Tony Benn's Last Will and Testament. A Casserole of Nonsense

Going to see the newly released Tony Benn documentary film seemed like a necessary outing for anyone who like myself takes an interest in politics and even though already holds strong opinions believes that it is the duty of any inquiring mind to expose themselves as much as possible to material and arguments from all sides of the political spectrum. In order to make your own case to the best of your ability it is equally important that you should aim to be just as knowledgeable of your opponent’s argument as you are your own, and even aspire to be able to make that case for them if for whatever reason your positions in the debate where exchanged. Too often the state of public discourse shows that such high minded ideals has fallen by the wayside. Though what is perhaps an even more important ideal has also disappeared, if indeed it ever existed, that is the ability to as candidly as possible ask yourself why your opponent might find plausible the arguments which they adopt. Ulterior and cynical motives do exist and some human beings simply are stupid but jumping to such explanations before properly considering any reasoning on offer is the first step on the road to zealotry and close-mindedness. It should do us no harm to regularly re-read that imperishable and haunting line of Oliver Cromwell ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken’.

However by the standard of these aspirations the film which was decorated by the Edinburgh film festival was an utterly disappointment of woeful proportions. Admittedly this really shouldn’t come as a great surprise to anyone familiar with the output of Tony Benn throughout his political career though this production provides one final reminder if it was ever necessary of how vapid and superficial a political mind Mr Benn really was. In summary it was extended reflection on the many causes Benn lent himself to throughout his life all tide together by the central theme of not being able to go beyond a very simplistic understanding of the political and economic world around him and being driven on by an unrelenting belief in the righteousness of nobody else’s cause but his own, no matter how benevolent and well intentioned that belief was.            

All of this was initiated at the beginning of the film with the question of nuclear power both military and civil. The images of the devastated cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were presented as self-evident testaments to the incontestable evil of nuclear weaponry. This was later combined with a statement by Benn in the commons proclaiming nuclear deterrence to be a sham. So game set and match, the great intellect of Benn speaking truth to power and who would dare disagree? Surely no one, unless they happen to possess a elementary knowledge of 20^th century history. Problematic at best Benn’s stated position seems to be made in utter ignorant defiance of the idea that there might exist credible arguments contrary to his own which at least merit some form of tacit engagement. Considerations as to the alternatives to dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, such as a US ground invasion or further blockade and starvation of the Japanese home islands, are never mentioned. Much like any possible acknowledgement of the role played by nuclear weaponry in maintaining the peace between both sides during the cold war by making the idea of open conflict unimaginable.  Instead Benn is presented as an edgy and courageous politician and intellect because he can simply point to suffering and say this is wrong but never accepting the moral responsibility of divulging what a credible alternative might look like.

This style of intellectual laziness then continues into the realm of domestic politics. After striving to build socialism in Great Britain ever since the massive impetus of the founding of the NHS under the Atlee Labour government and continuing onto its successors of the Wilson governments, any intervening Conservative governments that might have expanded social welfare provision being edited out of the narrative, a great tragedy and betrayal was committed. The IMF and then Mrs Thatcher gate crashed the party and turned the music off. At the point of crisis Tony Benn’s alternative economic plan was callously rejected as high finance and big business won the day. A victory of unrestrained greed the consequences of which we still live with today.

Though as usual certain important issues are missing from the film’s account. At no point is it ever explained that the IMF were only able to interfere in British eternal politics because the Callahan government had gone to the IMF to request a £4 billion emergency loan. In building socialism and attempting to maintain full employment and state ownership and management of large parts of the economy the financial sums were not adding up. The film also neglects to mention that inflation under the labour government had reached a startling 25% as printing ever more money to maintain full employment was causing long term erosion of the productive capacity of the increasingly outmoded and uncompetitive UK economy. Added to this the power of trade unions had extended to being able to veto decisions made at the ballot box and forestall much needed structural economic change.

Though seemingly painful for figures like Benn to admit a major crisis was at hand produced by the post war consensus and his solution to the problem was simply more of the same, greater state control, rationing and shortages. With his head firmly buried in the sand he was incapable of perceiving arguments that promoted the idea of greater control of market forces being the way out of state produced stagnation as anything but morally reprehensible. Neither in the film or in any of Benn’s other output does he show any real understanding of why such stagnation and inefficiency had occurred in the first place. The mantra of greater democratic control of the economy was always on his lips but he never answered arguments that demonstrated why democratic control being highly impractical in its ideal form leads almost inevitably to bureaucracy as the demands of complex organisation necessitate the formation of hierarchies and the subsequent entrenching of inefficiencies and conservative and reactionary interests. Though reminiscent of Trotsky, another idealist pushed into the wilderness, Tony Benn to his last breath operated on the logic that as long as you say the words democracy and socialism enough times the facts of reality might disappear or conform to your morally righteous ideas of how they should behave.

The 1984 miners’ strike is yet another scene in this same story of the denial of reality. The miners’ union being unnecessarily and mercilessly crushed by the police commanded by the Thatcher government, the demonic representatives of international capitalism. Who couldn’t shed a tear for such brazen an act of brutal exploitation of the working class?

Airbrushed from the interpretation of events of course was any mention of the massive costs of keeping an outdated and unprofitable industry on the life support of state tax payer subsidy. No mention of how Arthur Scargill led his members out on strike without a ballot and how throughout the campaign dissenters from this party line were physically harassed and intimidated for the crime of exercising their right to work. Instead we are presented with Tony Benn looking at scenes from the battle of Orgreave shaking his head and muttering the words ‘class warfare’, whatever those words are actually supposed to mean coming out of the mouth of the man who was part of labour governments who made more miners redundant than Mrs Thatcher could ever have dreamed of.

Skipping then to the figure of Tony Benn out of power and bereft of any political influence but instead recast as a lovable and doddering elder statesman turned political activist. Never so popular or as loved then than before, as now out of office none of his idealist emotive moralism need ever have been checked by seriously considering the reality of the consequences that his ideas might entail. Benn could criticise New Labour renouncing its socialist heritage or put the words blood and oil into a sentence to criticise the Iraq or Afghanistan invasions, receive thunderous applause. Even flying to Baghdad to give Saddam Hussein an Indian head massage of an interview and spending as much time talking to the genocidal dictator about the multiculturalism of his grandchildren as he did confronting Saddam about his continual evasion of UN weapons inspectors, affording the tyrant the benefit of the doubt when he pleaded innocence.  Free to indulge himself in the two dimensional thinking that had stopped him from ever achieving anything in political office Benn was probably never more in his element and in receipt of so much popular respect and never more ludicrous or intellectually stifling as a consequence. It was popularist but in any way radical or revolutionary most certainly not.

