Shakespeare: present at the creation

On Shakespeare, Money and Power

by John Molyneux

This article was written for the programme of "Timon", directed by Matt Beresford, and performed at the Baron's Court Theatre in London, 1-12 September 2009.

According to Marx, ‘Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money’. In the section on ‘Money’ in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Marx quotes extensively from Timon of Athens

“Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?
No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! ...
Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
... Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench…etc

And…

“O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
‘Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler
Of Hymen’s purest bed! thou valiant Mars!
Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian’s lap! Thou visible God! Etc…

Shakespeare, says Marx, stresses especially two properties of money:

1. It is the visible divinity — the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it.

2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations.
The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities — the divine power of money — lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.

And just as Marx can use Shakespeare to analyse the power of money so Marx can be used to sum up the essence of world depicted in Timon of Athens.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

Shakespeare’s hostility to money and money grubbing is not confined to Timon. It is also the theme of The Merchant of Venice. This fact has largely been obscured by the controversy about the play’s alleged anti-semitism, but whether or not Shylock is an anti-semitic stereotype (I think not), he is a money lender and the judgment of Portia is not so much a condemnation of Shylock as of the logic of money lending, of usury.

If Shakespeare understands but despises the power of money his distaste for power –political power- is even more intense and pervasive. Richard III is about a man who kills, and kills and kills again, including children, to gain and retain power until he himself is killed. Macbeth is about a man (and a woman) who kills and kills and kills again, including a child, to gain and retain power until he is ‘on blood stepp’d in so far…returning were as tedious as go’er’. Hanlet is about a man who fails to gain power and loses his life because he is not capable of ruthless cold blooded murder. Prince Hal’s transformation into the man of power, King Henry, involves the repudiation of, and crushing of his own feelings for, Falstaff. Above all, Antony and Cleopatra depicts the radical contradiction between the logic of power and the logic of love.

Shakespeare’s heroes, including his tragic heroes, are people of passion – Lear, Othello. Coriolanus, Antony, Romeo etc – and often they are betrayed by their passions. His victors, those who end up holding the reigns of power – Malcolm, Fortinbras, Bolingbroke, Octavius – are not his heroes. They are secondary figures who pass quietly through the main action – like Stalin through the Russian Revolution - to pick up the crown amid the carnage. They are men of ‘cold calculation’ with ice in their veins. Psychologically they are closest to his outright villains like Iago, Goneril, Regan and Edmund.

The familiarity of all this is so striking.It is more or less impossible to contemplate Shakespeare’s plots, characters and themes without thinking of Enron and Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Northern Rock, Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney, Blair,Brown and Mandelson. It is forty five years since the great Polish critic Jan Kott, in the most influential book on Shakespeare of the sixties, identified the bard as ‘Our Contemporary’ [“Kott is undoubtedly the only writer on Elizabethan matters who assumes … that every one of his readers will at some point or other have been woken by the police in the middle of the night” Peter Brook, Introduction To Shakespeare: Our Contemporary].

Shakespeare was our contemporary then and is our contemporary now. It is worth reflecting on why this is the case and how it could be so. It is NOT because he offers ‘timeless’ insights into an unchanging human condition The human condition is not unchanging and there are no insights out of historical time but there are profound continuities and parallels between one historical period and another. All artists are products of their times and the greatest artists are those who, amongst other things, respond most powerfully to the deepest currents and characteristics of their epoch. This is just what Shakespeare did.

Shakespeare wrote amidst the birth pangs of capitalism – that is a society based on generalised commodity production and production for profit. The birth of capitalism was an international , not a national, process [Shakespeare is an astonishingly international writer] . It began in Italy, in the city republics of Florence and Venice, as early as the 13rh century, but it stalled there in the early 16th century, and its development continued northwards through Germany, the Netherlands and England. Its first successful live births were the Dutch Republic and Cromwell’s Commmonwealth, both in the 17th Century. Culturally it brought the Italian Renaissance, the Reformation and the Elizabethan and Dutch ‘Golden Ages’.as well the foundations of modern philosophy and science [Descartes and Galileo].

It was experienced by artists, and more widely, as a massive expansion of human freedom and development of the individual personality – compare Cimabue and Titian, Chaucer and Shakespeare – but it was also a time of bitter struggles and terrible defeats – for example the German Peasant Wear of 1525 or the sack of Rome in 1527. Moreover it was a time in which the terrible inhuman alienation inherent in capitalism could be grasped, if only intuitively, as a presentiment of the future. The supreme artists of the time – Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Rembrandt – each arise at and express different moments in this process, but each grapples in his own way with this profound contradiction.

As regards Shakespeare’s understanding of, and hostility to, money, it is necessary to understand that money was then ‘an issue’ in the way that it has seldom been since. This was because although money as such had been around for millennia, the rule of money, its all pervasive domination of society, was something new, arriving hand in hand with the development of capitalism and commodification , and therefore a matter of debate (in a way that it was not in later ages which took it for granted.) Luther, and others, made the corruption and especially the buying and selling of indulgences a key feature of their critique of the Church. At the same time John Calvin, the key ‘ideologist’ of the Dutch Revolution, wrote an article arguing that usury was NOT a sin. The Catholic Church’s condemnation of usury was rooted in its feudal opposition to capitalism and the need to keep bankers, money lenders, and aspirant bourgeois in their place.

Regarding power this was a period of the most intense struggle, or rather struggles, for power right across Europe, ranging from the feuds of the Medici and the Pazzi in Florence to the horrors of the Thirty Years War in Germany, from the 80 years of the Dutch Revolt against Spain, to the intrigues and vengeance of the Elizabethan court, and the fratricidal conflict of the English Civil War. It is the age of Macchiavelli (who Gramsci identifies as a proto – Robespierre ) as much as the age of Erasmus. At bottom this was a class struggle between the rising Bourgeoisie and the old feudal aristocracy, but at the time none of the participants or observwers could be conscious of this, or indeed achieve any rational understanding of the conflicts and this made the struggles, interpreted variously as wars of religion or purely personal ambition, seem all the more bitter and senseless.

Standing at the cusp of this historical turning point Shakespeare looks back and forward. As part of the rising middle class he relishes the richness of the moment in his language, his imagery and his characters, but he also feels keenly the loss of ‘merrrie’ feudal England and has no love at all for men of power who, he suspects, will emerge victorious from the maelstrom.

‘In my beginning is my end,’ wrote T.S. Eliot. We live now in capitalism’s end game but the contradictions that now are writ large across the globe, between use value and exchange value, production for need and production for profit, were there at the beginning and Shakespeare’s intuitive grasp of them is the reason his so relevant today.


21 August 2009

5th International

wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_International

League for a 5th International has a website here:
http://www.fifthinternational.org/

4th international weighs-in:

Chavez calls for Fifth International

Decisive lessons from Stalinism & social democracy
François Sabado

During an international meeting of left parties held in Caracas from 19-21 November, 2009, Hugo Chavez launched a call for a Fifth Socialist International which, according to him, should bring together left parties and social movements. According to the president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, the Fifth International must be “an instrument for the unification and the articulation of the struggle of the peoples to save this planet”. In a world political situation marked by a total crisis of the capitalist system, this is a fact important enough to be underlined.

Indeed, leaders or parties who pose the question of an International do not grow on trees. That is the first merit of Chavez’s call.

All the more so as this call is accompanied by a declaration which denounces the systemic character of the capitalist crisis, beyond its financial and banking dimensions, and reaffirms the perspective of a socialism of the 21st century. It calls for an urgent mobilization against the new imperialist offensive in Latin America, by the US administration and the Latin American Right.

On the basis of this call, a broad world anti-imperialist front can be established, to mark its solidarity with the struggle of the peoples for their social and political rights, to oppose the new US bases in Colombia, to support, in particular, the mobilization of the people of Honduras against the new dictatorial regime.

In the trial of strength in which the imperialists are confronted with the struggles of the peoples, such a world front would constitute an important instrument to fight the power of the ruling classes, not only in Latin America but in the whole world.

We are ready, as we have been since the beginning, in solidarity with the Cuban revolution, the Bolivarian revolution, with the experiences in Bolivia and Ecuador, to fully commit ourselves to the common fight against the imperialist attacks imperialists and to take our full place in this world anti-imperialist front.

