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.

Last night, the American House of Representatives passed legislation to raise the debt ceiling and heavily cut public spending – a historic move if you take into account the first has never been conditional on the latter. Today, the Senate unsurprisingly passed it.

This trimming of the budget was inevitable considering the normalisation of neoliberal policies. Horrendous facts and figures regarding the extent of the cuts aside, the focus is on negotiations which took place and the ideological victory won by the Republicans and their Tea Party offshoot who succeeded in their desire to see no tax increases. The Democrats were evenly split in House votes (95 for and 95 against), whereas the Republicans were heavily in favour of the bill (174 for and 66 against).

Talk of a compromise being made flatters to deceive, with even staunch Obama supporters disillusioned by this legislation. Obama’s posturing has been to attract support from the centre of his party and the independents who are worrying about the deficit and its relationship between Wall Street investment for Main Street businesses and services. However, this will not wash when imagining the destruction of public services, social security and education. If people don’t have these things, they can’t get to work, won’t be qualified to work, and won’t be able to afford the rising costs of living in urban towns and cities.

Its easy to say Obama isn’t to blame; that he’s held in thrall to corporate interests and a Republican majority in Congress. However, it is easy to say he is to blame too. It is foolish for anyone to think he has failed because no one person should ever have that much responsibility or power anyway. The criticism will always be easy if it is about him. I am not taking anything away from his agency as president here, but we must not forget the words being whispered into Reagan’s ear to “hurry up” by Don Regan , his policy man, during a speech, or Clinton and the continuation of the Washington Consensus, or Bush Jr. and both the recent invasions. These men, while being the public faces of the problem, deflect away from a festering undergrowth of corruption, corporate collusion, nepotism and class warfare perpetrated by those who wish to maintain the status quo, their own corporate welfare, and social immobility.

Commentators have suggested this outcome is a severe weakening of Obama’s already lacklustre authority and maybe even his re-election chances, but this is all too simplistic and linear. Americans love a narrative, preferably with a soundtrack, of individuals with ideals battling their nemeses and prevailing for the ambiguously greater good.

It is popcorn politics the American mainstream media try and peddle, and it is the American public who start feeling powerless and apathetic because of it.

While austerity will be pushed onto us here and we will fight it tooth and nail, it is the Americans I wish to see rally and fight this new bill once it is enforced. If a large scale movement can be built with the support and enthusiasm the “Save Our Schools” campaign has recently generated there, there will be huge protests in all the major cities in the U.S, which will in turn reverberate around the developed world.

It has been said capitalism would destroy itself for a profit. We may be witnessing the beginnings of America’s implosion. After all, as we’ve seen with Spain’s “Indignados”, a movement which has been virtually ignored as of late despite daily protests and demonstrations held by thousands, “No es la crisis, es el sistema” (its not the crisis, its the system) must come to mind.

I think, or rather hope, more Americans act on the realisation that it is not Obama who they are now feeling increasingly alienated from, but the sacred system which both major parties defend and maintain with very little deviation.

A version of this article was first published in International Tax Review

Bongo players, Robin Hood, men dressed as drag dinner ladies and Mrs Doyle from Father Ted proclaiming the only tea she does not like is poverty greeted activists as they filed into Westminster Central Hall to lobby their MPs. But behind the fun and frolics of Tea Time for Change, organised by seven of the UK’s leading development agencies, was a serious message. The government must act to shore up aid, crack down on tax avoidance and push for a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions to help the world’s poorest people.

Tax justice

“It’s a scandal every day that 850 million people are going hungry,” said Chris Bain, director of CAFOD, which helped organise the event. “But aid alone won’t enable us to end global poverty. Developing countries need sustainability.”

It is for this reason that tax was such a central focus of the event, which attracted 131 MPs, and activists welcomed International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell’s positive words on the subject.

“Everyone should pay their taxes due,” said Mitchell. “We champion transparency.”

Mitchell told the audience that the government is working in Rwanda and the occupied Palestinian territories to help them build the capacity necessary to ensure companies are not avoiding taxes.

Mitchell’s opposition counterpart, Harriet Harman, was even more forceful in talking about the role of multinational companies in development, pointing out that developing countries lose more through tax avoidance than they receive in aid.

“Many developing countries are rich in natural resources – in oil, diamonds, and precious metals – but their people go hungry,” Harman said. “Businesses can play a major part in helping development. But they can also be an ugly force for exploitation – the unacceptable face of global capitalism.”

Harman urged the government to act to ensure companies play their part in development and backed the Publish what you Pay campaign.

“We want the government to require companies to show what they pay in the developing world – country by country,” said Harman. “So that the world can see whether the relationship between a multibillion dollar multinational and a poor country is fair. And so that the people in that country can see that too – and hold their leaders to account.”

