And these signs shall follow them that believe

In 1966-67, then-twentysomething filmmaker Peter Adair and his crew spent a year with a Pentecostal Holiness congregation in rural Scrabble Creek, West Virginia. Shot on a shoestring budget, the resulting 53-minute documentary Holy Ghost People (1967) was not released to cinemas* but made some critical waves and survived on the rental market. (Today it's in the public domain, so you are without excuse.)

Adair went on to carve out a career far from the mainstream with Word Is Out (1977), the first significant documentary to present LGBTQ people on their own terms. His later films, The AIDS Show: Artists Involved in Death and Survival (1986) and Absolutely Positive (1991), chronicled the impact of the disease on the gay community, as well as Adair's own life under the shadow of being HIV-positive. He died in 1996, aged fifty-two.

Holy Ghost People opens with decontextualised snapshots of a Pentecostal service: music is played, a girl dances frantically, someone holds a serpent, an old woman looks at the camera, a Bible reading is cut off mid-sentence by the editing. It's not too bold, I think, to call it a critique of the sort of sensationalist reporting on extreme religious phenomena that leaves us understanding less, not more. The rest of the film is a careful examination of the forces shaping the church's practices, an aetiology of Pentecostal worship in Appalachia as much as it is a record.

The film steps back, and Adair's narration sets the scene over footage of the area around Scrabble Creek shot from a moving car. The poverty of rural West Virginia in the sixties is frankly shocking: in the heart of the world's richest nation, these communities look more like the villages I've seen in the backwoods of Bolivia and Paraguay. Adair explains that while the church's raucous, unstructured worship practices are legal in West Virginia (but not in neighbouring states), adherents are often ostracised by their own communities. He stresses that snakebite, though common, is not usually fatal.

Most of the film is taken up by a lengthy service that unites the Scrabble Creek congregation with fellow believers who have travelled over sixty miles from Virginia. Adair starts us off slowly, showing most of the worship leader's somewhat rambling notices - tributes to those in attendance, prayer requests, and remarks on the film crew in attendance. (In classic cinéma vérité style, Adair draws attention to the presence of the camera.) From there, the service gradually escalates from singing and testimonies to wild dancing, speaking in tongues, convulsions, falling over ('being slain in the Spirit') and eventually snake-handling.

A key part of the film comes just before that, though, in the form of individual interviews with four congregants. One man first spoke in tongues at the age of thirteen, but grew up to be 'a very mean fellow' and spent a year praying in vain for the return of the gift after his release from prison, before finally receiving tongues again during a service. Another was dissatisfied with the evangelical churches he attended, and eventually found 'the Holiness way' through his father-in-law's influence and the powerful experience of a supernatural wind sweeping through his body at night. A woman talks about the happiness brought by the Holy Spirit, and her first experience drinking strychnine during a worship meeting. The last interviewee is a middle-aged woman who is wracked by convulsions and breaks into glossolalia in the middle of sentences she shouts with a preacher's cadence and inflection, rendering her all but incoherent.

Letting these people explain themselves in their own words, without interruption or cuts, is indispensable in setting out the background against which their worship takes place. It turns them from an incomprehensible - and, given their practices, possibly terrifying - Other into ordinary, sympathetic protagonists. As anthropologist Margaret Mead, who invited Adair to introduce the film to her students at Columbia, writes: 'The people in the film are work-worn and show the marks of malnutrition, poverty, and poor medical care, and yet, on a recent showing to a very sophisticated audience, someone on my right exclaimed: "What beautiful people!"' That's a privileged perspective, of course. But it reflects Adair's success in breaking through the liberal sneer at rural people preferred by the light entertainment that passes for public discourse.

In the face of their small number, legal trouble and hostility from neighbours, adherents resist by appealing to authenticity: the free, unfettered flow of God's spirit. In worship at least, the myriad hierarchies and restrictions on their lives disappear. In his testimony, one congregant lambastes people who 'think it's a disgrace to touch a serpent'. He is unashamed because 'I don't want to be highly esteemed among men. I gotta be just what I am, glory be to God.'

While Adair emphasises that serpent-handling only occurs when adherents feel led by the Spirit and far more time is dedicated to prayer and other charismatic manifestations, the congregation eventually do pick up venomous snakes, lifting them in the air, throwing them across the room and dancing with them. It's unsurprising that this requires hype, but it's still an astonishing display of faith (at least quantitatively). Near the end of the meeting the worship leader is bitten by a copperhead on camera. While he cleans the blood from his hand with a borrowed handkerchief he calmly declares: 'If I die with this snakebite, it's still God's word, just the same. God's word is just the same... Whether we die by it or live by it, it's still God's word.' Is that an impressive reliance on God's grace - whatever the folly of deliberately provoking venomous snakes - or a deeply problematic flirting with death?

Shot on the cheapest 16mm film stock known to man, Holy Ghost People's rough and ready look reinforces its down-to-earth setting. (The poor lighting and sound recording is inevitable in a low-budget documentary, but the awful digitisation isn't - what is this 'file size' you speak of?) Structured carefully and without sensationalism, Holy Ghost People nonetheless transports the wild atmosphere and sense of real danger to the screen (I challenge you not to squirm during the snake-handling scenes.)

The first charismatic service I went to ended with an altar call to come forward and receive the Holy Spirit. I stayed in my seat, not just because I was a firmer cessationist then than I am now but because I was frankly intimidated by the manifestations I'd just witnessed. Yes, they could easily be explained by appeal to religious euphoria, but it wasn't just implausibility. Charismatic worship requires an abandonment of self-control that is pretty alien to the bourgeois ideal of the individual (which is why it appeals to so many people). Holy Ghost People lays bare both why I find the charismatic movement fascinating and why it isn't for me.

*So far as I know, at least; I've been able to find woefully little information on the film online. Anyone who knows more, don't hesitate to pitch in.

The earth a common treasury for all

I believe that the earth was created for all people, not just some. Not just the 'right' people. Not just the people with guns and money. When there is a conflict between the powerful and the disenfranchised, the oppressor and the oppressed - say, coal miners striking for better pay and conditions - there's only one side you can be on without losing your integrity, forever. To be neutral in such a situation is to side with injustice.

Forgive that grandiose introduction, gentle reader. You see, the only grounds on which anyone could criticise Harlan County U.S.A. - indeed, pretty much the film's only feature to have attracted condemnation - is that it refuses to even pretend neutrality in the manner of certain other documentaries: it stands squarely on the side of the miners. But that is a strength, not a weakness. A neutral film about the Harlan County War would be an immoral monstrosity.