It is also within this framework that the process of construction of a new International would be posed. Chavez calls for the establishment of a Socialist Fifth International. That puts back on the agenda the discussion about a new International. Chavez situates the building of the Fifth International in continuity with the Fourth. We have already declared on many occasions: what do labels matter, if there is convergence over the content. But the constitution of a new International implies a whole process around a programme, policies, and an organization, which must be carried out on the basis of a broad discussion with all the protagonists.

There is, indeed, a new historical period, where divergences between various revolutionary currents can be surmounted on the basis of “a common understanding of events and tasks”. From this point of view, it is not a question of discussing the historical balance sheets of different currents, but it is decisive to learn together the lessons from Stalinism and social democracy, so that the tragedies and the errors of the past are not repeated.

Each party, each organization, each current and each militant must contribute to this debate. As for the Fourth International, it has already formulated, on many occasions, its proposals:

* An anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist programme of emergency demands, which starts from the demands and the social needs of the popular classes, proposes a new distribution of wealth, public and social appropriation of the key sectors of the economy and leads on to the revolutionary transformation of society.

* Unity of action of all the organizations, currents and militants against the attacks of the governments and the capitalist classes.

* Independence of the social movements, associations and trade-union organizations with respect to parties and states.

* Solidarity with all struggles of peoples against all the imperialist powers.

* The fight against oppressions and the defence of the rights of women, homosexuals, young people and immigrants.

* The fight for governments of the workers and popular classes which satisfy the principal social and ecological demands and base themselves on the mobilization of the population and its control over the principal sectors of the economy. This perspective implies not participating in governments which manage the state and the capitalist economy along with the parties of the centre-left or social democracy.

* The central character of the self-emancipation and self-organization of peoples, in the perspective of overthrowing capitalism.

* An ecosocialist project which combines both the satisfaction of social needs and the respect and balance of our ecosystem. In this sense, we have much to learn much from the indigenous peoples of South America and their relationship to the land.

* Socialist democracy as a project of society: self-management of the economy, democracy and pluralism of parties and social movements.

These are some themes for discussion in order to advance along the road of bringing together all anti-capitalists on an international level. They are the first ideas that we will defend in the process of constitution of a new International.

Lastly, Chavez’s call for a Fifth International also constitutes a point of support when it poses the question of a new International, independently of the Second (Socialist) International of which organizations like the social democratic parties, the Mexican PRI and the Brazilian PT are members. But it is also necessary to clarify a question in the construction of a new International, that of the difference between state policies and the development of a political project. One thing is to conclude economic and commercial agreements with states which have anti-imperialist governments, to conclude such agreements with other states, including some which have reactionary regimes, or to oppose attacks of imperialism against certain countries. It is quite another thing to give political support to regimes like those of the Chinese Communist Party or the Islamic Republic of Iran… The project of the Fifth International cannot in any way at all be associated with these regimes.

Once again, this call creates the conditions for a new international discussion, indissociable from solidarity with the Bolivarian revolution. It is in this spirit that the Fourth international, its organizations and its militants, will answer “Present”!

François Sabado is a member of the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International and an activist in the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) in France. He was a long-time member of the National Leadership of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR).

Anniversary of 1984-85 UK miners strike

Faith: A Dramatic Tribute to the Miners' Strike of 1984-85

Wednesday, 09 March 2005

Twenty years ago this month, the heroic twelve-month long struggle of the British miners to defend their jobs and their communities came to an end. The BBC drama Faith broadcast on February 28 on these events was like a breath of fresh air, an antidote to that earlier filth masquerading as ‘impartial documentaries’. For the first time in the national media the role of the state – its specially created national police force, its media, its secret services, and all the weapons employed by the ruling class to fight the miners – was vividly exposed.

Twenty years ago this month, the heroic twelve-month long struggle of the British miners to defend their jobs and their communities came to an end. This was the most important battle fought by the British working class since the Second World War. The whole period is rich in lessons for a new generation which has been starved of the truth. It was never enough for the ruling class to defeat the miners’ struggle, they insist furthermore on trampling on its memory, lest it serve as an inspiration for a new generation.

The first casualty of war is always the truth, and the Miners’ Strike was a war, a class war, with the workers on one side and on the other everything the ruling class could muster: the courts, police, and not least the lies and distortions of the media, exemplified by the distilled poison and venom poured into the outrageous Channel Four documentary broadcast last January to mark the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the strike which began in March 1984

That tawdry rubbish was meant as a warning to a new generation of workers: the miners lost and so will you if you try to fight, you will be beaten – in both senses of the word.

The ruling class is preparing through its media, just as surely as it is through new legislation designed to further curtail workers’ rights, for new battles. We must prepare too.

In the titanic struggles of the working class to come in Britain, a thorough study and understanding of past struggles is of decisive importance. Alongside the general strike of 1926 today’s new generation must also study the great miners’ strike of 1984-85.

To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the end of the strike we were presented with a far superior television programme. The BBC drama Faith broadcast on Monday February 28 was like a breath of fresh air, an antidote to that earlier filth masquerading as an ‘impartial documentary’.

For the first time in the national media the role of the state – its specially created national police force, its media, its secret services, and all the weapons employed by the ruling class to fight the miners – was vividly exposed. As Engels explained, in the last analysis the state can be reduced to armed bodies of men in defence of private property. However, it rarely is reduced to just that, particularly here in apparently sleepy Britain. Between 1984 and 1985 the masks of Democracy and Legality, behind which the ruling class usually hides, were stripped away, revealing the true, ugly face of the state apparatus, and its role in preserving the capitalist system.

At the same time the filmmakers tell their story not with the left-wing bias now being claimed (without any sense of irony) by the Tories and their mouthpiece the Daily Mail, but with sympathy for the miners and an equal measure of antipathy for the brutal treatment they endured.

In the telling of history there is no such thing as the spurious objectivity the Mail and co. so hypocritically demand. There are indeed two sides to the history of this struggle, theirs and ours; the lies and fictions we had to endure during the struggle and for all the years since, and the truth which we rarely see a glimpse of, making its appearance in this programme all the more important.

Thatcher infamously denounced the miners as ‘the enemy within’, horned devils fighting to overthrow the system. This is the image which has persisted in the mainstream media ever since. All miners were dangerous reds under the bed. What we find in Faith is the reality of ordinary working people and their families desperately struggling to defend their livelihoods and their communities. Through their experience of the lies of the press, the cruel activities of the police and the courts, many began to draw profound political conclusions. As Marx long ago explained conditions determine consciousness. The film’s central character, Michele, is a living example of that process of politicisation through experience.

For the miners this was a struggle to defend jobs and communities. For the ruling class, however, this was about a lot more than pit closures. It was about their right to hire and fire, their right to close, sack, drive down wages and conditions without the troublesome interference of the trade unions. Back in 1984 Britain had 170 collieries in production employing over 170,000 miners. Today there are just 9 working collieries employing about 3,000 miners and even those pits and jobs are constantly under threat. The coal industry like so much of British manufacturing has been decimated. In the case of coal however, this was more than just the short sightedness of the British capitalists chasing a quick profit through privatisation and speculation. The attack on the miners was political as well as economic. When Thatcher’s Tory Party came to office in 1979 they were still smarting from their humiliation at the hands of the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, which brought down Ted Heath’s government. Although revenge coloured many aspects of the dispute it was not the fundamental cause of this orchestrated attack on the miners and their communities. For the ruling class confronting and defeating the miners – seen as the vanguard of militant trade unionism – was the vital prerequisite for an all out assault on the working class as a whole. Reforms aimed at placating the working class could no longer be afforded. There was no longer any room for consensus. The response of the ruling class to the decline of British capital was to attempt to restore profitability at the expense of the working class, just as they had done in 1926.

This was never solely an economic question, however. Billions of pounds were squandered over a period of decades on nuclear power and on oil demonstrating the anxiety felt by the ruling class at the dependence of the British economy on coal, and the power this concentrated in the hands of militant miners.

The Tories had been preparing for this fight since the mid 1970s. Having avoided a false start from a weaker position in 1981, by 1984 they felt ready and began closing pits on so-called ‘economic’ grounds. The National Union of Mineworkers warned that it was the Coal Board and the Tory government’s intention to wreck the industry and destroy thousands of jobs. ‘No, no,’ Thatcher and the Coal Board promised, there were no such plans. Here the long litany of lies that characterised the bosses’ propaganda throughout the strike, and ever since, began. The NUM’s website quotes an extract from a letter sent to miners and their families in 1984, 14 weeks into the strike, by the then Thatcherite Chairman of the National Coal Board, Ian McGreggor. ”This is a strike which should never have happened. It is based on very serious misrepresentation and distortion of the facts at great financial cost. Miners have supported the strike for 14 weeks because your leaders have told you this. That the Coal Board is out to butcher the coal industry. That we plan to do away with 70,000 jobs. That we plan to close down around 86 pits. Leaving only 100 working collieries. If these things were true I would not blame miners for getting angry or for being deeply worried. But these things are absolutely untrue. I state that categorically and solemnly. You have been deliberately misled.”

