Bird’s Eye View: Many a true word is spoken in jest (2023)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the February 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many a true word is spoken in jest

‘The Islamic religion not only bans pork and booze; Islamic governments are totally anti-LGBTQ. In Muslim countries you are not allowed to eat, drink or be Mary. It was interesting to watch the Qatar team score its first goal. When the players got excited about it and celebrated by hugging each other, it was surprising they were not immediately stoned by authorities. Karl Marx was not right about much, but he hit the nail on the head when he said, “Religion is the opium of the people”’ (Daily Caller, 1 December, bit.ly/3VQdv5P).

Indonesia today, unlike Qatar, is an example of what passes for democracy under capitalism, yet its recently amended penal code would not look out of place there. Both say there is no room for the proliferation of the LGBT movement. Even worse:

‘Spreading communist, Marxist, or Leninist ideologies, or philosophies deviating from the national ideology of pancasila—five largely secular guidelines for Indonesian life introduced by the country’s first president—will be punishable by up to 10 years in prison. And the country’s rules on blasphemy will be expanded to include apostasy (persuading a believer of one of Indonesia’s six recognized religions—Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—to become a nonbeliever), punishable by up to four years in prison’ (Time, 6 December, bit.ly/3iDfpIC).

Verily, the past lies like a nightmare upon the present. Worse still, the growth of socialist knowledge, the mass understanding and conscious change at which we aim, can only be hindered by such legislation. Marx said, 175 years ago in the Communist Manifesto, ‘law, morality, religion are to him [the working class] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests’. In other words, the ruling class will employ any moralistic ideals at its disposal to tape over the brutal system of exploitation which we run in their interest.

As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly

China Miéville, author of A Spectre, Haunting, On the Communist Manifesto (2022) stated recently:

‘I constantly look around at the world and I think this cannot be as good as we can do. This can’t be as good as we can do and there are only so many times we can say if you just let us tinker with that a little bit, it’ll get better. And when that keeps failing, and keeps failing and keeps failing, we have to say to ourselves there is something in this structure that is leading to this. And when the structure itself says our driving energy is profit, not human need, it is not rocket science to think this might be related to the problems of the world’ (MSNBC, 7 December, bit.ly/3ULNQu2).

This voice of reason makes a welcome change from what passes for informed comment in, for example the American Thinker (sic!):

‘On a personal note, I know these clowns don’t read the book, because I ask every time I meet one; I have yet to find a “communist” who has actually read the Manifesto. (There’s really no excuse given the fact it’s basically a pamphlet, and contains an ideology responsible for the deaths of more than 100 million people, so what could they possibly have going on that’s more important than getting to the bottom of it, especially if they’re actively advocating and voting for communist policies that pave the way for more of the most horrendous tyranny known to man; but what do I know?)’ (American Thinker, 2 December, bit.ly/3Bp9eym).

Echoing the Manifesto’s ‘Society can no longer live under the bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society,’ Miéville states in a by far better, earlier interview:

‘Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now. In a world where 30,000 to 40,000 children die of malnutrition daily while grain ships are designed to dump food into the sea if the price dips too low, it’s worth the risk’ (Science Fiction Studies, November 2003, bit.ly/3PerFvx).

The pen is mightier than the sword

‘In her 50 years of filmmaking, Reichert won two Primetime Emmy Awards and was nominated for four Oscars, winning one with her partner Steven Bognar for “American Factory” in 2020. She quoted “The Communist Manifesto” in her speech, saying “things will get better when workers of the world unite”‘ (abcnews, 2 December, bit.ly/3XRF5RC).

Indeed. But what then, you may well ask, will be socialism’s attitude to existing religions?

‘All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance.’

And, to be clear for the old trope-believing American Thinkers out there:

‘Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat’.

Liberation, not elimination! To be fair, those Thinkers probably have not read The Principles Of Communism in which these passages appear, one of Engels’ two early drafts of what would become the Communist Manifesto (bit.ly/3hbg3wL). In fact, setting to one side the capitalist measures at the end of section 2 (which Marx and Engels in their joint preface to the 1872 edition declared obsolete) there is still much that socialists today would incorporate into a Manifesto for this century including:

‘The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got.’

‘…every class struggle is a political struggle.’

'The struggle for socialism ‘is the independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.’

‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.’

‘Workers of the world, unite!’

