Laura Kuenssbergposted by Richard Seymour
The Laura Kuenssberg affair is a low parody of the media at its worst. Not because Kuenssberg is particularly awful herself: I don't think she's any worse than her predecessors. But because the magnificent histrionics of the media circling the wagons in her defence indicates that they simply don't get it.Allow me to explain. Many people think that the BBC's chief political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, is partisan. That is to say, not just perceptibly biased as every journalist is and must be, but actively using the journalistic platform to pursue an anti-Corbyn agenda. I think that's improbable, but it's worth saying that a recent petition on 38degrees, which achieved 35,000 signatures before it was taken down, suggests that the impression is not totally marginal. And in my experience, whatever people make of Kuenssberg herself, it's just a common sense right across the Left that the BBC is remorselessly biased against the current Labour leadership.
Of course, the BBC is frequently criticised on the Left, and for good reason. Whether it is its coverage of war, where it is more biased toward the state than any other broadcaster, or its coverage of Israel-Palestine, Scottish independence, and all Corbyn-related matters, the BBC acts as though it were part of the political establishment that it reports on. Its political editors are usually a particular source of irritation. For example, people constantly criticised Nick Robinson for his right-wing bias, and even called for him to be sacked. There is a reason for this. The BBC's political editors speak with the voice of authority: the authority of the Corporation. When they editorialise, they declare 'the facts', and there is no opposition. That is, their inevitable bias is not acknowledged as such. In a media outlet that admits no partisanship, that is more than usually aggravating.
For example, in April 2003, the New Labour loyalist Andrew Marr stood outside Downing Street on the day that Saddam Hussein fell, he said:
"Mr Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party and beyond aren't going to thank him - because they're only human - for being right when they've been wrong. ... He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result."
This was what you might call 'peak Marr', as it expressed in concentrated form all the tendencies that were already apparent in his editorial stance. But he was not alone. It would not be difficult to find examples of other occasions on which correspondents have stated as fact grossly partisan political judgments. Just off the top of my head, I can recall Justin Webb reporting on Schroeder's welfare cuts, in which he asserted that 'Germans knew' that the big welfare state was unsustainable and would have to be pared down. You could probably come up with your own. These instances would have been a great deal less offensive had they been acknowledged as partisan interventions in a political field, as opinion commentaries which could then be contested within the programme. That they are offered as fact means that there is a degree of agenda-setting going on, because it takes them out of the realm of being open for debate. It would actually be possible for BBC journalists to be more objective if they were able to acknowledge partisanship, rather than pretend or strive toward impartiality.
When I say that the BBC acts as though it were part of the political establishment, then, I suppose I may as well come out and say it: it, and every other major news organisation, is exactly that. They are not just reporting on policy, they are part of the policymaking process. They do not just reflect on state power, state power circulates through them. They do not just represent what takes place in the political system, they regulate it and discipline it through the particular kinds of scrutiny they give it, the consensus they safeguard, the things they attack, the policy objectives they foreground, the debates they allow to be had, and the way they structure those debates. The 'non-partisanship' they esteem tends to be, particularly in the case of the BBC, a bias toward the governing centre, toward authority, and toward a default nationalism. This, to be clear, is not all that is happening in the media. It is not a homogenous entity, and there are spaces for contesting viewpoints which can expand or contract. And of course the media has to be in some sense susceptible to the views of its audience, no matter how much it may try to shape and manipulate those views. Nonetheless, if you assume that the major broadcasters and newspapers operate within the field of state power, have a mutually dependent relationship with other actors in that field, and contribute to its overall performance and reproduction, I think it makes their behaviour a lot easier to understand.
So, Laura Kuenssberg is the latest person to inhabit that authoritative editorial voice, the voice of the BBC, the voice of objective and impartial journalism. She is also, and this will become important to the story, the first woman to hold this post - a reflection of the BBC's institutional sexism. And, of course, she is no more impartial than she is immortal. That comes across in the very texture of her reporting. For example, I think there was something terribly snide and deliberate about the way in which the sacking of Pat McFadden during the reshuffle was represented as if it was because of McFadden's opposition to ISIS. That sort of thing, snide and insinuating, would leave any uninformed viewer alarmed that the leadership of the Labour Party has developed a crush on Daesh, which of course feeds into existing PR themes developed by the Conservatives and Tory-aligned media. But is she any worse in this than anyone else? Is she, as many people think, displaying a pro-Cameron bias? I don't think so. Her interviews with Tory figures have the same sort of performative aggression, the same zealous determination to catch the minister or whomever in a slip, however trivial or nonsensical. Whether or not she is personally Tory, her reporting doesn't evince a pro-Conservative bias. It does, though, bear the hallmarks of a generalised and institutionalised hostility to the left, a diffuse phenomenon of which Kuenssberg partakes.
After all, this situation is unprecedented. Corbyn is a radical socialist leading the main party of opposition, in a country where radical socialists have never been anywhere near executive office. The majority of parliamentarians, civil servants, media professionals, businessmen, think-tankers, pollsters, party professionals and others in that milieu, are used to the common sense that socialism is and will always be marginal (and amen to that, they add). Their sense of the political possibilities has, moreover, been radically reduced by decades in which Labour has rarely done anything but move to the Right. When Kuenssberg's reports were first singled out for scorn and satire, shortly after Corbyn was elected as Labour leader, there was a panic and derangement across the whole media, the like of which one usually does not see. Now, journalism is a cliquey profession in some ways, and the 'Westminster bubble' encloses media professionals as much as it does politicians. To some extent, if everyone else is reporting things in this way, and talking about things in this way, that sets the parameters of discussion for any journalist aspiring to be seen as non-partisan. To deviate from the established or emerging consensus is what would look like bias from the point of view of the journalistic profession. And if the parliamentary reaction is overwhelmingly the same, a sort of flutter and cry that the fox has got into the chicken coop, then that compounds the emerging consensus.
What about the Stephen Doughty resignation which, with BBC orchestration, took place live on air? It seems quite likely to me that in that case, several things are simultaneously true. First, no journalist in today's media would even consider turning down a story like that. Second, the pursuit of this story very probably overlapped with a contempt for Corbyn and his politics shared by most on the Labour Right and most at the BBC. Third, Doughty's desire to inflict damage on the Labour leadership, no doubt on the road to greatness, was congruent with Kuenssberg's desire to ensure that something that she reported was talked about for the next few days, in parliament and in other news channels.
To elaborate a little. Careers in journalism are hard-won, often by people who've hoked through the bins or hacked the emails or voicemails of private citizens, so on what possible ethical precept would they consider rejecting this story? Kuenssberg's determination to draw blood in political interviews and to get scoops that rock the tiny Westminster world to its tiny foundations, is an example of a tough journalist excelling at her job by the standards of most journalists. It may be trivialising, it may be obsessed with process and personalities, it may contribute to a general bafflement about and detachment from politics because of the way it treats politics as a series of racy stories without really giving any account of how real power really works. But that, by the standards of the capitalist media, is actually 'adversarial journalism' at its best.
