The Stall (1998)

A Short Story from the January 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Saturday 1 November an Alternative Politics Fair was held in Norwich and three of us decided to go along for the day to run a couple of stalls. We set the stalls side-by-side with one section piled high with copies of the Socialist Standard, including some free back numbers, and the other with literature, books, pamphlets, and leaflets of a radical nature.

Norwich (for those of you who have never visited it) is a colourful and cosmopolitan little city and political people know one another, either by sight, shared experience or reputation, so as we gathered in the auditorium of the Norwich Arts Centre there was no lack of co-operation between stall-holders as stalls were set up and boxes were carried into the hall. A general atmosphere of camaraderie reigned and some curiosity shown for other stalls. The Anarcho Syndicalists were there, a Disabled Rights Group, Friends of the Earth, Black Womens Rights, Ethical Investments—don’t ask me, I was told it was to do with investing ethically which is much as I thought. At ten thirty we opened to the public and waited for the surge.

The surge did not come and there were no hordes but there was a steady trickle and people did look round and some left laden with books and leaflets. Interest was shown in the Socialist Party stall and explanations required as to our political colour. We had to refute that we were anything to do with Militant Tendency, Socialist Workers, the Independent Labour Party or Arthur Scargill. Helpful discussion ensued from this but the idea of a system without the use of money was usually greeted with smiles of disbelief and some people said it would be very nice but . . .

The main problem for people seemed to be “human nature”. Fortunately the Socialist Party’s leaflet on the human nature question was included in packs of leaflets and Socialist Standards and handed to everyone who came to the stalls.There were the usual arguments. People would not work if food and shelter did not have to be struggled for. There would always be people who would grab more than others. We have to have leaders to represent us. Some people are bone idle and would live off the backs of those who worked harder. We endeavoured to deal with these arguments as they cropped up, but I have always found when talking to people about the abolition of money that they are, on the whole, not comfortable with the idea, seeing themselves as perhaps bereft without cheque books, wallets and purses to carry about with them. There is a general ignorance about the part money plays and a belief that it is money that is valuable and not the goods which are produced by people's labour. In fact I suspected that in the minds of some people money had been raised to that of almost supernatural status.

October's Socialist Standard was snapped up, the illustration on the front cover about Class War spotted immediately. We were asked what had happened to them. People agreed that in theory Class War s aggression had been unacceptable, but glints in the eyes of people told me that they found it exciting and satisfying, in some way responding to anger and frustration about the capitalist system. I found no-one to support anything the Labour government is doing and no-one who expected it to do anything other than it has done since it came to power.

It was a good day and Alistair sold many books on his stall, but disappointing to find that reformism is still depended on and money is still seen as the best means of exchange apart from perhaps the LETS system and bartering. A little sadly, I think, we packed our literature away and dismantled the stalls until the next time.

Heather Ball

Capitalism and the Internet (2): The Internet and Ideology (2000)

From the February 2000 of the Socialist Standard

Link 1

  The Internet is being hailed as a saviour by both capitalists and anti-capitalists alike. Rarely has any technology been so universally viewed as a holy grail by sworn mutual enemies. Who is right? Will it destroy capitalism or rejuvenate it?

At the Christopher Columbus school in Union City, New Jersey, a dustbin school with a dropout rate as high as its pass rate was low, an experiment was conducted in 1993. Each student was given a home PC and taught online, with both teacher and parent training to assist. The dropout rate fell to near zero, the daytime attendance rate rose to near perfect, and test scores rose 10 points higher than the NJ state average, in every subject. (http://www.gip.com).

Though schooling is unlikely ever to be entirely online, for social reasons, the possibilities of education in general via the Internet are nevertheless enormous. Traditional education—in real time—relies on too many ingredients being present in the right order, amount and quality. Virtual schools can tailor classes to individuals to a far higher degree of precision. Night school does not have to be at night, or local, or regular, or in one place, or reliant on one teacher. Educators have literally a world of resources to draw upon, while self-educators have the best access to knowledge of any generation that has existed. The establishment of the global knowledge network which we are now seeing has been aptly described by Douglas Rushkoff as “the hard-wiring of the global brain” (Cyberia 1994). Education, once the province of the rich and jealously guarded by them, is being democratised at an unprecedented rate. And ideology cannot change without a change in education.

