“West” marches Ukraine towards the abyss.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“I think it is absolutely in the interest of US security. It is extremely good value for money for the United States and others, for perhaps about 5 or 10% of your (US) defence budget, almost half of Russia’s pre war military equipment has been destroyed without the loss of a single American life.” Lord Cameron speaking in Washington this week.

An admission that this is a proxy war, in which the “West” supplies the munitions and the Ukrainians do the dying, if ever there was one.

The review on Labour Hub of Volodymyr Ishchenko’s Towards the Abyss – Ukraine from Maidan to War is a bit sniffy at how “even handed” he is; but in examining who he is being “even handed” between allows a chink of reality into a discourse on that site that has refused to acknowledge any fissures in Ukrainian identity at all up to now.

All the previous articles self referentially quoted in this review were consistent in dismissing the people in Crimea and Donbass who rebelled against the consequences of the Maidan movement and the incorporation of Ukraine into the Western Bloc either as non existent or, at most, a minority of Russian proxies.

But in this review we do have a recognition that Ukraine did indeed “polarise” towards, in and beyond the Maidan movement; in a way self servingly summarised by pro “western” commentators as between ‘new’ Ukraine – “young, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, fluent in English, stylish, mobile, liberal, well-educated, successful” to the old ‘Soviet’ or ‘Russian’ outlook – “old, conservative, provincial, rigid, clinging to dying industries, poorly or inadequately educated, in bad taste, losers.” “Sovoks” as the dismissive term goes in Kyiv.

This is worth noting as the first time that this reality has been acknowledged in a Labour Hub article. Its possible that this is simply for purposes of this review, and normal service will be resumed shortly, but taking it on board is essential for any serious search for a peaceful solution that does not go by way of a massive Western escalation, with a possible nuclear component, and a (now implausible) march on Rostov on Don.

However, though the summary of the polarity in this review does not minimise the scale of it, unlike previous articles on Hub, it continues to ignore a different, more disturbing, dimension. That the largely Russian speaking, and oriented, East, was, and is, for the most part industrial working class. The Donbass, in which the war is being fought, is heavily built up, with densely packed strings of urban settlements built around mines, or strung out like heavy, gritty beads along the main roads.

The EU – and now US – oriented Ukrainian speaking West, is more agricultural; with wide open spaces with sparse villages. Look at an aeriel view. The Ukrainian nationalism nurtured there draws from deep wells of peasant suspicion of urban elites, with poisonous roots reaching back through Banderist collaboration with the Nazis (all those concentration camp guards) and beyond, to Pyet Lyura’s short lived nationalist regime at the end of World War 1; notorious for pogroms even more severe than those carried out by the White Guards during the Russian Civil War.

This has its modern day expression in influential organisations now incorporated into the Ukrianian armed forces, like the Azov battalion or the Right Sector – whose leader has been filmed saying “certain people have too much influence in Ukraine… you know, like Russians…and Jews” . Not so “metropolitan”, “cosmopolitan” or “liberal” then.

A nationalism generated in service to a greater Empire runs in the tradition of this sort of Ukrainian nationalism. First for the Habsburgs, then the Nazis, now the USA. A self image as a frontier people, “a large Israel in eastern Europe”, as President Zelensky put it. In its full fat far right form, full of suicidal self romanticism: seeing themselves as the 300 Spartans against the Asiatic hordes. A view also actively promoted within the Left by the John Bull like Ukraine Solidarity Campaign weekly bulletins that paint a picture of Russian soldiers as the sort of sub human orcs that Georgia Melloni imagines them to be. Which is why the transatlantic far right has sent so many volunteers to fight in the Donbass since 2014, a practice now getting a nod and a wink from NATO governments, with “off duty” French Foreign Legionnaires beginning to appear in casualty lists.

But perhaps not quite so self sacrificial. Units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces that are effectively insourced far right militias, like the 67th Mechanised Brigade for the Right Sector and the 3rd Assault Brigade for Azov, tend to be used behind the lines to deter retreats and deserters. When put in the front lines they are developing a reputation for self preservation; with the 3rd refusing to take up what they considered to be suicidal positions in Avdiivka last month and, just this week, Chassiv Yar, while the 67th abandoned their positions there to avoid encirclement rather than seek the heroic martyrdom they advocate for others.

These are nevertheless the shock troops and guarantors of “the Ukrainian government’s decision to stick to neoliberal dogmas of privatization, lowering taxes and extreme labour deregulation, despite the objective imperatives of the war economy” as Ishchenko puts it.

But still, a polarisation. Two sides, in Ukraine. In which the tradition described by Ishchenko which celebrates the hostory that “Ukraine was crucial to the greatest social revolution and modernization breakthrough in human history. Ukraine was where some of the most significant battles of World War II took place” and in which “Millions of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers in the Red Army contributed huge sacrifices to defeat Nazi Germany” is actively celebrated in Donbass and Crimea; while people are arrested for expressing it in Western Ukraine. “Western” here being a term that is both geographical and political.

So, a civil war, in which the Russians are engaged with what they see as their people, and NATO is engaged with what have become their proxies. It is, indeed, innappropriate for anyone on the left to be “even handed” in a polarisation like this.

It takes a heroic act of disavowell on Labour Hub’s part to consider the economic polices outlined above to be a sovereign act by Kyiv, with the US and EU having no influence whatsoever; even though the “reconstruction plan” due to be administered by Blackrock after “victory” will take this to frenzied levels; initially conceived as a way for Western capital to carve up Ukrainian resources, with the oligarchy getting a cut, but, in the context of defeat, so the “West” can salvage what it can from the wreck of its military ambitions.

There is similar disavowell in the breezy assertion – contrary to everything the Russians said about their motivation since at least 2008 – that “Russia’s war on Ukraine had very little to do with a supposed ‘NATO threat’”. “Supposed ‘NATO threat'”? Its amazing how dismissive you can be just by using an adjective and a pair of inverted commas. Perish the thought that NATO outspending the Russians on arms by more than eleven to one, expanding right up to their border and carrying out annual war games practicing to fight them could be considered a threat in Moscow.

A way to picture that is this infographic, which has the NATO tank 11 times the size of the Russian tank and therefore has the respective threats in proportion. Not something that is ever evident in the media here, nor, sadly, on Labour Hub.

The US alone spends seven and a half times as much as the Russians do. Add together all the direct US allies and they account for 67% of global military spending. They are the core of Global imperialism. The military expenditure is to secure their ongoing exploitative relationship to the rest of the world. We know that they are willing to use this, and have done. Four and a half million people have died in the “war on terror” since 2001. And President Biden is busily pushing Congress to authroise an additional $18 billion in militray aid to Israel, even as it commits its genocide in Gaza, while at the same time as cutting off aid to UNWRA to further facilitate it. so, they are not intervening in Ukraine now, and did not intervene in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution or in the Maidan movement, out of any romantic belief in the self determination of nations; quite the reverse. As Anthony Blinken put it recently, “if you’re not at the table, you’ll probably be on the menu”.

This was a war of choice by NATO. A deal guaranteeing Ukrainian neutrality, autonomy for the Donbass within Ukraine, and open ended, possibly eternal, negotiations about the status of Crimea and mutual security guarantees for the whole of Europe were on the table in the Winter of 2021. That would have been a good result for everyone in Ukraine and eased tensions across Europe. NATO wouldn’t even discuss it. It is still the best outcome for the working class in Ukraine, and in the rest of Europe, and the world.

Without an even more catastrophic escalation, possibly through the Samson option foreshadowed by the UAFs recent drone attacks on the Zaporizhye nuclear power station, NATO is now heading, slowly, inexorably, towards defeat.

Continuing cheerleading for pursuit of this war pulls us all towards the “abyss” of Ishchenko’s title, but the people of Ukraine most of all.

Bending it… but not quite like Beckham.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

An extraordinarily well camouflaged butterfly in a rewilding garden somewhere in Essex. Look closely and you can see its eyes and antennae.

The slogan of the Essex and Suffold water company is “living water”. In current circumstances they might want to chnage that.

One of the people I argue with on the Next Door site goes under the moniker “Brick Oboe”. I find it hard to believe that that is his actual name. It sounds like the most obscure of the seventies rock bands who named themselves after the slang for an erect dick: Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan, Brick Oboe.

In the distance in the playing field opposite my parents house a strange figure dressed in a pink and white hazmat suit and medical mask looks as though he is prospecting for metal, or perhaps mines; sweeping his device from one side to the other, slowly, cautiously, systematically. As he gets closer, it turns out he is mowing the grass. The PPE seems a bit extreme for that. Perhaps he has a serious grass allergy.

