Miners Shot Down - commemorating the Marikana massacre

 

Remembering Marikana - Friday 14 August 2015

On 16 August 2012 South African police opened fire with live ammunition on thousands of striking platinum miners at Lonmin’s Marikana mine in the North West Province of South Africa. One hundred and twelve miners were shot and of those 34 died. The actions of police at Marikana were reminiscent of the apartheid era - Sharpeville in 1960 and Soweto in 1976 - where black people were shot for protesting. The Farlam Commission of Enquiry which was set up to investigate these killings ...largely absolved the police, the state, and Lonmin of any responsibility for this event. To date the families of the miners killed at Marikana have received no compensation.

What made the events at Marikana so shocking is that these killings took place under the auspices of a democratic, post-apartheid state with one of the most progressive constitution and bill of rights in the world. These killings are part of a growing trend of violence by the state toward non-violent protest and dissent in South Africa. The increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the South African state are retrogressive. These tendencies are undemocratic and threaten the right to free expression and legitimate protest.

The struggle to end Apartheid was long and hard. Many people gave their lives to this struggle. Don’t let the deaths of the Marikana mine workers be in vain. Join War on Want to remember the miners and their families

Programme:

• 19:00 Opening Address by War on Want and representative from UNITE the Union
• 19:10 Screening of Miners Shot Down
• 20:10 Marikana: The Aftermath by James Nichol
• 20:30 Q&A with film maker, Rehad Desai

Book your tickets here

Read Ken Olende's piece about the cover up of the South African state here

Defend University of London Student's Right to Protest

Please sign this statement:

We, the undersigned, unreservedly condemn the escalating use of police against peaceful protests at the University of London.
On 4 December, students were violently evicted from Senate House, University of London (UoL), by private security and police. On 5 December, a protest march in Bloomsbury in their support, calling for 'cops off campus', was attacked and kettled by police, and over 30 staff and students were arrested.
We believe this marks an escalation in the level of force against student-led protests at the University of London which threatens the ethos of the University. It seems clear that UoL Management are not negotiating with students and staff who protest - including occupying students - but are simply attempting to suppress dissent. We condemn the blanket injunction brought by the UoL against demonstrations or occupations across their many campuses.
We call on all who care about the future of our Universities to object to this invited invasion of the police onto campuses. Police intimidation has no place in a seat of learning. Many staff and students have fled repressive regimes. We are horrified at supposedly 'liberal' university managements adopting these tactics.
We demand an immediate repudiation of the injunction by UoL Management, no more police on campus, and for UoL Management to engage with students and staff about the concerns that led to the protests in the first place.

Once more on the Daily Mail and Hitler

This article from the Histomat archive 'Reasons to Hate the Daily Mail # 94: Hitler-worship' seems timely as the Daily Mail (of Hurrah for the Blackshirts fame) continues to attack the great Marxist Ralph Miliband, who as a young Jewish teenager with his family was forced to flee the rise of fascism. 

 Edited to add:

Protest: for everyone the Daily Mail hates

London:
12pm, Sunday 6 October
Daily Mail offices, Young Street
London W8 5EH (High St Kensington tube)
Map
Share and invite your friends on Facebook

Manchester:
12pm, Sunday 6 October
St Ann's Square, Manchester
Map
Share and invite your friends on Facebook

On Sunday, all the people hated by the Daily Mail - that's pretty much all of us - are going to turn up at their headquarters, loud and proud about who we are. If you're a woman, a Muslim, LGBT, a nurse, a socialist, a trade union rep, a disabled person or just someone who doesn't like hatred being pumped into public life every day, turn up.

This is an upbeat, carnival-type protest, a statement of defiance against bigotry and hatred. So turn up in a good mood, with colourful banners, full of pride about who we all are.

Journalist and campaigner Owen Jones said: "A newspaper that once had the cheek to back Adolf Hitler and the Blackshirts has smeared Ralph Miliband, a Jewish refugee who fought the Nazis for this country, as a 'man who hated Britain'.

"But the reality is it is the Daily Mail who hates Britain. They hate our proud institutions, like the NHS and the BBC. Their campaign of hatred has targeted women, public sector workers, trade unionists, immigrants, Muslims, benefit claimants, travellers, and other vast swathes of our society.

"We're calling on all those hated by the Daily Mail to join us on Sunday, and to be loud and proud about what they are in a show of defiance against bigotry and hatred."

