This is obviously a calamity for the Left, particularly for anyone interested in building any kind of radical left-of-Labour alternative.  At a time when the two major parties are lockstepped in the austerity drive, and when we can hardly count on the TUC to lead the resistance (this notwithstanding), yet another disastrous quietus was the last thing we needed.  That is not Salma Yaqoob's fault, obviously.  The usual suspects will spread vicious gossip ("she's taken the New Labour shilling" etc etc) but as far as I can see, her decision is perfectly justified.  I'm sorry to say it, but George Galloway did it to himself: he ought to have had the humility to retract his statement rather than relying on the diminishing fan club to issue cloying rationalisations.  

There are serious questions raised by this nadir, and not only about the gender politics.  If, only months after Respect's second coming, the whole thing could come crashing down like this then there are wider issues about the politics, institutional setting and tactics of left-of-Labour formations that need be thought over.  Not much else I wish to add for now. 

"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."

Every day, literally every day, there's some new signpost on the backlash against women's struggles, and some reminder of just how much malice and misogyny is out there. Recently, there was the spectacle of a couple of sportscasters nattering and sniggering like a couple of Alan Partridges about women, one of them going so far as to sexually harass a female co-worker. But even more interesting than these sad sacks has been their pathetic defenders, enraged by the suffering of the male. Another near coterminous example was Tory MP and ex-corporate lawyer Dominic Raab's expostulations about "feminist bigotry" and male oppression. Those are just a couple of instances that have grabbed headlines recently. There's a near constant sewer-flow of this invective. The target is usually, explicitly, feminism. The implication, with little variation, is that men are harmed by feminism, that they have lost something as a result of its achievements. Who is the audience for this? Who is intended to receive the message? Plainly, me. And other men. It's almost as if it's somehow necessary to innoculate men against feminism. Why would that be?

"Anti-feminist backlash exists because the movement was successful at showing everyone the threat patriarchy poses to the well-being of females and males. If feminist movement had not offered a true accounting of the dangers of perpetuating sexism and male domination, it would have failed. There would have been no need to mount an anti-feminist campaign. While patriarchal mass media continues to spread the lie that males are not welcome in the feminist classroom, truthfully more males are studying feminist thought and converting to feminist thinking. It is this significant change in feminist movement that makes it more of a threat to patriarchy. As has been stated, had the movement only focused on women, the patriarchal status quo would be intact and there would be no need to severely bash feminism." - bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody, South End Press, 2000, pp 116-7

...who see young girls as 'easy meat'. And let us not be politically correct about this. The problem is with white guys:

What can explain this disproportionality? Why can't the politically correct brigade acknowledge real problems? Answer: the ethnicity of the men involved is meaningless. What is meaningful, perhaps, is that the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of sex crimes are male, and the overwhelming majority of victims are female. That is a correlation that has some relevance, arguably. This might be related to that elusive, shapeshifting entity, 'culture', inasmuch as the culture we all inhabit routinely diminishes, humiliates and violates women. Can we discuss this? No, of course not. The problem of aggression and violence toward women and children has to be re-staged as a drama about race and 'multiculturalism', because the first order of business is to establish the innocence and virtue of said white guys, and the criminality and brutal lust-filled venality of non-white guys. That is the only way in which most bourgeois politicians and the capitalist media are prepared to deal with this issue.

The allegations against Julian Assange have raised some sort of hell on parts of the Left. I don't really want to touch the issue with a barge pole, and in general I prefer to avoid the obvious, but there's some surprising things happening under the rubric of Assange's defence in the media. The arguments are happening partly because the use of the claims by the Swedish state is obviously politicised. I think Michael Moore made this case very well here. The release of police documents to The Guardian's Nick Davies was obviously part of a propaganda war against Assange, who has been subject to crazed assassination threats in the US, among other things. There's a history of the use of rape allegations to justify political persecution and lynchings, and of the self-serving appropriation of feminist language by violent empires. And the politicised use of charges of sexual assault is obviously no service to the victims of rape.

At the same time, however, there's just as long a history of rape victims being smeared, and rape allegations not being taken seriously. To dismiss these allegations, or to diminish their seriousness, is to risk opposing justice for rape victims. To impute dubious motives to the women alleging rape - for instance by claiming, which seems unlikely in the circumstances, that they are participants in a 'honeytrap' operation - risks blaming the victims. And if you do that in this case, you set a precedent for how you treat future cases.

