The Managerial Revolution & Trump's evolution

Editorial Comment:

EIGHTY YEARS AGO James Burnham published his book The Managerial Revolution, which in 1941 caused a stir both in the USA and in this country. It recently occured to me as I struggled to make sense of what was going on now, that what was happening in the United States with Trump had something to do with the phenomena of managerialism. In this book Burnham took the view that capitalism was on the way out, but that Socialism was not replacing it, and that what was emerging was a kind of planned, centralized society which would be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic.

In such a society what may be called the new boss class was arising, and was to be composed of, in Burnham's view; business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers, lumped together as 'managers'. What it gave us in 1945 with in the UK, under the Labour government, was nationalisation and the NHS, and the New Deal in the USA.

Below is an account by Timothy Shenk on what lies behind the developments which have led to what has now come to be called 'Trumpism'.

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The Dark History Behind Donald Trump

'The Republican intellectual establishment (in the USA) is united against Trump – but his message of cultural and racial resentment has deep roots in the American right' so wrote Timothy Shenk, in an article in The Guardian (Tue 16 Aug 2016) entitled 'The dark history of Donald Trump's rightwing revolt'.

And he added: 'Trump is a unique character, but the principles he defends and the passions he inflames have been part of the modern American right since its formation in the aftermath of the second world war. Most conservative thinkers have forgotten or repressed this part of their history, which is why they are undergoing a collective nervous breakdown today. Like addicts the morning after a bender, they are baffled at the face they see in the mirror.'

Conservatives tend to portray their cause as the child of a revolt against the liberal status quo that began in the aftermath of the second world war, gained momentum in the 1950s when a cohort of intellectuals supplied the right with its philosophical underpinning, attained political consciousness in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, and won vindication with Ronald Reagan’s election to the White House. Ideas have consequences, they proclaimed. Just look at us.

But there is another way of interpreting the history of the American right, one that puts less emphasis on the power of ideas and more on power itself – a history of white voters fighting to defend their place in the social hierarchy, politicians appealing to the prejudices of their constituents so they can satisfy the wishes of their donors, and the industry that has turned conservatism into a billion-dollar business.

This is the explanation preferred by leftwing critics, who typically regard the Republican party as a coalition fuelled by white nationalism and funded by billionaires. But this line of attack also has a long history on the right, where a dissenting minority has been waging a guerrilla war against the conservative establishment for three decades. Now the unlikely figure of Donald Trump has brought in a wave of reinforcements – over 13 million in the primaries alone. Their target is the managerial elite, and their history begins in the run-up to the second world war, when a forgotten founder of modern American conservatism became a public sensation with a book that announced the dawning of a civilisation ruled by experts.

'The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World' was the most unlikely bestseller of 1941. The author, James Burnham, was a philosophy professor at New York University who until the previous year had been one of Leon Trotsky’s most trusted counsellors in the US. Time called Burnham’s work a grim outline of “the totalitarian world soon to come” that was “as morbidly fascinating as a textbook vivisection”.

The son of a wealthy railway executive, Burnham graduated near the top of his class in Princeton in 1927 before studying at Oxford and then securing his post at NYU. But the Great Depression radicalised him, and he began a double life, lecturing on Aquinas by day and polemicising against capital by night. By 1940, Burnham had lost his faith in the revolution of the proletariat. While Trotsky denounced his erstwhile disciple as an “educated witch doctor”, Burnham started work on the book that would justify his apostasy.

According to Burnham, Marxists were right to anticipate capitalism’s imminent demise but wrong about what would come next. Around the turn of the 20th century, he claimed, the scale of life had changed. Population growth surged, immense corporations gobbled up smaller rivals, and government officials struggled to expand their powers to match the growing size of the challenges they faced.

These structural changes fundamentally altered the distribution of power in society. In the 18th century, authority had rested with aristocrats; in the 19th century with capitalists; in the 20th century it had passed on to the managers, whose authority derived from their unique ability to operate the complex institutions that now dominated mass society.

Technocrats had become the new ruling class. According to Burnham, fascism, Stalinism and Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal were all products of this transformation, and there was no use struggling against the world that was coming into being – a world where state ownership of the means of production had become the norm, where sovereignty had shifted to a bureaucratic elite, and where the globe was divided into rival superstates.

Burnham was not the first to foresee a society run by managers, but the arguments he borrowed from others took on a different meaning when brought together in this form. His sweep was global, his narrative reached back centuries, and he almost seemed to welcome a totalitarian future. For Burnham, the only sensible response to the managerial revolution was to recognise that it had occurred and accept there was no point in trying to bring back a world that was already lost. This bleak forecast captured the public imagination. Fortune called it “the most debated book published so far this year” and it went on to sell more than 200,000 copies.

But Burnham quickly moved on to new territory. His true subject, he concluded, was power, and to understand power he needed a theory of politics. Marx had been his guiding influence in The Managerial Revolution; now he turned to Machiavelli, constructing the genealogy of a political theory that began with the author of The Prince and continued into the present.

For a Machiavellian, Burnham wrote, politics was an unending war for dominance: democracy was a myth, and all ideologies were thinly veiled rationalisations for self-interest. The great mass of humanity, in Burnham’s dark vision, would never have any control over their own lives. They could only hope that clashes between rival elites might weaken the power of the ruling class and open up small spaces of freedom.

Burnham’s new found zeal for defending freedom led him, in 1955, to a conservative magazine called National Review, and to the magazine’s charismatic young founder, William F Buckley Jr. Buckley’s goal was to turn a scattered collection of reactionaries into the seeds of a movement. His journal set out to make the right intellectually respectable, stripping it of the associations with kooks and cranks that allowed liberals to depict it as a politics for cave-dwellers who had not reconciled themselves to modernity. Burnham was there at the start, one of five senior editors on the masthead of the first issue.