The New College of Resistance

Earlier this year, it was announced that a private elite New College of the Humanities was to be launched in London, the inevitable logical result of the marketisation of education that has been steadily underway in the UK. It is therefore a pleasure to announce that in less than two weeks a 'New College of Resistance' will be held in central London on Saturday 29 October - a teach-in to help forge the links between lecturers and students for the coming struggles ahead. The timetable is now online, and to register go to here.

John Pilger on Murdoch's magical hypocrisy

'In 1995, Murdoch flew Tony and Cherie Blair first-class to Hayman Island, Australia, where the aspiring war criminal spoke about "the need for a new moral purpose in politics", which included the lifting of government regulations on the media. Murdoch shook his hand warmly. The next day the Sun commented: "Mr Blair has vision, he has purpose and he speaks our language on morality and family life..."

Edited to add:John Pilger and Socialist Worker's report on the latest News International phone-hacking scandal

Fascism and Big Business: The Case of Coca Cola

KKK-event-sponsored-by-Northern-Coco-Cola-Co

Given that the Klan often reflected a cross-section of the community, its members were often deeply embedded in the local power structure. In Atlanta, Georgia, the Klan pervaded the political and legal system--Klansmen filled prominent positions in the police, the courts, and the city government. Newspapers sanctioned their activities and important local businesses like Coca-Cola advertised in their publication.
'Making the Invisible Empire Visible:The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s'

The men in white emphatically embraced an emergent consumer culture, made prominent links with business, and never missed a trick on the merchandising front. Robes and paraphernalia were mass-produced in factories, and gimmicky, KKK-themed advertising surrounded the movement at every turn.
Interview with Craig Fox author of a new work 'Everyday Klansfolk: In Search of the Mainstream KKK'

While Coke was storming through Europe in the 1940s supporting American GI's , Coca-Cola GmbH (Germany) was busy collaborating with the Nazi regime. The company advertised in the Nazi press, thus financially supporting it. It built bottling plants in occupied territories. Then in 1941, when Coca-Cola GmbH could no longer get the syrup from America to make Coke, it invented a new drink specifically for the Nazi beverage market, out of the ingredients available to it. That drink was Fanta. Yessiree! Fanta is the drink of Nazis!
Mark Thomas in the New Statesman

Thank goodness Coca-Cola don't back any dodgy people or terrorist organisations today, hey?

Teach-In: Education for the People, Not the Market

From the Education Activist Network
Teach-in: Education for the People, Not the Market
Sunday 5th December, 12noon-4pm, King’s College London

Speakers include journalists George Monbiot and Laurie Penny, King’s College lecturer Stathis Kouvelakis and veteran of the 1968 student movement John Rose.

According to The Independent the student movement has broken through the ‘cuts consensus’. Now we have an opportunity to challenge a vision of education that is dominated by the market – where private companies are gaining the power to award degrees and young people are to be priced out of our colleges and universities. In the university occupations of May 1968 students took control of their curriculum from the authorities – thousands attended lectures by Sartre, Genet and others. At the national Teach-in, students, academics, artists, musicians, writers, precarious workers and trade unionists will be debating the alternatives for education. There will also be forums for HE and FE/school students to coordinate the next steps in the struggle.

Commercial break

Racists and reactionaries in Britain spend a lot of time this time of year bemoaning the way Christmas as a festival is somehow under threat, somehow in danger as a result of secularism and multiculturalism, as if amid all the Con-Dem cuts and economic austerity, the Xmas question is the critical issue facing our crisis-hit society. Yet you can hardly switch on the TV or walk through any urban environment without being hit by a barrage of corporate propaganda and advertising about Xmas - which has indeed for a while now come apparently officially sponsored by Coca-Cola. Given this, I guess it is good to see there are a number of 'socialist gifts' out there on the market - for example the mug above from Philosophy Football or an equally cool range of mugs and other gifts can be found on the Red Stuff Shop (including an incredibly popular 'Stuff the Wedding - Fight the Cuts' range and an equally respectful and tasteful 'Ding Dong Thatcher's Gone! Party Pack' - both which should come in handy in the months ahead...

Priyamvada Gopal on modernity, women and Afghanistan

The real effects of the Nato occupation, including the worsening of many women's lives under the lethally violent combination of old patriarchal feudalism and new corporate militarism are rarely discussed. The mutilated Afghan woman ultimately fills a symbolic void where there should be ideas for real change. The truth is that the US and allied regimes do not have anything substantial to offer Afghanistan beyond feeding the gargantuan war machine they have unleashed.

