanxi, the Chinese social and cultural concept in which personal relationships are considered as important as laws and written agreements. Pei himself has been wrongly predicting the end of CCP rule since the early 1990s.

Smith describes the Party ‘ruling class’ as ‘the gang of 90 million cadres led by a ‘few hundred top crime families’. He writes ‘life in the Party is not so different from life in the Mafia’; the ruling elite are engaged in a continuous warfare over the ‘loot’ and there have been several attempts to bump off Xi Jinping. Undoubtedly there is corruption within the CCP and at the highest levels and there is huge wealth inequality in China, in part driven by the city /countryside divide. This merits serious Marxist analysis but we are not getting this from Smith. He contends that the corruption and Mafioso practices which he understands to be central to the system are driven by the insecurity in property relations. It is not clear to me whether he is implying that capitalist property relations are preferable to state ownership. Thus he says that in the West ‘the security of property is completely formalised with the rule of law and independent courts, judiciary, and police to back it up’. Whereas in China ‘the state owns the land, natural resources, most of the economy, its offshore investments, foreign exchange holdings and the Party owns the state collectively’. Smith’s contention is that not only is the party deeply corrupt but that this extends to Chinese society as a whole. He presents a very bleak picture of a society in which he contends that the kidnapping of women and children are significant industries.

There are regular attempts to eradicate corruption within the system in China, and Xi Jinping instigated an anti-corruption campaign in 2012, the largest in the party’s history. However Smith argues such campaigns are largely ineffective and even when corruption among the ruling elite is uncovered those prosecuted are sent to prisons which are more like luxurious holiday homes. Smith says ‘many punished officials bounce back, like child molesters in the Catholic Church’. Later in the book he accuses XI Jinping of waging a campaign of terrorism against the elite under cover of the anti-corruption campaign and says that Xi’s policies have forced many wealthier Chinese to emigrate. Thus he says, ‘Mandarin is almost a second language in my neighbourhood of Chelsea in Manhattan’.

Smith maIntains that the corruption extends to the youth who ‘have been so seduced by capitalism and consumerism they have become cynical and indifferent towards politics, human rights and the environment, and insouciant toward the CCP lies and repression’.

In his view the entire society is cynical, amoral and nihilistic. China he says is ‘completely corrupt’: from the education system to the legal system and to the health service. Patients are treated in fake hospitals by fake doctors. China is busy building ‘hundreds of ghost cities’, roads and bridges that go nowhere, leading to massive pollution of its rivers, land and people and destroying much of the rainforest through its demand for hardwood. Smith contends that food produced in China is so contaminated by pollution that much of it is not fit to eat, in some cases rat meat is substituted for pork. Smith says that China has been forced to purchase Western food producers in order to provide its population with safe food. It’s unfortunate that the example Smith gives is that of Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the US whose production and food methods have a poor safety record and an even worse history of environmental pollution.

The contradictions within Smith’s narrative are many. His deep negativity about Chinese society and his determination to show that nothing is positive overwhelms his necessary message about the destruction of the natural environment which is the dominant issue of our age.

One central contradiction relates to the position of Chinese workers in society. On the one hand Smith argues that the working class is kept in conditions of near slavery by ‘the most powerful police state in history’ but on the other he concedes that wages are rising significantly. He explains that the working class has managed to raise the level of wages through widespread strike activity. Smith says the government faces hundreds of workers’ protests including strikes across the country every day and therefore has no choice except to initiate policies to eradicate unemployment, ‘the government cannot afford to have masses of unhappy unemployed workers milling about.’

The Chinese government does lays enormous stress on raising and sustaining levels of employment. However for Smith it is this priority that the state places on keeping its population in employment that is one of the central drivers of environmental damage. The state focus on full employment leads to overproduction and the creation of ‘ghost factories’ resulting in what Smith says are ‘horrendous consequences for global resource exhaustion and CO2 emissions’. According to Smith the introduction of market incentives into the economy has only worsened China’s environmental problems. But he argues that this is because the market reforms did not go far enough because the CCP refused to enact what Smith calls ‘real reform’. Such reforms he says would need the Party to ‘abandon central planning, privatise state industries, and fully commoditize the economy.’

Although Smith declares that Chinese youth have been corrupted by consumerism, he details the emergence of the hugely important Marxist-led student movement in Peking University which linked up with Marxist student societies in other universities in China. This student movement sought to support the widespread labour struggles taking place, particularly that of the workers at the Jasic Technology company in Shenzhen. Workers at Jasic sought to form a trade union to fight for better conditions and higher wages. The company fired the workers leading to protests from other factory workers in Shenzhen, actively supported by Marxist student groups. The student leaders, Qiu Zhanxuan, Zhan Zhenzhen, Shen Mengyu and Yue Xin, were arrested and placed in detention.

Shen Mengyu

The Chinese state is well aware of the powerful resonance of the combination of students and workers. The Communist Party was formed out of the student struggles of the May 4^th movement in 1919 and seventy years later the powerful movement of students and workers in Tiananmen Square so threatened the party that the army was brought in to suppress the movement.

Smith’s account of Chinese development is sometimes infused with a very dismissive and somewhat ignorant appreciation of Chinese culture. He makes some powerful points about the extinction of rare flora and fauna and China’s role in this trade but then he expands his point to take aim at Chinese traditional medicine as a whole calling it ‘superstitious quackery’. He goes on to say that, ‘Many assumed that China’s obsession with traditional medicine would wane as the country modernised’. However, many important developments in modern medical science have come from the integration of the contributions from Chinese preventive medicine developed over thousands of years. To give one example – in 1967 Ho Chi Minh asked the Chinese for help in curing the malaria which was wiping out the North Vietnamese troops on the Ho Chi Minh trail. The leading Chinese scientist at the time, Nobel laureate Tu Youyou, developed a cure from a 1600 year old traditional Chinese medical recipe. Her work not only helped win the war in Vietnam but went on to save the lives of millions of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Smith seems to be objecting to Chinese economic growth per se. Its ‘hyper-industrialisation’ compels China to ‘drive CO2 emissions off the chart’. Although records show that US per capita CO2 emissions are double those of China, he says, ‘no other nation has wrecked its environment so quickly and on such a scale’. Smith argues that this is as a result of the specific nature of the Chinese economic and political system. For Smith, China’s inability to protect its environment lies with state central planning and the absence of the profit motive. Under ‘normal’ capitalism a decline in profits will lead to a decline in production and a limit to growth. For Smith this is a necessary and essential step to save the planet, taken together with capitalist democracies allowing a freedom to organise which enables environmental organisations to impose some restraint on pollution. This is not possible in China because the economy does not follow the Western capitalist path. He says ‘These statist ruling class priorities give China’s hybrid bureaucratic collectivist capitalist system a different logic and rationality, and different drivers, contradictions and tendencies from capitalism elsewhere.’

How we understand China and the Chinese state will be crucial to the political struggles of the coming period. The conclusions that Smith draws from what seems to me to be a correct assessment of the nature of the Chinese economic system ie – state central planning, control of the banking system, the dominance within the economy of the state owned enterprises – are mistaken. In his understanding it is the state-controlled elements of the economy which are uniquely damaging and are the central drivers of the environmental destruction of the planet. Thus he shifts the necessary focus for struggle away from capitalism as a global system.

No country in the world has ever grown so fast in such a short historical period as China. For Marxists who consider China to be a capitalist social formation this should open some theoretical questions. How under capitalism has such a massive development of the productive forces taken place? Smith’s contention that this is a new economic formation distinct from normal capitalism but more dangerous to humanity’s continued existence, also poses some questions for us about the nature and necessity of economic growth. Smith appears to be arguing that it is  economic growth in itself which poses the central problem for humanity and that the protection of the planet and our future on it requires us to produce and consume less. This may be a possible strategy for sections of the population in the more advanced capitalist economies but it will not work for the impoverished billions in the Global South who understandably seek a better standard of living.

Smith is right to point out the inefficiencies of bureaucratic state planning in China which often creates wasteful building programmes, overproduction and what he calls other ‘market irrationalities’. As we saw in the Soviet Union, one of the main failures of state central planning is precisely that production targets are set by the bureaucracy to fit artificial requirements rather than realising production for use, which would require democratic control over production. A conscious plan cannot be imposed from above but must be the product of fundamental ordering and organisation of production and society by the workers themselves. This is how Marx understood it: communism as the necessary expression of an association of free and equal producers. However, restating the ideal does not in itself solve the problem of transition just as the mere declaration that workers in China need ‘the next revolution’ does not bring such an event closer to reality. The ‘free development of individualities’ necessitates the highest development of the productive forces. What we are witnessing in China is a historic transformation unprecedented in human history in which a country coming from an extremely low level of development will within the next immediate period, become the dominant economic power in the world.

Two of the main targets that China’s government sets, the maintenance of employment and the eradication of rural poverty, are not to be lightly dismissed. And neither of them will be fulfilled should China follow the path advocated by Minxin Pei and others, that China must become a genuine market-orientated economy. The solution to the problems of wasteful production does not lie in dissolving these state-owned enterprises nor in privatising the banking system. It is control over these essential economic drivers that will enable the Chinese people to help solve many of the environmental problems facing China and the world. In September, Xi Jinping told the United Nations General Assembly that ‘China aims to have CO₂ emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060’. This is quite a commitment for a developing country and will only be possible if China does not follow the capitalist path of development.