A week later, the whole field gets done by a tractor; which makes you wonder what the point of the bloke in the Hazmat suit was. Perahps he was just doing the irradiated grass…I take a deep sniff as I walk past for that fresh cut grass smell. A job with aromatherapy built in.

The ambulance worker in the non emergency hospital transport taking my Dad to Basildon goes to get a hospital wheelchair when we get there. This is a clunky, heavy device that looks like it was designed to carry industrial goods by a Soviet tank designer. An altogether more robust vehicle than the onboard wheelchair, which has a comfortable seat and at least the impression of suspension. He explains that the industrial design, and weight, of the hospital wheelchair is deliberate; to stop people stealing them. The long poles at the back of some of them are “to stop people getting them into cars. You’d be amazed.”

His colleague on the way back is so annoyed by the bossy recorded posh voice from the in vehicle safety monitor telling him to drive safely and do his seatbelt up that he does it up behind him and sits on it.

Listening to one of the carers chatting to my Dad about his life this morning, it struck me that carers – taken together- have a massive store of oral history about the area they work in.

Chatting to one of them, she said that she felt she had to get the job to stave off permanent boredom after moving to Purfleet from Central London. “Its so QUIET in Purfleet”.

As the stair lift is Dutch, perhaps the music to accompany an ascent should be the Flying Dutchman Overture. The chair goes slowly enough to get quite a way into it.

On the way back from the pharmacy back in NW9, a battered looking yellow football bounces down the path from the estate on Stagg Lane heading swiftly towards the road. I swing my gammy leg towards it and, in a miracle of luck, my dyspraxic slice at the ball conjures up a magnificent banana shot that takes it safely back into the estate and behind the hedge.

Of Pies and Doughnuts – 30 theses on Political and Economic issues in Green Transition.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“I wouldn’t start from here if I were you…” Trad.