Supporters of Corbyn found the story obnoxious because Kuenssberg seemed to be gloating about it and relishing the sense of crisis, which to them was artificial. The reshuffle martyrs - the Doughtys and McFaddens and Dughers, all metaphorically cruciform and wailing for the humanity, all undoubtedly destined for greatness were it not for Corbyn's vindictiveness - were attempting to represent an exceptionally minor change to the composition of the cabinet as a fucking Stalinist purge. They were being lionised for the most inane comments. And here was the BBC eagerly working to give one of them as much profile and impact as possible. It doesn't matter that it was a 'legitimate story', it felt like a stitch-up - and, what is more, just a particularly repugnant example of the BBC's palpable contempt for Corbyn. But, to reiterate, journalists don't see anything problematic in what Kuenssberg and her colleagues did in this case. The NUJ defends Kuenssberg and repudiates the petition against her. The New Statesman's 'media mole' probably reflects the view of many in the profession when querying whether we can remember when "the left believed in employment rights". Of course, that's a red herring. There is nothing in the idea of employment rights that says anyone is immune from the sack. But media professionals don't see a struggle over politics and representation - the criticisms may as well be coming from outer space as far as they're concerned - they see an attack on their profession.
Given this, it makes a certain amount of sense to look for ulterior motives. Since Laura Kuenssberg is the first women to become political editor of BBC News, sexism would be a logical motive to look for. That can be pitched on a number of registers. Either you can say that Kuenssberg is being targeted more for criticism than her male predecessors. I think that would be difficult to sustain, given Robinson and Marr. Or you can say that there is a certain unconscious sexism in the particular libidinised ferocity of the criticism. That's a tougher case to evaluate but we could make room for there being an element of that. Or you can say that most, or at least a sigificant minority, of the criticisms of Kuenssberg amount directly to sexist abuse. Well, the fact that there is outright sexist abuse of Kuenssberg, with some Twitter comments referring to her as a 'bitch' and a 'slag', exposes a nasty undercurrent of popular culture that was probably not as visible before social media. But is there any ground for thinking that the campaign against Kuenssberg is in any sense predominantly or even significantly sexist? Is the petition framed in a sexist way? What about the comments on the petition page (via)? Is there a preponderance of sexist spite or presumption or overt or covert male privilege in those comments? The evidence seems to suggest that the answer is no. And yet that has not been the conclusion of any media outlet, from the Guardian to those notable bastions of feminist thought and action, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail. There is, and we are not seeing this for the first time, a serious disconnect between conception, evidence and conclusion.
Therefore, from the outside, the furore in the media denouncing not only the individual comments or the culture they represent, but also the 38degrees petition itself and the whole critique of Kuenssberg as sexist, looks really appalling. It looks like it is instrumentalising feminism in a tawdry and opportunistic way. Laura Bates of Everyday Sexism makes the obvious point that you can't just dismiss sexist abuse as a distraction when it occurs. Absolutely right, but I would turn this point around. It is not a 'distraction', it is a real issue: therefore do not use it as a distraction. Talk about it, but do not pretend that is all there is to talk about. Do not pretend that this gives you a license to wave away the criticism of the BBC and its political editor. As Stavvers puts it, "There is misogyny going on. It is just that the misogyny is levelled as a distraction from issues they dont want you talking about. ... Using misogynistic language does not change the important discussion about bias from a public broadcaster, it merely deflects away from what we ought to be talking about." Those who deserve to be criticised for trivialising and dismissing the issue of sexism are those who utilise it in that way, leveraging it - as if we wouldn't notice! - to illegitimately rebuff the entire critique. A critique that, agree with it or not, threatens the flattering self-image of media professionals. The Guardian, whose renaissance under Katherine Viner is not quite as advertised, even went to the extent in its leader column of bundling together the Strauss-Khan rape allegations with the sexist comments about Kuenssberg on Twitter, under the category of 'sex abuse' - a term that in common usage, if you care to google it, refers to rape. That conflation is, someone please tell them, not just crazy but actually disgusting.
But matters get worse. After a sustained media campaign, both the petitioner and the petition's hosts decided to take it down. David Babbs of 38degrees explains that the petition had to be taken down as a gesture of principle, because: "A small number of people signing the petition were using it as a launch pad for sexist hate speech towards her on other platforms such as Twitter." I find it hard to blame Babbs for buckling under this pressure, but he did in fact buckle under pressure. By this standard, I swear, 38degrees will have to stop hosting petitions altogether. Because there will never be a time when one of their petitions doesn't generate 'a small number' of signatories who go on to say something trashy and bigoted on another forum. The attempt to implement this practice consistently would result in a generalised moratorium on all written material. That, of course, will not be necessary, because this standard would be applied in no other circumstances. But the press, again almost uniformly, has been bullish. They have also been joined by politicians, above all David Cameron. Fresh from addressing the fantastically corrupt practices of Nigeria, he's here to address the nation on sexism. And next, he'll be lecturing the farmers on how to avoid inter-species coition.
Now, if you're a journalist, ask yourself how this looks. We live in a society where, like it or not, the breakdown of the representative link is coextensive with a general decline in trust in the media. People do not feel represented by the government, and they do not feel represented in the media. The mirror of democracy has cracked and warped, and that means that people are more and more critical of what they see and hear in the media, and more inclined to see the media as an extension of the 'political class'. And what have you got here? A complete failure to understand the criticisms let alone take them seriously. A generalised smarmy smugness among the punditry, snorting at the silly little people and their silly little conspiracy theories. (There are conspiracy theories, but I don't think we need any lectures about that from the people who gave us the story of Labour's remarkable takeover by antisemites.) And finally, a crescendo, an undignified, hectoring campaign to shut them up, denounce them as sexist, get the petition taken down. A chorus extending from the Tory front benches to the Labour back benches, and right across the media, exultant and graceless in victory. Do you have any idea what you look like? No. Of course you don't.
Yes, it is a witch-hunt.posted by Richard Seymour
By now, I think, it is being quietly acknowledged in most sensible quarters that Labour doesn't have an 'antisemitism problem'. This doesn't mean there are no examples of antisemitism. There are. It just means they are a handful of cases, that they are mixed in with cases that are not antisemitic, examples that are tendentiously misrepresented, instances that are wildly exaggerated, and that they by no means justify the absurd claims of institutional antisemitism in the Labour Party. It is. Just. Absurd.But how does this relate to the argument that what is taking place in the Labour Party, with the apparatus of inquiry and suspensions, is a witch-hunt? After all, aren't many of these cases genuinely problematic? Didn't Naz Shah reference "the Jews"? Isn't there another councillor who referred to "Zionist Jews" when criticising Israel? Didn't Ken Livingstone's clumsy attempt to redefine antisemitism at least push in a dangerous direction? And so on. So what if a few "innocent people" get caught up in the understandable haste to expunge the taint?