And how could they? In the affluent west itself, modernity is now about dismantling welfare systems, increasing inequality (disproportionately disenfranchising women in the process), and subsidising corporate profits. Other ideas once associated with modernity – social justice, economic fairness, peace, all of which would enfranchise Afghan women – have been relegated to the past in the name of progress. This bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators. A radical people's modernity is called for – and not only for the embattled denizens of Afghanistan.

Full article here

Charlie Brooker on the World Cup

I wish I enjoyed the World Cup, if only for some fleeting sense of common unity with the rest of humankind. But I simply don't get it...What puts me off isn't the game itself, but the accompanying patriotism; or, more specifically, the hollow simulation of patriotism used to hawk products throughout the contest.

Take the current Carlsberg campaign featuring an insanely jingoistic dressing room "pep talk" which blathers on and mindlessly on about national pride. "Know this," the voiceover whispers portentously, "that shirt you're wearing? Your countrymen would give anything to put it on." Really, Carlsberg? I wouldn't put down a sandwich to lift the World Cup, let alone pull a sweat-sodden sports jersey over my head. And would even the most committed fans really do "anything" to wear it? Would they saw their own feet off with a bread knife dipped in cat piss? No. They wouldn't. So stop lying.

Having grossly overestimated the cachet of said hallowed shirt, the ad treats us to a cameo from virtually every notable English sporting hero of the past 50 years, pausing briefly for a patronising moment of silence for Sir Bobby Robson, before depicting an ethereal Bobby Moore, bathed in heavenly light at the top of the tunnel, standing proudly beside a lion. The whole thing plays like a masturbatory dream sequence for Al Murray's Pub Landlord character, the punchline being that the whole thing is a sales pitch for a Danish brewing company. The tagline should be: "Carlsberg: as English as Æbleskiver"...There are other adverts of course: Coca-Cola, Nike, Pepsi-Cola, BP, Blackwater Security, The Tyrell Corporation, Damien Thorn Enterprises and so on. All hitting the same phoney note of concord, all somehow cheapening the fun that millions will extract from the tournament itself...

Encapsulates much more eloquently and accurately what I was trying to argue here

Edited to add: See also Mike Marqusee

New book: Neo-Liberal Scotland

NEOLIBERAL SCOTLAND: Class and Society in a Stateless Nation
ISBN 97814
Edited by Neil Davidson, Patricia McCafferty
and David Miller
CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING
Academic Publishers

ISBN 9781443816755 470pp £24.99/US$34.99

Neoliberal Scotland argues that far from passing Scotland by, as is so often claimed, neoliberalism has in fact become institutionalised there. As the mainstream political parties converge on market-friendly policies and business interests are equated with the public good, the Scottish population has become more and more distanced from the democratic process, to the extent that an increasing number now fail to vote in elections.

This book details for the first time these negative effects of neoliberal policies on Scottish society and takes to task those academics and others who either defend the neoliberal order or refuse to recognise that it exists. Neoliberal Scotland represents both an intervention in contemporary debates about the condition of Scotland and a case study, of more general interest, of how neoliberalism has affected one of the “stateless nations” of the advanced West.

Chapter One takes an overview of the origin and rise of neoliberalism in the developed world, arguing that it repudiates rather than continues the thought of Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment.

Part One addresses the fundamental issue of social class in Scotland over three chapters. Chapter Two attempts to locate the ruling class both
internally and externally. Chapter Three explores the changing nature of working class membership and its collective experience. Chapter Four follows the working class into the workplace where heightened tensions in the state sector have provoked an increasingly militant response from trade unionists.

Part Two engages with the broader impact of neoliberalism on Scottish society through a diverse series of studies. Chapter Five assesses claims by successive Scottish governments that they have been pursuing environmental justice. Chapter Six examines how Glasgow has been reconfigured as a classic example of the “neoliberal city”. Chapter Seven looks at another aspect of Glasgow, in this case as the main destination of Eastern European migrants who have arrived in Scotland through the international impact of neoliberal globalisation. Chapter Eight investigates the economic intrusion of private capital into the custodial network and the ideological emphasis on punishment as the main objective in sentencing. Chapter Nine is concerned with the Scottish manifestations of “the happiness industry”, showing how market-fundamentalist notions of individual responsibility now structure even the most seemingly innocuous attempts to resolve supposed attitudinal problems. Finally, Chapter Ten demonstrates that the limited extent to which devolved Scottish governments, particularly the present SNP administration, have been able to go beyond the boundaries of neoliberal orthodoxy has been a function of the peculiarities of party competition in Holyrood, rather than representing a fundamental disavowal of the existing order.

