The Cedar Lounge Revolution

A spot of bother… May 17, 2010

John Waters is troubled by the minor outbreaks of violence during the week. Not very troubled for he sees it as unserious. And in that he may well be correct.

But he starts, as ever, with something insipid about ideology.

Catching sight last week of a poster advertising a “Right to Work” event, I was put in mind of Ali G’s deadpan question to Tony Benn: “Everyone’s goin’ on about the right to work – what about the right not to work?”

It’s a good joke, because it touches on something fundamental: the inability of ideologies to comprehend human desire for happiness resides neither in working nor not working, but always in a “something else”, and contingent on factors that change as that-which-is-desired is attained.

Is he entirely serious? Has he read Marx, or indeed the US Declaration of Independence, where working isn’t placed at the heart of human happiness but is indeed seen, in terms of the forms taken and structures within which it is currently and previously framed, to be entirely detrimental to human happiness (granted the Declaration of Independence is a little hazy on this, but the concept of ‘the pursuit of happiness’ is a not ignoble one)… I think I’ve asked this before of Waters, but has he read Gorz who explicitly positioned his thinking in a refutation that work was the be all and end all? Ah well, who can tell? Meanwhile…

At mention of the SWP, or Sinn Féin, or Éirigí, most people switch off, or just smile. It is not funny that a garda has been assaulted because of the inflammatory rantings of some well-heeled follower of Leon Trotsky, but still the whole thing suggests itself as something unserious.
Occasional outbreaks of such agitation are essential to the maintenance of the fiction that a democratic system embraces a wide range of options vying for the public’s attention. That they sometimes spike into the red suggests the limits of democratic freedom are being healthily explored. Thus, such episodes have precisely the opposite effect to that intended, deflating rather than exacerbating public dissatisfaction with “the system”.
…..

In Violence (Profile Books, 2008), the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj ZiZek studies the presences of various kinds of violence under the surfaces of our societies. He argues street violence is an incoherent response to the hidden violence that holds societies together; that such demonstrations, far from threatening “the system”, are dramatisations of impotence, “blind acting out” in societies operated by systems impervious to any kind of citizen intervention.

Which is fine to an extent. There’s few enough of us I imagine who believe that violence from whatever quarter is going to have any great effect one way or another, or indeed will achieve anything particularly one way or another in this system. There’s also a strong argument that far from demonstrating something educative to those more broadly who might be won over it does quite the opposite… that it merely delegitimises the left by collapsing all left wing activism however variegated into a single easily transmitted narrative for the media and political class.

But then, returning to Waters … we move eastwards, for not content to make a fairly obvious point – and one that many on the left might share – which is that street protest doesn’t trump hard slog in communities, he has to go and up the ante…

A few days before the scenes of anarchy at Leinster House, a slightly different kind of mob gathered in front of the Liberal Democrats’ HQ in London to protest about, er, the first-past-the-post voting system. The emotions of this assembly had been whipped up not by a lone demagogue but by the media in general, which for three straight weeks had promoted Nick Clegg as the British Obama.

Er.. not quite, had our intrepid correspondent cared to actually read or watch the media he’d have seen that there was actually a push back from almost all sections of it at such an idea. And even in the media favorable to Clegg, the Guardian, the Independent and that’s about it, there was much less made of him being a British Obama than he’d like to think. Indeed truth is Clegg’s achievement, such as it were, was simply to appear least overly polished in the first and second debates. Now, it’s curious that Waters should ascribe to the media something that in truth was an achievement of Clegg himself.

I also would suggest that to argue that the ‘mob’ at the meetings of the LD weren’t whipped up by the media, but by the prospect that the Liberal Democrats were on the brink of going into government and were – rightly as it now appears – concerned that in any coalition deal, most likely with the Tories, going to dump PR in favour of a more limited variant, or none at all.

None of these, what I like to term, facts, troubles Waters in the slightest. For he carries gracelessly onwards…

In the election, the Lib-Dems’ vote had remained more or less the same as in 2005, but this in no way encumbered the delusion of the 1,000-strong gathering of Notting Hill luvvies that they were on Wenceslas Square in Prague, dateline 1968. Their faces were transfixed with hate, but all their banners said was “Save Our Votes”.

The ‘transfixed with hate’ line is a classic. Were they? Go back to YouTube and tell me whether it was hate or enthusiasm. I can’t tell, but I’m doubtful that ‘hate’ is the proper word. Moreover there’s a certain glibness about the 1968 point (or indeed the concept of ‘Notting Hill luvvies’ – far more likely to be words applicable either to Cameron’s set or the worst of New Labour). In a society like the UK there is a strong, even an over-riding case, that first past the post has been profoundly detrimental in producing perverse election results. The Liberal Democrats could rightly point to the fact that they have garnered extremely high poll ratings to no benefit precisely because of FPTP and that that system has led to a lock on power by other parties with vote shares only slightly ahead. This may interest Waters not in the slightest but it ill behoves to condescend to others about democratic deficits.

I have this odd feeling of late that everything is being acted out as a reprise of some inspirational moment from deep in the last century. Half of those who address us want to be Che, and the remainder JFK. Each development in the public lives of our societies becomes like a movie in which everyone becomes infused with a sense of what “should” happen, ie what would happen if it really was a movie. The media whip this up for all its worth, unleashing massive collective disappointment when it emerges that, actually, it’s the same plot as last time and drifting again in the same direction.

Hmmmm… who pray tell is Che and who is JFK in our society? I don’t see an even divide. And frankly I’d be dubious about hearing from anyone who thought they were even faintly echoing either.
Then we’re onto yet another tendentious phrase…

Although we live in an advanced capitalist society, in which psychology is far more important than ideology, our political culture remains frozen somewhere short of 1970.

Really? I must think of that when next at some community meeting, that psychology is more important than ideology, y’know, in terms of how peoples ‘choices’ are framed in terms of education, health, even – take public swimming pools, as indeed they are being taken, sporting and leisure activities and how privatisations and commercialisation tips up further an already uneven field. But for Waters it’s all reducible to one area…

Although the real divisions are now to be located within the torn, paradox-ridden heart of the individual, we still describe things in terms of “us” and “them”. Although our market culture conditions us to lionise and covet private property, our public discussions seem simultaneously to hold that wealth somehow rightly belongs to everyone. And, although welfare and other radical forms of redistribution have unleashed a statist monster that now threatens to throttle the life out of the individual, we find, while the “have-nots” are utterly uninterested in left-wing ideas, a ludicrous pseudo-socialism persists among the “haves”, more and more of whom employ the “most vulnerable” as human shields to protect their own stashes of loot.

Since when is welfare a ‘radical form of redistribution’. Waters, I’m almost certain, can hardly point to any society – let’s take the OECD as a sample – which doesn’t have it in one guise or another. The nonsense about a ‘statist monster’ ‘throttling the life out of the individual’, is boilerplate. But even if it were true that ‘socialism’ were of no interest to the have nots, whoever he may define them as, that would not prevent an imperative for socialists to do their utmost to ensure that at least some fragment, some spark of it remained. For him, though, to trot out that laziest of right wing analyses, that somehow socialism is merely a form of selfishness is truly sad. But what’s also curious is his sneering tone about such matters, as if poverty either doesn’t exist or can’t be ameliorated and therefore those who do concern themselves with it are essentially frauds.

What a pity. An innovative thinker who can’t even be bothered any longer to sort out that the basic stuff is correct. No more and no less.

Here’s éirígí’s take on some of the events of last week.