Student Respect leader accused of racism

Assed Baig of Staffordshire University and Student Respect has been attacked for a rather curious article written for a student rag ‘GK News’ in which he muses:

In reality it is the white ruling elite which are responsible for much of the problems that we see today. Nuclear weapons, AK47’s and M16’s are all invented and made by white people. Fighter Jets, tanks and land mines are a white invention and largely made in the white dominated Western World. Terrorism has been perpetrated by white states. The terrorism that we are told to fear in the so called ‘War on Terror’ was initially funded and terrorists trained by our governments.

These and other comments inspiring groups titled Racist GK Ramblings. Assed has since qualified his remarks within a mass facebook message. Assed argues in this message that he intended to describe the relationship of a ruling class to other subordinate classes and the role of “deep-rooted, sub-conscience racist” ideas that play a role within this. Assed does not probe the suggested relationship between racism as a “tool of the ruling class” and the suggested “deep seated racist ideas” hidden within us. That the “rulling class” may indeed be ‘multi-ethnic’ in character is not a theme to which Assed chooses to turn.

If Assed is guilty of anything it’s having a poor analysis of society, which he then articulates. Poorly. The mechanistic appraisal of class and race he provides only mirrors the pond-like depth of the cod-sociology-cum-political analysis he is able to provide. That the wider political-project of Student Respect cultivates ‘student leaders’ able to provide ‘polemics’ of this depth perhaps speaks volumes of the shallowness of the project.

Britz

Britz hit our screens a few nights ago promising something exciting and a bit glitzy with a comprehensive ad-campaign in the run up to its four hour screening, including an accompanying DVD release.

The reaction to the show seems to have been mixed with the ever-progressive Telegraph suggest it expressed the show was largely expressive of an inherently simplistic “old-fashioned agitprop politics". This comment can only be understood in reference to the hamfistedly deadpan script and acting provided for the duration of the second instalment, unable to provide a degree of nuance beyond that perhaps expected in a book entitled ‘The Dummies Guide to Why I Became A Terrorist’.

What’s interesting is that while the program addressed many of the suggested featured involved in the ‘radicalisation’ of young British Muslims (including the screening of films displaying atrocities committed against Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere for example) the characterisation didn’t convincingly display a person being radicalised. Even with the use of running-commentary – roughly paraphrased as “oh, god, this is terrible, maybe that terrorist sympathising bloke had the right idea” - provided by the protagonist for the sake of the viewer. That said, the cardboard-cut-out approach to characterisation involved in the second episode occasionally provided a few laughs; when a comrade sees the main protagonist semi-naked and objects she dejectedly comments, with all the frustrated nuance of a teenager being asked to tidy her room, “what does it matter, I’ll be dead in an hour!” While this was perhaps intended to be something akin to the criminal in Albert Camus’s The Outsider rejecting his last rites, it instead comes across as more of a blunt instrument labelled ‘pathos’ smacked around the viewer’s head.

Text provided at the end of the episode cited statistics noting the number of those opposed to the war in Iraq and the resulting fear of persecution within Muslim communities. These figures may lend themselves to associations between a rise in terrorist activity and the increasing frustration felt by many Muslims about British imperial adventures within Muslim dominated countries. These are points that have readily been made by Stop the War Coalition leaders such as John Rees in reference to the perceived absence of ‘civil liberties’. While this is likely to retain strong elements of truth – an approach which limits the causes of terrorism to this factor alone seems unable to raise wider commentary on the nature of political-Islam, ignoring this phenomena for the sake of a good/bad duality of limited scope and vision.

As Mike Mcnair notes in the Weekly Worker, the focus of the U.K. as a target for the actions of Jihad is not a new phenomena while the rise of Jihadism must be understood in reference to the rise of political Islam, operating in a vacuum in which Communism has not the hegemonic appeal as the alternative to the alienation and commodification of capitalism. This fact operates within a context in which advocates of Marxism seem gripped by inertia and a dramatic absence of confidence in their own ideas. As Mcnair suggests the left, in this sense, has provided no solutions to the frustrations of members of those aforementioned working-class communities within the U.K. While Yassmine Mather and Ardeshir Mehrdad have commented that in order to understand the role of political Islam we must first understand the nature of the “economic, political and ideological” crisis enveloping those states in which Radical Islam has been resurgent, the role of a form of Neo-Liberalism seems key to this process.

Stop the War coalition censorship of critics

Both Hands Off the People Of Iran and Communist Students have had their affiliation revoked by the Stop the War Coalition (STWC) leadership – because of their opposition to both an imperialist attack on Iran and the theocratic regime in Teheran. This policy has been characterized by StWC chair, Andrew Murray, as "entirely hostile to the Coalition". A comment that speaks greatly of the approach currently supported by the Coalition on the issue of Iran.