As hard as it might be to imagine there were some endearing and heartening moments in the production and it would be dishonest not give them mention. The first being probably Benn’s only honourable political campaign in renouncing his peerage in order to continue serving in the house of commons and to continue representing his constituency of Bristol which had stuck by him throughout his campaign against the British establishment. The other cause for admiration is notably non-political and that is the undeniable warmness and charm of Benn’s character which were most definitely enhanced when it came to wearing the cloves of an older man. The most touching moment of the whole film was his description of his relationship with his wife Caroline who in Benn’s words taught him both how to live and how to die, and there is little more that a fellow human being can give you than that.

With this reflection in mind it is important at all times to distinguish between a person’s human characteristics and their political or intellectual values and opinions. It is all too easy to let one colour the other. In the case of Tony Benn his greatness as a personality and his intimacy as a human being has bought him the licence to spout endless nonsense as a politician which surely people on both the left and right of politics should by now find exhausting to listen to. Though problematically this confusion was aided by Benn himself his political methodology as stated in the film was to treat all political questions as moral questions. Technical considerations became a secondary priority, if of any importance, as all questions and issues became emotive ones in which opponents could only be understood as acting in a malicious cold hearted or immoral fashion with which there could be no compromise. As well intentioned as this method of operation might have been it stopped Benn from ever achieving anything substantial in the world of politics or from utilising his immense experience as a politician for anything but pitiful and asinine demagoguery. This uncompromising stance won him much respect as a man who stuck to his ideals but does history tell us that uncompromising idealism in human beings is necessarily always a force for good?

With all this being said and as many warnings given it is at least comforting to think that its hard to imagine what political legacy Tony Benn will have if any. There was no need to picket his funeral as the once described most dangerous man in Britain departed a harmless geriatric. We can now turn the page on his life and say good night sweet prince.        

                                  

                   

Farage learning the lessons of the interview from hell

Nigel Farage’s interview on LBC was no short of a political disaster. This being said from a member of the UKIP party. Farage got pinned down on several occasions where his answers were less than convincing and the interviewer James O’Brian was more than adept at hanging Farage out to dry on them such as his personal financial affairs and his associations with rather ugly far right elements in the European parliament and his less than competent attempts to disassociate himself from them on what should appear to most people as clearly a matter of principle. Over the 20 minute bout one person clearly won and the other clearly lost and already many people who don’t care too fondly for the future prospects of the UK independence party are jumping for joy and registering a clear success.

However this being said it also seems to be particularly apparent that some people should step back and take a reality check and put things into their correct proportion before they get a bit too carried away celebrating the potential demise of UKIP or the public disgracing of its leader. If one thing can be learnt and taken on board by the party it is that Farage has not done very well in defending himself on this specific occasion against a very pernicious set of tactics which he himself should more than well know are out there and seem to be the mainstay of the anti-UKIP lobby, namely character assassination and sensationalist point scoring which is completely abstract from the actual political issues at stake. I hope to explain why, being intellectually honest and recognising this specific episode as a defeat, one can still be firm in their support and campaigning for UKIP whilst learning some important lessons and that I have every faith in Farage as the brilliant leader I sincerely believe that he is as long as he takes notice and learns them.

One of the most important cases in point was Farage’s comment about the prevalence of foreign languages in public. At the root of this misguided comment is a very important and credible concern that should hopefully be far from illegitimate to make. Which is that in order to foster greater social integration, as well as economic productivity, immigrants should be required to have a certain aptitude in the English language. The second follow up point being that achieve this as well as other perfectly sensible controls on immigration it is necessary to leave the European Union which requires us to maintain an open door immigration policy to the populations of all of the nations of the ever expanding EU. Not doing so also means that controls can and will have to only be unfairly placed on migrants from outside of the EU. However the manner of Farage’s comment means that all of this lovely logic can easily be tossed aside, even though most of the British population would likely be in agreement, going by opinion polls, or at least treat it as a more than half reasonable position to uphold. By announcing an instinctive fear and un-comfort simply to the sound of foreign languages being spoken you unsurprisingly open yourself up to allegations and criticisms that Farage of all people should realise and know his enemies are just waiting more than ready to make against him.

That Farage can so easily walk head first into such a trap is disappointing especially because he has done so well in public debates at continually ramming home the key arguments against the EU which are distinct and separate from the little Englander prejudice and bile that is too often associated with the anti-European right. The need to stem back the tide of EU bureaucracy and regulations, the benefits of controlling our immigration and trade policies, a chance to exit the common agricultural policy or traditions of law alien to our own. All of these points and more were fabulously laid out by Farage in his debate against Nick Clegg who showed that he couldn’t hold a candle to the charisma and common sense logic of Farage instead resorting to nauseating political sound bites such as continually referencing that the EU is ‘the world’s largest economy’ and that we shouldn’t ‘pull up the drawbridge’. It is level headed and robust public displays like this as well as another impressive speech given at the LSE which have personally motivated somebody like myself to join UKIP not the scare tactics all too often associated with the party. To have come so far and to have achieved so much as the 4^th or possibly now even the 3^rd strongest party in the UK it’s excruciating to see such off the cuff remarks needlessly endanger the party’s public image.

