Warning: Long, probably unoriginal and intensely self-indulgent post focused on ideological rambling to follow. Ignore if you (perhaps justifiably) suffer a tendency to hurl accusations of pomposity at such posts; it’ll be better for us all.

The State and the Citizen: Or, Why I am a Democratic Socialist, part 1.

We move from first basics; we assume, in general, that people seek what they define as happiness, as Bentham suggests. It’s the only definition of human activity beyond the soul-destroying vagaries of genetic struggle which accommodates the more perverse elements of human behaviour. And it creates few problems; who would deny they want to be happy in life?

This should, for the most part, mean people are left to their own devices; happiness is subjective, and can only be achieved for each individual by those individuals. Anyone who pursues their own happiness and does not infringe upon the attempts of others to do the same only does what seems natural. They have every right to do so.

There are, however, conflicts likely to arise; some citizens will attempt to derive their pleasure at the expense of others. Say, if an individual chooses to steal from another the fruit of their labour; thereby furthering their pleasure at the expense of another. A state is thus necessary, with its primary purpose to balance the interests of citizens. It must seek to create the greatest happiness for the greatest number - in essence, a utilitarian tool.

Clearly, by virtue of universal humanity, we can assume certain freedoms are essential for that pursuit of happiness. The state must seek to safeguard those freedoms if it wishes to create the greatest happiness for the greatest number; and the classical libertarian definition of freedom won’t do, as it allows individuals and corporations to assault individual freedom. The state must, of course, have clear boundaries and be bound by the rule of law - but we must accept an interventionist state is necessary for greater freedom.

Instead of the libertarian definition of freedom, we should consider a doctrine of applied freedom; where theoretical liberty characterised by absence of legal restraint is useless if held back by real-life circumstances. Clearly, people aren’t free if they’re hungry; they cannot focus on the pursuit of happiness as they need to find food first. People aren’t free if a thief breaks down their door and ransacks their home. People aren’t free if they’re freezing - or suffer extreme poverty and have no escape, or lack support in their old age, or are orphaned, or ignorant, or their planet is dying through the negligence of others. They cannot act independently, and so cannot move towards happiness.

The state must guarantee these essential needs and freedoms if it’s to create the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Taxation becomes necessary; those who can afford it should be taxed at a level which won’t seriously impede their ability to seek happiness to allow those who can’t to seek that same happiness. The money raised funds the apparatus of freedom; state education to ensure all have the chance to pursue happiness, a police force to protect that chance and pensions to allow those who can’t work the same chance.

But even that’s not enough. The power of organised capital and corporations can be as damaging to individual freedom and happiness as any level of state power. Consider the relationship between an unskilled worker and a multinational corporation; there are many of the former, and despite the absolute necessity of many of the roles they fill, their sheer numbers ensure that employers can, in effect, screw them over. They need to work to survive, and so will work for virtually any wage - yet their employers don’t need them in particular, so can pay them any wage, no matter how low. The workers can’t refuse that piddling wage, as they’ll lose their jobs; and without those jobs, they’ll find themselves thrown on the mercies of society. In short, a clear example of certain individuals grossly profiting and the expense of others. So, the state must intervene, ensuring all employers pay a minimum wage on which it is possible to survive.

Likewise, if a group of selfish individuals control an essential and universal service, they can wreak havoc on the lives and livelihoods of others; witness the cruel absurdities of healthcare in the USA. Those who control an industry can take control, jack up the prices and so the profits - and if people can’t afford the service, they suffer. Universally necessary services in private hands are conducted to the benefit of those private hands - not the majority who desperately need them.

So, the state must take any essential services for which there is a universal human need, and ensure they’re universally accessible. You cannot be truly free if you’re sick; so a universally accessible national health services is necessary. You cannot be truly free if you’re freezing; so mass energy generation should be nationalised and energy - or the means of generating it at a household level - made accessible to all. This can take place on a partial basis too, if it’s all that’s needed. You can’t be free if you’re homeless but want a roof - so the state should build and control some housing. You can’t be free if you can’t reach your place of work as you don’t own private transport - so the state needs to provide some level of nationalised transport. And so on. The objective is to prevent one group of individuals gaining so much power over others as to make those others’ existence a misery; and the means of delivering this is placing the means by which life might be made into a misery into the hands of a neutral entity which exists for the benefit of all.

To ensure those services are rendered to the benefit of all, those who control the state must be rigorously accountable - and subject to regular elections. The power of the electorate to demolish any government that doesn’t act in the interests of the greatest number ensures that governments will act in the popular interest. Here, we see the superiority of nationalised essential services over the same services when they exist in private hands; democratic elections ensure those services are administered to the benefit of citizens, rather than the owners as they are when privatised.