The World Cup of Shame? (2023)

From the January 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many members of the Socialist Party, including the present writer, are keen football fans. We love the skill, the beauty, the athleticism of the game.. But at the same time we have severe reservations about the way it is organised and the conditions under which it is played. It is a kind of paradigm of capitalism as a whole, the system we all live under. What this means is that human beings produce the most potentially brilliant mind-blowing inventions and innovations and exhibit the most fantastic skills and ingenuity in putting them to use, whether that be in the field of technology, education, food and drink, sport, and much else. Yet there are almost inevitably serious warps in the way these are used and express themselves. That is partly because so much of what takes place in capitalism is focused on, bent towards money and profit rather than human need, but also because, through its system of forced wage and salary work as a means of survival for the vast majority, it engenders in the individual a sense of powerlessness, of being just a tiny cog, of being able unable to fulfil one’s individual potential.

Most people cope with this by considering it somehow natural quite simply because they have never known or imagined anything else, but also because, as one writer has put it, ‘distraction technologies and the entertainment industry sell us meaningless thrills to patch over the pain’.

Which takes us back to football and the spectacle the world is now emerging from, that of teams of highly talented footballers pitted against one another to win a coveted competition, the World Cup. One might have thought that the awful treatment – lethal in some cases – of those workers who built the structures and the infrastructures for the staging of the spectacle and the retrograde mentality of the rulers of Qatar (and apparently most of the inhabitants) would have led many of those with a degree of fellow feeling for other human beings to consider boycotting what one writer called ‘the World Cup of shame’. But few, it appears, went down that road, the vast majority being swept up in patriotic (or nationalistic or jingoistic – choose the word) hero worship of their own team and its players, individuals whose wealth dwarfed anything their normal daily grind could allow them to even dream of.The pictures on the television screen often showed nothing short of mass hysteria as teams scored goals or won matches, a true bread and circuses for modern times.

Yet at the end what was left was anti-climax, even for the supporters of the team that won the competition as they returned to their normal everyday lives as wage slaves and the powerlessness inherent in that role. Perhaps the spectacle they had experienced was an example of what the writer Charles Eisenstein, in his book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, calls ‘a substitute for the expression of one’s own greatness’.

Proper Gander: Hard Labour (2022)

The Proper Gander column from the November 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ongoing shambles of the Conservative Party’s leadership has overshadowed the recent shambles among the leadership of its Labour Party competitors. Although the downfall of Jeremy Corbyn after the 2019 general election was explained by many as due to his regime’s stance on Brexit and managing the economy, it has also been tainted by accusations of anti-semitism among members. Al Jazeera’s four-part documentary series The Labour Files examines the party’s toxic culture over the last couple of decades, through how these allegations arose and were handled.

The programme came about from what Al Jazeera describes as ‘the largest leak of documents in British political history’. Hundreds of thousands of internal Labour Party emails and records along with audio and video clips dating back to the late ‘90s were received (by whom? From whom?), and the programme-makers focus particularly on details of the party’s disciplinary proceedings against its members. These cases resulted in hundreds of party activists being suspended or expelled, some of whom appear on the documentary to speak about what happened and be shown for the first time correspondence about them. The allegations are revealed to follow a similar pattern, whether in Brighton, Harrow or Wallasey in Merseyside, with party officials searching through members’ social media accounts to find posts critical of Israel and then launching disciplinary procedures on the grounds of antisemitism. Those accused were supporters of Corbyn, who said that if his party got into power it would recognise the Palestinian State towards a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their accusers tended to be pro-Israeli backers of then-leader-in-waiting Sir Keir Starmer, with some even shown to have links to the far-right English Defence League. Corbyn’s spell as leader and its aftermath have brought to the fore nasty divisions between members supportive of Israel or Palestine.

'The Labour Files’ claims that actions against Corbynites were unsubstantiated and unscrupulous have been denied by Labour itself, along with some of the individuals criticised. The documentary is also critical of how some branches of the media fuelled the original allegations, especially an edition of the BBC’s Panorama from 2019 titled Is Labour Anti-Semitic?, which invited a reply of ‘yes’. This is cited as an instance of how the predominant narrative in the mainstream media has been anti-Corbyn. Starmer (against the advice of Labour’s lawyers) later agreed to pay out a six-figure sum to Panorama’s lead journalist and seven previous Labour employees, apologising for them being defamed by claims that their actions were motivated by opposition to Corbyn. Corbyn then said in a Facebook post that this payment risked ‘giving credibility to misleading and inaccurate allegations’. A few days after Al Jazeera released its criticism of the edition of Panorama, the BBC reported on allegations that bullying and harassment among Al Jazeera’s staff went unchecked. The dispute within the Labour Party has spilled out into a spat between the two broadcasters.

