In maybe the most offensive manifestation of the Daily Telegraph‘s slide from serious paper of record to hate-filled propaganda rag for the literate over-80s, their personal finance editor, Ian Cowie, brings us the following suggestion to improve Britain’s democracy:

 …here’s an idea that might really stir up some interest – and improve our nation’s governance.Why don’t we restrict votes to people who actually pay something into the system? No, I am not suggesting a return to property-based eligibility [oh no, that would be indecent]; although that system worked quite well when Parliament administered not just Britain but most of the world [oh, the good old days...]. Today, income would be a much better test, setting the bar as low as possible; perhaps including everyone who pays at least £100 of income tax each year.

[...]

This modest proposal [unfortunate choice of words, there] would, however, exclude large numbers of people who have no ‘skin in the game’ and who may even comprise the majority of voters in some metropolitan areas today [*cough* Labour voters *cough*]. Their contribution is not just negative in financial terms – they take out more than they put in – but likely to be damaging to the decisions taken by democracies.

[If you have the stomach for it, you can read the whole thing here: http://bit.ly/iHVEZF]

I was planning to fisk this pathetic little screed (including his embarrassing pub analogy), but there’s really no need with an argument so riddled with flaws and lacking in human empathy. I’d rather focus on what it says about the standard of public discourse in this country that such a suggestion – literally disenfranchising the poorest in society – is endorsed by a quality newspaper.

We’ve already seen the proposal by DWP minister Iain Duncan-Smith (who manages to be both profoundly boring and evil) that the long term unemployed be forced to clean the streets in high-vis jackets for £2 an hour (http://bit.ly/aXLdpM), which resulted in relatively little outcry. Once it becomes acceptable to force the unemployed into the kind of menial labour more commonly used as punishment for criminals, why not take away their political rights as well? Is that really such a leap?

This also illustrates something about the right wing press in this country: namely their monopoly on lunacy, paranoia and sheer fucking hatefulness. This was the subject of a very good piece by Dave Osler at Liberal Conspiracy (here: http://bit.ly/gZNQmJ) a while back concerning the columnists Simon Heffer and Melanie Philips and their opinion of the Soviet/Marxist credentials of the current government (really). He concluded, quite righly:

No serious left of centre publication – not even any low circulation Trot rag, come to that – would make space available to the broadly equivalent contention that Ed Miliband is some form of fascist.

‘Looney Left’, indeed.

We seem to be setting a standard nowadays for justifying injustice and dehumanising the poor. In the aftermath of the expenses scandal, there’s been much talk by various groups of ‘cleaning up British politics’. I suggest that addressing this would be a good place to start.

Last Friday I enjoyed a drink with some friends at the Southampton Arms. Upon arrival we had immediately headed outside, partly because the pub was extremely crowded, and partly because, like many other people, we still enjoy a drink amd a smoke. Suddenly just as the clock struck 10 several staff appeared in the beer garden and very quickly ushered everybody inside – since 10 pm was when the beer garden had to close. Nowadays this is a very common part of the pub going experience. Usually a few people living near a pub will complain about the noise, and the council will respond by imposing what often seem to be OTT restrictions as part of the pub’s licence.

Of course, nobody would suggest that pubs be given free reign, and that the feelings of residents be given no weight. Yet, considering that pub-going is such an important and popular part of our communal culture, there needs to be some give and take (indeed the smoking drinker who is inconvenienced most by such restrictions has been forced to do rather a lot pf giving of late). The question on my mind last week was why somebody would live next to a pub if they wanted quiet by 10pm on a Friday. Granted, people are limited by their circumstances, but the pub is question was on Highgate Road in Gospel Oak, right near the Heath. In other words, local residents probably enjoy the means to exercise quite a degree of autonomy about where they live. Indeed, pubs generally are concentrated in more central locations where housing is at a premium. Surely we can expect people to move into them on the understanding that they may be kept up a little past 10 on a Friday or Saturday.