  1. The first point that we have to be clear about is that we are now in a period of damage limitation. Continued emissions of greenhouse gases are putting humanity well behind the curve of saving ourselves from the breakdown of the climactic conditions needed for the survival of human civilisation. In the current relationship of forces, the question is not whether we can avoid the crisis, but how much damage we can avoid. As we need far more dramatic shifts that current political and economic relations allow, we have to seize and build on any and every change that is immediately possible in order to bank it – limit the damage – and build on it to have any prospect of breaking through the limits of those conditions. It is imperative to do both.
  2. The paradox is that fossil fuel interests are now under such a threat from the transition that is already taking place, even at its current slow pace, that they are putting significant resources into political movements that are either denialist, like Trump, Bolsonaro, Milei, or go slow, like Sunak. The dynamic of this is towards denialism; in practice if not in theory. This dovetails with the impasse of neoliberalism, which requires a dramatic shift in the balance of power against the working class and Global South to restore profitability and capital formation in the US allied countries. This tends towards fascism; because “normal” politics will be incapable of imposing that scale of defeat required. The question here is not whether Trump, for example, is a fascist, but whether the movement he fronts up (and which is an expression of very powerful class forces) is heading in that direction. This tendency is not inevitable, but has to be seen for what it is. As the inequality of wealth, and stratospheric concentration among the wealthiest has increased, political acceptance of democratic constraints among the wealthiest has declined sharply. Resistance to this is one of the motors of transformation.
  3. Fascism is a last resort for ruling classes because it is ultimately suicidal, requires exponential escalation of confrontation to a point of total victory or total defeat: but the prospect of ecological collapse makes this less of an inhibition in a kind of last days of Nazi Berlin recklessness; and generates the sort of exuberantly self indulgent celebration of irrationality that is such a feature of movements like MAGA.
  4. The capitalist class is divided on climate, however. Significant capital is going into renewable energy, electric vehicles, and other key transition sectors. Others are perturbed about the future, and want there to be one. We should note that there was a significant participation from private school students in the climate strikes for example. If you expect the world to be your oyster, then find out it is going to hell in a handcart, you’re going to be upset about it. It is also noticeable that the active cadre of climate denialism in the Global Warming Policy Foundation are not only rich enough to be part of the global 1%, they are also almost entirely over 70 years old. Lord Lawson, of course, is already dead.
  5. This division also plays out not simply in “green sector” businesses, among scientists and academia, but also at different levels in government. Cities are vital laboratories for a green social shift. The C40 movement, the most important legacy of the Livingstone Mayoralty in my view, knits together the Mayors of nearly 100 of the world’s biggest cities from New York to London to Jakarta to Beijing, Paris and Buenos Aires. All of them are working on ways to green construction, transport, urban planning, waste and recycling; and sharing the results in a vast process of mutual experimentation and shared learning. You can read about that here. The need to make such a conscious shift in every aspect of life is a new challenge and no one has all the answers. We are making it up as we go along, and any and every lever we have any access to is vital. Every small step that works is a seed, because it shows what might be done on a bigger scale. These cities cover a multitude of political sins, and at present it could not be otherwise. And they make a big contribution to the Paris process. Actions taken by US cities aligned with C40, and to some extent States, reduced the impact of Trump’s rollback on climate measures during his last Presidency by about half. Whatever the political character, and limitations, of the Mayors of NY and LA and the other cities involved, this is essential work. This could be seen as an application of Gramsci’s notion that we are in a war of position, seeking to gain ground in a myriad of social forms and organisations as part of the process of shifting hegemony towards a point that the old unsustainable order cracks.
  6. Nevertheless, pro Net Zero views among capitalists tends to a kind of techno Micawberism – the view that technological changes alone, leaving existing social and economic structures intact – will be enough. Given the studies by Oxfam and others that show that the carbon emissions of the wealthiest 10% will, at current consumption rates, take us beyond 1.5C on their own, regardless of what the rest of us do, this poses the limits of any bloc with them, and also a rule of thumb guideline for how much income is too much in global terms; roughly anything above £75,000 per person at the moment. For people above this, getting to sustainability will be harder than a camel threading a needle, but there we are. We can travel to sustainability, but not in private jets or yachts.
  7. The climate movement is necessarily broad. We should be prepared for united fronts across wide disagreements on other matters and to have debates within the movement; and also form blocs with different class forces on particular issues without doing so on their terms. Offshore wind companies, for example, are as ruthless to their workers as any others. This is a contradiction that we have to fight out within the imperative to have as many of them built as we can.
  8. The same applies to limited and inadequate political choices which reflect capitalist interests first and human imperatives a long way below. A continued Biden Presidency, for example, would continue to pursue an “America First” green transition, as well as its global war drive against China, arming the IDF assault on Gaza, channeling capital into military spending and sucking green investment away from even its subordinate allies. A Trump Presidency would make the US a complete rogue state on climate, smash up the Paris process, double down on fossil fuels, and spice up the war drive with what Boris Johnson calls “unpredictable violence”. Leon Trotsky’s argument in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany –that when you are confronted by two people who are going to kill you, but one has a gun and the other some slow poison, you bloc with the poisoner against the gunman, while building up your own forces so you can deal with the poisoner later – is relevant to this.
  9. Either way, the dominant ruling class in the US centred Global North bloc, for all its protestations of global leadership, will not lead humanity into sustainability. The ease with which they have found billions for wars, and now escalating military spending, compares starkly with the difficulty they seem to have providing climate finance for the Global South.
  10. The ideologues of the world’s imperial core have warned us of what they are going to do. In “The Age of Consequences” a projection of potential climate scenarios drawn up by allies of Al Gore in the US Democrat Party in 2008 stated quite clearly that in conditions in which climate driven “massive non linear events” began to unravel societies, “Governments with resources will be forced to engage in long, nightmarish episodes of triage, deciding what and who can be salvaged from engulfment by a disordered environment. The choices will need to be made primarily among the poorest, not just abroad but at home.” When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
  11. This is not simply a question of a confrontation with capitalism, it is a question of confronting imperialism in the first instance. The concentration of the major imperial powers into a US led Global North bloc – described by the Tricontinental Institute as Hyper Imperialism – is the last stand of an order that extracts wealth from the rest of the world, seeks to make its own working classes complicit in doing so, is arming itself to the teeth to confront the consequences of its failure to deal with the climate crisis; and is risking war rather than peacefully come to terms with China becoming economically weightier than the US, thereby accepting multipolarity. This means that we may not live long enough to experience the full consequences of climate breakdown, should the kind of US strategic thinkers advocating a war with China in the next five years manage to provoke one. If we manage to avert this – and it will take efforts on our part – the diversion of investment into military spending will cut essential investment in climate transition and do enormous and unnecessary damage anyway. We won’t get this time back.
  12. John Bellamy Foster’s call for an anti imperialist climate movement to address the twin threats of 21st Century exterminism, the US war drive and climate breakdown, is essential, in that there needs to be clarity on this on the Left, but also insufficient, in that there need to be united fronts with forces that are not on the Left, and forces on the Left that don’t see themselves as anti imperialist in the way that Bellamy Foster (or I) would; and this is a dynamic process.
  13. The role of the countries that see themselves as Socialist is a more positive one than they are usually given credit for in the climate and labour movements in the Global North. Whether this is Cuba being considered a sustainability model by the UN, or China investing twice as much in energy transition as the US and EU put together this year, or high speed rail investments as part of the Belt and Road initiative. This is examined in some detail here.  I use the phrase “countries that see themselves as Socialist” because large parts of the Left in the Global North don’t think that these countries are what they think Socialism is, but its important to take on board the fact that 90 million Chinese Communist Party members disagree with them – and that should pose (at least) a debate, with them, not about them. A good place to start getting a flavour of their views, and that of quite a broad range of the non Party Left is Wenhua Zongheng.
  14. Monthly Review has also made a serious reassessment of the Soviet Union’s ecological record, stressing that the ecological disasters, for which it is well known, generated a significant environmental movement, and big shifts in state policy with real impacts, particularly in the 1980s after Chernobyl; and that its overall environmental impact was no worse than that of the US. Anyone who has seen post industrial wastelands in the US will not find that hard to believe.
  15. The current escalation of extreme weather events is just the overture to impacts that will, on current trajectories, become locally or regionally unmanageable in the coming decades; posing political climate emergencies declared by local ruling classes seeking to survive at everyone else’s expense, confronting working class and popular resistance, forced into revolutionary solutions to seek survival. Developments of this sort can’t help but have a dramatic political ripple effect, transforming debate and actions globally. Columbian President Petro’s insight that Gaza is a dress rehearsal for what the Global North will increasingly impose on the rest of the world as the climate breaks down should also be seen as a promise of the sort of global solidarity it has generated. with the sharp political learning curve, shake up and shake down of allegiances and organisations that goes with it. As Bellamy Foster puts it; “A revolt by the world’s environmental proletariat …, in which hundreds of millions, even billions, of people will inevitably take part, is destined to come about in the coming decades as a result of the struggle for ecological survival.”
  16. We are the majority and should act to mobilise it. When Just Stop Oil in the UK says “We need a revolution”, they are proposing a combination of continued non violent direct actions with assemblies to mobilise local communities around matters of concern. We should not be formulaic about what forms “assemblies” should take; as they will necessarily be multiple and will obviously include workplaces; and in some cases, these will be the core of a wider social mobilisation, as they are at GKN Firenze.
  17. We should also be clear that any NVDA must be directed at appropriate targets and all actions be aimed at mobilising the majority opinion in favour of more urgent climate action, not substituting for that in ways that provide climate deniers with a popular stick to beat us with. JSO has not always been sensitive to that. Nevertheless, initiatives like this are part of the war of position. Revolutions, and counter revolutions, take place when a social order breaks down to a point that it can no longer go on. That is when the war of position becomes a war of manoeuvre and ecological breakdown or economic impasse or military confrontations can all be causes of that. (See point 13 above).
  18. In the UK, the biggest wave of climate activism, and optimism, coincided with the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party, which held out the prospect of a UK government that would qualitatively up the investment in green transition. This fed off, and fed, a series of mass movements outside Parliament and Parliamentary thinking that nevertheless led to Parliament declaring a climate emergency and embedded concern for climate as a top 4 issue ever since.
  19. A Parliamentary Road to Sustainability now looks too long and winding to get to its destination anything like fast enough; with the level of investment being proposed by Labour quantitatively better than that already in place, but not to the qualitative degree we need. This is a damaging and retrograde choice by the Labour leadership. The failure of economic logic is examined here. Sir Nicholas Stern and others at the Grantham Institute have also demonstrated that the UK needs at least 1% of GDP to be invested in infrastructure every year to keep abreast of other developed countries. 1% of GDP is £26 billion. Which is a familiar sounding figure. Anything short of that allows continued decay.
  20. Rachel Reeves recent Mais lecture got the relationship between climate transition and “growth” completely the wrong way round; with the notion that any investment in green transition will flow from “growth” in the existing economy; within the framework of restrictive fiscal rules and respecting Tory spending plans that have baked in another five years of austerity. Reeves argues that Labour will aim to “grow the pie”, addressing issues of productivity with selective state pump priming. The scale of this is the problem. Cutting planned investment from £28 billion a year to only a little over what the Conservatives have already pencilled in, means that few pumps will be primed. Even with a “growth unit” in the Treasury, there will therefore be little growth, because there won’t be enough investment to generate it; and what growth there will be will primarily reproduce existing patterns of unsustainable production and consumption, not the sharp shift in the economy to a much lower carbon intensity overall that we need. Its not so much that the pie needs to be bigger, but it does need better, more nutritious ingredients, and to be shared qualitatively more equitably. That follows the climate imperative to reduce the overconsumption of the richest 10% outlined above. But Reeves’s approach rejects social redistribution, with all but the most limited taxes on the wealthy ruled out. We should not accept the poverty of low aspirations that passes for “realism” in Labour leadership circles and push for what is realistically necessary.
  21. “Growth” in the sense that Reeves poses it, is a way to generate benefits without confronting unsustainable inequalities of wealth and power; leaving them intact. Without differentiating between what is sustainable and what is not. “A rising tide lifts all boats”, but in current conditions, it also drowns all coastal cities.
  22. However, “degrowth” is not a good description of what we are trying to do; all too easily translated, in current circumstances, as “austerity”, or an unjust transition requiring the 90% to pay the price for the continued indulgence of the wealthiest 10%. Growth is completely legitimate and necessary in the developing world. The importance of a massive shift in investment to it is to enable this to happen without reliance on outmoded fossil fuel technology, in the same way that Africa has leapfrogged landlines to use Satphones. The failure of the Washington Consensus finance structure to make this finance available is structural and condemns the majority world to continued poverty and a pattern of development that is slow and unsustainable. In the Global North our movement has to be about transformation and regeneration, lowering carbon intensity without crashing majority living standards.
  23. The US bloc is trying to unravel globalisation, as it no longer provides it with global dominance. In cutting the world economy into parts, it breaks up shared efficiencies of scale, making all progress towards sustainability more costly. Local production is not always better than working with a global division of labour, and is often less so, even when transport costs are taken into account.
  24. “Extractivism” is also not a useful formulation, as, if we are to make anything at all, we need the raw materials to construct it; and that involves mining, refining and so on. The point here is to have the most economic – sparing – use of these materials, including the most effective possible circular reuse; and the best possible terms and conditions for the workers employed in the global supply chains; which is part of increasing the living standards of workers across the world as we head for sustainability.
  25. The food metaphors used in this discussion are unfortunate as, given the choice, most people would go for a fat pie over a thin doughnut.
  26. It is a statement of the obvious that, if we are to survive, some sectors of the economy have to shrink dramatically and, in some cases disappear, while others have to expand while the overall carbon intensity of everything made or done has to decrease. That requires continued technological innovation. We can’t presume a magic bullet, and can’t afford to wait for one, but at present there is a 2% annual improvement in efficiency and, according to the IEA, that needs to double to get us on track. That needs investment and coordination. So, the transition is necessarily technologically intense. The figures from the study that drew up maximum sustainable per capita energy consumption in Jonathan Essex’s recent article on the Greener Jobs Alliance blog were based on a presumption of everyone having equal access to the most advanced technology available. This is a long way from “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” but the technological dimension of maintaining a decent and sustainable way of life will be huge (and require the commensurate level of skills to sustain it).
  27. At present in the UK, even with stagnant “growth” in the conventional sense, and a transition that is going too slow, the number of jobs being created in “green” sectors is greater than those being lost in carbon heavy sectors.According to the ONS, in 2022, 8,500 jobs were lost in oil and gas, while 40,000 were created in low carbon and renewable energy sectors (almost 5 gained for every one lost). But, they are different jobs in different places. All investment, transition related or not, tends to substitute capital for labour, so transition for workers in threatened sectors must be addressed by any government, or movement, serious about making a shift with public support and avoid devastating local impacts like that at Port Talbot. Our movement should be about anticipating those shifts and for the unions and communities concerned to be ahead of what’s coming to make the appropriate demands for job guarantees, retraining and redeployment. If that does not happen, we end up in the ridiculous position whereby unions representing North Sea Oil and Gas workers campaign against the freeze on new exploration proposed by Labour, even though this is contrary to the interests of the working class as a whole.
  28. If you go to the TUC HQ in London, there is a magnificent painting by Dan Jones of the demonstration outside Pentonville prison in 1972 that was the strongest expression of the General Strike that freed the Pentonville 5. If you look at the banners being carried, most of them are from unions and union organisations that no longer exist. SOGAT. The Port of London Joint Shop Stewards Committee etc. This should stand as a warning to us today. A trade unionism that limits itself to bread and butter issues and the immediate perceived interests of members confines itself to trying to get a better deal in someone else’s world; and leaves strategic decisions about the future in the hands of a ruling class that will make them in a self interested way that will destroy whole sections of our movement. This is trade unionism that Gramsci would have described as “subaltern” and “corporate”. Another way to put it is that it is trade unionism that, however militant, ultimately knows its place.
  29. We need, instead, to push for Just Transition bodies at every level, in every sector and in every community; and push for a government that could, for example, approach the highly skilled workers making private jets and ask them, “with your skills, and this kit, what could you make instead that would benefit everyone?” and coordinates all initiatives through a National Climate Service. There are vast reservoirs of creativity, imagination and preparedness for hard work that could be harnessed in a universally understood human mission to save ourselves.
  30. Article 12 of Paris Agreement states that all signatories have to educate their populations on the nature of the crisis and the measures needed to deal with it. We should not interpret that as a sectoral point, but as a whole society obligation whereby society mobilises itself to deal with the crisis. Our movement has to lead that, or it won’t happen.

