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« June 2004 | Main | August 2004 » 29 July Only a few hours until we see what John Kerry's made of. I'm not sure I can watch. The word is that the man has to make the speech of his life. On the basis of the others I've seen, this doesn't seem hard, but ... well, let's just leave it there for now. The Republicans are on alert, just in case. In the wake of that appearance the other day by Kerry's ball-breaking wife (why can't she stand instead of him? She'd eat Bush for breakfast), they've unveiled the weapon that really matters in the fattest and greediest nation on Earth: food. Remember those freedom fries? Remember when French's Mustard released a statement assuring the all-American public that they weren't really French, it was just, ya know, a brand name? Well, now we have the next logical progression: 'W Ketchup'. It's true! What with Kerry's wife being the heir to the Heinz food dynasty, it's become clear that no true blue GOP supporter can stomach their ketchup any longer: hence 'W' - 'America's ketchup'. Or, as the ad says, 'you don't support Democrats. Why should your ketchup?' See for yourself at wketchup.com What could be next? Tax cuts for the rich burgers? Gay marriage constitutional amendment cookies? Pre-emptive defence cola? I can't wait for three months more of this. Oh boy. Posted by paul at 12:20 PM | Comments (0) 21 July Thought for the day: what if Al Qaeda employed a team of management consultants to assess its strategy and effectiveness? Possibly you'd get something like this See: I can do short blogs if I concentrate... Posted by paul at 12:18 PM | Comments (0) 19 July Today we're going to be looking at the perils of literature. Have a peek at the 'reviews' page for my book on this site, and you'll see that all the reviews - save one, from the Socialist Workers Party - are either fairly positive or very positive about One No, Many Yeses. Obviously every author is tempted to spin his own work, but in this case these reviews are actually representative of what was written. Promise! I didn't get as many reviews as I'd have liked - not major ones, anyway - but those I did get were surprisingly consistent in saying that the book was, well, at least worth a read. Still, I like to think I can take criticism as well as the next man, so I'm going to share with you now the first really bad review I've had. It's from the web magazine Spiked-Online and, before I share my feelings about it with you, here's a chance to read it in full: Making the geopolitical personal Paul Kingsnorth's One No, Many Yeses is billed as a 'journey to the heart of the global resistance movement' The journey starts in Chiapas. 'What may turn out to be the biggest political movement of the twenty-first century emerged from the rainforest remnants of Southern Mexico on 1 January 1994', he writes. What makes the Zapatistas' 12-day rebellion the radical birth of a new political movement is the fact that they were no ordinary guerrilla movement. Rather than seek to seize state power in the name of 'the people' they sought to create a space for autonomy. Instead of appealing to the workers to rise up and join them, they called on 'civil society'. For Kingsnorth and others this marked 'the first postmodern revolution'. Anti-capitalists around the world herald the Zapatistas as a leading example of the new politics - evidence that the 'movement' is based on those most excluded from global politics, peasants and indigenous people, 'simultaneously the very least alienated and most oppressed people on Earth'. It is the struggles for survival in the non-Western world that appear most authentic and untainted by the cultural, economic and social pressures of modern consumer society. For Kingsnorth, 'This movement is different. Indigenous concerns have been at its heart from day one. Because it is a movement that was born in the "developing" world, because of its culture of diversity, because land and cultural identity and giving voices to the overlooked are key to its concerns, tribal people have played a key part in it.' Kingsnorth says the aim of his book is to 'torpedo one of the most widespread myths about this movement - the suggestion that the critics of globalisation come mostly from the rich countries'. But the book itself makes interesting reading precisely because rather than 'torpedoing' this suggestion it confirms the view that the 'global struggle' is very much a Western creation. This is a journey of personal discovery for Kingsnorth, not a story of finding something 'out there'. Before he started he felt that he was already part 'of a genuinely new political movement - something international, something different and something potentially huge. But what exactly was it?' As Kingsnorth says, 'I felt a part of it, whatever it was'. This is a journey to discover why Kingsnorth feels more connected to people struggling in the Global South than he does to people engaged in politics back at home. In researching the book, Kingsnorth spent eight months travelling across five continents. His first stop is Chiapas, which apparently has become a 'reality tourist' attraction. At Oventic, one of the key Zapatista bases in Chiapas, the revolution is still taking place, yet now solidarity comes with the opportunity to buy 'Marcos T-shirts, ski masks, bandanas, posters, keyrings, tape recordings of revolutionary songs, books, caps, even the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) ashtrays'. The Zapatistas' café does a brisk trade in bottles of Coco-Cola. This brings out some angst in Kingsnorth - a feeling of disappointment, 'followed immediately by a feeling of guilt about feeling disappointed. Why shouldn't they drink Coke? No, hang on, why should they?' Next he's off to the Bolivian city of Cochamba to attend a People's Global Action activist conference, where the highlight is a party, dancing and