Soon Burnham was Buckley’s ranking deputy. But in an editorial staff riven by abstract debates between ardent libertarians and devout Christians, Burnham was the pragmatist who urged his colleagues not to ask politicians for more than the electorate would accept. For the right to win over working-class voters, Burnham argued, the movement had to embrace a more populist economic policy – contrary to the wishes of his anti-statist colleagues and their corporate backers, who wanted to lower taxes on the rich and roll back the welfare state. “Much of conservative doctrine,” Burnham wrote in 1972, “is, if not quite bankrupt, more and more obviously obsolescent.” Less than a decade later, Ronald Reagan was president, and it was Burnham who seemed like a relic of the past.

For a long time, the only major study of Burnham’s work was a slim volume published in 1984 by a minor academic press under the title Power and History. The book’s author, Samuel Francis, seemed a typical product of the insurgent conservative movement Burnham had helped to create – though by the late 1990s, when Francis published an updated version of Power and History, it made more sense to speak of a new conservative establishment. Outsiders who arrived at the White House with Reagan had become senior executives in Conservatism Inc. With the end of the cold war, the right had lost the glue that had bound its coalition, but there were still battles to be waged, and the money was better than ever.

Francis was never going to become a star in the emerging rightwing infotainment complex. Shy and overweight, with teeth stained from smoking, he had difficulty making it through cocktail parties. After completing a PhD in British history at the University of North Carolina, Francis left academia for Washington – first working at a rightwing thinktank, then serving as an aide to a Republican senator, and finally joining the editorial staff of the capital’s influential conservative daily newspaper, the Washington Times.

Francis retained his academic interests while he ascended into the ranks of the conservative establishment. He published six books in his lifetime, but he worked in private on one massive volume that he hoped would bring together all the disparate strands of his thought. Finished in 1995 but not discovered until after his death a decade later, the result was published earlier this year under the title Leviathan and Its Enemies. It is a sprawling text, more than 700 pages long, digressive, repetitive and in desperate need of an editor.

It is also one of the most impressive books to come out of the American right in a generation – and the most frightening. It is a searching diagnosis of managerial society, written by an author looking for a strategy that could break it apart.

Like much of Francis’s writing, Leviathan and Its Enemies began with Burnham – in this case, quite literally. “This book,” Francis announced in the first sentence, “is an effort to revise and reformulate the theory of the managerial revolution as advanced by James Burnham in 1941.”

Francis agreed that society had been taken over by managers, but he believed the new ruling class was far more vulnerable than Burnham had realised. Not everyone had benefited from the rise of the experts – and Francis saw this unequal distribution of rewards as the managerial regime’s greatest weakness.

For reasons he never quite explained, he insisted that the cosmopolitan elite threatened the traditional values cherished by most Americans: “morality and religion, family, nation, local community, and at times racial integrity and identity”. These were sacred principles for members of a new “post-bourgeois proletariat” drawn from the working class and the lower ranks of the middle class. Lacking the skills prized by technocrats, but not far enough down the social ladder to win the attention of reformers, these white voters considered themselves victims of a coalition between the top and bottom against the middle.

According to Francis, this cohort had supplied the animating spirit of rightwing politics since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. They had supported Goldwater – but Francis regarded Goldwater’s programme, like the “movement conservatism” of the National Review, as a “quaintly bourgeois” throwback to the oligarchic politics of the 19th century, with nothing to offer the modern working man. Their tribune was not Goldwater but George Wallace, the notorious segregationist and Democratic governor of Alabama – who won five southern states as an anti-civil rights third-party candidate in the 1968 presidential election. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had appealed to this group, too, but neglected their interests after taking office. Despite having elected multiple presidents, the post-bourgeois proletariat had yet to find a voice.

But not all of the right’s intellectuals have been so blind. While keepers of the conservative flame in Washington and New York repeatedly proclaimed that Trump could never win the Republican nomination, in February a small group of anonymous writers from inside the conservative movement launched a blog that championed “Trumpism” – and attacked their former allies on the right, who were determined to halt its ascent. In recognition of the man who inspired it, they called their site the Journal of American Greatness.

Yet Francis had difficulty explaining why managerial society would generate so much opposition in the first place. In Leviathan and Its Enemies, he argued that resistance to the cosmopolitan elite would be driven by “immutable elements of human nature” that “necessitate attachment to the concrete and historical roots of moral values and meaning”.

He was more candid in a speech he gave while working on the book. “What we as whites must do,” he declared, “is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.” Where mainstream conservatives depicted the US as a nation whose diverse population was linked by devotion to its founding principles, Francis viewed it as a racial project inextricably bound up with white rule. The managerial revolution jeopardised this racial hierarchy, and so it must be overthrown.

Francis delivered his remarks on racial consciousness at a conference organised by American Renaissance, an obscure journal devoted to promoting white nationalism. Years earlier, Francis had struck up a friendship with Jared Taylor, who went on to found the magazine with Francis’s encouragement. From their first encounter, Taylor recalled, he and Francis “understood each other immediately”.

Francis’s employers at the Washington Times were not as sympathetic. The paper fired him after his comments were released, a move that was part of his larger expulsion from the respectable right. Buckley himself dismissed Francis as “spokesman” for a group that had “earned their exclusion from thoughtful conservative ranks”.