It is in fact not only concerns about noise that govern pubs outdoor spaces, but also the contemporary moral panic about people DRINKING on The STREET. In Camden Town – hardly the place where one would expect a quiet life – almost all pubs appear compelled to operate a no drinks outside rule. When combined with a “no smoking inside” rule, this can be a pain. Yet as somebody who is not overly cautious I am generally willing to leave my drink inside and watch it through the window if need be. Yet some of my female friends are understandably far more cautious about having to leave their drink unattended if they want a smoke – for them it can be far more than a minor annoyance.

Women are arguably made more vulnerable by a system of no drinks outside, no smokes inside. Yet my focus here isn’t purely on the worst possible outcome of these rules. The point is that women already face pressure not to go out and throw caution to the wind in the way that men are easily able to. Many already find themselves starting the evening by planning how they will get home for reasons men don’t have to think about. As such our night culture should be designed to make it easy for women especially do to as they wish, regardless of the threats they may face. And the current rules, I am afraid, do the opposite

With pubs still closing at an alarming rate politicians of all stripes pay lip service to the idea of supporting our pub culture. Yet they refuse to ever give the interests of pubs and their customers any priority over other concerns – whether it is the desire amongst some for quiet by 10pm on a Friday, or the amorphous and extensive concept of public order, or, in the case of the blanket smoking ban, public health. If our pub culture is going to be saved and supported, then public houses must be given some more leeway to operate in the way that we, pub going public, want them to.

Campaigns against the government’s cuts programme are incredibly important, and only going to become more so in the coming months. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about such campaigns, and Save the Arts’ new video seems to be a pretty good illustration of the latter:

We’re presented with an unconvincingly-accented farmer (He goes to art galleries in his tractor! Isn’t that just so quirky and endearing and not remotely patronising?) who begins this ostensibly anti-cuts video by telling us that cuts are unavoidable. Then he reminds us that the arts are considerably less essential than public services like the fire brigade…before abruptly claiming that they are essential after all (possibly because he remembered which side he’s meant to be on), and that they should be protected because ‘they delight us, transport us, [and] surprise us,’ they provide jobs and bring in money, and they’re our one remaining source of national pride, since everything else in the country’s so shit. And that, barring the frankly bizarre interludes in which the farmer’s heard trying to stop his apparently disturbed son from eating pig manure and molesting a newborn calf, is it. That’s the centrepiece of the Save the Arts campaign in its entirety. None of the positive points made in favour of the arts are backed up with anything – no examples of creative works with the power to surprise, delight or transform, no figures on how many people work in the arts, and no specifics on how much money the sector contributes to the economy. I’m not asking for a detailed statistical breakdown, but surely ‘arts funding in the UK is x billion a year but the arts contribute y billion to the economy’ is more persuasive than just baldly asserting that the contribution is ‘vast’?

If you already think the arts should have their funding protected, then you don’t need a video to persuade you. If you disagree, I seriously doubt that a video whose argument boils down to “sure, cut spending all you want, but not on us – opera’s not as important as pretty much any public service you can name but it brings in some unspecified amount of money.” is going to convince you. The fact that said video explicitly denounces everything else done or produced in the UK as a pile of crap doesn’t seem that likely to win it much support either.  We badly need opposition to the cuts, but an anti-cuts campaign needs to be just that – a campaign against the whole ideologically motivated slash-and-burn programme, not special pleading for individual causes.

Edit: The end of this post has caused some misunderstanding, so just to be clear – I don’t think campaigns against specific cuts are a bad thing per se, but campaigns which are just arguing for cuts of the same magnitude to be made somewhere else (as this video is doing) most definitely are.