Its passionate partisanship is a key part of Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning 1976 documentary, but the film is also an artistic marvel. After a terrific sequence showing the everyday work routine of coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky (Kevin Keating's cinematography in this scene alone would have made him a serious awards contender in a better world), the film's story begins with the miners at the Brookside Mine and Prep Plant affiliating to the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in 1972. The miners demand the same contract other UMWA members enjoy, but Eastover Coal, owned by Duke Power, won't budge. Thus begins an extended strike.

The conflict escalates when the company uses Basil Collins and his hired thugs to keep the road open for scabs by setting up a machine gun and intimidating the pickets with clubs and firearms. Collins is the sort of character who'd have to be invented if he wasn't real: venal, brutish, egotistical and racist, he's exactly the man you want for your dirty work. As one reviewer noted, the film doesn't tell us what became of him: 'I don't say this because I worry about the man's welfare; I just want to know he’s dead so I can sleep at night.'

The sheriff and the courts are on the bosses' side, but the company scores an own goal when a young miner called Lawrence Jones is killed by a shotgun blast, leaving behind a sixteen-year-old wife and five-month-old daughter. (This leads to the film's most harrowing scene, in which a grieving and angry miner points out bits of Jones's brain matter on the asphalt.) Eventually the bosses fold and the Brookside miners get their UMWA contract.

Barbara Kopple and her team lived with miners' families for years, observing almost every aspect of their political organisation. In the cinéma vérité style the film adopts, the camera is not a neutral observer but an active participant; Kopple makes no effort to hide the numerous moments in which her presence affects events, leading, for example, to Collins attempting to conceal a pistol in his trouser pocket. In a celebrated scene, the pickets are attacked before dawn by the gun thugs, shots are fired, and Kopple is pushed to the ground with the camera.

'Know that nigger?', yells Collins in reference to an African-American picket. 'That "nigger" is a better man than you'll ever be', replies a miner. Traditional structures of marginalisation and domination among the strikers break down. 'We done make every colour when we went in; you all be look the same when you came out', says a black miner about the thick layer of coal dust and grime on their faces at the end of a shift. 'We's all brothers when we out', replies his white colleague, and the easy banter and obvious affection between the men gives the lie to the drivel Blue Labour and the Heil feed us about working-class racism.

Not, of course, that all's rosy among the workers. Kopple does not gloss over the internal conflicts and personal recriminations that break out when the going gets tough, but the community emerges strengthened as it is transformed by struggle. Patriarchy takes a back seat when women, who turn out to be more energetic than the men, begin to coordinate the strike. Chain-smoking Sudie Crusenberry, a mother of two whose husband is retired with black lung, reignites the flagging struggle; Lois Scott becomes the effective leader before long, brave enough to face down Collins and his thugs and with righteous wrath to spare.

Even though the strike is victorious, Kopple ends Harlan County U.S.A. on an ambiguous note. As the reform movement within the national leadership of the UMWA crumbles, the miners realise they may be banned from conducting future strikes without approval at the national level. But Kopple's point is that the struggle itself - the Luxemburgian dialectic of spontaneity and organisation we see operating throughout Harlan County U.S.A. - is crucial even when it is defeated. As one of my favourite passages in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath puts it (forgive the gendered language and philosophical idiosyncrasy):

For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back... This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live - for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live - for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know - fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe. (Ch. 14)

Kopple never once abandons her story's particularity for the great forward march of history, but she does focus on the miners' political organisation at the expense of their personal lives. Considering she lived with her subjects, it's remarkable how rarely we see children or the inside of people's homes. There are, instead, a lot of meetings and interviews with several generations of Harlan people, from veterans of the vicious struggles of the 1930s to the teenage wife. 'The union' and solidarity have been fought and died for, and as a result they're deeply embedded.

Life in Harlan was hard even in the 1970s, before Reaganomics took their toll; in the film, the county looks like a third-world enclave inside the West. The legacy of neoliberalism was to bring the Global South home, globalising sharp contrasts between the rich and the poor. Kopple's miners have no confidence in government: they're fully aware that they'll only get what they fight for themselves. Call it all things held in common; call it democracy. Call it freedom: the freedom countless people have fought and died for through the ages, their names forgotten because they robbed, evicted and bombed no-one.

Ed Miliband, class traitor

Ed Miliband also likes cuts, and won't promise them reversed. He uses the exact same rhetorical strategy of divide-and-rule as his toady Balls (and if you're a toady to Ed Miliband, I feel sorry for you) by presenting it as a choice between 'protecting jobs or... pay rises'.

Wherefore see my earlier post on Balls, substituting Miliband's name where appropriate.

Ed Balls, class traitor

Ed Balls is a class traitor. He's accepting that 'we are going to have keep all these cuts'. He's using the government's language of 'pay restraint' when discussing the effective public sector pay cuts in addition to job losses that the Tories are imposing. He's attempting to play workers against each other by creating a false dichotomy between 'higher pay and bringing unemployment down'. In the conflict between the government and the working class, he's positioned the Labour Party firmly in the enemy camp.

Some people don't get upset with Labour anymore because they've come to expect this. I think the reason this sort of betrayal still angers me - the reason it still feels like betrayal at all - is that the Labour Party was founded to be the political arm of the working class, to fight capital and get a fair deal for the great majority, whereas both the Liberals and the Tories have always been bourgeois parties. In capturing Labour, the odious neoliberal flunkeys of the Balls-Miliband variety have turned a weapon of the working class against it.

There are many among the Labour rank and file who are actively fighting cuts and working within the movement against austerity. Balls is betraying them, too. The old Blairite instincts of the party oligarchy are alive and well. We can't count on the Labour Party leadership - and if not now, will they ever be on the right side? There is no parliamentary opposition, and that means there isn't actually any politics left within parliament. But there have been, and will be, marches, strikes and occupations. We will fight, and we will win.

As for Balls, don't say that he's hypocritical - say rather that he's apolitical.

Long and dark December

Usually it's worth being wary of Sundance: award-baiting generic indie fare isn't anyone's idea of a good time. But sometimes a real gem slips through and gets the accolades it deserves. Thus it was with Debra Granik's Winter's Bone (2010), and although the film failed to make a splash at the box office (earning $6.53 million on a budget of $2 million), critical reception more than made up for it.

