Nationalism; xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism.

Last year’s dramatic elections in Greece were marked by a significant political polarisation writes Piers Mostyn. New left party Syriza came second with nearly 27 % and the fascist Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) came fifth with nearly 7%. The far right as a whole (depending on how you define it) commanded over twice this amount of support. Since then GD support in opinion polls has grown to double figures, making it the third most popular party.

The rise of Syriza and GD reflects massive popular hostility to a political establishment which, at the behest of international financial institutions and the EU, has been hell bent on making ordinary Greek people pay the price for the country’s economic melt down. There has been continuous popular resistance, with mass demonstrations and strikes to an austerity offensive that has seen a continuous shrinking of the economy for five years.

Unemployment is spiralling towards 30% and there is mass pauperisation. By 2011 28.4% were unable to provide for basic needs and today its worse. Prime Minister Samaras last year warned of a Weimar Germany-style collapse.

Meanwhile the incompetence, corruption and venality of the ruling elite and its responsibility for the crisis have been laid bare.

The government has utilised violence, not only against trade unions and the anti-austerity movement, but increasingly against Greece’s immigrant community – thousands of who have been rounded up and detained in makeshift camps and thousands more deported – scapegoating them for the crisis and whipping up reactionary nationalism

This context illustrates the perils of taking for granted that a radicalisation to the right, not just to the left, can be triggered in these circumstances

Vacuum

The economic crisis and a consequent plummeting of confidence in the traditional ruling parties is the immediate cause of GD’s rapid growth. But other factors include the tainting of LAOS (previously the main far right party) by its participation in an earlier pro-austerity coalition government and a populist GD strategy of street campaigning and welfare work aimed at filling the vacuum left by the disappearance of state services.

With some government ministers and media commentators pushing the centre of political gravity to the right, GD’s reactionary politics have become legitimised. This has emboldened its supporters to engage in physical violence, particularly against immigrants. Protests against an allegedly “blasphemous” play with a “homosexual theme” led to it being pulled by theatre management. GD leaders are contemptuous of the law and talk of “civil war”.

Sections of the ruling class and the state appear to regard GD as a serious alternative. Talk of millionaire bankrolling may be as yet unproven, but few doubt the GD boast of over 50% support within the police given evidence that officers have been torturing anti-fascist demonstrators and collaborating with GD.

History

Whatever the immediate spark, mass fascist movements have social, cultural and political roots. To be effective, any opposition to GD will have to address this underlying foundation, which stretches back to be foundation of the modern Greek state.

The political formation of the ruling class was marked from the outset by under-development and dependence on the “Great Powers”. Although there were occasional liberal or progressive tendencies, this elite repeatedly resorted to nationalism and authoritarianism to compensate for this weakness and to crush challenges from the working class.

The 1829 victory in the war of independence that followed centuries of Ottoman rule was primarily the gift of Britain, France and Russia. Different factions of the Greek ruling elite were each identified with one of these competing powers. The head of state was a monarch, imposed from outside and constitutionally under great power control. This was a pale reflection of the European bourgeois revolutionary nationalism of the time which, for all its faults, at least made some claim to self-determination and democracy.

“Greece” in those days was much smaller than today and didn’t include the North or most islands. Its economic under-development and the state’s lack of political legitimacy generated a series of political and economic crises.

The main solution as the 19^th Century progressed was the “Megali Idea” (The Great Idea). This was an ambitious strategy of territorial expansion to unify geographically, linguistically and culturally disparate “Greeks” who then co-existed cheek by jowl with other communities and whose main connection was adherence to the Orthodox Christian church. As the century neared its close, this church was itself riven by schisms and splits, expressing rival Balkan nationalisms.

Expansion did occur to the point where, by the 1920s, Greece as we now know it was broadly in shape. But the underpinning reactionary nationalist ideology and successive political splits and crises shaped a ruling class that, instead of unifying, strengthening and becoming more coherent was dysfunctional, divided and unable to break from its financial and military reliance on foreign intervention.

Nineteenth century Greek nationalism increasingly crunched up against competing nationalisms in neighbouring Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia and Albania. As the Ottoman empire disintegrated and declined, local newly-formed Balkan states attempted to fill the vacuum under the tutelage of rival imperial power blocs. Cultures and communities that had co-existed for centuries came to be seen as alien.

This process gave an increasingly sectarian, racist and xenophobic shape to the national identity being forged by the Greek bourgeoisie. This was ironic given the relatively cosmopolitan Ottoman legacy: a multi-centred communalism that, whilst institutionalising sectarian discrimination, involved a vibrant co-existence between communities based on mutual exchange.

Thus until the 1930s, Orthodox Christians were only the third largest community behind Jews and Muslims in Salonica, Greece’s second largest city. And in the 19^th century the Plaka, Athens’ taverna-stuffed Mecca for tourists, was an Albanian quarter – its name meaning both Greek for paving-stone and Albanian for “old quarter”. Albanian was used in the law courts and for public business.

1922

This historical dynamic culminated with a Greek invasion of Turkey in 1919, egged on by Britain. The invasion resulted in resounding defeat and a traumatic humiliation for Greek irredentism and bourgeois nationalism.

This then led to a massive “population exchange” sponsored by the imperial powers led by Britain at the Lausanne Convention of 1922. Hundreds of thousands of Christian Orthodox (ostensibly “Greek”) citizens of Turkey and Muslim (ostensibly “Turkish”) citizens of Greece were forcibly deported at short notice to their supposed respective “homelands”, under terrible conditions. This exacerbated an already dire post-war economic situation.

 A racial, religious and ideological monolith was being carved out in the name of “Greece”, a job finally finished with the German invasion in 1940 and the genocide of 96% of a Jewish community whose ancestors had fled there nearly five centuries before following its expulsion from Christian Spain.

Marking Holocaust Memorial Day this year, Julia Neuberger observed that mass acts of civil disobedience in Bulgaria during the war ensured that not a single Nazi deportation took place and it was the only country to end the war with a bigger Jewish population that at the start. In neighbouring Greece, by contrast, despite a heroic war of resistance in the later period, rightwing collaborationism and inaction ensured the almost total destruction of the Jewish population.

Dictatorship

The Greek elite’s history of reactionary nationalism was periodically accompanied by authoritarianism and dictatorship as a substitute for its weak social base. Unlike the rest of Europe, there was no mass social democratic party until the 1970s. The Communist Party, for decades subject to illegality and repression, was characterised by a fatal combination of fanatical Stalinism and a tendency to split.

Facilitating this tradition of authoritarian nationalism has been a long-running tradition of rightist conspiratorial military organisation and linked terror campaigns. Arguably this goes back to the struggle for independence in which Philiki Etaira (The Friendly Society) played a key role. At end of the 19^th century a group of army officers revived its traditions, establishing Ethniki Etaira (The National Association) as a new secret society. Within 2 years it claimed some 3,000 members with 56 branches in Greece and 83 abroad – described by one historian as a “virtual state within the Greek state”.