Education is also about debate, and the lack of a public domain or sphere in which to discuss ideas has been held to be a key factor in late 20th Century ideological stagnation (Habermas, Schneider, Rheingold, quoted in Alinta Thornton’s Masters thesis, University of Sydney, (Link). Now, however, Usenet, the global network of mailing lists and newsgroups, is becoming an organic encyclopaedia and coffee house which permits debate on every issue 24 hours a day. As the Romans had the Forum, so we have Usenet. It is the new theatre in the war of ideologies now heating up. Good ideas will spread there. Bad ones will die there. Usenet is where theorists become activists, and where activists learn their theory. Capitalist ideologues are going to have to work harder in future, for educated populations cannot be fobbed off with fairy tales. They start to expect things their forebears didn’t even imagine. They start to make demands.

The DD Digerati

The first demand is more democracy. Capitalism in its advanced form relies on a model of liberal democracy to get the best out of workers, but it has to take a chance on them asking for too much. Now, governments from Britain to Malaysia to Costa Rica are “enthusiastically” experimenting with virtual council meetings and online voting in an effort to keep abreast of the public expectation of more open government. That this enthusiasm is ambivalent is shown by the fact that many of these same governments are also trying to legislate controls into the Internet—unsuccessfully as it happens. The cybergeek contingent—the “digerati”—are excitedly lyricising about running society with Direct Democracy instead of representative government, which they somewhat naively imagine was a democratic expedient imposed by geographical and other practical limitations.

Astonishing technical advance

Nobody who comprehends the class struggle will believe for an instant that the rich will allow Direct Democracy—except where it can’t do any harm and where it might bore us stupid with trivial decision-making. However, the expectation of more democracy is an important and empowering development nonetheless, for it represents a line of convergence with socialist thinking and away from the leadership mentality which plagues radical thinking. When it becomes loud enough, it will be a sign that the working class is gaining a little self-respect at last.

The second demand is a new agenda. As the organisational ability of “wired” protesters is now increasingly on a par with that of governments, as we saw with J18 and N30 and may see again with Mayday 2000, a new sense of potency seems to be sweeping through the radical mind. We don’t have to take it lying down. Corporations are not invulnerable. Individuals can be held to account. Even an entire social system can be challenged, as disparate and sometimes frankly deluded single-issue activists coalesce under the gravitational pull of common experience into what may yet become an embryonic anti-capitalism movement. Instead of being a passive consumerist mass, we can learn to think of ourselves as a proactive team of individuals. The Internet is creating a climate of new possibilities that cuts away at the dead growth of apathy and spawns a new idea: the network consciousness, a concept of interactive, interlinked human nodes in a vast, decentralised and co-operative process, a foretaste of working class consciousness.

Custodes custodiamus

Schooled however in the old thinking, we might conclude that the state will take over the Internet and use it as a new and terrible weapon of control over the working class. Accepting that they have always won in the past, we can only imagine that they will always win in the future. Is there not now a CCTV camera on every street corner? Do they not have their satellites, listening stations and Cray computers monitoring every move, purchase and phone call we make? Well, they may do, and those dedicated to underground criminal or insurrectionary activities may indeed worry about this, but there is something here for the monitors to worry about too—we can also watch them.

The near-level playing field of the cybersociety means that whatever they can do to us, we can do right back to them. This mutual integrated surveillance is already taking place, as US state governors now find themselves and their domestic affairs interrogated by an international brigade, and the government of Mexico finds its attempts to quietly crush the Zapatistas constantly harried and hamstrung by the unwelcome attention of the global online community. Amateur video of Rodney King helping police with their enquiries started the LA riots, and protesters now typically tool up with camcorders, laptops and mobile phones. Anything one protester discovers, all soon know. Governments, like the burglars they are, hate to work in the spotlight, and now it isn’t only the news media which are directing the beams. This is a game we can all play. Quis custodes custodiat? Answer: we do.

Bomb damage

Much is made of government censorship, and governments can certainly close down any website they don’t like. But only temporarily. Just as the forerunner of the Internet, ARPANET, was devised by the military to route around bomb damage to any node, so the Internet can equally route around censorship damage. Besides, the Net is global, whereas governments are local, and what one government dislikes another will frequently allow or ignore. China, so keen to imprison radical Internet users, is nevertheless in a minority of one where censorship is concerned, and its control of internal information flows is haemorrhaging at a thousand different points.