Despite repressive and authoritarian elements within the political system in China, the CCP maintains support because of the development of the productive forces and the consequent improvements in people’s cultural and material life. Infant mortality has declined sharply and life expectancy has nearly doubled over the last 60 years from 43 years in 1960 to 77 today. According to the World Bank, 850 million Chinese people have been lifted out of extreme poverty over the last 40 years. This would not have been achieved had the CCP followed the path advocated in the West and fully introduced the capitalist mode of production. We saw how disastrous that path was with the dissolution of the Soviet Union whose transition to capitalism destroyed its economy and impoverished its people. The transition to the market economy in the 1990s caused a dramatic increase in mortality, shortened life expectancy, and led to depopulation.

The central narrative within Smith’s book dovetails far too neatly with the dominant Western imperialist view of China. Smith wants to see China transition to democracy but his arguments echo almost exactly those of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. As Pompeo put it in his speech on Communist China and the Free World’s Future, ‘China [has]ripped off our prized intellectual property and trade secrets costing millions of jobs across America. It sucked supply chains away from America, and then added a widget made of slave labor. China is increasingly authoritarian at home, and more aggressive in its hostility to freedom everywhere else’. Both Smith and Pompeo’s account of China’s economic success as resulting from bullying, cheating and stealing ignores the fact that all industrialising nations borrow from other more advanced ones. The US itself borrowed from German and UK companies to fuel its own rise. Michael Löwy’s writings on combined and uneven development would illuminate the economic advances taking place in China more accurately than the gangster analysis from Smith.

Smith’s book, written before the pandemic took hold, is damning about the inefficiency and corruption of the Chinese health care system. He says that medical practice in China is hyper-marketised and inefficent, but it is important to recognise the huge expansion in healthcare that has taken place in recent years with the building of thousands of new hospitals and health clinics and that health insurance coverage now exists for practically all of the population. It is the pandemic and the response to it that has revealed the strengths of the Chinese system. China has a population of 1.4 billion people and yet has suffered fewer than 5,000 deaths from Covid-19. Its public health response has been incredibly effective and the work of the new national co-ordinating system has shown the strengths of the active mobilisation of the party’s ninety million members. The World Bank estimates that more than one hundred million people globally will be thrown back into extreme poverty as a result of the pandemic. It says this will be the worst setback in a generation. None of these millions will be in China. In fact the Chinese economy will be the only major economy to grow this year.

The Chinese state regime is repressive and may well become more so as the enormous working class in China becomes conscious of its own power and moves to assert its own interests. Overcoming the authoritarian centralisation of the Chinese state by creating democratic forms of social involvement and control without destroying the necessary productive foundations for a socialist society must surely be a crucial theoretical and practical undertaking in the coming period. Smith’s argument, that it is the nature of the Chinese economic system that has ‘turned China into the leading driver of planetary collapse’, fails to recognise that defending and strengthening those elements within the Chinese system which are counter-posed to capitalism will provide the basis for the solution of the environmental problems the world faces. Smith says that ‘the solution for China, and for the rest of the world, is ecosocialist democracy not capitalist democracy’ which few would argue with but we are left with a magical aspiration rather than a concrete analysis of material society. What are the transitional forms of political power that will actively contribute to a socialist transformation of China. This is the central  problem that needs to be addressed. The CCP was forced, following the chaos and brutalisation of the Cultural Revolution, to reorganise the economy and overcome the ever-present problem of the underdevelopment of the productive forces. This ‘solution’ whereby the state retained central control of the economy and of the political sphere but allowed significant capitalist development brings in its wake its own contradictions despite the enormous productive power that it has unleashed.

How these struggles will unfold in China we cannot yet know but the determination of many of the Western left to ignore the complexity of post-revolutionary China by labelling China, on the basis of surface appearances, as a capitalist and imperialist state formation will only give us the illusion of a real solution. The slogan that some advance as we enter the New Cold War is ‘Neither Washington nor Beijing’ – a reprise of ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ adopted by some in the time of the Soviet Union. Both are wrong and lead to mistaken political perspectives. As does the belief that China represents a new form of capitalism, thus negating the progressive advances of the Chinese Revolution. It presents humanity with a desolate future.

There are those on the left that make a comparison between China’s Belt and Road initiative with the imperialist role played by the European countries in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries but these comparisons seem to me to be superficial. They ignore the massive military intervention which accompanied European and US imperialism and which we have seen repeated in the Middle East in the very recent period. Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister in Greece, sees it rather differently. He tells a more benign story about Chinese state investment in Greece saying the Chinese state was prepared to invest over a long period and he ensured that they guaranteed labour rights, collective bargaining and profit sharing. There are no doubt many problems associated with corruption, debt and contracts between sovereign nations, and the Belt and Road is an infrastructure development with investments made in 70 countries mainly in the Global South. It is a qualitatively different strategy from the economic and political enslavement of colonialism and imperialism and for countries in the Global South it is an alternative route to capital investment.

China has managed to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union; it has navigated a different course by integrating within the global economy in a way that the Soviet Union never was. It is an economic peer of the United States and by 2040 its economy is projected to be twice the size of the US economy. Unlike the Soviet Union it has never tried to compete militarily with the US which would have drained away the resources necessary for economic development. China has avoided military action while the US has been engaged in almost permanent wars over the last twenty years and the danger is that the US has China in its sights for the next one – a crucial factor that Smith doesn’t really explore.

The political situation between the US and China is now deteriorating rapidly. The US has unleashed a human rights offensive over Hong Kong, Taiwan and Xinjiang with the goal of isolating China internationally and destabilising the CCP internally. The US aims to pressure China to dismantle state ownership and privatise the non-capitalist sectors of the Chinese economy. It hopes to strengthen those social forces in China that also seek that outcome. But its primary objective is to halt China’s rise and maintain its position as the dominant global power.

The US plans in the coming year the largest military expenditure in its history. It will spend over $700 billion in 2021, much of it on the expansion of its military capabilities in the South China Sea. The Trump administration plans to sell three new advanced weapons systems to Taiwan as part of its strategy of isolating China, involving new regional alliances with India, Japan and Australia. The world finds itself at its most dangerous moment as the US seeks to restore its dominance over the world economy with the real possibility of armed conflict with China.

Smith ends his book by saying that the CCP has ‘held back China’s masses for seven decades’ and that the party has created the worst ever environmental crisis. He paraphrases Mao’s victory speech in 1949 saying, ‘It’s time the Chinese people stood up again. The fate of their nation and the fate of the planet depend greatly on them’.

I’m not convinced he is taking aim at the right target.

 Mike Phipps reviews Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away with War Crimes, by Phil Miller, published by Pluto Press

This is a shocking book. It opens with an account of a massacre in 1985 in northern Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan army’s dirty war against the Tamil population was in full swing. In the incident described, helicopters landed and government troops burned down houses and killed civilians. One of the pilots who watched the scene was a tall white man. Three decades later, declassified documents suggest he was a mercenary working for a British company, Keenie Meenie Services – KMS.

Such companies began to multiply in the era of decolonisation in the decades after World War Two. They took on the work that British state forces could no longer undertake worldwide and became the breeding ground for Britain’s vast private security industry. KMS was one of these companies, small at first, but using its connections inside the Foreign Office and other parts of the state administration to great effect.

Some of the new mercenary outfits that sprang up were brutal even by the military standards of the time. There was a public outcry when the commander of one of these ordered the massacre of 14 men under his command who wanted to quit an operation in Angola. The then Labour prime minister set up an enquiry, but the attitude of many government officials was pragmatic and supportive about the deployment of mercenaries. Many were keen to distinguish between the cowboys and the more respectable outfits like KMS, which did a large amount of ‘security work’ in the Middle East and elsewhere for the Foreign Office.

It was a considerable step up from guarding British embassies to providing direct military training in countries like Sri Lanka, where the UK authorities did not wish to appear involved. Recently declassified documents suggest the UK government was not entirely happy about KMS training elite Sri Lankan military units, because they frequently went on the rampage, but initially did nothing to stop it happening.

KMS trained Sri Lanka’s Special Task Force from 1984 on. At this time, the Task Force’s activities attracted fear and loathing across Tamil areas, due to its large number of disappearances of young Tamil men, its widespread use of torture, of collective punishments, rape, looting and summary execution of children. These atrocities were committed on a systematic basis by the Task Force, trained by KMS, who were seemingly implicated in war crimes. Furthermore, local embassy personnel observed: “KMS have been drawn yet further into direct control of and participation in operations.” Yet the logic of privatisation meant that no British government personnel took any responsibility for what was happening.

By 1986, the Sri Lankan government admitted using air strikes on built-up areas. The impact of these was indiscriminate. “By now,” notes Miller, “Whitehall went as far as accepting internally that it was ‘probable’ KMS pilots had ‘taken charge’ of helicopter attacks.” Yet rather than suspend the passports of KMS members, which would have severely curtailed their ability to function, the government soft-pedalled. KMS operatives later confirmed that they had flown combat missions in which civilians were targeted on a large scale. In Miller’s assessment, their role was indispensable: without it, “it is highly likely the Sri Lankan army would have had to abandon the north, effectively giving the Tamils a de facto state of their own.”

There is further evidence if British complicity in these crimes. Despite a ‘fact-finding’ mission to Sri Lanka by the then Home Secretary, the UK government believed it was safe to send back Tamil refugees applying for asylum here.

KMS personnel were also involved in the covert US-led plans to destabilise the democratically elected government of Nicaragua, allegedly detonating bombs in the capital in 1985. This became public in the Congressional investigation into the Iran-contra affair in 1987, where the US had unlawfully financed the contra war against Nicaragua from funds raised by illegally selling arms to Iran. After this exposure, KS rebranded itself under a new name and began working in the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan.