I am a history buff. As such I find libraries and the smell of old history books seriously exciting. During a recent visit to Northumberland (Reuben would not approve) I spent several wonderful hours exploring the history section of the reasonably famous Barter Books in Alnwick. (See here: http://bit.ly/9D7xvL). I’m a vegetarian, but enormous books on the Reformation, printed like ornate bibles, more than justify the cows killed for their leather to craft the book covers. I found the older history books to be of two kinds: the first, hopelessly specialised volumes on, for instance, the history of land ownership in Kent in the mid-15th Century (these books are unreadable); the second, books that attempt in one go to explain the entire course of the history of Europe, say, or democratic government, starting with the Greeks.

Stephen Fry once cited the library as something wholly without flaw. Libraries are, he explained, almost ‘sexually exciting’ places, as they are ‘powerhouses of knowledge’. This applies to books in general, but history books in particular. Enclosed in the most pedestrian-looking books you can find the whole sweep of human experience. You can follow Alexander the Great through Persia, watch monarchies fall to revolution, or ponder the disappearance of hats in mens’ fashion in the 1960s. A.J.P Taylor put it very well, as he often did:

History is the one way in which you can experience at second hand all kinds of varieties of human behaviour, and after all the greatest problem in life is to understand how other people behave, and this is what history enables us to do: to see people in all kinds of situations and in all kinds of walks of life…It makes the reader, and to a certain extent the historian too, aware of a fuller, much wider life than somebody could possibly have merely by his own private experience. [though I'm sure he'd agree that leaving the house is often a good idea].

Immersing yourself in history from afar with books is one thing, seeing it happen is another. When we’re old and ugly and not as mobile as we used to be, we’ll likely be asked where we were on 9/11, as we ask people where they were when Kennedy was killed. (I was in year 6 at the time; my friend Nick was staying at my house for after-school games and neon coloured food. I’ll make the story more interesting later). Likewise I’ll always remember being called down in 2003 to watch the chimp President himself announce the invasion of Iraq to the world on TV as my Dad did the ironing. Such moments of ‘we interrupt our regular programming…’ punctuate the 20th Century: people learned of war or crisis from the television, which provided memorable viewing (think of Walter Cronkite choking up like a girlie liberal in Nov. 1963); earlier they sat by the wireless, fretting.

Which brings me to the BBC Archive. Museums must house pots and bits of metal for the benefit of historical memory, and likewise our country needs a class of archive minions to sit in the presumably dark, dank bowels of the BBC and sort through their thousands of hours of broadcasting, and provide it for the public. This civilisational achievement you can enjoy by clicking here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/.

Modern British history is made clickable on this thing. Election coverage, interviews with statesman, public scandals of yore, plus more hours of quality programming than a human being could watch in a lifetime. When Nicolas Sarkozy first took power, one of his first public statements expressed the desire to make French public broadcasting as good as the kind les rostbiffs enjoy for £2.60 a week. Here, you can see why.

The site has a ‘Today’s Choice’ box on the homepage, with a video or radio broadcast of note. Today’s is from 3rd September, 1939. It is highly likely that today you will spend slightly more than 12.38 minutes on your computer either mindlessly youtubing, embarking on a blue-link adventure on Wikipedia, looking up ridiculous sexual activities on Urban Dictionary or masturbating for the third time today (just to prove you can). I would encourage you to forgo such things and listen to this broadcast, preferably in a dark room.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/ww2outbreak/7917.shtml

Democracy in Britain leaves a lot to be desired – like actual democracy, for example. Governments secure unconscionable power with 33% of the popular vote; parties run multi-million pound election campaigns, ensuring they owe some millionaire or business, something, sometime; the anachronism of the constituency MP is still firmly in place and not going anywhere – I could go on.

But we should recognise what’s of value in our political system, and I can think of nothing more valuable than Prime Minister’s Question Time (PMQs) and the adversarial zeal that it epitomises.

