Another rant about Gerald Warner

A while back I voice my opinions on the reactionary bigot Gerald Warner, who uses his column in the Scotland on Sunday to relentlessly warn against his narrow-minded view of 'cultural marxism'.

I'm going to do it again. Chances are, there'll be another one after this, unless Warner succumbs to a rage-induced heart attack.

Today Warner wrote about the Cuban Missile Crisis, apparently as part of his campaign to have himself seen as some kind of historic revisionist historian ('revisionist' in this case meaning 'everything that's ever happened proves the left-wing are scum').

He covers the event is standard way, working his way through the tense stand-off, noting the role that Kennedy played in stopping it tumbling into a nuclear war. Then, like a hyper-privileged Rod Sterling, Warner uses his closing act to hit us with a stunning twist:

It is fortunate our parents’ generation was willing to risk annihilation to halt Marxism in its tracks. Otherwise, today, we might be living in a society where every candidate at elections stood for the same agenda, where freedom of speech was replaced by Newspeak, where people had to consider whether they would offend the authorities by uttering certain opinions, where they could lose their jobs for being politically incorrect, where messages on social media could lead to arrest and where someone could be sent to jail for an offensive slogan on his T-shirt. When Marxism stops goose-stepping it is not dead: it is coming in by the back door.
 

Boom: it was all a dream! It was earth all along! He was talking about marxism all the time!

Now, I'm a marxist, and I don't think about marxism as much as Gerald Warner does. I didn't get a column is a national newspaper just to piss it away criticizing a political philosophy based on what I wrongly assume its tenets are. Maybe Gerald is like those Southern preachers who react so strongly to homosexuality because they're trying desperately to suppress their own sexuality? Perhaps.

That paragraph is the microcosm of Warner's politics - it basically lists everything he believes marxism stands for, and everything he complains about on a daily basis.

• 'Every candidate at elections stood for the same agenda' - these candidates, who are indeed largely saying the same thing, are doing so out of their own free will, and the free will of their party. The fact that both Labour and the Tories have effectively merged into centrist mess, joined by the soul-selling Lib Dems, has nothing to do with marxism
• 'where freedom of speech was replaced by Newspeak, where people had to consider whether they would offend the authorities by uttering certain opinions, where they could lose their jobs for being politically incorrect' - again, this 'freedom of speech' complaint is a strong theme in Warner's work. He believes, as I pointed out in the last blog, that his right to be racist, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic etc. overrides the right of people not to be abused in these ways, or to be oppressed by a system designed by people like Warner to benefit people like Warner.
• 'where messages on social media could lead to arrest and where someone could be sent to jail for an offensive slogan on his T-shirt'* - similar to the last point, and, again, I do not see what this has to do with marxism. From what I can gather, he sees marxism as the creation of a godless, pro-communism hegemony, and criticises it as such. This ignores the role that hegemony plays in every political ideology. Marxism does intend, as Gramsci said, to create a working class hegemony, much like how capitalism creates a ruling class hegemony - the latter defended to the death by Warner. The problem is that Warner does not seem to see the creation of a capitalist hegemony. And if he does, he has no problem with it, thus making him a hypocrite.   
• 'When Marxism stops goose-stepping it is not dead: it is coming in by the back door' - a nice outing for the old 'far-left and far-right politics are both at the extreme ends of the spectrum that the spectrum turns into a circle, or something. Whatever, both are the same thing. IT WAS CALLED THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST PARTY FOR A REASON YOU KNOW!' fallacy.

Gerald - just shut up, pal.


*Here, I assume Warner is referencing Barry Thew, who was jailed this week for wearing a shirt reading 'One Less Pig - Perfect Justice' and 'kill a cop 4fun.com ha, haaa?' [sic] the day that two police officers were shot and killed in Manchester. In this case, I am actually inclined to agree with Warner - Thew should not have been jailed. His t-shirt was offensive, but his wearing it on that day was a coinsidence - he was wearing it the day before as well. The 'one less pig' part should testify to this - surely, if he was referencing the shooting, he would have written 'two less pigs' or something similar. The media reporting of the story has also failed to mention an important fact - that Thew's son was killed by the police three years ago. I planned to make this into a longer post, but never had the time or effort required.

