Vibe Check #4

I’ve been absent for about a month. My mental health has been pretty poor, and pretty much suffering from impostor syndrome. Much of it has delayed pretty much anything of worth to write about, so I’m just gonna make brief notes…on things I’ve noted.

Culture war windmills

There’s a lot of…interest that I did not expect from the “critical race theory” post. Curiously, the only comments so far seem to be from what I believe is deeply hostile to the framework without even explaining the problem he had with it. I don’t really mind not liking critical race theory. I don’t actually subscribe to it myself. But my guess is that he is one of the ‘concerned citizens’ primed by cynical right-wing provocateurs upset with the potential push for anti-racist initiatives in the public and corporate sphere in the wake of the George Floyd protests. I’ll write another post on this addressing this and hopefully, it’ll be understandable and digestible.

Return briefly to football fandom and race

Predictably after England’s loss to Italy in the Euros, black players Marcus Rashford, Raheem Sterling, Buykako Saka and Jaden Sancho received racist abuse online from football fans, with roughly 2,000 “potentially abusive” tweets sent to them. So much for ‘progressive patriotism’. Can’t say I’m surprised. It’s not all bad news though: there was a show of online solidarity with the players against the racism directed against them. This tweet perhaps articulated my sentiments towards the whole affair.

The ‘forever war’ ends

The United States deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan has led to the withdrawal of US forces. President Joe Biden claimed that the Afghan armed forces number 300,000-strong, were well-trained and disciplined, and have state-of-the-art weaponry to contend with the Taliban after they leave. What appears to have happened is that supposedly well-trained armed forces of the Afghan government were unable to prevent the advance of Taliban, and given the number of districts that the Taliban had already taken over in the months preceding this announcement, it’s likely to assume that Biden was well aware that they would likely complete the takeover of the country not long after they leave. Few of the international media outlets reported the reality that much of the government-armed forces were deserting en-masse to neighboring countries to avoid capture or death. The Afghan Ministry of Defence repeatedly inflated the number Taliban insurgents killed by their forces to present an overly optimistic image of their strength.

The speed by which the Taliban took control of various parts of the country surprised everyone, including themselves; by August 15th, 2021, they had captured Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, leading to the collapse of the Afghan coalition government, effectively granting the Taliban political control of Afghanistan once more. The deposed President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, reportedly with helicopters and four cars full of money. He is currently taking refuge in the United Arab Emirates.

The Taliban’s takeover perhaps can be better understood as the result of a number of factors: The horrible effect that Western occupation had on the daily lives of the Afghan people, the supposedly ‘democratic’ client state set up rife with corruption, extortion, and violence among its governors – leaving space for the Taliban to intervene and build public support largely around the rural populace (notably providing sharia courts for matters of jurisprudence where local governors utterly failed in), and the Taliban’s alliances with tribal leaders and rival militias to build support. The Taliban’s infamously repressive gynophobia has led to a focus by Western news outlets and politicians on the implications for women in the social sphere of Afghanistan, particularly whether girls will receive education and employment for women, however what gains women’s rights in Afghanistan came mostly from the absence of the Taliban, the Western-style education having a limited impact in the country, even accounting for the fact that it was limited to metropolitan cities – a deep conservatism remains throughout much of the populace – 80% of which is rural.

The Taliban for its part, through spokesperson Mohammad Naeem, claimed that there will be no reprisals against civilians who aided the occupiers or where part of the previous government, and that women’s rights will be recognised under sharia, though commentators have noted the ambiguity around the latter statement. The assurances made in the Taliban press conference were undercut by almost immediate instances of violence. The Intercept also reports that the data collection of Afghan civilians conducted by American forces are now in the possession of the Taliban. The biometric database contains the information of not only suspected terrorists, but those who assisted the US in gathering intelligence and engaged in its diplomatic efforts. While there has been a cottage of pro-intervention commentators decrying the anti-war left for ‘creating’ this outcome, the fact of the matter is that Biden was going to leave regardless of whatever (extremely limited) influence the latter may have on his foreign policy decisions having regarded the war as unwinnable perhaps as far back as 2015, and the deal was made with the previous Trump administration with a timetable set for September 11th 2021 at the latest. These sentiments are also wildly out of step with the wider American public, who may not collectively be pacifists but have come in opposition of the war in Afghanistan.

