Category Archives: Socialism

France: Le Pen’s been beaten – so what now?

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The majority of French voters have rejected Marine Le Pen. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the elected president is a free-market fanatic whose programme inspired a record number of people to cast blank votes.

Election posters in Champigny-sur-Marne on 7 May 2017 Photo: Tony Cross

Had Le Pen won the presidency, another country would have succumbed to the revamped right-wing populism represented by Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Orban and Brexit – not fascism, in my view, but a new kind of majoritarian authoritarianism endorsed by popular mandate, fuelled by fear of the future and resentment of the establishment, finding its expression in xenophobia and prejudice.

Emmanuel Macron could hardly be styled a courageous defender of minorities but he did resist Le Pen’s racism in the campaign TV debates, which is more than can be said for the mainstream right candidate François Fillon and, for that matter, more than can be said for Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls while in office.

So we’ve escaped a national-level version of the discrimination, repression and racist rabble-rousing the far right has let loose on the towns it controls. And Le Pen’s National Front (FN) seems to have big problems ahead.

Crisis for National Front

The result, and Le Pen’s disastrous performance in the few days before the poll, appears to have plunged the FN into crisis.

In one sense, they don’t have so much to complain about. They achieved a record 10.6 million votes, nearly double their score when Marine’s dad, Jean-Marie, made it to the second round against Jacques Chirac 2002. That’s a lot of Islamophobes – or, at least, a lot of people prepared to go along with the FN’s hatred of Muslims, immigrants, Roma and other minorities to poke the “elite” in the eye, which should, but won’t, give the “elite” pause for thought.

But, and this is really worrying, they could have done even better.

Le Pen ran an effective campaign up until the last few days. Then she had the bright idea of picking a holocaust-doubter as her party’s interim president (he also thought that beating up commies was a good political education but that received less media attention) say that France was not responsible for the wartime rounding up of Jews, call Fillon and his party “shits” (the FN claims she just said they were in the shit) and, worst of all, behave just like her father’s daughter during the crucial final TV debate.

The debate performance – where she was caught out lying, blustered, bullied, slouched and grimaced like the chip off the old block she is – has probably destroyed the “dedemonisation” strategy that had been working pretty well for Marine and her pals.

The FN’s canal historique is already sharpening its knives. Its best-known representative, Marion Maréchal Le Pen, one of only two FN-affiliated MPs at the moment, said on Sunday evening that the party must consider its strategy in the election after the “disappointment”.

And, if reports are to be believed, the rank and file is in disarray. An anonymous FN official told the Mediapart website that a the party’s post-debate postbag contained a number of torn-up membership.  And the “fachosphere” – the far-right social media network – is full of recriminations, mostly against Marine Le Pen and Florian Philippot, the FN vice-president who’s seen as the Svengali behind the dedemonisation strategy and the party’s “social” turn.

One is tempted to ask whether Le Pen threw the debate deliberately. As a Trump admirer, she must have read his comment that leading a country is harder than he’d thought. Being the party of mean-minded, resentful opposition has been a profitable business for her family, making them millionaires. Had the FN watered down its opposition to the EU, the real point of difference with the Fillons, Sarkozys and other tough guys of the mainstream right, it could have undergone the same transformation as Italy’s MSI and joined a coalition government some years ago.

But no, the FN leaders were riding a wave of anti-establishment resentment mixed with xenophobia and seemed genuinely to believe they were on the road to power on their own terms. Hence the disappointment today.

It remains to be seen if the backbiting will hamper their campaign in June’s parliamentary elections. A good result there could staunch the crisis.

Macron and extremes

Something else revealed in that TV debate is that Macron is not a very skilful politician.

He’s an intelligent man, a skilled technocrat who knows his facts.

But Le Pen destroyed herself, he didn’t destroy her.

When she posed as a defender of gay and women’s rights during an attack on a Muslim group that supported him, he failed to remind her of her own party’s record on those questions – the potential for mockery was great but Macron doesn’t do funny. When she justified her claim that the wartime deportation of Jews was not France’s responsibility but that of the Vichy government, he let it go without even a mention the former collaborators who helped found the party. Apparently, he also doesn’t do history.

This is not just a historical quibble. Obscuring the party’s Nazi origins and airbrushing out its anti-Semitism are a key part of the dedemonisation strategy and Macron passed on an opportunity to deal it a powerful blow.

In short, Macron has no political culture, which is also the problem of his newly founded En Marche ! movement. Apparently, the political experience that his presidential campaign lacked was made up for by Socialist Party traitors, working against their own candidate, Benoît Macron, in the first round and even more openly for a republican front – nominally anti-fascist but in reality more pro-Brussels – in the second round.

That was also apparent in his speech after the result was announced. In what he imagined was an olive branch to supporters of Le Pen and left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he told them they had voted for “extremists”.

Repeating the old canard of the “extremes” meeting up is hardly a way to win over the seven million who voted Mélenchon in the first round and Macron’s assurance that he understood voters’ “anger, anxiety and doubts” is undermined by his obvious lack of empathy with ordinary people on the campaign trail.

With 25 percent abstention, the highest since 1969 when France’s youth was radicalised by May ’68, and an absolute record of four million blank votes, Macron can expect trouble.

His programme, for the most part a collection of micro-measures and expressions of good intentions, is ardently pro-EU and pro-capitalist. Despite a promise to revive Europe’s connection with “the people”, Macron is determined to press on with reducing the debt through austerity, the very policy that has done so much to help demagogues like Le Pen. On the economy it’s more of the same – tax cuts and subsidies for employers, in the desperate and so far unrewarded hope that they will be bribed to invest, longer hours, later retirement and less social protection for employees.

He has promised to bring in more changes to labour law in the summer, his main proposal being to encourage company-level negotiations on working hours and other conditions, a further undermining of collective bargaining and trade union solidarity.

Mélenchon’s seven million votes mean that, for the first time for years, the left is not demoralised.

Rather it is in combative mood, witness all those blank votes. So strikes, demonstrations and social upheaval are guaranteed, indeed the first took place on the afternoon after the election.

Parliamentary elections – who know what will happen?

It’s all very well winning the presidency but afterwards you have to form a government.

For someone who doesn’t actually have a real party that’s a problem.

And, with the mainstream parties rejected by voters in the presidential election, everything’s up for grabs in June’s parliamentary election.

Will Macron succeed in destroying the Socialist Party, as seems to be his intention, with his assurance that En Marche ! won’t endorse any candidate standing under another party’s colours?

Will the mainstream right Republicans lose their more liberal MPs, tempted by the prospect of ministerial positions?

Will voters be as ready to reject sitting MPs as they were to turn their backs on their parties’ candidates in the presidential first round?

Will the FN pick up MPs in some of the 95 constituencies where Le Pen won more than 30 percent in that round?