Indeed, in one sense he was telling the truth. They did not destroy 70,000 jobs but far more. Striking miners received letters like this regularly. Nevertheless this combination of threats to their jobs and pensions on the one hand, and bribes and inducements to return to work on the other, failed to break the resolve, the militancy and the solidarity of the miners which permeates every scene of the film Faith.

This was a powerful drama which cannot have failed to stir the emotions not only of those who remember the events of 1984-5 – not least those who participated in that immense struggle – but also a new generation who until now will have seen nothing but distortions and falsehoods about this most important period in the history of the struggle of the British working class.

The strike was a more prominent feature here than in the film Billy Elliot, with which this film shared a certain feel, perhaps partly due to the fact that they feature the same actor in a leading role as well as a setting. In Faith the strike was not merely background but dominated the drama from beginning to emotionally charged end.

In dramatic terms all the characters were thoughtfully drawn, and it is the miners and their families, particularly the newly politicised Michele – the film’s central character – with whom the viewer can identify and sympathise. Michele is married to Gary, a striker, whose frustrations at the turmoil created in his life by his experiences of such a long struggle are realistically portrayed. Towards the end, before his death, he explains to his wife that he doesn’t feel the same way as she does about the strike. She has become deeply involved and is drawing political conclusions. He on the other hand is on strike because of loyalty, out of Faith, giving meaning to the film’s title.

Michele is drawn into activity through the local support group, and begins to address public meetings and rallies. Her sister, Linda, is married to a local policeman, Paul, who for many years has been Gary’s best friend. However, as the strike progresses, and Paul begins to relish his role as the liaison with the Metropolitan police brought in to fight the miners on the picket lines, Paul’s relationships with both his wife and his best friend begin to break down. Gary and Linda have an affair which further sours relations between the two men, resulting finally in a fight on a picket line towards the end of the strike which leads to Gary’s tragic death.

Whilst the miners and their families are wholly likeable characters, the police officers fighting them on the picket lines, waving their overtime money in the miners’ faces, sending in snatch squads to pick off individual strikers, particularly the Met officers – who advise their local liaison to remove his numbers from his lapels, so ‘no-one can tell tales’ – are wholly unlikeable. Yet the film does not resort to caricature even in the case of the villain of the piece, the slimy MI5 spy, who we are first introduced to as a ‘Labour Party activist who works in social services.’ We will return to him in a moment.

Thus not only do we get a glimpse of the truth about important events throughout the course of the strike, we get a sympathetic hearing for the miners cause, with heroes and villains on opposite sides of the barricades, and, for once, the heroes are on the miners’ side.

Remarkably, the battle of Orgreave is told from the miners’ side for the first time on prime time television. The Tories may well prattle on about there being two sides to the story, but – in relation to Orgreave especially – their side, the side reported by the BBC at the time, was pure fiction.

The events which took place at the Orgreave coking plant near Rotherham between the end of May and the middle of June 1984 led to the most violent confrontations witnessed by the British labour movement since the First World War.

NUM pickets assembled on one side of the plant while the police gathered in their thousands at the front, with mounted brigades lined up in a neighbouring field. Police with dogs, on horseback, and thousands more in riot gear surrounded the pickets. As soon as the lorries had entered the plant, the riot police launched their offensive. The mounted divisions rode into the surrounded miners, followed by truncheon wielding foot police. This was a military operation. For all the beatings and arrests, the miners were bloodied but unbowed.

Then, on June 18, 5000 strikers turned up to be met this time by an even greater number of police and an unprecedented orgy of violence. The forces of ‘law and order’ ran riot that day, beating and bludgeoning the miners. From their experiences on the picket lines, many ordinary miners who before the strike had respect for the law and the police who upheld it, learned a bitter lesson from the end of a truncheon, that the law, the courts and the police are arms of the state for the defence of private property, that is, for the defence of the capitalist system.

The capitalist media portrayed Orgreave as the height of picket line violence... by the miners! It was at this moment that Thatcher infamously denounced the strikers as “the enemy within”. In the Falklands she said they had fought the enemy without, and now they would fight the miners, this in other words was to be their ‘industrial Falklands.'

Labour leader (now Lord) Kinnock was joined by Willis, the TUC leader – both desperate to prove their respectability – in condemning both sides ‘even-handedly’, reserving most of their venom for the pickets. Doctored film footage was shown on the BBC – which years later conceded that a ‘mistake’ had been made – demonstrating that the miners attacked first.

In Faith’s version of events pickets returning by bus bloodied and torn are asked in the local club why they attacked the police since they would obviously retaliate. The miners are dumbfounded. That is not what happened. The mounted police waded in to the miners wielding their truncheons, and only then did the miners fight back to defend themselves. On the BBC news the footage had been shown ‘in the wrong order’. One of the wives in the club comments, “Moira Stuart does not lie” (referring to the presenter of the BBC news programme). How much more persuasive is a lie when the teller can usually be expected to tell the truth. The serious press report the truth nine times out of ten to be all the more readily believed the tenth and crucial time. This lie would be used throughout the strike as evidence of miners’ picket line violence. Here, in this film, for the first time, a glimpse of the true picture has been given.

Of course this does not make up for the lies and distortions that the BBC broadcast during the strike and ever since. We do not expect the BBC, nor the media in general, to support the struggles of the working class. Nor do we make any pointless appeals to ‘objectivity’. The media is owned by the capitalists and serves their interests. It is self-evident that the BBC is a central part of the establishment, in this sense the media is also a part of the state apparatus. At the same time, however, there are many independent minded film makers and journalists who attempt to expose the truth. Occasionally they manage to reach a wide audience with their ideas. Usually such an avenue is blocked to them.

The Tories’ claim that this film was broadcast in support of the Labour Party as a general election draws near holds no water. In the first place it will not be that welcome to Blair and co. who have repeatedly praised the hated figure of Thatcher, and are certainly not advocates of militant trade unionism.

It is interesting, however, that such a film should be broadcast at a time when there is much discussion about the independence of the media and the reorganisation of the BBC by the Blair government. We have no illusions in the independence of the media in general nor the BBC in particular. However, what little freedom of movement they have enjoyed is now being further curtailed by a government intent on establishing central control. This is not a whim of Blair and co, it is a process which has been developing for years and must be seen alongside the strengthening of the powers of the state, the centralisation of control away from parliament, and even the cabinet, to Number Ten. Nor are such changes confined to Britain. A similar process can be seen in the US and Europe. This represents preparations by the ruling class, refining the apparatus through which they rule, in readiness for the crises and events to come.

As well as raising many of the central issues of the strike, Faith also portrayed its human side. The international solidarity expressed in the food parcels and toys sent to miners’ children from workers around the world – images of which were movingly accompanied by Band Aid’s Feed the World – demonstrated the level of international support that the miners enjoyed.

Instead of the usual portrayal of striking miners as red devils, here we see a picture of comradeship. In one of the most emotional scenes in the film, an older miner is made to return to work by local union officials, to prevent him losing his pension entitlement. Pickets turn their backs at the man’s request, so that they do not witness his shame. He enters the deserted colliery with tears rolling down his cheeks, shared no doubt by many watching at home.

Similarly a man returning to work as a scab – because his wife is seriously ill – on an empty coach, surrounded by a massed police guard, is peacefully convinced to stay out. He leaves the coach and rejoins his comrades greeted by cheers and the promise of the local union official to look after him and his wife.

The Tories take great exception to the truth being revealed about events at Orgreave. They are foaming at the mouth too at the unsympathetic portrayal of Thatcher. Yet this is mild compared to the real feelings of miners and their families towards the Iron Lady. She is reviled and occupies a place next to her own hero Winston Churchill in the gallery of enemies of the working class. The praise heaped on her by Blair and co is a dreadful insult to the miners, their families and all the rest who suffered at the hands of her government.

The Tories are angry about all these things, but what will worry the ruling class more is the portrayal of the police and the security services, especially the thugs with no numbers. Here the film pulls no punches. There is no attempt to engender sympathy with the police, no spurious impartiality.