Monitoring of users worldwide is easily countered by the rapid growth of “anonymiser” sites (e.g. www.anonymiser.com), which strip out your personal details and let you roam without fear of identification. Autocensorship software is notoriously unreliable and it is easily outmanoeuvred. Besides, the rich themselves are not keen on government control. A book called Friendly Spies quotes the IBM office in Paris as having done a set of experiments to demonstrate the fact that the code keys they were required to share with the French government were being used for industrial espionage purposes (quoted in GIP).

It may not be states we have to worry about. The omniscient state may be an obsolescent dinosaur in any case, as capitalism militantly embraces the ‘free’ market and multinationals grow so powerful that “an estimated one quarter of all world trade now consists of sales between subsidiaries of the same firm” (Alvin & Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War, 1993).

  “The flow of information into or out of a nation can no longer be effectively controlled by the state; information is everywhere and accessible. To participate in the burgeoning economic benefits of world commerce means adopting practices that undermine state control . . .” (Carl Builder, Strategy analyst, RAND Corporation).

Riccardo Petrella, a former science and technology director at the European Commission, predicts the collapse of the nation state and the rise of a ‘hi-tech archipelago’ of city-states in conjunction with multinational companies, while Warren Christopher, former US Secretary of State, predicts “5000 countries rather than the hundred-plus we have now” and George Yao, Singapore deputy PM, foresees the disintegration of China into hundreds of city-states. (Quoted in Toffler).

Today, cutting edge; tomorrow, garbage

Were this to occur, it must be a disaster for fascist ideology, since it gives the nationalists just what they think they want, and lets them choke on it. People might fight for the right to be called Basques, Latvians or Chechens, but it is hard to imagine them fighting over Coke or Pepsi in the same way. In any case, war is likely to become increasingly hard to justify when the global working class is just that, global. Much of the hate propaganda necessary to stoke public sympathy for a war will be impossible to foist on an internationalised class which works together, online, every day of the week.

The String Vest of Secrecy

Even secrecy is on the wane in the future, if one believes the former science adviser to President Reagan, G. A. Keyworth. Pointing to the fact that traditional intelligence gathering has been on the monumental scale (the US Government produced 6.3 million classified documents in 1992 alone) and involves a huge industry of chaff sorting and “analysis paralysis”, he says: “The price of protecting information is so high that classification becomes a handicap”. Meanwhile Robert Steele of US Intelligence, a critic of the secrecy industry, says: “The hidden costs of secrecy are so immense they often outweigh the benefits by a wide margin.”

Steele and others argue for an open system, with very little secrecy. It is surprising what is already in the public domain. Larry Seaquist of US Naval Intelligence reports that they get more useful information from one Internet PC than all their private and highly secret SPARC workstations put together. There are already few things which are really secret, even if we might wish they were. An underground nuclear cookbook called Basement Nukes prompts Michael Golay, professor of nuclear engineering at MIT, to say: “What’s classified today is how to build a good weapon, not how to build a weapon.” In a wider sense, the Internet will by its nature militate against the holding of secrets, for risk-free disclosure is a button-press away for any individual and information sharing has long been the accepted mode of transaction online. The global brain, one might say, will steadily illuminate its own dark areas. Capitalist ideology, insofar as it depends on secrecy, is due for a hammering.

Paddy Shannon

(Next month: we continue the discussion of the impact of the Internet on capitalist ideology.)

Link to part 3

GLITCH 

As if to prove that computer technology is not infallible, in Part I of this series the first two paragraphs on page 9 of the January Socialist Standard , were garbled as a result of the unexplained introduction of material from another article. The garbled passage should have read:

Yet talk of “boxes” is itself an obsolescent concept, as Xerox have perfected “e-paper” (Observer, 22 August) and research continues towards wristwatch computers and even brain implants, giving rise to talk of “synthetic telepathy” in the more distant future. And as science revolutionises the Internet, so the Internet is revolutionising science. With the spatial decoupling of the scientist from the task, the so-called “collaboratory” is born, enabling multiple users to share a singe physical resource, enhanced productivity with no travel time, and participation by experimenters in multiple, geographically-distributed projects.

Our apologies to readers and the writers—Editors. 