We won’t die for Zelensky

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Is a sentiment increasingly strongly felt in Ukraine. An unwillingness to die for Grant Shapps is also a majority sentiment in the UK, with just 17% being prepared to “fight for their country” in recent polling (and just 14% of 18-24 year olds).

We are now at a very dangerous point in the war in Ukraine. NATO is having to contemplate a defeat. The Ukrainian armed forces are suffering terrible losses and retreating all along the line of contact. There are increasing reports of surrenders, sometimes whole platoons sent to occupy suicidal forlorn hope forward positions (who are asking the Russians not to include them in prisoner swaps so they don’t get sent back to the front). There are also now a lot of videos of men being press ganged by Ukrainian recruitment officers, involving chases down the road and punch ups. Sometimes they get away, sometimes they don’t. The new conscription bill, to draft younger age groups is deeply unpopular and has been a political hot potato for months. The days of eager recruits is long gone. There have been whatsapp groups used by men to warn each other when the press gangs are around, so they can keep their heads down, for quite some time now. The latest visit from US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is reported to have offered Zelensky a deal; pass the conscription law as the quid pro quo for the US unblocking its latest tranche of aid. Essentially, this translates as Sullivan saying you provide the men to fight and die, we’ll supply the weapons that keep them in harms way. Zelensky’s own standing is undermined by the expiry of his Presidential term this month. Elections have been cancelled until the war is “won”.

There are two problems with this.

1. “Winning” for Kyiv/NATO means;

  • reconquering parts of pre 2014 Ukraine that rebelled against the US/EU backed overthrow of a government they had voted for. 30% of the pre-2014 Ukrainian population spoke Russian as their first language. Calling for an end to “the Russian occupation” would actually require most of the population of Crimea and Donbass to become refugees heading for Russia. Calling for “Russian troops out” means driving the locally recruited Donbass militia, which is now integrated into the Russian armed forces – out of their homes and the land they have been fighting to defend since coming under Ukrainian attack in May 2014.
  • integrating Ukraine fully into NATO – the world’s dominant alliance of imperial predators – as “a big Israel in Eastern Europe” (President Zelensky). A military frontier henchman state for a US dominated bloc that, as we know from long experience, or should, applies the principle recently restated with alarming candour by Anthony Blinken at this year’s Munich Security Conference: “if you’re not at the table in the international system, you’re going to be on the menu.”

Neither of these are outcomes that anyone on the Left should support.

Even if you think that being against “campism” means that you have to defend “principles” like the “right” of a state to join an imperialist military alliance; if you find yourself agitating for that bloc to be more aggressive in supplying arms, there is no basis on which you can oppose the militarisation of our society, and the war drive that our ruling class is engaging in, because you have become a cheerleader for it. This is revealed by the argument in a recent article on Labour Hub from the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign that the impending defeat in Ukraine “has arisen from the self-limiting approach by the democracies providing aid.” My emphasis. Who does he mean by “the democracies”? The world’s richest, most powerful economies, coralled into a military and political bloc that exploits the rest of the world under the leadership of the USA? Those “democracies”? For the author, the core of world imperialism are “the democracies” engaged in a “key battle for democracy with the new authoritarianism.” This is straight State Department terminology and framing.

This way of thinking possibly explains why USCs contribution to the war drive of the countries that account for 75% of global military spending, launched the “war on terror” that killed 4.5 million worldwide and are currently arming Israel in its genocidal assault on Gaza, is to produce wild and lurid propaganda about Russia’s “barbaric methods” that are the contemporary counterpart of those penned by Horatio Bottomly in John Bull during WW1. They have reduced themselves to a descant chorus to the relentless drone of the ruling class narrative in the dominant media. Karl Leibknecht did not say “The enemy is at home – but for the Russians, Chinese, Syrians, Libyans, Cubans, Venezuelans, Afghans, Haitians (add whoever the next target is) we’ll make an exception”.

2 “Winning”, as described above, is impossible and the attempt to do so will destroy what is left of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian offensive last year was a debacle. The Western supplied equipment, and the tactics they advised, failed appallingly. Incremental gains were won at a terrible cost in men and equipment. There is no chance of a repeat. No one now seriously envisages punching through to the Sea of Azov, let alone a march on Rostov on Don. So, what, or who, is the war for?

For NATO, sustaining the war, at the cost of thousands more dead Ukrainians, is worthwhile to “weaken the Russians”, or at least stave off a very visible defeat. NATO is the core imperial alliance. “Losing” in Ukraine would be a loss of face even more severe than that suffered when its Afghan proxy regime collapsed within weeks of direct withdawal. Can’t have that. However, this requires Ukrainians to be willing to keep fighting, with no chance of winning, no light at the end of the tunnel, the only fuel being the sense of keeping faith with the dead, whose sacrifice cannot be aknolwedged to have been in vain. As noted above, this is beginning to wear out. People need, and deserve, a future that is not an endless war.

There are two possibilities in the current situation.

  1. The Russian armed forces continue to make steady incremental gains on the ground and thousands of Ukrainians die in a futile attempt to stop them; leading, eventually, to political collapse in Western Ukraine leading to partition and neutralisation. No amount of Western weaponry short of nuclear war is going to stop this. The argument in the latest article from Labour Hub – Labour and Ukraine: Oppose the Tory arms sales and demand the weapons to win! endorsing a proposal from John McDonnell and Clive Lewis that the UK Ministry of Defence should stop selling off its old inventory, and donate it to Ukraine instead, peddles the face saving delusion that a bit more second hand equipment would magically do in 2024 what it spectacularly failed to do in 2023. In so doing, it postpones coming to terms with what is staring us all in the face. To try to “win” would involve a level of escalation that would not only militarise society – and require “sacrifices” by the working class to pay for it – it would also threaten a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia; which would be suicidal for all of us. We should all oppose that.
  2. NATO escalates? It is not at all clear what they are going to do. NATO intelligence already provides the UAF with satellite data. There are advisers on the ground, Some of them were killed in a recent Russian missile strike on Odessa. The Black Sea operations are being run by a Royal Navy Admiral. There are also some Special Forces and “volunteers” engaged, like the former French Foreign Legion soldiers who took part in the recent UAF incursion across the Russian border (another costly debacle). “Mission creeep” is always on the agenda. There is currently a massive NATO military exercise going on, that started in January and is scheduled to last until May, largely focussed on the area to the West of Ukraine – part of an annual series of rehearsals for a war with Russia that have been going on for decades. This is in addition to increased permanent deployment since February 2022 into the countries that border Ukraine to the West. As NATO puts it itself, “allies reinforced the existing battlegroups and agreed to establish four more multinational battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. This has brought the total number of multinational battlegroups to eight, effectively doubled the number of troops on the ground and extended NATO’s forward presence along the Alliance’s eastern flank – from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.” So, there are forces poised. Sabre rattling from President Macron, proposing to send NATO troops into Odessa and other parts of Western Ukraine to secure it for “the West” and release Ukrainian reserves to fight and die at the front for many, many more months, kicking a resolution to the war bloodily down the road, has not been endorsed across the bloc, but has led to the deployment of sigificant French forces into Romania in recent days. Doubtless for USC this is another example of “the self-limiting approach by the democracies (sic) providing aid”. It should go without saying that this is incredibly dangerous and I wonder if USC would cheer them in if they marched across the border.