However to place the blame wholly at Farage’s door would be horribly tendentious. Any person who sees this particular interview as a victory against Farage and UKIP surely must have noticed by now that this is yet another interview and debate in which the EU itself and policy towards it haven’t even got a mention? Instead of discussing trade or immigration O’Brian like a line of interviewers before him has decided to dedicate all of his questions and allotted time to the lunatic fringe of UKIP and the personal finances of its leader which after the 100th episode of doing so really is no longer barely enough to keep the mind alive of anyone watching. It’s a stone wall tactic which ignores and stifles the advancement or discussion of anything approaching substance which compares almost to the tactics of coercion utilized by the members of Unite Against Fascism who have been resuscitating the 1930s brown shirt styled tactics of disrupting public meetings. It’s a sad tribute to the state of public debate and journalism which is perhaps best encapsulated in the latest article of Laurie Penny who calls for the nation to start taking the threat UKIP poses seriously instead of glibly dismissing it and then goes on to inexplicably call Farage a ‘thug’ and compare his party to the NAZIs. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/04/ukip-understands-people-will-always-want-someone-blameThough best of all after displaying such contorted logic of taking UKIP seriously by slandering them because taking them seriously might well mean you have to take them seriously, Penny has the audacity to then quote Orwell in her defence. And all of this is only one notch below the other favoured tactic of the anti-UKIP lobby of dragging out anecdotal evidence as to the impeccable valour of an immigrant they might happen to know as if it’s a substitute to an actual argument about the relative merits of controlled or open door immigration. And then for those who feel altogether more intellectually distinguished in the discussion a generic comment about the dangers of blaming the ‘other’ is usually not far amiss.

So in conclusion it should be and most probably already has been noted by Farage that he has unnecessarily fallen victim to the tactics of his opponents rather than playing to his strengths, though noting such is not to excuse the despicable and intellectually lazy nature of those tactics. The success of UKIP will depend on its members learning from this particular incident because if there is  one thing is for certain then its that there will be more James O’Brians in the future and such trolls need to be starved of the ammunition which only UKIP itself can best give them.               

Marx vrs Hayek

(opening speech given at the Marxist and Hayek society debate 18/03/2014)

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen, comrades, brothers and sisters, fellow Austrians

I must first start out by apologising to anyone in advance to anyone who has come expecting an epic economics rap battle, this simply not feasible and can’t be delivered. I would also like to thank the Marxist society for agreeing to take part in this debate, personally I can’t stress how tired I am of the lack of engagement across the political spectrum, we spend too much time talking past each other in different rooms and sneering at each other when the other person isn’t present instead of have the decency of debating face to face.

I would like to start on a point of agreement. Watching the not to recent debate between Marxist academic  Alex Callinicos and FT editor Martin Wolf I couldn’t help finding myself in broad agreement with a lot of what Callinicos had to say. Orthodox economics is in crisis. Not only did it fail to predict the crisis of 2008 but it also has no idea how to get out of that same crisis. The very same policies that got us into the current crisis, printing money and inflating booms in housing and asset prices, are being pursued with avengeance to deliver us from that very same crisis, and needless to say the outlook for the future does not look good.

We are supposedly entering into a recovery, but a recovery for whom? Unemployment is still very high, youth unemployment in particular and government debt is mounting. Thanks to QE we’ve seen a recovery of the stock market but since this predominantly effects those few in our society who own stocks and shares this is a recovery and further enrichment of the top 10% of the wealthiest in our society and not much for anyone else. We’re either on the eve of another great depression or we’re gearing up for a return of stagflation which the Keynsian consensus is once again leading us to.

Capitalism if it is not already dead is dying and im sure both sides would agree with that statement though taking it to mean very different things.

To end that section unnervingly warm and close agreement with Callinicos the question has to be asked and I don’t believe it was ever answered by him as to what Marxist Economics has to other us in lieu of the Keynesian mainstream.

In the field of economics Marx cannot offer anything of any value. To put it bluntly Marxist economics is obsolete and has been for a very long time. Any member of the Hayek society should be proud to point out that the death blows to Marx’s economic system were delivered by the Austrian economists who were the predecessors of Hayek. Karl Meneger and Eugen Bohm Bawerk in the later part of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th century exposed the fundamental flaws of Marxist economics, as they did the whole of the classical school. Namely this was done by exposing the contradictions of the labour theory of value and replacing it with the theory of Marginal Utility.

This dealt a fatal body blow to Marx’s understanding of capitalism and no Marxist economist has ever been able to respond. Reading George Cathphores’ introduction to Marxist economics he quite candidly states that no satisfactory response has ever been arrived at to Bohm Bawerk’s criticism that the Labour theory of value, which marx dedicates no more than a page to in Captial vol 1, is contradictory because it presumes that which it seeks to prove, in short it explains the price of labour by refereeing to the price of labour.

However Catephores doesn’t let this stop him, he goes onto make an even more startling admission, saying that the solution to this problem is simply to commit to the counter factual that the Labour theory of Value is legitimate and is coherent. Meaning quite bluntly that in order to gain the incites from the Marxist economic system you must first take a leap of faith. No longer can Marxist economics be called scientific, instead its entering into the realm of theology and metaphysics. Im not sure about the Marxist society, but that doesn’t pass for a sound argument at the Hayek Society.

Though such a fit of desperation is understandable, because without the Labour Theory of Value and against the rise of Marginal Utility Theory, Marx’s theory of exploitation collapses, his theory of surplus value goes out the window, his theory of crisis developing from either the tendency of the rate of profits to fall or the inability of capitalist systems to reach stable equilibrium due to the divorce between Use and Exchange values both go down the proverbial toilet. Such an admission to the importance of the theory was admitted by Rosa Luxemburg in her pamphlet on reform and revolution, where she clearly states that if the theory goes then so does the entire system.

As if this wasn’t enough another hole was then soon ripped in the economics of socialism by Hayek’s mentor, Ludwig Von Mises. As Mises pointed out first in his essay of 1922 entitled economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth and then in his book simply titled ‘Socialism’. A socialist economy is technically impossible. I will repeat that, ‘technically impossible’. Mises points out that the defining element of a capitalist society is free and functioning capital markets or stock exchanges. It is here where competition over scarce resources is battle out and prices produced and arrived at, through the market mechanism.

Mises pointed out that without multiple and numerous competing companies or individuals and instead with being replaced by one state in ownership of the resources allocating them centrally for ‘social instead of private gain’ no such prices can be generated. If there are no prices, except those fashioned by beurocrats out of thin air, then costs cannot be calculated in any meaningful manner, efficiency cannot be calculated and most basically of all no economising can take place. Only chaos may reign, even if the organisers at the centre have the best intentions in the world or where substituted by angels, they cannot begin to match or approach the efficiency and productivity of the market mechanism because in the words of Hayek the information conveyed through the price mechanism cannot be centrally concentrated, and to do otherwise is only the pretence of knowledge.           

