‘The system is fucked’. That is the conclusion reached at the end of the film that has become in the last few weeks Brazil’s most succesful production of all time. ‘Tropa da Elite 2′ is the sequel to a film which itself broke box office records in 2007. It is, in the words of the film’s director José Padilha, unusual for such a politically and socially engaged film to meet with such success.

The first film depicted a series of invasions of favelas by the incredibly brutal military police known as BOPE. It was based on real accounts from former BPE agents, and focussed on the attempts to ‘clean up’ the favelas in preparation for the visit of the Pope in 1997. Some people interpreted the film’s tortured protaganist, Captain Nascimento, as an action hero mercilessly blowing away the bandits, which was not precisely the intention of the film makers. Any kind of gung-ho interpretation of the sequel is not possible. In the new film Captain Nascimento joins forces with a prominent human rights activist to challenge the growing power of the milícias, mafia gangs mostly made up of former (and often serving) police officers who dominate life in many of the favelas, charging extortionate rates for services such as electricity and gas supplies, cable TV and internet, and threatening, beating and murdering those who stand up to them. The film depicts the way in which they have taken over from the drug gangs that used to dominate crime in the favelas, and also highlights the levels of corruption which permit and sustain their activity, reaching up to the highest echelons in the political system: corrupt politicians in the Rio government and in Brasilia itself - hence the stark and bitter conclusion to the film.

After the recent successful operation by the military to expel the drug trafficking gangs from their strongholds in certain favelas, police officers moving into areas previously outside their control were accused by residents of acting ‘just like in the film’ - demanding favours and a share of the income of local businesses. However in recent weeks the focus in the media has not been on the militias themselves, but on the drug gangs.

The drug gangs appear to be on the wane, but the power of the militias is much more deeply entrenched. Through intimidation and bribery they manage to get their own representatives elected to the city council, in order to protect and promote their interests. As for where the  proceeds from extortion go, the profits do not all go into the pockets of those further up the scale, but also subsidise the pitifully low salaries of the police, who because they earn only around $800US per month often moonlight as private security guards, either independently or with the mafias. The book of the film even goes as far as to say that in Rio, the problem of violent crime is the police.

In Brazil the police and the military are know as the ‘public  security’ forces. However, according to Marcelo Freixo, there is no such  thing as public security. He is well placed to judge; for the last number of years he has been a human rights activist fighting against police corruption in the city. It is on Freixo that the character in the film who tries to take on the mafia gangs is based. He has also just begun his second term as a representative on the city council, on behalf of the Socialism and Freedom Party, which split from the ruling Worker’s Party in 2002.

In that capacity has sought to uncover corruption, to expose links between the mafias, the police and politicians, and it was he who instituted a far-reaching public inquiry into these questions. The recommendations that the inquiry produced have still not been implemented. Although the character in the  film has a different name, in the book of the film he appears under his own name, and so he has gained a significant profile as someone prepared to challenge power in its most dangerous form. The film and the book both show clearly the terrible dangers that anyone brave enough to stand up to the milícias faces.

It is significant that in the first ‘Tropa da Elite’ film the favela is being cleaned up to ensure security for the visit of an international VIP, the Pope. Ten years later the Pan American Games saw the then governor of Rio reportedly embarking on a campaign to ‘retake the favelas’. The games brought new stadiums and a great deal of investment to some of the wealthier parts of the city, but, in the words of a community activist in one of the favelas, delivered ‘nada para os moradores’ – nothing for the people who actually live in the poorer parts of the city.

More recently the Rio government has launched a campaign to install police posts in some of the areas they were previously afraid to enter. By and large this has been a success in the limited areas where it has been implemented, and the events of the last few weeks, with supposedly impregnable strongholds of the drug gangs invaded and occupied in a very short space of time, have taken everyone by surprise, not least the drug gangs themselves. But as the film shows and as activists such as Marcelo Freixo have tried to make clear, the corruption and violence which blight the lives of hundreds of thousands of people throughout Rio is not at this stage directed or controlled by the drug gangs, but by the militias, whose power is more deeply entrenched.