On Caitlin Moran and feminism

The above (taken from the STFU Moffat tumblr site, which is doing lots of good stuff) created a Twitterstorm (are they still called that) based around Caitlin Moran, who is probably the British figurehead for feminism at the moment.

For a bit of context, Moran stated that she did not care that Dunham's hit TV show Girls contains no ethnic minorities, despite being set in New York, a city with a huge variety of people of different races. I haven't actually seen Girls, as I don't think it's been shown in Britain yet, so I don't know if the 'complete and utter lack of people of colour' refers just to the main characters, or to the cast as a whole. Either way, this seems like a strange case of casting.

The main issue that people took with Moran was that she stated that she didn't care about the race inequality in the show, prompting people to argue with her. Later, in an act of self-aggrandisement that would make Ricky Gervias baulk, proceeded to personally thank everyone that defended her.

The problem with Moran's statement is that she acts as if the role of race in the media doesn't matter. It does. Everything does, in terms of the media. Moran, as a feminist, should be aware that patriarchy is spread - partially, but not totally - through the portrayal of women in the media, the prime example being the prominence of rape culture.

In the case of Girls, which was frequently labelled the successor to Sex In The City, there's a belief that it may become one of those cult shows which people will want to model their life around - there's a consensus that the growth in popularity of coffee-shop socialising in the nineties was due to Friends (Friends wasn't quite a cult show in the strictest sense of the word - it had a devoted fanbase, but the fanbase was massive. It's not cult in the way Arrested Development is.) I'd imagine that Sex In The City prompted groups of women in fours to sit in cocktail bars and talk about their sex lives. Emulating lives lead on screen is a natural extension of escapism.

But Girls (as with all the shows mentioned above, in fact) the lack of a variety of race, though subconscious, will have an effect. All the above groups are populated entirely by white people - usually middle-class white people. What does this say to people - it says that the perfect group of friends you can have are white, middle-class, cis-gendered, straight, etc.

Moran's brand of feminism - I guess you could call it 'liberal feminism' - fails to address the theory of intersectionality - that social inequality is not simply found on one plain, and that gender inequality cannot be separated from the class struggle, the civil rights movement, the fight for homosexual rights - essentially, all fields of identity can, and should be considered.

I've touched on this once before on this blog, during a post about George Galloway's 'in the sex game' comments about Julian Assange. He claims to be a socialist, but, by being a misogynist, he simply cannot be - equality, in class terms, cannot just be for men.

Many people have had objections to Moran's liberal feminism, largely critquing her massively successful book How To Be A Woman. I haven't read it, so my views of it do come from blogs which have written about it. These blogs do quote heavily from the book, and usually give as much context as it is possible to give, so hopefully I am not too far off from what Moran meant, and won't look like too much of a fool.

From what I understand Moran regularly makes jokes about woman, jokes which you'd expect to find being made by someone who reached their twenties before poltical correctness emerged.* Jokes about woman being overly emotional, or scared of spiders, or being unable to drive. Essentially, jokes which force woman into a single hegemonic grouping. Moran's use of these jokes is an extension of the point which I made above - her ignorance of the cultural hegemony which allows patriarchy to survive.

Similarly, and this a point which I don't understand, she asks for over-the-top praise of male feminists. Treating a male feminist in this way, and worshipping his body in such a way, is problematic for a number of reasons. Us men shouldn't be congratulated for being pro-feminists/feminist allies - it should be expected. Certainly, not enough men are pro-feminists, but we should not be treated as superior to female feminists for being so.

Secondly, the sexualised imageary advances the stereotype of men pretending to be feminists so that they can sleep with women. Under no circumstances should this idea be popularised, as it would build a hollow-shell feminism which would crumble as soon as the men found a new way to talk women into bed.

