It was something that I haven't really seen en masse before. It was something that some people had written off. They said was a bit old hat, doomed to a slow, dwindling death, if it even really existed. It was the working class. Not the working class in the shitty, nostalgic, culturally regressive sense that people invoke, not the deus ex machina mobilised to berate black people and gays for being too assertive of their legitimate rights. It was the working class as an agent of its own interests; it was a class for itself. It was the labour movement, every bit the multicultural entity that Cameron reviles. And that movement, comprising several millions of people, having lain dormant for years, is now looking decidedly up for a fight. If you're a socialist in one of those workplaces on Monday morning, you should have an easier job arguing for militant strike action now, because people now know what they could not be sure of before: that we are many, and they are few.

Before we go any further, a digression. Can I please make an urgent appeal on behalf of sense and dignity for people to stop repeating the idiotic journalistic cliche that a minority of 'hardliners' (or worse, 'violent extremists') spoiled things for everyone else. So much work, you hear them say, so much time spent building up a great day, and these wreckers - yes, wreckers! - have to come and ruin it. Certainly, if all that matters is having a fun day out, giving a good impression in front of the media, the police and the politicians, and 'raising awareness', then I can see the logic. But, quite apart from the fact that people don't necessarily freak out and change their perspective on public services just because a few windows have been broken and paintballs thrown, that is not all that matters. A big march like this a wonderful, confidence-giving, life-breathing event. It helps give definition to the forces, from the left and the labour movement, who are prepared to resist the austerity project. It gives those involved a sense of their potential power. And hopefully it will lead to strike action to defend jobs and services, as Mark Serwotka, Len McCluskey and Billy Hayes promised from the platform.

Yet, what is strike action but a highly orchestrated and strategically situated form of disruption? And is that not what those who occupied Fortnum & Mason's, the most pretentious shop in London with the possible exception of Harrods, and paintballed the usual UK Uncut targets, did today? Isn't the whole intention to normal commerce and governance impossible, to make life difficult until they stop their attacks on us? Surely, the only possible basis for criticising this from an anti-cuts point of view is tactical? If it harms the movement, then there's a case for having this out within the movement. If, on the other hand, it does not harm the movement, then the real wreckers are those dispensing pithy denunciations according to script. Let's also drop the idea that this was done by nutters in balaclavas and face masks. The people involved were a mixture of activists from a variety of political backgrounds, engaging in a serious form of disruptive protest. There were trade unionists outside Fortnum & Mason's cheering them on, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few inside as well. Effective protest will always depend on a minority who are willing to risk arrest, or state violence, in order to throw a spanner in the works of unjust policies. Ed Miliband, speaking today, made his usual bland plea for 'peaceful' (meaning legal, parliamentarist) protest, while also situating this movement in the history of suffragism, civil rights and anti-apartheid struggles. Such revisionism does us no favours. All of those struggles were won by people who broke the law, and who devised strategies for breaking the law.

So, that said, those who have tried to argue for an anti-cuts strategy that excludes Labour have a little bit less credibility today. It was actually vital, not only that this was organised by the TUC, but that the Labour Party mobilised for it, and that their leader felt compelled to make an appearance. The labour bureaucracy can turn people out when it wants to, and today it turned out half a million by the reckoning of the police, the organisers and The Guardian newspaper - possibly it was bigger, but there's no need to haggle. Not only was the demonstration huge, but the crowds present represented an extraordinary depth and breadth of people from every segment of the working class - it was a very large, but concentrated manifestation of the labour movement as it exists in this country.

It has become a cliche, but it remains important to say, that among the women's groups, Labourites, socialists, Greens, anarchists and unaligned leftists, were people who don't usually do demonstrations. I saw council workers, nurses, librarians, bin men, firefighters, railway workers, civil servants, and teachers. Each of the sixteen trade union contingents were big, some enormous. Whole workplaces came out for this. Communities mobilised. Over 800 coaches were booked, as were more than a dozen trains. Thousands and thousands came in by scheduled trains and buses, and many of them could be seen wandering around in clusters through the centre's unexpectedly pedestrianised streets well into the evening - wherever I went, and I did take a long walk, a group of protesters with union flags and placards would suddenly appear, and just as suddenly scarper. Beyond the congregation zones, both official and ad hoc, the cafes, restaurants, coffee shops, pubs, and trusted purveyors of the "junior spesh" could be seen packed with FBU uniforms, Unison flags, NASUWT t-shirts, and so on.

Of note is who the crowds in Hyde Park were attuned to, and who they were not. Ed Miliband's speech was, as I've mentioned, weak tea. He was cheered politely, heckled a little, booed by some. His elevating rhetoric almost always falls flat, and the detail of his policy don't inspire - a turnout like this, an historic day like this, and he still has to keep to the tired old policy nostrums. Responsible cuts, yes, but the Tories are going too far. Cut the deficit, but tax bankers' bonuses. And so on. However, unlike Blair, Ed Miliband is not hated by, and doesn't hate, the labour movement. He is not embarrassed to be seen at protests, or be around working class people. And he will have a lot to think about after today - because every sign is that neither the trade union bureaucracy nor the Labour leadership expected anything like this turnout. Christ, until yesterday, the TUC were still talking about expecting 100,000 people. On the other hand, the more militant speakers such as Mark Serwotka were received with glee, particularly when the latter said: "imagine what a difference it would make if we didn't only march together but took strike action together." You may say he's a dreamer. But today we have seen that he's not the only one.