Think of it. The PM has to stand before the dispatch box, in front of a crowded chamber filled mostly with political enemies, and face half an hour of questions for which no preparation can really be taken. We can boot these people out of power with little pencils on strings once every five years or so, but the public standing of a PM can be destroyed by one bad performance (as they well know). Harold ‘Supermac’ Macmillan, that unflappable Tory, recounted in his memoirs that he would often have to pop to the gents’ to vomit with nerves before a performance at PMQs; a First World War veteran, he compared the experience to ‘going over the top’.  Who doesn’t want the PM to experience that kind of terror on a weekly basis?

The principal value of all this is that it makes the holding of the executive to account worth watching. This is something remarkable and very rare: compare those theatrical half hours on BBC Parliament with the legislative processes of most other countries, and you’ll see that this needs defending. Most European countries have hopelessly dull, ‘consensus’ – based affairs to sit through, and the goings on in the houses of America’s Congress could almost have been designed to make the savvy American voter change the channel.

C-Span, America’s main public service broadcaster (and a phenomenal aid to democracy and transparency in the US) broadcasts this half hour live to an American audience; it is one of its most popular shows. We can all feel rigid with pride thinking of Americans, living in a country racked with infantile consensus politics, sitting in their living rooms thinking, ‘Why don’t we have this?’ Image the chimp-president George W Bush subjected to this treatment for eight years. (Footnote: Proposals for an American Question Time, on the British model,  have been suggested since the days of Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, it was a little commented upon electoral pledge of John McCain, though sadly far outweighed by his choice of an illiterate demagogue for running mate).

PMQs, and the adversarial nature of Parliamentary proceedings in general, have their basis in a very British form of public culture, which has been termed a ‘boisterous democracy’. We argue in pubs, argue in our courts, argue in the street. We gravitate towards writers who don’t give a shit and have a sturdy tradition of ‘English Troublemakers’,  as A.J.P Taylor called them, who stand at the back and shout ‘Shame! Rubbish!’ at elected heads of state. Let the yanks make soothing noises about ‘bi-partisanship’, their Congress is boring.

Nigel Farage (a degenerate righty, I know) exported a bit of this spirit when he confronted our European overlord, Herman van Rompuy, in the EU Parliament. I’d encourage you to watch the short video below, and feel proud:

Nigel Farage harangues EU President Herman van Rompuy

Look how the Dutch-speakers boo and hiss!

Here’s one of the great parliamentary performances of the late Michael Foot, berating the then Industry Secretary Keith Joseph:

Michael Foot\’s Magician

This tells you all you need to know: in British political culture, it is quite acceptable for an MP to publicly humiliate a member of Her Majesty’s Government, providing the flowery language is kept to and some wit is on display.

Here’s the paragraph about how this wonderful thing is under threat: John Bercow – a lurid misogynist as it happens – has stated that the ‘abusive’ nature of PMQs needs revising. From the BBC website:

‘Mr Bercow…suggested the prime minister and opposition leaders of the day agree a “common understanding of behaviour” among their MPS, enforced by the whips, which would allow the Speaker to operate “the parliamentary equivalent of yellow and red cards…if that were to prove absolutely necessary” [My emphasis]‘

Never mind the fact that members can already be suspended for failing to keep to protocol; never mind the fact that this would constitute a great increase in power for the already over-powerful whips; and never mind the fact that the drama of PMQs  - in particular watching two grown men insult each other in fancy language – is its main appeal. David Cameron talked about ending the ‘Punch and Judy politics’ of Westminster: you know what a slimy bastard this man is when he references one quintessentially English institution to attack another. Swine.

Last week the French cabinet approved plans to ban the burqa in public places. Women who wear the veil in public face a fine of $185 dollars and compulsory classes in French values, along with imprisonment if they do not comply.

It goes without saying that a woman wearing a full face veil – her identity hidden from those whom she encounters – can be a ridiculous and depressing site. Yet the basic issue here is one of liberty and democracy. As far as possible, the state should not impose dress codes upon its citizens.