Chris Jordan, an economic justice campaigner at ActionAid, one of the charities behind the event, welcomed the government accepting the principle of transparency in the extractive sector, but argued that it should be wider.

“The government needs to take tangible steps before the G20, there’s no reason why transparency shouldn’t apply to all sectors,” Jordan told International Tax Review.

Financial transactions tax

Mitchell was positive on the possibility of a FTT and he stressed that using revenue from a new tax to finance development goals would not replace Britain’s commitment to spending 0.7% of its national income on aid.

“The Treasury is warm to this approach and it is looking at means to raise additional income,” Mitchell said, pointing to the report Bill Gates is preparing for French President Nicolas Sarkozy on financing for development. “We are looking at all the ways.”

Harman also supported taxing the financial sector to fund development.

“We back the demand that within Europe, in the G8 and in the G20, the Prime Minister leads on how we make the financial sector play its part in extra finance for development to tackle global poverty and climate change,” said Harman.

Campaigners were encouraged by the arguments heard from the government and the opposition.

“We welcome that the government is warming to a Robin Hood tax,” said Jordan. “We want to see those warm words turned into a commitment. Lots of the technical work has already been done, there’s no reason to delay.”

The benefits of a FTT for development, given its ability to raise large amounts of revenue with a tiny rate because of the breadth of the tax base, are obvious. So too are the difficulties. The European Commission, while giving its support to the FTT, said that it is something that needs to be implemented on a global level.

“It’s going to be most effective if it’s international, but there’s no reason why countries can’t go it alone,” said Jordan. “The concept is feasible, we already have a share transactions tax in the UK.”

The mood on the day was upbeat, with more than 1000 activists clearly excited to be drinking tea with their MPs and talking to them about tax and development. And despite the levity of the event, personified by Spitting Image comedian Jan Ravens impersonations of Sarah Palin – “When I heard there was a tea party I just had to come” – no one was in any doubt as to the gravity of the issues as the charities prepare to step up their campaign ahead of the G20 meeting in November.

“I want to share an African proverb because to me it sums up why you are here,” said Adwoa Kwateng-Kluvitse, country director for ActionAid Ghana. “When spiders webs unite they can tie up a lion.”

The Obama administration will be breathing a sigh of relied today as the House of Representatives narrowly approved the President’s flagship health reforms. A battle still remains in the Senate, of course, and amongst the crazed zealots in the country crying ‘freedom’ whilst attempting to deny millions of the poorest Americans the right to basic health care. But this is the first victory for progressives in what, for anyone on this side of the Atlantic who isn’t a slapheaded idiot like Daniel Hannan, is one of the most bafflingly incomprehensible arguments in history.

It was Sun Tzu who, all those centuries ago, argued that to achieve victory, one must know one’s enemies. But I simply cannot understand anyone who refuses to recognise health care as a universal human right. Not least those FOX News fanatics opposed to a bill that does not even come close to free state-run health care, which should be a basic requirement for any developed nation, and indeed is a treasured asset of many developing nations. Whilst proclaiming their right to choose – an utterly irrelevant criticism in light of Obama’s reforms – they would deny hundreds of thousands of people any choice save death or bankruptcy. And that is not just for the poor and uninsured. That goes for all those whose policies just don’t want to pay out, who pick holes in every claim, because saving money is more important than saving a life in this most inhumane of models.

I can begin to understand the neo-liberals of the New Right who believe society should be orientated around a free market philosophy. I can even begin to understand social conservatives opposed to abortion and stem cell research on the grounds of their own moral compass. But I can never understand anyone who argues that human life should be left to the naked principles of the market. But then, perhaps Glenn Beck will be able to draw me a map of the retarded right-winger’s mind on his blackboard. It’s the only way I’m ever going to get it.

In capitalism’s early life Marx compared capital to a vampire, that ‘only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’. Chris Harman thinks a different horror staple is appropriate for the system’s later years. Far from being the sophisticated, sentient vampire count, it is better compared to the mindless, destructive zombie, ’seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals and responding to human feelings, but capable of sudden spurts of activity that cause chaos all round’. Harman’s book is a detailed account of the history and nature of this zombie system, framing a thorough defence of the relevance of Marx to understanding the current economic crisis.

Zombie Capitalism benefits, ironically, from having been intended as a rather different book. Harman’s intention was an update of his book Explaining the Crisis, intended to defend similar conclusions and incorporate work done in articles in International Socialism over recent years. The Credit Crunch, Lehman Brothers and the onset of recession created a need to rework much of the book. This actually helps give greater background to the account of what is going on today. Rather than being a rushed out ‘Marxist guide to the credit crunch’ it is an important document in a particular tradition of Marxism, which gives a persuasive account of the events of the past two years by rooting them in wider processes in the system. In fact, only three of the fourteen chapters are taken up with a direct discussion of recent events.