In light of this realisation its both hilarious and tragic to read Lenin’s The State and Revolution where he reassures us that running a modern economy is only a simple matter of ticking boxes and administration. Consumer goods will be piled up in a big warehouse and the workers will come to collect them. Is it surprising in the least how chaos and gross waist of resources was achieved by the Bolsheviks and that in naively forwarding themselves as the group of intellectuals suited to solving this unsolvable task it only ended in authoritarian politics, as Hayek illustrates in his book the road to serfdom.

So leaving the wounded Marx aside and coming back the Hayek, the key to our current crisis in the light of the problem already mentioned is to reinstate the one mechanism humanity knows has the capacity to organise the extended order of society comprising millions of human beings. Lets bring back the market.

Crucially we need to give it the room and freedom that it needs to thrive. Most importantly of all this means brining back interest rates. Lets stop perverting the price system by printing hoards of money to try and magic our way back to growth on a tidal wave of false IOUs, which only lead to inflation and malivestments, which we have so far showed ourselves reluctant to liquidate.

For once lets allow the Austrain economists and the Austrian theory of the business cycle guide us out of cyclical boom and bust, manufactured by government and central bank expansions of the credit supply. What would Hayek do in the current crisis? Lets start with two very basic and brief recommendations with regards to two of our most important markets and industries.

Lets make the housing market, the source of so much of our woes a free market once again. Not only by not pumping it with cheap credit but by repealing the mountains of regulation that stop new houses from being built and is so complex that only a very few can navigate, securing them a government backed monopoly. Lets get rid of government schemes such as Fanny May and Freddie Mac or closer to home the Help To Buy Scheme which distort the function of the market by backing unrealistic home ownership schemes which only lead to disaster which is some how blamed on the free market  

Lets make banking a free market once again. Lets break up the government backed monopoly which is our current system of fractional reserve banking. Where banks are given cheap credit from the central bank to leverage themselves up to the hilt whilst providing little to no support for the real economy instead inflating asset bubbles and then turn back to the government when things go wrong and the market starts to fight back, expecting and too often receiving a bail out.  Lets get rid of the encyclopaedia Britannica of regulation that makes Banking second only to nuclear power in the complexities one has to overcome if you are a new entrant to the market.

To conclude lets return to the free market. Lets not replace crony capitalism and central banks with politburos and 5 year plans and the concentration camps that inevitably follow

 

The Spectre of Post-Modernism and rediscovering the Cosmopolitan

(by way of a response/comment on Alexandar Shea's article on Vladamir Putin's postmodern foreign policy http://www.lostcosmopolitan.com/#!putindostoevskymoment/czay . Small health warning that the below does develop into a bit of a ramble)

It is certainly true that we live in a world dominated by discourse. A world in which aesthetic is king. Even in the world of the intelligencia, to which society goes for wisdom produced by long, slow and specialised reflection, trend and consensus, which feasts on lazy and superficial thinking, is depressingly dominant. If you can train yourself in art of exchanging clichés then a glittering career as a public intellectual could well be open to you, that is of course if you’re not interested in becoming a career politician.

A great example of the power of aesthetic in shaping intellectual climates of opinion is the rise and fall of Marxism. A philosophy, though more accurately a political economy, brought to power by a revolution in Russia at the beginning of the 20^th century and then demolished with the falling of a wall in East Germany at the end of the century. Though what either of these two events actually correlate with or tell us about the contents of Das Kapital really is a mystery, yet these were the seminal events upon which the fate of the ideology in fashionable intellectual circles turned. As the great economist of the Austrian school Henry Hazlitt once said, we don’t seem to refute our enemies anymore, we simply say farewell to them, just as we never seriously endeavour to understand ideologies we simply wear them as badges to show off and distinguish ourselves to and from others.

If indeed we did care about reckoning with the intellectual tenants of Marxism then we would soon find out that the death knell had already fallen upon it much before 1989 or even 1917 as the economists who pioneered the marginal utility revolution, like Karl Meneger and Eugen Bohm Bawerk, tore up the foundations upon which Marx’s economics and thus his historical predictions rested, as early as 1871, only four years after Marx published volume one of Das Kapital. Just as the vast intellectual flaws in the idea of constructing a socialist economy were pointed out by Ludwig Von Mises in 1920, in his article on economic calculation, only shortly after the project got underway in the Soviet Union, thoughinterletuals seem to have acted as you had to wait to 1989 to be privy to this reality. However you will seldom catch any of Marx’s undertakers or any of his attempted revivers mentioning any of these names or attempting to address any of the specific and technical problems which they highlighted, such as the redundancy of the labour theory of value. Indeed reading much of the popular and academic reflections on the legacy and validity of Marx one would be forgiven for not realising that the man was an economist at all. Instead we are overwhelmed with refutations along the lines of smugly quipping that Marxism doesn’t account for ‘human nature’ or defences that centre around framing the recent financial crisis as being the old man stealing the last laugh on Fukayama and friends, as if Marx was the first and only economist to point out that capitalism can suffer crises and periodically slide into down turns.

I mention this topic specifically by way of introduction partly to agree with the Lost Cosmipolitan that the world of ideas is all too frustratingly inhabited by those who swallow and regurgitate sound bites and intellectual buzz words, leaving the post-modernist to wreak havoc when he ties his opponents in linguistic knots fashioned from their own verbal veneer. But also to specifically address his query about why we are now banned from ever talking about class, even in a society of increasing inequality, because even though I would agree in believing this to be a dismissal based on shallow foundations, im not really sure if anyone truly knew what they meant back in the day when wielding the critical hatcket of ‘class conflict’ was wide spread and commonly accepted, so why bringing it back in anything like its old form will do us any good is something about which im extremely doubtful. When Terry Eagelton, Eric Hobsbawm, Slavoj Zizek, Robert Skidelsky, David Harvey and Tony Judt amongst others vaguely tell us that we have to return to Marx, though steering clear of its Bolshevik mutation, to give us inspiration once again for solving the problems of our time, surely we can only weep as to how utterly unimaginative and stultifying these intellectuals are, because for one thing they certainly aren’t ‘radicals’. Could we at least have a go at parroting some other ideology before we let scientific socialism back into the saddle? Could we at least understand what Marx meant when he used the words such as ‘exploitation’ and the technical economic definitions he gave to them before we resurrect them once again.       