The state thus exists to benefits citizens - and only to benefit citizens. Regular elections should ensure this; while a codified constitution setting out the fundamental rights of citizens and the barriers of government ensure the same in between elections. If, though, the state breaks that constitution, and so assaults the population’s basic liberty, then citizens have a right to legal redress; the state is as bound by the constitution as citizens are by the rule of law, and so must be answerable. If the state prevents that legal redress from occurring, it ceases entirely to act in the interests of citizens, and so becomes a Tyranny. If a state descends into Tyranny and sheds the essential manacles of democracy, then citizens in turn are no longer obliged to obey that state’s laws.  Why should they sacrifice their happiness and liberty if they receive neither security nor the happiness of others in return? They shouldn’t. They have a right to rebel, throwing off the chains of the state which betrayed them and reclaiming that happiness. This right to insurrection must be written in the constitution; for only then will potential tyrants remember their peril.

A strange situation at Pickled Politics tonight; take a look at the comments thread here. The poster raised the well documented absurdity of the policing at the Kingsnorth Climate Camp. And found himself leapt upon by commenters as a hysterical leftie thoroughly disconnected from reality.

The following comment is typical:

The state are not imposing anything on anyone here. Just because you are forcibly removed from an area does not make you any more right, nor does it automatically entitle you to call yourself a victim. Why don’t these people, go home, get ‘actually’ politically active and try to come up with solutions instead of trying to manufacture publicity through stunts?

Pardon? The state very much has imposed itself here. Citizens have a democratic right to protest; one supposedly guaranteed in law by the Human Rights Act. They may gather on any piece of public land to voice their concerns over any matter. The state should exist to protect those very freedoms. If the state - or its agents, the police - attempts to restrict them, it commits an assault on liberty and fails in its role.

The protestors at Climate Camp were clearly peaceful. They came there to hold workshops on environmental life and climate change, not viciously beat up policemen. Some didn’t attempt to hide their intention of shutting down the power-station, no; but that, at most justified a police cordon around the power station to protect what’s legally private property. (That it spews out noxious gas and thus directly affects those around it, very much bringing the matter into the public interest, remains to be addressed…). The protestors within the Climate Camp should have been free from harrassment.

So when the police spend an estimated £3 million to bus in officers from far-flung corners of the country to set-up a cordon around the camp before routinely entering it, ransacking private possessions and cart-off protestors on any pretext, they do impose themselves. The protestors have a right to make themselves heard, and when a force supposed to protect that right mercilessly shits on it, they are victims.

More bizarre were comments along these lines:

I showed an American friend this video, she laughed, she said they were so brutal, her shoe nearly fell off!

Come on. There actions are probably over the top. But brutal? Have you heard the quip about heaven, where the Police are British, the chefs are French etc?

In France, the CRS would have literally beat the shit out of them. In fact, I cannot think of another country where the all police wouldn’t have drawn their batons straight away.

Wait - so because our instances of authoritarian policing are less brutal than those abroad, they become okay? Police brutality against peaceful protestors remains police brutality; just because the French riot police are downright sadistic doesn’t stop an assault on democratic freedoms across the channel from being just that.

It isn’t hysteria to rage at length over this. Protest is an essential tool to remind the powerful you exist; the state, which exists to protect and extend the freedom of all citizens, cannot be allowed to choose when or how it’s acceptable to exercise that freedom. Unless the exercise of liberty infringes on that of another, it’s not its job, and shouldn’t be - unless we enjoy repression.

Excellent news; a group of MPs plan to launch a motion challenging the current Oath of Allegiance sworn by MPs before taking their seats. The current wording is transparently medieval:

“I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.”

Atheists may opt out of swearing by God - but what of republicans? They’re forced to swallow their principles and spout the oath if they wish to represent their constituents. Democratically elected representatives must swear to an unelected figure or, as with Sinn Fein, betray the constituents who elected them and refuse to take their seats.

The republican case for dropping the oath, along with the entire monarchy, is strong enough; any democratic system must ensure sovereignty is derived from the people and not an unelected figurehead. The oath suggests MPs have a greater duty to the monarch rather than their constituents - and so, surely, defeats the point of electing representatives rather than appointing them. It’s merely a symptom of a grossly unrepresentative cancer in our constitution, which needs removal.

But even the most ardent monarchist must see the arguments here. The one Tory who supports the motion, Peter Bottomley, makes the case well enough; the Parliament exists, in our outdated constitution, to advise the monarch as to the will of the people. As such, all representatives of the people must be allowed entry, even those who seek to abolish the monarchy, must be allowed entry to argue their case. He wants an opt-out rather than the fundamental change republicans ultimately must seek - but he agrees that the oath has to change.