The creation of a national police force to take on the miners, to prevent them fraternising with the local police is clearly exposed. Paul, the local policeman who grows to relish his role as liaison with ‘the outsiders’ (the Metropolitan Police, or special forces, soldiers in police uniform etc), is virtually ostracised by his own sergeant in the local pub as a ‘scab’. He is warned ‘we have to police this area when these people have gone home’.

The use of surveillance cameras in a nearby house to spy on Michele, in dramatic terms, serves to expose the affair between Gary, the young miner at the heart of the film, and his wife’s sister. At the same time these scenes demonstrate graphically the extent to which the state spied on miners and their families, raiding houses, tapping phones, etc. After all, this is not even a union leader being spied upon – bad enough in a so-called democracy, but hardly a surprise to anyone – this is a young woman involved in the marvellous work of the support groups like thousands of others around the country.

Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to spying, which brings us back to the MI5 spy, the local ‘activist who works in social services’. This character makes a point of establishing a close relationship with Michele, even promoting her to speak in meetings, ostensibly because he is attracted to her, although she rebuffs his advances. Whilst believably played the ‘activist who works for the security services’ is, from the outset, a rather suspicious character. When Michele confides in him that she is hiding £5000 of the union’s funds (which could not be deposited in a bank because following the sequestration of the union the money would be seized by the state), his claim to have been asked to do the same thing by the union rings hollow. His role in spying on Michele, and turning over the union money that she was hiding to the authorities, leads to a confrontation between the two, in which the cynical bile he pours forth – “I used to be where you are now. I used to sell the papers and go on the demos... it’s no use... I ‘d rather be with the people who have power” – contrasts sharply with the honesty, integrity and character of a young woman politicised by her involvement in the struggle. Here too we have an explanation of the film’s title. The spy was a turncoat, a renegade, but Michele kept her faith, just as Gary (and thousands of others) had done. This indomitable spirit is what frightens the ruling class. It should, in the end it will defeat them.

The film ends with Gary’s return to the picket line. He has been agonising over what to do next. He feels frustrated and wants things to go back to normal. Just days before the strike ends, after a heart to heart discussion with his wife, his return to the picket line ends tragically. He is killed beneath the wheels of the scab bus.

Following a scene at the graveside of this fictional character, the names of those real people who died during the strike appear on the screen; followed by the fact that the Nottinghamshire police years later were forced to pay compensation to some 39 of those falsely arrested at Orgreave; and the admission by Dame Stella Rimington (the former head of MI5), that surveillance, phone tapping and agent provocateurs were used by the secret services against the miners and their struggle.

The ruling class threw everything they had into this fight. After enduring this for an entire year, at the start of 1985 there was a drift back to work. The miners and their families had fought valiantly for 12 whole months against everything the state could throw at them. Their solidarity and sacrifice remains an inspiration to this day. They could have done no more.

On March 3, 1985 delegates at a special conference voted by 98 – 91 to return to work. On March 5, the day the strike ended, there were still 27,000 miners out. All over the country miners returned to work, their families alongside them, behind colliery bands and banners, heads held high, proud of their tremendous struggle.

The strike had cost the ruling class over £5 billion. This fact alone tells us how important this battle was for capitalism. From their point of view this was money well spent. New anti-union legislation was pushed through. The counter-revolution on the shop-floor to drive down workers’ wages and conditions across industry accelerated full speed ahead.

The miners had struggled against a constant barrage of propaganda, the siege of their communities and violent confrontations on the picket lines. Yet, ultimately, it was not any of these measures, nor even their sum total, which defeated the struggle, but the betrayal of the leaders of the Labour and trade union movement.

There will be many more struggles in the years ahead, some even more decisive than this, yet the miners’ strike of 1984-85 will never be forgotten, nor should it be. In the end, the real value of a strike lies in the lessons the workers draw from it. The miners were defeated, but those who participated in this colossal school of the class struggle, have its lessons forever stamped on their consciousness.

The ruling class may desperately try to prevent these lessons from reaching a new generation, but they will have as little success as old King Canute when he tried to prevent the tide from coming in. As time goes on, memories fade and lessons are forgotten. It is therefore all the more necessary to remind ourselves of the real lessons of this titanic class battle. In war, and in the class struggle, it is better to fight and be defeated than to slink away from the struggle and surrender ignominiously. The miners fought with great heroism. They lost, but that was not their fault. In the crucial moment they were abandoned by the leaders of the TUC and Labour Party. The whole working class paid a heavy price for that betrayal. The role of leadership and the vital importance of building both a leadership and a programme worthy of the courage shown by the struggles of the working class – this is the fundamental lesson to be drawn from the experience of the 1984-85 strike.

The consequences of the miners’ defeat for the working class as a whole were profound. As the bosses launched attack after attack, the mood of workers became “if the miners can’t win no-one can.”

In the two decades since, we have endured Tory governments, privatisation, anti-union laws, and Labour governments who have aped their Tory predecessors. The triumph of social partnership (class collaboration) at the tops of the unions and Blair at the top of the Labour Party, represented a real low point in the history of the British workers’ movement.

The right wing always rests upon defeat and inactivity. They consolidated their grip on the leadership of the movement for a period as a result of the combined effects of defeat and the boom in the economy. Their triumph, however, was only temporary. Eventually the working class recovers from defeat, and is forced by the conditions imposed upon them by capitalism to return to struggle once more.

Now things are beginning to change again. In time memories fade, but wounds heal too. The pain and demoralisation of defeat is eventually replaced by a new mood and a new generation with no choice but to stand up and fight against the incessant attacks of the capitalist system.

It is our duty to uphold the proud memory and tradition of the miners’ struggle, and to pass it on to the new generation that is now preparing to enter the road of struggle. In this sense this film plays a very positive role.

Twenty years ago Britain was at war (as the policeman Paul explains to his wife), but that war did not end in 1985. The miners’ strike was just one battle in this war. The enemies of the working class may wish to bury the memory of the miners’ strike so that the new generation will not learn anything from it. They will not succeed. We will defend the memory of this epic struggle and pass on its many great lessons to the new generation that is destined to continue the fight to a victorious conclusion. In that victory we have an unshakeable Faith, not of the mystical or religious kind, but one based on the sound science of Marxism.

Marxists must be the memory of the movement. We remember the lessons of the 1926 general strike, and we remember too the lessons of 1984-5. Blair and co. will soon assume their rightful positions in the dustbin of history where they will quickly be forgotten. They will not even merit a footnote whilst the Miners’ Strike will always remain an important chapter in the history of the struggles of the British working class. It will live on, as a defeat yes, but with all its lessons, and as an heroic struggle by men, women and children, whole families and entire communities. This struggle is not a thing of the past; on the contrary it is a foretaste of what is to come. No doubt there will be other defeats too, but not one of them will be wasted if we remember them and learn from them. As the philosopher Spinoza once explained our task is “neither to weep, nor laugh, but to understand.” Faith helps us to do all three. In the end learning from all these struggles will be integral to the final victory of the working class. To the degree that we succeed in marrying the lessons of these struggles with the courage and determination shown by the miners, their families and communities in 1984-85, we can have confidence, we can have faith in the socialist future of mankind.

Anniversary of 1984-85 UK miners strike

Miners' strike 1984-85: The Tories' £6 billion battle against the working class

Miner lobbying the TUC during the miners' strike of 1984-85, photo by Dave Sinclair

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ago the great miners' strike of 1984-85 started. It was the longest lasting and most bitter industrial dispute of the second half of the 20th century in Britain. It had a huge impact on virtually every subsequent industrial and political development.

George Bailey

Today, with mass unemployment rising and communities facing devastation as a consequence of the capitalist economic crisis, there are many lessons arising from the miners' strike that can assist those fighting to defend jobs.

The British establishment and their apologists in the trade union and labour movement have always attempted to portray the strike as a doomed, futile attempt to preserve a dying industry, led by a tactically inept Arthur Scargill.

The arguments put forward by critics of the strike in the 1980s and onwards will sound eerily reminiscent to those being put forward by those today who argue that nothing can be done to stop jobs being lost from "dying industries".

Michael Ignatieff, regarded as something of a cultural guru by the ruling class in 1984, wrote towards the end of the strike that: "The miners' strike is not the vindication of class politics but its death throes."¹

Other critics included government minister Kim Howells. He was formerly a Communist and South Wales National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) research officer. He later converted to Blairism.