Can Mélenchon and his allies build on the presidential campaign success and win more seats?

I don’t know the answers to these questions and I don’t think anyone else does, either.

Which means that the parliamentary poll is going to be another cliffhanger and, whatever happens, French politics will never be the same again.

Read my analysis of the result for RFI English here

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The white working class – does it exist and should you despise it?

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In the US, the Republican right have taken to sneering at the “white working class”. But they’re not alone. Middle-class liberals same and the media feel free to caricature “white trash” or “chavs”. Class hatred lives on … when it’s top-down.

It’s so difficult to hate in peace these days. Overt racism is generally frowned upon – even by racists (“I’m not racist but …”).  Islamophobia is having a moment, it’s true. And then there’s class hatred, as long as it’s de haut en bas, especially if you target the “white working class”, the subject of sneers from the American right recently but also portrayed by media and liberals as the repository of all bigotry, backwardness and bad taste.

Having created a monster, the Republican establishment is desperately trying to shift the blame for flipping the switch that brought Donald Trump to political life. Two writers in the New Republic have found the perfect suspect – “the white working class”.

“The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles”, writes Kevin Williamson, going on to decry “the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog”.

Cheering him on, David French claims Williamson has debunked “the idea that the white working-class (the heart of Trump’s support) is a victim class”. His church tried to help these people, he reports, but found its efforts wasted because they prefer welfare to work, drop out of education on a whim, shag the neighbour at the first sign of marital discord and neck prescription drugs with the same gusto that respectable people sip Chardonnay.

Reassuringly, French “hate[s] the mockery that poor and working-class people of all races endure” and doesn’t think that the drug-addicted fornicators are solely responsible for their fate. The government, the “cultural elite”, “progressive culture”, “progressive policies”, the “progressive welfare state” and the “elitist sexual revolutionaries” are not blameless, he adds … to no-one’s surprise.

For the New Republic, while both the causes and the guilt seem to be collective, the solutions must be individual – don’t claim disability, be faithful, stop snorting OxyContin move to get a job – and the way to achieve this is to give “white working class” – collectively – a good telling-off.

It isn’t just the right that lumps white working-class people into a homogeneous, contemptible mass.

“[S]ince Donald Trump’s charade of a candidacy caught fire, I have heard many fellow liberals freely toss around the terms ‘white trash’ and ‘trailer trash’,” writes US journalist Connie Schultz. “These are people who would never dream of telling a racist joke, but they think nothing of ridiculing those of lesser economic means.”

Jack Metzgar in In These Times points out that the statistics don’t bear out the assertion that Trump’s support comes disproportionately from non-college-educated whites, the definition of working-class adopted by a Brookings article that says it does, while Charles Davis of TeleSur claims that among white voters who make less than US$25,000 a year, it is Bernie Sanders who is in the lead by a margin of 15 per cent.

But Trump isn’t really the point.

“Every group has its ‘other’,” Schultz observes. “For too many white intellectuals, it’s the working class.”

When Hillary Clinton was fighting Barak Obama for the Democratic nomination, she was accused of playing to racist sentiment to appeal to the white working class. In France the white working class is often blamed for the rise of the Front National’s support, as it is for Ukip’s successes in the UK, where “chav” is now a term of abuse and the poor are the given the reality-TV treatment. These are standard liberal media analyses, repeated again and again in various forms, but generally identifying a hazily defined racial-cum-socio-economic category with whatever prejudice is to be decried at any given moment.

My own experience is that there are selfish shits and bigots in all social classes, although upbringing and level of education may influence the degree of subtlety with which these characteristics are manifested. Generosity and open-mindedness can be found everywhere, too, although I’ve found solidarity, in the sense of standing together in the face of common oppression, is somewhat lacking in the middle and upper classes.

But, however you define it, the working class is not ethnically homogeneous.

So what is that adjective doing in front of that noun?

We don’t talk about the black female gender, so why would a socio-economic category have an additional racial characterisation?

I understand one can reasonably talk about a white bourgeoisie in some Latin American countries, we could certainly talk about a white slave-owning class in the southern United States and the Caribbean in the past but, despite racist employment practices, membership of the working class is not such a privilege that it is restricted to any one race.

When factories close workers of all ethnic groups are thrown out of work. When incomes are squeezed, the banks foreclose with a lack of discrimination that would be praiseworthy in another context.

Some working-class people may react to the loss of relative security with racism or other prejudices – as may middle-class business owners or professionals who feel the pinch – but, when they do so, they are identifying as white, not working-class. When you express contempt for someone who is less privileged than yourself, whether in education, income or status, you’re defining them by class. And that’s a form of bigotry, too.

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Pakistani atheist infiltrates jihadi training camps

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Saying you don’t believe in any god can be dangerous in Pakistan. It has tough blasphemy laws and apostates from Islam could be punished by the death penalty, if fundamentalist mullahs haven’t incited a mob to murder you before your arrest. Nevertheless some Pakistani atheists are open about their non-belief, there’s even a Facebook page, and are accepted by their friends. In Karachi in 2008 I met an atheist who took his bravery a little further and infiltrated jihadi training camps. Here’s what he told me (article first published on RFI’s English website).

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The port in Karachi Photo: Tony Cross

Karachi 21.02.2008

While Pakistan’s three largest parties are all secular, all mainstream politicians are at pains to justify their policies with reference to Islam.

Sikandria Hayat Janjua, a member of Farooq Tariq’s Labour Party, feels no such constraint. Sitting in a hotel restaurant, he rips into religion at considerable volume. Tareeq says that his outspokenness has landed him in trouble more than once. One night, after outlining a vigorous critique of Islam to a young man who was staying with him, Janjua woke up to find the shocked believer stabbing him repeatedly.

He fought him off, summoned help and was taken to hospital, where, he’s happy to report, medical science saved his life.

“I believe that we will one day conquer death,” he tells me.

Janjua’s religious skepticism dates from the death of his father, a soldier who was killed in the nominally-independent region of Azad Kashmir in 1980. His killer was not an Indian soldier defending Delhi’s rule of much of the divided state, but an Islamist who took exception to what Janjua calls his father’s “progressive views”.

Janjua joined the secular Jammu and Kashmir Student Federation and then came to Karachi University, where he now leads an organization called the Progressive Youth Front. The organisation’s relations with the Islamist student organisations are not particularly friendly.

But back home in Azad Kashmir Janjua is part of the community, so, in 2001, when a group of young men went off to an Islamist training camp, they invited him to attend.  He says he went back on two other occasions, in 2003 and 2004.

Janjua says that there are five such camps in Azad Kashmir and that they take in about 180 18-22-year-old men for six-month courses in fighting for Islam, including preparation to become suicide-bombers.