Put very simply, for NATO to attempt to “win” in current circumstances risks nuclear war, which we should all oppose. Sustaining the conflict, even with army surplus goods from the MoD, means many thousands more deaths and the destruction of whats left of Ukraine; with the war as an end in itself that has no end. A peace on the basis of accepting the self determination of both peoples in Ukraine, and securing Ukrainian neutrality could have avoided the war in the first place, and remains the best result now.

Personal post script.

In the early 1960s there was a popular record request programme on the BBC Light Service called Two Way Family Favourites. Well before the internet and mobile phones, this was primarily aimed at allowing service personnel deployed overseas a chance to connect with their family back home by way of requesting a record to be played during Sunday Dinner. A lot of requests came in from BFPO 39 (the Forces Post Office for the British Army on the Rhine) and a regular favourite was the 1812 Overture; Tchaikovsky’s triumphalist celebration of the debacle of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. They would always play the last part; depicting the snow swirling down and enveloping the Grande Armee as it limped West, and ending with the old Russian national anthem played as an up tempo riot, punctuated with cannons going off, heavenly choirs singing and church bells ringing. As a child, I thought at the time that the soldiers were requesting it because of the cannons, but (along with the equally frequent requests for the US President’s phone call to the Soviet General Secretary from Dr Strangelove) I think this was a way of sending the message that contemplating a war with Russia was a really bad idea.

“Extremism”: Fear and Loathing in the Conservative Party

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Its hard to listen to the slippery emollience of Michael Gove without Lewis Carroll coming to mind. Twas Brilig, and the slithely Gove did gyre and gimble in the wabe (Jabberwocky, slightly tweaked).

What follows is a number of points that Angela Rayner could have used to attack Michael Gove’s sinister redefinition of “extremism”, had she not followed the strategy of the current Labour front bench in deciding to attack it from slightly to its right.

Its hard to work out sometimes if the low calibre of the current government is because they are just second rate in themselves – Grant Schapp’s recent speech arguing for preparation for World War 3, for instance, came across, despite the gravity of its subject matter and perhaps because whatever AI algorithm wrote the speech for him had selected phrases designed to sound Churchillian, as the Gettysburg Address revoiced by a used car salesman – or because the diminished weight and power of the British state renders its representatives smaller, somehow hollow and sotto voce. In the case of Gove’s “Extremism” redefinition, perhaps the two go together with the the fact that his argument is taking place within the bubble of a mutually agreed false narrative; which can’t help but make them feel unreal and fake; however serious the consequences will be.

This reflects a ruling class out of its depth, with the challenges they face beyond their personal capacity; because time honoured systems of control are breaking down. The old songs don’t have quite the same potency. A poll of those willing to fight for their country at the time of Shapp’s speech showed just 27% willing to do so in the UK (and most of those were in age groups too elderly to actually be called upon to do so). The old knee jerk reactions once so easy to tap don’t spasm with the old reliability. CND marchers in the 1980s sang “We won’t die for Thatcher”. Very few people, it seems, are now happy to die for Rishi Sunak, or, indeed, Keir Starmer, bedeck themsleves with Union Jacks as much as they like.

In this context, the new working definition of “extremism”, unveiled with much fanfare by Michael Gove this week, is both tighter and more vague than the version that sucked Fundamental British Values out of the air ten years ago. Those were an anodyne and easily forgettable list of “democracy”, “respect”, “tolerance” (for those for whom respect is a bit too much to ask) “liberty” and “rule of law” – none of which were actually fundamental to the foundation of the British state in 1707 – quite the reverse for most of them – most of which had to be fought for against bitter resistance from the Tory Party, and few of which were applied with any consistency since; especially not in the Empire.

The impetus for this redefinition is the panic in Downing Street at the mass mobilisations against Israel’s brutal and illegal assault on Gaza, and its expression in the result of the Rochdale by election. Democracy must be at risk, because people voted the wrong way. And they keep marching in huge numbers. And Lobbying MPs. And not being brushed off with bromides because they can see a massacre taking place before their eyes. And have done for 140 days. Day, after day, after day. So, opinion is turning against a key UK and US ally and sympathy being expressed for people being occupied and oppressed by it. And that will never do.

Whatever the formalities of the definition, the framing of this movement as “hateful extremism”, or “extremism motivated by hate” is now such a trope that, with a nod and a wink, everyone knows what they mean. Are we thinking what they are thinking? Most of us aren’t, but it won’t stop them trying it on.

So, we now have “Extremism” defined as “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to: 1 negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; or 2 undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights; or 3 intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve the results in (1) or (2)”.

This is very odd. Because dividing and ruling by use of hatred and intolerance, restricting the freedoms and fundamental rights of minorities and the working class majority, including such choice devices as restricting the franchise, has been a very succesful modus operandi for the Conservative Party since its foundation in 1688; and they are still doing it right now. Just in this Parliament. Windrush. Scapegoating refugees. Photo ID for elections to restrict voting rights. Wars on “woke”. Restrictions on the rights of juries. The Minimum Service Levels and strike vote thresholds and protest restriction laws. Need I go on?

In fact, this definition is another attempt to do just that, because of who it is aimed at (and who it isn’t). Just a day or so before announcing this definition, the same Mr Gove commented on the direct incitement for Diane Abbott to be shot, made by Tory donor and beneficiary of government contracts Frank Hester – which undeniably expressed a lot of hatred, intolerance and violence – saying that he should be entitled to “Christian forgiveness.“

Diane, of course, was not recognised to speak about this at PMQs even though she stood up during the debate forty six times, by a Speaker who claimed to be so concerned about the safety of members that he bent procedure during the Gaza ceasefire debate two weeks ago. Not so concerned in this case it seems. So, all of this is relative. If the target of hatred, intolerance and violence is a Left wing Black woman, nothing to see here, lets move on; especially if the intolerant, violent hater has given fifteen million quid to the Conservative Party.

The Speaker’s concern during that debate was part of the softening up process for this defintion. Presenting the 5,000 or so people lobbying their MPs on that day calling for a ceasefire as though they were a threat to their life and limb. On Radio 4 this was expressed as MPs having “the right to vote with their conscience” without being “put under pressure”. Another way to put this is MPs having the right to vote against a ceasefire – for the continuation of a massacre – without having their equanimity about it disturbed by constituents arguing with them about why they shouldn’t. Some of these MPs, mostly but not solely Conservative, voted with their bottoms on this, being seen from the Public Gallery to be recieving slips informing them of constituents in the lobby wanting to see them, folding them up, putting them in their pockets, and staying put.

Gove says that this is aimed at “extreme rightwing and Islamist extremists who are seeking to separate Muslims from the rest of society and create division within Muslim communities”. This is an oddly contradictory sentence with a strange focus; because the division they claim to be concerned about is within the whole of society, not just “Muslim communities”.

More to the point, the “extreme right wing” is trying to demonise such communities, without much subtelty about it. But that is also true of the right wing of the Conservative Party and its Frankenstein child the Reform Party.

It caps consistent attempts by the government to pose this mass expression of a majority humanitarian concern as an expression of communalist hate. The comments Suella Braverman got sacked for – and which helped generate the biggest of the marches so far as people came out in outrage at her mischaracterisation, is now expressed in policy.

This is because it is instrumentally useful for them to do so. Not because it is true.