It is very clear what the impetus for this current campaign to retake certain favelas is about: it is in preparation for the coming of the football World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games two  years later. As an increasing amount of people around the world are aware, there is a history of the poor being shunted out of town to make way for these mega-events, as we have seen recently in Beijing, where the residents were impolitely requested to stay inside their homes so as not to get in the way of the important foreign guests, and in South Africa, where a movement sprung up fuelled by outrage at the forced evictions of shack dwellers to enable corrupt land deals backed up by the full force of the state.

Remaking the city for such events is not just a cosmetic exercise - it forms part of a strategy to remake the host city more amenable for business interests and tourism. It is also a means of forcing up rents and land and property prices - poverty that can not be physically forced out of sight and out of mind will not be able to withstand the increase in the cost of living as speculators move in - which raises the question of where the poor are to live. In the 1960s and 1970s the answer to the ‘problem’ of the favela was to uproot and force entire communities away from the centre, to the far west of the city. It has been suggested - and evidence shows - that this is what the preparations for the upcoming events will bring about.

Rio is said to be the capital of informality. The favelas are held to be one of its charms, and the views from some of the those located close to the centre are some of the most iconic images of the city. In Rio, the spontaneity and chaos are very much selling points, and the city is sometimes idealised as a space of democracy: rodas de samba, carnival and the beach, spaces which everyone, rich and poor, shares. Reality often and clearly contradicts this picture; the other side of this unboundedness is social exclusion, the threat of violence and the reality of third-world levels of deprivation. Tourists now flock to favelas on organised tours to get a closer look at this curious mix of heaven and hell. But if these spaces of informality are to be formalised, for whose benefit will it be? For the people who live there, or for the rich visitors? And to whom will these spaces belong once the VIPS have left?

Mega-events such as the Olympics and the World Cup seek to submit all local control to commercial interests backed up by the legal and physical might of the state, and to channel and control all surrounding economic activity in such a way as to benefit certain formal interests which operate, as Andrew Jennings has ably demonstrated, in a world of backhanders and sweeteners. The reality behind the airbrushed images is one of extortion and bribery, both formal and informal. Given the obscene corruption of FIFA and the Olympic Committee, amply documented on this site, and given the recent history of the brutal displacements in Beijing and South Africa, it is clear that corruption in Brazil is about to move up to another level. Fortunately there are signs of a growing movement in Rio to begin to expose and challenge the attempt to remake the city in the interests of corrupt international cartels which are much more powerful, but in a way very similar, to the mafia gangs that seek to control and exploit Rio’s favelas. It is, after all, in the words of Captain Nascimento, no accident that favelas exist in the first place.

What does the audience watching this talk learn about why the majority of the people of Malawi are poor?

They certainly seem to enjoy it, which must be a relief as they have paid thousands of dollars for the privilege of attending hundreds of ‘persuasive, courageous, ingenious, fascinating, inspiring and beautiful’ talks by figures such as Malcolm Gladwell and Steve Jobs on themes like design, business, science and global issues. The slogan of the conference is ‘ideas worth spreading’.

This focus on technology and innovative thinking as the keys to the world’s problems means that the audience is not confronted with anything that might make them feel uncomfortable - the question of changes resulting from collective action by the victims of global crises is not on the agenda, and the nature and consequences of the economic and political system which governs our lives, in the context of the relatively recent surrender by governments all over the world to the global market, is not up for discussion. For all the talk of technical innovation, the framework that the conference represents is deeply conservative, and what the audience pays to hear is a series of fables about how entrepreneurial innovations and philanthropy (the spirit of Bill Gates hangs over the event) will deal with global poverty and climate change.

Given that the talks themselves are sponsored by corporations, this is inevitable. There are a number of themes and interesting questions raised but always within the limited possibilities offered by the global market. Also nobody ever seems angry; anger is clearly not productive, and noone is visibly poor, but then as the clip demonstrates poverty is just a temporary state of mind. Over the weekend in London a much wider and more radical set of discussions took place under the umbrella of Historical Materialism. This is an academic conference open to non-academics which is becoming a regular and significant feature on the international calendar for socialists and Marxists.

What is the connection with TED? The video linked to above was used in one session at HM on the theme of the Big Society. Marina Kaneti from Columbia University School of Social Work used it to illustrate her tentative thesis that social entrepreneurship of the kind praised in the video presents a challenge to global capitalism in that it offers a non-market approach to solving social problems and lifting people out of desparate poverty.