A word about Trafalgar Square. As planned, hundreds - maybe at one stage thousands, I've heard different reports - of people gathered in the square for a bit of Rabelaisian carnival. Every eyewitness report has described it as a party, a rave, pungent with the smell of home grown, but with little prospect of it turning into a big deal. At least it was until riot police attacked it, batoning people and roughing them up. They turned a peaceful gathering into a frightened and bloodied huddle, kettled in a small space. They did not break windows, occupy buildings or paintball facades: they cracked skulls. Having waited all day, and maintained a relatively light touch as long as the official TUC march was going on (this is important - they probably don't particularly want to sour relations with the trade union bureaucracy), they found their opportunity at nightfall by attacking a very small and defenceless crowd of ravers. As they have done on previous occasions, they started a fight and then took the ensuing melee as an excuse to kettle their victims. Why would they do this?

You may as well ask why they would assault Jody Macintyre, put Alfie Meadows in hospital, punch a fifteen year old boy, and rough up teenage girls. It is because it is their job to contain threats to 'public order', and they see violence and intimidation against selected groups of identified 'troublemakers' and 'ringleaders' as the most effective means of doing so. History would suggest that they are not wrong. That's one reason why the people who suffer from police violence and harrassment need to our solidarity. It's also why it is vitally important not to fall into the knee-jerk, at best disproportionate, denunciations of 'violence' against property. Because in doing so, you corroborate the police's narrative and alibi. You displace the proper focus on far more serious and potentially lethal violence inflicted by people who are armed and trained in its application - I don't know how bad things got tonight, but they are going to kill someone one day if things continue in this direction. And you thus assist the weakening and intimidation of your movement. Earlier today, I was listening to a policeman complain to a member of the public that people confuse the police with the government, and forget they're public sector workers. I thought, but did not say, that it's easy to forget when the police spend all their time attacking the government's opponents with big sticks. On which note, this is doing the rounds on Twitter: "Unconfirmed reports that forces loyal to Cameron are attacking rebels in Trafalgar square."

Of course, you should follow me on Twitter today, for updates and quick snaps from the march, which is conservatively estimated to be drawing about 300,000. I'd bet it'll be bigger than that. People are already arriving and thronging into Embankment. It shall be leaving at noon, in theory, but the TUC expects the last marchers to leave at 2pm due to the size of the thing. If you're coming, here's the route:


View March for the Alternative Route in a larger map

I'll try and post updates throughout the day but, really, Twitter is where to find me.

THE LIBERAL DEFENCE OF MURDER

By RICHARD SEYMOUR

Published October 2008

-----------------------------

“Imperialist intervention, strenghtening the former regime elements and the most retrograde components of the revolt, was the worst thing to have happened to the Libyan revolution.”

As British and American planes begin bombing another Arab country, now is the time to revisit THE LIBERAL DEFENCE OF MURDER, Richard Seymour’s searing critique of the doctrine of ‘liberal interventionism’.

Richard Seymour blogs at Lenin’s Tomb - http://leninology.blogspot.com/.. You can read his blog posts on Libya there. See also this recent piece on the GUARDIAN website:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/22/gaddafi-demonology-media

------------------------------

In THE LIBERAL DEFENCE OF MURDER, Richard Seymour takes apart the mechanisms employed by liberals to justify the violence of this past decade, and shows us how appeals to the public to support war for ‘humanitarian’ reasons can often result in disastrous consequences.

Seymour examines the arguments of a range of left and liberal commentators, from Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen to Susan Sontag and Thomas Friedman, and provides a powerful indictment of their support for the Iraq war. He charts how such commentators represented American military power as an ally of progress rather than its enemy and were instrumental in mobilising public support for a misguided and illegal war.

Seymour also tackles the arguments of the ‘pro-war Left’ and demonstrates how they readily equated radical Islam with totalitarianism and refused to acknowledge the broader, and more complex, geopolitical climate that surrounded the attacks of 9/11.

Tracing colonial exploits in the nineteenth century and war mongering in the twentieth and twenty-first, Seymour shows how liberalism, a doctrine that appears to emphasise human equality and universalism, has often been implicated in violent systems of domination and exploitation.

Seymourexcavates the origins of liberal apologies for empire and tracks their development over three centuries, on both sides of the Atlantic, thereby providing an essential account of the many wars that have come to define the contemporary political landscape.

-------------------------------

Praise for THE LIBERAL DEFENCE OF MURDER:

“A great deal of damning material on the apologists of recent illegalities” Philippe Sands, GUARDIAN
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/21/richard-seymour-liberal-defence-review

“A powerful counter-blast against the monstrous regiment of ‘useful idiots’” THE TIMES

“A powerful critique of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and of those liberal intellectuals who support it.” INDEPENDENT
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-liberal-defence-of-murder-by-richard-seymour-1649105.html

“An excellent antidote to the propagandists of the crisis of our times.” INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-liberal-defence-of-murder-by-richard-seymour-1488515.html

“Essential reading” Owen Hatherley, NEW STATESMAN
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/12/liberal-defence-seymour-murder

“Among those who share responsibility for the carnage and chaos in the Gulf are the useful idiots who gave the war intellectual cover and attempted to lend it a liberal imprimatur. The more belligerent they sounded the more bankrupt they became; the more strident their voice the more craven their position. As the war they have supported degrades into a murderous mess, Richard Seymour expertly traces their descent from humanitarian intervention to blatant islamophobia.” – Gary Younge

“Indispensable ... Seymour brilliantly uncovers the pre-history and modern reality of the so-called 'pro-war Left.'” – China Mieville

------------------------------

Richard Seymour runs the popular Lenin’s Tomb blog, which comments on the War on Terror, Islamophobia and neoliberalism and has developed a cult following since it was founded in 2001. He also writes for other publications, including THE GUARDIAN. He is the author of several books, including THE LIBERAL DEFENCE OF MURDER and THE MEANING OF DAVID CAMERON.