Miller, formerly a researcher at Corporate Watch, has done a meticulous job in piecing together this story, scouring government files at the National Archives, once they were released to the public after a thirty year time lag – even then, heavily redacted. He also tracked down and interviewed some of the participants who had harrowing stories to tell: one spoke of the indiscriminate slaughter of Tamil civilians and compared what was going on in Sri Lanka to the Holocaust.

The main events covered here happened over thirty years ago. But the UK’s private military security business remains in robust health. New Labour squandered an opportunity to regulate it in 2002, when the then Foreign Secretary David Miliband proposed that mercenaries should merely sign up to a voluntary code of conduct. Then came the Iraq war where the industry boomed. Today it is worth up to £275 billion a year and the UK government itself is a significant client.

first published on Labour Hub

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has slammed into the global system with almost the same impact we might expect from an asteroid strike. All aspects of economic, cultural and political activity on the planet have been devastated and disrupted in ways that seemed unimaginable just a few months ago. Almost half a million human lives around the world have been extinguished already and the danger is far from over. Aside from the immediate biological threat of the virus, probably its most fundamental effect has been to stall the already faltering recovery of the capitalist system after the crash of 2008. The developed economies have been forced to take measures such as compulsory lockdowns, massive fiscal subsidies and draconian border controls on a scale that has never been seen before in peacetime.

The symbiotic economic relationship between the two titans of the global system, China and the US, had been pivotal to that recovery, as far as it had progressed in the pre-outbreak period. In 2018 however, U.S. President Donald Trump radically changed gears by initiating a trade war against Beijing. The political fall-out of the pandemic on the global stage is now further eroding diplomatic relations as a war of words has erupted between the two superpowers over which should shoulder the burden of responsibility for the crisis. Trump has accused Beijing of covering up the initial outbreak and has repeatedly referred to it as a ‘Chinese virus’. In response, Beijing’s Foreign Ministry accuses the U.S. president of seeking to deflect attention from the disastrous failures of his own administration’s domestic management of the virus. The potential for a war of words to spill over into military confrontation cannot be ruled out.

Jude Woodward’s study of the development of US-China diplomacy predates the corona crisis but still provides many useful clues as to how this renewed period of tension in their relationship might play out in the months and years to come. She usefully reminds us that although Trump’s foreign policy has been characterised by frequent bursts of crass Sinophobia, the fear and paranoia among the U.S. elite about their greatest rival really began to take shape under the administration of his predecessor. In 2010, Obama announced a ‘pivot’ of 60% of U.S. military power away from the Middle East and towards the Pacific (250). This strategic shift was the culmination of a decade or so of mounting consternation among Washington foreign policy commentators that Beijing’s stunning economic performance in the post-Mao era was creating the first credible challenge to U.S. global hegemony since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Propagandists on the U.S. side couched this redeployment in terms of ensuring equilibrium in terms of a balance of power, but Woodward shrewdly identifies the real agenda: ‘On the economic front these demands include opening up China’s markets on terms favourable to the West, privatisation of key industries, revaluing the RMB, deregulating its capital account and not developing production in areas of more advanced technology that would directly compete with the West’ (16). In other words, the U.S. is acting in the classic manner of imperialist powers of previous eras such as Britain and France at the turn of the twentieth century, seeking to thwart the emergence of a rival. The furore today over Huawei’s input to the 5G network in North America and Europe is another expression of this completive mentality escalating among the big powers. Woodward also notes that if such an economic strangulation were to succeed, another dividend for the U.S. would be the reduced ability of Beijing to offer material and moral support to recalcitrant states such as Venezuela and Iran that have noticeably managed to resist the will of Washington thus far in the twenty-first century.

Trump’s sabre-rattling belligerence is often presented by liberal analysts as out of character with the generally benign nature of the U.S. state as it has evolved over two centuries or so. Woodward’s observation that the intensified pressure on China in this century actually commenced under Obama is just one valuable corrective to this narrative of ‘American exceptionalism’. The author’s overview of the history of U.S. foreign policy neatly dismembers the myth of the country as a uniquely normative power, only committed to the diffusion of values such as freedom, democracy and pluralism, rather than acting out of a form of self-interest we take for granted from other powers. From ‘the megalomania of Manifest Destiny’ to the straightjackets of the IMF and the World Bank (both equipped with U.S. vetoes), Washington has carved a subtler version of the template of empire, but an empire nonetheless. Woodward explains that ‘its tactics in pursuit of its ultimately Brobdingnagian global project ranged from active to passive persuasion. And such arguments allowed the construction of a myth of the U.S. as a reluctant superpower, an anti-colonial state, when it was in fact pervasively seeking to coercively influence greater and greater spheres of the world’ (61).

Woodward describes how American analysts of international relations have tried to theorise the putative challenge from China. One of the most discussed models of the state of the global chessboard is Graham Allison’s ‘Thucydides Trap’. Taking a cue from the classic history of the Peloponnesian War by the eponymous Greek historian in the fifth century BCE, Allison posits that history is full of cases of rising powers encroaching on the hegemony of established powers, often triggering conflict regardless of the efforts of diplomats at the time to broker peace. Allison presents the U.S. as the modern equivalent of Sparta as the established power and Xi’s China as the counterpart of Athens, an ascending economic and military rival. Woodward is justifiably sceptical of this transhistorical and fatalistic perspective on the causes of war: ‘Ancient Greece was not at all similar to the world that faces the U.S. and China today, particularly economically. In a world where economic growth was insignificant…war to seize assets created by others, enslave populations or steal land was a rational route to enrichment’ (64). She notes the Chinese president himself has commented on the limited value of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ as a paradigm for understanding the contemporary world.

An alternative approach to China within U.S. foreign policy circles is the liberal notion of complex interdependence. Theorists such as Joseph Nye argue that the established role of American firms such as Apple, Walmart and General Motors inside the Chinese economy, in addition to Beijing controlling over a $1 trillion of U.S. debt, means the two superpowers are mutually dependent to an extent that precludes the possibility of inter-state military conflict. Woodward cautions that similar arguments ruling out the prospect of conflict between Britain and Germany were common in the years before 1914. The author contends that great power rivalry operates on multiple levels including the political and the military, and that an exclusive focus on the economic by liberal theorists such as Nye is unduly optimistic. She suggests Trump’s alternative strategy of confronting China could equally attract the support of aggressively protectionist elements of the U.S. financial elite: ‘According to such a perspective pre-emptively halting the rise of China is vital to protect the interests of global capital and will have a longer term pay-off for U.S. domestic industry by preventing China reaching the point of competing at U.S. levels of productively and technology’ (68).

Another valuable corrective to the standard Western narrative provided by Woodward is that China’s historical evolution as a great power has been characterised by a conspicuous lack of global ambitions; while in contrast, the U.S. has been remorselessly following an agenda of global hegemony since its initial emergence as a regional power at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The author recalls the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Existence’ as espoused by Zhou Enlai who presided over Chinese foreign policy in the 1970s (46). Similarly a decade later, the country’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping spoke of pursuing a policy based on the motto: ‘hide strength, bide our time’ (47). Even further back in time, the Ming dynasty in the 1400s had spurned the opportunity for global expansion created by the voyages into the Indian Ocean by Admiral Zheng He (70). Woodward contends that the historic concern of Chinese rulers throughout the ages has been to prioritise the country’s vast land borders and not to divert resources to any expansionist agenda. The current leadership in Beijing, under Xi Jinping, is also committed to this essentially conservative global outlook, according to Woodward: ‘This perspective is not against any other country including the US. On the contrary, it is premised on the idea that relations between states can be organised to their mutual benefit and that the way to secure peace and stability is precisely to build on such win-win relations’ (256).

The only weakness in Woodward’s otherwise excellent overview of the global chessboard is a tendency to take at face value statements of benign intent by the current Chinese leadership. Ultimately, China today has become thoroughly integrated into the operations of global economy and as such, is bound by the logic of the system in the same way as every other capitalist state, now or in the past. Xi may be genuine in his desire to avoid confrontation with the U.S. but the laws of motion of world capitalism, as Lenin and Bukharin argued many decades ago, ultimately operate outside the remit of politicians and twice already in the last century we have seen where that logic can lead. She also tends to dismiss legitimate struggles against the Chinese state such as those in Hong Kong and Xinjiang as little more than manifestations of CIA sponsored subversion (16).

Sadly, Jude Woodward has recently passed away. With this volume, however, she has bequeathed a valuable tool to help navigate the perils of the unfolding global crisis. In her memory, we should strive to enact the closing message of her last book: ‘in the end, the sword cannot win against the desire of human beings to go forward and improve their lives if they can see a way to do so’ (257)

Jude Woodward was an Editorial Board member of Transform journal.

The US vs China: Asia’s New Cold War?
Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2017, 304 pp.,

You can buy the book here

This article was previously published on Monthly Review online

Rebecca Long-Bailey is only the latest in a litany of figures on the Labour left to fall foul of the McCarthyite policing of criticism of Israel at the behest of an Israel lobby whose guiding objective is to elide Israel’s brutal apartheid character behind an iron wall of obfuscation, while extending itself in demonising and smearing as antisemitic those who would dare elicit more than the most tepid solidarity with the Palestinians.