Myself and several others found this highly questionable, and a useful debate which followed served to focus my mind on just what it was that made me feel so uncomfortable watching the video.

To return to my original question, what the video makes clear is that the reason why the people of countries like Malawi are poor is that they are, unlike the shining example of the guy who built the windmill, insufficiently entrepreneurial. It also associates his innovation with that of the company which created the Blackberry mobile phone, whose logo opens the clip as they were generous enough to support this kind of innovative thinking.

Why would a corporation go out of its way to support what appears to be social change in action? As I mentioned earlier, the spirit of Bill Gates serves to inspire an event such as TED. If what is asked of the world’s poor is innovative thinking at the level of coming up with ingenious solutions to the problems they face, the role of corporations if to help them with this, so what we also learn from the clip is that the central driving force of capitalism is social entrepreneurship, and the raison d’etre of the system which governs our lives is a kind of altruism.

There are countless examples of this ideology in action today. Walking past Pret-a-Manger on my way to the conference I noticed once again that the company now seems to be primarily exist to address the issue of homelessness. Pret-a-Manger is of course owned by McDonalds, which few would associate with philanthropy. Adverts for Starbucks exhort us to ‘help’ the company in its mission to ensure coffee farmers receive a far price for their products. And although it has recently been taken to task by protestors for dodging billions in tax, Vodafone sponsors hundreds of people to work fulltime for UK charities and NGOs for two months. All of this chimes perfectly of course with the specious doctrine of the ‘Big Society’: a smaller state with those in need dependent on the munificent whims of wealthy individuals and companies who donate their time and money in aid of the common good.

So with all this beneficience and promotion of social need over profit, where have all the capitalists gone? To Hollywood, where as Zizek points out countless films depict evil corporations dedicated to accumulating capital with no regard for the social or environmental consequences. Watching these films one starts to get the sense that the ideology of capitalism is increasingly “anti-capitalist”. Films such as Wall-E, Blood Diamonds, Syriana, etc. actually “exemplify what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film[s] perform our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.” One might also mention films such as The Corporation, Wall-Mart - the high cost of low price and Black Gold which portray what might be seen as an enormous conspiracy to cheat consumers and the world’s poor.

Laudable as a lot of these attempts to expose the iniquities of global capitalism may be, they share a common failing in portraying the system as an anti-social plot by evil men. This is the other side of the coin of the idea that a few well-meaning individuals and corporations can turn capitalism into a system works for the benefit of all. Both notions rest upon a set of implicit assumptions which are conservative in nature. As Hugo Blanco recently remarked, there is no global conspiracy between evil capitalists to destroy human life on this planet; the destruction is driven by the logic of the system, outside the control of any individual or organisation.

The famous quote of Frederic Jameson asserts that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’. This is certainly true in Hollywood, with countless other movies depicting our imminent demise. There are, however, very few mainstream films that tell stories of people coming together and collectively challenging the logic of accumulation for accumulation’s sake and creating a better kind of society (which could make for a happy ending). Just as in fact there is no-one at TED who draws attention to collective solutions, to trade union or political organisations, to the Zapatistas, to grass-roots struggles in defence of the environment or of jobs or working conditions, to a different kind of world. These kinds of initiatives are a greater mechanism for meaningful, radical changes in society than social entrepeneurship and the generosity of individual capitalists and corporations.

The ideology of charity and self-sacrifice no longer plays a merely peripheral role in the doctrine of neoliberalism. Capitalism increasingly disavows its own central mechanism of capital accumulation and proposes instead that its innovations are designed to take care of social need and deal with global crises. Few people are rationally fooled by this, of course; but to challenge these specious ideas and insist on the need for a society genuinely based on taking care of social need it is necessary to engage in organised political struggle. The belief that capitalism is capable of dealing with the challenges that face humanity is pure utopianism.

The prospect of the failure of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, with reports of unfinished facilities leading to athletes and even countries threatening to pull out, has led to an outpouring of racism in the British press. India was never fit to host the games, we read. It was a mistake to award such a prestigious event to a third-world country. Officials in India have also been keen to lambast their fellow citizens for their corruption and inefficiency, and a former sports minister publicly hoped the Games would collapse in disarray so India would not be tempted to bid for future events.