Proper Gander: All’s Whale That Ends Well? (2020)

The Proper Gander Column from the March 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stacey Dooley has an open-minded, grounded approach to her documentaries, with an engagingly genuine interest in the contentious subjects she covers. Her latest programme, Stacey Dooley Investigates: The Whale Hunters (BBC3), follows on from her previous investigations into women suicide bombers and sex offenders, among other topics. Stepping out of her comfort zone, she goes out on a Norwegian boat hunting minke whales, and watches as one get harpooned and dragged aboard. Most of the programme, though, is taken up by her meeting families on the Faroe Islands, where eating long-finned pilot whale meat has been part of their culture for a thousand years. Hunting pilot whales is called the ‘grind’(grindadráp) in Faroese; when a podis sighted out at sea, fishing boats herd the whales towards the beach where they are killed by hand. The recommended method claims not to cause any suffering: a sleek-looking tool called a spinal lance, the use of which is monitored and regulated. 

The Faroese live a rural life, close to nature and therefore not as distanced from where their food comes from as most of us. When we load our supermarket trolleys with meat or fruit or any food, we scarcely think about how it was produced. The Faroese see pilot whale hunting as ‘taking food from nature’, which it is their ‘duty’ to do. They emphasise that they don’t catch any endangered species and it’s more environmentally friendly than rearing cattle, which carries a significant ‘carbon footprint’. The grind is small-scale subsistence farming, with the meat just distributed among the islanders rather than being for export. Pilot whale meat remains popular among the Faroese, despite the islands’ officials recommending years ago that eating it should be avoided. This is because it contains high levels of mercury, DDT derivatives and polychlorinated biphenyls (chemicals largely banned in the 1970s), leached into the oceans and ingested by the pilot whales.

The Faroese see the grind as part of their culture, which others don’t have the right to interfere with. Whaling around the Faroe Islands isn’t covered by the International Whaling Commission’s ban on commercial whaling. For starters, the long-finned pilot whales hunted there are a kind of dolphin, despite their name. Also, as the Faroe Islands are devolved territories of Denmark, as Greenland is, their autonomy means that they don’t go along with Denmark as one of the countries which agreed to the ban. ‘Aboriginal whaling’, defined as the hunting of whales by indigenous communities is exempted from the ruling anyway. Japan always got round the ban by hunting whales for ‘scientific’ reasons, while Norway, Canada and others object to the moratorium and have continued commercial hunting. The hunting of whales was banned because many species were declining rapidly towards unsustainable levels. Another factor is that whales and dolphins are more intelligent than most other mammals, raising questions about their capacity for suffering and awareness.

Objections to the grind mostly come from the Sea Shepherds, a direct-action group, whose mission ‘is to end the destruction of habitat and slaughter of wildlife in the world’s oceans’. They used to actively protest against the grind, but since being banned from this their work has shifted largely to raising awareness by posting grisly videos of the hunt online. The group of them which Stacey meets are made up of activists from the UK and America, while none are Faroese. The Sea Shepherds emphasise their non-aggressive methods, and argue that the grind is a tradition which should be left in the past, and that it’s not as humane as its proponents make out. They point out that the spinal lance often isn’t used correctly, causing suffering to the pilot whales. Stacey shows an adviser to the Faroese government gory footage of a dolphin being killed in a clumsy, drawn-out way. Official reports claim that the methods used are humane and quick, whereas a fifth of whales take up to six minutes to die. The adviser recognises that sometimes the grind can be brutal, but that’s because it takes place in an uncontrolled environment, not in a slaughterhouse.

Objections to the grind and the risk of contamination haven’t stemmed the Faroe Islanders’ love of pilot whale meat. The grind, and whaling in general, have been traditions for hundreds of years, and could continue for hundreds more. How would the issue of whaling be handled in a socialist society? Of course, we can’t say with any certainty, as it’ll depend on whatever the situation is at the time. But the practice is still likely to divide opinion and represent bigger questions about cultural differences, animal ‘rights’ and sustainability. A socialist society would make its decisions democratically, rather than through hierarchies, commercial interests or laws, as we have to in capitalism. All sides would be able to have their say, and all relevant facts – about contaminants, whale populations, the methods used – would be freely available so that people can make an informed decision. This could be made by voting directly on whether or how to hunt whales, or by electing people into roles to resolve the issue, or some other approach we can’t imagine now. Would it be only for the whaling communities to decide? Maybe, maybe not, if hunting had a wider impact. It’s likely that a socialist society would have some decision-making structures with a global reach, more accountable and accessible than their equivalents today and not run through states (as states would be obsolete). So, it’s possible that something like the International Whaling Commission could remain in a socialist society, albeit structured differently and more democratically. Whichever way any decisions about whaling would be made in socialism, they would aim to directly meet people’s needs and wants, in balance with nature. There are no easy answers with controversial issues like whaling, but a socialist society would enable us to make decisions in the most reasonable way.