In the First World War the monarchist paramilitary League of Reservists engaged in terror attacks on establishments believed to be associated with the Republican wing of the ruling class, including press offices. The western-backed counter coup by liberal leader Venizelos led to purges of these monarchists from the armed forces and civil services. But a further series of crises led to the 1922 debacle, under the Venizelos leadership, resulting in its discrediting and collapse. The consequent political vacuum eventually gave rise to the Metaxas dictatorship in the 1930s.

Rightist military networks played a prominent role in the collaboration with Nazis in the Second War through the establishment of the Security Battalions. With the Nazi defeat, far from being dismantled, these forces were instead harnessed by the US and British-backed government to smash the Communist-led resistance in the civil war that followed.

This then fed into IDEA, a secret organisation of rightist officers, linked to an unsuccessful coup by Papagos in 1951. Many of these same officers a decade and a half later were involved in the “Colonel’s coup” in the 1960s.

World War Two collaborationism and the Civil War also threw up right wing paramilitary formations outside the state. These included the “Anti-Communist Crusade of Greece” set up in 1952 and a splinter organisation, the “Pan-Hellenic National Crusade” founded after the 1961 elections, during which a campaign of intimidation and ballot rigging by the gendarmerie and the TEA (National Defence Battalions) thwarted an anticipated left victory. Greek police officially co-operated with these paramilitary forces during state occasions when they were mobilised to assist with security.

The period since 1974 has been characterised by something approaching parliamentary democracy on the European model, with the newly-formed PASOK allowed to win elections and form governments.

But the anti-democratic rightist tradition remained deeply rooted in sections of the ruling class and its camp followers. Its resurgence at a time of crisis was predictable – the only question being whether this was through or outside the state.

Ideology

This history is not one long-running fascist conspiracy. It is more of an ideological and organisational melange, with different elements combining in different ways in particular periods. Its great weakness has been the chronic inability by the ruling class to achieve a strategic consensus, over issues like the constitution, democracy and relations with foreign powers, which could form the basis for stable over-arching project.

This ideological mix has centred on nationalism; xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism; adherence to the Christian Orthodox church; anti-communism and (far less so in contemporary times) monarchism. At times aspects have garnered mainstream popular support to which the left has not always been robust or coherent in opposing. In the case of nationalism, sections of the left have on occasion acted as cheerleaders.

An upsurge of anti-Semitism, particularly after 1922 not only fed into collaboration with Nazis, but carried on after the second war. The tiny number of surviving Jews who sought to reclaim property was subject to a campaign of vilification – with a public prosecutor claiming that they were persecuting Christians; local liberal politicians making anti-Semitic comments and, by the summer of 1947, a full-scale press campaign against Jewish claims. Some courts decided that Salonica Jews, deported to the death camps, had “abandoned” their property

In the 1990s Balkan crisis, the break up of Yugoslavia fed into a sharp rise in a very reactionary nationalism based on Christian Orthodox solidarity with Serbia; rank hostility to the newly formed state of Macedonia; and a revival of irredentism in relation to southern Albania. Technically Greece had remained at war with Albania for decades and normality had only begun to return in the 1980s.

Manipulated by US-British Cold War power-play over Cyprus, the periodic eruption up of tensions with Turkey has been the focus for a similar combination of territorial claims and racism against Greece’s indigenous Muslim population in Thrace.

 The upsurge in Greek anti-Macedonian chauvinism played a notable role in early stages of GD’s formation in the 1990s. And one of the party’s main annual mobilisations commemorates the 1996 Imia military crisis in which three Greek soldiers died in the course of a clash with Turkey over tiny uninhabited Aegean islets.

 In addition there has been deepening islamophobia and anti-Roma prejudice. These substantial, mainly northern communities with roots dating back centuries have been subject to a campaign of state discrimination.

All fascist movements feed off pre-existing reactionary popular currents. Greek fascism has been able to draw on a broader and deeper range of ideological and organisational traditions located far more centrally in the political formation of the country’s ruling class and state. It comes as no surprise that GD leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos is a former marine reservist who in the 1960s had links to the colonels’ junta.

Self-defence and mass action on the streets are playing an increasingly vital role in the fight against GD. But unless these social and ideological roots are also tackled this many-headed hydra will only re-emerge in other forms.

Visit www.greeksolidarity.org and Wikipedia on Golden Dawn for more info.

First published in Jewish Socialist No 66 Spring/Summer 2013. Email: js@jewishsocialist.org.uk

It’s kicking off everywhere

Özlem Onaran* gave this interview to Anastasia Giamali of Avgi (The Dawn), Syriza’s daily paper.

-Erdogan has been promoting a fully neoliberal agenda with privatisations, “development”, etc. Has this reached a ceiling? Is this the reason why people are protesting?

Yes, absolutely. The obvious injustice and police brutality in Gezi Park was the last drop in a long process of accumulation of discontent against an authoritarian government, their social policies pushing for a conservative Islamic life style threatening in particular women and youth, criminalization and imprisoning of oppositional groups ranging from seculars to Kurds, socialists, and trade unionists,  and neoliberal policies which increasingly commercialized public services, created areas of rent for large corporations, and eroded the living standards and security of a significant part of the working people. 27 May and the mobilisations that has followed will mark a historic moment for the collective memory of the movements in Turkey. This has been the insurrection of a new generation, who has been brought up by the conservative neoliberal authoritarian AKP regime for a decade.

-The establishment has been presenting Turkey as model not only for the Muslim world but also as an economic model for Europe during the crisis. Is Turkey really a model? 

Can authoritarianism be a model? Not a stable one, as the recent events have shown. Can neoliberal speculation and finance-led growth be a model of development, social cohesion and regional convergence? No, as the recent history of Turkey, which is marked by regular boom and bust cycles, and crises in 1994, 2001, 2009, shows. In the recent global crisis, Turkey had one of the severest recessions in 2009 –deeper than other major emerging economies. Indeed Turkey’s growth model dependent on cheap labour and speculative financial capital inflows and a high trade deficit, would have experienced a crisis sooner or later even without the global recession. The recovery since 2009 is as fragile as before. The share of industry in Turkey’s production is decreasing and becoming increasingly more dependent on the imports of intermediate and capital goods. No wonder, this is a jobless growth process with high youth unemployment rates reaching 22%. This is neither socially nor economically stable. AKP has recently took pride in having paid the last instalment of its debt to the IMF. However, in the last decade Turkey has borrowed increasingly more in the international financial markets, and in particular the foreign debt of the private sector has reached unforeseen levels. This is a fragile model. When the private debtors go bankrupt, those private losses are often socialized. The periphery of Europe is just one recent example of this to add to a series of former crises in Latin America and East Asia. The next bust and crisis in Turkey is not a question of “if” but “when”, and the international financial investors will make that decision.