So, congratulations to Norman Baker (who, incidentally, is in double favour at present) and the 21 other MPs launching the motion - both for the motion, and for pissing off Tebbit.

Miliband makes me seem all prescient.

Not that this was what I was expecting. A seemingly non sequitorious reference to the admittedely influential expanding Indian and Chinese middle classes seems typical of him. He has clearly embraced his brief as foreign secretary. He has also demanded quite a substantial amount from the government, certainly more than it has delivered thus far and, as the article mentions, he has not stated that Brown is a figure the party is dependent upon.

No, Miliband desires that Labour find itself a new soul. This is crucial to his argument that Cameron can not defeat Labour fully: if Labour can alter itself away from New Labour, Miliband suggests, the Tories will remain one step behind. Of the two assessments of the situation I find his entirely superior to Harman’s. Miliband seems to recognise, or at least is the only member of the Labour Party willing to admit, that the damage done to his party is deep. Perhaps Harman is restricted through her forced smile after one smashing defeat after another became stuck (I always found it quite unkind how she was expected to do the PR mop-up on national television time and time again…) but she has expressed no concern as to Labour’s direction.

Miliband, meanwhile, is steets ahead of not only her but the rest of the Labour high rankers. In this article in April he outlined what he thought Labour had to become in order to surive: a creature distinct from its 2001 incarnation and instead on informed by radical liberals and social democrats, something which I found most pleasing seeing as these are my favourite forms of leftist in history. Perhaps as good he is conscious of the enormity of the task facing Britain if it is to do its part in averting environment catastrophe: what is required is not merely a shift in policy but an entirely new structure for the economy, in lieu of rampant engorgement on petrol.

Miliband’s vision is given a new urgency by the dire state that Labour has plunged into: now the party’s future effectively rests upon whether it can be convincingly and winningly realised. It would be a remarkable achievement were it accomplished, and I suspect that in private Miliband shares my severe doubt that Brown is the man to do as much. No, to implement the vision there is none better than the visionary.

Quite why am I reading Robespierre? Specifically, his Justification of the Use of Terror. It’s terrifying (hah…):

It has been said that terror is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern by terror his brutalized subjects; he is right, as a despot. Subdue by terror the enemies of liberty, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is liberty’s despotism against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? And is the thunderbolt not destined to strike the heads of the proud?

Emphasis mine. The doublethink inherent here boggles the mind. State-terror is justified should it be directed at enemies of liberty, he cries. That this terror requires a basic negation of liberalism appears beyond him. If some people are legitimate target of oppression, and others are not, then clearly freedom from that oppression cannot be a universal value. If that freedom isn’t a universal value, then we clearly aren’t born equal or free - and so on. Robespierre’s words are those of a tyrant.

They represent an extreme perversion; the enabling state gone bad. He posits that we must rid ourselves of tyrants to be free. True enough. But here he falters, with crashing rhetoric demanding an outright tyranny against tyrants. That requires a universal negation of liberty - and a restoration of tyranny. The enabling state exists to make basic freedoms viable for all. When, in order to create liberty, those basic freedoms are cut off - very literally, in Robespierre’s case - that concept ceases to make sense.

Now, let’s put this arcane rambling into a modern context. Quoth Robespierre:

Society owes protection only to peaceable citizens; the only citizens in the Republic are the republicans. For it, the royalists, the conspirators are only strangers or, rather, enemies. This terrible war waged by liberty against tyranny- is it not indivisible? Are the enemies within not the allies of the enemies without? The assassins who tear our country apart, the intriguers who buy the consciences that hold the people’s mandate; the traitors who sell them; the mercenary pamphleteers hired to dishonour the people’s cause, to kill public virtue, to stir up the fire of civil discord, and to prepare political counterrevolution by moral counterrevolution-are all those men less guilty or less dangerous than the tyrants whom they serve?

Emphasis mine. The same principles abound as before; some are permissible targets for Terror, and so liberty isn’t a universal value. We can kill some of you to make the rest free, and you’d better appreciate it or you’ll be next.

And guess where that logic crops up today? Substitute, “terrorism,” or, “anti-social behaviour,” for, “counterrevolution,” and it becomes clear. The same clear logic of the, “Justification of the Use of Terror,” runs through virtually all modern counter-terrorist thought.

Even the rhetoric matches, give or take the linguistic drift of 214 years and translation. Take that last question - on whether the servants of tyrants are as guilty as those tyrants. Doesn’t that sound just like Bush’s axiom that, “if you feed a terrorist, or fund a terrorist, you are a terrorist?” It’s exactly the same principle; if you’ve any connection with terrorism/counter-revolution, you are a terrorist or counter-revolutionary.