Granik's drama stands out for its evocation of a place: an important part of any film, but Winter's Bone is all about the Ozarks, the hill country of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. It was shot in location in Christian and Taney Counties, MO., and the filmmakers were willing to rewrite lines to ensure an authentic representation of Ozarks culture. If that almost anthropological attention to detail is a strength, it's also the film's Achilles' heel - but I'll get to that.

Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is struggling to look after her younger siblings (Ashlee Thompson and Isaiah Stone) and her severely depressed mother (Valerie Richards) in rural southern Missouri. One day the local sheriff (Garret Dillahunt) pulls up outside and tells her that her father, Jessup, has skipped bail after being arrested for cooking meth. If Jessup doesn't turn up for his court date, the family will lose their house, which has been put up for bail. Ree, who knows her family will have nowhere to go, resolves to find her father and persuade him to turn himself in.

As she goes to ask relatives and neighbours about Jessup's whereabouts, though, she finds them guarded and uncooperative. Her uncle, Teardrop (John Hawkes), warns her that asking people 'about shit they ain't offered to talk about' is a 'real good way to end up bit by hogs' (Deadwood shout-out?). Even after being shown the meth lab in which her father allegedly blew himself up, Ree remains unconvinced, and her continued investigation eventually leads to a run-in with the clan of local crime boss Thump Milton (Ron 'Stray Dog' Hall).

The plot, though, isn't the single greatest contribution to the success of Winter's Bone. That would be the cinematography. As shot by longtime Debra Granik collaborator Michael McDonough, Winter's Bone looks frosty and crisp (it's no surprise it was filmed on the Red One digital camera). It's often deliberately overlit, capturing the long shadows and pale, cold daylight of winter. This is all the more effective as the film eschews the shopworn tropes of winter cinematography: there's no snow anywhere to be seen, for example. (Principal photography took place in late winter, concluding in March 2009.) The colours are desaturated but not washed out, as if they had retreated to their essence. Winter's Bone looks, in other words, like a dream.

That's appropriate since the film is essentially a fairy-tale, and Ree's search for her father is a quest. Her repeated refusal to heed warnings of a dangerous place in the woods, which drives the plot, is distinctly reminiscent of the genre, and the film's climactic scene, which takes place on a lake in the middle of the night, is a test of the heroine's commitment to her cause. Creating a drama about poor rural Americans not in the obvious mode - social realism - but as fairy-tale is perhaps the most interesting artistic decision Granik took, and it pays off in the viewing experience.

The performances, too, are mostly if not uniformly excellent. Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of Ree rightly catapulted her onto the A-list. She doesn't suggest that Ree is a vulnerable teenager beneath a hard exterior: rather, she has long shed doubts and fears, becoming tough in order to survive in a bleak world. The second standout is the terrific John Hawkes. His Teardrop is a man who has become so mean and threatening that Ree finds it difficult to trust him. Significantly, as Hawkes himself pointed out, he does not become a different character by the end of the film: rather, it's our perspective on him that changes. Dale Dickey is also mesmerising in the role of Merab, who regards Ree with sympathy but knows she must safeguard the interests of the Milton clan first.

Even so, there are a few reasons to feel uneasy about Winter's Bone. Its depiction of poverty is frankly pornographic. We're treated in lavish detail to the Dolly family's inability to feed itself: and while the rise of insecurity in the west should give us pause for thought, I'm not sure I like the outsider's perspective. There's an almost ethnographic feeling to the way in which rural America - shown as a society of patriarchal clans, as in much recent pop culture - is fictionalised here; and in presenting the Ozarks to an urban, liberal audience as strange, the viewer's perspective is affirmed rather than challenged. The backwoods are seen but not empowered.

#Nov30 in Nottingham

Today was an important day for the fightback against 'austerity', with two million public sector workers out on strike all over the country. It was a lovely late autumn day, cold but clear and sunny. We got up at an ungodly hour, by student standards, to support our lecturers on the picket lines around University Park Campus.

We put up posters, held placards and posted pickets on all nearby paths. Picketing an open campus is a little tricky: many of the cars going past you will be private sector contractors, who are not on strike, and students may be going in for more than one reason. Still, we encouraged all who came to turn back, go to the pub etc.: some did and were cheered for it. We got quite a lot of declarations of solidarity from passers-by, but really the old principle that you never cross a picket line needs to be reinstated. (I hope this will happen as the struggle against the government broadens and continues.)

There were tight-lipped managers in Jaguars, too, and scabs who would try to avoid looking you in the eye as they drove past. (We generally didn't denounce them as vigorously as I've seen happen at the 2009 Royal Mail strikes, for example.) Shortly after 10am, we packed up and walked to Forest Recreation Ground, where the trade union march was gathering.

It was a terrific march, certainly the largest I've been on in Nottingham. There were people from more unions I've ever seen outside the TUC March for the Alternative, including unions not commonly associated with protest and industrial action, like the Royal College of Nursing. The local Labour Party branches were there, too, reminding us that Labour is not just the spinelessness of an Ed Miliband. As in March, there were people from all sections of society, including many with children. We marched down Mansfield Road, through the city centre and Market Square (past the occupiers, with whom there was much fraternising) before gathering in Wellington Circus.

The atmosphere was amazing. No march I've been on has ever experienced quite so much support from the general public, I think: drivers honked and raised their fists, people young and old clapped and shouted. I don't want to exaggerate this, but polling data suggests the government has pretty much lost the argument on job losses and cuts to services. The Tories and their LibDem running dogs mishandled the conflict from the start, managing to create a broad front between smaller, more militant and larger, more conciliatory unions. The challenge to the anti-cuts movement is to maintain and expand the front that's been created, and keep pressing the most reactionary government since Caligula until victory.

Ed Miliband: cowardly man trapped between two different forms of cowardice

Ed Miliband spoke at TUC Congress today. While much of his speech was crowd-pleasing, Miliband refused to budge on a central point. 'While negotiations were going on, I do believe it was a mistake for strikes to happen [he said in reference to the 30 June walkouts]. I continue to believe that. But what we need now is meaningful negotiation to prevent further confrontation over the autumn.'