This is worth clarifying. A witch-hunt is not usually aimed exclusively or even largely at 'innocent' people. To take the classic example, McCarthyite terror was not aimed at 'innocent' people. (It will, of course, be controversial to compare party suspensions and inquiries to a state-led crackdown that ruined people's lives, but the point of the historical detour will become obvious.) According to Ellen Schrecker's histories of the era, the majority of those targeted by investigations, prosecutions, censure, blacklisting, purges, and so on - at least in the 'classical' age of McCarthyism (from 1947 to 1954) - were not 'innocent' of being either Communists or 'fellow-travellers'. That is to say, they were not 'innocent' of glorifying an atrocious, repressive regime. They were not 'innocent' of defending the show trials, supporting the Hitler-Stalin pact, or justifying Russian expansionism in eastern Europe at the end of the war. They were not 'innocent', from the point of view of African American civil rights struggles, of opposing the March on Washington during their 'anti-imperialist' phase (because it would encourage war), and of opportunistically anathematising organisations to their right. They were not 'innocent', from the point of view of the labour movement and the Left, of supporting repressive measures against workers and other leftists during the war - including, in a horrible irony, the invocation of the Smith Act which was later used to hammer the Communist Party during the Cold War. They were wrong in so many ways and, if you care to see things in this way, had a lot of explaining to do.
The point of this kind of witch-hunt was not that it invented accusations out of whole cloth, though it sometimes did that. And it was not that 'innocent' people got sucked into it, although that certainly happened - particularly during the civil rights era, when anticommunist countersubversion was directly utilised by Southern states in a battle to preserve Jim Crow. It is, rather, that real political problems were instrumentalised, exaggerated, and entangled with a great many non-problems, inventions and distortions, the better to create a narrative which could help organise political repression. It armed the state with the means to hammer the most powerful sector of the Popular Front Left and accelerate a realignment of many of these forces toward the 'Vital Centre'. It anchored the ideological mainstream in an anti-leftist articulation, and ensured that the dissidence of even moderate liberals was timid and well-policed.
For the sake of elaboration, those who are interested in this history may wish to have a look at what happened to the NAACP during the Cold War era. The NAACP was, as now, a mainstream, liberal civil rights organisation. It had close ties to the State Department, and some history of antagonism with the Communist Party going back to the Scottsboro Boys. But it, like all other such organisations, was put under tremendous pressure to 'root out' the Communist menace in its ranks. This included not only the expulsion of W E B Du Bois, who was faulted above all for his role in the We Charge Genocide petition, but the adoption of an anticommunist resolution supporting the purging of Communist influence in the organisation. As Walter White, then leading the association, put it, they vowed to be "utterly ruthless in clean[ing] out the NAACP, and, making sue that the Communists were not running it". There was, of course, precious little evidence of Communist membership, or 'infiltration', of the NAACP, much less of any Communist attempt to "run" the organisation. Illegitimate claims of infiltration were sometimes used to justify battles against individuals in local chapters who were, for one reason or another, considered problematic. But if there were no mass purges, that is because there was no one to purge.
So what was the function of anticommunist paranoia in this context? If there were no 'witches', what was the witch-hunt about? One end that it definitely served was to keep the NAACP loyal to the US government, so that leading figures whitewashed the realities of American racism in order to rebut "Soviet propaganda". A key example of this would be Channing Tobias downplaying the murder by a local Sheriff of four African Americans falsely imprisoned on rape charges, despite the victims being NAACP clients. It would, of course, be tendentious to claim that this sort of thing is exhaustive of the NAACP's record in this period. Of course it is not. And Cold War paranoia was not the only factor contributing to the moderation of middle class-led black civil rights organisations. But that is, in a way, the point: a witch-hunt works on the basis of existing materials, exacerbating, accelerating and re-directing existing tendencies. It codes these processes differently, giving them a seemingly coherent and compelling rationale, and putting their critics and opponents on the defensive.
A similar pattern is at work with Labour. The character of Labour's crisis does not have to do with antisemitism. It is a deep, secular crisis rooted in the changing social bases of Labourism, the crises of its traditional modes of party management, the depletion of its core vote, its inability to manage and respond to the problems with its traditional Unionism, and so on. Currently, as a consequence of the comprehensive collapse of the Blairite Right, it is taking the form of a battle led by the Old Labour Right to weaken and finally bring down a leadership of Bennite vintage (though not one that is able to advance Bennite policies). Long before the antisemitism accusations took off, there was an effort on the part of local notables, constituency chairs, councillors and others who detest Corbyn to find excuses to purge party members. The justification cited has usually been that they support policies or parties that are at odds with the "aims and values" of Labour, a suitably nebulous accusation. What the furore about antisemitism does, with all its grotesque disproportions, its slanders and distortions, is re-code those processes that were already at work. It draws on some combination of reality and bullshit to give new meaning to an old struggle, creating a panic situation which derails all of the careful groundwork that has been laid by Corbyn and his supporters over the last few months, and shatters the growing impression of a steady stream of modest but real successes. In the days before a series of elections, it has an obvious tactical purpose, but its goal is strategic: to bring forward the day when Corbyn, his allies, and his supporters can be effectively and irreversibly driven out of the Labour leadership. And even with the best will in the world, the current suspensions and the promised inquiry play into that.
How should the Left respond to this? Obviously not by denying that anyone has ever said anything problematic. That would be silly. We should defend people against false accusations, and point out when problems are exaggerated or distorted. But we should also point out that the relationship between the alleged problem and the supposed solution is not an intuitive one. For example, the latest instance of suspension involves councillors who, among other things, shared the famous satirical meme calling for Israel to be 'relocated' to the United States (which is not problematic), referred to "Zionist Jews" (which is in most cases problematic), and implicated Israel in regional conspiracies and intrigue (which is bombastic nonsense). And they've been suspended for this?
If someone, a Labour Party member or anyone else, used the phrase "Zionist Jews" in my company, I would politely point out that this phrase is dodgy and worth avoiding. If someone proposed a conspiracy theory about Israel, I would point out the ways in which the argument didn't make sense. If possible, I would do it without embarrassing them or being a dick about it. What I would not do is rush to call them antisemites. What I would not do is call the compliance unit and demand their suspension pending investigation and expulsion. It is the mark of a deeply unpleasant, authoritarian streak in anyone to think that the discomfort raised by statements about "Zionist Jews" is best dealt with by means of ex-communication. Any party would want to have recourse to means to exclude people where other means fail, and certainly where someone is consistently and unrepentantly racist, but I'm not sure even the most hard-assed 'Leninists' whom I have met would rigorously defend suspensions pending investigation and possibly expulsion for saying something stupid on Facebook.