On the actualite of Long-Bailey’s sacking by Sir Keir Starmer, the now former education secretary made the mistake of retweeting an interview in The Independent involving the actress and prominent left Labour voice, Maxine Peake, during which the latter claimed that the knee on the neck of George Floyd by racist white cop Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis a few weeks ago is a tactic that was learned from the Israelis. Long-Bailey was sacked despite posting a later Tweet stating that she did not agree with everything that Maxine Peake said in the interview, while Maxine Peake herself later retracted the claim that the murder of George Floyd had anything to do with Israeli policing tactics.

So far so very unusual in this censorious climate when it comes to dancing around the apartheid elephant in the room of Labour internal party politics.

Whether George Floyd perished as a result of Israeli policing tactics or not is really beside the point. Racist policing in the US, along with the lynching of black men whether at the hands of the police or the Klan (and increasingly the distinction between both becomes harder to discern), is not a product of Israel or any other external entity. On the contrary, it’s as American as apple pie – a symptom of the country’s white supremacist past and present which lies at the heart of the country’s dominant cultural values.

With this being said, though, writing in Middle East Eye recently, Sheren Khalel points out that though “The Israeli police force has tried to distance itself from any perceived similarities [between the manner of George Floyd’s death and its own methods], issuing statements denouncing what happened and stating that its officers are not trained to use knee-to-neck techniques…photographs taken as recently as March have shown Israeli forces using the same restraint on unarmed protesters just yards from the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City.”

Coincidence? People can make up their own mind.

Perhaps a more pertinent question to be asked is what exactly are the Israelis teaching various US police departments? And what is it, precisely, that US police departments believe they can learn from their Israeli counterpart that is applicable to the ethos of protecting and serving people in their own communities?

The sheer number of black victims of police violence across the United States is compatible with an ethos of internal repression rather policing. Along with the overweening militarisation of US police departments, it’s as if your average cop believes him and herself to be engaged in pest control when it comes to black America.

Here the parallel with Israeli security forces vis-à-vis the Palestinians is inarguable. And here we arrive at the proverbial heart of the matter. Black Lives Matter can only ever be anti-colonial in character. Blacks in America and to an extent also here in the UK are victims of domestic colonialism, while the Palestinians are victims of settler colonialism. This makes them natural allies in the same struggle against an apparatus of oppression that is underpinned by white supremacy, of which Zionism is but a species. And at this juncture, digressing for a moment in the interests of pointing out that white supremacy is as much an ideological construct as a racial one, the murals of George Floyd that have appeared on the Falls Road in Belfast in recent weeks are wholly in keeping with an Irish republican tradition that has been forged in resistance to the white supremacist reaction of Ulster loyalism in these here parts too.

In the end, the white supremacist knee that lay on the neck of George Floyd in Minneapolis recently is the same white supremacist knee that lies on the neck of the long suffering Palestinian people.

As for the Labour Party, it has under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership proudly nailed its colours to the mast of apartheid.

The retreat from the truth in the face of the wrath of the Board of Deputies is akin to the disinterment of the corpse of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Whether is was the robotic-like lack of emotion on the face of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin as he slowly choked the life out of George Floyd on the ground, keeping his knee on his neck for five long minutes despite Floyd screaming that he couldn’t breath, and despite him pleading; or whether it was the fact that Chauvin felt completely at ease in executing his prey in front of witnesses and in broad daylight; the image of him doing so was at that moment more representative of America than the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Statue of Liberty, or any of the baubles deployed in service to the myth of the United States as the land of the free.

Chauvin with his knee on the neck of a supine George Floyd was the acme of evil that is white supremacy. He was the overseer with his knee on the neck of a runaway slave. He was the Confederate Flag raised in triumph, the slaver’s whip, the lynch mob’s noose, the prison guard’s boot. In other words, Chauvin symbolised in those five horrifying minutes the entire legacy and long history of racial oppression in country that was born in genocide and developed and nourished for two centuries on the back of the African slave trade.

Here we are obliged to wrestle with an unvarnished truth — namely that though slavery in its chattel form may have been ended, the consciousness of the slaveowner remains alive and kicking within the diseased minds of racist white police cops all over that God-forsaken land. They are, in fact, less police officers protecting and serving, and more members of increasingly militarised right wing militia groups hunting for prey — black prey.

Those commentators who assert that the struggle for justice for black people has not progressed since the Black Civil Rights Movement in the Sixties are, with all respect, mistaken. They are mistaken because the struggle for justice for black people has actually and manifestly regressed since then. The most obvious symbol of this regression is embodied in the current occupant of the White House, Donald J. Trump.

Trump’s election was a racist pushback against Barack Obama’s two terms in office. You don’t have to approve of Obama’s legacy as president (I certainly don’t) to appreciate the symbolism of a black American with an African name being elected to the highest office in America back in 2008. For racists everywhere it was a moment to mourn, with Trump’s championing of a birther movement designed to prove that Obama was not a ‘real American’, leaving not doubt that he was among them.

You see, it’s very simple. In the hearts and minds of white supremacists, black and brown Americans are not real Americans. They are instead a threat to real Americans, white and proud Americans, and thereby dehumanised, demonised, and ultimately murdered with impunity as such.

With Trump’s election as president in 2016 the KKK and every card carrying white racist and white supremacist in America finally got their most precious wish; they finally got their man in the White House. And since he entered it has been open season on black and brown people.

Shifting focus for a moment, the issue of racial oppression in America is hugely important for people of conscience and consciousness living outside America to understand. For if the most powerful truths are the most simply expressed, then who better than Malcolm X to remind us that ‘You can’t understand what’s going on in Mississippi if you don’t understand what’s going on in the Congo’.

In other words, there exists a circular relationship between racial oppression at home in America and US imperialism abroad. As James Baldwin so eloquently put it: ‘A racist society can’t but fight a racist war. The assumptions acted on at home are the assumptions acted on abroad’.

And staying with Baldwin, when he averred that ‘To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time’, he gave voice to the rage behind the riots that have taken place, and continue at time of this writing to take place, in various cities across the US in the wake of George Floyd’s execution.

Founding member of the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton, was not a man who ever wasted time in beating around the bush.

To wit:

The racist dog oppressors have no rights which oppressed Black people are bound to respect. As long as the racist dogs pollute the earth with the evil of their actions, they do not deserve any respect at all, and the “rules” of their game, written in the people’s blood, are beneath contempt.

The militancy with which he was writing in 1967 was forged by racial oppression. As these words are being written a new generation of Malcom X’s and Huey Newton’s are likewise being forged.

New York protest against the murder of George Floyd.

The people are rising in Minneapolis and across the US. The police station where Floyd’s murderer worked  was burnt to the ground  and there have been dozens of other protests across the whole country. As many protesters said ‘we’ve had enough’.

Solidarity with those who resist.

]]> https://prruk.org/foot-work-what-your-shoes-are-doing-to-the-world/ Mon, 06 Apr 2020 18:57:35 +0000 http://prruk.org/?p=11750 TRANSFORM interviews Tansy Hoskins about her new book: Foot Work – What Your Shoes Are Doing To The World.

Credit: Liam Yulhanson and Michelle Woods

In Foot Work, you discuss the detrimental effects of the footwear industry on society and our planet. What would you say is the biggest issue in the book?

The working title for the book was Foot Work – What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation. I wanted to write it because I am interested in the way certain objects tell us a bigger story – in this case shoes perfectly tell us the story of globalisation and out-of-control corporate power.

Globalisation has meant a dramatic shift in where our shoes are made, how much people are paid to make them, and the ability of corporations to circumvent environmental protections. With production so cheap, 66.3 million pairs were churned out every single day in 2018. This is having a devastating impact on people, on animals, and on the planet.

I hope that a key take-home from Foot Work is that unchecked corporate power is trashing our planet and enslaving millions of people while the rest of us are sold a tale that everything is fine because there are shops full of nice sparkly consumable objects that we should aspire to own. Under capitalism, shoes have been reduced to being a shiny excuse for exploitation and profiteering.

In Foot Work I’ve tried to explain that you don’t need to know everything or have all the answers to want to change things: ‘There are a lot of big questions about capitalism, but the simplest ones hold the key. Is it worth destroying the rainforest to make trainers? Is it right that factories churn out 24.2 billion pairs of shoes a year, yet wealth is distributed so unequally that tens of thousands of kids get sick walking barefoot to school? Should people tanning leather have a life expectancy of fifty? If in our hearts we know the answer to these questions is no, then we have to ask ourselves what we are doing in a system where the answer is yes.’

What are standards, wages and factory conditions like in the shoe industry?

It is a mixed bag, but corporations systematically target different countries in the Global South to find the most amenable conditions with the lowest wages and restrictions.

I’ve written a lot about the fashion industry but when I started looking into the shoe industry it became clear that footwear is lagging far behind the rest of fashion in terms of standards and workers’ rights.

China is still the world’s number one footwear giant. I don’t think people quite get the scale of production in some of the industrial sites in China. There is a Taiwanese company called Yue Yuen which has 400,000 global employees – it is the biggest sports shoe manufacturer on the planet. When a strike took place at Yue Yuen’s facility in 2014, 40,000 workers walked out!

Another interesting, but far smaller, place to look at for shoe production is Eastern Europe. Often wages and conditions can be worse in Eastern Europe than in China – and these are shoes being made specifically for export to the rest of Europe.

A Macedonian factory I went to in 2018 was paying its workers, most of whom were women, 200-350 Euros a month. The shoes they were working on cost more than they would earn in a week so it was really depressing stuff. I have been thinking about the factories I researched in Eastern Europe a lot recently – one of them had just two toilets for fifty-six people. With those conditions how do you keep yourself and your work station hygienically clean during a pandemic?