Well, that sounds familiar, since it's the only statement available to Miliband in recent months. Apparently he's still not impressed by the argument, eloquently made by Mark Serwotka back in June, that the 'negotiations' are a sham. Mary Bousted reiterated the basic point: 'Just for information, the government are not prepared to negotiate. All they are prepared to do is negotiate how to implement the changes they have decided. There are no real negotiations going on. We can give you chapter and verse about that.' This sort of fake 'consultation' favoured by managerial types is well known to anyone who's ever been involved in conflict with our rulers.

The real kick, however, came during questions, when Miliband outlined his idea of what trade unions should be. Highlighting the need to increase unionisation in the private sector, he said:

Unions can offer businesses the prospect of better management, better relationships, as you did during the recession. Of course the right to industrial action will be necessary, as a last resort. But in truth, strikes are always the consequence of failure. Failure on all sides. Failure we cannot afford as a nation. Instead, your real role is as partners in the new economy.

This phony 'vision' for trade unions is quite familiar to me. I've been involved in negotiations with employers, and that's what they want unions to be: 'partners' helping them realise their aims. Channels of communication. Enablers. Miliband is parroting the rhetoric of Thatcherism, but in nicer-sounding New Labour packaging. Unions aren't useless relics, they can help the capitalists realise their profits! Let's all pull together! Unions should reject Miliband's patronising notion that they can be 'partners in the new economy'. To reiterate a basic point New Labour has always pretended not to grasp, workers and employers are locked in an antagonistic relationship, and a refusal to recognise that means surrender to the business owners.

Miliband topped it off with the beautiful reassurance that trade unions were a 'huge asset' to the Labour movement, adding that '[t]hey should never ever feel like passive or unwanted members of our movement. I want them to feel part of it.' Well, that's nice of you, Ed, if a little patronising. But the Labour party was founded to be the political arm of the working class - nothing more, nothing less. Unions are not an 'asset' to Labour: they are what Labour is about, or else the party is nothing. Despite his assurances to the contrary, it hardly seems that Miliband has any plans to reverse New Labour's efforts to subjugate the unions.

You might say that Miliband is caught between a rock and a hard place. He must at least pay lip service to trade union struggles; at the same time he's afraid of what the gutter press will do to him if he appears to openly challenge the neoliberal settlement. (And maybe there are actual political convictions in there somewhere: he never appears to believe what he says, but who really knows?) But this is not the time to be concerned with popularity. Miliband's fear reveals that he is not interested in the wellbeing of the working class, but in his political fortunes and, more broadly, those of his party: and that points to a politician who has seriously lost his way.

Bloody Harlan

 
In a key scene of the second season of FX's Justified, a representative for a coal company faces a meeting with the people of Harlan County. She argues that the corporation will bring jobs to Harlan, 'make it fertile in infertile times', but people are not convinced. In an extraordinary performance, Mags Bennett (Margo Martindale) argues that blowing off mountaintops will bring 'the spoil', chemical devastation of local water and flora, and threaten the region's unique and isolated culture.

It's this compelling evocation of a place that, as I've said before, quickly turned FX's Justified into one of my favourite TV series. The latter half of the first season was excellent, using the serial format to build towards a bloody climax and a perfect closing scene. After cleaning up the fallout from the Season One finale, the Season Two opener, 'The Moonshine War', introduces us to the Bennett clan. Mags and her sons Dickie (Jeremy Davies), Doyle (Joseph Lyle Taylor) and Coover (Brad William Henke) grow and sell marijuana in Harlan County, and seek to expand their operations after the demise of the Crowder clan.

Let's give it up for Margo Martindale: in Mags, she has created a mesmerising villain. Behind a motherly, folksy exterior (at one point, she invites all of Harlan to a 'big 'ole whoop-tee-doo'), Mags is ruthless, enforcing the family's rule position and internal discipline without mercy. She wreaks terrible vengeance on one of her sons in retaliation for a foolish venture; later, she asks a hostile local, 'Wherever your boys grow up, do you think they’d be better off doing it with or without their daddy?'.

At the same time, Mags is capable of great love: she raises fourteen-year-old Loretta McCready (Kaitlyn Dever, in a promising performance) after murdering her father, and is looking to create a better future for her grandchildren's generation. She feels guilty for raising three miscreants: Doyle, a bent policeman, is the nearest thing to a good son, but Dickie is overambitious, vindictive and reckless (he is even treated to a variation on The Godfather's 'Never let anyone outside the family know what you're thinking' speech), while Coover, though a savant when it comes to marijuana, is by Mags's own admission a 'nitwit'. (In one of the season's funniest scenes, he throws a dead rat at Raylan's car to express contempt.)

 None of this raving is to disparage last season's villains. M.C. Gainey as Bo Crowder was a brilliant, quietly menacing presence, but unlike the Bennetts, he was given less time to make his mark. Mags Bennett and her kin are present throughout the second season, ready to respond to every action by Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant). And of course there's another sometimes-villain, sometimes-hero: Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), finally promoted to regular cast, moves in with Ava (Joelle Carter) and struggles with the lure of his old outlaw ways.

It's the delicacy of the state of affairs that gives Justified its particular tension. In the insular world of Harlan, every action has consequences. The attempt by coal representative Carol Johnson (played with aplomb by the absurdly sexy Rebecca Creskoff) to buy properties held by Mags and Raylan's father Arlo (Raymond J. Barry, still brilliant and now with more to do) increases tension between the parties and threatens to rekindle the feud between the Bennett and Givens clans. Raylan's promise of help to Loretta, whose storyline is reminiscent of last year's indie hit Winter's Bone, draws him into the machinations of the Bennetts, leading to violence.

Season Two deepens the world of Harlan County, bringing it to life more and fleshing out characters and tensions, and it is in this sense absolutely better than Season One. Granted, like the first season, it has a couple of stand-alone episodes that drag down the overall experience: 'The Life Inside', the best of these, deals with a pregnant convict who escapes to give birth in freedom; the worst, 'For Blood or Money', tries and fails to give Raylan's colleague Rachel Brooks (Erica Tazel) more definition.

There's Justified's biggest problem: it has a couple of characters whom the writers cannot or will not develop. Rachel and Tim Gutterson (Jacob Pitts), both billed as main stars, are well portrayed by their respective actors, and one would very much like to know more about them: but the writers do not integrate them properly. Since they are of equal rank with Raylan, it's somewhat irritating to see them play second fiddle to the lead. (An exception, late in the season, is Tim's 'nanny duty' to stop Raylan from going after a group of criminals, which reveals that Raylan is quite possibly the least mature and responsible person at the Marshals office.) Raylan's ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea) also continues to be a weak character despite the actress's capable performance.