In the face of criticisms made by both Communist Students and Hands Off the People of Iran the leadership of the coalition has resorted to ham-fisted exclusion. This should be condemned by any principled internationalists - quite regardless of whether they support the campaign aims of either organisation.

The full press-release can be read on the HOPOI site.

I'd ask that you all take a few seconds out of your day to email the STWC leadership to complain about this blatant censoring of critical voices. You may do so here

The History of Capitalism

Both within the later-parts of the first volume of Capital and in other writings such as Grundrisse Karl Marx provides an overview of the origins and development of capitalist economy seemingly at odds with that most commonly ascribed to Marxist political philosophy.

Far from the common sense conception of Marxism expressing the simple reduction of "legal and political" structure of society to the "base" relations of production in a fairly mechanistic and automated fashion, these writings suggest a depth of historical understanding not easily evident by the accusations often leveled at Marx by his detractors.

While I’m not sure that Marx devoted huge tracts of writing on the precise nature of the developmental stages of abstract capitalism, those sections in which Marx does mention these processes are very illuminating. Marx notes in Grundrisse for example the ‘contradictory form’ of bourgeoisie society containing as it does relations “derived from earlier forms … in an entirely stunted form” [1].

Within the chapters ‘The origins of the Capitalist Farmer’ and the ‘Modern Theory of Colonalisation’ Marx appears to provide a proto-psychological basis for the advent of capitalist accumulation, noting that:

The advance of capitalist production develops a working class that by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws [2]

Marx talks of slavery as providing the embryonic basis of primitive accumulation before noting the exponential growth in ships employed in this trade, suggesting that (within America) the cotton industry provided the basis for “commercial exploitation”. Fermenting the “eternal natural laws” of capitalist accumulation [2]. The use of this term may well be an ironic dig at those that presume – as many continue to do so – that the laws of capital are unchangingly rigid expressions of eternal economic phenomena, upon which we may perhaps affix phrases such as that of “human nature”. Marx makes short thrift of such ideas by smashing the notion that features characteristic of capitalist economic relations, such as that of money, “wade through all economic relations” [1]. Noting the midwife of force inherent in tumultuous societal change, Capital nears its end with a closing remark on the blood and dirt the history of capital comes “dripping with from head to toe” [3].



[1] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm
[2] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm
[3] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm#n15

Stalinism and the 'Democratic People's Republic of North Korea’

A fascinatingly macabre insight into both the workings of a stanoloid state-machine and what remains of those grouping that unquestioningly follow them has been provided courtesy of a curious grouping calling itself the All Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (ALCPB). The grouping seems to exist without many of the links binding the U.K. Stalinist left to the official communism of the now non-existent Communist Party of Great Britain, suggesting a U.K. membership limited beyond even that of the remnants of the existing Stalinist left.

The AUCPB has posted within their internet group forum an official North Korean press-release titled Spirit of Defending Leader with Very Life Displayed in Flood-hit Areas. The article notes and comments upon the effects of the recent flooding affecting the ‘Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea’ (DPRNK) by remarking on the lengths workers have supposed to have gone to in order to protect images glorifying the country's leader, President Kim Il Sung. The article comments rather amazingly:

among such people are peasant of the Jongdong Co-op Farm in Phyonggang County Cha Hyang Mi who handed over portraits (of President Kim Il Sung) to rescuers and went to the bottom of the torrent water, peasant of the same farm Pak Jong Ryol who lost his wife and child by landslide but saved the portraits and worker of the Ichon Foodstuff Factory Kang Hyong Gwon who firmly took portraits in his hands in flood though his five-year-old daughter slipped down from his back (2)

(1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_the_Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union
(2)http://www.tongilkorea.net/?action=fullnews&id=8276

Lindsey German and the Grand Old Duke of York

A "Student Organising Meeting" was called at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) on Saturday 8 September, with speakers including NUS President Gemma Tumelty, Lindsey German and Tony Benn of the Stop the War Committee (STWC).

Writing in the pages of Socialist Worker, Assed Baig prefaced a report of the meeting by noting, apparently without irony, "things have changed" [1]. Beyond wafer-thin displays of public-unity between Gemma Tumelty and the Stop the War leadership, the meeting reaffirmed the central importance the STWC intends to assign the “Grand old Duke of York” approach to demonstrations in the coming year.