I don't doubt that Moran is actually a feminist, and, like the poster on STFU Moffat, think that she has done of good job of pulling feminism back into the mainsteam (slightly) and helping to remove some of the stigma attached to calling yourself a feminist (although this still has far to go). The problem is that Moran has limited this burst of feminism to a type that ignores the factors surrounding gender equality.

My belief, for what it's worth, is that patriarchy is implicit in capitalism. Capitalism reduces people to the roles exploiters and victims on all levels; the standard bourgeoisie and proletariat system; the system of imperialist nations and colonies; and, in amongst all this, the relations between men and women. Women are tasked with a vast amount of unpaid labour - raising children, looking after the family home. This idea is being erroded, slowly, but it is still commonplace. By taking apart the class system, we can remove the patriarcal aspect of society. The women's rights movement and class struggle are interlinked. I would hate for Britain for transform into a socialist state, only for women to still be subjugated.

So when we embrace feminism, we should not embrace it as a singular, isolated cause. Feminism must be used in tandem with the struggle for equality of all people. 
  

*Or, alternatively, on of those morons who think they're being clever by being willfully politically incorrect. People who think not being able to use the n-word in public is a disgrace to the concept of human rights. They can often be found saying things like 'You can't even say the word blackboard anymore!' I call this Clarkson Syndrome.

On the fallacy of 'post-ideology'

Frank Turner caused a minor furore recently, when Michael Hann uncovered some anti-left comments Turner made a few years in an interview with Moon and Back Music. A lot of people had mistaken his ‘don’t tread on the little guy, but don’t try to help him either, everything will sort itself out’ as socialist rhetoric, for some reason. This has helped mould Turner into the Billy Bragg of his generation (my generation, sadly), a moniker which apparently applies to anyone with an acoustic guitar and a vague knowledge of current affairs.

Bragg and Turner are friends, you know. Bragg tells us this in a Guardian article, where he shares tales of him and Turner enjoying a few matey beers backstage before a gig at Wembley Arena, and, more to the point, blames Turner’s libertarian views on this post-ideological age.

As you might expect from a ‘socialist’ who owns a huge house in a part of the country dominated by Tory politics, Bragg’s arguments don’t quite hold up.

This ‘post-ideological’ age is a fallacy. The argument that society and politics have moved beyond the need for vastly differing points of view originates in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book 'The End of History and The Last Man'. By disintegrating, the Soviet Union had dragged communism into irrelevance. Given the perceived influence of the USSR in far-left movements worldwide, they too were expected to fall apart at the feet of all-powerful Western capitalism.

 

The votes for communist and socialist parties around the world, especially in Europe, went into an even steeper decline than they already had (a decline which began after the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was quelled by Russian tanks and machine guns), and, as Bragg notes, British Labour removed Clause Four from its party legislation. Neo-liberalism had the upper hand, thanks to Thatcher, and Blair followed suit, shifting a once left-wing party into a different brand of Tory.

The idea of capitalism and democracy as intrinsically linked, and the latter not being able to exist without the former, also grew, as a reaction to the horror of Soviet autocracy. It mattered little that Marx never wrote a word that could be seen in being in favour of the persecution of the working class that Stalinism practised – as far as most people were concerned, Stalin could have went through the selected essays of Marx and Engels with Tippex and a biro, whiting out large passages and writing ‘all for me’ over the top.

So then – the twentieth century was battle between communist dictatorship and capitalist democracy, and capitalist democracy had won in the end. Fascism, of course, died in a bunker with Hitler, after a mortal wound sustained hanging off of a Milan petrol station.

This is a strikingly Atlantacist view to take, of course. In many parts of the world, communism still lives on. Whether China operates a communist country is debatable, but it still calls itself that. Cuba, resting under the nose of the Unites States, continues to follow the guidance of Castro, despite a growing flirtation with consumer capitalism. Elsewhere in South America, the ‘Pink Wave’ continues to gather speed – a series of democratic socialist governments have improved the lives of countless millions of people, from Brazil to Venezuela. The media in Europe and America is largely at a loss to explain why this has happened – as the countries modernised over the past decade, they no doubt expected them to follow the path set out by Europe in achieving short term prosperity.