It was a foregone conclusion that Justified would eventually touch on Harlan County's history of coal mining and trade union struggles, well known from the Oscar-winning 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA. We knew that Raylan and Boyd 'dug coal together' when they were nineteen, and Season Two sees Boyd returning to deep mining, with the possibility of death or injury, as well as the temptation to lay hands on the company's wealth, ever present. The locals plainly do not believe the philanthropy the mining company feigns to gain access to their coal, and the anger over their poverty and impotence provides a crucial backdrop to crime in the region.

The season ending is, perhaps, a little too neat, providing far more closure than the finale of the first season. But with the deep wounds many characters have sustained this time around, a breather, a new beginning, is not the worst of things. When Justified returns in 2012, I'll be watching.

The 'feral underclass' in ancient Rome

During social conflicts around debt in the early Roman Republic, the patricians were split between conciliating the plebeians and a more robust approach:

[N]aturally harsh as he was, and rendered even more uncompromising by the hatred of the commons and the fervid support of the nobility, [Appius Claudius] roundly declared that the mob had nothing whatever to complain of: the disturbances were not due to their sufferings but to their disregard for law and order; they were not angry - for they had nothing to be angry about: they were merely out of hand. That, he continued, was the natural consequence of the right of appeal: the appeal had destroyed consular authority; for now that the law allowed an appeal to those who were equally guilty, the consuls could never act - only threaten.
-Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.30 (in The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose:

This is criminality, pure and simple, and it has to be confronted and defeated. (David Cameron)

I've dealt with plenty of civil disobedience in my time, but the riots in August shocked me to the core. What I found most disturbing was the sense that the hardcore of rioters came from a feral underclass, cut off from the mainstream in everything but its materialism. Equally worrying was the instinctive criminal behaviour of apparently random passers-by. (Ken Clarke)

I don't doubt that the Cameroons would now identify some very definite social reasons for rioting in ancient Rome beyond 'disregard for law and order'. But they're Tories, innit: they always accept real social factors a generation after the event. But let's salute them: they've been fighting the corrosive effects of 'liberal dogma' for two and a half millennia. That must take it out of you.

In the deep dark hills of eastern Kentucky

I'm a country bumpkin. I grew up in a village of 250 people which was nevertheless something of a metropolis in the area, boasting a church, a pub, a shop, a fire station and a bank (except for the church and the fire station, these have all closed). When I was eleven years old, we went to Paris on student exchange. Before we left, my mother asked one of my friends to look after me on the trip. It was my first time in a big city, you see.

Maybe that's why I like all things hillbilly. I certainly fell in love with Justified, set in rural eastern Kentucky, rather quickly. Ultimately, I think that's down to a sense of place the show absolutely nails: its fictionalised Harlan County feels like an actual community, with all the rifts and tensions that implies. Everybody knows everybody, and loyalties and grudges go back a long way, just like where I'm from. Although we don't shoot each other as much.

In the pilot, based on an Elmore Leonard short story, Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) shoots a gun thug in Miami after giving him twenty-four hours to leave town, and for his sins is transferred to his home state of Kentucky. In Harlan, white supremacists led by Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) bomb a church. Raylan is assigned the case because Boyd and he 'dug coal together when we were nineteen'. Now Raylan must bring down Boyd and protect Ava (Joelle Carter), who has just shot her husband, Boyd's brother Bowman, to death at the dinner table.

Raylan is rooted in eastern Kentucky, much though he would prefer he wasn't. His ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea) lives there, as does his estranged father Arlo (Raymond J. Barry). On Justified, actions cause ripples throughout family, work and criminal networks, often coming back to haunt the characters. When Boyd tells Ryan that 'you get out of Harlan County by tomorrow noon, or I'll come looking for you', he confirms the claims, rooted in history, kinship and violence, that the parties have on Harlan.

The characters' feuds are often rooted in hopelessness and economic deprivation. As Ava says of her late husband's violence towards her, 'that all started as soon as he realised he was never getting out of Harlan'. Boyd's explanation for his racism, too, appeals to loss and defeat:

It's all changed. Mining's changed. No more following a seam underground - it's cheaper to take the tops off mountains and let the slag run down and ruin the creeks. You remember the picket lines, don't you? The courts backing the company scabs and gun thugs... Whose side do you think the government's always been on, Raylan, us or the people with money? And who do you think controls that money? Who do you think wants to mongrelise the world? The Jews.

That's not to suggest Justified is an austere social drama. In painting Harlan as a feuding society, the show creates something remarkably akin to the world of the Icelandic sagas: hard men and women competing with each other for power, money and influence by appealing to kinship, friendship, history and plain fear. And  chase scenes, standoffs and shootouts as well as verbal duels that can be as dangerous as those involving guns make for thrilling television.

It's fortunate that the series ultimately prefers wry humour to grimness. When the characters come under sniper fire on the Mexican border in 'Long in the Tooth', one comments that 'Well, that's not going to help tourism!'. Another scene, in which Raylan tells a chap wearing his hat that 'Mister, that's a ten-gallon hat on a twenty-gallon head', also springs to mind.

Timothy Olyphant gives a compelling performance as Raylan Givens. He has cowboy swagger enough and to spare, but that's not all he brings to the table. As Winona puts it, 'You do a good job of hiding it, and I suppose most folks don't see it, but honestly, you're the angriest man I have ever known'. Olyphant portrays Raylan as a man whose cool exterior masks the frustrations that he takes out on criminals. That sort of character could easily tip into outright villainy, but the actor and the writers have not dropped the ball yet.

It's not all sunshine and roses: as of Season One Winona is a seriously underwritten character, and Raylan's colleagues Rachel (Erica Tazel) and Tim (Jacob Pitts) mostly remain ciphers. But after the excellent series finale, I'm looking forward to catching up with the second season.

Why I won't condemn the riots

As unexpected as the riots in England's cities were, the response was tediously predictable. Beside the hang-'em-high fulminations of the right-wing press, media consensus from the Guardian to the Telegraph was to deplore 'mindless', 'senseless' violence by 'feral youths', 'thugs', and so on. We're used to this: it's how they've talked about all clashes on Britain's streets since Millbank (and long before that).