Thus, Melanie Phillip’s, “terrorist nation.”  A wall around the West Bank because Hamas exists there, regardless of the blameless children who also happen to exist there. Because, in this system, they’re not blameless.

And it goes beyond that. The enabling state and the values of positive liberty again become perverted. The 42 Days detention farce serves as the perfect example. Labour claims it protects the basic freedoms of life and liberty by introducing the measures; but effectively jeopardises those basic freedoms by allowing the police to grab a citizen off the street and hide them away for 6 weeks without telling them why. In a perverse twist of illogic whereby liberty becomes tyranny for liberty’s sake, liberty loses. And so do we.

It’s absurd to equate Revolutionary Terror with the present situation. But it’s the same thought that underlies both; freedom must be restricted for its own sake. It’s a perverse step which attacks the real purpose of the Enabling State. Certain intervention can make greater liberty available to all - but not when that liberty is undermined at a basic level. Modern politicians would do well to learn that, or face the consequences of their own petty tyranny.

(Scribo Ergo Sum at Marxism 2008 - part 4)

This time around I got to speak to some lefties before I even got into the festival, something which had only happened previously in order for me to ask some directions towards the location back on Friday. The reason for this was a pair of men who I overheard discussing some topic revolving around the Respect meetings and the SWP all having the same agenda upon arrival. This is (rather revealingly) something which caught my interest as the application of Democratic Centralism to coalition votes seems to have caused no end of complaints amongst the groups the SWP has worked in (the Socialist Alliance, Stop The War and, of course, the Respect Coalition). In fact I went so far as to presume that they were non-Left List/Alternative Respect members. It actually turned out that they were “critical” SWP members; quite an exotic breed. They spoke jovially about the state of Respect and stated that a split was effectively inevitable at some stage owing to the division which would have arose over whether to attack or back Ken Livingstone. Affable though they were they seemed slightly displeased with their position and perhaps a tad uncomfortable with the party. The less than glowing recommendation that I should probably not join the party if I didn’t believe what it did was given as we parted, perhaps their weak gesture towards participating in the recruitment side of this event.

By some unanticipated miracle I had avoided lateness, indeed it was the first speaker who was behind time, momentarily leaving me wishing that I had instead attended the one being held on Gramsci. This was exacerbated by her use of the phrase “Gramscian” when she did arrive and I had no idea what it meant (the reason for the delay was a breakdown in service from Oxford). But it quite quickly became clear that it was entirely worth it. Deborah Cameron is a linguistics professor and one of the few writers I have found that both share views concerning gender with me and have pierced mainstream media. She had a series of extracts from her book The Myth of Venus and Mars published in the Guardian earlier this year and reading them was what could only be described as a relief.

Cameron takes to task the substantial sub-genre of “Self-help” that effectively seeks to state that there are immense differences between men and women which are entirely inherent and that these should be understood and accepted as challenging them is a waste of time. Besides the obvious and intellectually cripplingly moronic failure to distinguish between presence and source these texts invariably exacerbate differences with the sort of selective pseudo-science everyone attempting to wield research as a weapon encounters. Where Cameron focuses, though, is her specialty: linguistics.

Male humans and female humans communicate in fundamentally different ways, the divisionists tell us: men speak far less than women and women talk about their feelings far more. Men are more assertive and women communicative, the former better in positions that lead and the latter in rolls revolving around empathy and emotional communication.

These are the claims but the evidence is scanty: Cameron started through telling us of an analysis which traced the myth of 20,000 words a day for women and 7,000 for men back to its source: a less extreme number in a Christian aimed book about marriage; which seemingly plucked the figure from thin air. Although in this instance she was able to obtain a retraction of the statistic from a well-respected book many other myths litter the memetic landscape that our and every culture consists of and she rattled through them at a satisfyingly brisk rate. There is no evidence that emotional words are used unequally between the genders besides swear words, which men do use more often (she notes that this never leads anyone to conclude that men are more emotional), men and women share conversation time equally when in equal status and it is only when there are more men higher in the hierarchy than women that they dominate conversations. Women are no superior at communication and men find women perfectly coherent as they speak the same form of English.

Where this starts to become of high importance is instances such as rape trials, where rapists can use this presumptuous nonsense to say that they somehow failed to understand women due to them not using explicit wording, when in reality almost all short of the mentally handicapped can understand signals of that nature under such conditions. She quoted the occasion in Cool Hand Luke where the prison guard tells the eponymous protagonist “What we have here is a break-down in communication”. Just as this was a euphemism for disobedience so is, for example, a man refusing to remove a bag of rubbish.