-We have come to conclude that the tone of the protest is not being set by the poor or the working classes but by the demand for democracy and social freedom. Is it possible to combine these two?

They have been already combined. The Confederation of Public Workers’ Unions has rescheduled its strike about a change in the labour law to 4-5 June in order to support the mobilization. What brought discontent to the tipping point of rebellion is also the increasing insecurity and impoverisation of the working people in Turkey. AKP has initiated a redistribution towards the poorest of the society via both crony in kind transfers of food and fuel as well as some institutional pro-poor changes, e.g. in the health services. However, the source of this redistribution was income scrapped from the organized blue collar and white-collar/professional working people, and not taxes on the rich. This redistribution helps to increase the profits of the large capitalists without hurting the poorest further. This also explains part of the mass electoral support for the party. In the last decade insecurity has increased for all segments of the working people bare the poorest. During a decade of AKP rule the amount of workers working for outsourced companies has more than tripled reaching to above 1.5 million. Almost a thousand workers died in workplace accidents. Dr. Ahmet Tellioglu, a workplace doctor at a major factory in Istanbul, who has been sacked recently because of his objection to serious health hazards in the practices of the factory, says that “anyone who is just above the poorest or earning just above the minimum wage, thus any working person, who has something to loose, feels increasingly more insecure in Turkey today”.

-According to the protesters the Turkish government is building shopping centers and malls all over the country and that’s what she is attempting to do in Gezi Park. They also say that these shopping centers will mark the end of the small shops and itinerant trade. Are we moving towards the creation of a new proletariat?

Yes, the losers of these policies are multi-dimensional. Gentrification and commercialization is generating a potential for new urban alliances across different segments of the society ranging from the dislocated Roma people and the Kurdish street vendors to organized workers and small shop owners. Some of the latter may have voted for AKP but the neoliberal policies as well as the sheer arrogance of their brutality and ignorance about any popular discontent may mark the beginning of the erosion of the diverse mass support for them.

-The past two years, we have seen uprisings everywhere, from Wall Street to Tunisia with most recent ones in Sweden and the current uprising in Turkey.  Do these movements/uprisings have anything in common apart from police brutality?

They have a lot in common. They are all a rebellion against the lack of democracy, voice, and representation as well as rising inequality, joblessness, insecurity, commercialization of the supply of basic needs and the multiple dimensions of the crisis -the energy crisis, climate change, ecological crisis and food crisis. Young men and women, who are mostly not coming from former organized leftist backgrounds, have been in the forefront of all these mobilizations. Not surprisingly, this is happening at a time of record high youth unemployment and increasing precariousness. This is a new generation, who feels insecure about the future, working, if at all, with fixed/short-term contracts, or part time without a choice, at times in the informal sector, most often for low pay, and usually in jobs not matching their education levels and aspirations. These mobilizations have given a massive expression to the discontent of a silent majority across the world and turned hopelessness into first anger and then hope. Their experiences has been followed and received by solidarity across the world. They have created domino effects, first regionally, but I believe now it is fair to say, also internationally. Turkey has a long tradition of rebellion, but I feel the recent images of rebellion from Greece or Spain or Egypt has been more alive in the memory of the first time demonstrators in Istanbul, Ankara or Izmir than the history of Turkey which has been persistently erased or discredited or demonized in the collective memory of the young Turkish people by the military coup and generations of ruling elite to follow. To occupy and demonstrate is now almost the new fashionable and “hip” thing in a positive sense. To overcome fear and to rebel is something to be proud of. It is a uniting feeling as hearing the song from the concert of your favourite band playing at a remote corner of the world. No matter what next, all these mobilizations have transformed our social genes forever.

*Özlem Onaran is a Turkish economist living in London.

From 5-18 June Israel hosts the second biggest international team tournament in European football, the Euro 2013 Under 21′s Championship. Its the biggest international sporting event ever held in Israel.

But on the other side of the wall Israel built football is played and watched in Palestine under the most abnormal of conditions. Massive restrictions of movement, 24 hour surveillance and illegal settlements and land grabs, yet on the football pitch, as recognised by FIFA, Palestine plays football as a nation.

Throughout the tournament Israel will do everything it can to keep attention away from football on the Palestinian side of the wall. Our film, shot over the past few days will help to break this silence. On Tuesday it was premiered in Ramallah at the HQ of the Palestine Olympic Association and simultaneously released on YouTube.

Today Philosophy Football also launches our Palestine Football Supporters Club T-shirt for a game with no borders, no walls. JUST £17.99 – £5 OFF – For the opening week of the Tournament, usual price £22.99. Sizes S-XXL and womens fitted. Available here.

The shirt has been produced to popularise the cause of Palestinian football. This shirt will fund this first film and future initiative of this sort.

We’re staying!

The spontaneous movement that started in Istanbul is unprecedented in Turkey’s history. It’s now spread to  sixty-seven of the eighty-five major cities writes Masis Kürkçügil of New Course for Socialist Democracy, the Fourth International section in Turkey.

It all started when a group of citizens decided to express their opposition to the redevelopment, including uprooting the trees, of Gezi Park in Taksim Square in the centre of Istanbul. Gezi Park, according to statements by the Prime Minister Erdogan, would be the site of a development project including rebuilding, as a luxury shopping centre, an Ottoman artillery barracks that had been demolished following a rising against the Young Turks Revolution of 1908. The site was subsequently cleared in 1940. This plan has also been criticised by town planners, architects and ecologists.

On Friday May 31st, the very same day that an Istanbul court decided to suspend the rebuilding of the barracks, the police attacked the peaceful occupiers of Gezi and forced them out. The police aggression provoked a massive reaction by the inhabitants in solidarity with the occupiers, and after violent confrontations the police finally moved back from the park on June 1st and 2nd and lost control of Taksim. The street fighting continued day and night in several districts of the centre of Istanbul.

The Party of Justice and Development (AKP), which has been in power for ten years, has become increasingly authoritarian. It has tried to exclude everyone who is not in its camp. Its neoliberal policies has provoked a hostile reaction among much of the youth. All these things contributed to the explosion which was detonated by the police intervention in entering the park to brutally evacuate people with their children and set fire to their tents

The AKP, which has a strong electoral base of fifty percent of voters, has suffered a first defeat, and from a popular mobilisation. This party, which is seen as having brought about important changes for half the population, had just sat down at the negotiating table with the Kurds to find a peaceful solution to the national question. Its policies were up to now contested only by militant but not very influential sections of the left, but suddenly a heterogeneous and not easily definable set of people conquered the centre of the city after courageously facing the police.

It’s a young movement

The majority of the demonstrators are, alongside the left groups, people of 20-30 years old participating for the first time in a political struggle although there is a sizeable participation in the demonstrations of secular Kemalist[i] currents opposed to the AKP government. It should also be underlined that young women occupied the front ranks in the confrontations with the police. The proximity of poor districts to the centre made it easy for young people from these districts to participate. People from all over the city went to the centre. At dawn a massive crowd crossed the bridge over the Bosphorus on foot and joined the other demonstrators. Although it remained limited, certain members of the far right Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi party took part in the demonstrations, but the party leadership immediately ordered them to leave.