Though back to spectre of the post-modern Vladimir Putin, which our lost Cosmopolitan brilliantly illustrates in his article, surely instead of just saying bravo to the elegance of the post-modern Tsar’s performance, should it not instead provoke a need to firmly and confidently restate our principles, for those amongst us who still believe in the ideal of liberal democracy and who still broadly vibrate to the manifesto of Fukuyama and strangely still think Neo-conservatism has something to say for itself? Like Emmanuel Kant responding to David Hume should we not at such a moment like this be awoke out of our dogmatic slumber and think it a scandal that the legitimacy as well as the clarity of our position was ever lost and that we now have a president of the USA who sees himself as nothing more than a ‘pragmatist’ and a global caretaker instead of a policeman. Does anyone else have a problem remembering his name; Barrack Carter or Jimmy Obama? Should we not to such a provocation, emanating from Washington as well as the Kremlin, have the instinctual urge to repeat Samuel Johnson’s cry ‘I refute it thus’.

So in an rough attempt to do this, here we go . . .

Concerning the first of the two pillars in Fukuyama’s vision, which is free-market economics and the recent ignominious implosion of the Washington Consensus, can we not still recognise the comprehensive triumph of free markets in the 20^th century as the superior model of economic organisation and the only game in town when compared to command economies or bloated social democracies? Though more importantly can we really continue to stand silent and powerless as this great institution is being destroyed by incessant government intervention in the form of massive and disastrous bouts of central bank inflation and money printing, which only lines the pockets of top ten per cent whilst producing asset bubbles and resultant economic meltdowns which leave the bottom 10% unemployed. Can we really say after these splurges of cheap government produced credit that flood the housing market, which is politically skewed by the government creations Fanny May and Freddie Mac, that free markets are the cause of all our woes? When the tax codes and business regulation of most western economies resemble encyclopaedia Britannica can we really blame the wolfs of Wall Street for our stagnant growth or should we look at something a little less visceral in the great degeneration of the rule of law to the rule of lawyers. When we declare that Neo-liberal economics has failed in places such as South America and gloat because we’ve found an exception to the rule which thankfully stops the people of the third world from suffering the agonies of capitalist consumerism, can we not heed the words of Hernando de Soto who reminds us that his native continent has never seen the success of free markets because it has not yet established the necessary requirement of functioning and reliable property rights upon which a market depends? And if not then how can we go about explaining the East Asian economic miracle, the great elephant in the room, if not the tiger?

Ultimately returning to the start of this article can we not define and clearly understand what we mean when we use words and phrases such as ‘free markets’ and ‘capitalism’ and learn to compare them to the plain mechanics of reality before we continue labelling cows as sheep and subsequently get distraught when they don’t bleat. If we can’t, then could the door be possibly left any wider open for the post-modern critique? If we live in a world in which Austerity means broadly maintaining current levels of government spending, instead of cutting them with aim of freeing up resources for use by the private sector, then it’s no surprise that Austerity hasn’t worked for the plain reason that it simply hasn’t been tried. If we lose the plain meaning of words then we only have ourselves to blame when we become disillusioned with a world that we’ve failed to engage with, in the most basic of terms. 

Moving onto the political, which is the second of Fukuyama’s pillars, which suffers from similar linguistic maladies as the economic, there are other whales of words which need to be harpooned as Robert Conquest once put it, if we are to fully value, appreciate and understand our inheritance left to us by the European enlightenment. The biggest whale word of them all is ‘democracy’. The reason that this word has become somewhat infamous is because we have forgotten and neglected how it should relate to and serve other concepts such as liberty and freedom, rather than confusingly becoming a value or an ideal in and of itself. As Karl Popper pointed out in his invaluable work The Open Society and Its Enemies democracy and elections are not the foundations of a free society. This instead is the rule of law in service of the liberal ideals of championing the freedom of individual, which find their best expression in that creation of the enlightenment, namely the US constitution. The democratic process itself cannot hold a candle to the importance of this creation but instead is simply the best mechanism that we know of to protect the undue disturbance and erosion of the principles of the constitution. It does this not by being able to select the best leaders to office but instead by giving us a stable mechanism by which bad leaders can be peacefully ejected. Indeed relying on the wisdom of crowds it promises little else. Thus even Churchill was subtly wrong when he described it as the worst system of governance except for all the others. He was well founded in his pessimism, just imprecise for calling it a system of governance rather than a mechanism of preservation for a system of governance.

Once this whale has been successfully harpooned, or this ‘weasel word’ vetted as Friedrich Hayek might put it, we can start to clear up or at least qualify some of dissolutions with the inevitable march of democracy. As the Venezuelans are finding out just because you freely elect a government it doesn’t mean they won’t slowly take away your freedoms by increasingly asserting their control over the nation’s means of subsistence, also known as the economy. And it will be interesting to see if the Venezuelans will be subject to the same revelation as the Palestinians if indeed the day does come when at the ballot box when the Venezuelan population decides it no longer believes in the Chavista revolution, that sometimes even if you’re rulers once sought a democratic mandate it doesn’t mean that they will necessarily ask for it ever again and that some groups are more than happy to be elected into office but certainly won’t stomach the idea of being elected back out again.    

Realising the proper definition of this word should hopefully help us in our efforts to export it. The examples of Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and a list of other countries in which US efforts, at least in part, has helped contribute to the creation of a thriving replication of its own self, should  prove that if done correctly, it is a more than worthwhile venture for both the USA and the countries in question. Doing so might involve backing dictators such as Augusto Pinochet, President Marcos or Suharto and even though we can’t be casual in this pursuit we shouldn’t be eternally embarrassed either. It is unashamedly in everyone’s interest to export our model of economic and political governance, or one might call it an ideology if they were feeling bold enough. Just as it is in nobody’s interest to do it in an unrealistic and ham-fisted fashion, such as in Afghanistan. We need to temper our passions with the restraint of strategic minds of the Kennan and Kissinger ilk, which is why I would agree that the USA has no dog in the Ukrainian fight and this article is not a call to arms over the Crimea. But equally we should never forget the purpose and importance of our cause, even if we don’t label ourselves ‘indispensible’ or ‘exceptional’, terms which will certainly come back to bite us when they take on a meaning and life of their own as we once again forget what the words are meant to stand for or subtly the ideas they represent. But if we want a coherent foreign policy then we can’t afford to label ourselves simply ‘pragmatists’ either, as this is only a tactic and not a goal even though it might masquerade as a replacement for one.