“They welcome me as a muslim and took me to a barracks,” he says of his first visit.

The fajr prayers, at dawn, were followed by readings from the Koran. Janjua says the verses were selected to encourage suicide-attacks then followed by physical training.

He says he attended an international training camp at Kotly, 160 kilometres north of Islamabad, where the mullahs tried to convince him to join their version of jihad.

“They said ‘You will be in heaven, paradise, and you will be with houris [the pure and beautiful companions promised to the faithful], you will get then wine and different kinds of fruits, honey, and you will have your own luxury cars and horses …’ ”

Most of the youths who go to the camps are poor, Janjua says, attracted by promises of happiness that escapes them on earth. Some are criminals, invited to atone for their sins by sacrificing themselves for the fundamentalist cause.

“They are told that ‘You are a criminal and you will be in heaven and this is the way – that you take a jacket and finish your enemy all over the world, especially India, British, America and all the white-skins’.”

Janjua confirms reports that Pakistan’s secret services help the camps, claiming that some of the preachers were from the military. He adds that Saudi Arabia is a major financial backer.

The camps still exist, he says, but their names have changed. In 2001 they were bellicose references to the armies of the faithful.

“Now their terrorist camps are changed, like gardens and like flowers’ names, and inside the terrorist camps they are the same.”

He hopes that a PPP-led government in alliance with secular parties like the Awami National Party in the North-West Frontier Province will bring the intelligence services to heel and close the camps.

“This is my hope. Ground realities may be different,” he concludes.

To read or listen to my reports for RFI of Pakistan 2007-08 click here

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Record French tax haul shows how much corporate tax dodgers cost us all

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French tax services netted a record 21.2 billion euros from tax dodgers last year. And the biggest culprit was big business, a result that should lead the government to dissolve the units responsible since, like most governments nowadays, practically its sole job-creation strategy is to let companies off paying their fiscal share.

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France’s Economy Ministry Photo: Pline/Open access

More than a quarter of the tax-evasion haul – 5.8 billion euros – came from corporate tax fraud, up from 4.2 billion euros in 2014.

Individual tax-dodgers with secret bank accounts abroad, no doubt panicked by Luxleaks and the UBS investigation, fessed up to the tune of 2.65 billion euros.

“We have to lay to rest this idea that income from tax inspection comes from hammering small taxpayers,” Budget Minister Christian Eckert pointed out in a rare counter to the right-wing – sorry, “centrist” in establishment-speak – offensive against the state collecting its due. “It’s not true! Income from tax inspection comes essentially from big companies.”

The indiscreet junior minister probably won’t keep job for long if he carries on in that vein.

Because France’s Socialist government has pursued an energetic policy of cutting taxes to business, on the pretext that boosting profits will persuade bosses to take on more workers, with only a minor deviation this year in the form of a labour law pretty much drafted by the Medef bosses’ union.

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The share of dividends in French companies’ operation profits

It’s a strategy that has proved startlingly unsuccessful. Unemployment remains at 10 per cent as companies have paid out the tax handouts in dividends, an international tendency to short-term gluttony that is particularly virulent in France.

Given that the 2014 Socialist government contained no fewer than eight millionaires, one can imagine that it feels more collective empathy towards those struggling to maximise their wealth than those struggling to survive on the breadline – even if the cabinet’s net worth must have taken a hit with the departure of the fabulously wealthy Laurent Fabius.

So the DVNI, the division responsible for chasing up companies with a turnover of more than 154.2 million euros at whose headquarters Eckert and Finance Minister Michel Sapin announced the good tax news, would be foolish to aspire to longevity.

If we follow the government’s logic, following the current economic orthodoxy, it should be closed down and those companies allowed to carry on fiddling their tax returns in the hope that they will be kind enough to employ a few more members of the lower orders with the gains made from their accountants’ creativity.

Indeed, the tax windfall, which has been one of the only positive contributions to the EU-ordered effort to reduce the deficit, seems to have been pretty much an accident.

The unit to pursue holders of secret foreign accounts was set up after budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac was found to be guilty of that very offence and forced to resign. His case opened last month and, the defendant having arrived lawyered up, been put off until September.

Successful though the tax inspectors have been, unions have complained that they could do better with more resources.

That’s certainly true if estimates of the level of tax fraud quoted by the ministry are true. They put the figure at 60-80 billion euros, so 20 billion should be just the beginning if ministers were serious about tackling white-collar crime.

Eckert’s statement is important – and not just in France – because campaigning against taxation has been the right’s most effective weapon in winning middle and working-class support for policies that have actually shifted wealth away from most of the population.

Tax is the Achilles’ heel of collectivism. Most of us want good public services but we’d all rather somebody else pay for them. At the very least, we’ll take any opportunity to reduce the amount of tax we personally have to pay. The right has played on that conflict between immediate individual interest and delayed collective gratification with enormous success.

An important component of most right-wing campaigning issues – benefits fraud, migrants, “wasteful” public spending – is an appeal to the wallet. And, although there seems to be growing scepticism about capitalism and a revival of some form of collectivism among the young, Donald Trump, or France’s Front National, are evidence of the kind of mass reactionary movements that will be whipped up and manipulated if the interests of the wealthy are ever seriously challenged.

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Charlie and me – Islamophobia, racism, freedom of expression and equality in France

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It’s difficult to write frankly about Charlie Hebdo – it was difficult to do so in the aftermath of the massacre and it’s only a bit easier now. In France there was shock, of course, a kind of solidarity and, let’s be honest, a lot of self-righteousness. But the French don’t have the monopoly on self-righteousness, as the debate on Charlie abroad has shown. I think the experience has much to say about France – and the world – today.

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Tributes to police officer Ahmed Merabet, killed protecting the Charlie Hebdo staff Photo: Azurfrog/public domain

Do I have to say I was horrified by the massacre at Charlie Hebdo and the murders in a kosher supermarket that followed? Maybe I do. It’s easy these days to find oneself accused of holding opinions one doesn’t hold and entertaining sympathies one has never entertained, of advocating when trying to analyse (for the record this piece doesn’t aspire to neutrality).

Last January Charlie Hebdo suddenly found millions of passionate defenders – many of whom had clearly never read it or, so far as the more famous among them were concerned, only done so in search of grounds for legal action. Of course, they had the right to be angry at the violence and to defend their perception of freedom of expression. But it was exasperating to be lectured on the nature of a paper one had once read regularly in formulations culled from press coverage rather than formulated from personal experience.

Then the debate took a different turn, in the English-speaking world at least, and I got exasperated with critics who had also clearly never read Charlie. No, anglophone friends, the paper is not entirely devoted to Islamophobic and racist bile. While there’s no defence for some of its cartoons – Riss’s latest on Aylan above all – others were satirising the attitudes many of you believed they were propagating. Like lots of things in life, it can be good and it can be crap.