As if the demonstrations were not diverse, representative of all ages and communities, with large vibrant Jewish contingents, with whole families of all age groups, peacefully bearing witness to and protest against one of the great crimes of our time and an expression of majority opinion in the country and the world. The most recent poll shows that two thirds of the public think there should be a ceasefire. The votes in the UN have been overwhelmingly in favour of a ceasefire. So, the marchers, organised by PSC, Stop the War, CND, Muslim Association of Britain and Friends of Al Aqsa represent the majority opinion in the country and the world. It is the government that is out of step. It is the government that is being divisive. Could this be because – when it comes to the crunch – they defend the “violence, hatred and intolerance” currently being dealt out to the Palestinians by the IDF and illegal West Bank settlers? With their votes at the UN, their overt supply of military assiatnce and covert supply of intelligence, they are certainly providing a “permissive environment” for it.

It is in the nature of a wedge to start with a thin end. And this is it. Rumours that climate organisations like Just Stop Oil would be included have not come to fruition, yet. But setting up and open ended Counter-Extremism Centre of Excellence to investigate (produce) organsiations that can be targetted in this way shows the direction of travel. “Centre of exellence” is an odd label. House Un-British Activities Committee might be a more appropriate title. There will now be a body whose job is to find organisations which can be defined as “extremist”.

A foreshadowing of this is the review of Prevent designed to play down referrals for far right sympathies because, as Suella Braverman put it, these are “mainstream Conservative Values” – and play up the focus on Muslims (even as ISIS was crushed and its appeal was long gone) and slipping in “ideologies” such as “socialism” and “anti-fascism” as potential indicators of “radicalisation” that could lead to “terrorism”. There has been no far left terrorism in the UK since the Angry Brigade planted 25 bombs betteen 1970 and 1972, injuring one person, so you’d have to be over 50 to have experienced it. Not exactly a clear and present danger. And “anti- fascism”? Fascism isn’t exactly a movement you can be a bit “meh” about. Its not something you can “disagree agreeably” about, as Obama put it. The only people who are not anti fascists, are fascists. This is such a wide sweep, and so transparently from a nakedly factional basis, that no one subject to the “Prevent Duty” in public service would refer people on these bases unless they are dyed in the wool right wing zealots.

And this is more fundamentally what is driving this. “We”, as a nation, are divided. Most of us have no “common interest” with a ruling class pushing austerity, towards war, and failing to deal with the climate crisis until it is too catastrophic to ignore.

Given the scale of the crises we already face, with the climate breaking down at an ever faster pace, and Gaza showing the level of military barbarism in rehearsal in the wars for the New American Century, there is no doubt that in a future in which American policy takes a turn towards far right mania with Donald Trump back in the White House, the Conservatives in opposition taking their lead from him, and Labour in government trying to appease him, they will find no shortage of targets.

The Budget in a 30 second nutshell

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Hunt’s approach is based on the presumption that if you give incentives to the private sector, they will invest and therefore the economy will grow.

They have been trying this for 14 years and it hasn’t worked.

The alternative approach, of state led investment to generate positive economic activity which, because it is state led, can follow social and environmental imperatives, has worked remarkably well for China – which has a growth rate double that of the USA and five times that of the UK.

There was an element of that in Labour’s £28 billion investment pledge.

Their decision to back off from this to put themselves in the same fiscal rules straitjacket as the Conservatives, means they will get similar results unless they break from them – so we will remain in the economic doldrums AND slip back away from meeting absolutely imperative climate targets.

Ambushed by Arts…

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

A dance of domestic abuse

One of my Dad’s carers, who used to do ballet, having finished dispensing pills and tea, suddenly breaks into a spritied performance of Knees up Mother Brown in the living room.

Knees up Muvva Brown, knees up Muvva Brown

Under the table you must go, E,I,E,I,E,I,O

If I catch you bendin’, I’ll saw your legs right off!

Knees up! Knees up! Gotta get a breeze up!

Knees up Muvva Brown!

Oi!

Makes you wonder about the lyrics. Under the tabke you must go! Definitely some coercive control going on there, but to what end? And, If I catch you bendin’, I’ll saw your legs right off! Seems a bit extreme. What’s that all about?

Crooning in the Chemists

At the top of Grays High Street, just before you get to the station, there is a slightly eccentric chemists. The pharmacy is at the back, looks swish and modern, is well staffed and stocked and has done a steady trade every time I’ve been in there. But you have to approach it through an empty front area that at one time was a cafe, now closed but still with its counter intact, scattered with a few random leaflets from the health side of things. This gives it a slightly random and precarious feel, with what could have been a lively addition to its operation left derelict as a reminder of its failure. A battered looking bloke in the queue behind me grins and starts singing, tunefully, at one of the pharmacists… “Hello…Is it me you’re looking for?” …and she joins in.

Maybe they’ve done this before…

Poetry on the tube

On the Northern Line on the way back home, one of the wonderful poems on the underground – pasted up where the adverts for all sorts of forgettable things usually are – makes me visibly well up. A few people look momentarily concerned, so I compose myself to maintain the social solidarity of mutual indifference.

This one by Marjorie Lotfi.

Packing for America — my father in Tabriz, 1960

He can’t take his mother in the suitcase,
the smell of khoresht in the air, her spice box
too tall to fit. Nor will it close when he folds
her sajadah into its corners. He can’t bring
the way she rose and blew out the candles
at supper’s end, rolled the oilcloth up, marked
the laying out of beds, the beginning of night.
He knows the slap of her sandals across
the tiles will fade. He tosses photographs
into the case, though not one shows her eyes;
instead, she covers her mouth with her hand
as taught, looks away. He considers strapping
the samovar to his back like a child’s bag;
a lifetime measured in tea from its belly.
Finally, he takes her tulip glass, winds
a chador around its body, leaves the gold rim
peeking out like a mouth that might
tell him where to go, what is coming next.

The world’s weirdest Gooner dancing by the subway

Outside Hendon Central Station, at about tea time, an eccentric Arsenal supporter has erected a structure framing a couple of AFC banners, topped off by a Charles III Coronation flag; all flapping in a brisk breeze. He stands to one side of it with a serious face, leaning over the fence to the subway below and dancing jerkily to an eruption of rhythm from a busker playing the sax. The busker looks like Bob Mortimer on a slightly rough day, but is enjoying himself enormously, bopping about from side to side. The tune is a hurtling series of distinctly East European staccatto sounds, flowing with an incredible velocity. Up tempo to the point of mania. As little squads of tired and dusty workers, who have just knocked off for the day, walk into the tunnel at the far end, their weary trance like expressions turn into surprised smiles as they are ambushed by the music; and the workaday functional passageway from one side of the A41 to the other is turned into an unlikely venue for a moment of joyful reprieve that creates a complicity in everyone there as people turn to each other seeking eye contact.

Stair chair fanfare

Having a stair lift put in is like having the world’s slowest Thorpe Park ride on tap. The chair is made in Holland, and I’m told by the engineer – who comes to uplift the bannisters so they don’t knock knees or pinch hands as the chair progresses onwards and upwards with its air of inevitable gradualism – that the speed is set by EU regulations. At some point, no doubt, the Daily Telegraph will cotton on to this and campaign for speedier chairs, to express the exhilarating freedom of the Brexit experience that we have all, no doubt, shared. And to cut the Nanny State red tape that stops it moving without the seatbelt done up first and dispose of that health and safety gone mad emergency stop button. As it is, this is a chair that pauses and thinks before it does anything. And clunks very deliberately when it does. Operating it is a school of patience. But thats cool. It is slow, steady and inexorable. It should have a musical accompaniment.

The tall, relaxed Dutch bloke who delivered it first thing on a misty morning – with the kids drifting slowly past, up the road towards the Hathaway Academy – had driven it from the factory in Holland. As he lifts off the huge box that contains all the smaller boxes with components in, I feel there should be a fanfare. On a two day UK tour, delivering bespoke stair lift systems to houses up and down the country – then back across the North Sea on the Harwich ferry with the empty van, he delivers all over Europe; Italy, Spain, Germany. I chat a bit about visiting Amsterdam last year and he says “EVERYBODY visits Amsterdam”. I think I manage to persuade him to visit Keukenhoff in the end, with the line that the effect of all those flowers is almost hallucinogenic, even though he starts of by saying “Visiting there is almost TOO Dutch!” and “no one who actually lives in Holland ever goes there”.