This brings me back to my main point. There are very few 'innocent' people, and hopefully none in politics. There is no one who has not - whether out of bad politics, inexperience, frustration, whimsy, or any variant of these - said something stupid. And sometimes, you may even have said something sexist, or homophobic, or ableist, or racist, or at least bordering on it, at least pushing dangerously in that direction. I certainly have, and I can recall moments that make me cringe. And I can also remember moments in the past where individuals have made arguments that sounded ever-so-tough and realpolitik, but which in retrospect would embarrass them. People learn, people change, provided someone is willing to argue with them. And hopefully, when they do change, they don't become self-righteous about it out of some overdetermined guilt reflex. But the point is that no one is 'innocent', all of us have been politically impure. So the existence of real problems, where they exist, may provide the occasion or raw material for a witch-hunt, but it is not its point, and it is not a justification.
Smile like you mean itposted by Richard Seymour
Don't pull that rictus gurn. Come on, big smile. Smile for The Sun, Nicola. Smile like you mean it. Stop it. Don't you dare cry. Don't you dare. Smile for us. Our readers want you to smile. You like our readers, don't you? Hmmm? They like you. They'll respect you for it. Smile, Nicola. Smile for The Sun. Come on, you can do better than that! Shut up. No one cares about 96 dead scousers. No one. Cares. They pissed on the dead. They're animals. Because we fucking said so. Now, smile. Smile for The Sun. Show us how much you love us. Show us your big happy smile. Show us how glad you are we're here. You want this publicity, Nicola? Hmmm? Do you? Bigger smile, then. So that's the best we're going to get, is it? Okay. Here's your publicity - now, fuck off.Where the twain meet.posted by Richard Seymour
There is, I think I've been clear, a witch-hunt, predicated on a moral panic. But one of the worst things about a moral panic is that it brings out the worst in everyone.Those wielding the accusations may be utterly dishonest or unhinged, but others caught up in the panic then become defensive and cling to simplistic certainties, or at worst (as we have seen) start to defend the indefensible. It would be better, and more strategically sensible, to use the occasion to improve our arguments. So, for example, it is true but insufficient to say that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are not the same thing. They are not, of course - but sometimes they are.
That is, sometimes people are antisemitic in an anti-Zionist way, and sometimes people are anti-Zionist in an antisemitic way. (This BBC article is a non-awful, albeit fudging and tortuous, attempt to traverse this terrain.) Beyond that, sometimes people are anti-Zionist in a way that doesn't have to be taken in an antisemitic way, but is far too uncomfortably open to such a reading. And, of course, sometimes people are calculatedly antisemitic by allusion, by insinuation - as Harold Abrahams said of English antisemitism in Chariots of Fire, you "catch it on the edge of a remark". So there is a need to make a far more subtle series of distinctions than we usually get to work with.
To think this through is to think about how language works. Often, people who have been accused of racism will say that they have been 'misinterpreted'. "That's not what I meant," they will say, and often in good faith. And sometimes the accusation is itself tenuous at best. But if the 'good intentions' of the speaker were all that mattered, we would not have any grounds for criticising, for example, the Tory race-baiting of Sadiq Khan. After all, how can we prove that they 'mean' to be racist? How can we prove that our interpretation is not a 'misinterpretation'? Likewise, everyone who enjoys their golliwog dolls professes the most innocent of intentions. Why 'misinterpret' them?
All interpretation is underinterpretation, Freud suggested. This is because language is so richly overdetermined, so freighted with multiple meanings and associations. The analysand who says "my father always stood behind me" could be referencing any number of potentially unwelcome and 'unintended' ideas - emotional support, a stab in the back, anal sex, lagging behind, louring over, and so on.
This is just a property of language, and it goes without saying that it is not susceptible to our unilateral control. Somehow only dictators manage to enforce a complete change in the meaning of a word, and even they can only do it piecemeal. The dictator of Turkmenistan changed the word for bread to the name of his mother, for example, and made a few other signal adjustments - but this still left the majority of his spoken language intact.
The fantasy that we get to control language through our 'intentions' always proves to be just that - a fantasy. Language somehow outruns our control, and the things we say exceed what we 'meant' or thought we meant. And, because of that, a statement can be racist even if we don't mean it to be. A statement is racist, where it is, because of its contexts - social, historical, ideological. It is racist because, in those contexts, it contributes to oppression. That one didn't 'mean' it to be racist is merely a sign that one may have misjudged it, not that it isn't racist. And even though we don't get to control language, we are still responsible for how we use it and the effects it has.
The difficulty arises in the grey area - and there is always a grey area when someone starts speaking. Most words are polysemic, and it's hard to think of a sentence that couldn't be interpreted in two or three ways. And because language includes connotation as well as denotation, because it can allude to things that are not outright said, statements which are not explicitly racist can yield to racist interpretations. For example?
The term 'Zionist' has a non-controversial meaning established through long usage, to refer to someone who is politically and ideologically committed to the idea of a Jewish national state and, more concretely, to the defence of the state of Israel. Given what that concretely means - viz. the colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and subsequent years of occupation and racist oppression - it is a term that usually has negative connotations. There is nothing inherently problematic about discussing 'Zionists' in the most disapprobating terms.
And yet, of course, the term also has another set of meanings established by reactionary conspiracy cultures. It can refer, in this racist discourse, to "Jews", or "Jewish oligarchs" who are supposed to enjoy considerable political power, or "Jewish bankers", or "Jewish media". And so on. This is not to say that one should never use terms like 'Zionism' or 'Zionist', it is just to indicate that it is a perilously overdetermined word, and one should use it with care. To use it in such a way that implies a cohesive political agency at the centre of political power, pulling the strings and so on, is an exaggeration that is clearly segueing into antisemitism. Or, take another example, to speak of 'Zionist media' as a way of explaining the pro-Israel bias of newspapers is to advert to the classically antisemitic stereotype of Jews running the media. Even if you don't 'mean' it that way, and stridently insist that most of the 'Zionists' are not Jewish, the connotation is there whether you like it or not.
But there's another aspect of racist language that we should think about. Often what is racist about a statement is not that it mobilises a specific trope, but the way it codes a threat or an aggression. When Arsenal fans used to chant at Spurs fans that "Hitler was a gooner", they weren't drawing on a specific trope about Jews (other than that Spurs fans are disproportionately Jewish). They just wanted to remind the Spurs fans of Adolf Hitler and what he did to people 'like them'. They just wanted to make them frightened and angry. Or, to put it another way, that is what such a chant objectively did, irrespective of the 'intentions' of the Arsenal fans - who, of course, would have claimed they were just having a lark.
