Last week’s seminar at the Frontline Club asked a very pertinent question of the Occupy London movement pitched outside St. Paul’s. What do you want? I was surprised to see from the show of journalistic hands that the majority in the room did not know exactly what the protesters are camped out for, though, given the lineup of speakers included accountant turned campaigner Richard Murphy and Julian Assange, fresh from court after losing his extradition appeal earlier that day, it was less surprising that the majority supported their broad aims.

Self-confessed occupy sceptic, Harry Cole, one of only two voices of dissent on the panel, accused the protesters of possessing an overwhelming mismatch of ideas.

“If you’ve got a movement that is calling for a realignment of capitalism, having speeches about climate change and Kurds within the space of 10 minutes, it’s not working,” Cole said.

More baffling opposition came from Daniel Ben-Ami, who described himself as of the left, but lost me when he called the protesters a deeply conservative movement loved by the establishment.

It fell to Murphy to give the most passionate defence of the movement, offering a rare charisma I had thought was bred out of accountants at playschool.

“The message from Occupy is you guys have got it wrong,” Murphy said. “After 30 years of neo-liberalism, which has actually suited both left and right in many ways, we end up with a social movement which is actually saying hang on a minute, what this is about is creating a geography of dissent. A space where people can say we are looking for alternatives ideas because our right to dissent, our right to even think has been crushed.”

“Yes it’s messy, but so is reality,” Murphy added.

Assange, confessing he had “had a bit of a busy day”, played up the importance of new forms of media and criticised the role of the mainstream press as the reason movements like Occupy were not in place five years ago.

“We now have ways to bypass the mainstream press,” said Assange, whose own means of bypassing the mainstream press, Wikileaks, has already helped topple governments, “pouring oil on the fire” that fuelled the Arab Spring.

From the speeches, particularly that of activist Naomi Colvin, and from contributions from the floor, it was clear that Occupy, despite the disparate groups that came together to form it, knows what it wants. A stand against cuts and tax avoidance and for the reform of a broken capitalism; a stand for the world’s poorest against the excesses of the world’s richest.

After my lunch breaks spent at the camp and marching on Westminster, swapping caps between journalist and protester, I find it hard to see why anyone could accuse the movement, messy and messianic as it is, of not knowing what it wants. They are persistent in their cause and assured of their politics – turning on, tuning in and dropping out in true radical spirit – and in that I can only wholeheartedly support them.

Equally, when Colvin talked of government not working in the interests of the general population and of her concern with financial services out of control, I found it hard to disagree. What worries me slightly, however, is the tendency of some protesters to link the movement to the Arab Spring.

“It’s one manifestation of a global emancipation movement that began with Egypt and Tunisia,” said Colvin.

Those make for stirring words, powerful, pretty, but also pretentious. It’s a pretention exemplified for all to see in the sign sitting opposite St. Paul’s reading ‘Tahrir Square EC4M’.

I can see what Occupy is trying to do and in showing solidarity with the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and the millions oppressed across the Arab world yearning for freedom from the yoke of dictatorship, they have a noble cause.

But where are the bullets and the cavalry charges? Where are the arrests, the beatings and the killings? I do not envy the Occupy protesters shivering in tents towards Christmas. But Paternoster Square is not Tahrir Square and they are not putting their lives on the line trying to get into it. I’m sure no one in the camp means to belittle the struggle for democracy in the Middle East, or lay claim to a struggle as dangerous, but as destructive and exploitative as modern capitalism is, as immiserating as its failings have been for the most vulnerable people in this country, the Arabs paid in blood for their emancipation, while the St. Paul’s protesters have been given a protected space by state and church – at least until the new year – in which to air their rightful grievances. To forget that, or to elevate a lengthy unseasonal politically charged festival to the status of a fundamental struggle against a sovereign that is trying to destroy you for speaking out against it, smacks of pretention.

That said, what they have done, in creating a space for discussion and democracy, linked with movements across the world, with a clear sense of what they are for and who they are against, is create a powerful symbol that politicians cannot afford to ignore.

