Northern Lebanon

I had a very interesting day yesterday. I'm visiting Lebanon with my good friend Anand, who is getting started as a freelance journalist. We met up with Bassem, a Lebanese friend of mine who is now working on humanitarian aid for people displaced from the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp by the fighting there over the last few months.

Seen from abroad, the Nahr el-Bared crisis has an almost comic quality. It's now pretty clear that Fateh al-Islam (FI) was set up with money from people close to the pro-western Lebanese government (Seymour Hersh reported this months before the fighting broke out, and recently a prominent member of Lebanon's most important political family admitted to funding to a similar group, Jund ash-Sham). The most plausible story is that these groups were built up in the hopes that they would attack Hezbullah and provoke them into doing something stupid, but when FI's backers realized they were dealing with a bunch of loose cannons (imagine that!) they cut off their money, and FI tried to take it by force. The Lebanese army has taken quite a beating (I just read that near the beginning of the fighting a group of Lebanese soldiers was ambushed and had to be rescued by armed civilians) in spite of a massive firepower superiority which they haven't been shy about using.

There is a sinister side to this, though. The frame for mainstream discussion here is the war on terror and the heroic army standing together in spite of adversity to defeat another foreign threat, but a few things creep through.

One thing which is entirely unsurprising but almost unremarked on is the army's hostility towards Nahr el-Bared and its' inhabitants, not just FI. Some of this comes through in a video Bassem showed me, recently posted on YouTube, of a group of Lebanese soldiers relaxing in the rubble (by the way, if you want to help improve the sound, transcribe it, or translate it into english please let me know). There are a lot of stories around of the army mistreating civilians while they were trying to get out of the camp.

No doubt part of this is a result of the xenophobic climate encouraged by the government here (which has also led to attacks on Syrian migrant workers), but there are signs that there is more to it than just bullying. Yesterday the Daily Star ran an article which talked about government's plans to make the rebuilt Nahr el-Bared the first Palestinian camp in Lebanon under complete Lebanese control, beginning the process of stripping the Palestinians of the last compensation they have for their pariah status. To drive the point home one frequently sees images (I particularly noticed posters put up along Lebanon's main highway by the municipality of Jounieh) showing soldiers raising the Lebanese flag over the conquered rubble of the camp.

Unfortunately virtually all political forces here are going along with the program. The PLO seems more concerned with diplomatic support for the coup in the West Bank than the future of the Palestinians in Lebanon; Hezbollah is keeping quiet, as it has been on most other issues recently; the Lebanese Communist Party sees this as part of Lebanon's still unfinished bourgeois revolution and supports the Army reflexively as a force for national unity, as do the soft left and some others; I hear that even some autonomists have been swept along. The only organized exception I can attest to personally is TYMAT, a small group informally associated with the International Socialist Tendency, although I have heard of others.

We drove through Jounieh and the other beach towns, past Tripoli and Nahr el-Bared -- you can see it from the highway, a pile of concrete rubble with a Lebanese flag stuck on top and surrounded by soldiers. We went back to Baddawi for several hours. Although Baddawi is not as densely built up as Shatila, which I visited a couple of years ago, with the extra 30,000 people who have come over from Nahr el-Bared it is quite crowded, on top of being incredibly hot and humid (refugee camps are seldom set up in the locations most blessed by nature). We spent a few hours in the camp; Anand set up some meetings while I sat around and talked to the kids loitering around the UNRWA school.

After a while Ashraf, who runs a computer store and community center in the camp, invited some aid workers and us to an early dinner "someplace cooler". This turned out to be a 40 minute drive away on the side of a mountain, which seemed to be floating in the layer of haze covering Lebanon's coastal plain and all of the commotion down there. As when I was in Lebanon last summer, I'm surprised by how close you can be to such momentous events and still feel like they are happening in another world.

Nox

The odd magazine I mentioned in my last post is called Nox; they have a website, but I couldn't get through to it.

Arrival in Beirut

I've now had a day and a half in Beirut, and although it somwtimes feels like the air is trying to claw my eyes out, the weather is everything summer in the middle east should be, and there are even more traffic barriers and jumpy young guys with M-16s than ever, it still feels comfortable.

So far I'm staying in what could charitably be called a flophouse. It looks like it hasn't been painted in at least a decade, and I am sleeping in what would seem to be a balcony which has been converted into a room by hanging a tarp over it. Nonetheless, it's reasonably clean, it's a lot more quiet and private than the hostel I was at in Istanbul, and for $8 a night for a place two blocks from the waterfront it's hard to complain too much. I've arranged for a studio apartment starting from tomorrow, which I'll be sharing with my friend Anand who will be coming here starting tomorrow to spend a month or so journalizing.

Nothing terribly exciting. I met up last night with my friend M (who is as big a curmudgeon as ever) and today with Ghassan from TYMAT.

While I was wandering around today I found a very odd Jordanian magazine, the name of which escapes me; it's sort of a glossy men's magazine written by intellectual, mostly-Arab lefties, with a regular column by George Galloway two pages after a review of the newest Porsche. The writing leaves something to be desired (partly because there is not very much of it -- 3/4 of the space in the features is taken up by pictures) but it's interesting nonetheless: I picked it up for a piece on how Hamas is operating a police force in the Gaza Strip.

Turkey follow up

Judging from the press reports the elections came out pretty well here. The AK Party got a resounding majority, a huge slap in the face for the generals who are still trying to run the country.

The left-Kurdish alliance has done pretty well. If the projections are right the DTP, the Kurdish party, has enough members of parliament to set up a formal parliamentary group. The AK Party just short of the 2/3 majority it needs to elect a new president, and the DTP probably has enough seats to make the difference, hopefully putting them in a position to get some concessions.

One of the Left candidates seems to have been elected too -- Mehmet Ufuk Uras, the chairmain of the Freedom and Solidarity Party (ODP). This is very important for the future of the alliance I talked about last time -- particularly since the ODP, the second most important participant after the DTP, was deeply divided about participating. Uras now has something to show for it, and one hopes that will help things along in the future.

Istanbul

I'm now in Istanbul, after a somewhat eventful trip involving an unexpected extra night in Rome and arriving in Turkey without my luggage. I've been doing some touristing (pictures to follow), and I just had the unexpectedly non-sucky experience of doing a paper sale in a language where I don't speak more than 6 words (I managed to sell about 10 papers, which I think is better than I ever did in the states).

I've been hanging out with Antikapitalist, the IS Tendency group in Turkey. They managed to broker an electoral arrangement between a bunch of Left parties (in particular ÖDP, EMEP, and SDP, for those keeping track) and the main Kurdish party (currently called DTP, formerly DEHAP) which has gotten a huge level of involvement: 15,000 people signed the statement Antikapitalist started things with, and there are nearly 100 campaign offices in the Asian side of Istanbul alone, mostly set up by groups that sprang up from nowhere. The election is tomorrow; it seems pretty much guaranteed that a lot of the Kurdish candidates will get elected, and we'll see about the others. In any case it is already a big development, and it's cool to be able to say that I had a little tiny part in it.

Unfortunately a neofascist party, the MHP, is almost certain to make a big breakthrough as well. Their street wing, the Grey Wolves, has recently shifted from sending groups of 50-100 people to start rumbles with campus leftists to sending groups of 5-10 people to ambush individduals on their way to/from school, which is much harder to counter and much less likely to get into the newspapers -- the latter is particularly important right now since they are trying to turn "respectable".