drinking to the Che Guevara song under the multi-coloured chequered flag of the campesino farmers. What hits Kingsnorth is his personal sense of solidarity with Maori tribesmen, Spanish playwrights, Bristol fire-eaters, et al, imagined by him to be 'representatives' of hundreds and thousands of members of the global movement. He argues that academics and media analysts often neglect the 'importance of protest on a personal level…the personal power that being one of so many people moving in the same direction can give you'. Compared with being at home coping with the excitement of local and European elections, I guess drinking and dancing under the jacaranda blossoms, with a sexy South African activist teaching him to toyi-toyi, it would be all too easy to romanticise the importance and influence of radical global politics. Kingsnorth takes us on a whistle stop tour taking in self-help community groups in South Africa, such as the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, the Church of Stop Shopping in New York, the World Social Forum in Porte Alegre and the Landless Rural Workers' Movement in Brazil. The most interesting chapter is the one recounting his experience in the highlands of West Papua where the Free Papua Movement (OPM) has undertaken an armed struggle against Indonesian mining interests. Three of the guerrillas trudge 20 miles through the rainforest to meet the English solidarity activists. Their leader Goliar speaks up: 'We want to know what you activists are doing in England. Can't you get us guns?... I have seen a film!… This man, Rambo. He has these arrows which he can set on fire. Have you seen these things? We want those!... We all agree that England has the best weapons. On television, we have seen you killing these people in Afghanistan. You have planes that can hover. We want those… We have come to ask you for help.' The OPM rebels will have to stick with their one worn-out Second World War revolver, and are disappointed to find out that solidarity will mean only the offer to 'try and tell people in England what is happening in Papua, which we hope will help you to get free'. The rebels' hope of international offers of solidarity had been a misplaced one. Kingsnorth writes: 'I feel suddenly guilty. These bedraggled warriors have walked for miles to beg from people they have never even met.' The guilt is assuaged somewhat when he realises that their policy towards the corporations - 'If we can, we kill them' - is, in fact, 'bracingly unsophisticated'. What attracted Kingsnorth to the Papuan rebels was not their politics or their strategy but a symbolic fantasy of the authentic life impossible in the alienated and consumption-orientated West. He discusses Papuan and English culture over roasted pig in a Papuan village where he suggests that Papuans shouldn't aspire to be like the West. Kingsnorth argues that millions are unemployed, sleeping in the streets and eating rubbish from bins, and tells his guide about 'old people's homes and rehab clinics, Prozac and cardboard cities, motorways and climate change, genetic engineering and landfill sites'. It is Kingsnorth's alienation from his own society that leads him to feel himself to be part of a global movement 'led by the poor in the "developing" lands'. His interpretation of diverse local political and social struggles as struggles to 'reclaim' space, or as 'everywhere a fight for space', stems from his own desire to separate himself from his environment. Yet, in his reading, he is not rejecting engagement in the politics of his own society but instead transferring his allegiance to the global sphere. There is little surprise that once this is done, his individual rejection of politics can take on a fantastical and radical form: 'Has a movement this big ever existed before? Has such a diversity of forces, uncontrolled, decentralised, egalitarian, ever existed on a global scale? Has a movement led by the poor, the disenfranchised, the south, ever existed at all…?' The struggles of peasants and farmers in the non-Western world are romantically reinterpreted as struggles for the 'authentic life', a life freed from the constraints and responsibilities of Western society. This is a global political movement not just made in the West but made up in the West. I think it's a safe bet that if there were a real global movement for social change we wouldn't need all these books and guides to reveal it to us. For Kingsnorth, this is not just a movement, but a revolution and one that 'is happening already. It is going on in Soweto and Porte Alegre, Jayapura and La Garrucha, Itapeva and Point Arena'. In fact, the more places the anti-capitalist revolution is 'discovered', the more it seems that the everyday struggle for survival has been reinterpreted and celebrated by Western radicals keen to free themselves from the mundane nature of what passes for politics in the West.
First a bit of context. Spiked-online is one of the many splinters that were produced when Living Marxism (latterly known as LM) magazine was closed down in 2000. It was forced to shut after losing a libel case brought by some ITN journalists, who it had accused of faking footage of Serbian concentration camps. LM was the magazine of the Revolutionary Communist Party, itself a seventies splinter of a particularly mad group of Trotskyists who managed to fall out with the various other communist parties in a classic piece of Peoples-Front-of-Judea type factionalism. Following the fall of LM, the RCP set up both Spiked-online and the Institute of Ideas, both of which propagate much the same sort of stuff. Like most old seventies Marxists they've long given up on most of the basic tenets of their faith (abolition of private property, workers revolution, overthrowing capitalism etc). They've morphed, instead, into uber-capitalists, unquestionably in love with new technology, ultra-rationalism, economic growth