As Sun Tzu famously wrote, “if know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles”. I suspect there will be more than a hundred battles ahead. Capitalism will not be over by Christmas and the camp may be gone by Easter. But the Occupy movement has tapped into a mood that stretches much further than a few hundred tents outside a famous London landmark. And, if indeed they do this once speak for the 99%, then that mood is not going away anytime soon.

I have to first apologise about the vague title of this post, but I found it somewhat resembling the confusion on which direction these occupations might take.

While I disagree with some of what Jacob has written previous to this post on here, I will say that we must remain thinking, all the time, about what we truly want from this new tide of popular activism, and not be too quick to dismiss it as rambling and boring. Jacob mentions the new protestors almost wearing kettling as a badge of honour these days. In other words, if I can put it crassly (apologies): to define the success of their afternoon wank by how heavy-handed the police deal with it (forgive the slight pun). I have a fairly different view, one more long winded, but probably equally crass in places.

I have never been thrilled whilst in a kettle. Its claustrophobic and very provocative, but now that I have been in a few, it has just become monotonous and pathetic. There were many occupiers sat down by police lines on Saturday night, me included, which held the space as the police tried to encroach one step at a time to intimidate and squeeze people out, eventually even bringing in the dogs to bark at us at 8pm. The people who I was talking to nearby, none of whom I had seen anywhere previous, were not displaying pride or childish enthusiasm for a fight, but single-minded resilience. Almost a dull, static resilience which read to me as a simple defiant “no” with no particular “because”.

It did not seem to me that we knew exactly what we were protecting, or what we wanted, but what we did know, or at least what I believed, was that at the most base level, it was our space.

This space is important, because like an unimpressive blank piece of paper, it presents the biggest challenge but promises the ultimate reward or failure. To condescend to people who are perhaps only just getting involved, or who are more languid than one would prefer, or who were passing by and took part, even for a few moments, is failing to recognise or understand what a popular movement looks like, especially at the beginning, in this culture and at this time, with a shadow and burden of a whole international movement looming in the background.

That aside, I have my own preliminary thoughts and reservations about the occupation, but ones born from a consideration of the state complex we are trying to occupy and undo, and not necessarily the occupiers themselves. It has only been two days, and thus, it is too early to prophesise failure or success without being flippant.

In terms of circumstance, we have an often oppressive state with glib politicians who more concerned with rhetoric and vote-swings than fairness, equality and genuine socio-economic progressivism. Couple this with a police force which is rash and sometimes violent, it has the hallmarks of a police state.

On Saturday, it was peaceful and the sizeable police force deployed were clearly unnecessary to all onlookers, partaking or not. Yesterday, the police had only deployed a small fraction of the numbers, with only a few scattered around observing the assemblies and workshops with a half-interested eye.

In these circumstances, a public assembly will always be resisted by the state at first. However, if the occupation maintains its peace, at least at the beginning as it has done so far, the state has no alternative but to desist from any meaningful antagonism as shameless provocation after this period will damage the trust in those services from the public. It will also ruin the narrative of the state being the benevolent enforcer of peace, especially at this crucial time. In the short term, I believe this peace will serve the occupation well to get it functional and operational enough to explore its potential.

Now, and most importantly, what direction can the movement take here?

Representative democracy is now dead, and capitalism has killed it. I scoffed at any suggestion last night of omitting the word “capitalism” from banners or literature, treating it as if it were religious dogma. Capitalism is an idea like anything else, and ideas can and should be heavily criticised all the time. This is not naive PR, it is a sensible and fundamentally important part of a progressive agenda.

Someone mentioned yesterday that we should not refer to “the bankers” as figures of contempt either, but to “the banks” as malfunctioning institutions so that we do not alienate those who we may be able to win over from within them. I disagree. In the same way any culture is only a sum of its people, a workplace is a sum of its workers, as are the reprehensible banking practices of today the sum of the bankers who facilitate them.

To do anything else dilutes the agency these particular workers have as they go to work every day to trade on starvation and droughts while gambling with your pension. Because to be fair, it is not the “good bankers” who seem to be more visible with their work. And even if there are only a few rotten apples, these few were capable of causing a global financial crisis with trillions at stake. The system is broken, and it didn’t break itself. The few bad apples seemingly had the power to bring the world to its knees.