There is a mixture of young headscarf-wearing girls, “anticapitalist Muslims”, fans of football clubs, LGBT groups, Kurdish, Kemalists. But most of those who were there said simply “we’re standing up against Tayyip Erdo?an, “we are here too, we exist”. The important slogans were “Tayyip resign”, “shoulder to shoulder against Fascism”, “It is only a beginning, the fight continues”, however there was no clear mass demand. Even if the Taksim Initiative has demanded the resignation of the minister of the interior, this demand is not yet very widespread among most people.

The most important fact is that, for the first time, hundreds of thousands of people are independently going to public places without being directed by a left organisation, trade union or the state in order to oppose to the policies of a government which is taking a more and more authoritarian turn. Even if social demands have not yet emerged, it is quite obvious that the implementation of neo-liberal policies is making people angry.

The revenge of May 1st or wars of memory

On May 1st this year the government had, on the pretext of work in progress, closed the symbolically important Taksim Square to demonstrations, paralysed maritime and road transport and deployed police officers everywhere in order to prevent May Day demonstrations. The government adopted the Putin method to choke off the social opposition and the city was paralysed.

There is a war of memory between the left and the government over Taksim Square which is known as May Day Square. Faced with the left which wants to perpetuate both the memory of 42 people who fell here on May 1st 1977, as well as working class ideals, the government would like, by rebuilding the artillery barracks, to both “revive history” and, by transforming it into a shopping centre, create its own historical legitimacy.

By humiliating the demonstrators whom it stigmatises as “marauders” and agitators, Erdogan revealed how “consistent” he was when he opposed to Israeli repression in Gaza or when he criticised Assad in Syria. Municipal and parliamentary elections will take place during the next two years, as well as the presidential election. According to many analysts, it is almost certain that Erdogan will be elected president. Erdogan would like a constitutional amendment that would enable him to constitute a Putin-style presidential regime.

However these recent events have been an unexpected defeat for him.

What we need now is new mass movements.

Is this the queue for ice cream?

Mass demonstrations and harsh governmental crackdowns are not new in Turkish political history writes Yunus Sözen , Antikapitalist Eylem (Anticapitalist Action). However, although the current demonstrations in Istanbul and throughout Turkey were initiated by socialists, there is no doubt that we are experiencing something strikingly different this time. This is displayed by not only the visible lack of political experience of a significant number of the demonstrators but also the sheer number and incredible resilience of the demonstrators in the face of massive and tear gas assaults by the police. What is the cause of this massive social explosion in a country where there is no sign of economic crisis, and where the government was elected in 2011 with 50% of the votes?

To better understand what is happening, let’s start with a discussion of the relationship between elections and democracy. Athenian democrats devised their democratic system without elections because they believed that elections are the oligarchic method of selecting the leaders. They believed that mechanisms that prevent the formation a political class (like the lottery and rotation systems) are the only democratic ways to select the rulers. Because, Athenian democrats believed that elections not only have an intrinsic class bias, but elections also provide the rulers autonomy from the ruled; that is, they make it possible for rulers to be able to do whatever they please. Indeed, the only reason why modern liberal representative government centred around elections is not simply an oligarchic system. It is because it is also a system that provides tools for the ruled, including methods of participation other than elections, freedoms for the opposition, and checks on the rulers. Although these tools are still severely inadequate, they do make it more challenging for the rulers to do whatever they wish and they do force rulers to respond to citizens to an extent. However, if elections start to become the only institution of a modern representative government, then elections merely become a tool for authoritarian rule by bolstering the executive branch with popular approval.

The demonstrations centred around the resistance in Istanbul’s Gezi park are exactly about the grievances caused by the dictatorship of an executive branch that is reinforced by electoral approval.  Specifically, the Gezi park resistance is one those instances where both the class character of the state and the oligarchic nature of electoral legitimisation became blatantly obvious. First, it signifies the class character of the state in a way that will not escape even the most crude Marxist analysis. Gezi is a public park at the political and social epicentre of the city, Taksim, and the government decided to replace the park with a shopping mall. When activists started to resist the plans turn the park into a shopping centre the government sent in its police. To put it even more bluntly, the state blindly used its instruments of violence to serve the interests of capital, and to convert a collective good into private property.

Unprecedented accumulation of power

Gezi also demonstrates the oligarchic character of a political regime based solely on electoral authorization. In the 2011 elections, nobody voted for to convert the public park in Taksim into a mall or any of the other government infringements of citizens’ rights. Yet the government had the legal right to rule as it pleases. However, despite their electoral mandate, this type of unilateral action may not have happened in a better functioning representative system which provides its citizens  with instruments of participation and opposition other than elections. Even though its democratic content is limited, in a liberal representative government citizens would have some access to policy making, there would be a level of transparency and free public debate, and there would be legal scrutiny over the issue. In Turkey on the other hand, no such limits are in place given the Justice and Development Party (referred to as the AKP or Ampül Parti)  unprecedented accumulation of power since 2007.

The AKP has now not only eliminated the historical challenge from the army, but it has also taken control of the high courts, and then slowly but surely, using its popularity, eradicated all oppositional freedoms. Concretely speaking, prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s policy could not be confronted by the non-existing oppositional media, and it could not be challenged by the judiciary that is now under the control of the executive, i.e. the ruling party. Therefore, when Erdogan wanted to turn a public space into a right-wing conservative space, where customers buy goods. There were no other way to stop him except by the force of numbers.

However, the hundreds of thousands of people out protesting are not resisting the police and subjecting themselves to the massive use of tear gas and brute force just because of the injustice at Gezi park, or just because of the fact that Erdogan is an authoritarian leader. These protests happened because in addition to Erdogan’s on-going attacks on oppositional groups (secularists, Alewites, Kurds, socialists and others), including purging them from positions of power, and criminalising and imprisoning them en masse for various reasons, he deepened to an unprecedented extent his neoliberal and extremely conservative exclusionary social policies. To name a few of the most recent ones, last year, without much debate, the whole education system was reconfigured to better serve not only the needs of capital but also in Erdogan’s words, ‘to raise a more religious generation’. Last month, in a country where per capita alcohol consumption is by far the lowest among OECD countries, strict alcohol consumption restrictions passed, which were defended by Erdogan as follows: ‘why is it defensible for you to accept a law passed by two drunkards [according to many signifying Ataturk and Inonu], but the law that is the imperative of religion becomes something that you need to deny…if you want to drink, buy your drink and go drink it in your own home’. Last week, the AKP enlarged its assault on women rights by making the morning after pill a prescription drug, and  a couple of days ago Erdogan later approved of an announcement made in Ankara metro warning against kissing in public. Many of these regulations would be very difficult to implement if previously existing checks were still place. For example, the constitutional court might strike a few of the legal changes, or the council of the state would limit or remove some of the others. Considering the lack of avenues for voice and the lack of obstacles against Erdogan’s power, these and many other similar policies, combined with his symbolically exclusionary and suffocating speeches, have apparently made a great many non-supporters feel not only completely powerless and frustrated, but also very angry.