This is where we could also make space for another grey area, where a statement can be perfectly valid in itself, but can also yield to an antisemitic interpretation and where it should be avoided. I don't mean to devalue this issue when I say it's partly about etiquette - I think we should take political etiquette very seriously. For example, there are many ways in which you can start off talking about Jews and end up by talking about Adolf Hitler, many of them completely innocuous. But, suppose you start by trying to rebut accusations of antisemitism, and end up talking about the Havaara agreement between the Zionist movement and the Nazi regime. What might that connote?
It's not that such a discussion is antisemitic. It is not that the Zionist movement should be awarded some special protection from this uncomfortable aspect of its record. It is not that there should be a special prohibition on talking about this. These things should be talked about,. The fact that Lenni Brenner's work on the matter is now being travestied and smeared in the national press, as if he was the only one to have written about this. And I don't agree with those who supported Livingstone's suspension for referring to it - in truth, I'm surprised by some of those who jumped on that bandwagon. But the "a-ha!" posts on social media pointing out that Livingstone alluded to an historical fact (in a not-totally-accurate way it has to be said) miss something important here. That episode is a somewhat recondite fact. Most people know nothing about it and would find it a provocative thing to raise at the best of times. If you're going to refer to it on air in most circumstances, it will require precision, finesse, a lot of context, and the most extraordinary care. Throwing Hitler into a discussion of antisemitism like a rhetorical hand-grenade involved no precision, finesse, context or care. It is not surprising that it was taken as gratuitous, as an insult.
It is not sufficient, therefore, to raise the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism as a totem of safety in these discussions. It is vital to be sensitive to the usages of anti-Zionism which dissolve or destabilise the distinction, and to the areas where it is necessary to fight for the distinction.
Pitch forks at the readyposted by Richard Seymour
Further, in a number of these cases, the allegation of antisemitism confuses criticism of Israel and Zionist politics with racism toward Jews. For example, Tony Greenstein is not an antisemite by any stretch of the imagination. He is a Jewish pro-Palestine activist who has spent a lot of time working to keep antisemitism out of the movement. I remember conversing with him about that during the period in which the SWP was hosting the antisemitic jazz player, Gilad Atzmon. Yet he has been suspended from the Labour Party on account of his propensity to criticise Zionist politics. Malia Bouattia is not a member of the Labour Party, but she has been fiercely and ruthlessly vilified in the national media as an antisemite on the basis of her criticisms of Zionist politics.
Even where there are cases of antisemitism, the way in which this is criticised in the media often tends to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism. For example, Naz Shah MP, who replaced George Galloway in Bradford West, was certainly being antisemitic when she said of an online poll back in 2014 (before her candidacy) that the Jews are rallying. The Jews dont act in corporate unity, and dont speak with one voice, and the idea that they do is simply and straightforwardly racist. But the first issue on which she was accused of antisemitism was a frankly trite Facebook meme, which she shared, satirically suggesting that Israel be re-located to the United States. Shah joked that she would tweet the idea to Obama, adding that it would save the US $3bn a year. Our pundits, with a marvellous cynicism matched only by a matchless poker-face, have claimed that this amounted to an endorsement of forced transfer, or something like ethnic cleansing. Given who has actually been subject to forced transfer in Israel/Palestine, it must take a lot to keep a straight face while claiming that.
Or, to take another example, Shah was accused of antisemitic provocation for having, in the context of criticising '#ApartheidIsrael', shared a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., which said: "We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was 'legal'." The full quote goes on: "and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was 'illegal.' It was 'illegal' to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany". In other words, King's statement was a defence of civil disobedience. When the media report this without context along the lines of, "she talked about how everything Hitler did was legal," this makes it sound as though she was endorsing Hitlerian attitudes and actions toward the Jews, rather than Palestinian civil disobedience. In other words, it is a malicious slur.
So this debate, with its rapid-fire denunciations and ex-communications, is already structured in such a way as to inculpate criticism of Israel or of Zionist politics. It is already saturated with mendacity on the part of those wielding the accusations. It is in danger of creating a new situation, wherein all but the most tame of criticisms of Israel are considered unspeakable. And, of course, it is wildly hypocritical. Boris Johnson is mayor of London and a leading member of the Conservative Party after years of racism against black people and Muslims. The Tories are openly using racism against Sadiq Khan, without any visible sign of embarrassment. Repeated Islamophobic provocations from New Labour frontbenchers and backbenchers never resulted in any setbacks in terms of career or party membership. This is not a country in which racism usually bears significant political costs. One case in which it did bear a cost was when Phil Woolass crude Islamophobic campaign to keep his parliamentary seat in 2010 went so far that it broke election law and forced a new election - and even then, it was more because he lied about his opponent than because he slandered Muslims.
To reiterate, dishonesty, hypocrisy and malice are structured into this discussion, which is more redolent of a McCarthyite inquisition than a real debate. So, what did Ken Livingstones intervention do in this context? Its obvious what has been done to him, and I will come back to that, but what did he try to do? He, in short, set out to defend Naz Shah MP, and to disentangle antisemitism from critique of Israel. Unfortunately, in attempting the former, he achieved the opposite of the latter. That is, by rationalising and explaining away Shahs comments - including the indefensible remark about "the Jews" - he ended up saying some stupid things which backfired horribly.
In trying to contextualise Shahs comments about 'relocating' Israel, he brought up the Haavara agreement between the Third Reich and the Zionist Federation of Germany, which enjoined the Nazis to support the transfer of Jews to Palestine. The point being, I suppose, that Zionist politics is not historically innocent of relocation. This, he added, was before Hitler went mad and ended up killing six million Jews. Later, in trying to defend the space for legitimate criticism of Israel, he referred to the Israel lobby, a concept popularised about a decade ago by Mearsheimer and Waltz. Well, in itself, theres nothing wrong with raising the real, historical collusion between Zionist and antisemitic politics, which continues to this day with the Christian Right. It's not quite correct to say that Hitler was "supporting Zionism," of course: the alliance was a temporary expedience for Hitler, who was more interested in achieving a frictionless ethnic cleansing. But this is crude phrasing, not antisemitism. Likewise, the stuff about Hitler 'going mad' repeats a banal cliche about the Nazi holocaust being an outburst of insanity, and is inaccurate, but it isn't antisemitism. Nor is the concept of the Israel lobby antisemitic (it can be in some usages, no doubt). Moreover, given how often Livingstone has been falsely and maliciously accused of being antisemitic, he has a right to be suspicious of how Israels apologists work. And if this was all that Livingstone had said and it is this for which he has been vilified in the media, and denounced by the meathead John Mann MP as a Nazi apologist then at worst he made a clumsy attempt to say something that is true.