Mike Foster

Pathfinders: The Ladybird Book of Revolution (2017)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Older readers will recall with fondness their salad days learning to read in the company of nice and respectable middle-class kids Peter and Jane, and Pat the dog. Ladybird has lately achieved renewed prominence with their amusing self-spoofing series for adults covering hangovers, red tape, mid-life crises, throwing a sickie, the people next door and surviving a zombie apocalypse. Having successfully re-established themselves as nostalgia comedy they’ve now done a very odd thing. They’ve let Prince Charles co-write a Ladybird book on climate change.

It’s a bit hard to see the thinking here. Ladybird books won’t mean anything to today’s children, and the retro look surely can’t be aimed at them, so Ladybird seem to be suggesting that some adults are too stupid to understand the case for climate action unless it’s written by a doddering royal in large type and words of one syllable, and with circa-1960 hand-drawn pictures. Condescending or what, your royal haughtiness?

Of course you can certainly argue that none of us really understand the science, because we’re not climatologists. But at the political level the argument is much simpler. Barring a few loony deniers, the entire scientific community is united and unequivocal. There is a problem. The question is what to do about it. There now, that wasn’t difficult, was it?

There is something of an elephant lumbering around the environmental debate which some will be painfully aware of while others may be studiously ignoring it – the lack of participation by what is called the ‘traditional working class’ (TWC) and the consequent domination of the subject by the cultural middle class (CMC).

These terms require a short digression. Socialists identify two economic classes in society which are perpetually at war with each other, the ruling or parasitical class which owns and controls everything but does no real work, and the working class or 99 percent, who control nothing and are economic slaves. One could picture these two classes as opposing trenches on a battlefield. For us there can be no middle class. If there was, it would be standing in No Man’s Land getting shot at by both sides.

However most people use the word ‘class’ in a vaguer cultural sense, with all sorts of prejudices and preconceptions attached. It is this world of cultural categories that is at issue here.

Go to any Green party or environmentalist meeting and count the number of people there with university degrees and CMC manners, voices, clothes and social connections. Very often there will be nobody at the meeting who does not fit that description, be they TWC, immigrants or other ethnic minorities.

There are three possible explanations for this lack of participation. The first is the one put forward by HRH, in collaboration with Ladybird. The message isn’t simple enough.

The second explanation is the one put forward by many sympathetic Greens themselves, as well as politicians and media pundits, and ably expressed by a British climatologist recently: ‘For too long the climate change discussion has been about things that will happen in 100 years time. For economically insecure people, statements about what might happen in 100 years time they just don’t care about, because they know these kind of predictions have been proved wrong in the past and will be in the future’ LINK).

One could go further and suggest that people facing a desperate struggle to survive today won’t care about anything that’s a hundred years away whether the predictions are correct or not. But while there’s obviously some truth in this, it is not the case that concern over the environment is always associated with personal financial well-being, i.e. that having an environmental conscience is somehow a luxury item that the poor can’t afford. Many TWC people are not especially poor, have foreign holidays every year and spend a fortune at Christmas, while some people with university backgrounds have no job or money yet still shop ethically, eat tofu and recycle religiously. It’s not simply about the money.

The third explanation is that the TWC are not only not interested in environmental concerns, but actually put off them because of their CMC image. If you live on a council estate, don’t have a degree and speak with a local accent, you might very well decide that environmentalism is not for you. You’re pretty sure you wouldn’t like or relate to anyone, and they wouldn’t like you. Your face, voice, clothes, hair and make-up just wouldn’t fit. You talk yourself out of being involved.

And are you entirely wrong to do so? Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that some CMC environmentalists are quite happy in their cosy little clique and would be secretly horrified if it was suddenly invaded by working-class types wearing hoodies and bling and reeking of skunk, or hard-boiled council estate veterans with tattoos on their knuckles. Environmentalism is Frasier and Friends and Have I Got News For You?, not Eastenders and Shameless.

The problem is the nature of environmentalist politics, which tends to ignore class politics as essentially irrelevant to the debate. We all live on the same planet, runs the thinking, so we should be able to rise above our petty class divisions in order to save it. But that of course is a lot easier to say when you’re not the one getting the worst of those divisions and you’re not even aware what the worst involves. This is how environmentalism slips into the genteel world of Ladybird, and away from the real and bruising world of class war.