I'll say it again. Imperialist intervention, strenghtening the former regime elements and the most retrograde components of the revolt, was the worst thing to have happened to the Libyan revolution. This is what's happening now:

And look at the photo galleries. The prisoners are almost all black. It's true that Qadhafi bears considerable responsibility for promoting racism in Libya, that his regime encouraged chauvinist and supremacist movements in northern and central Africa, and that he has played a classic divide and rule game by pitting Libyan workers against sub-Saharan immigrant workers over the last decade or so - resulting in several episodes of mob assaults on immigrant workers. It's also true that while the basis for this revolt was and is the manifest injustices and oppressive cruelties of the Qadhafi regime, racism has haunted the revolt from the start, with the early hysterical rumours about "African mercenaries" (hint: Libyans are Africans - they meant black people). Now this racism has fused with the revolution in the most dangerous, ominous way. Yes, Qadhafi uses mercenaries to kill his opponents - it's not unknown for him to do this. He may be using some of his networks built up over years of intervention in sub-saharan Africa. But it just so happens that racism operates on real antagonisms. For example, I don't know or think it inherently important how many of these are black ('African'), and how many are brown ('Libyan', or 'Arab'), and how many are white (Russian and Ukrainian, one reads) - it only becomes important when you apply a racist ideological frame to the subject. And that frame, having corroborated the harrassment and beating of African and immigrant workers by some rebel forces, and threatening serious "mob violence" against said workers, is now justifying purges against black and immigrant workers, when the revolution had the capacity to end that oppression.

What racism does in this context is externalise antagonisms that are inherent to Libyan society - it makes it seem as if Qadhafi rules solely through and on behalf of his extended family and 'tribe' and with the use of 'foreigners', as if the problem with Qadhafi is that he's some sort of alien coloniser. This makes a certain amount of sense for the former regime elements who want to conserve the basic class structure and particularly the position of the national bourgeoisie that was formed under Qadhafi's regime - all of Libya is united, they say, we have no divisions, only a usurping entity. And it is those elements who consistently lobbied for an alliance with imperialism, from fairly early on, even when signs were appearing saying "no" to foreign intervention. They had to win that argument, or at least win significant sectors of the revolution to it. It's important to stress that the transitional council has never really commanded authority throughout the insurgency as a whole, and is still trying to overcome the 'disarray' of a very de-centralised, disarticulated movement. It incorporates elites and professionals, military officials, academics, politicians, capitalists and so on, but it does not incorporate the popular forces actually driving the revolution. Ironically, Ghoga, who is defending this racist purge, is himself a human rights laywer. So, in this sense, the alliance with imperialism is probably intended to overcome their lack of authority over the movement, and their inability to act as a hegemonic, cohering element in the revolt.

This will be for a variety of reasons. The revolt in Libya happened very suddenly, and was almost as suddenly pitched into a civil war situation by the sheer viciousness of Qadhafi's response, which went farther, quicker than Mubarak's crackdown. Unlike in Egypt, where there had been a decade of building and organising among labour groups, Islamists, liberals and the Left, this revolt had to come together in a remarkably short space of time. But another crucial factor is that those assuming leadership could not articulate a set of sufficiently popular demands to win over the majority of the revolutionary forces let alone the society at large, due probably to their situation in Libya's class structure. So, lacking the ability to concentrate the wider social forces in Libya within its ranks, and without the defection of further elite forces, particularly military elites, the council began arguing for intervention from day one - an argument which they would have known meant cutting a deal with imperialist states, who would otherwise tell them where to go and certainly not vote through a UN resolution on their behalf. It would seem that without a genuinely representative national organisation pushing a clear popular agenda, and under the weight of Qadhafi's assault, and with a fairly conservative rump of elites bolstered by imperialism, the emancipatory content of the revolt has been diminished, leaving the more rotten elements to come to the fore. That would be my explanation.

I'm just recording an intuition, as I don't have time to work this thought out properly. If Cameron was looking for a Falklands effect - that is, a caesarist moment in which, by donning the khaki and giving Our Boys an imperial adventure, he could articulate the native sensibilities of a not yet fully decolonised public, talking over the heads of the establishment - he hasn't got it. I detect no enthusiasm for this war. Support in the dominant ideological institutions, parliament and the popular press, is broad but depthless. The usual gyrations from the right-wing tabloids lack conviction. Perhaps it's because they're not actually getting a ground invasion. I haven't seen any polls, but I expect this lack of enthusiasm probably reflected in public opinion.

If Cameron was looking for a Kosovo effect - which I would categorise as another kind of caesarist moment in that it consolidated the intelligentsia and political establishment behind Blair - he doesn't have that either. I remember the hysterical build-up to war over Kosovo, and there is nothing like the moral fervour and shrill liberal baiting that was prevalent then. They can wheel out the old satrap Paddy Ashdown to wheeze out some faded Gladstonian rhetoric, but it doesn't have the same ring to it. This isn't "overthrowing a tyrant", after all. The British military elites have made it clear that they're not up for that. Neither are other components of the fragile alliance against Qadhafi. This is about achieving a stalemate, with the likely result of a de facto partition of the country. That somehow isn't inspiring the bunting-laden festivities that are supposed to follow from British wars. It also points up a tension within the ruling ideology - humanitarian imperialism in this context sits uneasily alongside Islamophobia, especially when the latter is a far more predominant public sentiment. Those who could once be relied on to ventriloquise the intolerant martial bigotry of the popular press are no longer available for such ventures, especially if the supposed beneficiaries are, well, Muslims.