Even before the strike ended in 1984 he hauled up the white flag saying: "The state is much better organised for taking on mass pickets than it was in the early 1970s... It is the hardest lesson any workforce has had to learn since 1926. The whole of the organised labour movement has to take a fresh look in future disputes."²

Intimidated

But for Howells, and many like him, taking a fresh look has meant drawing only negative conclusions, and abandoning the trade union ideals of struggle and solidarity - ideals the miners fought for so valiantly.

And many on the left who solidly backed the miners, are even to this day intimidated by the miners' defeat. They lack the confidence to launch the kind of all-out struggles the miners did, to successfully turn the tables on 25 years of mostly uncontested attacks.

The miners' strike was not only justified - the miners came closer to defeating Thatcher than they knew - but it also holds many vital lessons for trade unionists embarking on new struggles in the 21st century.

Miners strike 1984-85: Detail from Alan Hardman cartoon

Over 27 million working days were lost in strike action in 1984 (mainly among miners). Over 11,300 miners and their supporters were arrested during the dispute and over 5,600 stood trial. More than a hundred were jailed.

Over £60 million was raised, according to the Guardian, for the miners, and warehouses full of food and toys were donated to the striking miners and their families.

Seafarers were sacked and railworkers were victimised for taking solidarity action with the miners. Over 700 miners were sacked and not reinstated.

To this day the victimisation continues, even in the strangest ways. In February 2003, ex-NUM official 69-year-old Jock Glen from east Scotland, was summoned to attend a meeting at the US consulate in London. It was over his request for a visa to enter the USA on a family holiday - he had been arrested during the miners' strike 20 years ago!

The Tories later admitted it cost nearly £6 billion to win the dispute, or £26,000 for every striking miner. It was a political attempt to break the power of the NUM. From 1985-95 the Tories' continued war against the miners cost over £26 billion in redundancy and benefit payments, keeping pits mothballed and lost revenue from coal.

Thatcher and her cabinet were desperate for victory and prepared to go to great lengths to try and weaken or destroy the power of effective trade unionism, which they saw as an obstacle to their free-market policies.

This ideologically driven class offensive graphically showed the short-termist approach of the British ruling class in that it was prepared to destroy a viable and necessary industry - underlined today by the fact that 25 years on there is a renewed attempt to resuscitate an indigenous British mining industry.

For the first time in a post-war national strike, the police were openly used as a political weapon. Agent provocateurs and spies were deployed and the state benefits system used to try and starve the miners back.

Miners strike 1984 - Protest outside Fitzwilliam Court by NUM and the Labour Party Young Socialists, photo Dave Sinclair

Despite the extraordinary lengths the Tories went to, by October 1984, six months into the strike, the future of Thatcher's government hung in the balance - when there were less than six weeks' coal stocks. The proposed strike by the pit supervisors' union Nacods threatened to close down all working pits in the Midlands at this time. Later, Nacods shamefully called off the strike for a shoddy deal which the Tories later reneged on.

So, the NUM had to battle on alone. However, despite the odds, they came within a whisker of winning.

Ten years after the strike, Frank Ledger, the Central Electricity Generating Board's (CEGB) director of operations, recounted how they had only planned for a six-month strike and that the situation at this time was verging on the "catastrophic".

Former chairman of the CEGB, Sir Walter Marshall, spelt out what this meant: "Our predictions showed on paper that Scargill would win, certainly before Christmas. Margaret Thatcher got very worried about that... I felt she was wobbly".³

Thatcher confirmed this herself nine years later: "We had got so far and we were in danger of losing everything because of a silly mistake. We had to make it quite clear that if it was not cured immediately then the actual management of the Coal Board could indeed have brought down the government. The future of the government at that moment was in their hands and they had to remedy their terrible mistake." ⁴

Ultimately, the key factor that defeated the miners was not their lack of militant spirit in facing the most sustained vicious state onslaught on them and their families. Nor was it lack of support from the wider ranks of the working class or even the mistakes that some NUM leaders made at national and area level - although some were of fundamental importance at later stages of the strike.

Trade union and Labour leaders

Miners' strike 1984-85, photo by Dave Sinclair

The absolutely crucial factor in the strike's ultimate defeat was the treacherous and cowardly role of the trade union and Labour leaders, who consciously sabotaged the possibility of a miners' victory.

Right-wing trade union leaders after the 1983 Labour election defeat were pursuing a policy they called 'new realism' - code for retreating in the face of the class enemy without firing a shot in retaliation.

Labour leader Neil Kinnock was also afraid of a rising tide of militancy in the event of a miners' victory, and he didn't want to see militancy pay, particularly not if he was prime minister.

They used the absence of a national miners' ballot and the fact that a section of miners was still working, to turn their back on the 130,000 miners who were striking. They refused to deliver the effective solidarity action that could have brought the miners victory - a victory which would have benefited the whole of the working class against the detested Thatcher.

The miners' defeat, along with the economic upswing of the late 1980s, set in motion a complex and difficult period in Britain, consolidating a massive shift to the right at the top of the labour movement. Labour and trade union leaders meekly accepted anti-union legislation and generally abandoned any pretence of struggle against industrial run-down and privatisation.

It was a bitter blow for those miners and their families who struggled. Their jobs are gone for ever and their communities turned into industrial wastelands with social devastation following for many.

Had they won, the whole course of history would have changed. Thatcher and her government would have resigned and most likely a Labour government would have come to power.

The pit-closure plan would have been dropped and, under pressure from a confident working class, even a Kinnock Labour government would have had to carry through some measures in favour of the working class, perhaps being compelled to abolish the Tory anti-union laws.

The miners' strike politicised a generation of young people - over a quarter of a million school students went on strike just a month after the strike, inspired by the example of the miners and led by Militant supporters (forerunners of today's Socialist Party). It also temporarily produced a massive shift to the left on many issues in society.

Immediately after the strike, Tory ministers privately fumed at how little goodwill their victory had brought them:

"For months after the strike was over, ministers often alluded in conversation to the strange ingratitude of the British public...When the strike ended there was no full-throated roar of approval of the kind which had been heard, almost universally, when the Argentineans surrendered in Port Stanley." ⁵

Had the miners not struggled as they did, many other anti-working class measures would have been introduced earlier than they were.

But, eventually, dizzy with her own success, Thatcher began a policy of deindustrialisation of British industry and further impoverishment of working class and middle-class people.

For a new generation of union activists, the real lessons of the strike now need to be drawn out. After 25 years, there are new signs of militancy in Britain and internationally, displaying once again the type of militant, fighting spirit that the miners' struggle embodied.

The new generation of union members are becoming less intimidated by the anti-union laws brought in by Thatcher and invoked ever since as reasons for not striking. Today's trade union leaders, unfortunately even the majority of those claiming to be on the left, still fail to address crucial questions arising from the strike.

Strategy

These include the role of mass picketing, democracy and leadership within the trade unions, the state, how to organise solidarity action, the role of Left leadership, what economic alternative trade unionists and socialists should put when an industry is claimed to be declining and crucially, what programme and strategy for the trade unions is applicable today.

New generations will return to the lessons of the strike to ensure they are better equipped to win their own industrial battles and succeed in the socialist struggle to change society.

But, the most important lesson the miners' strike taught the generation who lived through it and is still applicable today, is that it showed the willingness of working-class people to struggle and try to change society. That willingness and anger has intensified in the struggles since. What has been lacking however, is a mass party and leadership capable of taking workers' struggles to victory.

---

1 New Statesman, 14 December 1984

2 Daily Mail, 21 January 1984

3 Interviewed on a Channel Four Dispatches programme in 1994

4 The Enemy Within, Seumas Milne, Verso, London 1994, page 17

5 Hugo Young, One of Us, Pan edition, London 1993 page 375

---

What happened when

November 1983

NCB confirms 49 pits will close due to 'exhausted reserves'.

March 1984

March 5 - Yorkshire miners stop work at proposed accelerated closure of Cortonwood and Bulcliffe Wood. Yorkshire NUM calls total stoppage from 12 March.

6 - Scottish area NUM calls strike from 9 March.

8 - NUM national executive declares strikes in Yorkshire and Scotland official, and any other area 'which takes similar action'.

April 1984

April 19 - NUM special delegate conference supports action in all British coalfields. Resolutions for a ballot overwhelmingly rejected.

May 1984

May 29 - 5,000 pickets at Orgreave. Riot police deployed for the first time.