What is taking shape should not only be defined in the long term as a politics of dissent either. Indeed, to define the occupation as a stagnating antithesis or a counter-culture is castrating the principles of proactive deliberation and organisation. It is a common starting point to agree about what we do not want, but we must develop it into, in my opinion, an economy of dissent where what we want is expressed with real practical action, tackling problems many people feel apathetic or hopeless about. Dissent in this latter form by virtue is always practical anyway.

It has to be said, there is a broadening of the occupation taking place which is turning it into a more robust, communitarian space where workshops, assemblies and public speaking events are being organised at specific times to cover media and communication, politics, education, outreach and all sorts of knowledge sharing. It is difficult to gauge how successful any of these endeavours will be, but the level of organisation I have seen after just two days has been quite heartening.

However, let us not kid ourselves. An occupation is not simply a human forum. What the occupation must do is retain an element of spontaneous disruption to public and working life otherwise it will fall into obscurity and irrelevance with the media and the public.

As I see it in this localised embryonic stage here, it can go one of two ways:

First, in conjuring something of a “people’s manifesto” (which might even entail a people’s party movement) acting as a substratum for the ideas and policies which will gradually emerge from the occupation. Following this route will mean trying to quickly and coherently build a formal case against the system. Following this route will also mean formulising key policies which will depend on gaining public support despite no guarantee of even liaising or efficiently communicating with the greater public about them. Having something as formal as a list of demands (which they will be portrayed as, as if we’ve taken the country hostage) can also alienate swathes of people, turning the popular movement into an inwardly popular movement which will caucus off to routinely produce its own literature for future events and protests, remaining in the dreaded limbo between activism and voyeurism.

Second, something which is considerably less sexy, decisive, or calculable, but for me, infinitely more appealing (as I put it to a friend recently): a slow subversive war of attrition and disengagement with the state institution and the corporate economy through a steady knowledge diffusion process amongst the people. What I mean by that convoluted hazy sentence is simply: to do the best to keep things as vague as possible on a formal policy level, but do everything we can to undermine illegitimate authority on a socio-economic level. No flag waving. No grand proclamations. No organisation plugging. No casual leafleting. Nothing that linear or egoistic. No gimmicks. Something porous and accessible, yet not immediately high-flung and far-fetched. Looking at someone or a group and having a conversation together. Regularly. Preferably visibly too – that’s a start. Apathy is the first great obstacle, and it is not a hurdle one can leap over with a funny witticism or a strongly worded slogan, but a long and torturous mountain which will drain one almost entirely in overcoming.

Despite not knowing where the occupation movement here or abroad will end up, there is only thing thing which is problematic today as it was yesterday, and as it will be tomorrow: the absolute danger of not going far enough.

I do not want reform, or a minor rebalancing, or a 0.05% tax on trade transactions, or emergency taxes, or to break up of the banks, or to campaign against “corporatism” or “greed”, or anything mediocre which underestimates the sheer doggedness of finance capitalism and the compulsion of its sociopathic devotees (and the elected stooges) to maintain sovereign control of all acquired and acquirable assets in the private or public realm. Amending it in such ways can make the disease come back stronger and more virulent, like every “good” cancer.

Some may contend even a failure regarding this occupation will still be a positive contribution, like adding a corpse to a growing ladder of resentment upwards and onwards to our true revolutionary goal. Maybe. I wish the occupation here and elsewhere every success. Speaking on the London occupation, there is far too much at stake to be commiserative or depressed about whatever shortcomings it has at this stage. To be honest, there is far too much at stake to not be involved too.

This report on Syria is from a text circulated by a friend.

From April to June I’ve been sending you some reports on the situation in Syria. After briefly returning to Germany, for about a week I’ve now been back in Beirut with Rami Nakle (aka. Malath Aumran) in order to support him in his activities against the Assad regime in Syria. Unfortunately, the situation in Lebanon has deteriorated dramatically since last time I was here. The Syrian intelligence services and their local allies in Lebanon are doing all they can to track down anti-regime activists. We know from trustworthy sources inside Western intelligence agencies that Rami is one of their key targets. Unfortunately he cannot currently leave the country because of his refugee-status, which means that we spend most of our days trying to manage and plan his security situation. Last week alone we changed hiding places three times – something that is not only both physically and mentally exhausting, but also keeps us from doing our political work. The situation is simply not very pleasant. Depending on the security situation I will probably stay in Beirut until the end of August and keep you all updated on the constantly changing situation. But to start with, here’s a short analysis of the current state of play in Syria.