It is also vital to remember the millions of people who make shoes but who aren’t in the recognised factory system. Homeworkers are a key reason why the shoes on our feet remain so cheap. They are the hidden pillar of globalisation. Conditions when production drops out of the formal system are even worse – a family of 4 homeworkers in Pakistan can earn 800 rupees per day, which is about £8. Then there are the basements of Syrian refugee children stitching shoes in Turkey. That was an upsetting part of the book to write, these children face all kinds of dangers and abuses and then the shoes they make are exported across borders which are closed to Syrian children.

We live in a consumerist society, what should we do to change our relationship with the ‘things’ in our lives?

This is a difficult one because navigating modern society means being bombarded with messages that tell us we are being judged on what we wear, eat and drive. Thousands of adverts link consumption to our social status and tell us to be insecure about what we have.

Unfortunately this is a pressure that now starts very young and so we see children (as well as adults) desperate to own and wear a certain brand and type of shoe because their peer group considers other types of shoe to be a stigmatised product.

We certainly need to re-orient society away from valuing and stigmatising people based on their appearance and what they wear. This is a huge challenge because all the messages that tell us we aren’t good enough are designed to make us shop so ultimately we need to unpick capitalism and create a fairer world that values people not objects.

At the same time, people in much of Europe have lost their links with production as they no longer have friends or family working to make objects like shoes; this has allowed items in shop windows to become mysterious. This isn’t helped by the fact that shoe brands spend billions of advertising dollars obscuring supply chains and trying to make us believe shoes spring from puffs of pink smoke at the snap of a fairy godmother’s fingers.

The result is that capitalism has made us really alienated – from each other, from nature, from the true cost of the things around us. The best way to overcome this alienation is to work collectively to change the system.

Changing the world is definitely not an easy task. In Foot Work I worked on a tool called the Triangle of Change which contains three issues: individual, political and systemic. Individual change is placed at the top of the Triangle – because shoes are a consumer item, emphasis is often placed on changing ourselves, rather than the world around us. Individual change is not invalid, but it can function as a trap. The trap is thinking that as long as the top of the triangle is fixed, everything will be fixed.

The second level is political change, and it is here that questions of power begin to be examined. This level covers regulation, legislation, freedom of association and taxation, all elements that involve placing political pressure on governments and institutions and pushing them to regulate capitalism. By its very nature it is collective and covers a far greater number of factories and countries.

The third level is by far the biggest and is often the unspoken elephant in the room. This is quite literally the basis of the problem. It is here we find the most intransigent problems of capitalism: the systemic exploitation of women, the exploitation of the Global South, the creation and maintenance of racism and the imposition and exploitation of class and poverty. This third level means confronting capitalism and moving towards system change.

That is what I like about shoes – they carry us around but they also hold a lot of answers if we’re willing to listen.

Guardian Foot Work extract: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/mar/21/some-soles-last-1000-years-in-landfill-the-truth-about-the-sneaker-mountain

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‘Fascinating and eye-opening, FOOT WORK shows brilliantly how a simple everyday object can shed light on the hidden costs of globalisation and environmental degradation.’ Owen Jones

‘Tansy is one of the sharpest and committed analysts of the true cost of the stuff we own. FOOT WORK is an absorbing, meticulous and at times completely horrifying account of the shoes on our feet and how that supply chain is marching (all puns intended) us towards an even more dystopian future, especially for the workers in the system. Read this and you will make better decisions about all fashion, and all consumer goods in the future.’ Lucy Siegle

Manolis with the Greece Solidarity UK delegation 2012On the evening of Monday 30 March 2020, around 9 pm, one could hear people clapping their hands in many Greek neighborhoods. The clapping was followed by old partisans’s songs from the Resistance and in particular one called ‘Heroes’. In its lyrics one can find this line: ‘Heroes with twelve lives’.
If there was a person, that lived these ‘twelve lives’, this was Manolis Glezos, and the people clapping their hands in their balconies and shouting his name and playing old partisan songs were doing it to honor him, because today he passed away at the age of 98.
When Glezos was only 19 he made history, because along with his comrade Lakis Santas on the night of May 30/31 1941, just a few weeks after the Germans had entered occupied Athens, they brought down the Nazi flag from the Acropolis.
But this was just the beginning of eight decades dedicated to struggle. Active in the Resistance as a young communist, he would be arrested first by the Germans, later by the Italians and also by the Greek collaborators. His younger brother, Nicos, was executed by the Germans on May 1944. Glezos would always show the small note that his brother managed to write and throw out of the truck that was carrying him to the place of executions.
Manolis Glezos himself would be later condemned to death twice during the Civil War, but in 1950 his death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. He would be liberated on 1954 only to be arrested again on 1958 on espionage charges and jailed until 1962 despite the international protests against the prosecution for such a symbol of the antifascist Resistance. After the 1967 Colonel’s coup he would be again arrested.
After the fall of the dictatorship he would not join any of the two Communist Parties that had emerged from the 1968 split and tried to revive EDA (United Democratic Left) which was the legal expression of the Left during the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1980s EDA cooperated with PASOK (and Glezos would be twice elected to parliament) but he would distance himself from PASOK. For some time he would be the elected president of his village in the island of Naxos, where he would try to experiment with forms of direct democracy. Active on the Left, in the 2000s he would participate in SYRIZA, being elected again to Parliament in 2012 and the European Parliament on 2014. When SYRIZA capitulated after the referendum, he distanced himself from SYRIZA and in the September 2015 election, he was a candidate with Popular Unity.
During all this time he would always be active in various movements. From the movement to demand German reparations to local struggles and movements of international solidarity. A prolific writer he would dedicate a large part of his energy to defending the history of the Resistance (writing a monumental two-tome history entitled ‘National Resistance 1940-1945), always available to speak at meetings at schools etc. He was also present in demonstrations and protests. On March 2010, during one of the first mass rallies against austerity riot police sprayed him with tear gas with the Minister of Public Order being forced to condemn such practices. During the mass movement of the Squares he was also there speaking to crowds.

During the trial of Golden Dawn he was also there, reminding of the continuity of antifascist struggle.
However, just referring to Glezos’s political trajectory cannot explain the place he had in the collective thinking of many generations. Glezos was never just a ‘living symbol’. He was more like living history, history in the making, history in the present. One is really impressed to see how many people, of many different generations, actually had personal memories of meeting Glezos in one moment or the other.
It is as if he represented the continuity of a spirit of struggle, the red line of commitment, courage and sacrifice, from the Resistance and the Civil War to contemporary movements.
And whatever disagreements one might had with Glezos on one issue or the other, he was living proof of the ‘new humanity’ that the Communist movement had envisaged and projected: always committed but also open-minded, eager to experiment, insisting on the broadening of democracy, trying to avoid dogmatism and bureaucratic mentality.

Manolis Glezos pays tribute to the dead of the 1973 Students’ Uprising at the Polytechnic University in downtown Athens.

It is not that he represented a particular line or program. He represented a spirit of struggle and resistance in a society that in the past ten years went from insurrection and hope to capitulation and defeat. A spirit of resistance and struggle most needed now.
Because of the restrictions imposed of the pandemic Glezos’s funeral will not be a mass demonstration as we would have wished. But tonight’s salute to the ‘last partisan’ made evident the place he has in our collective memory, feeling and thinking.

Panagiotis Sotiris

“Ki-taek: They are rich but still nice

Chung-sook, Ki-taek’s wife: They are nice because they are rich

Chung-sook, Ki-taek’s wife: If I had all this I would be kinder”

This is a film for our dark times. Director, Bong Joon-ho, looks behind the shiny Samsung phones and Hyundai cars of the South Korean economic miracle and unmasks the reality of capitalist class relations. He shows how they affect people’s choices and actions. On different levels it is a black comedy, a ghost story and even a bit of a horror film. It manages to engage the audience with a plot that rips along with a great mid-way twist and with characters that seem real and human. At the same time, as the young son says several times in the movie, it’s all about the metaphors. What interests Bong Joon-ho is the huge inequality in Korean society. He creates a lively, enjoyable cuckoo in the nest story but infuses it with some explosive messages.

The story is straightforward. A poor working class family living in a basement in urban South Korea gradually insinuates itself into the life and, more importantly, the domestic economy of a rich upper class one. A friend of the son suggests he takes over the English tutoring role of the rich daughter. Once hired, he manages to get his sister to take over the ‘art therapy’ of the daughter’s young brother. They use a certain creativity and intelligence to achieve this but add a dose of ruthlessness in getting the rich family’s driver and live-in maid sacked and replaced by their own father and mother. The family had to deny its very existence to carry out these roles, an inspired symbolic example of how our very identity is alienated by this system.

Throughout you get a very physical, visual expression of the gulf between working class and upper middle class living standards. The contrast between the squalor of the basement with people pissing on their windows and the superb architect designed house in the upper quarters could not be clearer. This upper/lower spatial division has been repeated in many dystopian stories with the proles living underground. Most urban centres throughout the world have this very clear physical division between the classes.

A recurrent reference in the film is made to how the rich identify the poor with an unpleasant smell. The businessman in the back of the car talks about the smell of people in the subway and the driver begins to try and smell himself. George Orwell made some similar comments when he wrote ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’.