30 - Scargill arrested at Orgreave

June 1984

6 - 10,000 pickets at Orgreave: 93 arrests; 73 police and hundreds of pickets injured.

18 - 7,000 pickets take on 4,000 police in the Battle of Orgreave

July 1984

South Wales NUM, fined £50,000 for contempt of court, refuse to pay.

August 1984

1 - Mass demonstration outside South Wales NUM in Pontypridd against threat of sequestration.

16 - £707,000 seized by sequestrators direct from South Wales NUM accounts.

October 1984

1-5 - Labour Party conference backs the miners.

4 - NUM fined £200,000 for contempt.

25 - Proposed Nacods strike over colliery closure review procedure called off.

25 - Sequestrators appointed to seize NUM funds.

November 1984

13 - TUC general secretary, Norman Willis, confronted by hangman's noose at miners' rally in South Wales.

December 1984

14 - Energy minister, Peter Walker, rejects further talks.

February 1985

20 - NUM accepts review procedure as agreed by Nacods and asks for talks with no preconditions.

March 1985

3 - NUM special delegate conference votes by 98-91 to return to work without an agreement or amnesty.

5 - Miners return behind brass bands with their supporters.

Thrones, dominions: India and Saudi Arabia

It's Love! India and Saudi Arabia Embrace

By VIJAY PRASHAD

Construction projects on Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai have come to a virtual standstill. Financial agents in the region can't wait to offload the real estate deals that burden the books of the Emirates and its banks, not to mention the international banks whose chambers in London and New York shudder with any mention of more real estate failures. A fire sale has begun, with construction firms like Arabtec now being offered for a song, and as Dubai's own sheikhs bend their knees to Abu Dhabi to help with the $150 billion debt (the IMF says $109 billion, EFG-Hermes pushes it upward). The Sultans of Arabia are displeased. Oil profits sail in, but these are magically converted into petro-dollars that then boomerang to Wall Street, where they are welcomed by Goldman Sachs and its élèves who, these days, lock them up in their vaults, afraid to lend to anyone despite the blandishments of Obama and Bernanke. Petro-dollars are no salve to Dubai's ailments.

Riyadh's first family looks at the margins of their peninsula with concern. The financial turbulence of Dubai is one indication. Another is the rising insurgency in southern Yemen, compounded with the restive radical Islamists, whether in or out of al-Qaeda. The Carter Doctrine (1980) protects U. S. interests in the Persian Gulf, toward which the U. S. created the Central Command to organize this defense. Till now, those interests have included the protection of the House of Saud, whose current king, Abdullah, has effectively governed since 1995. The huge U. S. troop presence in Saudi Arabia since August 1990 served as a barrier against Iraq, but also as a fire-starter for domestic Islamists who were outraged at the presence of U. S. troops in the land of Mecca and Medina (it is this that turned Osama Bin Laden from an anti-communist militant to an anti-American one). Drone attacks in Yemen continue the policy of preserving the petrified Saud family, whose king is now personally worth about $22 billion (he is the third richest royal, after Rama IX of Thailand and Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates). The U. S. is effectively pledged to protect all these billionaire blue bloods against the grievances and aspirations of their own peoples.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia recognized after 9/11 that the status quo is not permanent. U. S. wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israeli wars against Lebanon and Gaza, as well as U. S. posturing against Iran have inflamed the Arab population and put the Sultans of Arabia in a box. They cannot be seen to be puppets of Washington, but nor can they alienate their principle benefactors. Anti-Saudi sentiment in the U. S. alarmed the royals (in 2002, a RAND expert told the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, without rebuttal, that Saudi Arabia is a "kernel of evil"; even the ever-pliant Prince Bandar, Saudi Ambassador to the Bush Family, was disheartened). In 2003, the U. S. government relocated much of its forces from their Saudi bases to Qatar. The U. S. then delivered Baghdad to the Shi'a political parties, who have a special relationship with Iran. On the political front, the Saudi royals no longer felt the warm embrace of Washington.

Economically things were even more fragile. Talk of "clean energy" has Riyadh afraid (indeed, at climate treaty negotiations, the Saudis have tried to mobilize the OPEC countries to push for compensation if oil consumption is reduced; the principle Saudi negotiator at Copenhagen, Mohammed al-Sabban proposed that the G-7 states provide the oil producers with technology and investment toward economic diversification). The U. S. has gradually shifted its oil dependence on the Gulf to new suppliers, such as Nigeria (the top three suppliers to the U. S. are now Nigeria, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia - the U. S. imports crude oil from Mexico and Canada in large quantities, but these are refined and exported back across the northern and southern border). The Central Command is busy fighting wars that don't seem to directly defend the Arabian Peninsula. Meanwhile, the Bush team created the African Command (Africom), whose ambit appears to be the protection of the oil lands of Africa. Finally, with oil itself being finite, the Saudis are concerned that they must diversify their economy.

If the Saudis could not look to Washington, Abdullah proposed that Riyadh "look east." Abdullah was always a major defender of Washington inside Riyadh Palace. But after his ascent to the throne, he began to listen more carefully to the Minister of Defense, Prince Sultan (the son of Prince Bandar). For the past three decades, the Chinese have sold the Saudis missile technology, including intermediate-range ballistic missiles. In making these deals, Sultan had a ringside seat to China's transformation and was comfortable with Beijing's ambitions in the Gulf. China is now the principle buyer of Saudi oil. It has also begun to invest in the peninsula, putting some of its considerable surplus to work on technological projects that might help diversify the one-crop Saudi economy. The Saudi oil company, Aramco, has thrown its wealth and expertise into China's petroleum refining sector (it will invest $8 billion to build a new refinery in Guangzhou). Abdullah visited Beijing in January 2006, and Hu Jintao hastened to the peninsula in April, where he addressed the Shura, one of the few foreign leaders to talk to the King's advisory council. Abdullah has since honored China by calling the Chinese his "brothers," a word reserved by Riyadh to describe fellow Muslims.

During Abdullah's January 2006 tour, he stopped in India. Here he was the chief guest at India's Republic Day celebrations. The irony seemed lost on both the Indian and Saudi governments. Here was a hereditary monarch of a theocratic state as the guest of honor for a celebration of India's freedom struggle and its secular, socialist Constitution. Indeed, it was odd to have a Saudi monarch in India. The last time one came was in 1955, when King Saud visited India. Earlier that year, Saud was at the Afro-Asian conference at Bandung, where he had befriended Nehru and had pledged his kingdom to "non-alignment." Not long after this brief friendship, the Saudis gave themselves over to the United States and drifted far from the Third World project. Nehru went to Riyadh in 1956, but it was a frosty visit. The people who gathered to welcome Nehru chanted marhaba Nehru rassoul al salam, welcome prophet of peace, but Crown Prince Faisal and King Saud were less enthused. Peace, for them, came in the form of the F-100 Super Sabre.

In 1991, India's new "reform" era opened with a commitment to neo-liberal state policy and a turn toward Washington against the non-aligned traditions of the dirigiste state. Manmohan Singh left his post at the South Commission for the Finance Ministry, where he guided the reform process. Three years into India's liberalization process, Singh traveled to Saudi Arabia. It had become clear to the Indian Finance Minister and to the Indian business world in general that India had to seek out new avenues for its growing energy needs. The previously state-owned Oil and National Gas Corporation (ONGC) went public, and began to prospect from the Persian Gulf to Sakhalin Island. But even ONGC's finds would not be enough. Singh went to address the Indo-Saudi Joint Commission, a body set up in 1982 on the basis of increased South-South cooperation. Now, the main issue was energy resources for India, and diversification of its economy for Saudi Arabia. The diplomatic process had been stalled by several intractable problems: Saudi Arabia's alignment with Pakistan on the Kashmir issue, India and Saudi Arabia's divergence on the imbroglio in Afghanistan, and so on. It was not a pretty picture. But, the economic needs sidelined the political differences, which were soon re-packaged into agreement (both parties, for instance, agreed in general that terrorism is not a good thing, but neither took pains to define who might be the terrorist in which case). Manmohan Singh's journey to Riyadh was followed by a series of visits between the two countries, and an onrush of oil. In 2006, King Abdullah came to Delhi, signed the Delhi Declaration and turned on the spigot: Saudi Arabia is now India's leading crude oil resource ($2.8 billion worth in 2008).