Not much longer, but ever more brutally – symptoms of the collapse of the Syrian regime

The situation in Syria is bad. Over the past weeks and months the military has laid siege to and shelled, with tanks and heave artillery, one Syrian town after another. Alongside the military it is the brutality of the Shabih (militias under the command of the president’s cousin) and the security services that is spreading fear and terror. And unlike in previous months, there is now not a day that passes without dozens of peaceful protesters being shot and killed. There are targeted hunts for activists, many of whom simply end up disappeared. More than 25.000 people have been arrested since the beginning of the insurrection. Temporary prisons and torture camps are being created, most recently in Latakia, where hundreds were held and tortured for days inside a sports stadium. All the while the security services are becoming ever more brutal: shots targeted to faces, the maiming of limbs, doctors who are killed simply for treating the wounded… There is also a dramatic increase in reports of rapes by security forces, but unfortunately we are seeing very few reports about this issue, as talking about sexual violence remains a major social taboo here. This is the worst the situation has been for people in Syria at any time over the five months that the insurrection has now lasted, never has the security forces’ violence been so brutal, massive and indiscriminate.

At the same time, never have the prospects of success been better than today. The months-long stalemate between the regime and the protesters is shifting ever more in favour of the rebels. Since the beginning of Ramadan (on August 1^st) we are seeing demonstrations not every Friday, but every day. Demonstrations that gathered a few thousands in April have grown to hundreds of thousands in July. In spite of all the brutality the people are taking to the streets with great endurance and tenacity, making it basically impossible for the security forces to keep the situation under constant control. Although the major protests in Deir Zur and Hama have, for the time being, been crushed so that the total number of protesters has declined, Syrians’ outrage and anger has increased manifold: not just in these cities, but also in Damascus, where we have thus far not seen any major demonstrations because of the intense security measures deployed in the city centre. Two friends from Damascus tell us that many people there are incredibly angry, and that it is only a matter of time until this anger turns into major protests.

But the growing intensity of the protests is only part of the broader picture – we are also seeing increasing signs of the slow collapse of the regime itself. Former ministers and members of parliament have publically criticised the government’s brutal actions. Assad has been forced to replace five governors of the provinces Hama, Homs and Daraa; last week the defence minister was forced to resign; a number of businesspeople have been refused exit from Syria for fear that they might not return; from diplomatic circles we hear increasing reports that especially very well-off Syrians are beginning to approach Western embassies in order to assure themselves of contacts there; and soldiers at most of the checkpoints have largely been reduced to searching for other soldiers as the number of desertions is increasing rapidly. To be sure, these are only small signs of decay that cannot cover up the fact that we have yet to see massive ruptures in the military and/or the wider System Assad, but these small signs keep growing in number, and every day we can see new ones.

International isolation, too, has increased in the wake of the US’ and EU’s demands that Assad resign. While the US’ almost entirely lacks the potential to impose effective sanctions, the EU does at least have the possibility to economically damage the Syrian regime by halting oil deliveries from Syria. Unlike with oil sanctions imposed on other countries there is a good chance that in this case, they could not be compensated for, as Syrian crude is extremely heavy and can only be refined in a very small number of refineries worldwide. But whether the EU can really bring itself to do this will probably not be decided until early September. The linchpin for the continued survival of the System Assad, however, remains Turkey. It possesses significant economic sanction potential that would directly affect the middle classes of Aleppo and Damascus. It is hard to imagine how Turkey would avoid responding to the passage this week of its ultimatum to Syria without resorting to tougher measures.

Finally there are hopeful signs that the Syrian opposition is coalescing. Over the past ten days there have been many informal meetings of different oppositional groups in Istanbul, while plans for a transitional council seem to be taking on more concrete form.