But many want to hear the reassuring signals of inherent difference and gender dichotomy being deeply entrenched, even if it means abandoning critical thought and relying upon shoddy readings of science. Challenging this is a vital task for any egalitarian as the division of humanity into an assortment of interacting but mutually distinct groups invariably should be pursued solely when necessary. This is not such an instance.

Before the meeting I had had a lengthy talk with a fellow who had seemingly been checking the room for anyone on their own and not in the Socialist Worker Party, for he quickly outlined to an extraordinarily attractive girl why she should prior to us leaving. He was another one of the charming young SWP members and he certainly seemed to consider it a positive organisation. I again expressed wariness at their organisational structure and today told that I was uncertain between social democracy and socialism (still truth) and thus uncertain if I’d be appropriate for an outright socialist party.

There were no communist groups around today but a few SWP were having something of a discussion on the grass outside Birbeck College with a pair of independent socialists. As this was ongoing I spoke to an Socialist Worker on the periphery who’s name was Simon. I later found out that he was from Belgium, where the left consists of four Maoists still talking about “Armed Struggle”. He had a sharp wit and when I told him my ideal for the left (a large structure with various factions) he told me that it already existed: the Labour Party. It takes your money and your vote and expects nothing else of you, he said. He told me that he was wary of working in an organisation where Stalinists or Maoists were also operative and I told him that I had not seen any such parties present at Marxism. His response was rather unexpected: he mentioned the CPGB. He stated that although they were not avowed in their ideology they followed such positions. Unfortunately the party in question weren’t around to ask.

He said that independent socialists had a role but could not expect their position to achieve a great deal, although they could of course be worked with in a popular front against fascism or the war or the like. He was opposed however to the autonomist anarchists who operated on in Sussex. As we left he paused and said that I should think about joining, because what with the 400 other people telling me to join the SWP I probably hadn’t considered it yet.

I headed out to check for any more interesting lefties around the corner but it seemed that only the SWP tents (and Stop The War and so on) were around so I headed kback to see a talk on “Zombieconomics”. This was a topic that intrigued me purely due to the name but which I knew nothing about, indeed in the room prior to the speaker’s arrival I engaged with another socialist about how it might be pronounced (with Zombie and Economics divided instead of combined, it eventually turned out).

The talk was given by Ben Fine, who had studied matters economical for decades and come to the conclusion that the subject was firstly dead: there was no room for growth or expansion as there were three main schools and hybrids between them but nothing beyond this could be envisioned. “Economics is dead” was not his message, however, in fact it was worse: rather than simply ceasing to exist economics had instead reached out and attempted to dominate the other social sciences, just as an unliving zombie has no essence of its own and seeks to forcibly extract it from those around it.

Much of his talk, as with Chris Bambery the day before, revolved around neo-liberalism but Fine made efforts to explain that this term can mean just about anything. Either a tendency to destroy public services to reform them, either an outright rejection of Keynesianism or a new form of it, theory or application, original form or current, these are all distinct varities that bear the same title. Comparatively the Respect/Respect split seems a matter of ease to understand.

The tone of his talk was in part hopeful: social sciences had moved away from post-modernism and neo-liberalism, he told us, although the extent to which he could go into points rather than merely touching upon them was limited. He was aware that he was not talking to a roomful of economists and confined by as much; but also avoided being condescending. To be honest though I still only half understand the meaning of “Financialisation”, although I accept that its implications seem to be negative ones.

I also don’t entirely understand the distinction between a political economist and a regular one but apparently it is primarily that the former are given less respect and purged from university departments more often. Apparently one of the speakers universities (in Sydney, as I recall) currently understands them to belong in the Arts department, something which they find most inappropriate.

In short it was mind-expanding stuff and probably the sort of stuff anyone wanting to become a Marxist would have to wrap their head around. Thankfully though I don’t have to and that’s one of the many reasons why.

I was considering just heading off home but decided to stage one final raid upon the mystical white “Marxism Attendees Only” tent, since that’s where all of the revolutionaries seemed to be at.

It seemed that my West London comrades were not in attendance but I caught up with Simon; who was behind a table stuffed full of food I eventually gained access to without paying. A discussion was underway between the assembled group about the Brighton bomb factory, a delightful but grim topic that revolved around the course of action to be taken against EDO. Apparently the aforementioned autonomist anarchists had taken up the course with force and were using a series of stunts and other direct action tactics to get the place shut down. A typical tactic was to chain themselves to the gates on a Wednesday and stay there until they got themselves arrested.