Such reports are now par for the course, perhaps even adding to the anticipation itself. Very similar things were written and said in relation to Athens, Portugal, Beijing and South Africa. But some of the commentary around Delhi has sought to look beyond this specific event to look at the whole genre of international sporting mega-events. In an excoriating article in the Guardian Simon Jenkins condemns the whole farrago and its real legacy of corruption and wastage. A separate report told us that holes dug all over Delhi to plant trees to beautify the city have led to an outbreak of Dengue fever. This is a telling image: attempts to makeover the urban environment to satisfy the overweaning demands of superpowerful sporting bodies such as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA are never merely cosmetic, and they always leave scars which may never heal and are increasingly difficult to hide.

Cities spend vast amounts of money to obtain the privilege of hosting such events. In so doing they find themselves trying to satisfy garguntuan appetites. The comi-tragic claim by the British Government that the 2012 Olympic Games will be more sustainable or even an ‘austerity games’ conflicts dramatically with the growing bank of reports highlighting the corruption, overspending and displacements mega-events always occasion. The Brazilian Government also affirmed that the World Cup in 2014 will be an opportunity to showcase and develop parts of the deprived Northeast of the country which do not have such a high level of international recognition. Unfortunately what such optimistic statements fail to acknowledge is that no democratic or national authority makes the decisions about what gets built and where. The terrain of the games is entirely given over to the voracious whims of an international cartel of corrupt megelomaniacs, media executives and giant corporations. The journalist Andrew Jennings has documented the extent to which the histories of the IOC and FIFA show them to be two of the most corrupt institutions on the planet, with the key players and any developers able to scramble onboard pocketing unimaginable quantities of cash, while for very many people the price paid for three weeks of sport is the loss of homes and communities.

Employment is of course one of the most commonly proclaimed benefits of such events. If the prestige were not enough justification for the cost and disruption, the boost to employment and tourism will surely compensate. Here in London over the last few weeks, however, we have seen posters appear on the tube offering opportunities for volunteers to make 2012 happen (a scheme sponsored and coordinated by none other than McDonalds). The roles on offer (staffing the turnstiles and information booths) are of the kind that one might reasonably have assumed to be remunerated. As for the purported benefits of tourism, we now know that not to be the case.

The legacy of all this is supposed to be the acquisition of world-class facilities and infrastructure to attract and dazzle future generations of high-worth visitors. Mega-events have come to play a vital role in the boosting of cities, a central element in the (failed, but nevertheless ongoing) neoliberal model of transformation of the urban environment. The aim is to construct cities of prestige and glamour for the mega-elites, while the poor are increasingly shunted away out of town, hidden behind barriers of billboards advertising the wares and the might of Nike, McDonalds and Coca Cola. But of course what cities such as Delhi, Rio, Beijing and Cape Town, cities home to millions of working and struggling poor, need is not world-class elite infrastructure. There is no urgent requirement for more luxury hotels to accommodate the kind of people who jet around the planet engaged in high-level competition, whether athletes chasing medals or the ubiquitous business traveller seeking deals. In the case of Delhi there is a desperate need for sanitation, electricity, running water, proper public transport, schools and health facilities. London needs to house generations of working class people currently crammed into poor quality and overpriced rented accommodation, rather than sporting superstars. In every city in the world people could be gainfully employed in the provision of all such basic facilities. But instead the cheerleaders of neoliberal globalisation offer the urban poor the once-in-a-lifetime chance to participate in the construction and guarding of new colosseums, built over the ruins of their former homes, while dressed in a uniform generously provided by a fast food company.

After the very public horrors of Beijing 2008 and South Africa 2010, with another of the world’s most unequal societies, Brazil, set to suffer two mega-events in two years, there is now a growing movement against the way in which sporting events are used as a tool to transform and sell off our cities for commercial gain. The left and radical activists everywhere need to engage with these campaigns, wherever attempts are made to sacrifice the urban environment to the lions of international neoliberal capital. No more colosseums!

A picket of the Russian Embassy in London  is to be held on Monday September 20th. The protest is part of a series of international actions in defence of the Khimki hostages.