Harman assumes little prior knowledge, and a good thing too as much of the debate amongst Marxists on these issues can be anything but accessible. Marx’s account of capitalist crisis, his Labour Theory of Value and the various debates around these issues are explained with clarity. Following Marx we get a picture of a system characterised by competitive accumulation, with periodic, ever deepening crises. A system which is international, but at the same time gives rise to powerful and competing nation states. A system which transforms use values into exchange values, and in so doing mystifies and distorts them, and which transforms even basic human capacities into a commodity. 

Harman identifies two key trends in the history of capitalism: Endless, rapid, competitive accumulation and, more controversially, the tendency of profit rates to fall. Marx argued that as the proportion of investment in fixed capital compared to that in Labour increased, the rate of return on investment will decrease. This is because Labour is the only source of value. Whilst this claim has been the source of much controversy Harman is not naïve about it, and he defends it with all the vigour of someone who has been an active socialist across five decades. This tendency, argues Harman, is crucial to understanding the various ups and downs of the global system over the past century and a half, and can help us understand what economists still see as the holy grail, the depressions of the 1870s and 1930s.

Whilst these tendencies help us understand the depressions, a developed analysis can also help us see how, temporarily, they were overcome. Drawing on arguments from Michael Kidron, he suggests out that investment in unproductive labour (defined as labour that does not aid capitalist accumulation) is leakage, or waste from the system. He argues that this insight can explain the so called ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’, from 1945 until the 1970s through the levels or arms investment at the time. The global system was stable because massive amounts of surplus value were invested in armaments during the Cold War, slowing the growth of fixed capital relative to Labour. This allowed the tendency to be offset for the longest period in capitalism’s history, but still crisis returned in the 70s.

And so to today. Since the recessions of the 1970s global capitalism has been hit by regular crisis, from the long drawn out collapse of the Japanese economy to the bursting of the telecoms bubble in 2001. Profit rates never returned to those before the golden age, and throughout the 1980s and 90s the solution was to try to prop up profits through shifting the burdens onto the labour force, holding down real wages and various ‘productivity improving’ techniques. During this period a system of finance developed which, as well as being essential to the management of ever greater international transactions, seemed to offer massive profits. The US’ biggest manufacturing firm, General Electric, received 40% of its revenue from its finance wing ‘GE Capital’, and would often use its assets to ensure it reported regular and steady growth. As Harman observes ‘the vast expansion of finance had created the illusion of a new “long upturn” in productive accumulation; the crisis of finance made that illusion disappear with traumatic effects.’

 Try as it might capitalism can’t escape Marx, and:

“In some important ways the system is even more chaotic than Marx’s account. The very size of the units that make it up means that it has lost some of its old flexibility. The destruction of some capitals through periodic crises which once gave new life to those that remained now threatens to pull these down as well. Life support systems provided by the state may be able to keep the system from complete collapse but cannot restore it to long-term vigour.”

Harman ends with an important call to arms. In re-affirming Marx’s belief that those capable of transforming society and ending capitalism are those who create its wealth, he adds that ‘those who study capitalism have to become an integral part of a movement of those who suffer from it’. And, as we all know, the only way to deal with a zombie is to remove the head, or destroy the brain.

Chris Harman is Editor of International Socialism and a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party. Zombie Capitalism is published by Bookmarks and is available from their website.

Chris will be speaking at the Book Launch at Bookmarks shop, 1 Bloomsbury St, Central London, on Tuesday 29th September, 6:30pm. Call 020 76371848 or email to reserve a place.

I’m a Guardian reader. Middle-class, well educated, long-haired and liberal, I don’t exactly dispel the stereotypes associated with the paper whose readers think they ought to run the country. Nor, as one of those lefty, anti-war, environmentalist types who grew up worrying about the state of the world, should it come as any surprise that the Guardian columnist I’ve always had the most time for is George Monbiot. And with the state of the world looking more worrying than ever, in the midst of an economic crisis and on the verge of an environmental one, it’s only natural that the fifth in my series of interviews for The Third Estate should be with the man who made print journalism and saving the world seem an attractive career path to me. So, on the eve of the most crucial climate change conference the planet has ever seen, as world leaders struggle to implement a strategy to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2C, I caught up with the author-activist to ask him for some happy news.

“The chances of preventing a two degrees rise in global temperatures are now pretty slight and diminishing rapidly,” Monbiot says in the way a schoolteacher might tell a naughty child who has just failed all his GCSEs that he has no one to blame but himself. I realise, at this point, that happy news isn’t looking very likely. “It’s partly because of a long period of inaction and denial and delay and obfuscation on the part of the world’s governments,” he tells me. The G8 finally pulled their heads out of the sand earlier this year to agree an 80% emissions cut by 2050. Is this not enough, I ask? “Not only is it not enough, it’s an irrelevant measure,” he says. “What counts is the cumulative emissions in the atmosphere. Simply because it’s so long-lived. We’ve produced so much greenhouse gas, that when you strip away the aerosols, like for instance sulphate pollution, which are shielding us from the full impact of the greenhouse effect, then it looks as if we’re already committed to two degrees of warming.”