There is still, however, no answer to the single most important question of how this brutal, criminal regime can be deposed as long as the army doesn’t defect to the people. Nor are there any signs that the inner circle of the system is cracking. And yet, I feel that at no point in this revolution has the political situation been as promising for the insurrection as they are today. And as I wrote some time ago in my last email: everybody knows that Assad’s days have long been counted – and maybe fewer of them remain that we dare to hope.

P.S. To be sure, Gaddafi’s fall will further encourage the Syrian protest movement. Last night Bengasi resounded with chants that promised: “Syria have no fear, you will be the next”. Let us hope that they are right.

Anybody interested in the revolution in Egypt should take the time to read this interview by Parvez Sharma with an Egyptian protester: http://www.al-bab.com/blog/2011/blog1102c.htm.

Being interviewed is the man previously referred to as ‘Yousry’ to protect his identity, but who now insists on having his real name – Omar – published openly (demonstrating the new sense of confidence among the protesters). We learn that more and more women are demonstrating in the streets, that fear of looting is no longer so widespread and that, from what we can tell, all classes in the country are united against the regime.

But what interested me the most was Omar’s rather dismissive take on the very idea of ‘social media’ having a significant role in any of this:

M[e]: Hey Omar…you know that there [are] many tweets coming in saying he is going to shut down everything tonight…whatever little internet was left and mobiles and landlines even?

O[mar]: Fuck the internet! I have not seen it since Thursday and I am not missing it. I don’t need it. No one in Tahrir Square needs it. No one in Suez needs it or in Alex…Go tell Mubarak that the peoples revolution does not need his damn internet!

Westerners see great significance in the Mubarak regime shutting down the internet, but most Egyptians (70%, according to Sharma) are not regular internet users. Here we see here just how little anyone in Egypt actually cares about this stuff; at one point Omar complains about trying to “[get] on the fucking internet which is not working and try and do these damn tweets you keep on telling me about.”

It simply doesn’t matter. As Anne Applebaum put it in Slate recently: “For all the guff being spoken about Twitter and social media, the revolution in Cairo appears to be a very old-fashioned, almost 19^th-century revolution: People see other people going out on the streets, and they join them.”

During the revolt in Iran, the use of Twitter by protesters was often reported as the main story. (People still talk about Iran’s ‘Twitter revolution’, conveniently forgetting that the Mullahs are still in power.) The idea that collective action – the only way any progress has been made anywhere – was more important than this new medium just wasn’t satisfying. Democratic change has never – and will never – come about through technological change alone. But the idea that it will is now accepted and championed by modern media. Televsion news pieces will often end with ’And you can get on twitter and tell us what you think…” Yes, send us your videos and stories and we’ll report your news; ‘like’ us on Facebook. ‘Get involved’. This is anti-political nonsense. Some years ago, the expectation was that the internet, by unleashing a deluge of information, would transform society and the way democracy works. I’m still waiting for this revolution in social relations.

Today, Google and Twitter offered Egyptians a way to bypass the sudden lack of internet connection: Egyptians can leave a voicemail on an international phone number on Google’s blog, which will then be tweeted, allowing Egyptians to ‘stay connected’. (You can see it here: http://twitter.com/speak2tweet).

This is a lovely gesture, but we can’t forget that this is a revolution involving the entire country. As Omar puts it: “40 % of this country is living below the poverty line and a large chunk above that is barely surviving…I can tell you that the majority of Egyptians have no idea what Facebook is or what Twitter is!” The strife in Egypt will continue in the ordinary way, whatever Google or twitter decide to do.

One of the most frequently repeated myths on the left is that we are fighting for the representation of this vast number of people who lie to the left of the Labour Party. In fact in nearly every single demonstration or large public meeting I attend I am told about this by some faux-psephologist with a microphone, normally someone with an interest in recognising him- or herself as the head of a growing mass-movement. I am perhaps a cynical grumpy old man, but today’s results in the Labour leadership contest should really be giving us something to think about.

Ok, the fact is that there was no real hard left candidate, but the closest thing to that in the form of Diane Abbott polled an appalling 7% before her elimination in the first round. Yes, I know that I will be told that there are all sorts of people who are left of the Labour Party so didn’t vote, but given that there has been a whole lot of caucusing around the hard left for the leadership election.