The mainstream view promoted by the Panorama episode and elsewhere was that Corbyn didn’t adequately tackle anti-semitism in his party, with the implication that this is due to his pro-Palestinian outlook. It’s argued in The Labour Files that Corbyn was damned either way: if he tried to speed up the processing of disciplinary cases he then would be accused of interfering in them. Lawyer Martin Forde’s report about racism in the Labour Party (commissioned under Starmer’s leadership and published in July 2022) said that there was no evidence that Corbyn’s administration hid or didn’t deal with allegations of antisemitism, and that antisemitism was used as a weapon by both factions in the Labour Party. The report also describes a ‘hierarchy of racism’ in the organisation, meaning that attitudes towards prejudice differed depending on which group was the victim. Examples given of this include how complaints of anti-semitism were addressed but Asian members were treated with suspicion by others who believed they were infiltrating branches, and how black people and those in other ethnic groups were side-lined so that Labour could instead court their traditional ‘red wall’ voters. So, while The Labour Files casts doubt on the widely accepted extent of anti-semitism in the party, it also highlights other discrimination its members experienced.

The documentary shows us that the Labour Party isn’t the saviour of the working class which many people still want it to be. According to the original allegations it’s been contaminated by anti-Semites or, as the programme argues, it’s contaminated by people (some with far-right connections) willing to trump up charges to discredit their rivals.

Al Jazeera is funded by Qatar’s government, and in return for its money it would want the channel’s output to support its own narratives. The Qatari government is critical of the Israeli state’s actions and backs Palestine. The Labour Files reflects this stance by being critical of a pro-Israeli tendency in the Labour Party who stirred up concerns about antisemitism to discredit pro-Palestine Corbyn and his supporters. This doesn’t disprove what the programme claims, but it reminds us that viewpoints in the media are there to support the perspective and priorities of entities with enough funding to promote them widely.

Despite the weight of the claims made against the Labour Party in Al Jazeera’s investigation, it has been scarcely commented on elsewhere in the mainstream media (and the Forde Report was also covered less than may be expected). While there’s a lot else happening in the world for journalists to report on, this suggests that many media outlets want to avoid upsetting Starmer’s Labour now that the Tories are increasingly discredited.

Mike Foster

Action Replay: What Price the 2022 Football World Cup in Qatar? (2015)

The Action Replay Column from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Qatar will host the 2022 World Cup, the first Arab nation to do so. Sepp Blatter, the FIFA president has already endorsed the bid and said ‘The Arabic world deserves to hold a world cup competition’. Qatar enjoys the support of the Arab league and the event is intended to bridge the gap between the Arab World and the West.

The first five proposed stadiums were unveiled in March 2010. The stadiums will employ cooling technology capable of reducing temperatures within the stadium by up to 20C. All of the five stadium projects launched have been designed by German architect Albert Speer and Partners. The air conditioning in the stadiums for the players and the spectators will be solar powered, carbon neutral and provided by Arup of England. The technology employed is remarkable but the labour required for its installation and the building of the stadiums has caused many deaths to migrant workers. Most of the workers are living in labour camps, enduring squalid conditions.

A Guardian article (25 September 2013) reported that a number of Nepalese migrant workers have faced poor conditions, as companies handling construction work for the 2022 World Cup infrastructure forced them to stay by denying them promised salaries and withholding necessary worker ID permits, making them illegal aliens. The precarious situation the various employers have created have forced the migrant workers to beg for food. Thousands of Nepalese labourers in Qatar face exploitation and abuses that amount to modern-day slavery as defined by the ILO.

During a building binge to pave the way for the Football competition in 2022, Nepalese workers in Qatar have been dying at a rate of one per day. A report released in March 2014 by the International Trade Union Confederation estimated that 4,000 more workers could die as preparations for the World Cup continue.

The barbaric conditions that migrant workers endure, brings sharply into focus, that under capitalism, capital is considered more important than labour. The profits that will flow to the companies involved in the Qatar World Cup, when the games commence, are considered more important than ensuring that proper safety conditions prevail to protect the migrant workers.

Kevin