Would it make much difference if environmentalists incorporated class into their world view, given that power resides not with them but with state elites? Well, it would give socialist revolutionaries and environmentalists something in common, and it would make the debate more inclusive, something which needs to happen if anything is ever going to change. You can’t wish away class war by ignoring it, but you can wish away a lot of potential support.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: The Activism Gap (2017)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Given that women are not especially rare in the general UK population, why are there not more of them in the Socialist Party? Is this a specific failing on our part, or more of a general trend? If it’s a trend, what other trends are there, and what changes are taking place?

There are, to be sure, various ‘activism gaps’. Young people are in general less politically engaged than older people, black and minority ethnic (BME) groups less than whites, and indeed the party spectrum itself divides somewhat along income and education lines, from high-end active association with the Tories, Lib Dems and Greens to low-end activity (or former activity) in Ukip, with Labour pertly straddling the higher and middle strata.

A recent House of Commons research paper looking at UK political party membership sets all this in sobering context. Overall, levels of engagement in any kind of activism are low. Around 26 percent are involved in some kind of sporting or cultural activity, 12 percent in religious or volunteering pursuits, and just one percent in any form of politics (House of Commons Briefing Paper Number SN05125, 28 March 2017).

The report notes the late increase in political interest among young people, from 32 percent in 2015 to 48 percent in 2016, underscoring a similar rise among the general white population from 51 to 60 percent, while observing that interest among BME groups has remained static at 35 percent. But there’s a big difference between labour-intensive political activism and instant, cost-free political voting, and here’s where the activism gap becomes obvious: “The largest disparity between the social make up of party members and electors is for gender. While 50.1% of electors were male, 67.2% of party members were men.”

This echoes the findings of an April 2004 Electoral Commission (EC) report which stated: ‘Women are significantly less likely than men to participate in campaign-orientated activities, such as contacting a politician and donating money to, working for, or being a member of, a political party. Women are also less likely than men to join voluntary organisations. Overall, a statistically significant activism gap by gender exists in the UK’ 123235687 (123235687 tinyurl.com/orjweuu123235687 ).

While today the female vote is roughly proportional to the male vote it wasn’t always so, and studies in the 1920s when women were able to vote showed that in practice they often chose not to. A 1960s study found that 'In all societies for which we have data, sex is related to political activity; men are more active than women’ (EC 2004).

It would be remiss not to ask the awkward question whether some form of historical or biological determinism is at work. First, could it be that the historical subjection of the female sex through recorded history has left an indelible mark whereby women now collude in their own political exclusion? To some extent expectations play a part. The Electoral Commission suggests that ‘women have a weaker sense of political efficacy than men; they have lower confidence that they can influence the political process’. But expectations change. Given the speed at which recent history has put up or taken down regimes and behaviours in just a few years or even weeks, it’s hard to picture women in liberal democracies wallowing in a continued sense of impotence just because it was historically so.

History is in any case not written into the genes, but what about prehistory? Could there be a deeper genetic legacy from the earliest times when pre-humans first invented the sexual division of labour (SDL) for purposes of mutual convenience? The classical argument is that women, having far greater investment and risk in child breeding, would choose to exert their social control there, while men, being largely untaxed by the process and anyway uncertain of their paternal credentials, would have looked elsewhere for theirs. This ‘classical SDL’ theory, once favoured by Engels and popular among socialists including William Morris, maintained that SDL was cooperative and not intrinsically oppressive or unequal until the arrival of property society made it so. However SDL is now thought to be modern, not ancient. Kuhn and Stiner, 2006, suggest that SDL emerged as late as the Mid-Palaeolithic, from 250-30,000 years ago, giving homo sapiens a survival advantage over the (probably) non-specialising Neanderthals then dominating Eurasia, and moreover this would have happened mostly in the ecologically-diverse tropics rather than in northerly latitudes. In some tribes, females hunted and men gathered (LINK). So the thinking in anthropology circles has moved away from ‘men and women are different, and that’s ok’ to ‘men and women are the same, and that’s ok!’