and Western-style development. Thought they've ditched political and economic Marxism for this rum brew they have, however, clung on to the worst tendencies of the extreme left: vanguardism (the people must be led and educated by intellectuals like us); unquestioning belief in economic growth (increased tractor production); a similarly unquestioning attitude to new technology (if it's new it must be good); and an arrogant refusal to consider the position of anyone who disagrees with them. I know I'm going on a bit, but as this lot have also very successfully infiltrated the media too, it's worth knowing who they are and where they're coming from when they pop up. Useful, too, in the context of this book review: not because their background means they are necessarily wrong about my book, but because they always present themselves as independent intellectual voices and never declare their actual interests. One of their interests, needless to say, is viciously attacking anyone espousing any sort of environmental or 'anti-globalisation' position: not because they've looked at the evidence and found those positions wanting, but because those positions clash with the tenets of their faith. Growth is good, development good, new technology good. Anyone who questions these things is a 'fascist' (their word) seeking to deny wealth to the poor in the name of a woolly western love of trees, whales, etc. What this amounts to is a call for removing all constraints on business, technology and science in the name of 'human progress'. Sounds like the neoliberal right, doesn't it? Which is what the RCP have, effectively, become. People like me are part of what they call an 'anti-progress alliance' so - when they notice us at all - we get a rough ride. I'll stop banging on about them now. If you want to know any more, there's a great guide to the RCP's tangled web of influence here Anyway, back to the review. I don't include it here just to mount a frantic defence of my book (really, life's too short) but rather to illustrate what this lot are about, and how they work. For what it's worth they come close to making a few good points, but, typically, they then have to go and ruin it all by spitting bile, deliberately misquoting, having a shot at a bit of psychological character assassination and - er - simply making stuff up. Hence, apparently, "this is a journey to discover why Kingsnorth feels more connected to people struggling in the Global South than he does to people engaged in politics back at home." How does the lemon-sucking rationalist who wrote this review know who or what I 'feel connected to'? He doesn't of course: but he wants to represent me - and through me, anyone concerned about any of this - as a Little Lost Boy, backpacking his way through global politics and romanticising the exotic brown people. See where this is going? And go there it does. "What attracted Kingsnorth to the Papuan rebels" for example, was apparently "not their politics or their strategy but a symbolic fantasy of the authentic life impossible in the alienated and consumption-orientated West." In case you missed that, here it is again: "It is Kingsnorth's alienation from his own society that leads him to feel himself to be part of a global movement 'led by the poor in the "developing" lands'." Got that? I am alienated from my own society (unlike David Chandler, who as an academic is presumably right in there), desperately seeking self-discovery and meaning, and transferring my psychological emptiness onto non-existent political movements. I don't like out-of-town superstores or motorway construction, so instead I've gone off wandering, and invented a revolution that David Chandler happens to know doesn't exist, because he hasn't read about it in the library of his former poly or seen it happening through the common room windows. But it gets better. Chandler then moves from psycho-analysing someone he's never met to simply making stuff up to prove the point he wanted to make before he even opened the book. Hence he writes: "The struggles of peasants and farmers in the non-Western world are romantically reinterpreted as struggles for the 'authentic life', a life freed from the constraints and responsibilities of Western society." Notice that 'authentic life' is sneakily shoved between inverted commas. That'll be a quote from the book, then? Er, no - it's a quote from David Chandler: this is what he thinks I think, and since I haven't actually said it (how inconvenient for the poor reviewer: sorry David!), he's just said it for me. Saves so much time. There's much more of this, but if I delve any deeper I'm going to look bitter. Oh, what the hell - I AM bitter. Not because this bunch of facile old Trots have attacked my book (it's actually rather flattering that they deigned to notice it at all - it must be having some impact) but because these people are dishonest, underhand and deeply unpleasant, and they pop up everywhere, spreading their fatuous 'I want more, daddy!' ideology all over the airwaves and the internet, without having the decency either to fairly represent the views of their opponents, or to be straight with people about their own background. OK, OK. I'm taking a deep breath. This is by far the longest blog I've ever written, so I'll stop right here. Have a nice day, people - and watch out for ex-Reds under the bed. Posted by paul at 11:27 AM | Comments (0) 15 July Very excited this morning, because my brother Simon, who has been acting as my webmeister since this site started, has finally showed me how to update my own blog, so I don't have to keep sending it to him to put up on the site. So here I am, sitting in front of Dreamweaver, trying to work out what the hell is going on. This could take some time, so please bear with me. While you're waiting, make sure you see Fahrenheit 9/11, if you haven't already. I caught it the other night and it really is a