Taking control of the city

This anger has now become embodied in massive demonstrations, where hundreds of thousands of people are taking back the autonomy that the government enjoys. In short, if the reason for the rebellion is the sense of powerlessness, lack of control over their own lives, the immediate result is perhaps the sense of power large sectors of the population are enjoying for the first time. For now, they have taken control of their city and of their lives. As a result, we are now part of a truly democratic moment. This is an experience that goes way beyond the ‘democratic rights’ enjoyed within liberal representative democracies, which at its best is a democracy tamed for the requirements of capitalism and the modern state. Therefore, in a counter-intuitive way, we probably owe this democratic explosion to the lack of democratic checks on the power of the electorally authorized executive.  For Erdogan, on the other hand, before our very eyes we are witnessing the transformation of his image from a leader who is powerful, popular, and if a little impulsive, still reflective of the values of the ‘Turkish nation’, into a tyrant who is so greedy and drunk with power that although he has the votes, he cannot manage the country effectively anymore. He is indeed trapped in a dictatorial dilemma: if he caves into the current demands, he will lose the perception that he is all that powerful; if he does not cave in at all, he will have to rely on coercive power to the degree that he will turn into a cruel tyrant. So far he has taken the second route, still belittling and criminalizing the demonstrators, hoping that the next elections in less than a year will result in a way to dissipate the democratic euphoria.  However, although this is one of those instances where the statement that ‘politics is open-ended’ is indeed the reality, it appears that sustained mobilization is the only course of action that will help satisfy both democratic and socialist goals.

Manchester People’s Assembly

The People’s Assembly Against Austerity has the potential to re-launch the movement against the government’s programme of austerity and cuts. Three weeks before the Assembly is to be held, there is a huge response with over 2,500 people having registered and paid to attend the event. This indicates that tens of thousands of community and trade-union activists are desperate to hear the alternative to neoliberalism and to plan for action to stop the devastation of the welfare state and the lives of people.

The initiative for the People’s Assembly came from the Coalition of Resistance after the October 2012 TUC demonstration as there was no further national event planned. The fight against the government’s national programme of austerity has to be met with a national programme of action. Local actions against local closures and cuts are essential, but have to come together at a national level so that the whole weight of the movement can strike blows that will force the government to retreat. Local actions are taking place in particular against the break-up and cut-back of the NHS such as the 30,000 strong demonstration to defend services at Stafford hospital.

Actions are also being taken in different sectors of public services. The NUT and NASUWT teaching unions are preparing for action to protect teachers pay and conditions and to defend education. Mass rallies at a local level are taking place, such as the one in Birmingham with 800 teachers, in preparation for industrial action which will start on the 27^th June in the North West, followed by other areas and then a national strike in the autumn. Other unions such as the PCS are now taking action over pay, while UNISON is planning for action in local government in the autumn.

The People’s Assembly has got the backing of most major unions and national campaigns such as Keep Our NHS Public and UK Uncut. It therefore carries a huge responsibility not just to issue a declaration against austerity and in defence of the welfare state, but to put out a call for actions which will be supported and built by all sections of the movement. The proposal in front of the Assembly will include regional demonstrations and a national demonstration in November. It will also call for local People’s Assemblies to re-energize local anti-cuts campaigns and build for the demonstrations. A reconvened People’s Assembly in 2014 could be the basis of a broader and more united national campaign against austerity, building a mass movement of resistance to defend public services and help to defeat the Tory LibDem Coalition.

The action to defend the welfare state cannot wait two years until the next general election as cuts and closures are taking place now. Nor can the anti-austerity movement place its hopes in Miliband and New Labour, as they are committed to austerity, albeit the “lite” version, just as much as PASOK in Greece and the Socialist Party in France. The Tory LibDem Coalition is weak and vulnerable and could be thrown into crisis by the rise of UKIP on the right with its nationalist and low tax/small state model. But the Coalition could also be thrown into crisis by a movement from the left which captures “the Spirit of 45” of nationalisation and public services to eradicate poverty by redistributing wealth and stopping austerity. Six years into the economic crisis, austerity is no longer seen as a credible solution. A mass movement to stop cuts and closures is vital but not sufficient. We also need to give hope that our efforts in the struggle to defend the welfare state are not wasted by leaving the political stage empty by the absence of a party which opposes austerity.  That’s why we need urgently a new broad party of the left. Left Unity offers our best hope for such party which would represent faithfully the interests of the working class, not those of the bankers and big business.

Horrific as war

The killing of a soldier in Woolwich on May 22nd was horrific. The indiscriminate murders of thousands of unnamed civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan by armed drones have been replicating this horror on a much larger scale for years. However no progressive political purpose is served by killings of this sort. We have seen how the event has been used to reanimate the discussion around the further erosion of civil liberties. The neo-fascist right has taken to the streets. British imperialism’s armed organisations have benefitted from a wave of sympathy and popular support which makes it harder for those of us who oppose their actions to have our voices heard.

Although this appears to be a random and macabre act, the response by Cameron was immediately to treat it as an organised terrorist attack.

The government’s reaction fails to deal with the political causes underlying such attacks. There were no such cases before the “war on terror” was launched in the wake of 9/11, which led to the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The description of this war by US President Bush as a “clash of civilisation” and a “crusade” has provided the context in which the killing in Woolwich occurred. This is understood not just by the left, but also by others such as former head of MI5, Stella Rimington, who said in 2008 that the war on terror in Iraq had influenced young British men to turn to terrorism.

The war on terror has been a failure in its own terms. It has not prevented terrorism but has caused it to spread. Civil war appears to be spreading in parts of Iraq, while in Afghanistan the Taliban is undefeated. In both countries, democracy and civil rights are wanting.

The failure of those supporting the “war on terror”, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has had damaging consequences: the spread of racism and islamophobia.  There were 38 islamophobic incidents, including three attacks on mosques, reported on the night following the killing. In Woolwich, over 100 English Defence League thugs went on the rampage. British Muslim leaders are expected to condemn the killing in a manner which is not expected of leaders of others faiths when atrocities are committed by white gun men, in Norway and the USA for example, often politically motivated. These killers are rarely described as terrorists, but as “fanatics” or “madmen”. The “war on terror” has also been used to restrict civil rights and instigate extensive and intrusive surveillance, in particular those with a Muslim faith.

In the wake of the events in Woolwich, the immediate issue for the left is to resist the racist backlash, to continue fighting against the “war on terror”, and to defend civil rights.

Socialist Resistance

May 24 2013

So that’s what they mean by “an extreme weather event”.