So what’s the solution? “We need to reduce emissions as quickly as possible, never mind by 2050. We need a 10% cut in the coming year. And then a 10% cut in the following year. Otherwise the cumulative emissions will push us above two degrees and more without any question. The idea that the G8 nations can carry on producing an absurd amount of carbon and then bring down emissions later and bring down global temperatures later as a result, it simply does not work like that.”

Naturally enough, Monbiot is a supporter of the 10:10 campaign to bring about exactly the kind of cuts he is talking about. But is there a danger that, although the campaign will be grabbing headlines in 2010, it could go the way of Make Poverty History by 2011? “Yes,” he laughs. “Maybe we’ll need an 11:11 campaign the following year. The purpose of it is to shame governments into acting, ideally at Copenhagen, by saying so many people have pledged to make this cut, the only people holding things up are governments.” I can see a glimmer of hope emerging at this point, but Monbiot is quick to dash it. “Ideally we’d see such a good result at Copenhagen that all the following years would be taken care of. As we know, in reality, that’s not what’s going to happen.”

The Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference in December will bring together 183 nations to tackle arguably the most serious issue of our time. But with China and America together producing over 40% of global CO2 emissions, only two countries at the table will really matter. Are they on course to make the necessary commitments? “Of course not,” Monbiot says without a second’s hesitation. “Those countries are holding out against the kind of cuts that are necessary. If you look closely at the Waxman-Markey Bill, which the US hopes to found their cuts on, and which hasn’t even been gutted by the Senate yet, effectively it means that there will be no substantial cuts until 2050. By which time it’s all over. As for China, it’s both the greenest and the dirtiest country on Earth. Greenest because of its vast investment in alternative energy, but the dirtiest because of its vast investment in coal.”

China’s reluctance to implement a radical reduction in carbon emissions stems largely from the belief that it is Western nations that are responsible for the current climate crisis, and that they should not be denied the opportunities Europe and America have long enjoyed. Convincing the developed world to slash their emissions would seem, then, to be only the tip of a very rapidly melting iceberg as the rest of the developing world looks towards growth. I ask Monbiot how one can possibly convince some of the poorest nations on Earth that they cannot afford to follow the model of rapid industrialisation that lifted so many millions in the West out of extreme poverty. “I fully accept that the poorest nations need industrialisation,” Monbiot says. “We have to make it easy for them to do it without the mass pollution which accompanied our industrialisation. That means major investment in alternative energy, which has to be supported by the rich nations.” The best approach to this, Monbiot believes, is outlined by Oliver Tickell in the book Kyoto2. “It’s a sophisticated cap and trade system. The huge amounts of money generated by putting a price on carbon emissions, probably somewhere between $1-3 trillion per year, could be used to sponsor alternative energy in poorer nations and to help them adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change.”

George Monbiot’s concerns go much further than climate change, however. In his debate with Paul Kingsnorth, who seems to embrace the coming apocalypse of resource depletion and environmental devastation with fatalistic satisfaction, Monbiot says: “for the past few years I have been almost professionally optimistic, exhorting people to keep fighting, knowing that to say there is no hope is to make it so.” But, I ask, does he in all honesty think that there’s still a chance to prevent the societal crisis that many Peak Oil theorists believe will result from the collapse of the resource that almost single-handedly drives the global economy? The answer to that is probably not. “As Robert L. Hirsch noted, you need a run up time of between ten and twenty years to substitute other forms of propulsive energy for the oil that’s running out. And if, as the IEA suggest, we’re looking at oil peaking between 2020 and 2030, we are already almost out of time to address this issue. If we leave it any longer, and no politician seems to be taking it seriously, then we are going to see total economic collapse.”

Monbiot’s hitherto professional optimism has been replaced by a brutal kind of candour. But surely there must be some positives in all of this? Could Peak Oil actually be a crucial driving force in convincing governments to replace fossil fuels with environmentally sustainable sources of energy? In the words of the nodding dog from the Churchill adverts, oh no, no, no! “Some of the measures that Hirsch proposed are even worse than using petroleum,” Monbiot says. “For example, he talks about using oil shale and tar sand and turning coal into liquid fuel, all of which are extremely polluting activities. Instead of addressing Peak Oil in a long-term, measured and environmentally friendly way, we could see governments panic and start exploiting every type of liquid fuel, no matter how destructive and damaging it might be.”