Yet Francis would not be so easily purged. For years he had cultivated a relationship with Pat Buchanan, a one-time Nixon protege who had become one of the country’s most recognisable conservatives thanks to his role as co-host of CNN’s popular debating programme Crossfire. In 1992, Buchanan launched a long-shot campaign against incumbent president George HW Bush that, against all expectations, garnered almost 3m votes in the primaries. While all this was going on, Buchanan was growing closer to Francis, whom he later called “perhaps the brightest and best thinker on the right”.

Francis and Buchanan were linked by their association with a breakaway faction on the right known as paleoconservatism. While mainstream conservatives had taken advantage of cushy gigs in New York and Washington, paleocons depicted themselves as spokesmen for the forgotten residents of flyover country. Francis urged Buchanan to make another run for the White House in 1996, this time as the candidate of the post-bourgeois resistance. That campaign would be based on three issues: protectionism, opposition to immigration and an “America First” foreign policy that repudiated global commitments and foreign interventions in order to focus on defending the national interest.

Buchanan listened, and he went on to a surprise win in New Hampshire’s pivotal early primary, convincing Francis that the managerial elite was more vulnerable than at any point in his lifetime. While mainstream Republicans and Democrats celebrated forecasts that the US population was on track to become less than 50% white as a sign of America’s capacity to adapt and grow, Francis believed that the members of his post-bourgeois proletariat regarded these shifting demographics as another reminder of their dwindling power.

Buchanan’s campaign fizzled after New Hampshire, but Francis had a ready explanation for the collapse: Buchanan was too loyal to the Republican party to seize the opportunity he had been granted. “Don’t even use the word ‘conservative,’” Francis told Buchanan. “It doesn’t mean anything any more.” The managerial class had absorbed Buckley and his followers. They, too, were the enemy.

After Buchanan’s defeat and his own exile from mainstream conservatism, Francis devoted himself to what he called “racialpolitik”. He was a regular contributor to outlets promoting white racial consciousness – becoming, in Jared Taylor’s words, “the intellectual leader of a small but growing movement”. Francis denied that he was a white supremacist, but he condemned interracial sex, warned of “incipient race war” and drafted a manifesto for a white nationalist group arguing: “The American people and government should remain European in their composition and character.”

When he looked ahead, Francis was especially concerned with the threat that one rising political star posed to his vision of the future. Barack Obama, he remarked in 2004, was “the model of what the New American is supposed to be”. Ivy League-educated, effortlessly cosmopolitan, promising to transcend barriers of race – Obama was the embodiment of the managerial elite. He represented everything Francis loathed about the contemporary United States.

The fact that Obama, Francis’s symbol for American decadence, became one of the most popular figures in the country brought the great contradiction of his thought into relief. The 19th century belonged to the bourgeoisie and the 20th century to the managers, he argued, because these rising classes had performed necessary social functions. His post-bourgeois proletariat, by contrast, were on the decline.

So was Francis. The supposed realist who cast hunger for power as the driving force of world history spent most of his time writing for journals with subscribers in the low five figures. In his last years, he was a lonely man. Before his sudden death from a cardiac aneurism in 2005, he had begun a study of conservatism and race. His masterpiece, Leviathan and Its Enemies, was still tucked away in a box of floppy disks; when it was published 11 years later, it would be under the auspices of a white-nationalist press. The right-leaning Washington Examiner ran one of his few obituaries. “Sam Francis,” it said, “was merely a racist and doesn’t deserve to be remembered as anything less.” It seemed just as likely that Francis would not be remembered at all.

"You want you to really listen to this,” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners in January this year. The king of rightwing talk radio was lecturing his audience, which averages around 13 million people a week, on Samuel Francis. Prompted by a magazine article casting Francis as the prophet of Trumpism, Limbaugh read aloud from one of Francis’s post-mortems on the Buchanan campaign. “What’s interesting,” Limbaugh said, “is how right on it is in foretelling Trump.” Before abandoning the subject, he added one point. Francis, Limbaugh noted, “later in life suffered the – acquired the – reputation of being a white supremacist”, a reputation Limbaugh insisted was undeserved.

The white nationalists who rallied to Francis in the last decade of his life disagree on that point, but they also see Trump as a vindication of their longtime inspiration. “Sam would have said that Trump is doing exactly what he advised Patrick Buchanan to do,” maintains Jared Taylor, who made news in the primary season when it was revealed that he had recorded automated phone messages endorsing Trump. (“White Supremacist Robocall Heartily Urges Iowa Voters to Support Trump,” reported a headline in the conservative Daily Caller.) According to Taylor’s American Renaissance, “Francis would be very pleased to see the GOP and conservative establishments mocked and destroyed.”

Even liberal commentators are looking back at Francis – whose prediction of a white working-class backlash against a globalist ruling elite seems to be coming true not just in the US but across Europe. “If you just drop the white nationalism a lot of Francis makes sense,” says Michael Lind, who once worked as an assistant to Buckley but now describes himself as a “radical centrist”. According to Lind, conservatives have been “spurning their natural constituency – the mostly white working class”, creating space for the rise of Trump.

Francis was also an inspiration for the team at the Journal of American Greatness, who called him “the closest thing to what could be described as the source of Trumpian thought” in their very first post. They admitted that Francis’s writing “overtly indulges various Southern nostalgias”, but insisted that his “deservedly criticised statements on race” could be separated from the core of his analysis. The managerial class was still the enemy, and only Trump seemed even dimly aware of what it would take to mount an effective challenge.

Trump the candidate, they admitted, was at best an imperfect messenger. But it was the message that counted: “The American regime – like nearly all its cousins in the west – has devolved into an oligarchy.” JAG was not just arguing that Trump’s campaign had a coherent agenda – a controversial assertion, given that many on both the left and right have dismissed Trump as an unhinged demagogue jabbing randomly at pressure points in the electorate. It was arguing that Trump succeeded because of his platform. Without those ideas, he would have been just another novelty candidate. Armed with them, any of Trump’s more disciplined rivals might have stolen the nomination from him – but instead they opted for recycled bromides from the Reagan era.