But still, discounting deterministic causes, women are not standing up for political change as much as men, and this remains a mystery. The self-disabling ‘too busy at home’ argument is largely a myth today, with 40 percent of women in the workplace and outnumbering men in unions. The Electoral Commission report identifies other factors, like ‘self-relevance’ and gender representation. Asked whether they agreed with the statement ‘Government benefits people like me’, women with a local female MP agreed more than men (49 percent to 38), and the reverse was true for seats with a male MP. Some studies in the US support this finding, others flatly contradict it. A 2011 review argues that knowledge is key: “At lower levels of political knowledge, women’s lower political knowledge depresses their participation in politics. The participation gap disappears at higher levels. These findings complement existing scholarship that finds women hold themselves to a higher standard before engaging in political activities such as running for elected office (Social Science Quarterly, 26 July 2011). In other words, men rush in where women fear to tread.

What could we do to address this activism gap? The EC report suggests ‘support systems’, while some on the left advocate ‘special mechanisms’ (e.g. Lindsey German, 1981, LINK). Such notions of positive discrimination run the risk of patronisingly perpetuating what they set out to solve. But we could do more ourselves, first to emphasise female ‘efficacy’ in our uniquely open democracy, and by offering more members something to do at the outset. Members could write more articles geared towards women and BME groups. Considering that a quarter of the population likes cultural activities, we could provide more social events. And we could construct a ‘Teach Yourself Socialism’ A-Z Wiki on our website to systematise what is currently a rather random DIY approach to learning. Such efforts may not close the gap, but they could help to narrow it.

Paddy Shannon

Clicktivism (2013)

Book Review from the July 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Digital Revolutions: Activism in the Internet Age, by Symon Hill. New Internationalist Books

The title of the book is self-explanatory, unlike the chapter titles such as Chapter 4 ‘We are Next!’ It focuses on a short period but in comprehensive detail. The back blurb explains that the book ‘takes a detailed look at the uprisings that have rocked the world since 2008 and looks at the part that the new media have played in their unfolding.’ There is a degree of presumption about the reader’s politics (and a whiff of reformism) when early on it reads, ‘In 2008, an economic crash exposed the truth of a system in which the wealthy benefit and the rest of us pay for it,’ and ‘corporations have continued to wield unaccountable power,’ and later on ‘something was very wrong … bankers had gambled with money that they did not own.’

The main crux of the book is a riposte to both digital luddites and digital utopians (who Hill labels extreme and ‘two ridiculous arguments’), aiming to strike a balance between the two. To the digital utopians Peter Tatchell, writing in the Foreword, observes ‘Digital Revolutions do not make social revolutions in and of themselves.’ Symon Hill writes, ‘There are cyber-utopians who attribute the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and anti-austerity campaigns and other global movements entirely to technology … with little, if any, reference to the economic factors and human complexities that have triggered unrest, protest and change.’   ‘At the other extreme of the debate are those who think that the internet has made no difference at all … Some even argue that the internet is undermining activism.’ Click ‘Like’ if you agree, presumably.

Ironically, Hill fails to mention, it’s the digital-luddites who are a newer phenomenon than the digital-utopians. Twentieth-century digital-utopians argued that the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe would topple the Soviet dictatorship, or that satellite TV would topple post-Cold War dictatorships.

Hill, associate director of the leftwing Christian think tank Ekklesia, writes ‘The core principle with which I have approached the book is not a belief about the internet but a conviction about power. Liberation comes from below and never from above.’ Why social change does not come from above could be an interesting discussion, but convictions need no explanation: ‘This book does not focus on presidential campaigns or Wikileaks, important though they are.’

To his credit, he goes on to acknowledge that power from below has in the past and can in the present and future challenge unjust and oppressive systems. He first mentions the printing press and its effect in the 17th century, but throughout, there is care taken to argue that the cause has been economic, not technological. He even goes so far as to agree with another writer that there is no causal link between social protest and communications technologies.

He refers to Tim Gee's model of counterpower, in which movements can use 'Idea Counterpower', 'Economic Counterpower' and 'Physical Counterpower' to challenge the power of ruling elites and argues that the internet is relevant to all three forms. One might be inclined to agree with the digital luddite Evgeny Morozov (writer of The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World) who argues that the internet is counterproductive for building physical counterpower. Hill does not overstate his case, quoting critics of net utopians who thought camera-phones would reduce police brutality.

Some obvious advantages are pointed out, for example the ability to rapidly organise and assemble via Twitter using locations revealed at the last minute without requiring leaders to issue instructions, an ability which favours non-hierarchical horizontalism networks with no ‘ringleaders.’  Although all 145 UK Uncutters who occupied Fortnum and Mason were arrested and locked up overnight, Pussy Riot have been imprisoned for much longer.