The anarchists had seemingly scared off the rest of the public from involvement with the cause; however they were also deterred by the obvious consequences: as great a blow as this would be for neo-conservatives in the short term (the factory makes door opening mechanisms for bombers that have been used by the Royal Airforce and US in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the Israelis against Palestine; therefore rolling a number of far-left issues into a potent cocktail) they would simply relocate and the effect upon the local economy from all the jobs lost would be disastrous.

Indeed I suspect that this was why the gentleman gently agitating in favour of action against EDO was struggling with the thus far non-commital SWP: much as they are often eager to take up a cause and take it to the streets in this instance they would be actively working in order to try and increase Brighton unemployment. But the activist in discussion with them stated that in capitalism everything was related to jobs and business and that any ethical projects would end up losing people jobs. This was simply part and parcel of operating politically within it and was unfortunate but had to be done and could be mitigated through demands including full employment for all the factory workers (who by, he did not outline).

Then there was the difficulty of methods: the suggestion of protesting on Saturday rather than the weekdays which had been done before (with the anarchists attempting to shame the factory workforce) was seen as an improvement but still considered warily. The difficulty was explained as there being no “Either or” choice between protest and direct action: the area had been cased and little willingness for factory closure found amongst the general public. Accordingly perhaps the only action possible is the sort that was apparently found legal by a judge in some similar case or other.

Just to complicate matters a little further the exact attitude of present company with regards to the autonomist anarchists was not precisely clear. They were dedicated activists and if direct action was to go underway doubtless valuable allies of some kind. But one of the Socialist Workers had heard that it was largely them that were scaring away any sort of mass movement over the issue of the bomb-delivery production plant. If so then any attempts at popular fronts would have to be formed without them and if direct action was the plan then they would have to be convinced to coalesce with socialists, at least to some extent.

In short I was receiving a quick vision first hand of just what a struggle it is to actually organise anything, even a local project with a specific aim.

The exact outcome of their in promtu meeting was indecided, but I was certainly well fed at the end of it thanks to a mixture of rolls, grapes and pasta. Stuffing the latter into the former was quite delightful, especially so because I got to do so while chatting to the chap organising against EDO. His name was Penny and he was quite possibly the result of the day. This I only discovered when probing (as one does under such conditions) his political affiliation. He was a member of Respect and told me his position within it when I told him that despite having covered it closely for a few months now and he replied that he was on its national committee and he still couldn’t.

This Respect is the Respect that isn’t Respect any more but was the Left List and now is the Left Alternative. Yes, the name is apparently around to stay, which I expressed my dismay over. Apparently he was plumping for the Left (too broad) or Left Solidarity (too close to Tommy Sheridan’s failed party for the electoral commission to handle) and the word “Party” was for some reason out entirely.

More importantly he was one of the seemingly rare Respect-but-not-SWP types I’d only met two of previously. I asked him how common his kind were and he said the split was either 50-50 or 40-60 in-not on the national committee, while on the local level the SWP bias was significantly stronger. He was not keen on Galloway but, unexpectedly, brought up Obama and expressed some considerable admiration. I told him that I also found it remarkable that he had defeated the Clinton Machine with such limited corporate backing and admired the transparency and skill that had marked his campaign, along with its top-down structure.

It was at this stage that I was approached by a Socialist Worker wearing an “Event Staff” t-shirt (weren’t they all?) who asked to see my ticket. I replied that I did not have one and he informed me that the tent was for Marxist attendees only. I replied that I was attending Marxism and he said he knew this as he was the one who had let me into Tony Benn and expelled me from the SWP student meeting. He reminded me that I had told him I had no money (perhaps presuming that I had paid for food). It was, I suppose, only a matter of time before they caught up with me. Too late. By this stage I did not even ponder resistance, when he told me I would have to leave the tent I didn’t even bother mentioning the ending of Animal Farm to him and obeyed his assertion of property rights, biding goodbye to the Respect member and then departing the area and the event.

On my way out I was stopped briefly by the Campaign Against Climate Change leafleteer, the first non-SWP sort I had encountered active that day. I mentioned the connotations of his leaflet with good humour and he laughed. We discussed the group for a short while and to demonstrate the Tony Been denying political bent of his organisation he simply pointed at his t-shirt, which declared Bush as “Wanted for Crimes Against Humanity” due to his stance on climate change. He spoke of the president now wanting to drill in Alaska and I told him how after the “addicted to oil” stuff this seemed to be junkie scrabbling. He laughed again and told me that it would make a fine cartoon; then I was on my way.