Some of the folks I was talking to were very worried about the situation after the elections: the elections were moved up by several months as a result of the army's attempts a little while ago to break the back of the ruling AK Party, but AK looks set to get an even higher proportion of the votes than in the last election, which raises the possibility that the army and the nationalist parties will try something more aggressive.

I've finally had the roots of the political situation here properly explained to me. It seems like Turkey is one of a few places in the world today where the different political parties are genuinely based on different economic strata of the ruling class. The Kemalists (CHP) are tied up with the army -- which is also owns the third biggest holding company in Turkey -- and other sections of the state, and along with that the big banks, the local affiliates of multinationals, and various hangers on. The Islamists (mainly AK Party) get their support from small manufacturing concerns as well as more "traditional" sectors. This isn't compradors vs "patriotic" capitalists: the small manufacturers are very export-oriented, hence AK Party's fixation on joining the EU (as well as friendliness towards Iran and Russia), but there is a difference. The Kemalists meanwhile use 'secularism' and ethnic chauvinism, as well as outright military force, to keep a near-monopoly on state support and patronage.

This depends a lot on US support, including US help through international institutions which lets Turkey sustain (so far) a ridiculously overvalued currency and a massive trade deficit, both mostly subsidizing the lifestyles of a few people (Turkish CEOs are apparently the 5th best paid in the world). At the same time the Turkish military is still not very comfortable within its present borders -- witness the constant interventions into Iraqi Kurdistan, which many seem to want to ramp up even further.

Anyhow. I'm still waiting for my luggage (32 hours and counting), and about ready to fall asleep, so I won't try for an elegant conclusion. Instead see if you can figure out what's wrong with this picture, taken of a market stall in the middle of Istanbul. First to post the correct answer gets a vague sense of satisfaction, at least if you're as easily amused as I am:

Naples and Pompeii

I'm now in Istanbul, without my luggage. A little tired, so I'm going to be lazy and post some pictures again.


A Metro station in Naples, which has the most elaborately aesthetic public transportation system I've ever seen.

Viala Antonio Gramsci.

Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the background.

Sunset in Naples.
Barricades on the Via Santa Brigata in Naples in 1848.
Via Santa Brigata.
The old church next to my hostel.
A peculiar architectural detail of same.
The baths in Pompeii.

Rome

So by the time I started writing my last two posts I was already in Rome, where I spent a day regrouping and a day touristing (I'm now in Naples). I just had a nice big glass of wine andI'm feeling lazy, so I'm just going to post a bunch of pictures.


This, in case you didn't guess, is a neofascist poster, of which there were quite a few in Rome. There have recently been several attacks by organized Fascist gangs on various events around there.
In the Piazza del Popolo.
Yes, that does say what you think it does. The present government in Italy is realigning into to parties, one of which is set to be called the Partito Democratica.

The Tiber.

The Roman Forum. 2,500 years of political history...

What I learned in London

I talked at great length in my last post about what I found so impressive about Marxism, and I had occasion a few `times to mention that I thought it helped to clarify what I had been thinking about the situation in the United States. I want to try to clarify that a bit now.

I came into politics starting with the sense that it was necessary to fundamentally transform the existing social order, and so I looked for a group that embodied some kind of overarching worldview and political project, and I found the ISO. I only got involved in "movement" activity afterwards. A lot of the people who make up the organized left in the US have a similar story, perhaps with a detour or two along the way.

There are only ever going to be so many people like that (and we tend to be a peculiar sort in some ways). One of the most exciting developments of the last few years is that there is a wave of people (most visible in the antiwar movement but also popping up elsewhere) who seem to be headed towards the same place from the opposite direction. If my own experiences and those of the people I know are anything to go by, there are thousands of people out there who have seen some of the crying injustices in the world around them and are trying to do something about them; who then see that what they are fighting against is one of a multitude of problems and that there are many unexpected pitfalls in overcoming it; and who are trying to come up with a way of understanding all this and a strategy to overcome it.

The role that radical (anarchist, socialist, communist, or what have you) political organizations generally aspire to is to give these people what they want, to give them a political home. Unfortunately none seem to be able to. Why is that?

As someone said, all happy families are alike in their happiness, but all unhappy families are unique in their misery. The american left has a myriad of shortcomings: some strands (most anarchists, or Democratic Party fringe groups like DSA, PDA, and Democracy for America) simply have little to offer in the way of ideas; others (most Maoists, Workers' World, PSL, the Communist Party, the SWP, and at least a dozen Trotskyist grouplets) have only ideas which are so detached from reality as to be worse than useless. Solidarity and the Socialist, Labor, and Green parties (together with their various factions) are so ideologically scattered and organizationally weak that in spite of the determination and acumen of many of the people who owe allegiance to one or another their organizational existence is almost irrelevant. The ISO, for me the most complicated case, is at the end of the day so organizationally and intellectually rigid that in spite of itself it is frequently reduced to the status of an alien body which has thrust itself into the various movements in which it projects itself. This has been the state of the American left for longer than I've been alive, and there are many who see it as an inevitable, natural part of the post-modern, post-industrial, post-whatever condition.

I don't think so, and this last week has given me a whole lot more confidence about that. The first point that was really driven home to me is that although things may be particularly bad in this respect in the US, the socialist movements in much if not most of the world (almost the entire developed world and a sizable portion of the rest) have been facing similar problems, but over the last 10 years or so have started to overcome them. This is actually the first key to overcoming the deadlock we face in the US -- if it can be done elsewhere, than that should give people a lot more hope that it can be done here.

The second thing we can get is an understanding of what it actually means to get beyond the current state of affairs. That means building structures that share a broad common understanding of the problems we face (war, neoliberalism, etc, to use the common shorthand) and a set of tactics to begin to fight against them. The latter vary from place to place; in Western Europe, the organizations in question are mostly new political parties of the radical left, which is to say that although their most important role is in social movements, trade unions, community organizations, and so on they often cohere around electoral activities of a kind which might be impractical in the US for some time to come.

This brings me to a rough point: even in, say, England there is a political culture so dramatically different from the US that it would be silly to try and directly copy the experience of RESPECT or some other group even if their success did come from some sort of written recipe and not a series of developments in reaction to a succession of complicated situations. I do think, however, that when a group of people comes together and makes a commitment to applying this project to the reality we find ourselves in we can draw any number of lessons from the details as well as the big picture of what our comrades in other countries are doing.

London - part 1

I've had a very exciting week-and-a-bit, so I've fallen a bit behind on writing anything here. London dramatically exceeded my expectations, and my head is still spinning from some of the discussions I had and the things I've seen and heard, but I'm going to try to get a little of it written down.

As I've mentioned before the main reason I went to London was to attend the Socialist Workers' Party (UK)'s Marxism 2007. I had some idea what to expect from listening to recordings from years past and from associated literature from the SWP and the International Socialist Tendency (which have been a staple part of my political diet for many years), but I think I'd picked so much negativity from various sources that I didn't really expect the event to be quite as fantastic as it was.

What I did expect was a lot of talks which were quite interesting in their own right. In particular I was happy to see a number of very good talks on Africa (including one on imperialism in Africa by Charlie Kimber and one on Nkrumah's political legacy by Mani Tanoh of the Ghanaian International Socialists). It seems (and I think this is increasingly accepted) that Africa is likely to keep getting more important over the next few years both as a focus of inter-imperialist rivalries and as a source of resistance, and besides learning more it was particularly heartening to hear about some of the exciting developments in the workers' movements in various countries.