The site could be fiery in its defence of Trump, but the best moments came when its targets were the grandees of the right. There are plenty of scathing articles about rightwing thinktanks written from the left, but none of their authors could write a sentence such as “Seeing conservatives court billionaires – which I have had occasion to do dozens, if not hundreds, of times – is like watching dorks tell cheerleaders how pretty they are.”

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Who is now 'The Left' and what about the workers?

beware long angry rant

by Dave Douglass
  
David Douglass worked as a coalminer in the coalfields of Durham and South Yorkshire, and was NUM Branch Delegate for Hatfield Colliery from 1979.  He appears in the documentary The Miner's Campaign Tapes to discuss the role of the popular media in the strike of 1984–85. In 1994–95 he was Branch Secretary at Hatfield Main, but after the pit was privatised the NUM no longer had any recognition there.  Dave was also until the 12th, August 2019 a Friend of Freedom Press, the anarchist publisher.   
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SINCE Thatcher and Major decimated Britain's industrial base there has been a seismic change in 'left' perceptions, and who exactly speaks for 'the left'.  Consistently the working class itself, self-consciously advancing its own interests not only embraced the politics of social change, anti-capitalism, and socialism, it determined for itself the how and what of strategy, tactics and general social outlooks.  The middle class 'left' the liberals the paper sellers in general stood in awe at the mighty columns of organised labour and respected 'the workers' as people who knew what was best for the class but knew who the class was and how it thought.  All other struggles and oppressions and individual hardships suffered by this or that specific, sexism or racism as symptoms of capitalism not necessarily overthrown by the end of capitalism were nonetheless subsumed into the overall class struggle, that being the struggle of the working class itself.

Some tectonic plates however have shifted, and we find now on issue after issue 'the left' is not by enlarge represented by horny handed sons and daughters of labour, nor yet the mass of intellectual or technical white-collar workers.  Almost at every stage 'the left' now confronts the opinions and politics of the working class , by 'the working class'  I am not talking figuratively here, I mean literally the folk who labour by hand and by brain , the working class communities, though mostly these are now post-industrial centers of unemployment and social deprivation.  These are the heartland of the working-class traditions with conscious class struggle halls of fame.  The left now isn’t us, not these people, the left is now the army of middle-class liberal leftists who deem to speak on our behalf and know what’s best for us. In order to do this they have of course to confront our own attitudes and outlooks and conclusions, so consistently over the last twenty years 'the left' has defacto become 'anti the working class' at least how we express our opinions and outlooks and conclusions.  

Any collection of normal working-class folk expressing opposition to what currently passes as left politics, is likely to be designated 'far right' or any of the numerous 'isms' which separate us out from the shining paths of liberal agendas.   Often the aspiration of the 'left' is synonymous with that of the state itself, on issues such as remain or leave the EU, or racism, transism, censorship, safe spaces etc.  So often the 'left' has become the cheerleader of the state singing off the same hymn sheet and forgetting the most fundamental principle of class warfare, to keep an independent identity from the state and its interests. The bleating of the 'left' over social distancing, scooting folk out of the parks or beaches, crying for harsher and longer curfews and abandoning any notion of civil liberties and social freedoms.

The Trade Union movement now that the big militant industrial unions like the miners and shipyard and heavy engineering proletariat have gone and construction workers and car and others have paled into insignificance, it is the white collar and professional unions which dominate.  Not that the nature of the work union members do, or even our opinions matter too much.  The unions and the TUC are now dominated by middle class liberal agenda's, re-education classes, PC speak schools, and making policy fit the liberal middle class left agenda is now the dominant 'culture' of the TUC. it is doubtful how far workers are actually allowed to express their opinions on subject like Brexit with unions like UNITE and GMB swinging in behind leave agenda's despite their rank and file's opinions (RMT and ASLEF were exceptions).  The passing of anti-radical feminist policies denying the existence of women as a biological sex, even in the Women’s Commission of the TUC is a case in PC point.  You could cite almost any major issue over the last twenty years and the so-called left will have drawn the opposite conclusion to the bulk of the actual working class and particularly the traditional working class, postindustrial communities and regions.  Brexit comes to mind, but then also the degree of hysteria and anti-industrialization in response to climate change is another, the remain position of the PLP and NEC and host of bright young mainly southern middle class liberals in the Labour Party itself, Identity politics and the trans impositions, and oddly the lock down and attitudes to withdraw of civil liberties and rights . There is now a miss match between those who see themselves as the left leaders of the working class and the working class itself.  The attitude of the current left tends be one of 'fuck em' if they won’t do as we tell them, they are all Tory, racist, xenophobic, sexist, transphobic, fascists anyway.  They appear to find the working class and engaging with our politics at large, entirely superfluous. In one way, it was this contempt for the opinions of the working class communities which led to the surprising victory of the Tories, the belief that Brexit- committed communities in the rust belts who were the heartlands of Labour support would never vote Tory and could therefore be ignored.  Actually I was one who swore they would never vote Tory too I knew they were never going to vote for Labour on a remain anti-industry program, but the degree of their anger transcended for the space of time it took to put the cross on their deep hatred of the Tories over generations of struggles.  The left is now expert at painting the working class into corners charging us with racism, and empire loyalism monarchism and patriotism and other such absurdities.