The BBC's stance, too, was well-rehearsed. Their reporting was thoroughly on-message, narrowing the issue at stake to 'Is the police response effective or not?' The most distinctive characteristic of such reporting on Tory Britain, however, was that from Diane Abbott to Nigel Farage, anyone who had a microphone shoved in their face was asked to condemn the rioters before anything else.

Those who did not do so with sufficient force ran into trouble with their interviewers, as Darcus Howe found out. It's a test of loyalty: agree with our political elites or become a non-person, an Other as far as the media are concerned. Such ideological rigidity rather gives the lie to our liberal democracy's self-professed openness.

David Starkey's racist comments, on the other hand, were not condemned as vigorously. (Toby Young's incompetent attempt to exonerate Starkey is typical of the 'He wasn't racist' crowd.) I don't think Emily Maitlis gave Starkey a free pass: she challenged him repeatedly. The historian may simply have been ignorant: he confused Jamaican Patois with Textspeak and saw rap as the reason for the riots (one might ask him about the role of rap in 1790s riots).

But there's something more malicious and calculated here. Starkey consistently attempted to racialise the debate, reducing debates about gang culture (valid by themselves) to questions about 'black culture' (and Owen Jones was spot on when he pointed out that by 'white' Starkey meant 'respectable'). Of course, the last forty years have seen a change in the discourse: instead of skin colour the Right now talks about culture, understood as a fixed quality innate to human beings, not a constantly changing process influenced by all sorts of factors, i.e. dialectically. Thus the sign 'culture' still points to the signified 'skin colour', but without embarrassingly blatant racism.

There's the first reason we shouldn't condemn the rioters: the racist vocabulary in which they are being execrated. Starkey is only making explicit what has been implied in much of the condemnation: the rioters are, pardon my Disney, savages, barely even human. Here's Max Hastings's astonishing tirade:

The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame... They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries. They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong. They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others. (emphasis mine)

Hastings goes on to express regret that looters were not shot, and complains about their antisocial refusal to watch the royal wedding. Disadvantaged young people are constructed as an utterly alien and contemptible Other. This isn't new: the people we now dismiss as 'chavs' were once Burke's 'swinish multitude' and the Victorians' 'vicious, semi-criminal' urban poor. To smear an entire segment of the population as the forces of chaos is hardly ethical.

Secondly, this demonisation both ignores and facilitates neoliberal 'reforms'. The Right initially insisted that any attempt to search for root causes amounted to an endorsement, and with good reason: such a search might uncover that youth club closures left young people with nothing to do and nowhere to go. It might find that 20 per cent of youth and half of young black people are unemployed, or that black people are 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white peers. By moralising looting and demonising the young such inconvenient facts can be ignored, while their 'feral' nature can be used to justify the attacks on jobs and services this government is anxious to push through.

Thirdly, the condemners keep bad company. The moralism now echoing through the Commons, from people who cheerfully defrauded the taxpayer, is nought but rank hypocrisy. David Cameron enjoyed smashing private property in his youth. The BNP and EDL racists now coming out of the woodwork to act as Freikorps are using understandable fear and anger to preach a message of hate. Frankly, I don't want to agree with these people on much at all.

Lastly and perhaps controversially, looting shows a response to real injustice, however poorly expressed. I hold that any attack on property is political - it claims that 'this should not belong to you'. What sort of politics this expresses depends on the situation: after all, imperialism or the current looting of the public sector are also attacks on the property of others. But the riots attacked a system in which corporations and the rich running them control the vast majority of human wealth, expropriating and withholding them from the majority. Ultimately, looting is an unhelpful, sporadic, localised response to this general malaise: a much better response would frankly be to expropriate all capital.

In refusing to condemn the riots, let's not fall into the trap of claiming they were not terrifying and destructive to many people, few of them wealthy. It's in the nature of riots that most of the people hurt will be subaltern, not the elites. But that doesn't mean we should collude in demonising the rioters: it means that we should argue for better working-class politics and engage with frustrated young people in building resistance movements. Riots are counter-violence, but ultimately they do little to hurt ruling-class violence. For that, we need revolutionary politcs.

Smash the dragons!

Occasionally, life is awesome. And thus it was that the local 'independent' cinema put on a screening of The Battleship Potemkin (1925), a film I had previously only seen on DVD. It absolutely blew me away. If you see The Battleship Potemkin - and until you do, your life will be incomplete - you must see it in the cinema: the film needs the space the big screen affords to develop its full power.

It's worth recalling the extent to which the Russian Revolution, which director Sergei Eisenstein served as a Red Army soldier from 1918, inspired an incredible boom of the avant-garde in Russia: in music, visual arts and film, Russia was world-leading in the first half of the 1920s, until the ossification of Soviet public life stifled the arts.

The Battleship Potemkin was Sergei Eisenstein's second full-length feature, after 1924's Strike. At twenty-seven years Eisenstein was considered a prodigy when he filmed The Battleship Potemkin, the troubles with Soviet authorities that would cast a shadow over his masterpiece, October (1927), still ahead of him. Although the film's success at home was less than stellar, it fared better internationally.

Designed as the ultimate revolutionary propaganda film, The Battleship Potemkin is divided into five dramatically distinct parts. In 'Men and Maggots', sailors on the battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea Fleet become angered by the rotten, maggot-infested meat they are asked to eat during the first, failed Russian Revolution of 1905.

In 'Drama on the Deck', the conflict comes to a head as the officers' decision to shoot down those unwilling to eat is confronted by a mutiny led by Grigory Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov). After a fight, the mutinous sailors take over the ship.

After the fallen Vakulinchuk is mourned over by the people of nearby Odessa in 'A Dead Man Calls for Justice', the revolutionary population is massacred by Tsarist troops and Cossacks on 'The Odessa Steps'. Finally, the Potemkin must face a naval squadron sent to quash the mutiny.

The version I saw was restored by the Deutsche Kinemathek and claims to be as close to the original as possible, unlike previous versions compromised by Stalin-era re-editing. It is distinctive for its soundtrack, a re-recording of Edmund Meisel's original score, and for the colouring of the red flag the Potemkin flies after the successful mutiny. The brilliant red in a black-and-white film is quite striking and I am more than willing to accept this deviation from the original, since it seems very much in the spirit of Eisenstein. There, are, however, some errors in the subtitles: the call to 'smash the dragons!' is a point of particularly hilarity, although thankfully it does not impede efforts to disarm the dragoons.