This is not to say that there weren't a few disappointments in the talks and discussions, though the SWP was mostly not at fault. I suspect that the talk by Slawoj Žižek was a bit similar from the comments I heard about it afterward, and also because he's always a bit like that.The worst talk I attended was by the USFI's Michael Löwy on Walter Benjamin. Besides his talk being rather dull, Löwy's main point seemed to be importance of revolutionaries encouraging a general sense of impending disaster, which seems to me to be exactly the wrong lesson from the time Benjamin was living in. Just like the main result of these politics in the '30s was the popular front, the main result today (at least in the US) seems to a desperate attachment to liberalism and reformism. The various SWP cadres in the audience were very complimentary, perhaps out of politeness, but who knows?

This is of course a problem I'm very familiar with, and another one was a hair-trigger response to anything smacking of islamophobia. I should say that I absolutely agree that this is one of the biggest problems facing antiwar movements and the left generally, and I'm very glad that the SWP is pushing hard on this front. However when admittedly reactionary ideas like these are so widespread even among people who are very actively involved in the movement, it's important to differentiate between people who are spreading and taking advantage of these ideas for nefarious ends and honest leftists who are simply being misled. As important as it is to denounce the former, it's even more important to give a positive lead to the latter. One of the speakers at this meeting was Ghassan Makarem, who has an excellent short piece on the same theme here.A good example was in a meeting (introduced by two excellent talks) on the LGBT movement in the middle east where a young Gay British activist from the Stop the War Coalition said, more or less, that no matter what he'd rather live in the UK where he 'has rights' than in the middle east where he 'wouldn't'. Of course that's based on an oversimplification of the situation in both Britain and the Middle East (as the speakers had done a good job explaining), but besides pointing this out politely the best thing to do is to explain that that attitude is a big problem for people who are trying to improve the situation in both regions. Unfortunately it seems to me that the comrades who tried to reply to him didn't do that very well, and it seems like part of the problem could have been an assumption that he was not just honestly confused/mistaken/misinformed. All else aside, I think a too-aggressive response to such a situation gives an impression of a lack of real confidence in the ideas being put out.

I should say, of course, that these problems are nowhere as severe as what I'm used to. I may even be exaggerating because of having been a bit oversensitized by me previous experience. I also hope I'm not giving anyone the impression that all of the discussions had one or another of these problems. It was refreshing, for example, to see Billy Hayes of the CWU (postal workers' union) speak in one session, and then hear John Rees in the next session call him out for opposing united strike action with other public sector unions.

Although I was generally very impressed with the insights the folks I was talking to had about the state of the US left, it did seem to me that except for possibly Molyneux all of the people I was talking to had a very distorted understanding of the ISO, Left Turn, and the processes that left the IST without an organized presence in the US.So far this is more or less what I expected. What really surprised me was getting an impression of the work the SWP in Britain and its sister groups in other countries (especially Germany) are doing, which along with some conversations I had with Chris Nineham (also more briefly with John Molyneux, Alex Callinicos, Lindsey German, and John Rees) and with comrades from the Canadian IS really helped me figure out some of the things that have been bouncing around in my head about the American left. This is something I'll be coming back to very soon, along with the results of some conversations I had with some other americans who came to the conference.

I, probably like a lot of socialists in the US, had a totally distorted picture of what the SWP is doing, particularly in the RESPECT coalition. The impression you get by reading the reports easily available on the internet is basically of a shabby attention-grabbing front group, which only gets votes by pandering to muslim communalism. To be sure some of the things George Galloway has done have been pretty unhelpful and it does seem to be true that (to a small extent) Muslim RESPECT candidates get higher votes than non-Muslim ones when both run in the same areas (if you want to go through the raw numbers, you can find some here). It may be that there have been tensions within RESPECT between the SWP and some more conservative elements in the coalition, as some have claimed.

The overall impression I got, though, is very different. Firstly, even at an SWP event you can see that the SWP is more than just SWP + Muslims + George Galloway. I think that with the SWP taking the lead RESPECT has been shifting form a two-issue group (war and islamophobia) to a more general militant antineoliberal formation. They have made a very serious turn in the last year or two towards building a connection to trade union militants (through the Organizing for Fighting Unions initiative, which has already attracted an imitation by the English CWI section) and fights against privatization of housing and medical services. This is going to be a long struggle, but in last year's local elections RESPECT was able to begin to go beyond what the Socialist Alliance was able to achieve both in non-Muslim immigrant communities and also in almost all-white areas in the British equivalent of the Rust Belt.

It's important not to see this as a 180º turn. My impression of the typical RESPECT local councilor is a socialist, leftist, or community activist (very often a young woman, it should be noted) who is also either a practicing Muslim or from a Muslim background; a good example was a councilor from Tower Hamlets, an older Bangladeshi woman, who made a comment at a meeting on the shape of the working class to the effect of "Insh'Allah (God willing), the working class around the world will unite to fight for justice". Even if a lot of these people got involved around civil rights issues or the war, it's not a big stretch for them or the people who voted for them to talk about public housing, pay cuts, etc.

The point is that RESPECT is being built up as an organization which is really part of the movements against war and neoliberalism in Britain, and gives a place to develop an overall set of political ideas and strategies. In more elevated terms, RESPECT is taking a first step out of what Stanley Aronowitz (in an otherwise largely incomprehensible book) calls "the Postmodern Left": the combination of a collection of single-issue movements with political organizations which oscillate between being loose collections of activists or which work inside the movements without really being part of them. It seems like there is a strong chance that Die Linke in Germany is headed in this direction from a very different starting point, and from what I have heard the LCR in France has just recently decided to move in a similar direction, and there is also reason to be hopeful about P-SoL in Brazil, although I think they have more problems than many people realize.

A digression but hardly an unimportant one: I have been led to understand that Rifondazione Comunista in Italy has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The sizable Trotskyist minority, mainly organized in AMR-Progetto Comunista and Sinsitra Critica, will probably have entirely left the party very soon, and the leadership under Bertinotti is steering clear of mass mobilizations and the anti-war movement and planning on a merger with the other post-Stalinist parties in Italy.This is not the first time something like this has happened, even recently. Rifondazione Comunista in Italy and the PT in Brazil certainly looked like this at one point but were lured away by the supposed virtues of "respectability" and being thought worthy to govern or be part of a coalition government. The Scottish Socialist Party seemed also to have substantial prospects, but then fall apart because of (depending on who you listen to) either personality conflicts, a fear of being part of movements it didn't control, or being blindsided by left-leaning Scottish nationalism.

What seems to set the IST apart in all this is a broad and deep historical understanding, which manages to integrate most of the experience of the socialist movement in the 20th century, and at least makes it possible to understand the process that is going on in these "new left parties" and the pitfalls in them. This doesn't mean that the efforts they are involved in are fated to be successful, but it does give them a fighting chance of coming out having accomplished something, and ready to take on bigger challenges in the future.

As I've said I think there is a lot in all this to learn from in the US; but that's something I'll have to come back to later.

Atlanta to London

I started writing this on the Eurostar from Brussels, and I'm finishing it up the next afternoon at Marxism 2007 in London.

The US Social Forum was enormous, and as usual there is the feeling of about a dozen conferences going on in the same place and overlapping only slightly. I mostly went to talks on socialism and the labor movement. Probably the most interesting one (which I'm still chewing one a little) was the one I already mentioned about minority (or "pre-majority") unionism. This is basically a matter of figuring out what to do when there is an organization of workers which is not legally recognized as a union nor likely to be in the immediate future.