There are few, now, who would disagree that something urgent needs to be done. But worrying about the world is the easy part. It’s much harder to agree on a common solution. Chief amongst the thorny disagreements for even the most ardent of environmentalists, is the issue of nuclear power. In an interview with The Third Estate last week, Caroline Lucas made her opposition quite clear when she told me “nuclear power is hugely costly, and carries major safety and security risks.” I ask George Monbiot, who was once awarded a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement by Nelson Mandela, what his position is now. “I don’t care anymore,” he says with all the blunt urgency the situation warrants. “I just want solutions. And as long as they can be delivered in the right timeframe, and as long as they’re not going to be particularly damaging to other aspects of the ecosystem, or to social justice and human rights, I don’t care what those solutions are. If nuclear power can be used safely, and if waste is disposed of safely, then I no longer have any major objection to it.”

Unsurprisingly, Monbiot has come under fire from leading members of the Green Party for these views, not least from former London mayoral candidate Siân Berry, whose quite bizarre and surprisingly sexist blog post attacked his gender, his age and even his hairstyle, but offered very little explanation as to why she felt he was wrong, aside from the fact he looks like a WW2 fighter pilot. The headline on Monbiot’s damning response in The Guardian read ‘Berry’s nuclear fallout has lost her my vote’. I ask him if that’s really the case. “I was being flippant about that,” he says. “I did think it was a ridiculous post.” I laugh and can’t help agreeing with my interviewee. It was actually incredibly silly. “I don’t think I actually said that I wouldn’t vote Green anymore,” he points out. “The headline suggested that, but it’s not actually my position.” That said, Monbiot tells me that he has finally found his spiritual home. “It’s Plaid Cymru,” he says. “I went to their conference this month and I was absolutely delighted by the positions they were taking on just about every issue and I felt that these were extremely sensible, switched on kinds of people who were trying to put into place many of the issues that I feel most concerned about.” Monbiot briefly supported Respect in 2004 in the hope that they could “forge a genuine red-green alliance.” When that turned out not to be possible, he pulled out. Now he says, “I have finally found the party that I feel very comfortable with. That’s not to say I feel uncomfortable with the Green Party, on the whole I support it, but I feel even more comfortable with Plaid.”

If there’s one person Monbiot definitely won’t be voting for, however, it’s Gordon Brown. In an article earlier this month, Monbiot argued that Brown’s failure to regulate the banks at the G20 meant that no one this side of the Atlantic now bears as much responsibility for ensuring that the economic crisis can be repeated than the Prime Minister. But surely crises are inherent to capitalism anyway, and the idea of boom without bust was a delusion from the start? “Yes,” Monbiot agrees, “I believe that’s true. And I believe it’s the job of government to defend us from the predations of capitalism. And the government has singularly failed to do that. Government exists to defend its citizens from all sorts of threats, including the greed and ruthlessness of capitalists. Instead of doing that, it has encouraged the risk-taking that has thrown so many people out of work.” Monbiot believes that government has a choice. If they’re going to sustain the capitalist system, rather than any other kind of economy, then they have to regulate it in the interests of their citizens. “They’ve consistently failed to do this. In fact they have argued again and again for deregulation, even as the impact of this is plain for everyone to see.”

"Labour has become a supine monoculture wholly committed to a neo-liberal, neo-conservative vision without a single radical cell in its collective body"

Monbiot ends his article with the question: ‘why was Brown permitted to remain in power?’ But does he believe there’s anyone in the Labour Party who could successfully replace him before the next general election? “I think the problem is that all the feisty people in the Labour Party have been purged,” he says. “Through the selection of MPs, preventing any interesting and independent minded people from entering Parliament, and through the gradual freezing out of the older MPs, Labour has become a supine monoculture wholly committed to a neo-liberal, neo-conservative vision without a single radical cell in its collective body.” Monbiot’s voice never once betrays a hint of anger, but listening to him deconstruct the failings of a party that once called itself progressive, it’s not hard to picture the moment last year when he attempted a citizen’s arrest on the arch neo-con John Bolton. “There are no more Robin Hoods in the Labour Party,” he says. “Or rather those that are left, like Alan Simpson, are about to leave Parliament. The party has been so comprehensively purged that there are no means by which it can be renewed.”

Labour will be due another purge in next year’s general election. And with a Conservative government looking pretty close to a certainty, I ask Monbiot if things are likely to be markedly different. “A Tory government is going to be a disaster for Britain,” he replies. “It’s going to be disastrous for the poor, for the environment, for foreign policy, and it’s going to be just the same, in almost all respects, as a Labour government. In other words, the current disaster continued.” Monbiot’s distaste for the Conservatives could not be clearer. But could he ever see himself voting Labour to stop them getting in? “No,” he says. “As much as I dislike and am disgusted with the Tories, I think you have to vote for what you think is right. And if you cling onto something bad for fear of something worse, no one will end up with the government they want.”