He then went on to suggest in passing, though - and this may have been a slip, as it appears to be a non-sequitur in the context of the transcript and isnt followed up on (but if so, what an interesting slip) - that antisemitism and racism are not quite the same thing. Such a distinction would be at best scholastic, and its not clear what purpose it would be intended to serve. He never elaborated on it, so were none-the-wiser. Lets say that it opens the door for some very uncharitable interpretations - some people no doubt think that Livingstone meant to reduce the severity of antisemitism, to minimise its seriousness by treating it as something separate from racism.
Then, in the context of somehow trying to rationalise Shahs comment about the Jews, he said that a true antisemite is not someone who just hates Israeli Jews, but someone who hates all Jews. Well, thats crap. First of all, because antisemites don't have to hate 'all' Jews, and often profess to love certain Jews. Racism is not about 'hate', and the idea that it is about 'hate' is one of the stupidities of the dominant ideology. Second, because even if it were true, there would still be something to say about 'hating' all Israeli Jews - whether one calls it antisemitism or not, it doesn't seem to me that you'd want to defend that. It's not clear that Livingstone was trying to 'defend that', of course, but the point is that it sounded as though he could be doing so, or at least minimising it, and anyone who wanted to impugn him for antisemitism would leap on something like that. In toto, Livingstones comments look like a series of accumulating hostages to fortune.
Now, many of the accusations against Livingstone are ill-informed or tendentious. It appears that, like John Mann MP, many pundits think Livingstone was making it up as he went along when he referred to Nazi collusion with the Zionist movement. Others are content to engage in eyebrow-raising, along the lines of: ah, so you think Hitler wasnt mad before the judeocide? Apologist! Which is pathetic. But Livingstones attempts to define antisemitism in order to separate it from anti-Zionism are also preposterous and ill-considered. They achieve the exact opposite of what he set out to do. So, his intervention today was a blunder with predictably awful consequences. And it would still be a good thing for him to clarify his comments.
Still, while I can sympathise to an extent with some of those on the Left who were cringing about Livingstones comments, and have been exasperated with his loose cannon tendencies, it is a grave mistake for anyone to either quietly condone the suspension out of a misguided sense of realpolitik (hes strategically unsound, better off without him, etc) or vocally support the suspension in the vain hope that throwing one more carcass into the ravening maw of the right-wing mob will placate it. The mob will not be placated. If you rebuke someone, theyll demand suspension; if you suspend them, theyll demand expulsion; if you expel them, theyll wonder why it took you so long to get round to expelling antisemites and why they seem so drawn to your party in the first place.
You cannot win by obeying this logic. And the logic which has been used to condemn Livingstone which, to stress, includes not just legitimate criticism but also pointedly ignorant and malicious mischaracterisation will soon enough be turned on others. Corbyn, for example. If Greenstein can be suspended for criticising Zionists, if Bouattia can be vilified for the same, and if Livingstone can be monstered as a Nazi apologist for referencing actual historical facts, then how long before another round of demonisation of Corbyn on the basis of his supposed connections to extremists, or his purported love for the dear old comrades in Hamas etc etc? Pusillanimity in the face of this kind of inquisition is its own kind of liability.
The more you concede, the more you are obliged to concede. And theyre going all the way if they can, right to the top. Alan Johnson, doyen of the 'antitotalitarian left' (a few dozen academics and journalists) as well as a senior research fellow at the pro-Israel lobby, BICOM, has stated the case very clearly: Save your pitch fork for Corbyn.
The 'antisemitism' panicposted by Richard Seymour
It's an interesting political moment. With the Hillsborough finding, the junior doctors' strike, the ongoing reverberations from the Panama Papers, a backlash among Tory backbenchers against forced academisation and even a loss of face for the government over child refugees, the government is reeling. It is not that Corbyn looks strong, although he does have the initiative for now: Labour even has a small lead in a series of YouGov polls. It is rather that the Tories are surprisingly weak, cutting against the grain of popular 'common sense', and being forced into a series of graceless retreats. So what is the relationship between that fact, and the current ideological offensive against Labour's left-wing, under the rubric of uncovering antisemitism? And why is this offensive assuming some of the characteristics, if not the proportions, of a moral panic?There is happily no need for me to revisit the specific allegations that have been made, since Jamie Stern-Weiner has already judiciously dealt with them in a characteristically forensic demolition job on the whole panic. There isn't much one can say about them - they are so small in number that it is impossible to extrapolate any wider conclusion. They are just a series of individual cases, nowhere near large enough to constitute a pattern. Can anyone seriously, without recourse to impressionism and hand-waving, demonstrate otherwise?
Of these allegations, one can say that some of them do genuinely constitute obnoxious anti-Jewish racism, while others fall into the category of criticism of Israel, or of Zionism. What is more, anyone remotely experienced on the Left can see the difference right away - it is not subtle. The only people who don't see the difference are antisemites, Israel's apologists, and those whose political strategy rests on not seeing a difference.
With those points in mind, there is a rather obvious gap between the scope of the allegations, hyped beyond all reason, and the scope of the claims extrapolated from them. These claims can be distilled to the argument that because of the victory of Jeremy Corbyn, and the change in the composition of the Labour Party's membership that made this possible, Labour is now institutionally antisemitic.
This, clearly, is a gross travesty, indefensible from any point of view. But it doesn't need to pass any test of intellectual probity. Like other moral panics, the power of claims made in the context of this panic derives from something other than their truth value. Like what? Well, for one thing, the fact that they resonate with a series of existing ideological representations. After all, this meme is not new. The 'new antisemitism' thesis is as old as the hills now. Right-wing newspapers have been using this sort of thing to bait the left for years now. And the attacks on Corbyn on this axis began before he was elected.
For another, there is a diverse coalition of people for whom believe in such a claim serves a purpose, or helps to encode a particular fear - that, for example, Labour has gone to the 'loony left', that the political establishment has lost control, that a black Muslim woman now leads the NUS, that Israel no longer commands near unanimous sympathy in the UK, that you can't support bombing a country any more without people calling you a warmonger, and so on. The idea, utterly absurd in itself, that Labour is now institutionally antisemitic because of the Left, is in this context an extremely useful modulation on standard red-baiting. It tells a seemingly coherent story, drawing on the tropes of 'antitotalitarianism', about how the centre disintegrated, and to what effect. And it restores the taint once associated with being a Red, by means of the association with antisemitism.