Here’s my confession of a Charlie reader who gave up.

When I came to France 22 years ago I soon discovered Charlie Hebdo. And I loved it.

The schoolboy humour naturally struck a chord, me being a Brit. The politics was anarcho-leftist-Jacobin, which mostly suited me. And it is true that its contributors mocked everyone, although not equally, as some of the never-read-its claim. Not very much humour on the Holocaust, happily. And lots of scurrilous attacks on the Front National and its then leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, also happily.

But, after a while, it seemed to change.

There were more and more sneers at Islam. I didn’t analyse how many cartoons and articles were devoted to each religion or set of political beliefs – I just stopped reading it – but Islam seemed to me to be becoming an obsession and I found it a distasteful one.

After the Charlie attacks a TV journalist became a French YouTube hit by showing that Charlie Hebdo’s covers over a given period of time featured few cartoons attacking Islam. This quite literally superficial analysis has no pertinence whatever.

Firstly, there was plenty on Islam inside.

Secondly, as former Charlie Hebdo contributor Olivier Cyran pointed out in 2013, attacking a minority religion, associated with an immigrant-origin population that is disproportionately underprivileged,  is not the same as attacking the Catholic church, “which had – and still has – newspapers, MPs, lobbies, salons and enormous property holdings”.

Catholics, one might add, never have their very right to live in Europe challenged, nor is their religion declared foreign to European culture, despite its provenance.

I can’t put a date on when I gave up reading Charlie. Cyran says it took a radical turn for the worse after 9/11. And he tends to blame Philippe Val, an ardent supporter of Israel who was later appointed director of Radio by Nicolas Sarkozy (not so iconoclastic as all that, eh?), and Caroline Fourrest, a hypersecularist who is rarely absent from TV, radio and the written press these days, thanks to her support for gay marriage, her opposition to hijab and her penchant for sniffing out Salafist conspiracies.

On RFI, January 2015: How will the Charlie Hebdo attacks change France?

On RFI, January 2016: One year later, how have the Charlie Hebdo attacks changes France?

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An idealised version of a sans-culotte during the French revolution, Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845)

But this hypersecularism is not unique to Charlie. It is very widespread in France – in its arrogant rejection of religion and the religious it was a sort of New Atheism avant la lettre.

It turns out that secularism is one of those container words that you can fill up with any number of meanings, like Liberté, égalité, fraternité or democracy, for that matter.

And, when a term becomes a sort of dogma, no longer examined critically, it lays itself open for exploitation by all sorts of cynical demagogues and authoritarians manqués. We know that from the history of religion, don’t we?

You can see secularism as a truce between non-believers and believers – you keep religion out of my state and I’ll keep my state out of your religion – or you can see it as a more aggressive measure to keep religion completely out of the public eye. That view tends to segue into an apparent desire to wipe religion off the face of the earth. In which case it’s not really secularism, is it? It’s state-sponsored atheism, which hasn’t worked very well.

France’s 1905 law on religion is in fact the first of these alternatives – a more aggressive anti-clerical faction lost the argument – but many French people interpret it as the second, with a tinge of the third, increasingly so these days.

When I first went to Turkey, to cover the 2007 parliamentary elections, some supporters of the secular parties used the French term laïcité to distinguish what Mustapha Kemal Atatürk had put into practice in Turkey from mere secularism.

Like the French version, Turkey’s secularism was born from a violent rupture with the past.

It was an attempt to break the hold of religion on the minds of the masses and end habits regarded as backward according to the Young Turks’ identification of modernity with Europe.

You can understand this zeal in the context of the French revolution. The revolutionaries needed to break the power of a Catholic church that was a powerful part of the ancien regime and, if we bear in mind today’s revelations of clerical child abuse in countries where the church went unchallenged, there must have been an awful lot of residual bitterness over priestly abuses of power, which may explain the violence of some anti-clerical exactions.

Post-Ottoman Turkey, too, had to replace a regime of which religion was an integral part  and create a state capable of standing up to the Islamic clergy, although, if we look at Turkey’s current political and social condition, we would have to conclude that it has been a mitigated success.  The largest secular party, the CHP,  seems to have recognisew this and is revising its hardline position.

But where is the relevance for France today?

When right-wing Catholics and assorted bigots turned out en masse to oppose the Socialist government’s same-sex marriage law – singularly failing to mobilise Muslims, by the way, despite some efforts to do so – there were few appeals to secularism. Indeed, right-wing politicians who have seen fit to call for pork-only menus to be served in school canteens were happy to play fast and loose with the god-botherers.

Because, excuse me for stating the obvious, it’s all about Islam. Nobody thought to ban “ostentatious signs of religion in schools, until a couple of Muslim girls turned up in hijab. (In that debate, which is now being recycled as a debate on cover in universities and workplaces, there is a strange confusion between those in authority and those over whom authority is exercised. Of course teachers should not proselytise, they represent the state, but why shouldn’t their pupils manifest religious convictions? Is it even realistic to expect them not to? In this respect the French are as prudish about religion as the British are about politics.)

On RFI i 2010 France’s burka bill, background to a bitter debate

That explains why many right-wing ideologues can one minute invoke Europe’s Christian or Judeo-Christian roots and the next pose as ferocious defenders of secularism, just as many of the political successors of the late 19th-century and early 20th-centur anti-Semites are now ardent defenders of Israel.

This form of secularism has become an assertion of the superiority of the Occident over the world it once colonised, tinged with class hatred, given that many of its exponents will happily mix with well-off, “integrated” persons of foreign origin, but like to whip up fear of a lawless mass in the banlieue.

Of course, Muslims are equal in France. Secularism applies to everybody just as “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread”, to quote Anatole France.

As Emmanuel Todd says in Qui est Charlie? – the book that earned him the singular privilege of a reply from the prime minister in the august pages of Le Monde – they face a pressure to conform from people of Catholic culture, who tell them “I have the right to blaspheme against my former religion, so you have to the duty to blaspheme against yours.”

The feeling of cultural superiority takes a distinctive form in France and has infected the left in a way it has not, in my experience, infected the British left.

To go back the two decades to my arrival in France I was struck by how in our globalised world – less globalised then, but still – national attributes continued to exist.

In my new home appreciating good food and drink was not considered elitist snobbery, it was not generally considered necessary to make room for other people when walking in the street, the arts were considered important enough to merit a slot on TV news bulletins, the customer was very definitely not always right, intellectuals felt under no obligation to pretend they were not intellectuals … and every French person was a bit of a patriot.

No matter how left-wing and in principle internationalist they were, they treasured in their hearts a certain conviction that French culture was superior to all others.

Of course, we all assume to some degree or other that what we’re used to is the natural order of things and I know that my new friends often found me quaintly British.