Marxism let me see a wide range of intelligent people for free and allowed me the peculiar opportunity to frequently be in a room-full of people who I was well to the right of. It allowed me to make some sense of Respect and conclude that everyone fucked up hard. My thanks to the SWP for putting on such a fine event. I’ll certainly trot along next year and hopefully can drag at least one of my SES comrades with me. In the meantime I’m still not a Marxist but I am far better informed than on Friday. Until next time, comrades…

Number of meetings attended: 10

Amount of money paid: £0.00

Number of infiltrations: 4 (Apparently the white tent counts, so my count of 1 yesterday was entirely inaccurate.)

Number of successful infiltrations: 3 (NOMNOMNOM)

Amount of free meals obtained: 3

Amount of offers to join the SWP: 400 a minute.

(Or: For Solidarity’s sake, comrade, don’t mention Kronstadt)

On a day where the Prime Minister appointed by his party declared himself against a return to the 1970s, a time which the far-left (and perhaps only the far-left) consider with some nostalgia, at least in contrast to the decade which followed who better to see first thing than Tony Benn?

Watching him at Marxism 2008 had a particular joy; in that it was one of the immensely rare occasions during which his audience would leave him substantially to the right. If, even after all these years of attendence, this left him unsettled it did not show an inch. I showed up very mildly late and he was in full swing; clearly in his element while speaker. His speech roamed over a broad number of points and annecdotes, distinctively Bennite in nature, covering everything from his rather surprising advocacy of rationing (the average height of the working class man rose by two inches due to it) to his ethical vegetarianism (his forward-thinking son Hillary told him fifteen years ago that if all the grain fed to animals was fed to people this would end famine).

It was obvious that the SWP presence (heavy) was left bristling by his outright suggestions that Labour was worth struggling to save and although his suggestion that Labour would swing left after a heavy loss to Cameron (something which would effectively require New Labour to end) he did acknowledge that Labour was not socialist but had socialists in it “Just as the Church has Christians in it”.

Speaking of which, he did not adopt an anti-religious tone but was opposed to religious authority. It occured to me later on (as well as the day before, when I was talking about the importance of imams concerning Respect) that Marxism falters when it comes to understanding the power of religious leaders. Its understanding being limited to wealth results in the power of a poor man standing on an upturned box and raving about a being that loves as it condemns being somewhat alien to them. Preachers often lack fortunes but are able to marshall people through belief in matters beyond the material. Although I would challenge the genuine existence of such forces as firmly as would Marxists I fear that their focus upon the tangible leads them to underestimate the might of that which is elsewhere. Even if it is merely steroid-fed speculation it gives copious power to the undeserving.

Regardless, Benn stated that his internet research had led him to the conclusion that all religions taught much the same message; which was that you should treat others as you would expect to be treated. Perhaps a rather simpler formation than the Universal Ethic tirelessly sought by renegade Catholic Hans Kung but the method of his learning struck me as interesting. When he was taken up on this point by an American concerned about the media (worse in his own country than here, he said, but perhaps America is simply more right wing I would suggest) who stated that the internet was inherently “structured” to favour the bourgeois Benn stayed firm, stating that he was sometimes uncertain why he still watched television as he got all the news he wanted from the websites he followed. A man after my own heart, clearly.

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(Or: SES at Marxism 2008, part 2)

This time around I managed to gather myself from slumbers early enough to show up in time for considerably more sessions than the day before, albeit not nearly as early as the brisk 10.00 start that the meetings began with. I actually underestimated my lateness and ended up ploughing into what I thought was Labour and Alienation soon after starting but which was in fact Historical Materialism about to finish. Consequentially entry was a matter of ease; although in hindsight I probably left a SWP doorperson or two baffled.

I honestly can’t remember a lot about historical materialism, but as far as I can tell there was somehow a conversation about ethics going on, which was topically innappropriate but entertaining all the same, if only for a chap with shoulder-length dirty blonde hair who took to the floor and began talking about Kronsdat.

Now if I was looking for a sharp start to my day here it was: once this world was uttered things seemed to ripple and the effect was as delightful as I had imagined ennounciating such syllables in a room full of Trotskyites would be. Indeed, I merely deemed it a pity that I hadn’t beaten the chap to the bunch.

He was immediately followed by a bleached-blond lass who would later turn out to be somehow important who gave it some typical blather. Safeguarding the Revolution and so on, you know the drill. Never mind that their hero had overseen and executed the crushing of the epitome of the revolution, had to be done to protect a structure that they didn’t even agree with, see? The alternative being a far more popular brand of socialism than the Bolsheviks seeing control of the country and that…Uhm…Anyway…

The room was still left unsettled. The topic moved on and it was about some other stuff, with my recollection failing me over the materialism stuff. What was interesting was that as he was headed out of the room the chap who had asked was verbally hailed by a pair of Marxism “Staff” t-shirt wearers from behind a table, who wanted to give him the Kronsdtat Chat. I stuck around to hear this and the first man was firm and pulled away quickly by duties while the second was softer but spoke to us for longer, accompanying us to the lift and staying with us for a while.