The allegations are serious. In one instance, Assange is alleged to have tried to have sex with one of the alleged victims without a condom on, was rebuffed, and went to sleep. When the woman awoke, the allegation goes, he was already having sex with her without the condom on. Having thus penetrated her without her consent, he is said to have assured her that he did not have HIV and she did not tell him to stop.  The defence against such charges could only be that he didn't do it. But Keith Olbermann, for example, made the foolish claim that "the term 'rape' in Sweden includes consensual sex without a condom". Those belabouring him for this nonsensical falsehood have yet to induce a retraction from him.

More worryingly, in this debate, Naomi Wolf astonishingly characterises the claims as inconsequential, stating that even the alleged events amount to wholly consensual sex on the grounds that once the woman woke up, she and Assange consulted and continued to have sex. Jaclyn Friedman rightly retorts that this isn't 'consent' in any recognisable sense. You can't start fucking someone while they're sleeping and then take a lack of explicit protest upon awakening as consent; it might represent fear, or any number of possible factors.  There are, of course, complex arrangements and unspoken communications between long-term couples, and not all consent is explicitly verbalised.  But the point is that there is consent, in one way or another.  If someone says they didn't consent, there is a problem. And if the allegations were true, then the allegation would be one of rape, not of consensual sex. I have never had much time for Wolf's particular brand of entrepreneurial feminism, her shilling for right-wing Democrats like Bill Clinton and Al Gore, or her alarmist (now ridiculous) putsch-auguring in 2008. Her concern about freedom of information, torture and the rise of authoritarian militarism in the US seems genuine enough. But it is a real shame that in her determination to defend Assange, who is in real danger of extradition to America (thence to a legal black hole) if he is handed over to the Swedish authorities, she has made herself an accomplice of patriarchy.

In an even more alarming example, the radical US magazine Counterpunch has published an article co-written by a notorious antisemite and Holocaust denier who prefers to be called 'Israel Shamir', which imputed the rape allegations to a CIA plant, and called for the protection of Assange from "castrating feminists". Shamir claims to represent Wikileaks in Russia, though he was outed by Searchlight magazine as an ex-pat Swedish neo-Nazi named Joran Jermas some years ago. Not everyone knows who Shamir is, but if Wikileaks doesn't have the sense to check him out, I would expect that Counterpunch should. Still, if they can tolerate a clown like Gilad Atzmon, opening the magazine up to a closeted neo-Nazi to spew misogyny may not be a big step. And if so, that reflects a wider degeneration of Alexander Cockburn's political judgment, which has also manifested itself in some quite kooky output about global warming.

I don't raise these examples with any relish.  And I would much rather the conversation was about the content of Wikileaks' exposures, and what they tell us.  The politics of Wikileaks, which in Assange's case appear to be pro-market Libertarianism, are also worth thinking about. But instead of looking at that, we've been lured into an argument wherein the defenders of Wikileaks are tearing at one another's throats over these rape allegations. This is all the more absurd because it's completely unnecessary. It's obvious that there has to be an investigation of these claims, that Assange must answer questions and give evidence in circumstances that guarantee his safety, and that the attempts by the US government to thwart the Wikileaks project through intimidation - by mistreating Bradley Manning and targeting Assange - have to be resisted. The casual dismissal of rape claims doesn't help that. And all of this is patently obvious.

The film, Made in Dagenham, is now out in cinemas. It's an exceptional film. It is an angry and joyful account of rank and file women fighting an extraordinary and ultimately successful battle to force "those exploiting bastards" (Ford in particular, capitalists in general) to pay women the same wage as men. In telling the story, yes, there is caricature, oversimplification, a few hostages to fortune, and slightly more cheerful resilience than I can usually stomach. But that's because I'm a miserable bastard.

For all that, the film intelligently grapples with the many dimensions of that struggle. I've already written a bit about the political economic background to the this strike that was so decisive in winning the Equal Pay Act, so won't go into detail. But you have the women resisting pressure from some of the male workers, from the trade union bosses, from the Ford bosses, from the media, and from the government. You have them building up confidence through struggle and gaining through it, as one character says, "a glimpse of how things could be". You have the Ford bosses dreading the prospect of a higher wage bill - womens' oppression is efficient business practice for them. You have union bureaucrats worried about whether this will divert resources away from "the blokes". You have the government desperate not to alienate Ford, and the media condescending to the women. And you have some of the most oppressed and exploited sectors of the working class winning an outstanding victory, contributing hugely to the wave of militancy that followed and peaked four years later, and gaining a sense of their potential power in doing so. Not bad for a night at the cinema.