But I think France is the only country where former interior minister Jean-Pierre Chévènement could found his own little party to propagate a bizarre leftish form of nationalism, where the hard-left candidate in the last presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, could this year wax indignant about the Corsican regional council taking an oath “in a language I don’t understand” and where Prime Minister Manuel Valls … well I was talking about the left, so let’s leave Manuel Valls out of it.

It’s partly the fault of the French Communist Party, which at the time when it was France’s biggest party in terms of membership took the popular front accommodation with nationalism very seriously, played a heroic role in the resistance to German occupation, which inevitably led to a certain nationalist, even xenophobic, contagion, and after the war just couldn’t get out of the opportunist habit.

And, of course, there’s the revolution, without which the modern world would not exist.

The legacy of the revolution legitimises popular revolt. The slogans of the revolution represent a promise that is sufficiently vague to serve as justification for the established order and rallying cry for those who wish to overthrow it. The revolution has served as example, case study and inspiration for every generation of revolutionaries since.

And its centralist, nation-building aspects sometimes morph into the secular ultimatums, sneering and prejudice that find expression in the pages of Charlie Hebdo, which, despite its affection for the slogan “No god, no masters”, seems to have found it easier to come to an accommodation with the latter than with the former.

Because, despite the naughty words, the routine impertinence, the tits, bums and dicks, Charlie Hebdo is a bit of a court jester these days.

Viewed from the banlieue, as academic and journalist Andrew Hussey points out, Charlie is part of the establishment.

“What is seen in the centre of Paris as tweaking the nose of authority — religious or political — is seen out in the banlieues as the arrogance of those in power who can mock what they like, including deeply held religious beliefs, perhaps the only part of personal identity that has not been crushed or assimilated into mainstream French society,” he wrote in the New York Times after the attacks.

Indeed, one of the main reasons that Islam is resurgent is that the left has lost the leadership of the anti-imperialist and antiracist struggles. Secular nationalist and left-wing anti-colonial movements degenerated into corrupt dictatorships or neo-liberal democratic plutocracies. Mass socialist parties voided themselves of their class content.

The spectre haunting the world today is the spectre of fundamentalist jihad, violent, divisive, frightening, supported by a tiny minority of Muslims but filling a demand created by the arrogance of the West and the inadequacy of the left.

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Between Islamists and the military – two voices of the Pakistani left

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Left-wing activists face state harassment and threats from Islamists. When I met two of them during the 2008 election that put an end to President Pervez Musharraf’s rule, they pointed to creeping Islamisation of both the military and civilian life and seemed isolated as previous anti-Musharraf allies dropped calls for a boycott.

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Activists, including Pervez Hoodboy, protest at police brutality in Islamabad during the 2008 election Photo: Tony Cross

Lahore 17.02.2008

As Shahbaz Sharif addressed several thousand people in Sheikhapura yesterday, an umbrella group set up by his party held a smaller rally in Lahore – to call for a boycott of the election.

The All Parties Democratic Movement, APDM, was never an entirely accurate name. The PML-N formed it along with the religious alliance, the MMA, and some secular parties when their previous alliance with the People’s Party broke down.

During the political turbulence that followed the firing of the Chief Justice and the declaration of the state of emergency, the APDM declared that the election couldn’t possibly be fair and launched the boycott call.

But PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif never seemed 100% committed to the idea, especially when the PPP refused to commit itself thus threatening to take most of the PML-N’s seats in a newly-elected parliament.

When the PML-N finally threw itself into the election campaign, its offspring turned Oedipal and expelled it, along with the Jamaat-Ulema-Islami, one of the two largest parties in the MMA, which also stood candidates. A revision of the group’s name seems in order, as the country’s three biggest parties devote all their energies to the election campaign. Among the relatively few parties left in the APDM, the best known are Qazi Hussein Ahmed’s Jamaat-e-Islami and former cricket star Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf.

Still, an alliance of left-wing parties came to comfort them in their solitude and this shell of an alliance managed to muster a couple of thousand at the Pakistan monument in Lahore.

Farooq Tariq Photo: Tony Cross

Farooq Tariq is the leader of the Labour Party Pakistan, a small group which is part of the People’s Democratic Movement, the AJT, a newly-founded coalition of former (?) Stalinists and Trotskyists who seem to be happily coexisting, for the moment at least.

Sitting in his garden in a quiet suburb of Lahore, he seems to be having second thoughts about participation in the APDM. Yesterday’s rally was smaller than expected, he says, and most of the movement’s activities have been dominated by the Jamaat-e-Islami activists. But he claims that there have been successful meetings in Baloochistan, where’s there’s a powerful, armed independence movement, and the APDM has been the only organiSation that has managed to hold meetings in all areas of the country.

There will be a successful boycott in Baloochistan, he thinks, and a low turnout elsewhere, except, perhaps, in Punjab.

“There is no enthusiasm in the election. It’s the most colourless election in my political life of 30 years. No mass meetings; no street meetings; only the media campaign, most like in the developed countries where the media is the main part and that has come to Pakistan in this election.”

There was no choice but to boycott, says Tariq, because the election was intended “to legitimiSe President Musharraf’s rule” and without an independent judiciary or election commission there will be no check on fraud and manipulation.

The left is already thinking of quitting the APDM, although he describes its platform as liberal and progressive and claims that the alliance is dominated by progressive nationalists.

“We can’t work with the fundamentalists, that’s very clear.”

His party has clashed with the Islamists on many occasions and he has received death-threats by SMS. One claimed to be from Osama ben Laden’s son, Hamza, and told him that “If Benazir Bhutto can be killed, the leftists must pay attention;” Musharraf’s régime hasn’t been too kind to him, either, arresting him 12 times and obliging to go into hiding for 18 days during the state of emergency.

Tariq expects the PPP to form the next government and PML-N to do well in Punjab. But “it doesn’t make much difference, only really the faces change.”

He says that representative of the three major parties all attended a seminar in Washington before the election, he says, and assured the US government and the International Monetary Fund that there would be no change in economic policy.

The PPP will be sharing power with Musharraf, “which is contrary to the consciousness of the voters who will go to the polls tomorrow” but was “Plan A of the Americans”, bringing Benazir Bhutto’s party together with the president to fight the fundamentalists.

Tariq and other left-wingers were invited to visit Bhutto shortly before her assassination. She asked for their advice but doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to it. Tariq notes that Benazir opposed the restoration of the judiciary.

To read my interview for RFI with a left-wing activist who infiltrated a jihadi training camp click here

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Pervez Hoodboy Photo: Tony Cross

Also on the secular left is Pervez Hoodboy, whom I met in his office at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad a week ago.