This loss of "imperial ardour", as Michael Ignatieff once called it, is devastating for those who seek khaki solutions to domestic woes. This Saturday will see a massive trade union-led demonstration against the austerity agenda in Britain. The TUC is calling it very conservatively, saying they expect 100,000 to attend. All signs are that it will be much bigger. The elements of Britain's shattered political make-up are still unsettled, still not reconfigured and re-polarised effectively; the opportunity is there either for a reactionary realignment based on Muslim and immigrant bashing, or for a leftist realignment based on the defence of welfare, public services, and trade unionism.

Towards a New Model Commune
talk at ICA 19.03.11



(25 minutes in, if you want to watch).

What are we fighting for? I think we're fighting for self-government. I think all of our efforts so far have been a way of saying that we should be collectively in charge of our own lives. I think, whether we conceive it in this way or not, this means trying to move beyond the public; not so much new publics, but post-public. This is not just because notions of publicity are gendered and historically elitist - and by the way, Dan Hind's recent book 'The Return of the Public' is an excellent account of this - but because the public-private dichotomy is part of the means by which we are maintained as dependents. As public citizens we exercise a franchise, but in the private sphere we accept bondage: the discipline of the market compels us to accept it. For most of our waking hours, we cede executive control over our bodily and mental powers to someone else – in the vain hope of one day retiring with a decent pension. Whoops, that’s gone. You’ll just have to save more. But you’ll have to borrow more, because the economy needs you to spend. And we find that in all but the most mundane matters, when it comes to the activities and processes that constitute the major part of our lives, we have no autonomy. We do not govern ourselves.

Even our free time is not really ours. Much of it is spent commuting for a start - the average person's commute is equivalent to four weeks out of a working year. Four weeks - on that tube, that bus, that motorway lane. Think about what that's costing you psychically. Much of the rest is spent recuperating, essentially recovering our ability to labour so that we can go into work and do it all again the next day. And don't forget, of course, that even your free time isn't necessarily your own, because companies now want to organise your fun. Dress-down Friday - because Friday is funday; birthday parties, and office drinks, team-building outings, sporting days. Your fun, your enjoyment, your affection, often your time - on their orders. Awkward socialisation with middle and senior managers, stressful, moronic conversations, and long-winded explanations of what goes on in different departments that you didn't ask for, and you don't need. Then there's voluntary, unpaid overtime, worth £29bn a year to the employers - that's called flexibility, and what a good sport you are for doing that.

No more do we govern ourselves in our home lives which all too often become tiny kingdoms, patriarchies in which, among other things, children are acculturated to being ruled by others, and in which the first springs of what I would call 'capitalist guilt' are lodged in place - capitalist guilt is that gut-wrenching anxiety you feel when you're late for work, even though you probably won't get in too much trouble for it; it's the sickly shame that ruins your day when you throw a sickie, and immediately, absurdly start to think "should I go in anyway?" I'm just clarifying my terms.

So, we must be alert to the ways in which, when something beautiful starts to happen, people begin to declare their independence. They begin to run their own lives, to take their rightful part in the running of the whole of society. They exercise their due franchise fully, in every sphere of life. I will not exhaust you with utopian blueprints or detailed analysis of the Paris Commune, or the Russian Revolution, though these repay analysis. But look at the history. In almost every revolution, there are workers' committees, cordones, shurahs, soviets, popular councils, cooperatives, collectives, syndicates of some kind, some attempt to work out the protocols for self-government. Even in protest movements and rebellions short of outright revolution, people always confront the problem of how they organise themselves properly, democratically; sometimes that has to confront issues of oppression, sexual, gendered or racial oppression that can operate within movements; sometimes it just has to do with developing procedures that genuinely include everyone, avoiding majoritarian tyrannies (this is why in the students' occupations, we've seen experimentation with things like consensus decision-making); in striving toward self-goverment, toward the commune in other words, we always encounter unanticipated levels of complexity, but the basic problem remains one of self-government.

So, I want to look at the materials that are available to us to flesh out a 'new model commune', and it seems to me that the best starting point is to look at the tendencies immanent in recent struggles in the Middle East. Here, for example, are some of the features of the revolutionary movement that overthrew Mubarak, and even now is still fermenting in Egypt. First of all, they took over a nominally public space which the state wished to exclude them from access to, Tahrir Square. Having taken it over, and affirmed that they wouldn't simply go home at the end of the day - something we might want to think about - they saw off wave after wave of assault on the protests, from police and plain clothes thugs. They set up committees to keep watch for government men. They set up barricades, and routine ID checks for everyone attempting to enter the square. They set up a network of tents for people to sleep in - it's freezing overnight, so some of them jog round the square to get their temperature up. There are toilet arrangements - no small logistical matter when there are routinely hundreds of thousands of people occupying the capital's main intersection. They rig up street lamps to provide electricity. They set up garbage collection, medical stops - they occupy a well-known fast food outlet and turn it into somewhere that people shot at or beaten by police can get treated.

They set up a city within a city, and collectively coped with many more challenges than the average city would have to face in an average day. There was of course commerce, people hawking food and cigarettes, confident that the whole system of exchange wasn't being overthrown. Yet, far more of their actions were driven by solidarity, collective decision-making, and democratic delegation, than is ever usual for a city. Tahrir Square was the beginnings of a commune. Beyond that spectacular exercise in the capital, the labour movement that had been kicking since the 2006 strikes in Mahalla, was doing something that labour movement's usually don't do. It was starting to strike to demand a change in management. It was striking over the exercise of authority. This had happened in Tunisia, and usually it was because the CEO was some ruling party stooge. But it was the people who normally have no say in the running of the company - and Egypt's private sector economy is overwhelmingly informal, and insecure - seeking to exercise a sort of limited franchise. They did not seek to replace the management of the company with themselves, which would have been the ultimate statement of their confidence in their ability to rule themselves. But they were trying to have a say, and usually succeeded in that. And when the government withdrew the police from local communities and encouraged looting and thuggish behaviour, the people - instead of panicking, and deciding that we can't do without the police after all, please send the uniformed thugs back in Mr Mubarak - organised self-defence committees. Just as in Tahrir, they set up checkpoints, ID checks, and they made decisions about how their community would be run.