These are two grassroots antifascist activists (Alexei Gaskarov and Maxim Solopov) who are currently in custody in Moscow on fabricated charges facing the prospect of very heavy prison sentences. The campaign they are part of put a temporary halt to construction of a planned Moscow-Petersburg toll highway through the Khimki Forest. In essence, they have been taken hostage by local authorities and police officials. If they are tried and convicted they could face seven years in prison. Meanwhile, police and other law enforcement agencies continue their hunt against other activists, especially those with connections to the antifascist movement.

Over the past three years, forest defenders have suffered numerous arrests and other forms of harassment by local police, as well as physical attacks carried out by “anonymous” hired thugs, including neo-Nazis. These actions by the Khimki administration and its partners are explained by the significant commercial interest they have in seeing that the highway construction project is completed.

The next pre-trial detention hearing for the two young men is scheduled for late September. International Days of Action are taking place to demand their release. Our main slogans are Freedom for Alexei Gaskarov and Maxim Solopov! and End the Persecution of Forest Defenders and Antifascists! For more details, go to the Khimki Battle website.

Picket the Russian Embassy, 13 Kensington Palace Gardens, from 5.45pm, Monday 20th September.  High St Ken tube.  Banners and placards welcome.  Called by Green Left, Socialist Resistance and the Russian collective Chto Delat.

Around 120 protestors braved the elements on Tuesday evening and raised their voices in a spirited and lively anti-cuts demonstration outside the offices of Haringey Council. The demonstration was organised by the Haringey Alliance for Public Services and marked the first council cabinet meeting of the new term. Speakers from HAPS, Unison, Unite, PCS, UCU, Haringey Solidarity Campaign, the Coalition of Resistance, the Right to Work Campaign and several more met with a resounding reception with their furious condemnation of the Tory Libdem governmen’s proposed cuts in public services and their opposition to any attempts by the Labour Council to enact them.

Haringey is one of the areas of the country with the highest level of unemployment, particularly among young people. It is also an area which depends on public services and public employment, with 28% of the local working populaion working in public administration, education and health. Despite this, the coouncil has announced its intention to press ahead with £70,000,000 in cuts over the next four years. However, the area has had a proud tradition of resistance, going back to opposition to  rate-capping and to the Poll Tax in the 1980s, and although the campaign has only been up and running for two months it has already generated a number of headlines in the local press. Now the task is to develop its roots in the local community and build connections with local union branches, drawing attention to where cuts are being threatened and organising to prevent them by all necessary means. In doing so it will need to draw on the lessons of previous and current campaigns and contribute to the success of the national anti-cuts fightback. Tuesday’s demonstration is certainly a very encouraging sign that this will happen and it provides an excellent example for other local campaigns to follow.

Slavoj Žižek recently proclaimed that ‘only a strong dose of the left can protect liberal freedoms’. At a moment like this, such a clear statement of the importance of radical left-wing ideas and of activity inspired by the Socialist tradition has of course to be welcomed. Žižek has become a hugely influential figure over the last few years. His work reaches a readership far beyond that usually achieved by often very lengthy books dealing with the ideological form and content of subjectivity, Marxist cultural analysis and the urgent need for radical political transformation. He writes prolifically, speaks to overflowing auditoriums worldwide and is the star of at least two films dedicated to his work. It is clearly a good thing to have left-wing ideas achieving such wide circulation.

His new book ‘Living in the End Times’ deals principally with our collective response to the various forms of armageddon that we are faced with. He applies psychoanalytical concepts and ideas borrowed from thinkers such as Hegel to look at the origins of denial of the consequences of the economic and ecological crises that threaten to assail the globe and the possibility and probability of radical transformation. Along the way he takes in subjects as diverse as the children’s movie Kung Fu Panda, environmentalism as a new opium of the people, the case of Josef Fritzl, and glimpses of a utopian society in the work of Franz Kafka, producing his usual dazzling succession of highly entertaining and inspiring insights, along with a few frustrating and puzzling diversions on the way.