About those small and debatable hostages to fortune? Well, here's one. Barbara Castle is too lovingly depicted. Her drive to 'regulate' the unions was compatible with Labour's agenda of building an expansionist corporate state. But, as this drive essentially involved suffocating rank and file militancy with restrictive legislation, it does not sit well within a film about rank and file militancy taking on and defeating the world's most powerful capitalists. Perhaps for that very reason the proposed 'regulations' are not dwelled upon. Another? Well, the political support behind the strike is underplayed. The sexism among many of the men is shown, but not the real support that came from many of the male workers at Ford. I raise this, though, merely to have something negative to say. It's a remarkably timely film intended, so its director suggests, to encourage people today to "have a go".

If you're an antiracist, or a feminist, or a gay rights activist, or struggling against any form of oppression, Walter Benn Michaels has your number (via Pink Scare) - you're a neoliberal:

For me the distinction is that "left neoliberals" are people who don't understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things.

Yes - neoliberalism, the political philosophy of Hayek and Friedman, of Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet, whose intellectual sources include the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt and the fascist sympathiser Ludwig von Mises. The ruling class praxis whose first practical expression was the fascist coup in Chile. The ideology of the New Right whose hallmark was a virulent attack on the gains of the Sixties, including a legal war against gay rights, a cultural battle to force women back into domesticity, and a racialised drug war that resulted in soaring rates of black imprisonment. That neoliberalism arose as a kind of commitment to feminism, gay rights, anti-racism, etc. Moreover:

it’s hard to find any political movement that’s really against neoliberalism today, the closest I can come is the Tea Party. The Tea Party represents in my view, not actually a serious, because it’s so inchoate and it’s so in a certain sense diluted, but nonetheless a real reaction against neoliberalism that is not simply a reaction against neoliberalism from the old racist Right.

Meanwhile, the actual Tea Partiers seek a "return to the principles of Austrian Economics, and redirect the economy back to one of incentives to save and invest" and demand that the government "cut spending, balance the budget, and institute a plan for paying down debt."
Michaels' brew of logical inversion, fancy, tenuous connections and adolescent provocation should earn him a television spot.

In July, I discussed the story of an Arab man from East Jerusalem who was initially charged with the rape and indecent assault of a Jewish woman but who, in the end, was actually convicted of 'rape by deception', meaning that he had had consensual sex with the woman in question but that the consent was obtained by the Arab man falsely claiming to be Jewish. The judge in the prosecution made the racist basis of this verdict about as explicit as he lawfully could. I am now told that there has been an update to this story in "the left-wing newspaper" Ha'aretz. In fact, it is an update that, I am assured, completely changes the complexion of the whole story. I have been asked by the editor of the F-word, which also covers the new claims, to publicise this information - so I'll oblige. The story is not published in the English-language version of Ha'aretz, so we have to rely on Google Translate, or this translation which is fairly close to Google's version.

The story contains edited highlights from the 100 page declassified testimony of the woman, 'B', who alleged that she was raped by Sabbar Kashur. The testimony was apparently declassified at the request of a local Ha'aretz affiliated newspaper. This forms the bulk of the article's actual content, which details the experiences of 'B' from childhood until shortly after the alleged rape. But the 'expose', as it has been called, depends on another source - the prosecution. The defence, though depicted in a rather unsympathetic light, (sadistically tormenting a rape victim, smiling through it all), is not directly quoted once in the article. The spin on the negotiations leading to a plea bargain is exclusively supplied by the prosecution, who alleged that they opted for a plea bargain - that is, an agreement on a lesser charge of 'rape by deception' - to protect their witness from the traumatic experience of being cross-examined by the defence on her past, with specific regard to previous allegations of rape against her father, and her career in prosecution. Thus, so the article has it, the defence sought to subject a vulnerable victim of rape to an emotionally lacerating attack on her credibility as a witness. It was not out of racism, the prosecution maintains, but out of humanitarian concern for their witness that the state decided to cut a deal with Sabbar Kashur, to allow him to serve a much lesser sentence for a much lesser crime.

The article comes amid a legal process, in which Kashur's defence is appealling to the Supreme Court, to the effect that the facts agreed in the original trial ought not to be the basis of a sentence. They say that his behaviour was at most 'immoral' in the sense that, per the court's verdict, he had sex with a woman while he himself was married with children, and allowed her to believe that he was a single Jewish man. The Prosecutor's Office has responded with fury to the appeal, according to the Israeli daily's account. If it is true that the criminal justice establishment is so deeply unhappy about an appeal which may further undermine their credibility and further shame them before the whole world, then this may be one reason why the court chose to release the testimony of 'B' - and, if I judge right, only that testimony. I have difficulty believing that they simply release the details of closed trials to any newspaper for the asking. I'll leave it to you to consider why Ha'aretz's local affiliate asked only for that testimony. I have also mentioned that the prosecution is quoted in the Ha'aretz article, though the defence is not. The prosecutors have good reason to cooperate with the media. Their argument is, after all, that the media's coverage of this case has been positively beneficial to the defence team. This article, which concurs with the prosecution's charge that its account of the nitty gritty of the trial was not taken seriously by the Israeli media, would therefore be a part of the prosecution's counterblast in anticipation of the Supreme Court's decision.