In fact, you begin to suspect problems with the organisation and the politics (irrespective of the internet) when you read passages such as this, that after police had responded with water cannons and tear gas ‘... the Tahrir protesters met to talk about their demands. Some seasoned activists [thought that] things should be taken in stages … Socialist [sic] campaigner and blogger Gigi Ibrahim explained ’but the people around us in Tahrir Square, the majority who didn't belong to any political group, were chanting for the removal of the regime. So we knew at that moment that we couldn't ask for less … Several hundred activists are thought to have been killed.’ This was all back to front, taking action first, then establishing minimum (not maximum) demands afterwards.

The interests of powerful minorities have always been opposed to democracy and equality. ‘Astroturfing’ refers to political, advertising, or public relations campaigns that are designed to mask the sponsors of the message to give the appearance of coming from a disinterested, grassroots participant. Although Hill is critical of astroturfing's success, with questions over the Arab Spring and the closure of London Indymedia, one can't help wonder whether the internet as a tool still favours the powerful. Hill uses Marx's class analysis favourably, to ‘go beyond clicktivism (online activism)’, which is touching on the real cause of social change, class struggle.

DJW

No logic (2003)

Book Review from the May 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fences and Windows. By Naomi Klein. Flamingo, 2002.

The protests in Seattle, London, Genoa and many other places between 1999 and 2001 gave rise not just to labels such as J18 but also to a widespread movement known variously as anti-corporate, anti-globalisation and even anti-capitalist. Naomi Klein's book No Logo came to be seen as a manifesto for this movement, and Klein herself as a spokesperson for it, despite her protestations to the contrary on both counts. No Logo (on which see the Socialist Standard for December 2000 and August 2001) chronicled the rise of massive global companies such as Nike and McDonalds, and of resistance to them. Klein's latest book is explicitly not a follow-up to her earlier work, though inevitably it deals with similar issues.

Fences and Windows consists of a selection of Klein's journalism and speeches, mainly from 2000 and 2001, and this is both its strength and its weakness. It gains immediacy from having been written in the midst or the aftermath of demos, protests and large-scale discussions, but lacks any overall theme or coherence. Nevertheless, a number of topics that it deals with can be singled out. The fences of the title are the (literal and metaphorical) barriers that prevent people from protesting, from using various resources and from gaining access to education and so on. And the windows are the various kinds of opposition, from mass efforts at direct democracy to landless Brazilian farmers cutting down fences around unused land.

A chapter written in Prague is interesting for what it reveals of the views of many young Czechs. They see both capitalism and “communism” (read: state capitalism) as centralising power in the hands of a few and of treating people as less than fully human. The issue is not whether the state or multinationals are in power, but of how power is distributed. As argued in other pieces, poor countries are required to follow the economic rules laid down by the rich – who then disregard them themselves when they see fit. Post 9/11, even Canada has been forced by the US to toughen security at its borders, and give up a great deal of control over them to US security officials.

The power-holders have of course not just sat idly by while the protesters make their protests. As a way to avoid the objectors, they have moved some of their meetings to virtually inaccessible places. More worryingly, protest and dissent have themselves been criminalised, with police violence becoming more or less the norm, with prominent resisters being arrested on trumped-up charges and so kept out of the way during demonstrations, and with all civil disobedience being equated with violence. (This has become worse since the invasion of Iraq, especially in the US, with any protest regarded as helping “the nation's enemies”.)

The final section of the book turns to positive proposals. A chapter entitled “Limits of Political Parties” attacks the New Democratic Party, Canada's nearest equivalent of the Labour Party (Klein is herself Canadian, and this piece originally appeared in a Toronto newspaper). Klein notes that the most socially excluded parts of Canada's population support “an idea entirely absent from the mainstream left: a deep distrust of the state”. While the NDP advocates strong interventionist central government, a true left-wing party should “articulate a different vision, one founded on local democracy and sustainable economic development”. The last chapter proposes a merger of two forces, international anti-globalisation activists and community-based organizations.

But there is still no real picture of a society to replace capitalism, or of what the real implications of local democracy and sustainability might be. These cannot be valued or implemented in a world divided along the lines of class and nation, where profit is the priority. A thoroughgoing change to a world without classes, nations, governments or profit is needed. Sadly, Klein and the rest of the anti-globalisation movement, despite the sincerity and effectiveness of much of their critique of capitalism, have taken the first steps but have yet to see through to the genuine alternative.

Paul Bennett