It is integral to our position as leftists that we do not give up the fight to convince people to think like us. For too long we have been complacent with the view that when the working classes realise their position in society they will join us, for too long the left has lied to itself. That is not to say that our cause is lost, and nor is it to say that we should move in the other direction towards the patronisation of current working class culture, but the signal is loud and clear that we must do something differently.

Although there are some fantastic new initiatives such as Mutiny, the leftist parties in this country lament the lack of barricades without taking any of the blame. We must think about new ways to reach people, as the old way – the production of pamphlets that nobody reads (actually, does anyone produce pamphlets anymore? Maybe it would be a good idea!), of weekly newspapers that only those in agreement buy, of parties that reaffirm the beliefs of their memberships rather than reaching out – are simply not working.

As Reuben will say to me once this piece is published, it is all too easy to lament the state of the left, it is all too easy to be critical of people who make small errors when the big errors are made by those in power, but that is not what I intend to do. Rather, this election must be seen as a call to action, a call to conviction in our principles, a call to the dissemination of radical ideas in new ways, a call to the production of new theories that engage not with the past but with how people are living, a call for changing how we organise.

In other news, at least we didn’t end up with David.

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.

Since Chris’ tragic death at the weekend there have been a number of warm and inspiring tributes, and I thought I’d highlight a few here.

Michael Rosen in the Guardian.

Alex Callinicos, John Rose and many other comrades in Socialist Worker.

Snowball on Histomat.

Keith Flett from the London Socialist Historian’s group.

Chris Harman, editor of International Socialism, former Editor of Socialist Worker and a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party, died last night in Cairo where he was speaking. This news is still raw, but I wanted to offer some initial thoughts.

Chris made, through his journal writings and numerous books, an enormous contribution to post-war Marxist thought. Equally important though was his activity in bringing the ideas of Socialism to new generations of people. His short book How Marxism Works was the book that won me to Marxism at the beginning of this decade. Through the pages of Socialist Worker, and through speaking at meetings up and down the country, he inspired people to fight for a better world.

I met Chris on a number of occasions, and only last weekend heard him speak. In person he could often seem oddly shy, whilst when speaking in public was capable of the most extraordinary polemic. It is very difficult to think about him in the past tense.

“He thinks we’re all bloody bourgeois” scoffed Austen Ivereigh, as he puffed on his Montecristo in a trendy bar in King’s Cross, whilst reading aloud David Broder’s response to yesterday’s Strangers Into Citizens demonstration. “This looks like it was written thirty years ago,” he chortled to himself. Ivereigh is a founder of the Strangers into Citizens campaign, and seems to be a staunch reformist. In many ways I don’t think Broder’s piece goes nearly far enough, although it certainly seems to be along the right lines. The issues that this protest brought up have significance above and beyond the immediate violence of the current immigration system, as they also reflect and comment on the government’s policies with regards to minority communities living in England. Broder is certainly correct to take apart the nonsense of a one-off amnesty at the expense of having a thought-out ideological positional praxis on the structures of oppression that face refugees and asylum seekers.

The issues of minorities and the structural violence of borders are intimately connected; the way our government treats asylum seekers and refugees is subsumed in a wider context of the way that they treat minority groups. Whilst they consistently claim to value diversity and cohesion, the reality is that government policies have actually increased segregation, whilst undermining the fight against oppression both directed toward and within these communities. It is worrying that the Strangers Into Citizens campaign fully buys into this rhetoric uncritically. One of the most interesting documents on this issue in recent years was produced by Women Against Fundamentalism and Southall Black Sisters as a submission to the Commission on Integration and Cohesion (of which the first ten pages are most relevant to this debate.) It states,

We are concerned about the wider underlying … that it is the immigrant communities as opposed to the settled communities that need to be ‘integrated’. This implies that immigrant communities are somehow malfunctioning cultures whose values are intrinsically opposed to the so called ‘British’ way of life. New Labour politicians such as Blunkett, Brown and Blair, have often referred to the values of human rights, democracy and fair play – the basis of a shared British culture. Immediately the assumption is that there are a set of fixed and given (unchanging) ‘British’ values that are superior and to which all those who enter the country must subscribe.