And this is the trouble with the over-hasty responses, such as that published on the F-Word, which treat this as a case of a victim unfairly maligned, abused in the media, which is "only too keen to pick up on stories of women supposedly ‘crying rape’". The prosecution - the Israeli state in other words - is engaged in a public relations offensive in advance of a court case, in which its single greatest asset is sympathy for a woman who, whether or not she was raped, is clearly vulnerable and in great distress. Is it not basically irresponsible to uncritically regurgitate the claims of an article that is for all intents and purposes, a puff piece for the prosecution before a major appeal? Is it not doubly irresponsible to instantaneously discount the claims of racism in this case, and trivialise the horrified responses as mere "chin scratching"? After all, it is true that the media is generally all too "keen to pick up on stories of women supposedly 'crying rape'" - but it is not true that the media is at all keen to discount stories of black or Arab men raping 'white' women. The facts of epistemic injustice, wherein someone's account is automatically devalued on account of their being black or female, do not neatly favour one interpretation or other here.

It may yet turn out that Sabbar Kashur is a rapist, though it has not been proven that he is. The Ha'aretz article, surprisingly enough for an 'expose', does not add to or subtract from the evidence one way or the other. The only evidence it deals with at all is the testimony of 'B', which might not be accurate, and which at any rate did not stand up in court. Still if it does turn out that Kashur raped 'B', then the original outrage at the state should be multiplied rather than muted, because in that case it would have taken an instance of patriarchal aggression and used it to further bolster racist patriarchy (the kind that 'protects' Jewish women from Arab men), which is unmistakeably and unavoidably what the verdict did. The interpretation of the judges ruling on the matter still says that it is a crime for an Arab man to 'pass' as a Jewish man in order to have sexual relations with a an Israeli Jewish woman, and that legal outcome is still inserted into a national context in which relations between Jews and Arabs are strictly taboo.

For these, among other reasons, I am far from convinced that the Ha'aretz article should place a whole new complexion on this story and our response to it, and am extremely dismayed by some of the incautious and uncritical responses to this story.

A milestone in labour struggles and women's liberation, a 1968 strike by machinists at Ford Dagenham, is to be turned into a film. The strike fed into the National Joint Action Campaign for Women’s Equal Rights, and resulted in a series of similar struggles across British industry, driving up womens' representation in trade unions. It also forced the Labour government to launch an investigation into Ford's practises by employment secretary Jack Scamp, ultimately resulting in the Equal Pay Act of 1970, one of the signal successes of British feminism. For all that the legislation failed to eradicate the yawning pay gap between male and female workers, it did provide the legal basis for a series of struggles that improved the situation of women. This should be a welcome addition to the spate of British films about working class struggle 'back then', from Brassed Off to the Full Monty - great as these films are, there's usually an antiquarian feel about them, as if class struggle is a sort of museum piece rather than an enduring reality. As Sheila Rowbotham and Huw Beynon write in Looking at Class, while films focused on working class issues in the Sixties were filled with anger and hope, emphasising the prospect of coming changes, even the more light-hearted films about the working class since the 1990s, as well as the grittier fare such as Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher, are incredibly pessimistic, depicting a world of disintegration and individual survival against the odds through tenacity and humour.

I wonder, though, what manner of depiction it will be when the producer renders the subjects thus: "I was fascinated by their story, and what struck me in particular was how innocent and unpoliticised they were. All they wanted was a fair deal. It was common sense rather than any kind of axe to grind." This may be a tactical statement, intended to soften the film's edges, but it's also a commonplace form of revisionism of the kind that mainstream culture often performs on formerly untouchable subjects to render them safe - think of the folk myths about Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela. Think of how posterity condescends to them, erasing as much of their relevance for today's struggles as possible. Or worse, how they're held up as self-sufficient agents of change through moral persuasion, as if they did not operate in a milieu of communism, revolutionary movements, labour militancy, global anti-imperialist struggles, and so on, as if they were not themselves convoked by grass roots agencies that have all but been forgotten.