Most worrying is the way in which “french values” have been invoked. A parliamentary resolution supporting the ban justified the move on the basis that the veil was “contrary to the values of the republic.” Sarkoxy mean while insisted that:

“We are an old nation united around a certain idea of human dignity, and in particular of a woman’s dignity, around a certain idea of how to live together. The full veil that hides the face completely harms those values”

The point is that when one talks of “French values” or “British values” one usually invokes a somewhat dubious ideological construct. Modern societies are characterised by many competing and contradictory values. Those values which are deemed to reflect the essence of the nation are generally those which happen to be most popular or most powerful at a given point in time. As such, by denying people the right to express themselves – or to adorn themselves – in a manner which contradicts “french values”, the government is in reality denying people the right to dissent from that which is hegemonic. In asserting that people must conform to “French Values” the government is in reality asserting that people people must not diverge from the mainstream.

There has been a whiff of this here too in Britain. Jack Straw, a few years back attacked the veil,not because he considered it oppressive to women but because it was a “visible statement of separation and of difference” (my emphasis). Ye, people ought not to separate themselves from the rest of society. But since when was it a crime to express difference, or for an individual to indicate that they are not like everybody else. Indeed the ability to stand out from the crowd is at the heart of what makes are democracy worthwhile.

This week I want to write about three things: a film I watched (Milk), one protest I did go to (the Party at the Pumps) and another I didn’t (the Big Gay Flash Mob). What ties these things together is the idea of an activist community.

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected politician in the States. Having never done anything political before (except vote Republican), at the age of 40 he moved to San Francisco with his new partner, and opened a camera shop. To cut a long story short, the shop became the centre of the gay community in San Francisco, and Harvey became the spokesperson for that community. From boycotts co-organised with the Teamsters, to bringing thousands of gay men onto the streets to demand proper gay rights, the gay community became a movement, and that movement became an electorate.

Harvey was elected, kept fighting, and was eventually assassinated. The excellent film about his life which came out last year is gripping viewing and really should be watched. What got me thinking is the sequence that Harvey and his team made from community, to movement, to electorate. The gay community is a really good example of this: yesterday there was the Big Gay Flash Mob, really quite a good action, highlighting the Tories’ mugwumping over gay rights. While I really wouldn’t want anyone to think it’s okay to vote Tory if they were to have an acceptable gay rights policy, it’s generally a good thing that there’s the ability to call a big, vocal protest at short notice over such an important issue.

The nice pic used for the Big Gay Flashmob fbook group. But who exactly are our masked vigiliantes?

However, on Saturday a friend and I went to the ‘Party at the Pumps’, a very different activist community. In fact, that’s mainly what the community is: one made up of people who believe that activism works. As we got out at Oxford Circus tube station, we looked through the crowds of shoppers, sunglasses on and big square designer bags by their sides, to find the other activists. Pushing through, we looked over everyone’s heads and eventually saw the dreads and beards, the little flags and face paint that says ‘this way for mischief.’

Everyone was gathered at the four different pedestrian corners of Oxford Circus, though there was a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing across the new diagonal crossing. As reclaiming the streets goes, it’s not exactly fighting the system, but it’s pretty liberating if you’ve always been a Londoner and remember going through this every Summer.

Anyway, at 1.30pm on the dot flag-holders started blowing their whistles and everyone piled down into the underground, away from the hustle of shopping central, dreadlocks, poi, fold-up bikes and all. We swarmed down the tube, filling the escalators, making a racket, stuffing ourselves onto the trains (police in tow, of course). At Shepherd’s Bush, the whistles started going off again, and we all piled out of the tube, skirting round the passageways, following the flag-leaders, until escalators climbed and oyster cards beeping, we got out, turned the corner and all ran towards the BP petrol station in sight.

pic by amelia of ameliasmagazine.com

BP are considering going full throttle into extracting oil from the Canadian tar sands, the most destructive and polluting project on the planet. So, in the run up to the BP shareholders’ AGM on Thursday, various eco-protest groups thought we’d try and send BP a message of what we think about their consistent desire to put profit before workers, indigenous rights groups and impending catastrophic climate change.