The insidious problem of submitting to the post-modern critique is that in submerging oneself in its relativism one becomes increasingly vulnerable to those who seek to use it as a cover for the promotion of sinister absolutisms. In name of battling Western hypocrisy we have to pair millennial ideologues with apocalyptic weaponry by arming the Iranian revolutionary guard with nuclear weapons. Genocidal dictators such as Saddam Hussein and his crime family have to be left the undisputed owners of the oil of Mesopotamia in order to plough the proceeds into accumulating vast stock of armaments of both the conventional and non-conventional variety. And the world would be a much better place if only the two neighbouring regimes mentioned were left by the side of each other to pursue a WMD arms race for a second round of the one million casualty conflict they fought throughout the 1980s. And of course being alarmed that this might take place on top of the world’s most important energy supply is disgusting by the virtue of the fact that in our cynical post-modern discourse energy security which relies on oil should be reviled more or less inexplicably for its own sake as if the latter three letter word was some horrible bodily excretion. If US armed forces are seen only as agents of hypocrisy where one narrative is only as legitimate as the next then we have to become the bed fellows of and learn to co-exist with the like of Slobadam Milosovic, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein for whom the world is surely better off without.  And any attempt to argue the case that western military intervention would have been welcome in other crises situations, such as Rwanda or Darfur is also surely but further lost to the detriment of mankind.

So in conclusion as impressed as we might otherwise be with intricacy and elegance of Putin’s postmodern foreign policy we shouldn’t find ourselves powerless to respond on the plane of ideas and thus inclined to sink into perennial cynicism or the pathetically apologetic retreating tone of the Obama administration who’s foreign policy from day one has been a continual reassertion simply that he isn’t George Bush, but unfortunately the time might come when he has to answer in the affirmative, or at least his successors might have to. However to successfully defend the legitimacy of the cause of Liberal Democracy we need to have a coherent understanding of what it stands for. That its economic foundations even though under threat are superior to any other and that it’s political structures can benefit all peoples, though their success is dependent on more profound details specific to each location than just holding elections. It is only once we understand the causes which we pursue that we can both defend them and act upon them in a coherent manner, as only coherent arguments are meaningful or moral ones and if we lack coherence then the postmodern critique is indeed apt in pointing out hypocrisy and showing everything to be relative.                

Blurred Lines and Equally Blurred Minds.

The selective pursuit of fascism at the LSE

The LSE is in dark times, fascism is swamping the campus, one can’t walk down Houghton Street without being barracked by agitators glorifying Mussolini. Cries that Franco-ism once again is ‘la moda’ are met with long and stormy applause. Work in the library is near impossible for the sound of jackboots and vigorous Sieg-Heil-ling. The courageous yet futile attempt of the proposers of the ‘No Platform’ to placate this tide have unsurprisingly been defeated in the Student Union and now surely it can’t be long before an enabling act is upon us. In the words of Albus Dumbledore, soon each one of us will have to choose between what is right and what is easy.

But to return to reality for a moment, and to fight the temptation to which some have seemingly conceded, to think that the LSE is somehow at the centre of a climatic struggle against the insidious march and return of fascism, the ‘No Platform’ motion and the limited debate on it which took place raises some important and interesting issues.  With no doubt the motion in its random, desperate and arbitrary composition of banning fascists, rape apologists and holocaust deniers all under the same banner was most definitely a sad and soiled caricature of how mind numbing student politics can be. Is anyone else left wondering why perhaps Satan worshipers or speakers endorsing cannibalism weren’t included in this unwieldy collection? However there are some serious points which should be excavated as diamonds from the dung hill.

Firstly the refusal of the proposers to accept the original or any variation of the amendment that proposed adding the crimes of communism to the list of ideologies that should be banished from campus. It must first be pointed out that this amendment came from the university’s small number of libertarians who certainly didn’t support the motion’s move to further corrupt the right to freedom of speech, which has come under repeated attack recently, but instead wanted to at least try to introduce a measure of intellectual consistency to the motion. The amendment would have benefited from not using the very broad term ‘Communism’ but instead ‘Marxist-Leninism’ or ‘Maoism’ but its thrust was still most certainly valid.  The proposers of the motion seemed shocked that their explanation for their refusal to accept the amendment was met by laughter and vocal disbelief. As they explained communism is an inclusive ideology a world away from fascism which is focused on exclusion. Surely this is reason enough to ignore the crimes of Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky, their enslavement, execution and torture of millions. After all they did so with good intentions didn’t they?

This quite hideous piece of moral relativism and apology for sadism, which was hopeful y and most likely born out of ignorance, is congruent with a wider common laxity of popular indignation and condemnation with which the crimes of communist and socialist ideologues are met by society at large. Quite rightly we all spit on the image and memory of someone like Adolf Hitler but when it comes to a figure like Leon Trotsky, a nutcase equally committed to slaughtering, torturing and locking up thousands of his fellow human beings, the jury is still very much out. We correctly remember the massacre of innocents on the basis of race under the banner of the swastika but turn a comparatively blind eye to the greater number of victims that suffered under the banner of the hammer and sickle on the basis of social class. Very dangerously and repugnantly suffering is made exclusive and those who are often first to be written off are those who were persecuted for the crime of owning property or capital. The Bourgeois doesn’t deserve tears to be shed over them, they can quite simply be forgotten. This is certainly a message which finds an ally in ULU’s decision to boycott Remembrance Sunday on the historically vapid claim that the First World War was nothing but a capitalist conspiracy to slaughter the working classes of Europe.