The women were not 'innocent', as this interview with strike committee leader Rose Boland confirms. They were class militants, and they were part of a labour movement that, through the involvement of socialist women, had started to take the issue of women's oppression seriously. The equal pay that the women were demanding had long been part of the TUC's agenda, and its 1963 congress had pushed for the next Labour government, which was elected the following year, to make equal pay a requirement in law. This was followed by an Industrial Charter for Women drawn up by the TUC's Women's Advisory Committee. This is not to say that the extant left and the labour movement was already totally PC and feminist, and that the women were pushing at an open door - far from it. The strike was also part of a rising wave of women's struggles, which had started to make an impact on the male-dominated labour movement, and was registering in some sections of the revolutionary left. It is appropriate to acknowledge that of the Trotskyist organisations the IS (forerunner of the SWP) did not respond to the women's movement as quickly as it might have done. Calls for involvement in the liberation movement were fiercely resisted at first, according to Martin Shaw, who was a prominent member at the time. (Ian Birchall's response to Shaw, disputing many of his claims, can be read here). It was IS women, coordinating among themselves, who effected a volte face that grew in pace as Seventies militancy escalated. In fact, it is fair to say that in the far left as a whole, women's liberation opened up a whole series of cultural battles on the family, homosexuality, children's rights, and so on. Struggles like the Dagenham machinists' strike, and the movement of which it was a part, had a profoundly civilising influence on the British left, and eventally on much of British society as a whole.

The background of the struggle in Ford is that the company's accumulation strategy produced some of the sharpest industrial conflicts in British labour history, and galvanised a militant shop stewards movement that was at the centre of the most radicalised sectors of the organised labour movement. In its three big plants at Halewood, Dagenham and Swansea, the company acknowledged the trade unions, and it would negotiate over pay, but it was adamant that it would not negotiate over tasks and workload - the assertion of management's right to manage was a centrepiece of Ford's strategy. The trade union leadership, for its part, was happy to go along with the Ford management, agreeing that shop stewards should not interfere in matters liable to have an impact on any productivity deal. So, the struggles that took place were often over precisely the issue of the authority of line managers and bosses. The revolutionary left paid especial heed to such struggles because they were more than "DIY reformism", more than bread-and-butter fights. They seemed to point toward the emergence of an agency that challenged the owners' right to dispose of the means of production as they saw fit. The Ford bosses in Detroit were worried sick about what they saw as the "British disease" of constant industrial conflict such that, in 1972, the company announced plans to build a plant in Franco's Spain, where strikes were largely banned and labour costs systematically repressed.

At the same time, the company pursued a systematically discriminatory policy in pay. Gender management - like race management in Detroit - was an effective way of stratifying and dividing the workforce and extracting more surplus from them. This was accomplished through a grading system that ensured that while one in four male workers were on the slightly higher 'C' grade (for 'skilled' workers), only in four hundred women were. The vast majority of women workers, despite performing the same basic tasks as their male counterparts, were deemed by Ford to be 'unskilled'. Such gradings, as Jack Scamp's court of inquiry pointed out, were 'systematic' without being 'scientific'. They relied to a considerable extent on the subjective judgment of assessors who toured the plants interviewing workers and making on the spot assessments as to what grade women should be on. The women largely worked as sewing machinists, making the car seat covers. Largely because it was seen as a woman's job, it was automatically treated as unskilled. Most of the women were therefore on the lower 'B' grade of pay, but even here they were actually getting paid only 85% of the full 'B' grade wage.

This issue of pay 'grading' was not separate from the issue of managers' right to manage, but integral to it, since managers insisted on controlling and determining job profiles in every detail: the workload, the range of tasks, and the pay grade associated with it. While an overall pay settlement, based on a productivity agreement, was usually negotiated between trade union leaders and managers, this always included a clause that it was for managers to shift workers' around between posts and jobs as they saw fit, to allocate tasks, and introduce labour-saving devices where it would boost profitability. That invariably produced a clash between the common sense of workers, who knew their jobs inside out and who understood the rationale of their tasks better than management, and the impositions of the bosses whose systematic-but-not-scientific evaluations were increasingly segmenting tasks in a way that was discriminatory. In fact, alongside the standard use of gender management, the bosses were finding ways to re-grade old jobs, and to create new ones with less prestige and lower pay. Management sought to impose agreements that would divide workers in different plants and roles, so that Halewood workers would gain where Dagenham workers losts, while small part sprayers would lose where sprayers in other parts of the plant would gain. Some workers were experiencing lay-off and deliberate de-skilling while other workers appeared, if only temporarily, to have it easier. These divisions were encouraged to the maximum by bosses, the better to undermine collective militancy, increase productivity and drive down wage costs - to increase the rate of exploitation, in other words.