I am of course one of those who believe that the labor movement is what workers get together and do rather than the organizations the government chooses to recognize, and who think that the biggest problem with said movement is how few of the people in it realize that. I myself, although I'd been told it before, rally realized how true this was when I found myself a member of a union with a solid institutional position but huge gaping holes in its actual functioning, which is a bit depressing. It's very encouraging to see people come into it from the other side.

Although it was more diffuse, spread out over several other workshops, I was also very pleased to see that Solidarity and Labor Notes seem to take the matter similarly seriously. One or the other hosted a big proportion of the workshops I attended, and for the most part I liked what I heard a great deal. I was particularly glad to see that they at least seem to be thinking about some of the things that have been on my mind about how labor bureaucrats often use students and student groups.

I see that about half of the folks quoted in Socialist Worker's article on the forum were members of the ISO delegation, although of course none are named as such. But enough of that.I also had some less innocent fun contemplating the efforts of various groups which were present. I've already mentioned the ISO, whose tiny presence I found rather striking. The SWP (who thought Social Forums were a middle-class waste of time until there was one in Venezuela) had about half-a-dozen tables of the usual sort, and the RCP now seems to have enough Chairman Bob merchandise to leave everything else at home.

I had a related experience at a session on revolutionary organizing in the 21st century or something of that sort. This was an entirely stultifying experience for the 90 minutes or so I managed to get myself to stick around, which consisted of 40 minutes of corporate-training-style ersatz friendliness courtesy of Bring The Ruckus, an "anti-authoritarian cadre organization" descended from Love'n'Rage followed by a variety of Maoist soundbites from BTR, FRSO, and various study groups, with a few innocuous words from a Solidarity member. It was packed (at least at the beginning) and went on for another 3 hours so after my eyes glazed over.

Unfortunately I had to leave before the forum was over, so I missed a few interesting-looking workshops, particularly one to do with GI outreach which I'm hoping to hear about from a friend.

---

Brussels, as usual, was quiet but very pleasant. It was a bit less grungy than I remembered, I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not. London should be more exciting, again I'm not sure whether that's good or not. The trip over to London was quite nice, and I'm staying with two photography students in Peckham.

Marxism is good so far. I'll write more about the workshops later, but I should mention that I just had a fairly frustrating conversation with an SWP member who seemed to be trying to convince me that the ISO had missed out on the "anticapitalist movement", as though he knew what was going on their better than I did just because he'd read a couple of documents.

Atlanta

I'm now in Atlanta, in the middle of the second day of the US Social Forum, and on the first leg of a trip which will also include Marxism 2007 in London and some time in Beirut around the end of July and the beginning of August.

So far things are looking pretty good here at the the Social Forum. A very large portion of the attendees seem to be scruffy-looking college types such as myself, but there are also a number of big delegations from workers' centers in the south and southwest, and although each is accompanied by a cluster of hangers-on that still adds up to a lot of working folks, in addition to Jobs with Justice and a few decent union delegations.

There are some surprising non-appearances, which bizarrely left Solidarity (with 3 or 4 people and a leaflet) competing with Workers' World for Most Visible Socialist Group at the opening march.

The ISO presence is quite pathetic. There seem to be only 6-8 members here, and they are wierdly hesitant about who they are. They have a big Haymarket Books table (with a pile of copies of Blue Grit), they are leafletting for meetings as CERSCThe two CERSC panels have five ISO members out of eight speakers, but only one is vaguely identified as such., and even Ashley Smith (who has been a full-time ISO organizer for I don't know how long) introduces himself as being on the editorial board of the ISR. It almost seems as though the ISO is trying to copy Freedom Road.

Hopefully that will be the last thing I'll have to say on that topic. I went to a fascinating workshop this morning on minority unionism, something I hope I'll have a chance to come back to later.

"We're seeing the rebirth of liberalism, and that's a great thing"

So said Sharon Smith, national organizer of the ISO, commenting on a speech by Laura Flanders. This was one of a number of strange notes struck during Socialism 2007, the ISO's annual public conference, which Smith and others on the ISO's Steering Committee used to roll out their new "agree to disagree" perspective.

The gist of the new line is that, since the new congress was sworn in this year, enormous numbers of democrats have started down a road of disappointments that will eventually make them available as recruits to the revolutionary socialist movement, but only - and this is the key - if there is a 'revolutionary' organization out there that "goes through the experience with them" (a phrase I have been hearing quite frequently from the ISO of late) and doesn't alienate them by carping too much (hence "agree to disagree").

There is a lot here that is reasonable, true, and not particularly novel. It's the United Front, or at least the ISO's traditional take on it: we want to stop the war, rank and file democrats (mostly) want to stop the war, the leaders of the Democratic Party don't; so we work with some democrats to try to do something about the war, and show (as well as tell) them that we're on their side and the politicians aren't.

The thing is, this is more or less how the ISO has operated since time immemorial. This seems to have confused at least a few comrades, who are scratching their heads and trying to figure out whether anything new is actually going on. This is exacerbated by some of the problems with the way the ISO operates, which I've talked about before. This new perspective is being sprung on the organization in the middle of the year: on paper the convention (usually held in January) is supposed to discuss and decide on where the organization is going, but apparently it didn't occur to anybody six months ago that this might happen, and it's too urgent to wait another six months. In principle the ISO's national committee is supposed to deal with this sort of situation, but about two years ago it shifted from a representative body that met in person in Chicago to a more loss appointed body that only meets via conference call. The result is much more of an announcement of a new policy than a discussion. This is not to say that the old national committee would have actually criticized the proposal like this, but if there had been a discussion in the end people might actually have ended up understanding the decision added been made.

That said, there is something new here although I don't think it's nearly as deep as Sharon et. al. seem to believe.

One superficial (and still uncertain) part is that it's unlikely that the ISO will support any third party candidates in 2008. In a way this is not such a bad thing; I have thought for while that most of what the ISO has done in green campaigns, with the partial exception of Nader 2000, has been pointless (particularly in California in 2006) and that some kind of reassessment is needed (ditto). But it seems to me that by claiming that we're in some sort of new period the ISO is just going to short circuit any kind of serious thinking about what they have and haven't accomplished, and probably make a lot of unnecessary mistakes the next time around.

Another aspect is that it may mean a different tack in talking to people. To be sure socially awkward comrades such like myself have been known to pursue arguments in a less than endearing way, but this is again nothing to do with any new political climate.

The important part is a bit more subtle. It's about this: what does it mean to "go through the experience" with ordinary democrats? In what I heard at the conference, as well as the conversations I've had with ISO members recently, there seem to be two main elements: occupying congressmembers' offices, and downplaying criticism of Democrats qua Democrats.

The first part of the idea is that flashy actions pushing democratic politicians will attract disaffected democrats (not only them, but it should have a particular appeal for them); and in the course of it they will "learn through struggle" that democratic politicians aren't on their side. Then who would they turn to except the amiable Marxists who have just "gone through the experience" with them?

Hence the second part. There was a great deal of making nice at the conference. I began this post with some words spoken in response to a talk by Laura Flanders, an Air America personality and an outspoken advocate of, as the subtitle of her book puts it, "True Democrats Tak[ing] Back Politics". Judging from that talk (the source of virtually all I know about her) Flanders is a sincere and dedicated leftist who has worked very hard to find a lot of like-minded people all around the country. She also has some very good things to say, for example about regional prejudice of the What's the Matter with Kansas? variety. In other words, she's certainly someone it makes sense for radicals to be in a dialog with, and at previous iterations of Socialism the response to her talk would probably have been fifteen people saying the same thing (Democratic Party = capitalists = bad) in slightly different ways; I've seen that sort of response even to people with much more innocuous things to say. Instead we had fifteen people, selected by SharonThe usual practice in ISO events of more than about 30 people is to use a 'speaker slip' system; attendees write their name and a summary of their intended remarks on a slip of paper, and the chair selects and calls on them.