Secondly, if this wasn’t already enough, very credible concerns were and should be raised as to how such a motion would be applied. Let’s put to one side for one moment the important arguments that were made in the union’s debate against the motion, centred on the need to defend the freedom of speech on campus and freedom of thought, as well as the insult the motion posed to the ability of students to defeat and dismiss far right ideologues on their own intellectual merits rather than being guided and vetted by our enlightened Student Union. This commentator for one has serious doubts that such a motion would have been anything but selectively applied. White middle class males such as David Irving would be immediately and firmly relegated from any hopes of ever being able to peddle his distortions of history in the service of holocaust denial at the LSE. But what about those other advocates and bed fellows of holocaust denial or anti-Semitism which might well have escaped censorship? The response to the question posed by this author at the union debate, inquiring if advocates of Hamas or other Islamist groups which have a less than enlightened attitude towards the European holocaust would be banned under the ‘No Platform’ was met by the proposers as being an unnecessary attack and offense to the university’s Muslims. After all we’re all multiculturalists aren’t we? So holding all groups to the same moral standards just isn’t cricket is it? God forbid, it might even commit the capital offence of offending someone.

It can only be presumed what the proposers of the ‘No Platform’ would have said in response to another inquiry that is worthy of being highlighted. This is, Hamas aside, if the proposes would be willing to condemn the students who quite rightly stand up for the rights and dignity of the people of Palestine for not at the same time being willing to condemn the Palestinian Authority for being led by a man, Dr Mahmoud Abbas, who’s doctoral thesis is a junk piece of history which presents the holocaust as a fantasy manufactured by Zionists. In the face of such an issue one can only imagine that the union would elect to do that which is easy and ignore the issue instead of doing that which is right or at least that which is intellectually consistent. As for the Iranian government’s flirtations with holocaust denial under Mr Ahmadinejad, it’s probably best not even to get started.  

When it comes to attacking the likes of David Irving, Anders Breivik, Nick Griffin or the EDL its no holds barred because we are such non-conformist and edgy moral crusaders here at the LSE. However speaking up against anyone or any group that it isn’t our archetypal image of fascism or anti-Semitism and the call to arms seems to falter. The case in point at the debate over motion was the proposers willingness to ban George Galloway on the charge of rape apology but to hesitate to do so similarly for his services in being the mouthpiece and shameless apologist and glorifier of Baath Party fascism in Iraq and Syria as well as his fundraising and support for anti-Semitic groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Say something repugnant in regards to sleeping with someone whilst they are unconscious as being merely ‘bad sexual etiquette’ and you won’t eat in this town again but publically salute the bravery and indefatigability of Saddam Hussein then nobody seems to care if you’re at their dinner table.  Just as Ken Livingston can get away with embracing Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a cleric who believes homosexuality should be punished by death and that its reasonable for a husband to beat his wife as long as it’s done with restraint and moderation, doddering figures like Tony Benn can be lavished with praise even though he’s publically said that Mao Tse Tung has to be viewed as a great figure of Chinese history.

Being on the left and posing as a radical or an opponent of American imperialism is all too often a moral passport to spew whatever obscenities you should so desire. May it be said that if we are to have bans and curtailments of freedom of speech then there are just as worthy candidates as Tommy Robison who are being overlooked.   

 

      

   

Fact Checking ULU Vice President Daniel Cooper

It comes as little surprise to anyone who was witness to last year’s shameful show of glib and tasteless remarks made by the president and vice president of ULU as to why they would not be sending an official ULU representative to the University of London’s memorial service on remembrance Sunday that the same insult is to be repeated once again. The ULU senate, on which sits Vice President Cooper, member of a Trotskyist group which last described the 2 minutes silence as ‘an orgy of militarism’, have decided once again to spit in the face of all those members of their union who believe that it is in no way unreasonable to demand that they have an official ULU representative at the service which commemorates the millions who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the cause of liberty and freedom. Could they perhaps be as gracious to acknowledge that without these great sacrifices their right to make such absurd remarks wouldn’t now exist? Or on a more pragmatic level could they tell us why they think it such a wise strategy if they are trying to defend ULU from closure why they think infuriating so many of its members is a wise course of action? Perhaps they should take heed of comrade Lenin’s remarks that you can’t build socialism on a dead corpse because similarly you can’t defend a union by first alienating its members and giving them a potent reminder of why they really could do without you as well as your Monty Python-esque socialist values.        

However to try and use this space for other purposes than just repeating the words of the already numerous students who are quite rightly outraged at their union’s activities, I would like contest the particular point upon which this debate revolved around last year, which was the respective morality of Britain’s entry and participation in the First World War. Daniel Cooper’s infamous published explanation last year for his refusal to lay a reef, which can still be found on line and should be read by all, centres on the conflict and deserves a reply addressing several points about which Cooper flat out wrong .

Firstly the conflict is framed in his letter as one fought by the working classes of Europe on the command of their evil rulers who were little more than armchair spectators to the slaughter. Understandably this is an image one might pick up from watching Black Adder but going to historical facts this image can be quickly identified as the popularised nonsense which it is. Members of all of Britain’s social classes fought and died in the First World War in equal proportions and without any significant differentiation in the proportion of deaths sustained by each class grouping. This is historical fact. It might also be illuminating to note that one of the social groups which suffered the greatest proportionate casualty rate were Oxbridge alumni . The reality is that this was not class war but one fought and inflicted upon an entire nation. However even with this put to one side surely it is abhorrent to mourn or prioritise members of the war dead on the basis of class as it would be to do so by race or gender? But this wouldn’t be the first time that the far left has sought to disqualify suffering on its pseudo religious worship of class differences.

Secondly Cooper trots out the old and worn out argument that the war was fought for the interests of capitalism seeking colonies and markets around the world as the rich in Britain sent the poor to die to protect their interests and profit margins against the encroachment of the Kaiser’s Germany. If Mr Cooper or any of his Marxists-Leninist-Trotskyite-people’s-front-of-Judea-ist following would care to look at the academic opinion on the conflict from the last 50 years they would realise how thoroughly discredited this argument is, let alone the economics that underlies it, but then again ignorance is bliss. One doesn’t have to do too much reading to find out how horrified global capital was at the prospect of a war in Europe, even a limited one. Walter Cunliffe the then governor of the bank of England pleaded with the British government to stay out of the war along with big business which was horrified the destruction of capital and trade it would cause along with the taxes and inflation that would be required to pay for it. Big business, apart from the very small amount which is concerned with arms production, does not like war, as was manifestly shown by the forced closure of stock market exchanges all over Europe as the threat of war spread in 1914.