In the late 1960s, a series of strikes broke out led by women, first at Halewood and then in Dagenham. These were driven by the same issues that had provoked militancy in male-dominated sectors of the plants - workload, managerial infringement, and job grading, and discriminatory practises. But axis of womens' oppression intersecting with the class conflict added fire to the struggle, and gave a pulse of new energy to the rest of the workforce. Huw Beynon, whose Working for Ford is a classic of industrial sociology, reports that these strikes had a "cathartic" effect on the men in the factories. Though they spoke in a macho and often sexist idiom, and though they were socialised in a patriarchal society that wanted them to hate women, and patronise them, they were gaining respect for their female counterparts. At least the women were having a go, they said. "These women are the only men in the plant," they said. "These tarts have taught us a lesson," they said. "We ought to go down there and shout a big fucking 'thank you'." Subsequent militancy, including sophisticated campaigns for parity in pay among all workers in the industry, owed a huge debt to the women's struggles.

The women at Dagenham didn't win the 'C' grade that they were entitled to, however. The Labour government was determined to contain the rising arc of industrial militancy. Maintaining profitability and growth was central to their ability to deliver reforms, and they were determined to resituate the role of trade unions in British society so that workers could not so easily push up labour costs. The In Place of Strife bill introduced by Barbara Castle as secretary of state for employment and productivity, with the support of the Conservative opposition, had been promulgated to thwart sudden shop steward militancy by forcing secret ballots, a 'cooling off' period, and collective bargaining with legally binding results. The bill failed because of opposition from the trade unions, the Labour NEC, a significant chunk of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and even Labour right-wingers like Jim Callaghan, who opposed state regulation of the unions on ideological grounds. This was an opening shot in the collapse of the post-war consensus, and ultimately the Thatcherites would succeed where the Wilson government failed.

In the meantime, the Dagenham machinists' three week dispute was a signal example of the kind of militancy that the government was determined to contain. Ford needed the workers they discriminated against - you can't sell cars without seat covers - but it was markedly bad at containing militancy. So, Castle intervened. The strike committee were invited to have tea in Whitehall, and they put their demands. The meeting ended with the women accepting 100% of the 'B' grade to be phased in over two years, with a promise of a court of inquiry and an Equal Pay bill that would criminalise separate pay grades for women. This ended an explicit gender bar in pay, but also left in place the most invidious form of discrimination in which womens' work was graded as 'unskilled'.

Note that no work, and no worker, is actually 'unskilled'. Skill in the sense used in industrial relations is a social category - it reflects more on the position of the worker within the labour system than it does on the workers' abilities or even necessarily her tasks. The process of 'de-skilling' labour that I mentioned earlier is a really a process of demotion within the labour system, intended to increase the extraction of surplus. The Scamp-led court of inquiry's verdict that pay grading was highly subjective is crucial here. The determination that womens' work was unskilled was driven by the company's need to contain pay claims, and buttressed by prejudicial assumptions about female labour. So it remains today. Job profiles are still highly gendered, and pay and prestige still attaches more to 'male' labour than it does to 'female' labour. Increasingly, as the service economy has grown, women have been pushed into roles where most of the work emphasises emotional labour, which is often a priori classified as 'unskilled' (though this is notably less true of the more macho 'sales' end of emotional labour). And so the same struggles go on, from a higher plateau.

The re-emergence of feminist agitation in the UK, the packed conventions of the London Feminist Network, the Reclaim the Night marches, a reviving feminist literature that is seeing liberals like Natasha Walter become radicalised, the campaigns against sexual objectification and violence against women with the Million Women Rise marches in the capital, thus forms a vanguard, an avant-garde, of the coming class confrontation. It will be disproportionately female workers in the public sector who will be out on the picket lines in the coming months and years. On the fortieth anniversary of the Equal Pay act, it is fitting that the beginnings of resistance to the long misogynist backlash should also be a frontline in the nascent resurgence of working class struggle.

This is an example of racist patriarchy. A man, Sabbar Kashur, has been imprisoned for doing nothing more than having consensual sex with a woman, whose name has not been disclosed. Both parties were of age, and no one alleges that the transaction took place without consent. Initially, this was not clear, as the original complaint suggested that there had been some coercion. But as the woman's testimony in the course of the trial made clear, the only crime that Kashur, now convicted of rape, committed was to have allowed the woman to believe that he was Jewish, when in fact he was an Arab. He did not even actively perpetrate a deceit, merely chatted the woman up and didn't say "by the way, I am an Arab". And that has earned him 18 months in prison, on the basis of a plea bargain. Judge Tzvi Segal explained:

"The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls."