Naturally, that begs the question, what is the alternative? With so much public hostility directed towards the bankers and the financial institutions that brought about the current crisis in capitalism, and following one of the greatest mass movements in history taking to the streets to oppose the invasion of Iraq, why, I ask Monbiot, is the left weaker than ever before? “I don’t know,” he says quite honestly. Then he laughs. “It’s interesting that you ask this, because it’s exactly the question I’ve been asking myself. I’m trying to get to the bottom of it at the moment. I think part of the problem is that we have nowhere to turn. The Labour Party was the focus of left-wing opposition when the Tories were in power, but it is as unconcerned about the issues as the Tories are now. I think also, we have been lulled and lulled in a constant void of television and celebrity and events that are peripheral to our lives, which seem to take centre place. And I think we have forgotten the lessons of history. But beyond that, I’m not sure what’s going on and I intend to try and find out.”

It is, perhaps, symptomatic of our confusing post-modern condition that even George Monbiot – Guardian columnist, bestselling author, hardened activist and forty something alpha male with a WW2 fighter pilot’s haircut – has no answer.

I ask him for some happy news.

But he just smiles and turns away.

www.monbiot.com

It’s extremely easy to criticise the politics of cultural products if you don’t agree with absolutely everything they say. If you consider your understanding to be more nuanced, it is very easy to say that a book, a film, or an article doesn’t go far enough. The point is that not every great film is like a glass slipper to each Cinderella viewer, but regardless of this fact these sorts of cultural products can be hugely valuable in changing consciousness and changing the world. It feels a bit silly to preface my review of The Age of Stupid with this, but I am all too wary that whilst I am writing a relatively critical review, I see this film as extremely important, and something that really should be disseminated as widely as possible. Or as Ken Livingstone has put it “Every single person in the country should be forcibly sat down on a chair and made to watch this film.”

The film is set in 2055, in a world in which almost all life has ended on earth. Pete Postlethwaite stars as an archivist, who looks back to the early 2000s, seeing how we got to a state in which the environment caused the collapse of civilisation. He follows a number of stories from different continents around the world ranging from a mountain guide in Chamonix watching glaciers melt, to an entrepreneur setting up a budget airline in India. The main political focus is on inaction and how we (the Western viewers) can do more to cut carbon emissions, and ultimately on how we must lobby in advance of the meeting on climate change in Copenhagen at the end of the year, which will decide on an international strategy on carbon emissions for the coming 15 years.

There are some powerful arguments here, and the film attempts as best as possible to be scientifically accurate, or at least as scientifically accurate as one can be with these sorts of projections. Real changes are shown, along with some of the realities of abject poverty and misery caused by both the use of oil and the industry that maintains its production. The message is loud and clear: if we do not act now, it will be too late.

The problems come, then, in the political messages of the film, or rather what is lacking in the political messages. We are told over and over again that the problem is consumption. Consumption on a scale we’ve never seen before. Consumption so large that it somehow alone makes people poor. Only once is capitalism ever mentioned, and the film-makers are far happier to rely on the rhetoric of consumerism. The problem is, though, that what makes people poor is categorically not in the field of consumption. Yes, over many decades this may be the case, when we exhaust the world’s resources, but there is a fork in the argument: why is it that when we are producing more than ever, when we are pumping trillions of pounds into the market that people are still poor. The point is that poverty is completely inadequately explained by consumerism, and that we need to look at production. A little is said of the so-called curse of resources, but this is never explained in any depth.

I can understand why the makers of the film stay away from this – add a bit of Marxist economics to your environmentalism and your world leaders are less likely to accept it. The trouble is that in ignoring this important debate the arguments for how we can transform the world, and avert crisis, disappear. If we found a clean way to run capitalism (that’s environmentally clean, of course, capitalism is never morally clean), then it is perfectly possible that global poverty would be worse rather than better. Well I mean people would be poor rather than dead, but we can’t be accepting this as a solution.

The film concludes with an argument for people to live in a way that is as close to carbon-neutral as possible. This suggestion seems aimed solely at the Western middle-classes. No advice is offered to, say, the Chinese about how despite rampant growth improving living conditions they should probably curb it a little. In fact there is no challenge to the consciousness of people in the developing world, which ultimately is about them demanding better quality of life, and often this isn’t a very green process (although it has been sometimes – I think back to Chico Mendes and the struggles of the rubber-tappers in Acre in the 1980s.) We can all do our own little bit, but in reality the redistribution of carbon emissions can only happen alongside the redistribution of wealth. Quality of life is not simply relative, and cutting standards of living in the West will ultimately not help people in the most oppressed regions of the world feel better about how they are forced to live.