Seeing The Battleship Potemkin on the big screen I was very much struck by the perfection of the compositions by cinematographer Eduard Tisse and Eisenstein himself. Image after image is perfectly created; this almost leads to a feeling of sensory overload as the modern viewer is too used to the narrative-centred, 'getting out of the actors' way' style of twenty-first-century direction.

The Odessa steps sequence is the film's most famous by far. And it deserves to be: it's perfectly shot and shockingly violent by the standards of the times. But it shouldn't overshadow other scenes. The early confrontation between recalcitrant sailors and officers is particularly tense, as is the climactic showdown between Potemkin and the Tsarist squadron.

Eisenstein films are notable in eschewing the individualism that is endemic in western cinema. So it is with The Battleship Potemkin: although Vakulinchuk is the only named sailor, he is killed in the second of the film's five episodes and remains a cipher, no more than a spokesman for the revolutionary proletariat. No, the protagonist of The Battleship Potemkin is the collective of the mutinous sailors and, in chapters three and four, the revolting populace of Odessa. It is virtually only the villains who actually receive names.

Speaking of villains: as a work of Soviet propaganda, the film of course deals in broad stereotypes. The bad guys walk around in finery and sport monocles; one attempts to turn the people's assembly in Odessa into a pogrom and is beaten to death for his troubles by the people, who of course know their woes cannot be blamed on the Jews. But such a clear distinction between heroes and villains is not necessarily a bad thing; indeed The Battleship Potemkin absolutely could not work if the counter-revolutionaries were treated fairly.

Propaganda, then: but what propaganda! You don't need to be a dirty Red like me to enjoy this film (although it helps): Joseph Goebbels was apparently a jealous admirer of Eisenstein's craft. But you must  bring a willingness to accept collective protagonists, the flexibility to adjust to silent film, and sturdy footwear to prevent your socks from being blown off. What are you waiting for? To the cinema, post haste.

Die Wacht in Wapping

Der Abhörskandal um die News of the World ist nicht nur eine Blamage für eine Zeitung oder einen Konzern. Vielmehr zeigt er die Verstrickungen zwischen der Macht Murdochs, der Polizei und der Politik. Als solches handelt es sich um eine Krise für einen gewaltigen Komplex - eine Krise, die die Meinungshoheit der britischen Herrscher insgesamt bedrohen könnte.

Das ist das Ausmaß des Skandals. Kein Wunder, daß Murdochs Parteigenossen darum ständig versuchen, das Ganze kleinzureden. Mein Lieblingsfeind Jan Fleischhauer zum Beispiel sieht hier nur einen Konflikt zwischen Murdoch, dem Helden der konservativen Volksmeinung, und linken Eliten, die den armen Mann wegen seiner unliebsamen politischen Überzeugungen verfolgen.

Es ist typisch für Fleischhauer, erstens das Thema grob zu entstellen und zweitens allerortens die Verschwörung der "Linken" zu wittern - die zu definieren er übrigens nicht vermag. In dieses Schema muß alles passen, darum die Verzerrung. Es lohnt sich darum selten, sich an Herrn Fleischhauer abzuarbeiten.

Dennoch muß der Behauptung entschieden widersprochen werden, daß, "wer auf die bunten Blätter herabschaut [sic!], [...] in Wahrheit auch das Volk [verachtet], das diese Medien groß und mächtig macht". Erstens wird hier wieder der eigentliche Punkt verzerrt: es geht hier nicht um den Boulevard an sich, sondern um die Macht Murdochs in Großbritannien, der ein stetig wachsendes Regiment von Medien straff nach Parteilinie gegen Migranten, Schwule und Linke hetzen läßt. Damit wird echte politische Meinungsbildung natürlich erschwert.

Wer also ein sich aggressiv ausbreitendes Imperium als letzte Bastion der Volksmeinung verstanden sehen will - wer den Milliardär Murdoch und einen gelackten Schreiberling zum Helden des kleinen Mannes macht - , der verdreht klar die realen Machtverhältnisse. Das hat bei Fleischhauer Methode. Er stilisiert sich stets als publizistischen Guerillakämpfer, als letzten Konservativen, den die linke Hegemonie mundtot machen will. Ironisch ist dabei, daß diese Selbststilisierung zum Opfer eben das ist, was Fleischhauer angeblich an den Linken mißfällt.

Zuletzt obliegt es mir, Herrn Fleischhauers albernes Nichtargument über entrüstete Deutsche abzutun: 

Die meisten, die sich nun hierzulande über Murdoch und die Recherchepraktiken in dessen Reich erregen, haben zwar wohl noch nie eines seiner Produkte in der Hand gehalten, aber man kann sich ja auch fremdempören. Das ist sogar noch schöner, als wenn man selbst nah dran ist.

  Nun muß man Herrn Fleischhauer zugestehen, daß er tatsächlich auch schon in Übersee gearbeitet hat. Zur Zeit linst er aber auch nur über seinen deutschen Schreibtisch. Nun, ich lebe in England, bin darum nah dran und darf Herrn Fleischhauer versichern, daß ich Murdochs Produkte in Händen gehalten und mich auch darum mitempört habe. Als dürfe man sich als Ausländer nicht aufregen: was wird da aus aller Empörung über die Zustände beim Feind, von Iran bis Nordkorea? Die sollten Fleischhauer und seine Spießgesellen dann wohl auch zurückziehen und sich auf eigene Sauställe besinnen.

Fleischhauer glaubt, in Kafkascher Hatz von der Linken verfolgt zu werden. Seine Wahnvorstellungen seien ihm gegönnt. In Wirklichkeit aber ist es Murdoch, dem in Großbritannien ein mächtiges Sprachrohr gehört. Der Kanonendonner gegen die Feinde des Australiers kann hier Debatten schaffen und abwürgen - dazu müssen oft nicht einmal Lügen geschmiert werden, Verzerrung reicht. Wer offene demokratische Meinungsbildung will, kann den Niedergang des Wapping-Reiches kaum bedauern.

Property crowned and uncrowned

The classes team up to take down the monarchy.

 

According to the Guardian, sixty-seven per cent of Britons believe the monarchy is 'still relevant'. That figure, of course, is rather worthless since it tells us nothing about approval. We'll all agree that Nelson Mandela is 'relevant'; so, I'm sorry to say, is David Cameron. The point stands, however: the monarchy does not inspire abject hatred. But neither are most Britons of the flag-waving loyalist variety. Before the royal wedding, only 37% professed interest in the event; according to YouGov, 35% would do their 'best to avoid' the whole affair. Indifference seems to be the prevailing attitude towards the House of Windsor.