Why can’t our High Streets be Orchards?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Odd scenes in North West London and South East Essex

Walking past the Thameside Theatre and a woman is furtively picking what looks like lettuce leaves from the flower beds at the front. I assume that she is wild scavenging, and now that I look like a harmless old geezer, complete with arthritic limp and shopping trolley, I feel emboldened to talk to strangers, so I ask. “Are those edible?” Waving them to underline her point, she says, “They are for my tortoises”. In Todmorden this is what everyone does. For over ten years they have encouraged people to plant food on any vacant and unused land, and for anyone who needs it to pick it. This brightens and greens up the streetscape, creates community – as loads of people plant things in all sorts of places – and provides extra fresh food, in season, for anyone who needs it. This has been picked up in lots of other small towns, but Hull is about to try it out on a city wide scale. We should all do it. Why can’t our High Streets be orchards too?

Three shops in Rainham. Vape shop. Fried Chicken shop, Undertakers. In that order.

As the C2C train arrives at Dagenham Dock, the small girl wearing a blue jacket with white angel wings designed onto the back – who has hitherto been exploring the physical space around her Mum, who sits a bit careworn in her mac and hijab, and elder sister, who is glued to her phone – lifts her head and listens. Perhaps its because the recorded announcement is done in posh. Emphasising all three syllables – “Dag-en-ham”, not the local version that makes the middle one redundant – “Dag – nem”; thereby bringing out its full rhythm and range of sounds. The drum beat of the syllables too; Dagenham Dock, boo, ba, bum – BOM! The percusive consonants at the start of Dagenham, the extended hum at the end Dagenhmmmm– the sharp crack of “Dock!” She seems enchanted by it and, all the way to West Ham, she keeps repeating it in various forms – stretching it out, making it jerky and jumpy- making it an impromptu nursery rhyme with no meaning but a definite music.

Of course, the part of my brain that still thinks in Lesson Plans started working out how to canal this spontaneous exploration into a rhythm game: sit in a circle and clap and chant the the names of stations; always ending at Mornington Crescent obviously…

Outside the Magistrates Court on the Edgware Road, a couple of pararazzi snipers with huge photolens cameras lurk in ambush, presumably waiting for a celebrity wrong ‘un to emerge at the top of the steps; the name of the Court photogenically framing them in more ways than one. One scopes out a shot from behind a tree, perhaps nervous of being seen by his mark.

Palestine, Ukraine and the Wars for the New American Century.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

A recent article on Labour Hub tries to link the struggle in Gaza and the war in Ukraine as parallel “struggles for self-determination”; not noticing that one struggle (Gaza) is in resistance to the US centred global imperial system, the other (Ukraine) is a struggle to join it as an auxiliary ally.

People in the Palestine Solidarity movement have strongly felt and taken note of the difference in the response from Western governments to these “struggles for self determination”.

  • The flags of Ukraine and Israel have both been flown on public buildings, head teachers and college principals have been told by the DFE to “stand with Israel”.
  • Palestinian flags – and Keffiyas – have been denounced as “threatening”, or “symbols of terrorism” or “hate” and children drawing flags on their hands or wearing badges in schools have been referred to Prevent. This has become increasingly shrill as the movement has grown and public sympathy for the Palestinians has grown with it.

Like many similar articles, this one has two glaring pieces of disavowell at the heart of it – a selective approach who who is entitled to self determination and a failure to take account of the very active role of the United States and NATO – and a logic that leads those sections of the labour movement who support their line to end up campaigning for the rearmament and militarisation drive that our ruling class is determined to push, even as our societies crumble for want of invetsment and fail to rise to the challenge of climate bteakdown.

All peoples are entitled to self determination, but some are more entited than others.

If a struggle for “self determination” is based on denying that right to another people, it has no leg to stand on. The Palestinian struggle, including the way it is defined in the revised Hamas Charter (2017) is against Israel as a racist state, not against the Jewish population, in the same way that the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa was a struggle against the state, not white people as such.

The dominant, far right, form of Ukrainian nationalism, however, denies the national rights of Russian citizens and heroises historic figures like Stepan Bandera, a recruiting seargent for Nazi concentration camp guards. The US and NATO are quite comfortable with this, but no one on the Left should be.

In this Labour Hub article, like so many others, the Russian population in Eastern Ukraine is ignored. Its as if they don’t exist, didn’t rebel in 2014 against the overthrow of a government they’d voted for, and weren’t bombed and shelled indiscrimately by the Ukrainian armed forces from then onwards. At most they are posed as “Russian proxies” with “no interests of their own”; just as Ansar Allah in Yemen is belittled as “Iranian proxies”. This writes them out of history just as surely as the Israelis would like to do to the Palestinians, who are still described in some quarters there as “not a people”.

As this statement from No Cold War – The War in Ukraine must end – points out; A 2001 census found that nearly 30% of Ukraine’s population considered Russian to be their native language. States with large linguistic and ethnic minority populations can only maintain their unity if the rights of such minorities are respected. The policies of the Ukrainian government after 2014, which included suppressing the official use of the Russian language in numerous spheres, were therefore bound to lead to an explosive crisis within the Ukrainian state. As the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, which certainly cannot be accused of being pro-Russian, stated: ‘the current Law on National Minorities is far from providing adequate guarantees for the protection of minorities… many other provisions which restrict the use of minority languages have already been in force since 16 July 2019’. There are only two ways to resolve this situation: restoration of the full linguistic and other rights of the Russian-speaking minority within the borders of the old Ukrainian state or the secession of these regions from Ukraine. Which outcome is realised will be a key subject of the negotiations. Nonetheless, it is clear that any attempt to maintain the Russian-speaking minority within the Ukrainian state while continuing to deprive them of their rights will not succeed, nor will any attempt by Russia to impose another state on the Ukrainian-speaking population of western and northern Ukraine.

All efforts to resolve these issues by military means will continue to be futile and will only result in further intense suffering, above all for the Ukrainian people. These realities will become increasingly obvious if the war continues – which is why it must be brought to a halt as rapidly as possible and negotiations must commence.

A “self determination” that denies the national rights of a large minority and denies it equality before the law within the area controlled by an ethnically defined state sounds a lot like Israel – a living expression of Marx’s dictum that “a nation that oppresses another cannot itself be free”. Not something any Socialist should be defending.

The limits of geopolitical Flat Earthism

Its important also to grasp the broader geo political context of these wars in a way that makes sense of both of them. This is because articles like this one reflect a widespread view on the left in the Global North that the world is geopolitically flat. That every country is capitalist. That there is no structure to global imperialism.

This is profoundly disorienting and can lead to the same people challenging the dominant narrative coming from our own ruling class on Gaza, while actively repeating it over Ukraine.

This is inherently distorting for any accurate understanding of whats going on; especially if you fall for, or worse, promote the sort of manichean propaganda that the Russians (or Hamas) are all evil, murdering rapists, while butter wouldn’t melt in the mouths of the Azov battalion or the IDF.

The bottom line on this is…

Who is threatening whom?

In the case of the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel, from 2008 to 2023 there were 319 Israeli deaths and 6,779 Palestinian deaths; thats a ratio of 21 Palestinians to 1 Israeli before Oct 7th and the ensuing IDF offensive.

That looks like this.

With 1,200 Israelis killed on that day and 235 since, and over 29,500 Palestinians killed in the Gaza strip and another 399 in the West Bank thats a ratio of more than 24 to 1.

That looks like this.

The balance of threat and the balance of death in this conflict is obvious and evident; and needs smoke screens of indignation to try to obscure it.

As there are millions of people in this country who feel a connection with the Palestinians, and have sources of information outside the establishment media, it has been impossible to control this narrative, to allow Israel to get on with what its doing with no scrutiny, and this is rebounding on the government and opposition, both now forced to oppose an IDF attack on Rafah and in some disarray. As there is no such community here with any links in the Donbass, even the existence of Russian speakers in eastern Ukriane is barely known about, let alone understood, and the narrative has been much more tightly controlled.

And, as the war in Ukraine is now being visibly lost by NATO, we are back to the sort of over heated rhetoric that was common two years ago – that NATO is an essentially defensive alliance needed to stop the Russians steamrollering over Europe.

This argument is politically absurd. Taking control of a continent would require a political project that could hold the allegiance of enough of the people who live there for it to be viable. It is not simply a technical military exercise. Russia does not have such a project. It has the military capacity and the political pull to absorb Russian speaking parts of Ukraine into the Russian Federation, and thats it. Even taking over the Western parts of Ukraine has been described as like “swallowing a porcupine”; let alone anywhere else.

Even if it could be reduced to the level of technical military capacity, the threat is actually in the opposite direction.

In 2023, NATO countries spent $1,100 billion on their militaries. Russia spent $100 billion.

This uses NATOs own figures for its spending. Monthly Review has assessed that US spending is actually about double the amount claimed.