UK news on the events have given considrable focus on former military personnel and notably Defence Secretary Ben Wallace reactions to the US withdrawal, and whether they felt the whole endavour was worth while. Ben Wallce’s public weeping made for a spectacle, as did the speech conducted by Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat before Parliament, as a signal for imperalist apologetics. It is worth noting that Afghan commentators either in or outside the country have almost universally lambasted the Western intervention for creating the circumstances the country is in. An Afghan refugee crisis appears to be on the horizon.

Even. More. Obligatory. Labour. Stuff.

I’m still obsessed with the Labour Party after leaving. Yet Labour, or rather the factions within Labour seems increasingly obsessive. News came last week of the explusion of filmmaker Ken Loach, ostensibly for being part of, or associating with the four organisations that Labour has proscribed: Socialist Appeal; Labour In Exile Network (LIEN); Labour against the Witchhunt (LATW); and Resist, the organisation set up by former Labour MP Chris Williamson.

Other than centrists, so-called ‘true Labourites’ (that is to say, those in the LP who see it as being part of a football team rather than to advance a particular kind of politics) have latched on to statements he made twenty years ago criticising the Labour Party for being a pale shadow of the Conservatives in response to the 2001 general election. These people miss the point, willingly, in some cases that Loach – whose work focuses around the experiences of working-class life in Britain, is also animated by vision of Labourism – one that was long-abandoned in the 1970s, and had a brief revival in Corbynism. How else could you look at “the Spirit of ’45” other than from one possessed by a deep appreciation of Labourist achievements?

Those appalled by Ken Loach’s expulsion expressed their solidarity mostly through the hashtag #IStandWithKenLoach. For them, Loach’s expulsion reflects a turn by Starmer’s Labour to repudiate the socialist politics within Corbyn’s tenure, to wage war on the left of the party wholesale, and to make the party safe of capitalist interests. I find myself mostly in agreement with those positions, except for me – the problems is two-fold: The first is that the expulsion Ken Loach is not only part of a wider purge of the left, but that the Labour Party routinely goes on these purges whenever those that control the apparatus feel threatened by loci of political influence generated by the left, and if you accept that is what Labour does, has done and will continue to do for the forseeable future as its function as a parliamentary organisation – the question is, what is to be done? The second is, in so far as it represents a current symbolic issue of a wider problem, what should be the immediate goal, over the long-term ones? It’s a question of strategy-and-tactics which the Labour left seems to have problems getting around on – although this response seems to be what they’ve come up with so far. Time will tell what it will lead to, if anything.

Book review!

This quite neatly leads into the stuff I’ve been reading recently. I’ve finished A History of the Labour Party: Fourth Edition by Andrew Thorpe. It’s rather brisk in explaining its development and the trajectories it took when encountering political problems. It only goes up to 2015….in the Ed Miliband leadership in its analysis. Given the tone of the book, which did try to approach fair assessments of different tenures, but rather predictably the Party has a force for electoral viability over analysis of the degree to which the Labour Party followed its social democratic vision – and perhaps even whether the horizon of European social democracy has narrowed in response to the neoliberal turn. At the time of Blair’s tenure as PM, contemporary centre-left academics and commentators were quite resistant in identifying the New Labour project as neoliberal – almost as if it was exclusively a Conservative policy, so it’s interesting even twenty years on, Thorpe also avoids that description as well, though what he does say that it eschewed Keynesian economics, and there seems to be something of a frustration about it from reading it. Even so, it does speak fairly glowingly of Gordon Brown’s handling of the great recession.