Now, this isn't socialism. Socialists were a current in the revolution, but not a big one. The major currents were Nasserists, Islamists, and liberals. And there are all sorts of political struggles that still have to continue - the horrible attacks on women in Tahrir Square on international womens' day shows that this fight has to occur within the revolution. And there's now the prospect that the army leadership will seek to consolidate a conservative ruling bloc with the assistance of the Muslim Brothers, who were an invaluable part of the revolutionary coalition but always the most right-wing element of it. While many Brothers will have been shaken up, radicalised and blasted with ecstasy by this revolution, their core base of small businessmen are probably anxious to get back to making money, and leave the commune behind. Still, the utopian moment of Tahrir Square and beyond showed us some of the lineaments of what a commune might look like. It demonstrated that with opportunity comes competence: that we can, if given the chance, quickly learn and apply the techniques of cooperation, solidarity and self-government.

Lately, our Party of Order - the Tories, the right-wing media, the police, the agents of authority and control - has been most vexed about the challenge posed by the mob, the student protesters. Cameron denounces them as 'feral', and the ideological frame that the media sought to apply, of selfish, solipsistic vandals disrespecting democracy, was ultimately supplied by one totemic incident, that of a fire extinguisher being lobbed from the top of Conservative Party headquarters. This 'mob', they said, clearly doesn't respect democracy. But democracy is not law and order. Democracy is the mob; the mob is democracy.

Democracy is supposed to mean popular sovereignty, not the unimpeded rule of a no-mandate government. It is supposed to mean that the will of the majority governs, not the interests of the rich. It is supposed to mean at minimum that people get the policies they vote for, not those they are overwhelmingly hostile to. In liberal democratic theory, the people are sovereign inasmuch as their aspirations and prerogatives are effectively mediated through a pluralist party-political state. They may not get all that they want all of the time, but the decision-making process will be guided by the public mood, which rival parties must compete to capture and express. Yet this system has only ever been effective to the limited extent that it has been when it has been supplemented by militant extra-parliamentary pressure, by the threat of disruption to stable governance and profit-accumulation. To the extent that the parliamentary system is ever really democratic, it is parasitic on a much more fundamental popular democracy. This reality, be it ever remembered, should exhort us to go further than we have, to turn our mobs into committees, shuras, soviets, communes. Let us, in future struggles, pose in practise the material possibility of our self-government.

It is, of course, a long-standing ruling class prejudice that we cannot govern ourselves. Trotsky once said, perhaps incautiously, that the Russian revolution was a gamble on the idea that ordinary working class people could rule themselves, and against the filthy aristocratic prejudice that they could not. His recent biographer, Robert Service, aligns with the Party of Order, insisting that Trotsky was foolish ever to have believed such a stupid thing. No surprises there. Trotsky, and the movements he inspired, hated the Stalinist regime for its savage despotism, the complete lack of genuine autonomy enjoyed by the mass of people. What the Party of Order hate about communism, however, is not what went catastrophically wrong with it, but what is right about it, what is admirable, just, plausible and emulable about it. It is the same thing that they hate about us - and we should welcome their hate, and their natural fear. It shows that their right to govern is no longer assured.

As if I didn't see this coming a mile off:

10 in favour, zero against, five abstentions. So the vote went exactly as predicted. "The resolution 1973/2011 is adopted.," says the chairman.

This could get very ugly. The resolution authorises a whole series of military measures short of ground invasion, including air strikes. The worst case scenarios? Not that air strikes will kill civilians - that is absolutely guaranteed, and thus constitutes an aspect of even the best case. Not that the war will escalate - that is not a dead cert, but a strong probability. However, it's also unlikely to involve a ground invasion, which I need hardly say would be catastrophic. The worst case scenario seems to be that this will fuel the centrifugal forces tending toward partition between a 'Western' allied statelet in the east, and a rump dictatorship in the west. Qadhafi has spent years deliberately 'underdeveloping' the east to punish these regions and tribal federations for their tendency toward rebelliousness, leaving towns and cities that should be as rich as those in the Gulf states desperately poor, surrounded by shantytowns and slums - and so he has laid the material basis for such divisions. Imperialism creates divisions where none existed before (look at Iraq). This is how it always operates. So it's implausible that where there already are such divisions, and where such divisions have a direct bearing on the conflict underway, that imperialist intervention would not exacerbate them. This may be the worst thing that could possibly have happened to the Libyan revolution. That's a worst-case scenario.

The best-case scenario is that people are killed to little avail, and the former regime elements in the transitional leadership have just diverted energies and initiative down a blind alley. I suppose you might object that the best-case scenario is that the air strikes exclusively kill the bad guys, turning the initiative in favour of the revolutionaries, allowing them to sieze power, build a liberal democratic state, and the cavalry heads home. And the band played, 'Believe it if you like'. Look, I'd like to believe it. I'd also like to believe that Obama is a socialist, Hillary Clinton a feminist, and David Cameron a salesman for unsecured personal loans. But the occasions in which imperialism has directly assisted a revolutionary process are rather infrequent, wouldn't you say? In fact, I suspect you'd be struggling if I asked you to name one.