Are you getting it yet? Sex with an Arab constitutes a violation of the sanctity of body and soul - an "unbearable price". This is not a freakish opinion in Israeli society. For example, half of Israeli Jews believe intermarriage between Arabs and Jews is equivalent to national treason (that demographic 'timebomb', you see). Some are determined to enforce this sexual separation through violence or policy. Gangs of men in a Jerusalem neighbourhood roam around, behaving as a de facto vice and virtue squad, to 'protect' young Jewish girls from Arabs. One local authority has set up a squad of counsellors and psychiatrists to 'rescue' Jewish girls who are dating Arabs.

Hostility to inter-marriage and cross-ethnic dating pervades Zionist culture, and is reproduced at structural and institutional levels from the cradle to the grave. There has been a raft of legislative measures since 1948 that are designed to frustrate socialisation between Jews and Arabs, and the existing structures of segregation in education and housing ensure that intermarriage is already very rare. Jonathan Cook, quoting the Israeli sociologist Dr Yuval Yonay, points out that Israel's education system, designed to inculcate Zionist principles in Israeli Jews, largely succeeds in foreclosing Jewish-Arab relationships. The Israeli far right has long wished to enforce the stigma on such relationships with legislation. Meir Kahane, before he was thrown out of the Knesset in the 1980s, attempted to do just that. The current political climate in Israel, with the most racist Knesset of all time and a host of discriminatory measures in the pipeline, will tend to compound this trend.

The woman who filed the charge can hardly be burdened with most of the responsibility. Who knows what pressures she was under? Perhaps no pressures other than the racist ideology that she will have internalised if she is a normal product of the Israeli education system. But perhaps it was put to her that her honour as an Israeli Jewish woman, and that of her family, had been sullied by her treasonous intercourse with an Arab from East Jerusalem and that, if she wished to expiate her crime, she should say that she had been raped. Whatever the case, without the backing of the forces of racist patriarchy her complaint would not have resulted in a conviction. It's not as if it's easy for women to get their complaint heard and a conviction obtained when a rape really has occurred. It's not as if the criminal justice system throws its weight behind women every time they experience domestic violence, harrassment, or sexual violation. This was a complaint that, with its obvious paucity of evidence of any kind of violation or assault, could easily have been dealt with outside of the courts. Instead, they devoted their considerable resources to keeping this man in lockdown - he was under house arrest for almost two years while the case was brought to trial - and so loading the scales against him that even when no evidence of rape emerged, he still ended up 'guilty'.

The court has therefore come down on the side of racist patriarchy, effectively joining those vice and virtue squads in 'protecting' Jewish women from any desire they may have to have sex and romance with Arab men, conserving the sanctity of the Jewish body and soul, and ensuring that the female body is strictly harnessed to the urgent task of perpetually regenerating the race. The criminal justice system itself, from the police to the prosecution and the judges, conspired to deliberately frame a consensual sex act as a violation. The fact that the verdict was secured with a plea bargain suggests that the defence also participated in this charade, intimidating and gaslighting Kashur so thoroughly that he ultimately 'confessed' to having committed a 'crime' and officially expressed a desire to be reformed. This is a calculated deterrence of inter-racial love, sex and solidarity. Perhaps it was seen as a necessary move due to the disproportionate presence of women among the Israeli peace movement, and the fear that their fraternising with the enemy is undermining militarist-nationalist morale. More likely, I think, such judgments are a logical corollary of founding a polity on the creation and maintenance of a demographically preponderant oppressor group through sheer military violence. A militarised colonial state, even one with a thin liberal democratic veneer, is necessarily a racially supremacist patriarchy, and would be so even without outlandish stunts like this conviction.

One of the projects I'm working on at the moment is the subject of work under capitalism. I have it in mind to write the kind of book that insubordinate types such as yourselves could take to work. It would be a sociological satire, a users' guide to the workplace, a good way of wasting company time, and a resource for the bored, stressed and bullied. It would be a work of explanation and incitement combined. Are you interested yet?

One aspect of the subject that always comes up is the way in which politicians speak of work as dignifying and emancipating. Whether you're a single mother, disabled, or simply unemployed, work is the answer. There's an important sense in which this is true. If you're not in a workplace, there's no one to socialise with, organise with, or fight against. You're stuck with your narrow horizons, enforced by a miserly income. In work, you can get a certain measure of independence and self-respect - sociological studies tend to show that this is what people value about work, and it's what attracts women to jobs even where they are paid less than men, even when the job is emotionally or physically taxing. It's an escape from house-bound drudgery.