Neil Davidson is a Senior Research Fellow with the
Department of Geography and Sociology at the University of
Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland.

Patricia McCafferty is a Lecturer in the Department of
Geography and Sociology at the University of Strathclyde in
Glasgow, Scotland, and Associate Lecturer with the Open
University.

David Miller is a Professor of Sociology with the Department
of Geography and Sociology at the University of Strathclyde in
Glasgow, Scotland

One Dimensional Woman

Writing from a Marxist theoretical perspective about contemporary questions of women's liberation remains a comparative rarity, so it was good to read a review of Nina Power's new book One Dimensional Woman in the Guardian by Natalie Hanman (there is another review online here). As Hanman notes,

Debates around gender equality have reached a particularly paralysing state, with a number of issues – from veiling to sex work – caught in a reductive dichotomy of good v bad. Individual choice is repeatedly deployed, conveniently ignoring a structural analysis or collective and historical dimensions. It is all very well to say one has a right to choose – but what about the ways in which that choice impacts on others? There are endless hypocrisies too: note those libertarians who argue that women "choose" to lap dance but ­often fail to ascribe the same agency to women who wear the veil.

Power's analysis is brilliantly acute on all this, with a critique of capitalism running as a clear thread throughout her interrogation of muddled contemporary feminisms. Pro-war "feminists", for example, are taken to task over the veil. Drawing on Alain Badiou, Power writes: "On the one hand, any woman who wears the hijab must, by the logic of secular reason, be oppressed. On the other, if she makes too much of the rhetoric of choice to justify her wearing it, she misunderstands precisely what that rhetoric is for. The logic of choice, of the market, of the right to pick between competing products cannot be used to justify the decision to wear what one likes, if one chooses something that indicates a desire not to play the game."

Capitalism: A Love Story

Louis Proyect on Michael Moore's new film

Strictly Come Goose-stepping with the BBC

The disgusting BBC decision to consider inviting the Nazi BNP on Question Time is - contrary to the brilliant Private Eye cover this week - no real shock, but it shows just how far away from any notion of 'public service broadcasting' the corporation is prepared to move when the hunt for ratings are at stake...

Edited to add: Why Nick Griffin shouldn't be on Question Time

The Place of the Celebrity in Late Capitalism

The celebrity, then, is a bundle of paradoxes. It has no function other than as an appendage to the process of capital accumulation and no meaning or significance other than as a vehicle for capital at a certain stage in its circulation - and yet, celebrities are also the focus of wish-fulfilment and projection on the part of great swathes of the population. They are invested with all kinds of concentrated, intensified meanings and significances on the part of the voyeuristic-oppressed consumers of the celebrity commodity and yet in order to function properly they must function without meaning other than the circular, sui generis logic of accumulation for accumulation's sake.

Full article here

Remembering Ralph Miliband

The State and Capitalist Society - Forty Years On
One day conference on Friday 22 May, 2009, Leeds.

Ralph Miliband's The State in Capitalist Society was first published in 1969 and widely acclaimed as a major contribution to the revival of both state theory and Marxist political thought. The book still stands as a key work in the development of social and political theory in the second half of the twentieth century. This one-day conference aims to revisit the arguments that Miliband laid out in the book and evaluate their continuing relevance in the apparently very different conditions of the twenty-first century. After all, people still do 'live in the shadow of the state' and states still operate in capitalist societies.

Alex Callinicos on J.G. Ballard

'a great subversive, and the world will be duller without him'. See also this piece, an interview from 2008 with James Campbell:

Ballard's conversation, like his writing, is regularly punctuated with inventories of the liberating spirit of technology. But with scarcely a twitch to indicate a change of direction, he explains that his most recent novel, Kingdom Come (2006), "posed the question: could consumerism turn into fascism? The underlying psychologies aren't all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you're looking down the parade, it's the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms. When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence."

Mike Davis on swine flu

...and why 'the corporate industrialisation of livestock production' is to blame for it:

Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers. In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

Where are Ipswich Town going?

Or some random thoughts on the further transition of Ipswich Town Football Club from 'gentlemanly capitalism' to military-industrial complex by someone who has long had a soft spot for the club

[Quick warning to those Histomat readers who are not bothered about a Marxist's take on a small English provincial football club in East Anglia - look away now (perhaps go and read Lenin's Tomb or something]

Ipswich Town Football Club rarely makes the news outside of Suffolk, but over the last few days there has been a kind of 'utopian revolution' at the Club which has attracted national attention. A new Chief executive, Simon Clegg, was suddenly appointed by the owner of the club, Marcus Evans, and the next day Jim Magilton, the likeable but ineffectual manager was out and replaced by the 'no-nonsense hard man' Roy Keane. Many Ipswich fans are still in a state of bewilderment - this was definitely a 'revolution from above' - and 'Tractor Roy' may take some getting used to.