“It may not greatly matter if the average middle-class person is brought up to believe that the working classes are ignorant, lazy, drunken, boorish, and dishonest; it is when he is brought
up to believe that they are dirty that the harm is done. And in my childhood we were brought up to believe that they were dirty” (Chapter 8)

The smartness, adaptability and abilities of the poor family contrast with the naiveté and vacuity of the rich family further reinforcing the idea that the system does not reward intelligence. But the director does not romanticise working people. The story shows a vicious fight for survival between working people, scrabbling to monopolise the benefits of working for the rich household. There is a great riff in the film on the idea of having a plan. The poor family keeps coming back to that discussion when they find themselves in a crisis. For a while their plans work effectively then their guard falls and they are unmasked. The father comes out with a great line that sums up to some degree the state of things today for working people in many countries. He says – in response to his son asking what the plan is –

‘You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan. No plan at all. You know why? Because life cannot be planned. Look around you. Did you think these people made a plan to sleep in the sports hall with you? But here we are now, sleeping together on the floor. So, there’s no need for a plan. You can’t go wrong with no plans. We don’t need to make a plan for anything. It doesn’t matter what will happen next. Even if the country gets destroyed or sold out, nobody cares. Got it?’

The protagonist role, the collective solidarity and organisation of working people is everywhere in crisis today.

The father’s frustrations at the impasse ends in a bloody denouement in the midst of an expensively organised birthday party for the young son while classical opera is being sung and canapes consumed.

The film reminded me of some of the progressive Italian black comedies of the 1970s by Scola, Monicelli and others such as Brutti, Sporchi et Cattivi (Down and Dirty) with Nino Manfredi or Scopone Scientifico (The Scientific Cardplayer) with Bette Davies directed by Comencini. Films that worked as popular comedies but which had a serious, anti-capitalist point to make. Some of the best Ealing comedies of the 1950s also had this quality, such as the Man in the White Suit (with Alec Guinness). Korean cinema has been making some great films – Burning (2018) was tremendous.

What is striking is the way cinema more easily than some other art forms – through subtitles – can make different cultural realities accessible. Some people have commented that in any case the direction is so adept that the film can be followed visually most of the time without needing the dialogue. The best films always have that visual quality that keeps scenes in your mind long after you have seen it. A good example here is the slapstick antics of the poor family having to escape the house when the rich family come back unexpectedly.

Deservedly winning the top prize at Cannes, this film merits recognition at the Oscars which would be poetic justice in Trump’s America today. Bong Joon-ho brilliantly makes us think about whom the worst parasites are, the rich family or the poor one.

As the sky lightened, more protestors arrived and soaked the pavement with buckets of fake blood. Red ink splattered the white clothes of the five. Police and security guards moved in, but then gave up. The protestors lay down on the pavement, their ‘Fuck Consumerism’ and ‘Beyond Fashion’ T-shirts soaking up the red liquid. Above the London pavement, plastic billboards promised beauty, glamour, and excitement with every purchase.

Two hours later the Fashion Week audience arrived. Logoed Mercedes Benz and black cabs pulled up at the curb, people with passes formed a queue behind metal railings and security guards, every attendee dressed with painful studiousness. Silver boots and clipped moustaches, baseball caps next to a towering mauve and yellow headdress, pink sunglasses matching a pink coat, chunky oversized sneakers, and layers upon layers of black cloth. They were an audience living for spectacles: they had come to attend a spectacle, and had striven hard to themselves be spectacles capable of competing in a crowd.

The Extinction Rebellion protestors had not left. They were still stuck to the building and others had gathered in a small crowd around a portable sound system. Their voices rang out around passionate arguments, they were kinder and more patient than most agitators.

Many of them used to be part of the fashion system – until they woke up and smelled the burning. So now they were disrupting Fashion Week, standing as a living reminder that our society, led by the dancing promises of retailers, has gone badly wrong. The audience did not want to hear it. The audience wanted to artfully observe the impact of their look on their surroundings, to be photographed, to pretend not to care.

"Why is this industry – perceived as the zeitgeist – not acting on the warnings?"
London Fashion Week off to a bloody start as @boycottfashion stage a die-in for the planet. #LFW pic.twitter.com/JVZx1ZlxPt

— Tansy E Hoskins (@TansyHoskins) September 13, 2019

Over the sound system Extinction Rebellion described the fashion industry as ‘playing the fiddle while Rome burns’. The queue was a Hunger Games moment, a Fashion Week audience of outlandish ‘Capital’ people refusing to see the reality the ‘Districts’ had brought to their door. It was an indifference to reality that reduced the spectacle of fashion to sad blandness.

The protestors made reality clear: brands at Fashion Week are showing collections to be sold in 2020 – the year we need to alter course if we are to avert runaway climate change. Next time the trade show returns to London, brands will be producing and showing clothes for the year 2021 – past the climate deadline set by the UN.

"You choose profit over planet, profit over people, profit over our future."
Extinction Rebellion @boycottfashion activists pour fake blood over the start of London Fashion Week. #LFW pic.twitter.com/hMMnA8jahx

— Tansy E Hoskins (@TansyHoskins) September 13, 2019

Bangladesh is draining its precious groundwater to feed thousands of fashion factories, the Aral Sea has been dried up by cotton production, every wash-load of polyester puts 700,000 microplastic fibres into the environment, and in 2015 the fashion industry was responsible for 1.7 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions. Under the shadow of facts like these, Fashion Week’s business-as-usual approach is unforgivable.

The fashion industry’s relationship with the future is deeply disturbing – it is simultaneously obsessed with the future and unable to confront it. As an industry, it constantly looks ahead and yet it won’t. Fashion wants to be the future, to construct it by defining what new things we should lust after, and yet it refuses to see the looming precipice this approach has created. All it can truly promise us is a headlong rush into disaster.

Under capitalism we have been taught to relate more to commodities than we do to nature itself. We no longer see ourselves as part of nature; rather the earth is something to be gloriously conquered for profit. Instead of existing in harmony with each other and with the planet, humans are taught to measure their success by their distance from, and indifference to, nature.

Extinction Rebellion described Fashion Week as ‘wearing the manifestation of our denial.’ Ultimately denial and indifference has one purpose – it makes exploitation easier. This exploitation, of the planet, of animals, and of people, is the heart of the fashion industry.

Now is not the time to give up. Rather exploitation must be challenged in its entirety. Extinction Rebellion have opened up a powerful space, exposing the hypocrisies of the industry. Now we must demand climate justice that goes hand in hand with social justice, both here and across the Global South. This means linking up with campaigns and trade unions in countries like Bangladesh where on the one hand climate crisis is already causing death and destruction, and where on the other exploitative factory jobs remain vital sources of income – these two issues have the same cause and the same answer and we cannot afford to separate these conversations from each other.

A sobering point from XR: #LFW brands will soon be 'showing clothes for a season that marks the turning point we must adhere to to avoid collapse.'
Sara Arnold from @boycottfashion pic.twitter.com/pEAz5qa1Qs

— Tansy E Hoskins (@TansyHoskins) September 13, 2019

Change means continuing to build a movement that rejects the premise that people are little more than ‘consumers’ whose only power is in choosing Product A or Product B. It means leaving behind the notion that fashion is a democracy where individuals have equal standing with corporations hell bent on competitive profit maximisation.

It means solidifying calls for planetary protection into binding legislation and enforcement, in holding corporations and their CEO’s to account for ecocide, and in collectively bringing about a permanent end to ending the exploitation of people and planet.

XR Fashion Boycott: RIP London Fashion Week Funeral March

Tuesday 17^th September 2019. Gathering 5pm at Sir Henry Havelock Statue, Trafalgar Square

See Facebook details here

When challenged about his insults to men, women, races, cities, countries and continents, he replied with a reworking of “sorry, but not sorry”.

Extracted from Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare by the late and very much missed Heathcote Williams.

The following quotes should be enough to convey a sense of the mind-set of this ‘national treasure’ whom the governing party in Britain has been turning into a cult figure and crediting with inflated gifts such as his being able to rebrand the Tory Party, so often nicknamed “the nasty party”.

Unfortunately for such a project, Johnson has more than his own share of nastiness. He talks of migrants who “leech, bludge and scrounge” off taxpayers. Visiting Uganda, Johnson cheerily said to UN workers and their black driver: “Right, let’s go and look at some more piccaninnies”—a racist word notoriously used by the Tory MP Enoch Powell in his ‘rivers of blood’ speech against immigration.

Johnson likens Chinese workers to “puffing coolies” and he even favours a return to colonial rule for Africa: “Left to their own devices,” Johnson has proclaimed, “the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain.”

More egregiously still, he adds: “The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.” He accused Nelson Mandela of moving Africa towards a “tyranny of black majority rule”. And he also used his column in the Spectator to claim that the Stephen Lawrence inquiry was a “witch-hunt” against the police.

The undiplomatic Boris Johnson is to be Britain’s leading diplomat. Will he be able to restrain himself from trying out his prize-winning Spectator limerick about the Turkish Head of State on President Erdogan in which: “A young fellow from Ankara/ Who was a terrific wankerer / Until he sowed his wild oats/ With the help of a goat”? The world awaits the re-release of Boris’s bestial squib with bated breath for no gaffe is now off-limits.

The most indiscreet man in public life will now also be in charge of MI6 and GCHQ: a man with no moral compass is in charge of a senior department of military intelligence and a lying journalist becomes the Chief Panjandrum of the doughnut-shaped surveillance centre.

On learning this farcical news the Daily Mirror suggested that “Britain’s credibility will now be hanging by a thread” and it illustrated its front-page story with a photograph of the ludicrous Johnson stranded in mid-air on a zip-wire in a publicity stunt that went wrong.

The Mirror was right and the world reacted with bewildered horror, disbelief and ridicule. When the US State Department spokesman Mark Toner heard the news, he struggled to keep a straight face and the American political scientist, Ian Bremmer, hoped that it might all be a joke. “Maybe the Brits are just having us on. We probably deserve it.”