And finally, of course, the opposition to such claims is cowed and weak. Corbyn and McDonnell are understandably desperate to shut this issue down, rather than enter into a difficult and - from a public relations point of view - potentially toxic series of arguments about the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. They will undoubtedly feel a tremendous burden of responsibility - just yesterday they were marching with the junior doctors on strike, going for the Tories in a way that no previous Labour leadership would have done. How, they will reason, can they afford to blow all that momentum on a series of arguments they can't possibly win?
Understandable as that may be, this also puts the Labour Left in a particular bind. The leadership is keen to kill the issue stone dead, and doing so with as much economy of energy as possible. So what will Labour activists say and do? What will Momentum and like-minded groups say and do? They will presumably feel under pressure to "defend Jeremy" and not embarrass him by raising difficult, complex discussions that are likely to blow back in everyone's faces when some snippet of some conversation in a pub somewhere becomes a Daily Mail headline. And perhaps they will not want to polarise Labour on issues like Israel-Palestine, especially since 'everyone' seems to agree on the principle of Palestinian statehood. Maybe just let it lie for now. Maybe prioritise, focus on the things that matter. Sit tight, weather the storm, and get back to the real issues.
The problem, if they are tempted by this option, is that it doesn't actually exist. Not every ideological battle can be won on the ground of short-term media cycles. This argument itself is going to keep coming back. Why? Because it has just been demonstrated that it works. It is very effective, not least because those targeted by such tactics feel compelled to cave in almost immediately. And it won't be difficult to repeat. Why? Because if you want to find examples of antisemitism in a racist society, you only have to be patient and wait: antisemitism exists and, as a matter of sheer probability, some of it must exist among some Labour members. And if you expand the definition of antisemitism to include any and all expression of anti-Zionist politics, then you will assuredly find some examples of that. And maybe, if direct expressions of anti-Zionism are deemed antisemitic now, perhaps in the future other forms of pro-Palestine politics - BDS, for example - can be subjected to the same calumny. Soon, perhaps, they can return to Corbyn's 'connections' to Hamas, or the 'abuse' allegedly received by Louise Ellman MP supposedly at the instigation of Momentum, and so on. The more you give ground to this type of campaign, the more ground you are compelled to give.
So the de facto coalition between the Labour Right, the Conservatives, and most of the media, initially launched during the 'Project Fear' campaign against Corbyn, will certainly find other occasions to converge on this line of attack. The only question is whether this attack is consistently countered by an informed, confident rebuttal, or met with lamb-like docility.
ps: note the list of Labour right-wingers queuing up to demand Ken Livingstone's suspension for referring to an 'Israel lobby'. So let us, please, have one extended interview with one of these people where they are forced to rigorously, in detail, lay out exactly what they are claiming is antisemitic. I want them to be compelled to give specifics. I want them to be forced to defend their logic. Because otherwise it comes across as a clamorous, opportunistic attempt to silence debate. I mean, it's almost like they're a 'lobby' or something.
Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politicsposted by Richard Seymour
How could an inveterate Bennite like Corbyn win the Labour leadership election, when Bennism is deader than Hulkamania? How did he get the nominations he needed from MPs, constituency branches and unions, none of whom have a recent record of radicalism? How did he more-than-double the size of the Labour Party's membership, when the party-form was supposedly undergoing a prolonged decline? How did the media get it so badly wrong, when they never get anything wrong? How did the wonks end up floating sideways in their think-tanks? Was it all because of Trot infiltrators, party-constitutional changes, Blairite meltdown, austerity, or the hoi polloi getting ideas above their station?
And now that he holds a leadership post - permanently encircled by resentfully plotting backbenchers, foes in the cabinet, a virulent media, and a centre-seeking Tory party - what chance does Corbyn have of success? And what might success mean in this context? If it means winning elections, is his chance of success greater than sub-zero? What else might it mean? What about the heteroclite constituencies that have been unified around Corbyn's distinctly self-effacing leadership? Can they change the Labour Party, and what can they realistically expect to change it into? What else might they be doing if they weren't doing that? And who is a greater threat to the Corbyn leadership - the noisy back bench belligerati, or those who have gone eerily quiet?
And if you don't buy it. If you don't buy it. By Christ. I hate you, I hate your haircut, I hate your compromising parents, I hate your filthy, stinking family, I hate your socially repellent sexual partners, I hate anyone who associates with you or looks like you. And I will hunt you down and beat you mercilessly until your insides look like apple sauce. I'll leave you bloodier than a Blairite in a leadership election.
'Erratic marxism' in its limits.posted by Richard Seymour
He may be unflappable, and reputedly of interest to a whole queueing phalanx of inflamed loins across Europe and beyond, but Varoufakis couldn't face down the masters of Europe, and he can't sell a progressive 'in' campaign on these premises. (A progressive 'out' campaign seems to be an even more difficult prospect, but that is of less pressing concern, since the vast majority of leftists who are doing anything about the referendum are campaigning for 'in'.) Watch the video for yourself, and note the logic very carefully, because it elides a number of registers of analysis without acknowledging that this is happening.First of all, "retreat to the nation state" can mean a number of things depending on the context. To oppose, not just TTIP but the whole apparatus of neoliberal trade and regulatory agreements which usurp democratic powers, could be characterised as a "retreat to the nation state". To insist on the right of national states to impose capital controls, nationalise industries, shut down tax havens, prosecute corporate criminals, or any one or all of these things, is a "retreat to the nation state". Whether it can "benefit the left" is a question of context and strategy. And given that national states even today are still more democratically accountable than any of the international governing institutions that they have willingly ceded power to, there is no case for this a priori claim on Varoufakis's part. And what is more, this assumption on his part, and that of his political confederates, cannot be said to have benefited the left in practice.
A coalition with "other democrats" to stop fascism can mean many things, but the idea that it has to mean the left aligning with the pro-EU centre is strangely oblivious of the last forty years or so. If the recent past demonstrates anything to us, it is that the left aligning with the centre is utterly useless at preventing the rise of fascism, because it means allowing the centre to perpetuate precisely the policies which give ground to fascism, while confirming the irrelevance of the left as an oppositional pole. After all, the rise of the far right in France, Greece, Hungary and elsewhere is hardly unconnected to the politics of the pro-EU centre which simultaneously work to progressively erode parliamentary democracy while also perpetuating moral panic about migrants, national security, and Islam, upon which the far right feasts. Fortress Europe permits a relative free movement of labour within it, but has now signed a pact with Turkey, sealed with Kurdish blood, to illegally pushback refugees. It is not unforeseeable that in some circumstances one would have to align in practice with the centrist political forces doing all this, but doing so now to 'stop fascism' of all things, seems perverse.