Bob Dylan remarks somewhere that “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”.  He forgot to add: you might need one to tell you about the tragedy of extreme weather events.  Not, perhaps, those committed by the erstwhile US urban guerrilla movement, inspired by Dylan’s aphorism, but definitely those due to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

As a person who in his prime was given to vivid symbolism, perhaps Dylan should now write a song about the crossing on May 9^th 2013 of the 400ppm threshold in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.  He might also revisit his anti-capitalist past and provide a critique of current efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.  But let’s not wait for that….

Studies have now confirmed what has been predicted all along: that climate change is leading to more – and more intense – extreme weather events.  One of these studies states that the land area of the world now affected by extreme hot summer anomalies in any one year, has increased from 1% to 10% in the space of 30 years.  It states confidently that the heat waves in France, Texas and Moscow in 2003, 2010 and 2011 respectively, all of which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, “almost certainly would not have occurred in the absence of global warming”.

New Scientist in mid-January summarised what this has meant for people, animals and plants recently in different parts of the world.  In Australia, temperature records are being “annihilated”:` wild fires in January devastated large areas of New South Wales and highly ecologically-sensitive Tasmania.  In 2009, 173 people were killed in bush fires around Melbourne, Victoria.  Current housing development doesn’t take fire risk into account.  As one scientist put it “[planners] are setting us up for the catastrophes of the future”.

In NE Brazil, the year-long drought – the worst in 50 years – has killed cattle, damaged corn and cotton crops and wiped out 30% of the region’s sugar cane (in part, used for biofuel).  Hydropower dams are at 32% of capacity, threatening electricity shortages.  Thousands of subsistence farmers have lost their livelihood, while agrarian reform under the PT government of Dilma Rousseff has “been abandoned”, according to the co-ordinator of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST).

Meanwhile, in the United States, 60% of the land area has been affected by drought and last year 25% of the maize (corn) crop was lost (12% of the world’s total) in the hottest year for the sub-continent on record.  This will impact on food prices for everyone.  In January, the Department of Agriculture declared 20% of agricultural land a “natural” disaster area, although it really is a “capitalist” disaster.  During and after Hurricane Sandy, some US politicians finally suggested that climate change might be a problem.

They now face a major choice for the future of New York: either abandon large sections of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and even sections of lower Manhattan, or build huge, ecologically-damaging barriers across the New York-New Jersey Harbor Gateway and the East River.  It is quite likely that neither option will have even been decided by the time the next “Sandy” hits.  Of course, the problems the people of New York face are as nothing compared to those in cities in emerging economies, such as Dhaka, Bangkok, Shanghai or Rio, which have fewer resources for defences.

Finally, four years of intense waves of cold weather have covered large parts of Asia, extending even to snowstorms and floods in the Middle East.  200 people have been killed by the cold in northern India.  This weather pattern is thought to be caused by the rapid warming of the Arctic, including a feedback mechanism, driven by the melting of the sea ice.  This has weakened wind currents over Asia and allowed Arctic air to spill over onto the continental mass.

Weather vs. Climate

A climate change denier might argue “that’s just weather: the climate trends are different, and even the Met Office said on 24^th December (2012) that the world has cooled since 1997-8 and will remain at current temperatures, about 0.43^oC above the long-term average, until 2017”.  This is precisely what the Mail Online reports: “Global Warming stopped 16 years ago …. So who are the deniers now?”

More recently, some climate scientists themselves have started to question whether their estimates of climate forcing by carbon dioxide are correct.  Climate forcing is the average world temperature rise that would result from a doubling of CO₂ concentrations and is in the range 2-4.5^oC.  That carbon dioxide concentration (but not the commensurate temperature rise – see below) is expected to be reached by about mid-century, on current trends.

The argument is that, in the last 15 years or so, the rate of global warming has increased more slowly than previously (not, as the deniers contend, that the world has cooled).  A report on the BBC’s Today Programme on 17^th May gave a flavour of the debate, but failed properly to confront the scientific issues – namely the difference between heat and temperature, a question that should be familiar to anyone who has done a GCSE science course. (Basically, a swimming pool at 30^oC contains an awful lot more heat energy than a spark at 3000^oC).

A small oscillation in the rate of global warming does not contradict the basic findings from the paleoclimate record.  Indeed, in the very week that this debate started up again, a study was published showing, based on records from the sediment in a Siberian lake, that the last time carbon dioxide levels were as high as at present,  3 million years ago, the average temperatures in Siberia were 8^oC higher than today.

Previous warming episodes have come about over periods of thousands of years, while the current one is much faster.  It would be even more rapid, if the sea did not act as a sink: it is unable to reach the temperature that corresponds to current carbon dioxide levels before those levels rise again.  This lag means current temperatures are cooler than they would be if the sea was not there, but  that we are already locked in to higher levels of temperature rises, like those of 3 million years ago, unless carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are actually brought down.  This is the rationale for the 350.org campaign.

Deniers show their cynicism

After the Daily Mail’s outburst  in January, comments of a similar calibre flooded the deniers’ media outlets and blogs, actions of deeply cynical dishonesty, designed purely for defence of the fossil fuel industry.  In fact, as Fred Pearce has pointed out , along with others, the Met Office’s findings are qualified by numerous caveats:

• 1998 was the hottest year on record and surface air temperatures can be expected to reach similar levels twice in the next five years
• The Met Office work is an exercise, designed to test the robustness of several new models that now take account of ocean currents, amongst other things
• In the medium term, climate is affected by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, which affect the amount of heat absorbed by the oceans, with the effects described above
• The factor that is fundamentally affected by atmospheric carbon dioxide levels is the balance between the energy absorbed by the planet and that re-radiated out into space.  If that energy is used to heat a previously unexposed colder ocean surface, or to melt ice, rather than to further heat up the atmosphere, it hasn’t “disappeared”: there is still a major issue, including sea level rises and extreme weather.  The rise in temperature will hit us later.
• If the Met Office forecasts prove to be correct, as medium term effects, they are just superimposed on the long-term atmospheric warming trend.

Pearce suggests that when these oscillations enter a new phase, warming could accelerate even further, as oceans give up to the atmosphere heat accumulated in the current phase.  “Scary”, is his summary of the situation.

This also is the conclusion that can be drawn from a recent study in Nature Climate Change, which modelled what would happen even if it was possible to cut world carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050.  This is a cut of 5% a year from 2016 (the authors give the international capitalist class and their political lackeys 3 years to read their paper and start to implement cuts).  There is currently a rise in emissions of 2.6% a year.

The 80% cut, the authors argue, would limit the average world atmospheric temperature rise to 2^oC by 2100, still viewed as disastrous by some scientists, but way below the likely rise of 4-6^oC.  They conclude that 20-65% of the adverse effects (heat waves, floods, crop failures etc.) predicted under “business as usual” could be avoided if the cuts are implemented.  Or, to put it another way, 35-80% of these effects would not be avoided.  Furthermore, no mitigation of climate change and its consequences is predicted prior to 2050, even if these large cuts in GHG emissions take place.