Hoodboy is a nuclear physicist who has opposed Pakistan’s nuclear arms programme, worked for normalisation of relations with India and taken up causes such as the campaign for the reinstatement of the sacked judges.

He believes that the election leaves Pakistanis with few choices and that it is unlikely to be free and fair.

“There’s a very strong opinion that these elections should not be held at all. On the other hand, there’s a very strong opinion that, unless these are held, the country will simply break apart and all hell will let loose.”

Hoodboy believes that the opportunities for rigging are limited because Musharraf and his allies are “deeply unpopular” but also that a coalition government would be divided, thus leaving great power in the president’s hands.

But it’s in his own field of expertise that Hoodboy is at his most gloomy. He doesn’t believe government assurances that the military’s professionalism and security safeguards keep the country’s nuclear weapons in safe hands.

“My concern is that technology ultimately is operated by human beings and soldiers over here in particular and the fact is that within the army there are a growing number of people who disagree seriously, severely, with the position the government has taken in fighting the Islamic militants.”

He believes that many soldiers are more sympathetic to the Islamic militants than to the people fighting them, so the “insider threat” is growing.

“Look at the fact that we’ve had numerous suicide-bombings done by insiders, guided by other insiders, and one cannot really be confident that these nuclear weapons can be kept out of the hands of the extremists.”

Earlier this month, he says, a convoy of ammunition and equipment were hijacked, just two days after the president claimed that it was impossible to steal even one rifle from the armed forces.

To the argument that Islamism has spread among lower ranks but not among higher offices, Hoodboy replies: “The lower matters more than the top because it’s the lower ones who have to do the fighting. We’ve seen hundreds of soldiers surrender without firing a shot in Waziristan, in the tribal areas.”

According to Hoodboy, the jihadists, who have been used as an instrument of foreign policy for a quarter century, have now infected the whole of the country’s culture.

Most female students at his university now feel obliged to cover their hair, he says, while photos on his computer show that this was not the case 20 years. About a million students now attend the country’s madrassas and even state education has been Islamised. As an example he produces pictures used to teach the Urdu alphabet. Knives and guns illustrate one letter, while kites and musical instruments are part of the image chosen for “an obscure Urdu word which not even I knew” – the plural form of the word “sin”.

To read about my visit to a madrassa run by Taliban supporters click here

To read and listen to more of my reports for RFI on Pakistan’s 2008 elections  click here

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Why is support for France’s Front National rising?

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As I write French voters are casting their ballots in the first round of regional elections, although turnout will be much lower than in presidential or legislative elections, so a sense of proportion is needed when analysing the results. Nevertheless it looks almost certain that the Front National (FN) will do well, possibly even taking control of one or more regions after the second round next week. Why is the FN’s vote rising and what does it actually represent these days?

  • The main difference between the FN and the mainstream right is not racism or Islamophobia but hostility to the EU. A short quiz. Who said the following?

“There is no Islamophobia in France. There aren’t any anti-Muslim acts — or no more than acts against women . . . or short people. But there is a rise in anti-Semitism.”

”Someone who comes to us must assimilate, adopt our lifestyle, our culture …. Do you keep your shoes on when you visit a mosque when you’re abroad?”

The first is FN leader Marine Le Pen, the second is Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the ex-UMP now rebaptised the Republicans. But it could have been the other way around, couldn’t it?

True, some members of the Republicans – Sarkozy’s rival for the party’s presidential nomination Alain Juppé, for example – are alarmed by Sarkozy’s appeals to Islamophobia, which this year have included the proposal to drop alternative meals for religious minorities in school canteens and to extend the ban on the hijab already enforced in schools to universities. It’s also true that Sarkozy can hardly be accused of consistency, sometimes trying to create a state-sponsored Islam or cultivate Muslims who will toe his line, and that the party from time to time reins in individuals like the slightly deranged Nadine Morano. But the appeal to prejudice in the name of a selective laïcité is now as likely to be heard at a Republicans rally as in one of Le Pen’s almost incessant radio and TV interventions.

What makes further rapprochement between the two parties impossible is not racism, Islamophobia or any other prejudice but the FN’s hostility to the EU, stance that is unacceptable to the French establishment, the Republicans, the Socialist Party, François Bayrou’s Modem and all the other mainstream politicians.

  • The FN is no longer a fascist party. The FN plays on prejudice, is authoritarian in office and, like the fascist movements of the ’30s, has stolen aspects of the left’s social policy to consolidate a popular base. But, although it was in its origin a far-right coalition dominated by fascists, it is not really fascist now, unless you are one of those people for whom “fascist” just means “nasty”. In fact, the mainstream right – sometimes risibly called the “centre right” – now shares many of the attributes listed above. The FN has no militia, does not physically attack or murder trade unionists or left-wing activists, does not appear to have a plan to create a corporate state. No reasonably sized party in Europe has these characteristics today because it is no longer necessary to atomise the working class, as Trotsky, in my view correctly, described the task of fascism, because that has already been accomplished democratically, thanks to globalisation, the decline of heavy industry in western Europe and the US, the weakening of trade unionism and the labour movement, consumerism and the brand in individualism that goes with it, the ideological offensive against collectivism and the rise of neoliberalism, and the confusion on the left that followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The FN would certainly be authoritarian and whip up intolerance if it ever formed a government. How authoritarian I don’t know and I don’t think it does, either.
  • Support for the FN is a perverse revolt against the establishment. Obviously, the 13 November Paris attacks have boosted the FN, part of the polarisation that Isis wants to take place in Europe. But the FN’s steady growth in areas that were once strongholds of the left are a sign that an atomised working class believes that the mainstream parties have failed to defend their interests and, in fact, despise them. The Nord, which could fall to the FN, has seen its heavy industries destroyed over decades. Mining, steelmaking and other heavy industries have been destroyed, sometimes deliberately thanks to EU policies based on economic projections that failed to foresee a rise in world demand for steel that led to the Chinese buying, dismantling and importing entire abandoned steel plants. The main parties leaders live comfortable lives, insulated from the daily problems that assail most of the voters, they are frequently caught with their hands in the till or breaking the very laws they or their predecessors have passed and they and much of the media lecture the petit peuple on morality and “republican values”. FN voters are certainly conscious of the party’s racism and mean-mindedness but many, especially the new ones, see their ballot as a poke in the establishment’s collective eye.
  • The Socialist government has betrayed its voters. If any French party is centre-right, it is the Socialist Party, even if its voters and some of its members are left-wing. The first-ever public declaration of ministers’ wealth revealed that eight cabinet members were millionaires. And their policies have protected their and their fellow Croesuses’ interests. The government has stuck to the austerity line, combined with massive tax cuts for businesses, despite their manifest failure to reduce unemployment or revive the economy. The only time it has faced down the right has been over same-sex marriage, a measure that proved perfectly acceptable to Britain’s Conservative Party.  One of the main reasons for the FN’s increased share of the vote is that left-wing voters are completely demoralised and have stayed at home.