And goes on to say

The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002 was preceded by a white paper entitled ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity.’ The assumption being that internal stability can only be guaranteed if the borders of the country are policed to prevent the influx of (undesirable) migrants and refugees. Immigration and asylum laws and polices have provided the basis for racism to flourish at an institutional level and on the streets.

This reified version of Britishness, somewhat reminiscent of Goodness Gracious Me’s The Coopers (Kapoors) and Robinsons (Rabindranaths) was present in a more pernicious version during the Strangers Into Citizens rally through the waving of the Union Jack, and the singing of God Save The Queen (not the Sex Pistols version.) Of course trying to get a bunch of impoverished immigrants and Catholics to sing this bollocks en masse wasn’t exactly successful, but that was hardly a surprise. I noted that only the first verse was sung, and the “O Lord, our God (the Anglican one?), arise. Scatter her enemies, and make them fall (how relevant to our recent colonial past.) Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks (what was that about valuing diversity?) On Thee our hopes we fix, God save us all (save to mention who does or doesn’t believe in redemption)” was omitted. The point being that this wasn’t just some silly little concession to try to get the Tories to agree with them, but rather that this treatment of Britishness is completely in line with the politics of Strangers Into Citizens. Such assimilation at the expense of cultural identity would seem rather to turn citizens of the world into strangers.

The speeches, too, failed to combat the structural problems with the government’s treatment of minorities as a whole. Time was given to the leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, an organisation WAF and SBS describe as “ha[ving] its origins in the sectarian Islamic politics of Pakistan and Bangladesh” and “claim[ing] to represent British Islam [but] has compromised the agenda on preventing extremism.” Other speeches were given to religious leaders who had nothing to say on politics above and beyond the affirmation that we were all people, God’s children to some of them, and one can assume all of God’s children have the right to be British without needing to acknowledge that such “Britishness” has been predicated on hundreds of years of colonialist oppression which continues (of course alongside hundreds of years of legacy of the Magna Carta that is slowly but surely being dismantled.) If only the Union Jack could be redeemed such that it could be value-free. If only our anthem requested that we “unite the human race” rather than “scatter enemies and make them fall.”

Maybe Ivereigh was correct in saying that Broder’s response sounded 30 years old. I personally think it may be worthwhile going a little further back to have a look at Trotsky’s work on the “Transitional Demand“. I know any reader is probably thinking “Oh no! He’s going to go all dogmatic on us now”, but rather than offering some kind of bizarre non sequitur of a defence of the Soviet Union, I just feel that Trotsky’s pamphlet on this matter offers a bit of conceptual clarity to the opposition of the No Borders movement and Strangers Into Citizens.

Trotsky’s concept of the transitional demand is that of a demand that could be met under capitalism but would not be without further consequences on the path to socialism (and I strongly believe that it is only in socialism that we’ll see the abolition of the structures that oppress refugees, asylum seekers, and minority groups.) the ‘transitional demand’ is counterposed with the “minimal demand” of reform. It is easy to map these two onto the two sides of this argument: Strangers Into Citizens maintains the nation, maintains the borders, maintains the structures that asylum seekers endure, whereas the No Borders campaign comes with the ideological baggage of an effective internationalism. On this very issue, Trotsky writes, ‘ ”Defense of the Fatherland?” – But by this abstraction, the bourgeoisie understands the defense of its profits and plunder.’ Strangers Into Citizens do this too with their economic arguments for the regularisation of those without status, rather than an analysis that cuts to the heart of oppression and racism. But Trotsky is not against reform though, as he says we should not “discard the program of the old “minimal” demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness.” But we should “carry on this day-to-day work within the framework of the correct actual, that is, revolutionary perspective.”

It is fair to say that the left has often failed to work effectively within communities, and certainly has less success that church based groups. That is something for the left to work on, but I do not believe that this failure is a consequence of a failure in the politics of the left. Talking to people at yesterday’s event, many felt themselves to be in much more agreement with the “no borders” slogans. The point is that whilst organisations like the Citizen Organising Foundation may be good at getting people out on the street, that is far more a reflection of their extremely competent community work than the soundness of their politics. The crowd at yesterday’s event was a very interesting one, in that it was the true grassroots of the city, but the politics of the organisers was flimsy at best. We have much to learn but also much to add to this movement if strive to make change permanent rather than a one-off amnesty bought in exchange for the future.