The statue toppling hysteria sweeping the nation, no I understand not many are being knocked over by groups of Simon pure iconoclasts, but the fear that they will and the fear of being regarded as reactionary, or racist has panicked City Councils into the pre-emptively felling them themselves. Let’s be clear I have no attachment to any of the victim statues thus far and I doubt that I will shed any tears for any on the secret hit list. What rattles us is that someone else has come along and imposed these judgements upon us, that without public discussion and debate a group of unelected vigilantes can decide what is 'appropriate' for us to continue to view.  

Cities are being scoured.for offending masonry and brass and any obscure imperialist lackey can now pay the price. This is an attempt to sanitize history it is an attempt to make the nasty history go away and remove memory of it, when clearly we should be doing the opposite. They were erected within a social and political context and thankfully that context has now changed , the statue though is a reminder of social attitudes and politics of the past , as long as there is adequate information boards alongside there is no reason why they need to be removed.  The statue of Nelson in Trafalgar Square is a case in point, was Nelson a distinctive character of history who served the state and the cause of his country as he would have seen it at the time?  Obviously, nobody today including the ruling class would aspire to empire building and defense and colonialism which they did at the time, almost anyone with a brain cell knows this is a historical monument in a historical context.  Actually it is quite interesting from a social history point of view, walk round the base plinth and look at the images of the seafarers in the height of the battle, look at the racial composition of the crew and the ages of the lads running through bombardments with gun powder for the guns, there is a clear presence of black seamen and boys, volunteers earning their freedom from slavery serving 'their' country.  Statues and plaques are interesting platforms for discussing history and understanding it.  Following the logic of the liberal iconoclast would surely see the pyramids fall and the colosseum?   There are already moves afoot to move the statue of the emperor Constantine from York, it appears the guardians have suddenly found out Roman Society was based on slavery, there noo !   I think most of us knew that, it really doesn’t make us want to run through the country uprooting all the many Roman monuments and remains for fear we upset.  Well who exactly?

Churchill and the miners existed in mutual hatred and class warfare, as miners children right through the post war period and before we were raised on stories not so much of Goldilocks and three bears, but Churchill and Tonypandy, and 26, and his hatred toward us.  Was he due his distinctive Mohican grass haircut and spray-paint during the class war protest of a few years ago?  Of course, he was.  Was he a distinguished member of the British ruling class and a memorable character from history, of course he was.  A statue of him in the coalfields would be blown to kingdom come, but outside parliament is fine by me, of course when we the miners pass it, our tale our history in regard to him is somewhat different than the ones told by the tour guides (incidentally see:  'The Day Britain Said No' a more clear sighted history of Churchill) and dauntless any demonstration by the working class or radical movements will find expressions of class war on the statue and plinth, no problem here.

Can I warn against allowing a simple 'hit list' of statues and monuments and plaques as this will always favour those opposed to and rarely those who defend, not least because the defenders won’t know whether or not they need to do any defending or whether someone is attacking something they think is valuable. Can I also warn against taking at face value accusations against particular historic figures, these may well come down to poor research or a particular political or cultural or class interpretation.  Scratching around for something to link Tyneside and the river and the region with the Slave Trade in order that we too might be suitably contrite and consumed with self-guilt, on the day of the first, BLM demonstration in Newcastle,  Look North focused on Blackett Street.  Repeating a poorly researched piece in I think the Journal, talking about Newcastle and the slave trade, the author firstly couldn’t even spell Fredrick Douglass's name right ! But then went on to talk about Blackett having made his fortune in an offshoot of the slave trade by importing Rum.  A totally misguided image was thus conjured up enough that now the name Blackett Street is now on some hit lists. Let’s be clear Blackett was a Liverpudlian , Liverpool being certainly a center of the slave trade though also strongly working class opponent of it. Blackett had started as a young merchant apprentice to his Cousin who did make his fortune in slaves, but he himself didn’t. The fortune and business and wealth of the river, city and region was coal not slaves. Of course, at this time boy miners from six years old worked in the mines, bonded to the coal owners and not allowed to run away or be employed elsewhere on pain of imprisonment the blacklist and starvation. This is the wrong sort of slavery of course, since these children who happened to be sometimes white, if they found time between the 18 hour shifts to get bathed and eat and sleep.  Doubtless some middle-class liberal PC wit will tell us they had 'white privilege' although I’ve never discovered just what that was.  It’s almost certainly true Blackett would have received cases or barrels of rum from his cousin, all rum consumed worldwide was based on the slave trade , as was tea, and cotton and much else, but this wasn’t how fortunes were made on the Tyne or Newcastle which were NOT part of the slave trade other than living in a country and state which overall was.  We had no specific connection and the penitents ought to stop scraping the bottom of (rum) barrels to find one.

The problem with a witch hunt is once you start looking, the world is full of witches.  All Judeo-Christian traditions including Islam have condoned slavery.  Neither Mohamad or Jesus condemned it or banned it or spoke or instructed against it, the bible euphemistically refers to master’s 'servants' rather than the slaves they actually were.  Paul went further and instructed the slaves not to disobey their masters and work hard for them.  This means all religious statues, churches, temples in that tradition Islam, Judaism, and Christianity could be charged with complicity and excusing slavery worldwide and therefore should be removed and shut down.

Modern morality imposes strict age limitations on sexual relationships, courtship and marriage, all sorts of outrage and repudiation is heaped upon those who breach the law or the consensus, but history had no restrictions especially on kings and queens.  If the trend is to take modern values and mores back into ancient history regardless of context and understanding of past society, the censorship of past artifacts could be unlimited.  How many kings and queens have been under 16 or were not even teenagers when they married,?  How many preteens and even on occasion babies, were married?  The whole of European history as it is represented could be shut down.