Because of the emphasis of electoralism, I got a bit frustrated with its assessment of the Labour Party’s response to gender, race and sexuality, again as policy issues – rather than the sites of struggle for recognition which contradicted the lofty ideals of the Labour commitment to social justice. Interesting tidbits like Michael Young – the educator, sociologist and father of notorious broadcaster Toby Young, being the head of Political and Economic Planning think tank, the looming figure of the Labour right, Ernest Bevin – having once occupied the secretary of the TGWU, and the ideological space for the New Labour project did have its openings other than the ‘soft’ neoliberalism it pursued: Will Hutton’s book The State We’re In sought to advance a renewed social democracy and even suggested an alliance with the Liberal Democrats to do so, attempting to persuade Blair. But it seems that the star of New Labour was rising too high to even consider the latter – the social democracy stuff he may have been interested in but ultimately dismissed. There’s this line that I find really funny in decribing Gaitskell’s attempts to get rid of Clause IV to stick it to the left after Frank Cousins won the TGWU leadership:

“So the scapegoat found was a small passage in the Labour Party constitution drafted in 1918 by Sidney Webb ritually ignored by every leader since, and virtually unknown in the mass of the population.”

While this is an amusing line to describe Gaitskell’s priorities, I do think that it is very much besides the point and again falls back into appeals to this nebulous concept of ‘the electorate’ over the significance of the ideological conflicts within Labour in determining the direction of its political program; Gaitskell wanted more than to spite the left, he wanted to make a clean break with the idea among the membership that Labour is a working-class party, and the ‘revisionists’ that he represented argued that the modern welfare state created in the aftermath of World War II had at last resolved the contradictions within capitalism, and did away with class conflict altogether. He was signalling something to the membership, and I’m unsure for even an ignoramus like myself that even the fact can’t escape me that party leaders feel compelled to wear two hats, one suitable for the party for internal matters, and the other outside as parliamentarians. This is something that Thorpe had actually signalled that he knows, but there seems to be a sense of exasperation in it.

The book presents the legacy of Tony Blair somewhat favorably, and given its priority on electoral successes, it’s no surprise that a leader who’d won three consecutive elections wouldn’t have been looked upon favorably. It also presents the public finance initiatives (PFIs) as a positive – being on the brunt of the underfunded health services, which in a wider sense is one of many casualties of increased NHS privatisation, I’d have to firmly disagree (who knows? – maybe Mr Thorpe uses BUPA).

The assessment of Blair’s foreign policy with respect to the War on Terror is a largely negative one, judging Blair as falling prey to the influence of the neoconservatives, though it argues that Blair sought to act as a check to George W. Bush, and the US’ aggressively interventionist foreign policy. I think Blair’s recent comments on the end of the War in Afghanistan undermines this argument:

On some level, I believe Blair, besides securing Iraq’s natural resources for the interests of British companies, was also animated by this idea of a civilising mission to the Middle East and Western Asia, and that all these people needed was for the ‘bad guys’ to be cleared out and ‘nice’ hand-picked technocratic leaders supposedly favourable to Western-style liberal democracy could improve it. Whether I’m right about whether he really believed it, or abandoned this view – is perhaps irrelevant to Blair himself, given that his post-politics career is literally getting massive amounts of dosh from war profiteers and autocrats. He is easily one of the most venal political figures Britain has ever had the misfortune to endure, and contrasting his activities with other former Labour leaders (even Gordon Brown), Blair comes off as especially amoral.

In any case, the book was very much an enjoyable and informative read. Will defintely use in the series of essays to come. I’m curious what the next edition would have to say on the Corbyn and Starmer tenures. If reading the Michael Foot era is anything to go by, it might not be all that bad for the former, especially since Labour became the largest progressive party in Europe around then. Still, I have to return to The Labour Party’s Political Thought by Geoffrey Foote if I want to get an in-depth idea of the tendencies within Labour, though it is twenty-five years old.

Other stuff

What next…Oh, the magazine Current Affairs is supposedly taking a week or two off cos the Seventh Doctor Nathan Robinson allegedly fired his most of his staff for trying to set up a worker co-op in the workplace. No doubt that this is due to damage control of the fallout. A shame – I liked that magazine, and thought their articles were good. Robinson’s ones critical of Jordan Peterson and Zizek’s current output were top-notch. I even considered subbing. I think Robinson either needs to shut this publication down, or step away from it altogether. There’s no other way to deal with the toxicity generated from this.

I need to start a series of posts called ‘feeling intellectually lazy, might delete later’ since I feel that way more often than one would think. You’d think that being intellectually lazy isn’t the same as being cute, but you’d be wrong.