Despite these difficulties, and the rather fluffy economics of the film, it remains important. We must act now, and the Age of Stupid is proposing a way forward. It’s a shame that the dissemination of the film is not as wide as it could be – I can only assume that there are rights issues that stop it being put up on Google Video or similar. Needless to say, there’s information about the campaign and screenings on www.ageofstupid.net and I encourage you all to watch the film, and show it to others too.

There’s a bit in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan where the eponymous character starts paraphrasing Moby Dick. “I’ll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares Maelstrom and round Perdition’s flames before I give him up!” he cries. Tracking down comedian Mark Steel can be a bit like that. Between appearances on shows like QI, Have I Got News For You and Mock the Week, and his stand-up performances, including this year’s Mark Steel’s In Town broadcast on Radio 4 from the more obscure parts of Britain, it’s hardly surprising he has a somewhat hectic schedule. But, in the wake of the disastrous European Elections, Steel was kind enough to talk to me about that perennially gloomy topic, the state of the Left today, and the few rays of light he’s seen.

Thirty years after Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the British Left is still sitting on the steps of the amphitheatre shouting “Splitters!” It’s an unfortunate pattern that hasn’t gone unnoticed by Mark Steel, who wrote in the Independent earlier this month that the Left, despite seemingly facing ideal conditions for success, “has a self-destruct button, and can’t stand being popular.” But did he have high hopes for Respect following the greatest mass movement of our time? “Respect had difficulties, but it had potential,” he says. “Whether something succeeds or not is not just a matter of whether it has a figurehead that gets on the news and so on, although that is very helpful, but it’s about getting a group of people in every area who seem to be doing things.” It seems an obvious starting point and Steel is quick to point out that it’s nothing new. “Going back to the English Civil War, that’s how agitation groups managed to get some sort of hearing. It’s not just being on the radio and saying things that people like.”

Of course, the state of the Left would be more depressing than even I imagined if the only successes it could tout were almost four centuries ago. Steel’s more recent inspirations can be found in the Scottish Socialist Party. “The SSP managed to get to a point where it could get 7% of the vote across the whole of Scotland,” he says. “That’s because Tommy Sheridan and his colleagues were known through the 90s, not just because they campaigned over the poll tax, but also when people who refused to pay had bailiffs coming round, the SSP organised people in the area to defend that person’s property.” It was a tactic, Steel argues, that was very successful both in the short-term and in the long-term. “In the short-term it meant people’s armchairs weren’t dragged out by the bailiffs. In the long-term it meant the poll tax was defeated.” Steel notes that they won themselves an immense amount of credibility over that. People trusted them. “They won an enormous amount of respect. Then of course they pissed it all up against the fucking wall with Sheridan accused of shagging someone in Manchester.”

And that’s the self-destruct button? “That’s the self-destruct button. But they did manage to get to that place first. And similarly, Respect did win in Bethnal Green. You can laugh at all the cat business. But it took an immense amount of organisation. George [Galloway] had won such respect because of his constant agitating over the war. But it wasn’t just that. There’s a company in Brick Lane that a lot of Bengali people put their money into and it went bankrupt, and George has campaigned over that and won concessions. It’s a combination of local everyday life things and the big issues such as the war in Iraq that made people trust him.”

In the end, though, Respect “tore itself apart in a feud about nothing that anyone can work out.” Did Steel find himself won over by Galloway’s Respect Renewal in light of his successes? “I’m not a member of Respect and I’m not going to be. But the Socialist Workers Party caused that feud. They’ve admitted as much now. In their own words, they ‘went nuclear’. They justified it as a Left-Right split. But once you end up categorising Ken Loach as a witch hunter then you’ve gone a bit haywire haven’t you?”

Following the election of two BNP members to the European Parliament, the SWP put out an open letter to the Left urging unity for the next election. Its unusually conciliatory tone seemed to some bloggers to be a step in the right direction. “I don’t think anyone will take the blindest bit of notice,” Steel says and it’s hard not to miss the sense of bitterness in his voice now. “It’s hilarious! You can’t go round trashing everything and everybody and then… you know, it was awful, really, really awful. It was particularly awful for longstanding SWP members, because you’d think, what the hell are we doing?” Steel is a great fan of Linda Smith, the chair of Respect Renewal. He describes her as “one of the most principled trade unionists I’ve ever known, a really, really gutsy woman.” But, “because she took the George Galloway side, the SWP called her a ballot rigger and invented this entirely fictitious story that she’d rigged her election position. You can’t then a year later write a letter to her and say ‘well let’s let all that be past and let’s see if we can set up something else.’” Steel’s friends would seem to agree with him. “I’ve got a mate who says it’s like an alcoholic going back to his wife and saying ‘I’ll be different this time I promise!’”