So, buildings, paintings and statues and books and even the history of such times could be banned and removed from view or knowledge.  The young comrades of the Chinese Red Guard during the so called 'cultural revolution' in their enthusiasm for change, destroyed swathes of ancient Chinese heritage believing it was keeping China in the past. it wasn’t of course, as the miner’s slogan says 'the past we inherit the future we build'.

 We have to acknowledge that Britain was a long time Imperialist and colonialist state, it invaded other countries, it imposed empires it suppressed other cultures and peoples, throughout that long period of the 'empire of which the sun never set' statutes and heroes of the time were built and commemorated. If the attempt is to be allowed to remove all markers to these people and any attempt to see them in historic context then essentially any appreciation of history will be impossible. All statues of Victoria and all other imperial monarchs, generals, wars , must be removed, Lord Collinwood springs to mind, certainly no Mr Nice Guy to his crews. Baden Powell the founder of the scout movement, unsurprisingly an imperialist empire loyalist, was not put up for that reason, but for founding the international scouting movement.  Shock horror they now discover he condemned homosexuality, but society condemned homosexuality, it was highly illegal and poor souls rotten in jails, were beaten and murdered for the offence, that was the injustice of the period in which he lived. Also as man trying to found an organization of little boys would hardly be a public advocate of same sex relationships would he ?, pedophilia being synonymous with homosexuality in those days.

A controversial figure in history, not particular Mr Nice Guy might well still be important corner stones of history and events and worthy of marking. I would expect that if Adolf Hitler had been born on Pilgrim Street Newcastle a plaque at least would mark this fact, that would simply be a historic marker and not some celebration or badge of honour.

The miners have particular reason to remember our slavery and oppression and see in the character of Lord Londonderry in Durham City Centre a monument worthy of removal, but how would that serve our history?  That statue allows us to tell that story, and to demonstrate that the same history can have at least two versions and two sets of facts.  I use it often given on the stump lectures.

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Trump And China

by Les May

I HAVE dabbled with computers for forty years.  For the last dozen years it has been mostly ‘junked’ laptops I have resurrected by installing the free, as in free beer and free of Microsoft, Linux operating system.  Though not free like the old laptops, in recent months I’ve bought a couple of tiny machines which are less than 3cm x 6cm in size and cost me about £5 each.  In case you are inclined to think these are toys I will mention that they have dual processors, and wifi and bluetooth built in.  They are meant for the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT).   I write programs on a laptop, download them to these tiny machines and then they run autonomously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things

(Scroll down to the section of privacy and security concerns)

But that’s not the most significant thing about them.  They encapsulate the real problem that Donald Trump and the rest of the USA have with China.   Trump may like to claim that China is involved in the wholesale theft of ‘Intellectual Property’ from the US, but these devices are an entirely home grown product, and what they show is that, like it or not, China is beating the USA at its own game; innovating and making things to sell to the rest of the world.

The same goes for the UK.  In Britain we refer to someone who makes ‘bath bombs’ in their kitchen as an ‘entrepreneur’.  The Chinese have entrepreneurs too, and they encourage and fund them, so there may be a lesson for us here. We may feel threatened by the face recognition technology is ubiquitous in cities, but lets face it, getting that working is a bit more difficult than making bath bombs.

What we have not noticed in the West is that China is a communist country in name only. It’s got its share of billionaires and an affluent middle class.  Watch the videos and TV footage and spot the Apple shops, Burberry shops etc.  MaoI recently heard a Chinese political scientist explain in impeccable English that in the US you can change your party, but not your politics, but in China you can change your politics, but not your party.

What he meant was that in the US the Republicans and the Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, whilst in China, since the revolution which brought Mao to power in 1949 the political landscape has changed immeasurably as the country has embraced the market economy and in doing so has lifted something like a half a billion people out of poverty, but that the same political party has retained power throughout that time.

Asked whether that made China a capitalist country like the USA he explained why it did not by saying ‘In the USA the politicians have allowed the capitalists to run the country; in China the politicians made sure they do not.’

Trump’s use of ‘Kung Flu’ to describe the virus which causes Covid 19 has predictably been labelled as ‘racist’, but it tells us more about his juvenile sense of humour and misses the point anyhow; Trump is signalling to his followers that China is the new enemy.

Thirty years ago I heard schoolchildren describing something they did not think much of as ‘Chink made’ and to many of us the Chinese were just that, ‘Chinks’. We’ve grown out of that, but deep down we still believe that they cannot have invented something themselves, they must have stolen the technology from the West; they cannot possibly have been successful in keeping the deaths from Covid 19 so low, they must be lying; if the virus was circulating last autumn, (as seems to be the case), they must have known about it and did not tell the WHO; the virus could not possibly have crossed the species barrier from bat to ‘what?’ to humans, they must have created it in the lab and were too careless to contain it.   Is this an example of what is meant by ‘institutional racism’?

Reagan and Thatcher could always point to a communist USSR as ‘the Red menace’; Trump cannot do that with China as it is clearly communist in name only.  But with a little help from his friends in the West, Trump has floated all of these accusations in one way or another.  Have his western friends just played the part of ‘useful idiots’?   Is he laying the groundwork for a new cold war which will conveniently ‘hot up’ a couple of months before the November election?

The political systems in both the US and in China have one thing in common; they both rely upon an underclass to sustain them.  In the US it’s those who have two jobs and visit food banks just to survive.  In China it’s the migrant workers living three families to a single flat in a city far from home. Some things don’t change it seems.

Question:  Does having a market economy, irrespective of what you call the political system, inevitably mean having very large differences in income and wealth?  Discuss.