The Berlin correspondent of German public broadcaster ZDF, Nicole Diekmann, tweeted: “So, Boris Johnson, foreign minister. British humour.” ZDF’s Brussels correspondent, Anne Gellinek, said that Johnson was “properly, properly hated” and was seen as “the head of a campaign of lies” in the EU’s headquarters. Simone Peter, co-leader of the German Green Party, likened Johnson’s appointment to “trusting the cat to keep the cream”.

The French Foreign Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said despondently: “During the campaign he lied a lot to the British people. I need a partner with whom I can negotiate and who is clear, credible and reliable.” His appalled reaction was echoed by Johnson’s audience when, shortly after his appointment, Johnson appeared at the French Embassy only to be soundly booed and jeered.

Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, condemned Johnson’s conduct in the run-up to the EU referendum as “deceitful and reckless” and he called the new foreign secretary’s behaviour ungeheuerlich, meaning outrageous. “People in the UK are experiencing a rude awakening after irresponsible politicians first lured the country into Brexit and then, once the decision was made, decided to bolt from responsibility, and instead go off and play cricket.”

Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s vice president, said that Johnson’s comments had been spreading “hatred” in a way he wouldn’t have believed possible in Britain.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson’s neighbours, feeling the need to apologise on his behalf, fixed a notice to the railings of his house which read in capital letters: SORRY WORLD.

By contrast, at his first Foreign Office press conference—held jointly with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry—Boris Johnson gave his latest reworking of “sorry, but not sorry”. When challenged about his insults to men, women, races, cities, countries and continents, Johnson arrogantly declared: “It would really take me too long to engage in a fully global itinerary of apology to all concerned.”

Theresa May once spoke of her regret that the Tory Party was known as “the nasty party”. Her ill-starred appointment ensured that its malign character would be maintained for some time to come.

Heathcote Williams (1941 – 2017), poet, artist, playwright, actor and political activist, wrote Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare in 2016. Every word of which still applies as we edge closer to the ultimate nightmare of Boris Johnson as UK prime minister.

Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare

Uncovered here are the lies, the sackings, the betrayals, the racist insults, the brush with criminality, that should have got Boris Johnson disbarred from ever being considered for high office.

Now in its second edition, available from Public Reading Rooms:
Price: £8 post free

Friends and family of Jeremy Hardy gathered to celebrate his life on Monday 13th May at the Battersea Arts Centre. This piece was published on Jeremy Hardy’s website.

They included Jeremy Corbyn, who spoke of a friendship stretching back to the the 1980s. “Jeremy was one who always gave his all to any campaign,” he said. He was followed by John McDonnell, who spoke of working with Jeremy on the campaigns to free the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four. “I loved the man,” he said, before explaining that he was then leaving early to continue Brexit negotiations with the government.

At times, Jeremy’s voice came recorded, from speakers. Another time, it came, breathtakingly, from Rory Bremner, with whom he once shared a house. “I used to live in Rory’s attic,” he said, in Jeremy’s voice. “That’s why he looks so young.” Harry Enfield played tribute in full Loadsamoney character, remembering Jeremy on Radio 4, which “is like TalkSport, but shit”. Julian Clary recalled him “being scathing about the Tories in a cardigan”.

Mark Steel spoke of being called by an obituarist after Jeremy died, and being asked, “was he political at all?” and his regret that he hadn’t retorted that Jeremy was the chairman of his local Conservative Association. Jack Dee, like many, recalled Jeremy’s mischief, and his habit of flicking ahead in the pages of flipcharts in rented conference suits, to leave, for the unwary, a sketch of a penis.

Former colleagues spoke in awe of his comic ability and delightful rage. Her favourite moments of the News Quiz, said Sandi Toksvig, was “when Jeremy went off on one, and I would take off my glasses and sit back, knowing that there were ten unbroadcastable minutes ahead of us”. He also, she revealed, heckled her at her own wedding, shouting out, “it should have been me!” According to Andy Hamilton, “it is an honour to be here, and it is also pretty inconvenient, which is what Jeremy would have wanted.” John Naismith, who produced Jeremy in I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, made the room collapse simply by reading out some of Jeremy’s messages in his inbox.

Victoria Coren spoke of Jeremy’s friendship with her father, Alan, and of how he sourced a yarmulke for his funeral, and wore it, even though nobody else had one, because it was in a churchyard. Younger comics, such as Francesca Martinez and Seann Walsh spoke of his mentorship; of meeting him as fans and of him flatly refusing to accept that dynamic and turning them into friends instead. Jeremy’s sisters, Serena and Joy, described him as a child, with Jack Dee reading extracts of the already hilarious letters he was writing to them as a thirteen-yearold. “On Monday,” he wrote, “nothing happened.” There was music, including a haunting Shipbuilding from Charlotte Church and performances from Loinnir McAliskey and She Drew The Gun. Kathryn Williams performed a song called Prospero, written for Jeremy.

As ever, Jeremy’s comedy was intertwined with his constant, compassionate politics. Hugo Rifkind talked of his ability to transcend tribalism, as an antidote to the divisiveness of the Twitter age. “He perceived suffering,” explained Emma Thompson, “and was somehow unable to bear it.” Maxine Peak and Saffron Burrows spoke of all spoke of his activism, and its invigorating, contagious, empowering effect. Leila Sansour, with whom he made Jeremy Hardy vs The Israeli Army, spoke of his passion for Palestine. Juliet Stevenson urged the audience to be more like Jeremy was, introducing Jawad and Ahmad Amiri, two refugees from Afghanistan, whom Jeremy and his wife Katie Barlow helped and befriended. “I did not know Jeremy was famous,” said Jawad. “When I found out, he denied it.”

The day ended with Katie [Jeremy’s wife] herself, reading a letter to Jeremy, talking of the loss felt by her, and by Jeremy’s daughter Betty, and by the outpouring of public grief after his death. “You became Saint Jeremy,” said Katie. “I’d been living with a saint, albeit one that said ‘c***’ a lot.” There followed footage of their wedding, and of Betty’s, both in the weeks before Jeremy died.

There was all this, and much more. “There’s this very fashionable idea that when you die it’s supposed to be a celebration and joyous and everybody laughing,” Jeremy once said, “but I want people’s lives torn apart when I go. I want to be embalmed and brought out when we have guests.” His own passing has featured the first and second of these, if not the third. He lives on in the minds and hearts of those who loved him, who numbered hundreds in that hall, and millions everywhere else.

There is a BBC Radio 4 tribute to Jeremy Hardy on May 16 & 23. Details here.

Source: Infernal Machine

We now have a country where an act of mass murder ‘inspires’ people to openly threaten Muslims with similar actions.

To put it simply, societies tumble off the abyss and become what the medieval historian RI Moore once called ‘persecuting societies’ because the forces that might have prevented this outcome  either don’t recognise the warning signs in time or they don’t act on these signs when they have the chance to do something about them.

Here in the UK it is becoming increasingly clear that a transformation has taken place that goes beyond the shenanigans and political convulsions in Westminster, and will not be resolved by ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ Brexits or arguments about the kind of deal on offer.  Consider the events of the last week.

Last Saturday a Romanian woman in Doncaster was savagely beaten by a group of teenagers who called her a ‘Polish cunt’ and told her to ‘fuck off to your country.’ The following Monday the yellow jacket thug James Goddard and his followers virtually took over a court hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court, and forced the judge to flee the court. Goddard’s followers went on to storm the Attorney General’s office.

Last Thursday the Labour MP for Brighton Kempton Lloyd Russell-Moyle was attacked on the street and called a traitor because he called for a delay to Brexit.  In the same week MPs were advised to take taxis to and from Westminster in case they were attacked, and  Independent Group MP Anna Soubry announced that she no longer goes home because she is afraid of attacks.

Yesterday the monitoring group Tell Mama reported a staggering 593% rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes across the UK since the Christchurch massacre. These incidents included attacks on five Birmingham mosques with sledgehammers, another attack on a mosque Scotland, and the stabbing of a teenager in Surrey.  In Oxford, Southampton and north London, Muslim men and women reported gun gestures or firearms noises being directed at them, and verbal abuse that included shouts of ‘you need to be shot’, ‘you deserve it’ and ‘Muslims must die.’

There was a time when you might have expected people who feel like this to keep their mouths shut—in public at least—in the aftermath of a white supremacist atrocity in which  49 Muslims were savagely murdered.  Instead being chastened by the massacre in Christchurch, however, it’s clear that the perpetrators of these hate crimes were inspired by it, and felt confident enough to actually threaten British Muslim men and women with something similar.

Contemptuous disregard for the rule of law; threats against MPs; violent attacks on foreigners; the exultant celebration of mass murder—if these are not warning signs then I don’t know what is.

None of this fell out of the sky. It’s been clear ever since 2016 that the referendum has actively emboldened and empowered the older far-right and its newer variants, and that Brexit has given these forces a cause celebre and a new constituency that is willing to listen to an ethnonationalist agenda that is profoundly hostile to Muslims, foreigners and immigrants, and also to the Westminster ‘traitors’ and ‘liberal’ elites who supposedly facilitated the foreign (and Muslim) ‘invasion.’

This is why Jo Cox was killed. Yet even when an MP was murdered by a white supremacist shouting ‘Britain first’, this horrific crime was dismissed as the act of an isolated ‘loner’ with mental health issues.