His work can sometimes be very hard to follow, given that in employing concepts from the work of Jacques Lacan it often echoes his endlessly elliptical and self-reflexive style; this is mixed with the eternal negations of Hegelian thought. A complete understanding of Žižek’s work would demand an indepth familiarity not only with those two thinkers, but also Marx, Kant, Heidegger, Lukacs, Adorno, Althusser, Marx, Freud, and many more, not to mention Wagner and the Bible. In the process of using (his often very idiosyncratic version of) those works to identify deadlocks in contemporary ideology, he encounters deadlocks in his own thinking, which he often neatly sidesteps by shifting the focus from political analysis to psychoanalysis to philosophy, using the tools of each to interrogate assumptions in the others. Put simply, he has a habit of changing the subject when it becomes clear that his argument is leading nowhere, but so captivating is his manner of doing so it can easily blind the reader to the inconsistencies of his arguments.

How useful is Žižek’s work to non-academic Marxist revolutionaries? He is keen to stress that he is a Marxist, but caution is called for; after all, Derrida and Baudrillard also allegedly defended the Marxist tradtion of thought, and Žižek himself has made it clear that none of his pronouncements are to be taken at face value. Echoing Alain Badiou’s notion of the messianic revolutionary (but entirely unpredictable) event, he often leans in the direction of Maoism. He also tends towards arguments of an ultraleftist variety; for example it is difficult to tell when he is being serious, joking or merely being provocative when he says that the protests against the Iraq war were counterproductive and served to legitimise it. Outside of an academic context such an argument would immediately be dismissed as ultraleftism, and the consistent tone of pessimism which characterises his work finds an appreciative audience among those keen on radical ideas but unwilling to engage in radical action. It contains a great deal of often vague exhortations to overthrow liberal capitalism but with no suggestion as to the means of doing so. At times he does seem to embrace the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, and at other times dismisses them out of hand and disparages the notion of building a revolutionary organisation along twentieth century lines. In a similar way he explores the radical core of Christian thought, but is very keen to stress his atheist credentials. As for his occasional embrace of certain aspects of Stalinist terror, he most often seems to be joking, which even the most cursory knowledge of psychoanalysis would recognise as a sign that he has an uncomfortable relation with Stalinism. The same can be said for his talk of the need for revolutionary terror in some form, echoing the Maoist cultural revolution.

Žižek has explained that his notion of the role of the philosopher is not to answer questions but to show that the wrong questions are being asked. Nevertheless, many people look to him for answers. His most consistent answer is: wait, think. His books can therefore be enlightening and inspiring but there is nothing that tells what to do, rather a confusing guide to what *not* to do. Also, as Ian Parker points out in his critical guide to Žižek’s thinking, there are clear limits to the use of the concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis, concepts intended to be applied in the process of individual analysis, as a strategy for radical political transformation. Žižek’s works provides an invaluable tool in the struggle to interpret the world; in terms of our understanding of the task of how to change it, we need to look elsewhere.

‘Living in the End Times’, Slavoj Žižek , Verso, 2010

An exhibition has just begun in the Institute of Contemporatry Arts in central London which should be of great interest to socialists and radical activists.

Chto Delat? is an autonomous Russian collective made up of artists, philosophers, activists. It takes its name from one of Lenin’s most famous quotes: What is to be done?

The aim of the group is to reconcile artistic practices, political theory, and radical activism. Using tools partly derived from Bertold Brecht and from critical theory they produce films and newspapers, host workshops and debates and engage in artistic practice wherever they are invited by institutions.

Their engagement with cultural institutions in not an uncritical one. They highlight the ways in which bodies such as the ICA exist within a system of power and patronage. Chto Delat? are careful to avoid their work being commodified and becoming part of the international art market.

The current exhibition is titled ‘The Urgent Need to Struggle’ and is the central project in a season called ‘Dissent’. Chto Delat? present a didactic installation consisting of films and texts representing a range of the art projects and political campaigns they have engaged in. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a Brecht-style ‘Songspiel’ piece of filmed musical theatre which enacts the debate around the controversial construction of the 403m-high Gazprom tower in St Petersburg. Another film shows the struggle in Serbia against the eviction and demolition of a Roma encampment.