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The Chains Around Some Brains

by Les May

Editor:  Here Les May, who was ahead of many of us
in dealing with this pandemic, addresses the problem
of the political idée fixe or apriori methodogy of thought.
Or what I have elsewhere called a 'cookbook mentality'.  
The writings of Charles Chahalambous, editor of the 
Labour Internationalist, are merely an aspect of this approach.
See the earlier post:

northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com › 2020/04 › on-certainty-in-coronavirus

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IN writing this I make no attempt to defend capitalism as a form of social and economic relationship.  My concern is to question the assumptions behind the assertion ‘the evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system that prioritises profit and the interests of big business over the well-being of the population’.  If we are going to take any lessons from what we are reluctantly experiencing now, I would like them to be the right ones.

Historically we experienced at least one outbreak of disease that can be said to qualify as a pandemic.  That is the so called ‘Black Death’ which swept through Europe in 1348 to 1349 and is thought to have killed some 30 to 60% of the population.  Even with the limited transport of that time the disease spread at about 10-15 miles per day, which is the sort of distance an individual might walk in a day.

https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/viruses101/could_the_black_death_actually

Two other more recent outbreaks of disease are relevant here.  Between September 1665 and November 1666 disease, usually assumed to be plague but possibly an Ebola like haemorrhagic virus, killed 260 people in the village of Eyam.  It did not spread to neighbouring villages because the villagers ‘self isolated’ and it eventually died out.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17223184-000-did-bubonic-plague-really-cause-the-black-death/

The second relevant pandemic is the so called ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918-19.  This spread rapidly across America along the routes of the railway system.  I would argue that the thing which facilitated the spread of the SARS CoV-2 virus to produce a pandemic is the frequency of the movement of individuals between and within countries.  People move to and from work, for leisure activities, for holidays, to visit family and to facilitate national and international trade.  None of these is unique to the capitalist economic and social system.

That there is frequently a tension between the interests of ‘big business’ and the well being of people is not disputed, but at the moment, at least in most of the industrialised developed economies, that is being resolved bt governments in favour of keeping people safe from infection by this virus.

In the UK we are in our present situation because of specific choices made by our politicians and to blame ‘the capitalist system’ simply shifts the blame for the outcomes we are seeing away from them and onto some abstraction of reality which has itself evolved into something very different from what it was in the 19^th century.

The Black Death started the long decline of feudalism as labour was suddenly in short supply and a wage economy came into being; ‘market forces’ at work one might say.   I doubt that our world after the Covid19 pandemic passes will be the same as the world we knew before.   We have a choice. We can reach into our ‘goody bag’ of ever ready solutions and wait for some vaguely defined ‘historical force’ to sweep away the present order and forge a ‘New Jerusalem’.  Or we can ask what lessons should be learned from our present experiences and then set about putting things right. 

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Charles Charalambous & his response to NV.

  by Brian Bamford

CHARLES CHARALAMBOUS, Editor of Labour Internationalist, questions my treatment of the argument set out in his editorial:  '“Thinning out the herd”: austerity kills'.  He is responding to my posted critique 'ON CERTAINTY' IN THE Coronavirus'.

He asks:  'what do you (Northern Voices) think of the basic argument set out in the statement?'
He says:  'the argument is based on a Marxist perspective over three pages, and the statement draws definite conclusions, which Labour Internationalist endorses.'

He confirms:  'We cannot (nor would we want to) predict the medical impact of Covid-19, but what we can say is that the evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system that prioritises profit and the interests of big business over the well-being of the population, and that those wrong priorities will probably continue to result in deaths which could have been avoided.'

He further asks:  'Do you disagree with the argument that the deliberate underfunding of the NHS over many years, designed to encourage the creeping privatisation of various components of the NHS and the promotion of a healthcare "market" that involves profits and shareholder dividends, is a major reason for the NHS's lack of resources and capacity to respond to the virus's impact in a timely and appropriate way?'

What is wrong with this form of reasoning?

We have got to distinguish between the effects caused by government policies  from other effects outside their control.  The political scientists, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, have demonstrated 'Democracy for Realists (2016)' that often shows voters punish politicians for outcomes that are clearly not under their control, including natural events such as shark attacks, droughts and floods.  To these we might, I suppose, add pandemics such as the current Coronavirus.

Mr. Chahalambous wisely qualifies his position by saying he can't predict the 'medical impact of Covid-19' none-the-less he says the 'evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system'.

The Origins of the virus

What we do know is one doctor in China tried to warn the world in December, and he, too, is now a statistic after dying from the virus in January.
 
A sad and disturbing part of this epidemic is the story of Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, which is the epicenter of COVID-19.
Dr. Li found seven confirmed cases of respiratory disease and coronavirus infection in his hospital in late December 2019.

He messaged his medical school classmates in WeChat, the Chinese social network, on Dec. 30, 2019. His WeChat post was shared in multiple internet platforms and gained wide attention.

We also know that the local authorities in Wuhan reprimanded Dr. Li for making false comments on the internet. He was then forced to sign a letter of admonition and promised not to repeat the transgression.

After the admonition, Dr. Li went back to work in Wuhan Central Hospital where he examined a patient, who was a storekeeper at Huanan Seafood Market with glaucoma and fever.  Sadly, he became infected with coronavirus, which eventually took his life.

That was the initial sequence of events that led to the medical development of the virus throughout the world.  The virus is presumed to have an animal origin with animal-to-human transfer at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China.  The infection became human-to-human and is now a global pandemic.

It suggests that in a strict hierarchical system such as in China that the local authorities in Wuhan sought to do what they thought would please their bosses in Beijing, and thus their first reaction was to clamp down on the whistle-blower Dr. Li.  Consequently the underlings misread the situation.