At this year's Socialism most of the meetings had a Steering Committee member, regional organizer, or similar person vetting the slips., fawning over her; if I remember correctly, Sharon called Flanders an "inspiration to all women".

The problem with this new style is that it's not any more of a dialog than the old one, and I think that there is an underlying problem: the ISO has nothing of much interest to say, and "agreeing to disagree" won't help that. This is a difference from the ISO's experience in the early 90s, which I suspect is where the germ of the idea came from. This was the most important period of growth and recruitment in the ISO's short history, the time when it became what it is today. Among the key events which brought in the people who are now most of the organization's mid- and high-level cadres were Clinton's election and the profound disappointments of his first year in office. The difference is that the ISO had a great many distinctive and important things to say: about the USSR (still a very timely subject in 1993), about 'humanitarian' imperialism, and about the democrats; and from what I've heard from the people who joined the ISO then, it was no more shy about the last point than anything else.

This matters: if you voted for a democrat hoping that they'd get real about stopping the war, if you sat in in their office and they still hemmed and hawed, you could draw any number of conclusions; supposedly there was no commitment to withdraw so that the funding bill wouldn't be vetoed, so maybe that would be different with a Democratic president, even if they weren't particularly enthusiastic about it. Maybe the answer, as Laura Flanders seems to think, is basically to get more people like you in office. Even if you get along well with some Marxists you met at the sit-in, they don't seem to have much of an alternative, or maybe they don't seem to mind. Maybe you'll still do a few things with them while you're campaigning for Obama, Kucinich, or whoever, or maybe not.

Of course it's not enough to tell people they're wrong, and this made the way the ISO used to do things rather difficult. But it could be the beginning of something else: the antiwar movement could do great things in the next few years, but only if people who aren't satisfied with how it's gone so far get organized and come up with a plan, and start showing people that even though it will take a lot of hard work and preparation we do have a way to end the war. The ISO is perfectly right about the basics for it -- a well-integrated, democratic organization; political clarity; and an appeal to workers and soldiers. The problem is that they don't seem to take it seriously enough to develop those ideas into something viable and compelling, and instead run around in the hope that if they're in the right place at the right time people will fall into their lap.

What Infoshop doesn't get about the ISO (and what the ISO doesn't get about them)

I was having a conversation today about the decision to hold the next national Campus Antiwar Network conference in Madison, and of course the subject of whether the decision had been made ahead of time to hold it at Madison, with a strong ISO presence, rather that Rutgers, which since I left has not a single ISO member. This got me thinking that I've had plenty of time to reflect on the ISO, and that I ought to put some of my thoughts down and try to correct some misconceptions.

Most of the ISOologists out there tend to conceive of their subject as a sinister, disciplined, hierarchical cabal constantly maneuvering to seize control of any coalition or organization that catches its sights. This always struck me as a pretty laughable picture, and even as an embittered ex-comrade it still does.

The first thing that tends to be missed is how much a typical ISO branch actually has in common with the the anarchoid groups which form the main habitat of the people who write on Infoshop and IMC. Almost all decisions are made informally and in effect by consensus. This is particularly the case with membership. Branches never, in my experience, formally exclude anyone for political reasons; if someone is seen as a problem, the last resort is usually to shun them, which typically leads them to leave the organization in short order. As with more explicitly "structureless" groups, those involved develop conflict avoidance strategies, which usually means avoiding any departure from an unstated, but nonetheless universally understood, set of common opinions and assumptions.

The resulting conformist political culture extends very clearly to the national functioning of the organization, where anyone who has attended one of the ISO's public conferences will probably have observed it. The ISO's conventions show a similar homogeneity - I can only think of one measure, that on the California recall election a few years back, that passed or failed with less than 90% of the vote.

The upshot is that although there is sometimes excessive pressure on members who are not seen as taking the organization seriously enough (inside the ISO this is called 'moralism'), there is very little formal pressure to "toe the line"; instead, there is an informal but solidly entrenched culture of avoiding certain kinds of disputes, and those who don't adapt find little reason to stay in the organization.

On paper, ISO members ought to be very well prepared for all this. I wouldn't have figured much of this out without the books and articles I read while I was one; in particular Jo Freeman's article The Tyranny of Structurelessness is invaluable. The problem is that, having read these materials, most members simply see the fact that they are reading them (and are part of an entity that is publishing them) as proof that there is no problem. Every year after convention, I would hear our delegates say how exciting all of the debates there had been, in spite of the fact that hardly anyone ever seemed to disagree on anything.

This goes along with something that a number of otherwise less astute critics have picked up on, the vapid and platitudinous character of the ISO's publications, which also extends to most of the internal discussion in the organization. Although each convention goes through the annual ritual of discussing perspectives and the results are usually sensible and sometimes interesting, they rarely have much to do with deciding what the organization will actually do in the coming year. This is usually figured out on the fly.

One good example of this is Todd Chretien's recent run for U.S. Senate. There was never any real discussion in the ISO of what the organization might want to accomplish in the Green Party beyond picking up a few recruits. Todd's decision to run (at Peter Camejo's urging, apparently after Cindy Sheehan turned down a place on Camejo's slate) was not even announced to the ISO's membership until after it was reported in (a handful of) mainstream newspapers. He ran a tepid and undistinguished campaign, and eventually gave up without (as far as I know) even acknowledging that he had done so. The only real accomplishment was a sort of negative proof of some things the ISO had said about the 2000 election: even in a race where the result was known years in advance, with an electorate far to the left of the Democratic candidate, a Green candidate can do much worse than Nader.

Although there are many other things that could be said about it, this experience is a good example of how limited the ISO's ability to make and carry out political plans is: Chretien ran when the nomination was offered to him, did very little with the campaign, and then wandered off to do something else. In the nearly nine years that I've been closely acquainted with it, the ISO has not taken a single political initiative of any note that was not someone else's idea. Even the Campus Antiwar Network, a very pedestrian organizational initiative, was (as the story came to me) the idea of a few unaffiliated students in Washington DC, although of course it would never have gotten off the ground without the ISO's heavy participation.

This relates to the biggest misconception about the ISO, that it is constantly trying to take over other groups and impose its agenda on them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course everything ISO members say on this score is true - there is a residual prejudice against 'reds', there is a lot of malicious gossip, and they're not detached from reality enough to think that the kind of things people accuse them of would actually achieve anything. Most importantly, though, an actual rule-or-ruin operation of the kind that I've seen Workers' World or some anarchist grouplets carry out just takes more forethought, competence, and just plain gumption than 10 ISOs would have.

But that leaves a question which I think most ISOers haved in the back of their head somewhere: why do they hate us? The ISO, after all, has very, very few friends, even compared to ANSWER.

When you see over a thousand enthusiastic, mostly intelligent people extolling the virtues of strategy, centralized organization and serious political thinking, which seems to show a lot of organizational muscle (all sorts of publications, conferences, meetings, and so on) but keeps its own company and only admits to the most banal activities, you'd be forgiven for thinking that things don't add up. You might imagine that all those would-be revolutionaries are up to something dramatic, something that it would be exciting to expose and try to do something about. I think even a few people who spent some time in the ISO convince themselves of it to make the time they spent there seem more worthwhile. The truth is that there's nothing behind the curtain.