We occupied the forecourt, and it seems the convenience store owner decided to close-up for the day – which actually wasn’t necessary; I dare say he could’ve sold a fair few beers to us (although it’s good that smoking was kept to a minimum). There were all the good markers of climate activism: samba bands, banner drops, stickers, subvertising, ceilidhs, rebel clowns (even though Jacob seems to think we don’t have such things). We danced, sang, stickered, leafleted everyone around, whether walking past, lounging in the sun or joining in the dance. But when people came to join in, who were they joining?

It’s a strange thing that for the last decade or so, the loudest ‘activist’ network hasn’t explicitly identified itself, or rather, where it comes from. The alter-globalisation movement, the ‘movement of movements’, doesn’t have a resounding socio-economic or legal status with which it campaigns. The gay community, trade unionists, feminists – all of these, to different extents, work towards a world in which not only their campaigns are unnecessary, but they’re communities themselves become absent as a distinguishable unit.

The activist community protests for others, the so-called ‘ethical politics.’ But what I can’t get out of my head is the fact that Harvey Milk, while him and those around him built a movement, could always know exactly who and what they’re community was. As the climate movement flounders post-Copenhagen, it would be good to really come out of the closet and say who we are.

The Man with the Blue Guitar, was a poem written in the 1937 by American poet Wallace Stevens. Stevens was certainly not a Marxist. Yet it is a work which I find politically thought provoking. It seems to offer something about what it means to be a revolutionary – about the ambiguity of engaging vigorously with the world as it stands before us, but always with at least one eye on a world turned truly upside down, about the problematic desire to look and stand beyound that in which we are necessarily enmeshed.

The Man With The Blue Guitar
by Wallace Stevens

One

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said to him, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are.”

Two

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If a serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

Three

A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Ourselves in tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them on the blue guitar,
Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.

Four

Tom-tom c’est moi. The blue guitar
And I are one. The orchestra

Fills the high hall with shuffling men
High as the hall. The whirling noise

Of a multitude dwindles, all said,
To his breath that lies awake at night.

I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,

As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentarily declares

Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.

Two events, at each end of the last week here in London, have highlighted the real range of activities and viewpoints of the left community in this country. The 7th annual Historical Materialism Conference, held last weekend at SOAS and Birkbeck, offered a fantastic opportunity for over 700 attendees from around the world to discuss Marxist theory. Today’s actions of “The Wave” followed by the beginning of a 48-hour climate camp in Trafalgar Square represented the cutting edge of British lefty activism. The question is, then, why can one not find the same faces at both events? Why are our theorists disinclined to involve themselves with activism, and why are our activists not engaging with the theoretical debates that surround the issues they wish to tackle?

At the Historical Materialism conference, there were literally hundreds of papers given, on topics ranging from political economy of the current crisis, to climate change, to aesthetic debates in the 1990s, to the poetics of containerisation. Despite this being a conference focussed on Marx’s thought, and on later Marxist thought, there can be no doubt about how great a level of heterogeneity there was in the viewpoints expressed, nor of ongoing polemics that occasionally bubbled to the surface. The atmosphere was lively, and unusually for a bunch of academics, the attendees were all serious about changing the world. Let us not get this wrong, despite the Marxist tradition often being highly intellectual, there were no punches pulled about the necessity of the forcible overthrow of the status quo. When on the first night, a Canadian academic gave a paper on the use of historical materialism is social scientific study to aid social democratic ends, he was absolutely taken apart, and the conference ended with Frederic Jameson arguing that we have to make the choice between Socialism and Communism.