I'm also afraid that all the talk about the inaction, delaying, dilly-dallying and procrastination of the 'international community', not to mention the demonology about Russia and China obstructing the good guys once again, has played straight into a very familiar war narrative. Just when you've uttered your last "but why won't they DO something?", just when you're about to give up and lapse into foul depression, the good guys come to the rescue. It's like 1941 all over again. There was never any doubt, as far as I'm concerned, that the US would support a no-fly zone if it could be suitably internationalized and involve support from the miserable dictatorships of the Arab League. And no one will be tasteless enough to point out that those very same states are currently butchering their populations with the arms and financial assistance of the imperial powers commanding this coalition of the willing. Because that would just be sour grapes.

"We begin by attempting to unpack some of the core images which seem to us to form central elements in the 'traditionalist' ideology of crime. Gouldner once argued that all social theories contain 'dominant assumptions' about society embedded in them. We would argue that all social ideologies contain powerful images of society at their heart. These images may be diffuse, quite untheorised in any elaborate sense; but they serve to condense and order the view of society in which the ideologies are active, and they constitute both the unquestioned substratum of truth - what carries conviction - and the source of its collective emotional force and appeal. Together, these images produce and sustain an uncodified but immensely powerful, conservative sense of Englishness, of an English 'way of life', of an 'English' viewpoint which - it also, by its very density of reference, asserts - everyone shares to some extent. We do not make any claim to offer here an exhaustive inventory of this traditional English ideology, only to have identified some of the major issues around which this traditionalist definition of 'Englishness' is constructed and organised. Our aim here is to open a discussion which we regard as of considerable importance, and to touch on two related but distinct aspects. First, can we begin to identify the social content which is being carried in these images, around which a traditionalist view of crime is organised? Second, can we begin to make sense of its power to generalise across social and class divisions - its claims to 'universality'? The traditionalist ideology is not the only active ideology in society by any means; but it is a dominant ideological field. And this dominance, and its claims to general representativeness, are connected. It is dominant because it appears to be able to catch up quite contradictory life and class experiences within its master framework. Ideologies are easier to understand when they seem, within their own logic, to reflect or adequately correspond to the experiences, positions and interests of those who hold them. But though ideologies do include this practical relation, they cannot wholly be explained in this way; indeed, when we speak of the practical social role of ideologies, we are speaking of the power of ideologies to translate into convincing ideological terms the outlook of classes and groups who are not, even in a collective sense, its 'authors'. So we are also concerned here with what it is in the social and material condition of subordinate classes which allows the dominant traditionalist ideologies to gain some real purchase, and to carry conviction, to win support. How is this traditionalist ideological 'unity' constructed out of disparate and contradictory class formations? How does this version of 'the English way of life' provide the basis of ideological consensus?

"We turn, first, to the notion of respectability - at once, so different for different social classes, and yet so 'universal' a social value. It is an extremely complex social idea. It touches on the fundamental notion of self-respect: men who do not respect themselves cannot expect respect from others. But respectability also touches the more 'protestant' values of our culture; it is connected with thrift, self-discipline, living the decent life, and thus with observance of what is commonly held to be upright, decent conduct. It is strongly connected with ideas of self-help and self-reliance, and of 'conformity' to established social standards - standards set and embodied by 'significant others'.

"The 'others' are always those who rank and stand above us in the social hierarchy: people we 'look up to', and in turn respect. The idea of respectability means that we have taken care not to fall into the abyss, not to lose out in the competitive struggle for existence. In the middle classes, the idea of 'respectability' carries with it the powerful overtones of competitive success; its token is the ability to 'keep up appearances', to secure a standard of life which enables you to afford those things which befit - and embody - your social station in life. But in the working classes, it is connected with three, different ideas: with work, with poverty, and with crime in the broad sense. It is work, above all, which is the guarantee of respectability; for work is the means - the only means - to the respectable life. The idea of the 'respectable working classes' is irretrievably associated with regular, often skilled, employment. It is labour which has disciplined the working class into respectability. Loss of respectability is therefore associated with loss of occupation and with poverty. Poverty is the trap which marks the slide away from respectability back into the 'lower depths'. The distinction between the 'respectable' and the 'rough' working class, though in no sense an accurate sociological or historical one, remains an extremely important moral distinction. If poverty is one route downwards out of the respectable life, crime or moral misconduct is another, broader and more certain route. Respectability is the collective internalisation, by the lower orders, of an image of the 'ideal life' held out for them by those who stand higher in the scheme of things; it disciplines society from end to end, rank by rank. Respectability is therefore one of the key values which dovetails and inserts one social class into the social image of another class. It is part of what Gramsci called the 'cement' of society.

"Work is not only the guarantee of working-class respectability, it is also a powerful image in its own right. We know how much our social and indeed personal identities are caught up with our work, and how men (especially men, given the sexual division of labour) who are without work, feel not only materially abandoned but spiritually decentred. We know in fact that this is the product of an extremely long an arduous process of historical acculturation: all that is involved in the erection, alongside the birth fo capitalism, of the Protestant Ethic, and all that was involved in the insertion of the labouring industrial masses into the rigorous disciplines of factory labour. Work has gradually come to be regarded more as 'instrumental' than as 'sacred', as manual labour under capitalism is disciplined by the wage contract; leisure, or rather all that is associated with non-work and with the private sphere, has come to rank even higher than once it did in the hierarchy of social goods, as family and home have been progressively distanced from work. Yet, for men above all, the workaday world of work, and the formal and informal values associated with it, seem in many ways coterminous with the definition of 'reality' itself. And this, though endowed with extremely powerful ideological content reflects a material fact: without work, the material basis of our lives would vanish overnight. What matters here, with respect to crime, however, is not so much the centrality of work, and our feelings about it, as what we might call the calculus of work. The calculus of work implies the belief that, though work may have few intrinsic rewards and is unlikely to lead to wealth, prosperity and riches for the vast majority, it provides one of the stable negotiated bases for our economic existence: a 'fair day's wage for a fair day's work'. It also entails the belief that the valued things - leisure, pleasure, security, free activity, play - are a reward for the diligent application to long-term productive goals through work. The former come after, and as the result of, or recompense for, the latter.