In the late 1990s, when the Hindu Right ruled in Delhi, they made a strategic miscalculation, and so tripped up this relationship. Believing that the way to Washington was via Tel Aviv, and that the political fight against terrorism is far more important than the economic lubricant from Saudi Arabia, the Hindu Right made an entente with Israel (I recount this story in Namaste Sharon, LeftWord, 2003). The Saudi royals sniffed at the poor choice of ally (they prefer their own link to the Israelis to be pragmatically managed by Washington, rather than openly celebrated at Herzilya). It was only when Manmohan Singh returned to power in 2004, this time as Prime Minister, that the far more strategically essential alliance was forged, this around oil and technology, not hot pursuit and targeted assassinations.

Manmohan Singh made his triumphant return to Riyadh over this past weekend (the first time in twenty-eight years that an Indian head of state went to Saudi Arabia). Like Hu Jintao before him, Singh addressed the Shura, and was received by King Abdullah not as "brothers," but as "dearest friends." Deals of oil, capital and technology are hastily being signed. Manmohan Singh's longest handshake was with Saudi Oil minister Ali Al Naimi. The Saudis and Indians celebrated the two million Indians who work in the Kingdom. Many of them, on the other hand, might agree with Habib Hussain of Moradabad, who complained that Indians are treated like cattle in Arabia after he escaped the kingdom in the toilet of a commercial aircraft. The Indian Minister for Overseas Indian Affairs, Vayalar Ravi met with the Saudi Arabian National Recruitment Committee, but nothing concrete came of it. Hard to treat workers nicely whose advantage is that they are international serfs. All the right noises were made, though. Dubai is the sore on the peninsula. It is also the city-state with the greatest Indian influence, whether of bankers, construction workers or gangsters. Not much was said of its financial problems, nor for the elaboration of the Gulf Cooperation Council-India Joint Study Group, set up in 2009 under Saudi auspices. Both Delhi and Riyadh wanted to insulate themselves from the mess in Dubai.

The tangled world of alliances did come up for discussion, but not at center-stage. That was reserved for economic matters. Prince Saud al-Faisal, who runs foreign affairs, pointed out that Pakistan is going through a rough patch, and that the Saudis worry about the "dangerous things" ongoing there. The Indian tweeting minister, Shashi Tharoor, got into his usual mess when the media thought that his use of the term "interlocutor" to refer to Saudi Arabia meant that he wanted the Saudis to mediate peace talks between India and Pakistan. That was not so. But the subject did come up, as did Afghanistan, to which the Saudis made clear that they severed their ties with the Taliban once al-Qaeda took up residence in the country. Once more the right words were spoken, but nothing tangible emerged, not even the usual promise from Riyadh to bring India into the Organization of The Islamic Conference (even as an observer, not as a member). None of these countries wants to take leadership in the recovery of Afghanistan; not as long as the U. S. occupation is ongoing.

What is clear from this new partnership is that India has now given itself over to the political status quo in West Asia. India's reticence from Saudi Arabia was founded on India's fealty to Arab nationalism, whose standard-bearer in the 1950s and 1960s was Gamel Abdul Nasser, the great enemy of the Saudi royal family. Now with the demise of Arab nationalism and the transformation of Indian nationalism, the stage has been set for these two powers of the Indian Ocean to join hands. Abdullah looks east to the two emergent Asian giants, wanting their technological expertise, and to link his kingdom to the Asian Century. Manmohan of Arabia goes home with a trunk full of oil, and the shattered dreams of Arab republicanism that once felt that India was its ally, and whose hopes were lifted when the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz sang his great anti-monarchical anthem, hum dekhain gay (we shall see):

Jab arz-e Khuda ke kaabe se
Sab but uthwaaly jain gay
Hum ehl-e-safa mardood-e-haram
Masnad pe bithaalay jain gay
Sab Taaj uchalay jain gay
Sab Takht giraaiy jain gay.

When from God's palace
All icons will be removed
We who stand in the mosque
Will be elevated to the altar.
All the crowns will be thrown off,
Al the thrones will fall.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College. His book Darker Nations is now out in French (Les Éditions Écosociété) and Swedish (Leopard Förlag). He can be reached at vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu.

Sci-Fi: from impossibility to normalization

The Future as Sci Fi: A New Cold War
Slavoj Zizek

The contours of a new Cold War are thus appearing on the horizon – and, this time, it will be literally a conflict fought in very cold conditions. On August 2 2007, a Russian team planted a titanium capsule with a Russian flag under the ice caps of the North Pole. This assertion of the Russian claim to the Arctic region was done neither for scientific reasons nor as a political-propagandistic bravado. Its true goal was to secure for Russia the vast energy riches of the Arctic: according to today’s estimates, up to one quarter of the world’s untapped oil and gas sources may lie under the Artic Ocean. Russia’s claims are, predictably, opposed by four other countries whose territory borders on the Arctic region: USA, Canada, Norway and Denmark (through its sovereignty over Greenland).

While it is difficult to estimate the soundness of these predictions, one thing is sure: an extraordinary social and psychological change is taking place right in front of our eyes – the impossible is becoming possible. An event first experienced as impossible but not real (the prospect of a forthcoming catastrophe which, however probable we know it is, we do not believe it will effectively occur and thus dismiss it as impossible) becomes real but no longer impossible (once the catastrophe occurs, it is “renormalized,” perceived as part of the normal run of things, as always-already having been possible). The gap which makes these paradoxes possible is the one between knowledge and belief: we know the (ecological) catastrophe is possible, probable even, yet we do not believe it will really happen.

And is this not what is happening today, right in front of our eyes? A decade ago, the public debate on torture or the participation of the Neo-Fascist parties in a West European democratic government was dismissed as an ethical catastrophe which is impossible, which “really cannot happen”; once it happened, we immediately got accustomed to it, accepting it as obvious… Or, recall the infamous siege of Sarajevo from 1992 till 1995: the fact that a »normal« European city of half a million inhabitants will be encircled, starved, regularly bombed, its citizens terrorized by sniper fire, etc., and that this will go on for 3 years, would have been considered unimaginable before 1992 – it would have been extremely easy for the Western powers to break the siege and open a small safe corridor to the city. When the siege began, even the citizens of Sarajevo thought this is a short-term event, trying to send their children to safety »for a week or two, till this mess is over. “And then, very fast, the siege was “normalized…”

This same direct passage from impossibility to normalization is clearly discernible in how state powers and big capital relate to ecological threats like the ice meltdown on the poles. The very same politicians and managers who, till recently, dismissed the fears of global warming as apocalyptic scare-mongering of ex-Communists, or at least as premature conclusions based on insufficient evidence, assuring us that there is no reason for panic, that, basically, things will go on as usual, are now all of a sudden treating global warming as a simple fact, as part of the way things are “going on as usual”… In July 2008, CNN was repeatedly showing a report “The Greening of Greenland,” celebrating the new opportunities that the melting of ice offers to Greenlanders – they can already grow vegetables in the open land, etc. The obscenity of this report is not only that it focuses on the minor benefit of a global catastrophe; to add insult to injury, it plays on the double meaning of “green” in our public speech (“green” for vegetation; “green” for ecological concerns), so that the fact that more vegetation can grow on the Greenland soil because of the global warming is associated with the rising of ecological awareness… Are such phenomena not yet another example of how right Naomi Klein was when, in her Shock Doctrine, she described the way global capitalism exploits catastrophes (wars, political crises, natural disasters) to get rid of the “old” social constraints and impose its agenda on the slate cleared by the catastrophe? Perhaps, the forthcoming ecological disasters, far from undermining capitalism, will serve as its greatest boost.

What gets lost in this shift is the proper sense of what is going on, with all the unexpected traps the catastrophe hides. For example, one of the unpleasant paradoxes of our predicament is that the very attempts to counteract other ecological threats may contribute to the warming of the poles: the ozone hole helps shield the interior of the Antarctic from global warming, so if it will be healed, the Antarctic could quickly catch up with the warming of the rest of the Earth.

One thing at least is sure. In the last decades, it was fashionable to talk about the predominant role of “intellectual labor” in our postindustrial societies – however, materiality is now reasserting itself with a vengeance in all its aspects, from the forthcoming struggle for scarce resources (food, water, energy, minerals, food…) to environmental pollution.