But work under capitalism can never be so unambiguously liberating, and I would hesitate to participate in the paeans without at least considering the matter of exploitation, and the way in which oppression can be intensified when intersecting with exploitative processes. In this respect, there was an interesting discussion at yesterday's Marxism meeting featuring Nina Power, Hester Eisenstein and Judith Orr. Those of you who have read Nina's book will know that it is a witty, trenchantly iconoclastic and incisive re-thinking of feminist mainstays on subjects from equality to pornography, its provocative opening line setting the tone for the combative, aphoristic style of exposition that follows. The chapter on the feminization of labour and the arguments therein were the source of mild controversy at yesterday's panel. To be brief about it, the argument is about the limits of female-emancipation-through-work.

The tremendous changes in the lives of women since WWII, with their increasing absorption into the labour force, is in very obvious ways a step forward. The erosion of the traditional capitalist patriarchy in the form of the nuclear family, which allotted to women a largely passive, housebound role in the reproduction of society, is a development that reactionaries have every reason to regret. When Frank Field MP recently said something to the effect that "single mothers don't need benefits, they need husbands", he was mobilising this retrograde, patriarchal version of social solidarity to justify the coming cuts in welfare and public services that working class women especially depend upon. (The Tories are now reportedly upping the ante, looking for up to 40% cuts across departments, though this may be an effort to make 25% cuts look moderate by comparison). Field explained that he was opposed to the emphasis on getting single mothers into work, and that the real issue was to target 'shirking fathers' who refused to find work. He blamed them for the high number of single parents, and said that they should lose their benefits altogether if they refused to take a government offer of work. This would coerce fathers into being productive and responsible, restore the cohesive family unit and serve mothers better than work. Now, this is a break from New Labour's agenda of coercing single mothers into jobs, but it is a break to the right. It is also significant that this anti-feminist, traditionalist, pro-family discourse is being used to bully working class men. It doesn't at all free women from the burden of bearing sole or key responsibility for the raising of children. In fact, it reinforces that role by attempting to restate the traditional status of men as key bread-winners. But what it does is attack the idea that motherhood is a social responsibility, that the feeding, education and raising of the future labour force is something that society has an interest in, and has to share the burden of. It individualises what is a social issue, and in this way discloses the hard, Thatcherite kernel at the heart of the Tories' "Big Society" soft-sell.

Still, despite the potential for emancipation that work can offer, the persistence of oppression reflected in such features as structural wage inequality suggests that it has definite limits. These limits express themselves in a number of ways. First of all, as insecurity, and the way in which this is turned into a virtue ('flexibility', etc). Secondly, as occupational typecasting, in which women are encouraged to take roles that involve emotional labour, 'caring' and 'nurturing' jobs, jobs requiring communication skills, and so on. Thirdly, as the sexualisation of labour, in which women are required to consider their sexuality - not merely their bodies, but their ability to be flirtatious and charming - as part of their job skills, part of being 'professional'. Employers don't expect to have to shout at their female employees to dress nicely; they expect women to come prepared, knowing the drill, internalising such requisites as part of their own career mission. And this applies outside work as much in the workplace, ie in social networking sites, which employers and recruitment agencies regularly check to dig up information on CV submissions. Women have to see themselves as walking advertisements for themselves. And finally, perhaps, as a conflict between production and reproduction, in which women are expected to manage child birth and rearing in ways that don't burden the employers. This is just one more way in which women are expected to augment the exploitation process by pre-emptively exploiting themselves, by assuming extra hours of labour, by accepting deductions from their income to pay for childcare. The 'labourisation of women', as Power puts it, is a process that has intensified exploitation and reinvented gender oppression. That it doesn't have to be that way, and that the organisation of women in trade unions offers the beginnings of a way out of this deadlock, suggests that these limits arise in part because of a particular organisation of work, perhaps because of the individualisation of work in the neoliberal phase of accumulation, but more broadly because it's capitalism, and capitalism is most efficient when it is most exploitative, and when that exploitation is augmented by oppression.

I suggested previously that the phrase 'work-life balance' inadvertently revealed something about work under capitalism, namely the fact that the majority of one's waking hours are not spent alive, but labouring in a sort of undead capacity. If work and life are separate and opposing modes of existence, then the tendency of the former to increasingly dominate the latter outside of formal working hours, structuring our 'fun', commanding and regulating our socialisation, governing how we conduct ourselves in public, etc., means that capitalism is almost literally sucking the life out of us. That this process is advancing most rapidly for women confirms that the feminization of the proletariat is not automatically a liberation for women - not without the struggle and solidarity it makes possible.