"Of course, some professional crime could, technically, be seen as 'work' of a kind, and there are certainly testimonies by professional criminals which would support such an interpretation. But few people would see it that way. The sharpest distinction is made between the professional or organised life of crime, and the petty pilfering and 'borrowing' from one's place of work, which is regarded as a customary way of setting a funamentally exploitative economic relation to right, and is thus not understood as 'crime' in the ordinary sense at all. Crime, in the proper sense, when involving robbery or rackets for gain, is set off against work in the public mind, precisely because it is an attempt to acquire by speed, stealth, fraudulent or shorthand methods what the great majority of law-abiding citizens can only come by through arduous toil, routine, expenditure of time, and the postponement of pleasure. It is through this contrast that some of the most powerful moral feelings come to be transferred against deviants who trhive and prosper, but do not work. One of the most familiar ways in which the moral calculus of work is recruited into attitudes to social problems is in the way people talk about 'scroungers', 'layabouts', those who 'don't do a stroke' or 'live off the Welfare'. The characterisations are often applied indiscriminately, and without much evidence, to various 'out-groups': the poor, the unemployed, the irresponsible and feckless - but also youth, students and black people. These are seen as getting something without 'putting anything into it'. The image implies instant moral condemnation. At the same time it is important to remember that again, a real, objective material reality is distortedly expressed in these negative images of the 'scrounger' and the layabout. For the vast majority of working people, there is absolutely no other route to a minimal degree of security and material comfort apart from the life-long commitment to 'hard graft'. It must be remembered that this feeling that 'everyone should earn what he gets by working for it' also informs working class feelings about the very wealthy, or those who live on unearned incomes, or accumulate large pieces of property, or about the unequal distribution of wealth. There is evidence that what is sometimes called a 'pragmatic acceptance' of the present unequal distribution of wealth is matched by an equally strong feeling that there is something intrinsically wrong and exploitative about it. So sentiments stemming from the prevailing 'work calculus' have their progressive aspect too, though they are often used to underpin root conservative attitudes to all who transgress it.

"Another social image with special importance for public ideologies of crime has to do with the need for social discipline - and with England as a disciplined society. Once again, there are different versions of this very general social idea across the different class cultures; the idea is interpreted and applied differently within different cultural systems of meaning, while retaining sufficient common elements to appear to carry a more universal validity. The idea of a 'disciplined society' is enshrined in popular mythology - the whole nation 'at prayer' having been long ago supplanted by the whole nation in an orderly queue. It is especially strong at those high points of popular history, like 'the War', where a country of free individuals 'pulled itself together' to defeat the enemy. The 'discipline' of English society is not the rigorously organised tyranny of the bureaucratic or regimented state, but that 'self-discipline', flexible yet tenacious, while holds the nation together from the inside when it is under stress. In the English ideology, 'discipline' is always linked and qualified by an opposing tendency which tempers its authoritarian harshness: in the upper classes, the idea of discipline and anarchism (as caricatured, for example, in the roles played by John Cleese in the television comedy series, Monty Python's Flying Circus). Lower down the social scale, discipline is often qualified by the image of a sort of petty-bourgeois 'anarchy' (as, for example, in post-war Ealing comedies or Dad's Army). However, the capacity of popular mythology to counter or qualify the respect for 'social discipline' in these ways does not mean that it is not a strong sentiment - only that it is held, like so many other traditional social values, in a peculiarly British way, and with a very special English sense of irony.

...

"The traditional idea of social discipline is closely linked, on the one hand, with notions about hierarchy and authority. Society is hierarchical, in the dominant view, by nature. Competitive success may promote individuals up through this hierarchy, but does not destroy the notion of a hierarchical order itself. But the hierarchy, in turn, depends upon the giving and taking of authority. And the exercise of authority, both on the part of those who exercise it, and of those who give obedience to it, requires discipline. This trinity - the hierarchical nature of society, the importance of authority and the acclimatisation of the people to both through self-discipline - forms a central complex of attitudes. In this version of the dominant social image, indiscipline is seen as a threat both to the hierarchical conception of the social order and to the exercise of 'due authority' and deference; it is thus the beginnings, the seed bed, of social anarchy.

...

"[T]he three social image clusters we have so far discussed - respectability, work and discipline - are inextricably connected with the fourth image: that of the family.