So while we should definitely exploit the opportunities opened up by global warming, we should never forget that we are dealing with a tremendous social and natural catastrophe, and that these opportunities are the by-products of this catastrophe which we should fight with all our means. In adopting a “balanced view,” we act like those who plead for a more “balanced view” on Hitler: true, he killed millions in the camps, but he also abolished unemployment and inflation, built highways, made trains run on time… This new constellation provides the starting point for Dipesh Chakrabarty’s elaboration of the historico-philosophical consequences of the global warming, the main being the collapse of the distinction between human and natural histories:

“For it is no longer a question simply of man having an interactive relation with nature. This humans have always had /…/ Now it is being claimed that humans are a force of nature in the geological sense.”) (”The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, Winter 2009)

That is to say, the fact that “humans – thanks to our numbers, the burning of fossil fuel, and other related activities – have become a geological agent on the planet”(209), means that they are able to affect the very balance of life on Earth, so that – “in itself” with the industrial revolution of 1750, “for itself” with global warming – a new geological era began, baptized by some scientists as “Anthropocene.” The way humankind is forced to perceive itself in these new conditions is as a species, as one of the species of life on earth. When the young Marx designated humanity as a “species being /Gattungswesen/,” he means something quite different: that, in contrast to animal species, only humans are a “species being,” i.e., a being which actively relates to itself as a species and is thus “universal” not only in itself, but also for itself. This universality first appears in its alienated-perverted form with capitalism, which connects and unites all of humanity within the same world market; with modern social and scientific development, we are no longer just a mere species among others or yet another natural condition. For the first time in the entire human history, we, humans, collectively constitute ourselves and are aware of it, so that we are also responsible for ourselves: the mode of our survival depends on the maturity of our collective reason… However, the scientists who talk about the Anthropocene ”are saying something quite the contrary. They argue that because humans constitute a particular kind of species they can, in the process of dominating other species, acquire the status of a geologic force. Humans, in other words, have become a natural condition, at lest today.”(214) The standard Marxist counter-argument is here that this shift from Pleistocene to the Anthropocene is entirely due to the explosive development of capitalism and its global impact – and this confronts us with the key question: how are we to think the link between the social history of the Capital and the much larger geologic changes of the conditions for life on the Earth?

“If the industrial way of life was what got us into this crisis, then the question is, why think in terms of species, surely a category that belongs to a much longer history? Why could not the narrative of capitalism – and hence its critique – be sufficient as a framework for interrogating the history of climate change and understanding its consequences? It seems true that the crisis of climate change has been necessitated by the high-energy-consuming model of society that capitalist industrialization has created and promoted, but the current crisis has brought into view certain other conditions for the existence of life in the human form that have no intrinsic connection to the logics of capitalist, nationalist, or socialist identities. They are connected rather to the history of life on this planet, the way different life-forms connect to one another, and the way the mass extinction of one species could spell danger for another. /…/ In other words, whatever our socioeconomic and technological choices, whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions (such as the temperature zone in which the planet exists) that work like boundary parameters of human existence. These parameters are independent of capitalism or socialism. They have been stable for much longer than the histories of these institutions and have allowed human beings to become the dominant species on earth. Unfortunately, we have now ourselves become a geological agent disturbing these parametric conditions needed for our own existence.” (217-218)

In contrast to nuclear war which would have been the result of a conscious decision of a particular agent, climate change “is an unintended consequence of human action and shows, only through scientific analysis, the effects of our actions as a species.” (221) This threat to the very existence of humanity creates a new sense of “we” which truly encompasses all of humanity: “Climate change, refracted through global capital, will no doubt accentuate the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital; some people will no doubt gain temporarily at the expense of others. But the whole crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism. Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged (witness the drought in Australia or recent fires in the wealthy neighborhoods of California).” (221) The most appropriate name for this emerging universal subject may be species: “Species may indeed be the name of a placeholder for an emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change.” (221) The problem is that this universal is not a Hegelian one, which arises dialectically out of the movement of history and subsumes-mediates all particularities: it “escapes our capacity to experience the world” (222), so it can only give rise to a “negative universal history” (222), not the Hegelian world history as the gradual immanent self-deployment of freedom.

With the idea of humans as species, the universality of the humankind falls back into the particularity of an animal species: phenomena like global warming make us aware that, with all the universality of our theoretical and practical activity, we are at a certain basic level just another living species on the planet Earth. Our survival depends on certain natural parameters which we automatically take for granted. The lesson of the global warming is that the freedom of the humankind was possible only against the background of the stable natural parameters of the life on earth (temperature, the composition of the air, sufficient water and energy supply, etc.): humans can “do what they want” only insofar as they remain marginal enough, so that they don’t seriously perturb the parameters of the life on earth. The limitation of our freedom that becomes palpable with global warming is the paradoxical outcome of the very exponential growth of our freedom and power, i.e., of our growing ability to transform nature around us up to destabilizing the very basic geological parameters of the life on earth. “Nature” thereby literally becomes a socio-historical category, but not in the exalted young Lukacs sense (the content of what is for us (counts for us as) “nature” is always overdetermined by a historically-specified social totality which structures the transcendental horizon of our understanding of nature). It becomes a socio-historical category in the much more radical and literal (ontic) sense of something that is nit just a stable background of human activity, but is affected by it in its very basic components. What is thereby undermined is the basic distinction between nature and human history: nature blindly follows its course, it just has to be explained, while human history has to be understood. Even if its global course is out of control and functions as a Fate which goes against the wishes of most of the people, this “Fate” is the result of the complex interaction of many individual and collective projects and acts based upon certain understanding of what our world is – in history, we confront the result of our own endeavors.

Chakrabarty seems to miss here the full scope of the properly dialectical relationship between the basic geological parameters of the life on earth and the socio-economic dynamic of human development. Of course, the natural parameters of our environment are “independent of capitalism or socialism” – they are a threat to all of us, independently of economic development, political system, etc. However, the fact that their stability was threatened by the dynamic of global capitalism nonetheless has a stronger implication than the one allowed by Chakrabarty: in a way, we have to admit that the Whole is contained by its Part, i.e., that the fate of the Whole (life on earth) hinges on what goes on in what is formally one of its parts (socio-economic mode of production of one of the species on earth). This is why we have to accept the paradox that, in the relation between the universal antagonism (the threatened parameters of the conditions for life on earth) and the particular antagonism (the deadlock of capitalism), the key struggle is the particular one: one can solve the universal problem (of the survival of the human species) only by first resolving the particular deadlock of the capitalist mode of production. In other words, the common-sense reasoning which tells us that, independently of our class position or of our political orientation, we all will have to tackle the ecological crisis if we are to survive, is deeply misleading: the key of the ecological crisis does not reside in ecology as such.

Perhaps, the key to this limitation is Chakrabarty’s simplified notion of the Hegelian dialectics. That is to say, is the idea of a “negative universal history” really anti-Hegelian? Is, on the contrary, the idea that a multiplicity (of humans) totalized (brought together) through a negative external limit (a threat) not Hegelian par excellence? Even more, is not for Hegel every universality ultimately a “negative” one, in the precise sense that it has to appear as such, in its opposition (“negative relationship”) to its own particular-determinate content – recall Hegel’s theory of war. Hegel may appear to celebrate the prosaic character of life in a well-organized modern state where the heroic disturbances are overcome in the tranquillity of private rights and the security of the satisfaction of needs: private property is guaranteed, sexuality is restricted to marriage, future is safe… In this organic order, universality and particular interests appear reconciled: the “infinite right” of subjective singularity is given its due, individuals no longer experience the objective state order as a foreign power intruding onto their rights, they recognize in it the substance and frame of their very freedom. Gerard Lebrun asks here the fateful question: “Can the sentiment of the Universal be dissociated from this appeasement?” The answer is clear: yes, and this is why war is necessary – in war, universality reasserts its right against and over the concrete-organic appeasement in the prosaic social life. Is thus the necessity of war not the ultimate proof that, for Hegel, every social reconciliation is doomed to fail, that no organic social order can effectively contain the force of abstract-universal negativity? This is why social life is condemned to the “spurious infinity” of the eternal oscillation between stable civic life and wartime perturbations.

In other words, Chakrabarty’s dismissal of the Hegelian universality would only hold if we were to reduce what Hegel calls “concrete universality” to the organic-corporate model of a universal order within which every particular moment plays its determinate role, contributing to the wealth of the All. If, however, we bear in mind that the Hegelian “concrete universality” designates a universal which enters into a dialectical tension with its own particular content, i.e., that every universality can only assert (posit) itself “as such” in a negative way, then the idea of nature as not only the self-evident stable background of human activity, but as the unity of the invisible background of and apocalyptic threat to the human species, appears profoundly Hegelian.