That imbalance looks like the graph above and shows the absurdity of NATOs claim to be both defensive and worried about the potential of being attacked by a power with less than a tenth of its strength. The Russians however, clearly have every reason to be worried about what NATO wants all that expenditure for; especially as it conducts annual “war games” in Eastern Europe practicing for a war with them.

It was fear of that threat, and the failure of NATO to even negotiate about it, which led to the current phase of the war in Ukraine.

Two phases of the wars for the New American Century.

The global context for this is that, for the first time since 1871, we are living in a world in which the United States is no longer the largest economy. China already is in Purchase Power Parity terms; and at current growth rates is likely to overhaul the US in Current Exchange Rate terms before 2030.

The “unipolar moment” and “end of history” is long gone. This analysis of the structure of global imperialism by the Tricontinental Institute goes into this in immense detail and is essential reading. Its core point is that the US has integrated the Global North into a subordinate imperial economic bloc and set of military alliances, but its decline is leading to increasing challenges from a far more diverse set of regimes in the Global South, with China as the core; and China’s highly succesful Socialist economic model at the heart of it. Those who disagree with this definition of China nevertheless have to acknowledge its success, and perhaps concede that that’s how the Chinese themselves define their society. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

In its resistance to its slipping domination, the USA threatens the end of humanity because, with its primacy in capital formation, production and trade gone, financial control and technological lead slipping, the US is trying to push the challenges it faces increasingly onto the military field; which it still believes that it can dominate. That is what makes our current decade the most dangerous in the whole of human history.

The first stage of the wars for the New American Century, the War on Terror after 9/11 2001, was directed at weak powers that the US could overwhelm, killing 4.5 million people according to Browns University, but nevertheless ending in defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; and chaos in Libya. This was when they thought they could incorporate China into their world order.

The second phase, now they know that they can’t, threatens to be worse, and could kill all of us, with a nuclear first strike an active part of US war planning.

This is where the tension in the world is coming from. This is who is driving it.

There is an argument within the US ruling class between those who think that it has to take Russia on first before it can get on to the confrontation it wants with China – the position of the Biden administration and more traditional Republicans – and those, like Trump, who think they might be able to get Russia onside against China. Putin’s response of ridiculing questions on these lines from Tucker Carlson in his recent interview, shows that this is wishful thinking on Trump’s part.

The second phase

The US and its allies have now crossed the security red lines of a nuclear armed power (Russia) in Ukraine, and have fuelled the attempted genocide in Gaza; because they have to be seen to be able to impose their will.

  • The US has repeatedly vetoed ceasefire motions for Gaza in the UN Security Council.
  • Russia and China have voted for a ceasefire in Gaza, along with the world majority, in both the Security Council and the General Assembly.
  • In General Assembly votes, Ukraine has been among the tiny minority who have voted with the US against a ceasefire.

Israel and Ukraine are both using weapons supplied by the US. Neither could pursue their war without them.

  • The US signed up to provide $38 billion in military aid to Israel between 2016 and 2026, and additional aid has gone in since October 7th.
  • It has gave Ukraine £113 billion between 2022 and September 2023, with more on the way.

The US is intervening in and arming both in its own interests. The Israelis are already an established US attack dog and the Ukrainian regime aspires to be; and has been playing that role since 2014.

A “Big Israel” in Eastern Europe

The forces the US is supporting – or using – in each war are the same sort of ethno nationalists with far right backing.

Netanyahu has Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalal Smotrich. Zelensky has the Right Sector and the Azov battalion.

Just to dispell any doubt, speaking in April 2022, President Zelensky was very clear that he wanted Ukraine to be “a big Israel” in Eastern Europe. A country where there were “soldiers in cinemas and supermarkets” and “people with weapons”, not a “liberal European” state at all.

This vision was eagerly and approvingly embraced by US commentators (its possible that they wrote it) because being like Israel is being a military frontier state for the US.

Israel has been the lynch pin of US domination of the Middle East. President Zelensky has volunteered his country to do the same in Eastern Europe.

The Left in NATO countries, marinading as we are in the ideological stomach juices of the belly of the beast, should never forget who our ruling class is.

NATO and other direct US allies – the world’s wealthiest countries – account for 75% of global military spending, are the core of global imperialism, organised as a coordinated bloc, with the US dominating its subordinate rivals.

Russia is not part of this bloc. It is a target for it.

Not recognising that NATO expansion in Eastern Europe has predatory intent takes self delusion a little far. See the map displayed by Kyrillo Budanov, Head of Ukrainian Military Intelligence for the partition of Russia that this aims at if you have any doubts.

Climate Breakdown helps drive US brinkmanship

The accelerating breakdown of the climactic conditions for human civilisation adds urgency to the increasing US brinkmanship that we have seen in Ukraine and Gaza. To try to survive it with the current imbalance of global wealth and power intact requires catastrophic defeats to be imposed on the Global South, and any power not included in the US dominant bloc; in short order.

This can’t be kicked down the road anymore; hence the emergence of apocalyptic maniacs as mainstream political options for the ruling class – from Trump to Bolsonaro to Millais – and the increasingly unhinged quality of mainstream political debate.

Into the vortex of barbarism

We are spiralling into a vortex of barbarism in which light minded fools like Grant Shapps can float the possibility of nuclear war with “Russia, China, Iran, North Korea” and argue that we should arm even more to prepare for it; and this is repeated in a blase way by media talking heads as though this wasn’t suicidal insanity. A mainstream consensus urging us on to Armageddon stretches from the military itself – with former Generals calling for the UK to be put on “a war footing” and floating the idea of conscription – to Boris Johnson arguing in the Dail Mail that a Trump Presidency might be “just what the world needs” because of his “willingness to use force and sheer unpredictability” – to Timothy Garton Ash, arguing in the Guardian that Trump’s America First volatility gives Europe the opportunity to become a more serious military imperialism in its own right – to the Labour front bench, with Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules mysteriously not applying to the large increases in military spending pencilled in by the Tories (in a country which already has one of the highest military spending burdens in the world).

Supporters of Ukraine Solidarity Campaign like Paul Mason are following the logic of their support for NATOs war aims by arguing, in his case, that the investment needed to combat climate change cannot be afforded because “the cost of borrowing has increased”, but at the same time saying that the UK should follow the US and EU in using debt to finance arms spending. Suicidal logic.

The whole labour movement should be pushing in the opposite direction.

Strange elisions and imbalances in Labour ceasefire amendment.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The wording of the Labour curates egg amendment to the SNP ceasefire now motion has all the signs of being written in haste in an attempt to build loopholes into it that would allow wiggle room for the “catastrophic humanitairian consequences” of Israel’s ongoing assault to go ahead. My additional wording to tease out its imbalances are in bold.

That this House believes that an Israeli ground offensive in Rafah risks catastrophic humanitarian consequences and therefore must not take place;

notes the intolerable loss of Palestinian life as a result of the Israeli offensive so far and the prospect of famine if it continues, the majority being women and children;

condemns the terrorism of Hamas who continue to hold hostages and the actions of Israel in holding many more prisoners without charge;

supports Australia, Canada and New Zealand’s calls for Hamas to release and return all hostages and adds that Israel should release Palestinian prisoners and not rearrest them and for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, which means an immediate stop to the fighting and a ceasefire that lasts and is observed by all sides, noting that Israel cannot be expected to cease fighting if Hamas continues with violence nor that Palestinians can be expected to cease resisting if Israel continues its attacks and that Israelis have the right to the assurance that the horror of 7th October cannot happen again and that Palestinians have the right to the assurance that there will be no more IDF assaults on Gaza, and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank will end;

therefore supports an immediate ceasfire followed by diplomatic mediation efforts to achieve a lasting ceasefire;

demands that rapid and unimpeded humanitarian relief is provided in Gaza an the UK immediately restores and increases its funding for UNWRA;

demands an end to settlement expansion and violence;

urges Israel to comply with the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures and for the UK to withdraw all diplomatic, military or other aid until it does;

calls for the UN Security Council to be meet (?) urgently and pledges that the UK will vote for a ceasefire when it does with no equivocation;

and urges all international partners to work together to establish a diplomatic process to deliver the peace of a two-state solution on the lines of China’s proposed international peace conference, with a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable Palestinian state, including working with international partners to recognise a Palestinian state as a contribution to rather than outcome of that process, because statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people and not in the gift of any neighbour and further recognising that leadership of that state must be the choice of the Palestinian people themselves not imposed on them.