"In the traditionalist lexicon, the sphere of the family is of course where moral-social compulsions and inner controls are generated, as well as the sphere where the primary socialisation of the young is first tellingly and intimately carried through. The first aspect has to do with the repression and regulation of sexuality - the seat of pleasure - in the family nexus; and thus with authority. The second has to do with the power which the family has, through its intimate exchanges of love and anger, punishment and reward, and the structure of patriarchty, to prepare children for a competitive existence, work and the sexual division of labour. The family, too, is a complex social image; different forms, functions and habits may be found in the different social classes. Thus the structures of sexual identity and repression within the working-class family, though in some respects reproducing the dominant stuctures of sex roles in the organisation of the family, are also profoundly shaped by the material experiences of the class - the construction of practices and a definition of 'masculinity' and masculine work and values in the world of production which are transposed into the sexual organisation of the family. Similarly, the apparently cross-class conception of the family as 'refuge' carries a particular weight and intensity when the world from which the family froms a 'refuge' is the daily experience of class exploitation in production and work. But the 'sense of family' is a strong value because it is an absolutely pivotal social institution. Few would deny its central role in the construction of social identities, and in transmitting, at an extremely deep level, the basic ideological grid of society. Family ideology is undoubtedly also changing; and we have learned to think of the family, also, in more positive, less punitive terms. But, when we come 'right down to it', the dominant image of the family - perhaps across classes - still has more to do with the duty of instilling a basic understanding of fundamental 'do's and don'ts' than it does of providing a mutually sustaining and releasing framework. Love is what we hope and pray will emerge from the family, but disciplining, punishing, rewarding and controlling is what we seem actually to do in it a great deal of the time. Reich, with some justification, calls it a 'factory for creating submissive people'. And, as we have come to see, the fundamental images of authority, power and discipline, aloong with the primary origins of what Giles Playfair calls 'the punitive obsession', are experienced and internalise first within its tiny kingdom. The alignment of the sexual and the social - a fundamental task of the family - is just the homology of structures which creates inside us those repertoires of self-discipline and self-control for which, later, the wider world is to be so thankful. It is little wonder, then, that fears and pancis about the breakdown of social discipline - of which crime is one of the most powerful indices - centre on the indiscipline of 'youth', 'the young', and on those institutions whose task it is to help them internalise social discipline - the school, but above all, the family."

You remember that amid my general critique of Johann Hari's sensationalist diatribe against British Muslims, I mentioned a worrying and potentially dangerous issue arising in the East End. This concerns the recent phenomenon of anti-gay stickers being put up in Tower Hamlets, Hackney, and elsewhere. In fact, as far as I know, these stickers have also appeared in other parts of the country, including Manchester. This was rightly condemned by local politicians, Muslims and LGBT groups, and There was initially some suggestion that the EDL may have been putting these stickers up to stir things up. The LGBT group Rainbow Hamlets expressed this fear publicly, and Al Jannah, the LGBT Muslim group, are also saying that it considers this an example of "massive EDL trolling". I now understand that this is unlikely to be the case, though it is still not known who is responsible. Whoever is behind it, it constitutes a threat to local LGBT people and it is right to confront it. Another pressing danger, however, was and is that EDL supporters were going to use this as a means of getting the boot boys into the East End by spuriously claiming to support gay rights.

When a group of hitherto unknown individuals unconnected with the East End organised something they called 'East End Gay Pride', with its activism based on a Facebook group, it transpired that among its supporters were English Defence League members. This might have been a trivial matter of accidental support, except that the chief organiser initially welcomed the support of the EDL. Then, after criticism of this position was aired, the group was closed down and replaced with a new invite-only Facebook group, to which open EDL members were invited. The group has consistently suggested that it is really apolitical. I would be willing to believe this, but several of them appear to be aligned with Islamophobic politics or have EDL friends. They have responded to criticism from LGBT activists by complaining about "gay apologists", and the "anti-fun brigade" and have dealt with the complaints about the EDL involvement by belatedly removing the EDL members who they had themselves invited into the group and stating that no political placards would be welcome at the rally. Their statement, which they reproduce on a daily basis, equates the anti-fascist group UAF with the EDL. And, as their critics have pointed out, they appear to have no objection whatever to EDL members joining in the protest as long as they don't draw attention to themselves with placards etc. Given that the EDL contains some of the most viciously homophobic forces in British politics, some of whom would usually be more at home beating up LGBT people than parading with them, this is an astonishing stance. And their response to queries about why the "hate-filled Daily Star" was backing the event - I have no idea if the Star is actually supporting it -was to insist that not everyone finds the Daily Star to be "hate-filled".

Concerns have been expressed by local gay rights groups. (Unfortunately, word has not yet got to the organisers of Pride London, a celebrity-supported group which is prominently supporting the event, but raising none of the questions that other LGBT groups have.) UEL LGBT, which initially supported the protest, have decided with withdraw their backing because of the continuing ambiguity over the EDL's involvement. Out East have sent an open letter to the organisers, expressing concern about the involvement of EDL supporters in the group, and the denunciation of UAF. It has been co-signed by the LGBT activist Denis Fernando of UAF and the Greater London Trade Unions Council. The open letter questions why the group gives the impression that the East End is actually in danger of becoming a 'gay free' zone, never mentioning that local politicians, Muslim groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain, LGBT groups and the East London Mosque have actually been working together to counter this problem. Prominent statements have included this, from the Association of British Muslims: “There is nothing in the Qur’an against LGBT people. Allah has honoured every son and daughter of Adam, so such a hateful message is not only morally and ethically wrong but actually unislamic.” The approach of Out East and Rainbow Hamlets in dealing with this issue has been welcomed by LGBT trade unionists.

Centrally, the letter from Out East takes issue with the approach which reduces homophobia to a simple issue of nasty ideas and prejudice, saying: "Out East believes that our response to homophobia must be political because homophobia is a system which is present everywhere and not only a hate feeling from particular groups or individuals. Homophobia is not caused only by one particular group but is part of broader society and has political roots. It is easy to portray other minorities (even unintentionally) as the cause of homophobia rather than, for example, questioning the lack of means to fight discrimination in a period of cuts in public services. Instead, we want to highlight the intersection between sexuality, gender, race and class oppression. Homophobia is fed by political practices and ideologies which in turn encourage individuals to commit discriminatory acts."

But the legitimate concerns of LGBT activists have unfortunately not been dealt with in any but a snide, condescending and arrogant fashion.