Three and a half years later, we now have a country where an act of mass murder ‘inspires’ people to openly threaten Muslims with similar actions. We would be very foolish indeed to dismiss the possibility of these threats being realised, and if we are to have any possibility of preventing the country sinking any deeper into the toxic political sewer, we need to recognise that this transformation is partly due to Brexit.

Neither the Brexit right nor the Lexit left likes to admit that Brexit has contributed to this emboldenment and empowerment.  To do so would undermine the image of Brexit as a popular rebellion against the ‘elite’ which both the right and some sectors of the left still adhere to.

Suggest that Brexit is, in part, an ethnonationalist project with racism and xenophobia at its core, and you’re likely to hear the same banal arguments that ‘not all Leavers are racists’ or ‘ it’s not racist to be concerned about immigration’ or ‘a few bad apples don’t define a country’ etc, etc

But we need to join the dots, even if they produce a picture that we would prefer not to see. We need wide and deep mobilisations across the country to defend our communities and uphold the diverse, open society that an emboldened and empowered extreme right is now looking to ‘take back’.

We need to take the country back – from them. And unless we can do this, these forces will get stronger and more vicious, till it is no longer possible to ignore or escape from them.

Creeping Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It
By Neil Faulkner with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda

How can we stop a ‘second wave’ of fascism returning us to the darkest times? How do we prevent the history of the 1930s repeating itself?

READ MORE…

Source: Michael Rosen Blogspot

Author, poet and broadcaster Michael Rosen spoke at the Stand Up to Racism and Fascism March in London on 16 March 2019, one day after a far-right white supremacist attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50 worshippers at Friday prayers, and wounding at least 50 more. This is his speech.

Today’s demonstration was planned months ago long before the horror and terror of Christchurch, but it is that horror and terror we come together today to try to anticipate and to prevent.
It is because we fear it and dread it that we fight against it.

But what is it?

I see the newspapers are busy trying to compare what happened in Christchurch with what they call other acts of terrorism.
No need for that, newspaper people.
It is what the perpetrators say it is: white supremacism.
It’s been around for a long, long time.

It’s been used – sometimes by you, yourselves, newspaper people –
to mock, deride and condemn minorities.
It’s been used – sometimes by you, newspaper people, to justify invading and bombing other people’s countries.
It’s been used by people in power to justify slavery, segregation, discrimination, persecution and genocide.

This tells me that it’s dangerous to trust those in power to fight it.

Too often, the people in power have been the perpetrators themselves.
Too often, it’s people in power who’ve won their power and kept their power by scapegoating and persecuting minorities.

Too often, newspaper people, you’ve helped the people in power do that scapegoating and persecuting.

It’s people in power who sent vans round saying to migrants: ‘Go home, or face arrest’.
It’s people in power who created what they called a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants.
It’s people in power who created the Windrush scandal.
It’s people in power who refused to treat Shamima Begum and her baby as British citizens.

And it was people in power in 1943 who ordered 4 policemen to knock on the door of my father’s uncle’s room at 2.30 in the morning in a little village in western France.

He had fought for France in the First World War.
He was a French citizen.
He had committed no crime,
He wasn’t ever put on trial.

In a well-organised, orderly way,
according to the laws of the day,
he was deported to Auschwitz
and never came back.

This is the kind of thing that people in power sometimes do.

This is why I wrote a warning that I’ll read in a moment.

It’s dedicated to my parents, Connie Isakofsky and Harold Rosen – who, in the 1930s, fought Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists on the streets of east London, right where they lived and went to school.

The Tory government of the day gave permission to that British Union of Fascists to parade through those streets. It was only the collective action of 100s of thousands of people that stopped them.

My parents showed me that we ourselves have to organise, and to turn up, to stop the rise of racism and fascism,
and they taught me that we must never forget that fascism often comes disguised.
It often appears making promises.

The poem is called:
I sometimes fear…

“I sometimes fear…
…that people might think
that fascism only ever arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.

No. Not always so.
Fascism can arrive as your friend.

It can arrive saying that it will…

restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
clear out the venal and the corrupt

remind you of how great you once were,

remove anything you feel is unlike you…

It doesn’t walk in saying,

“Our programme means:
militias,
mass imprisonments,
transportations,
war,
persecution
and mass murder.”

They don’t say that. “

Source: Infernal Machine

Time for politicians to stop pandering to the vicious anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hostility that is becoming a seedbed for fascism. 

It’s become a cliché in far-right and conservative circles to claim that ‘Islam is not a race’, that Islamophobia doesn’t exist, and that hostility towards Muslims may have some kind  of legitimacy.   At best these arguments are a product of confusion and ignorance, and at worst a deliberate obfuscation intended to avoid accusations of racism.   Either way they are extremely useful to the  ‘new’ far-right and also to ‘hard conservatives’ alike, who have placed Islam and Muslims at the centre of their 21st century ‘clash of civilisations.’

The idea that ‘Islam is not a race’ enables the right to say all the things it used to say about Indians, Pakistanis and Arabs while all the time maintaining that it isn’t their ‘race’ they’re concerned about, it’s just their ‘religion’ or their ‘culture’.  Such arguments allow you depict Muslims as terrorists or terrorist supporters, barbarians, rapists, and invaders without ever having to mention race or racism overtly.

Such arguments assume that racism is only racism when it’s based on  biology or skin colour or the size of one’s skull.  They nevertheless have a powerful political salience, echoing  older confrontations between Islam and Christendom in which Islam was identified as the antithesis of civilisation.  They make it possible for barely-educated psychopathic killers and Oxford graduates to trace grand historical trajectories from the Battle of Tours/Poitiers and Charles Martel, through the Siege of Vienna in 1688 to the  21st century ‘Muslim invasion of Europe’ by immigrants and refugees.

In this way mainstream pundits like Douglas Murray and knuckledragging nazis and white supremacists have been able to propagate paranoid narratives about the Islamicisation of Europe and the ‘end of Europe’ that reach from the pages of the Spectator to the fringes of social media, where violent dreams of murderous ‘resistance’ are gaining traction.

The manifesto produced by the murderer calling himself calling himself ‘Brentan Tarrant’ makes it clear that he was an out-and-out racist, bigot and ethnonationalist.  No one will be surprised that he cited ‘Justiciar Knight Brievik’ as an inspiration for the mass murder he perpetrated yesterday, and said that he had ‘received a blessing for my mission after contacting his brother knights.’  Or that Tarrant listed a number of white supremacist murderers including Dylan Roof and the Finsbury Park Mosque killer Darren Osbourne.

Like his hero Breivik, Tarrant’s manifesto was steeped in paranoid and explicitly racist narratives of ‘white genocide’ and ‘the ‘great replacement’, which identity migrants, refugees and Muslims as a common threat to Europe, and he made it clear that his murders were intended  ‘ to directly reduce immigration rates to Europe by intimidating and physically removing the invaders themselves.’

In killing Muslims in Christchurch in order to ‘save Europe’, Tarrant’s savage atrocities demonstrate how the white supremacist movement that he belongs to has become ‘borderless’ in the age of social media, in much the same way that the transnational terrorist jihad has become borderless.

It’s tempting – and convenient – to depict Tarrant as just another lone psychopath who has been nurtured in the danker corners of the Internet, but the attitudes that led him to kill yesterday belong to a wider spectrum that reaches above and below the media radar.   In his manifesto Tarrant praised the pro-Trump conservative Candace Owens, who only recently launched the Turning Point UK chapter with the observation that Hitler was ‘ok’ until ‘ he became too ‘globalist.’  Tarrant also hailed Donald Trump as a ‘symbol of white identity and common purpose.’

It is clear that the election of Donald Trump has coincided with an increase in far-right extremism.    According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre 2018 report,at least 40 people in the U.S. and Canada were killed last year by individuals ‘motivated by or attracted to far-right ideologies,  embracing ideas and philosophies that are cornerstones of the alt-right.’ The SLPC linked the growth of alt-right groups and ‘fight clubs’ to the election of Trump, which  ‘ has opened the White House doors to extremism, not only consulting with hate groups on policies that erode our country’s civil rights protections, but also enabling the infiltration of extremist ideas into the administration’s rhetoric and agenda. Once relegated to the fringes, the radical right now has a toehold in the White House.’

This ‘toehold’ is reflected, among other things,  in Trump’s policies at the border, in his ‘Muslim ban’ and his depictions of Muslims and migrants in general, in his tacit support for white supremacists such as the demonstrators at Charlottesville, in the incitement to violence that characterised his election campaign.  Only two days ago Trump  told Breitbart News ‘ I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.’

Yesterday the Christchurch murderer ‘went bad.’   And there will almost certainly be others like him, who will take encouragement from a US president who explicitly threatened his political opponents with violence, and will take inspiration from the fear and loathing of immigrants in general and Muslims in particular that have become the cornerstones of the far-right resurgence.

According to a 2018 Europol report ‘The violent right-wing extremist spectrum is expanding, partly fuelled by fears of a perceived Islamisation of society and anxiety over migration.’

These ‘fears’ produced the murderous hatred that we saw yesterday.   It’s time to call out those who propagate them – some of whom are now shedding crocodile tears over Christchurch.

It’s time for politicians to show some real courage and stop pandering to the vicious anti-immigrant hostility that is becoming a seedbed for fascism.  It’s time for the security services to treat the far-right threat with the seriousness it deserves.

It’s time to recognise that Islamophobia is real – and it can be deadly.  And even as we mourn the dead of Christchurch, we should reject the rampant racist ethnonationalism that was unleashed yesterday, and stand up for the diverse, open societies that Brentan Tarrant and his cohorts would like to destroy.