To read my article on Marine Le Pen’s efforts to clean up the Front National’s image on the RFI English website, click here.

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Peoples Party trades on Benazir martyrdom to harvest votes from poor in Pakistan’s 2008 election

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Despite her assassination, Benazir Bhutto was to play a major role in Pakistan’s 2008 rally. Her recorded voice and her picture meant she was the star at election rallies addressed by her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, a dodgy businessman converted into the guardian of the Bhutto martyr cult – a handy propaganda weapon for a party led by wealthy landowners but drawing most of its votes from the poor, some of whom call for socialist revolution. This is my account of a rally in the city of Faisalabad, written at the time.

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A young man brandishes a poster of Benazir and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at the rally in Faisalabad Photo: Tony Cross

Faisalabad 14.02.2008

The Benazir cult is at its height in Faisalabad, an industrial city in Punjab province where her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, has chosen to hold the last of his small number of election rallies.

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An exultant PPP supporter enters the rally at Faisalabad Photo: Tony Cross

The Benazir tape plays again and again. Her image is everywhere – on banners, on posters and on placards held by the faithful. Sometimes her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, gets into the picture, too. He was the party’s founder and its first martyr, when General Zia ul-Haq deposed him as prime minister and then had him hanged.

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Young PPP supporters Photo: Tony Cross

The martyrology appeals to Rayur Abbas, who, judging by his references to the battle of Kerbala and the death of Ali, is a Shia-Moslem and has the Shia admiration for sacrifice and solidarity with the oppressed.

“Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was the first prime minister in Pakistan who give the courage to the lowest persons of this country,” he says. “Before Zulfikar Ali Bhutto the lowest persons  could not talk with the rich persons, their owners where they do the work. He gave us the courage to speak against the rich persons which don’t give you the rights.”

The fact that the Bhuttos and many other PPP leaders are big landowners, often called “feudal” by their critics, doesn’t worry him.

“In the circumstances of Pakistan, the poor person cannot participate in the political system  because this is the old game of money … There is no doubt that the rich persons are leading us but the training of the Pakistan People’s Party is, if you cannot support the poor persons, you cannot live in our party.”

The Bhutto family is the only family in Pakistan to have sacrificed their lives for their convictions, he says.

“The others have not a single sacrifice – not a little scratch of the skin. But Benazir Bhutto – I salute her.”

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Female PPP activists organise the women’s seating at the Faisalabad rally Photo: Tony Cross

Under an increasingly hot sun, a crowd of thousands assembles. Many are clearly poor. There are representatives of the local tobacco-workers’ union which is supporting the PPP. Women file in through a separate entrance, where they are frisked by female cops and party workers. A large delegation of students chants “Benazir zindabad!” – “Long live Benazir!”

One of their leaders, Ali Hassan Bukhari, strikes a radical note, which seems inconsistent with the party’s record in government.

“We want a socialist revolution here in Pakistan,” he declares.” And every problem will be solved through revolution. No reformism, we don’t want any reformism. The need of the hour is a socialist revolution. That is the only solution, not only for the students but for all people of this country and, also, not only for this country but for the whole world.”

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Security at the entry to the rally Photo: Tony Cross

Zardari, whose nickname is “Mr Ten Per-cent” because of his reputation for corruption when his wife was prime minister, doesn’t seem to have this course of action in mind. Recently he told the newspapers that he was ready to form a coalition government of all parties, including Musharraf’s allies, the PML-Q.

Bukhari feels that is due to pressure from journalists.
“When our leader goes to a media person, his thinking is something else,” he says and adds that the real Zardari reveals himself when he speaks to the ordinary people.

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A young man dances as drummers warm up the crowd Photo: Tony Cross

After four hours of chanting and speeches, Zardari finally speaks.

He declares that democracy will be the best revenge for his wife’s death and hints that he may shift the balance of power away from Punjab, which is perceived as dominating the country’s politics and the military, declaring that equality between all the provinces is the best way to avoid animosity against Punjabis.

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The women’s section at the rally Photo: Tony Cross

The crowd pours into the street as soon as Zardari finishes. A car with two young men in it zig-zags through the traffic, playing a tape of Benazir at full volume with the windows down.

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The audience approves at the PPP Faisalabad rally Photo: Tony Cross

For audio reports on the PPP election campaign click here and on this rally click here.

For all my reports for RFI on the 2008 Pakistan election click here.

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Corbyn’s election sends British right wing back to the 1980s, can his supporters resist?

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Jeremy Corbyn’s victory has annoyed all the right people (pun intended). It’s back to the 1980s so far as abuse and distortion are concerned. So, how loony is the left? And can Corbyn’s supporters defend him against dirty tricks and hate campaigns?