“Dirty hippy layabout scum, taking the taxpayers’ money and wasting it, not interested in politics as much as his own image or where the next spliff is coming from.” Such is the common description of any student on an occupation. Always seen a illegitimate because they don’t have proper jobs. Always seen as not really understanding politics because they’re too young or too idealist. These words are reserved for students on occupation, as those in student unions are being “socially useful” (I believe the reverse to often be the case.) But in the last weeks we’ve seen examples of occupations by people other than students. Workers at Visteon car part plants have been staging sit-ins, and this week parents and carers went into Easter holiday occupations of two schools in Glasgow because the local council is looking to close down 13 primary schools and 12 nurseries across the city. Often, yes, occupations are made up of students who have greater flexibility in their time, but occupations have a longer history and one which is often forgotten. Before anyone ever dreamed of 1968, anarcho-syndicalists such as Tom Brown were theorising “stay-in” strikes. He writes:

Consider what happens in an orthodox strike, general or particular. The strikers, who had the means of production in their hands one day, on the next hand them over to their class-enemies in a nice tidy working condition and go home. The railmen and bus and lorry drivers hand over the vital means of transport, without which modern capitalism and the State cannot exist. The electrical engineers hand over the power stations; the gas workers the gas producers; Dockers, ware-housemen and food factory workers surrender millions of tons of precious flour, bacon, meat, butter, rice and fruit. Engineers vacate arsenals which might be used to arm Fascists. Then they go home to sit by grates which gradually become fireless or at tables with a lessening loaf or go out on to the streets to be battened upon their defenceless heads.

How much better to stay at work and do your striking there. Naturally, to many workers this will seem a strange idea, they are used to striking by leaving the job, not by staying on it, least of all to continuing at work and striking at the same time. But stay awhile, all fruitful ideas must have sounded startling at first hearing, as startling as the first steam-locomotive to a stage coachman.

Instead of starving, we eat as we have never feasted before, instead of being clubbed, shot and imprisoned we retain the means of defending our lives. The employing class will be without petrol, heat, electricity, communication or servant. Such a General Strike has been often called The General Lock Out of the Capitalist Class. Perhaps that is a more appropriate term.

Whilst I’m sure that many of those on recent occupations may not go as far as Brown, the reason why these protests have shown themselves to be so successful is that they do scare the state, they do scare the owners of the factory, or the high-up administrators of the institution. The student movement has, for all intents and purposes, reinvented the sit-in, but the working class using tactics such as these can produce real changes. In some ways the student movement has reinvigorated that old structuralist notion of power in space, an the fact that this is being taken on by fresh campaigns, and by people who one would not normally associated with hippydom, mummy and daddy funding their idiosyncrasies, or an over-reliance on trance music, must be seen as a positive step. It has been made clear that whilst we march on Westminster every other month, sometimes more often, we are rarely listened to. It has been made clear that the petitions we sign are never read. People, now, who wish to tackle an immediate social issue (whether that be loss of public provisions or loss of a job) are being forced to look for other means not to simply express themselves (this was never what marches, protests, and petitions were about anyway), but to create change.

I’m sure a lot of the readers will have been following what’s been going on with Visteon, but I thought I’d go into a little more detail about what’s happening in Glasgow schools. Glasgow Council is currently looking at closing 13 primary schools and 12 nurseries in an attempt to save some money. The result is that kids will have to travel miles to school, often at great inconvenience to their parents, and possibly at danger to themselves. The study that the council has done has been poor, and in one case it completely ignores the fact that one of the schools has a special unit for autistic children. The numbers don’t add up, and where they do, it is at the expense of local people. Parents have been occupying Wyndham and St Gregory’s schools for the last two weeks (they finally ended their occupation today, but the campaign is continuing.) For people wanting to follow the campaign, there are the following resources: a bebo page, a blogger blog, a wordpress blog, and a facebook group.

Maybe one day we may see what Tom Brown envisaged, but for the moment it seems that occupation is being used in a strong and pragmatic way, and the old complaints about students need to be thrown away – rather than being frivolous, those who occupy have shown themselves to be deadly serious.