More importantly, Varoufakis should have learned his lesson: Syriza went into office thinking it would find all sorts of beneficial alliances with 'other democrats' across Europe, to defend Greek national sovereignty and hold back the austerity juggernaut. They thought that an Hollande, or a Renzi, would take their part. Those hopes turned out to be founded on delusion. What is more, the rise of the neo-Nazi formation, Golden Dawn, took place in part thanks to the record of the broad pro-European centre in power, and what it did to the Greek population under the rubric of serving its debts to European banks. If Golden Dawn isn't marching to power now, that is not because of any alliance between the left and the centre. Far from it, the centre - including centrist politicians and the press - coddled the fascists until they overstepped the mark. It is because the left maintained a consistently independent antifascist opposition. The fascists, happily enough, then got into a fight with the Greek state over who wielded effective authority on the streets a little too soon, long before they had any chance of forcing an outcome in their favour. Had that dynamic of neo-Nazi ascent not been broken, who knows what would have been the result of Syriza's collapse into the pro-austerity centre?
Still, at least the fascist threat is a real one, and genuinely frightening. I'm less rattled by the claim that "Boris Johnson will be your Prime Minister" and "TTIP will be signed faster". Absent other context, that doesn't seem to be very different to what we have. Putting the case at its most forceful (and setting aside the stuff about TTIP, which is going to be signed either in Brussels or London), the argument would be that the beneficiaries of Brexit would be the most hyper-Atlanticist, hard right wing of the Tory party, who would then be able to claim the Tory leadership and win back all the lost Ukip support. Johnson, as leader, would depend on the hard right and feel compelled to give them red meat. In the new polarisation of politics, post-Brexit, a more right-wing Tory party would once again win the election and the protections and rights in British law, conforming to EU regulations, would be rolled back. And thus would descend a long reign of reaction.
Well, that's one way of calculating the possibilities, and it's a real risk. But it isn't the only way to think through the prospects, and these aren't the only considerations. We don't know that the Tories wouldn't split down the middle after a Brexit. We don't know that Corbyn wouldn't find the 2020 election much easier. We don't know that, deprived of their key mobilising issue, the radical right might not begin to run out of steam. I am not claiming that all of these outcomes are likely, merely that there is a degree of indeterminacy. On the other hand, we don't need to speculate too much about what staying in means - it means Maastricht, Lisbon, the fiscal pact, competition laws, etc., along with the free movement of labour within the Union. It means privatisation and competition in the public sector. It means neoliberal limits on borrowing and spending. It means for sure that the further centralisation of power in the hands of its unelected institutions will continue apace. It means that the iron cage of the bureaucracy, codifying the interests and demands of the European Business Roundtable, will continue to tighten around the representative institutions. Whether you like it or not, the European Union represents an immense obstacle to the achievement of left-wing ends. It is not the only such obstacle, but we do not have to behave as if it isn't an obstacle. This is why the vast majority of large corporations in the UK are in favour of staying in. And what is more, within that context, the radical right would also certainly continue to gain ground - because the undemocratic nature of the EU, its neoliberal constitution and its crisis-ridden nature, are all likely to breed the sorts of discontents and dysfunctions on which the radical right thrive.
If, as Varoufakis fears, a Brexit were to lead to the disintegration of the European Union, the only absolute certainty is that this framework and the laws which national governments have passed to conform to it, would be up for re-negotiation. It would all have to be fought over again. Ironically, the very forces of the European radical left that now support the EU with a 'warts and all' clause - Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn - could potentially find themselves with a much freer hand to achieve radical ends if elected. And even if the radical left were not able to gain some wiggle room in the short term, there is no accounting for the possibilities that this weakening of the political power of the European business class would open up in the long term. So there is the question of the immediate balance of forces, and the likely short-term beneficiaries of Brexit, and the long-term consequences for a mode of class rule that would have to be re-negotiated, struggled over again, and linked to a profitable formula for growth. In the short run, one wing of the right will be the victor whatever the outcome of the referendum, because the left is absent. In the long run, business can not be confident that in the subsequent struggle to reorganise and re-institutionalise its class dominance, it wouldn't suffer significant losses.
All of this is not to say that there's a clean, socialist road to Brexit. Far from it. The point is that while staying in is a relatively known quantity, leaving is not. It would be messy and murky, and in that murk there would be the forces of the petty-bourgeois, nationalist right. But being a Brexit-sceptic doesn't mean you have to soft-sell the EU as an opponent either. It is easy to avoid dealing with this problem by putting all the emphasis on the need to combat the nationalist right, but this is just shirking responsibility for the logical consequences of one's stance. If there is to be a progressive 'in' campaign, let it fully admit and take ownership of its choice. Let it acknowledge that all the options are bad, that staying in is bad, that leaving is bad, but that the unpleasant certainties of staying in are better than the uncertain difficulties of leaving. Because it would be a grave mistake to win a referendum on the basis of downplaying the EU as an opponent, only to find a new crisis on our hands, a new Greece being made an example of, a new Lampedusa where immigrants are savagely tormented, a new government being told what to do on pain of fiscal strangulation. Don't let the nationalist right be the only ones talking about the brutal and undemocratic nature of the EU.
The wooden version of Lenin's Mausoleum, March 1925. Lenin died on January 21, 1924. Two days later architect Aleksey Shchusev was charged with building a structure
LENIN'S TOMB
The Laura Kuenssberg affair is a low parody of the media at its worst. Not because Kuenssberg is particularly awful herself: I don't think she's any worse than her
Lenin Mausoleum
A virtual tour of the Lenin mausoleum in Moscow; requires VRML plugin.
Lenin's Body on Display in Red Square - About.com Travel
Lenin's body is on display in Lenin's Tomb in Moscow. By Kerry Kubilius. By national dictate, Lenins body is free to view. And that may be the most novel thing
Inside Lenin's Mausoleum - Comtourist
Lenins Mausoleum was the holy shrine of the Lenin cult during the Soviet era. Stalin, and other Soviet leaders have a tomb behind the mausoleum, other important
Lenin's tomb reopens to public after renovation - BBC News
Vladimir Lenin's tomb in Red Square in Moscow has reopened to the public after a major renovation. The mausoleum closed in 2012 for urgent repairs to fix the building
Shocking images with Lenins body in his tomb mausoleum
Vladimir Lenin body shocking photos from mausoleum tomb. Lenin dead body preserved and embalmed in Lenin's tomb mausoleum.
Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow
Red Square's Lenin Mausoleum houses the body of Vladimir Lenin on Red Square in Moscow. More on the Lenin Mausoleum and other top visitor attractions on Moscow's Red
Vladimir Lenin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lenin's Mausoleum, Moscow, Russian Federation: Nationality: Soviet Russian: Political party: League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class (18951898)
Body Of Stalin Removed From Lenin's Tomb
After his death in 1953, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's remains were embalmed and put on display next to Vladimir Lenin. In 1961, it was removed.