Unfortunately there has been a lot of unnecessary grief spread, particularly in the antiwar movement, by both uncomprehending (if not entirely incomprehensible) hostility towards the ISO and to a much lesser extent by its clumsy responses. Over the last few years the ISO has I think been groping with the problem, but a lack of understanding of the nature of it has meant that the responses have mostly been ineffective. I think the best example of this has been the Socialism conference. Over the last few years the ISO has tried to attract people from outside its immediate orbit but has been mainly unsuccessful, with attendance still growing at about the same rate as the previous several years. The tone of the talks have been adjusted, the posters have been redesigned, there are a few more outside speakers, but no one sees it as anything except an ISO conference - but now looking vaguely ashamed of it.

CWI loses Dáil seat

The CWI's Joe Higgins lost about a fifth of his 2002 vote and missed getting reelected to the Dáil (Irish Parliament) today.

I heard him speak a couple of years ago at a PSOL rally at the World Social Forum. He really epitomized the characteristic anglophone CWI speaking style, which is to say that he was boring, kept bragging about the CWI's dubious achievements and went on for about twice as long as he was supposed to. I'm surprised he managed to hold on to his seat as long as he did.

Blowback in Lebanon

You know Fateh al-Islam, the nasty al-Qaeda (or are they pro-Syrian?) Palestinians (or are they Ethiopians, or Pakistanis, or who-knows-what?) who are giving the Lebanese army such a hard time right now?

Here's what Seymour Hersh wrote about them back in March:
I originally found this on Lenin's Tomb, a fine blog run by a guy from the British SWP.

Alastair Crooke, who spent nearly thirty years in MI6, the British intelligence service, and now works for Conflicts Forum, a think tank in Beirut, told me, “The Lebanese government is opening space for these people to come in. It could be very dangerous.” Crooke said that one Sunni extremist group, Fatah al-Islam, had splintered from its pro-Syrian parent group, Fatah al-Intifada, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, in northern Lebanon. Its membership at the time was less than two hundred. “I was told that within twenty-four hours they were being offered weapons and money by people presenting themselves as representatives of the Lebanese government’s interests—presumably to take on Hezbollah,” Crooke said.

---

A few days ago I was noticing a lot of reports claiming that many of the members of Fateh al-Islam were non-Arabs, the implication being that they had been recruited abroad. One thing that I noticed visiting Sabra, Shatila and Bourj al-Barajneh camps in Beirut (and which I haven't heard mention of so far) is that there a lot of non-Palestinians living there. Most are migrant workers from Syria, but there are also Iraqi refugees and others, and I wouldn't be surprised if the supposed Somali mujahideen or what not were actually people who were recruited at the camp.
Samidoun (Steadfast) was a network of activist groups and NGOs that worked to help displaced people in and around Beirut during and after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon last summer. I did some web stuff for them while I was there.

I found out about the relief effort from MarxistFromLebanon, who was also part of Samidoun.

---

I also see that there is a grassroots relief effort, on the same lines as Samidoun and involving many of the same people. There is info on their blog, including where to send donations.

Photos from West Virginia

I just got back from Coal River Road in West Virginia. I was taking pictures for my friend Anand Gopal of Leftwords, who's doing a story for Wiretap Magazine on the mining communities out there. It was a fascinating trip and I want to write a bit more about it, but I'm moving house today so I'll content myself with putting up a couple of pictures.



This is Marsh Fork Elementary School, with a coal silo towering over it in the background. We got started because Anand heard from some folks in Philly about this spot. A lot of kids here have been getting sick, either from the coal dust or from the chemicals the company uses to treat the coal. Out of view in the background is 2.8 billion gallons of water full of mine waste, held back by a leaky dam.



This is Anand with Larry Gibson, a local activist, in Kayford, WV. Larry is pointing out a fissure opened up by explosives used in mountaintop removal mining. The mountain we're standing on top of is honeycombed with old mineshafts which are also full of wastewater; a fissure in the right place could flood the valleys and displace thousands of people.



This is what mountaintop removal looks like: the Samples mine in Kayford. The peak of this mountain used to be 700 feet above where we are standing. Towards the right you can see some of the attempts at restoration - native species don't grow back well on the fill from MTR, so they use imported grasses as a covering. You don't get a good sense of the scale from this picture, but if you look at it at full resolution you can just barely see the dumptrucks they use to pour the rock over the side of the mountain; they have tires the size of an SUV. It's also pretty impressive in Google Maps. Google Earth has a recent picture superimposed on out-of-date topographic information, which helps give a sense of how much the area has changed.



This is the memorial to 12 miners who died after being trapped by an explosion in Sago last year. The company had been cutting corners on safety, and locals say they held back a team that was ready to go in and cut these guys out. Mine safety has deteriorated tremendously with the expansion of aggressively nonunion companies like Massey Coal, who also push mountaintop removal.

Hangovers from 2000

I'm only even writing this post because Kim Stanley Robinson has written the best political scifi out there. His best known works are Red Mars and its sequels, which played a big role in my getting political. Plenty of his other works are, if anything, even better. The Three Californias Trilogy (reprinted not long ago) and Years of Rice and Salt are absolutely astonishing, as are some of his less remembered works, like Icehenge and The Memory of Whiteness. He's written a lot of clangers, though.
I've just picked up Kim Stanley Robinson's Fifty Degrees Below (the middle of a trilogy on climate change) again after a break. It has some good parts, but on the whole it's probably his worst book so far. There are plenty of reasons for this, but I'm particularly struck by the asinine politics.

A good deal of it centers around a miracle democratic presidential candidate, Phil Chase, who likes to talk about getting along with the rest of the world, pays attention to what scientists say about global warming and so on; in spite of that, he feels so threatened by a hypothetical independent 'scientific' candidate "polling about five percent in the blue states" in spite of not being on the ballot or even actually existing that the protagonists feel obliged to have it 'withdraw' from the race.

It's one of the best examples of the really bizarre reactions a lot of folks on the left are still having to the 2000 election. Robinson, who is pretty sharp politically, seems to have been so traumatized that he thinks that even an imaginary third party candidate - that is, even the idea that we might be able to do better than what's on the official menu - needs a sort of ritual exorcism.

Of course, we shouldn't forget that real democratic nominees are nowhere near as attractive as Phil Chase, but that every four years millions of people try to convince themselves that they are. Before Al Gore reinvented himself last year as a born-again environmentalist, he had worked hard to kneecap the Kyoto protocol - something that I think a lot of Nader voters knew or suspected in 2000.

This is part of the reason that, in spite of some reservations, I'm still glad I campaigned for Nader in 2000 and voted for him in 2004. There is a big problem with the political culture in the US, and one small but important part of it is that so many of the people who should be trying to do something about it are too pessimistic to even think seriously about it.

---

Incidentally, there was an excellent piece by Garret Keizer in this month's Harper's to do with Al Gore and the politics of global warming. Among the many interesting points, he suggested that global warming could be a good counterpart to the "war on terror" in keeping people from thinking about everything else that's going on. That's an interesting way of looking at what's happened to Robinson.

I've been quiet for a while...

I've just started posting again after something of a hiatus. I've been having some health problems over the last few months - nothing serious, but it's been keeping me from stringing more than a couple of words together. Hopefully I'm through the worst of it now, and I'm agonizing over a couple of more long-winded articles.

Incidentally, I've been listening more or less continuously from the soundtrack to Children of Men, which is just as awesome as everything else about the movie. Kode9 and Spaceape are especially amazing, and I finally found out that I kind of like John Lennon.