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How can you vote against Bolshevism?” A French anti-communist poster from 1919, probably not featuring a vegetarian
  • Better the 1980s than the 1890s: George Osborne – and the Little-Sir-Echos in the media and the Labour Party – are worried – or happy, the Tories can’t decide on the line on this one – that Jeremy Corbyn will drag Labour back to the 1980s. This is a bit rich, coming from someone who is dragging Britain back to the levels of inequality of the 19th century, George. And, as I remember it, the worst thing about the 1980s was that your lot were in charge.
  • Corbyn’s candidature dragged the media back to the 1980s. The people who don’t want Labour to go back to the 1980s are busy dusting off the terms of abuse that graced the headlines of that very decade, “loony left” for example. But what was so loony about the left? As I remember it, the tabloids’ main targets were feminism, gay rights, anti-racism and talking to Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, most of which look pretty mainstream now. Another fine journalistic practise that is getting a lot of mileage at the moment – although, to be fair, it never exactly went out of fashion – is distorting what your subject says and stands for.
  • The people who said Corbyn could not be elected Labour leader now say he can’t win a general election. Have you no shame? You got it wrong. Time for a rethink, not another piece of pro-big business propaganda disguised as analysis. Hey, look! A Sky (!) poll shows he was the most popular of the candidates among the general public and “his left wing policies are also not necessarily as unpopular as many might believe” (they left out the “want to” there, for some reason).
  • Corbyn’s programme is not all that radical. Corbyn may be the most left-wing Labour leader ever, as Tariq Ali argues, but that’s mainly because of his foreign policy. On domestic policy it’s not exactly storming heaven. I was distracted from my work the other day by a lady from the Bloombergs agency explaining on one of those irritating BBC panel shows that advocating renationalisation of the railways would consign Labour to some circle or other of economists’ hell. But we did it before, Madam, and it wasn’t accompanied by red terror nor did it lead to economic collapse. How will it be paid for, she asked. Well, perhaps by savings on scrapping Trident – Oh sorry, it’s unrealistic not to spend billions on that – or by making Bloomberg subscribers and other top earners pay their fair whack in tax.  People’s quantitative easing seems consistent with what Thomas Piketty argues and everyone thinks he’s wonderful, except for the Financial Times on alternate days. Raising the minimum wage? The president of the United States wants that to happen in his country – but then he’s a Muslim socialist born in Kenya, so what does he know?
  • Corbyn owes much of his victory to social media but can social media defend him? Hoist by their own primaries petard, Labour’s right wing are already plotting to reverse the party’s left turn by any means necessary.  A key factor in mobilising for Corbyn was social media, whose echo-chamber effect allows us to consort with the like-minded, reinforcing our views/prejudices and giving us a feeling of power in the numbers, one of the functions of the revolutionary party, if I recall my Lenin. But the social media is also physically isolated, indulging his or her pleasure from home, the workplace or on public transport with headphones clamped to ears. Will the three-pounders or even many of the new party members be prepared to trudge along to monthly party branch meetings, be delegates to constituency parties, conferences etc so as to stop right-wing dirty tricks and ensure that the party’s policies align with those of its leader? Of course, I’m biased. I was expelled from Labour in the 80s. It was quite a relief, to be honest.
  • Corbynmania was in part a revolt against how democracy works but is there a viable alternative? Some 251,000 people, many of them never involved in politics before, rejected their betters’ advice and voted for Corbyn. Why? Many were young people feeling the effects of austerity and disillusioned with post-2008 capitalism. Many responded to a glimmer of integrity in the sewer of modern politics. And many were reacting against the cynical consumerist strategies that were the Blairites’ only principles but are to some extent inherent to parliamentary democracy, which is not government by the people, for the people but the people choosing who will govern them as a globalised capitalism decides the most important aspects of their lives.  Syriza had a mandate to change this but failed.  Admittedly, there are only 11 million Greeks but do 64 million Brits – or that proportion who want a change – have the power or the structures to impose it?
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Corbynmania and the Sanders surge are a rejection of consumer politics

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Everyone’s surprised by the support garnered by Jeremy Corbin and Bernie Sanders, not least their most ardent supporters. The British Labour Party may soon have a leader who can be described as left-wing without inverted commas. Americans may be invited to vote for someone who says he’s a socialist and could even win. Can this possible be true? And, as importantly, what does it mean?

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“Keep voting, I’ll do the rest” De Gaulle tells France in this poster from May 68

The unpredictable is the only safe prediction in today’s political world, as parties that were solid melt into air and others that scarcely registered on the pollsters’ radar no so long ago win control of towns, cities, a country even.

Clearly, the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and the mainstream parties’ responses – generosity to the banks and billionaires, austerity for those without their clout – have discredited capitalism, or at least its most brutal manifestations, in the eyes of many.

As Bernard Porter points out, to the generation that has grown up since the Cold War and is experiencing the Thatcher/Reagan legacy, Corbyn is not a dinosaur but a revelation.

Austerity has discredited its enforcers, including the careerist leaders of Europe’s formerly social-democratic parties, leading to an unexpected revival of the left in Greece, Scotland and Spain.

Of course, it’s also given a boost to the Trumps, Le Pens and Farages but that, too, is a symptom of the collapse in the authority of established parties and ideologies.

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“I participate, you participate, he participates, we participate, they profit” Atelier populaire, May 68

But I think there is another, connected reason for the explosion of support for these two men and other political outsiders.

Isn’t it also a symptom of the rejection of the market approach to politics? Of spin doctors telling parties not to present policies they believe in to voters but pitch offers to that part of the electorate that is not inclined to vote for them – the “Them’s me principles but, if you don’t like ‘em, I’ll change ‘em” approach to democracy.

The efforts of Corbyn’s opponents to explain how unelectable he is, as he packs in huge crowds, races ahead of them in the leadership election stakes and then proves to be the most popular candidate among many non-Labour voters, have been an invaluable contribution to the great British comic tradition, as have their efforts to get rid of thousands of the wrong kind of voter.  If we don’t like the voters, we can change them, as well.

Corbyn’s and Sanders’s support is evidence of a widespread desire for personal integrity in politics, a quality that is notable by its absence in most parliaments these days.

But, judging by reports of party meetings and public rallies, there’s also a demand for political honesty.

The strategic masterminds told party activists and bedrock supporters that they must keep their political libidos under control for fear of frightening the floating voter. In Britain that got them the Iraq War, economic crisis and two electoral defeats, not to mention the personal enrichment of prime ministers and their Svengalis.

So, many people want to vote for what they’d really like to see happen this time round. And it looks as if that could be a more realistic strategy in attracting many voters – including some of those tempted by Ukip or even Trump – than trying to sell a party as if it were something that gets rid of unpleasant stains.

Hannah Arendt apparently argued that electoral politics transforms the political relationship into that of seller to buyer, a point taken up by the PKK and the PYD in their turn to alternative forms of participation and organisation.  Voters become consumers, passive individuals in an increasingly atomised society, delegating decision-making to a political caste that can claim their consent because they have participated in the electoral process.

We are thus coopted into our own political and economic exploitation, all the more so today when the politicians then declare themselves powerless in the face of the market on the most important questions that affect our lives. Russell Brand may not be as superficial as Jeremy Paxman would have us believe.

This goes some way to explain the enthusiasm for direct election of presidents, mayors etc that has spread outwards from the US, the Afghans having it imposed on them as an indispensable element of democracy by a coalition of countries many of whom didn’t practise it themselves (the UK’s Jack Straw congratulated them on at last electing their head of state – was he being subtly subversive or just not thinking what he was saying?).

The more representatives are elected, and the more personalised those elections are, the more consumer choice has been exercised and the more passive the electors should be once their ballots have been cast.

Hence the primaries – invented in the US, of course, and now exported to Europe (the mainstream French parties now have primaries, too, but, so far, they’ve delivered the required results, so no hooha about who’s voted in them).

Hilariously, in Britain a procedure that was designed to dilute the power of party activists in a mass of passive voters has become mobilised thousands to express disgust with austerity, careerism and top-down politics.

With added irony, the rise of social media, which in a sense add to the atomisation of society – the individual sits isolated in front of the screen and is bombarded with what algorithms decide is good for him or her – have fuelled the process, creating networks that establish a new form of the collective.

If Corbyn or Sanders wins, what happens next?

In Britain the establishment in its various manifestations has already shown its intention to override the democratic process by any means necessary.

I suspect that is when the weakness of social media-driven enthusiasm will become apparent. Will the thousands who have voted have the stamina or power to resist a long-term campaign of sabotage and vilification by professionals whose careers are intimately linked to the status quo?

In this respect, the Greek experience is not encouraging, so far at least.

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