Equally the conflict was not caused by the scramble for Africa or a conflict for colonies. This is because despite Lenin’s theorising that new colonies were of the upmost importance to European imperialists and capitalists to exploit new sources of surplus labour, colonies were of no great importance whatsoever in the strategic decision making of 1914. In fact the economic insignificance of owning huge swathes of Africa owed to the decision that the British took to gift the Germans large African territories in the preceding decades before the war. This is because Marx was completely wrong about the tendency of profits to fall, meaning that only diminishing returns could be gained from investing in already industrialised economies, eventually leading to the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Economist Thomas Sowell has shown that despite the spurious and confused figures presented by Lenin in his book on imperialism, advanced capitalist economies invest in each other at a substantially greater rate than they do in developing ones. Because profits don’t irretrievably fall and capitalism is a fluid yet stable system, which creates great prosperity for all social classes, capitalist economics meant that in 1914 the maintenance of empires was not the cause of the war.  Such non-vital issues of national interest had always been resolved by peaceful diplomacy and had never been deemed worthy of risking a world war over.

Instead the British war effort in 1914 was one reluctantly conducted against the militarism of the German monarchy which had, despite the peaceful desires of the German people, launched an aggressive war against France and Belgium in order to gain military mastery over the continent. To not enter the conflict would have been to see the destruction of the French and Belgian democracies at the hands of such a reactionary force which in the words of one of its own commanders was prepared to risk the destruction of the whole of European civilisation to achieve its own dominance and ascendancy because even if Germany went down in flames it would still be a beautiful accomplishment. The Kaiser’s Germany might not have been as archetypally menacing as Hitler’s nor the political institutions of Britain and the other allied powers of 1914 as liberal and progressive as the ones we enjoy today but the success of the allies in this horrific and tragic conflict is something that we should be proud of. Although the peace was definitely bungled, it was fought to protect the core principles which have helped the long arch of history continue to progress towards justice instead of suffering a dramatic reverse and I see no shame in affirming that belief.

So in conclusion unless the leaders of ULU can provide credible historical arguments to back their objections then they should be silent about which they cannot speak and about which we are all too tired of hearing them do so. 

                

      

     

The road to serfdom along blurred lines

The recent decision to ban the song ‘blurred lines’ by the University of London Union and the debate surrounding the decision hinges on one important word, increasingly in vogue as the justification for such bans, namely ‘normalisation’. Seemingly unbeknown to those who wield the word to silence anything they consider undesirable or unpleasant, the word ‘normalisation’ makes those who have any knowledge of the history of totalitarian socialism in Eastern Europe shudder as they see the slogan branded by those who mercilessly crushed the Prague spring in 1968 being used by their own student union. Perhaps its not as bad as having a barbeque to burn copies of the song or calling the policy ‘musical re-education’ but none the less this should hopefully be a disturbing choice of words chosen to label an already worrying policy. Even if this the farce that follows the tragedy under the leadership of Michael Chessum and Daniel Cooper ULU has strived in its commitment to be part of the farcical afterglow which has followed the death of socialism the world over. Decisions like these are increasingly making more students look forward to the end of this year when the union that Chessum and his comrades run is finally closed down and their oh so noble insurgency and twilight resistance against the Clegg and Cameron coalition of doom is finally put out to pasture.

 

To return to the issue at hand, need the argument be restated again as to why some students find the idea of simply banning and outlawing not only a dangerous policy which is a slap in the face of the liberal educational values a university is supposed to uphold and embody  but also one that is exceptionally insulting. Call it radical but perhaps it should be questioned whether clumsily banning such songs is a more dangerous normalisation of a culture of censorship and suppression of freedom of speech than Robin Thicke’s atrocious song which supposedly normalises a culture of rape by simply including the words ‘I know you want it/ You’re a good girl’?

 

Call us old fashioned but some of the subjects of ULU, the author of this piece included, believe that we are grown up and adult enough to listen to such lyrics without them altering our views and beliefs on the gravity of the crime of rape. In the same way feel ourselves being perfectly capable of having a responsible and healthy relationship with the alcohol the union so generously allows us to drink in the ULU bar. An important point does here arise out of that which might seem trivial as to concede the principle that the student union, or any governmental authority, knows best and thus must limit our freedom in order to secure our safety and to act for our own good, is to place ourselves squarely on Mr Hayek’s road to serfdom. To concede that governing bodies are knowledgeable enough as to make such micro managements of society and thus hand themselves the responsibility as well as the authority to do so then there is no limit to the extent to which it can pass arbitrary ruling after arbitrary ruling. Such haphazard attempts to centrally engineer society gain their own momentum as their inevitable creation of more problems requires more disastrous and increasingly indiscriminate measures to salvage the last salvo of blunders. The only thing proved by such irresponsible policy making is the sheer ignorance of government which it was arrogant enough to first presume it possessed.

 

The only way to cover and deny such ignorance is to resort to the bazar and the mystical which brings us back to absurd terms such as ‘the normalisation of cultures of rape or misogyny’.  These terms have no definable or specific meanings and to look for one is to try to nail the proverbial jelly to a wall. However they are terms used to justify the very specific interventions under discussion, because not being able to justify these interventions on the basis of evidence, such as how many rapes are going to be prevented by removing the lyrics ‘I know you want it’ from the union bar, the only defence is to revert into the pseudo religious by indignantly employing such vacant terms, the penalty for challenging which is too often social crucifixion.

 

Its easy to wonder if all this would be 100% clearer if the politically active students on campus spent less time attempting and pretending to read the 1000 stale and incoherent pages of Marx’s Das Kapital and instead diverted their attention to the remarkably slim and easy to read volume which is The Road to Serfdom, authored by that now sadly all too obscure Austrian economist Friedrich Von Hayek. Perhaps injecting a more liberal streak into the body politic of ULU would teach students that their university experience is an invaluable opportunity to realise that if they support or detest different points of view then open debate or learning the art of peaceful co-existence is superior in the long run to forging rods that might someday bind their backs by banning the opposition or creating ‘cultures of prohibition’.