What are the Capitalists Doing?

How well is the capitalist system faring in its attempt to implement such cuts?  A cut of 80% in emissions by 2050 is, after all, the figure on the European Commission’s “road map”, whatever that means.  The current rate of emissions rise has already been mentioned.  We can look at some fossil fuel projects being implemented or planned.  In the Athabasca tar sands, oil production is to nearly triple by 2020.  Obama is about to decide whether to give the go-ahead to the Keystone XL pipeline, connecting these tar sands to Texas refineries.  There already is one going to Illinois and Oklahoma.

US coal exports (mainly to China) have more than doubled in 3 years and there are plans to increase them further – by building ports in Oregon, Washington State and British Columbia linked to railways from the western fields.  China’s annual coal consumption, already nearly half world consumption, is forecast to grow from the current 3.52bn to 5.2bn tonnes by 2020: another 2bn is consumed in the rest of the Asia-Pacific region.

At the same time, there is the dash to use the opportunity of the melting of Arctic sea ice to open up the region for oil and gas exploitation, while Japan has recently developed the technology to recover methane clathrates from the sea bed.  These clathrates, or hydrates, are a crystalline compound of methane and water, unstable except at high pressure, or well below 0^oc.  The Japanese extraction method involves reducing the pressure to release the gas from the compound.  This must involve the risk of inadvertent release to the atmosphere of large quantities of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Fracking, for gas and oil, is having a major impact.  Shale gas, trapped in the cracks and pores in rocks, rather than in large reservoirs, is extracted by drilling deep wells that turn horizontal, then opening up the fissures using high-pressure water.   The technology has many damaging environmental consequences: possible pollution of aquifers; air and noise pollution at ground level; very high well-head density (roads and pipelines).  Large amounts of water required (which returns to the well-head polluted by the chemical additives and often by the underground minerals and volatile organic compounds.  The technology is highly dependent on road transport,  the new roads destroying ecosystems and leading to even greater carbon emissions.

Largely using this technology, the US is set overtake Russia as the main gas producer in 2015, and to exceed Saudi Arabia’s oil production by 2017.  Gas prices in the USA have plummeted, while the “fracking rush” has only just got underway.  These developments could have significant world-wide political consequences.

There are slated to be up to 170,000 (see 1.06:48) fracking wells in Pennsylvania alone, drilled over a long period of time: one every 80 acres over 70% of the accessible land.  These will add to the well over 300,000 existing and exhausted oil and conventional natural gas wells in the state.  Already, there are signs that these old workings are being damaged by fracking, causing methane leaks and even explosions.   Of course, this is partly because the old wells were never properly sealed.

Fracking all over the place

Other countries, such as Britain, Poland and South Africa are trying to introduce gas fracking, in the face of considerable popular opposition.   The Transnational Institute has surveyed moves towards fracking and counts four countries that have started and 18 that are interested, including the major imperialist powers, except France, and all the BRIC countries.  In France, fracking was banned in July 2011, following a large national mass movement, based on opposition in areas where sites had been earmarked for exploration.  A movement against fracking is developing in Algeria, where fossil fuel companies Shell, Eni and Talisman have interests – particularly because of the tax breaks the government is offering.

China is meant to have the largest on-shore shale gas reserves and is aiming to use the resource for 6% of its energy needs by 2020.  Again, according to TNI, Chinese companies have linked up with the likes of Shell, BP, Exxon, Chevron and Total to extract the gas.  There is no effective environmental protection and the water demands, often in areas of shortage, will add to all the other harmful effects on local ecosystems and people.

The TNI links the interest in fracking to land-grabbing by multinationals, particularly important, given the large land area “per unit gas yield” the technology requires.

In Britain, after a 1 ½ year delay due to some minor earthquakes near Blackpool, resulting from exploratory drilling, the government in November 2012 gave the go-ahead for fracking test wells.  Shale (but not necessarily recoverable gas) is present over 60% of the land mass of England and drilling licences have already been granted (or old conventional gas and oil ones revived) in Lancashire, the South-East and South Wales.

One other technology for which permits have been given in the UK is underground coal gasification (UGC).  Interestingly, Lenin wrote approvingly about this technology, describing the benefits that could be gained from it under a socialist system, and its earliest large-scale application was in the USSR in the 1930’s.

Another technology, more closely related to fracking, is Coal Bed Methane (CBM).  Planning applications have been sought for this process in the Falkirk/Stirling area and it is likely that this site will be the first to use one of these technologies on a large scale.

The drawbacks described below for fracking largely apply to UGC and CBM as well.

Some environmentalists are starting to claim that fracking will have the benefit of reducing the dependence on coal for generating electricity and thereby carbon dioxide emissions.  There are three reasons why fracking is not the answer to this problem.  One is the issue of methane leaks.  The fragility of old workings has already been mentioned, and there are videos on the internet of people showing flames in their methane-contaminated tap water.  Probably more serious are long-term leaks from the new wells, resulting from careless work or poor quality materials.  The wells are lined with concrete: the Deepwater Horizon disaster was due to the failure of non-compliant concrete.

A study from Cornell University in 2011, with a follow-up in 2012, found that fracking caused up to twice as much methane leakage as conventional drilling and that, as a result, “the GHG footprint of shale gas is greater than that of other fossil fuels on time scales of up to 100 years”.  Another report, from January 2013, has shown that some wells leak an “eye-popping” 9% of their production.  Presumably, this leakage could be reduced by better practice, but who will inspect the hundreds of thousands of installations to ensure that is implemented?

The second objection is that all these new technologies are locking the system into fossil fuel dependence for (more) decades to come.  This is the effect of building of ever more fossil fuel infrastructure.  Capitalists who invest in expensive plant will want to use it for as long as possible, in order to maximise their revenue and profits.  Every new investment reduces the prospects of a viable system of energy saving and renewable energy generation being implemented.  It also diverts financial and human resources (research and skilled labour) away from these goals.

Finally, the fracking boom is likely to reduce the prices of all fossil fuels.  Again, this makes it more difficult to implement fuel-saving or renewable energy strategies, especially as fossil fuels attract subsidies, open or hidden, which are not given to non-fossil fuel technologies.

A CEO of a US energy corporation summed up the capitalist attitude to fossil fuel exploitation at a recent business meeting on fracking, dismissing the concerns of an MIT professor (who also happened to be a former head of the CIA!):

“There is no question that climate change and global warming are issues, but you cannot ruin the economy to address them….We’re in these businesses and we are driven by economics. I can tell you that in my opinion all of these alternatives are not economic against natural gas.”

Conclusion – not a holiday

In 2005, one of the predecessors of Socialist Resistance pointed out that capitalism had already had fifty years’ warning that greenhouse gas emissions were subjecting the world’s people and ecosystems to a “large scale geophysical experiment”.  We surveyed some of the effects of climate change that were already visible and pointed out the threats, especially to agriculture, and of the spread of tropical diseases and mentioned that a major extinction event was already under way.