Some observations on the Left in the French elections

Glancing over the exit polls from the first round of the French presidential election, I noticed a few interesting comparisons with the results from last time around.

I'm including the Communist Party and the Greens as well as the Trots and José Bové in these counts.Perhaps not surprisingly given what happened in 2002, the far left (broadly defined) went down from 19% of the vote to 15%, and generally the centrist parties did significantly better. More interesting is the relative performance of the groups.

The LCR's Oliver Besancenot was the only one to hold steady, at about 4.3%; in 2002 that put him 8th, after the Greens and Arlette Laguilier of Lutte Ouvrière; this time 4th with as many votes as the Greens and Arlette put together.

The "Non collectives" were the main organization of the "Non de Gauche", the campaign against the proposed EU constitution of 2005. They later reinvented themselves as "antiliberal collectives" and subsequently as "the Popular and Anti-Liberal Left". Apparently the Communist Party managed to maneuver itself into a controlling position in the network over the last several months. José Bové did remarkably poorly, perhaps because of his decision to spurn the "antiliberal collectives". He came 3rd to last, ahead of only the Hunting and Fishing Party and the tiny Lambertiste Parti des Travailleurs. Marie-George Buffet of the Communist Party - which from the'40s to the '70s could count on 20% of the vote - got only 2%. This was a third lower than in 2002, even though she was officially the candidate of the former Non de Gauche.

On the whole this seems to reflect rather favorably on the LCR, and particularly on the perspective the LCR majority adopted leading up to the election. I have to admit that I was rather skeptical, but events seem to have proven them right.

Support our soccer players

I read recently that sales of those magnetic "support our troops" ribbons you see on SUVs have collapsed since last year. It looks like someone is getting desperate to get rid of them.

Miguel Angel Hernandez launches blog

I just found out that Miguel Angel Hernandez, the most prominent theoretician of the Partido Revolucion y Socialismo (PRS) in Venezuela has started a blog. It is wordy and in Spanish, but should still be of great interest to many of you (click here for a machine translation). As with John Molyneux's blog, most of it seems to be articles written originally with other outlets in mind.

For those who don't know, PRS is the main (though often not most visible) Trotskyist group in Venezuela, and includes the most prominent leaders of the Union Nacional de los Trabajadores, probably the strongest trade union confederation there.

Antiwar roundup

First, the action we did around Ehren Watada's first day in court went quite well, considering the intense cold. We managed to stay out for about 45 minutes and got about 40 people to stop long enough to sign the petition, and hopefully several hundred more people at least have a vague idea about who this guy is. I posted a couple of pictures I took above; I know there are better ones out there somewhere. There was a short but decent piece in the Daily Targum about it.

We've got plenty coming up; Janis Karpinski is speaking at Rutgers on Tuesday, there will be a rally Thursday to do with the events at Santa Barbara, Columbia and so on, and then of course gearing up for March 20th.

I went to a meeting in Newark Tuesday night of what is now called The Coalition for Peace and Justice (more explanation in a previous post). Most of the big decisions had been made in advance, mainly by POP. The main items are an indoor rally on March 24th, days of action April 4th-7th leading up to the anniversary of the assassination of MLK, a big march "for Justice, Jobs, Equality, and Peace" in Newark on the anniversary of The March On Washington on August 25th, and a followup "People's Peace Conference" in January, also in Newark.

I've made a point a few times about the discussion process not being very open in this milieu; there has not really been much of an opening for people to have much input into the process. I do not think this is intentional (the POP organizers have been very forthcoming when asked for specific information, for example) but it is a problem. There was what seemed to me to be an extremely tentative attempt by the Coalition for Peace Action to shift the center of gravity a little ways away from POP by proposing that the conference be held in Trenton, but they dropped it before it even came close to coming to a vote. We'll see how things develop.

Ehren Watada action at Rutgers tomorrow

There is going to be a quickie action at Rutgers tomorrow to call attention to the beginning of Lt. Ehren Watada's court-martial for refusing deployment to Iraq. Here is the centerpiece of it, which we just spent the afternoon painting:



I still need to build a stand for it. Grr.

Marxists.org under attack

Most of you will probably already be aware, but in the last three weeks the Marxist Internet Archive has experienced a series of denial of service attacks originating from mainland China and presumably from the Chinese government. The MIA has not made any appeals for help that I am aware of, but they are one of the most amazing things on the internet and deserve your financial support in any case.

Of course the irony is intense, although I'm sure there can't be more than a dozen people left out there who will be shocked by it. I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a young scientist from Beijing a couple of years back. It was the last night of a conference and myself and the Brazilian attendees had gotten smashed and started singing the Internationale. The eastern european attendees were shocked, but this one fellow came up to me, smiling from ear to ear, and told me that he hadn't heard anyone singing the song since 1989!

Incidentally, I found my notes from the SWP meeting I mentioned last week. One thing that I forgot was that Jack Barnes had mentioned that someone (I assume it was the CMI) was talking about setting up a Trotsky Library in Havana, and that he strongly hoped that they wouldn't. Not quite on the same scale, but...

PS: Since I first posted this I've gotten my first few readers from China. I'd very much appreciate any comments from you guys.

Ken Macleod, Science Fiction and politics

I was very pleased to hear today that Resistance MP3s has posted new files from Marxism 2006. I've already listened to Ken MacLeod's talk on science fiction which is very interesting, though unfortunately his wrap up is missing, and I hope I haven't said anything unfair as a result.

I always enjoy talks like this, partly because looking back I've realized that a lot of what got me started thinking about politics and was reading Scifi, both good and bad. Ken's written some of each; his Fall Revolution series is absolutely fantastic on a lot of different levels, but his other books are mainly good for in-jokes (for example who naming a starship after a book by Tony Cliff), although still better than some. I think my favorite book of his is The Cassini Division, which deals with a the common problem in political Scifi -- that utopia is boring -- by contrasting two "utopias": the socialist society on earth and a sort of cyberpunk-libertarian "utopia" on the other side of the wormhole. It's one of my favorite depictions of a possible socialist society that I've seen anywhere.

For me the most interesting point in his talk the was about the prominence of the idea of a "singularity" and post-humanism in recent Scifi which I think he's quite right to see the as reflecting how much difficulty people have nowadays of envisioning an attractive human future and a sense of powerlessness. He puts this mainly down to the reaction to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and so forth. I'm sure this is significant; there were no shortage of science fiction writers who had the same kinds of attitudes about "really existing socialism" as other left and soft-left intellectuals (it always struck me how much Isaac Asimov's more pleasant future societies reminded me of an idealized version of the Soviet Union). However I think you can already see that demoralization in Cyberpunk and a lot of the dystopian turn in the eighties. As with the the shifts in the academic "left", I bet it has a lot more to do with disappointment in the outcome social movements and upheavals of the sixties and seventies. The shift from that towards posthumanism I think reflects a shift from a sense that things are more or less just decaying to more prominent feeling (presumably down to a sense of the effects of globalization and all that) that something overpowering is happening, and many people can't sort out whether or not they are frightened of it.

All this, and some of the comments in the discussion, also got me wondering about why people think so highly of Iain M. Banks -- although he's a very skilled rider in a lot of ways I don't find any of his work all that interesting, I think because he's so wrapped up in post-humanism that he just doesn't have that much to say to me. His culture series also has the Star Trek problem of having a supposedly classless etc. society which has to "defend" itself in a way that sneaks in a lot of bits from defenses of contemporary imperialism.