great, stirring piece of work. Imperfect, yes and, as predicted, in need of a ruthless edit, and often pursuing dubious arguments which aren't properly followed through. But worth seeing simply for the cumulative effect of all the footage it contains - much of it previously unseen - which adds up to a stirring and disturbing certainty that something - many things, in fact - is horribly wrong at the top end of the most powerful country on Earth. It also, despite its flaws, shows most of the attacks on the film for what they are - nit-picking whinges from people on the wrong side of the argument. Talking of nitpicking whinges, can anyone work out how the Butler Report could have concluded that vastly serious mistakes were made at almost every level of government and the intelligence services over those non-existent WMDs, but that it wasn't actually anybody's fault? And where can I get Butler's number the next time I need my accounts doing? Posted by paul at 04:15 PM | Comments (0) 10 July Some sad news today. One of the country's leading environmentalists, and one of the Green Party's two principal speakers, Mike Woodin, has just died, at a horribly young age. Despite leading a much healthier lifestyle than me, and being just seven years older, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer six months ago, and died from it this week. Mike was a leading light in the Green Party, and one of its inspirations. He won a seat here in Oxford in last month's council elections despite knowing that he wouldn't live to see his term through. He really will be hugely missed. As someone who knew him, though not well, I can also report that he was a wonderful guy. Depressingly unfair that people like him should be lost to us so young. There's more about Mike here, and hopefully he will receive some obituaries deserving of his status over the next few days. Posted by paul at 11:13 AM | Comments (0) 9 July Two brief thoughts for the day: Thought one: it's interesting to see the Michael Moore backlash in full swing. I haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11 yet, so I don't have an opinion on it (not that this seems to have stopped some people from weighing in with their valuable thoughts). I enjoyed Bowling for Columbine, though it could have done with a ruthless edit, and Moore's mawkish tendencies occasionally grate. His flaws, though, hardly rate this kind of right-wing hatchet-job. Or, indeed, this, from the ever-reliable Christopher Hitchens (Anyone know where Hitchens places himself on the political spectrum these days, by the way? A smart and readable attack, this, from one fat boy on another, but it begs the question: just what has Moore done to deserve this kind of broadside? Answer: become a successful, populist, irritant to the status quo. He might not always be right (or, indeed, funny), and there might be something increasingly smug about him too (hard to deny it, I'm afraid). And he might eat too much. And I wish he'd take that bloody cap off. But if he wasn't doing it, who would be? There's nothing a Republican despises more than a successful leftie polemicist who moves beyond the liberal ghettoes and speaks to people who don't read The Nation or Chomsky's latest volume. That, surely, is the reason for all the vitriol: Moore's attacks are hitting home. Thought two: I intend to cut out the picture of former Enron CEO Ken Lay being led to court in handcuffs, which was in all the papers today, and stick it on my wall. An incredibly rare example of a corrupt, overpaid 'fat cat' actually looking like he might get a jail term, rather than a vast payoff, for his crimes. Lay's real crime, of course, was to get caught - and on such a massive scale that even the supine US authorities couldn't turn their heads. But what the hell - let's enjoy it while we can. Chances are it won't come round again for a while. Posted by paul at 05:56 PM | Comments (0) 7 July Hardly any time at all for blogging at the moment. I am up to my ears in work. This is the way it goes when you're freelance: nothing happens for month, then ten pieces of work come along at once and you end up getting no sleep for weeks. This is how July is looking for me. But at least it means I can pay my rent… Just one very short observation about Jonathan Freedland's column in today's Guardian. He's talking about Bush and Kerry (prepare yourself for far, far too much more of this sort of thing over coming months). There was one sentence that stuck with me as I read it: 'Even if Kerry's official platform were identical to Bush's, Democrats would work hard to get him elected.' This says all you need to know about the nature of 'democracy' in modern states. The lesser of two evils, the more interesting of two bores, the slightly less gung-ho of two neoliberals. This may not be an original observation but it's a crucially important one. What does democracy mean when the market is the real ruler? I'm writing an article for the New Internationalist magazine soon in which I want to explore this issue in more depth. If I can find ten minutes of my life do it in, that is. Watch this space… Posted by paul at 10:55 AM | Comments (0) 4 July Well, Glastonbury rocked, and also rolled, and though I still feel jet-lagged (ten hours sleep in four days is not something you want to be doing too often, whatever substances you use to keep you awake….) it was a great success. Our Papuan band and singers went down a treat and we raised a lot of awareness about the all-new Free West Papua campaign which I and some others have recently set up. Raise your awareness too by visiting our homepage - or, if you want to be kept updated, send an email to friends@freewestpapua.org and we'll put you on our database. We promise not to pass your details on to any loan companies, penis-enlargement specialists or relatives of recently-ousted central African dictators. Posted by paul at 03:50 PM | Comments (0) |