Ideology did not end – it was stagnant, and the crisis of capitalism has reawakened it. Specifically, the austerity measures which have affected huge areas of Europe. Nowhere has felt the grip of austerity like Greece, and nowhere has seen such a resurgence in anti-capitalist politics either.

The Greek situation is a desperate one – as it drowns in the Mediterranean, the ECB stands on the shore with a fraying rope shouting ‘Swim harder! I’ll throw you the rope if you just swim harder!’ The centre-left party in power at the time, PASOK, has atrophied in the face of public anger, surviving only as a junior power in a rickety pro-austerity campaign headed by centre-right former rivals New Democracy. What was most surprising in the Greek election was not the collapse of the PASOK vote (any left-leaning party who commits itself to such austerity should expect their supporters to baulk) but who replaced them. The Eurocommunist/green activist coalition SYRIZA moved from a tiny share of the vote, pre-austerity, to becoming the official opposition. It flew past the PKK, the parliamentarian communist party who had retained a significant level of support in Greek elections over the past couple of decades.

                                                          SYRIZA election poster

More worryingly, the far-right also experienced a rise in support, as fascist movement Golden Dawn entered parliament for the first time. Its supporters act like the SA and are referred to by the party leadership as ‘stormtroopers’. It is no surprise that some people predict civil war in Greece, perhaps the natural progression from the breakdown that social order has already felt.  Anarchist squatters, who attend protests in black bloc mode, fight with Golden Dawn, who fight with immigrants, while the police attempt, and fail, to keep order.

The Greek situation signals the fallacy of the post-ideological belief in several ways. First, Greek politics sheltered a communist party which still achieved a good level of support in elections. The PKK’s role in Greek politics has added dimensions which are not present in other countries – the party’s role in the Greek revolution of the seventies, for example – but, in any case, there was clearly still an appetite in Greece for radical politics.  

Secondly, the rise of both SYRIZA and Golden Dawn has shown that a strong belief in centrist politics has evaporated. Elsewhere in Europe, both the far-right and the far-left have made gains over the past few years. Ultra-nationalist parties, claiming to counter what they termed a ‘worldwide Jihad’, operated on an Islamaphobic message to make electoral gains – in France, Marine Le Pen’s Front National finished third in the latest French elections. Also at these elections, the UMP of Sarkozy (who styled himself as the French Thatcher, dedicated to union breaking and individualistic pursuits of wealth, and failed) were replaced for the first time in years by the Socialist Party, while forth place was taken by a resurgent Left Front, led by Jean-Luc Melenchon, who planned to introduce a minimum wage. In the Netherlands, where the far-right’s European figurehead Geert Wilders was enjoying support, the formerly-Maoist Socialist Party has taken back votes.

Even in Britain, where the rise of neo-liberal anti-politics was, arguably, first heralded by the three election victories of Thatcher and the demise of working-class unionism, both radical sides of the political spectrum have began to grow in influence. The BNP, while enjoying success in the last decade, have collapsed in on themselves, suffocating under the weight of voter apathy and lack of funds, but clearing the ground for the EDL and various splinter factions to fight it out. And whatever you think of the man, the Respect Party has got someone who at least claims to be a socialist into Westminster.

The final argument against Fukuyama's optimistic but naive comment is not taken from votes polled or party membership, but from political philosophy:

"They do not know it, but they are doing it"
 

said Marx, originally in relation to false consciousness. Marxism concerns itself greatly with the way in which capitalist ideology worms its way into the mind of the people without them knowing (Gramsci's hegemony, for example). The End of History is not possible because the end of ideology is not possible. Ideology is inescapable, no matter what one you subscribe to - communism, capitalism, fascism etc. It is the way politics is structured, on every level, and, therefore, seeps into everyday life.