Lindsey German provided a perfunctory speech on the "global" successes of the anti-war movement. Highlighting the "lobby of parliament" on 8 October, she paused only briefly to brush aside suggestions that student activists might question the strategy of a march, distinguishable from the last only by its dwindling number of attendees.

Perhaps fearing that promises of unceasing protest may have sounded more menacing than originally intended, the crowd were treated to a seemingly endless shopping-list of Stop the War achievements, ranging from the premature ejection of Blair from office to the “recent decision to withdraw British troops from Basra to a base outside the city” [1].
That the leadership of the STWC felt compelled to rally the troops to hear about these latest achievements suggests that they at least partially recognise the demoralising effect of asking a fairly small core of activists to repeat unchanging slogans, in lieu of a wider strategy for change.

Ben Lewis of Communist Students commented on the “global” anti-war movement Lindsey German had made not inconsiderable reference to, by highlighting the existence of an anti imperialist anti-war movement in Iran and the ripe opportunity this presents for principled unity among Iranian workers, women and students in opposition to Iran’s Islamic regime, while opposing US imperialism.

This position of solidarity was in turn caricatured by an SWP member from the floor, with the expressed support of the STWC leadership on the platform, as dictating to the Iranian left. Unsurprising though this may be, such an attempt to deflect criticism with convenient hyperbole should be met with the disapproval it deserves.

[1] http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=12990

Gay Rights in Iran & The SWP

The issue of rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans individuals (LGBT) has reached unparalleled prevalence on the far-left within the last 20 years or so, related discussion feature in the Socialist Workers Party’s ‘Marxism’ and the Socialist Party’s ‘Socialism’ events yearly. Accusations of retrospective homophobia levelled at Socialist Party comrades are dismissed as nonsense, or simply attributed to the lingering ideological baggage of previous political leaders. Such as Socialist Appeal’s Ted Grant – a man prone to describing the movement for gay liberation as “petty bourgeois” nonsense [1].

That the language used by sections of the left in reference to these issues has changed is not expressive of a reawakening of the left to the importance of these issues. Far from the championing the rights of oppressed and minorities groups within the last five years there has instead been an abdication of basic solidarity within many of the most oppressed and marginalized within these groupings.

Comments made by Lindsey German of the Respect Party most clearly express the Herculean task sections of the far-left have set themselves in accommodating phantom right-wing reaction of every shade and hue. This is perhaps most famously expressed by the characterization of the rights of gays and women as expendable in an attempt to avoid “shibboleths” at the Marxism 2003 meeting ‘Revolutionaries & the left’ [2].

That Respect has had to begrudgingly accommodate – if just formally – an acknowledgement of the rights of LGBT individuals within the material it publishes says something about the measure of pressure exerted on the leadership in the face of previous omissions and oversights [3].

I cite these examples not for the joy of the inarticulate genuflection within which they are couched but to instead suggest it is expressive of the wider politics of the Socialist Workers Party’s role inside and outside of Respect. Beyond the lip-service occasionally paid to the issue at conference time and in policy documents scant attention is provided by the Socialist Workers Party to the rights of oppressed minorities they begrudgingly champion, as is most clearly the case in Iran.

Reading the pages of the ‘Socialist Worker’ one would not know that there even existed a persecuted LGBT movement in Iran, a belief that would seem to oddly coincide with views attributed to London Central Mosque cleric Sheikh Sharkhawy, that homosexuality simply does not exist in the Islamic Republic of Iran [4].

Until recently the most obvious omission of this fact related to the scant coverage of the hanging of two gay teenagers – an act rightly condemned by gay rights organizations such as Outrage! The threatened deportation from the UK of Iranian lesbian Pegah Emambakhsh to near certain “arrest, imprisonment, torture, lashings and/or possible execution” looks set to continue this tradition of silence on the part of the Socialist Workers Party – members of which can expect very few articles about the persecution of Pegah and others like her [5].

The attacks on gay minorities in this and other instances are attacks on us all and should rightly be met with the vocal and continuous outrage they deserve. The task of principled communists is to call on the unity of LGBT minorities, students and workers to condemn these acts and fight against the capitalist fundamentalists that threaten and divide them, as part of a wider project of principled international solidarity in opposition to imperialist war and regime change from above.


[1] http://www.marxist.com/the-theoretical-origins-of-the-degeneration-of-the-fourth-interview-with-ted-g-3.htm

[2] http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/602/respect%20LGBT.htm

[3] http://www.ukgaynews.org.uk/Archive/2005nov/2202.htm

[4] http://www.ilga.info/Information/Legal_survey/europe/supporting%20files/out_and_muslim_in_the_united_kin.htm

[5] http://www.petertatchell.net/international/savepegah.htm