Today’s “The Wave” march was equally heterogeneous. Finding myself marching with everyone from the Socialist Workers’ Party, to the Lib Dems, to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (who happen to act like a rather right-wing pressure group most of the time), with everyone kitted out in blue garb. Everyone was coming together to make what they see as necessary political demands. Of course, the climate camp taking place later in the day was rather less diverse, with attendees being a range of hippies, students, recent graduates, and NGO workers. The Wave, itself, is of little political interest, it was not particularly left-wing, and the demands were broadly reformist, but this is not the case for climate camp.

And yet, climate camp is a heavily anti-theoretical environment. One finds oneself surrounded by the most conservative discourses on nature, in which people consider the rolling back the industrial revolution. Both nature and creativity become a fetish, in the here-and-now climaxing most ingloriously in a hedonism whose claim to make demands for the future are, with the creative obsession and the throwing away of history, held firmly and problematically in the present. Maybe I give the climate camp a bad press. They do amazing work, and get the sort of media attention most Marxists could never dream of. Nonetheless, as an urbanist of sorts, and as a modernist, I can’t help feeling slightly uncomfortable about banners that say “Nature doesn’t do bail-outs”. Somehow I think that, “Humanity shouldn’t do bail-outs” would be more appropriate to the cause.

And yet the academic Marxists have their problems too. Surrounded by the most erudite and eloquent debates on theory, a session on Israel and anti-Semitism was banal at best. The imposition of a Realpolitik was awkward and confused. The one time in the weekend when I felt that this was really being addressed was in a fantastic session on “Apocalypse Marxism”, with one of the papers being given by a PhD student at University of California Santa Cruz who also happens to be involved in the ongoing student struggles across California. Maybe the collaboration of theory and praxis are going better elsewhere

Amongst the book stalls at the conference, the SWP’s seemed rather out of place, with its emphasis on popular Marxism and Trotskyism not quite hitting the spot. The problem is, for many Marxist academics, that left-wing activists seem inherently dogmatic. Academics would often rather be debaters than involve themselves in the sort of demagoguery needed to run a vanguard part.

The challenge to integrate theory and praxis has been long-discussed, and it is perfectly possibly that my judgment is clouded by the demise of Adorno at the hands of May ’68ers, and their slogan of “Adorno as an institution is dead.” I see their legacy in climate camp. I see it in the lifestylism that allows placards that read “you can’t eat meat and be an environmentalist” or in any challenge to capitalism at the point of consumption.

If we carry on as we are, any revolution will not be theorised, and yet we cannot afford for this to be the case. Maybe we can analyse this split in terms of Marx’s famous final thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” In its popular, although incorrect, interpretation this is a call for activism, to throw out philosophy. The other interpretation is that Marx demands a philosophy that itself changes the world. But take with it the argument that philosophy should be immanent to all elements of human existence, and you have a fine argument for a ground in which philosophers must partake in praxis, and activists must at the same time critically examine their status rather than simply assuming it. And yet to simply make this argument is not enough, as we must start to think very carefully about how these two important elements of the left can be integrated, and in fact must be integrated, to effect any real change.

One of the above images appeared, at the turn of the century, in an anti-Semitic Austrian newspaper. One of the images, however, is a contemporary portrayal of the legendary tight fisted businessman, Scrooge. It has gone up on posters across the London Underground – and elsewhere – to advertise Disney’s new animated version of the story.

As I walked past the picture I was struck by the way Scrooge had – actually quite unusually – been given exaggerated Semitic features, specifically a ridiculously hooked nose. Meanwhile his talon like hand is not unusual in traditional, hostile portrayals of Jews.

It is worth stressing that Scrooge – unlike Shylock or Faigin – has not traditionally been considered a Jewish character. It is, after all, a story about Christmas. As such there is no ‘artistic integrity’ type justification for such portrayals. Do I think the illustrator set out to make Scrooge ‘look like a Jew’? Perhaps not. But the image does seem to draw upon certain ingrained cultural reference as to what a tight-fisted businessman should look like. And such imagery cannot be fully disconnected from Jewry, or from anti-Semitism, in either its origins or its contemporary consequences.