When Ipswich was bought by the mysterious Marcus Evans a couple of years ago, I wondered at what might the future hold, given Evans's day job involves presiding over a company which in part organises conferences on 'Delivering Critical and Actionable Information to Assess, Prevent and Respond to Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive Events' and 'ELECTRONIC WARFARE: Enhancing Warfighter Capabilities Through Technology'.

We now also learn that Evans is a supporter of the Liberal Democrats - so a classic modern 'liberal imperialist' then, and the new chief executive Clegg has no previous connection to the game of football - though he was a former major in the parachute regiment. As the BBC note of Evans,

'He has so far done his talking through statements like the one on the club website which is littered with jargon such as "business portfolio" and presenting the club to an "international audience". All that is a far cry from the days when the blue-blooded Cobbold family ruled Portman Road before former Etonian David Sheepshanks took the reins.'

There is something to be said for Keane - my favorite moment in his career was back in 2000 when he lashed out at the way working class Manchester United fans had been priced out of home games to make way for corporate hospitality:

'Some people come to Old Trafford and I don't think they can spell football let alone understand it. As I've said, away from home our fans are what I would call the hardcore fans - but at home they have a few drinks and a prawn sandwich and don't realise what's going on out on the pitch and that's a worry.'

The potential dangers of what the further corporate takeover of Ipswich Town under Evans means are obvious, but the logic of competition in such a highly competitative capitalist industry like modern football means that a smallish club like Ipswich has to either strive to become a club like Manchester United by whatever means necessary or else slowly fade away into obscurity. The fans need to be prepared to fight the prawn sandwich/parachute regiment/electronic warfare brigade as and when. In the meantime we can perhaps savour Ipswich winning matches 3-0 again...

Thinking outside the (post) box

When George Bush a few weeks ago said of all the things he was most proud of while President his fight against 'ideological thugs' was the thing that made him most proud, it was an intensely ideological statement that revealed Bush to be the worst kind of 'ideological thug' out there - one who pretends they have no ideology of their own - they just deal with 'reality' as they find it. New Labour famously prided themselves on their 'pragmatism' of seeking a 'Third Way' between Old Labour's ideological commitment to welfare state capitalism and the New Right's Thatcherite free market capitalist fundamentalism - which allegedly built on the strengths of both and avoided the weaknesses of both. They were 'non-ideological'. They would just do 'what worked'. They would 'think outside the box'.

And so to the decision of Business Secretary Lord Mandleson, New Labour personified, to 'part-privatise' Royal Mail. Apparently, this is not an 'Old Labour' defence of a monopoly - nor full scale Thatcherite 'privatisation' - it is 'part-privatisation' - a nice 'non ideological' compromise plan that will apparently improve the postal service.

There is only one very slight flaw with New Labour's idea. It is bollocks. As well as threatening 50,000 postworkers jobs, as Seamus Milne notes:

'Just as the free market model which spawned a spate of failed and exorbitant privatisations is imploding all over the world, the British government has seized on the idea of handing over a slice of a socially vital national institution to a predatory private competitor...The idea that, in the wake of the biggest failures and frauds in the banking and corporate sector for 70 years, handing over yet more public services and institutions to private firms is going to be a political winner is simply bizarre.'

Moreover, it reveals that New Labour for all their pretence are in reality as ideologically thuggish as they always were - as committed to the corporate takeover of Britain on behalf of their friends in big business as ever - regardless of all the evidence of how disastrous privatisation has been wherever it is tried. The idea that what one needs when one wants to post a letter is a 'choice' of about three or four different post boxs in a row - all owned by different companies competing with each other for you to send your letter through them - is the ultimate in lunacy - but is the logical endpoint of New Labour's way of thinking. What one wants when one posts a letter is simply for it to arrive safely and in reasonable time at the other end. And the existing system delivers that service fine. As one letter writer in today's Guardian notes,

Once again an attempt is being made to privatise the Post Office. Yet, as we are reminded at this time of year, the Post Office works perfectly well. If there is a shortage of funds, maybe some of the sums used to prop up people who have been markedly less good at providing a public service in recent years - the banks - could be used.

Now such an idea really would be 'thinking outside the box'.