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The Hobgoblin - 8 (Online) 2006
Building Fighting Unions in the Public Sector - a Marxist-Humanist View - John Campbell
Euston, We Have a Problem - Richard Abernethy
Hobgoblin World Cup - Ian MacDonald
Freedom Fries Cold Capitalism - A View on the French Riots - Ken Wong
The British Trade Union Movement – Slow Death or Radical Rebirth? - David Black
Africa - After The G8 - Ba Karang
Cultural Diversity Or Cultural Oppression? - George Shaw
Book Review: Stephen Oppenheimer: "OUT OF EDEN: The Peopling of the World" - Richard Abernethy
Film Review: The Lord of War - Ian MacDonald
Hobgoblin World Cup
By Ian MacDonald
The 2006 World Cup reflected some progressive change and exposed further mind numbing hypocrisy and good reasons why capitalism need to be got rid of and a society of liberation put in its place. I will also mention the football!!
On a positive note, it is good that the slogan of the World Cup, “Make A Friend,“ seemed to have an influence, given the mindless thuggery seen in previous expeditions by English football supporters. Seriously though, this had nothing to do with it. It is more the case that there is now more internationalism between fans, because it is in international capitalism’s interest for this to be so. This “internationalism” is due to the fact that it is easier for fans to travel and secondly that they are now not treated as barbarians by the particular states, but rather as consumers. The German and English Police’s joint efforts was in the main a tactical success but also symptomatic of a general shift in global capitalism.
As Marxists we are not against football fans getting on together, this is positive and should be used positively in term of building international anti-racist campaigns and also making links with East European and other International teams the basis of solidarity and support for Asylum Seekers and anti-capitalist struggles per se. Concretely the above example also exposes the redundancy of political positions in some sectors of the Left that argue for getting out of Europe. This does not mean that I as a Marxist think that the European Union is progressive, but calling for a return to an isolated English capitalist fiefdom is hardly progressive either, and is based on pure economism.
What about the football then! Well, the England team displayed a dialectical relationship at work. On the one hand they were a team of extremely talented individuals, but on the other could not as a team even equal the sum of their parts, rather than being qualitatively more than the sum. The team played square and left the luckness Rooney floundering with no support as the sole hope for England up front. No wonder he lost it! Beckham was an anchronism to a by gone age, trying sadly to do a “Cry God for Harry and St George, “ He fooled no one. In essence the team played old-fashioned football and did not play this at all well. What is more they knew it!!
The reason for this historically goes back to when Alf Ramsay resigned. The English Establishment have always thought that a conservative, cautious management was the order of the day and certainly did not want flamboyance, an element of risk and creativity, to be the way forward for English football. In this sense Erickson was an international clone of Don Revie, who took the money and ran as well! This innate conservatism was the reason Brian Clough never got the job in the seventies. He was not a Marxist, but he opposed racism and hit football supporters that invaded his pitch! He was a flamboyant and creative human being. Since this decision not to appoint Clough, English football has been stuck in the same boring mould. I would give McClaren a year at most!!
And on to Zidane ! I think that Zidane, following in the wake of Eric Cantona, who quite rightly assaulted a known racist years ago, showed humanity by spontaneously assaulting his Italian opposite number, after being verbally provoked. I am being serious. Compare the Press’s unanimous howling about how shameful it was, when at the same time, hundreds are being slaughtered in Iraq for the most inhumane of reasons, the protection of American Capitalist hegemony in the region. Yet Zidane acts as a human being and is vilified for it.
Marx talked in Capital about human relations taking on the, “form of a relation between things.” The above example reflects the fact that under capitalism, where acting inhumanely is seen as normal human behaviour, acting as a human being with passion, is castigated with mind numbing hypocrisy.
5 August 2006
Cultural Diversity Or Cultural Oppression?
By George Shaw
Azar Majedi, the head of the Organisation of Women's Liberation, asks some pertinent questions in a speech in Canada on Sharia Courts and Women's rights.
Is the recognition of two or more sets of values, laws and rights conducive to a harmonious society? Are we not going back in reversing what has been hard won rights for citizens particularly women in the modern context? Are we to accept the patriarchal value system experienced by women in some communities because of diversity this could hardly be called voluntary? Should not citizens have universal rights which are paramount as opposed to community sectarian interests? Has empowerment of the leaders of local religious communities created a monster reducing the rights of some members of their communities in the realms of marriage and some aspects of education?
Azar Majedi says: “We have long witnessed in the past decades, a glorification of culture as a primary issue dictating people’s lives and rights. Culture has come to take precedence over human rights, equality, liberation, rights of individuals, children’s right and women’s rights – concepts and issues which have been long been argued and have prominence in modern and civil societies. The birth of cultural relativism its recognition in the society as a credible concept is the result of this process.”
Azar Majedi goes on to query: “I ask you why an arbitrary concept as culture must be so glorified that takes precedence over prominent issues such as freedom, equality, and justice? Why should people be categorised and placed in different pigeon holes according to culture and religion? These should be private matters. There is no justification for assigning such prominent status to culture, which overshadows any sense of justice, equality and freedom, the achievements of long battles fought by freedom loving people and socialist for more than two centuries.”