Cookbook Explanations & Remedies 

Whenever I engage with a tract based on a Marxist perspective such as Mr. CHARALAMBOUS offers here from the Fourth International, I feel as if I'm reading a book on French Provincial Cookery.    I feel that something's being cooked-up for me that comes from some rigid recipe from a tired cook, who can't be bothered to think outside the ideological box.

I'm not saying Mr. CHARALAMBOUS hasn't thought through his analysis.  Indeed not, as he has a closely considered position, and he is modest enough to admit that he can't predict the 'medical impact of Covid-19', but he insists the 'evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system'.  Nor would I say that our government was well prepared for a pandemic such as Covid-19.  Clearly it wasn't.  Especially when compared with Germany that was so much better prepared to tackle the virus and has checked more than 350,000 people in the past week alone, the Robert Koch Institute public health group said Tuesday in a report.  Germany also benefits from other health-care advantages, including one of the continent’s highest rates of hospital beds in relation to population size.


Germany has a powerful weapon in the battle to contain Covid-19: a wealth of private laboratories that are helping it test more than 50,000 people a day.
The country had already tested about 920,000 people through late March and checked more than 350,000 people in the past week alone, the Robert Koch Institute public health group said Tuesday in a report.  That may still understate the country’s total effort, since not all the laboratories that have done assays have yet submitted numbers for last week.

Germany’s widespread testing -- still not as comprehensive as many there would like -- has enabled better tracking of the coronavirus’s spread than in many other European nations. The country benefits from other health-care advantages, including one of the continent’s highest rates of hospital beds in relation to population size.

The fact is as Wittgenstein wrote:   'It is hard to tell someone who is shortsighted how to get to a place.  Because you can't say “Look at that church tower ten miles away over there and go in that direction".'

We should all by now be coming to realise that in the current crisis we are all shortsighted!

Claims & Predictions

What we at Northern Voices hold to, as I tried to explain when I wrote my post 'ON CERTAINTY' in the Cronavirus', is that maybe 'Uncertainty, the twin of certainty, cannot be banished from human affairs..'

Yet, Mr. CHARALAMBOUS writes:

'what we can say is that the evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system that prioritises profit and the interests of big business over the well-being of the population, and that those wrong priorities will probably continue to result in deaths which could have been avoided.  So, the alternative to capitalist barbarism is socialism, which starts with defending the interests of the working class against the interests of the capitalists.'

He insists:  'the argument is based on a Marxist perspective over three pages, and the statement draws definite conclusions'

But which version of the Marxist perspective is he and his followers employing here?  Most thinkers these days realise that the social sciences can't prophesy future historical developments with any degree of accuracy because of the many variables involved in human affairs and the unintended consequences of human actions.  A pandemic had been predicted; five years ago, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates gave a TED Talk had been warning that the world was not ready to take one on - but no one could prophesy that it would come from a wet market in Wuhan and how it would then develop.

Karl Popper* has written:  'It should be mentioned.... that Karl Marx himself was one of the first to emphasize the importance, for the social sciences of these unintended consequences.'  And he writes that '[i]n his more mature utterances, he [Marx] says that we are all caught in the net of the social system.  Popper adds:  'The capitalist is not as not the demoniac conspirator, but a man who is forced by circumstances to act as he does; he is no more responsible for the state of affairs than the proletarian.' 

This sociological view of Marx has been disregarded by Marxists and Popper claims it has been replaced by a 'perhaps for propaganda reasons, perhaps because people did not understand it - and a Vulgar Marxist Conspiracy Theory  has replaced it.'

 Conspiracy Theories

Charles Charalambous in his editorial “Thinning out the herd” writes:   The UK government 'chose a strategy based on the theory of “herd immunity”, which means survival of the fittest: let the virus work its way through the population, who will gradually build up immunity, and if hundreds of thousands of older and weaker citizens die, well tough luck.'

He said:  '[the] initial response to the crisis (for at least one month) was to ignore the views of epidemiologists and immunologists around the world who were calling for urgent practical measures to limitand confront Covid-19.'

This is not true because on March 27th, Tim Harford wrote in his column in the FT:  

'When I read about a new disease-modelling study from the University of Oxford, I desperately wanted to believe.  It is the most prominent exploration of the “tip-of-the-iceberg hypothesis”, which suggests that the majority of coronavirus infections are so mild as to have passed unrecorded by the authorities and perhaps even un­noticed by the people infected.  If true, many of us — perhaps most of us in Europe — have already had the virus and probably developed some degree of immunity.'

Clearly Charles Charalambous had seemingly overlooked the Oxford University model when he wrote that the Johnson government chose to 'ignore the views of epidemiologists and immunologists'.  Clearly initially the government chose to follow the 'tip-of-the-iceberg' Oxford study rather than the grimmer Imperial College study which has now been adopted of a current 'lock down'.
This then leads to a kind of conspiracy theory based on a kind of catastrophic gradualism that allows in a form euthanasia in which is an attitude of "let it thin out the herd" and so, for him, it ultimately proves 'the bankruptcy of the capitalist system: let the older and weaker citizens die, which ultimately will lighten the burden on the NHS and the pensions system.'
Karl Popper does not assert that conspiracies never happen, but he does say 'they are not very frequent, and they do not change the character of social life.'  If Charles Charalambousis is asserting that people with a taste for eating pangolins or bats in a wet market in Wuhan, China is evidence of a capitalist conspiracy, then I think the Labour Internationalist are scrapping the bottom of the barrel.

*  Conjecture and Refutations:  The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963) by Karl Popper

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