A lot of the discussions didn't touch that much on what Ken was saying but it did bring up some good points about what China Miéville usually covers in these sorts of talks, the role of fantasy and imagination in politics. I was happy to hear a few people stick up for the politics of Firefly, although I think the comments actually didn't give it credit for being as subversive as it actually is. One intervention described the Alliance (the central government in Firefly) as totalitarian, but in fact it's a version of our contemporary government, admittedly viewed through a conspiratorial lens: a nominal democracy, actually dominated by big corporations, and perfectly willing to resort to all sorts of sinister means to maintain its power -- and the tremendous gap between the wealthy "core worlds" and the mostly impoverished periphery. It's a very good example of what I think another one of the participants was trying to get at, which is that Scifi can have a Brechtian effect (if you'll pardon me for being pretentious about it), of making a familiar thing more comprehensible by presenting it in an unfamiliar way.

This discussion took place in the summer, so there are two incredible examples to add since then. The first few episodes of the new season of Battlestar Galactica were one of the most incredible commentaries on the Iraq war I've seen anywhere near the mainstream media, and Children of Men (the film; I haven't had a chance to read the book yet) had more going on than I can hope to cover.

Second thoughts on the left in the Brazilian election

Coverage from various tendencies: the ISO (USA), SWP (Britain), the (USec) Fourth International, the CWI, and UITci/Revista Movimiento (some of these deal with some of the issues I raise here). A document I wrote in 2004 on the formation of P-SoL, which is still dated but does offer some useful background, is available here.

Lee Sustar of the ISO (USA) told me some time before the election about attending a very enthusiastic speech given by Ernest Mandel about the PT, probably in the '80s. Lee made an intervention to the effect that the PT was doomed to reformism, and speaking to me years letter expressed some surprise that he had actually been right.

A note on names in Brazil: most public figures in Brazil are universally referred to by their first names or by nicknames which sometimes seem ridiculous to American observers: for example Brazil's current president is almost invariable referred to as Lula ("Squid"). This even extends to many official contexts, such as ballots and election records. Heloísa Helena's full name is Heloísa Helena Lima de Moraes Carvalho. The strong performance of Heloísa Helena in the recent Brazilian presidential election has been a cause for a fair amount of celebration on the part of the Trotskyist movement worldwide, both among those who are trying to salvage something from their (perhaps now embarrassing) enthusiasm for the Workers' Party and those who "saw it coming all along".

With 6.8 million votes (just under 7%), Comrade Heloísa in fact did quite well. Her party's other candidates did not. If her slate, the Left Front, had done as well in congressional elections then under Brazil's system of proportional representation her P-SoL party would have gone from 7 seats in the house of deputies to about 35, and its partners, the PSTU and the (refounded) PCB might have picked up a seat or two in their own rights for the first time in their history. Instead the Left Front got about 1.3 million votes (about 1.5%) in the House of Deputies, and P-SoL dropped from 6 seats to 3, on top of losing Heloísa Helena's seat in the senate. Their vote in other areas were even worse; just under a million for state legislatures (again winning only three seats) and about 600,000 for the senate.

This was not a small matter. P-SoL was established as a fairly loose agglomeration of modest-sized groups (tendencies), and hasn't been too successful at finding anything other than election campaigns to hold it together; as far as I know they haven't even been able to launch a common newsletter. It's been able to operate in the way it has largely because of the organizational resources that parliamentary office gives. A Congressmember in Brazil gets a salary of 17,000 Reals a month (by way of comparison, the monthly minimum wage is 350 Reals and a skilled blue-collar worker is lucky to get 1,500), and can hire a sizeable staff at public expense besides. If he or she forgoes the politician's usual practice of lining their pockets and hiring their relatives that gives a big boost to the war chest, a set of free full-time organizers, and various other goodies (when I visited the PSTU's headquarters in 2003, all of the notepads still had the letterhead of Lindberg Farias, a congressman who had jumped ship and joined the PT two years earlier). Winning more of these seats was a big enough deal to get P-SoL and PSTU to bury the hatchet in order to have a better shot at them, as the P-SoL's national executive made clear (see the section Metas eleitorais in this document).

So why the discrepancy in the votes?

First it's worth saying a few things about Heloísa and how she got that many votes. Although she's been a far-left activist basically her whole adult life, she has a very old-fashioned catholic way of looking at a lot of things. She's anti-abortion and had a tantrum and broke out in tears on the senate floor when a satirical website posted a cartoon depicting her on the front page of of Playboy. I don't mean this to take a potshot at her (if I wanted to do that I'd make fun of her voice); I just think it's important to understand how this fits into her image. One part of that is the way it adds to her just-folks charm, as does her habit of dressing in jeans and a t-shirt even in the Senate, but there are other effects as well.

Some of this shows up when you look closely at who supported Heloísa. Garotinho claimed that his not-quite-endorsement was reponsible for Heloísa's strong showing in Rio.

The relevant surveys are Datafolha, April 7 2006 and Vox Populi, July 11 2006. Anthony Garotinho, the populist former governor of Rio de Janeiro who has lead a campaign to bring creationism into public schools in Brazil and one of the main figures in the centrist PMDB announced he would vote for her. In surveys early in the election season, most of the people who intended to vote for her were urban, educated, fairly well off (at least by Brazilian standards), and were at least as likely to vote for center or center-right candidates as for Lula.

This is because Heloísa was able to project herself as an honest, tough-on-crime candidate, something that the other candidates had a hard time with (Lula because of the PT's corruption troubles, Serra because of his perceived inability to deal with a massive outbreak of gang violence in São Paulo). One also wonders whether her statement on national television that socialism was something for 30 or 40 years down the road might have been meant to solidify that image.

Heloísa's running mate, Cesar Benjamin, went even further, effectively disowning the Left Front's program in favor of a straightforwardly social-democratic "program for government".

Besides the P-SoL members elected to the lower house, José Nery Azevedo, had been elected as an alternate (suplente) for Ana Júlia Carepa in 2002, while still a member of the PT, and so became a Senator when she stepped down to become governor of Pará.

Babá was one of the "four radicals" who founded the P-SoL, of whom now only Luciana Genro is still both in Parliament and in the party. So Heloísa Helena's appeal was rather different from that of the rest of the P-SoL. On top of this is one of the party's most distinctive features, its lack of organizational and political coherence. Two of the three candidates successfully elected had strong organizations in their area to fall back on (Luciana Genro's Movement of the Socialist Left in Porto Alegre and Ivan Valente's Socialist Popular Action in São Paulo). Heloísa Helena's coattails were very short, and candidates without much else to rely on did very poorly. Babá for example left Pará, where he had a support base, for Rio de Janeiro, where Heloísa was expected to get the largest number of votes, and failed to get back into congress as a result. Even Heloísa's Enlace faction was unable to get its two congressmembers, Maninha and João Alfredo, reelected.

In the aftermath Cesar Benjamin left the P-SoL, describing its leadership as "a rare combination of ignorance, truculence, and arrogance". This was by no means the first high profile defection the party has suffered in its short existence. P-SoL is no closer than it was at its foundation to a unified perspective or any meaningful common actions.

The overarching lesson if there is one, is that there is no substitute for the left for the hard work of building a powerful organization with a coherent worldview and capable of common action. Not only is electoral success not a substitute for it, but without a strong organization it's extremely difficult to even take advantage of it,

In a different way, Venezuela is an example of this. Chavez's elections dealt was a blow Venezuela's bourgeois political parties haven't even started to recover from, but real social change has only come slowly as genuine popular organizations have grown in strength. I think this dynamic, and its possible outcomes, are still very important there and I intend to return to them later.