Steel himself did not have the easiest of divorces from the SWP. It would be hard to imagine Alex Callinicos’s review of his memoir What’s Going On? being so negative if he were still a member of the party, whilst a certain capitalised colloquialism for the female anatomy has been amongst the more hateful comments he has received. “One bloke called me a TWAT and he was a twat. He wrote about a hundred comments on my website, each one managing to beat the previous ones in their incoherence and madness.” But Steel does not regret his experiences over the past decades. “If you leave something you’ve been in for a long time, most people say they don’t regret it except that they wish they’d left a couple of years earlier. It’s a bit like when your marriage breaks up. I probably should have left a bit earlier.” But, he says, “When I joined the SWP, it was young and a natural home for people who wanted to campaign over every issue. Not only that, it had the ideas.” The party’s analysis of the collapsing Soviet Union as a state capitalist society is a case in point. “It doesn’t mean that socialism is redundant, it proves that those states were not socialist in the first place, which is what we always said. If you believe that those countries were socialist, either you defend them on the ridiculous ground that these barbaric bloody places were the sort of regimes that we should aspire to recreate, or you conclude that socialism is bound to end up with people in gulags for looking at the regional politburo officer the wrong way.”

I ask Steel if there’s anywhere in the world that he does consider socialist and if there’s any country he draws encouragement from. “I think Cuba you can draw encouragement from, but I don’t think it’s socialist,” he says. “Venezuela I don’t believe is in the control of the working class, but Chavez has clearly gone out of his way to protect his working class base by using the oil money to fund projects that the ruling class hate. Henceforth three times they’ve risen up in rage, with the backing of George Bush, to try to overthrow the democratically elected government and every time he was forced back by a genuine uprising. I think anyone vaguely interested in human decency must be encouraged by that.”

Mark Steel believes that Chavez in Venezuela has done exactly the sort of thing the Left should be doing here. “I would imagine in Venezuela, lots of people would think ‘oh yeah he goes on about socialism and anti- imperialism and this, that and the other, and I sort of half follow what he’s going on about, but I tell you what, the schools are better since he was in.’ And that’s what socialists have to do. You win a hearing on the bigger issues by proving that you can handle the day to day issues.”

For Steel, this can’t be achieved by tiny parties shuffling themselves into different transient alliances. It has to be built from the bottom up with campaigners taking principled stances on the issues that matter to people. “I saw the Green Party doing that in lots of areas. There was a point when the socialist groups would do that, but the Greens have occupied that territory now.”

It’s easy for me to understand where Steel’s coming from. Although I spent a fraction of the time he did in the SWP, I am a former member of Respect who has found a new political home in the Green Party. But, I put it to Steel; can the Greens ever whip disaffected socialists like us into the kind of flag-waving fist-raising zeal of the past? “I don’t know,” he says after some thought. “There is going to be some tension between a Green Party outlook and a socialist outlook. The Greens are not based on trade unions. But there is socialist contingent in the Greens that is growing.” Steel spoke at their conference last year. “I was very impressed with them,” he says. “Caroline Lucas is a very impressive character. There are people in the Greens, Jonathon Porritt type characters, who are very much establishment people, free market, friends with Prince Charles, which doesn’t sit easy with someone on the Left. But they’ve definitely moved towards a more agitational stance and I think that socialists could certainly feel comfortable within the Greens.”

Of course the Greens, despite substantially increasing their share of the vote in the European Elections, significantly failed to increase their number of seats. Steel often jokes that he jinxes every cause he supports. But what’s really holding the Left back? “It’s not because the SWP and George Galloway and Tommy Sheridan are all bonkers. The reason that these people are to different degrees bonkers is because it has been very, very difficult to promote socialist ideas in Britain in recent times. The working class movement in this country was smashed much more seriously than anywhere else in Western Europe, by Thatcher’s laws initially, and then ideologically by Blair.”

Steel cut his political teeth in Thatcher’s Britain. But it is for Tony Blair that it seems he reserves most of his angry incredulity. “The extraordinary thing about Blair is not just that he said and did what he did, but that the bulk of the labour movement went along with it, however grudgingly. Even at the end, after Iraq, after all that had gone on, all the privatisation, all the scandals, he spoke at the TUC and apart from Bob Crow and a few people from the RMT, they just let him.” There’s a bit in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when another character, one James T. Kirk, tells a young officer: “How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life.”

On his website, Mark Steel jokes, “I’ve spoken at lots of demonstrations and union meetings and protests, and appeared at quite a few benefits, and yet capitalism still seems to rule the world.” And perhaps it’s in this that we can find our greatest inspiration in these troubling times. Throughout his career Steel has successfully used comedy as a vehicle for politics and politics as a subject for comedy. The leftists who’ve been prepared to satirise their own viewpoints have always had more resonance for me than those who are dour and right-on to the point of humourlessness. Perhaps the greatest lesson we can learn from people like Mark Steel, is that laughing at our beliefs can stop us crying because of them.

www.marksteelinfo.com