Their arguments seemed to consist of a mixture of emphasising the importance of crushing the Kronsdtat threat, claiming that there were none of the original Kronsdtat sailors left owing to attrition from the revolution(s) against the Csar and the heavy losses of the Civil War (concerning this, as with all other matters of detail, you must consult Douglas or some other historian who is of this field rather than early Medieval as I am) , launching ad hominems (those that bring this up are bourgeois or anarchists aiming to discredit Trotsky rather than achieve anything productive) and talking about how the Bolsheviks agonised over the decision.

They also stated that the Kronsdtat make up was Socialist Revolutionary rather than Bolshevik, and this irked me: even I am aware that when Lenin briefly allowed an experiment in democracy the very reason he rejected the outcome was that the SRs won in a landslide, crushing the Bolsheviks electorally and demonstrating a level of support for the militants of an immensely smaller scale than they liked to presume. This considered, that there were plenty of Kronsdtat sailors Social Revolutionaries is hardly surprising at all.

Unfortunately all Bolshevik apologists dislike you bringing up their almost total absence of mandate about as much as Trots do his authoritarian atrocities. So we didn’t get far but the people we spoke to were perfectly friendly and their response seemed more an earnest attempt to explain their position rather than intimidation or anything of the sort. As ever the SWP seemed like a misguided but ultimately lovely bunch.

As we headed outside I encountered a large number of groups that thought otherwise. This was a set of people who’d cleared off before I arrived yesterday and were in some ways who I was there for. The SWP I’d already heard plenty from and now it was time for The Rest of The Left.

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Brown appears not to understand the concept of civil liberties. Quoth the OED on the term:

civil liberty n freedom of action and speech subject to laws established for the good of community

Legal bods could make the definition more nuanced - but that’s almost good enough. Civil liberties are what Berlin termed negative freedoms; ones which exist and cut down upon, not those created by the state.

Which is why Brown today insisted that:

Gordon Brown has defended the use of CCTV, ID cards and the DNA database - saying they protect civil liberties.

And, moving on to the speech:

“New technology is giving us modern means by which we can discharge these duties, but just as we need to employ these modern means to protect people from new threats, we must at the same time do more to guarantee our liberties,” he said.

“Facing these modern challenges, it is our duty to write a new chapter in our country’s story - one in which we both protect and promote our security and our liberty, two equally proud traditions.”

And so on. Notice what Brown’s missed, though: the fact that he wants to create liberty through state intervention. That doesn’t represent the negative freedom characterised by a lack of restraint typically associated with “civil liberties.”

The state can do a great deal to promote and protect liberties. Intervention isn’t in itself evil at all; the enabling state’s list of achievements is huge. But when the state itself becomes the danger to liberty - as it does with proposals to allow it to lock people up for 6 weeks without charge - then it can’t guard against oppression. Brown would do well to realise that…

Bensix provided a valuable link in the comments section, which I consider well worthy of repetition. Quite simply David Davis lacks any credentials to the title of “Libertarian” which has seemingly been constantly heaped upon him by all sides of the media. That link evidences as much even without mentioning his standard reactionary stance upon drugs {the outright idiocy included in Ian Duncan Smith’s report on the topic received not a whisper}. He failed to attack Section 28, a vile law with just as little evidence for necessity as 28 days. He voted against gay adoption, he only avoided voting against civil partnerships seemingly through his absence as there is little to suggest he would support such a measure given past form.

I respect David Davis for taking this risk {it fails to surprise me that a challenger has appeared who should pose a threat even in the absence of a Labour campaign, an event of such high profile was bound to attract such attention}. I think that the argument of him supporting 28 days is a weak one as this compromise was the only one which stood any chance of defeating the government. It is much along the same reasoning as that outlined to me by Ann Widdecombe while giving a speech at my school whereby she explained that her opposition to abortion was not expressed in votes for outright bans but for whichever proposals it seemed the pro-life MPs could muster enough supports to turn out a decent showing for. David Davis is clearly as opposed to 42 Day Detention as Widdecombe foeticide and claiming otherwise is unfair. That he is willing to stand the chance of sacrificing career for conviction is a striking and valuable move that should earn him considerable respect and sets him apart from the professional politicians who now dominate the Commons.

But the man is no libertarian; and to state as much is a grotesque distortion of that flawed but noble political position.