Among sections of the Left there's a long-standing puzzlement about the British monarchy. It is assumed that a democratic republic is the 'typical' form of bourgeois government and that, accordingly, Britain represents an anomaly. A more Marxist response, surely, would be to argue that 'typical' forms of government hardly exist and that historical materialism is a critical method rather than a template for understanding every historical event. Indeed, the notion that republics are natural forms of government under capitalism can be quite easily refuted. Before the First World War, of the Great Powers only France and the United States were republics; Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia and Britain were all monarchies of varying types. Indeed new monarchies were constantly being created at the height of nineteenth-century capitalism. In the century following the Congress of Vienna, new monarchies were installed in France (which didn't last), the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece; both Germany and Italy were unified under conquering monarchies. Where these crowned heads fell at the end of the Great War, this was caused by proletarian revolutions that threatened the entire propertied order.

The French Revolution was a revolution against royal absolutism - yes, but what does this mean? Was it a revolution against untrammelled executive power, against the constant subordination of the periphery to the centre, of the part to the whole - a revolution for 'checks and balances' as Montesquieu advocated them? (This advocacy led Carl Schmitt to dismiss Montesquieu as, essentially, a medievalist.) On the contrary: the Revolution not only displayed all these characteristics of the ancien régime, it shattered all the obstacles to absolute rule the king had been unable to remove. It is in this sense that the Revolution was fulfilled by Napoleon. Lord Elton was right to claim that the twin principles of the revolutionaries of 1789 were order and equality: the removal of all the inefficiencies, corruption and arbitrariness caused by privilege - and the removal of decision-making from a single, weak individual, controlled by advisers, mistresses and outdated noblemen: in short, the replacement of the unchecked rule of a monarch by the unchecked rule of a class.

The reasons for the creation and fall of the Second French Republic (1848-52) are laid out by Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The July Revolution of 1830 had led the bourgeoisie to embrace not republicanism but the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe. The July Monarchy, however, struggled against proletarian uprisings and increasing hostility from those sectors of the bourgeoisie that felt left out by a state that mostly represented high finance. The February Revolution of 1848 left no option but a republic as the system that divided Frenchmen least (Adolphe Thiers). It was simply impossible to hand the crown over to yet another dynasty, although Louis Napoleon was waiting in the wings. The uprising of the masses in June 1848 was defeated by the bourgeoisie in alliance with the lumpenproletariat and the petite bourgeoisie. Thereafter the country was run by a parliament mostly composed of monarchists that could not muster the strength to resist Louis Napoleon's bid for power.

As the French bourgeoisie discovered in 1830 and 1848, it is very difficult to have a revolution against monarchy and privilege without opening Pandora's box: revolution, where it happened, constantly threatened to create a maelstrom in which the bourgeoisie, having participated in the overthrow of the old order, would itself be destroyed by the propertyless classes. This happened, of course, in Russia in 1917, and was a distinct possibility in Germany, Hungary and Italy after the First World War, France in 1871, Spain after 1931, and others. The result was that, where it perceived a threat from below, the bourgeoisie would prefer to work with rather than against the old order. Sometimes, of course, the bourgeoisie simply repeatedly failed at wresting power from the ancien régime: thus most infamously in Germany.

The accommodation that the bourgeoisie reached with monarchs as well as aristocratic and ecclesiastical elites removed the need for a republican form of government. Today, in Britain at least none of the main bourgeois parties advocates republicanism, although republican views are presumably more commonly held by Labour and Liberal supporters than they are by Tories and the associated Church-and-King mob of the gutter press.

The conclusion must be that the abolition of the monarchy is now quite impossible without a wide-ranging reconfiguration of British society as a whole: in other words, revolution. (The argument that a socialist society would of necessity be republican need not be made here.) The sort of liberal republicanism that impotently mocks the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in the pages of the Guardian rightly elicits little more than pity from the Right. They may not have chosen it, but republicans and revolutionaries can only achieve their aims together.

Impressions from London: which side are you on?

I’ve just got back from the great anti-cuts march in London. Estimates of numbers are still confused – the number most often cited is 250,000, although the Guardian claims half a million. One of the most paradoxical aspects of attending a demonstration of this size is that while you’re there, you have no idea what’s happening on a larger scale; it takes leaving and reading the news to gain an impression of the whole. But I thought I should record a few impressions.

 

We got off the Unison coach at Euston and proceeded to ULU where we joined a students’ feeder march. Upon reaching Embankment, where we joined the main march and the trade unionists, the previously tense atmosphere, changed markedly. The mood was one of cheerful defiance as we moved on to Parliament Square and from there to Trafalgar Square. (Being the largest demonstration I’ve ever attended, it was also the slowest.) The news reports will tell you about ‘protesters’, as if these were isolated people; but the overwhelming impression on the ground was that we were with the working class, union banner by union banner. And what banners! We were near the CWU and (massive) RMT contingents most of the time, and they were not alone in having the most fantastic and individual banners for local sections, clearly painstakingly sewn and painted; many were decades old but clearly beloved. I – and as a child of the bourgeoisie I felt like an imposter – was quite overwhelmed by the pride these workers had in their self-organisation, their struggles and their past: many banners referenced the labour tradition. There was great solidarity between the unions as well, a shared sense of having come here to defend working people. When I say ‘working people’, I include teachers and others in accordance with the Marxian tradition – a sense that will hopefully be revived as all who need to work for their living come together to resist the class warfare of this government.

What I mean to say is that there was love: a recognition that public services are an expression of love for one another, and a willingness to smile and talk to total strangers recognised as comrades. Sure, the usual suspects were around: in Hyde Park the CPGB-ML, the CPB, the SWP and the SP had their stalls quite close together. There were plenty of hooded activists, but the day was not about destruction of property (which I do not oppose), unlike the student demonstrations. Instead, it was dominated by this peaceful celebration of the working class. I hope that the march will have helped create a working-class sense of solidarity that goes far beyond any individual cut but recognises the government as attacking working people as a whole. The fight-back must begin in practical terms very soon. There need to be occupations of government buildings and of public spaces, actual disruption of the smooth running of the machinery of power. Defeating the cuts practically is the only way to honour this country’s great tradition of working-class struggles.