Since then, carbon dioxide concentrations have risen from 380ppm to 400ppm and the rate of increase of emissions has also increased by about 20%.  There is no indication that capitalism is structurally capable of turning this around.

Along with the continuing frantic extraction of fuels outlined above, the problem is perhaps best illustrated by a recent report, which warned of the possible collapse of the fossil fuel giants, if serious emissions curbs were implemented.  The top 200 giants are worth $4tn (based, in large part, on a valuation of their claimed reserves), but have debts of $1.5tn, so a policy that stated “no, you can’t use your reserves” is untenable for the capitalist economy.

Bursting the fossil fuel bubble would have severe consequences for the capitalist system as a whole.  The fossil fuel system giants cannot be allowed to collapse and nor can the pension funds that own so many of their shares.  Capitalism has no way out when it comes to climate change, except possibly when it is faced with global ecological catastrophe.  By then, the “cure” capitalism proposes will most likely make the current austerity programme look like a summer holiday.

What are the alternatives that socialists propose?  These will be the subject of subsequent articles in the series.  We will examine especially agriculture, energy resources and biodiversity, hopefully showing how, through a socialist strategy, correctly addressing these issues can secure the future of humanity and the ecosystems on which we depend.

Sharon Smith re-evaluates feminism

Terry Conway explains how the ideas of American socialist Sharon Smith have developed in relation to feminism.

Sharon Smith’s article “Domestic Labour and Women’s oppression” in International Socialist Review 88 is a breath of fresh air, particularly when compared with Sheila McGregor’s article “Marxism and women’s oppression today” in International Socialism 130.

The most significant difference, evident in the opening lines of both articles, is one of approach, of method.  While McGregor starts her piece by bringing together a rather well-rehearsed of facts about the reality of working class women’s lives in Britain today, Smith tries to situate her piece in relation to others’ theories of domestic labour.

Smith seems unafraid in her forthright delineation of the contradictions of Marx and Engels approach to the ‘women’s question’ while situating herself clearly within a Marxist approach. Her summing up of those contradictions is worthy of the way she herself describes what historical materialism offers:  “As a living and breathing theory, Marxism can and must continue to develop in relation to a changing world”.

Smith goes on to talk about the way that the rise of second wave of feminism from the 1960s onwards challenged a whole raft of ways in which the ‘founding fathers’ of the communist movement failed to . The Women’s Liberation movement not only developed new practice but wove new theoretical insights.

I found Smith’s discussion of the differences between Marx and Engels on a number of questions particularly interesting.  Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State is a book I have read time and time again over the years of my activity as a Marxist feminist – and each time it sticks in my craw the way his vision of relationships under socialism is confined to ‘individual sex-love’ between men and women – idealising monogamy and ignoring the possibility of non-heterosexual relationships and just as problematically implying that monogamy is a protection for women – presumably because we are ‘naturally’ less sexual than men!

It’s always been to Alexandra Kollontai that I have looked for more inspiration on the question of personal relationships not Engels. But now Sharon Smith has suggested that I should also explore the writings of Marx, who unlike his colleague does not assume that the monogamous family is the pinnacle to which human relationships can aspire or that it will inevitably survive a transition to socialism.

Much of the rest of what Smith has to say here is fairly familiar territory to one like myself who read and discussed much of the ‘social reproduction’ writings of socialist feminists in the 1970s and 1980s – well summarised and explained – but not particularly groundbreaking.

Why are her views important?

So why write about this? Haven’t there always been critical Marxist feminists saying these sort of things? It’s certainly true, and Smith herself acknowledges that much of what she argues in this piece is part of a line of argument developed since the 1960s by many different socialist feminists. What makes her contribution particularly worthy of note is not its content – though I think that is insightful and well formulated – but who she is and the context in which she is arguing.

Sharon Smith is a leading member of the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), a revolutionary organisation in the United States which until 2001 was a member of the International Socialist Tendency – the international current with the British Socialist Worker’s Party at its centre.  In 2001 they were expelled from that current – supposedly for not being enthusiastic enough about the antiglobalisation movement in the run up to Seattle – but in fact, I would argue for being a little too interested in thinking about and acting to transform the concrete political reality in which they found themselves. In another article, Marxism, feminism and women’s liberation (published at the end of January 2013 but based on a talk given in 2012.) Smith is direct and explicit about where she now disagrees with some important arguments on the women’s question put by her previous co-thinkers.

As in the previous piece I have discussed Smith pays tribute to the gains of the women’s liberation movement – but also here to the Black Power and Gay Liberation movement. She makes a sustained explanation of why all women, regardless of class (or race) suffer as a result of sexism, although obviously working class women are at the bottom of the pile.

She is fiercely critical of some arguments put forward by some feminists – and I think it’s unfortunate that she conflates a polemic against bourgeois feminism – which I would describe as the idea that women’s liberation can be achieved under capitalism – with the term middle-class feminism. I don’t have the scope in this piece to explore the question of what mean by middle class in depth – but in the context where millions of women sell their labour power in insecure and badly paid jobs in sectors such as teaching, health and social care which were certainly considered middle class when I was growing up I’m not sure this is helpful. It’s not that I would give any more credence to the arguments of women like Naomi Wolf than Smith does – just that I don’t think that is a helpful characterisation.

Reductionism?

There are other things in Smith’s arguments I don’t completely buy into – I think for example she dismisses the arguments of ‘dual systems’ feminists too quickly in a way that undermines what she has previously argued about feminism being a movement not based on class but nevertheless with a huge amount to contribute – and I would argue to teach the left as a whole.

She does go on to talk about the way that socialist/Marxist feminism has been sidelined and ignored both by those hostile to the left within the women’s liberation movement and those hostile to feminism within the left. She pays a welcome tribute to some of those whose work has impacted on her – notably Lise Vogel and Martha Giminez – both of whom should be on any recommended reading list of socialist feminism

The most important part of this article comes when she sets out what she has now re-examined about her former co-thinkers:

“Unfortunately, not all Marxists have, at all times, understood the need to defend feminism, and to appreciate the enormous accomplishments of the women’s movement, even after the 1960s era gave way to the backlash. This includes some in our own tradition, the International Socialist tradition, who, I would argue, fell into a reductionist approach to women’s liberation a few decades ago.”

“What is reductionism? In its purest form, reductionism is the notion that the class struggle will resolve the problem of sexism on its own, by revealing true class interests, as opposed to false consciousness. So this approach “reduces” issues of oppression to an issue of class. It’s also usually accompanied by a reiteration of the objective class interests of men in doing away with women’s oppression–without taking on the harder question: How do we confront sexism inside the working class?”

This description of reductionism I think well sums up an approach common in many writings from the Socialist Worker’s Party which are  partly responsible for a situation where some people in that organisation were prepared to see the description ‘creeping feminist’ as an insult!