Engagements such as this demonstrate that, for all the highlighting in the gallery of quotes and images from certain icons of radical thought - the Black Panthers, Debord, Godard - this is not remotely a case of radical chic. Theirs is a genuine exploration of and attempt to recuperate not merely the spirit of but also the principles and tactics of previous generations of radical thinkers and activists and to put them to good use. The context in which they do so, that of the ‘New Russia’, makes their work highly risky. The regime of ‘managed democracy’ has labelled all forms of oppositional activism ‘extremist’, and their actions are very regularly physically targetted and attacked by the authorities.

The group describes itself as ‘leftist’ rather than Socialist or Communist, but it takes inspiration from Alan Badiou’s already seminal essay ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, which is a call for the reassertion of the most basic principles of the communist project: that the fundamental subordination of labour can be overcome, and that a egalitarian form of collective social organisation is practicable.

A visit to the exhibition is very highly recommended. It runs until October 24th and will be accompanied by a number of debates and films, including an open-microphone ‘Night of Angry Statements’, and a weekly screening event addressing political filmmaking. More details at www.ica.org.uk/chtodelat.

There were a number of very positive things about the Compass conference ‘A New Hope’ in London last weekend. Both Caroline Lucas and Nick Dearden communicated very radical anti-cuts messages to a packed and very appreciative audience. The Green leader was very hard on both New Labour and the ‘obscene Tory cuts’, while the head of the Jubilee 2000 campaign talked of the disastrous failure of both the neoliberal and New Labour experiments, emphasising the urgent need to go beyond passive campaigns based on marketing, postcards and lobbying and to build links in the UK and internationally with those actively resisting capitalism. A packed Labour Representation Committee meeting saw John McDonnell tear into the legacy of New Labour and its campaign s to destroy democracy inside the party, using very underhand tactics such as parachuting central candidates into safe seats in order to bypass local Party organisation. He spoke too of the need to build a broad campaign against the forthcoming wave of cuts and to actively demonstrate solidarity with people in struggle, particularly with the BA strikers. An intervention from SR pushed the Labour Left to build for and to take part in the demonstrations on June 22nd outside parliament, an idea which McDonnell fully welcomed.

There were also a few dispiriting aspects of the Conference. Although Diane Abbott stood out in the party leadership debates, with her clear attacks on the illegal wars and her firm defence of immigration, there was clearly very little to distinguish between the other four on the platform. In a half-full meeting on how to rebuild the party in opposition, Doug Alexander demonstrated that reports of New Labour’s demise may be premature, with his jargon-heavy managerial and breathtakingly uninspiring talk of community organisation in the form of the London Citizens, a church-based voluntary organisation suddenly beloved of Ed Miliband, James Purnell and other unreconstructed New Labourites. There was no talk in the debates about the banking crisis or the war, and afterwards a number of people seemed to be just as stuck as to who to vote for as before.

But as I say the leadership debates were not really representative of the rest of the conference, which saw a number of meaningful debates about what the role of the Labour Party should be, especially for its grassroots, and discussions on how to integrate and galvanise the 20,000 new members who have joined since the election, given that local party organisation is by the sound of it pretty moribund.

One thing which reawakened unpleasant memories for me was witnessing just how insular and sectarian the Labour Party can be, with some speakers rejecting out of hand any cooperation with the Green Party, and the otherwise relatively sensible Tony Robinson going out of this way to equate the dangers of ‘infiltration’ by the ‘trots’ and by the BNP. This kind of attitude will endear the Labour Party to noone on the left.

Compass itself is I would say to the left of the Labour party in that it stands for certain principles of Social democracy which of course New Labour long since abandoned. Neal Lawson seems to regard Sweden as something of a utopia, which is ironic given that the new education Secretary Michael Gove also claims to take inspiration from there. In terms of an influence on Labour policy it has to be seen as a good thing, a move away from the mid-Atlantic Anglo-Saxon politics of the New Labour age, as represented by the four identikit ex-New Labour policy advisors on the leadership debate platform.