(http://www.iranian.com/Opinion/2005/January/Canada/)
Whenever some of us attempt make an objective critique of the whole issue the accusation of Islamophobia is thrown at us as cultural relativism is pushed down our throats – a new monster for us to fight. Perhaps Agnes Poirier of the French daily Liberation (29 July 2005) points out that the nation-building ideals of the French Revolution were deployed to bring down with the monarchy, aristocracy and regional languages. As the revolutionary France started fighting off its reactionary neighbours, that identity took shape. Poirier goes on to mention that in 1905 they separated the State from Church. The State, free from dogmatic religious values, would be able to teach all the children of France - whatever their social and religious background - the “esprit” critique and how to question all revealed truths. This is what laicite (secularism) is all about, you leave your religion and all sorts of social division at home in order to enter the public space on an equal footing with the rest of society. In any case those ideals seem to have now run up against the recent events events in the northern suburbs of Paris - the revolt of disaffected young Afro Caribbean, Senegalese and young Asian or Magrebian youths -,thus threatening the bourgeois revolution’s recipe for inter communal harmony. Egalitarian society in the French context as in all large urban complexes elsewhere has a long way to go.
All the pronouncements about the colonial legacy, tired old solutions of “empowerment”, pouring in massive tranches of funding to bolster deprived areas are simply not enough. Neither is the pushing for secularism is enough for a free society, except to say that religion is a personal and private thing. Certainly statist sponsored religion does not offer any pointers to a new Enlightenment or more specifically to development of new social relations.
If the concept of multiculturism and diversity has reached its limits and usefulness, this is not simply or only the result of Messrs Blair’s, Chirac’s or George Bush’s policies. What is more fundamental is the structural problems in Capital itself that have been manifested in the past three decades or so. Changes in the requirements and imperatives of capital as an economic system have largely spawned the wide polarisation in our inner cities and suburbs. The motor that has driven the system has had to replace its means for accumulating value in declining production to other sources in its drive to expand. We must not be thrown off course by what Blair, Chirac or Bush are doing, but be quite clear about the enemy we are fighting.
The whole question begs a concerted approach that lies deeper than the current panaceas on offer about “going back to the Family and its values” or a resort to religious manifestations of varying kinds. Multiculturism and diversity as ideologies may have had good intentions at the start but are now failing those very people that have took to the streets as well as the victims of “honour killings”. These have been trotted by the “left” out precisely because there is a void that is not being filled to project any real alternatives. The continued reformist preoccupations with reformism of nationalising property and production, and with tinkering about with civil society and culture continues to act as a brake on any serious discussion on the social relations of capital and the need to change it.
Hegel, in his preface to the ‘Phenomenology of Mind’, makes a critique of the “abstract negation” that now prevails today as post-modernist ideology. The anti-modernity of post-modernism opens it up to tailending reaction fundamentalisms, especially those which parade themselves as anti-imperialist. Hegel concept of “determinant negation” was concretised by Marx as determinant negation of capitalism. As the 2005/6 Perspectives of the US News and Letters Committees put it: “The failure by Post – Marxists to transform the production relations because they fetishized property forms has led many to act now as if the most we can reach for is to transform the political and cultural superstructure of capitalism. In BOTH cases transforming alienated labour and the capitalist mode of production is left untheorised.”
6 December 2005
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Film Review - The Lord of War.
By Ian MacDonald
This film did not so much as inspire me as confirm my cynicism about moralistic tirades against arms dealing. Having said that it is a sharp, witty farce which exposes directly the ultimate dehumanising effect of global capitalism i.e. temporarily powerful humans savagely murdering permanently powerless people often in the context of an AIDS-ridden, drug ridden, poverty-ridden society.
Orlov played by Nicholas Cage has escaped from the poverty of the Ukraine to New York and rapidly progresses from selling arms to local youth to a worldwide operation often acting as a foil for various states, notably the USA itself.
The contradiction between the objective situation, vividly expressed in the opening shots, and the subjective - Orlov’s revulsion of actually killing anybody himself - is resolved when a brutal dictator encourages him to pull the trigger with him, and kill an enemy, another arms dealer. This he does.
Whilst Orlov’s humanity goes down the pan, his wife’s is going in the opposite direction. There is a scene when she has realised what Orlov is and she sits there naked not wanting to wear or touch anything that has been bought by blood money.
The film itself keeps the audience engaged because it is funny. It is dry sardonic humour directed against the hypocrisy of American Capitalism as it employees people like Orlov to supply various regimes because they cannot be seen to be doing it themselves. You stop laughing however when toward the end you witness some of effects of the trade in Rwanda. As Morrisey once sang, this seems to be, “…to close to home and too near the bone…”
Whether the end is a surprise or not may depend on your point of view, but is commendable that the Five Permanent Security Members are exposed as selling a lot more arms than Orlov. What is worrying about the film is that Orlov is almost portrayed as helpless and having no choice about getting shed loads of money out of other people’s misery. He doesn’t take responsibility for his own inhumanity but rationalises his actions as, “ I am good at it,” even though he loses his family in the process.
The only hope in the film seems to be his wife leaving him but ultimately betraying him to a cop, who doesn’t realise he is a cog in a much bigger game.
As the film draws to an end Orlov is saying to border guards somewhere in the Sahara that his crates are full of umbrellas, which they accept with a grin when he bribes them with dollars. Cynical laughs all round and a good film but of course the point is to change it, the world that is, and that, the film does not address!!
6 December 2005