Nevertheless if the Labour left is to rebuild itself on the basis of activism it will inevitably have to happen despite the leadership, and there are a number of uncertainties that will have to be argued out first. It was refreshing to see Labour members having meaningful discussions about politics, but it does seem that inside the party itself space for such debate is limited. It can’t take place as part of the elections for a new leader, or at what Tony Robinson called the ‘meaningless’ conference, or at the apparently deathlessly boring branch meetings. There is hope however that the Labour left can revitalise itself through groups such as Compass, Tribune, the LRC, and Young Labour, which is soon to become semi-autonomous and may be transformed into an activist organisation rather than merely a factory for producing New Labour apparatchiks. Perhaps just as a thousand flowers may bloom on the broader left as the struggle against the cuts begins to heat up, the same will happen inside the Labour Party. Those 20,000 new Labour members have almost certainly joined the party because they hate the Tories and want to do something to challenge them. The Labour left may well be coming back to life, and the revolutionary left is faced with an opportunity to engage with it and to encourage any signs of genuine and meaningful radicalism to broaden and deepen.

One of the tragedies of the failed New Labour experiment is that it was always based on a repudiation of all historical precedent. Alistair Darling seems to be feeling the pinch of this somewhat. He has attacked the Tories for fiddling the figures to make it appear that government borrowing over the next period will be higher than it actually is, and to pretend that the rate of growth will be lower, all in aid of their plan to slash away at jobs and public services. (1)

I recently came across a very instructive lesson from history, from the notoriously dark decade of the 1970’s, a decade we are repeatedly warned against returning to.(2) As Andy Beckett makes clear in ‘When the lights went out: What really happened in the 1970s’, whenever the seventies are evoked we are shown a certain very partial picture, painted in stark and ominous Thatcherite tones, of what happened. We all know that in 1976 the prospects for the economy were so bad that Britain had to go ‘cap in hand’ to the IMF.(3) But Beckett uncovers a darker and more complex picture of what went on.

Callaghan did indeed enter very lengthy negotiations with the IMF, which had recently shifted from its original remit to adopt what we now know to be a harsh neoliberal line. In return for the loan it demanded huge cuts in public services. The Prime Minister himself, along with his increasingly rightwing Chancellor Dennis Healey had already been implementing a series of cuts to public spending in response to a series of runs on the pound and was not entirely averse to more. But he did manage to bargain the IMF, which initially demanded cuts of 4.5 billion, down to less than half that amount. He had quite a job getting it through cabinet, with Tony Benn in particular resolutely opposed. But the figures seemed to speak for themselves: with a loan due to be paid back to a number of countries by the end of December, the Bank of England would be left with only two billion in the kitty, and in the event of further speculative attacks on the currency, the country would be bankrupt.

The cuts were carried out and the prospect of bankruptcy narrowly avoided; so far, so familiar. However, the story has a sting in its tail. When the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement was announced six months later, it was as if the crisis had never happened. In direct contradiction with what the Treasury had predicted would be the case, the PSBR was not 10 billion, as had been thought, but 5.6. The emergency IMF loan, and the cuts upon which it had been conditional, had been unnecessary.

How had Sir Humphrey and the gang got it so very wrong? The answer is, they hadn’t. Here we learn of a ‘hallowed Whitehall tactic known affectionately to all insiders’ as the ‘Treasury Bounce’, as a Whitehall insider is kind enough to explain:

‘You can’t manage the economy tightly over a long period. You only get a chance once every decade to get the economy under control. What you need is a crisis that frightens ministers into accepting [your ideas]. … It’s what we call the Treasury Bounce.’

Here we find a very resonant echo of what Naomi Klein would write about in ‘The Shock Doctrine’: a crisis designed and manufactured in order to push through changes in public policy which would otherwise be politically unacceptable.

Callaghan’s Government paved the way for Thatcher’s attacks on public services and jobs. In much the same way, in 2009-10 New Labour were already talking of the urgent need for massive cuts, once again serving up a steaming platter of public sector spending reduction for the Tories to feast upon, allowing them to carry out a fundamental reassessment” of the way government works.(4) The kinds of cuts that are being planned for a huge range of government services are of the kind that never heal. If only Alistair Darling was able to read we might not have found ourselves in this dismal situation.

(1)   http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jun/11/alistair-darling-david-cameron-apology“

(2)   See http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aLnsi63waXdQ

and

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/sep/16/uk-economy-public-spending-thinktank“

(3)   See e.g. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/conservative/4319385/Britain-may-need-IMF-bail-out-warns-David-Cameron.html

(4)   http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jun/08/george-osborne-cuts-departmental-spending